On the third edition of Clan Way, the Los Angeles duo brings back the laugh-out-loud antics. It’s breezy and fun, bolstered by the pair’s flawless chemistry.

Clan Way 3

For BlueBucksClan, popping bottles with models in the club isn’t a flex, it’s a religion. The Los Angeles duo is devoted to a life where every night sounds like a bachelor party that has gotten out of hand. This is deliberate—each of DJ and Jeeezy’s mixtapes is like an individual How to Be a Player handbook. A few of the guide’s tips would probably include: Rack up the room service charges like the kid from Home Alone, wear designer clothes at all times even if you’re chilling in the crib, and take your date to get her toes done. Take their advice, and you too will be leaving the club arm in arm with NFL wives and actresses.
On the third edition of their Clan Way series, BlueBucksClan stick to this blueprint. But their approach holds more weight than your standard lifestyle rap fare; on top of the wild, sex-fueled anecdotes and out-of-pocket extravagance is an ode to their brotherhood. Now in their late twenties, DJ and Jeeezy have been close since their teen years in the Pop Warner football program in South Central. They played together in high school, where DJ was a cornerback and Jeeezy was on the D-line. That chemistry is reflected in the music they’ve been releasing since 2019’s Clan Way: The pair is a pure rap duo in that they sound almost incomplete without each other, and at times, their connection feels nearly telepathic. DJ is the smooth talker, always using his inside voice, and Jeeezy has a rumbling but surprisingly nimble flow. When they rap, they function as each other’s sounding boards. It’s like they’re at the gym, recapping all the shit that they got into lately.
For the most part, there are no frills on Clan Way 3, just DJ and Jeeezy getting fly and sleeping around. Sometimes, the tag team shakes up the structure of their tracks, hooking their stories around a specific phrase. On “Have You Ever,” DJ and Jeeezy tie almost every line to the question in the song’s title. “Have you ever took a nigga bitch and left him scarred for life?” asks Jeeezy, like he can’t believe he did exactly that. Other times, it’s when they’re going line for line; on “FYM,” they daydream about the exes they can’t stop thinking about.
What’s missing here is the bouncy, hyper-regional L.A. production that they’ve sidestepped since 2020’s Clan Way 2. Popular producers from other cities, like Honorable C.N.O.T.E., Chopsquad DJ, and Buddah Bless, drop beats here, and they’re never poorly crafted. But the breeziness of the West Coast sound is what helps to hammer in the dissonance between their outlandish stories and blasé attitude. Still, beats aren’t entirely the point of BlueBucksClan; their production is usually pretty minimal anyway, purposefully directing most of the attention to their words.
And for much of Clan Way 3, the stories they tell are fun as hell. There’s an onslaught of pop culture references, including mentions of Pauly D and Bryce Harper; throwaway lines about lobster dates and shopping for Prada heels; and a casual phone call on “Jeeezy WYA” that perfectly encapsulates the duo’s relationship. In the song, DJ rings Jeeezy to let him know he’s at the Ritz Carlton with six women, but Jeeezy is out to dinner with his girlfriend and her family. Jeeezy ditches them and it’s not entirely worth it, so the two just go and do their own thing. Sure, it sounds like a bit in an early Jamie Foxx sex comedy that has aged terribly, but the way they bounce off each other is so natural and effortless that a struggling plot can be overlooked. With BlueBucksClan, you come for the antics, but stay for the brotherly bond.


On Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey, the fifth studio album by the Foreign Exchange, the group pays homage to old-school funk and R&B while remaining close to their own blend of Eurocentric soul. It's a victory lap and a step forward in the crew's creative process.

The Foreign Exchange: Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey

Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey

If you are curious about Phonte and Nicolay’s mindset going into their fifth studio album as the Foreign Exchange, just look at their social media accounts. Phonte, the group’s affable frontman, feeds his Twitter stream with acerbic real talk and hot-take movie reviews. On Facebook, producer Nicolay posts videos of bobblehead dolls in his studio, and jokes about his paltry royalty checks from streaming services. After 11 years together, and several albums of grown folks' soul, it seems the two aren’t taking themselves too seriously. They're having fun and don't mind bringing you into the fold.
Tales from the Land of Milk and Honey is a delightful collection of sophisticated R&B and electronic dance, tied directly to the era of Morris Day funk grooves and Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing. As it plays, Phonte, Nicolay, keyboardist Zo!, and vocalists Carmen Rodgers and Tamisha Waden recall the storied Minneapolis funk sound while staying true to their own established blend of Eurocentric electro-soul. In a way, Milk and Honey feels like a concept record: The press photos resemble a parody of Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, and the title track evokes Sergio Mendes’ brand of airy Brazilian jazz. The lyrics pull from Stevie Wonder's songbook of imagined utopias and peaceful horizons. Then suddenly, on "Work It to the Top", Phonte sings in a nasal tone that channels groups like Ready for the World and Cameo over a vintage, computerized-R&B stomp.
Milk and Honey moves swiftly and has the same radiant mood as 2013’s Love in Flying Colors, the group’s previous album. But if Colors embraced the joy of a new relationship, Milk and Honey explores the comforts of sustained romance, where the urge to hit the club gives way to Netflix date nights and glasses of wine at the crib. "Body", a standout near the album’s end, says as much: "Nowhere to go and it’s nothing on these streets," Phonte sings, who addressed a similar notion on his 2011 solo album, Charity Starts at Home. The familiarity of the music is the best kind, and for anyone who has kept up closely with this project, it's both a joy and a comfort.
Ever since the group’s landmark debut, the Foreign Exchange has evolved into a roving crew of musicians who specialize in adult contemporary soul. They tend to focus on the day-to-day aspects of love and life, which helps them stay connected with their cult followers, some of whom have kept up with the crew since its inception on Okayplayer. Overall, Milk and Honey is a victory lap and a nice step forward in the group’s creative progress. Or maybe it’s a two-step.


The New Pornographers’ seventh album is a peppy team effort, rich with new wave synths and closely blended harmonies. It’s their first LP without Dan Bejar, and lacks his stranger inklings.

The New Pornographers: Whiteout Conditions

Whiteout Conditions

Coming-of-age movies from the 1980s are joyous, singular quests of the ego. This explains their largely teen viewership—it helps to have archetypes to parse while determining your own identity. It can be comforting to hit the prom by proxy in a Pepto-pink tulle puff, or step into the shoes of a glib slacker as he leads a parade through downtown Chicago; it’s means to a self-actualized end.
So it’s notable that, as the New Pornographers inch ever-closer to the sound of a John Hughes soundtrack, they prove to be almost apologetically devoid of vanity themselves. (They still shrug off that they’re a “supergroup” despite A.C. Newman, Neko Case, and Dan Bejar’s considerable individual fame.) Whiteout Conditions packs the most blanket pep of the power-pop group’s seven albums, dense with that particular new wave brand of electronic two-for-one—insistent, tinny arpeggio synths pinpricking rich, sweeping base chords. The album also largely discards lead vocals in favor of closely blended harmonies, the type that practically huddle in their team spirit. This, plus a singularly bright and skipping tempo, creates an almost forcibly energetic mix—but like any 1980s production worth its salt, it betrays a deeper well of desolation. The color white may reflect light, but it doesn’t absorb it.
The balancing act is most apparent in the presence of the default lead Pornographer, Newman, a man who’s earned both a chuckle and our deepest condolences for sticking to this band name for nearly two decades. On Whiteout Conditions’ title track, his high, hardy vocals nudge out ahead of the busy synths and chipper drums to recall a depressive episode; he recounts days spent falling into a resentful hermitude, turning from windowpanes, before clawing his way back toward the light (a sunny day literally helps kick him out of inertia). The tale gets most grim in the chorus, but pivots on the natural buoyancy of Case’s voice. She makes its bitter pill lyric “The sky will come for you once/Sit tight until it’s done” peal like a tourism brochure tagline.
Elsewhere, Newman and Case stake out an uneasy duet in “We’ve Been Here Before,” as a reunited couple that sounds invariably doomed again, though the lilting guitars and hummingbird synths behind them offer a convincing gloss. In the closer, “Avalanche Alley,” they dream of “controlled demolitions” to wipe away the modern barrage of news, disappointments, vilifications. Case sounds near-saccharine here, with an innocent tang to her topnotes.
It’s Case who brings out the playful core of Whiteout Conditions. The group’s last record, 2014’s Brill Bruisers—a brisk, dance-pop nod to the Brill Building—was a turning point for Case’s role in the band. Before it, she’d largely posted up as lead singer in the ballads; onward from the band’s high-water mark 2005 album, Twin Cinema, her presence as a frontwoman felt strongest in the meditative dust-kickers. On Brill Bruisers, she paired her formidable country-folk pipes with swiftly paced electronics, and it felt intuitive from the first notes. On Whiteout Conditions, she sings with a clean minimalism in the comparatively clipped phrasings of pop music. On “This Is the World of the Theater” and “Darling Shade,” her lead moments are soon enough accompanied by Newman, but her gentle tones reel in those choruses, which are the album’s most memorable.
Dan Bejar is missing here for the first time (he was waylaid by the next Destroyer album) and with him go the New Pornographers’ strangest corners. He has often felt like his own island in the band, despite how smoothly integrated his tracks have been; his tongue is just too sharp, even when he seems otherwise pleased. His nasal screeds gave Brill Bruisers its surreal sheen—from envisioning a sprightly apocalypse in “War on the East Coast” to rasping an all-purpose paranoia on “Spidyr”—and have been a beguiling draw from the band’s start. In the absence of his Beat eccentricities, a stevedore, stalwart band remains—another approach to pop, if a slightly less romantic one. But working consistently with your friends, for the pleasure of it, can be a kind of poetry in itself.


Off the Wall is the sound of young Michael Jackson's liberation. Though he would become even more successful in the '80s, Off the Wall remains unabashedly fun to return to for its joy and lack of baggage. For 41 minutes, we can live in the eternally young Neverland Michael longed for, a universe largely without consequence or death.

Off the Wall

In the summer of 1976, a variety show called "The Jacksons" debuted on CBS. The program came about during a relatively fallow period for the showbiz brood, after the Jackson 5 ignited nationwide fervor with hits like "ABC" and "I’ll Be There" but before Michael Jackson set out for solo superstardom. Their future success seemed in doubt, and the show—with its glaring lights, sparkling costumes, and rampant cheesiness—was a Vegas-style extravaganza that played to well-worn pleasures. One recurring segment called "On the Wall" saw Michael inviting various guest hosts to sign a fake brick facade and do a little dance before everyone eventually ended up in a frozen ta-dah! pose. Though Michael was all smiles on "The Jacksons," he later claimed that he "hated every minute" of it. During the show’s year-long run, he was smack in the middle of gangly teenagedom, acne and all. Raised in the limelight by an infamously strict father, Michael was painfully self-conscious, worried that he might never be able to shake his child stardom. He didn’t want to merely cling to his family’s fading notoriety. He wanted to break away from it completely.
Off the Wall is the sound of that liberation. And he knew exactly what he was doing. On November 6, 1979, just as the album was starting to take off, Michael wrote a note to himself on the back of a tour itinerary, a proclamation of self so ambitious it could make Kanye blush. "MJ will be my new name, no more Michael Jackson. I want a whole new character, a whole new look, I should be a totally different person. People should never think of me as the kid who sang ‘ABC’ [and] ‘I Want You Back,’" he jotted down. "I should be a new incredible actor singer dancer that will shock the world. I will do no interviews. I will be magic. I will be a perfectionist, a researcher, a trainer, a masterer… I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it. Take it steps further from where the greats left off."
Those words were eerily prescient in many ways, of course, but they also highlight one of Michael’s most important dualities: He wanted to be magical—to defy expectation and reality—but he knew that such skills could not materialize from thin air. He understood that exceptionalism took hard work. Growing up in the Motown system, he would often sit in on sessions, soaking up lessons from the greats: Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, the Temptations. He studied the way James Brown, Sammy Davis Jr., and Fred Astaire moved their feet onstage, in movies, and on TV. At 17, he counted hallowed masters like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Duke Ellington among his favorite songwriters. He had released four solo albums in the early ’70s, but Off the Wall, which came out when he was 21, finally allowed him to flex all those hours of research into something that was his.
It also marked a moment of idealism. Around the time of Off the Wall, Michael’s musical and physical changes felt natural—joyous extensions of the black American experience. Disco was overwhelmingly popular, breaking down color lines and radio formats while offering utopia on the dancefloor. Coming from the segregated, working-class city of Gary, Ind., Jackson's achievements and acceptance represented a rosy view of the country’s future. But 1979 was scarred by the beginning of the quasi-racist "disco sucks" backlash; Michael also got his first nose job that year, narrowing his nostrils. And though he would become even more successful in the '80s, those astronomical heights sometimes catered to white tastes—in both appearance and sound—in a way that could seem effortful, cynical, and sad.
So part of the reason why Off the Wall remains so unabashedly fun to return to involves that lack of baggage. For 41 minutes, we can live in the eternally young Neverland Michael longed for, a universe largely without consequence or death. This lasting affection is reiterated by a new Spike Lee documentary, Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall, which is included in this CD/DVD reissue and finds Jackson family members and associates, along with more modern stars like the Weeknd’s Abel Tesfaye, ?uestlove, and Pharrell, paying tribute to Michael’s earliest incarnations. "Off the Wall was definitely the one that made me feel like I could sing," says Tesfaye in the doc, which was in part produced by executors of Michael’s estate and barely mentions anything about the artist’s life after Off the Wall.
The album was released toward the tail end of the disco era and it managed to encompass much of what made that style so infectious while also pushing out its edges. "Our underlying plan was to take disco out. That was the bottom line," the record’s producer, Quincy Jones, once said. "I admired disco, don’t get me wrong. I just thought it had gone far enough." Jones, a calm, jazzy Zen master who had worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, and Count Basie, helped Michael flesh out his own songs as well as tracks written by others, putting forth a record that is at once beautifully simple and sneakily complex.
Most of these songs follow the most basic disco tenet: Put all of your worries behind you and just dance. Michael took part in this type of ecstasy while filming 1978’s The Wiz in New York City, when he would spend his downtime brushing shoulders with the likes of Woody Allen, Liza Minelli, Steven Tyler, and Jane Fonda at Studio 54. By all accounts, Michael didn’t take part in the club’s notorious orgies of sex and drugs, but he observed it, standing by the DJ booth and noticing which songs drew the biggest reactions. And he would dance, getting high off of the music and movement around him.
Alongside Jones, Michael made his own disco anthems, but rather than merely copying what came before, he expanded the form with dense, orchestral arrangements that mixed in sophisticated layers of strings, horns, and syncopation while never never losing their underlying funk. This is heard on iconic opener "Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough," the first song Michael ever wrote by himself and the first of four record-breaking Top 10 hits from the album, which has now sold 30 million copies worldwide. It's an ode to the power of romantic love, something Michael had little experience with at that point. But the track’s intricacies, as well as the singer’s effortlessly rhythmic yelps and phrasing, suggest a deeper understanding, one that goes beyond words. Another Michael-penned track, "Working Day and Night," hints at the detrimental effects of his workaholic upbringing and an encroaching paranoia, though ricocheting guitar lines and exuberant horns keep the groove moving along smoothly.
There are more overt experiments here, too. "Off the Wall" begins with 15 seconds of sinister-sounding laughter and spaced-out instrumentation—a precursor to the high-wattage oddities of "Thriller"; co-written by Stevie Wonder and originally intended for Songs in the Key of Life, "I Can’t Help It" incorporates smooth jazz and twinkling synths—its influence on Pharrell’s off-kilter funk cannot be overstated. The ballad "She’s Out of My Life" risks stopping the album cold with its beat-less melodrama but ends up being a classic of the form, with Michael audibly moved to tears at the end of the song, his voice cracking. It’s an imperfect moment from a noted perfectionist, and Jones’ production handles the emotion with understated grace. "A lesser producer would have milked all that drama for all it’s worth," says ?uestlove in the doc, laughing. "Trust me, if Puffy was producing ‘She’s Out of My Life’ he would have had… Kleenex sponsor the tour."
The joke resonates. Off the Wall is the product of a boy who was reared by his father to be a product, whose idols were often found on his TV screen, who understood his own commodification enough to want to reject it—while also aiming to sell a gazillion albums and unite the world and become the ultimate entertainer. There are many contradictions in that quest and, in hindsight, Michael’s subsequent pitfalls almost seem inevitable. But Off the Wall was that unlikely moment of balance, when Michael Jackson’s purity and innocence still seemed holy, not stunted or distorted. When he cried on record, he was living his art, giving us a genuine performance.


The Brooklyn band Lucius has been a stylish presence on the tour and festival circuit for the past few years. The quintet’s sophomore album sounds like everything at once but nothing in particular.

Good Grief

The Brooklyn band Lucius has been a stylish presence on the tour and festival circuit for the past few years. Though the group released one album before Good Grief—2013’s Wildewoman—this sophomore collection feels like one of those debuts that arrive preternaturally fully-formed, with songs as polished as the quintet’s outfits. Singer-songwriters Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, who met while studying at the Berklee College of Music, provide prominent, explosive close harmonies of the ’90s folk rock sort lately repopularized by the likes of Girlpool. Their voices are set to the sort of synthy, cavernous production that evokes an increasingly decontextualized version of the ’80s.
It’s hard to talk about this sort of music without mentioning Haim, who’ve refurbished a lot of sounds formerly consigned to adult-hits radio to great acclaim; meanwhile, mainstream pop has been setting acoustic toplines to synths for the better part of this decade. And after the notably crunchier Wildewoman, Lucius is clearly moving in that direction. It’s not a bad look. Parts of Good Grief resemble a Luscious Jackson record with the ’90s electronica swapped out for its 2010s synthpop counterpart. Times have changed, and what might have sounded hopelessly overproduced then, or during the late ’80s or whichever period Lucius is evoking on any particular track, comes off sparkling and large-stage in today’s musical world.
This is best demonstrated on the restrained “Truce” and exuberant single “Something About You,” both of which set folky hooks to spangly production. Most of Good Grief, however, leans more toward one end or the other. “You Were on My Mind” and “Madness,” with only minor adjustments for an acoustic setting, might work in an Indigo Girls set, while “Dusty Trails,” befitting its title, is a slow plod of guitar and high-lonesome harmonies. At the other end of the spectrum, “Born Again Teen” worships a Holy Trinity of “Kids in America,” ’50s rock, and hyper-compression. A breathless sprint much like Chairlift’s “Romeo,” it’s an easy standout. Bonus track “Let’s Dance” plays a neat trick of reproducing in acoustic form the stuttered and sampled textures that are near-ubiquitous in pop. Elsewhere, on “Gone Insane,” Lucius taunts you with the prospect of breaking out into The Proclaimers’ “500 Miles” before settling on more obvious multi-tracked wailing. It’s perhaps a cliché for the title, but it does make for a suitably ferocious sound that Wolf and Laessig’s voices are more than capable of stirring up.
As put-together as Good Grief’s presentation is, and as ingratiating as its songs are, the record suffers from a distinct lack of identity. “Some of the band wanted it to sound like an avant-garde, German experimental record, and some of them wanted a straight pop record, as far as referencing Taylor Swift,” producer Shawn Everett told the Village Voice. The argument seems to have been resolved via compromise, making Good Grief sound like everything at once but nothing in particular. In that interview, the band is very specific about their influences, the sort of disparate chunks on songs easy to isolate in an instant-streaming age: the drums from Beyoncé’s producer, the vocals on a Judee Sill track. Any one of these might make for a good, cohesive album, but like so many acts with newfound popularity and a sophomore record, the issue’s settling upon one.


This 10-song EP scans like a means for the San Diego vocalist to transition into more personal territory. It's the rare album that feels meditative and cathartic all at once.

MU.ZZ.LE

Gonjasufi's 2010 release *A Sufi and a Killer *succeeded largely on the strength of an engagingly odd presence: the simultaneously croaky and sweet voice of Sumach Valentine, which sent initiates scrambling to identify fellow travelers, from Captain Beefheart to George Clinton to John Fahey. It stood up as a strong example of psychedelic rock rewired for an audience more attuned to *Madvillainy *than The Madcap Laughs. But it still scanned a bit more like a shared vision than an individual voice: The album was just as much a revelation for the Gaslamp Killer, who helmed the bulk of the production and laid down his own mark with a sprawling slate of beats that complemented Valentine's vocalizations.
When the album that introduces a unique vocalist to a newly expanded fanbase also happens to do the same for its equally distinct producer, you wonder how each will fare on his own. If last year's freebie *9th Inning *EP was a catch-up session of self-created, unreleased older tracks meant to remind newer fans of his broader repertoire, MU.ZZ.LE scans like a means to transition from A Sufi and a Killer's multiple-identity psych into more personal territory. And it does this in a way that reinforces what made that previous album great.
Gonjasufi and fellow San Diegan noise-break purveyor Psychopop have centered their production around a codeine-paced, heavy-headed swoon that still manages to bristle with an undercurrent of stress. Psychopop handles beats for four of the 10 cuts, and their half-speed wooziness is like the musical equivalent of the slow-motion running you might experience in an unsettling dream. The headswimming electric piano blues of "White Picket Fence" and the loping, pendulous guitar in "Feedin' Birds" set the pace, ethereal as it is, and get a surprising amount of pull from their downtempo floatiness. But Gonjasufi's own production is just as steeped in dubbed-out, crumbly atmospherics. The bass in "Venom" glows and throbs, peppered with a jingling percussion timbre halfway between a tambourine and a handful of change. "Blaksuit" sounds like a vintage funk 45 flipped to 33, its twangy loop pacing back and forth like a half-finished thought. And even when the snares pop, as they do on "Nikels and Dimes", they do so through a thick coating of resin and ash.
If you think that means MU.ZZ.LE is a passive, inert slog of an album, keep in mind that every trudging, straining step of the way is cut through with Gonjasufi's voice, which is still a hell of a thing. The unconventional cast of his voice might be Valentine's most immediately recognizable trait, but it's not his deepest. Every last creaking wail, blown-out mutter, and wounded drone is heavy with reflection, and after a few listens it all starts to sound less like altered-mind eccentricity and more like raw, unfiltered feeling. For all the talk about shroomed-out weirdness and otherworldly mysticism that's surrounded his music, there's a more crucial sense of a real, laid-bare emotional core here.
All those shaky notes and half-intelligible murmurs disintegrating into decaying echoes might run parallel to an oddball Lee "Scratch" Perry sensibility, but they evoke frustration and dejection vividly. The words aren't always clear through the fog of reverb, though this might be by design, some statement on how the plain truth of honest words can be sometimes hard to understand. But the agitated sentiments remain clear, whether castigating against the abuse of privilege in "Nikels and Dimes" or straining to maintain an interpersonal connection on "Rubberband". When Sumach's wife April has a wraithlike torch-singer turn in the second half of "Feedin' Birds" and distantly doubles up his lead on "Skin", it's to act as a sweetly voiced counterpart to lyrics that allude to guilt, death, and a search for love. And when the funereal lo-fi new wave of "The Blame" emerges near the end of the 24 1/2-minute running length, it's the late peak of a record that wrings out a devastated man's crisis of consciousness-- "You say I'm not supposed to kill/ Keep walking with my head high/ But every time I go somewhere/ I feel the dread inside their eyes." MU.ZZ.LE might be a transitional point on Gonjasufi's path and it shows just one face of an eclectic, multifaceted performer. But it's also that rare album that feels meditative and cathartic all at once.


The singer-songwriter's fourth full-length is both his most stripped-down effort to date and also his best.

Catacombs

Cass McCombs works quietly. Over the course of three full-lengths and five years, McCombs has quickly slipped in and out of scenes, skipping from one major American city to the next like he owed stacks of cash in every one. He's played with folk, grafting bedroom pop flourishes to sonic skeletons just strong enough to support them. He swam through 1980s Brit jangle and deep chasms of reverb. No matter how much mileage he accrued, one constant held firm: His lyrical shell games often kept listeners at arm's length, regardless of how well-crafted and inviting his melodies were. McCombs' songs were addictively opaque-- easy to hear, tough to digest, and even more difficult to describe to your friends over beers.
McCombs' slipperiness seemed as much like a rejection and re-routing of the traditional singer-songwriter tag as it did a refusal to meet a listener halfway, as though the dude were allergic to interpretation or the idea that someone, anyone, might want to peer inside his braincave. It all sounds like a carefully conceived blend between garden-variety male vulnerability issues and wild-eyed, guitar-toting-dude-who-fancies-himself-an-enigma bullshit. But on Catacombs, his fourth full-length and most stripped-down effort to date, the singer-songwriter steps out from behind the curtain that's cloaked his work in the past. And despite the sparser arrangements and increased focus on direct lyricism, it's every bit as aurally hypnotic as his previous work. It seems like he realized there was someone he really did want to sing to.
Reportedly a tribute to his wife, these are songs for the heart more than the head. Opener "Dreams Come True Girl" is beautiful evidence of that. It's a straight-ahead chord progression that's just a minor chord kiss away from Bright Eyes' "First Day of My Life" and Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright". McCombs washes it in Pacific surf, lets it dry, and then flips it into a late-blossoming duet with actress Karen Black of Easy Rider and Nashville fame. A stunt cameo like that could easily fog up a recording, but Black's turn and lower register compliments the feet-up vibe really well. "You Saved My Life" waltzes farther into territory, McCombs' croon swaying along to a bass line that never ever loses its way. Hammocks of pedal steel, duvets of synth, steady breaths of acoustic guitar-- it's a warm, understated arrangement that typifies music for sunlit rooms and Sunday mornings. Most impressively, there is not a trace of sap or slobber to be found anywhere.
"The Executioner's Song" takes the same approach to speech-song serenading and despite a defiantly mid-tempo pace that borders on drowsy, its heartbeat doesn't waver. "Harmonia" and "Prima Donna" are simple strummers that recall early-70s Dylan, the former an especially strong showcase for McCombs' voice. Smooth as river stones and perfectly evocative when dipping into baritone raps or twirling in falsetto, it's fit to carry songs so bare. "Lionkiller Got Married" traces narrative threads back to 2007's Dropping the Writ and signals a shift towards the outwardly old-timey and too well-defined-- a rickety template that only serves to box him in. In fact, the bounce of "Jonesy Boy" and Main Street shuffle of "One Way to Go" both run on and out of steam.
It's good reason to come back to the beginning though, to the track whose directness stands tall above a set with inches to spare: "Dreams Come True Girl". Given a song like this (the chorus straight up kills me every time), and a staggering mind/skill set like McCombs', it's remarkable that he's avoided being part of the greater discussion on great American songwriters. While Conor Oberst's been saddled/showered with New Dylan hosannas and critical tongue baths this decade, McCombs has fashioned himself a groove as new school rambler and pokerfaced tone poet totally under the radar. It's a space he seems and sounds to have been most comfortable in. Until now.


Following a sophomore slump, the eclectic singer-songwriter pairs with Timbaland for a pair of chartbusting singles and, uh oh, some duff ballads.

Loose

Loose is the best and worst pop album of the year, scattershot in every respect, crippling in its inconsistencies, and just a regular pain in the ass if you're the kind of person who values listening to albums all the way through. Which is basically nobody these days-- so Loose is great! Except when it's not. Its post-new wave/slink-funk/pseudo-reggaetón/drippy ballads template signifies a few things, but most especially that Nelly needed a hit badly.
After the failure of her second album, Folklore, an adventurous-if-sappy globo-handjob, Furtado's been paired with rhythmic savant Timbaland and his protégé Danja Handz for all but two songs on Loose. And they've already provided international hits with "Promiscuous" and "Maneater", two doses of buzzbeater bass and clomping hi-hats right out of Tim's standard playbook. The songs fit snugly into Tim's oeuvre, but not Furtado's, who's best known for "I'm Like a Bird" and the manic Tim-produced remix of Missy Elliott's "Get Ur Freak On". They sound unlike Furtado not because they're danceable or sexy-- her first two albums were those things-- but because they're about dancing and fucking.
It's hard to tell who is most responsible for the odd execution of this album, Timbaland, Interscope poobah Jimmy Iovine (as Pitchforker Julianne Shepherd has opined), or Furtado herself. But it's all over the place musically. The two singles come early and are surrounded by the album's other interesting songs, like the Madonna-aping swirler "Glow", which rises and falls under the swell of some stop-start keyboards. After "Glow" is "Showtime", a midtempo ballad that comes so close to Aaliyah's understated grace, vocally and emotionally, it's terrifying. Hearing Furtado-- usually a vocal berserker-- rein things in is gratifying for that moment, even when linked with Danja's Timbo4cheap production.
"No Hay Igual", which has presumably been called reggaetón because it's sung in Spanish and isn't salsa, is an aerial assault. But it never wears down the listener and actually uses a few vocal change-ups, unlike the much-maligned genre it's been compared to. Directly after that, everything goes to hell. With a series of groan-worthy, poorly sung ballads mixed with far inferior grasps at pop, the album fades hard down the stretch. If "Promiscuous" is one of the fiercest songs of lust in recent memory, "In God's Hands" is one of the limpest. It sounds like Paula Cole on Paxil singing Rob Thomas' throwaways. "Our love's floating up in the sky in heaven/ Where it began, back in God's hands". That's the chorus. The Chris Martin-penned "All Good Things (Come to an End)" is less painful, but not by much.
The strangest thing about Loose isn't its irregularity, but the simple fact that this doesn't sound like Nelly Furtado at all. Listening to her first two albums, Furtado developed a bizarre speed-slur in her hooks, one of the most unique singing styles in modern music. She digs melisma, but avoids showing off. It seemed like her voice just couldn't stop doing that bob-and-weave. Here, she coos and caws and crows, but she never lets, um, loose. Even the kinetic singles are sing-rapped or delivered in crisp turns. This makes for a very cold album, fatalistic in its sexiness but soporific in its soul-searching.
There's been much made of Furtado's referencing of NBA MVP Steve Nash and the knowing nod to Hall & Oates, but those are just pop-cult placeholders: Look! She's hip and Canadian! If anything, these feel like the most corporate moves on the record, a kowtowing to which Furtado never seemed to stoop. The only thing that speaks to the proposed offhandedness is the ghastly between-song banter between Furtado, her band, and Timbaland. Rather than the warm, strident girl that once sang, "I don't want ambivalence no more", the crush of sex and power and chart potential has got her chirping, "Move your body around like a nympho." It's not the worst outcome in the world, and as nearly all of Timbaland's music does, it makes you move. But maybe at the expense of a thoughtful songwriter.


The roaming, Americana-obsessed songwriter brings a sense of purpose to his zigzagging on his debut album, a collaborator-filled collection of heartbreak tales.

Absolutely

Los Angeles singer Dijon likes to roam. Since his alt R&B group Abhi//Dijon split amicably in the mid 2010s, he’s become a wanderer, his music accreting and discarding styles like a subletter acclimating to new quarters. In the past two years, he’s released a smoldering cover of Chaka Khan’s “Sweet Thing,” recorded a Prince pastiche in which he shouts out “Automatic,” and assembled Raveena, John C. Reilly, and Dan Reeder for what can only be described as a folk cypher. The latter song was purposefully eclectic, the guest list decided—in a strange echo of Pitchfork contributor Claire Lobenfeld’s review of Dijon’s 2020 EP—by throwing names into a hat. Dijon has never cast these ventures as ironic, kitschy, or audacious, but they could feel like diversions, gimmicks obscuring the anonymity of his songwriting. Absolutely, his debut album, moves more deliberately, his zigzagging purposeful.
Dijon’s pliant, raspy voice guides the record, shifting from coos to wails to murmurs as he sings of love and its complications over folk and soul arrangements. He tends to shun gloss and polish, instead crooning with no discernible enhancements or processing. Accordingly, even his prettiest notes sound physical and textured, like he’s fighting a cold. That strain defines “Many Times,” the powerhouse single about a breaking point in a relationship. “Strawberry, raspberry/Candlelight, satellite/Television, X-ray vision/Aw, what’s it gonna take for you to listen?,” he sings with frustration. His delivery quickens as he rattles off the items of the strange list, the syllables and rhymes running together, growing sillier.
For “The Dress,” a slow jam about a couple revisiting their glory days, Dijon turns pleading, drawing out his melodies. “We should go out/And dance like we used to dance/We should go out/And hold hands,” he sings. The character knows the spark has died but prefers to dream, a common choice in these tales of heartbreak. “Annie” is even rosier, Dijon’s narrator glumly telling Annie she can “change [her] mind.” There’s little outright storytelling on the album, but Dijon’s impassioned performances make the elisions feel loaded. Grievances lurk in every omission.
The production follows Dijon’s contortions, flickering and flaring in tandem with his theatrics. He recorded Absolutely with a revolving door of collaborators who he encouraged to show up at their leisure, an atmosphere captured in the compositions. Sometimes, Dijon is alone. On the self-produced “Did You See It?,” he floats in a drumless void of plucks as he wonders aloud whether the drugs have kicked in. Other times, the room is packed. “Big Mike’s” swells with instruments—slide guitar, organ, percussion, clarinet, piano—that accent Dijon’s yearning vocals. The singer on “Noah’s Highlight Reel” is just some guy. “He’s a great friend of mine, but also a real country boy—I couldn’t approximate that,” Dijon told NME. Compared to the calculated syncretism of his past music, the direction here is whimsical and open.
Dijon can feel closed off despite the bustle and personality of these songs. His love of Americana has deepened without any elaboration on why he’s so fixated. Though the unrequited love between a mechanical bull champion and his admirer on “Rodeo Clown” and the Friday football games and “honky tonk bars” mentioned on “Noah’s Highlight Reel” are well-rendered, they feel like stock images, revealing nothing about the characters’ perspectives. Although he avoids the empty provocation of RMR or Machine Gun Kelly, his heartland Easter eggs scan as souvenirs rather than symbols.
Absolutely works best when Dijon’s writing is as vivid as his performances, as on “Talk Down.” Over a breakbeat, Dijon tells a story of two people bickering during a car ride. His voice cracks as he details the fogging windows, tired eyes, and blushing cheeks. They listen to Gillian Welch, the Band, and Liz Phair as they trade sarcastic remarks and backhanded compliments. There are no gimmicks here, just people and the pulsing spaces between them.
Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly attributed “Credits!” to Noah Le Gros. He actually sings “Noah’s Highlight Reel.”

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Two versions of Michael Gordon's meticulously designed piano composition—one equal-tempered and one just intonation—played by Vicky Chow showcase the pair's crazed and brilliant obsession with rhythm.

Sonatra

Over the last three decades, composer Michael Gordon has done as much as anyone to promote and develop the tradition of minimalist classical music. Upon his arrival in New York, in the late 1970s, he plunged head first into the scene already established by Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Along with his collaborators in the Bang on a Can collective, Gordon also helped push the style forward.
His interest in no wave and punk is plain to hear in the odd harmonies and stomping profile of early works like “Four Kings Fight Five.” By the time of his 1992 composition “Yo Shakespeare,” Gordon’s work with rhythm was unusual enough to earn the excited praise of Reich himself.  (The elder composer had some memorable advice for Gordon, too: “The first thing you’ve got to do in this score is, on the front page, you’ve got to say, ‘This is the rhythm.’ Because if people look at this score, they’re going to think you’re an idiot. But if you actually tell them on the front page that you know you’re an idiot, then they’ll take you seriously.”) Ever since, one of Gordon’s great skills has been the way he keeps a crazed, obsessive concept interesting over long stretches.
In recent years, Gordon has explored some comparatively mellow textures—treading closer to the dream-state effect created by some other minimalists. Gordon’s popular piece for pitched percussion, Timber, was recently remixed by a variety of electronic music stars. But his new piece for solo piano finds Gordon reconnecting with his high-intensity mode. Played by the contemporary piano virtuoso Vicky Chow, Sonatra offers a fresh glimpse of classic Gordon. It’s meticulously designed, hard-charging and in an unusual way, addictive.
The 15-minute composition that forms the album’s core begins with single-note progressions, galloping up the length of the keyboard. Gordon uses both major- and minor-third intervals as his stepping stones—creating impressions of uniformity and unpredictability at the same time. When the final note in each successive line starts to change, you get a sense of how the piece will undermine its seeming emphasis on repetition.
With the manic feel of the piece well established, Gordon starts engineering new sonic effects. Soon, clusters of notes in one of Chow’s hands start to sound as though fully set apart from what’s going on at the other end of the piano. Chow carries off these distinct, interlocking parts with great poise, even at a great pace. Then the two motifs gradually merge back into an unbroken line—a great, cascading rampage of melody.
Keeping a sense of proportion in mind is one of the dozens of challenges facing a pianist who takes on this music. Aside from her obvious technical facility, Chow also has a poetic feel for the piece’s overall structure. The forceful quality of Gordon’s opening material sounds plenty loud, from the drop. But Chow has deep reserves of emphasis: the floor-rattling power she provides, when reintroducing some bass notes in the third minute, is gorgeous in its considered, hardcore force.
In the final third of Sonatra, superimposed piano lines start to embrace jazzy harmony—it’s as though a trace of cocktail-piano noodling has infiltrated the otherwise barreling music. Gordon says the title of Sonatra amounts to a sideways embrace of Frank Sinatra (as well as the classical sonata form). But in Chow’s hands, the riffs-for-days feel can call to mind other swing references; at times, her playing conjures a vision of some vintage piano genius like Art Tatum coming back to life and getting high on post-minimalism.
Gordon’s writing—and Chow’s execution—delivers a delirium state of rare potency. And then they do it all again, kinda. The album’s second half is devoted to another performance of the piece, with one significant difference. Instead of performing Sonatra on an equal-tempered piano (aka the kind of piano you’re probably used to hearing), Chow plays the second take on a “just intonation” instrument.
Differences between the “pure” intervals of “just intonation” setups and common tuning are complex (and fascinating to explore). But at their essence, “just intonation” tunings just sound plain odd to most of us, today. The first wave of minimalists—including composer-performers like La Monte Young and Terry Riley—also explored “just” tunings to fantastic effect. So Gordon’s alternate version of Sonatra is part of a long-running conversation in minimalist circles. For this performance, Gordon merged two different “just” tunings pioneered by the composer and keyboardist Wendy Carlos. As this version of Sonatra moves into the middle section—in which lines of notes are played in different octaves—and then the piece’s final, more complex harmonies, this tuning begins to produce strange new effects, even as the rhythmic energy remains familiar from the initial take.
Chow’s just-intonation performance of Sonatra doesn’t have quite the same jazzy exhibitionism as her first, equal-tempered take. But this makes sense—as the resulting harmonies of the “just-intonation” version sound a fair bit removed from mainstream jazz practice. And over the balance of the second performance, the composer’s snaking lines start to sound just as compelling in this alternative intonation. Gordon is used to pushing around received ideas about composition: fusing punk, jazz and classical accents. But this is the first time he’s pushed his own writing around every bit as forcefully. It’s a smart idea, executed with a thrilling degree of insight by one of our era’s most brilliant pianists.


On their liveliest album in at least a decade, indie rock’s most steadfast institution squares up against ubiquitous darkness.

This Stupid World

To fully dig the manifold charms of This Stupid World, it’s best to take a single step back into Yo La Tengo’s 38 years-and-counting catalog. In July 2020, amid that first summer of extreme pandemic disorientation, the trio surprised devotees not only with a new Bandcamp page but also with a fresh album, captured at their Hoboken practice space just weeks earlier and offered up like a timely postcard from a friend you’ve missed—we’re OK, and we hope you’re OK, too.
Still, this wasn’t some coddling batch of covers or a soporific balm for the common weal. Instead, We Have Amnesia Sometimes gathered five casually beautiful improvisations, set decidedly on edge: a snapshot of listless and helpless terror. Really, Yo La Tengo’s entire enviable path owes to that impulse to put their shared moment to tape. Whether triumphantly covering Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War” after 9/11 or dreaming of the stars and baseball from somewhere in suburbia, they have always played what they felt, sans commercial master plan or artistic safety net. Yo La Tengo are, after all, a band that would rather write new music for commercials than cash in on past glories.
On This Stupid World, Yo La Tengo are ready to sing again, to shake free of Amnesia’s uneasy torpor and charge ahead by reimagining and recharging some of the best parts of their history. Their mass of albums have collectively done a little of almost everything, from samba and soul to raw noise and regal country. For these nine tracks, they key on two specialties: Mostly there are the ironclad, soft but steely rippers that perhaps no band does better. And then, at just the right time, Yo La Tengo deliver extended astral jams that feel like invitations to disappear. Where other Yo La Tengo albums have often felt discursive, This Stupid World feels focused and lean, the work of a band that needs to tell you something now.
Yo La Tengo begin with that electrifying first category of rock songs, slicing straight into a galvanizing romp about the ruin that is sure to come. At the start of “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” Georgia Hubley and James McNew lock into a rubbery motorik throb, pushing against or easing off the accelerator as if navigating freeway traffic. Hubley and husband Ira Kaplan coo over the rhythm, their tuneful near-whispers fluttering like pillowcases on a clothesline.
But then there’s Kaplan’s scabrous guitar, which spends all seven minutes turning the nice little melody inside out and upside down, until all that’s left is a pile of rusted scrap metal. When he reaches the mid-song solo, he lunges at a few ragged chords, gives up, and then lashes out at individual notes, as if trying to remember how they fit together. He finally finds the riff and crawls back toward the song, resolving this riveting little melodrama. “Until we all break/Until we all break down,” Kaplan and Hubley harmonize again toward the end, the pieces of this anthem of oblivion slowly drifting apart.
This feeling of resignation powers much of This Stupid World, no matter how lively the bulk of its songs may sound. “Every day, it hurts to look,” Kaplan sings early into “Fallout,” one of their most effortlessly magnetic songs ever. “I’d turn away if only I could.” The trouble is everywhere, as inescapable as polluted air. And it’s not just outside: Kaplan laments his inability to overcome his ego during the wonderfully bittersweet “Apology Letter.” Irreparable destruction and inevitable death linger as miasmas, like when grief catches Hubley by surprise on TV during her lovely country sigh, “Aselestine.” Kaplan advocates for a sort of Swedish death cleaning of the mind above the warped canter of “Until It Happens,” a cautionary tale for those of us who sometimes want to believe bad things are only other people’s problems.
Even the McNew-led “Tonight’s Episode” playfully inveighs against a faddish world of self-help gurus and know-it-all advisers. Its chants of “guacamole” and games played with a yo-yo might feel like doggerel, but he’s just doing what he can to hold it together. “No need to cast the I Ching,” he sings like he’s sharing his own secret advice, noise ripping like a gale behind him. “Let the night astound/I don’t have to think.” If Yo La Tengo were on the edge when they cut Amnesia, the last three years have caused them to slip over its lip. Maybe the abyss isn’t yet in plain view, but reports from its depths are coming up more quickly now.
Despite all the fretting, This Stupid World exudes a loveable lightness, the byproduct of a band rooted in a triangle of trust and camaraderie since McNew joined 30 years ago. Catch, for instance, Hubley’s near-hidden giggle as the amplifiers whirr to life at the start of “Aselestine.” The sadness is easier when you’ve got friends around, it seems to say. You can hear that solidarity in “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” too, as Hubley and McNew stick with the rhythm while Kaplan wrestles through that amplifier turmoil. When he’s ready to sing, they lock back into shared softness.
The temptation to brand This Stupid World with a superlative or triumphant tagline is strong—Yo La Tengo’s best album in at least a decade (true), their most consistently compelling rock songs in years (ditto), a new triumph of indie rock’s old guard (facts). But such reductive critical capstones feel wrong for the steadfast march of Yo La Tengo, a band that’s been so indispensable for so long because they love making music together exactly how and when they want. Releasing a new album every two years or so for almost as long as the internet has existed, they have never indulged the illusion of scarcity by disappearing for a while, only to climb aboard the comeback circuit.
This Stupid World is just a particularly timely chapter in the modest saga of indie rock’s most unassuming institution. Its songs capture not only the darkness so many of us feel with each waking day but also the impulse to keep waking, to keep going. “This stupid world, it’s killing me,” the trio finally offers as one on the title track, a mighty shoegaze wonder where distortion and feedback thread together like a warm blanket. “This stupid world, it’s all we have.” It’s a mantra shared among pals holding each other up, now extended to the world beyond their cozy Hoboken studio. They know how this thing ends, and they play on anyway.


The second album from the Brighton four-piece is the sound of a band mercilessly digging into itself with a stunning, dynamic performance from singer-songwriter Dana Margolin.

Every Bad

When Dana Margolin repeats her lyrics like incantations—“I am charming, I am sweet,” “I’m bored to death, let’s argue,” “You will like me when you meet me”—it can be hard to gauge whether she wants to believe these facts, or decimate them with irony. This is among the frictions that power Every Bad, the sometimes twisted, often transcendent, always incendiary album from the Brighton four-piece Porridge Radio.
The band’s once-minimal sound—reminiscent, back in 2015, of Frankie Cosmos’ witty Bandcamp-as-diary style—has scaled colossally, transforming into a fever dream that lifts every song. Where 2016’s Rice, Pasta and Other Fillers, recorded in their drummer’s shed, had a dark streak, Every Bad is unabashed sorcery. Margolin’s dusky voice and serrated riffs sometimes recall Polly Jean Harvey, sometimes the attack of early Karen O, but Porridge Radio has devised its own approach to guitar music. The songs balance stoicism with just enough cracked-open ache to feel human. In their quiet-loud dynamics are the exorcisms of a woman who knows that a whisper is often more tormenting than a scream.
Every Bad is the sound of a band digging into itself: On the opener, Margolin asks, “What is going on with me?” and she spends 11 songs excavating answers, turning them into melodies that hang gracefully aloft. In three-and-a-half minutes, “Don’t Ask Me Twice” pivots from Lou Reed-style lyrical exposition, to an infernal screamo blast, to seasick balladeering and back. But Porridge Radio’s alchemy is equal parts severity and humor. By the end of “Born Confused,” as Margolin chants “Thank you for leaving me, thank you for making me happy,” her tone devolves from cheerful to deranged to completely shattered, gasping for air, like an absurdist deconstruction of Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next.” And there’s no shortage of attitude on the breezy “Give/Take”: “How do I say ‘no’ without sounding like a little bitch?” Margolin low-key snarls. “I want want want want want want want.” It’s this unwillingness to stick to one sonic or emotional truth that gives life to Porridge Radio’s music.
A gothic grandeur courses through Every Bad, a reminder that Porridge Radio are from the same seaside England town where Nick Cave currently resides. Like Cave, Margolin channels vacancy and existential dread with flair—sometimes ornate, sometimes plainspoken—and Porridge Radio’s songs always reach at something just beyond their ending. On the expressive “Nephews,” Margolin sings of wanting to be unmoored like “two nephews under the sea” while watching another person “slip into unconsciousness.” She presents the sea as a place “where your head might explode, and the water is so dark you can’t feel your heart,” reflecting, as she does often across Every Bad, on the meaning of safety, family, and home.
Porridge Radio achieve sinister, soul-cleansing extremes, and never more powerfully than on “Sweet.” The dour woman at the center of the song is, in the eyes of her mother, a “nervous wreck” who “bites her nails right down to the flesh”—she could be the protagonist of a bleak Ottessa Moshfegh story. Margolin voices these perceptions of herself with an eerie stillness, augmented by echoes from keyboardist and backing vocalist Georgie Stott, and then her bandmates set them ablaze, unleashing a maximally rendered noise-rock onslaught. It sounds like a call-and-response between Margolin’s internal monologue and thundering abrasion of Sonic Youth proportions, or metal. “And sometimes I am just a child, writing letters to myself,” she sings in calm measures, “Wishing out loud you were dead/And then taking it back.” What could be more brutal? “Sweet” seems to narrate a specifically feminine dynamic, sending up the self-hating expectations so often placed on young women, incinerating them to ash.
Still, there’s a sense of togetherness in Porridge Radio’s arrangements—Stott was a fan singing all the words up front before Margolin asked her to join the band—and it adds levity to their heavy sound. A jagged post-punk dance banger, “Long” expresses the breathless agony of having someone waste your time, which is to say your life, but Margolin and Stott scream out “every bitter breath” until the tensions boil over, giving way to comfort: “I’m glad it’s not me.” And while the uncanny merry-go-round waltz that opens “Circling” seems to undermine its message that “everything’s fine,” it becomes a beautiful ode to the healing powers of the sea, which “takes me away/Puts me to sleep/Holds my hand and whispers gently.” “Lilac,” meanwhile, channels the desperation of trying to help someone, and its epic rave-up—“I don’t want to get bitter/I want us to get better/I want us to be kinder/To ourselves and to each other”—is, if didactic, a welcome feeling.
For every savage truth on Every Bad, there’s an equal and opposite moment of hope. “Maybe I was born confused,” Margolin speak-sings on the opener, “but I’m not.” Every Bad is full of small self-possessed triumphs like this, a portrait of reality in which neither struggle nor joy is denied, where little is abstracted or prescribed. Using words and noise to create mantras and blow them up, Every Bad is the inspired result of a rock band finding itself in 2020, inhabiting many ways of being.


The California surf-garage rockers extend their recent series of EPs, and succumb to their own sense of anhedonia.

Dispassionate EP

Since their 2010 debut, Together Pangea, the Los Angeles trio behind songs like “Blood, Blood, Blood,” “Shitty,” and “Sick Shit,” have been heralded among their Southern California peers for blazing, surfy garage punk. Known for crude lyrics, boozy gigs, and tours supporting established rockers Alkaline Trio and Twin Peaks, the group arrived at a sweet spot on their most recent album, 2017’s striking rock’n’roll bruiser Bulls and Roosters. Rather than release a full-length follow-up, they opted to split a February 2018 recording session into three disparate EPs: the acoustic Sleeping Til Sunset, last October’s tizzied Non Stop Paranoia, and the milder Dispassionate.
The pleasant reworkings of older songs on Sleeping Til Sunset successfully highlighted Together Pangea’s mellower side, so it’s not as if the band loses all their appeal when they set aside their usual lawlessness. But in contrast to the full-bodied Bulls and Roosters, 2014’s fervent Badillac, and even the gaudy synths of Non Stop Paranoia, Dispassionate feels watered-down. Its retro influence sounds less like the work of Burger Records alumni and more like a squeaky-clean throwback to “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Opener “Bet You Wish I Would Call” is inspired by the real-life unreachability of frontman William Keegan, who went phoneless for years. His razor-sharp riffs carry the song, but they’re bogged down by cliches like “Summer days are meant to sleep ’em away” and “Listening to all my favorite songs,” Together Pangea’s own best crack at Bruno Mars’ “The Lazy Song.” The beachy “Never Said I Wanna” offers a seed of thematic development, but lines like, “Time is ash boy, I was 21/Crossing a great divide, trying to follow the one/It’s in the past boy, like a dying sun,” wind up more muddied than profound.
The EP’s title track is simultaneously its most glum and most kinetic, kicking off with a twee xylophone ditty before the lyrics lurch toward oblivion. “It’s Monday, vodka and cigarettes again/I’ve hell to pay, I’ll be inside this week,” Keegan sings, belting the word “dispassionate” a few times. It’s a recurring habit: Three of Dispassionate’s four songs make heavy use of their respective titles in the chorus. With so little substance elsewhere, it feels like a crutch.
“Moonlight Lately” brings the most muscle, as drummer Erik Jimenez saunters through flourishes that rattle with the gusto of Spanish folklorico. The lyrics detail a violent crash: “The screeching of tires, the burning of rubber/The breaking of glass, and the witness, my brother/That's when my baby hit the ground!” With a blown-out saxophone solo taking over halfway through, it feels like Together Pangea’s take on an ’80s action-drama soundtrack, and it’s the song most closely in line with the band’s traditionally reckless ethos.
Though Together Pangea are capable musicians and songwriters, Dispassionate succumbs to its own sense of anhedonia. The band attempts to mask the anonymity with their tried-and-true rumbling drums and animated guitars, but this time, their edge can’t cut it.


Bing & Ruth's debut album, first released in a tiny run in 2010, has been reissued. City Lake features an 11-person ensemble—two clarinets, two cellos, two voices, bass, lap steel, tape delay, percussion, and piano—and the large lineup brings David Moore's ambient-leaning compositions to life.

City Lake

City Lake is not a new Bing & Ruth record, but it might as well be. Only 250 copies of the chamber-ambient ensemble's album were pressed when it was first released on vinyl in 2010. It reappears now, on New York's RVNG Intl., as a sort of coda to last year's RVNG-released Bing & Ruth album Tomorrow Was the Golden Age. That record, a luminous affair for piano, cello, clarinet, bass, and tape delay, was many listeners' first encounter with David Moore's group, so it makes sense the label would want to dust off a recording that most people never got the chance to hear.
City Lake is very much of a piece with its successor, although there are subtle (and not-so-subtle) differences between the two. While Tomorrow utilized just seven players, City Lake features an 11-person ensemble—two clarinets, two cellos, two voices, bass, lap steel, tape delay, percussion, and piano—and the effect of the expanded lineup is notable. It's a fuller, richer sound with more definition. The piano leads the way, knocking out rapidly repeating chords that emphasize the instrument's percussive side, and the reeds, cello, and lap steel frequently twist into sturdy, vine-like shapes. Tomorrow, with its shimmering delay, has a wispier, more featherweight feel; City Lake, while still beautiful and tinged with melancholy, leaves more room for dissonance, and even flat-out chaos. If, already familiar with Tomorrow's calm, cozy atmospheres, you turn to City Lake to soundtrack your next dinner party, maybe don't use the fine china: Your meal may take an unexpected turn some 40 minutes in, when the music explodes into a buzzing, squealing maelstrom of insistent crash cymbals and earsplitting glissandi.
Just like Tomorrow, City Lake is built upon exceedingly simple musical figures, but the results are anything but. Moore is often compared to American minimalists like Steve Reich and Terry Riley, and not without reason; he is fond of repeating patterns and stalwart pedal tones, and his chord progressions are usually content to stay in one place, shifting from foot to foot. And, just like Reich and Riley, Moore's own music doesn't easily square with a concept like minimalism. Immersed in the billowing harmonics of City Lake, you don't think of empty space, but of fullness. You don't think of absence, but of presence. The dominant motif of "Broad Channel" may be the piano's hollow open fifth, but the way he uses the rest of the instruments to color in that interval, you're left with the impression of a sound that can't be contained.
You feel it most in "City Lake / Tu Sei Uwe". Gentle piano chords, wreathed in glowing drones, create a sense of space that exists outside of time. The rhythm plays out only in the broadest of strokes, like the movement of waves. It builds imperceptibly, until, some 10 minutes in, cymbals and voices and a stream of gravelly feedback rise in a squall that, in the score, is notated as "HEADACHE INDUCING LOUDNESS." It might feel out of character for Bing & Ruth; in fact, if you dropped in unawares, you might mistake the passage for Swans. But it's over just as quickly as it's begun—a sudden cutoff, then silence. If Tomorrow Was the Golden Age corresponds to what Erik Satie termed "furniture music," City Lake is a glimpse at the raw materials before all the splinters have been sanded down—and it is all the more exciting for them.


EPs have traditionally played a peripheral role in the Chicago group’s catalog, but this six-song release has both the vision and the range of their full-lengths.

Hot Sun Cool Shroud EP

Wilco have been a lot of things in their 30-year career, but they’ve never been an EP band. Where other acts use the format as a testing ground for new ideas, Wilco always performed their wildest experiments on their studio albums, and Jeff Tweedy has historically favored the LP and the lengthy live set as forums for working through big ideas and worrying over deep uncertainties. Their EPs have almost always been promotional tools, whether it’s their short live set for iTunes or the bonus CDs they’ve appended to proper albums. Even 2003’s More Like the Moon started out as a promo for the Australian edition of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot before it received a standalone release. They’ve been dumping grounds for live cuts and leftovers rather than major statements in and of themselves.
Hot Sun Cool Shroud ostensibly serves a similar purpose: Wilco culled tracks from recent sessions and are releasing the EP to coincide with this year’s Solid Sound Festival, where concertgoers will have first dibs on exclusive vinyl before it gets a wider release later this year. But this feels like the first time the band has crafted an EP as a coherent statement with the purpose, if not the weight, of a full LP. There’s an intentionality here that wasn’t present even on More Like the Moon, an embrace of the possibilities of the shorter format. They use the medium surprisingly well, establishing and then elaborating on a “summertime-after-dark” vibe (to use Tweedy’s description). It doesn’t mean much to say Hot Sun is the best EP Wilco have ever made, because there’s not much competition. It means more to say that it feels complete, like a haiku.
Opener “Hot Sun” practically melts from the heat, guitar notes bending and warping as Tweedy sings about the physical pleasure of sunlight hitting skin. With that sensation comes a nagging doubt, possibly about climate change: “Shouldn’t I be doing something?” he asks himself. “What can I do? What can I do?” These two oppositional feelings sit in the song as equals, not just as things to experience, but to write about. “What’s the word I want?” Tweedy sings, as though concerned he might not fully convey either the joy or the fear. Few artists can break the fourth wall of a song so eloquently without sounding too clever.
With summer as a general theme, Hot Sun is structured in two acts, each side of the 10" featuring an instrumental bracketed by two vocal-centric tracks. In this setting Wilco sound more focused, the songs tauter in their melodies and more purposeful in their arrangements, even when those arrangements seem designed to be disorderly. The instrumentals move by their own logic—especially “Livid,” a collision of reckless post-punk guitars that recalls A Ghost Is Born—but every song makes space for a little bit of noise, a little bit of chaos. Even the relatively twangy “Say You Love Me” has a heatsick quaver as they offer up a rousing, reassuring, aching sing-along chorus that will no doubt sound great at Mass MoCA.
Especially for a short EP, there are a lot of different Wilcos on Hot Sun Cool Shroud. There’s Wilco the dad rockers on “Hot Sun,” still figuring out their responsibilities to their children and everybody else. There’s Wilco the noisemakers on “Inside the Bell Bones,” screwing around in the studio. There’s Wilco the frayed worrywarts on “Ice Cream,” wondering how anybody could love them. There’s Wilco the festival organizers, Wilco the migraine rockers, Wilco the country-rock band, Wilco the goofballs, Wilco the Wilcos. To this familiar parade, add Wilco the EP band, elevating a modest tracklist into something much bigger than itself, and demonstrating how they’ve kept in touch with all those different Wilcos for so long.


Grammy winning jazz singer Gregory Porter shone on the Disclosure single, "Holding On." But he's got a big career of his own outside of the British brothers. His new album is sweet and serene.

Take Me to the Alley

In May 2015, Disclosure released a song called “Holding On,” a dance tune that put singer Gregory Porter on full display. The collaboration likely wasn’t a big deal for Disclosure fans: The group works with big name R&B singers quite often; compared to Sam Smith or Miguel, Porter is certainly under the radar. For Porter, though, the feature was somewhat surprising given his career path. He’s a jazz artist, the guy in the big hat who used to play football. But "Holding On" was a big success despite his low profile, in large part because of Porter's presence. He’s got that voice, so booming and majestic that it cuts through any instrumental, no matter how pronounced or easygoing. On his 2011 single “1960 What?,” for instance, Porter is especially demonstrative, tweaking his strong baritone to lament social injustice. Conversely, on the next year's “Be Good (Lion’s Song),” the vocalist took his time, carefully peeling off each word through a sweet, conversational cadence. With these songs and others, Porter thrives using a unique style, an ever-changing vocal magnitude you simply have to hear to appreciate. He sings with conviction, calmly drawing you in, like having a long chat with an old friend.
Despite two successful albums, 2011’s Water and 2012’s Be Good, Porter hit a high mark on 2013’s Liquid Spirit, which won the Grammy a year later for Best Jazz Vocal Album. Powered by songs “No Love Dying” and “Hey Laura,” Porter brought true pathos to sentimental tales. While Liquid Spirit was decidedly nostalgic, rooted in traditional jazz and soul, for his new album, Take Me to the Alley, Porter reconnects with long-time collaborator Kamau Kenyatta to create something more serene. With its scant, acoustic backdrop, the mood is overtly relaxed and the pace is low to mid-tempo, making for a record best suited for late night consumption.
Compared with Liquid Spirit, Alley feels more reflective, if not lovelorn. “Don’t Lose Your Steam” and “Day Dream” are coming-of-age tales meant for Porter’s three-year-old son, Demyan. The album’s middle songs—namely “Consequence of Love” and “Don’t Be a Fool”—seem preoccupied with regret, as though the singer wants to atone for mistakes he’s made along the way. “Insanity” speaks to the raw passion lovers sometimes feel for one another. It finds Porter in limbo, that point where the relationship is over but neither person wants to give up. “Sometimes a lover can be angry till the end,” he sings earnestly.
On “More Than a Woman,” Porter sings about his late mother who, while dying from breast cancer, encouraged him to pursue a full-time singing career: “She brought love to my life, gave love light … simple words, I love you, she made true.” Porter is a formidable songwriter with poetic flair, but Alley puts more focus on what he’s saying than the music itself, which lessens the album’s immediate satisfaction. Porter sounds best when his music has greater variation. His narrative stands up here, but without a broader spectrum of sounds, Alley feels a little flat. It’s more of a slow burn and a slight step backward from Liquid Spirit’s dynamic nature. The results are nice, but with too few standouts, Alley breezes by.


The new LP from pioneering industrial band Godflesh is the duo’s best effort in over 20 years—a sinister amalgam of Justin Broadrick and G.C. Green’s collective work to date.

Post Self

“We understand the ordinary business of living, we know how to work the machine,” T.S. Eliot wrote in 1939’s “The Family Reunion.” “We are insured against fire, against larceny and illness, against defective plumbing, but not against the act of God.” Eliot’s play was a disaster, but it well illustrates the binaries written right into the name of pioneering industrial band Godflesh. Since the duo’s formation in 1988, their artistic underpinnings have encompassed human screams and assembly-line roars, hot blood and cold steel, the devil we know and the android we fear.
Multi-instrumentalist Justin Broadrick and bassist G.C. Green weren’t the first in heavy music to exploit these binaries through unbridled aggression; Killing Joke, Throbbing Gristle, and Einstürzende Neubauten are but three iconic groups that were active long before Godflesh. But in matters of sheer sonic magnitude, Godflesh’s juncture of man-made instrumentation (searing shouts, buzzsaw riffs) and artificial fury (militant drum loops, chrome-laden effects) was unprecedented upon arrival.
Three decades, six albums, and one 13-year hiatus later, Godflesh remain revered—and what’s more, they keep getting better. Post Self, the duo’s eighth LP and third release since reconvening in 2014, is easily the group’s best effort in over 20 years, not to mention 2017’s best industrial-metal album. Whereas the preceding A World Lit Only By Fire functioned primarily as a reintroduction to Godflesh’s primordial rage, Post Self represents a sinister amalgam of its creators’ greater body of work, especially Broadrick’s ambient project Jesu.
Broadrick and Green have tinkered with the scale of their musical modi operandi over the years, but they’ve kept their building blocks consistent. Broadrick’s drum machines and Green’s gnarled, rubbery bass riffs supply the music’s driving engine as well as its primary source of order, a rhythmic buffer against Broadrick’s animalistic grunts. Godflesh’s factory-floor soundscapes prove hostile and inhuman. “Be God” and “No Body” find Broadrick playing Iron Man’s murderous cousin, his full-throated bark distorted beyond recognition. “In Your Shadow” takes the mechanical suffocation even further, with vocals so compressed and static-ridden, you can’t help but wonder if the man moonlights as a Dalek.
Post Self’s violent detachment from the world of the living are certainly attention-grabbing, and on songs like “Parasite” and the title track, even ear-pleasing. But the disturbing ghosts haunting Godflesh’s machine aren’t as simple, or as static, as they seem. “Mirror of Finite Light” lights up the darkness with a shoegaze-y arc flash straight out of the Jesu playbook, awash in textured synths and hazy drone. “The Infinite End,” the LP’s closer, explores this liminality to majestic effect, condensing light and shadow down to a single, sublime point, like the Big Bang in reverse.
Brisk, 47-minute runtime aside, Post Self is a daunting listen, as well as an essential one, even by Godflesh’s sterling standards. Broadrick and Green’s brutal alchemy has never felt more prescient in our current age of backflipping robots and—if inventor Elon Musk’s predictions hold true—global wars sparked by AI. If we’re barrelling straight towards the point of singularity, we might as well go out with speakers blaring. And we’d be hard pressed to find better sonic guides than Godflesh, industrial-metal’s most trusted duo, to carry us to the inevitable end.


This twelve-track compilation celebrates the German label Tresor, a vital point in the Detroit-Berlin techno axis. Drexciya, Donato Dozzy, Jon Hassell, and others contribute.

Dreamy Harbor

When Dimitri Hegemann set up an art space in the vaults under the Wertheim department store in East Berlin in the spring of 1991, it seemed unlikely that it would last out the initial three-month lease. But the club Tresor became a vital point on the Detroit-Berlin axis in the early ’90s, its lease was extended, and the underground club became a conduit that brought the first practitioners of techno over to Europe, introducing the likes of Jeff Mills, Carl Craig, and more to the continent, which in turn helped it become a worldwide force. The club has always been a more vital catalyst than the label of the same name, established the same year. But its heaviest releases—Robert Hood’s Internal Empire, Surgeon’s Basictonalvocabulary, Drexciya’s Harnessed the Storm, X-102’s Discovers The Rings Of Saturn, for starters—have maintained its international status.
While perhaps no longer at the cutting edge, twenty-five years in Tresor continues to stay relevant, tapping newcomers like Objekt and providing a home for the likes of Detroit’s Terrence Dixon. To help celebrate, the label presents Dreamy Harbor, a twelve-track assortment of older artists that helped establish the label, a few newcomers from the far corners of the globe, as well as a legendary composer not previously associated with the label. Veering from woozy ambience to clanging techno and back, it shows the label to be in a transitional space of sorts.
One of the first surprises is the opening track, Vainquer’s now-legendary “Solanus (Extracted 2).” Originally a B-side on the Chain Reaction label, it’s one of the defining beatless dubs to drift out in the mid-90s. It’s a bit difficult to tell just how much has been tweaked on this version from the original. Those chords that mimic exhalations from the void; that sense of serenity cut with the prickly buzz of cicadas—it remains intact here, save that its ethereal nod now lasts a precious three minutes longer.
It segues into a track from newcomer Shao, who released his first single on Tresor in 2015. Shao’s “Sensi (edit)” fidgets and slowly ratchets up a sense of dread on the track, but at times it feels like an echo of the old Tresor sound. Donato Dozzy, a longtime master of such chasm-like techno in Italy, also recalls that type of sound but with more nuanced results. Where the set fares best is in breaking from the merciless sound of techno and having its artists worm into the spaces between the beats. Recent signee Marcelus lets live, loose-metered drums skitter beneath the floorboards of the haunting “Odawah Jam.” Newcomer Claudia Anderson gives “Phase” a buoyant stutter step, and Terrence Dixon slips in some saxophone breaths and a beat that seems to just gathering loose marimba tone bars together like firewood.
It’s the shortest track on the comp, but the haunting voices that float across the spine-tingling keys of “Direction Asymmetry,” from Gerald Donald’s post-Drexciya project, Daughter Produkt, might be the most affecting, sure to pique Drexicya fans wondering what’s to come. Most curious is the inclusion of fourth-world composer (and Brian Eno compatriot) Jon Hassell to the mix. Recently, Hassell’s groundbreaking work has been getting a long overdue reassessment, and more and more new artists are drawing on his reimagining (and inverting) of indigenous and ambient sounds for their own work. Hassell’s piece is the odd one out here, but its flickering electronics and gorgeous piano and trumpet twinkle like lights on the far shore. Hopefully it hints at more work from Hassell to see light on the label in the near future. Dreamy Harbor might not be as handy or invigorating a comp as some of Tresor’s mid-90s sets, but it’s that rare release on the imprint that finds greater effect coming from the dreamier side of its telltale sound.


The jazz rap trio’s 1993 debut questions the very fabric of our existence while celebrating its nuances.

Digable Planets: Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space)

Seconds into any Digable Planets’ song and you’ll hear it: the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra, the unorthodox free jazz of Albert Ayler, the black spirituality of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, the spoken-word funk of the Last Poets. Freedom, progressivism, oneness, harmony, and serendipity are the core tenets that would come to define the rap trio and their ideology throughout their career. How fitting, then, that intuition and a kiss of luck would birth their first jazz rap odyssey, 1993’s Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space), which is both a product of community and exploration.
Digable Planets followed in the conscious footsteps of the ’90s New York collective Native Tongues—spearheaded by A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers, and De La Soul—which was cultivating a more positive-minded, jazz-influenced rap community. Linking from varying backgrounds, the three Planets MCs—Ishmael Butler, Craig Irving, and Mary Ann Vieira—sought to embody the inclusivity their forebears had brought to rap. Reachin’ tested the limits of hip-hop alchemy, creating otherworldly transmissions that sampled hard-bopping jazz acts. They turned Karl Marx, Sonny Rollins, and Parliament into pillars of their cool, communal space.
The group formed through chance encounters in 1987, as if by kismet. Each member was already active on local rap scenes: Butler was workshopping Planets, pretending he was a group on his demo, Irving was booking shows around Howard University and rapping in another Tongues-inspired group called Dread Poet Society, and Vieira was in a dance crew that backed up rap acts when they came to town. After repeatedly running into each other along the coast—in New York, Philly, and D.C., at venues, house parties, and hangout spots—Butler finally enlisted Irving and Vieira for the third iteration of his ongoing, fledgling Digable Planets project. They took on the names Butterfly, Doodlebug, and Ladybug Mecca respectively, and the group quickly congealed, with each member possessing their own effortless style and indelible flavor.
The newly-minted trio signed with Pendulum Records in ’92, and they started recording songs for their debut album almost immediately. They needed to cut records for a production demo, and Butterfly suggested they use an old Dread Poets Society song called “Skin Treatment.” With the blessing of Doodlebug’s old group mates, Digable combined the song with another called “Brown Baby Funk,” a fusion that birthed “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” the unfadable jazz rap record that won the group a Grammy and put them on the map. With both local jazz and rap clubs backing the single, the airplay-boosted cut continued to build momentum. They didn’t set out to be a “jazz rap” group; they simply made use of available resources, sampling what was around them and being as creative as their circumstances would allow. Their raps reflected their respective worlds merging: Butler’s jazz roots, Irving’s street savvy, and Viera’s cross-cultural identity.
Reachin’ is an album about freedom—from convention, from oppression, from the limits imposed by the space-time continuum. It envisions slick rhythms and grooves as emancipation from the natural order of the physical universe; as Ladybug Mecca puts it on “Last of the Spiddyocks,” “It’s simple: Swing be the freakin’ of the time/The spinnin’ by the kings good for speakin’ of the mind.” Its smoothness feeds the agency of its inhabitants, whose vivid, weirdo raps conceptualize life outside of the binary.
There’s some talk of confrontational inner city street politics, but Digable were foremost promoters of peace and unity, and both their rap names and their music bore out their messages. Reachin’ found a through-line from more philosophical thinking to pragmatic street-dweller wisdom and logic. References from big thinkers like Marx, Fromm, Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche are scattered across the record, on songs like “Pacifics (Sdtrk ‘N.Y. is Red Hot’).” The album got its name from an essay by Argentinian writer and theorist Jorge Luis Borges. They, like Borges, theorized that time and space are conceptual, relating only to individuals. Outside of its obvious jazz homage, the title track was meant as a mark of their aspirations, as Butterfly put it, their efforts “trying to get to a new place.”
Reachin’ is at once vintage and futuristic, a vision for a new utopia influenced by the past, daring to imagine insulated black communities as separate from Earth—unified, Afrocentric, and untarnished by subjugation. It’s a world within a world, complete with its own language and monuments and dogma—comparing New York to a museum, its graffiti as much high art as the work of Dadaist Salvador Dalí. Digable Planets make their own pre-internet information exchange, where traveling a few blocks could mean an introduction to a completely new milieu, where little ever gets lost in translation, where the inspiration for ideas occurs as spontaneously as a trumpet solo.
Butterfly produced Reachin’ alongside soundmen Shane Faber and Mike Mangini in basic, makeshift studios erected in their tiny Jersey apartments. They were each well equipped to help see the group’s vision through. (They had done programming and engineering work for Run-D.M.C., Sean Combs, Queen Latifah, and Leaders of the New School. Faber was the engineer for Tribe’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm.) The album’s soundbed is warm and swinging. Carefully selected samples are sewn together at the hem. One sample might split open to reveal another, as on “What Cool Breezes Do.” Or they’ll all feed right into each other; the flutes, guitars, and bass that segue one into the next on “Nickel Bags” are all separate elements from separate songs. The samples they couldn’t afford, they recreated. Each track is unique, and yet every one is a puzzle piece completing the group’s cosmic take on transference.
As the album’s primary architect, Butterfly is at its center, but songs are often driven by Ladybug Mecca, who is silvery in her delivery, slipping promptly in and out of moments like a preternatural guru. Doodlebug imparts his wisdom as digressions, kicking facts in a wingman capacity. As a unit, they never miss a beat, constantly attuned to each other’s frequencies, moving in sync and sharing ideas. So much of the action is reliant on their ability to read each other and react accordingly, to big-up someone when the moment strikes or to cede the spotlight just in time. This awareness pays off on “Time & Space (A New Refutation Of),” where each verse latches into the next, every MC propelling the one that comes after. The other members even give Butterfly the chance to do a few solo cuts, somehow never sucking the wind out of the group’s sail. “La Femme Fetal,” an upright bass-led pro-choice parable, is written in the style of Butterfly’s idol, Jalal Mansur Nuriddin of the Last Poets, with a loose, almost interpretive flow that ebbs and rises to suit the inflections of Nuriddin’s cosmic storytelling. The ode, one of rap’s earliest defenses of women’s rights, serves as a cornerstone of the group’s progressive sensibilities.
Reachin’ is among hip-hop’s greatest artifacts, the realization of the Native Tongues vision for perfect rap harmony. They personify the balance they promote. It’s an album that questions the very fabric of our existence while celebrating its nuances. As Digable Planets refute the boundaries of their continuum, their imagined cosmology creates a jazzy, spatial anomaly full of sonic wonders and game theory. It is an enduring, inclusive work that helped usher in a wave of vibrant, oddball thinkers in rap, a funk dimension that envelops you and embraces all. In service of the collective, one of rap’s mellowest crews shared a heartfelt ode to soul and jazz that sought to open the gateway into a more enlightened future.


The Ghanaian producer and DJ’s debut surveys contemporary African electronic music, uniting a breadth of influences and guest vocalists in a shadowy, clubby musical world.

Different EP

In recent years, popular African artists have received a few bright moments in the American spotlight. In 2016, Drake’s “One Dance” became the first song to reach one billion Spotify streams with the help of South African producer DJ Maphorisa and Nigerian supernova Wizkid. Two summers went by before another African artist made a real splash on U.S. charts. Finally, in 2019, Davido’s “Fall,” Afro B’s “Drogba (Joanna),” and Burna Boy’s “Ye” became day-party soundtracks. Then, last July, Beyoncé released The Lion King: The Gift, a compilation of songs inspired by the Disney remake that featured some of the continent’s key contemporary talents.
Ghanaian producer and DJ GuiltyBeatz was one of the talents Bey recruited. The three standouts he co-produced on The Gift were smooth, sauntering afrobeats, akin to hits that had gained traction in the U.S. already. His debut EP brings change: The predominately afro-house songs on Different demand more—both physically and mentally—than “One Dance,” “Fall,” or “Joanna.” This is not music to lounge or two-step to on a sunny day. These songs pulse and pull, building a shadowy, clubby world from echoing synths, pounding percussion, and slick, scant singing. GuiltyBeatz has been to Coachella, DJing for Nigerian Afropop star Mr Eazi; with Different, he sets his sights on Tomorrowland, where he can be an electronic maestro.
Different is loosely about desire—romantic, sexual, and economic—but most listeners won’t catch everything the cast of vocalists is saying. They’re from three different countries, and perform in at least four languages. Nigerian dreamboat Joeboy stars on “No Love,” sometimes warding off gold-diggers in Yoruba, sometimes skating across the beat with rhythmic punctuations. On “Condom Collector,” South Africa’s Moonchild Sanelly powerfully professes her coital obsession in English. On “My Vibe,” Ghana’s J.Derobie seduces his lover in patois.
But it’s GuiltyBeatz’s thoughtful production and sequencing that speaks loudest. He moves between sentimental longing and brazen lust with transitions so sleek it’s hard to tell where one song ends and another begins. “No Love” slips into “Uthando,” where the sweet-voiced Nigerian singer Nonso Amadi beckons you deeper down Beatz’s mystic path. The drums sparsen to usher in “My Vibe,” whose final keys flow easily into “How Long.” Different is only 16 minutes long, but like a satisfying workout, it both exhausts and energizes.
Beneath the project’s electronic umbrella, Beatz shows off his genre dexterity. “My Vibe” is a sultry dancehall number. With a delicate piano melody atop galloping drums, “How Long” has the air of South African amapiano music. The EP’s most backbreaking track, “Condom Collector,” takes cues from gqom, a subgenre of South African house with BPMs around 126. It is relentless and exorbitant, but GuiltyBeatz manages a smooth comedown. Wisely saving the familiar for last, he caps Different with its months-old single, “IYABO,” an afro-house cut with pop flare. The kooky buzz of its synths suggests the twirling walls of a funhouse exit.
Africa to the world is a popular rallying cry of the continent’s artists, whose work speaks in every tongue to the breadth and universality of Africa’s gifts. Born in Italy and raised in Ghana, GuiltyBeatz imagines a global audience for himself and his peers. His debut is not just for Saturday afternoons at Everyday People, the popular dance party celebrating the black diaspora; it’s also made for voltaic raves, psychedelic highs, and steamy trysts. Different envisions a Western world that doesn’t relegate African and Caribbean sounds solely to warm weather and tropical vacations. With a six-song survey of African electronic music’s boldest and shiniest new ideas, GuiltyBeatz begins to draw the lines of a more interconnected future.


The Architek-- the new record from Chicago juke icon Traxman-- is overlong and not always engrossing, but its range and confidence are impressive, further cementing Traxman as footwork's mischievous, elusive virtuoso.

Teklife Vol. 3: The Architek

You've probably heard Lyn Collins before. A James Brown collaborator, the 1970s soul and funk singer's output has proven a small but deep well for samplers. "It takes two to make a thing go right"-- that's Lyn Collins. Her songs featured breaks that found their way into hip-hop and drum & bass. She's been covered by the Human League and sampled by Bruce Springsteen. "We Want to Parrty, Parrty, Parrty" was sampled on Charli Baltimore's "Stand Up". Chicago juke icon Traxman samples "Parrty" too, on Teklife Vol. 3: The Architek, a double album for DJ Rashad's Lit City Trax label and Teklife. He turns its harmless imperative, "Hey you! Blow your whistle!," into a barked command; by the end of the track, I'm tired of being yelled at.
Traxman's record collection is purportedly renowned amongst Chicago locals; he's been DJing house and juke and hip-hop for more than three decades. Obscurity, though, is not his game. Last year's Da Mind of Traxman featured AC/DC's "Let There Be Rock" amongst its absurd and hamfisted appropriations. The Architek makes hay with Juicy J ("Off Them Bars", exactly what you would expect) and, hilariously, Michael Jackson's "Earth Song", flipping the song's one ominous line-- "What about killing fields?"-- into nearly four minutes of eerie, melodic paranoia.
It's not the sample, it's how you use it. But Traxman albums are not for trainspotters: the train is 30 yards away, barreling down the tracks at you (blowing its whistle). Where DJ Rashad and RP Boo are menacing and soulful, and DJ Diamond is concerned with breaking rhythmic barriers, Traxman's guilelessness adds warmth and jes to his records. He's the footwork artist most willing to abandon the genre's hyper-rhythmic backbone to explore cheese and glitz. Elements of acid house, juke, and drum & bass meet schlock-pop, glam, and rap.
His tracks tend to conform to one of two templates: heavily deployed vocal samples over sparse drums and more intense, wordless rhythm attacks. Some of his most thrilling moments fall into the latter category. "Japan" utilizes a sparse beat and aquatic bass to underpin a wild, staccato squeak. "Manic" features a long, undulating synthesizer jam. Like last year's "1988", "Mobile Acid" reveals acid house roots, taking an already warped bassline and turning it over on itself until it's a mound of refried goo. "Electric Funk"'s deranged beeps sound like Shangaan electro retrofitted to Chicago juke.
It's those vocal samples that serve as signposts on The Architek, though, like the James Brown-sampling, DJ Rashad-collaboration "Bussin" or the self-mythologizing DJ shoutout "We Takin' Over". "Hold It", a longtime footwork favorite, samples a large swath of Psycho's title theme and adds a short, shrill vocal sample-- "Hold it!"-- over the top. The combination doesn't make a lot of sense, musically or thematically, but it succeeds at feeling both familiar and alien.
The middle of "Blow Your Whistle" features another short Collins sample. Traxman nabs her count-in to the track-- "1! 2! 3! 4!"-- and slices into a wild, disorienting breakdown. It's as fine a summation of Traxman's sound-- blurring the line between voice and rhythm-- as you're likely to find. At 21 tracks, The Architek is overlong and not always engrossing, but its range and confidence are impressive, further cementing Traxman as footwork's mischievous, elusive virtuoso.


Chris Cohen's warm, homespun albums are welcome throwbacks to introspective '70s singer/songwriter LPs. His latest is touched by the sting of loss.

As If Apart

Chris Cohen's quietly awestruck presence, straddling melancholy and yearning, is unmistakable, even if you don't really know who he is. It informs The Runners Four-era Deerhoof, Curtains’ impressionistic scrapes, and the gossamer, doe-eyed pop of Cryptacize, the quartet the Los Angeles musician fronted alongside fellow vocalist Nedelle Torrisi. His sensibility is theatrical in a generous, arresting way, as though his primary prerogative is to clear room on his futon for listeners to safely explore a broad spectrum of common emotions.
This ethos finds its fullest expression in Cohen’s solo albums. Overgrown Path, his warm, homespun 2012 debut, was a welcoming way to lose track of 33 minutes, a worthy descendent of introspective 1970s singer-songwriter LPs. Four years later, Cohen sounds lost in a different sort of wilderness; *As If Apart *trades the optimism, existential wonder, and woozy jangle of *Overgrown Path *for in for heartbreak. The disorienting sting of absence informs lyrics and vocals, while *Apart *is pointedly off in a musical sense: every hook shivering near the precipice of melody. Given Cohen’s CV, it can’t be a complete coincidence that this particular vision of splitsville often sounds a lot like an early Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti cassette.
A psychedelic carousel of slow-motion bad cheer, opener "Torrey Pine" sets the tone. Fanciful guitar chords circle and dog-pile one another, their colors fading out, every verse seeming to dead-end in the same two words: "without you." "In a Fable" glances back wistfully at the last days of an acquaintance, while the stark, minimalist "Sun Has Gone Away" confronts absence with doubled vocals and echoing pianos.
Single "Drink from a Silver Cup" appears to be As If Apart at its most engaging until you’ve really *heard *it. The laughter of children at play introduces a certain sadness at the outset; the metaphorical silver cup the narrator imagines could rekindle a romance is denial, hope, and fantasy rolled into one. The lyric is as achingly beautiful as it is painful. "Yesterdays on My Mind," meanwhile, preaches hope from the other side of despair "I’ll give it some time/but yesterday’s on my mind," he sighs on the chorus. Whether autobiographical or artistic, As If Apart is a powerful, exquisitely realized journey, the sort of bummer that sounds strongest in that alien hour between when you’re supposed to fall asleep and when you should be jerking awake.