The avant-garde composer and the tabla master orchestrate a controlled collision of their approaches, with harmonious results.

2 Tone

Look around and find the nearest ordinary object. Anything will do, really. You might be staring at Shuta Hasunuma’s next musical instrument. The 34-year-old composer’s idea of an orchestra is as likely to resemble a cluttered attic as a string ensemble. Those aren’t hypothetical examples: On the top floors of a gallery in Brooklyn, Hasunuma’s current interactive exhibit, Compositions, invites visitors to make sounds using objects including glass bottles, a tattered cardboard Amazon delivery box, and a basketball. Elsewhere, in a recent open call for his philharmonic orchestra, Hasunuma urged applicants not to worry whether or not something qualifies as an instrument before using it to audition. Which brings us back to that nearby object—is it your computer? Perfect. As he noted in that same open call, if you bash a computer with a rock, it will make a sound, and thus music.
Hironori Yuzawa’s craft has a tighter definition: He plays the tabla. Where Hasunuma has probed a thousand different instruments, seeking the right pitch from each, Yuzawa mainly sticks to just the one, coaxing a thousand different voices from the compact South Asian drums for his recordings as U-zhaan.
The two Japanese musicians’ new collaborative album, 2 Tone, is a controlled collision of these opposite approaches, with harmonious results. It’s a mostly tranquil piece, with unexpected splashes of sound disturbing the gentle ambience that Hasunuma creates using keyboards and synths. The two musicians’ ultra-light touch pulls you in, at which point their surprises come out.
Hasunuma is the lead architect here, but it’s U-zhaan’s skill that really opens doors. His tabla is, at various moments, a percolating coffee machine, a cockroach scampering under a rug, and a heartbeat. “Music for Five Tablas” features nothing more than generously spaced tabla hits, with U-zhaan reaching beyond rhythm with some pitch-perfect intervals. “Radio S,” the best of the three tracks here that stretch into the seven-to-eight-minute range, opens with serene raindrops, eventually develops a frantic rhythm, and then settles somewhere in the middle. The track comes full circle in its just-polyrhythmic-enough final minute, powerfully positive and twice as danceable as the duo gets anywhere else.
They expand 2 Tone’s world further with three guest features from experimental luminaries. Ryuichi Sakamoto brings down the mood for a spell on the dark and dissonant “Lal,” while Arto Lindsay sings his own lyrics and adds guitar effects to the anaesthetized “Green Gold Grey,” which sounds as though it’s being breathed into the ear. Each of the cameo tracks is a success in its own right, even if they somewhat distract from an otherwise focused experiment. The Devendra Banhart-murmured “A Kind of Love Song,” especially, feels like an intrusion from a different album. It’s graceful and contemplative, but as a piano ballad in the midst of Hasunuma and U-zhaan’s formless exploration, it’s out of place.
That’s not to say that the balanced partnership at 2 Tone’s center is necessarily incongruent with pop-leaning songwriting, and the album’s best highlight attests to this. On the penultimate track, “Dryer,” Hasunuma gives a warm and friendly lead vocal performance—his only singing on the album—while U-zhaan does triple duty, contributing horn and acoustic guitar on top of his usual percussion. The song shifts accordingly, from a calmly strolling chorus to a bridge of over-caffeinated 16th notes and back again. And then, after all the push and pull, it finds a peaceful resolution.


Recorded in Los Angeles in 1957, the jazz legend’s classic album—the first to use the now-standard saxophone-bass-drums trio—looks like a novelty and sounds like transcendence.

Way Out West

Sonny Rollins doesn’t fear the familiar. He’s persistently original, yes—those lucky enough to see him live before his deteriorating health prevented him from playing remember a “limitless” improvisor, one of jazz’s best. It only takes a cursory listen to what we now know were his final albums, the live Road Shows series, to hear how inventive the now 87-year-old jazz legend could be. Even now, unable to blow the horn that made him a colossus, he told Vulture last year, “I can’t get rid of [musical ideas]. It’s just a little trial that I have to endure.”
But even in his last concerts, he was still performing some of the same standards he injected so much life into throughout his seven-decade career—including those that appear on 1957’s Way Out West, an album that looks like a novelty and sounds like transcendence. The project, one of Rollins’ canonical recordings, has gotten a 60th-anniversary reissue in the form of a two-LP box set which includes previously unreleased outtakes and some in-studio dialogue. (A digital version is also available.) All these years after its release, Way Out West still shows Rollins’ unique ability to revere his musical heritage without losing his edge. Old songs, new sound.
At 26, the New York native was visiting California for the first time while on tour with drummer Max Roach. When Contemporary Records asked him to put together an album during his visit, the inspiration was obvious: the wide open spaces of Los Angeles and the Hollywood Westerns Rollins had grown up watching. “I was really living out my ‘Lone Ranger’ thing,” he remembered later.
There’s certainly a literal level to the album’s Western theme: “I’m an Old Cowhand,” Johnny Mercer’s 1936 ode to city slickers, “Wagon Wheels,” and “Way Out West,” an original by Rollins, all offer some degree of country shuffle and even a few woodblock horse-hoof clip-clops from drummer Shelly Manne. The cover, an instantly iconic study in subverting kitsch (Rollins had an explicit interest in the oft-overlooked history of black cowboys), shows him heeled with his horn instead of a Winchester.
But this half-concept album gets more significant inspiration from the idea of the frontier than from shootouts and Stetsons. This was the first jazz album to use a saxophone-bass-drums trio, a now-established ensemble that Rollins concocted to allow for a more liberated approach to improvisation. Without the accompaniment of a piano or guitar, suddenly even the most conventional song is just wide-open space. It didn’t hurt that the rhythm section Rollins assembled was bassist Ray Brown and Manne, two of the best of their time, and ever.
Everyone in the band had other studio dates and gigs, so there wasn’t time to rehearse before the now-legendary 3 a.m. session. They started with a standard, Duke Ellington’s “Solitude”—though it would have been familiar to everyone in the band, the original liner notes suggest that Rollins might have supplied the lyrics. (In some of the audio from the reissue, he’s reciting “I’m an Old Cowhand.”) You can hear them, somehow, in his opening notes, which swoon without schlock: “In my solitude, you haunt me…” He’s both vocalist and accompanist, never straying too far from the melody while garnishing it with soaring, distinctively Sonny arpeggios and squawking, virtuosic runs. It’s a feat of evocative improvisation, and was effectively the warm-up for the session itself.
From the driving hard bop of “Come, Gone” to the pleasantly off-kilter title track, the band seems to exist as one organism: Sonny and Ray in seamless contrapuntal motion supported by deep, driving swing from Manne. Their collective restraint leaves plenty of breathing room, both for each other and for the listener, which helps temper each tune’s inherent sentimentality. Rollins’ brash tone, somehow bluesy and sensitive and modern at once, also adds some acidity without ever losing the thread of the original composition. The same is true of “There Is No Greater Love,” where he lopes along with an easy lyricism that’s punctuated by asymmetrical gurgling and emphatic honking, giving the timeless melody a gutsy new twist.
The best part is that the listener might as well be in the middle of the studio: You have Rollins on your left, his horn wailing in your ear, and Brown and Manne on your right, each bass rattle and heat-of-the-moment vocalization jumping out of the speaker. It’s a remarkably intimate, casual aesthetic for such timeless performances—add some applause and it could be live. The instrumentation may be an exercise in understatement, but Way Out West’s 45 minutes go by all too quickly once its beautiful details begin to emerge. Brown’s beefy, fluid basslines are worth a separate listen, as are Manne’s almost imperceptible embellishments.
With Rollins’ melodies, there’s something new to hear every time. The variations in each song—fleshed out with the newly released alternate takes—offer an ever-more-complete portrait of an artist who was completely earnest in what became a lifelong quest for authentic expression. The listener is privy to ideas being worked out, experiments taking place, and mostly, endless creativity. There’s the sense that the band could have kept playing forever, if only they’d had enough tape.


The rapper, singer, and designer envisions transition as the ultimate creative moment on a release that transforms her racing thoughts into crackling electricity.

Mothe EP

One of the key tricks that video game designers use to facilitate immersion is to beautify lag. Using a range of visual and audio cues, games fill gaps in play with skeletal but engrossing ephemera: animations, jingles, loading screens. These transitional sequences are virtually never the highlight of playing a game, but they epitomize the ways in which change can be connective and catalytic, keeping established spaces alive as old forms fade. Savoring the uncertainty of change, rapper and singer Kilo Kish envisions transition as the ultimate creative moment on Mothe. It’s a snapshot of her ideas in motion and at rest.
Kilo Kish has been in transition since she debuted. In a 2012 profile she described rap as a “little art project” intended to serve as a stopgap between graduating from design school and finding a job. The little art project has remained small as planned, but only relative to her extensive list of interests. Between collaborations and tours with Vince Staples, Gorillaz, and the Internet, she has designed clothing, modeled, built art installations, and edited a design blog. The range and quality of her music have evolved tremendously during this period, but music has never been Kilo’s day job or even her second job. Her quirky 2016 album Reflections in Real Time attempted to make sense of all that life outside of music but ended up sounding tedious and stilted.
Mothe recalibrates. Building from the stream-of-consciousness style that characterizes most of her catalog, Kilo Kish turns her racing thoughts into crackling electricity. Preceded by an installation and a video game interface (also titled Mothe) that debuted earlier this year, the EP is a concentration of Kilo’s various artistic instincts.
Her voice is still a lithe, intimate murmur, but here it expands and condenses, splits and reconstitutes, taking on new dynamism and zest. Her verses on “Like Honey” zig-zag around a wall of pounding bass and strobing synths, cutting oblique paths and images. “I fly into the night from the restroom/They fold my napkin like a crane/I’ll powder my face/Go ’head and have it your way,” she sings. There’s no narrative here, but her details suggest many plausible scenarios: an embittered couple bickering over appetizers at some posh noodle house, maybe, or an exasperated speed dater slipping into the restroom for a meltdown. This expressionist approach allows Kilo’s writing to take on shapes better suited to her voice. Where Reflections relied on transparency that verged on oversharing, Mothe embraces haze and elusion. On “Void,” her casual singing staggers behind pulsating synthesizers, highlighting her flows, which can be hard to detect given her conversational way of rapping. Awash in gothy synths on “Prayer,” Kilo’s soft timbre warps the sting of self-deprecating zingers like “Somewhere in the discourse/Don’t you see me wrapped up in the wrong cause?” and “We’ll disappear, for sure.” It’s unclear whether she’s resigned, or bemused, or indifferent. She could be alluding to online debates, or climate change, or nothing—she doesn’t clarify. But as “Prayer” shifts into an amelodic whorl of spoken word and whirring distortion, that ambiguity becomes defiance. “I laugh in the dark/You search the ground in the dark,” she taunts.
Kilo’s abstraction and ambivalence take their most beautiful shape on “Elegance.” As Ray Brady’s centrifugal production churns around a distorted bass riff that swallows every other sound, she breezily raps and sings through the calm and the storm. Her verses are indistinct, but the way the chorus bubbles up is cathartic. Ultimately, what’s thrilling about Mothe is that it feels like both a capstone on Kilo’s days as a cloud rapper and a template for her future—a sublime moment of lag before she reaches the next level.


The Alabama rapper’s second project of the year is a mixtape-length “First Day Out” that serves as a timestamp of this moment in his developing career.

The Hood Dictionary

The Hood Dictionary arrived on streaming services less than 24 hours before NoCap’s release from Mobile County Metro Jail. In September, the Alabama rapper turned himself in to police on charges of allegedly shooting into an occupied residence. He marked his surrender in much the same way at the time, inverting a popular rap trope with “First Day In.” The song, which now appears as the penultimate track on the new project, helps explain why NoCap has begun to cut through in a packed lane of melodic rappers: It’s both deeply personal and invitingly vague, somber and triumphant in equal measure. He sings to open the verse, “Turned myself in in Off-White/Tell myself that it's alright.”
A decade removed from Gucci Mane’s “First Day Out,” the celebratory freedom song has become a rap-industry standard, an opportunity for artists to address their fans and capitalize on increased attention. For NoCap, The Hood Dictionary is a mixtape-length “First Day Out,” as he elaborates on traumatic experiences in Mobile, the circumstances that landed him in jail, and his wins in spite of it all. And while the project—NoCap’s second full-length of the year—is an effective showcase of his developing strengths as a singer and storyteller, it primarily serves as a timestamp of this moment in his career rather than as a significant step forward in his catalog.
Most listeners outside the region likely first heard NoCap on Lil Baby’s Street Gossip mixtape in November 2018. The two rappers share a twangy vocal register and a love of guitar loops, but NoCap takes the latter to an extreme. Seven of The Hood Dictionary’s 16 songs feature prominent guitar melodies; the results are among some of the project’s most memorable moments, allowing NoCap to find the pocket where he’s clearly most comfortable. “Still Me” is a skillful combination of confessional and catchy writing, “Take Care” is a rare instance of carefree joy amidst the pain songs, and “Heaven Gates” offers a slowed-down moment of introspection: “Mark ain’t never comin’ home, he tried to kill the police/I know the police comin’ home if he ever kill me.”
At times, the chords and riffs begin to feel forced. Towards the end of the project, NoCap croons about “F-150s and Durangos” on the hook of “Country Boy,” a strange song that feels generic and cliché in its references. Similarly, the punchlines that have become NoCap’s lyrical calling card are inconsistent. For every entertaining play on words (“Pissin’ haters off, my next chain gon’ be yellow” on “What You Know”) there’s a phrase that falls flat (“My bitch ain’t O’Neal, but I really hope she kill [Shaquille] for me” on “Take Care”). NoCap is capable of making straightforward come-up bangers, “Bankroll” being the strongest example here, but he’s best as a cuttingly honest narrator. When he drops his voice to a low mumble to admit, “I made the wrong decision, they put my sister in jail,” it hits harder than any double entendre.
As far as rappers who sing go, NoCap is currently somewhere in the middle of the pack. Over the past year, he’s shown glimmers of solidifying his own distinct voice and moving past the Lil Baby comparisons. On The Hood Dictionary, that comes through clearest in the moments when he’s eulogizing his friend Fred, raising his voice up a few notes to belt out a hook, or describing memories that couldn’t belong to anyone else. But the project feels like a lateral move from The Backend Child, released in May. Even its peaks don’t provide much new information about NoCap or resonate in a way that feels like they’re meant to last into the next decade.


Tyondai Braxton and his distinct vocals have moved on, but Battles remain committed to making complex pop-prog sound like fun. Gary Numan guests.

Gloss Drop

Let's get one thing out of the way: Gloss Drop shouldn't really be compared to its predecessor, Mirrored. The sole Battles record to feature Tyondai Braxton's digitally cartoonified vocals, Mirrored is now consigned to brilliant one-off status in the Battles catalog; Gloss Drop, created after Braxton left the group entirely, is more of a refinement and expansion of Battles' early work. In a way, for fans, the loss of Braxton was the best thing that could have happened to Battles. It meant they couldn't record a true follow up, which might then pale (or just come off as more of the same) next to one of the most distinctive and unexpected debut LPs of the 21st century. Battles could have recorded an all-instrumental album in the Mirrored mold, or they could have drafted in another singer to try and imitate Braxton's crucial contribution. Instead, they forced themselves, having lost their most immediately striking and divisive element, to move in a new and potentially radical direction. So the important questions with Gloss Drop become, "Is this new direction interesting?" and "Have Battles made it thrilling?"
The answers are: "Yes," and "More often than you might guess." Mirrored was an album that made its impact via complexity and speed and wild humor, a sound that owed as much to the orchestral zaniness of classic cartoon soundtracks as the grimmer heads-down virtuosity of the metal and math-rock bands in which the Battles members made their names. Not only could these guys pull off these wild instrumental zigzags at high velocity, they made ultra-tricky, computer-assisted pop-prog sound like fun. For their circumstances-dictated new direction, Battles have slowed their roll a bit, foregrounding both the pop and propulsive qualities of the music rather than its can-we-top-ourselves inventiveness. It still sounds like devious fun, but the sort you get from a band tweaking audience expectations.
Gloss Drop is the most ride-the-groove record Battles have ever made, owing plenty to both the straight-forwardness of house and rock and the crazed syncopations of soca and dancehall, where Mirrored's whole point could seem like leaving listeners breathless with this-could-go-anywhere prog invention. And considering Battles are possibly the tightest man-machine unit going now that LCD Soundsystem are dead, you can imagine how hot these grooves burn, and how meticulously they're constructed, their most audacious attempt yet to make the line between "programmed" and "played" completely invisible.
Of course I say these two albums shouldn't be compared, but that won't stop most people from doing just that. Inevitably the starker differences between the two will leap right out on first listen, but if you're worried about a complete makeover, Gloss Drop still does sound an awful lot like Battles. There's the same blurring until you can't be sure what instrument is responsible for which melodic or rhythmic element of the mix: Are those steel drums all over this record, or a guitar processed to sound that way, or some sort of "Caribbean" software patch? There are still the same surging moments when you're reminded, for all the band's post-human rhythmic complexity, what a great rock drummer John Stanier remains. There's still the sense of thrill that comes from music where any element coming loose would mean everything falls apart, and there's the surprise that music this fussed over can still hit so hard.
In a way, that's been the constant in their career, and there's often the feeling here that Battles haven't forgotten their pre-Tyondai days, where they seemed to be applying the hyper-detailed structures of math-rock to the feel of minimal techno. Battles' early EPs offered one of those shouldn't-work-but-does hybrids: prog rock, with all its furrow-browed instrumental digressions, that still somehow follows the straight-line pulse of dance music. The difference is that they learned how to be a (far) left-field pop band on Mirrored, and there probably wouldn't be much thrill in ditching that just to look backward. Though the tone remains gleefully plastic and mechanical, Gloss Drop is less forbiddingly dense, chilly, and opaque than those instrumental EPs. "Sweetie and Shag", with appropriately dream-pop-esque vocals from Blonde Redhead's Kazu Makino, is the most tender song the band's ever recorded, not a praise term you would have previously applied to Battles. If those early records resembled an auditory obstacle course, this is more of a playground, strange but inviting. Not for nothing does so much of Gloss Drop resemble carnival music, both in the "rides and games" and "Caribbean parade" senses of the word.
Sometimes this slave-to-the-rhythm approach doesn't quite come off, as on "Futura", where trad dance-rock is just given a frosting of virtuosity. There are moments like this on Gloss Drop where you remember Battles are capable of so much more than trad anything. And there are also times when the joyous silliness that runs through the record becomes oppressive, like the band's hammering you with the fact that serious music can also be super whimsical. But when it all comes together, as it does more often than not, it works on every level. "Ice Cream", with vocals from dance producer Matias Aguayo, is both the band's biggest and best pop moment since "Atlas", with a real disco bounce, but also totally perverse in its construction, like a mutated Phoenix single. And on "My Machines", they even call down that old (literal) tech metal thunder, with the added bonus of a big drama-queen performance from Gary Numan, one of their spiritual fathers in linking electronics with rock. Despite all the guests, and the nods to global pop, Gloss Drop will still be best enjoyed by groove heads, whether they come from the rock or dance worlds, but if you worried Battles would run out of surprises on album two, who knew they'd find common ground between post-punk devotees, Yes fans, and the children of UK funky?


Breakout UK producer Tim Reaper and his collaborator Comfort Zone convey the power and possibility of jungle.

Tim Reaper / Comfort Zone: Banoffee Pies White Label Series 01

Banoffee Pies White Label Series 01

Spend a minute listening to jungle and you’ll feel its torrential power right away: the immediacy of whiplashing breakbeats; the incessant drive of sinuous melodies; the triumphant integration of Black music, from jazz to ragga to techno to hip hop. The genre was in constant dialogue with everything else in the “hardcore continuum” during the early-to-mid ’90s, and the consequent expansion of UK dance music’s boundaries was fast-paced and exhilarating.
Banoffee Pies White Label Series 01 is a mighty 12" because its four tracks avoid lazy, nostalgic rehashing; these songs may feature hallmarks of classic jungle and drum and bass, but there’s no cutting corners. This makes sense given the presence of Tim Reaper, a prolific and remarkably consistent producer from London. He’s a real head—check his YouTube uploads—and is something of a poster boy for contemporary jungle, having managed to crossover to audiences less jungle-inclined. He’s joined here by previous collaborator Comfort Zone, and together they showcase a masterclass in jungle production.
Opener “All the Time” shows off their chops: Across six minutes, Reaper and Comfort Zone utilize the classic Think Break to anchor a song ornamented with glossy synth chords, fluttering woodwinds, and soulful vocal samples—pure decadence. Elements constantly arrive and disappear, an exchange that keeps everything light. Such airiness is key to the song’s simultaneously loose and linear sense of movement; when heady bass or flecks of punchy vox enter the proceedings, it feels both subtle and surprising. There’s a finesse to the introduction of synth blips, a hard-edged beat turn, or a fake-out ambient move. As the song progresses, a joy accumulates in hearing everything in flux: It feels alive on a microscopic level.
While “All the Time” thrives because of its unrelenting sense of possibility, “Touchdown” finds unexpected beauty in its offbeat linkages. There’s a dash of humor to it: The producers utilize the oft-sampled loon, and its reverberant warble primes the listener for the textural and emotional similarities between it and the rest of the instrumentation, from the psychedelic ebb-and-flow of synths to the resonant cries of vocal samples, even the stuttering of the breakbeat’s snare rolls. Reaper and Comfort Zone use excess economically, treating every sound as a piece of a grand puzzle. And with “Touchdown,” the loon sample goes beyond mere decoration—it’s the lens through which the entire song comes into focus.
The back-and-forth synth melody in “Pacific” serves a similar purpose. The dotted rhythm meanders while the song’s atmospheric passages drift aimlessly, yet all this is set straight with an abrasive and pummeling breakbeat. When the synth melody reappears in the second half, it brings the type of clarity you find after painful soul-searching. “Sherpa,” on the other hand, serves straight-up vibes. While its brooding vocal samples and alien synths have a retro-futuristic aura, it’s really a showcase for the breakbeat itself—every crisp snap and hi-hat shuffle is magnified, and the song often feels like a jazzy drum solo. It’s a representation of what Reaper and Comfort Zone do best on BPWL01: They prove each element counts by finding excitement in every single sound.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In an underground scene where guitar bands tend to be one trick ponies, pummeling punk duo Urochromes’ unpredictability lends them a rare star quality.

Night Bully EP

Urochrome, singular, is the pigment that determines the color of urine. Urochromes, plural, are the pummeling duo from Western Massachusetts that released a handful of noisy hardcore platters over the past two years on underground punk labels. Frontman Jackie Jackieboy commands attention with his rabid, yammering screams. Dick Riddick is the shredder, responsible for solos and the band’s massive, gnarly guitar tone. Their drummer is (literally) a machine. On their first release, 2015’s Get in Line 4 Mental Decline, Jackie shout-sang about pissing in a bottle in his room, and then, pissing on his best friend. At a glance, that appears to be the ceiling for Urochromes—fun, volatile, rapid-fire scatological punk. With their new EP Night Bully, the duo and their robot drummer seek paths beyond hardcore’s aesthetic limitations.
The title track begins with crackling guitars mingling with deep, burbling electronics. Jackie forgoes a scream, focusing all his intensity into an aggressive, rhythmic whisper. The title “Night Bully” suggests  intimidation, and there is definitely a posturing pushiness to its narrative. “I am the new muscle/Everyone needs a secret hustle,” Jackie notes, menacingly, before prodding further: “You should know that/You should really know that.” He repeatedly demands that you “be the uromancer”—someone who divines the future by reading urine bubbles. It’s the only overt reference to piss, and it’s puerile, yes, but it's also an incomprehensible, psychedelic call to action.
“Night Bully”’s overall tone isn’t unprecedented for Urochromes. The band had already been working with drum machines, and their obsession with industrial punk acts like Chrome came through loud and clear on their 2015 cover of “Chromosome Damage.” Jackie’s whispers take that aesthetic into new territory. The EP’s closing track, however, comes out of left field. The Northampton, Massachusetts-based coldwave duo Boy Harsher deliver a remix of “Night Bully” that renders the source material unrecognizable. A smooth, beatific synthesizer melody floats over a pulsing drone as a somber Jae Matthews croons the same words Jackie had just been aggressively whispering. It’s a wholly unexpected turn, but the synth pop jam shares Urochromes’ sonic DNA. There are familiar stabs of darkness that come through—demonic voices and the occasional squeal of guitar. It’s a welcome note to end on.
The record’s entire A-side, by contrast, shows Urochromes at the height of their hardcore powers. Riddick’s hooks are polished on “Confront Ya,” and the drum machine ratchets up the urgency. Jackie ladles bile on his target—someone who boasts about finding success while outlining their plans to climb the ladder. “You want to crush me with your boot,” he observes before bellowing with disgust, “You want to move to L.A.!” Jackie’s frustration holds sway on “My Disposition”—his disposition, apparently, is that he always manages to blow a relationship before it even gets off the ground. That’s the nature of Night Bully—they’re frustrated, and they’re lashing out.
Urochromes’ new one is about 11 minutes long (if you don’t count the second Boy Harsher remix that’s offered as a digital bonus), and within those time constraints, they build an emotionally complex and sonically elaborate world. This chaotic, always-fluctuating, heavy music undercuts self-consciousness, bitterness, anger, and an unsettling self-confidence. It’s a record that easily lends itself to shoving or dancing (or, you know, both) before arriving at a shimmering, uncharacteristic come-down. Given how ambitious these 11 minutes are, it’s impossible to predict where they go from here. In an underground scene where guitar bands tend be one trick ponies, Urochromes’ unpredictability lends them a rare star quality.


Carissa’s Wierd alum makes her first foray into crowd-pleasing synth pop in an intriguing collaboration with Seattle-based producer SYML.

Single Rider

Allow Jennifer Champion to reintroduce herself. Since releasing 2014’s Cool Choices as S, the former Carissa’s Wierd co-vocalist has made several changes to her music and persona. In 2015, she announced via Facebook that she would no longer go by “Jenn Ghetto” (a moniker that dated back to her Carissa’s Wierd days), apologizing for “the anti-black racism i perpetuate using the word ‘ghetto.’” Now known as Jenn Champion, a more search-friendly moniker than S, she’s started making synth pop. Her third record for Hardly Art, Single Rider, is the result of a collaboration with Seattle-based producer SYML, as well as her realization that, as she put it, “the record I wanted to make was... a cross between Drake and Billy Joel.”
Single Rider doesn’t actually sound like Drake or Billy Joel, but despite the stylistic left turn it represents, Champion laid the groundwork for this new direction on Cool Choices’ drum-machine-led “Tell Me,” as well as on her 2016 single “No One.” While those songs added new instrumental flourishes to her spare, confessional songwriting, Single Rider goes full-bore pop, to the extent that it barely resembles anything in Champion’s back catalog. The album’s sparkling synths and airy atmosphere are reminiscent of a similar transition made by Minneapolis duo Now, Now, who traded emo for more synthetic sounds on this year’s Saved.
Mainstream-leaning synth pop typically emphasizes the kind of melodies that carry the promise of marketability, so it follows that Single Rider is Champion’s most accessible and immediate work yet. (The fact that the opening synth line of “You Knew” recalls the McDonald’s theme song is an unfortunate coincidence.) The dancefloor spangle of single “O.M.G. (I’m All Over It)” and the laid-back, effervescent pop of “Mainline” are representative of the album’s palatability, even as Champion herself seemingly acknowledges her newly sync-friendly approach elsewhere on the record: “We’re all trying to be real/But we need that mass appeal,” she sings on “Holding On,” her voice floating over handclaps and creating night-drive vibes.
Luckily, Champion keeps her sense of perspective intact: Amid lyrics about love and longing that are native to the genre she’s working in, she manages to incorporate some impassioned (if vague) statements that speak to widespread societal frustrations. “They’re gonna push you out/They’re gonna hold you back,” she proclaims on “O.M.G.,” imploring the listener to “fight the things they do.” “You Knew” finds Champion avowing, “We’re all gonna break this shit wide open/And make it clear again/That we don’t owe you anything.”
Single Rider marks a watershed moment for Champion, even if she hasn’t entirely figured out what to do with her new sound. Style sometimes trumps substance here, and now that she and SYML have mastered the former element, establishing a unique lyrical point of view could help her distinguish herself from the ever-growing synth-pop pack if she chooses to keep making this kind of music. But the album shines brightest when Champion returns to her previous, more organic sound: “Bleed” has a Figure 8-esque skip to it that suits Champion’s anguished lyrics, while the simple piano of “Hustle” builds to a stirring vocal climax as she reaches into her upper register and repeats, “Hang on.” Champion has been doing that for upwards of two decades now, and she still hasn’t exhausted her range as a songwriter and a stylist.


Faithfully recreating the music of slave organizers, freedom fighters, and abolitionists, a recent compilation sheds light on the politics of collective liberation at the root of 19th-century American folk and bluegrass.

Various Artists: Songs of Slavery and Emancipation

Songs of Slavery and Emancipation

Ending slavery in the United States took much more than a civil war. Decades of conflict between enslaved Africans and white supremacist slaveowners culminated on the battlefield, yet a prolonged ideological struggle set the stage for emancipation even before the American Revolution. Resistance on and off the plantation often took the form of song, either to inspire rebellion or shift public opinion. A new compilation, Songs of Slavery and Emancipation, restores this revolutionary spirit through the music of slave organizers, freedom fighters, and abolitionists.
Released alongside a book and documentary, the double album portrays abolition as a shared language connecting those in bondage with escaped and freed Black Americans. Producer Mat Callahan pieced together solo and ensemble arrangements using archival lyric sheets, tablatures, and oral histories. More than 50 musicians recorded 31 tracks on a single microphone, primarily inside a Kentucky chapel; Callahan claims this environment fostered a “natural sound” devoid of technological intervention.
“Given the sheer volume of music created by Africans held in captivity, fugitives, and their abolitionist allies throughout the Atlantic World, it is not an exaggeration to claim that ‘American’ folk music was forged in the crucible of slavery,” writes historian Robin D.G. Kelley in the liner notes. Kelley critiques how historians downplay enslaved people’s contributions to emancipation, from withholding labor to overthrowing their masters. As such, these compositions undo whitewashed legacies of American folk and bluegrass, rooting them in a politics of collective liberation.
Gospel and Sacred Harp singers coalesce over 19th-century strings and percussion, producing a rich, challenging listen that rewards quiet contemplation. Insurrectionary chants revive vernacular, creolized languages to recall historic slave rebellions (“You can’t keep the world from moverin’ round, nor Nat Turner from gainin’ ground”) or evoke memories of lynched insurgents Jean Saint Malo and “Uncle Gabriel” Prosser. Here, voices of Dr. Kathy Bullock and Givonna Joseph soar between rhythmic cadences and raucous choruses, accompanied only by hand claps and shakers. Meanwhile, harmonious spirituals like “My Father, How Long?” demonstrate how enslaved people sang to bide their time, just as in prison.
Traces of the Black radical tradition hint at broader leftist themes. The cover shows communist artist Charles White’s powerful sketch of a matriarch, Move on Up a Little Higher (1961), named after a Mahalia Jackson tune. “Recognition March of the Independence of Hayti,” an instrumental by Philadelphia freeman Francis Johnson, signals transatlantic solidarity with the Haitian Revolution. Likewise, battle hymn “The Enlisted Men” honors escaped men who joined the Union Army, enacting what W.E.B. Du Bois deemed the nation’s first “general strike.” For these soldiers, the bell does not toll; rather, the “trumpets sound.”
Songwriters of what Callahan calls the “abolitionist playbook,” including fugitive novelist William Wells Brown and New York Committee of Vigilance secretary David Ruggles, penned anti-slavery songs condemning the Southern aristocracy. Underground Railroad conductor Joshua McCarter Simpson critiqued the hypocrisy of Christians enslaving human life in “To the White People of America” and “The Voices of Six Hundred Thousand Nominally Free,” adapted from the French revolutionary anthem, “La Marseillaise.” Kelley claims Simpson’s music inspired Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, whose activism necessitated the war. Yet while women’s voices feature prominently in the recordings, their emancipatory contributions are less evident in lyrical themes outside the penultimate “Woman’s Rights.”
Records of slavery remain scarce due to slaveowners’ erasure of African culture, and today’s conservatives continue this political lineage in suppressing marginalized voices. As such, Simpson’s “Song of the ‘Aliened’ American,” adapted from “America (My Country ’Tis of Thee),” resonates as a psalm of the subaltern. Simpson replaces the final line, “Let freedom ring,” with “Our chains must break,” positioning uncritical patriotism as the enemy of true liberation.


Jeff Buckley died before completing his second album. Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk, compiling those sessions, gives a glimpse into an erratic mind that could be too mercurial for its own good.

Jeff Buckley: Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk

Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk

Jeff Buckley would be 50 years old this year, and it’s hard not to think about what he’d be up to right now. As an adopted son of New York City’s downtown art scene in the 1990s, he could be wailing truth to power, like Patti Smith. As someone who hated how the early internet infringed on his privacy, he could have turned into an elusive icon, like Fiona Apple. A virtuoso guitarist with perfect pitch and a keen ear for improvisation, he may have leaned into Los Angeles’ embrace of modern jazz, jamming with Thundercat and Kamasi Washington. As a punk purist who was drawn to severe sounds and radical ideas toward the end of his life, maybe he would have turned into an anti-establishment musical figurehead, like Steve Albini. He could have coupled electronics with progressive politics and the voice of a fallen angel, like ANOHNI. Or, as an acolyte of George Carlin and David Letterman who was known for his outlandishly comical stage banter, maybe he would have given up music altogether and tried his luck at biting comedy. Would he have been excited by the way his version of “Hallelujah” became such a ubiquitous hymn, or repulsed by its overuse? Then again, without his tragic story as ballast, would “Hallelujah” have ever seen a resurgence at all?
Such what-ifs are inevitable when an artist dies too soon, but fruitless daydreaming is especially tantalizing when it comes to Buckley. His talents were so limitless, his range so vast, and his explorations of them so inchoate. In his 30 years, he lived a head-spinning number of musical lives, as chronicled in David Browne’s essential biography, Dream Brother. Growing up in Orange County in the ’70s, Buckley was obsessed with the prog theatrics of Styx, Yes, and Genesis. In his early days as a professional musician, he played with reggae and hair metal bands. During that time, he paid the bills as a guitarist and songwriter for hire, creating hacky tracks for a variety of L.A. up-and-comers, from R&B crooners to precious singer-songwriters. He made a proper name for himself in tiny Manhattan clubs through ecstatic solo covers of everyone from Nina Simone to Van Morrison to Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Such fluidity would be unique in any era, but especially in the early ’90s, when the internet had yet to fully flatten barriers between styles, Buckley’s musical interests were freakishly broad. At a 1993 show, he mimicked Khan’s chanting vocals over the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” riff as a delightfully bemused audience tried to take it all in. Following the impromptu mashup, he quipped: “I’m a ridiculous person.”
This ridiculousness miraculously came together on 1994’s Grace, an album that combined psychedelia, Led Zeppelin-style hard rock, shimmering pop, torch balladry, and a hymn originally written in the 16th century. Released in the middle of grunge mania, it was an ethereal tonic. Grace was not an instant hit by any means—the record sold 2,000 copies in its opening week and only went platinum at the beginning of this year. But Buckley’s label, the Sony-owned Columbia, home to legends like Dylan and Springsteen, put a ton of money into the project nonetheless, sending the singer around the globe with his band on tour to help kick off what they hoped to be a decades-long career. Though he was signed to a major label, Buckley was forever mindful of upholding the sacredness of his music and avoiding the evils of commercialism—necessary objectives at a time when alternative culture was being streamlined by corporations at a breakneck pace. His artsier tendencies sometimes clashed with Columbia’s bottom line, but in general he was given the room—and cash—to make his own choices, with the label figuring they’d eventually recoup on their investment later on.
Buckley was in a privileged position, and he undoubtedly enjoyed the runway he was being offered, but being associated with a global conglomerate weighed on him. He was a punk at heart, after all. He admired the way Kurt Cobain was able to navigate the industry before he killed himself, and hung a photo of the Nirvana frontman in his bus while touring behind Grace. And there was another artist whose battles with commerce were always in the back of Buckley’s mind: his father Tim. Buckley barely knew his dad, but he was well aware of Tim’s legacy as a risk-taking singer-songwriter in the ’60s and ’70s who was chewed up by the business before he died of a heroin overdose in 1975 at age 28. The son was adamant not to follow his father’s path, going so far as to poke fun at such tragic rock‘n’roll mythologies onstage. In this way, Buckley wanted his art to capture all the romantic wonders of ’60s pop while maintaining the knowing cynicism of his own era—a tough balance even without a genealogy filled with alcoholism, mental instability, and dire misfortune.
So under increased pressure from his label, Buckley began nursing a contrarian streak and attempted to trade in Grace’s gorgeous softness for something spikier and confrontational with his second album. There were troubles from the start. The initial rehearsal sessions with his band at the end of 1995 didn’t go anywhere. Soon after, his drummer quit. Columbia started throwing around potential producers to try to get the album on track, radio-friendly names like Butch Vig, Brendan O’Brien, Steve Lillywhite, or even Brian Eno. Buckley had a different idea: erstwhile Television frontman Tom Verlaine. This was years before the Strokes would put Verlaine’s band—and its scuzzy postpunk lineage—back in the spotlight, and the producer was about as far as you could get from a typical hitmaker. Which is exactly what Buckley wanted.
In the summer of 1996, Buckley and his band—including an inexperienced new drummer—recorded their first session with Verlaine in New York. Nobody was happy with the results and, that October, Buckley wrote in his journal: “I’m going to lay off the band.” Instead, he replaced one new drummer with another and continued to work on his in-progress songs, trying to nail down the more lo-fi sound in his head, something like the blunt force of contemporary underground acts such as the Grifters, Polvo, and the Jesus Lizard. He was over the pristine untouchability of “Hallelujah.” Feeling boxed in by Manhattan, Buckley decided to follow his friends in the Grifters to Memphis, where he regrouped with his band and Verlaine for another recording session in February 1997. Once again, the experience didn’t live up to Buckley’s high standards, as he was constantly rearranging songs and tweaking lyrics in search of the right sound and feel. He was a perfectionist with an encyclopedic knowledge of rock history and a masterful musical talent; he had so many choices, and whereas that dexterity once served as a stunning resume, it was now stymying him.
After the February session, Buckley realized Verlaine was not the man to bring his album to fruition, and it was decided that Grace producer Andy Wallace would sit in the control booth when the time was right. The band went back to New York, and Buckley stayed in Memphis, in an empty shotgun shack on a nondescript block with only the house’s jumping fleas to keep him company. He continued writing, taping ideas onto his four-track recorder. Away from the stress of New York, he loosened up, playing weekly gigs at a dive bar to small crowds. His musical brain started to flow and, by the spring, he felt like he had finally figured out what his album should be. He sent demo tapes to each of the three members of his band, summoning them down to Memphis once again on May 29, 1997. But around the same time they were touching down at the airport, Buckley decided to take a spontaneous dip into the nearby Wolf River in black boots and an “Altamont” T-shirt, singing Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” while doing the backstroke. Then a barge glided by. Its current tugged Buckley underneath the water. He was gone.
Following his death, Columbia intended to cull a 10-track album from the two Verlaine sessions and release it under Buckley’s working title, My Sweetheart the Drunk, in late 1997. His mother, who took charge of her son’s estate, nixed that plan, and instead compiled a two-disc set featuring tracks from the Verlaine sessions as well as some of the four-track experiments Buckley was compiling in his small house. Either way, there’s no getting around the fact that Buckley did not want any of the recordings on Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk to be heard. Even so, it’s a fascinating document, one that lifts the lid on a prodigy’s creative process and lets us peer into an erratic mind that could be too mercurial for its own good.
From the first few seconds, it’s clear that this is not Grace 2. Opener “Sky Is a Landfill” is the closest Buckley ever came to agitprop, a denunciation of capitalist and media systems that now reads prophetic, if a bit overwritten. “Turn your head away from the screen, oh people,” he sings, “it will tell you nothing more.” Considering the proliferation of smartphones in the last 20 years—and the untruths and addictions that have come with them—it’s easy to see the warning as wisdom. Meanwhile, the music is stark and fuzzed out, like a post-hardcore version of the Smashing Pumpkins. Its angst has not aged terribly well, though, as with everything on this document, it definitely allows for future greatness—what if he changed that one wordy line, or smoothed out that other transition? Listening to an incomplete work like Sketches, it’s natural for anyone to turn into a music critic, picking at things that could be improved. And it’s reasonable to think Buckley was doing the same exact thing in Memphis.
Though he was aiming for something gritty with the new music, the general rule with Sketches goes: The less distorted the song, the better it holds up. Buckley’s voice, which could go from divinely supple to shockingly overwrought, just sounds better when it’s not trying to blow the room out. Just because he could sing anything doesn’t mean he should sing anything. “Yard of Blonde Girls,” written by a few of Buckley’s friends, is a grungy trifle that has him trying out his best Alice in Chains impression. The singer originally hid the song from Columbia thinking they might glom onto it as a single, and his reservations are founded; unlike Buckley’s best, “Yard of Blonde Girls” sounds carbon-dated to the mid-’90s. “Nightmares by the Sea” fares better, its foreboding atmosphere and quicksilver arrangement finding a midpoint between Grace’s flowering darkness and something more sinister—twist your ear just right and you can almost hear St. Vincent coming up with something similar now.
And like many tracks on Sketches, “Nightmares” can be hard to hear, filled with eerie lines like, “I’ve loved so many times and I’ve drowned them all.” But then, Buckley always used water imagery in his songs. It was an elemental fear for him, something he could not wrap his hands around. So instead of enacting some sort of death wish by wading into the Wolf River—as some have suggested—he could have been finally overcoming a phobia. As for these songs’ scenes of death, that was typical for Buckley as well. As in any important drama, the stakes were always high in Jeff Buckley songs—he fashioned himself a poet, a seer, a gothic diva. Music was his life, so echoes of death were inevitable. He was always running away from them.
“My opinion was that the guy was much better without the band,” Verlaine has said of Buckley, and Sketches bears this theory out. The most beautiful moments occur when Buckley lets himself be beautiful, something he was loathe to do after his high cheekbones, intense stare, and luscious vocals turned him into alt idol following the release of Grace. But these songs aren’t mere retreads—they’re more creepy than consoling. “Morning Theft,” “Opened Once,” and “Jewel Box” are all love songs, but they flutter, never quite landing on a resolution. They are lyrically surreal, dancing around a romantic elusiveness that fuels so much great songwriting. “New Year’s Prayer” is similarly low-key, a mantra between light and dark inspired by Buckley’s infatuation with Sufi devotional music, while “You and I” comes off like an unsettling plea from a damp forest in the middle of the night.
The song hints at yet another future for Buckley: as a Scott Walker-type ghostly menace throwing shadows around his unearthly voice forevermore. Perhaps the most surprising song on the album is “Everybody Here Wants You,” a straight-up R&B number that could sit comfortably aside hits by the era’s neo-soul stars like Maxwell and Erykah Badu. Buckley wasn’t happy with the song, thinking it was too much of a pastiche. He’s probably right, but it’s wild to think that he could toss off such genre-tourist brilliance at will.
The four-track demos, by nature, are frustratingly unfinished, and they require a special sort of imaginative listening to hear what could have been. With its bittersweet resignation and one of the better hooks Buckley ever put to tape, “I Know We Could Be So Happy Baby (If We Wanted to Be)” has traces of a rock radio hit; “Murder Suicide Meteor Slave,” with its careening structure, ugly discordance, and self-lacerating lyrics, barely has traces of a song. One of the most intriguing demos, “Gunshot Glitter,” was wrongly turned into a bonus cut but is worth seeking out—riding a steady DIY bass thump, it hints at flamboyant dance rock decadence, as Buckley playfully deems himself a “paranoia politician diva.” The song had the potential to encapsulate all sides of Buckley’s persona—the weirdo, the hopeless lover, the charming clown—into something that could pump both hearts and bodies. It hurts to know we’ll never hear it as it was supposed to be heard.
Even if all had gone according to plan, and the finished My Sweetheart the Drunk was released at the end of 1997, it would have entered a shifting pop landscape. By then, the aggressive male wing of guitar rock was migrating from grunge to nu metal. Teen pop was on the rise, with Backstreet Boys and Spice Girls CDs flying out of chain stores while *NSYNC and Britney were still on the horizon. Hip-hop and electronic were ascendant as well, making the idea of a band of white guys with guitars seem increasingly quaint. There was an exception: Radiohead, whose frontman Thom Yorke counted Buckley as a major inspiration on his vocal style, released OK Computer the week before the singer’s death. That album pinpointed a lot of the anxiety and doom that Buckley was trying to put forward with his own music, but in a way that was epic and widescreen instead of insular and austere—it would have provided some tough competition in the howling-falsetto sweepstakes. Coldplay, perhaps Buckley’s most successful progeny, didn’t arrive until a few years later, essentially unspooling the singer’s complications for mass consumption. But, given his wariness of the mainstream and his quest to subvert expectation at every turn, it seems safe to say that Jeff would’ve hated Coldplay.
Sketches ends with a solo performance of the standard “Satisfied Mind” that Buckley sang on the radio in 1992. It’s a song about maintaining a richness of spirit that everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Bob Dylan to Mahalia Jackson has sung over the years, and he does it justice. “When it comes my time,” he sings, “I’ll leave this old world with a satisfied mind.” But in the context of this release—and the tragedy intertwined with it—the conclusion is too easy, too pat. By most accounts, Buckley’s mind was anything but satisfied when he passed. In the days before his death, friends say he was acting strangely, talking in code, making random phone calls to people from his past. He was also coming to grips with manic-depressive tendencies. All this doesn’t necessarily mean he wanted to die, but it does seem to indicate he was dealing with some serious issues. The volatile nature of Sketches’ four-track demos bear this out too. Plus, satisfaction was never this artist’s goal. He wanted to disrupt, even if that meant going against his most obvious gifts. Dissatisfaction was something Jeff Buckley had to grapple with for much of his life. It’s where he left us.


Reissued at last by the label that borrows its name, the second album from the computer music innovator is less predictable, with dark moods rising to a captivating surface.

Unseen Worlds

When Laurie Spiegel first released her computer-crafted compositions on her 1980 debut, The Expanding Universe went mostly unheard. But when New York sound-art label Unseen Worlds reissued her debut in 2012, 32 years later, the material resonated with a new generation of fans. “I wonder what it would have been like if there had been this kind of positive interest in the music and technology when it was new,” she mused to The Wall Street Journal. In the 1970s, Spiegel made Bell Labs’ GROOVE system—that is, Generating Real-time Operations On Voltage-controlled Equipment—sing, applying the inspiration of Bach, guitarist John Fahey, Appalachian folk, and the cosmos itself to room-sized computers.
In the wake of The Expanding Universe, though, Spiegel lost access to GROOVE when Bell Labs decommissioned the project. But in the years after releasing Universe, Spiegel began developing her own program, MusicMouse, using a Macintosh 512k to generate tones with the movement of a mouse. It’s the way she created her 1991 follow-up, Unseen Worlds, which met a more ignoble fate than The Expanding Universe. She released it on Scarlet Records, which almost immediately went under; Spiegel issued copies herself, though it essentially vanished. But now, Unseen Worlds comes full circle, reissued at last by the label that borrowed its name.
The opening vignettes, “Three Sonic Spaces I-III,” reveal just how changed for Spiegel since Universe. Her first album showcased incremental layering and meticulous adjustments within the system, her minimal sonic palette always progressing toward transcendence. But here, Spiegel moves mercurially between less predictable moods, rendering unstable atmospheres. Glowing sounds turn pensive. The weight of once-gentle drones becomes crushing. The thrill of outer space quickly turns toward rumination of the void.
Still, the album’s short pieces recall the lyricism and beauty of her previous work, as with the twinkling étude “From a Harmonic Algorithm” and the conceptually and musically charming “Strand of Life (‘Viroid’).” Ever the egghead, Spiegel conceived of the latter while laid low with an infection; she entered a viroid’s RNA into her computer so that it played back as MIDI data. The echoing “Finding Voice” sounds like a lost Balearic ambient track, one that would readily find a home on current labels like Music From Memory or Melody as Truth.
But most of Unseen Worlds instead fearlessly delves into dark sounds and turbid emotions. The bass drones and crystalline high-end of “The Hollows” feel icy enough to turn your breath into hoarfrost. There’s a tactile tingle at the start of “Sound Zones,” but as the piece evolves, those gentle prickles intensify into a Jacuzzi jet and then a sandblast, providing a whiplash between the serene and the skin-scouring. The closing epic, “Passage,” begins like a stuck doorbell chime—incessant, digital, and a little annoying. But Spiegel soon moves into deeper space as a bass rumble takes over. The piece mutates often and rapidly, like countryside seen from a high-speed train. She maintains that sense of great speed even as “Passage” enters more ambient expanses.
Having Spiegel’s slim but profound discography available again should help cement her legacy as a tireless explorer at the frontier of computer music, able to illuminate both the beautiful and ominous sounds such technology can create. Unseen Worlds succeeds not by furthering her previous work but instead by foregrounding the dark matter of her universe.


Bruce Springsteen's 17th studio album is an overtly political affair, with songs that tackle hypocrisy, greed, and corruption set to a musical backing of Civil War snares, gospel howls, and chain-gang stomps.

Wrecking Ball

"In America, there's a promise that gets made... called the American Dream, which is just the right to be able to live your life with some decency and dignity. But that dream is only true for a very, very, very few people. It seems if you weren't born in the right place or if you didn't come from the right town, or if you believed in something that was different from the next person, y'know..." With those words, Bruce Springsteen summed up his entire ethos-- searching for the American Dream and coming up short and then searching some more-- during a time of rampant unemployment and disquieting economic inequalities. The year was 1981. Yeah, Bruce has been here before.
Back then, Springsteen expressed his blossoming political awareness as well as the no-way-out stories of his friends back in small-town New Jersey with the stark vignettes of Nebraska. Recorded alone on a four-track, the album hovers like candlelight through a pinhole, its hope-deprived characters somberly trying to reconcile faded dreams with the realities in front of them. The album is an empathetic work with Springsteen's disillusionment coursing through it, offering a personalized stamp on America's Promise, and what happens when that bond becomes weak.
Fast-forward to present day: While the State of the Union may feel familiarly shaky, Bruce Springsteen is attacking his country's hypocrisy, greed, and corruption in an entirely different way on his 17th studio album, Wrecking Ball. The keyword is "attack." Several songs here are polemics from a man who has been betrayed one too many times. "If I had me a gun, I'd find the bastards and shoot 'em on sight," he threatens on "Jack of All Trades", while nothing less than the sound of shotgun fire is heard at the climax of "Death to My Hometown". Perhaps inspired by the folk songs he covered on 2006's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Springsteen fills the first side of Wrecking Ball with his own protest music. Like pretty much everything Bruce does, it's a noble gesture-- biographer Dave Marsh pegged him as "the last of rock's great innocents" in the 1970s, and the title still holds-- but it can also sound misguided.
With Nebraska Springsteen was updating the folk music tradition, whether that was his intention or not. The record was insular and personal, which fit its increasingly splintered times. We Shall Overcome was a communal throwback, but it re-energized its dusty source material with spirited performances and an approachable shagginess that's often eluded Springsteen on record over the past couple of decades. Wrecking Ball guns for such sing-alongs-- its musical roots call back to Civil War snares, gospel howls, and chain-gang stomps-- but it fails to support them with ample life.
Part of this can be chalked up to the album's production, which, like nearly all of Springsteen's post-Tunnel of Love material, continually finds a way to professionalize the singer's blue-blooded rawness. While a few E Streeters make cameos here and there, the bulk of the album was played by Springsteen and new studio partner Ron Aniello, whose previous credits include Bruce's wife Patti Scialfa, along with Candlebox, Guster, and Barenaked Ladies. The production isn't a disaster, but most of the stylistic flourishes can feel gimmicky or, at worst, like dry history lessons; the "Taps"-like horns on "Jack of All Trades" could be announcing the song's own funeral, and a startlingly bland concluding guitar solo by Tom Morello doesn't help matters. There's also the tugging sense that Springsteen and Aniello are trying to cover up some of the album's lackluster songwriting.
Springsteen never fell into punk's nihilism in its heyday, instead opting for fuller and more ambiguous pictures of the problems of the American working class. So it's odd to hear him rail against those up on "Banker's Hill" in the sort of black-and-white terms that continue to plague and cleave his home country. Not to say he has a moral obligation to tell the banker's story-- he doesn't-- but his lashing anger largely gets the better of him (and his writing) on Wrecking Ball's opening half, from the simplistic thieves of "Easy Money" to the overly broad characterization of "Jack of All Trades". For Springsteen, the Promise has always been a complex notion, and there's beauty in the tangles. Nothing is easy, not joy nor vengeance. There are always repercussions, always second and third and fourth thoughts behind any given action. "The road of good intentions has gone dry as a bone," he sings on opener "We Take Care of Our Own", and the plea is unfortunately carried through the record's first five songs.
In that light, Wrecking Ball's back half acts as something of a rescue mission, for Springsteen's soul, and for the album itself. The two best songs are here, and not coincidentally they're the oldest tunes of the bunch, ones that were written with the full E Street Band in mind. Both of them-- "Wrecking Ball" and especially "Land of Hope and Dreams"-- also feature the unmistakable sax blares of Clarence Clemons, who passed away last summer. That added emotional weight certainly contributes to these songs' heft, but so does the fact that they fit in with Springsteen's lifelong mission in a way that the rest of the album does not. "Wrecking Ball" was originally written to pay tribute to the Meadowlands' Giants Stadium in 2009, when Springsteen and the E Street Band played the venue's final concerts. And indeed, Springsteen personifies the stadium in the song: "I was raised outta steel here in the swamps of Jersey some misty years ago," he starts. Now, this might seem a little goofy and random. But keep in mind that Giants Stadium was being raised in Springsteen's home state just as his own career was taking off in the 1970s, and that he opened the Meadowlands' Brendan Byrne Arena (now the Izod Center) with six sold-out shows in 1981. These hulks of steel mean a lot to Springsteen-- they're his pulpit. And outlasting one of them is no small feat. Across "Wrecking Ball"'s six minutes, Springsteen is harkening back to his sprawling arrangements of yesteryear, and marking it with a glorious bridge that acknowledges the 62-year-old's mortality while defying it all the same. "Bring on your wrecking ball," he sings, over and over, relishing the joy of this ending.
"Land of Hope and Dreams", written around the time of the E Street reunion tour in 1999, follows suit-- it's sprawling at seven minutes and boasts not one but two prime Clemons solos. (In the Wrecking Ball booklet, Springsteen breaks down the duo's invaluable accomplishment: "Together, we told an older, richer story about the possibilities of friendship that transcend those I'd written in my songs and in my music.") This song is huge, not only in length but scope, and is imbued with an all-encompassing, arena-blowing bigness that Springsteen has shied away from in his new material for years. It rolls along using one of Bruce's favorite metaphors: the train. This is the one Curtis Mayfield was talking about on "People Get Ready" (which is called out here), the one critic Greil Marcus rhapsodized about in his essential tome Mystery Train, the one that welcomes all Americans regardless of class, race, creed. Coming out of Springsteen's mouth-- and Clemons' horn-- it's still a touching ideal, a testament of hope when we need it most. And for going on 40 years now, that's Bruce's job-- to remind us of what brings people together when everything around us seems hellbent on proving the opposite. Too hokey? Probably. But the true power of a song like "Land of Hope and Dreams" lies in its ability to overcome self-consciousness and cynicism, a feat that's tougher to achieve now than ever. Hard times come and go-- why spew anger when exultance is in your grasp?


Aquarius is the major label debut of Los Angeles R&B singer/songwriter Tinashe, after a string of buzz-building mixtapes and the summer-smash "2 On". The album is an anomaly in an age of major label standardization: a debut done unmistakably on Tinashe’s own terms. Clams Casino, Dev Hynes, Future, A$AP Rocky, and others contribute.

Aquarius

It was the Platonic ideal of a 2014 chart-topper (Mustard on the beat—check; cheeky interpolation of a throwback hit—check; benevolent but ultimately useless Drake remix—check), so it’s no huge surprise that “2 On”, the star-making lead single from Tinashe’s debut album, Aquarius, proved to be a bit of a red herring. And while it’s still probably the best song of the Los Angeles singer/songwriter’s career, ultimately that’s a good thing. Tinashe’s post-“2 On” rise may have seemed sudden (and especially glaring, in a year where male voices overwhelmed the R&B charts), but the 21-year-old is hardly a rookie. After devoting most of her teenage years to the Stunners, a Vitamin C-founded quintet that briefly toured with Justin Bieber, she spent the last few years at work on a steady stream of promising, if unpolished, mixtapes recorded in her home studio. Those tapes—filled with dusky ballads for spooning a laptop and sounding quite at home among the glut of zoned-out, “alternative” R&B artists—got her a deal with RCA Records, but if the distance between her gently trippy mixtape work and the glossy ratchet-pop of “2 On” seemed potentially unbridgeable, it’s because she never intended to bridge it in the first place. Instead, Aquarius is an anomaly in an age of major label standardization: a debut done unmistakably on Tinashe’s own terms.
Much of Aquarius feels like an ambitious extension of Tinashe’s mixtape tracks, elevated to professional quality where they once felt muddled while leaving breadcrumb trails of idiosyncratic details leading back to her bedroom-producer past—distorted guitar solos, eerie found-sound interludes, somber spoken word bits. Sure, sometimes it’s a little much: wide-eyed lines like “What is truth, if truth is subjective?” read more like “Ever seen the back of a $20 bill on weed?” similar to peer Jhené Aiko, another recent indie-to-major transitioner with a penchant for dorm-room stoner koans. Mostly, though, Tinashe’s polished her act without dulling her edge, as the most interesting tracks on Aquarius come closest to approaching anything remotely like a radio hit—consider “How Many Times”, a Janet Jackson-referencing, late-'80s worshipping duet with Future so sultry it renders his shouty “Sh!t” flow as aphrodisiacal.
But Tinashe's most straightforward songs come with dark subtexts. Production-wise, second single “Pretend” has all the bite of an Avril Lavigne ballad playing during the break between "Lizzie McGuire" episodes (not necessarily a knock—somehow Detail’s mushiest productions are always his best) but the lyrics find Tinashe pretending her deadbeat boyfriend, played by A$AP Rocky, isn’t a scumbag so they can get it in a few more times. “All Hands On Deck”, the album’s sole answer to “2 On”'s club-readiness, has shadowy corners not often found in radio ratchetry, and that’s not counting the song's pan-flute breakdown: what first reads as a blithe dance instructional swiftly devolves into caustic post-break-up stunting, as Tinashe snarls, “Kiss the old me goodbye/ She's dead and gone.”
Though Tinashe’s held on to the self-reliant tendencies that guided her mixtape days, the sense of disembodiment, sometimes verging on aloofness, that often present in her early work—a recurring pitfall of the production-driven “alt-R&B” she once fit into—is mercifully absent. Somewhat paradoxically, too, working with a bigger team has made it clearer than ever that ultimately, she’s calling the shots; even with such a breadth of instantly recognizable collaborators, from Mike WiLL Made It to Clams Casino to Devonté Hynes, the vision remains wholly Tinashe’s throughout. As she’s shed the trappings of distinctly 2010s R&B for something less easily time-stamped, she’s revealed a new and very telling set of inspirations, unmistakably the product of coming of age in the Y2K era of R&B, where Janet Jackson and Aaliyah gracefully countered choreography-happy, big-budget smashes with flashes of something darker and deeply personal.
Tinashe has a bit of the coy, collected swagger of less canonical, "Total Request Live"-era mainstays such as Mya or Christina Milian, too—especially in the sauntering “Thug Cry”—but for all that early-'00s worship, Tinashe’s unshakeable faith in her own vision could only really pay off in a climate like right now, where a record deal is hardly the end-all be-all to a legitimate career. If the risk-taking featured on Aquarius doesn’t pan out, she can do it herself—she already has—so why not use the momentum of the biggest song of your career to propel you in the complete opposite direction?


The genre-defying violinist levels up as a songwriter on an EP of experimental pop and R&B. It explodes conventional musical logic with disarming ease.

Sink EP

Sudan Archives is a 24-year-old violinist with “too much swag,” as she once sang, but that proportion is serving her quite well, actually. Using little more than strings, a looper, and electronic beats and shimmer, Sudan transposes the bounce and swing of R&B and hip-hop onto a fantastically original sound that could only exist now. She has cited as an influence the late, defiant Cameroon composer and ethnomusicologist Francis Bebey, who made a similar hybrid of organic and electronic African sounds in the late 1970s and once told an interviewer, “The artistic challenge is to use the tools of Western progress and [communicate] messages of the African heritage.” Sudan steps up.
The warmth and poise of Sink, her second EP on Stones Throw, bears out her singular confluence of interests and experience—her deep psychic archive. Nearly all of its six tracks contain traces of the North African one-stringed fiddle players who inspire her, lending her work an inviting minimalism. Sudan’s voice moves between a smooth R&B breeze and the blunted real talk of subtle raps. Her lucid singing roots back to the teen pop duo she once had with her twin sister, and, at times, the celestial grooves of Sink evoke “Queen Kunta”—her brilliant 2016 cover of Kendrick Lamar’s “King Kunta.” Another of Sudan’s stated influences is the Sufi multi-instrumentalist and scholar Asim Gorashi, a world whistling champion known for interpreting Mozart with his lungs and lips. Sudan’s own approach similarly explodes conventional musical logic with a disarming ease: She rethinks the possibilities of her classical instrument, employing the same ingenuity Dorothy Ashby brought to harp and Arthur Russell to cello. She accomplishes the rare feat of honoring tradition while remaining unbeholden to genre.
Beyond this compositional prowess, Sudan levels up as a songwriter on Sink. Her lyrics can be elegant or biting, but they’re always grounding and purposeful. The EP’s brightest point, “Nont for Sale,” opens with the mic-dropping kiss-off, “You only call me when you need something,” as her voice glides over her own effervescent pizzicato. About halfway through, a faint rattle kicks in, like a pencil sketch of a trap beat. “Nont for Sale” is a song of personal empowerment that suddenly flips to become a comment on colonialism—“This is my land, nont for sale”—inspired by a hand-painted sign she saw on a hillside during a recent trip to Ghana (where she filmed a video for 2017’s “Come Meh Way”). “Beautiful Mistake,” an ode to the glorious and inevitable imperfections inherent in being human, pivots on some anti-authoritarian swagger: “They don’t know/They just fuckin’ old people tryin’ to steal all your gold.” Sudan’s words are as sharp as a fingersnap. Her conviction is contagious. And despite the EP’s many moving parts, Sink always finds space; never cluttered, it stands as a cosmic beacon of composure.
Sudan is a musician at the crossroads of multiple dualities: an experimenter with her own vision of pop music, an artist uncovering histories while directly in conversation with her own time. Sink feels refreshingly present, and never more than when she spells out that engagement herself: “My strings propagate/Through space and time/Here and there/At the same time,” she unspools over “Nont for Sale,” with its cloud of bass. “This is my seat, can’t ya tell?” Recently, when a journalist asked Sudan how it felt to make such self-contained music, she said, “I just feel like an African queen, like I’m ruling the world… I can make any sound I want, any world I want, and no one can steer me another way.” Sink is a 19-minute promise that, song by song, her world is getting bigger.


Brian Eno and John Cale’s 1990 collaboration is an album of contention, contrasts, cycles, and pop songs so layered and euphoric it is one of the best albums either artist has ever made.

Wrong Way Up

The calls came around 5:30 in the morning. Brian Eno fumbled to the phone and heard an excitable Welsh voice on the other end. “Eno! I’ve had an idea!”
It was London, 1974, and Eno was serving as an “ideas consultancy” for John Cale, who was making his fourth solo album Fear. “I was a kind of consultant or advisor...John was using me to bounce ideas off of, and get reactions from,” he said the following year. “It was a very intense month.” A journalist visiting the Fear sessions found Cale constantly switching instruments and holding court with various visitors while Eno brewed tea and attempted to bring a bit of normalcy to the operation.
These roles—Cale as whirlwind; Eno as accountant—would define their working relationship. After a brief period of camaraderie in the early ’70s (they once crossed into East Berlin together to be stared at by the East Berliners), their studio collaborations became sporadic courtesies. Eno treated Cale tracks like “The Jeweller” and “Helen of Troy”; Cale played viola on Another Green World’s “Sky Saw” and “Golden Hours.” “There was a lot of substance abuse going on,” Cale recalled to Eno’s biographer David Sheppard. “It was obvious to Brian at that point that I was pretty incorrigible...” Once while dining with Eno, Cale set fire to the check. Eno “was helpless with laughter, screaming, ‘Oh horseplay!’ while the bill was in flames in the ashtray.”
Cale was unlike many of Eno’s other collaborators. Six years Eno’s elder, he’d worked with La Monte Young and had recorded The Velvet Underground and Nico when Eno was still in art school. A skilled violist and pianist, he couldn’t be intimidated in the studio by a self-confessed “non-musician.” Recording with Cale meant raucous musical debate with no moderator. Cale seemed to live by an internal set of Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards. “Bursts of genius interspersed with oceans of inattention,” as Eno described Cale’s working methods.
In October 1990, they finally released a full collaboration: Wrong Way Up. Though it marks Eno’s first “song” album since 1977’s Before and After Science, and despite being among Eno and Cale’s loveliest, most accessible records, Wrong Way Up has faded from view—out of print on CD and vinyl (despite having been reissued in 2005), not streaming on Spotify.
Its credits read as if dictated by negotiation—most songs were “written and composed” by Eno and Cale, with care taken to note who wrote which lyrics. Eno was producer, Cale “co-producer.” In promo interviews, both admitted they hadn’t gotten on at times, or apparently much of the time. Eno reportedly called Cale irrational. Cale said Eno “would listen to what you said, but he really didn’t have much patience with it...I haven’t figured out yet what Brian’s notion of cooperation, or collaboration, is.”
Yet Wrong Way Up would be far more euphoric than either expected. Eno said, “We both started out thinking it would be quite stark and sort of, industrial...perhaps slightly Eraserhead in feeling.” In the first post-Cold War spring, with the Berlin Wall down and Nelson Mandela freed, “the feelings were hopeful. It was ’Hey, the future looks good.’” Eno was enjoying the World Cup that year and his wife, Anthea Norman-Taylor, recently had given birth to a daughter. “All those elements, those loops, combined in that particular way,” he said. “The World Cup, my daughter, and me singing again. And John, of course. He’s another loop, combining.”
It began the year before. Cale, having set four Dylan Thomas poems to music, sent a tape of a live performance to Eno. As his label had developed contacts in the Soviet Union, Eno told Cale he could get the pieces recorded by a top-rank orchestra in Moscow for a fraction of what it would cost in the West. And he agreed to produce.
A video documentary was made of the Words for the Dying sessions, in April 1989. Throughout, Eno seems irked, flipping off the cameraman, holding a clipboard in front of his face. (Cale has no qualms about being filmed, even when caught screaming “fuck!” in frustration while recording a boys’ choir.) Then, in a sequence caught via monitor camera, Eno and Cale whisk a song together.
A double bassist, the late Rodion Azarkhin, has come in for an orchestral session. Spurred to write a new piece for Azarkhin, Cale sits at the piano, Eno hovering over his shoulder. “This beat doesn't have to have blue notes like jazz does, but that sort of...smoky pace,” Eno says. He keeps time by waving a pen, Cale drums out chords. They move to the control room, giving instructions like “play simple harmonics in between the verses” (Cale) and “get him loosened up, not stuck onto one idea—find something he likes to play” (Eno). Eno mimes playing the double bass; Cale yawns and does a crossword puzzle. It’s like watching two lobes of the same brain interact.
While filling out the album back in the UK, Cale sensed that Eno was growing comfortable with vocal songs again and proposed a full collaboration. It would be a pop album; Eno would sing on it; he would tour with Cale for it. Eno tacitly accepted the terms. Getting Eno to sing again on record was a coup. He spent the ’80s making ambient instrumental albums, mulling ideas like “quiet clubs” and “research gardening,” working on video sculptures and projects like a Tropical Rainforest Sound Installation for the World Financial Center, and being half of the production team that delivered U2’s The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. As late as September 1989, he told a radio interviewer, “I’m sure I could, if someone held a gun to my head, crank out a record of songs, but at this point in time I know it wouldn’t be any good, because there’s no conviction to carry it forward.”
Yet nine months later, Eno was in his home studio—in his grand Victorian house in Woodbridge, Suffolk—working on a record of songs with Cale. He’d missed singing, it turned out. Visitors often found Eno humming or singing while in the kitchen. He’d been listening to gospel and Arabic music, and had never lost his love for doo-wop. He and Daniel Lanois had even recently recorded a version of “You Don’t Miss Your Water” for the Married To the Mob soundtrack (it would be a bonus track on Wrong Way Up’s reissue).
If he would return to singing, however, he’d “mass the voices so that the ’individuality’ of a single voice is lost in the crowd.” Eno’s voice was wonderfully described by Geeta Dayal as “paper-thin like a piece of phyllo dough: it stacks well on itself, giving way to a layered, golden richness.” It was made for harmonies. He’d improved as a singer—where he’d sung nasally in the ’70s, he now favored his chest voice, lower in pitch and rounder in tone, with more ornamentation.
Eno would sing nonsense words to create cadences, then develop syllabic rhythms, then move to full phrases (some of his notes are found on the inner sleeve: phrases depicted as em-dashes). “He works out his melodies and lyrics by locking himself up and just starting to sing,” Cale recalled in 1990. “He starts with vowels and works his way into consonants. He’d be in the studio late at night doing that while I would be able to get out and go play squash.” Wrong Way Up is compellingly singable, laced through with melodies—lines like “I am the termite of temptation!” are phrased like hymns.
Under Eno and Cale’s vocals were loops and circles—Wrong Way Up as a collection of orbits. “I am the wheel,” as Eno sings in “Lay My Love,” a track that spins like an orrery—snare fills, 16th-notes on synthesized cymbal, rhythm guitar, a two-phrase violin loop, “cowbell” fills, all circling a central sequencer pulse. The album’s title comes from “Empty Frame,” a sea shanty about a cursed ship going around in circles, never returning to port. The rhythm section, Daniel Lanois’ touring group of Ronald Jones and Daryl Johnson, was broken into shards—a kick drum loop, a sinking root note, an isolated snare hit—and shuffled through tracks. For “Crime in the Desert,” a Cale Western with drive-in gambling and a body left on a racetrack, Cale played a circling boogie-woogie piano riff into a sequencer, which Eno edited into a loop, against which Cale played another piano riff.
There’s also a homemade quality to Wrong Way Up, a sense of being scrapped together from whatever was lying around Eno’s “state-of-the-art 1979” studio (as he called it in the ’90s). He mainly used his storied, “unsophisticated” Yamaha DX7 synth. See the various bottle-clinks and UFO probe whirrs, or the cicada percussion on “Cordoba.” Beats came from the DX7 or a Linn M1, the latter’s beats “severely treated so that they become more industrial sounding than the M1 would normally allow.” Cale and Eno sang into an “old beaten up Shure SM58 microphone...the cheapest basic rock ’n’ roll mike you can get,” their vocals run through an equally old Neve limiter/compressor.
After three weeks’ work, a few other musicians came in, cutting their parts in a few days. Robert Ahwai, the album’s quiet hero, played rhythm guitar that makes tracks like “Spinning Away” and “One Word” sing. Nell Catchpole was the guest star, her soaring violin heard on the opener “Lay My Love” and closer “The River.”
Eno’s studio was bright and airy, with windows that let onto the garden. “Birds would come and sing at the window, for god’s sake!” Cale recalled. He was Eno’s houseguest. When he arrived, Eno had some rhythm tracks done, but Cale’s work habits hadn’t changed. Eno would find Cale reading newspapers and making business calls while listening to playback. And Cale considered Eno to be a control freak, often bristling at his suggestions. It being his studio, Eno had the home-field advantage.
The mood in the studio became that of two only children made to play together by their parents. Eno described it as being like “cabin fever.” Cale missed his wife and young daughter. Tensions culminated when, after one sharp argument, Cale turned to see an angry Eno coming towards him, a chopstick clenched in his hand. “Imagine, being frightened by Brian Eno!...The whole idea is ridiculous,” Cale said. In his autobiography, he said Eno had rattled him. “What if it had been a knife? On his private property, I was an interloper.” Cale called his manager in a panic, saying he needed to check into a hotel. (For his part, Eno said he had no memory of the chopstick attack. He felt Cale’s book “gave an unfavorable and sometimes downright untrue version of what had happened during the making of [Wrong Way Up]”).
There’s something performative in these antics—as if they subconsciously knew they worked best when they dreamed of garroting each other. Eno once compared their relationship to what “may have existed between two neighboring principalities in pre-Bismarck Germany: constant sorties across the frontier and occasional truces and treaties and occasional coincidences of purpose.” Cale’s most essential complaints about Wrong Way Up were that Eno kept monkeying with the mix after he left and, most of all, that he’d reneged on his promise to tour the album. The album’s grotesque cover came from the set design of the Eno/Cale tour that never was—giant playing cards, with their heads at dagger points from the other.
On one spin of Wrong Way Up, Eno seems to dominate. He gets the spotlight numbers and the opening and closing songs. Another listen finds Cale holding his own territory. His songs have his usual mercenaries, drug-runners and itinerants, but he also gets the big pop moment, “Been There Done That,” his and Eno’s high-water mark on the U.S. charts (peaking at No. 11 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart). Seemingly mixed for transistor radio, it has Cale heartily singing over what sounds like repurposed video game soundtrack chips.
While Eno said that “nothing about this record was particularly democratic,” they influenced each other in subtle ways. Eno recalled “In the Backroom” as being “entirely” Cale’s, but it’s the production touches that linger in the memory—the ominous fade-in, like a noir opening credits sequence; swirls of guitar and synthesizer that move in strange dances through the mix; how Cale’s voice grows so distorted at times that it seems to be breaking apart, a blocked transmission.
”One Word,” however, was an eye-to-eye collaboration—Cale offering a line, Eno volleying one back. In refrains, Cale soars over a company of Enos. Each sings a separate refrain but also answers each other:
You say——one word
the same——one sound
thing——it makes the world
again——go round...
At its best, Wrong Way Up is as sublime as anything Eno and Cale ever did. “Cordoba” came from Eno reading Hugo’s Latin-American Spanish In Three Months. The book had short, declarative English sentences, the bones of the Spanish phrases the learner was meant to recite: The man was sleeping under the tree. He wrote to me from Cordoba. He put the suitcase under the bed. The elevator stopped between the two floors. The sentences, just by being arranged in sets, became a mystery novel, Eno thought. Who is the Cordoban? Why does the elevator stop between floors? What’s under the bed? It suggested a scenario to him, of terrorist lovers who don’t know each other’s real identities, plotting to plant a bomb on a bus. Cale gave the lines a slow, haunted phrasing—”the way he sings it is this strange combination—sinister and tender at the same time.” Cale seems startled by details as he sings them, like he’s suddenly recalling pieces of a dream.
Then there’s “Spinning Away,” a song so lovely that even a cover by Sugar Ray couldn’t ruin it. Eno built it as collisions of speed, with a rolling, off-balance rhythmic base over which Eno’s vocals and Catchpole’s violin (the latter playing in a different time signature) bob like boats.
”Spinning away, like the night sky at Arles.” It’s Eno as Van Gogh painting The Starry Night, but not the hippie saint of Don McLean’s “Vincent” or a century’s worth of tormented artist biopics. It’s Van Gogh as an Eno, as a craftsman: working up sketches, drafting in pencil, moving to oils, bringing the night sky down into the frame of his canvas, making threads from loops and dots. He steps back to see the whole. “I have no idea exactly what I’ve drawn,” he sings. “Some kind of change.” The hub of the album’s circles, “Spinning Away” sings the making of itself. Along with “The River,” it’s the most beautiful vocal that Eno ever sang.
The fruit of a sunnier time, Wrong Way Up, made by two quarrelsome fathers who would never collaborate in this capacity again, is a set of miniatures, full of spies and sailors, turncoats and magicians, Cordobans and the Mona Lisa’s eyes. It’s the closest that a pop record has come to a Joseph Cornell box. Songs are played on “Scarlatti piano,” “dark guitar” and “fairground organ,” are garnished with Shinto bell, dumbek, “little Nigerian organ,” and tabla. The joy of finding the right accumulations. It’s an album of movement, even if moving in a loop. As Cale and Eno sing in “One Word,” “If it all fades away, let it all fade dancing away.”


Pomegranates, an alternate soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov's 1969 avant-garde film The Colour of Pomegranates, is the latest excursion by the producer Nicolas Jaar. It's one of his most unusual projects to date, and often sounds like Jaar's version of musique concrète, but the second half contains some of Jaar's loveliest melodies.

Pomegranates

Nicolas Jaar has had the kind of career only possible in the digital era. After putting out a few singles, he released his one and only solo album, 2011's Space Is Only Noise, when he was 21 and still a student at Brown University. That record introduced a unique sensibility that centered on Jaar's expertly constructed slow-burn rhythms and his unusual voice, which looms between speaking, singing, and chanting in an almost comically low register. He had an aesthetic connection to minimal techno and its attendant fascination with dub, but his voice lent his music a pop sensibility that drew fans from outside electronic music circles. In the four years since, Jaar has done everything but follow up Space's success with another solo full-length. He steered the Other People label, which has a busy release schedule (including Jaar's own EPs) and has experimented with a subscription service. For a while he focused on Darkside, his psych-jam project with guitarist Dave Harrington, which got relatively huge until Jaar left it behind. He created installations and film soundtracks, started yet another duo, pulled off a full-album remix—Jaar's a multimedia artist, and the traditional album cycle doesn't fit his m.o.
Pomegranates, an alternate soundtrack to Sergei Parajanov's 1969 avant-garde film* The Colour of Pomegranates*, is the producer's latest excursion, and it's one of his most unusual projects to date. The film, a non-linear depiction of the life of Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, has an ornate surrealism that for me brings to mind Matthew Barney, and the soundtrack often serves as a minimal contrast to the onscreen grandeur. Heard just as an album, Pomegranates often sounds like Jaar's version of musique concrète, with buzzing electronics, warped orchestral samples, and jittery recordings of scrapes and rustles coursing through the mix. Jaar's description of it as "a weird collage of the ambient music I had made over the last 2 years" is apt; it's an album of fragments, ranging from abstract sound design to pretty piano solos. There are long stretches, particularly in the early going, where it's more of a sound piece than what is usually described as "music", but the album's second half contains some of Jaar's loveliest tunes.
While Jaar has always had a great ear for texture, his music has been defined by its rhythmic sense, a loping swing that has become his signature. Beats only crop up in a few places, and when they do, they snap you back to the producer's organizing aesthetic. "Shame", for example, with its processed vocal and slow groove, could easily be an interlude on a Darkside release. But the bulk of the record is filled with drifting tracks that defy classification. "Pass the Time" mixes room tone with a pinched vocal sample that sounds like it's been crumpled up and is being dragged around on a string. "The Fool and His Harem" sounds like broken Middle Eastern instruments half-playing a modal melody amid bursts of hiss. "Beasts of This Earth" brings to mind the near-music of Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba, where tracks half feel like something that was found on the ground. If it's not always easy to locate Jaar in these soundscapes, there is always a lot to explore within them.
Pomegranates' other notable element is something we've heard from Jaar since the beginning—piano, sometimes heard in isolation and sometimes mixed in with the electronics. "Nothingness" is almost unbearably delicate, as single notes are played and then electronically stretched into long and thin tendrils of sound. And the record's back half features the piano more prominently, most notably on the solo "Muse", which comes over like a nocturne mixed with a jazz ballad. The piano tracks serves as a kind of tentpole on the record, pulling it back whenever it threatens to seem too much like a collection of sound design without any particular shape. After the textures and the flow lure you in, the melodies rise to the surface, slowly, giving Pomegranates a quiet lingering power.