Nike enlists James Murphy to craft an entry into its iTunes-only "Original Run" series, and the DFA leader turns out a 45-minute disco track.

45:33

Fucking working out. How I hate it. How I hate stepping out the door only to come back sweaty, vaguely pissed off, and not much more in shape. It's not that I don't have the gear: running shoes, iPod, neutral tee, the wherewithal to notice girls while praying the finish line was just a little closer. However, even with an array of devices and strategies, everyone knows that working out only works if you, uh, work. In short, there's no easy way out of stretching, running for half an hour, and stretching some more. I've heard it's all about your attitude. I also read somewhere that I should "just do it," but frankly, that always seemed like borderline-sarcastic taunting.
And now that LCD Soundsystem have sold out to the greatest American shoe company ever to co-opt popular culture, I really have no excuse. Okay, "sold out" is harsh, especially considering Nike's advertising and marketing track record: 1987's "Revolution" spot by Portland-based ad tycoons Wieden & Kennedy (who'd also worked with Lou Reed for Honda), the "Bo Knows" campaign of the late 80s, Spike Lee as Mars Blackmon wondering how MJ put so much height into his jump ("must be the shoes")-- at this point, they're less stealing from pop culture than contributing to it. And it doesn't hurt that these campaigns were wildly successful, so if James Murphy and company can condescend to the corporate ranks, far be it from me to cry foul.
Put simply, "45:33" (would that John Cage needed to shed those unsightly post-Columbus Day lbs.) is an original workout mix by LCDS. Commissioned by Nike and available at iTunes, the piece is purportedly based on "an arc designed for running," featuring new music by the band, pieced together like a DJ mix in a fashion that's apparently supposed to help me forget I'm hating life on the jogging trail. And somehow, it almost manages to do that. After taking it on a test run, I can attest that the music really does move forward similarly to my own metabolism, gradually building, holding a modest climax in the middle, and ending on a long, fluffy comedown. None of the music really qualifies as "songs," as there isn't much in the way of lyrics or big hooks beyond unobtrusive chants like "shame on you" or "no fun in space"-- though, as I see it, that's a plus for a running mix. There's nothing like being bogged down by music that demands too much attention while you're trying to exercise.
Things begin slowly with an unassuming analog synth line that gradually speeds up and introduces a hyper-tasteful, jazzy house piano line. A few minutes of building morphs the tune into DFA-flavored soft disco-rock, with Murphy's pronouncements, "You can't hide... your love away from me! Hey!" Subtly, the track is peppered with tambourine and a little extra kickdrum, and further morphs into a section I call "treadmill disco," crossing kinetic motorik and what sounds like the mechanical wheeze of exercise machines. When the bells enter with the melody, I start to wonder when this is going to be fleshed out for a new LCDS 12". That goes double for the following section, wherein Murphy opts for mid-tempo disco-funk (a la the first part of "Yeah"), eventually adding horns and the "no fun in space" refrain.
Things really take off at about the 28:30 mark with a horn break, and fast, glittery disco-rock that PAGING DFA PRODUCTIONS really should be expanded into a single. The cutting bassline and relentless, stone-faced pulse are almost perfectly tailored for the most active part of a workout-- although, even if you wouldn't come within a mile of a jogging trail on a bet, the hi-NRG is tough to deny. In fact, just when you might be ready for extra oxygen and an IV, the bottom falls into the first of two (!) cool-down sections, beginning with the "shimmering, harmonious tinkerbell cooing" section, followed by the merely "harmonious cooing" part. It's debatable whether or not a mixtape should be 20% comprised of the comedown, but then again, Nike is a big company: Never underestimate the unfit nature of the American consumer. In any case, my trial run ended with me all in one piece, and a lot of this music still in my head. Nice mix.


Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997 is the first-ever compilation to honor Chicago house music's coarse, brilliant, and suddenly trendy prodigal son. Best known for lewd, raw, high-tempo tracks—a style known then and now as ghetto house—the Dance Mania label churned out dozens of classic singles that rarely escaped the Midwest.

Various Artists: Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997

Club music is easy to mock. Most people know someone skeptical or dismissive of it, a class clown-type who'll derisively mimic a cut by huffing "uhnt-chk-uhnt-chk-uhnt-chk" while goofily nodding his head. Heed this warning: Paul Johnson's "Feel My M.F. Bass" will be a boon to this person. Shrill and stone-stoopid, the song's refrain repeats as such: "Feel my moth-er-fuck-ing bass in your face/ Feel my moth-er-fuck-ing bass in your face." The rhythm, composed on a then-cheap, probably discarded drum machine, goes "uhnt-chk-uhnt-chk-uhnt-chk" except when it goes "unt-uhnt-uhnt-uhnt." The bass line sounds like...well, there is no bass line. But if you dropped this little chunk of rhythmic coal on the South or West side of Chicago in 1994, or if you drop it just about anywhere in Europe in 2014, people go wild.
"Feel My M.F. Bass" is a standout track from Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997, the first-ever compilation to honor Chicago house music's coarse, brilliant, and suddenly trendy prodigal son. Best known for lewd, raw, high-tempo tracks—a style known then and now as ghetto house—Dance Mania churned out dozens of classic singles that rarely escaped the Midwest. The label was, essentially, primed to run as a modest small business: attract a dedicated, local following by using its paltry resources to shake as many asses as possible.
Ray Barney and Duane Buford started Dance Mania in 1985, running it through the 1990s. When Barney resurrected the label recently, he did it for the same reason he made so many of the choices that shaped Dance Mania: it seemed like a practical business decision. European DJs, it turned out, were paying hundreds of dollars for Dance Mania 12"s, and Barney had shelves full of unbought records in his basement.
This uptick in popularity found influential Russian DJ Nina Kraviz saying things like, "Sometimes I think that my only purpose of DJing is to play Dance Mania records!" to anyone who would listen. (Her loving, abstract ode to the label, "Ghetto Kraviz", was a smash.) Boysnoize curated a tribute album. When art-damaged misfit Actress toured America late in 2013, he brought Dance Mania mainstay Parris Mitchell with him. The label's earliest shoutout remains its biggest: "Teachers", Daft Punk's 1997 ode to their producer heroes not only namechecks many of Dance Mania's principals, it openly apes the Parris Mitchell Project's "Ghetto Shout Out!!"
The first third of Hardcore Traxx traces DM's early years, when it was releasing good but familiar first-wave Chicago house: diva-scorched anthems that implore you to jack your body and submit yourself to "house nation." After failing to land the type of European hit that buoyed peer labels like Traxx and DJ International, Barney—who, after college, helped turn his father's popular South side record store into a record distribution hub—leveraged his network of DJs to cater to the local market. Unable to afford studio time, Dance Mania producers recorded their tracks in their homes, often with little more than a drum machine and a sampler. The crass mantras needed not appeal to radio jocks and helped attract an audience increasingly interested in hip-hop.
Like garage rock or blues or any art that's trying to accomplish a lot with very little, a surprising amount of weirdness ensued. There's lots of grunting and wheezing on Hardcore Traxx; rappers sound like cartoons and MCs like carnal preachers. Dance Mania is a testament to the power of the riff. In the best DM tracks every single element functions as a hook: Uhn-chk-Uhn-chk-Ride-me-baby. Whether you find dance music far too repetitive or you live for old Traxx 12"s, you will remember Dance Mania's tracks, as they are among the catchiest and most brazen of their kind, alternately hypnotic and disruptive.
For much of the 90s, DM's local focus shielded it from Europe's abandonment of first-wave American dance musics. The label just kept churning out tracks, eventually fostering ghetto house offshoots juke and footwork (footwork legends RP Boo and Traxman recorded for the label). Declining vinyl sales shuttered the label in 2001, but even that seems like a blessing. Dance Mania is one of the few early house labels to remain on good terms with most of its artists.
The success of ghetto house and Dance Mania was built on a really simple concept. You could hear Traxmen & Eric Martin's "Hit It from the Back" in a field rave in Wisconsin for the same reason you could hear it in a seedy Chicago club: it was (and still is) really good at making people grind their bodies against one another. The surge in popularity overseas no doubt stems in part from the fact that ghetto house is perhaps the only large American dance subgenre not to have been co-opted by Europe in the 1990s. But the local flavor—that of a neighborhood shop—persists. To hear "Ghetto Shout Out!!"'s call and response—"Cabrini-Green in this motherfucker? Hell yeah!"—is to hear how DM helped get off a lot of people who really, really needed to get off. And those who didn't need to get off, too. Say this about anyone who mocks "Feel my M.F. Bass": he will be feeling this lethally catchy, modestly conceived motherfucking bass in his face for days.


Rheia not only transforms the Belgian metal band's own abilities, but the breadth of the much heralded—and derided—black metal-shoegaze fusion.

Rheia

A couple years ago, Belgium’s Oathbreaker were just another band that had some skill in merging shimmery melodies with blastbeats: an alluring and even comforting sound, if not the most original. In the three years between Eros|Anteros and their latest record, Rheia, they’ve expanded their scope without losing their rage. The album transforms their own abilities and the breadth of the much heralded—and derided—black metal-shoegaze fusion.
Unlike many of their peers, Oathbreaker play with a hardcore directness, and even their more melodic moments draw more from post-hardcore than Britpop or shoegaze. “Second Son of R.” and “Being Able to Feel Nothing” in particular are two of the most furious tracks the band’s ever recorded, blazing through and never losing momentum even when the pace settles down. Comparisons to Deafheaven are inevitable (they were labelmates at one point), and they’re not always accurate, but there’s no denying that the surging breakdown towards the end of “Immortals” is modeled after “Luna.” Oathbreaker make it their own by suggesting an ultimate payoff, only to cut off before ultimate ecstasy. They’re vicious with their metal, albeit more discerning with how it’s dished out.
Caro Tanghe’s vocals are where Oathbreaker really distinguish themselves, and it’s her awakening in particular where Rheia makes the biggest leap. She can scream her ass off, no question, but she’s able to lead the band by changing her tone. “Nothing” relies more on her choral sensibilities, which never make the rest of the band feel bloated or frilly. The acoustic refrain “Stay Here / Accroche-Moi” sees her taking on a ghost-country approach: She slyly suggests pain that she’s more explicit about elsewhere. And even her screaming is varied—the end of “Second Son” is a constantly escalating hysteria, different from her more straightforward attack most of the time. By not defaulting on a raspy yell all the time, she fills in the band’s softer sections, which would be awkward with merely a hushed screech.
“Needles in Your Skin” is Oathbreaker at their most dynamic, and makes for the album's centerpiece. It skews the “loud-soft” formula of post-black metal; Tanghe howling over clean guitar isn’t any less of a force than the full-on black metal blast that follows. In the middle, the band transitions to a hardcore chug, and layered under Tanghe’s hopeless mantra, “How could you go without me?” her desperation shines through. It’s simply devastating. Tanghe makes such a simple question, one we’ve all asked, harrowing in its relatable power.
On Rheia’s second half, Oathbreaker break down structures even further, sometimes drifting away from metal altogether. “I’m Sorry, This Is” ushers in the shift, where the unease comes not from the guitar but from the wordless voices of Tanghe and added field recordings. It knocks “Where I Live” off its axis, making the raging black metal tempos that the album’s built on seem alien. “Begeerte” closes the record with airy vocals and submerged industrial drums, like Triptykon’s “My Pain” minus the goth-metal schmaltz. It’s an unsettling counterpart to intro “10:56,” which features Tanghe at her most soothing. “Begeerte” is different enough to where calling it and “10:56” bookends isn’t quite right. It’s more akin to returning to your hometown after a devastating disaster—or a devastating exposure to life outside it. Rheia never really returns home, and that’s the point. It’s meant to capture how our bodies fail us and the wandering nightmares that result with no neat resolution.
While still fairly beholden to black metal, Rheia shares a core ideal with Cobalt’s Slow Forever and Deafheaven’s New Bermuda: They broke out of black metal’s stylistic confines, using it as a launching pad more than a set of totalitarian marching orders, and in the process became emotive, powerful metal albums. Without sacrificing extremity, they all captured the spirit of metal, not just the sound. It’s not that genre records don’t hold their own power; it’s that an album like Rheia can do so much more by crossing and uniting several paths.


The soulful and enigmatic UK singer Jamie Woon brought the textures of the post-dubstep UK bass scene into his sophisticated debut Mirrorwriting. It got lost in the clamor around peers like Jessie Ware and James Blake. Now, on Making Time, he's pared away his music to focus on his stunning voice.

Making Time

A classic singer-songwriter never goes out of style. The soulful and enigmatic crooner Jamie Woon rediscovered this in the four long years between his charming-but-uneven debut album, Mirrorwriting, and the release of his second, Making Time. Rising with a fresh crop of UK-based, slightly experimental vocalists and collaborators in the London bass music scene (think Jessie Ware, James Blake, and Sampha), Woon’s debut produced sophisticated music that ultimately failed to catch on as strongly as his contemporaries.
Like many artists in his position, Woon could have become a victim of the time, a footnote to a rising scene. But Woon took the opportunity to realign with his musical origins. In a 2011 interview with BBC, Woon said "At the heart of what I do is R&B; it’s groove-based vocal-led music." On Mirrorwriting that "R&B" was partially obscured in production atmospherics, but Making Time exhibits a renewed focus. The album sounds loose and organic, revealing layers of precision in the production and recording on repeated listens.
Inspired by D'Angelo’s Voodoo, Woon was interested in recording with a live band in the room for Making Time, a far cry from the electronic-roots of his debut. "My starting point was that I wanted to hear a funky rhythm section," Woon offered to Pharrell Williams in an interview on Beats 1. Mirrorwriting was distinguished in part by collaborations with revolutionary musician and producer Will Bevan (otherwise known as Burial), but Making Time reduces songs to their core elements: a perfect harmony, strong melodies, and a crooning voice that is unlike any other.
Woon's vocals are rare and stunning, the kind of sound that washes over its listeners, and no synths or heavy-handed production is needed to make that effect possible. The instruments here play supporting roles. "Movement" transforms halfway through its length into a groovy, throwback jam, and the slinky, snake-like bass guitar cocoons Woon’s voice without overpowering it. Later the horns gradually stomp in. Their sound is elastic and ominous, pushing and pulling against the light fluidity of Woon’s ad-libs. And on "Sharpness", the album’s lead single, the bass pops in and out of the song just as much as the steady drums. The result shouldn’t surprise, but still does.
Channeling pieces of piano jazz and folk as well as R&B, Making Time feels philosophically similar to Jessie Ware’s restrained 2014 sophomore effort, Tough Love. Many described the work as "adult contemporary"—an insult, if not entirely untrue. But that sort of designation fails to engage with the work at hand, lumping it all together. And while it never hit as hard as "Running" on Ware’s debut, songs like "Kind Of … Sometimes … Maybe" and "Champagne Kisses" offered surprises brimming underneath the surface. It’s smart music that doesn’t beat you over the head with its intelligence. If Woon’s last album was an attempt to incorporate the contemporary sounds he favored at the time, this current album is a testament to the strength of traditional music composition: simple guitars, slinky bass lines, and sophisticated songwriting. Woon has, from the start, been his strongest when he lets his voice say everything that’s necessary. This might come across as traditionalist, but that is OK. With songs this good, little else needs to be said.


With their signature 10-ton riffs and glacial tempos, few bands do what YOB do-- marry Black Sabbath's heavy and psychedelic sides.

The Great Cessation

Infinite shades of black exist even within metal subgenres. "Doom metal," for example, has diversified so much that the term doesn't mean much beyond down-tuned guitars and slow tempos. The tree from which all doom (and metal in general) springs is Black Sabbath. Sabbath lead to the bluesy stylings of "stoner doom" of Sleep and Electric Wizard. The doom tree also has stranger branches-- "death doom" (death metal + doom metal) hybrids like Coffins and Hooded Menace; "sludge doom" like Eyehategod and Sourvein from the American South; the astral density of the UK's Esoteric; grandfather clock bongs a thousand years wide from their compatriots Moss.
Oregon's YOB have carved out a niche of "cosmic doom," which is a descriptor, not a subgenre. Few bands do what YOB do-- marry Black Sabbath's heavy and psychedelic sides. Sabbath did both equally well. But when they wheeled out acoustic guitars and bongo drums, they were just taking a break. YOB keep the pressure up, driving riffs into subterranean depths, yet sending melodies spiraling skyward. 2005's The Unreal Never Lived perfected such duality. It found the intersection among roaring guitars, yoga class, black light dreams, and white light ecstasy. Black Sabbath with Dio as singer changed their name to Heaven and Hell for legal reasons. Had they followed through sonically, YOB might have resulted.
YOB's discography is variations on this theme-- again, shades of black. The band is mostly a one-man project by singer/guitarist Mike Scheidt, with different rhythm sections over the years. Even a detour in 2007 as Middian was YOB-like, with more diverse speeds and tones. Middian lasted only one album due to a trademark dispute with Wisconsin metal band Midian. The lawsuit took a lot out of Scheidt, both financially and personally.
The Great Cessation perhaps reflects this. It has YOB's signature 10-ton riffs and glacial tempos. But their delivery is more vulnerable now. The band sounds a little weary. Scheidt's Dave Mustaine-esque wail is ragged and desperate. The theme of damaged vision recurs throughout: "burning eyes brim with tears"; "thorn in the eye, gods that are blind"; "tears of lead"; "eyes like magnets." At one point, "The Lie That Is Sin" breaks down to a single, naked guitar. Of course, it builds back up to surging peaks. But the attack is no longer a galactic wall of sound. Sanford Parker's production is partly responsible. It's more rock and less metal. The tones are darker and leaner than before. All this makes for a surprisingly human YOB record. Before, the band strode on astral planes. Now heaven and hell are closer to earth.


Keeping one foot in grindcore while the other plays a game of Twister with electronics, noise, and feints at jazz, Ottawa's Fuck the Facts have created their heaviest album yet.

Disgorge Mexico

As their name implies, Fuck the Facts can be hard to grasp. (Even Amazon is conflicted about whether to spell the band's name with the full expletive.) Their moniker comes from a Naked City song, and the band is similarly freewheeling. One foot stays in grindcore, but the other plays a game of Twister with electronics, noise, and feints at jazz. Over the band's 10-year history, it has amassed an astonishingly lengthy discography comprising dozens of splits, singles, EPs, and full-lengths. With a revolving door of personnel totaling eight ex-members, the band's sound has mutated in an ad hoc fashion. Current vocalist Mel Mongeon, a woman with a man's growl, and increasingly powerful production have stabilized the band somewhat; 2006's Stigmata High-Five was merely spastic in comparison to previous epileptic leanings.
Disgorge Mexico was written during a two-week road trip from the band's native Canada to Mexico. The title comes from a Mexican death metal band, but it also describes the record's creation. Burnt out after the road trip, the band went on hiatus and left the album unfinished. Gradually, after months of personal issues, they reconstituted themselves. The result reflects the angst and uncertainty of that time. Mongeon's lyrics and album artwork are rife with images of construction and destruction: "The entire walls were built with sand bricks/ As everything piled up, the architect was left drained." Related are themes of betrayal and refuge denied: "How could it be?/ The same hands that gave peace and shelter to the ones that they are about to destroy." Mongeon isn't slave to her printed lyrics, often glossing over lines to emphasize crucial words rhythmically. Sound is the weapon; text is simply its icing.
Fittingly, Mongeon's bandmates wrap her in walls of dread. The production is monstrous, and Fuck the Facts now sound like they are exploding instead of imploding. "No Return" careens through hairpin turns; "Dead End" bulldozes like a slowed-down Slayer. Electronic dalliances are at a minimum here; big riffs are not. This is the heaviest Fuck the Facts have ever been, which suits Mongeon's buckets of black paint. "Driving Through Fallen Cities" glints with Metallica-esque clean tones, complete with melodic solo, then drops into "La Culture du Faux", a doomy soundtrack for end times. "The Storm" is an exhilarating steeplechase through anthemic melodies, chugging hardcore punk riffs, and a limber jazzy break. While such diversity is not new for Fuck the Facts, it now comes in a huge metallic exoskeleton. It's scary because it's scared, a nightmare amplified and multi-tracked. Instead of slipping through fingers, Fuck the Facts now engulf.


The experimental guitarist’s latest piece thrives on tension—between pulse and drone, repetition and variance, and, particularly, between the naturalism of the musicians’ playing and the artifice of the mix.

Shebang

As a composer, Oren Ambarchi tends to think like a drummer. That’s what he started out as, before an encounter with the noise titan Keiji Haino inspired him to pick up the guitar. For the past decade, most of the Australian musician’s solo recordings—which are in fact often densely collaborative affairs—have been headlong tumbles into spirals of texture and groove. The first of these pieces was “Knots,” the 33-minute centerpiece of 2012’s Audience of One: He began by asking drummer Joe Talia to play an extended sequence in the style of legendary jazz drummer Jack DeJohnette, then recorded himself in conversation with Talia’s playing, laying down cascades of feedback. Over the years, “Knots”—which he and Talia debuted on the 2011 live album Hit & Run—has continued to unspool, yielding two live albums (one with orchestra) and supplying the flexible backbone of virtually all his longform studio work. Quixotism, Hubris, Simian Angel, and now Shebang have all been modeled after its sprawl.
Listening to duo recordings of “Knots,” it can be hard to imagine that there are just two people involved; Ambarchi’s playing, assisted by digital effects, sounds bigger and unrulier than anything you might expect to hear coming out of a single instrument. On his subsequent albums, meanwhile, he is everywhere and nowhere at once: Disappearing into the producer’s role, he wrings a carefully distilled chug out of the most unwieldy virtual ensembles. Between 2014’s Quixotism and 2016’s Hubris, his collaborators have included minimal-techno producers Thomas Brinkmann and Ricardo Villalobos, improvising pianist John Tilbury, tabla player U-zhaan, computer-music number-cruncher Mark Fell, and guitarist Arto Lindsay, whose work spans no wave, jazz, and Brazilian music. It can be hard to believe that these albums were collaged together from multiple sessions and players scattered around the globe; there’s a real live-in-the-room feel to their shape-shifting permutations. That’s particularly true of Shebang, Ambarchi’s most ambitious and absorbing piece to date.
In keeping with Ambarchi’s predilection for longform works, the 35-minute Shebang is a single composition divided into four parts that seamlessly fuse together. Part I begins with Ambarchi—credited on “guitars and whatnot”—playing a chiming melody so simple it could almost be a nursery rhyme. Bright, consonant notes glisten like dewdrops, and over the first couple of minutes, contrapuntal lines multiply, like a spiderweb revealing itself in the path of the morning sun. But even at the outset, the guitar’s burbling accidentals offer cause for curiosity; there’s some kind of digital trickery afoot, even though its precise nature is unclear.
Shebang thrives on tension—between pulse and drone, repetition and variance, and, particularly, between the naturalism of the musicians’ playing and the artifice of the mix. The piece reaches its first climax some five minutes in, as Ambarchi’s percolating guitar is engulfed in a cloud of almost Stereolab-like ahhhhs. Paring back the thicket of guitars, a Hammond-like thrumming rises from below; steady cymbal taps announce the arrival of Talia’s drums. Then the soundfield stretches and smears as Sam Dunscombe’s bleating bass clarinet tugs against a snare flam, and dissonance leeches into the background, suggesting a momentary flash of Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock.
A succession of players each gets time in the spotlight. In part II, pedal-steel player BJ Cole—a session veteran whose credits include Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” as well as records with T. Rex, Cat Stevens, and Björk—paints on a slow, patient melody that drifts untethered to Talia’s stuttering groove, whose brisk hits and wandering pulses mirror the pointillism of Ambarchi’s playing. Part III belongs to pianist Chris Abrahams, of Australian improvising trio the Necks: While Ambarchi’s frequent collaborator Johan Berthling sketches out a dub-techno bassline on upright bass, Abrahams lays down staccato chords with his left hand and lights into a ruminative, searching solo with his right. Finally, in part IV, Julia Reidy turns their 12-string guitar into a fistful of icicles, emphasizing the brittleness of Shebang’s 16th-note groove. It’s anyone’s guess what else is going on in the finale, as the sound thickens and churns; Abrahams’ piano is in there somewhere, along with Cole’s pedal steel, both a liquid presence presaging the melting tones of Jim O’Rourke’s synthesizer in the minute-long denouement.
On a measure-by-measure level, Shebang is an embarrassment of riches. Talia’s supple clockworks suggest that he’s a machine made of flesh; O’Rourke’s playing, however brief, is so expressive you could build an entire album around it. But as gripping as any solo highlights may be, they’re always folded back into the whole. The evolution of the piece is so gradual that it may come as a shock to realize that the opening section is in a completely different key than the bulk of the piece. The groove is endless, the focus constantly shifting. Even when Ambarchi’s instrument is hard to pick out, his vision is unmistakable. He once described his interest in the pursuit of “sound as a landscape”; on Shebang, armed with a kaleidoscope in place of binoculars, he takes us further into the wilderness than ever before.


R.E.M.'s pivotal 1986 album is remastered and reissued with an intriguing bonus disc of full-band demos.

R.E.M.: Lifes Rich Pageant (25th Anniversary Edition)

The cover of Lifes Rich Pageant features the handsome forehead and full eyebrows of drummer Bill Berry, whose face is cut off at the nose by a low-contrast picture of two buffalo. It's a curious image, embedded with a Buffalo Bill pun, and it playfully nods to the band's refusal to practice expected music-industry behaviors like appearing prominently on their album covers, lip-syncing in videos, writing love songs, or generally revealing too much of themselves beyond the music. Even four albums into their career, they still cultivated an enigmatic presence on Lifes Rich Pageant, starting with that cover and extending to the dropped apostrophe in that title and the mismatched tracklists. Furthermore, the mysterious painted figures and roughly sketched symbols in the liner notes presented the album as something more akin to folk art than folk rock.
In direct conflict with that visual impression, Lifes Rich Pageant was R.E.M.'s most pop-oriented and accessible album up to that point. Recording frequently and touring almost constantly, the band had been nurturing a grassroots audience throughout the early 1980s, and Pageant is a pivotal album in their career, representing the moment when their Southern post-punk sound anticipated larger venues and began expanding to fill those spaces. It was also, strangely, their most overtly political collection, with songs addressing environmental crises and political malaise. Rather than sounding sanctimonious, however, such dissent energized R.E.M. and injected more pep into Berry's drumbeats, more incisive jangle into Peter Buck's guitar, and more charisma into Michael Stipe's performance. The album barrels along in just over 30 minutes, lending the songs a sense of purpose. This is music that has to be somewhere.
Lifes is celebratory rather than commiserative, with tense tempos fueling heraldic choruses and shout-outs to Woody Guthrie ("Cuyahoga") and Cole Porter ("Begin the Begin"). Stipe's lyrical dodginess, such a formidable weapon on previous albums, allows the band to come at these issues from obscure angles: With its rousing chorus and pensive bass line, "Cuyahoga" mails postcard dispatches from a museum where rivers and plains are artifacts, consigned to diorama and memory rather than reality. "Fall on Me" mixes spiritual and consumerist language to deliver a knotted ecological message that takes some unpacking: "Buy the sky and sell the sky," Stipe sings, then changes the Wall Street phrasing: "Lift your arms up to the sky. Ask the sky and ask the sky, don't fall on me."
Maybe that's why the band chose to close with Mike Mills-sung cover of the Clique's "Superman". Seemingly out of place on such a serious-minded album and certainly jarring after the Civil War fever dream of "Swan Swan H", it's been derided as R.E.M. at their most superfluous. But that's how they must have felt at the time-- like supermen taking on the world's problems and finding they had unknown powers. In that regard, they're aided significantly by producer Don Gehman, who was then famous for helming John Cougar's early albums. Who knew that Gehman would handle R.E.M. better than folk-rock legend Joe Boyd, who nearly made a muddle of their previous album, Fables of the Reconstruction? In addition to giving the melodic leads their own space, he emphasizes the muscle in Berry's beats and the intricate interaction between the rhythm section. No wonder the drummer's on the album cover: Berry's responsible for the furious pace of the album and enables its abrupt detours into salsa and Nuggets pop.
That dynamic makes the remaster on this 25th anniversary reissue sound even livelier and warmer, reinforcing the balance between excitement and gravity that illuminates these songs. It also makes the second disc of demos all the more intriguing, presenting these familiar songs in their most skeletal format. The small flourishes that didn't make the studio versions sound charmingly off-handed: Stipe hums most of "I Believe", then punctuates the end with a sing-songy la-la-la. He tries out a harmonica solo on an early version of "Bad Day", then uses the instrument to cover for forgotten lyrics. This is R.E.M. at their most ramshackle, a vibe that makes Dead Letter Office a fan favorite even today.
Lifes is R.E.M.'s first transition album, one that builds on the innovations of their early releases while hinting at the territory they would cover on Document and Green. It's both epilogue and prologue, yet these songs retain their own specific flavor, as R.E.M. map the borders between small clubs and large venues, between underground and mainstream, between rhythm and melody, between outrage and hope. That in-between quality still sounds invigorating so many years later.


This electronic collaboration pairs Dylan Carlson of pioneering drone metal band Earth with UK producer the Bug. It’s one man’s sprawling open space versus another’s sonic claustrophobia.

Concrete Desert

Despite the similarities between noise and heavy music, the pairing of the Bug’s Kevin Martin and Earth’s Dylan Carlson still makes for a bit of a curious contrast. The UK-born Martin traffics in chest-compressing beats, drawing on a lineage spanning from dancehall through grime and dubstep. Earth, meanwhile, is a Washington state doom band that trudges with an ambient, codeine-hazed pace. In other words, this electronic collaboration, Concrete Desert, is one man’s looming sonic claustrophobia versus another’s sprawling open space.
But dig into the nuances of their catalogs—like the sparse first-half of the Bug’s 2014 album Angels & Devils, or the low-end of Earth’s heatstruck churn on that year’s Primitive and Deadly—and it begins to make sense. Forget genre or even structure: Martin and Carlson value pressure. They revel in the attack and release of slow-building drone grooves and the contrast between thumping bass and a floating tempo. Concrete Desert sees them finding common ground, though there’s more debt to minimal, tense electronic music than dust-bleached rock. The beats themselves are sparer than most of what you’d expect from a producer like Martin, who is so steeped in dance, and Carlson adds a pensive quality, showing what Martin can build when he makes music to stop moving to.
Concrete Desert leaves space for the sounds to sink in, and you can really absorb the individual qualities of both artists. The album feels crucially airy—not breezy, but rather a stinging dry heat. A few songs let booming basslines take on the role of Carlson’s droning riffs, or echo them, like the tense “Snakes Vs Rats.” Given room to wander, the feedback and reverb become instruments themselves. Lower frequencies heave like rusted cellos on “Broke.” And a decayed quality brings out the static in the beats on “Don’t Walk These Streets” and “Hell A.” When the songs really take advantage of the record’s dynamic—ambient contemplation jolted by a rattling bassline or scalpel-jab guitar strum—the idea of this music as a doom-metal dubplate sinks in. On a track like “Agoraphobia,” the lowrider subs are laced with guitar echo, and it feels less like a meeting of bass music and drone and more like bass music as drone.
If the album’s title weren’t enough, Martin has stated that Concrete Desert is a specifically Los Angeles kind of album, and not just because it was recorded there, in Daddy Kev’s studio with DJ Nobody at the console. Even if all the words are in the titles—“Gasoline,” “City of Fallen Angels,” “Other Side of the World”—the music itself is laden with a Brit’s half-awed, outsider take on L.A. It feels a bit like the sonic equivalent to English punk iconoclast Alex Cox turning to the grimier outlying regions of L.A. to depict a lawless and unpredictable concrete landscape in 1984’s Repo Man. (Concrete Desert’s spiritual resemblance to the film’s score doesn't hurt, either.) It’s neo-neo-noir music that draws you into its discomfort. If its vast expanses leave listeners vulnerable, at least there’s more space to let yourself roam.


The Pittsburgh band’s throwback emo revivalism casts a hometown identity crisis in the harsh light of climate change. Their debut has the conceptual heft of an album twice its length.

Fates Worse Than Death

In the public eye, Pittsburgh may forever be the “home of the Steelers,” the embodiment of a bygone blue-collar economy weaponized in Bruce Springsteen songs and MAGA agitprop alike. If that’s the case, its reputation hasn’t caught up to reality: It’s a meds-and-ed mecca where the gentrification rate compares to San Francisco, Denver, or Austin—fast enough that a young band like Short Fictions can look back on 2014 with nostalgia. “The kids in Oakland have such joie de vivre and it makes me sad because all I ever think about is dying and everything that I love in Pittsburgh is quickly vanishing or getting gentrified,” Sam Treber sings deep into the band’s debut full-length, Fates Worse Than Death, which, like Greta Thunberg playing a round of “This City’s Makin’-a-Comeback!” bingo, casts their hometown’s identity crisis in the harsh light of irreversible climate change.
“Think globally, act locally” is Short Fictions’ ethos on a political and musical level. Fates Worse Than Death is essentially emo-revival revival, a throwback to the turn-of-the-decade moment when DIY emo became too ambitious to be confined to basements across the Keystone State. Just count them among the growing number of bands for whom Whenever, If Ever might as well be Sgt. Pepper’s. Treber’s vocals are immediately reminiscent of either of TWIABP’s leads, somehow both pointed and rubbery like a sour AirHeads candy, occasionally balanced by Alex Barkeley’s harmonies or a random scream. There are trumpets, tubas, glockenspiels, and spoken-word interludes; guitars that draw equally from college rock, post-hardcore, and band camp (not Bandcamp) emo and twee; and lyrical Easter eggs that span Pittsburgh’s cultural legacy from Mr. Rogers to Code Orange.
If the familiarity of Fates Worth Than Death is the immediate draw, it also can border on a liability. “Property of Pigeons” begins with a telltale drumroll leading to an ascending twinkle riff so reminiscent of “Never Meant,” it has to be an inside joke—which would explain why they spend the rest of the song pummeling it with metallic guitar chokes and d-beat drumming. But Short Fictions evade mimicry by internalizing the most important aspect of their influences—an exploratory approach to arrangement and song structure that lends a record just shy of a half hour the conceptual heft of one twice its length. On the fantastically titled opener, “Fates Worse Than Death Pt I: I Don't Want to Wait Out the Apocalypse With Anyone But You,” Treber longs for the voice of an ex or a neighborhood that he loved just as futilely. “I’d hear it sing through apartment walls/Niagara Street, South Oakland, Pittsburgh, 2014,” he wails, before his own voice is replaced by that of an old-fashioned newscaster warning of 110-degree temperatures and “more of the same, only hotter” tomorrow.
The twisty nature of Fates Worse Than Death aligns with the band’s ambivalence over whether to muster the motivation to change the present, hope for annihilation, or maybe pull a Doctor Manhattan, living forever just to look upon humanity with distant scorn. “You should only write songs about girls and your friends,” Treber mocks on “Nothingness Lies Coiled at the Heart of Being (It’s Such a Good Feeling).” The ensuing “Really Like You” does exactly that, constructing a sweet-and-sour homage to Los Campesinos! that solidifies their bid to be grandfathered into modern emo. The pop efficiency of “Really Like You” initially feels like an outlier, rather than the centerpiece that grounds Short Fictions’ apocalyptic visions. Yet sincerity carries the day. Towards the end of the album, the band yelps together, “I’m a liar and I’m a hoarder, I love every brick and mortar in this house/And we built this home together, I could live here for forever/I’ll have money when I get older and I can love again.” The fleeting optimism is countered by the song title—“Living in Places Like These Can Be Bad For Your Health (Can’t Live Here Anymore)”—but it’s still a love letter to Pittsburgh, the people in it and those getting pushed out, who can’t live here anymore but have nowhere else to go.


The debut album from Yorkshire house producer Ewan Smith is a collection of daydreamy mood pieces. Stepping up the sound design, these melancholy tracks highlight Smith’s expressive sensibility.

There Is No Right Time

Ewan Smith’s style of house music often seems to belong to everywhere and nowhere at once. Smith—aka Youandewan—hails from Yorkshire but is based, like so many of his peers, in Berlin, and his productions mirror the way that the house and techno of the 21st century have long since pulled up stakes. It’s not that there are no longer any local signatures in dance music, but they don’t tend to stay in one place for long. Sounds dreamed up in one place soon slosh back and forth between cities and scenes like volatile ocean currents.
Since he began putting out records in 2009, Youandewan’s music has variously shown the influence of Chicago, Detroit, New York, Berlin, Bristol, and London, along with his native north of England. Moodymann’s fogged-up sample soul; Phuture’s wriggly 303s; the Burrell Brothers’ cool pads—you can hear all of those vintage elements darting through Smith’s tunes. He also draws on more contemporary sounds: Levon Vincent’s scuffed reductions, skipping grooves indebted to UK garage and Thomas Melchior, and the airy vocals that have decorated so much UK bass ever since “Hyph Mngo.” Sometimes it seems that he’s not simply absorbing these influences, but reverse-engineering them: Just compare N.Y. House’n Authority’s classic 1989 tune “Apt 3A” with Youandewan’s “Alright Son,” from 2014, which blurs the line between homage and cover version. At its best, though, his music gives the impression of an artist using a dog-eared archive as the springboard to more personal expressions.
There’s always been a melancholy cast to Smith’s music, and that’s especially true on his debut album. There Is No Right Time focuses the emotional content of his singles into a concentrated form. We’re told the bulk of the songs have their roots in a lonely winter a few years back, after a rough breakup and a move to Berlin, and you can believe it: It’s easy to imagine Smith sitting bundled up next to the space heater in his home studio, translating the rivulets of rain trickling down the windows into the brooding piano melody of “Time to Leave,” a despondent hip-hop instrumental that sounds like it’s been rescued from a water-damaged box of memories he regrets having opened.
Taking inspiration from artists like Four Tet and Leon Vynehall, Smith has stepped up his sound design—a rich mixture of synthesizers, scratchy samples, and physical instruments like electric guitar and a drum kit—and he explores a broader-than-usual range of tempos and rhythms. In addition to his habitual deep house, we hear sluggish boom-bap, snapping electro, and, on the standout “Be Good to Me Poly,” even rolling drums patterned after jungle’s signature groove. That range underscores the fact that this isn’t really a club album; as a collection of evocative, daydreamy mood pieces, it’s better suited to evenings in and weekends on the couch, to packing bowls and thumbing the morning paper.
It’s actually a more diverse LP than it seems at first, despite his foregrounding of forlorn melodies and wistful atmospheres. The album’s back half is particularly active. Sleek and energetic, “Earnest Kelly” mixes up Metro Area-style electronic disco with Japanese new age atmospheres. The quick-stepping “Left on Lucy” reshapes similar sounds, like those DX7 chimes and flutes, into the kind of optimistic anthem that sunrise beach raves were invented for. “Something Keeps Me Real Quiet” is a Smallville-styled romp through the insides of a snow globe that smartly offsets its twinkling keyboards with gruff, overdriven drums and bass. Even the closing “4D Anxiety,” despite its languid tempo and shuffling beat, sneaks in a playful boogie groove borrowed from Floating Points’ early singles.
There’s no shortage of highlights, really: The silvery accents on “Be Good to Me,” a tune that sounds a little like a jazz-funk Radiohead cover; the delicate synth and guitar counterpoint of the brisk, snapping “Waiting for L”; and especially the all-encompassing swirl and searching chord changes of “Our Odyssey.” They’re all evidence of Smith’s remarkable production talent and also, more importantly, his expressive sensibility. The album’s only real flaw has less to do with the uniformity of its mood than the uniformity of its structures. No matter the style, tempo, or instrumentation, Smith’s tracks—nothing here ever quite makes the leap from “track” to “song”—all develop the same way. They begin with a ruminative loop and then take on new layers until, some imperceptible peak having been reached, they start slimming down again. The denouement is as gentle as the buildup, and while it may make for profoundly enveloping listening, heard enough times in a row, it leaves you wanting something different: something jarring, something jagged, something to break the flow.
It’s a tough thing to ask; Smith’s album is so carefully and tastefully balanced, a sudden wrong move could ruin the mood. But as anyone who has lived through a cold, despondent winter in a strange city can tell you, every now and then you need something to jerk your head out of the fog. Still, as wistful ruminations go, both on and off the dancefloor, they don’t come much sweeter than this.


A month after calling it quits, the inventive British art-rockers bid farewell with a revealing EP drawn from the sessions for their final album.

Wild Beasts: Punk Drunk and Trembling EP

Punk Drunk and Trembling EP

When Wild Beasts announced their split in September, many fans responded with a gnashing of teeth at the disappearance of such a fantastically improbable guitar group—tempered by a muted acceptance that their last album, Boy King, showed a band running out of gas.
It wasn’t so much that Boy King was a bad album. The problem was that for the first time since debuting in 2008, Wild Beasts sounded behind the times, offering up a cloying R&B fusion that wasn't nearly as good as, say, Arctic Monkeys’ AM. The result was overcooked and under-weird, quite the antithesis of the fierce experimentation that Wild Beasts had made their own.
The news of one last Wild Beasts EP, gathering up two tracks from the deluxe vinyl edition of Boy King plus an unreleased track from the same sessions, felt something like a soccer player bowing out in a special post-season exhibition match. It meant a chance to say goodbye, even if the circumstances aren't hugely alluring.
Sure enough, the two formerly bonus tracks sound like just that: addenda, inessential and fairly unenlightening. “Maze” is an indistinct cut whose promising idea—pairing organ drones and airy guitar lines with Tom Fleming’s earthy baritone—is smothered by an unmemorable melody. Had Wild Beasts continued, maybe this vaporous torch song style would have been the start of something new. As it is, “Maze” is the runt of the litter.
“Last Night All My Dreams Came True” may be more conventional than “Maze”—it feels very much in line with Boy King’s rubbery synths and spartan drums—but it benefits from an impassioned vocal turn from Hayden Thorpe, who swoops and soars all over the chorus like the ghost of tormented lust. The distorted guitar line that underpins the chorus is another lovely touch, ruffling up the rather staid musical backing.
Still, Punk Drunk & Trembling would be an underwhelming send-off were it not for the title track, which rivals anything in the band’s history for ecstatic release. You can understand why the song was left off Boy King, as it doesn’t really fit with that album’s machine-tooled sleaze. But whereas the LP’s sound felt ill-fitting, “Punk Drunk & Trembling” soars with apparently effortless ease. You wonder if the song suffered from being almost too effortless, too reminiscent of the illustrious past for a band who, by 2016, had decided instead to “don the leather jackets and embrace the chaos and carnal force of rock’n’roll”.
Whatever the case, “Punk Drunk & Trembling” is a thrilling song, marrying the melodic contortions of Wild Beasts’ first two albums to the electronica-brushed production of Present Tense, their fourth. It adds up to a showcase for the best elements of the band’s sound. Start with the drums: Chris Talbot understands the power of experimental restraint, tailoring his patterns to subvert the band’s songs. He drives this one with a subtly disruptive rhythm that often hits when you don’t quite expect it, peppered with flashes of echo and other effects.
The song’s instrumental structure rests on a simple yet effective bass line and breathy synth notes; Thorpe’s and Ben Little’s guitars lend spare rhythmic touches, slowly branching into melody as the song progresses. The effect is one of quiet power, like a swan floating across a pond while its feet thrash furiously beneath the surface. When the band do finally cut loose, they unleash a four-note bridge that has more in common with the ecstatic communion of techno than their indie-rock peers, threatening to take the top off your speakers in joy.
The best thing about “Punk Drunk & Trembling” is Thorpe’s falsetto vocals, which shower the song with drama, torment and soul. His voice makes you believe in his words even as you marvel at his powers, like Minnie Riperton or Kurt Cobain before him. He sounds like he's singing to save his life: His voice, hushed and mysterious on the verse, slowly builds in determination, waiting for the euphoric release that the chorus provides.
For this performance alone, the Punk Drunk & Trembling EP is worth the price of admission. It’s a fitting end to one of indie rock’s most distinctive groups—a band that, in the end, knew to leave us wanting more.


Lovitt Records' flagship post-hardcore band relocates to Lookout! and sets Thrice producer Brian McTernan behind the boards to capture a more polished sound.

Engine Down

With their new self-titled record on Lookout!, Engine Down seem poised to join Pretty Girls Make Graves, Sparta, and Taking Back Sunday in the mainstream niche occupied by bands who've planed away the rougher edges of screamo (or "post-hardcore," if you like) and conflated edgy indie deportment with radio-ready pop dynamics, catchy adrenaline-soaked melodies, and a healthy dose of youth culture lifestyle branding (you know-- cute boys, great hair, sensitive yet hard, punk rock as corporate-backed package tour and soundtrack for extreme sports). Often, these kinds of traits pose problems for rock critics, but I'm not going to sling a dour screed that calls for a return to fatuous indie ethics. This is a diagnosis, not a lament.
In terms of creative trajectory, Engine Down have traversed a remarkably tidy arc, with a foreseeable terminus toward which they're decidedly aimed (it will be marked by full-on major label support and promotion, MTV rotation, and frequent soundtrack placement). The progression has been accomplished with precisely measured gestures of smoothing and softening. To wit:
Engine Down's debut LP for Lovitt Records, Under the Pretense of Present Tense, was prototypical, screamy post-hardcore (to a tee-- the superficially abstruse yet intrinsically meaningless syntax of its title is characteristic of the micro-genre). It was an exercise in stark opposites and crisp corners, with its pronounced loud/soft instrumental binary and Keely Davis' whisper-to-a-scream vocals. While pretty standard stuff, and no more worthy of mainstream attention than spiritual brethren like Four Hundred Years, its sharp melodic sense and inchoate cello arrangements augured evolutions to come.
It required two records for Engine Down to bridge the gap between the indie-screamo of Under the Pretense and the radio-hardcore of this new album; they were the roughly coequal Lovitt releases To Bury Within the Sound and Demure. Both of these albums were solid, if slightly strange due to their transitional state, as Engine Down got busy with the chisel and began hewing the sharp corners from their sound. Davis' reedy (yet bell-clear and resonant) vocals rubbed rather oddly against the still lo-fi (if more ambitious, thanks to J. Robbins) production-- the songs weren't quite the easy-to-swallow capsules they would become, but neither were they the quadrangular slabs of the band's debut, and the amorphous shapes were difficult to quantify. The albums retained post-hardcore trappings, but were more melodic, moodier, poppier, screamless, slower, subtler in terms of volume and tempo shifts, and anchored more centrally around the piano and string arrangements. While these records were not of the same caliber as this, their self-titled Lookout! debut, their ambition made it easy for anyone with a little intuition to see a departure like this mounting on the horizon.
And so we arrive at Engine Down, wherein the quantum leap the band was clearly straining toward on their previous two records is somewhat achieved. Via a confluence of experience, ambition and glossy production, Engine Down have arrived at a palatable music that, with a little more refinement and promotional support, could cement their place in the mainstream cultural canon. Indeed, the production is going to be the deal-breaker for Engine Down fans, and if you're usually biased against vaguely hardcore bands who put extra coats of lacquer on music that you feel should be raw and untamed, I'd suggest dropping the rating above by a full point. By the same token, if you feel music is well-served by a high production value and view recording techniques as an integral component (Flaming Lips and late Modest Mouse fans, here's looking at you), you may do well to boost the rating into the low eights.
Because on this record (for which they've left Lovitt for the somewhat larger Lookout!, which one assumes to be a stepping stone toward Interscope or Epic), Engine Down have employed producer Brian McTernan (Thrice, Hot Water Music, et al.) to achieve starker sound separation, richer tones, and their most dark and rumbling atmospheres to date. The upgrade is most apparent in Davis' vocals, which no longer cut through the arrangements like a dorsal fin, but nestle deeply into their terrain-- instead of being nasal and keening, they're lower, more variegated and shaded, and seem summoned from the diaphragm rather than torn from the lungs.
The band is easily recognizable-- Cornbread Compton's primal and syncopated percussion, Davis' vocal theatrics, Jason Wood's metronomic bass, and Jonathan Fuller's winnowing minor-key guitar dirges are all intact-- but recognizable in the way you recognize a childhood friend upon reconnecting with them in adulthood. Paradoxically, in perfecting a music that should resonate in teenaged breasts across the land, Engine Down have grown up.
All the earmarks of the new Engine Down are distilled in the opening track, "Rogue". It's leaner, more propulsive and snarling than anything they've heretofore produced. Davis' now-restrained vocals dart amid a swirl of feedback and unremitting, distorted bass, climbing a ladder of intensity toward the explosive chorus. The staccato bursts and lilting, plaintive vocals of "And Done" recall Sunny Day Real Estate's more expansive moments. "Cover" unfolds with relentless intensity as Davis glissades over meaty power chords and tricked-out guitar scribbles with an undeniable vocal authority. Such aggressive fare is juxtaposed by morose torch songs like "In Turn", which wafts an ominous arpeggio over swelling strings and Davis' gentle vocals, as the arrangement ramifies in a crescendo of mounting pageantry.
"Etcetera" is a haunting chamber-song of night sounds and smoldering piano-man emoting, which, of course, gradually builds into a spine-shivering guitar climax that puts the record to rest. Its tone is consummately elegiac and mournful. Given Engine Down's history and implicit future trajectory, it's hard not to perceive "Etcetera" as a literal elegy, instead of a figurative critical construct: a requiem for the band they were, which must be interred and memorialized before they can embrace the band they clearly want to become.


Willis Earl Beale's Noctunes is a bedroom recording in the truest sense: as it plays, you can almost see Beal sitting in a dark room, calmly peeling off each note. That makes Noctunes a pretty heavy listen from a guy coming off a raw divorce and a very public falling out with his record label. He's got a lot to sing about.

Noctunes

In the 2013 film, Memphis, Willis Earl Beal stars as a singer who drifts through the woods and walks the streets alone. He visits a church and a strip club, soaking in the city by himself. Beal’s recent work feels born out of that movie, its meandering pace and self-assessing narrative a direct complement to the flick’s equally meditative theme. In Memphis, Beal’s character hits a minor breakthrough, his face bathed in blue light as he sings in one of the film’s pivotal scenes. Beal never achieves such catharsis on Noctunes, his latest album. Instead, he casually floats by in a billowing wave of airy soul that never quite lands.
Noctunes, Beal’s seventh album in five years, moves slowly—very slowly—as he tries to channel the same ethereal ambience Marvin Gaye once did. Like the album title suggests, these are evening tunes. That they induce sleep if played at low volume is perhaps on purpose. The music just sort of hangs around without any progression, making the album seem longer than its already not short 63-minute runtime. This is a bedroom recording in the truest sense: as it plays, you can almost see Beal sitting in a dark room, calmly peeling off each note. That makes Noctunes a pretty heavy listen, except these songs aren’t as structured as previous efforts. The light melodies accentuate Beal’s best feature—his dynamic, gospel-inflected baritone—as he sings about personal struggles. And while he draws you in by the sheer magnitude of his timbre, Beal gets lost in the tracks too often, making Noctunes tough to sit through.
He’s got plenty to talk about, though: In August, Beal was arrested in Portland, Ore. on charges of criminal mischief and harassment. He’s struggled with alcoholism, been homeless, and was plagued with health complications that forced him from the Army. Last year, Beal had a very public fallout with his then-label, XL/Hot Charity, and spent time couch surfing on the West Coast following his divorce. He addresses those romantic perils toward the middle of Noctunes—on consecutive tracks "No Solution", "Stay", "Say the Words", and "Love Is All Around". On "No Solution", in particular, Beal sounds especially contrite. He references a "lost" wedding ring and the dissolution of his marriage. By "Love Is All Around", he gives in to some sort of finality: "Those haunting words that she said/ ‘Go the fuck away.’" The singer processes these emotions on Noctunes, though his thoughts don't always shine through, given the album's milieu and paltry backdrop. These should be great deep blues songs, but they’re missing the cohesion of that genre at its best. Noctunes is muddy and unfocused, and not inspirational at all. Instead, the tracks are drab and make the album almost impossible to endure.
Beal's output has never been polished, but at least on his fascinating debut, there was a certain earnestness to his music. With Beal, there was something alluring about the lo-fi hiss of "Sambo Joe from the Rainbow" or "Too Dry to Cry". Noctunes resembles a half-baked effort to recapture some sort of personal peace. A noble exercise, but in Beal’s attempt to exorcise old demons, the LP comes off way too moody and far too methodical to resonate long term.


Intimate and unadorned, these five recordings from the Melbourne-based artist sound like the dying embers of torch songs.

Flipped It EP

You can sense Sarah Mary Chadwick’s commanding presence from the audible breath that opens her new EP, Flipped It. “I hung my dreams on you,” she sings on the opening title track, after gathering that air like ammunition, piano joining tentatively. It’s a stark introduction with the confrontational immediacy of a punk song. It makes sense: The New Zealand-born chanteuse carved a niche fronting noise-rock outfit Batrider during the early aughts, later pivoting to a solo career with a softer set of tools but the same feral delivery. In her raw vocals and unadorned production, heartbreak becomes discomfitingly intimate, something painful, beautiful, and occasionally transcendent.
The five songs on Flipped It are a mix of new and old material, some salvaged from the cutting room floor and others recorded specifically for this project. Together, they sound like the dying embers of torch songs, throaty reflections warbled as though they’re being sung from the closet floor. In the title track, she describes her body “wide and open bright with fear,” and then, on “All Those Things We’ll Never Do,” she notes, “I’ve fallen down real bad, or who knows, maybe I’m just tired/But when you’re tired are you also deathly sad?” For the most part, contentment is out of reach, whether it’s because of her inherent nature or a deck stacked against her. In “The Impossible Task,” she forces herself to assume the roles of both “the abusive drunk and the nagging wife,” refusing, ultimately, to accept her partner’s insistence that she’s free enough to flip this script.
Even in moments of levity, Chadwick’s arresting alto—smoky like Cat Power’s Chan Marshall, but tattered and ominous like a bank of clouds—casts a sense of foreboding. “Lay Your Body on Mine” is ostensibly a celebration of love’s ephemeral nature, an urge to simply “let this diamond glisten now.” But the slow progression of organ chords alongside Chadwick’s melancholy voice turns things funereal, like she’s already looking back from a future where things didn’t work. It’s one of the weaker songs on the record, a mopey disjunct between style and substance that never quite coheres, whose vision of love feels blurry at best.
It follows, then, that the real diamonds on the EP are the songs where Chadwick’s inimitable voice finds a complement in instrumentation, like the willowy flute smuggled into “All Those Things We’ll Never Do.” The combination of the particulars of a breakup—having to reimagine every ritual, no matter how pedestrian—pairs especially well with the sparse piano, vocals, and woodwind. The same proves true for the accordion in “People Shouldn’t Set You Up,” a perfectly jolly contrast to the song’s defeatism. In this spate of introspective tracks, some unexpected texture lets air into an otherwise claustrophobic room. The EP’s best arrangements sprinkle dejection with glimmers of curiosity or defiance, a path to transcendence littered with the refuse of grief.


Spencer Seim and Zach Hill's shapeshifting unit records its first album for Ipecac, and here their once freeform compositions tend to concede more readily to conventional rock structures.

There's No 666 in Outer Space

By the time you finish reading this review, Sacramento experimental outfit Hella could be broken up. Or they could be releasing a 12-hour DVD concert box set. Hell, they could even have ditched the experimental math rock and become a Tom Jones cover band in Vegas. In other words, when an insanely talented band, frenetically producing material with an endless frontier mentality towards experimentation, operates under the auspices of a cultish fanbase, said band's career path takes on the unpredictability and inconsistency of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. While Hella's longtime, close-knit lineup of founders Spencer Seim and Zach Hill allowed for such a fluid shifting of gears, last year's Acoustic marked the first time the band recorded as a quintet. On There's No 666 in Outer Space, Hella's first release on Ipecac, that quintet gets completely revamped (save for Seim and Hill) and the band's sound gets jacked up.
Although difficult to tell with such a protean group, 666 seems to represent a shift for Hella. This is their first release to feature vocals on every track, and as a result of new singer Aaron Ross' caterwauls, Seim and Hill's once freeform compositions tend to concede more readily to conventional rock structures. Also, Ipecac's hallowed studio walls apparently instilled a sense of the dramatic in Hella's songwriting, as many of the songs-- while not wholly earnest or dire-- soar to lofty heights whereas previous tongue-in-cheek compositions would have them fall flat on their face.
Hmm, carefully deliberate sections? Sprawling compositions? Emotionally intense vocals? If it sounds like Hella's gone prog, they kinda have, veering close to the Mars Volta's shopping mall prog with Eastern-tinged guitar riffs, arcane lyrics and Ross's soaring voice, which eerily resembles Volta frontman Cedric Bixler's. For example, even the most sycophantic fans will experience mild cardiac arrest when, on songs like "The Things People Do When They Think No One's Looking", the band implodes at the four minute mark, only to neatly regroup for a closing chorus featuring Ross' charged lyric "Money doesn't make the world go round."
That said, this is still the freewheeling band that recorded a song titled "Welcome to the Jungle Baby, You're Gonna Live!" On "Hand That Rocks the Cradle", Hella parody monolithic acts like Rush or Yes, farting out goofy synth lines while Ross vacillates between Geddy Lee falsetto and slack-jawed Les Claypool hokum. At times 666 even flashes a calmer, gentler Hella-- relatively speaking. The verse on "Anarchists Just Wanna Have Fun" ripples around Seim's muted faux-Fugazi riff and Ross's sing-song melody, while "The Ungrateful Dead" parlays the 8-bit Nintendo epics covered by Hella side project the Advantage into a stomping opus that'd fry any Castlevania cartridge. Tracks like these don't give 666 a free pass solely because they combine the histrionic with the cheeky. Hella jampacks each song with riffs and hooks at almost the same clip as magnum opus Chirpin' Hard, avoiding the ham-handed ten minute build-ups that Mars Volta trudges through, arriving at a chorus hardly worth the wait. Excusing the album's inherent garishness, 666 expands Hella's core sound to new heights that, although at times hard to stomach, finds the band both at their most playful and regimented.


Fetty Wap’s new tape doesn't quite answer the question of whether the New Jersey rapper will sustain his success or remain “Trap Queen Guy” forevermore.

Zoovier

New Jersey rapper Fetty Wap reached complete cultural saturation with his surprise hit “Trap Queen,” a love story with a crack core that swept through suburbs and schoolyards all the same. Before long it was getting Vox explainers and an Ed Sheeran cover, and then Fetty was singing it on stage with Taylor Swift at stadiums. It charted in the Top 10 in Belgium and Denmark. His success ballooned enough that he started crossing milestones only held by megastar rappers like Lil Wayne and Eminem: Three songs charted in the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 10 and three in the Top 20. But a fourth single never caught hold, and soon he was making a mixtape with French Montana, Coke Zoo. This February, he received a few cursory Grammy nominations and his self-titled debut was finally certified platinum, but his visibility was waning. By August, he was guest starring on “Love & Hip Hop: Hollywood,” alongside Nicki Minaj’s spurned ex Safaree Samuels. Ubiquity can be a fleeting thing.
It isn’t the most precipitous decline in rap history or even the most unusual rap career arc for a would-be star, but it would appear Fetty Wap is nearing a crossroads. What Fetty does next is crucial to whether or not he sustains his success, or just becomes the “Trap Queen” Guy. Though promising sales and streams for his debut appear to indicate a healthy base eager for a proper follow-up, it’s just as likely that the album was merely the beneficiary of the house of mirrors that is “album-equivalent units.” His latest release, Zoovier, is a 19-track sampler mixing his trap balladry with more traditional trap bangers. To avoid a Fetty Wap retread, there is significantly more rapping, which, unfortunately, produces more than his fair share of bars like “Bitch I’m Papa Smurf, I got my money right/Got a Super Soaker for her water ride.”
But if you wade through some of the cringy lyrics (on “King Zoo”: “I put the molly in her shit hole/And watch it light up like a disco”), the straight-up boring ones, the more grating moments, and the lulls here or there provided by songs like “Bad Lil Bitch,” there’s a more compact offering that recalls his most invigorating uses of Auto-Tune and his most charming performances. A song like “Instant Friends,” with its harmony fills and subtle come-ons, is magnetic in its delicate use of social cues, yet it’s lined with DM-violating blunt talk. “Don’t Love Me” and “Hate You,” a pair of gummy synth delights, are perfect complements, in sound and subject. The only true ballad on the tape, “Shorty,” is a reimagining of Plies and T-Pain’s “Shawty” that is as much an exhibitions for the ad-libs as it is for his full-bodied croons.
When it hits, Zoovier is a reminder of just how malleable Fetty Wap’s voice is, flipping from flirtatious to tender to outright lovestruck in a blink. But this is a bloated release that doesn't play to those strengths enough, and his boasts all start to run together after a while: exotic cars, exotic women, having sex with exotic women in exotic cars. It isn’t just that he’s a ball of rap cliches; it’s that he doesn’t make any of them seem fun. Fetty isn’t a very imaginative writer, and he relies primarily on feel, so it’s odd that he would intentionally tie one hand behind his back with so many melody-less raps.  Zoovier is further evidence that Fetty is best (and perhaps solely effective) as a trap romantic. Why ruin a good thing? If this tape is some kind of beta test for the Next Gen Fetty Wap, here’s hoping he opts to just stick to the formula that swept the nation.


This Toronto band’s best songs have just the right amount of rage to get them out of the shadows of PJ Harvey and Sonic Youth.

Basic Behaviour

FRIGS have been described many ways: “swamp rock,” “sludge-pop,” “doom and atmospheric gloom.” Most frequently, though, they’re compared to PJ Harvey and Sonic Youth. The Toronto band makes no attempt to mask those influences on its debut LP, Basic Behaviour—indeed, they’re cited in FRIGS’ own press releases—and their presence can at times be stifling, like a fragrance that lingers long after someone has left the room. The most compelling songs on this album occur when the group reconfigures these component parts into new shapes. Vocalist Bria Salmena’s gnarled growl is the main force shaping their sound, while Duncan Hay Jennings’ shrieking guitar doses it with frenzy. These warring frequencies imbue otherwise prosaic songs with depth, texture, and just the right amount of rage.
FRIGS have released only a handful of songs since their inaugural split cassette as Dirty Frigs in 2013, but their sound has made noticeable strides in five years. If they’re not quite fully formed, the music resonates with potential all the same. Opening track “Doghead” is a concise example: Its initial guitar and bass notes volley in conversation before Jennings interjects with a metallic scratching, as if he’s sliding a hacksaw down his fretboard. Salmena butts in last, deploying the record’s most memorable phrase. “He put his tongue in sordid pies,” she snarls. Her lyrical palette is evocative but limited—the whole of “Doghead” contains only 15 distinct words.
Salmena’s vernacular doesn’t expand much throughout the record. She relies heavily on simple language and repetition, and these stunted verses can undermine otherwise punchy singles. Take “II,” which endlessly reminds us, “This is shit, just admit it.” But every once in a while, Salmena spits allusive verbiage that prompts interpretation. In the middle of the same song, she tells us: “It’s bleak/I can barely speak/My instincts or what’s left of me, heat.” This admission conveys a rare sense of vulnerability in Salmena, who sounds so broken down that her vital signs are the only indication of life.
The first three songs on Basic Behaviour—“Doghead,” “Talking Pictures,” and “Waste”—are dynamic and pithy, spiked with shards of guitar and bone-rattling bass. It’s evident that the band paid close attention to arranging this trio, and Jennings’ contributions are palpable: a squeal of feedback here, a slash of distortion there. Unfortunately, a stretch of filler follows, exemplified by tracks like “Solid State” and “Gemini.” Both feel overtly derivative, the former of Kim Gordon, the latter of Mazzy Star. These songs aren’t bad, but they lack the defining traits necessary to differentiate FRIGS from any number of other latter-day post-punk bands.
Where “Gemini” drags its feet to generic, swaying dream-pop, “Heavyweights” is the most successful slow song on Basic Behaviour. Salmena’s multi-tracked vocals, as dark and viscous as motor oil, ooze over tangy guitar and skeletal drums. The result is eerie, and FRIGS’ music is most effective when leveraging this kind of sonic discomfort.
These musicians are great interpreters of human unease, and nothing on Basic Behaviour conveys that better than “Chest.” Based on the 2016 Brock Turner rape trial, this ripping track finds Salmena at her most impassioned. “What would you do if they said they found me laying out back with legs round my neck,” she sings. Salmena’s voice gets coarser with each depiction of assault. “Stay asleep as you spoil me... /Lower me down to the depth of my sex,” she groans, before unleashing her scream: “Am I wide enough for you?/... Father, am I safe?” These succinct questions implicitly hold all men accountable for tragedies like the Turner case—not just the men who abuse women, but also those who are meant to protect them. “Chest” makes it clear that FRIGS’ strongest asset is their own anger.


Taylor McFerrin's debut Early Riser has been in the oven for a little under four years; his debut for Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder imprint tends to float away into the atmosphere long before you even notice it's gone.

Early Riser

Taylor McFerrin's debut Early Riser has been in the oven for a while. In the fall of 2010, a three-track sampler briefly made the rounds, and then not much else was heard in the intervening years from the composer/multi-instrumentalist and son of improv legend Bobby McFerrin. Now the album's arrived on Brainfeeder—Flying Lotus' ever-expanding imprint that has become a haven for artists who consider themselves neither round nor square pegs—there are traces of that original sampler that remain. That link to an earlier incarnation of Early Riser is "Place in My Heart", a pleasing if somnolent dollop of funk that finds most of its structure in vocalist RYAT's contributions.
As a straight-up producer, McFerrin has a knack for knowing just how many elements he can balance before things topple over, which speaks to his proclivities as a jazz fusionist; but Early Riser is by no means the kind of affair that'll leave you struggling to orient yourself. The majority of the album passes by in a pleasant swirl, to the point that McFerrin's efforts could be mistaken for complacency. For every moment of undeniable beauty, such as the more recent single "The Antidote" and the moving "Decisions", there are just as many that feel like closing your fist on a handful of sand. When "Degrees of Light" finishes, any imprint it left evaporates immediately with it. Without a strong anchor, much of Early Riser floats away into the atmosphere long before you even notice it's gone.
On Early Riser McFerrin often builds towards an unforseen point without reaching a clear resolution, but this approach occasionally yields positive results. "Postpartum" gradually swells, picking up pieces along the way like a musical Katamari; it never quite achieves liftoff, but the slow, exaggerated stretch is pleasing regardless. The aforementioned "Stepps" circles higher and higher over five minutes without ever finding a release.
That moment of release finally arrives on the album-closing "PLS DNT LISTEN", a necessary jolt of adrenaline on an album that otherwise takes its time thawing out. At its conclusion, *Early Riser'*s title proves a misnomer—this is an album built for slow weekend mornings spent in bed with a loved one more than brisk, early-morning runs.


The songwriting from Laura Hermiston on her latest indie-pop album is noisy but lucid, reflective of the sound and vision coming from Toronto’s Buzz Records.

Distancing

Buzz Records was born in a house off Spadina Avenue in Toronto’s Chinatown as a way to release cassette tapes of concerts held in the garage. Over the last seven years, it’s grown to become one of the most prominent record labels in the city—as indispensable to the burgeoning indie scene today as Arts & Crafts was to the indie rock renaissance that fostered Stars, Feist, and Broken Social Scene in the early 2000s. From Weaves to Dilly Dally to Odonis Odonis—whose bassist Denholm Whale founded the label with friend and roommate Erik Jude—the Buzz roster has a sound and vision, as punk and DIY as you’d expect from its origins. The aesthetic is represented well by Twist, whose second album, Distancing, is entirely typical of the Buzz aesthetic and the philosophy that has brought it forth from the underground.
Twist is singer-songwriter Laura Hermiston, who shares with Dilly Dally’s Katie Monks and Weaves’s Jasmyn Burke a similar attitude of rock abandon and creative invention. She makes an expressive indie-pop that uses a sound-expanding echo to fill out her otherwise straightforward compositions. Distancing is an album full of counterintuitive decisions with an elusive spirit—playful and sometimes slippery—that makes this record a compelling listen.
Her songwriting has something of the pop simplicity of the girl groups of the 1960s: sunny vocal melodies, big pop punch, understated lyrics with familiar sentiments both cheerful and melancholic. On Distancing, she develops a number of simple, lucid themes: cold lovers, long roads, open doors. She might be “waiting for the feeling of love” on “Tides,” or else reflecting that she’s “been in love so many times” she’s lost count on “Waves.” (It’s no coincidence that both titles work the same image.) She finds ways to poke and prod these lines with her voice, like the way it curves up toward the end of each sentence in the middle of “Towers” as she asks simply, “Does it make you feel good?” She gets a lot out of that little “good.”
The production is dense, busy, and prominent throughout, to the point that many of these songs are unrecognizable from how they’re performed live. Brian Borcherdt, of the beloved Canadian instrumental electronic band Holy Fuck, comes on as producer. He has an obvious, even ostentatious influence, so much so that he seems more active collaborator on the album’s soundworld than merely the technician shepherding it to fruition. Still, his deft touch, most clear on the strikingly dancey “Waves,” gives Hermiston the latitude to be more adventurous, and she integrates even the most unmistakably Borcherdt-ish flourishes into her work with ease and intrigue.
This approach—simple songwriting juiced up with a complicating frisson on the backend—is rewarding even if it exhausts its potential just as the album draws to a close. Still, resourcefulness and imagination are Twist’s key strengths, the reasons for her place on Buzz, and what lifts Distancing above common underground rock and into rarer air.


Isaac Brock is that rare character in an independent music world\r\n\ crowded with upper-class college boys and eccentric ...

Sharpen Your Teeth

Isaac Brock is that rare character in an independent music world crowded with upper-class college boys and eccentric old men: a legitimate redneck. Hailing from a rural logging town thirty miles east of Seattle, Brock grew up in a rusty trailer, doomed to the blue-collar nightmare of foundry life or some other back-breaking eternity. Over the past ten years, he's seen the backwoods town's tall pines and muddy soil swallowed alive by the corporate monster and shit back out as duplexes and strip malls. What little nature remains there now is permeated with the death stench of ChemLawr yards and Wendy's drive-thrus. So, after the success of Modest Mouse's classic The Moon and Antarctica, Brock packed up and moved to Cottage Grove, Oregon, another even more remote logging town-- one whose chances of becoming a suburban hellhole are about as likely as his mother's of winning a Powerball jackpot.
Brock is extremely candid in interviews about his love of drugs, particularly psychedelics and uppers. As everyone knows, there's not a lot to do out in nature but get high, and there's nothing like getting high in nature. It gets you thinking about the broader picture-- typical hippie shit like your place in the universe, and the usual depressive shit like your own mortality and irrelevance. This kind of environment can't be good for a guy who, beneath his surly exterior, is about as depressed as a motherfucker comes. But it helps him write, and when that's all you've got going for you, you go where it comes easiest.
I have little doubt that Brock wrote a great deal of the lyrics for The Moon and Antarctica on psychedelics, as many of his insights were so disconnected and profound that they could only have come to him in a moment of altered consciousness. But recently, including during the recording of that album, he's spent a lot of time in stone-sober Chicago, where psychedelics are considered hideously lower-class and drink is the drug of choice. None of this affected his magnum opus-- presumably because he was still hanging mostly with his druggy bandmates-- but Brock's solo debut as Ugly Casanova reeks of mental clarity, sacrificing the great philosophical lyrics of records past for pleasantly poetic, but never revelatory, subject matter.
Brock recorded Sharpen Your Teeth with Red Red Meat's Briar Deck, Califone's Tim Rutili, Pall Jenkins of Black Heart Procession, and a few random others at his Portland home studio, Glacial Pace, which he built using the advance Sub Pop offered him to record this very record. But let's consider his company here: Deck-- producer of the last Modest Mouse album and the first installment of Brock's Ugly Casanova side project-- for all his culvert reverb and glistening, interstellar software tricks, strikes me immediately as a man who has either never ingested a poisonous mushroom in his life or has long since outgrown such leanings. Rutili's work with Califone is marked by its junkyard percussion and Budweiser Americana. Jenkins sounds like he walks around in graveyards all day praying for inevitable death to just get it all over with. This is no company for abusing prescription tranquilizers.
But maybe that's the purpose of this project, to step away from the pursuit of universal knowledge and convey a simpler desperation. Or maybe he just wanted a new cast of characters to collaborate with. And this is indeed a collaboration. Though the songwriting-- which all members had a hand in, right down to the lyrics-- sounds unmistakably like Modest Mouse, you can hear the distinct marks of all the other players. It's initially evident on "Spilled Milk Factory," and later on "Pacifico," both of which feature clanging percussion and sparse background peripherals echoing Califone's Roomsound.
The collaborative nature of Sharpen Your Teeth, of course, yields a few missteps, the worst of which stumbles backwards and breaks it neck: "Diamonds on the Face of Evil" is an awkwardly loping experiment in which Brock recites a few lines of nonsense padded with the ceaselessly hollered refrain of "shey shaw shey shaw!" Likewise, "Parasites" comes on like some absurd postmortem parade, with blaring synth trumpets and Isaac morbidly insisting that "the parasites are excited when you're dead/ Eyes bulging, entering your head/ And all your thoughts... THEY ROT!" "Ice on the Sheets" is, at 6\xBD minutes, repetitive and overlong, and "Bee Sting," though surely intended as a segue, hinders the flow of the album-- a tuneless interlude with Isaac offering some of the least thought-provoking lyrics of his career.
There are some damn fine moments here, though. Brock seems to have been born with an innate talent to impart the sourest dejection. His approach is more akin to Arlo Guthrie than to the mop-headed, crybaby adolescentry that presently dominates our rock. If he stuffed his shit with 75-cent dictionary finds, it'd be one thing, but he uses plain English to communicate complex meditations, analyses that could as easily be grasped by drunken farmhands as by world-class poets. The finest of these crops up on "Hotcha Girls," when Brock, at his most austere, sings, "Don't you know that you'll rust, and not belong so much, and then get left alone.../ Don't you know that old folks' home smells so much like my own."
The opener, "Barnacles," has Brock referencing classic Rolling Stones amidst antisocial daydreams: "I don't need to see/ I don't see how you see/ Out of your window/ I don't need to see, I'll paint it black." Then there's the killer two-song punch that ends the record: "Things I Don't Remember" recalls the very best upbeat and rhythm-oriented Mouse moments, with truly propulsive percussior hitting with ferocious thwacks, as if trying to better the Pixies' "U-Mass." When the song springs to life out of the pleasantly countrified "Smoke Like Ribbons," it hits with such caffeinated urgency that its surrealist lyrics actually become incredibly fun where they might otherwise have been fatally clumsy. This guides us to the reflective closer, "So Long to the Holidays," which evokes both wistful memories of past Christmases, and going off somewhere to die-- and with just two simple lyrics.
Sharpen Your Teeth was undoubtedly a therapeutic outing for Isaac Brock, giving him some time to recuperate from his band's definitive statement and temporarily alleviating the pressure of making the next one. And lucky for us, the final product fares far better than these things generally do. Rutili is an able guitarist and lyricist, as is contributor John Orth (who got his start in the Florida-based band Holopaw), and Brian Deck's production, though sometimes excessively spacy, is always warm and nicely balanced. That said, I'm looking forward to Brock falling back in with his old crowd. The drugs might not be good for him, but the inspiratior is.


On their debut album, this Portland quartet demonstrates their old school death metal bona fides, even when they’re more interested in evolution and atmosphere.

Living Tomb

Ossuarium are a very new band with a very old sound, very quickly approaching the vanguard of modern death metal. Since forming in Portland, Ore., two years ago, the sepulchral quartet has released a gnarly demo and a compelling split, enough to earn them a spot on the roster of current underground tastemakers 20 Buck Spin. In recent years, 20 Buck Spin has become a one-stop shop for crucial death metal releases, alongside its rich past of metals black, classic, doom, and sludge. Recent signings like Tomb Mold and Ghastly have positioned the label at the top of the post-millennial heap, even challenging institutions like Relapse for the throne of skulls. Ossuarium’s full-length debut, Living Tomb, offers welcome reinforcement.
Living Tomb is a tight 40 minutes of ugly, bottom-scraping death and doom, firmly rooted in the past but cognizant of the need to evolve. Ossuarium understand how important atmosphere—that most slippery quality—can be in the conception and execution of truly great death metal. The skill slithers through in the 30-second prelude, where foreboding synths and thin feedback set the stage for the onslaught of “Blaze of Bodies,” a fast dive into Floridian swamp stomp. With its perfectly roiling churn of old school death metal, “Blaze of Bodies” makes it clear that Living Tomb won’t be just another garden-variety, OSDM platter, all murk and no meat. For a death metal album, it sounds startlingly alive.
“Vomiting Black Death” solidifies that promise, stretching the parameters of classic death-doom hybrids like rotten taffy. Ossuarium add a heady dose of melancholy, bell-clear melodicism, and thrumming weirdness inside this gloomy premise. There’s an off-kilter, low-end-focused Finnish sensibility to the otherwise straightforward parts of tracks like “Corrosive Hallucinations.” Ossuarium’s understated but incredibly muscular technicality proves they can play like the Devil damned their fretboards, though they are more interested in banged heads than shredded strings. “Writhing in Emptiness” adds gnarled solos and a wink of industrial metal crunch to OSDM’s most visceral, knuckle-dragging impulses. Then, though, they segue into an eerie break that’s unexpectedly pretty, a scintillating breath of fresh air among blasts of crematory miasma.
Even when Ossuarium shift toward traditionalism, as on “End of Life Dreams and Visions Pt. 1,” they still slow down and melt into elegant doom before song’s end. Its counterpart, the finale “End of Life Dreams and Visions Pt. 2,” reinforces that element. A doomed ode executed for maximum morbidity, it comes crowned in phantasmagoric atmosphere, one that allows maudlin notes—with their aura of classic European doom—the space to undulate and prowl without burying their rock’n’roll simplicity.
Living Tomb is a solid death metal album, no question. But in moments like the end, when Ossuarium show their willingness to experiment and think more holistically in their pursuit of creeping heaviness, their real promise shows. At this point, new old school death metal is best when it’s approached not just with veneration about also a sense of evolution. A genre founded on gore and teenage apathy can afford to get a little messy, purists be damned. Ossuarium are here for it.


A woozy, raw, magical, and extremely short album from hip-hop’s most tantalizingly inscrutable rapper.

Feet of Clay

Last year, around the time he released Some Rap Songs and ended his deal with Columbia Records, Thebe Kgositsile said he was looking forward to “doing riskier shit.” Apparently, that meant turning his already-insular music darker and more inscrutable. The rapper, better known as Earl Sweatshirt, doesn’t offer much direct commentary on Feet of Clay. Instead, he pushes further into the murky territory he began mapping on Some Rap Songs, loosening up his flow, letting down his guard, and wandering ever-further into the recesses of his mind.
Kgositsile has described Feet of Clay, his latest seven-track, 15-minute project, as “a collection of observations and feelings recorded during the death throes of a crumbling empire.” The title references the Bible’s Book of Daniel: in it, the prophet interprets a dream of Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, in which he sees a colossal statue made of four metals: a head of gold, arms and chest of silver, body and thighs of brass, and feet of iron and clay. Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar the statue represents the kingdoms of the Earth, starting with Babylon, and that a stone cut by non-human hands will fall on the statue’s feet and destroy it, a metaphor for the end times. “We at the feet of clay right now,” Kgositsile told Apple Music. “We posted up live from burning Rome.”
His verses don’t give much clarity to that ambitious context so much as they offer fragments: “I beat you to the point/My noose is golden/True and livin,’ lonesome/Pugilistic moments/Riveting, come get to know me at my innermost/My family business anguish, now I need atonement,” he raps on “OD.” The line hints at Kgositsile’s grief over his father, who passed in 2018. This is the project he made in the wake of that loss. The pall of death haunts the edges of his rhymes; birds of prey circle carrion on “74,” and on “OD” he raps, “My memory really leaking blood/It’s congealing, stuck.” If these are confessions, they are delivered in code, and the meaning comes from the sounds of the words themselves.
As a teenage prodigy, Kgositsile leaned hard on his technical skill. Now an adult, he still cares deeply about craft, but he seems to be thinking differently about delivery and performance. There are moments on Feet of Clay when he seems to be actively subverting ideas of what being good at rapping sounds like. On “East,” which pairs blunted raps with a harsh accordion-like wail, he mutters “had a story careen against the bars,” and it’s the closest he’s come to defining the style he’s striving for: narrative and emotional, physical and abstract.
As with Some Rap Songs, this project is heavily influenced, in aesthetic and tone, by the New York City rap underground; not just recent Earl Sweatshirt collaborators like MIKE, Medhane, and Ade Hakim but also minimalist Ka, dialectician billy woods, and impressionist Akai Solo. Kgositsile has adapted rather quickly to this gloomy, withdrawn world of distorted jazz and R&B loops supporting his talky cadences. This is straight-up anti-pop-rap: unpolished, unevenly mixed, structurally unbalanced, primarily self-produced, and polarizing.
The warped, bassy “4N,” which accounts for nearly a third of the project’s running time, partners him with fellow recluse Mach-Hommy, the brusque and enterprising Jersey rapper Kgositsile has long admired. As the beat winds like a skipping record, they keep everyone at arm’s length. There is some more traditional production: the Mavi-assisted “El Toro Combo Meal” dusts off a vintage soul sample, and the Alchemist-produced “Mtomb” bends Mtume’s “Theme For the People” into a sputtering hymn. But even these are merely cushions for wrestling with deep-seated trauma. On the latter: “Piscean just like my father, still got bones to pick out/For now let’s salt the rims and pour a drink out.”
There is a punch-drunk quality to Kgositsile’s verses that occasionally makes them seem like stoned spitballing. But they have the looseness of freestyles, a nonlinear flow he may have picked up from Mavi, a pupil turned sparring partner. They don’t sound half-baked so much as purposefully unfinished, a move even further off the grid for one of our most promising shut-ins. Nearly a decade after becoming a prodigal rap savant, Earl Sweatshirt is still burning old selves in effigy, figuring out who he wants to be in real time.