Conceived as a companion piece to 2017’s Twin Solitude, the Canadian songwriter’s fourth album is a dialogue with the person he’s been.

New Ways

While putting the final touches on his third album, 2017’s Twin Solitude, Canadian songwriter Leif Vollebekk began to understand it better. Across 10 tracks, he’d mourned the dissolution of a relationship, grasping to resolve his past as newfound success created geographic and emotional distance. Only when he stopped searching did clarity find him. Rather than revise Twin Solitude, Vollebekk set about fashioning new songs to explore his growing perspective. “I started working on this new record [New Ways] while I was mixing that one,” he told Atwood Magazine. “I had this idea,” he said, “that it would be a companion piece.”
Vollebekk sensed chatter between the two projects—so much so that he considered titling the new album Phaedrus, after Plato’s dialogue by the same name. Among the discussion topics in Plato’s Phaedrus is the effect of writing on memory: how creating a record of an event discourages remembering it. Vollebekk doesn’t heed that warning. New Ways sidles up to the past, opening a dialogue with time, with place, and with the person he’s been.
One central figure lingers across the album—a present absence that sits easier than on Twin Solitude. “She’s my woman and she loved me so fine,” Vollebekk sings on the bruised “Never Be Back.” Love has come and gone, but on New Ways the lesson finally sticks. “She’ll never be back, never be back,” he adds, briskly repeating himself. The steady piano paces Vollebekk’s manic verses. His desire to understand hasn’t abated, but he no longer seeks to change the past—merely to invoke it. “Not making a case for you or for trying,” he sings.
Vollebekk laces his capacious, meandering music with a ’60s folk-jazz sensibility. As with Twin Solitude, he recorded New Ways directly to tape, allowing each song’s mood to dictate its direction. “When I hear music, I hear lots of space,” he’s explained, “and then I find that when I add instruments it’s almost like somebody saying too much [...] or saying the wrong thing. It takes the air out of the room.” The sparse, tense “Hot Tears” doubles his voice while a piano and burnished hi-hat clear space to collate bygone days. When he fills out that baseline with a sumptuous Wurlitzer (as on “The Way That You Feel”) or a crestfallen sax (as on “Wait a While”), the songs remain understated and affecting.
His frenetic lyricism sits in clarifying contrast to the spare arrangements, the same qualities that helped Twin Solitude earn nominations for the Polaris Prize and Juno Award. “Hot Tears” and “Transatlantic Flight” stand out, but on the whole New Ways doesn’t live up to the emotional spark of its predecessor. There’s a point when mulling over the same memories shifts into melancholia; Vollebekk comes close to that cliff, but he keeps regret at bay by focusing on reality. The drums on “I’m Not Your Lover” tick like a clock as he traces how time has changed his circumstances: “Drifting in thrift stores I see something pretty/See a jacket I’d wear ’til I gave it to you,” he sings, before soberly reminding himself, “I’m not your lover.” On “Phaedrus”—what remains of the album’s original title—he repeats the first and last verses as if they were a mantra: “The way that it was/Is the way it should be.”

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Peder Mannerfelt has produced groups like Fever Ray and Blonde Redhead. On his new EP, he channels his interest in emancipatory politics and exotic rhythms into crisp, clever tracks.

Equality Now EP

No subliminal messaging for Peder Mannerfelt: on Equality Now, he wears his politics on his record sleeve. Hailing from Stockholm, Mannerfelt is a skillful engineer and a tireless collaborator. As well as his solo production work, he performs as one half of analog synth duo Roll the Dice, has produced records for Blonde Redhead and Glasser under the name the Subliminal Kid, and played an integral role in Karin Dreijer Andersson’s Fever Ray. He shares a few common interests with Andersson—emancipatory politics, exotic rhythms, and Brothers Grimm dress-up. Playing live, he wears a waist-length wig that obscures his face, making him look like a sort of techno Rapunzel.
The Equality Now EP marks Mannerfelt’s first output on Numbers, the Glasgow dance imprint that discovered Rustie and SOPHIE, among others. Its three tracks explore three quite different directions, while holding to a few base tenets: clever ideas, executed simply, with a minimum of gloss or clutter. The title track is crisp, propulsive techno produced with such economy that you probably couldn’t excise a single aspect without the whole thing disintegrating. Arid drums lock into a manic bounce, synth lines bend and flex into strange timbres and two synthetic voices—one male, one female—intone the world “equality”, mostly in unison, sometimes a tantalizing half-beat out of of step. Its repetition recalls a chant or a march: grassroots activism tailored for the dancefloor.
While at first glance Equality Now’s productions can appear fairly simplistic, they often conceal ingenious elements. “Breaking Patterns,” the EP’s second track, is a borderline-crude acid number that contains rhythmic echoes of Mannerfelt’s 2015 LP The Swedish Congo Record—a sonic “research project” which attempted to fastidiously recreate 1930s field recordings of tribal music in the Belgian Congo using modern tools. Taut hand drums pound ceaselessly, as synthesizers spit out electronic zaps and distressed strings crawl mournfully across the frame. But most of the action happens on a microscopic level: beats form themselves into unusual polyrhythms that morph and reshape, while small twists of FX or a shifting mix suddenly jolt the track onto a new footing.
Equality Now bows out with “Rules, Ropes & Strings,” an ambient piece that pares back the beats and ushers in slow tidal washes of shimmering texture. It’s a strangely sedate end for a record that is elsewhere out to enthuse or provoke. Hardly unusual for a figure as mercurial as Mannerfelt, though. This is music guided by impulse, not premeditation; music in which an idea is good, right up until the moment that it’s spent.


Yeasayer's third LP is an abrupt transition for a band whose sound always seems to be in flux, bearing both a more limited stylistic range and a narrower sense of identity.

Fragrant World

Say what you will about Yeasayer, but up to this point in their career, their music hasn’t been easily categorized as "unremarkable". It’s invited opinions-- loud ones-- from supporters and detractors alike.  Since their tracks are based on similar qualities-- spirited, can-do lyrics, sweeping harmonies, and deliriously stacked arrangements-- there's been almost no middle ground separating their excellent run of singles ("2080", "Tightrope", "Madder Red", "O.N.E.") from their catastrophic face-plants ("Mondegreen", "Rome"). Now that's changed. Yeasayer's third album, Fragrant World, is their first and only consistent LP. It not only proves that Yeasayer can make an unremarkable song, but that they can make 11 of them in a row.
Fragrant World marks another transition for a band whose sound appears to be in constant flux, and initially, it can make you miss the "old" Yeasayer. There's a significant change here. While *All Hour Cymbals *and Odd Blood sounded nothing like each other, they reflected Yeasayer's surroundings at the time, the maximalist grab-from-anywhere approach that defined ambitious East Coast indie rock. They were in the lineage of TV on the Radio and Animal Collective when those bands they were still psychedelic and tribal, and they brought to mind the track-stuffing, techno-hippie approach of MGMT or Gang Gang Dance in a pop mood. Fragrant World, on the other hand, is a decidedly minimalist affair. Its album cover might suggest otherwise, but Yeasayer have not gone dubstep or witch house, although the occasional undulating bass wobble and ticking hi-hat suggest they're going for something a little more trunk-rattling this time around. On the whole, the stylistic range is far narrower, and the geographic one much wider, as Fragrant World sounds like it's trying to jockey alongside miniaturists such as Grimes, Purity Ring, or the xx-- acts that make music that sounds simultaneously tiny and fragile enough for iPod shuffles and scalable to subwoofers.
None of which plays to Yeasayer's strengths. The leaner sound puts the focus squarely on their lyrics, and their overall disposition hasn't changed along with their sonics; Fragrant World can feel painfully self-aware. A typically curious juxtaposition occurs over the  phased chords of "Blue Paper", when Anand Wilder sighs, "She used to walk on concrete/ Now the sidewalk isn't green enough for her/ Says she misses Mother Earth." Later on the squelching "Devil and the Deed", he mocks, "You could never handle if she was into magic/ You could never stand it/ She couldn't speak your language." The robotic bump 'n' grind of "Longevity" is a new look for Yeasayer, but the only real friction is that of a square peg plugging into a round hole: "My girl says that all the rain promises is to give life to the seeds/ Live in the moment/ Never count on longevity," sings Chris Keating. It's the sort of thing people say with alarming frequency in Yeasayer songs and absolutely nowhere else.
Songs here often take an advisory tone, and the lack of grounding becomes more pronounced whenever Yeasayer get topical. The overkill of EQ filters makes it nearly impossible to identify the folk hero or the shtick on "Folk Hero Shtick", with "The emperor's standing naked/ How much longer can he fake it?" failing to serve as any sort of guidance. Likewise, witness "Reagan's Skeleton" imagining right-wing oppression as a "Thriller"-like phantasmagoria.
Then again, did the lyrics of "2080" or "Ambling Alp" get in the way? With those songs, Yeasayer managed to overwhelm the listener with an undeniable melody and sheer psychedelic swooning. Though their previously hyper-colored records were also self-produced, Fragrant World is curiously thin. It goes beyond the arrangements. While the hooks of "No Bones" and "Devil and the Deed" slowly grow on you, each hits a point around the three-minute mark where you might expect a pivot, a bridge, or some new texture. Instead, they just end meekly. This quality is most noticeable on lead single "Henrietta", which works a melodic bassline, and the sort of elastic groove that powered Odd Blood's best tracks. Yet after only two minutes, it cuts out and spends more than half of its time playing catch up with the first Neon Indian album.
Credit where it's due-- Yeasayer are ambitious enough to do something other than write "2080" sequels, even though they have every incentive to do just that. But unlike the erratic, occasionally captivating, and always bold Odd Blood, Fragrant World rests in a tentative middle ground.


Though at least two of Maiden’s first four albums are metal masterpieces, they showcase a band eagerly evolving while building a classic lineup in a breathless four-year span.

Iron Maiden: Iron Maiden / Killers / The Number of the Beast / Piece Of Mind

Iron Maiden’s first four albums—Iron Maiden, Killers, The Number of the Beast, and Piece of Mind—have been reissued again. It’s part of a year-long project by Parlophone to recommit the band’s 16 studio albums to CD, four at a time, though availability has never exactly been an issue. These versions don’t add much; they are CD dumps of 2015 vinyl remasters with the original British tracklists. Knowing that hardcore Maiden collectors are legion, the only addition is that The Number of the Beast—the band’s third album and the first featuring dynamo singer Bruce Dickinson—includes a plastic figurine of the iconic Eddie and a patch of, well, the Devil. Cynically, it’s a cash grab. Still, this is the band that harnessed 1980s fear and turmoil in order to shape metal as we know it, and these records deserve any life support a record label wants to give them.
These four albums, issued one per year from 1980 to 1983, show a band in constant mutation: Melodies get stronger. Arrangements get more intricate. Dickinson replaces the scrappy upstart Paul Di’Anno, pushing the band to the next level of power and popularity. These records are not flawed but certainly developmental, battles won and occasionally lost on the journey to supremacy. Beast and Piece of Mind are redoubtable metal classics; still, even if it’s hard to consider “Run to the Hills” and “The Trooper” pieces of a work in progress, they are points along Maiden’s path to becoming the global behemoth that made 1984’s Powerslave, their landmark fifth album. And watching Maiden develop was watching metal develop, shaking off the haze of 1970s boogie and speeding up its attack while borrowing from the harder side of progressive rock. If Sabbath birthed metal, Maiden looks and oftentimes sounds more like metal’s stereotypical boogeyman.
Maiden arose from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) scene at the dawn of the ’80s, though they’re so foundational to metal they’re often not talked about in that way. You link Maiden with Sabbath and Judas Priest, not Tygers of Pan Tang and Satan. The distance is evident from the jump on their self-titled debut, brimming with hooks and attitude. “Running Free” is the first archetypal song from a band with several of them, as they doggedly pursue some ambiguous form of “freedom.” It barely matters what freedom is, though, as Di’Anno convincingly sells the idea that going blind into the future is the only way during the gutsy chorus. “Prowler” succeeds on self-assurance, too. It’s unclear on Maiden’s first two records if Di’Anno is an untethered beast or a weird stalker (probably the latter), but he gives Maiden’s crisp melodies an energy that would remain a calling card.
Di’Anno excels at these kinds of barreling tracks, which is why he ultimately wasn’t long for the world of Maiden. “Phantom of the Opera,” to wit, seems written for Bruce Dickinson two years before he joined Maiden, as it’s the first taste of what bassist and mastermind Steve Harris wanted his band to be. It’s here that Harris sets the template for Maiden’s longer, more complicated but melodically rich songs by fusing jumping basslines inspired by Yes to bastardized classical ideas routed through heavy rock (in essence, metal, or what Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore had done). “Remember Tomorrow” isn’t even as complex as “Opera,” but you can still hear Di’Anno’s limits during the quasi-ballad. It’s too slow for his hesher persona, requiring a sensitivity he just couldn’t summon.
In 1981, Killers shined floodlights on the debut’s dinginess, allowing Maiden to clear the muck from a dirty rocker like “Purgatory” without removing its grimey heart. Adrian Smith’s addition on second guitar allows for bombastic dynamics with Dave Murray, another piece of Maiden’s grand design. “Wrathchild” blends the menace of “Prowler” and the breezy fun of “Running Free,” while “Murders in the Rue Morgue” shows that Di’Anno is trying to match Harris’ ambition as he keeps up with the jittery bass. By doubling down on attitude, and bolstered by the record’s brightness, he sounds more confident and able. And on the title track, he introduces two vocal tics that Dickinson would master—terse declarations in the verses, arena-ready “whoas” in the open spaces.
There are still fans who insist that the Di’Anno Maiden of these first two albums is the best Maiden—contrarians, honestly. Those declarations undercut metal’s capacity for exploration, growth, and having a higher sense of purpose. Sure, “Wrathchild” and “Free” are plenty great and far more memorable than most NWOBHM obscurities, but they wouldn’t have made Maiden a global force. It’s not all about Di’Anno, either; Harris was still refining his ideas as a songwriter. He hadn’t yet loosened the reins for other members, but he also hadn’t fully tapped into the progressive rock that would influence Maiden from the mid-’80s onward. Still, the short but intricate “Genghis Khan” is probably best left as an instrumental, anyway—it would be too much for Di’Anno to handle.
Iron Maiden emerged as more than a way-above-average NWOBHM band on 1982’s The Number of the Beast. The proof is instant on “Invaders,” an underrated Maiden opener that shows just how much Dickinson vitalized the band as he yells “IN-VADERS!” in acrobatic high notes. Murray and Smith bob and weave, pierce and strike in calculated disarray; they get wilder, because Dickinson’s technical aplomb has empowered them.
The explosive wails at the end of “Children of the Damned” set the bar for the higher-the-better theatrics that would soon become a metal hallmark. As when Dio joined Sabbath, the vocalist switch was never simply about technical ability. Harris’ writing boasted a dizzying drama that Di’Anno was too streetwise to nail. But here was a voice that could match him. Real mania drips from Dickinson’s every word during “22 Acacia Avenue,” a feeling the straightforward Di’Anno would have missed.
What’s more, who knew a band that still packs soccer stadiums would be so existential? During “The Number of the Beast” and “Hallowed Be Thy Name,” two of Maiden’s definitive songs, Dickinson and Harris pit the self against the world and one’s own self-judgement and temptation. “Hallowed” is Maiden not just versus death but also versus fate, versus the powers that be, versus the fear that you’ll end up watching your sands of time run low. Its somber opening presaged metal’s forthcoming darker tones, too. “The Number of the Beast” works the same way, essentially saying you’re going to encounter some bad shit when you’re cutting loose. Do you take the plunge? In heavy metal, of course.
A year later, on Piece of Mind, the classic Iron Maiden lineup finally cohered, with Nicko McBrain replacing Clive Burr on drums. Just as Dickinson turned the start of Beast into a showcase as to why he was the one for the job, the arresting, tom-filled opening of “Where Eagles Dare” does the same for McBrain. He is more crisp and fluid, like a relaxed Neil Peart but every bit as ecstatic. The songs here again run up against hopeless situations and make music from the despair. “Flight of Icarus” indulges in Dickinson’s mythology geekery and unintentionally presages The Decline of Western Civilization II, the infamous documentary that featured many hair metal bands flying too close to the sun.
Though bursting with melodies and some of Dickinson’s most dramatic performances, “Die With Your Boots On” and “The Trooper” don’t romanticize war. Dying by the state isn’t cool, whether it’s getting shot at in the name of imperialism or by the death penalty. Dickinson is the most convincing drill sergeant, yelling that this isn’t triumph. The triumph comes from overcoming war and misery, always Maiden’s aim.
Theocracy doesn’t entail burning “Satanic” metal records en masse anymore, and demagogues may not seem as sneaky as they once were. But Maiden’s message—“If you’re gonna die, die with your boots on,” or don’t back down in metal parlance—has persevered. Maybe that’s why, even if these reissues are mere collector bait, Maiden still speaks, screams, and solos to our times nearly four decades after these records were made. War’s still hell, stalkers and grifters still abound, and dreams still get deferred. That’s reason enough for heavy metal, reason enough for Iron Maiden. “Life down here is just a strange illusion,” Dickinson offers during “Hallowed,” perhaps not even knowing how right he is.


This double-album soundtrack functions like a greatest-hits set, with a focus on the singer-songwriter’s early material and some recent collaborations.

Sheryl Crow: Sheryl: Music From the Feature Documentary

Toward the end of Sheryl, a new documentary that’s somewhere between a gentle hagiography and an electronic press kit, Sheryl Crow reckons with her status as a music business veteran: “There’s a weird thing that happens when you become a ‘legacy artist.’ It’s sort of a sideways compliment. It’s like, ‘OK, you’ve stood the test of time but also you’re old and you just haven’t gone away.’” The accompanying double-album soundtrack, Sheryl: Music From the Feature Documentary, proves Crow’s point by balancing the core of her catalog—the songs that have stood the test the time—with the music she’s made as a legacy artist who no longer visits the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100. Partly a greatest hits collection, partly a testimonial to Crow’s endurance, Sheryl: Music From the Feature Documentary leans heavily into the bookends of her career, emphasizing her 1990s hits along with Threads, the 2019 album she claims is her farewell.
Like the film, Sheryl places the spotlight squarely on the music she made at the outset of her career, which seemed like a throwback even in the 1990s. Raised on classic rock, Crow tapped into a distinctly 1970s vibe with her 1993 debut Tuesday Night Music Club, a record steeped in the slick, heady sounds of Southern California. Its retro vibe was roughly in the same ballpark as alternative rock, which happened to crash into the mainstream just prior to the album’s release. Crow courted the alternative rock audience just once: She smudged up her sound on her self-titled second album, which arrived during alt-rock’s commercial peak in 1996. The thick, churning guitars of “If It Makes You Happy” represented a definitive break from the effervescent sunniness of “All I Wanna Do,” signifying her artistic independence more than any desire to chase trends.
Sheryl doesn’t create a strong differentiation between the sunny vibes of Tuesday Night Music Club and the relatively grungier aspects of Sheryl Crow. The soundtrack deliberately alternates material from the two records, a sequence that emphasizes continuity over evolution: What stands out is how Crow managed to freshen classic rock conventions without repudiating their clichés. Her best work demonstrated a clear debt to idols like Fleetwood Mac and the Rolling Stones—both Stevie Nicks and Keith Richards return the favor by appearing in Sheryl— but she synthesized these elements into a distinctive voice that sounded weathered, soulful, and hopeful. She deepened this approach on 1998’s The Globe Sessions, then turned it into shiny pop for C’mon C’mon in 2002.
These four albums provide the backbone of both the documentary and its soundtrack. The first hour of the 90-minute film takes viewers up thorough C’Mon C’mon, while the soundtrack relies heavily on material from these records: Seven of the 11 songs on Tuesday Night Music Club are here, as are eight of the 13 cuts from Sheryl Crow, then four songs from The Globe Sessions and two from C’mon C’mon. The entire Sheryl project essentially glosses over the following two decades of Crow’s career, bypassing the handsome adult-alternative album Wildflower, the R&B genre exercise 100 Miles From Memphis, and Feels Like Home, her excursion into country music. While these records aren’t as bracing or idiosyncratic as her first four, they’re supporting evidence for Crow’s strength as a troubadour.
Instead of touching upon these albums, Sheryl concludes with a heavy dose of duets from Threads, the collaborative 2019 record Crow claims will be her final studio album, adding three new tracks that underscore her lifer status. “Forever” is a pretty ballad that hearkens back to delicate moments from Sheryl Crow, and “Still the Same” charts somewhat new territory for her, a stately romantic pop ballad with a heavy debt to Paul McCartney. She returns to her wheelhouse with a version of the Rolling Stones’ “Live With Me” that’s a bit too polished for its own good, its tight rhythms contrasting sharply with the looser feel of her first recordings. As a listening experience, the 35-song set feels somewhat anticlimactic. This isn’t a full portrait of Crow’s gifts as an artist, but it is a reminder of the high standard she set early on—music that retains its vitality, so much so that it can overshadow the perfectly enjoyable work that came later.


Electronic music at the moment may not get more gurgling than Amnesia Scanner. The European duo keeps pushing the outer limits of noise and techno further on this excellent new collage of songs.

AS TRUTH

Berlin-based Finnish producers Ville Haimala and Martti Kalliala first made waves in 2011 as Renaissance Man, an impish electro duo equal parts quirky energy and bleary-eyed techno. The producers have since discarded that shell, reinventing themselves as Amnesia Scanner, a brutalist avant-club project whose music is engineered to alienate and provoke. In loose dialog with dance deconstructionists like Arca, Angel-Ho, and Lotic, Amnesia Scanner’s violently kinetic club visions deal in the dissonant and the absurd, all the while glimpsing hellish dystopian wastelands and the disorientation of future shock.
Since 2014’s AS LIVE [][][][][] and the following year’s AS ANGELS RIG HOOK, Amnesia Scanner have been crumpling grime, trap, rave and various regional dance strains into one convulsive, machine-like knot. Last year’s AS EP, Amnesia Scanner’s first official physical release, dialed back on the aggression ever so slightly, distilling the duo’s inclination for shrapnel textures and keening electronics into comparatively shorter, more accessible bursts. The duo’s latest, the AS TRUTH mixtape, flips the script once again—Amnesia Scanner has never sounded this abstract, this exceptionally unstable.
AS TRUTH’s artwork depicts a lobotomy—what looks like a forced lobotomy, to be specific. The victim appears resigned to his fate, looking confused, dejected, but also angry. In turn, the viewer is forced to share in that terrifying scene, in that discomfort, in that fear. Similarly, AS TRUTH feels like a music that’s flung at you, forced on you—something that not so much asks to be interpreted as reaches out and grabs at your attention, in thrilling, if deeply unnerving, ways. Throughout its 15 unbroken minutes, the mixtape hurls listeners into a bramble of juxtaposing textures and timbres. Hi-tech, high-gloss sounds clash up against coarse, serrated ones; needling dissonance rubs shoulders with creaky silences. Synths screech and squeal, bellow and gurgle. The percussion flits between skittering, frenzied beat-programming and concussive thunder. Shards of disembodied vocals are interspersed throughout the mixtape, reduced at turns to melting, pitch-shifted ooze and flinty cries. Seemingly brittle one moment, colossally impenetrable the next, AS TRUTH’s angular shapes move in fits and starts, like some cybernetic albatross still searching for its sea legs.
AS TRUTH’s tracklist outlines seven individual cuts, but simultaneously released on SoundCloud and Bandcamp as a single unsegmented stream, the mixtape functions as one long-form work without noticeable seams. Apart from the back-to-back midsection deluge of “AS TRUTH” and “AS BRIETH”—released as a two-sided single last December—AS TRUTH consists of all new material. It starts with a wail—part marine air horn, part digital leviathan stirring to life—and closes with a throaty exhale. In between lives some of the most radical and ear-splitting electronic music you’ll likely encounter all year. From opener “AS POWERLESS,” with its helicopter flicker and haunted rave theme, to outro “AS SANE”, which is of a piece with OPN’s Garden of Delete, AS TRUTH never fails to confound. It’s a release of ferocious intensity, constructed from an unwieldy set of moving, interconnected parts. Vestiges of melody and rhythm are teased here and there, but no sooner do they gain footing than they collapse in on themselves, receding back into the maelstrom.
Yet, for all its noise and frenzy, AS TRUTH also contains some of the slowest-paced and quiet music Amnesia Scanner has released so far. Take the funereal ambient of “AS WEEP”, which breeds tension in its gaping negative spaces. Gothic harpsichord, computerized plinks, slurred vocals, and muted drums are all that cut through the silences. However, this proves to be just another of Amnesia Scanner’s clever devices: they lull you into a false sense of serenity, just so they can later spring a noisy trap.


With livewire intensity, the Savages singer-songwriter’s ambitious and experimental solo album explodes with life from every corner as an epic display of contrasting themes and emotion.

TO LOVE IS TO LIVE

Jehnny Beth didn’t set out to write love songs. In 2011, as the French singer born Camille Berthomier began to write a debut album with her new punk band, Savages, she swore off the subject, finding topics like identity and censorship more fruitful. But when it came time for Savages’ second record, a switch had flipped. Overwhelmed by the generosity and warmth radiating from her audience, Beth wanted to bounce some of it back. That impulse yielded 2016’s Adore Life, an album whose slash-and-burn guitar work lit up the tenderness of its lyrics.
TO LOVE IS TO LIVE, Beth’s new solo album—written and produced with Savages producer (and Beth’s longtime partner) Johnny Hostile—is not a Savages record by another name. Beth sidelines the grimy, distorted guitar and reaches for a more diverse palette, including strobe-like synths, downy woodwinds, and inscrutable snippets of found sound. But there are constants: TO LOVE IS TO LIVE is rife with the same livewire intensity, the same embrace of tensions and apparent contradictions. Lyrically and musically, it vacillates between the corporeal and the ethereal, prudence and excess, softness and severity. Its various parts could fill out the whole character alignment grid from lawful good to chaotic evil. If not always love, they demonstrate fascination with the full spectrum of human experience and beyond.
Presenting herself as an alien (or a sentient robot?), Beth opens the record with a sweeping, spoken-word poem warped by vocal filters. Elsewhere, she’s an all-too-human lover, longing for closeness. On “I’m the Man,” she’s an aggressor, spitting the titular phrase more than 30 times through an audible snarl. She is pious and a miscreant, sometimes at once. Beth appears as a statue on the record’s cover, her powerful stance and icy glare locked in stone; under the surface, though, things are far more fluid.
This has structural implications, too: TO LOVE IS TO LIVE is stuffed with disorienting interludes, codas, and about-faces. On more than one occasion, Beth and her collaborators build up a hardcore frenzy, then swiftly pull out the rug: The seething chaos of “How Could You” abruptly tumbles into ambient birdsong. Instrumental lines are collaged together with skittering synthetics; Beth’s alto is distinctive but mutable, and she flits between acridity and softness. There is some organizing logic across the album, like the reprisal of the opening poem on its final track, signaling the completion of a cycle. But, on the whole, it is indifferent to order.
Rather, urgency emerges as its guiding principle, heard in its dramatic crescendos and emphatic percussion. Beth’s idea for a solo project germinated in 2016, following the death of David Bowie. After revisiting his final album, Blackstar, she was overtaken by an existentialist conviction that man (or woman) is nothing but his or her own making. Beth wanted to create something to cement her own legacy—an undeniably daunting task. “I couldn’t shake the feeling of my mortality, all through doing it,” she recently said, of working on the album. “I felt it was important that I do this before I died.” The sense that the clock is ticking hangs in the air. On opener “I Am,” a timer pulses as if Beth is on deadline to transfer her thoughts onto tape. There’s no room for tidiness under such conditions.
Pondering death raises matters of conscience (particularly for someone like Beth, who is, as she notes on “Innocence,” plagued by Catholic guilt). And so sin—both of the flesh and of society at large—emerges as a motif. Near the midway point, Beth enlists actor Cillian Murphy to bemoan the cruelties of war and capitalism in a piercing reading of her poem “A Place Above.” Beth said that “I’m the Man,” which follows, is not an excoriation of the patriarchy, but an exploration of the destructive tendencies that live within all of us. It’s difficult, though, to write off the song’s blatantly misogynistic language (“There’s no bitch in town/Who doesn’t understand/How hard my dick can be”) entirely; in this self-interrogation, Beth takes toxic masculinity as a given, a baseline against which she can measure her own inner demons.
But Beth’s lyrics are often more evocative than they are precisely descriptive or narrative. And for all her fixation on virtue and sin, she’s not out to moralize, exactly, but rather to capture all the messiness, contradiction, and even ugliness of life. This is true even of album closer “Human,” on which she refutes her humanity altogether and surrenders her body to the cloud: “I used to be a human being/Now I live in the web.” Scientists say that whole brain emulation—actually uploading our minds—is still a distant prospect, for reasons both technological and ethical. Until then, we’re left with more analog methods of cataloging our lives and shoring up our legacies. As any artist knows, this is an imperfect, imprecise project—but that’s the beauty of it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Drawing from emo, pop-punk and '90s alt-rock, Pity Sex trawl the messy depths of failing romances. White Hot Moon follows the course the band set on 2013’s Feast of Love, with a few deviations.

White Hot Moon

For the surprising influence that it wields today, second-wave emo was not without its shortcomings. While the movement’s largely male figureheads were more than happy to detail the emotional harm they suffered in relationships—usually at the hands of women—their avoidance of the topic of sex was near puritanical. Arriving nearly twenty years after the fact, Ann Arbor’s Pity Sex felt like something of a corrective. Despite their typical beginnings—hardcore scene vets start melodic project—Pity Sex were very much unlike their peers, a co-ed emo act willing to venture beyond the bedroom door. What’s more, their first-person vignettes turned emo’s central trope on its head, telling stories of doomed romances from the perspective of the unfeeling aggressor, rather than the wounded victim. “There’s nothing to talk about,” one such protagonist admits on 2013’s Feast of Love, “When we talk about love."
Pity Sex don’t sound all that emo these days; since their noisy, shambolic beginnings on 2012’s Dark World, they’ve expanded their sonic palette, borrowing guitar tones from alternative rock’s '90s heyday and brisk, hooky songwriting from that same era's pop-punk. Their latest, White Hot Moon, doesn’t stray far from this path, though it does find the band further cleaning up their sound, with the assistance of producer Will Yip. There’s a satisfying crispness to be found on White Hot Moon, from the crunch of its power chords to the bright pop of each snare hit. Like many of Yip’s projects, White Hot Moon recalls a time when even scruffy bands like Jawbreaker had access to the sort of studio equipment a major label budget affords.
Still, if you’ve been following Pity Sex, most of White Hot Moon’s dynamics will feel familiar: quiet verses, loud choruses, fuzzed-out guitars set atop driving percussion. The beating heart of most Pity Sex songs lies in the interplay between Brennan Greaves' stoic tone and Britty Drake’s earnest delivery, and lead single “Burden You” leverages this formula to great effect. Here, Greaves takes on some of the messier lines ("Follow me home between my sheets and mend the burden in me”) with a cool detachment, while Drake alternates between singing “I wanna burden you” and “I wanna burn in you,” channeling the dark intimacy of In Utero-era Kurt Cobain. That’s not all they’re borrowing from the monsters of alt-rock: the song closes with a squall of feedback that creeps up steadily through the final verses. Even so, the kicker—Drake’s gutting admission, “I’ll always think of your lips/When I’m moving mine against his”—feels like a signature Pity Sex move, an emotional time-bomb delivered as a casual aside.
Most of White Hot Moon plays out similarly, from the punky sprint of “Orange and Red” to the squealing string bends and knuckle-dragging minor chords of “White Hot Moon.” For evidence of the band venturing outside of their comfort zone, look to the handful of ballads, which extend their range with mixed results. “Dandelion” gets by on prettiness, hiding its payload inside of the kind of bodily metaphors ("Let roots run through me like veins, ventricles, and arteries”) that rank among emo’s most beloved clichés. “September” goes further yet—here, the band attempts to pass as a clean-cut, Midwestern emo act. Its sappiness is maybe a bit too on the nose: after all, the refrain of “You are the earth beneath my feet” is just a few words away from being a Bette Midler lyric.
The album’s most striking number, “Plum,” manages to put that same earnestness to better use, with Drake detailing the loss of a parent with an artful yet unflinching candor. Her sadness here is deeply felt but never morose, while the band provides just enough muscle to propel the narrative forward. Pity Sex’s primary asset is their willingness to approach emotionally difficult topics head-on, and “Plum” is perhaps the most wrenching demonstration of this skill yet.
Overall, White Hot Moon is likely to please existing fans of Pity Sex—its 12 tracks largely find the band continuing to leverage what worked on Feast of Love. That said, White Hot Moon isn’t quite as catchy as that record—its hooks feel a bit dilute next to an earworm like “Drown Me Out.” The band's relative lack of growth here is also disappointing. Certainly, their central conceit—using the tools of angsty, suburban teens to get at some very adult themes—continues to be compelling. But with an emo revival in full swing, they’re hardly alone in this endeavor. Just look to bands like The World is a Beautiful Place..., The Hotelier, or Touché Amoré, all of whom have found emo to be a more than capable vehicle for mature songwriting. Emo is growing up, but is Pity Sex?


Like a corrupted file ripped straight from LimeWire, the Houston rapper’s new tape smashes together crunk, snap, and SouljaBoy ad-libs into a blast of nostalgia that’s never stuck in the past.

Let Me Update My Status

In the fall of 2013, the Treasury Department issued the first new $100 bill design in nearly two decades. The Series 2009A was a radical change mostly because it was, well, blue. These bills present something of a problem for TisaKorean, the Houston-bred dancer and rapper. On “StEvIe wOnDeR (yCg).mp3,” from his new tape Let Me Update My Status, he laments that thumbing through the new currency is leaving dyed residue on his fingers. Like a boom mic sagging into frame, the stains puncture the almost perfect illusion of an LP—or, more likely, a .zip file unearthed from the late W. Bush years.
The file in question might scan as slightly corrupted: Most of Update’s antecedent styles—crunk and snap primarily—coexisted, but seldom fought for space in the same mix. Song titles are styled as if ripped straight from LimeWire, or as if a clip of a Bill Clinton speech is nestled next to TisaKorean bragging about changing a girl’s pH balance. On “cRaNk iT Up (BoNuS).mp3,” snap’s incremental creep seems perpetually on the verge of exploding into a totalizing roar. “StUnNa sHaDeS.mp3” has even more negative space, but the digital pings approximate a steel drum and a dial-up modem searching for connection, instilling the same menace as the most elbow-animating crunk beats.
A handful of song titles, a few appearances of fossilized “YOU!” ad-libs, and other assorted hallmarks frame Let Me Update My Status as an album-length Soulja Boy tribute. But his view of the period is more expansive—so much so that it can accommodate the twilight fugue that rappers like SahBabii explored in the early 2010s (“SiLlY MoAn.mp3,” the sublime “StOp tExTiNg.mp3”), or the type of serrated synths the Neptunes might have handed Fam-Lay in 2005 (“uHhH HuH.mp3”). Still, each of these songs sounds like it could have been haphazardly coded onto a MySpace page. TisaKorean is also a fundamentally different writer than Soulja Boy was in this period; as loose as the latter’s songs could seem, they were generally built around phrases that had been sanded down to their essential elements. Meanwhile, TisaKorean’s verses have a first-thought unpredictability that complements the usually self-produced beats. On “hYpNoTiZ4.mp3,” that unpredictability even survives the instant vocal screwing: As far as I can remember, Pimp C never rhymed “certified” with “circumcised,” even if it feels spiritually correct.
Scattered moments throughout Update recall TisaKorean’s earlier work, which was sometimes so formless it was almost avant-garde. “mOtOrCyClE.mp3” sounds like one long, intoxicating mistake, a series of clipped phrases rapped to a beat that’s largely just distortion. But on the whole, the album lingers on the fringes of pop, nearly every song a potential viral hit that would nevertheless stand out as the oddest thing on any YouTube playlist it burrowed into. They’re not exactly relics and not exactly new—they’re code being mulched and conflated and spit back out forever.


Shuggie Otis: Here Comes Shuggie Otis / Freedom Flight

Shuggie Otis, we hardly knew ye. No, the former child prodigy hasn't spun off this mortal coil just yet, but Shuggie's erstwhile recording career has certainly seen better days-- and unfortunately, those days were 30 years ago. Back in 1974, Shuggie managed to raise critical eyebrows with his ambitious Inspiration Information LP, an elegant, absorbing collage of delta blues, soul, R&B;, and funk laced with the velvety psychedelic twist of his own flawless production. At the time, due to promotional misfirings and a fickle music market, album sales barely registered, and a despairing Shuggie turned reclusive. But finally, following a 2001 reissue on David Byrne's globe-spanning Luaka Bop label, the record gained the widespread acclaim it was previously denied, and rock's standard bearers hailed its genius at last.
Sadly, Shuggie's ain't the Cinderella story it could have been. Grasping at his 15 minutes three decades after they were due, Shuggie embarked on a major-city tour in the fall of '01, culling voracious audiences on both coasts. But this time, the press wasn't so thrilled-- SF Chronicle critic Joel Selvin called Otis' Fillmore performance "haphazard" and "inept"-- and Shuggie once again retreated from the spotlight.
Whether this release from Australian two-for-one reissue mavens Raven Records is a worthwhile listen for fans of Inspiration Information depends on how much of a completist you are. Raven packages Shuggie's solo debut, 1971's Here Comes Shuggie Otis and its '72 follow-up Freedom Flight together on one epic CD, but only Here Comes Shuggie Otis contains any true classics not featured on the Luaka Bop release. That disc added Freedom Flight's four best tracks, including the cosmic funk of the title song and Shuggie's most famous composition, "Strawberry Letter 23", a swirling, swinging midtempo breeze inspired by his girlfriend's scented stationery. "Me and My Woman" and "Someone's Always Singing" elicit Shuggie's gentle bump, but fail to merit revisitation rights. And even though his B.B. King-inflected guitar and deft, overdubbed bass on the instrumental "Purple" reveal his rootsy intuition, the song is far from classic.
The liner notes, which are interesting but never revelatory, can't overstress Shuggie's youth during the original recording of Here Comes, and the depth of the record's content certainly belies his 16 years: He played six instruments, sang, and co-wrote each tune with his famous father, bandleader Johnny Otis, Sr. Kicking off the twofer, "Oxford Gray" is second only to "Freedom Flight" as Shuggie's grandest stroke. Blazing guitar and harpsichord lead into a massive, stirring pizzicato-strings-vs.-slide-guitar duel which trips through a rock 'n' soul jitterbug crowned by a elaborate orchestrated horn section. It's an astounding opening statement from the father-and-son team, and its heaving, soulful psychedelia rivals even Axis: Bold as Love.
But from there, Here Comes becomes less focused, and its quality wavers. "Jennie Lee" is noteworthy for its gorgeous strings and horns, darkened blues guitar, and Shuggie's Alan Toussaint-esque vocals, while "Bootie Cooler" brings standard Sly/Meters funk nodding to Shuggie's bouncy organ and Hammond overdubs. Namedropping his guitar influences (B.B., Elmore, Son House), Shuggie busts into a rolling blues shuffle on "Shuggie's Boogie". Elsewhere, the rolling horn section and syncopated guitar on "Hurricane" provide a gritty Stax/Volt spark, while "The Hawks" closes with a Memphis country funk feel.
Casual consumers will likely pass up this reissue like they did Inspiration 30 years back-- which is probably fine, as the majority of these songs fail to add much of significance to Shuggie's discography. Still, for groove hounds, funk archivists, and collectors, there's more than enough solid material here to justify at least a few spins.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit INXS’s fifth album, a pivotal and underrated moment for one of music’s most formidable, hit-making pop-rock bands.

Listen Like Thieves

At the 1996 BRIT Awards, INXS lead singer Michael Hutchence gave an amiable fist-pump as he announced the winner for Best Video, Oasis’ “Wonderwall.” Moments later, Noel Gallagher, clutching the BRIT and smiling cocainely, sneered, “Has-beens shouldn’t present fuckin’ awards to gonna-bes.” At the time, the slag was simply on-brand petulance, all part of the Gallagher brothers’ calculated and successful anti-charm offensive, yet it hit a nerve. INXS’ most recent album, the grunge-bandwagoning Full Moon, Dirty Hearts, had come out in 1993, marking their longest period of dormancy amid no small amount of personal turmoil; in a year and a half, Hutchence would be dead.
Nearly 22 years later—and 11 since Oasis were gonna be anything but broken up—the insult is still a cheap shot, but it also feels in league with a broader cultural dismissal of a band whose legacy feels more complicated than a mere 15-year run of singles. From 1980 to 1984, INXS were a likeable, unassuming Australian pub band turned New Romantic synth-pop strivers with a handful of good songs and one perfect one. From 1987 to 1997, they minted hits seemingly at will behind a swaggering, came-with-the-frame picture of a louche rock star, filling stadiums before riding diminishing returns to a tragic end. In between, they made one pivotal album that mined the hookiest qualities of the former iteration while laying the groundwork for the latter. Stacked with eminently catchy songs from top to bottom that sound evergreen in ways that evaded so much pop music from the same era, Listen Like Thieves is a classic “verge album”—think Fleetwood Mac, Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, R.E.M.’s Green, or U2’s The Unforgettable Fire—a mid-career highlight where a fully formed, fully confident band finds its footing at the precipice of something much bigger and maybe just beyond their control.
By their fifth album, INXS were known entities, products of and grist for the nascent MTV juggernaut thanks in large part to frontman Michael Hutchence’s basic-cable charisma and moves like Jagger. Shabooh Shoobah, from 1982, introduced the band via the video for “The One Thing,” in which a black-tie banquet erupts into a bacchanalian food fight, replete with shots of Hutchence eye-fucking the camera and a woman defiling a fig. Their following album, 1984’s The Swing, went double platinum in Australia, thanks in no small part to marquee assists from fellow blue-eyed soul purveyor Daryl Hall and, more crucially, Nile Rodgers’ production on “Original Sin.” The album was a conscious effort to further blend rock and funk and at least indirectly channel Talking Heads’ Remain in Light. The Farriss brothers—guitarist Tim, keyboardist and songwriter Andrew, and drummer Jon—along with multi-instrumentalist Kirk Pengilly and incredibly named bassist Garry Gary Beers, had spent years grinding in bars and clubs across Australia, but the producer enlisted for the follow-up to The Swing didn’t hear any of that grit, or Hutchence’s obvious sex appeal, in those records. A couple hit singles aside, the album didn’t do huge numbers in the U.S. or the UK.
“To me, The Swing had nothing to do with what the band was doing live,” famed producer Chris Thomas said in the band’s 2005 memoir. “That album doesn’t sound like a rock’n’roll show at all. The gig I saw at the Hollywood Bowl was a dangerous concert—grown women were throwing themselves at the stage. I hadn’t seen a gig that exciting or a band having that kind of effect on people in years.” Thomas worked on the White Album and Abbey Road and Dark Side of the Moon, then went on to produce four Roxy Music albums and Never Mind the Bollocks, as well as all three Pretenders albums, culminating in 1984’s crossover Learning to Crawl—a dream CV to take on a band navigating the moat between mannered new wave and swing-for-the-fences rock, and he held that spot for the three-album run that definitively reinvented INXS.
What Thomas was implicitly advocating for over the course of three months in Sydney’s Rhinoceros Studio was an album built out of “Don’t Change.” The final track on Shabooh Shoobah and the band’s usual set-closer, it’s the kind of feel-good, brawny U2 anthem that U2 have spent decades trying to write. Still driven by Andrew’s keyboards, “Don’t Change” felt leaner and less fussed over, destined to be covered by, among many, many others, Bruce Springsteen, a man who also spent a lot of time in 1984 and 1985 thinking about what rock songs for the masses should look like.
The song’s DNA is evident in “This Time,” about as uplifting a breakup song as anyone will ever require, from the isolated-riff intro to the slow but cathartic build. “Kiss the Dirt (Falling Down the Mountain)” and the title track follow similar scripts; they don’t necessarily sound like “Don’t Change,” or like one another, but they share a penchant for climactic escalation tricks—a head-fake key change here, an extra-soaring chorus there—that pulled off the even neater trick of not sounding like tricks and not being overly laminated in studio polish. There was an ease to the songs that belied their ambition.
Even the songs that managed to not be huge hits were as catchy as the ones that were. The smoldering “Same Direction” and “Shine Like It Does,” the brassy “One X One,” and ripping closer “Red Red Sun” were stripped of the kind of studio gloss that might have been applied on past records, and have aged better because of it. Pengilly’s saxophone flourishes nearly save the instrument from punk-rock punchline status. While The Swing’s “Original Sin” and “Dancing on the Jetty” broadly gestured at social issues (institutional racism and war and strife, respectively), Listen Like Thieves had no particular flag to wave or message to send beyond the one that would propel them for the rest of their career: Michael Hutchence fucks.
As much as INXS operated and presented as a proper tight-knit and deeply skilled band, with shared songwriting credits and half its members literal kin, they thrived once they figured out how to nudge Hutchence even further front and center without disrupting the balance, and once he fully embraced it. (“I really am a great fucking rock star,” he told Q in 1993.) But before he shacked up in a French villa with Helena Christensen or corrupted Kylie Minogue or took a guy on tour with him for the express purpose of supplying ecstasy, Hutchence had to shed the last of his new wave chrysalis, grow out his mullet, embrace tank tops, and lean into the whole disco-Morrison thing. “What You Need” was that nudge.
The first song on Listen Like Thieves was the last one recorded for the album, a quick cure for what was diagnosed as I-don’t-hear-a-single-itis that wound up changing the band’s lives forever. Thomas had Andrew dust off a demo labeled “Funk Song No. 13,” which contained the slinky two-chord guitar riff to what would very quickly become “What You Need”—an eminently danceable no-brainer that landed in the Top 5 in America, cast Hutchence’s casual lustfulness as a halo around the band, and cemented Hutchence and Andrew Farriss as the band’s principal songwriters.
Of all the members of INXS, Andrew was the one who seemed the least like Hutchence, and the least likely to be the driving force behind a libidinous multi-platinum rock band; his brothers were naturally hammier and looked the part, while he seemed content to be the introvert tucked behind stacks of expensive-looking keyboards. (His floppy safari hat in the “Don’t Change” video should go down in the annals of Why Didn’t Anyone Say No to This?) But the duo’s chemistry was recognized and elevated as the band’s secret weapon.
Thomas returned to produce 1987’s Kick, which, not all that implicitly, was built out of “What You Need,” particularly in regard to blockbuster lead singles with crystalline, ambiently funky guitar riffs and the word “need” in the title. (Rather than leave anything to chance, 1990’s X featured basically a third iteration of this rollout plan with “Suicide Blonde.”) Doubling down on the use of Hutchence’s face as the band’s identity, Kick sold tens of millions of copies and established the visual aesthetic that would define INXS until Hutchence’s death. Kick wears some of the sonic pockmarks of its era in a way that Listen Like Thieves doesn’t, and made INXS both a bigger success and a bigger target. If anyone wanted for any reason to scoff at the spectacle of a tousle-haired rock god whose shirts all appeared cursed with non-functioning buttons lounging in the south of France with supermodel girlfriends, INXS provided. Hutchence’s charm, however, lay in the fact that he seemed in on the gag; excess was baked into the band’s name. And he was just vexingly likeable. If anyone used that spectacle as an excuse to dismiss the workmanlike ease with which they churned out hit after hit, that is understandable, but a shame.
Though they didn’t have the impact of the three they made with Chris Thomas, the band’s final albums with Hutchence yielded songs that outlast the legacies of the albums themselves. “Heaven Sent,” from 1992’s Welcome to Wherever You Are, is as good a pop song as any made in the past 30 years, and yet it somehow feels like an afterthought in their own estimable discography. INXS’ rise to massive global financial concern wasn’t without its collateral damage: At the height of American Idol mania in 2004, the surviving members recruited a new singer via network TV reality show; 2005’s Switch, with JD Fortune, mostly just furthers the argument that Hutchence’s chemistry and charisma can’t be recruited.
Which is why Listen Like Thieves feels like a moment worth preserving—a snapshot of a band finding its voice and its lane in real time and figuring out how to do something that seems nearly beyond comprehension 35 years later. There are no heirs apparent. The 1975 have the big-tent ambition and certainly the look, but are complicated and navel gaze-y in a way INXS never seemed interested in. The Killers have the chart success but a decidedly Mormon interpretation of sex appeal. Coldplay have to work too hard to convince you that they’re any fun. Spoon have the songs and the hooks and the decades of consistency that make them easy to overlook, but not the actual hits. (Oh god, is it Maroon 5?) But the notion of sex, drugs, and dance-oriented, innocuous, hugely popular rock’n’roll as a formula for a decades-long career in some ways died with Hutchence. This almost sounds like a backhanded compliment now but it should be a badge of honor: INXS were a very good band that was very good at their job and that no longer really exists.

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Trickled down from the success of “Old Town Road” and the meme-level pervasiveness of the yeehaw agenda, the ubiquitous producer’s purported country album suffocates in treacly kitsch.

Diplo: Diplo Presents Thomas Wesley Chapter 1: Snake Oil

For every Diplo that you see—slouched on a Zoom DJ set in a shirt that says “Mercury’s in quarantine,” slack-jawed on a red carpet in a bright pink cowboy hat—there are maybe five Diplos you don’t see. There he is, folded into Jack Ü, working with Skrillex to make the best song of Justin Bieber’s career. Catch him in the Mark Ronson collab group Silk City, throwing throbbing beats under a Dua Lipa track. You could be forgiven for not knowing Diplo is part of Major Lazer, or that he toured with Grimes on a train across Canada, or that he produced two songs on Beyoncé’s Lemonade. And if you lost track of who ended up on which remix of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” as the song contorted into genre after genre (K-pop! Kidz Bop!), maybe you forgot that Diplo was the one to make it shiver and surge into electronica.
Diplo is aware of his tendency to be both ubiquitous and forgotten; he named a 2014 album Random White Dude Be Everywhere. His new album, a purported country record trickled down from the success of “Old Town Road” and the meme-level pervasiveness of the yeehaw agenda, has his real name in the title, signifying a shift from sparkly club bangers. Snake Oil is a country album the same way Westworld is a western, or “Cotton Eye Joe” is a saloon ballad. The record is steeped in stock-image cowboy aesthetics. A fiddle trembles through AutoTune. “Uh, uh, do si do,” Blanco Brown grunts, 18 times in two and a half minutes. In Diplo’s world, the Jonas Brothers are as convincing a country group as the Zac Brown Band; they bleat about hometowns, back roads, and “giving into love,” while crawling guitars give into beat drops and blurry synths. But Diplo succeeds in what he sets out to do: He braids classic Diploisms into country frameworks, and sometimes, he doesn’t sound like Diplo at all.
Such is the case on the best song on the album, “On Mine,” a gentle, rasping Noah Cyrus love song. The production borders on theatrical—melodramatic wobbling bass, a chorus of layered vocals, seconds-long cymbal reverb echoing at the end—but this is still Diplo at his most subdued. “I don’t know if I can walk this world alone,” Cyrus pleads. The chorus rises in a swelling mash of instruments; it’s close to sounding genuinely euphoric, a mood Diplo typically reserves for juddering bass-blasted rave tracks. On “Dance With Me,” he coaxes strumming guitars into muted tropical house as Young Thug snakes around the beat and country-pop songwriter Thomas Rhett croons, “Give me your body.” It’s as danceable and easily dissolved as any summertime Top 40 radio hit.
You don’t listen to a Diplo album for the songwriting, and Snake Oil suffocates in treacly kitsch. Song titles betray the generic romance clichés: “Heartless,” “Heartbreak,” “Real Life Stuff.” “I guess what goes up, it must come down,” Ben Burgess drawls over trudging 808s. “Just because you’re out here running doesn’t make you free,” cries the country singer Cam. “Sometimes in life, what you wanna do isn’t necessarily what you’re gonna do,” Orville Peck says on the album’s intro, a 97-second spoken-word mush of countryisms about gunslinger showdowns and desert hideouts. It’s meant to be funny, and it is: This is Thomas Wesley’s playground, and success isn’t measured by whether his country songs are convincing or even by whether they’re good, only by whether the listener has fun. Still, the closing “Old Town Road” remix feels like a reprieve from the rest of the album, not a template for it. You want to stay in this thumping oasis, a place where Billy Ray Cyrus moans about Fenty sports bras and whistles whirl around the beat, buoyed by the simple neon ecstasy of Diplo doing what Diplo does best: soundtracking the party, wherever it leads.


Having added a second drummer and a synth player since its 2018 debut, New Orleans’ self-described “free-jazz party band” vacillates between abandon and unease.

Doubles

In New Orleans, it rains every day in the summer. The mornings are bright and beautiful, the sky a surreal and optimistic blue filled with towering clouds, which by afternoon give way to violent grays and gashes of lightning. When the storm has finished its 20-minute rage, the soft colonial buildings of the French Quarter sparkle with light, and the Mardi Gras beads perennially stuck in the oaks of St. Charles Avenue blink like jewels. It is unbearably beautiful. It is miserably hot. It is an impractical climate to live in. It is precisely what Basher’s new album sounds like.
Doubles is the second LP from the New Orleans “free-jazz party band,” following 2018’s 100% Humidity, but it feels like the kind of identity-staking work you expect from a debut. In the four years since 100% Humidity, the group added a second drummer and a synthesizer player and fundamentally reshaped their sound, juicing up the dark-night jazz into a somewhat slick, free-ranging, and surprisingly expressive music that could be played everywhere from the packed clubs of Frenchman St. to a secret house show in St. Roch to the apron of the Superdome on game day. Despite that winsomeness, Doubles is soaked in disappointment and clouded by tragedy, its undeniable joys always gated by the expectation that they’ll be ripped away without notice.
Such competing dualisms reveal themselves in multiple ways: not just in the freedom of improvisation versus the control of form, or in the celebration of life and the mourning of its compromises, but also in the album’s structure itself. Doubles mostly alternates between small-group improvisations for alto and tenor sax and synthesizer, and tightly structured jazz-funk songs powered by a pair of drummers. At times it can feel like the two sides of the band are in conversation with one another. In the improvised “Artemis,” alto saxophonist Aurora Nealand pinches her tone until it sounds like a crying trumpet, quivering in response to the dry breaths and clicks of tenor saxophonist Byron Asher. The shuffle-strut of “Carnival 2019” is turned around and backed up by the two drummers, patiently building its way to revelry with stabs of horn and flashy tightness in a way that recalls the legendary Lundi Gras sets of local funk heroes Galactic. An overblown version of the song’s melody line comes ripping through the parade sirens and daiquiri rush of synth in the following “Borealis,” a visceral rendering of how quickly the excesses of Carnival season can turn into a total loss of control in the blur of deep gras.
These overflowing, abundant moments are rare on Doubles. The improvisations are mostly restrained and responsive, if a touch tentative. Asher and Nealand’s careful attention to one another’s playing at times can be too deferential; it can feel as if the tracks have been daubed in gray to keep the brightest lights from shining through. In a similar way, the traditionally composed songs are orderly and well drilled; “Claptrap Clapback” is a study in staying on task even as Daniel Meinecke’s synths whistle and whirr.
Still, there are moments when the band’s two sides merge. A couple of minutes into the stately funk of “Primetime a Go-Go,” the two drummers pull apart and expand the song’s boundaries, giving Asher and Nealand enough room to back away from one another and push off down what become wildly separate paths, the two discordant solos unrolling over a cut-and-thrust rhythm. You don’t even notice how high in the rafters they’ve taken you until they guide your feet back onto the ground.
It’s easy to want Basher to go the full Mwandishi, to not only test the limits of their concept but blow right past them; you sense that these songs were built to do just that in a live setting. But as a studio work, Doubles is more interested in maintaining a level of unease that is endemic to New Orleans culture. The humid blues of “Ponchatoula” pulses with mourning and the feeling of joy squandered, with Asher letting out a satin braid of a solo that flashes and dims as the band guides it through the changes. New Orleans musicians have been writing storm-dampened songs like “Refinery Skies” for a hundred years, and maybe longer; like the light that shines through the polluted air of the oil facilities across the Mississippi River, the music’s incredible beauty is the direct product of the malignancy of the environment.
New Orleans loves a good time. But for longtime residents, the thrills can often feel like meager recompense for the exhaustions of climate, crime, and—since Katrina, at least—a horde of transplants eager to be redeemed by the Big Easy’s legendary juju. Doubles pays tribute both to the city’s abundant spirit and to its complicated legacy. Decay creeps into this album’s brightest moments, making these songs feel a little distant, a little difficult to love for the way they seem to keep the party at bay.


First Songs collects Kleenex’s output from 1978 to 1982. Their gleefully anarchic music still feels like liberation, reveling in the limitless freedom that comes with tossing logic aside.

First Songs

Kleenex began with a crash. It transpired one night not long after they’d formed, in Zurich of 1978, while the germinal punk group was onstage. They had but four tunes then—“Beri-Beri,” “Ain’t You,” “Heidi’s Head,” “Nice”—and at early gigs they would play them over and over to small but delighted crowds who did not want the noise to stop. When Kleenex’s original male guitarist didn’t care to continue on as such, the late Marlene Marder stepped up from the audience and swiftly found her place alongside bassist Klaudia Schifferle and drummer Lislot Ha. Marder—a literal post-punk; she delivered mail—was armed with a knowledge of two chords if not an awareness of pitch. “Lislot didn’t know that you can tune a drum kit,” Marder once said. “We played like this for a year, without tuned drum kits or a tuned bass or guitar. The guys were more ambitious so they didn’t want to play with us. For us, it was OK not because we said, ‘We’re the greatest!’ We just did as we could. Not serious in the beginning.”
In all their chaos, those four songs were unusually taut. Kleenex made riotous music like a rubber band; it could tighten, or snap, or shoot in air. When some friends in the small Swiss punk scene released them as the Kleenex EP, word moved fast. The exuberant 45 made its way quickly to Britain, entering the orbit of John Peel as well as the Marxist intellectuals at the then-nascent Rough Trade label, beginning Kleenex’s affiliation with that bohemian London scene. “Ain’t You”—with its wiry riffs and chanted, pogoing hooks, its chic edge and abandon—fit well on Rough Trade’s 1980 Wanna Buy a Bridge? comp, alongside the scratchy Swell Maps and their similarly daring one-time tour mates, the Raincoats.
First Songs collects Kleenex’s output from ’78 to 1982, preceding their first album (at which point they’d been forced by the tissue company to switch their perfect name—capturing the very Pop disposability of consumer culture—to LiLiPUT). The band’s lineup was constantly in flux; these songs also feature saxophonist Angie Barrack and vocalists Regula Sing and Chrigle Freund. The reissue’s title is clever; if these 24 tracks are all indeed songs, then Kleenex was reimagining what a song could be. The shortest one, the 69-second “1978,” for example, is a queasy interstitial propelled by unsparing riffs and amusingly primordial drumming. On “Eisiger Wind” (“Icy Wind”), the clangor and “OOO AHHH”s and “LA LA LA LA”s culminate with a nails-tough 15-second coda that brings to mind Mothers of Invention. But then, in Kleenex’s gleefully anarchic world, “song structures” seemed tedious.
Their methods of composition were peculiar even for punk. One was extreme repetition, in which a song would progress by repeating a few minimal bars over and over, starting slowly and speeding up each time, as if running up a hill and then tumbling down it. The band punctuated their music with things like whistling and saxophones and kazoo sounds. Their guitar chords had a soured edge, and their lopsided call-and-response vocals alternately evoked stoic Patti Smith and a wayward school choir. Most crucial were the befuddlingly shredded human voices—grunted, exasperated, bloodcurdlingly shrieked, pitched so high as to pierce into the reddest red—which sounded more like a Yoko Ono Fluxus experiment than anything resembling pop. But the inquisitive core of Kleenex’s music stokes curiosity in a listener: From what plane of existence does that scream originate? Is that a person? Is that a recorder? What even is a nighttoad?
The lyrics, sung in English and Swiss-German, veer between ominous images or deliberate nonsense. On “Die Matrosen” (“The Sailors”), the song’s jovial whistling is undermined by a narrative of a man in a pub who “had a blackout” and “lost control.” The combination of a grave voice with sugary ones on “Beri-Beri” skewers the lyric “and each day you feel nicer!” “Madness” is one of the most affecting Kleenex songs, with its alternately slammed and melancholy chords: “Hey madness you have touched me,” it goes, “Hey madness what do you want from me?” These emphatic early songs are fervent invocations, evidence that pure conviction could summon magic and newness from the wilderness within.
The signature Kleenex songs fall together in ways that manage to approximate pop. The best one is “Hitch Hike.” “Girl was on the road to drive away/She had no money to pay the train,” goes the gummy, sing-song chorus. “Hitch hike ghost, don’t touch me/...Let me be.” Upbeat as “Hitch Hike” feels, it also touches on the necessary guardedness of being a woman in public, the adventure and risk of the female wanderer (it reminds me of Cindy Sherman’s 1979 Untitled Film Still #48). Defiant beyond its jingly form, it’s cut with the howls of a rape whistle. Not unlike their comrades in the Raincoats, Kleenex’s collective shouts were eruptions of joy as well as gestures of outsider solidarity.
At the heart of Kleenex’s music is a radical sense of resourcefulness. It’s part of what helps them transcend their moment; indeed, many of the works of artier O.G. punk bands feel more potent today than those of their instigating major-label peers. Accordingly, the decimating screams of “Ü”—“EEEEEEEEEEEE”—are the point of punk (it’s worth noting that Greil Marcus put “Ü” on his influential Lipstick Traces compilation). Kleenex collaborated with Rough Trade’s early go-to production duo of Geoff Travis and Red Krayola’s Mayo Thompson on the “Ü”/“You” single, perhaps owing to its audacious and wildly electric ensemble feel. “You” explodes with democratic purpose: “This is your life/This is your day/It’s all for you.” With that, the influence of Kleenex on a punk scene like Olympia’s from the 1980s onward is palpable; Kurt Cobain included “anything by Kleenex” on his list of favorite albums, but Bikini Kill’s “Liar” or Girlpool’s “Jane” are primary sources for the legacy of Kleenex screams today.
“Split” is the perfect storm of Kleenex’s bottle-rocket inventiveness. The lyrics go, “Hotch-potch, hugger-mugger, bow-wow, hara-kiri, hoo-poo, huzza, hicc-up, hum-drum, hexa-pod, hell-cat, helter-skelter, hop-scotch.” This dizzied, scissor-cut, full-throttle collage is undercut with spirited declarations that, “Yesterday was a party! Yesterday the drinks were strong!” and a crude siren of “woo! woo! woo! woo!”s. There is nothing cerebral; there is only pure jubilance, only action. “Split” doesn’t sound “sung” as much as it sounds like it’s bolting out of someone’s chest. Play “Split” alongside anything off Never Mind the Bollocks and see which sounds more lawless; Kleenex make Sex Pistols sound like alt-rock.
“We didn't have songs like ‘Fuck the System’ like other bands had,” Marder once said. “We didn’t throw stones and smash windows. We stood there and played songs.” But an autonomous message persisted. For several months in 1980, violent youth riots turned Zurich into a “war zone,” sparked by “a paucity of funding and space for the alternative arts scene.” Kleenex responded viscerally to this unwelcoming world by creating their own.
In 2017, the rollercoaster ride of punk remains replete with adrenaline and adventure and thrills, with semblances of danger and truth. But rollercoasters have tracks and belts and guards; they are always the same. Kleenex built a rollercoaster with loose bolts, not at all predictable, bravely betraying structure, careening. At its best, punk offers up a self-immolating blueprint that says, year after year, “the blueprint is yet to be written.” Kleenex’s raw rapture still lights up this idea. First Songs is a testament to the freedom in limitation, or rather, the limitless nature of freedom when logic is tossed aside.


Critic and theorist Fred Moten joins bassist Brandon López and drummer Gerald Cleaver for a conceptually rich, politically weighty album that asks timeless questions without overexplaining.

Fred Moten / Brandon López / Gerald Cleaver: Moten/López/Cleaver

Moten/López/Cleaver

In an interview included with his 1988 album Live in Vienna, Cecil Taylor struggled to define the boundaries of his music. The innovative, classically trained pianist had just released Chinampas, a full-length album of spoken-word poetry featuring yelps, screeches, chants, and other percussive sounds, but largely devoid of piano. Were these vocal pieces to be viewed as part of the same trajectory of free jazz that he helped define with his piano compositions? Or were they something else entirely, a new language even further uncoupled from the structural limitations of jazz? “I’ve always tried to be a poet more than anything else,” Taylor told the writer and photographer Spencer Richards. “...[The] music is primary, but everything is music once you care to begin to apply certain principles of organization to it.”
Fred Moten uses these lines to make the claim that poetry can function as a kind of musical system, one that, for Taylor and others, stands at the forefront of the Black avant-garde tradition. Moten, a poet, critic, theorist, and recent MacArthur Fellow, has spent roughly the last 20 years writing about music and poetry with conceptual rigor. His book In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition and his three-part consent not to be a single being book series synthesize the work of Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others into a dizzying account of the fundamental irreducibility of Black expression to inscription technologies like magnetic tape, digital recordings, or written language. Moten’s poetry is similarly ambitious, deploying dense, reference-rich language with an economy and restraint that still feels personal. In 2019, the writer joined upright bassist Brandon López and drummer Gerald Cleaver for a one-off performance at the long-running Vision Festival in New York, and the three reconvened in 2020—in the midst of a global pandemic, and in the weeks following the George Floyd protests—to record their debut as a group. “For me, it was like a fanboy experience because I love their music and listen to it so much,” Moten said at a recent Guggenheim Museum panel. Like Cecil Taylor years before, the trio’s self-titled album pushes back against the formal limitations of jazz convention, expanding the scope of López and Cleaver’s improvisations with the totalizing perspective of Moten’s poetry.
The eight-minute opener, “the abolition of art, the abolition of freedom, the abolition of you and me,” plainly states the stakes of artmaking while recognizing that music alone can’t resolve the troubles it addresses. “Art don’t work for abolition/Art works for bosses like you and me,” Moten says. The statement becomes a deft point of entry, contesting his own self-awareness to prove how much still can be done. The track spirals over lurching pizzicato from López’s bass and sparse percussion from Cleaver, making rapid references to the many people and places that have shaped Moten’s thinking. “Let’s work against royalty, like a Prince, formerly known as the artist/Let’s work against how art don’t work for abolition,” he says. A passionate defense of art’s emancipatory potential, the piece sets the tone for a heavy, conceptually rich collection that asks timeless questions without overexplaining.
While Moten’s poetry feels like the conceptual engine driving the album, it always functions in tandem with López and Cleaver’s improvisations. Pieces like the two-part “b jenkins” start from sparse instrumentals, as López paces across the fingerboard with increasing intensity. Named for Moten’s late mother, the tracks make oblique reference to the Great Migration and the hardships that ensued for generations of Black Americans alienated from any sense of place that they might call home. “Up and down the regular highway in every two-tone station/Passing through the cure, for preservation to unfold it all away,” Moten states. The poet broadly gestures at the kind of Black Internationalism taken up by writers like Cedric Robinson and C.L.R. James, even as he spends most of the tracks situating these ideas within the personal lives of those affected by the cold-blooded politics of space. These weighty concepts fall into the background, overtaken by quotidian images of lives lived in the shadow of systemic oppression. “The phonograph is also a photograph of movement and what it bears/You found dances waiting for dancers,” he says. With off-kilter drumming and relentless bass, the piece takes instrumental cues from free-jazz classics like Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr.’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, reinforcing the trio’s political aspirations as they venture in their own direction.
It’s tempting to view Moten’s theoretical writing as a skeleton key that unlocks the meaning of his poetry, and while the two bodies of work overlap, there are limits to this approach. Midway through “the faerie ornithologie,” Moten flips a line about color field painting into a succinct condemnation of the “blood at the root” of abstract expressionism and modernism generally. While these words wouldn’t sound out of place in his first book, the line works in service of a broader meditation on the violence and brutality of the cultural economy, which mirrors the violence imposed by the state on Black people. “You don’t get to not see motherfucker, but what happens when you act like you do?/Somebody black and poor can’t breathe,” he states with a burning rage. Pointed and direct, the line lands with newfound intensity, using the language of protest to capture a bald-faced anger that’s largely absent from his other work.
While it’s possible to interpret these lyrics as a direct response to the George Floyd uprising and ongoing pandemic, Moten/López/Cleaver ultimately asks how these events fit within a broader history of Black struggle. Grounded in the present, each track looks backward, mining the wreckage of history for parallels in music, poetry, and visual art. Exhausted of reference, the album closes with a look at the “face” at the heart of the word “surface,” riffing on concerns about agency and personhood that have followed Moten since his first book. Rather than retread familiar theoretical territory, the writer leans into the track’s emotional weight as the music flattens out, punctuated by stretches of breathy silence. It’s a rare moment of recovery on an otherwise breathlessly complex album, one that finally brings its passion and its pain fully into focus.


Soulja Boy just isn’t able to capitalize on his recent goodwill with some worthwhile new music.

Best to Ever Do It

Long before the maligned “mumble rap” claimed the title as the most contentious style of the day, there was ringtone rap, and no artist embodied its market-savvy spirit quite like Soulja Boy. As a 17-year-old, the Batesville, Mississippi rapper parlayed a viral dance into radio ubiquity with the most despised hit of 2007, “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” a catchy pairing of Atlanta snap and chintzy synthesized steel drums. Fleeting as its pleasures were, the song lingered on the radio for an eternity, well after the novelty of its youthful accompanying dance wore off. It was as if some bitter Clear Channel executive had decided to shame the public for taking to the track in the first place by keeping it in rotation as long as possible.
“Loathe” isn’t a strong enough word for how the masses felt about Soulja Boy when “Crank That” was at its most inescapable. But the public’s hatred didn’t deter Soulja much; if anything, he fed on it. “I don’t give a fuck, middle finger to the sky,” he responded on his 2008 track “I Know You Hate Me.” He went on to land several much-improved hits, “Kiss Me Through the Phone” and “Pretty Boy Swag” among them, before the laws of gravity took hold and the industry lost interest in him.
Even his detractors had to marvel at his resilience. Soulja Boy used his independence as an opportunity to reinvent himself. He befriended Lil B and adopted his process, firing off as much music as possible with no regard for quality control, in the process releasing a few undeniable mixtapes. For a few years in the early-’10s “Soulja Boy is actually good” became a fashionable contrarian take. When Beyoncé paid tribute to Soulja Boy’s most fondly remembered single “Turn My Swag On” on Lemonade, it felt like the culmination of a long redemption story. He was finally appreciated.
If only he were able to capitalize on that recent goodwill with some worthwhile new music. His new workmanlike mixtape, Best to Ever Do It, says everything you need to know about why, unless you run in some very esoteric corners of online rap fandom, you probably haven’t heard anybody beat the drum for new Soulja Boy project in quite a while. It’s also a reminder that Soulja Boy never had an original bone in his body. He’s still going about his swagger jacking ways, except now instead of cribbing from OJ Da Juiceman or Doughboyz Cashout he’s looking to fresh blood like Lil Pump, whose boyish cadence he lifts on “Rollie Wrist” and “I Got the Yop on Me,” or Playboi Carti, whose spacey adlibs inform “Pull Up in a Coupe.” He also mimics 21 Savage’s dead-eyed croon on “Mega Star” and does a patronizingly awful impression of Swae Lee’s falsetto on “Cotton Candy.” Even the tape’s one feature, from Lil Uzi Vert soundalike 24Hours, is on-brand by being off-brand.
Soulja’s Hamburglar routine would be easier to excuse if he backed up his borrowed styles with some vivid writing, or at least flashes of his old, mischievous spark. There isn’t one verse on the entire tape where he says something revealing or unexpected, or even so much as a single colorful word choice. He prattles on about pots, pans, Phantoms, and Porsches without a lick of conviction, regurgitating tropes instead of spinning them. There was a time when that might have been good enough. Earlier in his career, it was possible to claim a real market share with passable facsimiles of popular sounds, especially if you hustled as enthusiastically as he did. But in the era of abundant free streaming, there’s less demand for knockoffs than ever, and Soulja Boy’s business model has grown outdated.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Spacehog’s 1995 debut, an architecturally sound, occasionally great, always amusing collection of transatlantic power pop.

Resident Alien

Spacehog was founded in New York City in 1994 when guitarist Antony Langdon met drummer Jonny Cragg in an East Village café where Cragg had a job killing rats with a shovel. This is the story that Cragg seems to have told every reporter he’s ever spoken to, so it may as well be true. They recruited Langdon’s younger brother Royston, a singer and bassist with a notebook full of songs left over from a previous musical endeavor, and then Cragg’s friend Richard Steel on lead guitar. All four band members had come to the States from Leeds, England. They named their first album Resident Alien in reference to their visa statuses.
They could’ve joined up back home and saved themselves a trip, but there was probably some calculation behind the move. In the UK, Britpop had taken hold and you couldn’t swing a Super Furry Animal without hitting a band turning its retro influences into brightly catchy alternative rock. But in New York, hip-hop reigned and the local A&R departments had to fly all the way to Seattle to find guitar groups, which meant Spacehog had Lower East Side clubs more or less to themselves while they played nightly auditions in the industry’s backyard.
British bands were a tough sell in the U.S. but Spacehog made a commercially plausible pitch that distinguished them, somewhat, from their countrymen: They were the happy middle between Britpop and American grunge, with the hooks and humor of the former tempered by the familiar Big Muff’d power chords of the latter. (Plus, if you liked the Gallagher brothers, just wait till you got a load of the Langdons, who were equally quarrelsome but slightly more handsome.)
Spacehog’s own retro influences primarily included British glam-rock artists of the ’70s—Bowie, Queen, T. Rex, Slade—to whom they paid tribute through high-effort, decorum-free stagecraft. In concert, the Langdons dressed like Spiders From Mars and prowled around like a pair of Freddie Mercurys; Steel played solos with a foot up on his monitor and a cigarette stuck in the headstock of his Flying V; and Cragg twirled drumsticks and lit his gong on fire. All this would’ve looked pretty stupid if their music couldn’t back it up, but it actually sort of could—one song in particular!
If you remember Spacehog, it’s almost certainly for their first single “In the Meantime,” an alt-rock anomaly so packed with wonders that it seems to give you a new reason to like it every time you listen. There’s the dial-tone intro (sampled from a track by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra); Royston’s yodeling falsetto and venturesome bassline (how he played it while singing is a mystery that has vexed other singing bassists for 26 years); the double-bend guitar riff; the dramatically dopey lyrics of the verse (“And in the end we shall achieve in time the thing they called divine”); the fuzz-bomb chorus sung from the perspective of friendly extraterrestrials (“All in all we’re just like you/We love the all of you”); and the bridge that flies by like an F-14. It’s not seamless, but that’s by design; the song’s three main sections are all in different keys, which creates the feeling, harmonically speaking, of climbing an Escher staircase where the rules of gravity change at every landing.
“‘In the Meantime’ was the first song I ever played in Spacehog,” Cragg has said. “It had this brilliant rubbery McCartney-esque bassline, played by this little kid with a huge voice… It was the one that got me hooked and made me realize what a special talent Royston Langdon is.” The band recorded a demo in a Manhattan jingle studio, inviting Antony’s friend Sean Lennon to tag along. (Afterward, “he invited us back to the Dakota building to jam,” Cragg remembers. “Sean gave Roy one of his dad’s Rickenbacker 4001 basses that night.” He played it on the album version of the track.)
In 1994, record labels were so desperate to land the next Nirvana that one of them had even signed Candlebox. So after Spacehog's demo made the rounds—quiet verses and loud chorus? Check and check—a live showcase was arranged for Sire founder Seymour Stein, who offered them a deal immediately. Resident Alien was released in October 1995 and sold 500,000 copies in its first eight months, largely thanks to its lead single, which played on MTV and topped Billboard’s mainstream rock chart for four weeks. Spacehog opened for Tripping Daisy and Everclear and then hit the road with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. When they got home, they packed New York’s medium-size venues by themselves.
They weren’t exactly rock stars, but in a scene that wouldn’t beget the Strokes for a few more years, the Langdons became local celebrities. Soon, they were recurring characters in international tabloids that were cool on the music but captivated by the brothers’ romantic adventures. Here’s the short version: Antony befriended fledgling heartthrob Joaquin Phoenix, who introduced the Langdons to his then-girlfriend actress Liv Tyler, who broke up with Phoenix and began dating Royston—they eventually married and divorced—and then introduced her friend Kate Moss to Antony, who unsuccessfully proposed marriage to the model after just three months. (Phoenix and the Langdons stayed friends; he cast Antony as his personal assistant in the 2010 mockumentary I’m Still Here.) There weren’t any blogs or camera phones around to document it, so we’ll never know for sure, but it’s possible that everything that happened to all the bands in Lizzy Goodman’s New York aughts-rock oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom happened to Spacehog first between 1995 and 2001.
One thing that didn’t happen, though, was another hit. Follow-up singles from Resident Alien failed to connect, and Spacehog’s artier second record, 1998’s The Chinese Album, generated nice reviews but not much business; Sire gave it a small push and then dropped the band. Comeback attempts in 2001 (The Hogyssey) and 2013 (As It Is on Earth) stalled, and they split up for good in 2014, leaving behind one song for future generations of karaoke singers but perhaps failing to, in the end, achieve the thing they called divine.
Still, “In the Meantime” seems to be remembered more fondly than other one-off hits from its decade. The song’s bassline was recently voted the fourteenth best of the whole 1990s by readers of UltimateGuitar.com (just four spots behind the Seinfeld theme). This summer, Ezra Koenig revealed a soft spot for the track on an episode of his Apple Music show Time Crisis, imagining a Yesterday-style scenario in which he wakes up in an alternate timeline where nobody else remembers Spacehog, allowing him to steal “Meantime” for the next Vampire Weekend album. (“I could make this work in 2021”, he said.) Were Spacehog not merely a one-hit wonder but in fact, as has been posited, the greatest one-hit wonder?
Revisiting Resident Alien now, it’s easy to hear the ingredients for a longer career than they had. Many alt-rock debuts had one catchy single and a dozen lesser songs bearing little resemblance—that was a good enough blueprint for some other Brits—but Resident Alien over-delivers. Considering the pressure a track like “In the Meantime” would put on any band’s first record (especially when sequenced as the album’s opener), Spacehog’s is an architecturally sound, occasionally great, always amusing collection of transatlantic power pop.
Recording the band in a Woodstock, New York studio, producer Bryce Goggins (Pavement, Apples in Stereo) mines the tension between their native influences and the American rock of the time and winds up with something that never sounds fully like either. The guitars—thick and wooly but with top-end bite, deployed in wide dynamic range and played into warm amps through long chains of fuzz and phaser pedals—clobber those on most early Britpop records. But there are also pianos, glockenspiels, and bongos, among other textures not found on many grunge albums, not even when Stone Temple Pilots mounted their own glam revival a year later.
It might be harder than you’d think to pick a second-favorite song on Resident Alien, because Spacehog had a way with a tune. Take “Cruel to Be Kind” (no relation to the Nick Lowe song), a rewrite of “Jessie’s Girl” so likable that Rick Springfield may as well just give them the publishing. Or “Space Is the Place” (no relation to the Sun Ra song), a Buzzcocks-style pop-punk workout that gets stuck in your head in a lot less time than it would take to parse its sexual politics (“Just because you kissed your brother/It doesn’t mean to say you’re gay/’Cause even when you’re fucking him it doesn’t mean you don't love me”).
If either of those descriptions makes this album sound derivative, well, it is, but Spacehog were not worried about camouflaging their inspirations. You can hear the Langdons doing the “hoo hoo”s from “Sympathy for the Devil” in “Never Coming Down - Pt 1” and Royston bellowing the hook from Tin Machine’s “Crack City” through the outro of “Spacehog”—and is the chorus of “Starside” quoting the melody from “Starman” or the theme from Star Trek or both? A lifetime’s worth of listening to their idols hadn’t yet coalesced into a unique identity, but it’s fun to hear the band figuring it out.
The album’s most shameless lift is conceptual. Lyrically, Resident Alien is an unlicensed reboot of Bowie’s Major Tom franchise starring the Langdons as astronauts floating around heaven feeling low. Narrators on no fewer than five tracks spend the verses bemoaning their earthly miseries before blasting off to outer space for the choruses (“See you later, now I’m gone/So long I’ll see you when I’m starside,” “Space is the place where I will go when I am all alone and when nobody calls me on the phone,” etc). As a songwriting device, it works better some times than others, but taken as a metaphor for the band’s own feelings of dislocation—they’re aliens, they’re resident aliens, they’re Englishmen in New York—it has some thematic resonance.
Much was made in early reviews over Royston’s vocal similarity to Bowie, but his impersonation on Resident Alien is so over the top that it kind of becomes its own thing, a baritone vibrato with enough wobble to send a less confident Adam’s apple flying across the room. Royston could also jump octaves like Bono and grind vowels like Axl Rose, stirring up drama even in sleepy side-two ballads “Ship Wrecked” (“So if you raise a glass to love you passed/Raise a glass to me”) and “Zeroes,” about a woman who gives him the brush-off when he asks for her phone number. During one of Spacehog’s hiatuses, Royston failed an audition to replace Scott Weiland as the singer of Velvet Revolver—their loss.
In recent interviews, members of Spacehog have reflected on what they might have done differently to prolong the band’s lifespan. (“I think the prevalent feeling amongst the group is that we fell short of our potential,” Cragg lamented in 2017.) Antony has said he wishes they’d built momentum by releasing a couple of other singles before “In the Meantime,” which wouldn’t have hurt. Were they also hindered by an awkward name? It could’ve been worse: “I believe Grass was the original idea,” Cragg has said, “but it was shite” (and might’ve invited unfair comparisons when they shared a bill with Supergrass). “We settled on Spacehog in the end. I think it was a bit less shite.” Maybe they miscalculated the demand for a Ziggy Stardust update at a time when American glam rock had only just been vanquished, and when David Bowie himself was making some of the least-loved music of his career. “We were inauthentic,” Cragg has said. “We got thrown in with all that mid-’90s alternative rock… but we really didn’t have all that much in common with a lot of the other bands out there.”
Others blame Spacehog’s followup to Resident Alien, The Chinese Album, a concept record with a concept that nobody could ever quite figure out. It was supposedly intended to be the soundtrack to a movie that was never made—R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe was said to have toyed with directing it—about a band that moved to Hong Kong after being dropped by its American record label, but none of that is clear in the music. The songs themselves were actually pretty good, though. Try “Mungo City,” “Carry On,” and “Almond Kisses,” featuring Stipe.
Then again, in the second half of the ’90s, right around when Spacehog might’ve had their theoretical second hit, the six major record labels became five; the radio industry was deregulated and playlists tightened; MTV abandoned music videos; and at-home broadband gave rise to file-sharing—not exactly conditions under which a band of arch, glam-rocking aliens were designed to thrive. So maybe Spacehog peaked too early. Or maybe they wrote a great song and came 3,000 miles to play it for us just in time.

Buy: Rough Trade
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