The Sacramento rapper is more relaxed and nonchalant on his latest project, a mood that suits his knack for finding humanity in the darkest of situations.

Starshooter

ShooterGang Kony doesn’t make street rap, per se. Topics and moods on his albums include the memories of calling friends while being incarcerated and a seen-it-all attitude reminiscent of the Jacka. It isn’t enough for Kony to rap about what went on in the streets, he talks about the effects that it had on his family. Kony and a handful of other Bay Area rappers use biting humor that make you wince with every punchline and straightforward crime tales with a world-weary message.
On 2020’s Red Paint Reverend, Kony was trying earnestly to make this kind of affecting music. “A Sinner’s Story” off of that record was a yarn that Caine of Menace II Society would have told, a story about street killings and snitching, a cautionary tale as much as a song the block would play. On his latest album, Starshooter, Kony is less concerned with acclaim. It’s better this way; Kony is more relaxed and nonchalant this time. He still has the gravelly voice that he shares with fellow Bay Area rapper Mozzy, but Kony floats with the mindset of a veteran that has already proved his worth. On “Up2Date”—a duet with San Francisco’s Lil Bean—Kony makes flagrant disses like, “I’ll send your little brother home as a gesture.” Bean’s hook is great, a classic Bay sound that sounds like the vocals are being blocked by some light wind.
Still, despite his more subdued attitude, Kony remains one of the more deadly writers on the West Coast. It’s incalculable how much better would the Sacramento Kings be if they played his songs before tip-off. “We got all the glocks, it take one to leave you headless” is one of those lines on this album that shows Kony’s ability to make a threat sound like a polite proposition. The production, which utilizes the typical brooding and creepy Bay Area beats, is a great juxtaposition to Kony’s confident and regal flow.
Kony is at his best when he makes you look at humanity in the darkest situations. “Never knew him but they calling you your dad’s son,” on “Glizzy Over Rugers,” is a line that not only talks about life without a father figure but the feeling of being a descendant of a lineage. Everyone expects you to represent as he did. If Kony wasn’t a soldier who was first sentenced to probation before he was in High School, the pressure of making it out the streets would have overcome him. He’s been through the wringer and it shows in his music, even when he’s having fun. To him, joy is being able to tell you street tales for entertainment. Now the pain that has subsided, he is flexing.

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Jay Dee continues to update soul music by paying homage to the selfsame sounds he's modernizing.

Donuts

J Dilla's eagerly awaited Donuts, the follow-up to 2001's Welcome 2 Detroit (released as Jay Dee), is, like its predecessor, a stark departure from the cozy-socks-and-Xbox feel of his former group, Slum Village. In fact, Dilla, if anything, is imposing a meta-rap bent on neo-soul, assaulting the senses in ways unseemly for a guy who used to work with Q-Tip. The drums, though remarkably fluid, are lighter, domineered by dense, abrasive samples that are sequenced with a sense of swing. Percussive end pieces are shorn cheese-grater sharp, then appended to sickly spliced moans. The end result is akin to Norman Smith and DJ Shadow sitting in on a RZA-produced session-- spry, voiceless prog-hop by any other name.
Opener "Workinonit" comes on like a Rubin-produced take on Schoolhouse Rock. Clang-y guitars give way to doubled-up groans and what sounds like a back-masked Zulu chant. The sample, supplied by '60s soulsters Them, is diced with manic precision, and around the 2:00 mark, the melody builds to a climax, fading, with echo-y vocal bits, into bodiless abyss. Equally engaging is "Anti-American Graffiti", which combines lighters-up, love-not-war humility with a track both wistful and world-weary: A crazed voice spouts end-of-the-world admonishments like some disenfranchised apparition, colliding with somber guitars.
"Don't Cry" finds Dilla taking sprightly, blu-lite soul crooning and flipping it counter-cockeyed: "If Blue Magic or Whoever could see me now!" First he plays the original, then throws in the "Now, you play it and I'll show you how my voice would have made it unbelievable!" bit, before gently lifting its face off. It's chest thumping, to be sure, like the Copa shot in Goodfellas or Bigger and Deffer. And it's courteous. Similarly cordial is "Time: The Donut of the Heart", where he turns the Jackson 5's "All I Do Is Think of You" into a lucid dream-- the song's intro is now with the chorus it always coveted. Says ?uestlove: "[J Dilla] time compresses Michael and Jermaine's ad-libs with the uneasy ease of a tightrope-walker, with oil shoes on, crossing one 90-story building to another, after eight shots of [Patrone]." I'm sayin'.
Not that Donuts deals with only obvious sample sources-- "The Twister (Huh, What)" is the sound of flu-sick flutes chiming in time to a busted weathervane; "Waves", a hiccuping Hare Krishna class. It's Dilla's show-and-tell method, however, that's most effective, because it illustrates how he's, more or less, upgrading soul music-- we get to see how he unpacked its bag, what spots he told it it missed. This approach also allows Dilla to pay homage to the selfsame sounds he's modernized; the drums are light, to reflect the original sound from which he's borrowing. In that sense, Donuts is pure postmodern art-- which was hip-hop's aim in the first place.


This Record Store Day round-up of collaborations conducted over the past year features a cast that includes Ke$ha, Chris Martin, Nick Cave, Yoko Ono, Bon Iver, Neon Indian, and Lightning Bolt, among others. Amazingly, it hangs together well as a front-to-back album.

The Flaming Lips: The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends

The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends

Bono may be the archetype for the do-gooder rock star who wants to heal the world, but if any musician is going to broker peace in the Middle East, convince North Korea to deep-six its nukes, and get the original line-up of Guns N' Roses back together, it's Wayne Coyne. With the possible exception of Arcade Fire, everyone loves Wayne-- from the executives who've let the Flaming Lips follow their madcap muse on Warner Brothers' dime for 20 years now, to the Oklahoma legislators who named "Do You Realize??" the official state rock song, to Kevin Durant and the tall one from LMFAO.
On paper, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends-- a Record Store Day round-up of various collaborations conducted over the past year-- doesn't appear to be the next official chapter in the band's ever-evolving history so much as a tribute to Coyne's skills of diplomacy, like his hyperactive Twitter feed brought to life. The internet may have splintered the pop monoculture into myriad musical streams, but Heady Fwends provides as inclusive a congregation of the entire, circa-2012 under-to-overground spectrum as you can muster in a single album, with a guest list that spans top-40 stars (Ke$ha, Chris Martin) and noise-rock extremists (Lightning Bolt), anarchic avant guardians (Nick Cave, Yoko Ono) and chilled-out indie new-schoolers (Bon Iver, Neon Indian), electronic experimentalists (Prefuse 73) and hip-hop heroes-cum-children's-television hosts (Biz Markie). Really, all you need to complete the picture is a Pauly D remix.
When the Lips started plotting these collaborations last year, they seemed like the latest in a growing line of guinea-pig projects that have kept the band busy since 2009's Embryonic, click-bait novelties to be filed alongside the six-hour songs and gummy-skull-encased USB sticks. And while the first of these pairings to surface-- EPs with Neon Indian, Lightning Bolt, Prefuse 73, and Yoko Ono, each represented here with a single track-- yielded interesting moments of aesthetic intersection, their free-form nature didn't exactly demand repeat listens. The songs on Heady Fwends are likewise rife with indicators of their hastily cobbled-together origins: flubbed vocal cues, songs obviously constructed via email file swaps (Ono's "Do It!"), goofy lyrics that sound like they were written seconds before recording ("You always want/ To shave my balls/ That ain't my trip"). But here's the craziest thing about the whole project: This piecemeal patchwork of tracks hangs together amazingly well as a front-to-back album-- to the point where, if the band had released this as the official follow-up to Embryonic, without the public stunt-casting campaign and Record Store Day tie-in, no Flaming Lips fan would feel short-changed.
If anything, Heady Fwends is arguably an even more wiggy experience than Embryonic, an album that marked the Lips' return to brain-bending, fuzz-covered psychedelia, but was still very much beholden to the record-collector canon of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Can. Heady Fwends immediately adopts a more sacrilegious tack. Not only do the Lips lead with their most unlikely and unapologetically obnoxious collaborator, Ke$ha, they let her run roughshod on a classic Stooges song: "2012" presents a mutant, robot-rock rewrite of "1969" that cranks up the original's Bo Diddley beat into an industrial-strength stomp and sees Ke$ha appropriating Iggy's "oh my and boo hoo" sneer as her own. But as chaotic and scatterbrained as the track is, it effectively sets the all-bets-are-off tenor of the record, and actually serves to introduce the predominant themes of science fiction and global apocalypse that run through many of the tracks here. And therein lies the key to approaching Heady Fwends: What at first seems rather silly actually proves to be quite purposeful.
The subsequent synth-smeared ballad "Ashes in the Air" further reinforces this logic, with Coyne offering an almost comically grave account of being chased by "robot dogs" through some post-war wasteland, while Justin Vernon echoes each line with his best Rick Moranis-doing-Michael McDonald. But then the song blossoms into a disarmingly elegiac chorus that makes the scorched-earth scene suddenly feel very real and despairing. Taken back-to-back, "2012" and "Ashes in the Air" provide a handy microcosm of the emotional extremes between which the Flaming Lips vacillate on Heady Fwends. Fortunately, the album's expert sequencing makes the shifts between the two poles feel natural, and puts tracks that wouldn't necessarily stand on their own to effective transitional use. The Prefuse 73 collab "Supermoon Made Me Want to Pee" doesn't amount to much more than three minutes of manic, percussive propulsion, but, coming between the epic, Edward Sharpe-assisted folk reverie "Helping the Retarded to Know God" and the sun-kissed Tame Impala tryst "Children of the Moon" (the purest pop song in the batch), it serves an adrenalizing role akin to the one "On the Run" plays on the Lips' favorite Pink Floyd album.
And you can thank Nick Cave for casting some of the Lips' previously released collaborations in a more favorable light: in the aftermath of the delightfully gonzo, Grinderman-in-space splatter of "You, Man? Human???", the Lightning Bolt-bolstered epic "I'm Working at NASA on Acid" assumes the mantle of Fwends' centerpiece track, with ominous acoustic-driven passages bookending an ecstatic, blast-off guitar jam that hearkens back to the Lips' In a Priest Driven Ambulance days. (The squelching, slow-motion Neon Indian entry "Is David Bowie Dying?" also feels much more dramatic in the context of Heady Fwends' more somber second act, rather than as the lead-off track to an EP.) But where most of the Heady Fwends collaborations up to this point have yielded outcomes where you can easily parse out what each party's bringing to the table, the late-game Erykah Badu appearance counts as the real revelation here. On their droning, distended 10-minute cover of the Ewan MacColl/Roberta Flack standard "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face", the two entities blur into something nigh unrecognizable: The Lips' bombast is tempered into soothing gusts of distant distortion, while Badu's commanding presence is refashioned into that of a ghost communicating through a shortwave radio frequency.
This stunner is unfortunately answered by Fwends' one out-and-out dud, "Thunder Drops", a piece of spaced-out Bowie karaoke (courtesy of Polyphonic Spree/Lips sideman Daniel Huffman, aka New Fumes) that never achieves the lift-off its grandiose intro suggests. But Heady Fwends' comes to a peaceful conclusion with "I Don't Want You to Die", a mournful piano ballad boasting a liberal quote of John Lennon's "Imagine" and a tasteful, middle-eight assist from Chris Martin. With Coyne reverting back to the creaky, Neil Youngian croon he hasn't really adopted since the 90s, the song presents a fearful rumination of death that feels like the more vulnerable flipside to the life-affirming gospel of "Do You Realize??" But it's also a welcome reminder that, stripped of all their spectacle and high-concept strategies, the Flaming Lips can still win you over the same way they did 20 years ago, with a sweet, sad melody and simple, affecting sentiment. "I love the Flaming Lips," Martin blurts out in the recording's dying seconds-- and, really, that's the only thing on this surprisingly substantial album that feels obvious.


Curated by Ben Gibbard and featuring Sharon Van Etten, David Byrne, Japanese Breakfast and more, this tribute album fares best when the artists match Yoko Ono’s fearless spirit.

Various Artists: Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono

Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono

Whenever Beatlemania goes into brief remission, the world recalls that Yoko Ono helped invent punk, post-punk, and new wave. From Kate Pierson of the B-52’s to Kim Gordon to Kathleen Hanna to ANOHNI to RZA—the list of artists who cite her as a spiritual and stylistic godmother is staggering, and her influence spans from the avant-garde to the Billboard Hot Dance 100, where she racked up six consecutive No. 1s at the ripe age of 78. But all this history is instantly submerged the minute the Beatles reenter the cultural conversation, which will happen as long as entertainment companies have Q4s. Then, it’s 1971 all over again, and she is once more reduced to a lightning rod. Sometimes, it feels the world is not big enough to contain both Yoko Ono’s public persona and the music she made.
For that reason, there’s never a bad time to put out a compilation celebrating Ono’s output. But Ocean Child, a new tribute album assembled by Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, comes at a particularly charged moment: It was just over three months ago that Peter Jackson’s 8-hour documentary Get Back debuted on Disney Plus, reigniting the “Yoko Ono, Destroyer of Beatles” narrative that swarms without fail to the surface of any reexamination of the band’s final days. The setting is ideal for a corrective, something to put her music back in people’s ears.
The trouble is, listening to this comp is a spotty way to get to know her. In a sweet note accompanying Ocean Child, Gibbard expresses the hope that the album will guide new listeners to Ono’s work, and the list of contributors suggests he understands her music's elemental power: Thao, Sudan Archives, Deerhoof, Sharon Van Etten, the R&B group We Are KING. The song choices are smart, and all of the covers range from capable to very good, but all of them reinforce the idea that no one else could make her music.
The first selection, “Toyboat,” comes from Ono's wrenching 1981 album Season of Glass, released in the wake of her husband’s murder. The original has an eerie serenity to it, suggestive of shock or stupor. Sharon Van Etten makes a skin-prickling hymnal out of it—it’s excellent, but it’s a Sharon Van Etten song, and because Season of Glass is unavailable on streaming platforms, it’s not all that easy to contrast it with the otherworldly stasis of Ono's original.
A few artists pay her spellbinding songs the dubious honor of transforming them into unremarkable indie rock. David Byrne and Yo La Tengo’s “Who Has Seen the Wind?” would sound nice synced to a few shots of leaves falling on roofs in an A24 dramedy, but it’s hard to shake the feeling their placid performance waters down the original. Death Cab’s “Waiting for the Sunrise” smooths the emotional violence from the tempo, and Gibbard drops Ono’s brittle enunciations, so it no longer sounds like one brutalized soul offering fragile hope—just some guy waiting around for a sunrise.
The best covers summon Ono's fearless spirit. Japanese Breakfast’s unadorned take on “Nobody Sees Me Like You Do” captures her vulnerability, as does Amber Coffman’s close-mic’d reading of “Run Run Run” for just voice and electric guitar. Sudan Archives, an artist whose intensity is a good match for Ono’s, fills Season of Glass’ “Dogtown”—a song that opens with the observation “I think of my friends, they were once not so dead”— with a suffocating silence, her pizzicato and her voice spreading like spider cracks across the surface of the arrangement. U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy’s vocal tone is close to Yoko’s, and Remy’s “Born in a Prison” has the original’s baleful atmosphere, like a nursery rhyme wafting out of a collapsed building.
There was a lot of horror in Ono’s music, whether it was convulsive and nightmarish like “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for a Hand in the Snow)” or placid and eerie like “Mrs. Lennon” (“Husband John extended his hand/Extended his hand to his wife/And he finds, and suddenly he finds/That he has no hands/They’ve lost their bodies”). Ono watched bombs fall on her family’s estate at the outset of WWII as a child, and her music is full of bleak, durable wisdom about how to live in a world raging with the hellfire of war and hate. She wrote about trauma in real time and sang about it with an otherworldly vulnerability. Very little of this legacy is palpable on Ocean Child, which feels sort of like a Lifetime Achievement Award introduction in album form, without Ono taking the stage. It still seems like there are plenty of people willing to speak for Yoko Ono, but not that many willing to listen to what she had to say herself.


The UK singer weaves in and out of reality and make-believe on her debut album of lush, experimental R&B. It’s a transparent look into her swelling heart and wistful imagination.

Fantasy & Facts

Roses Gabor is a dreamer. Free-flowing like her Pisces sign, the artist’s winding career is proof of her ability to make waves in various spaces. Before arriving with her new project, the singer-songwriter was known mostly as a gifted background vocalist and featured guest with acts like Gorillaz, Brasstracks, and SBTRKT on his 2011 song, “Pharaohs.” In 2012, she took a leap and premiered “Stars,” her first independent and dub-heavy track. Over the last six years, Gabor has been working hard on building her otherworldly sound. On her debut album Fantasy & Facts, Gabor has re-emerged with silvery melodies that expand on the electronic rhythms she holds close.
Sonically, the project lives within the special ecosystem of experimental R&B while Gabor’s emotional candor carries its own light. In 2018, she shared it on her first album single, “Illusions,”  featuring Sampha, which is a heart-rushing song where the two singers yearn the ghosts of a past love. Throughout all 11 tracks on Fantasy & Facts, Gabor’s production is thrilling, but she doesn’t let it overshadow what’s on her mind and heart.
Her sincerity isn’t heavy, it’s refreshing. On the standout single, “I Could Be Yours,” produced by the Stereotypes (who also worked on Bruno Mars’ “24K Magic”), Gabor tells a lover that pride and regret is the only thing stopping them from being with her again. “Tomorrow might not come for us/But you still wait for fate/You know how I was the one/But things didn’t go your way,” she sings. It seems like the type of heartfelt honesty that can only be shared and treasured far away from a jaded world. Gabor’s saccharine harmonies magnify the urgency of her bold and starry-eyed feelings. She sinks into a deeper groove on “F*ck up the Bass,” which is a slow and sensual cut with galactic chords. Gabor doesn’t want to be limited to any specific sound, but the song’s soulfulness leaves a yearning for more sultry tracks like this.
Gabor walks the lines of many genres but categorizes her music simply as “feels.” The description is vague, but it’s more fitting than the industry classifications that are a tad too linear for her art. On Fantasy & Facts, she flows through 42-minutes of moods, stretching her smoky tone comparable to Kelis’ which brings fullness to her sadness and adoration. The end of Fantasy & Facts seems to lose a bit of momentum. The latter tracks are all solid and of high-quality, but it’s hard to top the hypnotizing mid-album gem “Interlude: Awkward Desire.” The pattering drum kicks paired with Gabor’s anti-gravity lulls create a brief out-of-body experience that could last longer. But the album is her universe and all of her feelings have a rightful place.


Montreal duo Essaie Pas are just one of a scattered network of contemporary groups reviving the sound and aesthetic of minimal synth music. Demain Est Une Autre Nuit captures the sound more or less at its best. It feels alluringly other: a secret, shadowy wormhole that tunnels through layers of electronic music history.

Demain Est Une Autre Nuit

Perhaps appropriately for a genre of music rooted in the enigmatic and the obscure, the minimal synth revival has quietly become a movement without ever quite becoming a bandwagon. Montreal duo Essaie Pas are just one of a scattered network of contemporary groups reviving the sound and aesthetic of a lost generation of DIY-minded synthpop artists of the '70s and '80s, who either by accident or design ended up too rudimentary, too melancholic, or too plain odd to fulfill the "pop" part of the equation. You might, if you chose, chalk this up to another case of retromania, of modern musicians mining post-punk history in lieu of looking forward. But in a club music demimonde that holds up druggy hedonism and flashy maximalism as guiding principles, there is something attractive about minimal synth's severe, austere poise. This music got few props at the time, but at its best—and certainly, Demain Est Une Autre Nuit captures the modern sound more or less at its best—it feels alluringly other: a secret, shadowy wormhole that tunnels through layers of electronic music history.
Essaie Pas are the husband-and-wife duo of Marie Davidson and Pierre Guerineau—she a solo recording artist, he a music engineer who has worked with Montreal musicians such as Dirty Beaches and Femminielli. This, their fourth album and debut for DFA—the title of which translates as "Tomorrow Is Another Night"—was born out of long winter nights rehearsing at one of Montreal's deserted industrial complexes, which the pair occupied after returning from tour to find their studio and practice space had been shuttered.
Some of this sense of frigidity and dislocation has found its way into Essaie Pas' music – or perhaps more accurately, has intensified and authenticated a spirit that was already there. Moments like "Dépassée par le fantasme" and "Carcajou 3" recall their New York peers Xeno & Oaklander in their skittery analog intricacy. But Essaie Pas are also wise to dance floor imperatives: deeper into the record, "Facing the Music" locks into a mute, driving techno redolent of DFA labelmates Factory Floor, while "Lights Out" is a twilit acid pulse through which Davidson periodically announces the title, voice smothered with echo.
The more song-centered moments on Demain Est Une Autre Nuit offer a sense of the pair's influences. Vocals are largely delivered in French, Guerineau dourly intoning longer, narrative passages and Davidson singing choruses, or just holding long, trilling notes that dissolve into texture. Singing in French gives Essaie Pas an umbilical link to earlier continental synth and coldwave groups such as Elli et Jacno (who Essaie Pas covered on their previous album Nuit de noce) and Asylum Party, groups whose lyrics often tipped beyond lovelorn melodrama to a place of bereft existentialism. "Retox" is a tale of romantic separation riven with violent imagery, nights spent battling insomnia, and fantasies of screams that bruise flesh; at one point we hear Guerineau lift a receiver and key in the Montreal area code before apparently perishing from the sheer ennui of it all. On "Le port du masque est de rigueur" ("Wearing a Mask Is Mandatory") he picks morbidly over the bones of a love affair. "J'ai tenté de t'oublier/ Comme on noie une portée de chatons," he sings—"I tried to forget you/ Like drowning a litter of kittens"—as electronics gurgle away maniacally on one chord.
"La Chute" ends the album on a dreamier note, a bloody Valentine with just a hint of yacht rock gleam to the synths, and listening to it, it's not hard to imagine Davidson and Guerineau working together at night, as frost collects on windowpanes and breath clouds in the air. Back in the late '00s, while minimal electronic music was the toast of underground Manhattan thanks to Veronica Vasicka's Minimal Wave imprint and the club night Wierd, DFA's attention was elsewhere, on the pneumatic house moves of the Juan MacLean or Shit Robot. Yet Demain Est Une Autre Nuit feels not just a good fit for the label's vintage-modern aesthetic, but a culmination of something. Perhaps it's simply that this weird, mannered synth music is no throwback, but merely a style ahead of its time, and one that only now is coming of age.


Super Furry Animals' Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip enlist the Strokes' Fab Moretti, Spank Rock, Yo Majesty, and others on a record that-- although it was conceived two years ago-- captures a lot of what's been in the past few years' zeitgeist.

Stainless Style

Where we're going, we don't need roads. Remember with me, if you will, a time when cocaine was as rampant as synthesizers. When a wave of unprecedented M&A activity and yuppie-style prosperity was driving Wall Street to record heights. Sequels and superhero movies dominated at the box office, while starlets with limited discernible musical talent were releasing remarkably enduring pop songs. A conservative Republican was in the White House, giving aid and comfort to Iran as if he were someone who wasn't quite all there.
I'm talking, as you know if you're reading two words ahead, about 2006, when Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip first announced their collaboration under the name Neon Neon. Just as a yearning for the 60s characterized much of the indie pop and indie rock of the 1980s-- from R.E.M.'s jingle-jangle mourning to C86's "perfect pop" to the slowed-down garage-y guitar heroics of Dinosaur Jr.-- so the memory of the 1980s has dominated certain music circles in recent years. Whether electrohouse, new wave, new rave, synth-pop, Miami bass, Detroit techno, Chicago house, Italo disco, Balearic, or, most recently, the revival of what used to be called "world music", the 80s have left their mark on the YouTube era. Now if only the 49ers could win four Super Bowls again.
Rhys, solo artist and frontman for Welsh psych-poppers Super Furry Animals, and Boom Bip, the electronic/hip-hop producer known to his folks as Bryan Hollon, bring an eclectic background to the early-1980s revival. For an album conceived two years ago*, Stainless Style* captures a lot of what's been in the past few years' zeitgeist-- from Alan Braxe and Fred Falke's "Rubicon" to Chromeo and Cool Kids (if not quite all the way to Yeasayer); a recent Neon Neon "influences" mix included the Italian prog song that lays the foundation for Justice's "Phantom". And then the bright, 1980s-style guitar pop, murky electro rap, and cybernetic white-boy funk make for an album that upends some of the stereotypes about the hollowness of sleek 80s chrome. Hey, there's heart behind all this silvery excess.
The more melodic, Rhys-fronted tunes sped up on me first, and they're also the most chronologically displaced. Bizarre Princess Leia brush-off "I Told Her on Aderaan" puts the Cars beneath 1980s snare sounds, angelic synths, kitschy spoken-word interjections, and one of the catchiest choruses so far this year. The midtempo candidate for a weepy beach break-up music video, "Steel Your Girl", comes close, with chiming soft-rock guitars and phased keyboard. "Video games are nothing but illusion," Rhys begins. Factory farewell "Belfast" leans more toward wistful Duran Duran synth-pop. To all this, the herky-jerk call-and-response "Dream Girls" and shades-are-good electro creep-out "Michael Douglas" are wrecks by comparison.
Not that there's a clear divide between songs where Rhys seems dominant and ones where Boom Bip takes over. Raquel Welch ode "Raquel" and its Miami Sound Machine (and then Run-D.M.C.) beats comes closest to melding the SFA frontman's skewed pop vision and Hollon's electro-conscious hip-hop. On "I Lust U", meanwhile, Rhys duets with Welsh singer Cate Le Bon, trading one-liners on an Italo-tinged dream not too far from something like Simian Mobile Disco's "I Believe". Spank Rock and Sean Tillman get in a couple of snappy verses amid the Prince-ly groove and Midnite Vulture-isms of Har Mar Superstar on first single "Trick for Treat". A messed-up title pun and Rhys's fuzzed-out oddness sort of redeem Yo Majesty's heavy-breathing shtick on "Sweat Shop" (where's Missy Elliott?), but Fatlip's scene-setting rap on "Luxury Pool" is more biography than biopic, helped by a hiccuping, fame-pimping hook.
As a crossover side project involving an artist linked to 1990s Britpop, Neon Neon were bound to get compared to Gorillaz. Stainless Style is more consistent as an album than Damon Albarn's output with his first non-Blur group, and the potential hits, for what it's worth, hit equally hard. "Oh, how many are my foes?/ How many rise against me?" Rhys sings, with a choir of himself, on the title track and finale. Tuneful and engaging, though not flawless, Stainless Style holds a mirror up to a generation of 1980s nostalgia and, by warmly and humorously depicting a human being behind the bizarre rise and fall an engineer playboy, reminds us there's more to that most notoriously superficial decade than, well, surfaces. There's Huey Lewis, for example.


Jay Reatard was 18 when he recorded the Reatards' second album Grown Up, Fucked Up. His chaotic rage is the driving force behind most of the songs, and Grown Up, Fucked Up illustrates the final transition from sweet-faced little Jimmy Lee Lindsey to Jay Reatard.

Grown Up, Fucked Up

Jay Reatard was 18 when he recorded the Reatards' second album Grown Up, Fucked Up. The short time between the Memphis punks' extraordinary debut Teenage Hate and their new album had apparently taken a toll. "In the past year all innocence, all naiveness, and all kindness has all but been sucked out of my heart, my mind, and my soul," he wrote in the liner notes. By 1999, he'd already started to alienate some of the people around him. Guitarist Sean Redd stopped regularly hanging out with Jay outside of Reatards shows and only played on Grown Up, Fucked Up because Jay asked him. Jay once noted that about 27 different people had been Reatards at some point; the turn-around rate was significant.
There's footage of Reatards playing a Reno basement in 1999, which offers a pretty good illustration of his live presence at the time. He screams and thrashes everywhere, hitting the floor and smashing himself in the head multiple times. He chokes himself with the mic cable. He'd just been dumped; he is not kind when he described her in his between-songs banter. "I use [sic] to be a nice caring sweet kid that everyone loved," he wrote in the album's liner notes. "Now I'm just fucked and no one can fucking stand me." Grown Up, Fucked Up is about making the final transition from sweet-faced little Jimmy Lee Lindsey to Jay Reatard. There was no going back—from then on, he was that shrieking figure writhing on the Reno basement floor.
On Grown Up, Jay's chaotic rage is the driving force behind most of the songs. His enemies list on the record includes Led Zeppelin fans and the entire city of Memphis. On "No One Stands Me", Jay posits himself as a "dirty motherfucker," growling and screaming. Many of these songs are about feeling like the perpetual other. "I'm gonna break down," he repeatedly sings in one of the album's best hooks. It's ironic that this declaration is the album's closing sentiment (before the bonus cuts on Goner's new reissue)—he seems to have been going through a loud, violent breakdown all along.
Of all of Jay's many projects, Reatards are among the most primitive. While speed punk jams like "Sat. Night Suicide" and "Eat Your Heart Out" reinforce that idea, there are moments that begin to take it apart and predict where Jay would travel next. "Blew My Mind" is all muscular guitar and gang vocals right up until the bridge, when handclaps enter and the power-chord melody takes on a saccharine sheen. In glints, you can see the the aggressive-but-catchy sound he'd master on Blood Visions.
The middle of the album bogs down a little bit, with hooks and performances that blend into each other. The three bonus tracks from the 1999 "You're So Lewd" 7" feel tacked-on and inessential. Their cover of the Persuaders' "Heart of Chrome" is sluggish when stacked next to songs like "Sick When I See" and "Sat. Night Suicide". But even when this album's on the downswing, the Reatards are still screaming, blaring, and ferocious. Sometimes they trudge and sometimes they sprint, but they are always effective.
Jay Reatard pushed people's buttons, but he was beloved. This love shines through in the reissue's liner notes, which feature tributes from Goner Records' Eric Freidl and Empty Records' Meghan Smith. Both remember him for who he was—a frustrated teenager who broke disco balls and sought refuge in rock'n'roll. He was an incredible performer—an unhinged presence whose emotions seemed to be spilling out from all sides at all times. It's been five years since he died, and while many artists make angry rock'n'roll in the Reatards' wheelhouse, Jay's absence is felt. Many have tried, but nobody screams like that.


Game's business is making you cringe for him, and on his fifth studio album, a collection featuring spots from 2Chainz, Rick Ross, Meek Mill, Lil Wayne (twice), Future, Young Jeezy, Chris Brown, Common, Pusha T, Jamie Foxx, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and others, business is...well, it remains a business.

Jesus Piece

The Game has no dignity, but it certainly hasn't hindered his career, which was built entirely without it, and even predicated on its absence. Dignity's overrated, anyway; if you leveled the accusation at him, he'd probably work it into a rhyme about Blackstreet so he could remind you how much he likes "No Diggity". When you've sold 10 million albums abasing yourself at every available opportunity, there's no reason to change course, and on his fifth studio collection, the Game is still happily, busily, thoroughly ethering himself beyond all comprehension: "I don’t care if Kanye hit it/ I don’t care if Jay hit it/ I’ma eat it up and I’ma lay with it" he says on the first verse of "I Remember", a song that is a bald imitation of Future's "Same Damn Time", with Future himself on the hook. Looking away yet? He's just getting started.
Here are some other things the Game says on Jesus Piece: He reminds us on "Freedom", again, that Eminem murdered him on The Documentary's "We Ain't", as if if wasn't embarrassing enough when he exclaimed it on that very song. He tells us that his iPod is "shuffling between Common, Jay Electronica, and Bono" on "Heaven's Arms". At one point, he interrupts himself to say "Hold on, I gotta take Birdman's call," before interpolating audio of a Birdman voicemail. He yells "Murder is what I do to these Just Blazes," on an album produced entirely without Just Blaze's input. Game's business is making you cringe for him, and business is...well, it remains a business.
Truthfully, it's a little shocking to see another Game product in stores a mere year after The R.E.D. Album, a  project with a development so troubled it redefined the lengths a record label will go to double down on a losing hand. It hit the top of the charts with what felt like a dead-cat-bounce, but here the Game is, seemingly unscathed, with another full platter of his signature blend of desperate-networker hip-hop. He is the rap game Wile E. Coyote; no matter how many times he blows himself to smithereens, he survives to do it again another day.
What presumably keeps him going-- besides, of course, a frightening, "Walking Dead"-like tenacity-- is that when you scrape away all these irritating quirks, he remains reliably good at cobbling together poppy gangsta-rap songs. He's always boasted excellent, if unadventurous, taste in beats, and he sources some excellent ones on Jesus Piece from SAP, a 22-year-old kid from Delaware whose biggest hits thus far have been Mac Miller's "Donald Trump" and Meek Mill's pre-MMG street hit "In My Bag". SAP provides the catchy Bone Thugs redux "Celebration" and the choir-sampling "Name Me King", a song that also has a sharply focused verse from Pusha T. Jake One gives him an infectious early-Kanye-style beat, reminiscent of "The Glory", for "Hallelujah", and Game makes a very early-Kanye-style song out of it. Longtime collaborators Cool & Dre soak his ruined voice in greyscale synth tones in "Can't Get Right" and "Pray" and then give him a helium-filled bouncy castle of New Jack Swing vocals on "All That".
The album and song titles hint at a sustained religious fascination, but this isn't Game's concept album. Even so, it's more focused than he's been in awhile, and while you couldn't call an album featuring 2Chainz, Rick Ross, Meek Mill, Lil Wayne (twice), Future, Young Jeezy, Chris Brown, Common, Pusha T, Jamie Foxx, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and more "lean," Jesus Piece is less all-over-the-place than The R.E.D. Album. Except for an embarrassing breakout of "hanhs" on the Kanye-sampling title track and his blood-draining Future imitation on "I Remember", he mostly keeps a lid on his irritating habit of mimicking other rappers' flows.
The flip side to being prone to saying any fool thing that pops into your head is that you can occasionally be hilarious: on "Church", he for some reason kidnaps and attempts to drown a woman before saving her and explaining to her that she was baptized. On "Can't Get Right", he continues his long string of overly attached girlfriend messages to Dr. Dre, telling us that after Dre passed him up to work on Kendrick Lamar's record, he had "nightmares" that someone shot him. The Game's contract with Interscope is up after this record and something tells me that wherever he goes next, it will be messy to watch, and probably just as entertaining. Seven years into a career that's resembled a slow-motion wreck as often as a highlight reel, and I remain morbidly fascinated with what will happen to him next.


Aaron David Ross’s latest as ADR is composed of vocal samples, most scrubbed clean of any signifiers of human origin. The effect is amusing, even creepy, and recalls Holly Herndon or Katie Gately.

Throat

As half of Gatekeeper, Aaron David Ross produced dizzying, over-the-top synth experiments, full of conceptual knots. His 2015 solo release under the name ADR was similarly dense, an exploration of life within networks that mimicked the spiraling disjunct of online life. With THROAT, he delivers something more distilled. Maybe the most conventionally listenable release of his career, its smoother productions serve as subtler—even insidious—vehicles for his ideas about communication and mediation.
The conceptual twist here is that the album is composed of vocal samples, most scrubbed clean of any signifiers of human origin. Remembering this as you listen can be amusing, even creepy, and the overall effect is that of a futuristic gloss, each sourced note subsumed into a larger whole. Ross has built these abstract fragments into all-but-seamless collages that climb, flutter, and drop in accordance with the rules of pop songwriting, but what’s constructed here has no singular voice, no characters, no storytelling—indeed, no language, at least not in the traditional sense, though occasionally a voice will float out in an unintelligible lead. Still, these tracks brim with feeling, or feeling’s synthetic analog.
Where his previous work tended to assault the listener, here there’s a sense of being swept up or carried—a more elegant transaction, but still one that requires the listener to cede power. On opener “Every Node,” Ross weaves bubbly melodies into a hopeful chorus, developing into a sort of call-and-response over a whispered R&B beat; “Lost Ya” supplements a bassline full of chipper indifference with wistful pitched-up interludes. Musically, the effect isn’t so far off from the high-definition, high-anxiety likes of Holly Herndon, Katie Gately, or, dare I say, PC Music—music that strives to sound ultra-contemporary.
Especially within this focused palette, Ross’ hyper-detailed approach to composition comes into crystalline focus. As pop producers do, he’s plumbing and deploying an array of styles here, from classical choral arrangements to polyrhythms to, on “King David,” what sounds like a muddled take on the “Ha Dance” break. But he’s also a student of a certain breed of outsized radio-EDM; Jack Ü comes to mind. The implication is that while such music succeeds because of how intensely legible it feels, this belies a dangerous lack of genuine content to communicate.
Ross’s project might be dystopian at its core, revealing us to be floating a little too comfortably in the cybermuck that builds up invisibly between sender and receiver. But his choruses still speak, in their own strange and affecting ways—I think, for example, of the plaintive solemnity of “Advice,” or “Effort,” in which danceable ambivalence gives way to a sample that’s been blown out into a cathartic machine scream, not unlike something you’d hear in a Linkin Park song. The structures of communication twist and splinter, but we can still sense a constant longing.


Four years after its self-titled debut, this collective-- which features members of Memphis' garage-rock community-- creates a swifter, cleaner-sounding record than its predecessor.

Pretty Loud

In some ways, Memphis has never gotten over garage rock. Largely left to their own devices by an industry that had little use for the city after the 1970s, generations of local musicians have been rethinking, reformulating, and in some cases re-creating that 60s sound and attitude. Following the Grifters, Simple Ones, and Oblivians in the early 1990s, the members of MouseRocket have mined these influences for more than a decade in numerous outfits: Alicja Trout in Lost Sounds (with Jay Reatard), the River City Tan Lines, and Black Sunday; Robby Grant in Big Ass Truck and Vending Machine; and cellist Jonathan Kirkscey in, um, the Memphis Symphony Orchestra. In 2004, with rhythm section Hermant Gupta and Robert Barnett, they released a self-titled debut full of dirty guitars, distorted vocals, raunchy organs, and covers of Love and the Nightcrawlers.
Gloriously dark and weird, MouseRocket sounds like a one-off, but it wasn't. Four years later, the band has launched its follow-up, Pretty Loud, which they recorded locally over two years and are releasing exclusively on vinyl (the LP includes an afterthought CD, but it sounds significantly better on a turntable). It's a swifter- and cleaner-sounding record, less distracted by all the noisy interludes, spoken-word samples, and studio shenanigans that gave the debut its oddball flair. In a word, Pretty Loud sounds professional: a concerted effort by a real live band rather than just a bunch of friends screwing around in the studio. Both approaches have their merits, of course, and opener "All Been Broken" immediately lays out the virtues of this new attack. Beginning with Grant's low vocals over Kirkscey's elegant cello, the song crescendos into a heavy riff that sounds like the fossilized skeleton of a Dinosaur Jr song. MouseRocket have carefully arranged the song for maximum impact, ratcheting up the soft-loud dynamics until everything falls into place on the last chorus, which smacks you squarely in the jaw.
MouseRocket reshuffle the garage rock deck effectively, adding classic-rock guitars, punk vocals, new wave keys, prog drums, and Kirkscey's dexterous cello, which reinforces Grant and Trout's brazen riffs, bolsters Gupta's booming bass, and generally adds a distinctive texture to these songs. A curiously calm, nearly Byrdsian guitar theme opens "Never Stand a Chance", which builds over three minutes to an ear-splitting freak-out finale. Trout and Grant trade off vocals, each proving a commanding frontperson: He gives "All Been Broken" and "44 Times" a world weariness that contrasts nicely with the songs' frantic energy, and she alternates between sing-songy vocals on the country-pop "Set on You" and shouted attacks of the glam-metal "Shadows", whose abrupt, punchy chorus is one of the album's best moments.
The album flags toward the end. Following a buzzy cover of Steven Calhoun's "Fall Down South", "Steal" deconstructs itself aimlessly, barely holding together, and the start-stop momentum of "Aphrodite" is more stop than start. They're followed by an "electro" version of the MouseRocket closer "Missing Teeth", whose paranoid lyrics about fluoridated water are illustrated with muted beeps and clicks that cannot improve on the original. Sequenced together, they close a strong album weakly, which is especially a shame considering that most of Pretty Loud manages to put a distinctive stamp on familiar styles. Most bands never get around to doing that, but MouseRocket have done it twice already.


The fifth disc from the New Brunswick, N.J., punk trio builds off the group's reputation as shred-oriented SST revivalists, with a refined focus on songwriting.

Ugly

The Screaming Females story begins with sweaty, ask-a-punk gigs in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at such dank, quasi-legal basements as Meat Town USA. As the tale goes, drummer Jarrett Dougherty suffered from tendonitis during the band's infancy, which barred him from drumming for weeks on end. While recovering he spent much time with Michael Azerrad's seminal survey of 1980s indie rock in America, Our Band Could Be Your Life, presumably getting stuck on the ethos, humility, and hybrid rock stylings of the Minutemen.
Quite fittingly, the band recorded its 2006 debut on a shoestring budget in Dougherty's attic. They booked hundreds of shows themselves. In time, the college student who ran the local punk label Don Giovanni threatened suicide if the band didn't sign on for 2009's Power Move, so they did. They were plucked up by the Dead Weather and toted around the States on tour. They were written about by a teenager for Rolling Stone. Years later, they recorded their nuanced fifth disc, an opus of sorts, with Steve Albini, and called it Ugly.
If any Screaming Females record has suggested they may someday become a group worthy of cataloging in a book like Azerrad's, Ugly is it, igniting a classic punk sound with a friction that falls somewhere between SST and PJ Harvey's Rid of Me. The band's sound has always been characterized by frontwoman Marissa Paternoster's fiery howl and brutal guitar work, the latter of which has garnered her "Best Guitar Shredder" distinctions that never feel hyperbolic. Ugly puts a newfound emphasis on songcraft and sustained momentum. Paternoster has always been an astounding guitarist and performer, equal parts J Mascis and Carrie Brownstein; her songwriting is finally entering the ring.
Given the backstory, it's almost comical that the record begins with the title "It All Means Nothing". Much of the discourse surrounding the Females has centered on Paternoster's spectacle: She shreds, she is very short, and she is also female. But here, she equates her self-worth to "a broken hand" and makes it clear that she can't buy what people are selling her. There is a fun, anti-commercial sentiment that comes with her dismissal of a commodity for sale, and the song's opening line-- "You take what's mine, and face me like you're blind/ It all means nothing"-- diminishes the relevance of a visual element.
Of her sonic trademarks, one of Paternoster's most distinct characteristics is her vocal vibrato, which conveys a sense of liberation that is intrinsic to the band; like a maximum-throttled Corin Tucker, little is restrained, and she occasionally dips into a hardcore screech. The chorus of "Rotten Apple" finds Paternoster painting words with a broad palette, hitting the many corners of her register over a pointed guitar crunch. Loud, animated shrieks come often at the end of the band's songs-- like the unhinged bellow that helps close out "Red Hand" (and that's after three minutes of Paternoster sounding like she could maybe murder someone). The color red is a noticeable motif throughout Ugly, from the "red ribbon" and "red blood" on "Slow Birth", to "Doom 84", a heavy seven-minute piece that's true to its name, where Paternoster is "blinking red fury." This emphasizes the passion, rage, and aggression on Ugly, qualities that make rock music such a powerful language of freedom, particularly for women.
Ugly is the most varied Screaming Females record, as evidenced on tracks like "Leave It All Up to Me", which is full of vaguely psychedelic fretboard mystics. Album closer "It's Nice" is a real change-up, a proper Screaming Females ballad, with Paternoster's vocals showcased over orchestral strings, as she sings, presumably, about not selling out ("If I'm bought and sold, then I'm cruising in on a dead end street"). Hell hath no fury like Paternoster on "High", where she is at her most anxious and intimidating. One of the most frightening moments of the album comes with her roar at the end and its ensuing patch of chaos; it's also one of the many points seemingly designed for a live show.
Visceral lyrics abound elsewhere on Ugly, and Paternoster specializes in violent, abstract musings. She offers plenty of references to death and an undefined "family curse," and all over, there are images of blood and bones, a clenched gun or noose, a burning altar or sun. The earth shakes. The sea recedes. At a point, there is a sour taste in Paternoster's mouth.
But Paternoster also gets quite literal about the radical qualities of what she is doing-- a testament to her growing capabilities as a lyricist. On "Something Ugly" she is on the phone with her mother, afraid to die alone; on "Crow's Nest", she's trapped in a self-constructed "prison," analyzing her own scars. She burns, throughout, with an earnest desire to quench and feed her own wants and needs. Paternoster is perpetually contemplating her own satisfaction, pleading for help, and presenting clear-headed ideas about defiance, all the while exerting her knack for creating suspense on a song and then, with her band, leaving it entirely obliterated.
One of the record's most surprising moments comes on the otherwise unmemorable "Help Me". Paternoster admits she'll "learn your letters" and "rewrite all the books," after which, she declares, "you've been warned." Screaming Females are a group with a classic rock sound who are expanding our idea of what a rock band can be. They could help redefine it if Paternoster remains true to her word.


With the Royal Trux once again in his rearview mirror, Neil Hagerty returns to his own group. In place of the genre mashups of 2013’s Best Of, he’s back to making satisfyingly ragged rock’n’roll.

Knuckleball Express

For a band who often looked like they had just rolled in from recording Exile on Main Street, Royal Trux were far too abstruse to be genuinely retro. But recent noises from Neil Hagerty—former/current/who knows? Royal Truck and now head honcho of the Howling Hex —have suggested a certain wistfulness in his dotage. “Rock and roll is what’s missing in bands these days that take a generic approach to playing that’s almost machine-like,” he harrumphed to Rolling Stone, indulging the kind of ruefully nostalgic statement that Liam Gallagher would tape to the studio mood board. The new Howling Hex album, Hagerty said, would be 100% real—a record, he promised elsewhere, that “people want to listen to without throwing it out the window.”
To an extent, Hagerty keeps this promise on Knuckleball Express, the first Howling Hex album since Royal Trux’s ill-fated, occasionally wonderful reunion. Black Crowes fans will certainly find less to defenestrate than on 2013’s not-actually-a-best-of The Best of the Howling Hex, which was awash in polka rhythms, fuzz, and bizarre cowpunk lurch. “Lies,” the most immediate yet least satisfying track on Knuckleball Express, is a slice of heads-down Southern boogie, frenetic enough to raise a knowing smile without greatly troubling the cortex, while “Words” oozes with the leery strut of an acceptable Jagger outtake.
Elsewhere, Knuckleball Express has enough of Royal Trux’s obstinate weirdness and willful rough edges to distinguish it from the retro blues of the barroom band. Hagerty’s guitar may be turned up as loud as you would expect of a man who has recently escaped an unhappy musical partnership, but there’s something deliciously unrefined about his playing, all jagged lines, rusty nails, and hangover shuffle. The drums have a similarly imperfect edge, their classic rock clip punctuated with a few too many lolloping tom rolls for comfort, while many songs shun the traditional verse/chorus structure in favor of bolting intros to riffs and solos to verses. “Heavy Curtains” sounds—brilliantly—like three unrelated songs welded together in a musical cut and shut.
At its best, Knuckleball Express channels its awkwardness into songs that are thrilling in their instability. “Mr. Chicken” trembles on the edge of collapse before the unexpectedly well-mannered vocals of Kristine Shafer nudge the song into Belle and Sebastian-meets-Pussy Galore territory. “Cowboy Motors" throws a harpsichord into the mix for no particular reason, like a cruel parody of 1960s baroque pop, while “North Aquarian” introduces a drunken-sounding face-off between drummer and electronic squiggles—hardly Beatrice Dillon in its audacity, but modish enough to remind you that Knuckleball Express was recorded this millennium.
This waywardness is important. The tensions that drove Royal Trux, like many bands before them, were the same impulses that eventually unraveled the group. The risk for Knuckleball Express was that Hagerty, safely ensconced in Colorado with no tempestuous bandmate to spark off, might have succumbed to the easy musical life. Certainly, there are moments here—like “City in the Country,” where he hymns the “sweet Rocky Mountain waves”—that suggest a certain mellowing. But Hagerty remains as wily and weird as ever. Full of charm, panache, and eccentric raw power, Knuckleball Express makes good on his promise to make something real.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Montreal musician and former Grimes collaborator weaves synthetic woodwinds and harpsichord into a dizzying yet heartfelt fusion of classical pastiche and skewed electronic pop.

Rhododendron

A decade ago, Chris d’Eon went looking for the archangel Gabriel in the depths of cyberspace. Having recently returned from a year-long stay at an Indian monastery, he was living in a windowless room in Montreal and working in a call center. The economy was falling apart. Everywhere around him he felt a sense of malaise, a creeping pessimism at odds with Silicon Valley’s utopian promises. It felt clear that God, if He existed, had abandoned us; if His messenger was out there, d’Eon reasoned, he might be lurking somewhere in the chaos of the internet.
The result of d’Eon’s spiritual quest was LP, an ambitious and occasionally overblown album that loaded up an opulent bed of synthesizers with new-age atmospheres, pop melodies, jungle beats, and lyrics shot through with Quranic references and technological disillusionment. Following 2011’s Darkbloom, d’Eon’s split EP with fellow Montrealer Grimes, LP cemented his reputation as a visionary figure in the nascent vaporwave scene. But while Grimes turned a similar strain of techno-spiritualist world-building into bona fide hits—and a career as the world’s foremost futurist pop star—d’Eon’s music only became more hermetic. With his Music for Keyboards series, also inaugurated in 2012, he largely abandoned LP’s pop overtones and lyrical preoccupations in favor of sparkling synthesizer etudes fit for crystal emporia. The Trios series, launched in 2015, veered down a knottier path, trading prismatic bliss for dissonant thickets akin to black MIDI. Rhododendron, which marks d’Eon’s first physical release in six years, feels like a return from the wilderness and a culmination of his diverse interests, folding classical pastiche, obsolete technology, and bracingly inventive compositions into an unmistakably heartfelt package.
Stylistically, Rhododendron is a curious hodgepodge of neo-Baroque, medieval folk music, and 20th-century serialism, moving among intricate counterpoints, Ren Faire melodies, and impenetrable blasts of atonalism. What holds it all together is a palette of chamber instruments like harpsichord, oboe, and clarinet—or synthetic versions of them, anyway. But these are not particularly faithful copies; they are clunkily ersatz and clearly fake. The vibrato is too steady, the harmonies too perfect. But that patina of inauthenticity is a big part of their charm. d’Eon’s use of “rompler” synths popular among game designers in the 1990s—devices capable of playing back pre-recorded sounds of acoustic instruments—imbues the music with an almost subliminal nostalgic charge: The idealized forms of the 18th and 19th centuries come cloaked in the outmoded sounds of the much more recent past. It triggers a kind of temporal vertigo.
In mood, Rhododendron often feels like a series of fake-outs. “Intro” opens the album with stately cello and reeds before “Rhododendron pt. I” launches into an innocent pastoral refrain. Every eight bars, a new voice enters the frame; the melodic themes amount to a breezy amalgam of Baroque, pop, and classical minimalism. Two more versions of “Rhododendron” appear across the album, each one jauntier and more bucolic than the last; by the end, it sounds almost as though d’Eon has been pilfering old tapes from the music library of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre. But as the album progresses, other pieces turn thorny and dissonant, less Switched on Bach than “Jazz From Hell.” “Into the Clearing pt. I” begins as an airy fantasia for woodwind, but jabbing harpsichords upset the key signature; the scattershot “Into the Clearing pt. II,” which follows, sounds as indeterminate as John Cage’s star-chart compositions. The two-part “Through the Mangrove,” for electric organ and harp, hiccups like a tangled garden hose of wrong notes.
Even d’Eon’s more melodic tracks are not always what they seem. “Cobra” follows the limpid, reassuringly consonant “Rhododendron pt. I” with a jarring study in contrasts. This time, dissonance reigns, trills clattering like coins on a countertop. But after a series of sour, staccato counterpoints, the song eases into a slinky, almost Latin-tinged pop motif, like some unholy blend of Shakira’s pert “Me Enamoré” with David Sylvian’s dour “Pop Song.” Here, all the contradictions of d’Eon’s music come excitingly to the fore. He grinds gears between exaggerated naivete and extreme difficulty; possibilities multiply in the uncanny valley of his presets. The chintziness of his synthetic instruments is almost poignant, like a remnant of a simpler era. In its own way, Rhododendron feels as much like a spiritual quest as LP did. Now, however, instead of looking for messages from God in the darkest corners of the internet, he’s seeking transcendence in shopworn tropes, bargain-bin synths, and the collision of sounds that were never meant to go together.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Japanese post-hardcore titans Envy have reached a point of being so embedded within their genre that they can disappear without going away. Their first album in five years is an opportunity to reappraise their overlooked past work without having to go through the trouble of reissuing it.

Atheist's Cornea

Atheist’s Cornea arrives after the longest break between Envy albums, but that’s immaterial—the Japanese post-hardcore titans have reached a point of being so embedded within their genre that they can disappear without really going away. Their splits with Thursday and Jesu are crucial documents of post-hardcore diplomacy as is their working relationship with Mogwai, reaching out towards post-rock, metal, and emo. Bands that incorporate some combination of those elements—Deafheaven, Touché Amoré, Mono, to name a few—sing their praises. They may have singlehandedly legitimized screamo. All of which sets up quite nicely for Atheist’s Cornea: it can be framed as a "triumphant return" and also an opportunity to reappraise their overlooked past work without having to go through the trouble of reissuing it. But after five years that reiterated how much Envy has influenced other bands, for 40 minutes, Atheist’s Cornea plays out a complete role reversal.
"Blue Moonlight" starts with a 20-second salutation of wayward, delayed notes that gets decimated when the band enters with a typical, consumptive roar. This move doesn’t get repeated all that much throughout Atheist’s Cornea, though it’s a proper introduction in promising, "this is a post-hardcore record that will have pretty moments." Its means of making good on that promise go as expected. "Blue Moonlight" bursts apart in opposite directions much like Deafheaven’s “Dream House", heat-seeking guitars skyrocketing towards the sun and drums keeping the rhythm of falling down a jagged mountainside. Meanwhile, the twin guitars of "Ignorant Rain at the End of the World" swordfight like early Thursday, swift clashes of sharp, clanging metal. Closer "Your Heart and My Hand" damn near namechecks an Explosions in the Sky song with its title alone, to say nothing of the tremolo-picked clean leads and drum crescendos and everything else that causes "cinematic!" and "epic!" to be dug out of critical wordbanks like a reflexive, glassy-eyed dig into a bag of popcorn.
Fortunately, the specific textures of Tetsuya Fukagawa’s vocals aren’t as easy to imitate as Envy’s pedalboard setup. Compared to most of his peers, Fukagawa has a squat, muscular, and ugly tone rather than something shrieking or abrasive. Especially as the band becomes more slickly produced, Envy songs are immiscible mixtures where the vocals always rise to the top. It can be difficult for non-aficionados to distinguish what makes for a good vocalist in this realm, but Fukagawa clearly has range. Not in the multi-octave operatic sense—rather, he has a number of distinct modes of expression. Whether he’s dramatically muttering spoken word, letting out a blowtorch-intense, burnt-black scream, or a surprising sing-song cadence in "Footsteps in the Distance", Atheist's Cornea maintains an urgency that’s palpable even for those who don’t speak Fukagawa’s native language.
Still, this is a tenuous foothold as the instrumentals of Atheist’s Cornea go through every "emotional" post-hardcore motion. They may boast more technical precision and higher production values than most—the gleaming open chord strums on "Footsteps in the Distance" sound like straight-up alt-rock triumph rather than some distorted approximation of it. Likewise, the tinkling Rhodes solo in the middle of "Shining Finger" is a legitimately new touch and there’s unassailable beauty in the sighing string arrangements of "Ticking Time and String" (naturally) and the cymbal washes of "An Insignificant Poem". It’s not Envy’s fault these effective means of establishing contrast are basically public domain tropes in post-hardcore. But Envy established their reputation of being one step ahead rather than in lockstep with their peers...it is their fault for assuming the risk of doing these things in 2015. There’s almost no way Envy intended to namecheck their progeny in such an orderly manner. But it does get to the troubling contextual effect of hearing them in 2015 rather than echoed in other’s work: Envy just sound like an Envy-influenced band now.


A producer with a knack for matching any rapper’s flow and a rapper at his best when embracing his regional flair are, turns out, good influences.

Bad Influence

Kenny Beats may be the perfect producer for Q Da Fool. Last year’s fastest-rising beatmaker, Kenny possesses the chameleonic ability to match most any rapper musically while retaining his own dirty, low-end thump. With JPEGMAFIA, that means metal-edged sludge accented by the synths of British grime; with Rico Nasty, it means chasing her energy with sparse, loud hits, highlighting her without crowding her half-yelled flow. On Bad Influence, Kenny’s six-track EP with Q Da Fool, it means trap-indebted, percussion-oriented beats that carry weight, letting Q settle into the pockets of every groove.
Q has risen to the top of the DMV’s ascendant rap scene, but, on a collaboration with Atlanta street king Zaytoven last year, he eschewed the regional tonality that gave him his initial break. Still, on last year’s standout track “Heavy Metal,” he solidified his place not as a mere area talent riding the wave of an increasingly popular scene but instead one of the nation’s most exciting acts. He matches machine gun beats with menacing one-liners like, “If we was beefin’, you’d be dead/So don’t say my name.” Q’s blend of terror and excitement gives his tracks immediacy. On the best parts of Bad Influence, he commands the same attitude and attention.
“Drop,” the opener, serves as an apt summary of Q Da Fool’s interests. Over a flute sample and the hi-hat triplet so crucial to trap beats, he doesn’t mince words: “Got her legs up/Like a Tesla truck/Bitch said I fucked her bed up/Made her catch the nut.” The imagery is unsavory, but Q’s electric delivery and playful eye for details allow him to color the scene with flamboyance and gravitas. During the trap-inspired “100,” neither Kenny nor Q let up for two quick minutes. Q’s flow boosts the enthusiasm of his strongest lines—cocky without becoming off-putting, more charisma than braggadocio. Q sounds even more confident in his own voice on “Win,” using the same approach that took him toward the top of the DMV heap in the first place. Over wispy synths, he presses ahead in a vivacious double-time flow.
When Q approaches the sing-song method of regionless rap birthed and developed by SoundCloud rappers untethered to place, Bad Influence drifts off course. “Had Shit” relies too heavily on Auto-Tune, the effect interrupting Q’s flow and swallowing his energy. Still, as a whole, Bad Influence is another win for Q Da Fool, a course correction after last year’s effort with Zaytoven. When he abandoned his bread and butter to match the producer’s melodic stomp, he pulled shakily him away from his most engaging styles. It’s reassuring to know it wasn’t permanent. At his best here, Q realizes that home isn’t necessarily a place but instead a concept—the sound peerless and singular, distinctly personal yet universally relatable. More and more, it belongs to Q Da Fool.


The former Roc-A-Fella star brings his ferocious voice and unique intensity to Rhymesayers, here teaming on a record with Jake One.

Freeway / Jake One: The Stimulus Package

The Stimulus Package

The Stimulus Package comes housed in a gigantic money clip-- the liner notes on the backs of gigantic dollar bills with the faces of Freeway and Jake One on them, the CD itself in a cardboard wallet along with a download card for the instrumental version. As a design conceit, it's brilliant-- the packaging alone might make the album worth its price as a straight-up conversation piece. But it also highlights some of the weirdness surrounding the record's release, since the LP probably wouldn't exist if Freeway were still walking around with gigantic money clips in his pocket.
When Free made his debut about a decade ago, he was part of Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella stable, which means he debuted on the grandest stage imaginable. On tracks like "1-900-HUSTLER" and "Rock the Mic", his raspy, tense flow sounded perfectly at home next to Jay and Beanie Sigel. On his 2003 debut album, Philadelphia Freeway, Mariah Carey and Nelly made cameos. In 2004, it was mildly shocking to hear him alongside a backpack rapper like Mos Def on Kanye West's "Two Words". Then Roc-A-Fella imploded and the market for major-label rap dried up. And now Free's at Rhymesayers, labelmates with guys like BK-One and I Self Divine.
But maybe the weirdest thing about Free's long migration underground is how much sense it makes. Free was always a role player on Roc-A-Fella, too knotty and intense to really stand any chance at mainstream stardom. And after the crew splintered, Free didn't stop working: A month of tracks released to the Internet every day, a middling street album, and now this. At Rhymesayers, Free's got a label with a built-in fanbase and, thanks in part to Brother Ali, an appetite for grown-man firebreathing. And he's also got the chance to team with Jake One, the journeyman producer who's worked with everyone from G-Unit to MF Doom to John Cena. Free is an East Coast rap fundamentalist at heart, and the idea of cranking out a full album with only one producer must've been tempting. Anyone who loved Roc-A-Fella in its prime has to root for Freeway, one of the crew's most vital presences, and it's great to see him land somewhere fitting. Plus it means we get the weird thrill of hearing Birdman on a Rhymesayers album, an unmistakable sign that rap's universe is shrinking so fast that nobody knows what the fuck to do.
But feel-good story aside, this isn't Free's best work. When he recorded Philadelphia Freeway, he had an opportunity most rappers never get: He got to work with one of the greatest producers in history, Just Blaze, at his peak. Just produced most of the album, and his raging storms of old-soul pathos and drum-machine whirlwinds made a perfect complement to Free's strained ferocity. Everything Freeway and Just Blaze made together felt urgent and immediate, and Jake One, solid producer though he is, just doesn't have that level of intensity. Though not all the beats on The Stimulus Package feature actual musicians, most of them do have a sort of gritless, anonymous session-musician sheen to them.
But even over tracks that scan as merely competent, Free's got one of those voices that demands attention. Too many of the songs on The Stimulus Package have goofy one-note concepts, which for some reason is almost always an issue when a once-popular rapper goes underground. So we get the song where Free talks about his rapping as a drug, or the one where he raps about the letters he gets from fans. Even on songs like these, though, Free comes with great little touches that keep things interesting. On "Stimulus Outro", the one with the letters, he adapts a slight Southern twang when rapping in the voice of a fan from North Carolina. On another, he calls a snitch a "Bubbles from 'The Wire'-ass nigga", which is sort of great. And he has a way with telling little details that ground his urgency and make it tangible: "I'm not trying to do carpentry like my pops," "I had my Walkman in my pocket, used to hop on the bus," shouting out his lawyers by name.
The Stimulus Package would work better as an album if Free had a little more help directing his skills, or if he just decided to rap hard on every song instead of tying himself to concepts. But even the goofiest songs here are still fun listens, and a few tracks come close to capturing his old brilliance. "Microphone Killa" has no grand unifying idea; it's just Free and State Property comrade Young Chris rapping hard and fast over a classically funky beat. And "Never Gonna Change" is a riveting example of storytelling rap, though it would work better if Free didn't open with, "It's like the Biggie 'Warning'." Jake One's beat moves around constantly, injecting drum breakdowns every few measures, and Free takes it as a challenge, punctuating every breakdown by putting a syllable on every snare hit in a dizzying display of technical precision. The Stimulus Package might not have as many moments like these as Free's first two albums, but a few moments like that are still enough to make the LP one of the stronger rap releases of 2010 thus far.


Philly band Hurry's new LP is pure power pop in the vein of the Posies and Matthew Sweet, revealing a band that is serious about its frivolity.

Guided Meditation

When Hurry expanded to a trio for 2014’s *Everything/Nothing**, *there were two ways to view Matt Scottoline’s formerly solo project. One: a solid Philadelphia band making fuzzy, mid-fi indie rock. The other was as an offshoot of Everyone Everywhere, who released two of the first truly outstanding albums from emo's fourth wave, albeit ones that predated 2013’s mini-explosion of "revival" trendwatching by at least a year. Taken in combination, those two views could work against Scottoline: there are damn near hundreds of solid bands in Philadelphia making fuzzy, mid-fi indie rock and only one Everyone Everywhere, whose near total inactivity since 2012 feels like more of a semi-permanent hiatus than a result of their methodical work ethic.
Hurry's third LP Guided Meditation sounds like a credibility bid for Scottoline's fledgling new band. The cover might be a Brian Eno homage, but there is no magical "Enoxification" happening here. Their success is in their ability to be serious about frivolity, which could be an oblique strategy all its own. The difference is entirely present within a rerecorded version of “Shake It Off," which appeared on a stacked 2015 six-way charity split that damn nears as a mini-*Singles *soundtrack for Philadelphia. Perhaps they figured since it would be associated with Taylor Swift anyways, “Shake It Off" removes anything that made the original sound bashful—the unnecessary feedback is sheared, the performance is significantly tightened, Scottoline’s vocals aren’t subject to the same fuzz as the guitars. And there you go: Hurry decided they’re really a power-pop band at heart, not indie rock.
Regardless of how much Scottoline’s beloved Yo La Tengo or Guided By Voices influenced the writing of *Guided Meditation, *this is more in the lineage of the Posies and Matthew Sweet, acts who would’ve been considered pure *pop *had they existed in a different decade or just simply sold more records. And like them, Scottoline writes from a position of weakness, of being “dumb and in love" and not always both at the same time: he’s incapable of handling life due to the prospect of a new crush on “Fascination" (“overthink and overplan imagining you hold my hand"), uses relationships as a shield from life’s responsibilities (“Under Her Thumb"), retreats the moment those responsibilities start piling up (“Nothing to Say") and ends Guided Meditation wishing for a kind of zen existence that requires nothing out of him (“I Wanna Be You").
They’re adolescent feelings that don’t really ever go away and Scottoline honors them by letting them speak for themselves. Likewise, Hurry doesn’t overcomplicate things musically—they abide by the Weezer Method that states all vocal melodies should sound good as guitar leads and that instant gratification can be replicable gratification. Hurry are capable of expanse and modest grandeur, though like Everyone Everywhere, they find a kind of psychedelia in everyday fatigue—“Love is Elusive" cruises through six-and-a-half minutes of flanger clouds towards a sunburst of layered harmonies and “Nothing to Say" feels like companion piece to Everyone Everywhere’s definitive “I Feel Exhausted" if cubicle-bound anxiety was traded for a three-beer daze at happy hour.
But music this reliant on simple pleasures is also inherently risky. If the melodies don’t connect, there isn’t much to fall back on and occasionally *Guided Meditation *harkens back to Hurry’s less distinct previous work. Still, the lack of punk or emo or played-out '90s touchstones (i.e., Pavement or Dinosaur Jr.) in Guided Meditation makes it at least something close to novel in 2016. Fittingly, the most easygoing and instantly ingratiating song here ("When I'm With You") shares a title with Best Coast. As with Crazy for You, *Guided Meditation *can be accused of being too simplistic, too sweet and unengaged with the present. But, really: isn't being dumb and in love the most uncomplicated state of being?  So when Scottoline sings, “I don’t even have to try when I’m with you/All the stupid things I say, you know they’re true," it damn sure sounds like the truth.


The apparent effortlessness (and occasional silliness) of the metal band’s 20th album could make it feel tossed off, but the duo’s enthusiasm mostly prevents that from happening.

Astral Fortress

If Darkthrone had retired after 1992’s A Blaze in the Northern Sky, they still might have gone down as the most influential band in black metal history. The nihilistic Norwegian scene they emerged from ate bands alive, but Darkthrone survived. The same two-man lineup of Nocturno Culto and Fenriz has stuck around for 35 years now, and instead of milking their early success on anniversary-themed nostalgia tours, they’ve continued to make records. (They don’t even play shows, and never have.) There’s a new Darkthrone LP out every couple of years, and each one pushes the band a little further away from their black metal roots. Astral Fortress is the band’s 20th album, and like its immediate predecessors, Old Star and Eternal Hails, it finds Darkthrone in thrall to the analog warmth of ’70s hard rock and the thunderous stomp of classic doom.
The stakes never feel particularly high on Darkthrone albums anymore, which usually works in the band’s favor. They release a ton of music, and almost all of it is at least pretty good. Nocturno Culto and Fenriz have already pushed each other to peaks that few others have scaled, and if they now tend to sound more like a couple of aging pals jamming together, that’s their prerogative. Astral Fortress continues what the band calls their “old metal” era, and its songs are lumbering, prehistoric beasts, straightforward in structure and firmly in-the-pocket in execution. Fenriz can’t quite swing like Bill Ward behind the kit—he credits himself with “cave drumming” in the album’s sleeve—but he’s tapping into the same primordial well that once birthed Black Sabbath. He and Nocturno Culto both still sound genuinely enthralled by metal’s elemental power. The apparent effortlessness (and occasional silliness) of Astral Fortress could make it feel tossed off, but the band’s enthusiasm mostly prevents that from happening.
“The Sea Beneath the Seas of the Sea”—the album’s 10-minute centerpiece—best illustrates Darkthrone’s half-serious approach. (That begins with the title, which evokes fathomless Lovecraftian horror and the giddy idiocy of a rehearsal-room goof-off in equal measure.) It opens with a distant, reverb-drenched guitar line, an eerily effective run of notes that sets the scene for the primitive grandeur to come. Additional elements soon start to pile on—a series of hypnotic riffs, a simple, thudding drum pattern, Nocturno Culto’s inimitable rasp. The first six minutes build in density and mass before releasing all its tension in an unaccompanied recitation of the title that lands like a punchline. “The Sea” is an effective, economical epic that remains single-minded in its purpose, a reversal of the “riff salad” approach of some of Darkthrone’s previous long songs. It’s probably the best “Doomthrone” tune to date.
Isolated moments of greatness lurk inside every other song on Astral Fortress, too. “Impeccable Caverns of Satan” drops a chest-clearing “ough” that would make Tom G. Warrior blush. “Stalagmite Necklace” rolls out a handful of vintage keyboard sounds that serve as vital counterweights to some of the best riffs on the album. “Kevorkian Times” veers off its initially doomy course to briefly revisit the band’s crusty D-beat era, kicking the tempo up just when the album needs a shot of adrenaline. “Eon 2” has the album’s best lead guitar parts in what feels like a subtle nod to the last true Darkthrone masterpiece, 2013’s trad-metal-obsessed The Underground Resistance. If there’s any black metal on Astral Fortress at all, it’s only in the sense that if Darkthrone made it, it must be black metal.
Darkthrone’s reluctance to revisit their hallowed past has long been one of their most admirable qualities. Even A Blaze in the Northern Sky was a refusal to capitulate to audience expectations; it followed the band’s Swedish death metal-inspired debut, Soulside Journey. In true Darkthrone fashion, Astral Fortress feels like it was primarily made to satisfy Fenriz and Nocturno Culto. It’s an album that’s defined less by its sporadic moments of brilliance than its ambivalence about delivering them. At times, that can make it feel a little too low-key, but in a nostalgia-choked metal scene where legendary bands repeatedly return to the sound that secured their legacy, Darkthrone’s solitary path is refreshing.


Autolux's third album is produced by Boots, and features a performance that permanently places Carla Azar amongst the pantheon of great American rock drummers.

Pussy's Dead

When you talk about the best drummers of the last 15 years, Autolux's Carla Azar is near the top of that list. Jack White knew exactly who to recruit when he was putting together his all-female solo group the Peacocks, giving her material on both Blunderbuss and Lazaretto to really embellish her love for Mitch Mitchell and Keith Moon. But nothing compares to what she does as the spine of L.A.’s Autolux. Her evolution is palpable across the din of the trio’s first two albums, 2004’s Future Perfect and 2010’s Transit Transit as she, bassist Eugene Goreshter and guitarist/keyboardist Greg Edwards split the difference between the electronic and the organic. On Pussy’s Dead, they take this distinct hybrid of *Dirty-*era Sonic Youth dissonance and vintage 4AD dreaminess completely into the EDM/IDM machine.
They worked in collaboration with Boots, collaborator with Beyoncé and Run the Jewels, and his influence is all over these 10 songs. Azar has already mastered the Bonzo stomp, but the discipline of abstract timekeeping she constructs on songs like the sultry “Soft Scene” and the trap-like “Junk For Code” are new. They have the metronomic mastery and razor-edged precision of ?uestlove or Phil Selway.
They've also stepped up their songwriting from their prior studio works. From Sonic Youth, they appear to have learned the ability to find melody in madness. The spacey piano ballad “Anonymous” or the gorgeous penultimate track “Change My Head” hits the transcendence of Breeders and Spiritualized records, bolstered by the vocal harmonies of Azar, Edwards and Goreshter. By the time you get to the buggy coda “Becker,” Edwards is singing in a high, plaintive tenor that feels open-hearted. Yet, as the second half of “Listen to the Order” indicates, they can wield slashing fuzz guitars to slice through you like hot shrapnel all the same.
For those of us who have been in Autolux’s corner since they first emerged from Los Angeles, it’s been a bit trying to watch this group hide in plain sight. All kudos go to Boots for parlaying this influence he’s garnered producing the likes of Beyoncé, Run The Jewels and FKA twigs to help craft this record for a band whose breakthrough moment has eluded them for long enough.
Correction (4/5/16 at 5:22 p.m.): The original version of this review incorrectly claimed that Eugene Goreshter sings "Becker."


The Kitchen Cinq released just one full album, Everything but…the Kitchen Cinq, in 1967. This Light in the Attic set sounds like a survey of popular '60s rock and pop, from the Byrds to the Beach Boys to the Beatles.

The Kitchen Cinq: When the Rainbow Disappears: An Anthology 1965-68

The mid-to-late 1960s were awash in regional bands hoping to become the next Beatles or Rolling Stones. Not all of them were good, but many—the Wailers from the Pacific Northwest, the Music Explosion from Ohio, the Barbarians from Mass., the Chocolate Watchband from Calif.—were doing interesting enough work to merit a larger amount of exposure than they received. Some of these groups ultimately enjoyed a latter-day career re-examination due to compilation releases like the seminal Nuggets, but most, like the Kitchen Cinq, a psychedelic rock group hailing from Amarillo, Texas, have been lost to history.
The Kitchen Cinq released just one full album, Everything but…the Kitchen Cinq, in 1967 and a fistful of singles for LFI and its distribution partner Decca before ultimately calling it a day in 1968. Assembled by Light in the Attic, this anthology of their work is like a survey of popular '60s rock and pop sounds. You can hear jangly traces of the Byrds on "If You Think…", the exquisite vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys on "Still in Love With You", the abrasive fuzzed out tones of the Yardbirds on "Solitary Man", the then-fashionable Eastern sounds on "Dying Daffodil Incident", and then there’s of course the near-obligatory cover of the Them garage rock anthem "Gloria". There’s even a dynamic, pushed-to-the-brink take on the Beatles’ "Run for Your Life". Heard without any background or context, it’d be difficult to tell whether the band was on the cutting edge or merely chasing trends, but they certainly had a keen ear for what was happening in the world around them.
The real strength of the Kitchen Cinq as a group lies not in songwriting but rather in the way they arrange and perform the music. Their voices intertwine and harmonize in a way that adds real weight to the chorus section of the songs, and those harmony parts, deployed to their fullest effect on "Figareux Figareux" and "You’ll Be Sorry Someday", distinguish the group’s general sound from any number of other '60s pop and rock bands. And while Mark Creamer is no Jeff Beck or Jimmy Page, his guitar work had style—the solos on "Need All the Help I Can Get" and "Searchin’" are particularly thrilling.
It’s easy to dismiss collections like this one as nicely packaged cash-grabs marketed to the musically curious in search for an obscure outfit to champion, but the Kitchen Cinq are one of those rare acts like Sixto Rodriguez or the Sonics who merit another look. Maybe they didn’t catch the breaks they needed when they needed them, maybe their label dropped the ball or didn’t push them hard enough to the tastemakers, or maybe, as band member Jim Parker has suggested, the scene in L.A. simply chewed them up and spit them out. The music on When the Rainbow Disappears deserves another chance to be heard.


On her fourth album, the UK rapper wrestles with the split between her public persona and private self, raising broadly relatable questions about the craving for validation.

Little Simz: Sometimes I Might Be Introvert

Sometimes I Might Be Introvert

In the hundred or so years since Carl Jung popularized the term “introvert,” a few common misconceptions have emerged. Foremost among them is that introversion is the same as shyness or a lack of confidence. Jung’s more nuanced position was that introverts are people who focus their energy inwards, thoughtful and connected with feeling. Their extraverted counterparts, meanwhile, project outwards, thriving on interaction and attention. Whether (or how) a pop star could be an introvert is the sort of topic that could fill a book—or an album.
Little Simz poses the question directly: “Simz the artist or Simbi the person?” It slips out a couple of minutes into the UK rapper’s fourth album, concealed beneath the brassy drama of masterful opener and lead single “Introvert.” It’s hidden in the title, too: Shorten Sometimes I Might Be Introvert to an acronym and you get SIMBI, the nickname that Simz, real name Simbiatu Ajikawo, goes by among her friends. The modern pursuit of everyday validation makes the question more pressing—“Why the desperate need for an applause?” she asks on the bubbling “Standing Ovation”—and reshapes it into one that you don’t need to be a pop star to relate to.
A couple of albums into her career, Little Simz had picked up the admiration of two of her musical idols—Kendrick Lamar called her “one of the illest doing it right now” and Lauryn Hill took her on tour. Then, in 2019, her introspective but musically adventurous third album, GREY Area, proved to be a watershed. Simz’ profile shifted from “acclaimed but underappreciated” into something more like “national treasure in waiting.” A starring role in Netflix’s Top Boy reboot, countless cover shoots, and a grab bag of awards and nominations have stationed her on the cusp of household-name status in the UK. But despite the confidence in her abilities—“Honestly, respectfully, I think I’m very, very talented,” she told the London Evening Standard this year—Ajikawo has watched the gulf between Simz and Simbi widen as acclaim rolls in. “Don’t be so obsessed with me you think you what’s best for me,” she purrs on “Standing Ovation,” before slipping into her own Jungian analysis: “Take my energy, come to find there’s nothing left of me.” She’s caught in a bind. Writing is how she figures out what she thinks, who she is (“I bottle up and then spill it in verses,” goes “Introvert”), but how does she deal with the fact that, the bigger she gets, the more people will be privy to those inner tussles? What happens when the dream comes true, and the world listens in while you confront your “daddy issues”?
The weight of these questions doesn’t drag SIMBI down or stunt the album’s flow. Its 19 tracks fall broadly into three camps. There’s the orchestral swagger and playful sampling of songs like “Introvert,” “Woman,” “Little Q PT2,” and “Miss Understood.” The arrangements here are glorious: huge swathes of string and horn, cascading drums, choral flourishes. These songs luxuriate in their own richness. Against this backdrop, Simz’s delivery comes like a whisper. The pairing fits: More conversation than sermon, Simz makes hefty subjects—familial rifts, systemic racism, youth violence—more manageable. “I Love You I Hate You” picks over the open wounds left by an absent father. Lines like, “Is you a sperm donor or a dad to me?” land like a boot to the gut. But like the best love songs, the track’s design—the chorus a sort of inverted petal-pulling exercise—invites the listener to see their own experiences in Simz’ stories.
A run of songs in the album’s sprightly second half offers a burst of extroversion. Simz takes over from Simbi on “Rollin Stone,” hurtling over grime and trippy trap with bars like, “Can’t believe it’s Simbi here that’s had you listenin’/Well, fuck that bitch for now, you didn’t know she had a twin.” She boogies in the blown-out colors of “Protect My Energy,” then follows with back-to-back bops on the Obongjayar-featuring “Point and Kill” and Fela-esque “Fear No Man.” These moments are delightfully blithe and airy. When Simz takes a big swing, she very rarely misses. “Woman” wouldn’t sound out of place on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
Lengthy interludes—so rarely beneficial—are dotted throughout, the bulk of which are narrated by fellow Netflix star Emma Corrin (monarchy fans will recognize her as Princess Diana from The Crown). These are mostly tiresome and offer a full bingo card of clichés—“follow your heart,” “pressure makes diamonds,” “the top of the mountain is nothing without the climb,” “only the strong will survive,” etc.—but fulfill a basic role of providing breathing space between beats. Simz is occasionally guilty of the sort of rapping that packs syllables at the expense of real meaning (the closing stretch of the otherwise tender and intimate “I See You” is a culprit here), and these highfalutin intermissions are another version of that tendency to overreach in pursuit of epiphany.
But there’s still that nagging doubt. On “Standing Ovation,” she sits at home, surrounded by her spoils, asking “What is it I’m meant to be?” Twelve years ago, Simz was asking a similar question in a different way. She was standing outside London’s Roundhouse theatre in a throng of teenage boys, trading verses over rough, beatboxed grime instrumentals. “They say they wanna be a superstar, but are they gonna work hard to achieve that?” she rapped into the circle of adolescents. More than a decade on, her work is there to see. Much of it has been concerned with figuring out who Little Simz is and where she stands; Sometimes I Might Be Introvert still tugs at that thread. This is the sound of Simz reconciling with Simbi. And it sounds great. Cue the ovation.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Recorded with an ensemble of Toronto musicians, the fun and referential second album from Josh Korody’s indie rock project feels like a big, messy collage.

Only Up

For Only Up, the second album from Josh Korody’s indie rock project Breeze, the Toronto musician enlisted an entire scene. With his usual collaborators unavailable, Korody took the opportunity to upgrade the intimate jangle of his 2017 debut, record, into a heavier sound built for stadiums. Working with more than a dozen collaborators including members of Broken Social Scene, TOPS, and Orville Peck’s band, Korody condenses several eras of British rock into a fun, referential mix that celebrates the idealized hedonism of his favorite records alongside his community.
The highlights of Only Up tap into the UK’s Second Summer of Love, an era when bands were embracing the psychedelic possibility of the studio and the sounds of house, techno, and hip-hop imported from the United States. “Ecstasy on Keele Street” makes the party  atmosphere explicit: “These drugs are really kicking in,” Korody sings between tambourine breakbeats and a wordless refrain. The closing track, “Only Up,” climaxes with a mellotron playing beneath beneath Korody and guest vocalist Tess Parks’ harmonies: It sounds a bit like the horn section from Primal Scream’s “Loaded” on the comedown after a long night.
On “Come Around,” Korody channels the slightly flat bellow of the Stone Roses’ Ian Brown to sing about a looming presence—be it divine, romantic, or chemical—over a towering two-chord vamp and a distorted drum loop. In a guest verse, rapper Cadence Weapon references psychedelic icons like Brian Wilson and Syd Barrett and rhymes about getting so high he can text God to drop a pin. “Don’t Cry” is even more anthemic, with strings warbling over commanding snares that land a half-beat early, a combination that conjures the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” The arena rock sound is a contrast to the lyrics about a personal grievance. Castigating a former friend who refuses to confront their misdeeds, Korody sings with a palpable sense of disappointment: It is his finest moment as a frontman.
Korody’s songwriting stumbles at higher tempos. “Let It In” feels like a re-work of a Beck pastiche of 1970s funk. When Korody sings “Usually the first idea’s the best,” he may be summing up the spirit of the recording sessions, but in this moment, it sounds more like an excuse for the band’s wilted groove. The scratchy guitars and vocal processing on “Our Scene,” meanwhile, resemble the early 2000s approach from the Strokes and LCD Soundsystem, two bands that were ripped off plenty when they were new, and Korody’s pondering about “whatever happened to our scene” lacks the dry wit of their respective frontmen.
Only Up succeeds in the moments when the songs feel like the product of a real ensemble: when the band sound like they are jamming at an idyllic countryside cottage or an abandoned Manchester factory as opposed to the studio. At its best, Only Up evokes a communal feeling of watching a band utterly locked-in, their intertwining parts echoing across a large, open space. Korody never quite conjures the chemistry necessary to transcend his influences, but, like a teenager decorating his bedroom wall with torn-out tabloid photos, he creates a messy, lovable collage.

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