This eight-song EP, comprised primarily of tracks from Wilco's most recent album The Whole Love, also finds them unearthing older song-oriented material that suggests they're getting back to the business of being a pop band.

iTunes Session

An eight-song iTunes Session EP hardly seems conducive to taking in the full scope of a band's career, especially when the tracklist primarily comprises songs from the most recent album. But we've got a few months' perspective on The Whole Love now*,* and this new release unearths a track from Wilco's 1995 debut, A.M., which suggests they're getting back to the business of being a pop band. They aren't curtailing their experimental urges so much as they're putting more emphasis on tight songs they'd want to play and you'd want to hear in a semi-live setting. There is, in other words, a retrospective undercurrent to iTunes Session, which, instead of including the 10-minute krautrock jams and noise-rock punctuations of their early-2000s heyday, looks to the song-oriented period just before and just after.
Rethinking what it means to be Wilco has always been a big part of being Wilco, so the inclusion of the 17-year-old "Passenger Side" suggests a band seriously reassessing its past and drawing strong connections between the Wilco of 1995, the Wilco of 2002, and the Wilco of 2012. The band has exhibited an enduring propensity for noisy undercurrents, concise vocal hooks, and unexpected nods to pop history, all of which are animated by Tweedy's lyrics, which range from invigorated nonsense ("I Might") to semi-tragic lucidity ("Passenger Side"). Toward that end, iTunes Session emphasizes the immediate over the arty, omitting the rambling Whole Love opener "Art of Almost" in favor of that album's catchiest tracks and choosing the direly hooky "War on War" instead of some of the strident tracks from their catalog.
For those of us who prefer Wilco's pop songs over their avant-garde numbers, this is a strong, short set, emphasizing buoyant momentum over digressive din. The tracks don't sound quite as full in this setting as they did on The Whole Love, but there's still a lot of charm and dynamism in the way the bass and keyboards trade off the ascending/ descending riff on "I Might", like kids taking turns on the playground slide. If this version surpasses the studio take, it's largely due to Tweedy's exaggerated sighs. Only "Black Moon" suffers in this setting, becoming so lax that it threatens to dissipate altogether. It's clear the band is less interested in that sort of high-concept noodling than they are in simply jamming.
In that regard, Wilco have hijacked the iTunes Session and turned it into a document of the Whole Love tour. These are, ostensibly, crowd favorites, tightened and refined in front of big crowds. They even bring out avuncular opening act Nick Lowe for a workmanlike rendering of his 1979 hit "Cruel to Be Kind", a regular encore over the last few months. It's a fine song, a bit redundant and not quite as relevant to the band as their B-side cover of Lowe's "I Love My Label", but you can hear how much fun Wilco (or "Wilc-Lowe," as Tweedy introduced the band at a recent show in Chicago) are having just singing those doo-doo-doo's.
Lowe is, in fact, an intriguing forebear for Wilco, a man who transformed himself seemingly effortlessly from a post-punk smartass into a genial country crooner. More recently, he's settled into a gentle nostalgia that lends his recent albums-- specifically At My Age and That Old Magic-- a wistful gravity that pushes against any notion of granddad rock. Similarly, Tweedy seems intent on forging a lengthy career with just as many twists and turns, dark corners, and bright avenues. Which is where this new version of "Passenger Side" comes in: Just as Lowe's country material has proven every bit as sturdy as his Stiff Records output, Wilco are pointing to some hidden gems in their own catalog, rehabbing forgotten tunes to prove that the band hasn't gotten better or worse, just different. That old song, so straightforward and unassuming, settles in remarkably well among their more recent, more celebrated material, so how long till dBpm releases a deluxe reissue of A.M.?


A fixture of New York’s experimental scene, the vocalist Amirtha Kidambi makes her bandleading debut on Holy Science, fusing classical Indian music, drone, and free jazz with an original perspective.

Holy Science

In New York’s experimental scene, the presence of vocalist Amirtha Kidambi on a concert bill has been a consistent indicator of quality. In 2013, she impressed in a live appearance with the legendary composer and improviser Muhal Richard Abrams. At the 2014 Whitney Biennial, she was part of a youthful ensemble that gave the premiere of one of the final operas by the late visionary Robert Ashley. Until forming the group Elder Ones, though, Kidambi had yet to create a vehicle for her own compositions.
The quartet that plays on her bandleading debut includes some familiar talents. Drummer Max Jaffe’s jabbing power has been heard in the high-complexity pop of the band JOBS. Soprano saxophonist Matt Nelson’s work has proved critical to recordings by tUnE-yArDs and Battle Trance. But Kidambi is the clear driving agent of the group.
While her mostly wordless vocal parts on Holy Science are influenced by the South Indian devotional singing groups she participated in as a child, they also call to mind her past work with composer Darius Jones. Kidambi’s simultaneous harmonium playing reflects her ongoing study of India’s Carnatic classical tradition, as well as her appreciation of modern drone music. And the feeling of free jazz—in particular, the high-intensity blast of late Coltrane—is often present here. That’s a lot of material for any composer to process usefully, but Kidambi and Elder Ones distinguish themselves by fusing these influences with a point of view all their own. With each lengthy track titled after a yuga (or “eon”) in Hindu scripture, Holy Science clearly has significant thematic ambitions. Yet Kidambi’s 64-minute suite contains lively, minute-to-minute variety, in addition to a grand overall design.
The title of the opening movement, “Sathya Yuga,” references an ancient eon in Hindu mythology—one in which spiritual enlightenment was widespread. The track opens with the leader’s voice and harmonium playing, and the texture is meditative. Kidambi’s singing has the feel of mantra, with certain groups of syllables receiving devoted repetition. But she also adds to the lines as she goes along, creating a searching quality.
When Jaffe enters, he plays in free-time, often using cymbals to accentuate the vocal lines. After Nelson’s soprano sax joins, nearly three minutes in, he and Kidambi begin experimenting—very softly—with unusual harmonies. After a brief solo harmonium drone, a rhythmic vamp is introduced, via Brandon Lopez’s bass. And then the entire band carries this new material to a full boil, with “Sathya Yuga” climaxing in a fiercely swinging, post-minimalist melodic progression. This is a happy intensity: full of a community vibe as well as opportunities for individual expression. But it is not the end of the story.
Since subsequent yugas narrate a descent into fractious conflict, the album’s next movement (“Treta-yuga”) incorporates a greater sense of alarm. Here, the free jazz riffs are more anxious sounding. Nelson’s soprano sax language adds in some of the piercing effects heard in the music of virtuosos like Roscoe Mitchell. But still, in moments when the players’ parts fall in-line together, there’s a sense of hard-won beauty.
Things fall apart more completely during the third movement, “Dvapara Yuga (for Eric Garner).” Kidambi composed this piece in the hours after first seeing the horrifying cellphone video of Garner’s death at the hands of police officers in the summer of 2014. And Kidambi’s choice to place this contemporary reference in this album’s evocation of the Dvapara eon is smart, and chilling. In Hindu scripture, this is only the second most destructive epoch—and the one in which the Bhagavad Gita is recited. That text, influential to a wide range of thinkers that includes Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, centers on a cosmic battle between warring factions in society: a span of carnage that often results in empty victories.
Here, the evocation of ancient and contemporary questions about violence and moral response proves gripping. At the end of this cacophonous movement, Kidambi sounds depleted. Nelson’s saxophone lines are similarly strained—a harrowing reference to Garner’s own increasingly desperate struggle to breathe, as seen on the video that documents his death. At all times, this track works as an oath. In its opening section, it swears memory to a victim. By its close, it promises enduring opposition to unjust outcomes.
Even though the suite still has one more era to explore, Holy Science’s relationship to the legacy of free-jazz protest is most pronounced in that third movement. And by this point, it’s clear that Kidambi has managed to house all of her influences in a project that is original. This sound isn’t merely the product of well-chosen reference points; in its abstract way, it makes a unique argument for the virtue of cross-cultural curiosity. Appropriately, the nature of this music is constantly morphing. When a muted introduction gives way to a more celebratory aesthetic, the change is achieved gradually, through small changes in the arrangement. When a demonstration of rage reaches a peak that cannot be sustained, the musicians in Elder Ones are able to navigate back to a more stable feel, without losing the passion and awareness that has animated those foregoing blasts of harshness. The result is an astonishing debut for a composer, and her band.


Rallying against aggravating, absurd political realities with passion and humor, the Leeds post-punks offer a tongue-in-cheek counterpoint to dourer contemporaries.

Lines Redacted

Mush’s Dan Hyndman savors every syllable. On the Leeds post-punk band’s second album, the vocalist and guitarist delivers five-dollar phrases with obvious glee, offering acerbic commentary ripped from international headlines. Songs about Russian bots meddling in elections and drinking bleach to cure COVID-19 could only be written in the present day, but Lines Redacted also serves as a monument to the band’s late guitarist Steven Tyson, whose versatile shredding defined their sound.
Mush first earned attention with their 2017 single “Alternative Facts,” named for the nonsense phrase Kellyanne Conway used to justify former White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s lies about the size of the crowd at Donald Trump’s inauguration. Nearly 10 minutes long, the song became a surprise favorite of BBC Radio 6 DJ Marc Riley, showcasing both the group’s duelling six-string pyrotechnics and topical takes on current events. At the time, Hyndman explained how his vocal delivery had evolved from a generic post-punk monotone into his self-described “shrill and cutting” style.
Those vocals provide a tongue-in-cheek counterpoint to contemporaries like IDLES, Shame, and Fontaines D.C., whose gruff, dour frontmen appear to take themselves deeply seriously. Hyndman’s yammering yelps, by comparison, have a frenzied urgency like Art Brut’s Eddie Argos and an exaggerated enunciation like a sarcastic impression of Bob Dylan. By acknowledging the aggravating, absurd reality, then rallying against it with passion and humor, Mush’s lyrical themes share more with New York bands like Parquet Courts or BODEGA.
In 2019, Mush’s debut album 3D Routine reflected a feeling of political optimism in the UK before Boris Johnson’s Conservative party crushed the dreams of a socialist future under Jeremy Corbyn. On the new album, Hyndman sings from the perspective of various narrators on either side of the aisle, cynically celebrating dead cat strategies (“Positivity”), doomsday preppers (“Hazmat Suits”), and the “sleepwalking breed” who would prefer to remain apathetic (“Seven Trumpets”). He reveals his personal beliefs in the rollicking highlight “B2BCDA” (that’s “Back to Back Consecutive Dark Age”), shouting at politicians who refuse to fight for change in the midst of crisis: “Smug anesthesia no time for their complacency/Walking around like their history’s redacted.”
Just when they start to sound like a meat-and-potatoes post-punk band, Mush save their musical experimentation for the album’s back half. “Morf” is a welcome palette cleanser, with a primarily instrumental wash of oddly tuned riffs and buzzing amp noises ripped from one of Sonic Youth’s shinily produced DGC albums in the early 1990s. “Hazmat Suits” continues to fuck with the formula as drummer Phil Porter grooves on a baggy beat, but even here Tyson can’t help but add chiming shards of No Wave guitar. Album closer “Lines Discontinued” attempts to repeat the trick of Mush’s breakout “Alternative Facts,” stretching out across almost eight minutes. Yet instead of sounding totally wired, they drift through dreamy passages reminiscent of the sleepier moments in Stephen Malkmus’ discography.
The album’s closing track is also its greatest showcase for Tyson, Mush’s late guitarist, with a loping instrumental hook giving way to wild solos that would make his hero Robert Quine proud. In a Facebook elegy for their bandmate, Hyndman describes the “life-changing bond” the trio formed while living together in their early 20s. The lyrics of Lines Redacted may be forever tied to our present moment, but the album is simultaneously a tribute to the kind of youthful friendships that are difficult to savor before they’re gone.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Rising Def Jam star follows his huge "Hustlin'" single with a debut album that leaves us no closer to learning anything about the MC.

Port of Miami

Rick Ross is a great rapper. Just ask him and he'll tell you. Weird, though: For such a blowhard, we hardly learn anything about Ross on Port of Miami, his lavishly promoted Def Jam debut. If anything, the album proves you can listen to someone expatiate on himself and walk away feeling like you've learned nothing about that person; it is-- not insignificantly-- a paean to saying a lot without saying anything.
Credit Def Jam for an admirable con job. Port of Miami sounds so good, you might be duped into thinking Ross can actually spit. The first line of its first single, "Hustlin'," is a fucking beast, the best 12 words Ross ever strung together: "Who the fuck you think you fuck-in' wit' I'm the fuck-in' BOSS." Ross accents against the beat, giving the line a free-falling feel. His "boss" is the sound of a trillion-pound weight hitting the ground.
But that's about the deepest this guy runs. In a gross perversion of lyric-writing fundamentals, Ross usually eschews the specific for the general. We know he made big bucks selling coke but (unlike Young Jeezy) he glosses over the dark side of black market entrepreneurship. We know he spends liberally and audaciously but (unlike Pharrell) he spares us colorful sketches of his favorite wardrobe items. We know he took a woman home from the club last night but (unlike Lil' Wayne or Art Brut) he withholds prosaic details like how many times they stumbled making it to the bed or what was breakfast the next morning or even, God forbid, what she wore. We never learn for sure where Rick Ross came from, and that prevents us from truly knowing where he's coming from. He's that rare, mythical creature: a rapper without a back story.
As if digesting trap-hop wasn't beguiling enough, here's an album presenting perhaps the starkest gap in quality between production and personality since Puff Daddy and the Family's No Way Out. The first six tracks are absolute titans, all sweeping synths and hypnotic organs and Scarface samples. "Push It" flips the same-named track from that movie's soundtrack, slowing the beat to match Ross' phlegmatic gait. Grim, creeping arpeggios lend themselves to opening tracks, and this song's twinkling piano line recalls the menacing string plucks Young Jeezy used to open Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101. The similarity's no accident. "Blow" sets gale force tuba farts against Dre's fairy dust hook. To call Ross' verses redundant, however, would be just that: "Mo' trips (mo' trips)/ Mo' whips (mo' whips)/ Mo' money (mo' money)/ I'm mo' rich (mo' rich)."
"I'm Bad" contains some of the album's most syllabically ambitious stanzas, but also some of its worst stumbles. Which is a shame, because the hook Ross delivers over the song's speedboat bass and sparkling horn hits is legendary: "I'm bad (I'm bad)/ I'm back (I'm back)/ I'm mad (I'm mad)/ I'm strapped (I'm strapped)." For a few, thrilling seconds, Rick Ross is Mr. T. "Boss" offers a blueprint for a successful slow jam, emphasizing the first and third beat as much as possible without grinding the song to a complete halt. It's the kind of track Lil' Wayne would absolutely obliterate, but Ross fades into the background, overwhelmed by Cool & Dre's euphoric flybuzz synths. "For Da Low" might be the record's biggest surprise: a "jazze phizzle pro-duck shizzle" with exactly zero (0) sine wave synths. Jazze Pha, probably under instructions to keep the mic away from Ross as long as possible, does a particularly belabored version of his homicidally annoying intro drop. If anything his voice reminds us how bad we could have it.
Port of Miami is a case of invention begetting necessity. Sure Ross needs these beats-- he has all the charisma of a cold meatloaf. But they need him all the same. He's a supporting actor, second fiddle to the real, Pro-Tooled stars, desirable not for his authority or presence but for his utter blankness. Def Jam could heli-drop any bozo into such glorious ambiance and score some hits; the album facilitates sedentariness. By contrast, Trina's "Told Y'all" is a quicker, snappier production than anything on Port of Miami. No coincidence Ross sounds a hundred pounds lighter in his guest verse on that track from four years ago.
Rick Ross may be bumbling and redundant and charmless, but he's not a disease. Drugs juke and jive with the zeitgeist, in and out of authority's searchlights, and this fall's college freshman won't blow lines or not because of Rick Ross. The fact he can't articulate himself for shit makes him more joke than jailbird. He's simply incapable of portraying the coke trade with Jeezy's glamour or Clipse's fatalism, of making a persuasive endorsement either way. Ross' real danger is the type of effort he countenances for mainstream rap. His girth belies his drive: He's not hungry at all.


Portland indie supergroup focuses on its strengths and boils its songs to their most essential ingredients on their best album in years.

American Gong

For a band with such an illustrious pedigree Quasi have strangely remained a niche act: Its primary members are Heatmiser's Sam Coomes and Sleater-Kinney and the Jicks' Janet Weiss, and it released records on Touch and Go and Kill Rock Stars. Perhaps that's due to other band commitments; perhaps because Quasi rarely perform outside of the band's Portland hometown. (Though they are about to embark upon a fairly extensive tour in support of this new effort.) Or perhaps it's because Quasi's lyrical content-- from the overt politics of Hot Shit to the silly-yet-obtuse children's poems of When the Going Gets Dark-- can be too arch for some. Or maybe it's just that the band's tricky mixture of jazzy piano honky-tonk, Southern blues guitar, and rambling psychedelica is a jarring concoction that can, for some, be an acquired taste. Whatever the reason, it seems like even the band's best reviews seem to note the band is unlikely to convert new fans.
Well, that is not the case with American Gong. The band's eighth album (and first with bassist Joanna Bolme) is both a summation of its career and an accessible introduction for new listeners. American Gong showcases Weiss' textured, musical fills and muscular beatkeeping and Coomes' bar-piano melodies and bent-note blues guitar riffs. But here they focus on those strengths and boil their songs down to their most essential ingredients: knotty, seasick melodies, heavy riffs, surprisingly sugary harmonies, and virtuosic drumming.
Quasi have always been enamored of repetition, both lyrically and musically, but often to a monotonous effect. Here that becomes a draw. "Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez", a mid-tempo rocker featuring barely more than its titular lyrics, makes Coomes' nasal, keening delivery as much a part of the song's syrupy groove as Weiss' undulating drum rolls. And the fuzzy guitar arpeggios anchoring "Bye Bye Blackbird" and cyclical structure and central refrain of "Rockabilly Party" accomplish the same thing.
American Gong is also blessedly free of typical Quasi jams-- which work live, but can drag on record. There are still lurching, aggro guitar solos and hints at foundations for what will become showcases for improv on tour, but the album's arrangements are simplified and mostly serve their vital hooks. There are some surprisingly quiet moments-- from the subtle, acoustic track "The Jig Is Up" to the mournful opening of piano-peppered "Everything and Nothing at All"-- that show off the band's dexterity. But with an experimenter's adventurous spirit, they eschew pure prettiness by adding a shambolic solo or acidic harmony to keep things from getting predictable. And 16 years into their career, that's a valuable thing. Here, a rewarding one, too.


On his most substantial solo release to date, the longstanding club MC slots into Manchester’s rich lineage of maverick dance musicians.

Somebody’s Child

For at least 15 years, Chunky has been the unofficial voice of Manchester’s underground club scene: a toasting host in the old tradition, but with a soft humor and musical demeanor that eschew the usual macho trappings of club MCs. He dips and bobs over hip-hop and grime with the same ease as drum’n’bass and leftfield techno, and his nasal soundbites and cheeky aphorisms—about rude basslines, the price of a bag of weed—are often the sound left ringing in clubbers’ ears as they make their daybreak journeys home.
Manchester has changed a lot since Chunky started spitting, with billions of pounds being pumped into the construction of new glass-and-steel monoliths throughout the city center, driving locals out and luring yuppies with a penchant for noise complaints in. And while the city’s cultural baggage still swings heavy—Factory Records, the Haçienda, those Gallaghers and their legions of parka-and-square-haircut acolytes—the hum of envelope-pushing electronic music has remained constant. With Somebody’s Child, the rapper-producer’s most substantial solo effort to date, Chunky slots into a rich lineage that runs from A Guy Called Gerald to Anz: one that emphasizes character, charisma, and, sometimes, just being a little odd.
In spite of where it was incubated, Somebody’s Child feels removed from the open hustle of the club or the itch of the afters. Instead, those nighttime influences arrive like solar flares, sparking aurora in scatters of color and light: The production is spare, particulate, and trippy, led by a kind of childlike curiosity that matches the gentle intimacy of Chunky’s vocal delivery.
He skips between metallic shards on “RNS,” rants over the sofa-slumped bassline of “GNG,” and claws through a foggy gloom on “Meh.” Opener “YES I” doubles as a mesmerizing stream-of-consciousness manifesto that leaps without hiccup between stage shows and Rosa Parks, Napoleons Dynamite and Bonaparte, shoulder barges and rounds of cards. He weaves candid interviews with younger family members between the broken dancehall of “Long N Strong,” collapsing the aloof, tinny percussion arrangements into moments of homely intimacy. In doing so, he applies the same qualities that have helped him warm up crowds in the dance, nudging them to move to the front, fill out the space, connect with strangers.
This freeform approach does have its limitations. There are sketches that feel like they’re still in the draft stage. The jazzy bop of “Giv U,” a tender dedication to his mother, struggles to hold up the golden weight of Lemn Sissay–esque lines like “If I could’ve chosen, know that I still would’ve made you my mam/Woulda stole, woulda killed, woulda found an excuse/To still go and make you my dukes.”
But it all, eventually, leads back to the dancehall, whether in the slick delivery of the slinky-hipped “@Me” or the dubwise ambience of “Spare the Rod.” Somebody's Child is every bit of Chunky distilled: soaked through the fine silt layers of thousands of hours helming booths, spinning records at the afters, sinking deep into YouTube rabbit holes, and then breaking bread with his family the next day.


The Houston rapper’s first mixtape since 2016 is full of unsparing storytelling, pusher anthems, and a dynamic array of trap production over which Maxo delivers some of his most effective writing.

Punken

Emekwanem Biosah, better known as the gritty Houston rapper Maxo Kream, is full of dark revelations. He often sounds unrepentant and unforgiving, but he comes off like a realist; exposed to the cruelties of life early, savagery and lawlessness became his standard. Set-tripping and hustling made him money and granted him a measure of power, and so he doesn’t regret the terror he’s caused, just the people he’s lost. There’s no going back: fast money is what he knows, and he’s cultivated a taste for violence. Punken, his first mixtape since being arrested in a 2016 drug and money laundering sting, takes a peek inside his operation and provides backstory. (Members of his Kream Clicc Gang were arrested for shipping drugs from California to Texas, and a narcotics task force seized 85 pounds of marijuana, 2,000 Xanax pills, and 13 guns.) The tape is family-oriented in the sense that shootouts and trafficking treat organized crime as a family business. This is “trap philosophy,” as he calls it on “Capeesh.” Punken is chock full of his most unsparing storytelling and unflinching raps that preach commitment to the mob, the mantra of a gang lifer.
Being loyal is the moral of almost all the stories on Punken. This principle shapes the way scenes play out on the tape. Songs like “ATW” and “Janky” relive scenarios where snitches destroyed families or crews. When the songs aren’t focused on those around him, they’re about distribution or his enterprise, packaging and moving work. “Maths teacher ask me Maxo why I’m always skippin’/I was trappin’ fractions after school like detention,” he raps on “Work,” the mixtape’s pusher anthem. When he isn’t moving drugs, he’s using them recreationally (“Love Drugs”). On “Pop Another,” he binges on Xans and lean, as each line slips into the next. But don’t lump him in with his peers, who he labels addicts. “All these rappers junkies talkin’ like they dope dealers,” he raps, scoffing, on “Roaches.” “One song they scammers the next song they killers.” Identity and authenticity are everything to him, which is why he’s so hell-bent on affirming his rep.
Maxo has always been an impressive rapper and an imposing force, maximizing his thunderous voice, but Punken has his most effective writing, his most complete performances, his most engrossing setups, and his most enduring images. His cadence constantly shifts on “Hobbies,” packing internal rhymes into choppy schemes before stringing individual phrases out. On “Janky,” the sentences all run together, but the messages are clear, sharply turning and segueing into each other. The single long verse builds to his indictment of the criminal justice system: “Court gettin’ judged by 12 whites/Who never had to struggle in they goddamn life.” He’ll often add a splash of color to liven a scene (“Little nigga, 13, got the older niggas plotting on him/Wrinkled ass tee even though he got the iron on him”). Then there are the potent mini profiles, delivered with a straight-faced, nearly wooden demeanor, like this of a coked-out uncle: “Petty thief and junkie, but he always had my most respect/When I was six I seen him stab a nigga, and he bled to death.”
So much of Maxo’s sharpest scene-setting happens when he’s reflecting, and Punken thrives on these moments. As a teenager, after he was kicked out of his parents’ home for arousing police suspicion, he moved in with his grandmother, and this transition inspires much of his writing. “Grannies,” a clear standout, features a rotating cast of characters traveling in and around her house, his grandmother being the only acknowledged authority. The song sketches vignettes of his relatives, revealing how they shaped his worldview: In one scene, he boosts his aunt’s car to commit a robbery, and when the cops come knocking, she follows protocol: “Never snitched, betrayed her family, but she always told my Granny.” Each snapshot is intense and effective.
As on past tapes, the content of Punken is plenty violent, but the beats aren’t as disquieting and feel far less dire than those on Maxo 187 and The Persona Tape. He’s replaced the gloom with more viscous and diverse beats, and the change of pace suits him. There’s even a Tame Impala sample. Newcomers like the Wilderness, Beatboy, and Mexiko Dro contribute colorful productions. Trap veterans Sonny Digital and Honorable C Note effortlessly share space with oddballs Tommy Kruise and Ethereal. His booming raps cut through any noise.
In the album’s closing seconds, “punken” is revealed to be Maxo’s family-given pet name. Only minutes after lamenting the damage Hurricane Harvey did to his mother’s home, and the toil his cases have taken on his family, his parents reiterate how proud they are of him. It’s a powerful few moments. The subtext is that everything he’s done, from juuging to making music, is in service to them, to the memory of the brother he lost, to the ones still living. After 43 minutes of criminology, Punken establishes itself as an autobiographical look into a hustler’s motives.


The Cure: Seventeen Seconds / Faith / Pornography

Seventeen Seconds / Faith / Pornography

Between 1980 and 1982, the Cure switched lineups, switched producers, made friends with the pop charts, and steadily toured Europe. They also got drunk, got weird, got in fistfights with one another, took loads of drugs, walked off tour, and generally danced through some surreal Kabuki version of the Libertines' recent press. We're looking for a word and the word is "tumult."
Which makes it kind of striking that they also, during those same years, released three remarkable records that represent the first phase of their many-phased career. These albums are the latest in Rhino's series of two-disc deluxe-package reissues: Stylish smoke-and-mirrors new-wave on Seventeen Seconds, dark pop drama on Faith, and all-out emotional assault on Pornography.
What's so remarkable about them? Start with Seventeen Seconds, which is a perfect example of the kind of record that's been subdivided out of existence-- a lying-in-bed-dreaming record, a guitar record that make no distinction between pop pulse, rock catharsis, and the atmospheric space we now mostly get from computers. With this album, it's all three at once-- all the austere, spooky grace of Robert Smith's Asian-art fixations gathering up to inhabit a clean, minimalist new-wave package. Album-accounting types might get antsy over how many of these tracks are about building mood, slinking along as the exact opposite of today's amaze-me-now aesthetics. But even the shiftiest of iPod types, buried beneath the covers some morning, will remember that an album like this doesn't work any other way. The sound is like a bare room with four guys in black occupying just enough space to let you wander on your own, and when they stop slinking around and let the pop move-- see "Play for Today"-- they do it with incredible elegance, winking and posing from behind the smoke machine.
And then there's Faith, which sounds best of the three in about 60% of normal human moods. It's best in those bean-counting album-consistency more-for-your-money terms, sure, but that's hardly the big draw; the thrill here is hearing the Cure shape up into the singular band that trailed on through the next couple of decades. This is a band, after all, that did something indie guitar bands haven't lately been so great at-- tapping into vivid emotional drama in a form that felt entirely unpremeditated, creating a fantasy world coherent and accessible enough that your average 13-year-old didn't need to be up on any scenes to get sucked into it. A band whose career highlights were all about shading one intense emotion into another-- blurring the line between severe depression and total joy, making bright colors and Christmas seem like the mopiest things ever, and eventually, with Disintegration, making an album that was both oceanically bleak and entirely sparkly-beautiful, to the point where you imagine ghost-couples ballroom dancing to it.
It all takes shape on Faith. Just listen to "The Funeral Party", a gorgeous, slow-moving synth wash that anticipates both Disintegration and the theme from "Twin Peaks". This album winds its way from ultra-sophisticated pop thrills ("Primary") to synth mope ("All Cats are Grey") to fierce snarls ("Doubt") to snakey exoticism ("Other Voices"), all without ever changing its raw, minimalist instrumental setup or really seeming to shift course at all. It's packed with effortless old-fashioned emotional communication; it's a stone-cold classic; and here we reach the point where critics temper fan-boy impulses and leave well enough alone.
All that emotional richness just brings us back to all that tumult, which somehow manages to color every inch of this material without laying hands on the performances: No matter how much the songs reek of crisis and desperation, the band seems as calm and on-point as a ballet troupe. That's precisely what makes Pornography-- which totally owns that other 40% of human moods-- work. This is one of those records where a band walks into the studio feeling stripped and grim and dedicates itself to creating something exactly as big and frightening, yelling at the producers that they really want that part to sound that ugly; Smith himself says he wanted the album to be "virtually unbearable."
Which would make this the best possible failure. The result isn't as double-dark bleak as people like to pretend, thanks to the same streaks of vigor and beauty that make it such an obvious precursor to Disintegration. Smith's said the two records are part of a trilogy, and you can hear exactly that: The minimalist sound gets abandoned for just the kind of big, booming drama they came back to at the end of the decade, and the tired wailing of a track like "The Figurehead" sounds perfectly natural next to something like "Fascination Street". The record's most harrowing moment turns out to be a single: "The Hanging Garden", which is mostly just the relentless pounding of a single drum, with Simon Gallup's signature bass sound (the moves of a snake and the same scaly texture) rumbling beside it. If Smith wanted "unbearable," he should have hired a different singer, because his voice makes this-- and just about everything else-- completely thrilling.
Listen through any of these recordings, in fact, and you'll find yourself hanging on his every breath and moan, every word sounding as perfectly in-place as the well-groomed claps and trills of a chart-pop production. On "The Hanging Garden", he makes an understated wail hit you like a scream, which isn't a bad lesson for the world's hammier Iggy-wannabes: Half of the this stuff's wild intensity comes from how calm and steely-eyed and purposeful and just plain sweatless he sounds, and I can't imagine any other approach that could make a listener feel comfortable singing along with lines like "Cover my face as the animals die." Run the mood over to forlorn, and it's "I could lose myself in Chinese art and American girls"; run it back to fierce, and it's "It doesn't matter if we all die"-- just three of countless phrases that come out of his mouth sounding way more important than anyone else could manage.
So that's three of the discs; the bonuses are a whole other animal. With so much of the Cure's single and B-side output already heavily compiled, this series has mostly restricted its extras to the kind of source material that proves a serious feast for box-set-owning Cure geeks: Scratchy home demos, rough studio takes, live performances, and associated rarities. Most notable on Faith and Pornography are the mood-setting instrumentals from the films that introduced the band on tour ("Carnage Visors" and "Airlock"); with Seventeen Seconds it's the A- and B sides, studio and live, of the sole single by Cult Hero, the project Smith and Gallup used to test their musical compatibility. (It sounds like either Ian Dury or Jilted John.)
The rest of the Seventeen Seconds set offers some terrifically-recorded live material, as does the second disc of Faith; the Cure put a lot of studio time and echo-pressing power into giving Smith's voice the huge open-air sound these performances get pre-packaged. Across the rest of Faith's extras, the rarities pick up into material that seems more than just archival. There's the much-loved "Charlotte Sometimes" single, but the real gems are a quartet of studio out-takes-- three surprisingly sprightly instrumental tests (Smith mostly just moans) and an early version of "Primary" that's pretty much a whole other equally good song. (Current acts who aren't Radiohead may take note of what writing in the studio can accomplish.)
Fullest of all, for obvious reasons, is the Pornography bonus; we're still working our way up to the sets of alternate takes and shelved songs that will probably accompany late-80s albums. Instrumental sketches of songs like "Demise" and "Temptation" can let you play Robert Smith at home (you are all of you welcome to record your own vocal tracks and send the results my way), and a totally-different early version of "The Hanging Garden" gives another weird look behind the tumult: Dysfunctional as the band may have been, they clearly still had the work ethic to write and rewrite songs until they turned out perfect. The live tracks here, sadly, aren't nearly as hi-fi as elsewhere.
And that, in six discs and too many words, is phase one of the Cure, neatly packaged and neatly slipcased. When Rhino started this series, the timing seemed appropriate: The new-wave revivalists may not have tried copping these moves yet, but bands like the Rapture certainly had. Listening through these albums, though, you might come to a different realization. Old-fashioned and rockist as these criteria may be, the fact is that these albums have a raw resonance that frees them almost entirely from time and trend. The next few packages, after all, will see them dance through any number of timely styles without losing that center. And by the time we reach the ones beyond that, they'll have created the teenage-escapist fantasy world for which they're most remembered-- one whose singular thrills haven't changed with time or age. I'm looking over the stacks, and I can't spot any other band I can say that about.


The NYC rapper YL’s music is full of slice-of-life details that capture the feel of aimless youth.

Born Again

YL’s personal, stream-of-consciousness raps are composed of the small and inconsequential moments that make life in New York City special: eating at the Dominican spot on the corner with the good breakfast, subway rides from Broadway to Bushwick, the little feeling of relief as the NYPD van doesn’t notice the smoke that you just exhaled. Born Again, the NYC rapper’s second collaborative album with the producer Zoomo, feels like you’re aimlessly drifting through the city by his side, seeing what he sees.
It’s easy to tell that YL has spent much of his life absorbing all of the hip-hop the five boroughs have to offer: colorful, post-Illmatic Queens rap like Capone-N-Noreaga, Tragedy Khadafi, and most specifically, Mobb Deep; the superficial swagger perfected by Cam’ron and Dipset in Harlem; the cinematic Wu-Tang classics.
Each song on Born Again feels like a slice of life. You won’t experience YL’s New York through the romanticization on a NYU student’s Instagram feed or the pages of a high-brow newspaper or the episodes of a television series that might as well be a fairytale. Whether he’s “Smoking eighths to The Purple Tape” on “It’s Gonna Hurt,” or reflecting on the “Nike SBs, pre-hypebeast era” on “Mike Bibby,” YL manages to capture the feel of New York, where anything might be possible but most days feel mundane and basic.
There are moments when YL’s songs are too humdrum. Occasionally it’s because his bars are unmemorable, like on “Stop Bag Splitting,” which could use a splash of hyperbole. Other times Zoomo’s production can sound overfamiliar—the beat on “All Change Isn’t Growth” brings to mind the smoky production on Pink Siifu’s ensley, but not as cozy. Fortunately, over the course of the album’s 10 tracks (not including two bonus cuts), the chemistry YL and Zoomo have built since Sunday Holiday, their 2019 album, is apparent. On “Price Tag,” Zoomo’s mellow loop is the good kind of familiar, like a home-cooked meal from your grandparents, and it lays the foundation for YL’s frivolous reflections: the time he was posted up on 125th street in Harlem, or the time his friend pulled up in the cleanest Polo outfit.
For the most part, YL is able to capture the intimacy of the New York hip-hop he grew up on. His imagery is invaluable, on “Youuu” and “Ragatoni,” a pair of cuts assisted by fellow New York rapper Starker, we’re aware of what he’s wearing, smoking, and drinking at all times. And on “Memory Bank,” it’s like you’re shadowing the emcee; there’s always a rough idea of his whereabouts on the New York City map. Listening to these tracks my mind constantly shifts between three reactions: I’ve been there; I’ve done that; I’ve felt that, too. But chances are, even if you grew up outside the city, you’ll still hear a piece of yourself, a moment you recognize. Born Again might be grounded in the five boroughs, but aimless youth is universal.

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Japanese all-female group and Boredoms offshoot continues to refine its unique, experimental voice.

Armonico Hewa

Japanese all-female group and Boredoms offshoot OOIOO's fifth album, 2006's Taiga, holds a more than respectable score of 78 on Metacritic, but it split Pitchfork listeners. The percussion heavy, often amelodic beast came off as needlessly difficult and even lazy to some staffers, yet Dominique Leone claimed it to be, in so many words, the easiest entry point in the OOIOO catalogue. I don't begrudge either extreme viewpoint: OOIOO's output is divisive for the simple reason that the band has a unique capacity to both wow and disappoint. To call the new Armonico Hewa one of the band's best mostly acknowledges the group has refined its curatorial voice.
While not overtly acknowledging Boredoms comparisons, the group (founded by original Bore Yoshimi P-We in the mid 1990s) teases expectant Boredom-crazed trainspotters by sonically orbiting the mothership but never quite giving in to the white-hot bombast of its predecessor. At the same time, the group frustratingly "rewards" the careerist patience of its growing fanbase by fiddling with band dynamics with every release. You really never know what you're going to get, but it usually ranges between a take on Slits-esque post-punk to the incomprehensible stutter-start No Wave splendor pioneered by the antecedent Boredoms catalogue, all meaning abstracted out into pseudo-lingual screech. The first track on Taiga, for example, is a mess of jungle drums falling over one another, Yoshimi belting out like a megalomaniac cheerleader and announcing the abrupt (if brief) renunciation of the group's melodic sensibilities. What results is often ballyhooed, sometimes brilliant, but it almost always leaves sonic travelers all packed up for one of the group's pop-tinged psychedelic sojourns out in the cold.
Armonico morphs between musical touchstones but engages the listener much more directly. "O O I A H" updates spacy funk with guitars in full face-melt mode and supporting members belting out a falsetto chant, but "Ulda" proffers a wonky, new age keyboard chord preset before morphing into a more familiar guitar-driven drone. Space-age rock guitar riffs remain a prominent signpost, but up against the monolithic axe slabs rub such dated synthesizer lines lifted from progressive electronic pioneers. Manic drumming abounds, metronomic but paradoxically indebted to the languid beatkeeping of centuries of world cultures. A notable referent is not only the rhythms of Africa, but those as transposed by progressives sharing an equatorial gaze such as Bruford-era King Crimson. OOIOO's drummer, Ai, came on board for 2006's Taiga, a record which arguably let its new percussive weapon direct the group's usually holistic jams. The group's previous record, Kila Kila Kila, suffered a similar problem in aimless, almost tuneless guitar riffage. Thing is, OOIOO operate best as a democratic entity, forming compositions out of the blind ambiguity of improvisation and the relative economy of instrumental balance. On Armonico Hewa, for the first time in years, the balance struck by the group's best work is approximated while largely preserving the same display of technical chops on their last two records.
The group is also best served by developing the possibilities of their constituents' voices as instruments. Highlights like "Be Sure to Loop" from Feather Float and the incomparable, uneven singsong chorus of Gold and Green's "Mountain Book" elevate the female voice, sometimes to endless heights and sometimes to fall off false plateaus. Armonico casts the molten steel of meaningless syllables into machine-gun bursts, sonar echoes, radioactive dirges, and girl-group coos of the group's best work. It's a monument to the endless possibilities afforded by an improvisational spirit, but more importantly it highlights Yoshimi and her band's tireless and ever-evolving voice.


Performed almost entirely at the piano, the follow-up to Tamara Lindeman’s 2021 breakthrough Ignorance raises dizzying questions with sensitivity and quiet hope.

The Weather Station: How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars

Tamara Lindeman recorded How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars in a short stretch of days as the world tipped into stillness. A year after completing her stunning fifth album as the Weather Station, Ignorance, the singer-songwriter returned to Toronto’s Canterbury Music Company to put down another LP. Since 2017’s The Weather Station, she had shifted her songwriting foundation from acoustic guitar to piano, a change of framework that she expanded upon with woodwinds, strings, and tumbles of percussion. Between March 10 and 12, 2020, Lindeman recorded live from the room where she’d made Ignorance, with sax, lap steel, clarinet, and electric organ adding dashes of shimmer and glisten.
Though the ringing “Ignorance” didn’t make it to the album of the same name, that song and the rest of Stars further her questions of what possibilities remain amid clouds of uncertainty. The songs, performed almost entirely on the piano, predicate a world undergoing permanent, devastating changes, but they float with delicate sensitivity. They add more nuance to a body of work that already teems with vivid detail.
The open air of Stars occasionally feels like an echo of the early Weather Station LP All of It Was Mine, returning to lighter arrangements that place Lindeman’s details in central focus. But now with a decade of adulthood behind her, Lindeman’s perspective is steadier, less springy, more careful. The cool, fluid movement of the album recalls the quieter periods of prolonged reflection between the dramatic flushes of passion. The gravity of the piano’s hammers and the airy lift of Lindeman’s voice feel like complementary forces, glassy like reflections in clear water.
Within her songwriting, Lindeman interrogates how her attempts at understanding the world around her can become an impediment. She raises dizzying questions: What in life is worth understanding? What should just remain a mystery? On “Ignorance,” she wrestles with finding meaning and the reality that naming something beautiful is another way of restraining it. She confesses, on “Sleight of Hand,” that she’s tired of unfulfilled promises and pretending to be amused by them. “Endless Time” is surprisingly graceful and gentle in how Lindeman addresses living in what could be the sunset of humanity.
The struggles she describes extend beyond the boundaries of personal circumstances or ruling institutions: We’re uniquely limited—and increasingly unwilling—in our capacities to understand one another, which breeds situations like bellicose school board meetings and snarling trucker caravans. Throughout Stars, her songs pull focus between the common threads of all relationships, from the platonic to the political. “Close your eyes/Go ahead and pretend it is how you see me best,” she sings on “Taught.” It’s a line that could be said in the heat of an argument or written in block letters on a sign at a protest.
When Lindeman permits herself to sidestep her worries, she reveals more of the heart that she so fervently protects. On “Sway,” she turns her attention to an overflowing love, and the metacognitive “Song” shines quietly with the hum of possibility. In the closing cover of John Southworth’s “Loving You,” Lindeman transforms a slice of AM gold by her fellow Canadian into a small buoy of cautious optimism, a pledge of endurance in fragile conditions. Like so many of her songs, Southworth’s writing suits intimately attuned and wide-angle views of the world. And though she highlights a vulnerable edge in “Loving You” by veering away from the original’s percussion and layered backing vocals, she adheres to its sentimentality enough to end the album with a slight uplift.
About halfway through the record, Lindeman raises the question in its title: “How is it that I should look at the stars?” One way is to consider that, by the time they become visible to us, they may no longer actually exist. In her songwriting, Lindeman assumes a similar perspective: She illuminates the world while acknowledging the fractures, and what we might have already lost. “I swear to god, this world will break my heart,” she sings, an observation that feels more true with each passing day. But hope streaks through Lindeman’s work, a reminder that even in the darkness, there’s still a reason to look up.


The Melbourne-based songwriter’s debut is sparse and hypnotic, drawing connections between her experiences of leaving a relationship and leaving a religious upbringing.

Maple Glider: To Enjoy Is the Only Thing

To Enjoy Is the Only Thing

Tori Zeitsch’s music aches with loss. The threadbare folk the Melbourne-based singer and songwriter makes as Maple Glider is skeletal in the most literal sense—absent of flesh, only intermittently lively, spare by necessity rather than choice. Her debut album, To Enjoy Is the Only Thing, conveys the hollow ache of being alone, the way loss wastes away at one’s very being. Early on in the record, she sings, plaintively: “I’ve served coffee in five different cities now.” Although she delivers the line with a smile—as an aside to a friend with whom she’s fallen out—it’s a vivid, visceral depiction of loneliness.
To Enjoy Is the Only Thing’s narrative throughline is transcience. Written during a period Zeitsch spent travelling in Europe and Asia while undergoing a protracted breakup, the album is rich with markers of unfamiliar places and experiences: a harsh, black-and-white coastline, a chilly Northern Hemisphere December, uncannily delicious red wine. But these vignettes are in service of something larger: To Enjoy Is the Only Thing draws connections between Zeitsch’s experiences of leaving a relationship and extricating herself from her religious upbringing. The album is less concerned with how it feels to lose another than how it feels to lose the feeling of devotion itself, and the act of finding yourself anew.
The way Zeitsch layers her metaphors—physical rootlessness as romantic rootlessness as spiritual rootlessness—could be impenetrably heady. But despite their sparseness, the album’s songs are hypnotic and tightly structured. On the chorus of “Swimming,” words cascade like beads cut from a string as Zeitsch translates a look from a lover into something dangerously liturgical: “Tell me my body has/Been so beautifully lived in/I almost fell apart/When you looked straight at my heart.” The lyric is ingratiating and incantatory, a deft translation of the way casual words from a partner can feel all too controlling. “Friend” plays like a Carpenters song slowed down and stripped bare; Zeitsch’s lyrics about the dissolution of a band and a friendship are made deceptively bright through their gorgeous, sighing melody: “Friend, you were on both sides/Pulling me up and dragging me down.”
As on “Swimming,” To Enjoy Is the Only Thing finds tension in parallels between submission to a lover and submission to a higher power, a kind of inversion of pop’s longstanding obsession with the sex-as-prayer metaphor. On opener “As Tradition,” the comparison is simple and discomfiting (“You and God, baby, love me the best/When I’m laid to rest/And only my body is left”) but on “Performer,” sex becomes a site of self-determination: “I do not know this man/But he is in my bedroom unfurling/And I am uncertain I can play as I have played before/But I am a performer, of course I’ll perform.” Neither song is particularly condemnatory; instead, they act as gentle explorations of meaning, ways of replacing one long-held belief with another.
To Enjoy Is the Only Thing is produced by Zeitsch and Tom Iansek, co-founder of Zeitsch’s Australian label Pieater. They practice careful, admirable restraint, barely expanding the record’s palette beyond gently fingerpicked acoustic guitar, piano, and a muffled kick; more leftfield details, such as the scramble of an AM radio on “Swimming,” are often only perceptible with headphones. There is one exception: On “Good Thing,” the record’s sweltering highlight, electric guitar and a full drum kit provide outsized heft. Zeitsch lets her voice rise to a rich, resonant belt, cutting off a relationship for the good of herself and her partner: “I guess that’s how we learn/By setting fire to things that bring us life/Before we’ve got to watch them burn.” In contrast to the uneasy ambiguities of the rest of the album, “Good Thing” provides a resolute, cathartic ending. The revelation, as hard-won as it may be, feels profound: There’s meaning enough in one’s own self-possession.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This Philly group skated on the edges of post-punk and no wave in the late 1970s, releasing just one 7". Thurston Moore shepherds their surprise comeback LP.

We're Here to Help

It's hard to think of a more surprising reunion than that of instrumental trio the Notekillers. The Philadelphia-based group skated on the edges of post-punk and no wave in the late 1970s, releasing just one 7" ("The Zipper" b/w "Clockwise") during a five-year career. What they didn't know when they broke up in 1981 was the single had a big effect on Thurston Moore and the band he was starting at the time, Sonic Youth. 20 years later, Moore cited that influence in Mojo magazine, sparking a renewal that led to an archival Notekillers release on his Ecstatic Peace label, and the reforming of the band, whose members were now split between Philly and NYC.
Flash-forward another nine years, and the Notekillers have finally crafted their first album of new music since reuniting*.* That may seem like a long time, but it's understandable given how busy the three musicians are-- especially guitarist David First, who has forged a three-decade career as a minimalist composer and sound artist. Besides, time seems rather irrelevant for this band. The sound of the 10 chugging tracks on We're Here to Help is as vital and distinctive as those they originally crafted the first time around.
It's a sound that's accessible and welcoming, but not easy to pin down. This is ostensibly structured punk rock, with melodic shapes that resemble verses and choruses. The closest reference point is another underappreciated instrumental outfit, Pell Mell. Some songs also recall the brain-vs-brawn math-metal of Don Caballero. But where both of those groups colored within their own designated lines, a good bit of Notekillers' appeal comes from their willingness to play rough and loose, and let their sounds spill around a bit. Sometimes they even stretch into feedback-drenched free jazz. And the band's melodic curves are deceptive-- often a catchy hook becomes a repetitive mantra before you know it, no doubt due to First's highly-developed feel for the powers of minimalism.
If that sounds too theoretical or abstract, don't worry-- We're Here to Help is way more fun than educational. The Notekillers make energy and momentum their main priorities throughout, and every song-- even the loosest and noisiest-- has its share of head-nodding beats and air-guitar-worthy riffs. For me, the best tracks feature a wide range of twists, leaps, and crescendos. Take "Papers": opening with a snaky guitar line akin to Pete Townsend's wiry intro to the Who's version of "Shakin' All Over", the trio swerves from rising rave-ups, to hypnotic chord repetitions, to fiery noise, to even a bouncy middle section begging for hand-clap accompaniment. Such fresh diversity makes it seem like the Notekillers could-- and hopefully will-- keep churning out this ecstatic music for a long, long time.


Originally self-released during lockdown’s first wave, these unpredictable modular-synth pieces toy with rhythmic convention while perpetually throwing time out of joint.

M. Geddes Gengras: Time Makes Nothing Happen

Time Makes Nothing Happen

Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary—a posthumously published set of fragments written as the French literary critic grieved his mother’s death—is a tumult of disembodied musings, one of which synthesist and producer M. Geddes Gengras repurposed for the title of Time Makes Nothing Happen. Originally self-released on Bandcamp in May, Time Makes Nothing Happen has been reissued six months later on experimental label Hausu Mountain, and the title increasingly reads more like a koan. If the pandemic lockdown in spring seemed to slow life to a crawl, how has our perception of time been further distorted, half a year on?
Recorded live by Gengras on modular synthesizer, Moog, and Elektron Machinedrum, the set’s teeming, sputtering morass of blips and squiggles has a mesmerizing effect. If every day since mid-March has felt a bit like Groundhog Day, this might be the soundtrack for it, reveling in the drudgery of quotidian routine.
Throughout Time Makes Nothing Happen, Gengras toys with the tropes of electronic dance music (repetition, meter, gridded quantization), only to gradually veer off into unkempt wilderness. The visuals accompanying both releases hint at that opposition: The cover of the Bandcamp release is a pane of glass that replicates a pattern of corrugated metal, while the Hausu Mountain art is a dense collage of video-game foliage. Building up and then erasing each component, the album can feel manicured in one stretch, corroded the next. Gengras’ approach makes his modular setup seem more like a terrarium in which total control is impossible; the would-be world-builder is resigned to patience, careful pruning, and a willingness to live with the outcome.
The title track summarizes the cumulative effect of the whole album in five minutes, presenting a seemingly impenetrable surface of bleeps, glassy timbres, and subliminal thumps. Gengras plays with expectations and anticipation as elements go blipping out of earshot and then fall back into place, to the point where you question if they ever actually vanished or were there all along. Rather than build toward release, the track instead dissolves into purgatory, like waiting on a subway platform for a train that scrapes and echoes down the tunnel yet never pulls into the station—and unexpectedly finding yourself standing not on concrete, but dirt.
In Gengras’ hands, motion itself becomes illusory. There’s a tingling electronic pulse at the start of “Time Is a Marble in a Bucket,” and the introduction of a deep bass throb conveys a quickening sensation. But just when a breakthrough feels imminent, you’re instead bundled in a staticky wool blanket, all crackle and dark space. Lullaby-like chimes are soon distended and paired with an approximation of a cowbell clonk on “Slip the Tape Through a Corkscrew, Pull and Repeat,” widening into a roomful of cuckoo clocks going haywire as they strike the hour.
The final tracks on the album add the Elektron Machinedrum and wind up in slightly more conventional territory; the only real surprise amid the straightforward, club-friendly thumps of “Bend (Edit)” and “Throttle” is that the floor never really drops away. Which feels a bit like an inversion of expectations, if only because after nearly an hour of dizzying befuddlement in the tangle of Geddes Gengras’ machines, when something finally happens on Time Makes Nothing Happen, it winds up feeling a little less interesting.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The American DJ, known for her breathtaking, hyperkinetic club anthems, delivers a wide-ranging, shape-shifting set of techno, breakbeats, and leftfield pop.

DJ-Kicks

When Avalon Emerson and her girlfriend made a cross-country road trip from Los Angeles to New York this summer, they shot a set of impromptu videos that neatly encapsulate Emerson's musical choices and mixing style: kinetic, evocative, and deeply personal. The terrain is both ever changing and continuous; speed is its own reward. Rarely veering away from 132 BPM, Emerson constantly blurs the line between the ecstatic and the anxious.
In recent years, Emerson has been more active as a DJ than a producer, but her DJ-Kicks set slots in four new tracks from her (as well as a remix of Austra), swiftly roving between breakbeats, abstract techno, electro, and leftfield pop, and even detouring into sweaty dance punk. For those familiar with her run of breathtaking techno tracks, the opening selection is the equivalent of screeching brakes. “I’m not a vibeman,” Emerson has said about her DJ style, and the startlingly faithful cover of the Magnetic Fields’ “Long Forgotten Fairytale” that she kicks off with dares to infuriate techno purists while speaking to Emerson’s ear and sense of craft. No matter how wild and abstract her productions can get, there’s always a melodic thread that holds it all together. Those diametrically opposed yet sympathetic elements are evident as the arpeggios of “Long Forgotten Fairytale” morph into the anthemic swirls and stretched putty of another new production, “Wastelands & Oases.” The chopped blips and snares of Waveforms’ “Breakers in Space” recall classic breakcore, but with a dreamy synth line undulating just beneath the hectic surface. So when the mix opens into the broad vistas of Emerson’s own “Rotting Hills,” the effect is especially lush, like clouds breaking to reveal a sunny day.
Throughout, Emerson gravitates toward synth textures that can feel crystalline and lucid one moment, barbed and abrasive the next, as when a glassy background turns gnarled as the Knife member Olof Dreijer’s techno side project Oni Ayhun lurches to life. Distorted, dark, and jumbled, it just as quickly veers right back into the sleek, SOPHIE-like pop of Oklou’s “Just Level 5 Cause It’s Cute.” Pulled from the artist’s Soundcloud page, it’s a giddy early highlight; Emerson reaches this plateau without any kick, her ascent powered by delirious arpeggios alone.
Sweet little lyrical snatches give off a feeling of contentment, as when the sped-up vocal lifted from S.O.S. Band’s “The Finest” hammers home the admission: “Time flies when you’re with me.” But just as often, what would otherwise sound heart-quickening intensifies into something anxious: The distorted disco strings of Smith & Hack and Soundstream are ratcheted up until their high frequencies trigger bouts of vertigo.
Release comes in the form of the two scruffy dance-punk cuts that pay tribute to two crucial dance-music scenes. Considered one of the founding tracks of Detroit techno, A Number of Names’ “Sharevari” gets a loving, sweaty, spot-on cover from the Dirtbombs, right down to Mick Collins’ European-by-way-of-Dracula delivery. Emerson blends that into !!!’s psychedelic “Hello? Is This Thing On?” A song by the Sacramento band remixed by a former member of San Francisco’s Wicked crew (though dating from when both parties had decamped for early-’00s NYC), it’s a claustrophobic highlight that gives way to another Emerson original. Burbling and bright, “Poodle Power” suggests she may have been spending time with Mort Garson’s early synthesizer experiments like Plantasia.
Emerson’s remix of Austra’s “Anywayz” winds down the set. Much like the Oklou track at the mix’s midway point, it favors a nearless beatless atmosphere, giving way to Katie Stelmanis’s Enya-like vocals and the ambient sound of rain. Though the set rarely lets up, Emerson finally takes her foot off the gas at the end, giving us a moment to breathe deep and take in the landscape. Only then can you see how far and fast her DJ-Kicks set has really traveled.


On her most rap-oriented release yet, Nicki jettisons all the industry madness, drowns out the noise, and creates rap the way she believes it should sound.

Queen

To reign over the charts, the critics, and the streets, a hip-hop star with pop ambitions must be everything to everyone while holding on tight to their identity. This balancing act is especially unforgiving for women, and Nicki Minaj has contended with these double standards and sky-high expectations for over a decade. Her biggest chart successes have come with songs like 2014’s bawdy “Anaconda,” and the effervescent “Super Bass” from her 2010 debut, but there are still incessant calls for some combination of the take-no-prisoners snarl of her breakout verse on “Monster” and serious art made up of reflection and maturity. But with Queen, Nicki jettisons all the industry madness, drowns out the noise, and creates rap the way she believes it should sound.
Due to hip-hop’s sexist, one-at-a-time cap on women dominating the genre, this is the first time Nicki has ever released an album with another commercially successful woman also climbing rap’s ranks. And whatever pressure—whether real or spectator-projected—is there, she rises to the occasion with Queen, her most rap-oriented full-length to date. Never lacking for charisma and attitude, her flows and cadences are a whirlwind of husky aggression and bouncing animation. She sends shots in every direction (“Don’t duck if it don’t apply,” she sneers on one track) with the confidence of a woman holding court in a kingdom she conquered. From Michael Jackson to Sizzla to Patti Labelle, she drops so many names and references that someone could get a halfway decent music (fashion and sports too) lesson if they Googled them all. They spill out as both venerating homages and a testament to her high-powered lifestyle.
With the album’s contentious rollout, marred by social media drama and middling singles, Nicki really buried the two big ledes here. “Barbie Dreams,” which adapts Notorious B.I.G.’s “Just Playing (Dreams)” and updates Nicki’s own “Dreams 07” cut from her 2007 mixtape Playtime Is Over, is a flamethrowing pink slip delivered with a wink. Positioning some of rap’s biggest names in her crosshairs, she playfully jabs at her peers, turning their reputations into reasons they won’t be seeing her in the bedroom. It highlights the kind of quick wit and humor that earned her the spotlight to begin with. And in a proud display of her Caribbean background, she enlists fellow Trini-rhymer Foxy Brown for the patois-flavored “Coco Chanel.” The two share a magnetic synergy as they trade verses over a dancehall production that interpolates the classic Showtime Riddim. The cross-generational collaboration is significant—particularly for Nicki, who is rarely caught on wax with other female rappers and considers Brown an idol.
With those peaks coming at either end of the album, the middle faces an impossible task of keeping the pace over an hour-long hike. The lows range from fine (“Bed”) to forgettable (“Thought I Knew You”), but the highs are immaculate: The electrifying “LLC” and the twerk-ready “Good Form” showcase the rapper’s inimitable technique, the one that turned heads in the first place. Little tricks, like her play on the phonetics of “good form,” which she alternates to sound like “good for him,” are the kind of flourishes that set her apart. On the slow-burner “Come See About Me,” she gives the bravado a rest and, over a swelling piano-laced production, reminisces about a past lover in a manner more hopeful than heartbroken. Like the sappy The Pinkprint closer “Grand Piano” or the yearning “Save Me” from Pink Friday, there’s always a moment of pause when she goes full-ballad. But even though singing isn’t exactly Nicki’s secret weapon, it offers an additional emotional texture that isn’t available to her when she’s flowing.
Nicki has spent her career engaged in a battle against being boxed in. The bubbly pop markers that separate her albums from her early mixtapes were evidence of her fear of becoming just another rapper. Queen is the safe and sturdy middle ground. The lyrical barbs are there, but nearly every song is glossy enough to spend some time in the Top 40. The album offers hints of nearly every era and iteration of her career thus far: the razor-tongued Nicki the Ninja, the sexually-charged Nicki Lewinsky, and even the zany Roman teases an appearance at the tail end of “Barbie Dreams.” The connections between past and present, between style and form, make Queen feel like her most creatively honest album. She remains a force—whether you’re willing to bow or not.

Young Money Entertainment / Cash Money / Republic


The London trio follows its now-classic 2009 debut with an album that's even more stripped down and minimal. Coexist takes the most distinctive things about the xx and eliminates virtually everything else.

Coexist

The xx's self-titled debut was the kind of record that filled a void most of us didn't know existed. Several currents of music flowed into the work of this London band to create something that felt strangely new. Singers Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim treated the pop song like a whispered secret, an achingly intimate exchange best understood in the general vicinity of a bed. And the xx foregrounded the hushed voices by process of subtraction, creating music with a daring sense of space. Under the production direction of third member Jamie Smith (now known as Jamie xx), the xx created a sound world where the simplest chord change was freighted with emotion. xx's minimal production reacquainted listeners with the expressive possibility of the guitar. Croft's gently picked lines, ultra clean with a tasteful mist of reverb, were quietly devastating in their own way, connecting the music with indie rock proper. The final piece of the puzzle was Jamie xx's careful beat programming, which was aware of up-to-the-moment trends in UK bass music but never pandered to them. These parts came together in a debut that sounded great at the time and has become a landmark. Channeling the spirit if not the precise sound of the softer and more cerebral end of R&B (Sade Adu is the spirit mother, Aaliyah the holy ghost) and mixing it with a pinch of DIY guitar music and a smart underpinning of rhythm, the xx created music rich with possibility. And while they didn't change the way music was made, they did have an effect on how it was heard. Without them, we'd be coming at music by artists like the Weeknd and Jessie Ware with different ears.
But you knew what was coming with album number two: Where do you go next? Do you light out for new territory or refine what's already there? The xx have chosen the latter tack, if you consider further stripping of their already-naked sound a refinement. Coexist takes the most distinctive things about the xx-- "shh" vocals, guitar patterns that feel like faint line drawings, lyrics that detail the most essential aspects of yearning-- and eliminates virtually everything else. It didn't seem possible that the arrangements on the debut could stand to have even more taken from them, but that's what's happened here. In that regard, the album feels in its own way brave. They're doubling down on what makes them stand out, which brings with it the real possibility of self-parody. Fortunately, the xx aren't at that point yet. So the most appealing thing about this record is that this band, having created a brilliant and moving sound, returns to it again for another 38 minutes. "Angels" drips with austere beauty, "Tides" begins a duet so stark it's breathtaking, the evocative piano in "Swept Away" is a nice wrinkle. This is still gorgeous stuff, and it's hard not to enjoy it while it's on. But while the edifice of their aesthetic still stands, in a few places it's getting a little rickety.
If generally successful on its own terms, Coexist also serves to remind us why exactly the debut was so brilliant. For one, xx had a very subtle and effective sense of dynamics. I'm thinking in particular of songs such as "Islands", with its halting beat that mapped the push-pull production of Timbaland onto an indie pop context. There are no such moments on Coexist, an album that moves from one song to the next like a slow-rolling fog. You can't help but wish Jamie xx had experimented a bit more and borrowed ideas hatched from his creative run of production work since the debut. With his remixes, DJ sets, mixes, and a brilliant single, he's proven to be one of the more adventurous and open-minded young producers going, hungry to incorporate all kinds of sounds and approaches into his music. The only real evidence of those explorations here is the steel drum that pops up on "Reunion", which brings to mind his use of the instrument in his single "Far Nearer" and gives Coexist a rare crack of light. There's no reason why the xx have to try something new sonically. But bands with a unique signature generally stick around by growing as songwriters and staying open to the possibilities of production. Coexist shows no such growth. With the music so focused and constrained, the album becomes slightly claustrophobic; where the first made you think about the different sounds that came from outside, this feels closed off.
In terms of lyrics, the xx have done away with specificity and chosen to focus on the travails of relationships using the broadest possible language. If I were to say, "You know the song that mentions a look in a lover's eyes?" you'd say, "Which one?" because some variation of the phrase pops up repeatedly. I see it in your eyes... the feeling in my heart... something has changed...the feeling goes on... never again... A handful of images and thoughts are shuffled like a deck of cards and doled out, seemingly at random. And while Croft or Sim don't need to get near Frank Ocean's level of sophistication for their music to work, with music so minimal, I find myself yearning for a line as pedestrian and relatable as "We watch things on VCRs." Too often, these words feel like placeholders.
Shortcomings aside, I find myself enjoying Coexist and returning to it. It's hard not to be disappointed given what came before, but the xx are still a special band, and time could possibly be kinder to their second LP as its place within a longer career comes into focus. For now, they've earned the right to make this record. Every band that creates a new world deserves a chance to return to it, to play around some more and see how much inspiration still exists. Asking for a third shot at it, on the other hand, is generally a harder sell.


The divisive and highly personal Welsh group continues to grow up, embrace its inner punk, churn out amazing lyrics, and sharpen its edge.

Romance Is Boring

One of the earliest Los Campesinos! singles came with a daisy chain of paper dolls tucked into the sleeve, each Campesino! holding hands and smiling wide. Had a razorblade popped out of 2008's We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, I doubt anyone would've blinked an eye. Over the past three years, Los Campesinos! transformed themselves from a smart, spry, neon pop group possessed with a seemingly boundless everykid exuberance to a bunch of noisy, angry, funny weirdos. Their near-blindingly bright debut LP, Hold On Now Youngster, sat on shelves for a scant eight months before the group followed it with We Are Beautiful, a squalid spleen-venter. They started touring with noise-rock bands. Gareth Campesinos!, lead shouter/songwriter, began barking for heavy stuff like Xiu Xiu and Parenthetical Girls on their Twitter; then, they got the guy from Xiu Xiu to guest on their latest record. In practically a year's time, Gareth went from phrase-turning, scene-critiquing clever kid to a sadsack of Steven Patrick Morrissey proportions, while his band loosened up and billowed out, their grandiose pop growing at once messier and more symphonic. It's all been pretty good.
And it all comes to a head here on Romance Is Boring, their third proper LP. All that they've managed to do over the three short years-- the not-so-quiet confidence and compositional precision of their earlier work, the weary weather-beaten sound of We Are Beautiful, and of course Gareth's hilarious, grotesque, and immensely affecting character sketches-- finds its way onto Romance. And Gareth, poor hilarious Gareth, though still very concerned with the goings-on around his navel, has turned his gaze outward just a bit; heck, the first line on the record has him pleading to "talk about you for a minute." They're still utter musical maximalists, still keen to shout when the time calls, and still led by a perpetual malcontent, but Romance Is Boring feels like the payoff of three years of extremely hard work; Gareth may never settle down exactly, but his band's sure getting some stuff figured out.
On sonics alone, Romance Is Boring is a triumph; bringing back We Are Beautiful's John Goodmanson as producer, they've expanded their already sizable instrumental palette, thrown a little more space into the still-crowded mix, and figured out a way to make the big moments count even more by pulling back during the ones that mean less. Whereas before, it occasionally seemed as though they were piling on instruments just to keep idle hands busy, they've learned not to do everything at once. Gareth's been badmouthing their early reliance on glockenspiel to just about anybody who'll listen these days, and there's definitely a deemphasis on the cuter side of things; that's clear as soon as you hit the turgid electronic breakdown of "In Medias Res". Those still-great old numbers from the Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP sound like they were written by some gifted children, the jarring wallow of We Are Beautiful like young adults; the comparatively subtle Romance Is Boring feels almost full-grown.
Gareth, too, is showing off some of the wisdom of his not-so-advanced age; a limber, funny, and often uncomfortably direct lyricist, he's a little less concerned with being clever here. One striking thing about Romance is how little concern there seems to be with rhyme schemes, as if expression of these thoughts couldn't be relegated to some prescribed formula. Because he writes well over the lines, songs start and end in strange places-- "Straight in at 101" kicks off with a knee-slapper about post-rock and winds down with a televised countdown of worst breakups ever-- but it has the naturalistic feel of a stream-of-consciousness confessional written by a dude who's been through a lot and spent even more time thinking about it. He's always managed to find the humor in the tragic, but here, he finds time for both. He begins one song detailing a friend's struggles with eating disorders, then leads off the next with a unison scream urging one and all to "calm the fuck down." Because so much of this seems ripped from the pages of Gareth's journal-- and because he still sings like he's gonna blow up at any moment-- the urgency of all that he's trying to convey can knock you flat. There may be slicker songwriters, and there are many more economical, but there are few more honest, more willing to put it all out there, and for many, more relatable.
For some, the cohesive, self-assured Romance will be their favorite Los Campesinos! record; others will continue to prefer the extremity of what came before. That's the breaks with an intensely personal band like this, I suppose; you're going to get intensely personal reactions. Speaking as somebody a little older than your average Campesino!, I can tell you I'm glad to be out of the shitstorm of my early twenties on display here, but I do remember it well; never better than when I'm listening to this band, for better and worse. I can remember at that age feeling constantly on the verge of something, but not knowing sure just what. Romance Is Boring smacks of that feeling, knowing more than before but still trying to hash out just where to go with it. It's fun watching bands grow; it's been a pleasure watching this band grow up.


The cool, shimmering* blackSUMMERS’night *is probably Maxwell’s most cohesive effort since Embrya, fit to soundtrack sessions of sex so exquisite and transcendental, tantric comes off as boring.

blackSUMMERS’night

Though consistently excellent, Maxwell has always sailed forward with a quiet confidence and little controversy, and he’s never really received the fanfare that fellow neo-soul progenitor D’Angelo probably wishes had skipped him. Their pioneering careers launched simultaneously, but *Brown Sugar, *D’Angelo’s studio debut, was released in July 1995 to immediate success. Maxwell turned in his first album, Urban Hang Suite, around the same time, but it was shelved for almost a year and when it finally did drop in April of 1996, it gathered steam slowly. You want both in your boudoir, but Maxwell is the yin to D’Angelo’s yang: While D’Angelo’s steamy devotion makes you kick off the covers, Maxwell is the cool side of the pillow.
Twenty years after his masterpiece of a debut, Maxwell proves he’s as chill as ever with the elegant *blackSUMMERS’night, *another collection of shimmering love songs that pushes on the limits of R&B and proudly embraces the “grown and sexy” label. With forever-sophisticated lyrics sung in his still-creamy voice over a band so tight they sound loose, *blackSUMMERS’night *is probably Maxwell’s most cohesive effort since his sublime (critics panned it; they were wrong) sophomore album, *Embrya—*and the first since then with no skippable tracks, the better to soundtrack sessions of sex so exquisite and transcendental, tantric comes off as boring.
Of course, thematically sound records have always been Maxwell’s strength. Urban Hang Suite is a concept album that exalted monogamy; the prequel to the current album*, BLACKsummers’night, *details another emotionally complex romantic relationship. Seven years later, *blackSUMMERS’night *picks up where that left off, with Maxwell writing yet another album that explores the full spectrum of love. Curiosity—the desire to dissect and examine a partnership—has always set him apart; Maxwell wants to push far past the surface, almost clinically so, of any easily won emotion. Here, that means he doesn’t shy away from vulnerability (“Feel like I’m average, the pressure’s so savage,” he sings on “The Fall”). His attempts at “happily ever after” continue to serve as musical inspiration, perhaps never as heart-wrenchingly so as in “Lost,” where he observes a former lover from a distance and takes note of her growing children and doting husband. Still, he somehow remains miraculously open, or maybe just fated, to falling in love: As he insists on “III,” “Cupid keeps targeting me/Arrows are flying, I can’t see.”
Maxwell’s head is usually in the clouds, and his music reflects that. Even “Pretty Wings,” a song about a breakup, is as light and airy as any ode written to a new crush. On *blackSUMMERS’night, *at least half of the album is drenched in sunshine. He juxtaposes sparkling chords with fed-up lyrics on “Gods.” His aching on “Of All Kind” contrasts with glittery synths. Through it all, his voice remains effortlessly calm.
In fact, there are moments when you worry that Maxwell might lose listeners because he’s so cool. Heat emanates off D’Angelo not just in “Untitled (How Does It Feel)”; Prince turns positively primal by the end of “The Beautiful Ones.” Maxwell is more esoteric, however, often appealing to your mind as opposed to your body. As delicate as “Hostage” is, it can skew negative when you really consider lyrics like, “I’m free inside the cage of your heart of gold/The prison of your love, it makes me so.”
Which is why a song like “1990x” stands out as necessary. Musically, it brings to mind Embrya, which found the singer diving deep into glistening oceans of sound, undulating bass lines, gurgling synths, with his sweetly effortless tenor floating and glinting atop. “1990x” is similarly submerged, with plops of steady and strong percussion echoing the line, “Lay here closely beside me, feel my heart as it’s pounded.” Along with lead single “Lake by the Ocean,” the perfect song for a summer wedding’s first dance, it grounds the whole album. The album may be musing or abstracted, but that’s his hallmark, and blackSUMMERS’night is polished to a blinding sheen. “I just want to live and do what I can to be my best/Nevertheless, never settle for less,” he sings on album opener “All the Ways Love Can Feel.” Mission accomplished.


With a 30-song record, the rising country star takes a closer look at Music Row clichés, writing in easy, idiomatic shorthand that plunges you directly into his world.

Morgan Wallen: Dangerous: The Double Album

Dangerous: The Double Album

Morgan Wallen’s voice can be as abrasive as the bottom-shelf liquor he sings about. When he auditioned for a short-lived stint on “The Voice” in 2014, Shakira called the aspiring country singer’s vocal tone “as manly as it gets,” a distinction he later built on with a testosterone-forward look that combines cut-off plaids, a mullet, and a party-starting catchphrase, “GAHT,” something like a good ol’ boy’s “dale.”
Wallen’s raucous side first got him noticed in Nashville, but baring his soul on songs like “Cover Me Up,” a bruised take on a Jason Isbell song, made him into a superstar. Even before the release of his second album, Dangerous, the Sneedville, Tennessee native had racked up 3.4 billion streams, including four country airplay No. 1s and a Billboard top 10, culminating, infamously, in being disinvited from Saturday Night Live after video surfaced of Wallen not wearing a mask at a party. Dangerous has 30 songs, two discs, and two modes: the “rowdy redneck” raising hell in the boondocks, and the downhome romantic dreaming of his own piece of sky. Though Wallen’s idea was to split the album according to theme, things aren’t quite as delineated as that. Even at his most boisterous, Wallen is given to introspection, and he can make the straightest love song gnarly.
The clichés of Music Row are well-worn; Wallen looks at them closer to find a new grain. On “865,” he is a poet laureate of boozy desperation, coming closer to drunk-dialing with each shot; on the Thomas Rhett co-write “Whiskey’d My Way,” he has the pathos of a wounded pup, apologetically approaching a crush over pedal steel. For all their intimacy, these are songs made to fill football stadiums; Dangerous’ sole producer Joey Moi provides a sheen that can make Wallen’s music feel as epic as anything by Adele. With its rousing chorus and super-sized guitar solo, “Silverado for Sale” makes a love song to a truck feel fresh, as Wallen realizes, glassy-eyed, that his memories are etched into each wrinkle of its bench seat.
Part of what makes Wallen’s writing so magnetic is the easy, idiomatic shorthand that plunges you directly into his world. Take the tongue-twisting lines that open “Somebody’s Problem,” a tender ballad to a free-spirited woman that’s among Dangerous’ very best songs: “A ’Bama-red 4Runner pulled into the party/With a 30A sticker on the back windshield,” he sings, an image so vivid you can practically smell the gasoline. He has a riddler’s ear for wordplay and an enchantment with the everyday that makes “dodging potholes in my sunburnt Silverado,” as he sings on the piano-led opener “Sand in My Boots,” sound downright alluring. Wallen’s biggest crossover hit to date, the Shane McAnally co-write “7 Summers,” is lit by the rosy glow of lost love. The daydream is not without bite: Wallen spells out the lyrics’ double meaning with a stand-up comic’s knack for timing. “That was seven summers of coke..../And Southern Comfort,” he sings, a hook that plays innocently enough for country radio but holds a knowing wink for those who really like to rage.
As Wallen’s audience has broadened, so has his taste. Dangerous’ big and breezy title track is a maximalist flip of the angular art-pop that packed out Scottish indie discos in the ’80s, and the booming drums and ’80s synths of “This Bar” wouldn’t sound out of place on Taylor Swift’s Red. A weaker spot is “Wasted on You,” with a blend of trap snares and guitar twang that isn’t quite as fluid as the country/hip-hop hybrids of, say, Hunt. But among the album’s 30 tracks there are few skips. You could lose the slightly formulaic “Only Thing That’s Gone,” which wastes a Chris Stapleton feature, and the overly literal “Outlaw.” The boisterous “Country A$$ Shit” riffs on the fun-dumb ethos of Wallen’s 2017 Florida Georgia Line collaboration “Up Down” but loses its knockabout charm.
Wallen’s best songs need less adornment, as with the album’s bookends “Quittin’ Time” and “Sand in My Boots,” a heartbreak kid’s confessional that echoes as if he is singing from a church’s pulpit. “Somethin’ ’bout the way she kissed me tells me she’d love Eastern Tennessee,” Wallen sings, as his barnacled voice cracks into a howl that could reach up to the neon moon. The sentiment is familiar enough, but when Wallen sings it, it’s enough to make you shiver.

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With her fourth album, the pop songwriter reaches a welcome sense of self-assurance. But if this was supposed to be an introspective record, that’s not what’s happening musically.

Brightest Blue

A folktronica artist who pivoted to mainstream pop, Ellie Goulding stumbled upon longevity in the 2010s with one fluke hit after another. Both “Lights” and “Burn” began as bonus tracks from modestly performing albums (2010’s Lights and 2012’s underrated Halcyon, respectively) before gradually crossing over. “Love Me Like You Do,” a one-off from the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack that she didn’t even write, achieved nearly a billion Spotify plays—but the subsequent album, 2015’s Delirium, yielded only one outright hit. Its formulaic songs rarely took advantage of Goulding’s malleable, oft-sampled warble, leaving her with a distinctive voice in only the most literal sense. A half-decade of EDM collaborations and false starts later, Goulding returns with Brightest Blue, an album about taking control of her life and identity—with a few proven hits tacked onto a bonus EP billed as Side 2. Pop music hasn’t been fun for some time, so a quieter record makes sense commercially as well as spiritually. But Brightest Blue has a unique problem: Its suffocating production undermines the more grounded lyrics.
If Goulding intended to make an introspective record, that’s not what’s happening musically. This is a crowded, obscenely expensive-sounding album. Though the crew is small by pop standards (including previous collaborators Jim Eliot and Joe Kearns), multiple songs feature real orchestras and real choirs competing with synthetic orchestras and Goulding’s own multi-tracked vocals. This isn’t always a bad thing; “Love I’m Given” updates the post-Adele songs from 2012’s Halcyon, even mimicking the looped vocal riff from “Only You.” But after five or six other electronic-gospel hybrids, the title track doesn’t stand out. When “Tides” breaks through the monotony, the skittering, trebly production feels too small to compete against the surrounding density.
Beneath that density, there are genuine strides. “Woman” works by focusing on Goulding herself and how she’s grown, rather speaking for everyone else. It’s hard to hear over the Inspiring, Motivational string arrangement and the Pasek-and-Paul chorus, but there are lovely sentiments about aging in public: “Free-falling through the photographs that paid my bills” might be the most evocative line on any Goulding album. On “How Deep Is Too Deep,” a clear standout, she sneaks in some unconventional but welcome metaphors: “You cast me in your thriller just to cut the scene out,” and, “You wanna wash me off but you want me as your tattoo.”
That kind of emotional depth feels like a necessary correction from Delirium, but while Blue is thoughtful and beautiful, it’s a drag to sit through. The interludes have more personality than the full-length songs; the hyper-processed sketch “Wine Drunk” is more memorable than “Bleach,” the song it precedes. Serpentwithfeet’s verbose opening stanza on “Start” offers the kind of quirkiness missing elsewhere: “Every summer my friends prevent me from using the grill/They believe Cancer men don’t have the will/To play with fire.” The other collaborations, concentrated on Side B, can’t match the album’s soul-searching. Goulding gives as much as she can when her duet partners are pop sadboi Lauv and veteran edgelord blackbear, but without the insight of the proper album, all that’s left is underwritten background music. These songs aren’t actively bad, but their trend-chasing is distracting, and a collaboration with the late Juice WRLD makes for an oddly melancholic closer. Continuing the contradictory streak of Goulding’s career, Brightest Blue’s often compelling narrative of self-assurance still ends with an identity crisis.

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