Four years after the landmark Channel Orange, two new releases from Frank Ocean find him writing richly emotional songs for a quieter, more meditative space.

Blonde / Endless

At first, Frank Ocean was simply a great storyteller. Then he became the story—an avatar for all of our fluid modern ideals. He could be the dynamic human of the future, exploding age-old binaries with an eloquent note, melting racial divisions with a devastating turn of phrase or quick flit to falsetto. He breathed hope. Then he went away.
Years clicked by. It was easy to worry. There are precedents for this sort of thing, for disappearances, for the self-implosion of black genius. Lauryn Hill. Dave Chappelle. “Black stardom is rough,” Chris Rock once said. “You represent the race, and you have responsibilities that go beyond your art. How dare you just be excellent?” The Rock quote is from a 2012 profile of the reclusive D’Angelo, who felt compelled to release his first album in 14 years following the shooting of Michael Brown; the moment spurred him on.
Faced with a hellish loop of police brutality, other musical leaders like Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé came forth with brilliant righteousness as well. But not Frank. Though he posted several elegant messages online, reacting to horrors in Ferguson and Orlando, his relative silence only grew louder as tensions outside continued to rise. The stoic empathy he beamed throughout Channel Orange was missed. There was a yearning for his perspective—how he could soothe without losing sight of what’s important. How he allowed us to escape within his carefully drawn characters while never letting us off the hook. How his voice was allergic to nonsense, how it could shatter a heart into dust.
It still can. “RIP Trayvon, that nigga look just like me,” he sings on “Nikes,” the opening track from Blonde, his wary exhale of a new album. In the song’s video, Frank holds up a framed photo of the 17-year-old martyr, the boy’s sad eyes tucked inside a hoodie. Even now, four years after the Florida teen was shot and killed with Skittles in his pocket, the line jolts. It’s also the most overtly political statement Frank makes across the entire record. And “Nikes” is hardly a call to arms. The song is a woozy, faded, screwed-down odyssey, replete with helium warble and dewy third eye—and it’s actually one of the album’s most propulsive tracks.
On its surface, Blonde seems tremendously insular. Whereas Channel Orange showed off an expansive eclecticism, this album contracts at nearly every turn. Its spareness suggests a person in a small apartment with only a keyboard and a guitar and thoughts for company. But it isn’t just anyone emoting from the abyss, it’s Frank Ocean. In his hands, such intimacy attracts the ear, bubbles the brain, raises the flesh. These songs are not for marching, but they still serve a purpose. They’re about everyday lives, about the feat of just existing, which is a statement in its own right. Trayvon Martin would be 21 today, and Blonde is filled with feelings and ideas—deep love, heady philosophy, despondent loss—that he may have never had a chance to experience for himself. The stories Frank tells here find solace in sorrow. They’re fucked up and lonely, but not indulgent. They offer views into unseen places and overlooked souls. They console. They bleed. And yes, they cry.
The power of Frank’s work often comes via extreme transparency, but he’s not writing diaries. It’s about how he’s able to locate the crux of any situation, or expose undue artifice, or peel things back to their naked core. Like how he skewed L.A. privilege without breaking a sweat on “Super Rich Kids” or broke down the Coachella generation’s bored numbness in five minutes on “Novacane.” Recently, he’s expanded this skill beyond music. It’s in the “Nikes” video, which both takes advantage of movie magic, like lighting a man (Frank?!) on fire, only to deflate the trickery by also showing the crew of extinguishers putting him out. It’s in the oversized, seven pound, coffee table magazine Boys Don’t Cry, which came out along with the new album; in it, screenshots of internet histories—perhaps the most accurate mirror of our modern selves—are on full display, along with literally naked bodies on and around his beloved sports cars, and charmingly unfiltered interviews with fellow artists and friends. (These chats can get a bit stoner-y, though amusingly so; in one, Frank asks Lil B, “is money sexy?”)
And this transparency was also expressed in the current campaign’s prolonged rollout, which at one point had fans watching Frank watch paint dry as part of a live stream lead-up to a visual album called Endless. As a piece of filmed entertainment, Endless is painfully dull, and perhaps that’s the point. As we watch Frank build a spiral staircase with his bare hands, the piece offers a sort of anti-promo message that comments on how an album’s release strategy can often diminish the art it’s built to uphold nowadays. Or maybe, you know, it’s just really dull. Either way, the Endless soundtrack is much more exciting—46 minutes of music that plays like a mixtape, sliding from song to song, demo to demo, like scrolling through Frank’s hard drive of unreleased material. It’s an intriguing peek into his process, and it contains some of the rawest vocal takes he’s ever put out—like on the strung-out power ballad “Rushes”—but it lacks the clarity of Blonde. (In a neat inversion, it now looks like Frank used the relatively minor Endless to fulfill his major label contract and then self-released Blonde, the main event—though both were exclusives to Apple Music, putting into question what “self-released” even means at this point.)
With Blonde’s unobtrusive instrumentation—large swaths go by without any drums whatsoever—the album could be mistaken for background music. But then Frank’s voice enters, and the overall quietness turns into a soft spotlight, capturing attention. It’s a technique pioneered by noted minimalists like Brian Eno and Rick Rubin, both of whom are included in Blonde’s who’s who list of contributors and inspirations. Many tracks feel emptied, with only the plain strumming of an electric guitar or foggy atmospherics left behind. But they mesmerize. Even a song like “Nights,” which sounds straightforward at first with its shards of silvery chords and midtempo beat, eventually turns into a strange shredding solo before ending with what sounds like a Drake dream heard underwater. “Nights” is not an anomaly. It’s the album’s centerpiece, by an artist who is following nobody but himself.
Frank is 28 now, and his voice has grown stronger and more dexterous, while some of his tales have become more abstract. “Skyline To” is essentially a tone poem about sex, summer, and California haze backed by mood and mystery. “Godspeed” nods to gospel but stays grounded in its prayer to steadfast but broken love; a short story in the magazine, also called “Godspeed,” reads like uncanny science fiction but is actually based on Frank’s boyhood. Certain things are clear, though. The big questions are on his mind. He’s aware of his mortality now. He’s thinking about families, about what it means to live outside society, whether that’s a sustainable goal. He contemplates settling down with “two kids and a swimming pool” on “Seigfried,” a song that works in words by Elliott Smith and ends with a spaced-out soliloquy about living life in the red before a random solar flare brings chaos unto earth. This is not light fare. But the touch is oh so feathery. On “Solo,” he contemplates various stages of singledom, from the jacket-throwing hedonism to the smoked-out emptiness, with nothing but a churchly organ backing him up. It’s a stunning piece of songwriting that ultimately finds some peace with being alone. It sounds like a friend.
Later on, “Solo (Reprise)” marks the album’s only major vocal guest appearance, with a devastating, head-spinning verse from André 3000. It pinpoints one of Blonde’s major themes: nostalgia. André looks back on his 20 years in hip-hop and feels duped by rappers who don’t write their own rhymes. “I’m hummin’ and whistlin’ to those not deserving,” he says, amid a conclusion that will likely haunt Drake’s nightmares for years. “I’ve stumbled and lived every word, was I working just way too hard?” There is disappointment in his voice, and some bitterness. André’s disillusionment could be a cautionary tale for Frank, who often uses the album as an opportunity to look back with a rosy tint: climbing trees, Michael Jackson, cannonballs off the porch, Stevie Wonder. It makes sense for an artist who titled his first major project Nostalgia, Ultra. when he was only 23. Longing looks good on him, though, especially when he’s able to harness it to aching effect on “Self Control” and “White Ferrari,” songs that fight off despondency with a sadness that feels three-dimensional.
The album ends with a final look in the rearview, in the form of spliced-up old interviews with some of Frank’s young friends as well as his brother Ryan, who was around 11 at the time. A cozy keyboard rolls in the background as the boys talk about who they are and what they wish for. Carefree laughs—the kind that adults can’t seem to utter—are looped. Harsh static constantly intrudes, though, hinting at the distortions of time. These brief talks are also transcribed in the magazine alongside photos, and when asked about his dream superpowers, Ryan says, “I want to be invisible, I want to fly, and I want to be invincible.” His bright eyes peer out from under a Supreme cap and pink bandana. He looks like he might pull it all off.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Daft Punk’s debut, the duo’s greatest illusion yet.

Homework

Daft Punk’s Homework is, in its pure existence, a study in contradictions. The debut album from Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo arrived in 1997, right around the proliferation of big-beat and electronica—a twin-headed hydra of dance music fads embraced by the music industry following the commercialization of early ’90s rave culture—but when it came to presumptive contemporaries from those pseudo-movements, Homework shared Sam Goody rack space and not much else. Daft Punk’s introduction to the greater world also came at a time when French electronic music was gaining international recognition, from sturdy discotheque designs to jazzy, downtempo excursions—music that sounded miles away from Homework’s rude, brutalist house music.
In the 21 years since Homework’s release, Daft Punk have strayed far from its sound with globe-traversing electronic pop that, even while incorporating other elements of dance music subgenres, has more often than not kept house music’s building blocks at arms’ length. 2001’s Discovery was effectively electronic pop-as-Crayola box, with loads of chunky color and front-and-center vocals that carried massive mainstream appeal. Human After All from 2005 favored dirty guitars and repetitive, Teutonic sloganeering, while the pair took a nostalgia trip through the history of electronic pop itself for 2013’s Random Access Memories. Were it not for a few choice Homework tracks that pop up on 2007’s exhilarating live document Alive 2007, one might assume that Homework has been lost in the narrative that’s formed since its release—that of Daft Punk as robot-helmeted superstar avatars, rather than as irreverent house savants.
But even as the straightforward and strident club fare on Homework remains singular within Daft Punk’s catalog, the record also set the stage for the duo’s career to this very day—a massively successful and still-going ascent to pop iconography, built on the magic trick-esque ability to twist the shapes of dance music’s past to resemble something seemingly futuristic. Whether you’re talking about Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s predilection for global-kitsch nostalgia, their canny and self-possessed sense of business savvy, or their willingness to wear their influences on their sleeve like ironed-on jean-jacket patches—it all began with Homework.
It couldn’t possibly make more sense that a pair of musicians whose most recent album sounds like a theme park ride through pop and electronic music’s past got their big break at Disneyland. It was 1993, and schoolboy friends Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s rock band with future Phoenix guitarist Laurent Brancowitz, Darlin’—named after a track from the 1967 Beach Boys album Wild Honey that the three shared an affinity for—had disbanded after a year of existence that included a few songs released on Stereolab’s Duophonic label. (Melody Maker writer Dave Jennings notoriously referred to their songs as possessing “a daft punky thrash,” which led to the pair assuming the Daft Punk moniker.)
While attending a rave in Paris, Bangalter and Homem-Christo had a chance encounter with Glasgow DJ/producer Stuart McMillan, the co-founder of the Soma Recordings dance label; like any aspiring musicians would, they gave him a demo tape of early Daft Punk music. The following year Soma released Daft Punk’s debut single “The New Wave,” a booming and acid-tinged instrumental that would later evolve into Homework cut “Alive.”
A follow-up, “Da Funk” b/w “Rollin’ & Scratchin’,” hit shops in 1995; according to a Muzik profile two years later, its initial 2,000-platter pressing was “virtually ignored” until rave-electronica bridge-gap veterans the Chemical Brothers started airing out its A-side during DJ sets. A major-label bidding war ensued, with Virgin as the victor which re-released “Da Funk” as a proper single in 1996 with non-Homework track “Musique” as its B-side. During this time, Bangalter and Homem-Christo casually worked on the 16 tunes that would make up Homework in the former’s bedroom, utilizing what The Guardian’s Ben Osborne referred to in 2001 as “low technology equipment”—two sequencers, a smattering of samplers, synths, drum machines, and effects, with an IOMEGA zip drive rounding out their setup.
Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s work ethic while assembling the bulk of Homework was of the type that makes sloths appear highly efficient by comparison: no more than eight hours a week, over the course of five months. “We have not spent much time on Homework,” Bangalter casually bragged to POP. “The main thing is that it sounds good… We have no need to make music every day.” The songs were crafted with the intention of being released as singles (“We do not really want to make albums,” Bangalter claimed in the same interview), Homework’s eventual sequencing a literal afterthought after the pair realized they had enough material to evenly fill four sides of two vinyl platters. “Balance,” the pair said in unison when asked about Homework’s format-specific sequencing in Dance Music Authority following the album’s release. “It is done for balance.”
Indeed, Homework is practically built to be consumed in side-long chunks; taking the album in at a single 75-minute listen can feel like running a 5K right after eating an entire pizza. Its A-side kicks off with the patient build of “Daftendirekt”—itself a live-recording excerpt of introductory music used during a Daft Punk set at 1995’s I Love Techno festival in Ghent—and concludes with the euphoric uplift of “Phoenix”; the B-side opens with the literal oceanic washes of “Fresh” before stretching its legs with the loopy, Gershon Kingsley-interpolating “Around the World” and the screeching fist-pump anthem “Rollin’ & Scratchin’.” The third side keeps things light with the flashy, instructional “Teachers” before getting truly twisted on “Rock’n Roll,” and the fourth side takes a few rubbery detours before landing on the full-bodied “Alive”—the thicker and meaner final form of “The New Wave”—and, quixotically, a slight and rewound “Da Funk” return, aptly titled “Funk Ad.”
Bangalter explained to POP that the title of Homework carries a few meanings: “You always do homework in the bedroom,” he stated, referencing the album’s homespun origins before elaborating on the didactic exercise that creating the album represented: “We see it as a training for our upcoming discs. We would as well have been able to call it Lesson or Learning.” That instructional nature is reflexive when it comes to listeners’ presumptive relationship with the album, as Homework practically represents a how-to for understanding and listening to house music.
Nearly every track opens with a single sonic element—more often than not, that steady 4/4 rhythm inextricably tied to house music—adding every successive element of the track patiently, like a played-in-reverse YouTube video showcasing someone taking apart a gadget to see what’s inside. Such a pedagogic approach can have its pitfalls; there’s always a risk of coming across as too rigid, and Daft Punk arguably fell victim to such dull, fussy didacticism later in their careers. But they sidestep such follies on Homework by way of the purely pleasurable music they carefully assembled, piece-by-piece, for whoever was listening.
Under the umbrella of house music, Homework incorporates a variety of sounds snatched from various musical subgenres—G-funk’s pleasing whine, the cut-up vocal-sample style of proto-UK garage made popular by frequent Daft Punk collaborator Todd Edwards, disco’s delicious synths and glittery sweep—to craft a true musical travelogue that also hinted at the widescreen sonic scope they’d take later in their careers. Above all, the album represents a love letter to black American pop music that’s reverberated through Daft Punk’s career to date—from Janet Jackson’s sample of “Daftendirekt” on her 2008 Discipline track “So Much Betta” to Will.i.am’s failed attempt to remix “Around the World” the year previous, as well as the duo’s continued collaborations with artists ranging from Pharrell to Kanye West and the Weeknd.
The spirit of house music’s Midwestern originators is also literally and musically invoked throughout. Over the winding house-party groove of “Teachers,” Daft Punk pay homage to their formative influences, ranging from George Clinton and Dr. Dre to Black house and techno pioneers like Lil Louis, DJ Slugo, and Parris Mitchell—and in a meta twist, the song’s structure itself is a literal homage to Mitchell’s 1995 Dance Mania! single “Ghetto Shout Out,” an interpolation clearly telegraphed in the middle of Daft Punk’s astounding contribution to BBC’s Essential Mix series in 1997.
Alongside Daft Punk’s preoccupations with American popular music, Homework also carries a very specific and politically pointed evocation of their native Paris in “Revolution 909,” the fourth and final single released from Homework that doubled as a critique of anti-rave measures taken by the French government after Jacques Chirac assumed power in 1995. “I don’t think it’s the music they’re after—it’s the parties,” Homem-Christo told Dance Music Authority, with Bangalter adding, “They pretend [the issue is] drugs, but I don’t think it’s the only thing. There’s drugs everywhere, but they probably wouldn’t have a problem if the same thing was going on at a rock concert, because that’s what they understand. They don’t understand this music which is really violent and repetitive, which is house; they consider it dumb and stupid.”
“Revolution 909” opens with ambient club noise, followed by the intrusion of police sirens and intimidating megaphone’d orders to “stop the music and go home.” The accompanying Roman Coppola-helmed music video was even more explicit in depicting the frequent clash between ravers and law enforcement that marked dance music’s rise to the mainstream in the early-to-mid-’90s; amidst a kitschy instructional video on making tomato sauce, a pair of cops attempt to disperse a rave, a young woman escaping one of their grasps after he becomes distracted by a tomato sauce stain on his own lapel.
It’s been rumored, but never quite confirmed, that Bangalter himself appears in the video for “Revolution 909”—a slice of speculation gesturing towards the fact that Daft Punk’s Homework era was the time in which the duo began embracing anonymity. The now-iconic robot helmets wouldn’t be conceived of until the Discovery era, and the magazine stories that came during Daft Punk’s pre-Homework days were typically accompanied by a fresh-faced photo of the pair; during Homework’s promotional cycle, however, they donned a variety of masks to obscure their visages, including frog and pig-themed disguises.
In conversation with Simon Reynolds for The New York Times in 2013, the pair cited Brian De Palma’s glam-rock masterpiece Phantom of the Paradise as artistic inspiration for their decision to retain visual anonymity, and Daft Punk’s press-shy tendencies (since Homework, the interviews they’ve chosen to take part in have been few and far between) are firmly situated in a long tradition of letting the music do the talking in dance culture—from the sci-fi evasiveness of Drexciya and Aphex Twin’s relative reclusiveness to the preferred reticence of Burial and his contemporaries in the UK bass scene.
But refusing to turn themselves into rock stars upon Homework’s release also afforded Daft Punk a crucial element that has undoubtedly aided their perpetual ascent to the present-day: control. Retaining a sense of anonymity was but one of the conditions that the pair struck with Virgin upon signing to the label before Homework’s release; while the music they released under the label (before signing to Columbia in 2013) was licensed exclusively to Virgin, they owned it through their own Daft Trax production and management company.
But Homework proved influential in other, more explicitly musical ways. G-house, an emergent dance subgenre in the mid-2010s dominated by acts like French duo Amine Edge & Dance, borrows liberally from Daft Punk’s own musical mash of hip-hop’s tough sounds and house music’s pounding appeal; the dirty bloghouse bruisers of Parisian collective Ed Banger—founded by Pedro Winter aka Busy P, who acted as the group’s manager until 2008—would literally not exist were it not for Homework, and that goes double for the party-hardy bloghouse micro-movement of the mid-late 2000s, which Ed Banger’s artists practically dominated. Parisian duo Justice, in particular, owe practically the entirety of their 2007 landmark † to the scraping tension of “Rollin’ & Scratchin’.”
It’s tempting, too, to tie a connective thread between Homework and the brash sounds that proliferated during the peak heyday of the financial descriptor-cum-music genre known as EDM; close your eyes while listening to “Alive”’s big-tent sweep and try not to imagine the tune destroying a festival crowd. But for all of Homework’s aggressive charms, it’s also retained a homespun intimacy in comparison to how positively widescreen Daft Punk’s music became afterwards. “We focus on the illusion because giving away how it’s done instantly shuts down the sense of excitement and innocence,” Bangalter told Pitchfork in 2013, and the fact that two Beach Boys fans fiddling around in their bedroom could conceive of something so generously in-your-face and playful as Homework might still stand as Daft Punk’s greatest illusion yet.


The London-based singer’s jazzy debut album shines most brightly when she gets explosive, yet her muted moments also resonate.

’Til I Start Speaking

Four years ago, Katy Morley accepted solitude. After putting out two lovelorn, trip-hop-influenced EPs, the Minneapolis-born, London-based singer, whose pen name is Morly, released “Sleeping in My Own Bed,” a track that emphasized her newfound fulfillment with a jazzy full-band arrangement. This song appears remixed and remastered on Morly’s debut album ’Til I Start Speaking, functioning as the final entry of a trilogy—following the lethargic title track and the smoky reflection “Dance to You”—about contented singledom. Throughout the album, Morly drifts between resigned longing and reciprocated love, painting in every shade of heartbreak and romance along the way.
’Til I Start Speaking shines most brightly when Morly gets explosive, yet her muted moments also resonate. During the climactic bridge of “Dance to You,” she sings, “I can’t grow inside your glow/And I’d rather be an artist than his wife,” as the storm of toms, minor-key pianos, and distant oohs and aahs surrounding her reverts to the track’s primary melody. This swelling accompaniment makes Morly’s confidence in this realization palpable; she recognizes that she’s more capable of understanding herself alone. Yet more common is the listless melancholy that defines “Superlunar II,” which depicts the opposite feeling: “I need you/You’re my proof/That death is worth the wait.” Her icy production works here: The track’s obvious romantic tunnel vision doesn’t require much fanfare, and the haunting chord progression flickers in the dark, lingering like a deep obsession.
Morly’s songs are most powerful when she shines a direct light on her life. On the minimalist piano ballad “Twain Harte,” she explains exactly what she did about a passion clouding her vision. “They must have followed you across the sea/Pulled down the line/Because I’m so in love with you” isn’t a metaphor: Morly recently moved from L.A. to London to be with her partner. When Morly gets even more specific, the results are captivating. “At home/Dinner cooking on the stove/And Nina singing to my soul,” she sings at the outset of the gorgeous guitar-and-Mellotron haze of “Up Above.” The first time I heard it, I instantly visualized her in a tiny big-city kitchen, steam rising above her head, a slightly warped I Put a Spell on You LP spinning on a record player. By conjuring these moments out of thin air, she shows that she can be arresting simply by recounting her day-to-day experiences with specificity.
Yet there is a moment where Morly manages to evoke a vivid scene by applying broad strokes. On “Jazz Angel (Bill),” she hears “an old song that makes me feel young” coming from behind a neighbor’s door. It’s a lonely, noir-tinted portrait of life in the city, and like the most affecting Morly songs, it’s a foggy window right into her heart.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Montclair, N.J. band Pinegrove's debut LP Cardinal recalls some of the most consistently likeable rock bands of the past 20 years in their most easygoing phases: There’s the rootsy shamble of early Wilco, the wiggly guitar solos and general guilelessness of pre-prog Built to Spill. But beneath the amiable surface is an intense work about one of the most important things imaginable: how to make our friendships really matter.

Cardinal

Montclair, N.J. band Pinegrove's debut LP Cardinal doesn’t initially come off like a hefty work. Its eight songs, which never move at too hurried of a pace, recall some of the most consistently likeable rock bands of the past 20 years in their most easygoing phases: There’s the rootsy shamble of early Wilco, the wiggly guitar solos and general guilelessness of pre-prog Built to Spill. Songwriter Evan Stephens Hall’s voice betrays his New Jersey roots, taking on a geographically non-specific drawl than nonetheless makes you feel welcome wherever you are. Still, it doesn't scream "rootsy": the slow songs are the ones where Pinegrove sound like they’re waiting to derail, whereas "Visiting" and "Then Again" have the sentiment and aerodynamic thrust of pop punk.
All together, you might call it alt-country, though it’s more in the spirit of Saddle Creek circa The Execution of All Things, Album of the Year, and Lifted—there’s banjo and twang and formalist structure. But unlike the trad-leaning No Depression style, this music sounds like it was made by young people, artists who created a dialogue with their fans by speaking to their specific concerns in an effusive, colorful language that mirrored their own.
It's only when you spend time soaking in this language that *Cardinal'*s deeper themes emerge. The character Hall plays is a familiar one within lovelorn indie rock—he’s the well-read, verbose guy doomed to recount time and again the failure of words to express what he really wants. "Cadmium" was inspired by a book compiling letters sent between two authors, the first of which was a square of the titular color. As a seemingly sturdy barroom shuffle collapses, Hall yelps about the impossibility of just telling it like it is. "Aphasia" references a speech and language disorder, though it appears to be more of an emotional hangover that Hall shakes off on his way toward clarity. "So satisfied, I said a lot of things tonight," he sings, the victory not in what he said or even how he said it, just that he was willing to do so in the first place and put his pride on the line.
Cardinal includes some material from Pinegrove's Everything So Far compilation, which might initially disappoint longtime fans. But "Size of the Moon" and "New Friends," which reappear here, scan as completely different songs in their new context*:* The cutesy reference to Nancy Kerrigan has been cut from "Size of the Moon," and the experience of playing the song live dozens, if not hundreds, of times has led to a newfound confidence of Hall’s vocals and a tighter performance. The full-band surge added at the bridge, when Hall screams "I don’t know what I’m afraid of!", seems to tacitly acknowledge the big-room anthem they’ve created.
Pinegrove's Bandcamp bio describes them as "hard at work in the promotion of introspective partying!", which might sound silly at first. Indie rock typically presents introspection as the opposite of partying, after all, and as an activity it is supposed to be incompatible with things like band promotion and exclamation points. But Cardinal feels like one big determined push outward, an album-length fight against solipsism without losing your sense of self in the process. There's nothing frivolous about that, and nowhere does the band make the seriousness of their mission more apparent than in album-closer "New Friends," the other song that originally appeared on Everything So Far.
Here, it draws a closed circle around Cardinal by commenting on the album opener "Old Friends": Hall resolves to make new friends—"I liked my old ones, but I fucked up, so I'll start again." It sounded wistful and clever on Everything So Far, but set off on "Old Friends," where he admits "I should call my parents when I think of them/ I should tell my friends when I love them," it cuts deeper. And then Pinegrove’s mission finally makes sense. "Introspective partying" may sound frivolous, but it deals with one of the most important things imaginable: how to make our friendships really matter.


Arcade Fire's lush, imaginative 85-minute fourth album is a triumph, but not a victory lap; the band never sounds content enough for that. Instead, Reflektor is an anxious, occasionally downright paranoid album that asks big, barbed questions aimed not just at the man who may or may not be upstairs, but the more terrestrial gods of rock history, too.

Reflektor

It's likely that the first time you heard the Arcade Fire's monstrously anticipated fourth album Reflektor, you were—to borrow a phrase that Win Butler spits out like a bite of bad food during the record's disco-noir title track—"staring at a screen." This past Thursday, the band posted to Youtube an 85-minute video which cued up the entirety of the double-album to visuals from Marcel Camus' kaleidoscopic 1959 film Black Orpheus. If something that happens on the internet can be considered An Event, then this certainly was one; in the same moment I saw the band's official tweet announcing it, two people simultaneously instant-messaged me the link. It was late afternoon on the East Coast, lunchtime on the West, and in that moment I did exactly what thousands of other people in those and all other time zones did: Stopped what I was doing, closed some extraneous tabs and programs, and listened. The auto-updating comments became a chronicle of knee-jerk first impressions: fervent gushing ("The bassline on 'Joan of Arc' is fucking epic"), groan-worthy puns ("I can't even reflect how excited this makes me!"), and egregious misspellings ("I don't understand what all the fuzz is about"). This scene would have seemed bizarre—and likely a little sad— to us decades ago, and it's frightening to imagine how quaint it will seem in the future. But this is how a lot of people at this moment in time—the one in which Reflektor was made, and the one it distrustfully interrogates—discover new music: Alone; together.
All four of the Montreal-based band's albums have been about the tension between those two words, taking up subjects like suburban isolation and the false community of religiosity, but Reflektor is larger, at least in scope, than anything Arcade Fire have done before. Of course, the stakes have been raised considerably since we've last heard from them: Their previous album, The Suburbs, was the unexpected winner of the Grammy for 2011's Album of the Year. And yet, no one involved in this record sounds to be resting on the laurels of their achievements—that includes producer and LCD Soundsystem retiree James Murphy. Reflektor is a triumph, but not a victory lap; the band never sounds content enough for that.
This is instead an anxious, occasionally downright paranoid album that asks big, barbed questions aimed not just at the man who may or may not be upstairs, but the more terrestrial gods of rock history, too. With either Ziggy Stardust, the Fly, or maybe that first guy who played Daft Punk to the rock kids as their guide, Arcade Fire have spiked their usual clenched-fist earnestness with a small but welcome pinch of irony—and this is what makes it feel vital in a way that a lot of recent guitar-based music is not. "Do you like rock'n'roll music?" Butler asks in a mock-Elvis shudder at the beginning of glam-rock earthquake "Normal Person". "Cuz I don't know if I do…" The only way to make a Big Rock Record in 2013 is to make one that is skeptical of what it means to be a Big Rock Record in 2013.
On their last tour, the Arcade Fire played for the first time in Haiti, the country where vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Régine Chassagne's parents were born. Their time there served as the inspiration for Reflektor; Butler spoke recently about the experience of playing for audiences who'd never heard many of the classic rock groups we take for granted, and instead "connecting to people on a purely rhythmic, musical level…completely stripped of context." You can hear the Caribbean influence in Reflektor's emphasis on kinetic rhythms and deep grooves, but also in its somewhat irreverent attitude towards Anglo rock history. Reflektor is at once nostalgic for—its sense of sprawl feels like a throwback to the heyday of AOR—and iconoclastic about the past. It sounds like it has ingested a bunch of the great art-rock records you're "supposed" to learn to appreciate in your formative listening years—Low, Remain in Light, Exile on Main Street, The White Album, Here Come the Warm Jets— and thrown them into the fire, in an attempt to make new shapes from the smoke.
Reflektor's sound is lush and imaginative, but never in a way that suffocates you with the fumes of its polish. It's limber and loose, as though the songs were performed live; the arrangements breathe, seethe, and sweat. As their detractors will be quick to point out, Arcade Fire's greatest crime in the past has been sometimes coming off too stately and self-serious (The Suburbs in particular had a buttoned-up quality that failed to capture the frenzied energy of their live shows), but on the first half of Reflektor they often feel like they're deflating their own sense of grandeur. It's nice to hear a band that showed up on the scene quite literally dressed for a funeral now sounding like they're having (at least a little) fun.
Goofy asides, unexpected left-turns, and tiny imperfections bring these songs to life: Check the odd, muttered phrases scattered throughout the intros, the parts on "Normal Person" when Tim Kingsbury's high E string seems to get clipped by the fretboard, or, maybe most thrillingly, the tempo fake-outs in "Here Comes the Night Time". That song, one of the album's best, begins with a celebratory Carnival beat, but then—the sonic equivalent to the tricks they've been playing in recent concerts and TV performances—suddenly switches to a slower, dub-inflected pace. There's a charming scrappiness to that moment as the band reorients to the rhythm, like a marching band suddenly realizing they're going the wrong way and trying, calamitously, to turn around.
There's always been a physicality about the Arcade Fire's sound—we're talking, after all, about a band whose members used to find it necessary to wear helmets on stage—but the rhythm section has never popped on one of their albums the way it does here. That emphasis has Murphy's stamp all over it (Butler says they all learned an important lesson early in the recording: "If you can get James tapping his foot, you know you're on the right track"), and so do the punched-up backing vocals. This is the first Arcade Fire album on which Chassagne doesn't sing lead, but her crisp, smartly arranged harmonies on songs like "Reflektor", "It's Never Over (Oh Orpheus)", and "Joan of Arc" make her a major presence. (Same goes for Colin Stetson, who did the album's horn arrangements and whose uneasy bass sax is the title track's secret weapon.) Even Reflektor's most straightforward pop songs like "Joan of Arc" and "We Exist" are fractured and haunted, reminiscent of the way Achtung Baby summoned the ghosts that had always been dormant in U2. When people talk about Murphy's production on Reflektor, the Eno comparisons will be obvious, unavoidable, and earned.
Reflektor unfolds over two discs, and which you prefer will depend on how many packets of earnest magnificence you take in your Arcade Fire. Disc 1 is raw and grounded; Disc 2 is airier, more cosmic, and a little less self-aware. The record's most divisive song is the second half's centerpiece, "Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)", which—Julie Taymor style—aims to be nothing less than all the Beatles songs at once ("Hey Jude" and "Revolution 9" included). It inevitably falls short, but it's hard not to admire the effort. Lyrically if not sonically, the album's weakest link is the slinky "Porno", whose heavy-handed lyrics ("Take the make-up off your eyes…Little boys with their porno/ They don't know what we know") feel a bit too much like bleeding-heart teenage poetry. And yet, even if the shoulda-been-B-side "Porno" feels like a lapse in judgment, it springs from the same source that helps the band continue to be so vital. Arcade Fire are eternal, defiantly emotive teenagers, and that's what kept them sounding like genuine underdogs even as they've become one of the biggest bands in the world. Nearly a decade after Funeral, Butler still sings like everything is at stake. For this band, growing up has not meant cooling the flames so much as beckoning them higher. The figures at the center of the Side 2 suite of "Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)" and the wonderfully Cocteau-glacial "It's Never Over (Oh Orpheus)" are not the Springsteenian everypeople of Funeral and Neon Bible, but instead the star-crossed lovers in a Greek myth.
And yet, even on Disc 2 it's hard to shake the feeling that Orpheus and Eurydice are just the B-plot; the great love story on Reflektor is the one between music and listener. With its clipped snippets of airwave chatter (the BBC's Jonathan Ross makes a cameo), warped VHS hum, and retro-luminosity that nods to a time when synthesizers connoted un-jaded wonder and revelation, Reflektor is designed to be an homage to the many ways music is transmitted, discovered, and incorporated into people's lives. Chassagne has said that her earliest and most stirring musical memories were "listening to [her] neighbor's music, the sounds coming through the walls" and then trying to replicate them on piano; in the same interview, the Texas-born Butler spoke similarly about U2's (much maligned) Pop Mart tour. Reflektor's scope is vast enough that it speaks to both of these experiences—and to our own. In the end, it doesn't feel like a critique of this screen-glazed moment so much as a validation of it. They've given us something in the present tense that, these days, feels depressingly unfashionable: An Event—an album that dares to be great, and remarkably succeeds.


Big Sean's Dark Sky Paradise is by many lengths his best album, approaching the elusive sweet spot where his music works as mindless fun while still leaving you just enough to chew on. Kanye West, Ariana Grande, John Legend, and others guest.

Dark Sky Paradise

Established rap careers can die suddenly nowadays, and not too long ago it looked as if Big Sean’s might wilt away early, if not exactly tragically. Though Sean's existence as a rapper was more acknowledged than appreciated, it was undeniable that he had a way of running into hits, and sometimes creating them, too. But his second album Hall of Fame, released in the summer of 2013, floundered: After scoring a run of Top 40 hits off both his debut album and various G.O.O.D. Music releases (like "Clique", which was fleshed out from his demo), Sean spent much of the last year and a half watching single after single expire upon arrival. "Control", the Kendrick Lamar showcase that rattled every rapper in New York, was the album’s biggest story for somehow not making the cut.
Hall of Fame was not just a problem commercially, but artistically as well. Over the course of his career, Sean has honed his on-mic personality into a charming sort of gleeful obnoxiousness. He is good at being dumb, even if sometimes he is too dumb. His "ass" riff that opens G.O.O.D. Music’s "Mercy"—"ass-quake," "ass-state," "ass-tray"—are his most quintessential lyrics: funny and stupid in not-quite equal measures, but memorable in their shameless goofiness. He is the class clown of rap, entertaining or annoying seemingly at random, but just witty enough that he’s enjoyable to have around.
Too little of that persona was present, though, on his weirdly dour and entirely too serious second album. Where Sean’s debut Finally Famous was blandly listenable but anonymous—with its big hits driven by guests Chris Brown, Kanye West and Nicki Minaj—Hall of Fame felt like an overcorrection meant to position him as a rapper’s rapper, the kind of guy who you tune into to focus on lyrics. Big Sean has an appeal, but that is not it.
Dark Sky Paradise, his newest, does not wholly shed his aspirations for a certain level of legitimacy, as the nonsensical but very official-sounding title would implicate. But it is by many lengths his best album, and the first one that gets closest to hitting an elusive sweet spot where his music works as mindless fun while still leaving you just enough to chew on. The best example of this is "I Don’t Fuck With You", the song that kick-started the album and perhaps saved Sean’s career as we know it. Put online in September along with three other tracks, the song is an obvious banger with an instantly catchy hook and some truly great lines—"I just bought a crib, three stories, that bitch a trilogy"—that also leverages his broken engagement with "Glee"’s Naya Rivera in a way that feels authentically inspired. That song is where everything clicks for Big Sean, and the confidence he seems to derive from fully harnessing his powers seeps from its pores.
Not all of Dark Sky Paradise is as successful, but when it’s at its best it feels like it came from the same place: a guy rapping more ferociously than he ever has because he knows that he’s better than he ever was. It’s that quantifiable oomph in Sean’s rapping that makes Dark Sky Paradise feel immediately more substantial than anything he’s released. Lyrically, he still straddles a line between being knowingly bald-faced and straight up showing his ass too often—"Headed to the game for OK seats/ Now I’m courtside at OKC"—but there’s palpable kinetic energy in the way he raps now, spitting in an almost-literal sense, his words splattering across beats in places that he may not even have intended.
There’s a controlled but energizing chaos to songs like "Dark Sky (Skyscrapers)", the standout Kanye feature "All Your Fault", and especially "Paradise", which was uploaded to SoundCloud alongside "I Don't Fuck With You" but appears here with a new, and fantastic, second verse. On these songs, Sean’s eagerness imbues his music with a sense of urgency that makes his typically dopey lyrics—"I was in Florida, no Marlins, nigga/ I’m that Shawn, no Marlon, nigga"—feel not just like rib-nudging cracks but legitimate boasts.
Unfortunately, the album only sustains that energy for about half its run time. After "Paradise"—which is preceded by the admirably boogying R&B palate cleanser "Play No Games"—Dark Sky Paradise becomes dreary and ponderous much like his second album, with leaden beats running past the five minute mark for no apparent reason. The album picks back up with its closing two tracks—the slightly treacly but skillfully executed "One Man Can Change the World" and the DJ Dahi-produced "Outro", which chops up a soul song (Darondo’s "Didn’t I") about as well as Kanye ever did—but it’s hard not to feel like the album’s second side represents a major missed opportunity.
The deluxe bonus tracks—most notably the Ariana Grande collaboration "Research", which has a beguilingly tricky beat—help redeem the proceedings, and if you’re the type of person who doesn’t mind actively perfecting tracklists, you can make a pretty solid little rap album by replacing the album’s soft midsection with those three songs. Regardless, Dark Sky Paradise is a big leap in the direction of the ideal Big Sean full-length. Whether he will ever make it there is certainly an open question, but in the meantime the smirkiest rapper in the business finally has an album that justifies all that self-satisfaction.


Filled with people, stories, and dialogue, the New York songwriter’s second album flows like an emotional breakthrough, tying together disparate observations into a serene and unified vision.

Cassandra Jenkins: An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Three songs into An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, we hear a sampled monologue: “So, these are real things that happen,” it begins. The speaker is a security guard at Manhattan’s now-closed Met Breuer museum, and the person on the receiving end, recording the voice memo and presenting it to us, is songwriter Cassandra Jenkins. A New York native as interested in telling stories as she is in collecting them, Jenkins seems to kick into action when people preface their thoughts this way—when she senses someone about to reveal something honest and intimate and useful.
Phenomenal Nature, Jenkins’ second album, is filled with direct quotes, stories, and dialogue. Often, her characters have names: There’s David, Warren, Grey, Darryl, Lola, Peri, Hailey Gates. Some of them, like Gates, are the focus of entire songs, while others, like the museum security guard, pass through in momentary scenes. The overall effect is less diary than documentary, as we follow a single subject through the world, supplemented with key insight from experts.
Working with producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman, Jenkins keeps the album focused and breezy. In just over half an hour, it features one perfect song (the dazzling “Hard Drive”), five excellent ones, and an instrumental coda. Surrounding her voice with saxophone and fretless bass, drum loops and field recordings, acoustic instruments and new age synth, Jenkins’ accompanists mirror the conversational tone of her writing, ensuring that the revelations aren’t limited to the lyric sheet. The whole thing flows like an emotional breakthrough, tying together disparate observations into a serene and unified vision.
With the exception of “Michaelangelo,” a thematic overture that summons the understated wisdom of Aimee Mann, Jenkins composed the entire album in Kaufman’s studio over the span of a week. Plainspoken and intuitive, her writing zooms into a specific period in her life. In summer 2019, she was prepared to join David Berman on his comeback tour as Purple Mountains when, just before opening night, she received news that he had died by suicide. Throughout these songs, she guides us through the immediate aftermath—grief, helplessness, canceled flights—along with a more imagistic fog of loneliness and confusion.
While Jenkins’ early work offered a cozy spin on glammy Americana, here she and Kaufman carve a new atmosphere that feels particularly suited to this material. “Empty space is my escape,” she sings in “Crosshairs,” and her collaborators take these words as a kind of prescription, letting their melodies and rhythm materialize around her like constellations. Often, the cadence of her storytelling informs the sound of the band: Her search for enlightenment amid the depressive limbo of “New Bikini” casts them as a kind of ambient lounge act, while the solitary ghost story of “Ambiguous Norway” emits a heavenly campfire glow, like the ballads from Bon Iver rendered as sci-fi.
Jenkins’ goal as a writer is to remain present, receptive to the poetry of daily life. But anyone who has dabbled in meditation knows the other side of that pursuit: the anger of feeling stuck in your own head, the frustration at your own frustration, the fear that maybe you’ve veered too far off course to ever get centered again. Despite the lapping calm of “New Bikini,” with its luxurious saxophone accompaniment from Stuart Bogie, there is a storm brewing below the surface. In each chorus, Jenkins recalls a friend’s advice—“Baby, go get in the ocean/The water, it cures everything”—and reconsiders it with optimism, skepticism, or sarcasm. Over the course of the song, you can hear her outlook dissolve from peaceful, cosmic nothingness into the more void-like, everyday kind.
Despite the trauma in her subject matter, Jenkins’ writing summons a graceful, almost aspirational quality of lightness. She draws on the language of self-help—the mind-body connection, chakras, carving yourself from marble—but she also leaves room for pain to exist unresolved, unprocessed. She fills her music with community and friends, but she also understands that no one has it all figured out—least of all the people who claim to. This is why a song like “Crosshairs,” with its heartsick plea to “fall apart in the arms of someone entirely strange to me,” does not come across like rock bottom desperation: From Jenkins, this is a prayer, her belief that shared vulnerability can lead to its own kind of strength.
The album’s gravitational center, and her peak as a songwriter, is “Hard Drive.” Over a steady, slow-building arrangement, Jenkins recites each verse in her speaking voice, undistracted, letting us into four distinct scenes: an art exhibit, a bookshop, a driving lesson, and a friend’s birthday party. Here, Jenkins meets a psychic who offers a few words of hope and guides her through a breathing exercise. Somewhere along the way in Jenkins’ retelling, a transformation takes place. Singing in the second person, she becomes the psychic. The drums cycle uphill and the band crescendos toward a psychedelic sunrise of pedal steel and ringing, open, major chords: “We’re gonna put your heart back together,” she promises. “Are you ready?” Her voice glimmers with the confidence of someone who already knows the answer.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Repeat after me: MF Doom is not Zev Love X. Zev Love X is not MF Doom. Or so he ...

The Best of K.M.D.

Repeat after me: MF Doom is not Zev Love X. Zev Love X is not MF Doom. Or so he would have had us believe for the last half-decade.
Last year, hip-hop paragon MF Doom (aka Daniel Dumile) completely flipped his pancakes and released three albums under divergent personas: Take Me to Your Leader as King Geedorah, Vaudeville Villain as Viktor Vaughn, and another installment in his Special Herbs series as Metal Fingers himself. The move brought him his greatest success to date, and cemented his position at the forefront of underground hip-hop.
Before the masked man terrorized the undieground with raspy rhymes and hallucinogenic beats, of course, he was Zev Love X, and he represented Five-Percenters and bouncy black power sophisticates with the underappreciated collective K.M.D. It wasn't meant to last: After just one album, his brother and bandmate DJ Subroc was struck by a car and killed, and the band's subsequent album was shelved by Elektra Records. Zev reappeared underground in 1997, after nearly five years in hibernation, and has since come correct with an array of records invoking and sampling everything from Stevie Wonder to 1950s monster movies.
In anticipation of K.M.D.'s upcoming reunion, Nature Sounds has cobbled together this best-of collection featuring much of the trio's out-of-print material. Of course, the disc amounts to little more than a refresher course for the K.M.D.-impaired, considering the group only released two proper albums. The first, 1991's Mr. Hood was a sprightly bit of Sesame Street-sampling brilliance that built a narrative around the album's ignorant namesake; the second was mired in controversy for much of the last decade: 1993's Black Bastards, whose cover featured a Sambo-like cartoon character being lynched, was put on hold by Elektra, and didn't see official release until 2001 on the Sub Verse label. To this day, Doom believes Elektra's motives went beyond the cover art, noting the more aggressive nature of the album as a possible reason for postponement.
So this compilation has been hashed together, somewhat lazily, in hopes of reigniting some interest for the nearly forgotten Long Island crew. Both album's best tracks are lifted and placed in chronological order, without any apparent rhyme or reason, save a few Busta Rhymes-featured remixes at the album's end. Even the liner notes are slapdash, with snapshots of scribbled notebooks scattered throughout. There are no credits or thank yous, just written-in chaos, which is apropos of K.M.D.'s sound, but unfortunate for a greatest hits compilation-- especially one whose subject's history is so notorious.
The good news is that virtually every track is a standout, from the rolling piano bump of "Humrush" to the wildly original "What a Nigga Know". "Nitty Gritty", however, showcases hip-hop's Five Percent godfathers, Brand Nubian, and exemplifies how they were always better at this type of thing. Zev, Subroc and Onyx were capable and energetic MCs, but lacked the charisma and flow control of Sadat X or Grand Pu. Most of the beats here are self-produced, and the raw sound, while intentionally grimy, exposes less than up-to-date technology in the studio. Even now, MF Doom is prone to taping samples off his VCR.
The more incendiary diatribes from Black Bastards are smarter and more focused. By shedding their animated jester-characters, the trio's rhymes punched through the paper-thin walls of alcoholism ("Sweet Premium Wine"), drug abuse ("Stop Smokin' That Shit") and womanizing ("Plumskinz") without succumbing to the pedantic or pretentious tendencies of some of their contemporaries.
What's most appealing than this release, though, is that it provides the opportunity to hear a more helium-voiced Doom as a young and hungry MC, less deluded by death and drugs and more driven by racism and poverty. His evolution into a gruff rapper's rapper would have been hard to envision given some of his goofier appearances here. It should be interesting to see what the schizophrenic genius cooks up for K.M.D.'s forthcoming Mental Illness. Until then, this shoddily assembled set should tide you over.


Slint's landmark second album has been reissued in a box set that includes outtakes, live cuts, and a feature-length documentary by Lance Bangs. The record's greatest legacy might be the boundless inspiration it perpetually provides for all the bands that have yet to emerge from the basement.

Spiderland

“We’re from Louisville, and we thought you needed to hear this.” These words are heard deep into the rarities portion of this 3xLP box set, as the introduction to a live recording dating back to a 1989 Chicago show in support of Slint’s raucous debut album, Tweez. And just what did Slint think their audience—who, judging from the faint smattering of applause, barely cracked the double digits—needed to hear at that moment? A freakin’ Neil Young cover, and a wholly reverential, note-for-note eight-minute reading of “Cortez the Killer”, at that. But the moment is significant nonetheless, and not just because “Cortez” proved to be the root DNA of the ominously methodical music they would go onto explore; that brief spoken introduction counts as an extremely rare document of Slint actually asserting their worth in public.
In many respects, the story of Slint is an exceedingly familiar one of influence accruing in absentia, of mavericks who were ignored in their time and had to wait years to get their due. Except unlike other members of the criminally neglected alt-rock trailblazer club—from the Stooges and Big Star to Pixies and My Bloody Valentine—Slint didn’t just fail at becoming the world-beating superstars that their record labels and music-critic boosters alike hoped they would be. Through their initial 1986-1991 existence, Slint were obscure outsiders even within the subterranean confines of the American indie-rock underground.
Compared to the get-in-the-van, play-anywhere ethic practised by fellow 1980s-hardcore students, Slint rarely performed live, and when they did, it was rarely as a headliner. Interviews were scarce; band photos all the more so. Spiderland—their second, final, and ultimately most revered album—wasn’t some painstaking, Loveless-scaled masterwork belabored over in the studio for months on end; it was a collection of six pared-down basement jams recorded over a single weekend, with many of the lyrics rush-written at the last minute. And Slint were so uncertain of their purpose upon the album’s completion, they actually included a call-out for female-vocalist auditions on record’s back cover, before just deciding to disband altogether prior to its official release. With Spiderland’s chilling, dead-of-night ambience, its predatory rhythmic gait, spine-tingling guitar plucks, and short-story narratives recited in unnervingly hushed tones, Slint had essentially crafted the mysterious soundtrack to their own disappearance. Even that seemingly innocuous, Will Oldham-shot album cover of the band members playfully swimming in a quarry looks just like the sort of photo you see on an 11 o’clock news bulletin about four local teens who went missing on a camping trip.
It wasn’t until their friends—in bands as stylistically divergent but spiritually connected as the Jesus Lizard and Palace Brothers—achieved some degree of national renown in the mid-90s that Slint began its transformation from footnote to boldface; to read interviews with these and other affiliated groups in magazines such as RayGun, Alternative Press, and Option was to play a game of Spot the Spiderland Namedrop. By 1995, Slint started turning up on major-label-issued movie soundtracks; by ’96, Gavin Rossdale was dialing up Steve Albini—who recorded Tweez—to bring some of that corrosive crunch to Bush’s Razorblade Suitcase. And with the similarly atmospheric, equally explosive likes of Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor dominating the late-90s indie-rock conversation, Slint ceased to be just some band that had broken up too soon and became an entire subgenre of music unto itself.
But well after they ascended to sainthood status, Slint’s sense of timing remained as curiously off-kilter as the tempos of their signature songs. In 2005 the band reunited, a good five years after the post-rock they’re credited with spawning had peaked in popularity. And now, after a few years of intermittent touring, we have the 23rd-anniversary box-set reissue of Spiderland, featuring a much-needed remaster courtesy of Shellac’s Bob Weston, 14 previously unreleased outtakes, a handsome 104-page photographic history of the band (with a foreword from Oldham), and director Lance Bangs’ thorough and intimate feature-length documentary, Breadcrumb Trail. On the surface, it’s the sort of hefty package that adheres to the standard process of classic-rock-level canonization. But true to the band’s spirit, the set is ultimately a grandiose act of self-effacement. Because for all the mystique Slint have acquired over the past two decades, no one has been more mystified by the band’s rising posthumous reputation than Slint themselves. (I mean, just look at the cover of the box set—notice something missing?)
Rather than trumpet the album’s immense influence on subsequent generations of indie rockers, emo kids, and doom-metalheads alike, everything about this set works the other way to disassemble a quote-unquote classic into its basic raw materials. The demos practically break down Spiderland on a riff-by-riff basis, as we hear the songs devolve from pre-production dress rehearsals to rudimentary acoustic sketches recorded on cassette. The visual materials, meanwhile, trace Spiderland’s genesis back through the unheralded but highly fertile 80s Louisville post-hardcore community (which served as a sister scene to the Touch & Go/Drag City stables in Chicago), all the way to the formative relationship struck by band principals Britt Walford and Brian McMahan when they were kids attending a downtown alternative elementary school.
Early in Bangs’ film, Walford claims he was bored with rock‘n’roll by the time he was 11; by the time they were teenagers, he and McMahan were already bored with hardcore, having served time in horror-punk torchbearers (and certified Friends of Danzig) Maurice and Hüsker Dü-styled thrashers Squirrel Bait. When the duo formed Slint with Maurice guitarist David Pajo and bassist Ethan Buckler, there was little to suggest the band would amount to anything more than another of Walford and McMahan’s impulsive extracurricular projects, which at that point had included everything from videotaped improv comedy routines to cassettes featuring nothing but the sound of their flatulence, samples of which reportedly seeped into the mix of Tweez. Though obviously indebted to the caustic, caterwauling post-punk of their producer’s former band, Tweez also gleefully subverted underground orthodoxies: In contrast to hardcore’s stern, anti-authority-figure rhetoric, the band named each of the album’s songs after their parents, while Pajo’s avant-Halen squeals and Buckler’s muscular but dextrous basslines meant Tweez wound up not too many slam pits removed from late-80s funk-metal phenoms like Faith No More and Jane’s Addiction. (Dissatisfied with Albini’s recordings, Buckler left the band shortly after Tweez’s release, and was replaced by Todd Brashear.)
When Slint began working on the songs that would form Spiderland in 1989, the initial wave of post-hardcore indie rock was on the wane, with scene stalwarts either trading up (the major label-bound Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.) or breaking up (Black Flag, Mission of Burma) or both (Hüsker Dü). Recorded by their friend Brian Paulson, Spiderland would forge a new indie-rock lexicon by applying hardcore’s emotional intensity to music that, formalistically speaking, was its complete inverse. Even in its heaviest moments, Spiderland wasn’t so much about rocking as stalking: Songs prowled instead of pummeled, with clean, glistening guitar lines (inspired by Pajo’s obsession with Minutemen’s D. Boon) accentuating lyrics that were muttered rather than screamed, all enhanced by a strategic use of space that meant the silences between the notes accumulated their own crushing weight. The album’s definitive bookend tracks—“Breadcrumb Trail” and “Good Morning, Captain”—don’t so much shift from quiet to loud as from bleak to blinding, with McMahan and Pajo emitting the sort of frequencies that make you cover your eyes instead of your ears. And when the band do encroach on something resembling conventional rock—like with the meaty, metallic, morse-code riffage of “Nosferatu Man”—it’s to a sadistic, merciless degree of excess, until you feel like the poor bastard in the movie Se7en whose stomach explodes after being force-fed too much spaghetti.
Spiderland’s volcanic outbursts naturally count as the album’s most bracing, memorable moments. The one drawback is that they occasionally obscured and overshadowed McMahan’s monologues, which remain eminently unnerving for both their delivery (not so much “spoken word” as melody-averse singing imbued with cold-blooded, dead-eyed dread) and their amazingly immersive economy. Even a simple opening line like “Don stepped outside” (from the distorto-folk centerpiece “Don, Aman”) instantly sets a vivid scene of simmering unease, of needing to escape from some stifling, suffocating situation; the devastatingly melancholic “Washer” scans as a break-up ballad, but could also very well be the prelude to a murder-suicide. (Fortunately, Weston’s new master gives McMahan’s voice a greater clarity, while the amplified-vocal demos of “Good Morning, Captain” and “Nosferatu Man”—not to mention the supplied lyric sheets—allow you to follow the words more closely.) Back on Tweez’s “Carol,” Slint hinted at the darkness lurking in the backwoods of suburbia “past where they paint the houses”; forsaking its predecessor’s inside jokes for outsized drama, Spiderland ventures past that point of no return where the mundane turns horrific, with songs of vampiric lust and county-fair roller-coaster rides and boat trips gone terribly wrong. When Slint do inevitably unleash the noise, it’s less a sonic device than a narrative one, to mark the moment after which, for the songs’ protagonists, nothing will ever be the same again.
And that seemed to be the case for the band itself. The one Slint legend Bangs’ film does confirm is that, after recording the harrowing vocal climax on “Good Morning, Captain,” McMahan checked himself into a hospital. And the fact that nothing more is said of his stay supports the theory that for Slint, Spiderland was something of a transformative, Deliverance-type experience for the band members—what began as a casual amusement among friends unwittingly lead them into somewhere very dark and disturbing, the details of which are never to be discussed publicly. (The box set reveals a couple of instrumental bed tracks from heretofore unpublicized, eventually aborted post-Spiderland sessions—the fragmented “Todd’s Song” and the drum-machine-ticked “Brian’s Song”. Their drifting, meandering nature suggests returning to the same headspace was too daunting a proposition.) Where Pajo would go on to enjoy some success with Tortoise, as Aerial/Papa M, and as an alt-rock ringer for Interpol and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, McMahan's post-Slint outfit, the For Carnation, has been dormant since 2000. Brashear—who wasn't involved in the reunion tours—now runs a video store. And Walford, once the galvanizing wünderkind of the Louisville scene (and, briefly, a Breeder), likewise receded into the sidelines as a supporting player for various Drag City acts and old blues-circuit singers alike, while sporadically working on music in private. (It's only now that he's reemerging with his first proper band in two decades, Watter, whose debut album comes out next month on Temporary Residence.)
However, the album’s shadowy aftermath doesn’t necessarily make Spiderland a more intriguing artifact; likewise, the fact its creators were actually a bunch of goofball pranksters from loving, supportive, well-to-do families in no way diminishes the album’s grim majesty and visceral potency. If anything, the elucidating peek behind the curtain that Bangs’ documentary provides makes the album feel like an even more singular, remarkable achievement. Spiderland has always felt like the work of old, wizened souls who had endured great physical and psychological trauma and barely survived to impart their cautionary tales. But even with the visual evidence presented here, it’s still hard to fathom that music this visionary, disciplined, and emotionally resonant was being made by a bunch of guys still in their teens. (Slint may have a great band, but they were even better actors.)  Spiderland’s greatest legacy is not that it motivated a cluster of semi-popular bands in the late-90s and early 2000s to adopt its whisper-to-scream schematic. It’s the boundless inspiration it perpetually provides for all the bands that have yet to emerge from the basement.


The Berlin-based producer’s new album is a spellbinding fusion of atmosphere and texture, forever on the point of mutating into new shapes.

Lambda

For as long as he’s been putting out music, ZULI has stayed two steps ahead. The Egyptian producer switches up styles not just from record to record, but often from song to song. His debut EP encompassed noise-rap beats, lo-fi techno, Detroit-inspired futurism, and crickets chirping over bell tones. The leaps between releases are even greater: After the extreme abstraction of his moody 2018 LP Terminal, in which hip-hop and footwork were pulled apart at the seams, ZULI sank his teeth into a set of no-holds-barred breakbeat smashers on 2021’s ALL CAPS EP. A Cairo native, the artist born Ahmed El Ghazoly spent much of his childhood in London before returning to the Egyptian capital, a double displacement that he says gave him his sense of restlessness. “I think the move between countries instilled an urge to rebel against my surroundings,” he told an interviewer in 2021. He was talking about his preference for “niche” sounds over popular styles, but he’s just as reluctant to relax into a niche of his own making. Now, on Lambda—his first major release in six years—he changes course yet again, jettisoning the rhythmic force and focus of his previous records in favor of a spellbinding fusion of atmosphere and texture that spills over with nebulous emotion.
Lambda opens like a sunrise over a ruined city, vast chords of cinematic scope and symphonic grandeur swelling and morphing. A lurching electro rhythm rises and fades, speeding and slowing before abruptly falling silent, but what really drives the action are the tiny vibrations rippling across the surface of the music, a riot of unpredictability. ZULI’s productions have always felt unstable, but they’ve never been more precarious than they are here. His chords are a swampy morass; his textures shudder like ground liquefying in an earthquake, minuscule particles suddenly gushing in streams and bursts.
This palette—a thick slurry of buzzing synths and blown-out distortion—carries across the breadth of the album, lending a feeling of uniform intent that makes it the most cohesive release in his catalog. Despite the extremity of the sound design, Lambda frequently feels like ZULI’s attempt at pop. In “Trachea,” a heavily processed voice groans and gurgles over chords that gleam with the imposing majesty of Jean-Michel Jarre; in “Syzygy,” UK-born, Hamburg-based performer MICHAELBRAILEY’s shrill falsetto soars above a shapeshifting backdrop of synths and piano that’s reminiscent of Arca’s mutant assemblages. The majority of the album’s tracks feature some sort of singing, usually woven deep into the gelatinous mix. “Syzygy” kicks off an interconnected three-song suite in which voice and synths alike are ground to dust; in “Plateau,” a highlight, Abdullah Miniawy’s mournful incantations twist like smoke, twined with melancholy clarinet and a tremolo figure that delightfully, however accidentally, recalls the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now.”
Only once, on “10000 (Papercuts, Pt. 1),” do the vocals feel like the main event, as MICHAELBRAILEY intones a mantra of self-doubt and desperation over a roiling sea of molten bass and chimes. The song’s overt drama lays all its cards on the table; it lacks the intrigue of murkier, more ambiguous tracks like “Fahsil Qusseer,” an overcast trip-hop etude built around a poem written and recited by the producer’s father, Osama Elghazoly, or “Ast,” in which Coby Sey raps meditative, free-associative verses over a tape-warped music-box beat that becomes increasingly tangled over its two-minute run. (ZULI’s twisted productions work remarkably well with relatively straight-ahead rapping; I’d love to hear what he might do in collaboration with someone like Armand Hammer’s billy woods and Elucid.)
The sense that these mercurial soundscapes could suddenly veer off in any direction—careening from distortion-encrusted power ambient to illbient tone poem or electroacoustic composition—is part of what makes them so compelling. Even after many listens, Lambda’s abrupt shifts in both style and emotional resonance remain surprising. It took me ages to pinpoint the heavy beats running beneath tracks like “Trachea” and “Release +ϕ,” given the rolling waves of synth swallowing them up. ZULI has previously pushed back against expectations that he should somehow represent Cairo in his music: “They always try to inject political narratives, projecting their own ideas of what an Egyptian musician should be, and I feel like the concept of ‘an Egyptian musician’ is kind of ridiculous considering that we’re like 120 million at the moment,” he complained in that 2021 interview. “I don’t really consider myself an Egyptian, I’m just a musician.” On Lambda, he takes his resistance one step further. In refusing to deliver the kind of club productions with which he’s long been identified, he has created an album that sounds breathtakingly original, even by his standards.


Stephen McBean's boogie outfit makes a more concerted effort to reconcile the band's inner darkness and light, leaning as much on pop as psych.

Wilderness Heart

"Is it safe for the cowards to do what they've already done?" It's a rhetorical question, of course, but coming from the well-bearded mouth of Stephen McBean, the sentiment is especially pointed. For in his 10-plus years of making music, McBean has never been one to retrace his steps, venturing outward from the dirgey folk-rock of Jerk With a Bomb to the ever mercurial noise-pop of Pink Mountaintops and the earthquaking boogie of his most successful outfit to date, Black Mountain. But even the popular perception of Black Mountain as 1970s-style riff-mongers is unfairly myopic, with the seeming anomalies in their discography-- the carefree jangle pop of "No Satisfaction", the hypno-drone trance of "No Hits", or the raised-lighter sing-along "Stay Free"-- proving just as prevalent as the Black Sabbath worship. In their heart of hearts, Black Mountain are really just peaceful hippies, but ones who aren't afraid to deploy heavy artillery to assert and protect their way of living. (Run their hearts around at your own risk: If their philosophy could be displayed on a VW microbus bumper sticker, it would read "Make Love Then War.")
On the band's third album, Wilderness Heart, there's a more concerted effort to reconcile the band's inner darkness and light, a symbiosis reflected in their choice of producers: Randall Dunn, best known for his work with doom-metal giants Boris and Sunn O))), and D. Sardy, whose lengthy list of multi-platinum clients includes Oasis and the Rolling Stones. Couple those big-name producers with the decision to record in L.A., not to mention their mainstream toe-dip on the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack, and all signs point to Wilderness Heart's being Black Mountain's go-for-broke commercial bid. But while the new album is certainly more streamlined and luminous than 2008's weighty, apocalyptic In the Future-- no 17-minute prog-rock suites to be had here-- the sharper focus doesn't dilute the band's cannabis-clouded cool.
In FM-radio terms, Wilderness Heart is Black Mountain's Houses of the Holy, an album that shimmers as much as it bulldozes, humors as much as it rages, while flexing a more pronounced pop sensibility that mostly works in the band's favor rather than to their detriment. And just as John Paul Jones' Mellotron-based set piece "No Quarter" was arguably the highlight of Houses, Wilderness Heart's most striking moments come courtesy of keyboardist Jeremy Schmidt-- his thick, Deep Purplish tones on the Camaro-rattling "Old Fangs" prove heavier than the glam-metal riff chugging underneath it, and instead of dropping in the de rigueu**r guitar solo, the band lets him slather on dreamy layers of laser-beam synth drones. Likewise, his Mellotronic backdrops on the stoner-folk reveries "Radiant Hearts" and "Buried by the Blues" refashion these downcast acoustic interludes in a more majestic light.
Schmidt's spotlight turns are indicative of a broader shift in Black Mountain's M.O., where the band is becoming less reliant on a monolithic power-chord attack and playing more to the strengths and subtleties of its individual members. Sure, Wilderness Heart boasts Black Mountain's fiercest thrasher to date in "Let Spirits Ride"-- which takes the proto-speed-metal riff of Black Sabbath's "Symptom of the Universe" for a joyride-- but the real revelation is the playfully loose, stutter-grooved "The Hair Song", which despite being built upon contorted acoustic-guitar strums and slides, hits as hard as anything else in the band's canon. The song also charts the increasing confluence of McBean and Amber Webber's voices-- where they were initially presented as stark contrasts, the two are now practically finishing each other's sentences. And in some cases, Webber even steals the song from de facto frontman McBean, her chorus turn on "Rollercoaster" elevating the track out of its sludgy morass.
For an album that presents a more assured, swaggering Black Mountain, it's a minor disappointment that Wilderness Heart doesn't so much climax as gradually wind down, without a show-stopping finale to crown the victory lap. But even in their quietest moments, the band can still leave you unsettled-- the closing track may be the first Black Mountain acoustic ballad dedicated to a girl, but not coincidentally it's a name ("Sadie") strongly evocative of the Manson murders and the tenuous line between blissful, free-loving hippiedom and violent anarchy. And as the song fades out into an ominous tribal-stomp procession, you're still not sure which side Black Mountain are going to lean toward next.


Accompanied by some of the best players in the scene, the country maverick performs bluegrass versions of highlights from his back catalog, revealing the hidden roots of his idiosyncratic songwriting.

Sturgill Simpson: Cuttin’ Grass Vol. 1: The Butcher Shoppe Sessions

Back in June 2020, Sturgill Simpson confessed his bluegrass dreams to an empty Ryman Auditorium. “I decided after climbing the ropes of country-music stardom and then completely destroying that career to make a rock’n’roll record. Now I have great ambitions of a life of gravel parking lots and Porta Potties,” he joked during the livestream concert, flanked by a small band featuring some of the greatest talents in bluegrass. His jab was affectionate: Simpson says he was a fan long before he moved to Nashville and became one of the biggest country stars ever to insist that he wasn’t really country. His new album Cuttin’ Grass Vol. 1: The Butcher Shoppe Sessions, a collection of bluegrass versions of songs from Simpson’s own back catalog, grew out of a fundraising challenge with his fans, but you get the sense Simpson eventually would have gotten around to recording a bluegrass record anyway, if only because the genre’s emphasis on acoustic instrumentation and technical chops flies in the face of what many perceive to be Nashville’s reliance on slick production and cookie-cutter stars—qualities that, fairly or not, he has repeatedly lambasted.
In that Ryman Auditorium livestream, Simpson stressed the influence of bluegrass on his own playing and songwriting. Whether he was revving them up for his early punk-country group Sunday Valley or exploding them on Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, Simpson was heavily influenced by the rhythms, melodies, and sentiments of the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, and others. But he’s also a master of concision, often refusing to repeat some of his catchiest passages and typically eschewing the verse-chorus-verse format. There’s a military precision to his songs—fitting for a guy who spent three years in the Navy and then used that experience as the thematic foundation for his breakout album, 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth. So his tunes slide easily into bluegrass, a style that prizes individual precision within a larger group dynamic.
Simpson has recruited a band of barnstormers for Cuttin’ Grass, which he recorded at the Butcher Shoppe Recording Studio with friend and producer David Ferguson. Almost every player on the album was up onstage at his Opry and Ryman shows, and they’re all among the best at their respective instruments. Guitarists Tim O’Brien and Mark Howard toggle fluidly between lead and rhythm to ensure everything moves at a steady clip. Banjo player Scott Vestal and fiddler Stuart Duncan treat “All the Pretty Colors” like a Cubist canvas, finding new angles in the central melody and slyly reinterpreting Simpson’s metaphor about heartache washing all the color out of his world. If anyone dominates these arrangements, it might be Sierra Hull, a mandolin prodigy whose picking is as sensitive as her backing vocals, especially on a tender, soulful version of “Breaker’s Roar”—arguably the most transformed song on the album.
The best bluegrass players balance blazing technique with close attention to the song and deep knowledge of the canon. Even when the picking is deft, it’s rarely showy; instead, there’s a modest ostentation to Cuttin’ Grass, which simultaneously plays up the cosmic quality of Simpson’s songwriting but also grounds it in earthy arrangements. Dreams are constantly intruding on reality in his songs; God infuses everything, light constantly battles darkness, and death just takes us to another plane. “Gonna transmigrate to my destination far beyond time in an eternal dream,” he sings on “Just Let Go,” right before the band joins him on the chorus: “Am I dreaming or am I dying?” It’s a murder ballad where the ego gets the knife.
Cuttin’ Grass at times plays like a covers album, with the artist and the subject both the same, but overall it’s a de facto greatest hits, surveying nearly the full breadth of Simpson’s career. Granted, his success should have put the lie to “Life Ain’t Fair and the World Is Mean,” which sounds like sour grapes from an artist who can convince a major label to fund the anime film that accompanied his lackluster 2019 rock’n’roll record SOUND & FURY. Otherwise, his choices are compelling, especially the three songs from Sunday Valley, which only released one album and one EP before Simpson went solo. He and his bluegrass band transform them from rowdy, rusty alt-country numbers into this collection’s biggest revelations. The best of the lot, “I Don’t Mind,” takes the conventions of country music and subtly inverts them. Against Miles Miller’s two-step drum pattern, he describes heartache as an existential conundrum, striking a bittersweet balance between defeat and desire. “If you think you can ever love me again, please go ahead, I don’t mind,” he sings, as the players offer their consolations.
The appeal of Cuttin’ Grass goes beyond the novelty of hearing familiar songs in a new setting. This isn’t Pickin’ On Sturgill Simpson. Rather, these performances emphasize the cosmic and the sentimental in Simpson’s catalog. What’s missing, however, is the sense of possibility that defines his other albums, even the lackluster SOUND & FURY. As a country artist, Simpson is determinedly subversive; as a bluegrass artist, he’s incredibly conservative. There are none of the abrupt stylistic changes that made Sailor’s Guide sound as big as the world and none of the sonic experiments that made Metamodern Sounds such a trip. Simpson can’t quite sustain a double album in this style, and Cuttin’ Grass loses some steam toward the end. However, there are more than enough bracing moments here to make you wonder what Volume 2 will sound like, especially if it’s all those ’80s covers he promised his wife.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Merge reissues the first three albums from these indie rock legends.

Dinosaur Jr.: Dinosaur / You're Living All Over Me / Bug

I'm shocked at the relatively low-key reaction to Merge's Dinosaur Jr. reissues. Do today's cardigan undergrad massive not appreciate one of the key DNA strands of what we once unironically referred to as Alternative Rock? Was this the final victory of new wave? Will no one else admit to sporting a homemade puffy paint Black Flag t-shirt for the whole of ninth grade?
It's not wholly surprising, given the deathless nature of early 80s nostalgia at the moment. The SST bands (and Dinosaur were proud to be on the label until they realized Greg Ginn's accountant was Houdini) rocked unashamedly, something very few bands do in 2005. It's understandable, given how many current rock bands came up in the 90s, a decade of unashamed rocking by unreconstructed doofuses like Collective Soul. Irony and earnestness are a precarious balance, and once hardcore went mainstream, beginning with Nirvana and peaking with Dashboard, a swerve towards brittleness and arched brows was inevitable, maybe even desirable. (Bright Eyes, "O.C." Mixtapes, and Matrix-rocking girl-pop shoot that theory to hell. Oh well!)
The band was nothing if not earnest, but those impulses were balanced by a gentle, aw-shucks bewilderment. They were-- and either enough time has now elapsed, or I'm going to turn into a pumpkin for writing this-- the quintessential slacker band. I'm not going to detail the WMD-grade antipathy going on in the band at the time these albums were recorded, but clearly J, Lou, and Murph had yet to develop what Dr. Phil would deem fully formed personalities. They're forgiven this because, in true "Behind the Music" style, their inability to interact with any sense of decency may have been part of the combustion that made them one of the best guitar rock bands of my lifetime.
Dinosaur were initially called Deep Wound, and played a particularly speedy and rectilinear form of hardcore that somehow wound its way across the pond and into the hands of the bands who would basically create grindcore and death metal. After the usual line-up shuffling (off to college, home from college, I don't like you anymore) and maturation (wow, there's other music than rat-a-tat 200bpm speedcore out there), they became Dinosaur. J Mascis switched from drums to a guitar that he took to playing as loud and hard as possible because it didn't have the bruising capabilities of his beloved kit. Lou Barlow played bass, not badly but too enthralled by half with Peter Hook. Murph played drums and was Murph.
Dinosaur (the Jr. got safety pinned on after they became famous when a dinosaur Dinosaur came crawling out of the woodwork to protest) is, like many albums made by people just out of high school, stylistically incontinent. (This a polite way of saying it's a fucking mess.) There was all this cool music out there, new and old, and Dinosaur wanted to sound like all of it, with a hardcore base. Opener "Bulbs of Passion" cribs from Sonic Youth; "Forget the Swan" is an outtake from The Cure's Three Imaginary Boys; "Cats in a Bowl" shoulda called itself "Burger Marionettes", etc.
All the songs feel like they go on longer than they should. The confusion is right there on the back cover photo. J wears his love of the Birthday Party atop his head. (Nice pendant, dungeon master.) Lou looks like Sally Jesse Raphael has just violently possessed the body of Superchunk's Mac with styling by Bill Cosby. Murph looks like he should be working at 1985 Texaco (or be in Journey's "Separate Ways" video). This is actually quite charming in a moment when bands spring fully formed from a stylist's imagination into their perfectly mediated debut albums within six months (coughkasbiankaiserchiefsbraverycough).
It's amazing what a little growing up in public and support from your idols will do for you. In two short years, Dino went from bar band nobodies to a pop-noise outfit with a panzer attack and a heart of gold. The move to SST surely bolstered their confidence, and J's zen despondency over the guitar (he may have wanted it to sound more like drums, but you get the feeling he would have been just as happy playing a zither if it could get really heavy) burst into a particular volcanic ooze of proto-indie.
Dino cut all the excess ruffage from their diet, and Murph and Lou locked into a tuff little unit that made Joe "I like rock, me" Carducci and Ginn want to sign them in the first place. Even the solos feel like they're being corralled by their burgeoning pop instincts. If they lumber, it's a tuneful lumbering. They discovered the sweet spot between Black Sabbath and the Buzzcocks, which every carpetbagging grunge chancer (and one or two geniuses) took to the mall a few years later. (Though, to be fair, without the grunge chancers, I'd have maybe never heard of Dino in the first place.)
The album opens with skreeching chalkboard feedback before switching up for REM engineered by Swamp Thing. The opening of "Tarpit" casually invents all the parts of emo Rites of Spring didn't invent first, but then decides to, like, totally fucking shred. "Poledo", on the other hand, invents everything icky and solipsistic about indie rock in the 90s: Lou fishing for chicks in his bedroom with a four-track, an acoustic guitar, and some Stockhausen-by-way-of-Fisher-Price pause-button edits. It all climaxes with their immortal (and surprisingly reverent) cover of the Cure's "Just Like Heaven", which is a lot of fun but can't hold a candle to any of the live versions of this era, where J took the second solo as an opportunity to rend a hole in the space-time continuum. If you have any interest at all in rock music, the electric guitar, good songs, the freed weed, or teenage ennui, buy this album. Key lines: "I'll be waiting by your window/ Please come pat me on the head/ I just want to find out/ What you're nice to me for."
Bug was recorded a year later as Dino crested on a wave of goodwill, good press, and international touring. "Freak Scene" is probably indie rock's greatest guitar performance and the band's greatest pop song, somehow finding room for Psychedelic Furs jangle, Edge-style ascending harmonies, Eddie Van Halen in the drunk tank, pickled country, and a cherry on top in three and a half minutes without feeling at all cluttered. "What a mess," maybe, but worlds away from their debut. Bug is a tighter and cleaner a whole, and you can hear why they would soon be courted by major labels getting their noses open by first alt-rock drops of blood.
You can also hear the influence/feedback loop Dino had after razing London, specifically the combo of distant sounding feedback washes and Byrdsy plucking that closes "No Bones", a sound cut-rate shoegazers would milk for another six years at least. "Yeah We Know" turns like a tank's treads flipped in the mud, each crunching snare hit at the end of the verse tricking you into think the song's about to end. "Pond Song" showcases what a subtly clever drummer Murph was when the noise got stripped away, and "Budge" is a testament to the virtues of straight-ahead pounding. "Keep The Glove" is a jaunty little end tune, but it was pretty sadistic to make Lou scream "why don't you like me?" over and over on "Don't", when it was increasingly clear on stage that no one in this band liked anyone. It all collapsed, absurdly half-assedly, shortly after the Bug tour when J made Murph fire Lou who didn't even get the hint at first.
Dino were pretty much done at this point, though Mascis released a few more decent albums under the name-- Where You Been, in particular, was a fine slice of overlong, rangy grunge pop. Barlow formed Sebadoh, indie rock's longest running ugly late-night post-breakup phone call, and then what Stephen Malkmus neatly summarized as "the thing with the loops." Murph diminished into the west and remained Murph. The world suffered through a lot of bad loud-quiet-loud by guys in gas station jackets. The albums went out of print, and we sufficed with an aptly named best-of, Ear-Bleeding Country. Now Merge has reissued them in excellent new mixes (the SST version of You're Living All Over Me in particular sounded as if it had been recorded on gauze through a metal funnel) with good photos, liner notes, and slightly rejigged tracklists. Unfashionable or not, here's a band who cut through on nothing but heft, volume, songcraft, earnestness, and a kind of underrated virtuosity. Even if the on-record response was whatever, man.


Long-awaited follow-up to 1994's critical smash Hex finds the band in remarkable form, again drawing comparisons to former contemporaries Talk Talk and The Durutti Column.

Codename: Dustsucker

Too often in the (still) geeky-white-kid-dominated indie world, rhythm gets cast aside as a marginal sidekick to ambitions such as writing the perfect melody or scoring an NME-abetted college radio chart-topper. Dancepunk tried valiantly to remedy this but, in a way, only made things worse: Musicians who seemed to have little or no interest in a groove took a crash course in ESG and sought to control rhythm's basic tenets because it was the thing to do. As a result, the image of the awkward white kid sloppily banging out a rigid disco beat on a shitty drumset is now more farcical than endearing, and the fun of records like The Rapture's Echoes has been overshadowed by pale imitators. It's nice, then, that Codename: Dustsucker, built from the ground up on "found drumming" from ex-band member Mark Simnett and new tracks from Talk Talk's Lee Harris, thrives on and reveres rhythm rather than merely tinkering with or flat-out ignoring it.
Dustsucker arrives a decade after Bark Psychosis' previous album, Hex, and the band's subsequent dissolution. That 10-year hiatus may seem slight in a year in which Brian Wilson fans were relieved of their 37-year wait for Smile but, like the former Beach Boy, Bark Psychosis deliver. And, like Hex, Dustsucker sounds utterly unique, eschewing even the broadest classification.
This album is percussion-centric, and that's to say nothing of the temperance and agility of the drummers' playing. It's also an album smitten with texture, space, and silence, a seamless blend of acoustic instrumentation and electronic processing on which its piecemeal compositions generate massive momentum within predominantly slothful tempos. On "Shapeshifting", one can hear a constant push-and-pull between the acoustic and electronic elements, as plaintive strummed guitar nudges against a stiff drumbeat with metallic, Gamelan-like flourishes.
The record is also filled with huge, billowing clouds of resonance, which occasionally inundate its tracks in a morass of sustained sounds. "400 Winters" lingers and lingers, drawn out by massive amounts of reverb, plenty of held notes, and an ethereal underpinning of backward-looped vibraphone. Though melancholic, the song is ultimately too hopeful to be dragged down and it's easier to bask in its hazy formlessness than moan about its lack of variation. But while "400 Winters" manages to stay afloat, some tracks suffer from lethargy. "Inqb8tr" is opulently adorned in multiple layers of effects and textures, but is too congested to endure its eight-minute runtime.
But even when Dustsucker's songwriting falters, the percussion is distinct, lending direction to the record's stacked orchestration. "Reserve Shot Gunman" emerges from directionless darkness with a propulsive, vaguely Latin groove. A mercurial bassline gradually annexes notes until finding a melody that, in lieu of vocals, provides the track both a face and a backbone. "From What Is Said to When It's Read" incorporates huge, tympanic tom sounds as a kind of melodic element, while "Shapeshifting" rides an unflinching vamp through a two-minute coda that features no melody, only noisome sound effects and drums.
Dustsucker may be languorous and dense enough to put off those who are on edge, but even when the album grinds to a halt under its excessive weight the scenery is beatific. And what the songs lack in structural certainty or melodic eloquence they usually make up for in the remarkable depth and vibrancy of their textures. Considering the band's 10-year layoff, it's a somewhat understated return-- and one painted in broad strokes. But the album's unerring intimacy implores closer looks. In 2004, the fact that this record exists at all is significant, and fans of Hex should find plenty to like under its moody lightning.