Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book is one of the strongest rap albums released this year, an uplifting mix of spiritual and grounded that even an atheist can catch the Spirit to.

Coloring Book

When Chicagoan Chance the Rapper delivered his verse on “Ultralight Beam,” the opening song from Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, there was a lot going on—sly homage was being paid to West; rappers were being put on notice (“This is my part/Nobody else speak”); and, most importantly, Chance was encapsulating his past, asserting his present, and telegraphing his future. He was finally positioning himself as a rapper to be reckoned with from a mainstream podium, but he was also delving deep into Christian ideology, with allusions to Noah’s Ark and Lot’s wife, with his “foot on the Devil’s neck till it drifted Pangaea.”
That verse rolled out the red carpet for Kanye’s long-awaited album, but it doubled as an announcement of Chance’s new Coloring Book (then given the working title Chance 3), which may very well be the most eagerly-anticipated hip-hop project this year that doesn’t come attached to an actual record label. West billed his album as “a gospel album with a whole lot of cursing on it,” but The Life of Pablo wasn’t that; it was a rap album with some gospel overtures. Coloring Book, however, fits the billing, packing in so much gospel verve that it sounds like Hezekiah Walker & the Love Fellowship Crusade Choir are going to drop into half the tracks and recite 1 Timothy 4:12 in chorale. Instead, we get Kirk Franklin promising to lead us into the Promised Land, alongside appearances by demonstrated materialistic heathens like 2 Chainz, Lil Wayne, Young Thug, and Future—and the result is an uplifting mix that even an atheist can catch the Spirit to.
Thematically, Coloring Book is a far cry from Chance’s previous efforts. His debut mixtape, 10 Day, was a small, heavy-lidded odyssey of being suspended from high school “for chiefin’ a hundred blunts”; his breakthrough, 2013’s dilated Acid Rap, contained songs about being a “Chain Smoker” and confessions of “cigarettes on cigarettes/My momma think I stank/I got burn-holes in my hoodies.” But here, on Coloring Book, Chancelor Bennett observes that “we don’t do the same drugs no more” over acoustic piano and choristers backing his sentiments. He says the song is not about drugs, but it still comes off as a sobering admission from a rapper who once dedicated a small travelogue to taking acid south of the U.S. border.
“Music is all we got,” Chance professes on “All We Got,” the inaugural number featuring the Chicago Children’s Choir and West returning the “Ultralight Beam” favor—but it’s clear from the outset that this is Chance’s show. His vocals—elastic and taut, all jerky grace, full of word-sound collages that hearken back to his spoken-word genealogy— are now almost fully dedicated to God and being high on life. “I get my Word from the sermon/I do not talk to the serpent/That’s a holistic discernment,” he raps before threatening to “give Satan a swirly.” Although his puerility remains intact, his fervor is amplified as never before.
On “Blessings,” poet-activist-singer-songwriter Jamila Woods comes through with the hook: “I’m gon’ praise Him/Praise Him till I’m gone,” while Chance drops sanctified tweetables: “I don’t make songs for free, I make ’em for freedom/Don’t believe in kings, believe in the Kingdom” and “Jesus’ Black life ain’t matter/I know, I talk to his daddy.” He also manages to mix in heavenly faith, the joy of fatherhood, and redemption in a couplet and a half: “I know the difference in blessings and worldly possessions/Like my ex-girl getting pregnant and her becoming my everything/I’m at war with my wrongs.” It’s a heavy message delivered lightly, with tongue aflame.
Coloring Book is not all about transcendence, however. Despite asking “when did you start to forget how to fly?,” Chance still has his feet firmly planted as one of the biggest independent rappers of the moment. On “No Problem” he raps, “If one more label try to stop me/It’s gon’ be some dreadhead niggas in your lobby.” (In a sublime stroke, the song features Lil Wayne, stretching and compacting his flow to approximate Chance’s delivery while speaking on his own ongoing contractual issues with Cash Money Records.) “Mixtape” features Young Thug and Lil Yachty—two rappers who have found growing success by upending traditional music industry norms like Chance—to speak on their outsider stances. Thug doesn’t get specific enough to make the song as heavy as it might have been, but Yachty’s verse is strong (“Time and time again they told me no/They told me I wouldn’t go…/Fuck them reviews that they put in the paper/Did what I wanted, didn’t care about a hater/Delivered my tape to the world as a caterer”) and helps the hook shine through: “Am I the only one who still cares about mixtapes?” (It’s worth noting that Chance, who has never released a project for sale before, also released a real-time mixtape last year with fellow outlier Lil B.)
The bars here are so hard that it ain’t one gosh-darned part you can’t tweet, but the tracks carry their weight like their brother’s keeper. “Summer Friends” hisses with soft humidity; “Juke Jam” is the soundtrack to a candlelit bedroom; “All Night” moves its feet to Chicago house, courtesy of a roller-rink jam from Kaytranada. But the bulk of this record is handled by musical ensemble the Social Experiment. They’re Chance’s trusted collaborators—together they released last year’s Surf, spearheaded by Donnie Trumpet—and they’ve been refining a sound of expansive but intimate live jazz-indebted soul for the past few years. Here, they take listeners to church with organs on “How Great,” steel drums on “Angels,” and choirs, choirs everywhere. On the “Blessings” reprise that closes out the album, there’s an uncredited “All of the Lights”–esque group harmony courtesy of Ty Dolla $ign, Raury, Anderson .Paak, BJ the Chicago Kid, and others.
Coloring Book is one of the strongest rap albums released this year, and is destined to be on year-end lists aplenty. It’s a more rewarding listen than Drake’s recently released Views; it’s nearly as adventurous as The Life of Pablo. In execution and focus, it comes as a joyful, praise-dancing rejoinder to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. It feels a bit silly to compare Coloring Book to Butterfly, but it feels even sillier not to. When music comes like this—personal and panoramic, full of conversations with God, defying hip-hop norms while respecting them, proving that the genre can still dig deeper into its roots—it needs to be contextualized as what it is. This is an ultralight beam; it’s a God dream.

CORRECTION: The original version of this review stated Chance the Rapper was suspended from college. He was suspended from high school.


It's a more mature album with songs about the intricacies of relationships, but 4 has its share of stunning tracks, many co-written by The-Dream.

4

One of the year's best music videos was directed by Jay-Z and cost about zero dollars to make. The camera phone clip shows Beyoncé rehearsing her new album's opening eternal-love ballad, "1+1", backstage at "American Idol". There she is: eyes shut, standing in front of a mirror, singing her guts out while family and friends look on in quiet awe. The video has a similar impromptu charm to the many intimate, one-shot performance clips popularized by Vincent Moon's "Take Away Show", its appeal compounded by the shock of seeing such a notoriously manicured superstar without embellishment. "Help me let down my guard," she belts. And, as Beyoncé finishes the song, you hear her proud husband let out a joyous "woo!" It's all quite endearing and personal-- two words one might not often associate with this superhumanly talented and famous couple. "Sometimes you need perspective," wrote Jay in an intro to the video on his Life + Times website. "You've been right in front of greatness so often that you need to step back and see it again for the first time."
It's a fitting sentiment and song to introduce 4, which largely deals with monogamy and all that comes with committing to one person for a potential lifetime. Which, like a bad marriage, might sound boring, repetitive, staid. But, in Beyoncé's more-than-capable and still-in-love hands, a relationship that lasts can seem as complicated and rewarding as anyone would hope. "If I ain't got something, I don't give a damn/ 'Cause I got it with you," she testifies on "1+1"-- potentially dubious words from a woman who certainly has "something," but her mainlined vocals quickly dismiss mere logistics. The song boasts some of her finest-ever singing laid over a bed of warm and flowing synths, strings, and bass that manages to connect the dots between Sam Cooke and Prince without sacrificing any Beyoncé-ness. "1+1" is that rare wonder: a wedding song that pleases but doesn't pander.
The only recent pop ballad that comes close to its power is Adele's stunning "Someone Like You". But where that song-- and its massively successful corresponding album, 21-- wrung out the aftermath of young heartbreak, Beyoncé is aiming for something a bit more challenging with 4: love the one you're with, and have some fun doing it, too. The album's relative riskiness extends to its music, which side-steps Top 40 radio's current Eurobeat fixation for a refreshingly eclectic mix of early-90s R&B, 80s lite soul, and brass'n'percussion-heavy marching music. All of the album's best elements, thematically and sonically, burst ahead on Jay-Z ode "Countdown", a honking, stutter-step sequel of sorts to "Crazy in Love". The new track makes 10 years of loyalty seem just as thrilling as the first time, with Beyoncé offering her partner copious praise in that famed half-rap cadence: "Still love the way he talks/ Still love the way I sing/ Still love the way he rock them black diamonds in that chain."
The album's carefree retro sensibility pops up on three more highlights, including the Kanye West-assisted "Party", which combines a pitch-perfect André 3000 guest verse, a Slick Rick sample, bubbly 80s keyboard tones, and 90s girl-group harmonies. The track has Beyoncé infatuated once again while its mid-tempo bounce provides prime summer barbecue background. "Love on Top" lilts like a lost Reagan-era smash, its light-as-air bop recalling Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, and Stevie Wonder at their sunniest. And "End of Time" is perhaps 4's most strident declaration of co-dependence; sounding like En Vogue remixed by a high school pep band, the song has Beyoncé finding the strength in two as she sings, "I just wanna be with you/ I just wanna live for you/ I'd never let you go!" That track-- along with most of 4's stand outs-- was co-written and co-produced by the star's other invaluable partner, Terius "The-Dream" Nash.
The pair first combined forces on super hit "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)", but their collaborative relationship fully blooms on this album's ramped-up back half, including the bombastic, Major Lazer-sampling empowerment tract "Run the World (Girls)". As a songwriter, The-Dream has a way of drawing out a side of Beyoncé that's both more personal and brash, and, as seen on his several brilliant solo albums, his production style routinely references past greats while standing in the now. Tellingly, without his help the album stumbles, as on the overblown "I Was Here", a faceless, theoretically-inspirational slog written by veteran schlockmeister Diane Warren. (Unsurprisingly, "I Was Here" is the only cut on the record that wasn't co-written by Beyoncé herself, too.) Elsewhere, Babyface spearheads the decent "Irreplaceable" retread "Best Thing I Never Had", which probably wouldn't sound out-of-place on a Vanessa Carlton album, and Sleepy Jackson/Empire of the Sun leader Luke Steele worked on the ungainly "Rather Die Young", which ruins its Philly soul vibe with a theatrical Broadway glaze. (Steele also contributed an awful hook on Jay-Z's Blueprint 3 trash-can bait "What We Talkin' About"-- can we get him away from this couple, please?)
Ironically, 4's deluxe edition comes with three bonus songs that would easily count among the proper album's finest moments. Chiefly, The-Dream co-written/produced "Schoolin' Life" is an irresistible Prince tribute that's much more motivational than "I Was Here" could ever be: "Who needs a degree when you're schoolin' life?" struts Beyoncé. The singer has said she recorded more than 60 songs while making 4, and some of the wrong-headed inclusions are lazy attempts at re-creating her past hits. But they are few. And the lion's share of the album-- along with its excellent deluxe tracks-- has one of the world's biggest stars exploring her talent in ways few could've predicted, which is always exciting. After 2008's I Am... Sasha Fierce, which saw Beyoncé catching up to trends when she wasn't trying Streisand-wannabe ballads, 4 is more akin to her wily sophomore solo album, B'Day. But where that record was preoccupied with the club, 4 is happy at home; on Off the Wall-style bonus track "Lay Up Under Me", the contented 29-year-old gushes, "You ain't gotta worry 'bout a club, just come on lay up under me tonight." If anyone can make a quiet Friday night come off like an open-bar blowout, it's Beyoncé.


What may be the final Dirty Beaches album was recorded in Alex Zhang Hungtai's current homebase of Lisbon. The album consists of instrumentals and primarily features synths and saxophone; in stark contrast to that combo’s new-agey connotations, the tracks here corrode in grainy, greyscale textures.

Stateless

Our adult lives exist on a spectrum demarcated by domesticity and liberty. The stability of long-term companionship, steady employment, and home ownership comes at the expense of spontaneity, adventure, and wanderlust—and vice versa. Inevitably, those residing on opposite ends of the spectrum start to long for what the other has. For the working musician—whose very livelihood is a function of perpetual financial risk and chronic displacement—those poles shift further apart with each passing year, thus amplifying the cruel irony of trying to make a living so, that one day, they can enjoy a life that’s ultimately creeping further out of reach.
While the old adage says "there’s no place like home," for Alex Zhang Hungtai home is no place. The music he’s produced as Dirty Beaches has amounted to an extended examination of the vagabond life, one that he comes by honestly. (Well before he became a touring performer, he had spent his formative years shuttling between Taipei, Hawaii, Montreal, and all points in between.) While his 2011 breakthrough, Badlands, romanticized the lone-wolf lifestyle with its impeccably pompadoured inhabitations of early-Elvis and Suicide-schooled bad-boy archetypes, the music he’s released since has focused on the flipside of that outlaw ideal: the constant sense of dislocation and isolation.
His electro-shocked 2013 album, Drifters and its soundscaped counterpart Love Is the Devil respectively captured both the hedonistic allure and homesick ennui of globe-trotting travel. But on Dirty Beaches’ latest release, that feeling of disorientation and disconnection becomes all-consuming—to the point of obliterating his Dirty Beaches identity altogether. If Love Is the Devil was a series of impressionistic snapshots cataloguing the many far-flung locales stamped on Zhang's ever-crowded passport, the all-instrumental Stateless captures the eerie sensation of waking up and not knowing where—or who—you are. After hearing this album, you'll understand why Zhang recently announced he's retiring the Dirty Beaches concept: this is the sound of an artist who, after years of nomadic musical exploration, has reached the end of the road, with nothing but open water before him and a desire to submerge himself completely.
The pensive instrumentals on Love Is the Devil revealed Zhang's mounting interest in less theatrical, more introspective modes of expression. With Stateless, he finally achieves the state of pure anonymity that his work has been inching toward, fashioning four extended pieces that do away not just with vocals and rhythm, but identifiable melodic motifs altogether. As was the case with Love Is the Devil, the song titles serve as highly evocative headers to blank diary entries—but where its predecessor offered some geographic cues to help frame Zhang’s free-form excursions ("Berlin", "Alone at the Danube River"), Stateless deals in intangible, existential messaging: "Displaced", "Time Washes Away Everything", and so forth. Even the one recognizable locale—"Pacific Ocean"—is defined by its imposing vastness.
For all its seeming aesthetic and thematic open-endedness, however, Stateless proves to be the most focussed, tightly orchestrated release in the Dirty Beaches canon. For one, its two album sides share a similar arc, opening with a relatively shorter piece—both of which clock in at exactly 7:27—that set up longer works surpassing the double-digits mark. And where the instrumentals on Love Is the Devil had a more roaming quality—with Zhang laying down wandering piano lines and serrated guitar shards as a gateway into his subconscious—Stateless is a work of deceptively serene, slow-roiling tension, liberated from traditional song structure yet claustrophobically contained at the same time.
Recorded in his current homebase of Lisbon, the album primarily features Zhang on synths and saxophone, but, in stark contrast to that combo’s new-agey connotations, the tracks here are corroded in grainy, greyscale textures. With Zhang’s staccato sax squawks woven into Colin Stetson-like oscillations alongside guest Vittorio Demarin’s trembling viola, the opening "Displaced" resembles the foreboding intro to a Godspeed You! Black Emperor epic (shut your eyes and you can practically picture the accompanying Karl Lemieux projections), but lingers on the sense of encroaching dread rather than deliver the crescendo rock-out. On the title track, layered synth drones form an oppressively thick mist under which Zhang’s saxophone murmurs are barely audible, like foghorns emanating from some indeterminate location far off in the distance. For Zhang, the ship is always arriving, but never settling.
Stateless’ second act eases up on the tension, and in its place, reveal subtle but forceful moments of emotional release: "Pacific Ocean" begins as a synth hum that’s as monochromatic and all-enveloping as the namesake body of water, but Zhang gradually introduces affective chord changes that hint at all the wondrous subaquatic life that exists beneath the surface. And the immense 14-minute closer "Time Washes Away Everything" brings Demarin back for an exquisitely melancholic meditation whose intertwined, synth-swaddled viola and sax sweeps constantly seem to be on the verge of flickering out, before the embers come alight more brightly than before.
If Love Is the Devil was intended to challenge the expectations of fans initially drawn to Zhang for the greaser persona and wild-child shrieks, then *Stateless—*fitting for a finale—proves to be the ultimate test of their commitment. The album’s stationary sound and glacial pace, ironically, make it a more demanding listen than Dirty Beaches’ more outwardly confrontational, punk-inspired previous releases. But coming from a musician who, not too long ago, could be easily slotted alongside other retro-fetishist garage-rockers, Stateless feels less like a sad, unceremonious farewell than the quietly triumphant completion of a mission, the final step in an ongoing process of deconstructing Zhang's prefab persona into something pure and personal. Before the news broke of Dirty Beaches' demise, Stateless sounded like an audio analogue to Zhang’s eternally unmoored existence. But now, it feels like the natural end point of Dirty Beaches' unpredictable aesthetic evolution. In other words, it feels like home.


Riding the wave of success from the Fugees’ The Score, Wyclef Jean’s 1997 solo debut is a 74-minute party, as advertised. It’s a proud transcultural product that broadcasted an eclectic future.

The Carnival

The Fugees’ beautiful 1996 landmark album The Score went six-times platinum, numbers only racked up within the world of hip-hop by people like MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. During an era when JAY-Z and Nas made early career statements and 2Pac and Biggie were murdered, the Fugees presented a wide path for the future of hip-hop. Missy Elliott and TLC had already drawn plans for some of the genre’s pop futures; the Fugees corroborated and ran with them. In three interplayed voices, they were cooly courageous instead of reactionary. They rose Roberta Flack from the past, covered Bob Marley at the Grammys, and won two of them.
In The Score’s wake, Wyclef Jean, the multi-instrumentalist producer, was the first to go solo. He recorded The Carnival on the road as the Fugees traveled the world. The album was born in the summer of 1997: Bill Clinton was president again, before the Lewinsky scandal, the economy was booming, and the Gap was playing the Roots, Jamiroquai, and Sublime on the same in-store playlist. The executives at Wyclef’s label, Columbia, were not shy about their hopes for The Carnival’s success. One marketing VP told Billboard that their goal was for the record to achieve “total global saturation,” picking up where The Score had left off, introducing rap to listeners that hadn’t traditionally embraced it. That potential audience wasn’t explicitly described as nonblack, but the implication was strong. The album was intended to be understood as universally accessible, and to be taken seriously as high-concept pop theater.
Those expectations weren’t unmerited. Years before the iPod revived the singles market and trained listeners to shuffle their favorites into new contexts, The Carnival gathered an ambitious array of personalities into 24 disco-roots-creole dance tracks. Lauryn Hill, Pras, the Neville Brothers, Celia Cruz, Funkmaster Flex, and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra all play on this 74-minute thing. One single’s music video has a Bob Dylan cameo, another song samples the Bee Gees. There are eight skit interludes, several of them acting out a court case in which Wyclef humorously frames himself as someone whose character is on trial. “He’s a goddamn revolutionary!” a prosecutor yelps. In response, Wyclef presents The Carnival as proof he is the kind of winking populist rascal who can make a home anywhere and thrive. “Feel the excitement, taste the culture, know who you are!” extols an announcer on the album’s infomercial-styled intro. Wyclef ups the ante: “We are not stopping for no red lights tonight!” An hour later, a skit called “Closing Arguments” seems like it’s going to end the album. Instead, it’s followed by another interlude, and three more songs. This is a party with enough endurance to actually replace the everyday, not just help you temporarily escape it. If the runtime seems exhausting in hindsight, the premise holds up. At The Carnival, anything can happen.
You could look at The Carnival as a craven ploy by record companies seeking to further mainstream black music ahead of the millennium’s turn, but even that wouldn’t betray the remarkable history of how its particular hybrid sound came to be. Wyclef’s move from Haiti to Brooklyn (and then New Jersey) was part of a large migration of Haitians to the U.S., prompted by the repressive Duvalier regimes of the ’70s and ’80s. With the Fugees, he fused his immigration story with the DNA of New York’s housing projects and Caribbean sonics. The Carnival is an equally proud transcultural product, attesting to how dislocation and intersection mix people up. Its songs sung in Creole celebrate and affirm Haitian identity, but the album also indicates that most people have claim to multiple heritages, are the inheritors of multiple pasts.
Since his debut, Wyclef has been effectively called on to cross artists over. He produced a radio hit for fusion guitarist Carlos Santana, and re-gifted his song “Dance Like This” to Colombian idol Shakira as the double-platinum breakout “Hips Don’t Lie.” With “My Love Is Your Love,” he provided Whitney Houston’s early aughts comeback a contemporary reggae canvas. He wasn’t the first to sidecar substance in the name of style, but all-embracing, rap-rooted albums like Puffy’s No Way Out were made more thinkable by Wyclef’s contributions. “It’s an algorithm, dog, when you put cultures together. That kind of music is no longer music. It becomes just a cultural phenomenon,” Wyclef said of this winning strategy, on the Drink Champs podcast this year. “As much as I’m Haitian, no one can’t tell me I ain’t Latin, no one can’t tell me I ain’t African… If you close your eyes and I start to play piano, you be thinking I’m from Cuba.... They separate us or whatever, but for me, I know I got family from Cuba, from Jamaica.”
Can we recognize this as the same kind of strategic anti-essentialism that’s been familiar since Lil Wayne boasted that he wasn’t a human being? Or that people like Future and Lil Yachty now invoke when they plead to be considered more than rappers? Music has always been inhabited by people whose lives defy tidy paths, and what people embrace as their own can be as powerful as where they come from: American Jazz heroes had classical chops, and Western classical music was inspired by Turkish trends. DJ Khaled and Rihanna’s omnipotent 2017 smash “Wild Thoughts” revives “Maria Maria,” the song Wyclef was inspired to write by a Sondheim musical, which takes its guitar line from both “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing Ta F’ Wit” and a popular gypsy scale. The eclectic future The Carnival broadcast was always real, and it still is.
At the time of The Carnival’s release, critics reckoned with Wyclef’s dual appetites for social change and pop stardom. In an issue of SPIN with Ani DiFranco on the cover, reviewer Sia Michel argued that even if he thought of himself as a revolutionary, he was more a savvy politician. “It was once hip-hop tradition to crown yourself a leader, but armchair gangstas have made it uncool to care about anything you can’t smoke, fuck, or spend,” she wrote. “Wyclef emerges from the vacuum less a public enemy than a dreadlocked diplomat... He’s for cohesion, not confrontation.”
Translating stories and combining styles is a powerful, important tactic, but one perhaps more easily employed in music than outside of it. When Wyclef took his appealingly unpreachy social conscience into actual politics in 2010, mounting a campaign for the presidency of Haiti, he was disqualified for living in the U.S. Around the same time, the expenditures and tax filings of a charity he founded, Yéle Haiti, were scrutinized in the wake of Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. The organization was closed in 2012. Speaking with The Daily Beast in 2014, Wyclef said: “Within every foundation, will there be mistakes and errors? Yes. If you’re in the middle of a crisis and there’s an earthquake and you’re trying to help 250,000 people, you’re just trying to get them water. That’s what I was thinking. It’s not my job to be filing paperwork.”
Recently, a streaming service served me an artificial-intelligence playlist of songs it speculated would be meaningful to me, with The Carnival’s “Gone Till November” at the top. There’s something fundamentally bittersweet about this; having your memories pandered to by a machine. But I’m pleased by the crowd-supported recognition that the songs I engage with most now—rap music from unsinkable personality Cardi B, Latin trap prince Bad Bunny, and grime singer Not3s that draw inspiration from far-flung locales and imagine a world not dominated by any nation’s taste—have identifiable roots in an album that captured my attention at a formative time. And I’m not surprised. In the streaming era, the dream of reverse engineering culturally resonant megahits is alive; in Wyclef’s words, they’re almost algorithmic. We can learn a lot about big audiences and what they might like. Global scale has arguably never been more alluring, or attainable.


While the Japanese producer’s early music was grounded in footwork, he relegates rhythm to the margins on his latest EP, arranging his samples into wild abstractions and warped folk songs.

Uchigawa Tankentai EP

Before Takahide Higuchi tried his hand at music, he dreamed of working as a game designer and bringing to life the fantasy worlds in his imagination. Though his initial experiments with RPG Maker software proved frustrating enough to put those ambitions aside, the Japanese producer’s abstract beatcraft under the name Foodman can often resemble the intricate worldbuilding of classic titles like Chrono Trigger and EarthBound. Inspired by the cut-and-pasted bricolage of footwork and juke, his songs are built out of tiny, chirping samples that skitter like 16-bit sprites ambling across the screen. Earlier works like 2021’s Yasuragi Land remained tethered to the conventions of club music, occasionally locking into bouncy four-on-the-floor grooves, but his new Uchigawa Tankentai EP is a detour into greater fragmentation.
True to its title, which translates to “inner journey,” the record is guided by a loose, instinctual sensibility, evolving organically rather than following a linear progression. “Hajimari,” for example, develops like a screen-recorded playthrough of Pikmin. While you can distinguish the vague outline of a rhythm beneath the track’s chaotically deployed samples, it’s more interesting to observe it from a distant point of view, as a self-contained ecosystem. Insectoid synths warble and coo as if in conversation while tom drums, reversed hi-hats, and visceral squelching noises illustrate the collective efforts of a hive foraging for food and constructing shelter. In the album’s introspective focus, it’s as if Higuchi’s soul-searching had distilled emotion down to a cartoon symbiosis between neurons and gut flora.
Elsewhere, Higuchi inserts his own voice into the soundscape, turning splintered pieces into warped folk songs. On social media and in interviews, Higuchi often cites private moments like cold baths or lunches eaten alone as sources of inspiration, and on opener “Pichi Pichi,” he imitates the strained croak of an old man, waxing nostalgic about the texture of perfectly crisp potatoes and warm summer days as metallic synths clatter in the distance. The blend of sounds can be disjointed and sour, but that imperfection is by design. These sound like the tuneless songs you might sing to yourself while doing chores: snippets of naive expression that lend human intimacy to Foodman’s digital songcraft.
Covering five tracks in just 10 minutes, Uchigawa Tankentai is one of Foodman’s shortest releases. There’s charm in its diminutive scale, though a track like the 90-second “Hoso Michi” would benefit from further development. The interplay between its dissonant chords and MIDI choral arrangement is fascinating—like Anthony Braxton composing on a Dreamcast’s sound chip—but the song explodes into a whirlwind of drums and screams before the atmosphere can take hold. Despite its brevity, the EP succeeds as an opportunity for Foodman to steer his already eccentric artistry in a number of new directions without disrupting the flow of more conceptual LPs. Embracing the post-structural freedom evident in his earlier releases, it’s some of his most expressive—and challenging—work yet.


On his first solo billing in six years, the guitarist—a member of Darkside and Taper’s Choice—bids farewell to NYC. These patient, wistful explorations are heavy on both melody and collaborative spirit.

Skull Dream

In 2019, Dave Harrington, lifelong New Yorker and stalwart of the city’s avant-garde jazz and improv scene, moved to Los Angeles with his partner. But before he left, the guitarist gathered some of the city’s best players, both contemporaries like bassist Spencer Zahn and longtime heroes like Steven Bernstein, and made one last New York record. Fittingly, Skull Dream is an album of patient, wistful explorations that seem unable to keep from casting their eyes California’s way, even as they celebrate a lifetime of rich musical relationships. The album is at times funereal and at times shot through with optimism; its generosity of spirit shines so brightly, its desire to be in two places at once so palpable that it blots out all boundaries—between places, between jazz and noise and Americana, but also between the songs themselves. If that means it gets a little same-y, well, so does a cross-country move.
Harrington first came to prominence in Darkside, his collaboration with electronic producer Nicolás Jaar, where the hard slink of his stippling phrases—part soukous, part erotic murmur—dug creases in the otherwise placid surface of Jaar’s productions. Listening to his playing on their instant-classic 2013 album Psychic sometimes feels like watching someone run their tongue over black velvet. A regular at eclectic Lower East Side club Nublu, he quickly installed himself at L.A.’s ETA after the move, becoming a regular player in the surging local jazz scene. He also joined up with Real Estate’s Alex Bleeker and Vampire Weekend’s Chris Tomson, as well as keyboardist Zach Tenorio-Miller, to form the instantly beloved jam band Taper’s Choice, turning their mostly straightforward choogle inside out with effects-heavy leads that sometimes sound like they’re beamed in via choppy satellite.
On Skull Dream, Harrington’s guitar tone is a little hoarse and a little spacey, and he often uses it to tangle notes into tumbleweeds, sounding like the 1980s version of Jerry Garcia trying his hand at some Duane Eddy and Link Wray. His last major release, 2019’s Pure Imagination, No Country, was credited to the Dave Harrington Group, and while Skull Dream’s solo billing might suggest a showcase for the guitarist’s grandest riffs and flashiest licks, he brings the same cooperation and composure to these songs as to his other projects, a collaborator in his own music.
In opener “Dust String Peaks,” Harrington laces his patient lead through a sighing choir of saxophones and clarinets. It’s the kind of plaintive and plainly beautiful melodic line that sometimes made the Band sound like they were imagining their own funerals. The guitar and horns stroll over the patient strike of the drums with so much dignity, it feels valedictory, like the ensemble wants to sum up decades of accrued wisdom while it still has the time. Harrington occasionally allows himself a showy moment, as when the juicy horns of “Acid Western” give way to a guitar that sounds like a soprano sax, then an overdriven harmonica, and finally a wordless vocalist. But his instrument is largely beside the point, just one ray among many in the shifting light that shines and fades in what one track dubs a “Box of Sun.”
Skull Dream’s songs have a similar relationship to the album as a whole. As with any prolonged goodbye, everything here is colored by a bittersweet vibe. Even the skronkiest tunes—like “Vistavision,” where the heat shimmers of guitar and battering horns jam the knotted percussion down into a grainy mash—seem to be playing out under a long shadow. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing: Consider the power of your best friend’s going-away party. Harrington has said that his priorities when mixing the album were to keep melody as prominent as possible, avoid needless obfuscation, and above all focus on allowing himself to pursue the sounds he likes, rather than something that might sound “right.” That freedom is key to Skull Dream’s thematic consistency, and to the largeness of its heart. But allowing those amber lights to shine so brightly without changing the colors flattens some of the ensemble’s dynamism over time and nearly edges the album into melodrama.
The trade-off, though, is that Skull Dream is intimate and emotionally present in a way that this kind of music frequently is not; you can sense the affection coming off each of the players. In the same way that grainy clips of future Olympians carry a strange affective charge when juxtaposed with their present selves on the podium, Skull Dream is an encounter with both the romance and the tragedy of time—a portrait of how we got here, and a promise that there’s no going back.


For the majority of Americans, it's a given: summer is the best season of the year. Or so you ...

Oh, Inverted World

For the majority of Americans, it's a given: summer is the best season of the year. Or so you'd think, judging from the anonymous TV ad men and women who proclaim, "Summer is here! Get your [insert iced drink here] now!"-- whereas in the winter, they regret to inform us that it's time to brace ourselves with a new Burlington coat. And TV is just an exaggerated reflection of ourselves; the hordes of convertibles making the weekend pilgrimage to the nearest beach are proof enough. Vitamin D overdoses abound.
If my tone isn't suggestive enough, then I'll say it flat out: I hate the summer. It is, in my opinion, the worst season of the year. Sure, it's great for holidays, work vacations, and ogling the underdressed opposite sex, but you pay for this in sweat, which comes by the quart, even if you obey summer's central directive: be lazy. Then there's the traffic, both pedestrian and automobile, and those unavoidable, unbearable Hollywood blockbusters and TV reruns (or second-rate series). Not to mention those package music tours.
But perhaps worst of all is the heightened aggression. Just last week, in the middle of the day, a reasonable-looking man in his mid-twenties decided to slam his palm across my forehead as he walked past me. Mere days later-- this time at night-- a similar-looking man (but different; there a lot of these guys in Boston) stumbled out of a bar and immediately grabbed my shirt and tore the pocket off, spattering his blood across my arms and chest in the process. There's a reason no one riots in the winter.
Maybe I need to move to the home of Sub Pop, where the sun is shy even in summer, and where angst and aggression are more likely to be internalized. Then again, if Sub Pop is releasing the Shins' kind-of debut (they've been around for nine years, previously as Flake, and then Flake Music), maybe even Seattle has turned to the bright side. For some have hailed Oh, Inverted World as the next great entry in a long line of clean and carefree pop albums that strings back to the Beach Boys' early surfing days. This is what's meant by "sunny" music: both laid-back and upbeat, with crystalline vocals and lyrics that, while sincere, aren't particularly weighty.
Thankfully, the Shins are a little more unpredictable than the summer, with its incessant, oppressive heat. "Caring is Creepy," the opener, recalls the slower numbers on Sunny Day Real Estate's last prog-heavy offering, The Rising Tide. James Mercer's voice is nearly as inhuman and unclear as Jeremy Enigk's, and his dramatic delivery shifts momentum almost as often. A less fortunate similarity is the echo-heavy vocals, which likewise provide ample pretension, but they're not enough to derail this good rock song.
The following track, "One by One All Day," is decidedly different. The more conventional vocals are instead layered and slightly withdrawn, allowing the thumping drums and jangly guitar to share the forefront. However, for all its pleasantness, it's fairly uniform. "Weird Days," the most obvious Beach Boys-inspired song here, slows the pace to a drift. Like the previous number, it's not particularly dynamic, but the vocals and tropical strumming are pretty enough.
The Shins start showing their real strengths with "Know Your Onion!" which sounds like a 60's British garage band striving for the Kinks and just falling short. Just. The hook is surprisingly deceptive, the occasional childish background vocals are fun without being irritable, and there's even a welcome hint of their previous sound, which comes in the form of a slow, Modest Mouse-like interlude that ends with a patented Guided by Voices guitar lick.
"Girl on the Wing" is another strong, but more straightforward pop song that rides along on ringing keyboard notes not unlike-- but less abrasive than-- GBV's "Titus and Strident Wet Nurse (Creating Jeffrey)" from this year's Colonel Jeffrey Pumpernickel compilation. But "Pressed in a Book" is undoubtedly the most straightforward, and perhaps the best song on Oh, Inverted World. The sound is like Weezer at their best-- simple, addictive chord changes and clear, sing-song vocals-- but for some background rattling and a few slow, strummy passages.
At times, though, the Shins seem too content to float along. The folky "New Slang" is Simon and Garfunkel all the way down to the celestial humming. "The Celibate Life," with its distant guitar and soft percussion, would be a carbon copy of the Magnetic Fields if it weren't for a lone harmonica. "Your Algebra" returns to S&G;, this time to their chantey side, adding only a spare, diligently picked acoustic guitar as accompaniment. But despite the obvious comparisons, these songs are too pretty to turn down.
Like summer itself, the Shins are slightly over-hyped. All the buzz that's surrounded this release had me thinking (read: hoping) it would be the pop album of, at the very least, this summer. Oh, Inverted World comes close, but too much of the material here recalls other bands to consider it a "great" album. Nonetheless, I still can't believe this is what most people think summer sounds like. I only wish this wretched season sounded so good.


Like many of their early ’80s UK peers, Maximum Joy mixed punk, funk, disco, and reggae. This new set captures a band carving its own place with two of music’s most powerful tools: muscle and joy.

Maximum Joy: I Can’t Stand It Here on Quiet Nights: Singles 1981-82

Listening today, three-and-a-half decades later, it’s easy to hear Maximum Joy as a relic of their era. The defining characteristics of their music—rope-like basslines, squalls of dub delay, and alternately soaring and honking horn parts—peg them to the early 1980s, when punk rock, funk, disco, and reggae were all mixing together. But the Bristol, UK, group has never enjoyed the acclaim of contemporaries like Rip Rig and Panic, Pigbag, or the Pop Group (with whom they shared members), to say nothing of New York acts like ESG or Liquid Liquid (with whom they rubbed elbows on the roster of New York’s 99 Records). The group’s prime recording years spanned only from 1981 until 1983, in which time they recorded three singles, an Adrian Sherwood-produced LP, and a handful of compilation tracks. Since then, Maximum Joy have remained largely a footnote, despite the widespread reappraisal of funk-punk that began in the early 2000s, with the rise of DFA. They landed one track on Strut’s landmark 2008 compilation Disco Not Disco and another on last year’s Sherwood at the Controls Volume 1: 1979-1984; it has largely fallen to DJs like Andrew Weatherall and Optimo’s JD Twitch to keep their memory alive for the dancing public.
This new collection overlaps with an out-of-print 2005 anthology on Germany’s Crippled Dick Hot Wax! label, though the compilers here have mostly opted for different mixes, like the 7” “Silent Dub” of “Silent Street” instead of the 12” version, or the 12” mix of “In the Air,” which runs nearly twice the length of the previous comp’s version. Focusing primarily on the group’s three singles, I Can’t Stand It Here on Quiet Nights captures a band carving out its own place using two of music’s most powerful tools: muscle and joy. The former is right there on the surface, in the group’s slashing and zig-zagging rhythm section and horn riffs. Bassist Dan Catsis, formerly of the Pop Group, is alternately nimble and brute in his attack: On “Silent Street (Silent Dub),” he traces a taut pattern so neatly you might not even notice that the song is in 9/4 time; on “White and Green Place (Extraterrestrial Mix),” he digs in hard, thumbing a riff that suggests kinship with Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern” bassline before sliding fat, greasy fifths down the neck of his instrument.
Ex-Glaxo Babies drummer Charlie Llewellin is the perfect foil for Catsis’ blend of agility and force, with a fondness for crisp, skeletal grooves—nimble dub on “Silent Street,” neck-snapping disco on “Stretch (7 Inch Mix)” and “In the Air (12 Inch Mix)”—that make the most of the emptiness between hi-hats and snares. As for guitarist John Waddington, another Pop Group alumnus, he sides mainly with that gaping negative space, his presence felt mainly in glancing funk chords that fall across the music like the glow of a stained-glass window.
It’s singer Janine Rainforth that best embodies Maximum Joy’s exuberance: Having co-founded the group when she was just 18 years old, she channeled her inspirations—singers like X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene and the Slits’ Ari Up—into her own shape-shifting style. On “Stretch,” the A-side of the group’s debut single, she belts it out in the manner of her mentors, slicing into the midrange frequencies with a tone poised at the midway point between speech, screaming, and singing. It’s an entirely fitting complement to the song’s defiant positivity: “Stay positive, stay strong!/Hold safe, hold straight/Don’t terminate, no end!” Listen closely, though, and you’ll hear another side of her: a soft soprano background coo, diffuse as a pastel-colored mist. This is the voice that gives “Silent Street (Silent Dub)” its ethereal, sui generis feel: The lyrics (“Let’s have the music all day long/Let’s have the sound all night”) may scan as reggae boilerplate, but her airy tone lends a uniquely spooky quality to the song, like a ghost haunting the dancehall. It’s a quality you won’t find in any of their contemporaries.
Somewhere in between all that sinew and euphoria, Wrafter’s saxophone and trumpet blaze their own trail, shrieking and soaring and honking. On “In the Air,” no wave skronk comes to the fore, abetted by Rainforth’s own dissonant violin; on “Simmer Til Done,” his lowing, lyrical style has more in common with Clarence Clemons or the “Saturday Night Live” band’s Lenny Pickett. It’s here, as well as in his guttural bellowing on “Stretch,” that Maximum Joy’s music can occasionally feel dated.
Elsewhere, though, Wrafter's woozy tone gives the music its undeniable frisson: On “Silent Street” and “Building Bridges (Building Dub),” his atonal trumpet blasts are the glue that holds everything together. It’s no wonder the compilation opens with “Silent Street,” which was the B-side to their debut single. The song is where they found something inimitable. At the nexus of a bunch of different styles, in the shadow of their peers, they struck a spark that still glows.


Chicago's NE-HI come out of the basement for their second album, one that sees the band shaping their wiry garage rock sound for larger stages while still honing their musical personalities.

Offers

Selectivity is the calling card of Chicago’s NE-HI. On the band’s self-titled 2014 debut, which was recorded in one of the many city basements that grew them, they never showed their full hand. Four of its nine tracks were a single hook of eight or nine words and almost nothing else. Jason Balla’s guitar lines featured plenty of space between each note, and they honk, nasal and blaring, as if their garage indie rock was designed with the express purpose of forcing their way through to the back of an overcrowded basement. The band learned quickly that their overflowing energy is best spent when pouring more into less, and not vice versa.
Offers is NE-HI’s second album and first on Grand Jury Music, and it reintroduces the band as one who plays above-ground. Coming off of multiple tours where they regularly played on proper stages for the first time, NE-HI built these songs accordingly: They sound twice as developed. The co-frontman platoon of Mikey Wells, the more verse-chorus-minded songwriter, and Balla, who on stage assumes the form of a rubber band in flight, dial up the energy between the two. Their ballooning sound is a close approximation of the NE-HI live show—the band's best foot forward—and captures the breath of the band up close like being inches away from their mics in a moldy basement.
On the Wells-led highlights “Buried on the Moon,” “Sisters,” and “Don’t Wanna Know You,” Balla’s guitar buzzes and swerves behind him, forming these hardly logical interactions that make for Offers’s most interesting moments. The album’s first single, “Drag,” is also the best bridge between basement- and stage-NE-HI, featuring a full structure without sacrificing the shouts. The abrasive instrumental breakdowns that NE-HI leaned on for their loudest early songs aren’t common here, but the one that shows up on  “Out of Reach” punctuates one of the least ambiguous lyrics Balla has written: “Do you want to get along?/Say the word, I’ll let you right in.” Neither singer is one to get cheated on a single vowel sound.
Offers was completed on its second studio go-around after the first was scrapped almost entirely. The pressure to deliver—and to fold into the business of building a successful band—seems to have found its way into the songs, which can flirt a little too closely with self-obsession. “Every Dent” reckons with all the glad-handing required to get ahead in the business, and on “Buried on the Moon,” Wells takes an even more cynical look at the process: “Well come on make a record like your dear old dad/Yeah, we’ll give you all the money then make you feel sad.” The shoegazing title track looks upon the defeat of a missed opportunity with dread: “Offer’s gone/No response/I’ve been on too long,” Balla sings, exhaustingly.
But Offers deliberately ends on a more optimistic ode to their roots, a song that feels like NE-HI’s home base. On “Stay Young,” they talk changing, growing, and resisting age—while all too self-aware of the embarrassment of admitting to resisting age. “Time gets away from you / And it’s not coming back,” Balla sings. But time spent pouring energy into work that marks a new chapter, while the energy is still there, is time well spent. NE-HI are comfortable doing as much as they can.


Compared to the Wu-Tang Clan’s rowdy 36 Chambers and the canonized solo albums that followed it, Method Man’s solo debut is a reclusive, interior record, concerned primarily with securing refuge and dispatching threats.

Tical

Of the many monikers, aliases, and riffs that whizz like flying guillotines across Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), only one gets spelled out: Method Man. The Staten Island rapper’s self-titled song, a geyser of idioms and allusions to cartoons, commercials, and weed, offers the earliest proof that Wu-Tang is for the children. His puerile free associations spring off and glom on to RZA’s dusty drums and piano plinks like chewing gum on teeth. “You don’t know me and you don’t know my style,” Method Man taunts, an ethos that would come to define his debut album.

Released a little over a year after Enter the Wu-Tang in the fall of 1994, Tical opened the fusillade of solo Wu-Tang albums that followed the clan’s rowdy debut. It was supposed to be second in line, but Ol’ Dirty Bastard blew his $45,000 advance from Elektra on a hooptie and had an erratic recording schedule. Meth stepped up with a debut informed by drug-altered states and the grim environments that make them desirable. It lives in the shadow of the canonized Wu solo albums that succeeded it, and relative to the cold precision of Liquid Swords, the wry unpredictability of Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, and the dizzyingly stylish pulp of Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, it’s not as refined, eclectic, or cinematic. But that’s by design.
Though he became the breakout star of the group, thanks in part to his frequent collaborations with non-Wu artists like Biggie and Spice 1, Tical is an interior record. Across these reclusive tracks, Method Man’s primary concerns are securing refuge and dispatching threats. Named after methtical—Staten Island slang for weed—but also deeply shaped by angel dust, Tical molds the suave playfulness of “Method Man” into anxious evasion. The music is claustrophobic and quicksilver, Method Man’s liquid delivery sliding around, across, and into RZA’s jigsaw beats. “Bring the Pain” is a flow clinic in which Method Man skillfully drifts in and out of meter over a purring sample of Jerry Butler’s soul gem “I’m Your Mechanical Man.” Though he sounds unbothered as he peels off boasts and references to Star Wars, Driving Miss Daisy, and Kris Kross, his fleet-footed rhymes are charged with unease. “Is it real, son, is it really real, son?/Let me know it’s real son, if it’s really real,” he rattles off on the jittery hook.
In a 1994 ego trip profile, Method Man said the goal of the album was to “take niggas outta hell for a minute,” but the music never feels escapist in the traditional sense. He presents escape as active and adrenal, his thoughts racing as he chases relief in a rhyme or an inhale. Music about getting high often basks in the way weed dilates consciousness and stretches time, but Tical is more like a cigarette break on the clock, every puff underscoring the brevity of the comfort.
Most of the verses are functionally strings of battle raps, harking back to both the Staten Island cyphers where the Wu members cut their teeth and the internal competitions that would determine who ended up on the Clan’s songs. “Meth vs. Chef” epitomizes that mode, staging a friendly skirmish between Method Man and Raekwon. But Method Man’s shit-talking often doubles as venting. On single “Release Yo’ Delf,” he sounds outright annoyed. “Notice, that other niggas rap styles is bogus/Doo doo, compared to this versatile voodoo/Blazing, the stuff that ignites stimulation inside ya/’Cause I be that hell sure provider,” he raps, slyly emphasizing the first counts of each measure. He has a singular gift for stylizing transitions between words and bars, a skill that makes his rapping conversational and personable even when he’s taking heads.
The opening lines of “Sub Crazy” are full of artful pauses and change-ups that string threats into a vignette: “What up, opp? Niggas is strapped, ready for war/On the ill block, things just ain’t peace no more/Fuck it, if you ain’t with me then forget me/Niggas tried to stick me/Retaliation, no hesitation, shifty/Creepin’ niggas in the dark, triggers with no heart/Ripping ass apart, I be swimming with the sharks now.” The rhymes are polysyllabic but unembellished, his voice instead stressing the shifts in cadence that stitch all the images together. Method Man would later become revered for his smooth and assured voice—a pillar of orthodoxy in the midst of the Wu ruckus, and the legible counterpoint to Redman’s freehand word splatters—but here he’s as dynamic as he is suave.

RZA’s inkblot beats are just as fluid; the sooty drum kits, corroded piano melodies, and spectral voice samples shroud the album in moody darkness. On “Mr. Sandman” he degrades the Chordettes’ cheery ’50s pop standard of the same name into an eerie death wail and sprinkles it over a dulled breakbeat. He tops the cavernous bass of “Sub Crazy” with a chilly, melodic howl and the disturbing sound of a bomb falling. “Release Yo’ Delf” flips Gloria Gaynor’s anthemic “I Will Survive” into a dubby marching drill. “Keep it moving, baby, we be moving,” chants Method Man, the drum major to RZA’s one-man band.

Compared to Enter the Wu-Tang, Tical’s production has briefer skits and fewer identifiable movie and soul samples; that may be the result of a flood that laid waste to scores of completed tracks and beats in RZA’s basement. Method Man ended up having to re-record verses over refurbished beats, a snag he has credited with diminishing the album’s quality and impact. But RZA’s jagged and phantasmic productions fit Method Man’s restless rapping, underscoring the recurring mentions of death, loss, and disease. “I’m from a small town where nigga do or nigga die,” Method Man wheezes on “Stimulation,” distilling the bleak world of Tical to its solitary core.

Tical is essentially a photographic negative of Enter the Wu-Tang; the Shaolin mythology and bonds of brotherhood dissolve as Method Man pushes through the abyss alone, comforted by fleeting pleasures and his loved ones. “All I Need” provides the album's sole moment of respite, Method Man promising his girl better days while thanking her for back rubs and support. RZA’s surgical sample of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “You’re All I Need to Get By” leans into the longing of Method Man’s writing, pulling and compressing the source’s melody without the vocals. The platinum-selling remix with Mary J. Blige would become the canonical version of the song (and cement Method Man’s begrudging role as Wu-Tang’s resident heartthrob), but the original captures the indelible blues of the track. Method Man speaks to and about his muse, who would later become his wife, as if trying to condense the expanse of his love into a single message.

Tical’s singles ended up having a longer tail than the record as a whole. Chris Rock named a comedy special after “Bring the Pain,” and 2Pac, Missy Elliott, and R.A.P. Ferreira, among many others, interpolated it. The “All I Need” remix became a Top 10 hit and a hip-hop soul classic. But the full album isn’t as lauded as 1994 rap albums like Nas’ Illmatic, Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die, Scarface’s The Diary, and Redman’s Dare Iz a Darkside—a legacy in many ways attributable to the caginess of its elusive narrator. No single song or sequence quite conveys who Method Man is; the constant shapeshifting reveals his style and interests but not his worldview or background.
In its narcotic detachment, though, Tical anticipates the groggy inward turns that rappers as varied as Lil Wayne, Kid Cudi, Earl Sweatshirt, and Lil Peep would take as drugged states became a sonic and narrative pillar of hip-hop. Method Man dusted so Future could sip. There’s a distinctive openness to Tical compared to its distant cousins, however. Unlike the many stoner anthems (some of them coauthored by Method Man) and laments that succeeded it, Tical declines to foreground its muses; the benders that shape it are always subtext, never a focal or talking point. That chronic distance allows the pleasures and miseries of addiction to go unfixed, instead of cohering into an easy takeaway about the drugs or the user.
Method Man baked that slipperiness into the record when he scrapped the album’s weed-referencing original title, The Burning Book, in favor of hyperlocal slang that couldn’t be reduced to a lifestyle or brand. Tical, he explained to High Times in 1995 when asked what it meant, was a “word that’s gonna mean more shit in the future”—a deflection and a bit of prophecy. In 2017 Method Man told Desus & Mero that “tical” stood for “taking into consideration all lives.” Though that clearly retroactive riff adds no new dimensions to the record, it feels congruent with RZA and Method Man’s expressionist songwriting. In their view, slang—like samples, like flows—is meant to keep morphing, keep moving. Sometimes a stride is as striking as a story.


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 a monument psychedelic funk, a defining document of Black rock music in the early ’70s.

Maggot Brain

Inside the gatefold of vinyl copies of Maggot Brain is an excerpt from an article about the concept of fear, published in a magazine by the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a religious sect founded in England in the mid-’60s. Its thesis: “Fear is at the root of man’s destruction of himself.... Do we know the extent to which we are at war with one another—on every level from personal to world wide [sic]—because we are afraid?” That’s some heavy shit for a funk band to be dropping on folks, but Funkadelic mastermind George Clinton harbored an iconoclastic streak. While his fledgling ’60s band the Parliaments tried to adapt to Motown Records impresario Berry Gordy’s preference for matching suits, synchronized dances, and well-crafted vocal harmonies, they failed to make the cut. In his 2014 autobiography, Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kind of Hard on You?, Clinton observed that Gordy deemed the Parliaments as too similar to Motown artists the Temptations and the Contours, and their wildly varying heights struck the label boss as too odd. Ultimately, this rejection was for the best, as Clinton’s imagination was sprouting in ways too strange for Motown, as manifested in Funkadelic’s first three albums.
With the freedom afforded by Armen Boladian’s Westbound Records, Clinton proceeded to create a sonic and lyrical universe that placed equal importance on moving minds and bodies in unprecedented ways. If that meant immersing listeners in unconventional thoughts about fear or triggering meditations about world destruction, then the headstrong bandleader had enough faith in his audience to handle his bold blend of the pleasure principle with eschatological matters.
Though the Process Church dogma took up a quarter of the gatefold’s layout and imbued the record with a gravity, it wasn’t necessarily essential for analyzing and enjoying Maggot Brain’s merits. In fact, in a 2006 interview with Wax Poetics, Funkadelic bassist Billy Nelson said that he held no truck with the religion’s allegedly Satanic doctrines—nor, for that matter, with the grotesque cover art featuring a screaming Black woman buried in a mound of maggot-laden dirt, with the back cover revealing simply a skull. “That’s George [Clinton] sabotaging us again,” Nelson lamented. Defending the Process Church in Brothas, Clinton described its ethos as “a form of self-actualization.” He would delve further into its thinking on Maggot Brain’s 1972 follow-up, America Eats Its Young. But this was an ephemeral phase in Clinton’s artistic life, and secondary to the revolutionary sounds he and his bandmates were creating.
Funkadelic’s self-titled debut LP (1970) and the same year’s Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow proved that Clinton and company were adept at penning hook-laden soul nuggets, “wayback yonder funk,” gully blues-rock, sinister gospeldelia, and freak-flag-flying jams. By the time they entered Detroit’s United Sound Systems in late 1970 to record their third full-length, Maggot Brain, they’d honed their myriad styles to a raw-nerved peak. For a group rumored to record while zonked out of their minds, Funkadelic really held it together on Maggot Brain. They may not have been as tight as James Brown’s backing band the J.B.’s, but Clinton, Nelson, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, guitarists Eddie Hazel and Tawl Ross, and drummer Tiki Fulwood had cohered into a fearsome unit.
Perhaps the most distinctive thing about Maggot Brain is its incomparable bookends: The opener “Maggot Brain” and closer “Wars of Armageddon” are the most evocative expressions of birth and annihilation ever put on record. In the former, Funkadelic plunges into the dank throes of an existential quandary, as Clinton intones, “Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time/For y’all have knocked her up/I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe/I was not offended/For I knew I had to rise above it all/Or drown in my own shit.” Clinton really knew how to rivet attention and prep you for the journey of a lifetime.
The mythos surrounding this 10-minute epic is extraordinary. Clinton claimed that he and Hazel were tripping hard, and then the bandleader told his guitarist to play like his mother had died. Realizing that Eddie had executed a world-historical solo, Clinton decided to excise most of the other players’ contributions from the track and then “Echoplexed everything back on itself four or five times,” as he noted in Brothas. “I could see the guitar notes stretch out like a silver web.” (An alternate take with all the instruments intact appears as a bonus track on a 2005 CD reissue of Maggot Brain, and in retrospect, you can’t argue with Clinton’s decision. The keyboards, bass, and drums are fine, but they impinge enough on Hazel’s wizardry to be distracting.)
This solo—with its solarized, distraught wails, smooth dive bombs, and shattered-crystal grace notes—occupies the loftiest perch in the guitar-hero pantheon. How can something so mournful fill you with so much life? It was perverse of Clinton to place such an elegiac show-stopper at the beginning, but in the early ’70s, perversity was the man’s lifeblood. Conventional wisdom in those days involved starting albums with the most instantly appealing song; instead, Clinton opened with amplified and warped chewing sounds and a lysergic monologue about planetary impregnation and cranial infestation. Out of such grotesque imagery, Clinton and Hazel alchemized heavenly beauty.
If “Maggot Brain,” is the album’s yin, “Wars of Armageddon” is its yang. Right from the start, Funkadelic unfurl a maelstrom of angst: explosions, crying baby, grouchy dad, protesters chanting for freedom—all of it accompanied by a surfeit of cowbell, bongos, and organ. The track’s chthonic thrust and swagger foreshadowed Miles Davis’ later fusion masterpieces On the Corner and Dark Magus. As it turned out, Miles so loved the drumming here that he temporarily stole Fulwood from Clinton.
Clinton may have been an avid druggie in Funkadelic’s early years, but his mind was highly attuned to the outré music, anti-war sentiments, class struggles, and free-love mores of the time. All of his thoughts and feelings cohered to a potent degree in “Wars of Armageddon.” In the song’s final third, we hear more chants (“More power to the people/More pussy to the power/More pussy to the people”) and some nasty animal and bodily function sounds as the music continues to wildly carom. This is Funkadelic’s ultimate freakout experience, their “Sister Ray” and their “Helter Skelter” rolled into an acid-rock/musique concrète journey to the center of a blown mind. Toward the end, Clinton mutters, “Goddamn/Look at that pollution!/It’s a fat funky person” amid the sound of distant explosions. The music may signify end times, but he can’t help facing catastrophe with a prankster’s devil-may-care blitheness.
Between these towering extremes, Funkadelic wheeled out the sort of soulful funk-rock that could fuel world-class parties. It would be hard to name a hotter five-song streak in the Clinton canon than that which flows from “Can You Get to That” to “Back in Our Minds Again.” The former is actually a remake of the Parliaments’ “What You Been Growing,” and when this ditty ambles into earshot after the desolate “Maggot Brain,” it feels as if your entire extended family’s swarming you with good vibes at your surprise birthday party. Funkadelic lay down sun-fatigued funk with intricate female/male vocal interplay, including Ray Davis’ basso profundo interjections and the harmonizing of Isaac Hayes’ backing singers Pat Lewis, Dianne Lewis, and Rose Williams. In Brothas, Clinton claims that the metaphor of “When you base your love on credit/...insufficient funds” for troubled social or romantic relationships was lifted from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It was a new twist on an old sentiment, one that would be further manipulated by time and genre in Sleigh Bells’ “Rill Rill.”
Sleigh Bells’ sample was not the only example of Funkadelic’s early material resonating with white artists from the ’80s to the ’00s; musicians as diverse as the Balancing Act, Mike Watt and J. Mascis, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, among others, have covered Funkadelic songs. In Brothas, Clinton noted that in their early years Funkadelic were too Black for most rock kids and too white for most funk and soul aficionados. But it was exactly this in-between-ness that generated the essential friction of their music, the X-factor that lent it its heady allure and unusual durability.
Contemporaries working in similar modes such as Sly & the Family Stone, the Chambers Brothers, and War—all of whom were multiracial groups—had found the key to crossover success. But as an all-Black rock unit, Funkadelic struggled to achieve more than cult status in their heyday, even if some of their releases scraped the lower reaches of the charts. Upon its release, Maggot Brain was too strange for most music consumers to grasp. Even in their Detroit homebase, Funkadelic couldn’t catch a break with the city’s AOR radio outlets. Over the decades, however, the album’s guitar heroics, relentless grooves, and cavalier hooks have infiltrated their way into more receptive minds.
Listening to the staccato “Hit It and Quit It,” you can understand why those early-’70s listeners would be perplexed. Keyboard prodigy Worrell unfurls Keith Emersonian burbles and proggy flourishes alien to the funk genre at the time. Revealing Funkadelic’s democratic nature with regard to singers (a ploy that may have hindered their ability to break through commercially, as there was no dedicated frontman), Clinton allowed Worrell to sing his skinny ass off amid a libidinous landslide of guitar riffs and basslines. “Hit It” ranks as one of the filthiest lust songs ever to stoke a libido.
Another example of Funkadelic’s egalitarian microphone policy, “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks” is sung by Billy Nelson; the track exudes the air of a communal Sly & the Family Stone anthem, but imbued with the menace of the Manson Family, with the bass/drums groove ranking as one of the most lethal in the Funkadelic canon. Despite the sinister aura, the song is a plea for equality and understanding among all people. For what it’s worth, “You and Your Folks” is the most-sampled track on Maggot Brain (11 times), and Alabama Shakes singer-songwriter Brittany Howard covered it on 2020’s Spotify Singles.
In a 1985 issue of Spin, P-Funk professor emeritus Greg Tate dubbed “Super Stupid” a “heavy-metal hydrogen bomb test”; it’s no wonder heavies such as Audioslave and Big Chief took stabs at it. This is mercilessly vicious rock that attracted the attention and respect of British rock royalty when Funkadelic first toured England. Clinton claims David Bowie, Rod Stewart, and members of Cream, the Beatles and Led Zeppelin checked them out on that jaunt. “Super Stupid”’s metallic guitar avalanche is tempered by Worrell’s circus-y keyboard effusions, but the real star is Hazel, who is on fire in extremis, both on ax and vox. “Super Stupid” warns of the foolishness of drug abuse (Worrell claimed in Wax Poetics that band members were snorting heroin) while, incidentally, making you want to take drugs.
Following the release of Maggot Brain, Hazel and Nelson split to work for the vastly more popular Motown act the Temptations, reportedly due to dissatisfaction with Clinton’s handling of the band’s financial situation. Fulwood also was disgruntled about pay and left Funkadelic. Although Clinton doesn’t mention this issue in Brothas, the Wax Poetics interviews feature complaints about George’s stinginess. Ross, too, departed, after alleged misadventures with either LSD or speed. These painful losses were ameliorated by the additions of Bootsy and Catfish Collins, Garry Shider, and Boogie Mosson—all world-class funkateers. Nevertheless, Funkadelic never again released an album as laden with genius as Maggot Brain. It was the culmination of their first phase’s most outrageous and ingenious sonic ideas, establishing a new precedent for how Black musicians would exist in a rock context, juxtaposing metal, gospel, prog, funk, blues, and jazz fusion with nonchalant virtuosity. It’s the epitome of their extravagant virtues and vices.
Summarizing the LP in Brothas, Clinton wrote, “Maggot Brain was going places that Black groups hadn’t gone, into questions about whether America was still on the right path or whether the promise of the late ’60s had completely evaporated.” In these seven songs, you can hear Funkadelic attempting to make sense of the turmoil of the times, as they express the euphoria and anguish of being born and dying in the most extraordinary ways.

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Jeff Tweedy produced the Duluth band's tenth studio album, placing an emphasis on the drama that distinguishes it from previous Low efforts. Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker sound like true equals here, as their writing, singing, and playing complement one another vividly.

The Invisible Way

It’s easy to forget and hard to believe that Low have been doing this for 20 years now. Alan Sparhawk, Mimi Parker, and John Nichols started the group in 1993, following in the wake of Codeine and Galaxie 500 but eventually coming to represent the slowcore sub-subgenre by dint of sheer longevity. Those two acts have already reissued their entire catalogs, but Low have kept on keeping on. Still, slowcore is an odd sound to buoy such a long career and sturdy catalog, if only because it’s defined by its self-imposed limitation: at its best, that slow tempo can be as intense as a punk song; as boring as wallpaper at its worst. Having hit both extremes at one point or another, the most perfectly named band on the planet have owned up to the restrictions of their aesthetic.
As a result, their catalog is not necessarily diverse, but they’ve managed to find a great deal of variety within this small patch of terrain, thanks primarily to the open-ended nature of the band. Sparhawk and Parker have proved mainstays, with numerous musicians caught in their orbit over time (the latest being multi-instrumentalist Steve Garrington). Furthermore, Low have never shied away from working with producers who bring their own specific styles and aesthetics to their songs. In the late 1990s, Kramer, Steve Fisk, and Steve Albini helped them define and refine their sound; in the next decade, Dave Fridmann and Matt Beckley helmed albums with varying success. All used the band’s glacial dirges as a blank canvas, and Low savored these outside perspectives, as though they knew the band was never quite a self-contained unit.
The latest producer to helm the boards for Low is Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who recorded the band at the Loft in Chicago. On one hand, he’s such a perfect match that it’s surprising they’ve never worked together before: they’re all indie veterans who have come to represent various aspects of the Midwest-- Tweedy the busyness of Chicago and Low the remote plane of Duluth. On the other hand, Tweedy may be the most Americana-bound producer Low have hired, and at the very least represents a departure from Albini’s punk austerity, Fridmann’s art-sprawl, and Beckley’s pop haze. Especially compared to their 2000s output, The Invisible Way sounds crisp and live, produced to emphasize the individual instruments and to highlight their natural reverb. The sustain of the piano is a major component on “So Blue” and “Waiting”, and the Loft shapes the fading tones of Sparhawk’s sharply picked acoustic guitar on “Amethyst”. The album sounds so good-- and so quintessentially Low-- that the music distracts from the occasionally weak songwriting, which is just what it’s supposed to do.
This sparer sound allows Low and Tweedy to emphasize the drama of the album that distinguishes it from previous Low efforts. While “Holy Ghost” and “Mother” sound sharp in their soft-spoken approach, the pace of “Just Make It Stop” is relentless, at least relative to how we perceive the band, with the piano pushing Parker’s vocals to a subtly harried and desperate pace that fits the lyrics. She’s a stronger presence on this album, singing five songs (nearly half the tracklist) instead of her usual one or two. Even when she’s not taking lead, she remains prominent. As Sparhawk ponders the nature of time and songwriting on opener “Plastic Cup”, Parker ghosts his vocals, her voice trailing off of his and turning each line into a question thrown into the abyss.
Parker and Sparhawk sound like true equals on The Invisible Way, as their songwriting, singing, and playing complement each other vividly. Still, he gets saddled with two of the weakest tracks here, which is especially disappointing coming so soon after his excellent Retribution Gospel Choir album, 3. With its prominent, yet distracting proper nouns, “Clarence White” sounds like it should allude to something specific, yet the only thing truly harrowing about it is the steady, unsettling drum tattoo. When every other instrument falls away, that simple rhythm sounds like that old horror trope: the lumbering monster you can’t seem to outrun. “On My Own” begins with a sweet, straightforward melody about the looming fear of solitude, but then blunders into a lengthy outro that awkwardly languishes in some guitar fuzz and wishes you happy birthday 32 damn times. Repetition has always been a useful, if risky tool in Low’s songwriting kit, but here it just sounds jarring, even embarrassing.
Even when it stumbles, though, The Invisible Way gives the impression of a band on the run. From what, not even they can say. But something horrible lies in wait just offscreen, something like time or death or irrelevance or separation. Low are wise enough not to show the monster, which means these songs are compelled by a strange desperation and worry-- as though Low are barely keeping their demons at bay. Nothing on these songs sounds the least bit rote or comfortable, and that’s remarkable for a band so far into an unlikely career. The Invisible Way suggests that Parker and Sparhawk have been able to maintain the band for so long by never making it easy on themselves. They’ve questioned every assumption about what a band like Low-- a band with a very rigid aesthetic-- can do, which has proven a sound strategy for turning a trend like slowcore into a career.


Layering his custom-built 48-string zither with slide guitar, clarinet, and pump organ, the Texas native makes music that draws as much from drone and ambient as from jazz and Americana.

Sun Arcs

The music of Blue Lake is a solitary journey. Led by the Texas-born, Denmark-based artist Jason Dungan, the instrumental project is characterized by a peaceful, wandering approach that should be familiar to anyone who enjoys walking along the same route every day, noticing how different seasons, soundtracks, or moods can alter the view. As a composer, Dungan never tires of a few specific textures: the melodic drone of a zither winding along a major scale; the way a drum machine can loop into a trancelike momentum; the sketch-like presence of clarinet and recorder suggesting the outline of a symphony.
To create his latest album, Sun Arcs, Dungan retreated to a cabin in the Swedish woods where his days were occupied solely by making music and walking his dog. The results of his exercise feel clear-eyed and optimistic, ambitious and multidimensional enough to conjure the sound of a full band even though he is the only person in the room. The project shares a name with a live album by jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, and the influence of improvisatory ensembles is clear in Dungan’s work. He leaves an impression less through melody than through feeling: the kind of ecstatic release that comes from hammering a simple theme over and over, until its movements come second nature and each subtle shift promises to lead somewhere new.
This sense of patience aligns Dungan’s music with genres like drone and ambient as much as jazz, and his use of acoustic instruments helps strike a blend that feels distinctly his own. His work centers on the sound of a 48-string zither, which he built specifically for the project: a texture that lands somewhere between harp and sitar. Some tracks are devoted almost entirely to the instrument. The title track is a duet between zither and the driplike, amelodic plucks of slide guitar, played high up the neck. “Green-Yellow Field,” meanwhile, is an improvised solo performance that sweeps with incidental harmony reminiscent of wind chimes, the pauses between each note carrying as much resonance as the strings.
Other songs feel like breakthroughs, new ways to ground his distinctive voice. “Bloom” is Dungan’s most uniformly gorgeous performance to date, based on an open-tuned, fingerpicked melody that would sound equally at home on a solo guitar record or accompanying a singer-songwriter. The magic is in how it builds. Like guests slowly arriving at a party and filling the room with conversation, the arrangement gathers at a natural pace that grows warmer and brighter as each new element joins in: a deep, sawing cello; a childlike keyboard melody; percussion that seems to echo the movement of Dungan’s hand along the fretboard.
Taking a tactile approach to each instrument, Dungan’s music transcends from merely pleasant to something inhabitable: places that you will want to return to. In the liner notes, he refers to visual cues as often as sonic ones, and the recording process seems inextricable from the compositions themselves. He recalls the way his dog slept on the floor beside him through the entire recording of “Fur,” whose pattering drums, pump organ, and clarinet each find subtle ways of offering companionship. For the nine-minute closer, “Wavelength,” he cites the 1967 film of the same name by experimental auteur Michael Snow, whose endless zoom-in technique he draws from by pulling us closer without limiting the psychedelic, open-ended appeal of his art.
In addition to fellow Americana wanderers like William Tyler, whose experiments with krautrock on Modern Country set a precedent for the more fleshed-out songs here, Snow’s minimal but boundaryless approach seems a fitting model for Dungan’s evolving vision. Near the end of his life, Snow focused on art made with the perspective granted by his remote Newfoundland cabin. “The isolation and silence, the lack of interruption, has been inspiring,” he said in a 2021 interview. In one of his later pieces, he filmed a curtain blowing against an open window at sunset while he and his wife were eating dinner, the sound of their dishes faintly audible alongside their breath and the wind. The recordings on Sun Arcs conjure a similarly intimate view, one that can feel both magical in its simplicity and all the more compelling for what’s just out of frame.


Bruce Springsteen’s fifth album gushes forth with the fury of a burst dam, delivering torrents of despair, inspiration, heartbreak, and joy. The Ties That Bind: The River Collection expands the original 20-song double album to a 4xCD set supplemented with video.

Bruce Springsteen: The Ties That Bind: The River Collection

The River doesn’t flow—it floods. Bruce Springsteen’s fifth album gushes forth with the fury of a burst dam, delivering torrents of despair, inspiration, heartbreak, and joy. Coming after the deliberate twin masterpieces of Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town, records epic in scope but precise in execution, The River not only appears to be a mess but embodies the classic definition of a double album: it seems to be a clearinghouse for every song Bruce Springsteen had at the ready in 1980. The Ties That Bind: The River Collection shows just how wrong that assumption is. Expanding the original 20-song double album to a 4xCD set supplemented with video, it laughs at the notion that the original album was much too much by underscoring exactly how Springsteen intended the album to overwhelm.
Initially, Springsteen planned to follow 1978’s Darkness on the Edge of Town with an album called The Ties That Bind but he withdrew the record in the fall of 1979, believing that it wasn’t "big enough." This claim came from the stage during a 2009 performance of The River at Madison Square Garden, with Bruce going on to say, "I wanted to capture the themes that I’d been writing about on Darkness. I wanted to keep those characters with me and at the same time added the music that made our live shows so much fun and enjoyable for our audience." On this box, the scrapped The Ties That Bind gets an official airing as the third disc on the set—here it’s dubbed The River [Single Album]—and it does indeed play like a truncated, miniature version of The River, containing in its 10 tracks seven of the double-album’s songs, along with two alternate versions of tunes that wound up on the released record. What’s striking is what’s absent: shorn of its party songs, the record feels gloomy and haunted—even "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)" in a lonesome Sun rockabilly incarnation feels like a transmission from the lonely black of night. It reiterates many of the themes of Darkness, only without aggression, fury, or precision, the very things that give that record a lift that fights against its undercurrents of hopelessness.
Surely recognizing this deficit, Springsteen spent roughly another year in the studio, reviving old songs and writing new ones, arriving at full-blown, completed recordings of most of these tunes, then picking and choosing from his surplus to create the final album. The result was enough material for another double album, presented here as The Ties That Bind, a collection that runs two songs longer the 1980 double-LP but winds up six minutes shorter. This is an absurd amount of shelved material—and, even with this abundance, there are a handful of bootlegged cuts that didn’t make the grade. There’s a lot of unheard music here, even if some tracks are colored with new Bruce vocals, a slightly sour grace-note that is only notable upon close inspection.
Listening through the box, it’s hard not to be struck by Springsteen’s labor-intensive creative method. He knew the broad outline of what he wanted to achieve, so he kept tweaking his material in the studio, rearranging and recording until he found just the right emotion. If The Cutting Edge 1965–1966 proves how Bob Dylan sought to capture the lightning of a live performance, Springsteen always is seduced by the illusion of a record: sure, he’s invigorated by live performance—and the Tempe concert included here is tremendous, the E-Street Band at the peak of their power—but he sculpts his albums out of tracks that are powerful as recordings, not simply songs.
This is especially true of The River, which Bruce loaded up with the purest, hardest, and happiest rock’n’roll the E-Street Band ever cut in the studio. "She’s the One" pulsated to a beat borrowed from Bo Diddley and Darkness surged with desperate passion, but Bruce’s first four records rarely touched on the ecstatic joy that can be had from just making noise. The River is full of these moments ("Sherry Darling", "Crush on You", "I’m a Rocker", "Cadillac Ranch"), and some of the weightier items trade in this same sense of exuberance—a sense of desperation cuts against the grain of the sunny hook on "Hungry Heart", and "Two Hearts" spins headfirst into unfettered romanticism. But this music is so simple, so visceral, that it’s often been tagged as throwaway, the detritus surrounding the haunting "The River", "The Price You Pay", and "Stolen Car".
Thing is, these throwaways give The River its cinematic scope. Some of the newer additions were cut from a familiar forlorn cloth ("Independence Day", the closing pair of "Drive All Night" and "Wreck on the Highway") while "Point Blank" and "Jackson Cage" split the difference between the celebration and sorrow. But the biggest distinction between The River and the original Ties That Bind is this full-on bash, funny and furious and entirely sincere in its worship of the sounds rocking frat houses and AM radio in a '60s that didn’t belong to the Beatles. It’s the Springsteen album that can easily slip onto any show on Little Steven’s Underground Garage, and this party winds up providing an ideal counterpoint to the sweeter, sadder moments on The River.
Take the second side, which opens with "Hungry Heart"—Bruce’s first genuine hit single, reaching number five on a combination of its hook and Springsteen’s general momentum—then dwells upon the cinematic escape "Out in the Street" and serves up two breakneck rockers before settling into the dreaminess of "I Wanna Marry You" and the stark "The River", the latter two hitting harder due to the companions. Each side is structured similarly, with the last song tipping slightly toward melancholy, the cumulative effect suggesting there’s no separating pleasure from the pain. It all comes at once and, depending on mood, The River either seems like the happiest or saddest of Bruce’s records: in its mess lies a mirror that reflects the listener’s state of mind.
The Ties That Bind illustrates this sprawl was no accident. Within these 22 rejects—some of them sneaking out as B-sides or on previous reissues, including the 1998 box Tracks and the bonus disc on 2003’s The Essential Bruce Springsteen—Springsteen explores the same terrain as he does on The River: urban romance, accidental violence, working-man’s blues, and restless nights. Like its parent, The Ties That Bind achieves a delicate balance between adult despair and adolescent freedom: he may dwell upon "Little White Lies" and "The Time That Never Was", but he also borrows a song title from Claudine Clark ("Party Lights") and tips a hat to Connie Francis’ beach classic Where the Boys Are ("Where the Bands Are"). Enough great songs didn’t make a cut that it’s possible to cobble together a killer single album from the outtakes—one that would open with the breathless "Meet Me in the City" and contain the cloistered paranoia of "The Man Who Got Away", the blank desperation of "Roulette", the open-hearted "Ricky Wants a Man of Her Own" and "From Small (Big Things One Day Come)", a heightened Chuck Berry story song Bruce turned over to Dave Edmunds. But like the completed album, what resonates is the magnitude of the sprawl itself.
As they spill out, the songs play off each other, accentuating the sorrow or celebration heard in their predecessors. Combing through these outtakes, it quickly becomes clear how Springsteen, Van Zandt, and Jon Landau constructed each track to deliver its own specific visceral thrill and then culled through their finished product to find the cuts that fit their intended design. Some of these rejects rely on that headstrong old time rock’n’roll—"Living on the Edge of the World" bops along to its syncopated swing, "Paradise by the C" is a roadhouse jam highlighting Clarence Clemons—but others play like ripostes to the E-Street Band’s peers: the live "Held Up Without a Gun" (which would later morph into the finished "You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)") careens like Elvis Costello & the Attractions, the chiming guitars of "Take ’Em As They Come" seem like an answer to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, while "I Wanna Be With You" pulses to the Iron City rush of Joe Grushecky & the Houserockers.
Thirty-five years after the release of The River, it’s easy to think of Bruce Springsteen as existing on a separate plane from such contemporary kindred spirits or perhaps as somebody who only belongs to part of a self-styled lineage that runs through Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. By adding The Times That Bind, both the scrapped '79 LP and this new double-disc collection of outtakes, to The River, this box highlights the plain, prosaic ways he belonged to his time. On these 52 songs, Springsteen sings about gas shortages, cold beer, unemployment agencies, busted dreams, and Burt Reynolds, fleeting images of a blue collar America that unknowingly was entering its decay but these words are married to the sound of a working band that knows it has to work, aware that it has to have songs to fuel those marathon three hour shows.
Springsteen never really let these straight-up rockers be part of his records again—maybe on Born in the U.S.A., but both "Darlington County" and "Working on the Highway" end in tears—but he also never quite worked the same way again, producing such a ridiculous surplus of finished material as he set out on his quest for bigger, greater things. The River brought Bruce to those heights, giving him his first number one album and Top 10 single, but it’s hard not to think of it as not a beginning but an end, the last record where he and the E-Street Band were not the biggest band in the land but merely the best. In that light, piling on a ton of unreleased music, all in the same spirit and feel as the final album and nearly as good as what made the cut, feels like a gift. And for those who may think four CDs and three DVDs are too much, consider this: for an album that is all about contradictions, excess and mess, more of everything is most certainly a good thing.