On his second album, the London producer summons the divine with intoxicating, emotional dance music fit for a crowded warehouse.

Romeo

The last time we heard from Salvador Navarrete, he was in a dark place. An electronic producer who gravitates towards deconstructed club music that stuns and seduces, the 29-year-old artist was best known for the spine-chilling beats he contributed to dance music provocateurs like Shygirl and Dorian Electra, as well as co-founding the underground music collective NUXXE. But on 2020’s Salvador, his debut full-length album as Sega Bodega, Navarette sang directly about subjects like alcoholism and mental health, meditating on what it means to lack “a basic understanding of just how to love.”
A year later, Romeo moves towards the light. The new songs still resonate on an emotional level, with Navarette describing the fear of loneliness and lingering feelings of inadequacy. Despite the vulnerability in its lyrics, Romeo feels immediate and succinct. Nearly every song has a bass drop or twisting industrial beat fit for a crowded warehouse: This is intoxicating, club-driven, dance music with the chameleonic shifts of hyperpop.
On opener “Effeminacy,” Navarette’s vocals arrive in a deadpan that sounds almost taunting: “You don’t own effeminacy, do you?” he asks. “What does effeminacy mean to you?” A warble of incoherent vocals interlocks with a blown-out, gasping beatbox accompaniment; later, soft humming synths hover over a delicate harp melody. The glitched beats on “Angel on My Shoulder” convey a gap between reality and afterlife, while the interpolation of drum’n’bass captures the euphoria of finding a devotion to something larger than yourself. These contrasting elements introduce the complicated moods of Romeo: hard and soft, agile and chunky, aggressive and delicate, corporeal and cosmic.
The lyrics are similarly mult-dimensional, incorporating a loose narrative about a character named Luci, whom Navarette describes as his “mythical girlfriend made entirely of light.” He plays with religious themes to emphasize love’s grand and mysterious capacities, states of emotion that can feel like their own higher power. “Heaven is a place you belong,” he sings on “Only Seeing God When I Come,” as delicate synth coos blossom into a UK garage beat, matching the tension of sensuality and insecurity in the lyrics. Later, he gets help from guest vocalists Charlotte Gainsbourg and Arca to further celebrate love’s thrall with the noir disco of “Naturopathe” and the “Wild Thoughts”-inspired “Cicada,” respectively.
While Romeo is filled with the most tactile production of Sega Bodega’s career—ambient organ hums and percussion that shudders like a cicada’s wings—the most understated moments are also the most affecting. On “Um Um,” Navarette grieves the late producer SOPHIE, sounding bereft, with no spiritual guidance to make sense of the tragedy: “So empty without your words, without your grace/Even God would tell us that this is just not okay.” In “I Need Nothing From You,” co-written with Blood Orange collaborator and experimental R&B artist Bea1991, Navarette introduces a poignant sparseness that feels like new territory. “Isn’t that everything we wanted/Just to feel alive,” he sings. At first, there’s a quiver of vulnerability to his voice. Soon, he’s accompanied by a choir of his own layered vocals and a halo of clapping hands. This quiet revelation proves that Navarette doesn’t need to rely on his typical whirling experimental sounds to summon the divine.

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After a downturn with 2006's A Hundred Miles Off and a grisly full-album cover of Nilsson/Lennon's Pussy Cats, the Walkmen triumphantly return to form. You & Me is more than their most focused record to date-- it's also their most carefully crafted and heartfelt while simultaneously feeling totally effortless. Rarely has the word "unambitious" translated into such a positive attribute: They just make it look that easy.

You & Me

On both record and onstage, the Walkmen have always reached for the rafters-- often at the risk falling on their collective faces or completely overshadowing their moodier material. In the light of their previous powerful singles and go-for-broke performances, the New York band's latest album, You & Me, might seem like a step down. However, it's the first that fully commits to their seductive, eminently soused-sounding late night sulk. If there are people who still consider the Walkmen a singles act-- granted, that will happen when you write a couple of the best rock singles of the decade-- You & Me might finally convince them otherwise.
The album begins with a whimper-- the tentative patter of "Donde Esta la Playa" followed by instrumental "Flamingos (for Colbert)"-- but there's one striking, early difference between this record and all their previous work: You can make out what singer Hamilton Leithauser is saying. It's a good thing, too; among hazy tales of reckless vacations, the album's most vivid tracks are often its most lyrically straightforward: "Red Moon" is about missing a girl, "The Blue Route" is about missing better days.
Those are simple, well-worn topics, but nearly all of these songs are buoyed by some small, cautious detail that-- while it might sound slight on paper-- make for indelible musical moments: The woodsy whistling on "On the Water", the horns that make "Red Moon" gorgeously mopey, or the warm hum of organ and harp-like piano fills on "Long Time Ahead of Us". Elsewhere, the fantastic, clattering percussion on "Postcards From Tiny Islands", "Four Provinces", and more reaffirm drummer Matt Barrick is the band's MVP.
Moreover, these songs refine old ideas scattered throughout the Walkmen's catalog, mostly building them into stronger tracks than their predecessors: "Red Moon" takes the ostentatious horns from "Louisiana" (from 2006's A Hundred Miles Off) and use them as essential pieces of atmosphere and mood. The loping guitar and offbeat drumming of "Look Out the Window," from their 2002 split EP with Calla, are folded into the late-game clincher "The Blue Route". Here, all the band's wanderings coalesce with more focused lyrics and assured songwriting, neither racing nor shuffling towards its ambiguous climax. With all the elements of a Perfect Walkmen Song-- cavernous echo, stinging guitars and straining organ, vocals where you can hear the veins on Leithauser's temples bulge-- it would easily fit on the band's peak, Bows + Arrows.
You & Me isn't as hard or immediate as the band's earlier records, but that's not a complaint; its sound is coy, and invites you to spend time with it. Its lyrics are direct and its pleasures are simple-- as easy to notice as the mournful horns on "Red Moon", or hearing Leithauser hoping to get home to his loved one on the same song. While the Walkmen likely have more hits in them, if they keep making records as consistently engaging this, they won't sink for a lack of them. This is the sound they've reached for since the very beginning, and they've never played it as gracefully or confidently as they do here.


The jazz trumpeter’s meditation on the legacy of civil rights and the heroism of Rosa Parks is formally inventive and emotionally gripping.

Wadada Leo Smith: Rosa Parks: Pure Love. An Oratorio of Seven Songs

Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith has created a boundary-breaking work that combines the classical form of the oratorio (a musical composition with dramatic underpinnings, similar to an opera) with avant-garde jazz, drone, modern musical production, and historical narrative. Smith, a composer with a long history writing ambitiously proportioned works, has described the oratorio as a “meditation” on the civil rights movement, dedicated to “Rosa Parks, a person of exceptional courage and wisdom, who made the right move of resistance at the right time.” He employs music that is alternately challenging, somber, austerely abstracted, classically beautiful, and wracked with tension to guide our imaginations through the momentous chain of events that Parks set off by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955.
Smith summons a small army: The piece is written for three vocalists, a string quartet (RedKoral Quartet), a trumpet quartet (BlueTrumpet Quartet), drums, and electronics; it also incorporates excerpts of early recordings made with his former Creative Construction Company bandmates Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, and Steve McCall. The decision to fold in elements of his own musical past imbues the piece with a sense of the long arc of history.
For all this, the sound of Rosa Parks is often minimalist, so much so that at times—notably the chilling, beatless later stages of “Vision Dance 2: Defiance, Justice and Liberation”—the record resembles organic drone music more than it does jazz, an exercise in atmosphere over melody, in which subtle electronic effects create brief, almost hallucinatory textures. Album opener “Prelude: Journey” is closer to traditional jazz, the BlueTrumpet Quartet’s nerve-rending tonal attack jousting with Pheeroan akLaff’s skittery drum lines; the long notes and unsettling horn melodies get under the skin like an ecclesiastical early-warning system. “Song 3: Change It!” uses cinematic string stabs, restless drum fills, and rousing operatic vocals from Karen Parks, who delivers her lines like a Shakespearean hero on the eve of battle. And in the second half of “Vision Dance 1: Resistance and Unity,” both quartets play off unnerving electronic effects from Hardedge (Velibor Pedevski, a longtime collaborator of Smith and his A.A.C.M. peers), violin notes sliding off treated sound effects like a punch-drunk cartoon boxer, while trumpets urgently call for attention.
These songs are frequently beautiful; the almost Björkian way Min Xiao-Fen’s voice soars over sparse string lines on “Song 1: The Montgomery Bus Boycott—381 Days of Fire” is particularly gorgeous. But more important is the way in which Smith and his musicians evoke the emotional tension of this fraught period in American history. “Rosa Parks: Mercy, Music for Double Quartet” uses dissonance and a steadily mounting nervous musical energy to capture the drama of the moment that Parks refused to give up her seat. “Song 1” teases the taste of victory with an uplifting swell of vocal melody; Xiao-Fen savors the word “justice” and “Song 3: Change It!” burns with righteous anger.
Rosa Parks is a continuation of Smith’s work on Ten Freedom Summers and America's National Parks, both politically charged pieces that played off not just the civil rights struggle but the very idea of America—its freedoms, its failures, its legacy. Vividly conveying historical injustice and ongoing struggle through wild instrumental swings and empathetic composition, Rosa Parks is music for the ages.


Blending melodic rap, explosive pop-punk, and languid electro-pop, the Japanese singer and producer’s adventurous new album is fueled by an impassioned wish to escape reality.

Killer in Neverland

Even before her debut single in 2018, 4s4ki had wandered into one corner of the internet after another. The Japanese artist initially took inspiration from the flourishing rap scene on video-upload sites like Nico Nico Douga, particularly the acts who delivered sentimental melodies over beats that crossed boom-bap, electro-pop, and gothic trap. Her output eventually caught the attention of SASAKRECT, an agency home to self-produced rappers and beatmakers. On her full-length debut, 2020’s Your Dreamland, she gravitated towards SoundCloud producers whose cutesy, kitchen-sink synth-pop arrangements channeled the dominant sound of the country’s electronic pop. She’s since signed to a major label, and though she hasn’t yet broken through to the J-pop mainstream, a recent transition to a more abrasive, chaotic production style landed her on Spotify’s influential hyperpop playlist and further extended her underground reach.
While 4s4ki has done well riding the coattails of hyperpop, her latest release, Killer in Neverland, resists easy definition. Compared to the concentrated focus of past EPs, the new album dips into multiple interests at once. Introverted, melodic raps give way to an explosive burst of pop-punk that bleeds into languid electro-pop, sometimes all in the same song. Splintered as the album sounds, the voice at its core remains consistent: Regardless of genre or BPM, self-loathing runs deep in the unfolding internal monologue. 4s4ki’s songs tend to peak with an impassioned wish to escape her current reality, and her stylistic choices amplify the urgency of her pleas.
4s4ki doesn’t completely abandon the signature sounds—like twinkling electro-house synths or crunchy gabber drums—that helped define earlier releases. Besides the happy hardcore-esque freak-out of “先制の剣” (“Sword of preemptive attack”), though, she supplies these songs with few of the bombastic beat drops familiar from her recent output. Even as the production readies to unleash the building tension, she seems too self-occupied to exert it. The seething hard trance beat of “Freedom Kingdom” balloons in size without a moment to cool off. When a relentless breakbeat rushes through the chorus of “ring ring, you kill me,” 4s4ki sounds reluctant to give in: “I will take pills and pain/It’s hurting my heart,” she sings in a whisper, as though the flood of sound signals the return of a repressed memory.
When a track does provide a release valve, it’s as purposeful as it is emotionally cathartic. After 4s4ki describes a world conspiring against her in the verses of “paranoia,” the song abruptly shifts into a punk-rock breakdown that pushes her to express her true feelings: “If only I could be reborn,” she shouts, her effects-laden vocals bleeding into the track. The outpouring of drum’n’bass in the chorus of “Log Out” articulates her desperation even before she launches into the titular hook: “Log out/I want to stay in this imaginary world,” 4s4ki screams, retreating into the internet to escape a merciless reality.
As musically satisfying as the intense build-and-release of “paranoia” and “Log Out” are, 4s4ki isn’t reliant on one technique to convey the force of her emotion. When she recites lines about her childhood in the more straightforward rap track “傍観者” (“Bystander”), the ease of her delivery reflects the fleeting nature of the subject. On “Cross Out,” she takes a sincere approach, singing over a maudlin acoustic guitar loop, but the mood is no less bleak: “I’d leave it all behind/If only it was that easy,” she sighs in the chorus. As 4s4ki refuses to be pinned down to a specific sound, Killer in Wonderland illustrates how her adventurous production is guided by her subject matter, never the other way around.


In 1971, Link Wray reinvented himself and made one of the greatest roots rock albums ever, full of fuzz blasts, gnarled folk, and backwoods gospel. Rock’n’roll doesn’t get leaner or more primal.

Link Wray

There’s a long list of acts that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has shamefully failed to induct over the years, from Chic and Kraftwerk to Motörhead and Brian Eno. But to shut out the man responsible for both the power chord and distortion, the twin pillars of rock—a man who inspired the likes of Jimmy Page, Neil Young, and Pete Townshend to pick up a guitar, a man whose guitar tone was so menacing it was banned from radio play, despite the fact that the song in question, “Rumble,” was a glowering instrumental. Rock, punk, garage rock, and heavy metal would sound drastically different were it not for the six-string stylings of Fred Lincoln “Link” Wray, Jr.
Along with his brothers Vernon and Doug, Link recorded raucous early rock’n’roll, country, and rockabilly sides from the late 1950s into the mid-1960s. By the time rock became the established sound of the late ’60s, Wray had all but retired from music to be a farmer. But when the likes of Van Morrison, the Band, and the Rolling Stones turned to folksy Americana with albums like Moondance, Music From Big Pink, and Beggars Banquet, Wray must have sensed an opportunity. Putting a tape machine inside a converted chicken shack on his brother’s property in Accokeek, Md. (soon deemed Wray’s Shack Three Track), Wray reinvented himself and made one of the greatest roots rock albums ever, full of fuzz blasts, gnarled folk, and backwoods gospel.
For any subsequent artist who has sought to strip the varnish and gunk built up around rock’n’roll—be it Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, the Black Keys, or the White Stripes—it doesn’t get leaner or more primal than this. Wray could wring profundities out of the barest of materials, which meant a three-track tape machine rather than the 16- to 24-tracks that were standard by that point. It meant 11 songs belted out by a man who lost a lung to tuberculosis contracted during the Korean War.
The singular sound of the album is evident from the opening hymnals “La De Da” and “Take Me Home Jesus.” Tempered by a rusted piano deemed so out of tune that the Wray brothers instead tuned down to it, those cracked chords filter down to Link’s coyote-like yowl and the raw harmonies that accompany it. But the album presents a far different Link than his early, black leather-clad greaser days. His voice is at times strangled and reminiscent of Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan; his devout lyrical concern came as the result of a religious conversion from when he contracted TB. And instead of that sinister guitar attack that defined his legacy, dobro and mandolin come to the fore. When Link did plug in his electric, the guitar was so loud that they had to drag the amp out to the yard and mic it through a window in the coop.
A gentler, wiser Link emerges again on “Fallin’ Rain” and “Ice People.” The former sounds like a sequel to Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” right down to its chord changes and the prophetic imagery of a spiraling world and blood on the ground. On the dobro-laced “Ice People,” the rhyme of ice people not treating their fellow humans very “nice” might seem pat, but Link’s delivery makes the song effective. The piano echoes Burt Bacharach’s “Walk on By,” as Link sings about the hypocrisy of an inhospitable society that itself walks on the less fortunate and thinks “If you don’t go to war/You’re not living by the golden rule.”
Listen to the simple and effective stomp of “Juke Box Mama” and you can hear the future tattoo of the White Stripes’ “My Doorbell.” As Wray and band create a bare-bones boogie out of a whipped snare, plunked piano, and scraped washboard, Wray’s dobro and electric guitar solo slithers around like a rattler in the near empty space. Similarly effective is the beat behind “Fire and Brimstone.” An acoustic country blues guitar lick combines with a clattering beat made of drums, Coke bottle and cowbell, rattling as Link bellows about a harrowing vision of doomsday. But for all of its imagery of the sun standing still overhead and darkness on the face of the Earth, damned if Link doesn’t make end times sound like one ecstatic, howling hoedown. The garage rock stomper “God Out West” has Link’s fuzz guitar lashing at full blast as he sings the praises of the Lord so convincingly as to convert almost any agnostic.
Never reissued on vinyl before, this edition newly reveals a crucial link in Link’s highly influential discography. Between this and prominent placement in the recent music documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, (Link was three-quarters Shawnee), which traces the lasting influence of Native Americans on the American music vernacular, perhaps the Hall of Fame and its voters will finally see fit to put Link back on its ballot.


The Palestinian Chilean singer’s debut blends elements of Arab pop, R&B, EDM, and jazz into an energizing new sound with deep respect for tradition.

Woledto

This past Valentine’s Day, Elyanna opened the Chicago date of her first North American tour by performing the title track of her debut album, Woledto. Lured onstage by the mallet drumming of a tabla baladi and the spellbinding melody of an electroacoustic oud, the Palestinian Chilean singer-songwriter took the mic draped in angelic white. “And I ask myself after my absence,” she trilled in Arabic. “Heartbrokenly: Why did I go away/When your love was above the stars?”
To reach the stars—and last year’s Coachella stage—Elyanna has summoned sounds that cross time, space, and dialects, simultaneously ancient and ultramodern. Raised in Nazareth, with roots in Viña del Mar, Chile, she emigrated to California when she was 15. Now, at 22, her sound carries the weight of her diasporic identity, channeling the honeyed style of Nancy Ajram or a young Dalida with the playful attitude of Shakira or Rihanna. Building on self-titled EPs from 2020 and 2022, Woledto (or I Am Born) plays with Arab pop, R&B, EDM, and jazz to express the nuances of love, loss, and longing. Where her EPs balanced SWANA-inspired elements with concessions to Western pop, perhaps hoping to acclimate Anglophone audiences, Woledto sounds liberated, prioritizing audacity over assimilation.
In many ways, Woledo is part of a long oral tradition, embracing elements of Levantine folk, tribal fusion dance, and zajal (an Andalusi Arabic form of oral strophic poetry). Elyanna’s lyrics honor the influences that define her artistic lineage. “Did love strike you?/Or were you thrown with arrows?/This is just the nature of a man in love!/Come on and give me cups of it,” she sings on “Lel Ya Lel” (“Night Oh Night”), evoking the pain and romance of the ghazal poeticism of Egyptian musical icons Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez. One minute Elyanna is riffing maqam scales; the next she’s wailing, “You’ve forgotten to remember me and erased our past,” backed by a sample of her grandfather, a zajal wedding singer.
The whole album is a multigenerational effort, each friend and family member adding a layer to the collective memory. Elyanna co-wrote most tracks with her mother, Abeer; her brother Feras serves as pianist and creative director. He’s also co-credited as executive producer alongside two of Elyanna’s longtime mentors, the Lebanese Canadian R&B singer Massari and Nasri Atweh of the reggae-pop band Magic!. (It was Atweh who first encouraged Elyanna to sing in Arabic after discovering her covers of English-language pop songs.) Even her sister and stylist Tali leaves her imprint on the music, supplying the gold coins that ring out between the tabla, trumpet, and tambourines of “Ganeni” (“Make Me Crazy”).
Two of the album’s nine tracks are elaborate reinterpretations of contemporary classics. “Callin’ U (Tamally Maak)” is a bilingual mash-up of Danish hip-hop group Outlandish’s “Callin U,” itself a take on Egyptian pop singer Amr Diab’s “Tamally Maak” (“Always With You”), a 2000 guitar ballad that became an international smash, adapted into Spanish, Russian, Hindi, Kannada, Romanian, Greek, and more. With just this one track, Elyanna strikes a chord that vibrates worldwide. The lead single, “Al Sham,” emerges as an electro-raï anthem, sampling “N’ta Goudami,” by the late Algerian folk singer and “mother of raï” Cheikha Rimitti. Meanwhile, in its lyrics, Elyanna reimagines Aleppine tenor Sabah Fakhri’s 1970 composition “Khamrat El Hob” (“The Vintage of Love”). “A life without love is a stream without water,” she sings in a simmering glissando that eventually erupts like a whistling kettle. Against an original synth dabke bridge, Elyanna employs Bedouin-esque chants, ululations, and the metallic swooshes of drawn swords, conjuring the rage and urgency of a warrior preparing for battle. But tune out the intensity and you’ll hear a syrupy Elyanna croon (in English) “I’m ready for the water.”
Elyanna has downplayed the political undertones in her music, but Woledto represents her most socially charged project yet. Across the album, subtle yet poignant references to identity, displacement, and cultural resilience underscore her sorrow and ferocity. She brings her own perspective to Arab hits most often interpreted by men and celebrates her feminist inspirations, whether through direct sampling, stylistic channeling, or collaborative work. On the tambourine-tinged anthem “Mama Eh,” a pissed-off Elyanna seeks her mother’s wisdom to cope with unrequited love and constructs a rallying cry for women in search of matriarchal strength.
Elyanna’s debut album comes at a tumultuous moment. On one hand, her star is ascendant. At the same time, Palestine—her homeland—is in crisis. Children of the Arab diaspora never forget where they came from. After all, “How can a soul forget someone it adores?” Elyanna muses on the closing piano ballad “Sad in Pali.” The intangible echoes of our beginnings linger in nostalgic realms like music and movement, practices that evoke the abstract idea we call home. “Through distance, you’ll learn the meaning of togetherness,” Elyanna reassures in the outro, reciting a poem written by her mother. “Through distance, your heart will learn the meaning of drought/And your heart will learn the taste of return/After the wait.” It’s a declaration that reverberates far beyond the stage.


The London producer’s latest full-length, a high-concept electronic consideration of the artistic soul, balances between fragility and bombast.

Value

Though he has roots in the U.K. grime scene, Louis Carnell’s productions as Visionist have followed a singular path, responding to and charting an internal life rather than focusing on music for a club setting. That’s been particularly true since his last full-length, 2015’s Safe, which explored the arc of a panic attack, locating an agitated kind of beauty in sharp-edged vocal samples and tangles of chilly sound. On his new album, Value, Carnell expands out a little ways from that claustrophobic place.
The vulnerability in Carnell’s music becomes a metanarrative of sorts on Value. The album comes with a high-minded concept, which he explained in a recent press release: These tracks are meant to consider the role of the artist amid the demands of industry. If Safe charted a visceral loss of self, Value seeks to reconstitute and locate that self, but also to consider its boundaries and susceptibilities—when to protect oneself, and when to open up.
It does this by toeing a line between fragility and bombast. Though a few tracks early on echo the bassy density of Carnell’s production style on Safe, these productions are for the most part markedly brittle. Carnell is known for his use of manipulated vocals, and while he continues that approach here—including cold stylized versions of his own voice—the piano, surprisingly, is the most prominent instrument on Value. Where other elements bristle and spiral atonally, the piano arrives with a comparatively organic finish—serving, maybe, as an analog to the vulnerability Carnell locates in the artist. When “Homme” abruptly transitions from a crowded crescendo into a reverb-soaked minor-key piano solo, it seems to signal a new tenderness. “No Idols” reverses this narrative halfway through, subsuming a similarly mournful line in assaultive digitized percussion. The lovely “Made in Hope” decorates its keyboard melody with whispers of echo and then brings in vocal samples, forming an icy duet of sorts.
Throughout the 10-track album, Carnell leans in to a sense of narrative and drama, his pieces climbing and falling quite a bit given their relative brevity (none is longer than four minutes). “Your Approval”—the one selection featuring lyrical vocals, contributed by the Nashville singer Rolynne—conjures an orchestra from a limited palette of samples. Voice and production are equally breathy, and both summon a degree of theatrical formality even as Rolynne’s words lay bare a set of inter- and intrapersonal anxieties. “They say I should forgive you/They know these words you say are not true/ But they tell me I’m not worthy,” she sings. The song feels like a defining moment for Carnell, controlled in its execution and maintaining a steely composure even as it fosters a sense of intimacy.
In part because they volley so readily between extremes, Carnell’s productions can lose their focus elsewhere. Thematically, finding oneself a little lost might be more or less the point of Value, but for an artist with such intensity of vision, a greater sense of clarity or structure might better support the complex ideas he lodges in his productions. Carnell captures his negotiation with vulnerability in the process of its unfolding, and his relationship with his sonic language feels in-process as well—a generative path, to be sure, if sometimes an uneven one.


Though the duo’s joint project feels tethered to tradition, there is something fairly radical about a pair of earnest rap nerds so devoted to the nuts and bolts.

Eat Your Food

Eat Your Food, the full-length debut from Brooklyn transplants Smitty! and witSmusic, is distinguished by its pockets. Sometimes these pockets are a function of the production duo’s syncopated drums, which lay the framework for witS’s breakneck raps. More often, witS takes advantage of negative space and creates his own, dicing bars into whipsawing rhyme patterns with a surgeon’s precision. On Eat Your Food’s more expansive tracks, the instrumentals dissolve into discrete elements, allowing witS’s vocals to take on a percussive quality. The result is like a trusty pair of cargo shorts: ductile and utilitarian, if not the flashiest piece in the wardrobe.
An accomplished drummer in addition to his vocal and production work, witS tackles complex flows with mathematical rigor. “Numbin” alternates rhymes on the one and four, with bass and clap drums emphasizing the upbeats. On “Seat 4 Da Cause,” witS’s triple-time flow mirrors the accented snare, maintaining sharp enunciation through a series of tempo shifts. His low, resounding voice pairs with the soft keyboard synths of “Respek,” his percussionist’s instincts evident in transitional pauses and rapid-fire syllabic fills alike.
There’s a whiff of the avant-garde in the duo’s arrangements, yet Eat Your Food feels deeply conscious of its lineage. “God’s Child” layers Rhodes keys over crunchy drums with an SP-1200’s warmth, evoking the treble-heavy sonics of Breaking Atoms and A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing. From there, you can trace a line through the alt-rap milestones of the ’90s and 2000s. On the title track, witS’s righteous affect recalls the turn-of-the-century backpack scene, whereas “Try Again” resembles the moodier digressions of Binary Star and Diamond District. The album’s sparer productions have an industrial, found-elements quality reminiscent of New York’s Karma Kids and Backwoodz Studioz crews.
The formal discursions throughout the project make for some of Eat Your Food’s most compelling moments, even if the duo’s weirder impulses are only visible in glimpses. “Fall Off” and “Numbin” are buoyed by their tricky melodies, while the instrumental breakdown on “Try Again” features a stand-up bass and accordion synth. The juxtaposition of these abstract methods with old-fashioned ethic makes for an offbeat charm. With its state-of-the-rap-union concept, “Co Exist” might have been a drag, but the song’s structural pivots are thrilling. The title track’s social commentary is similarly upbeat without being overly pedantic: “Every day above ground is a good day/Lemons into lemonade, that’s the Black way/Separate the bullshit, and now we happy.”
On occasion, Eat Your Food feels tethered to tradition in a way that prevents witS and Smitty! from making a bolder statement, but there’s something fairly radical about a pair of earnest rap nerds so devoted to the nuts and bolts. The album’s two big-ticket guest appearances are instructive. Quelle Chris, who appears on “Hurry Up,” is a looser performer than witS, able to convey more in fewer words; Bruiser Wolf’s flamboyance on “Modern Day” renders his collaborators humble by comparison. Yet witS punches his weight on both tracks, flashing mechanics where Wolf and Quelle opt for stylistic grandeur. As a duo, witS and Smitty! are painstaking students who’ve clearly studied the right texts.


Cameron Stallones' latest LP under the Sun Araw name is another fever dream of dub-mottled organ grind and guitar squiggle; at once elemental and futuristic, it's less a departure from than a refinement of his 2010 breakout On Patrol.

Ancient Romans

Like a sleepless night in an intemperate climate, Sun Araw's undulating edgeless psychmares stick to your clothes and leave chemtrails in your periphery. Ancient Romans, SoCal seeker Cameron Stallones' latest LP under the Sun Araw name, is another fever dream of dub-mottled organ grind and guitar squiggle, at once elemental and futuristic. Romans proves less departure from than refinement of his 2010 breakout On Patrol, a primordially textured slow-going ooze not unlike Excepter doing Earth covers over a skipping disc of Agharta. On Romans, Stallones continues rendering colossal structures in sound, dialing the scale of its predecessor back ever-so-slightly while retaining both its massive scope and its wide-eyed searcher's gaze.
With a touch more space between its sinewy guitars, warbly keyboards, and omnitextured bass thump, Romans doesn't immediately inspire the same awe the impossibly grandiose, oppressively humid On Patrol did. Those slowly mutating tunes, even when they tipped in at a quarter-hour, felt almost immaculately composed, each craggy instrument and edge-of-perception toneshift perched against the others just so. Though all of Stallones' music is built around improv, Romans feels a mite looser, more free-flowing than its predecessor, its individual movements less choreographed, its overall mood a bit more relaxed. Yet Stallones maintains his incredible compositional economy and precision; with all its moving parts, Ancient Romans can sound a bit haphazard at first, but each gurgle and whirr works in brilliant tandem, and one more element could tip any of its scales. Romans' sandstorm soundscapes and Afrobeat-indebted underwater funk are panoramic, deliriously detailed visions beamed in from some untapped back-of-the-mind vista.
Romans begins slowly, the reedy "Lucretius" rolling out like a fog. "Crown Shell" matches its dubby bass nausea to flittery desert guitar, with Stallones imparting illegible wisdom over top. What vocals do pop up on Ancient Romans are used to enormous effect; whether it's conspiratorial chants of indoctrination or chants of earthen ecstasy, Stallones' populating of his sound world with these indecipherable characters leaves them feeling at once more alien and more habitable. You can almost make out the very edges of pop song structure in the warped Zapp-and-Fela bootleg of "Crown Shell" and the snaky, sunbaked gospel "Lute and Lyre"; though Stallones' epic-length music resists hurry, it doesn't skimp on form, and even with Romans' somewhat looser feel, he never lets his instrumental wandering take him too far from the compositions.
It ends with "Impluvium", which flips the trance-like qualities of Araw's eyelid-movie music into something else entirely. Easily the danciest track in Araw's arsenal, "Impluvium" knocks, riding a chant-laden, clanky 4/4 groove off into some equatorial sunset. Up against the rest of Romans' slowmo dub-sludge, a track like "Impluvium" could well be an overreach, but Stallones' vision for Sun Araw is both so carefully controlled and so wide-- and "Impluvium", like everything that precedes it, so roughshod and naturalistic-- the tune becomes like an ideal disembarking point for Romans' steamy night-on-the-river. It's one of Stallones' finest moments to date, yet another reminder that there are few people making music either this all-encompassing or this enveloping. The mighty On Patrol brought together many of the disparate strands in Stallones' work (both as Sun Araw and his stellar Magic Lantern) into a dazzling whole, and though Romans' textures are grittier and its gaze more inward, the ground it surveys isn't too far afield from that of its predecessor. But if Romans is something of a lateral move where innovation's concerned, it's by no means a step down in quality. In the last couple years, Stallones continues to carve out what feels like uncharted territory; hard to blame him for wanting to survey the scenery a little while longer.


Behind DJ Seinfeld’s resolutely non-serious façade lies a strikingly wistful take on deep house. His debut LP pushes even further in this direction.

Time Spent Away From U

Many class clowns have a sensitive side, and DJ Seinfeld is no exception. The tongue-in-cheek name, it turns out, is just a byproduct of how the Swedish electronic musician processes heartbreak. The origin story he tells for himself, from a couple years back, goes a little like this: A particularly nasty breakup led to an extended period shut up in his bedroom, watching season after season of old “Seinfeld” reruns. It’s the opposite of mysterious, basically.
Armand Jakobsson had already begun making music under another, more serious-seeming alias, Rimbaudian—a nod to Arthur Rimbaud, the absinthe-swilling French poet and enfant terrible of the 1870s—but it was his droller persona’s productions that first found traction on SoundCloud and YouTube. The two projects sounded pretty similar, actually: Both took 1990s deep house and suffused it in tape hiss and sly sample flips. But the rise of the jokier alias coincided with a handful of emerging producers with aliases like Ross From Friends and DJ Boring, author of the YouTube hit “Winona,” who accompanied similarly shopworn sounds with similarly frivolous references. A trend was born.
Between the TV-casualty names and the meme-like titles and graphic design, it can sometimes be hard to tell whether these guys are kidding or not. (The attitude is reminiscent of a classic bit from the 1996 “Homerpalooza” episode of “The Simpsons”: One slacker asks another, “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” and the second one replies, “I don’t even know anymore.”) But in DJ Seinfeld’s case, behind the resolutely non-serious façade lies a strikingly wistful take on deep house. His debut LP pushes even further in this direction.
The hallmarks of his sound have not changed since his early uploads. In fact, a number songs here have been floating around YouTube for a year or more. His drums, whether breakbeats or samples from classic machines like the 808, are pushed into the red until they ooze distortion; his kick drums practically leave bloody marks where they land. At the same time, his programming yields nimble hi-hat patterns and lots of skipping syncopation. It’s a neat contrast: heavy, swollen sounds made magically weightless.
His synths and samples have a similarly vintage, battered air. The bassline of “Too Late for U and M1” is a winking throwback to the Korg M1 organ sound made famous by scads of early-’90s pop-dance hits like Robin S.’ “Show Me Love.” The TB-303’s undulating acid squiggles worm their way across the album. The whooshing textures of “How U Make Me Feel” flash back to the silvery sound of the French touch in all its filter-disco glory, and omnipresent R&B vocals and keyboards lend a glossy, richly hued patina beneath the sandpapery distortion. All of it swims in tape noise, as though his beats and loops had come from an old C90 cassette rescued from a thrifted Walkman.
None of these traits are particularly novel; musicians have been busting out “lo-fi” club tracks since the 1980s, when the machines in question were new on the market, and in recent years there’s been a retro-minded resurgence of the sound. What makes DJ Seinfeld’s music worthwhile is its genuinely affecting emotional tenor. He’s got a knack for sumptuous chord changes that can make even suspicious listeners feel some type of way: Just check the bittersweet keys of “U,” with their air of Bruce Hornsby heard through the world’s saddest, drunkest jukebox, or the winsome interplay between bassline, synths, and ribbony vocals on “I Saw Her Kiss Him in Front of Me and I Was Like WTF?” (Much like his alias, DJ Seinfeld’s titles often feel almost like brazenly self-aware performance art.)
At times, his knack for taking four bars of misty-eyed pop and throwing a suggestive veil over it recalls the Field’s emotive sleight-of-hand. And on “U Hold Me Without Touch,” the way he takes long strips of sampled vocals and inserts them into his own productions—as the singing bobs teasingly in and out of key—recalls another nostalgia-prone musician who likes to frontload his tunes with the surface noise of well-worn wax: Burial. He recalls Burial thematically, too. Just as Burial’s music evokes a lost rave utopia the UK producer was too young to have experienced firsthand, Jakobsson admits that his perspective on the ’90s amounts to “this kind of fake type of nostalgia. It was around me, but I wasn’t a part of it.”
Sincerity, rather than authenticity, is the watchword. Jakobsson readily acknowledges that he makes all of his music on the computer; the amp distortion and tape compression are just illusory effects dialed up in his software production suite. (Once upon a time, “Is it live, or is it Memorex?” was the operative question; these days, it’s “Is it Memorex, or is it Ableton?”) Perhaps it’s because he leans upon these effects so heavily, but there’s something disconcerting about a style so dependent upon these kinds of simulacra; it’s unclear how much is the talent, and how much is the tools. Across the span of the album, the ubiquitous sonic degradation can get old; one wishes there were a little more variety in the record’s sound design.
Nevertheless, on the best tracks, like “U” and “U Hold Me Without Touch,” Jakobsson’s chosen effect suits the mood. There’s something cathartic about hearing such sentimental melodies turned up so loud, to the point of distortion. It gives the sense that there’s more emotion here than the tape—or the hard drive, anyway—can contain. Anyone who’s spent a lovelorn night blasting sad songs through their home stereo can identify with the desire to wallow in an excess of sentiment. In a world that’s been reduced to digital 1s and 0s, this feeling goes to 11.


The Philadelphia noise-rock band’s new tape is a thrilling rush of punk violence, pop sparkle, art-rock experimentalism—and wild chirping bird noises.

Liberating Guilt and Fear

Unlike, say, that famous “Portlandia” sketch, there is nothing twee or saccharine about the birds you’ll hear on Philadelphia noise-rock quartet Empath’s records. Take “No Attachment,” from their new four-song cassette, Liberating Guilt and Fear. It opens with a burst of frenetic hardcore drumming. With blunt ferocity,  singer, guitarist, and sometime bassist Catherine Elicson proclaims that she feels “no attachment to myself.” The clamor is briefly and beguilingly interrupted by a twisty bass melody, then dissolves entirely into a chorus of manic tweeting and chirping. These aren’t the birds that get printed on tote bags—they’re the ones a cartoon character might hear, as stars circled her head, after taking a punch to the jaw.
That isn’t a bad metaphor for the music of Empath, which alternates between punk violence, pop sparkle, and art-rock experimentalism, often layering all three together in compositions that sound aggressive and otherworldly at once. Half-buried in the mix, Elicson’s vocals can build from whispery cooing to feverish screaming within a single track.
Originally a trio comprised of Ohioan Elicson and two New York state transplants, drummer Garrett Koloski and keyboardist Emily Shanahan, Empath fuse their Midwestern lo-fi pop and upstate hardcore influences with their shared love for jazz skronk and sundry extramusical sounds. The addition of Randall Coon on synths, plus tape loops from co-producer Shaun Sutkus, makes Guilt and Fear fuller, stranger, catchier, and more distinctive than anything they’ve done before.
Despite its brevity, the tape showcases Empath’s range. At the core of “The Eye,” which escalates to a chorus where Elicson chants “You don’t have to spend all of that money on me, baby,” is a hook of pop-radio proportions. But what makes it the best song Empath have released—and one of the year’s most spellbinding singles to date—is the way that vocal melody bounces off bright keyboard tones and pushes through the clatter of drums and cymbals. The mostly submerged lyrics are a secret message that you have to decode if you want to sing along (and you will). “Be the tear that washes out the eye” is Elicson’s parting plea, a bittersweet exhortation borrowed from a poem by Adrienne Rich.
At the opposite extreme is closing track “III,” a wordless piece that’s more like sound art than a song and, at nine minutes long, takes up more than half of the cassette’s runtime. Windy howling, squalling feedback, heavenly drones, and drums that pound like sneakers on pavement evoke constantly shifting environments. A tropical jungle during rainy season dissolves into a tornado tearing up the Great Plains or a city caught in a midnight thunderstorm. Alongside the suggestion of elephants trumpeting, there are sounds that feel man-made: helicopter propellers, weathervanes gone haywire, viscous liquid being sucked through a straw.
“III” may be the purest representation of the Empath aesthetic. It brings forth a lush, harsh, immersive alternate reality that marries the natural and the artificial, like a sonic equivalent to the fake flowers and neon lights in their video for “The Eye” (which Elicson shot in the house where she and Koloski live). The birds are present for all nine minutes of “III,” too, their chirping equal parts tranquil and hysterical, hovering above the glittery mess to herald the arrival of a band whose dazzling versatility doesn’t come at the cost of coherence.


The Philadelphia post-hardcore band mewithoutYou's lyricist Aaron Weiss draws together Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, forming an intricate, collagist cosmology. Musically, Pale Horses functions as a kind of career summary, compressing the group's musical digressions into a coherent whole.

Pale Horses

For an explicitly Christian record label, Tooth & Nail was home to several ambiguously religious post-hardcore bands. Underoath and Anberlin often framed their devotionals in the more general language of emotional or physical apocalypse. Philadelphia five-piece mewithoutYou were signed to Tooth & Nail in the mid-2000s, but their spiritual qualities are introspective and intersectional; lyricist Aaron Weiss draws together Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, forming an intricate, collagist cosmology through which he relates to God.
Weiss' lyrics on Pale Horses, mewithoutYou's first album for punk label Run for Cover, detail his struggles with the densities of language and the inward mutations of faith, which writer John Jeremiah Sullivan once characterized as "a logical door which locks behind you." "I've just been thinking and reading more about language and words and how hard their meanings are to pin down—even simple words, let alone complex, lofty ones that I've long since been fascinated with," Weiss said in an interview with Myspace posted a few weeks ago. "So I sort of questioned my ability to communicate anything worthwhile. If I'm not sure that I'm going to say something that's going to help anybody or say anything that's true, then I might as well make it sound pretty."
The imagery on Pale Horses offers generous doses of apocalypse, drawing largely from Revelation 6, in which seven seals are broken and generate the end of the world; in one verse, Death materializes on a pale horse. In the song "Red Cow", "green figs fall from the Nebraska sky"; in the Book of Revelation, this is an analogy for stars unscrewing from the depths of space. Pale Horses also absorbs several modernist texts; in the same Myspace interview Weiss mentions the influence of James Joyce, which contributes a kind of unconscious and shattering rhythm to his writing. "Here again the chords clash," Weiss sings at the start of "Watermelon Ascot", reshaping a line in Ezra Pound's "Sestina: Altaforte", and through the rest of the verse ("Again the half-past/ Carrie Nation cut glass/ Prohibition children of the have caste") his internal and associative rhyming begins to simulate the inversions and precise orbits of Pound's poetry. On previous albums Weiss tended to communicate through analogy and parable; on Pale Horses his words and references collapse on each other like glass in a mosaic, only obtaining sense and meaning after they've fallen together.
Musically, Pale Horses functions as a kind of career summary, compressing their musical digressions into a coherent whole. It's also their first album recorded by Will Yip, who this year recorded dreamier, gauzier records by otherwise formally punk bands Title Fight and Turnover. To Pale Horses he mainly contributes a concussive drum sound reminiscent of the snares on Nirvana's In Utero, where individual hits resemble the burst of a paper bag. The songs are motivated more by groove than any individual riff or melody, anchored by bass and drums around which guitars pulse in uneasy constellations. Under these conditions, songs tend to expand and change shape, often ending in places more aggressive and primal from which they began.
The final track on Pale Horses, "Rainbow Signs", begins gently and glacially, Weiss barely whispering over soft bruises of guitar. It ends with a guitar riff that metaphorically and physically peels away the earth, lifting out of the track like a cathedral through a desert floor. "The sky, I'd been told/ Will roll up like a scroll," Weiss screams, and you could almost mistake his voice for a bloom of static. "The sun will turn black as a dead raven's back/ But there's nowhere to hide from the judge's face." But after the world recedes in a dense cloud of scripture, Weiss ends the record in a very personal and opaque place, with a dream of him and his deceased father, consciously merged and inwardly telling an intimate, unexplained joke about the Bible. It's one of the few completely successful and uncompromised methods of communication between people: An inside joke.


The Chicago duo’s inert new album has a gorgeous sound, but it comes at the cost of depth and spontaneity.

SPARK

The Chicago duo Whitney made a bracing first impression with “No Woman,” the lead single from their 2016 debut, Light Upon the Lake. Over a spare, eerie folk arrangement, singer-drummer Julien Ehrlich sang almost entirely through his nose—the Bonnie “Prince”-Billie Holiday vibe he created with guitarist Max Kakacek was intriguing and strange, but then he found the plumb line where his chest voice, already high, met his rangy falsetto. That’s where he has hovered ever since, dabbing cirrus wisps on an evolving musical backdrop.
In the last seven years, Whitney’s ethereal indie-folk has filled out with strains of soft rock, smooth jazz, country rock, feel-good soul, and other staples of throwback FM radio; the more contemporary R&B influences that became evident later are now plain to see. Spark, their fourth album (counting the covers one), calls their debut to mind when a feline cast steals over Ehrlich’s voice for the sauntering ocean-liner soul of the first song, “Nothing Remains”—and then this vocal eccentricity swiftly fades, making way for the multi-tracked lacquer that coats most of the record. Spark has a gorgeous finish, but it seems to have come at the cost of depth and spontaneity.
The album was produced by Brad Cook and John Congleton, who shape a crisp, supple surface and a gooey, waist-deep low end from a palette of strings, synthesizers, and horns. The latter two are cunningly bridged via an EVI, which allows a synth to be played like a trumpet. The live ensemble adroitly coils through sturdy, refined drum and sample programming, and the album seems to have ample variety: There are the churchy Prince pastiches, like “Blue”; the dreamlike Bon Iver voicescapes, like “Twirl”; and disco macarons that taste of Hot Chip or Jamie Lidell (“Memory” is a highlight, with that little techno arpeggio picked out on a palm-muted guitar).
So it’s hard to pin down why Spark can feel so momentary, inert, or even monotonous. There is a tendency toward slow tempos, which is accentuated by Ehrlich’s deliberate, pausing pace, as if each line were written on a separate scroll that had to be ceremoniously unfurled. And the lyrics, it must be said, don’t stand up to such careful scrutiny. Favoring the handiest why-sky rhymes when they bother with rhyming at all, they have little narrative shape or specificity, and the phrases are bland to an extent that seems willful, heavy with emotion but light on meaning.
Most of all, there just isn’t quite enough to some of these songs for them to stick. A couple of compact hooks repeating for a few minutes might sound fetching without adding up to much, and songs like “Back Then” give away all their moves too soon, then repeat them for a little while. Even the unruly bass-and-piano groove of “Real Love” is quickly tamed into the record’s sweet, solemn patina as Ehrlich sings the same run on the word “love” over and over like a human sample. (Also, it takes guts to call a ’90s R&B homage “Real Love” if you’re not Mary J. Blige.)
Still, there is something about Whitney that you want to like. Perhaps it’s that their music is so eager to please, so familiar, so keen to plump up a cushion for you. But there’s a fine line between grace and ingratiation. Besides that mewling beginning and one refreshingly unadorned passage in “Self,” Ehrlich’s voice is blended smooth as vanilla pudding without respite, losing more in expressive range than it gains in expressive impact. Someone (let’s not get into who) once quipped that Wagner’s music was better than it sounded, and perhaps Whitney’s music is starting to sound better than it is. A little more songwriting, and a bit more leeway for that old, bracing strangeness, would go a long way.


The first full-length collaboration between the No Age drummer and the harsh noise musician plays like a simmering, abstract hallucination.

Dean Spunt / John Wiese: The Echoing Shell

The Echoing Shell

Dean Spunt and John Wiese have spent their careers pushing and prodding at punk music from different angles. As one half of No Age, Spunt imbues old-school punk rock with the sublime, layering his Ramones-y songs with shimmering walls of distortion until they become heavenly, larger-than-life anthems. Wiese takes an uglier path, creating harsh noise under his own name and churning out teeth-gnashing grindcore with his shapeshifting group Sissy Spacek. Though their approaches may differ, both artists have found invigorating ways to toy with the limits of their genres, reconfiguring them into beautiful, bizarre new shapes and becoming godfathers of L.A. DIY in the process.
The Echoing Shell is the pair’s first full-length collaboration, and stylistically the album sits in Wiese’s side of the court. Working with Spunt’s loose, flowing drum patterns, Wiese utilizes his ear-prickling collage editing style to transform the drum kit into a vehicle for long-form, harsh-noise hallucinations. In some ways, it feels like a follow-up to Wiese’s 2007 release Soft Punk; but where that album spliced live recordings from punk shows into an exhilarating, avant-garde hurricane, The Echoing Shell is a more elegant dalliance into noise, focusing instead on the lingering tone of crash cymbals left hanging in the air, or the way Spunt’s crisp hi-hats bounce off Wiese’s fizzling undercurrent of feedback. Every small interaction between the two musicians is rife with subtle details that reward close listening, each tense moment of silence hinting at a ruthless chaos threatening to break loose.
There is little to differentiate each of the album’s sidelong tracks—titled “Fruit From Color Vapor” and “Black Fruit,” respectively—aside from the latter lending itself more to full-on blasts of hellish feedback. For the most part, The Echoing Shell is more simmering than stinging. In the opening minutes of the album, Wiese twists Spunt’s tapped cymbals into a haunting, mangled apparition, until about two minutes in when an onslaught of noise bursts like a demonic entity clawing to be let out. Spunt consistently turns his drums into their own textural playground, like near the end of “Black Fruit,” when he begins to click his sticks all along the edges of the kit. As he unleashes jazzy fills into empty space, Wiese takes a magnifying glass to the snare hits, enlarging them until they’re as blown out as an overexposed polaroid. Even if the sounds feel abstract, the duo makes them flow as naturally as any other jam session.
Throughout The Echoing Shell, Spunt and Wiese make the dissonance seem almost graceful. All of the duo’s sine tones dance at the upper end of the register, always hovering just below the threshold where it might actually start to become grating. Rather than waging a full-on assault, they opt for surgical precision, panning back and forth and cresting on a constant stream of free-associative noise logic. It may start to blur together if you let it drift into the background, but listen intently and The Echoing Shell offers worlds of hypnotic interplay, as visceral and intense as any punk record.


Formed by Kristina Lieberson, keyboardist for Here We Go Magic, TEEN make cloudy, lo-fi indie that wouldn't sound out of character being banged out in a suburban basement.

In Limbo

Despite a moniker that suggests kinship with the last decade of bands drawn to ideas of  carefree adolescence, TEEN has no actual young folks and doesn't dwell on the emotions and worries of high-schoolers. Formed by Kristina Lieberson, known best as the keyboardist for Here We Go Magic, TEEN make cloudy, lo-fi indie that wouldn't sound out of character being banged out in a suburban basement after homeroom. Lyrically, however, In Limbo deals with adult-style issues, which is the rub. While you get the sense that Lieberson herself is more than willing to provide a window into her thought process, the music suggests she isn't ready to make big decisions. Whereas a 14-year old snaps to decisions and sorts out the details later (if at all), TEEN too often hedge and equivocate, getting lost in their own thoughts.
You could say that In Limbo has a firm grip on vibe but a very loose sense of form. "Better" opens the album strongly, driven by a sharp vocal, pungent synth lines, and Moe Tucker-inspired drum primitivism, while Lieberson plainly but forcefully asserts, "I do it better than anybody else." Her post-punk punch is tougher than the song, but not by much. "Better" peaks around the three-minute mark-- the handclaps added to the chorus are a nice touch-- but then it continues on for two minutes more, neither changing nor adding anything new, a band content to play for itself.
With Here We Go Magic, this might have worked. Lieberson was an important cog in a strong machine there, and the whole band was precisely equivalent to the sum of its parts. Particularly in a live setting, they could stretch out and morph a simple rhythmic idea for what felt like an eternity, with each player's parts as fascinating to focus on as the clockwork sound of the entire band. With TEEN, this is not the case. The songs are dense and trebly, swirling and mutating but rarely growing, and too often staying way past their welcome. There are plenty of worthwhile ideas, but a seasoned producer could strategically shave 20 minutes off the album while losing little.
Without this sort of quality control, Lieberson's ideas get lost. In Limbo would definitely benefit from a few more songs with the animated romantic ache of "Come Back", and minus album-closer "Fire" (my first thought upon hearing the song's opening seconds was of the band glumly receiving the "millionth customer" prize for appropriating Hal Blaine's "Be My Baby" drums). The second half of the record, marked by the lingering dirges "Unable" and "Roses and Wine", falls into a slumber. While "Roses" drags on for six-and-a-half minutes with nothing much to report, "Unable" is the best example of the album's need for some fresh ideas in the studio. The lyrics detail the emotional weight of the album's title, narrating the mundane predictability of person-to-person interactions and the seeming impossibility of breaking free of this rut. Humming along at a numbing pace, the song does no justice to such an interesting perception, though. TEEN have promise, and should make better albums than In Limbo, once the band gains the strength of Lieberson's convictions. With material like this, it's best to strive toward investigating and captivating rather than simply brooding.


On his solo debut, the frontman of emo band Foxing offers a mix of bubble-grunge, jangly power-pop, and breezy balladry. It manages to be as heavy and compelling as his main group.

Smidley

Conor Murphy’s solo album was inevitable—but not because he’s been held back by the emo band he fronts, Foxing. The St. Louis quintet has always been pragmatic about their expected lifespan, and their oft-repeated Foxing slogan is “we’re a band, and someday we won’t be a band.” That Smidley would be a lighter affair than Foxing’s two albums also seemed inevitable; 2013’s The Albatross and 2015’s Dealer were among the most painstakingly crafted and emotionally draining records produced by emo’s fourth wave. So here we have Smidley, which is unsurprisingly more streamlined and accessible than Foxing. That it manages to be just as heavy and compelling, though, is a surprise.
There’s every indication that Murphy meant Smidley as a free-spirited and free-flowing affair. Though they’re impossible to spot without the credits, Smidley is a thoroughly Philly record, featuring Tigers Jaw’s Ben Walsh, Eric Slick (Dr. Dog), and Cameron Boucher from Sorority Noise (albeit on saxophone); it’s produced by Joe Reinhart of Hop Along and emo revival OGs Algernon Cadwallader. With the exception of presumptive medley “Nothing’ll” and “Pink Gallo,” every song on Smidley is a detour into unfamiliar settings for Murphy. There’s sticky, bubble-grunge (“No One Likes You”), jangly power-pop (“Dead Retrievers”), crafty and breezy Elliott Smith balladry (“It Doesn’t Tear Me Up”)—a well-balanced serving of standard issue stuff in 2017 indie rock.
The fatigue associated with these styles usually comes down to the familiarity of the vocals—laconic musings on existential dilemmas, lo-fi double-tracked confessionals, and the like. While his tics could not have been better designed to assimilate within Foxing’s seismic shifts and dramatic crescendos, given the more trad settings of Smidley, his adenoidal yelps and serrated, erratic screams are familiar in a completely unexpected way. With that, the album draws a connection between emo and the Brian Wilson/Wayne Coyne mode that became de rigeur in the sponge-painted, day-glo indie of the late 2000s. The twisted album cover and art direction of the video for “Fuck This” lead one to believe that Murphy may very well hold the torch for the likes of Yeasayer’s Odd Blood.
The trippiness in Smidley’s psych-pop isn’t a facade. This is a plainly druggy record, in that a lot of drugs that went into making of it—MDMA, Xanax, acid, cocaine, gin, rye, red wine, 2C-1—are name-dropped, and Murphy even threatens to drink “everything under the sink.” That regimen sounds unexpected coming from Murphy, but it’s all still plenty sad. On “Hell,” he sings with a sweet nostalgia about a shared bad trip—“If this was hell, let me sink into it.”
For the most part, all of these mind-altering substances open Murphy up to express himself in ways that we haven’t heard from him before. Namely, he’s got the ability to laugh at himself. “No One Likes You” is a self-affirmation that deflates Foxing’s dead serious on-record reputation, and “Fuck This” repeats its title as a hook, playfully self-sabotaging Smidley’s best chance at an algorithmic playlist hit. Still, Murphy has never written a song more stripped bare than “Milkshake,” as he unsteadily moans, “I love every moment that I’m fucked up” over fingerpicked stumbles—it has the same intensity that turned Foxing’s “Rory” into a generational anthem of unrequited love. And yet, “Milkshake” isn’t meant to be dramatic in the same way, nor is it a cry for help. “At least I’m under the table with you,” he sings on the ensuing closer. It scans as an explanation behind getting fucked up and perhaps also Smidley itself. Both could be seen as escapes from one’s primary obligations, but they’re a means of community and connection.


On their first collaborative album, Laura Marling and Tunng’s Mike Lindsay wrap prickly observations about lifestyle consumerism in bales of gorgeous melody and grumbling dissonance.

LUMP

“LUMP is a product,” Laura Marling declares on the final track of her first collaborative LP with Mike Lindsay. LUMP is the moniker they’ve given both the project and its debut, but the album’s designation as a “product” in its closing moments carries more thematic weight than the word “LUMP” itself—a title randomly selected by Marling’s six-year-old goddaughter. The contrast between the amorphous band name and its sterile classification as a product mirrors the music throughout the record, which wraps prickly observations about lifestyle consumerism in bales of gorgeous melody and grumbling dissonance.
LUMP took root in 2016, when Marling and Lindsay first met. What might seem like an odd combination of styles—Marling’s sparse, angelic folk interfacing with the digital sound palettes Lindsay honed in Tunng—results in a remarkably fruitful collaboration. Marling’s dexterous voice leaps and languishes atop Lindsay’s Moog flutters and brooding soundscapes. Their partnership is elegantly antagonistic; sinister rattles of percussion lend grit to Marling’s seraphic voice, and her wry lyrics slice through dulcet flute phrases and oceanic synthesizer. This tension has a beguiling effect, as the duo’s alluring art-pop melodies momentarily disguise Marling’s poetic critiques of contemporary life.
“Hand Hold Hero” is LUMP’s most intriguing convergence of aesthetics. Marling delivers steely talking blues over synth arpeggios in the style of Giorgio Moroder. Her voice is so languid and so noirish in its huskiness, it’s as though she’s exhaling cigarette smoke that curls into words mid-air. As Lindsay deploys compact blasts of static, she mocks the banal trappings of a comfortable existence: “Money didn’t buy you nothing at all,” Marling groans. “Accept a ball for your chain.”
“Shake Your Shelter” intensifies the claustrophobia of this domestic cage but leaves more space for empathy. A gauzy fringe of chimes and wooden creaks encircles lyrics that imagine being “born a crab/Naked and sad.” Marling’s introspection quickly extends to the outside world, as she surveys a landscape of vacant homes: “I know the feeling/Of losing the ceiling/On a beach full of empty shells.” This is one of the album’s most poignant images, illustrating a universal sense of isolation–of being alone together. In the distance, bells echo, percussion rattles, and a choir of voices sweeps across the track like wind on the surf. It’s a desolate sound but a familiar one.
LUMP’s conceptual and musical centerpiece is lead single “Curse of the Contemporary,” an avant-pop offering that skewers faux-enlightenment, sung in Marling's skyward, Kate Bush-style soprano. The album’s most melodic offering, it also bares the sharpest teeth. Atop Lindsay’s bright slashes of guitar, Marling sneers, “If you should be bored in California/I’m sure I’m not the first to warn ya/Don’t read in too much to all the signs and turns/Keep your wits about you.” It is a smiling reprimand, sung in Marling’s most saintly register.
The song begins with the same rumbling drone that permeates the record, fusing tracks together like connective tissue. Beneath LUMP’s sweetness, this foreboding buzz growls ceaselessly, like the ambient hum of fluorescent lights in an office building. In the chorus, Marling translates that murmur into language, questioning the Western desire to leverage spirituality as a commodity but offering no alternatives. “We salute the sun because/When the day is done/We can’t believe what we’ve become,” she sings. “Something else to prey upon.”
“Curse” sharpens LUMP’s critique of commodified individualism to a sparkling point. But on the album’s last track, Marling addresses the commodity of her and Lindsay's own making. Over a patina of flute and atmospheric chatter, she lists off the album credits with the cool detachment of Siri. “Moog recorded at Meme Studios by Ben Edwards, also known as ‘Benge,’” Marling intones. If LUMP is a commentary on the commodification of art and the self, then its final minutes suggest the duality of music as a commodity. On one hand, LUMP turn their critical lens inward, suggesting that their work is also complicit in the mass marketing of culture. But Marling’s verbal recognition of the record's instruments and players returns the work to the human hands that made it. “LUMP is a product,” she repeats.


The Stooges' fifth album Ready to Die avoids the pitfalls of 2007's disastrous reunion album The Weirdness, but 40 years removed from the kamikaze death-trip fantasies of Raw Power, it's the sound of Iggy admitting, “I’m too old for this shit.”

Ready to Die

“We could’ve been the American Stones,” Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton told MOJO magazine back in 1996. “We fucked up, man.” But for all the tales of bloodletting violence and self-destructive substance abuse that defined their initial 1967-1973 run, the Stooges’ biggest fuck-up wouldn’t come until 2007, with the release of their disastrous reunion album The Weirdness. And, ironically, with that, the Stooges finally achieved their elusive American Stones status-- in that, as with the Stones, expressing one’s enthusiasm for the Stooges now requires a qualifying remark along the lines of, “Well, I like their older stuff.”
But where the allergic reaction to The Weirdness and the untimely 2009 passing of Ron Asheton would seemingly discourage surviving Stooges Iggy Pop and Ron’s drummer-brother Scott Asheton from extending their discography, this band has survived bad reviews and the loss of a founding member before. Conveniently enough, their post-reunion narrative can simply mimic that of their first phase: after the group fell apart following the commercial failure of 1970’s Funhouse, Iggy shrewdly reassembled the Stooges for 1973’s Raw Power, by recruiting James Williamson and demoting Ron Asheton to the bassist position. This is the iteration of the Stooges that has been touring steadily since 2010, with Mike Watt replacing Asheton on bass (as he did for the late Dave Alexander in 2007) and honorary fifth Stooge Steve Mackay on sax. And the band's name reassumes its "Iggy &" prefix, signaling another change in direction: Where the evil alchemy of the band's first two albums proved impossible to recapture on The Weirdness, Raw Power's more playful, darkly humorous trash-canned rock 'n' rolla provides the Stooges v4.0 with a more easily pliable template to work from.
That's not to say Ready to Die matches the live-wire abandon of its 1973 antecedent-- not even close. And the tame, contained nature of even its most petulant tracks is all the more disappointing given that this band can still absolutely slay onstage. All those years working in Silicon Valley haven't diminished Williamson's fiery fretwork (see: the “Gimme Danger”-styled grind of “Burn”), but Iggy's delivery is too wry to exude rage, the songs rarely rise above a mid-tempo chug, and Mackay's jovial sax blurts are way more roadhouse than Funhouse. But, unlike The Weirdness, the palpable lack of menace feels intentional, and more true to a band that, in the wake of Asheton’s death and their own advancing ages, has good reason to question its own mortality. Over the shake-appealing shimmy of “Gun” (essentially, a prettied-up “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”), Iggy sings, “If I had a fucking gun/ I could shoot at everyone,” a seemingly throwaway, suddenly topical line that recycles one of the more odious lyrics from The Weirdness (“my idea of fun/ is killing everyone”). But where the latter reeked of forced misanthropy, there’s a cheeky nonchalance to his voice here that acknowledges the absurdity of such idle threats coming from a reasonably content 66 year old. Forty years removed from the kamikaze death-trip fantasies of Raw Power, Ready to Die is the sound of Iggy admitting, “I’m too old for this shit.” And he’s come armed with not one, but three acoustic ballads to prove it.
Of course, we’re used to hearing Iggy mellow out at this point-- his last two solo efforts were a record of jazzy chansons and a low-key covers album featuring songs by the Beatles, Serge Gainsbourg, and Cole Porter. But it’s telling that he’s now exposing that sensitive side in the Stooges, as if he’s trying to defuse the band’s formidable mythos from within. The Stooges made Iggy a punk-rock legend, however, that status has exacted a considerable physical toll, one that, to this day, requires him to be the shirtless, stage-diving psycho onstage even as his recent work suggests his interests now lie elsewhere. It’s hard to hear this album as anything but his attempt to punch out, torn as it is between his desire to bow out with dignity and his duty to play the dirty old man for the fans. But where Iggy once made an effort to obscure his pervy provocations in coded language-- “T.V. Eye” had nothing to do with watching television-- Ready to Die yields unfortunate evidence of how he just can’t be arsed anymore, resulting in the lazy-lothario lechery of  “DD's” (“I’m on my knees for those double-Ds”) and “Sex and Money” (“nipples come, and nipples go”).
In light of these numbskull regressions, Ready to Die’s most raucous song, “Job” seems less like a blue-collar working-man complaint (chorus: “I got a job/ but it don’t pay shit/ I got a job/ and I’m sick of it”) than a comment on the slog of being a Stooge. (After all, for all their influence and infamy, the band’s commercial prospects in 2013 are no better than they were in 1969.) So it comes as a great relief when Iggy starts waving the white flag on “Beat That Guy”, a surprisingly radiant, Petty-esque elegy that sounds less like an Iggy Pop song than a James Osterberg one, as he tries to lay his wild-child persona to rest by ruefully admitting, “I’m running out of space/ I’ve run out of time.” The knockout blow is delivered by “The Departed”, a hushed acoustic lullaby that effectively serves as a requiem for both Asheton and the Stooges as an entity: Williamson bookends the track with understated quotes of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” while, in between, Iggy repackages old lyrics into fortune-cookie bursts of reflective, Yoda-like wisdom. (“Serious talk’s no fun … this nightlife is just a death trip.”) The song shares its name with Martin Scorsese’s recent Oscar winner, but it’s more reminiscent of that final shot in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta’s reformed gangster retrieves the morning paper from his doorstep: it's the sound of a notorious bad-ass leaving his unsavoury past behind, resigned to living the rest of his life as a schnook.


Collaborating with a host of producers from across Africa, Europe, and Asia, the Nairobi vocalist shrieks and growls his way through a harrowing fusion of metal, rap, club music, and noise.

The Adept

A veteran of Nairobi’s metal scene and former collaborator within the Nyege Nyege collective of experimental electronic artists, Martin Kanja speaks multiple dialects of extremity. As Lord Spikeheart, the vocalist and producer has made bristling grindcore with his now defunct experimental band Duma, along with pounding industrial, creaky noise, and many other kinds of abrasive music. The through line in all his work, which combines global strains of metal, electronic, and traditional music, is intensity. He gravitates toward arrangements that are serrated and dense, seeking catharsis in the clashing. Kanja’s debut solo album surpasses the might of his past work by several degrees while showcasing his flair for integrating disparate sounds. Listening to it feels like moshing in the Mariana Trench, being hurled by the currents through liquid darkness.
The Adept is a heretic metalhead’s ode to all drums. Backed by producers and vocalists with roots in digital hardcore, noise, and rap, Kanja welds blast beats and club grooves into a nightmare engine of rhythm. He gleefully steers this hulking frigate, perhaps keen finally to be seen as a lead act. On Duma, his feral vocals mainly rode and accented the percussion, taking a backseat to bandmate Sam Karugu’s layered beats. Here, his repertoire of growls and grunts dictates the shape of the chaos, constantly pushing the songs forward or lurching them sideways.
The arrangements are even thicker than the marbled sound slabs of Duma. Warped wails, ghostly chants, and shrieking ululations whip through valleys of low end. Drums smack and pound against each other like monstrous molars. River systems of snarls course through strata of distortion and static. From the opening snare strikes to the closing synths, negative space is rare. Kanja and crew pack these songs like a metal turducken.
The record isn’t just an exercise in compositional gall; it is as dynamic as it is confrontational. While some songs, like the trap-infused “33rd Degree Access,” storm ferociously out the gates, others build painstakingly to their peaks. On the record’s most dancefloor-ready track, “4 AM in the Mara,” Spikeheart and co-producer DJ Die Soon let tension smolder for nearly two minutes before dropping a thick bassline. “Red Carpet Sleepwalker” swings from a haunted whorl of distorted Fatboi Sharif vocals to trance synths and later gabber drums stacked with screams, finally dissolving into drumless babble.

Likewise, “Sham-ra,” one of three songs produced by mischievous BBBBBBB producer Saionji, opens with gurgling synths, a meditative backbeat, and gusts of drone that suggest a waterside temple. After whipping into a tempest of bass kicks, staccato grunts, and prickly static, it just keeps transforming: first a roaring death march, then simmering hums and chatter. The record molts more than a cicada brood.
Without a lyric sheet or fluency in Swahili and Kikuyu, it’s hard to know whether Kanja was joking when he called The Adept “a very loving, positive, and uplifting record.” To my ears, “aggressive,” “brutal,” and “immense” are more appropriate descriptors. But even if Kanja was being cheeky, he sounds renewed over this punishing backdrop. In his hands, metal and dance, Berlin and Kampala, Backxwash and BBBBBBB, feel like kin.


Portland instrumental act continues to swallow entire genres whole with its sludgy, shapeshifting post-rock.

Deep Politics

At this point, you'd have an easier time rattling off all the kinds of music Portland instrumental rockers Grails don't make than the kinds they do. They have not, to my knowledge, released a hip-hop track; the klezmer influence is negligible. Beyond that, though, their shapeshifting post-rock seems capable of swallowing genres whole. And Deep Politics, their latest, is among their richest, most expansive offerings to date.
From stoner sludge to swirling desert rock to meditative mood music, Grails run an impressively wide gamut on Deep Politics. Less heavy and histrionic than 2008's grisly Doomsdayer's Holiday, Deep Politics has a rugged but decidedly habitable feel, craggy but markedly earthbound. Though the record's cohesion in the midst of its ever-changing sound is plenty impressive, each constituent part, too, is thrilling. So much post-rock leaves the listener waiting around for the good bit to kick in; Grails' constantly changing sound makes every moment arresting, not simply the big crescendos. For all its sparseness and delicacy, nearly every moment on Deep Politics is suffused with a sort of looming dread. And when it hits, it hits hard.
You can take your pick on Deep Politics' most stunning segment; the gnarled tangle of guitar and strings on opener "Future Primitive", the towering symphonic blast of "All the Colors of the Dark", the punishing back half of "I Led Three Lives". The many quiet moments prove just as rich and striking, suffusing the disc with rays of light to help offset the wide swaths of darkness. They push sounds nimbly in and out of the mix without ever risking overload, and while there's plenty of virtuosity bubbling under the surface-- particularly on the trickily fingerpicked closer "Deep Snow"-- there's little flash to be found, all instruments joined in service of the overall picture. From swirling Eastern-tinged psych to ruddy widescreen metal to lilting modern classical-inflected strings, the dynamics are constantly in motion, but everything slots together just so.
The flute-led "Corridors of Power" shoots for twilight peyote ceremony but winds up in a suburban yoga studio; it's salvaged a bit by its snaky guitar backdrop, but it's the moment on Deep Politics that misses its mark. Just the same, though, it's as easy to imagine the smoky backlight poster vibe of the mildly funky "Daughters of Bilitis" or one of their sidetrips into heavier realms turning some other listener away. That's the risk you take when you take on so much music in the course of three-quarters of an hour, I suppose. But while their pan-genre noise is certainly ambitious, the quietly virtuosic Grails only occasionally overreach. And even as they fold more sounds into the mixture, they find a place for nearly all of them. All encompassing and utterly engrossing, Deep Politics proves yet another stirring triumph from one of rock's great unsung ensembles.


The Los Angeles noise-pop band's early-1990s catalog gets an extensive work-through courtesy of Captured Tracks.

Medicine: Shot Forth Self Living / The Buried Life

Sometimes reissues are about the general reappreciation of artists everyone seemingly already loves; other times they're attempts to reclaim work that might otherwise be forgotten or near-forgotten. In the case of Los Angeles' Medicine, whose early-1990s catalog has been given an extensive work-through by the Captured Tracks label as part of their Shoegaze Archive series, it's the latter: While the band found itself on Rick Rubin's American Recordings label at the time, major-label connections and random appearances such as a club scene in The Crow never translated beyond cult worship. It's cult worship that's being fed here, with two full albums each with bonus tracks and a separate disc of demos, live cuts, and rarities (a Record Store Day box set containing these earlier this year also included an expansion of a further EP, Sounds of Medicine, into a full-length vinyl release plus a cassette tape documenting various live appearances). But there's a third kind of reissue logic that can occur, not due to the label but due to the listener: the one when your current self looks at your past conclusions and either wonders what you were thinking or goes, "You know, I'm still right."
So cards on the table in my case: For the longest time, I've been a fan of Medicine's main guitarist, sometime vocalist, and general lead figure Brad Laner for everything else he's done (and he's done a lot over three decades, solo and with others, from genteel home recordings to extreme dark feedback ambience and back again). But as a young L.A.-based shoegaze freak when it all first hit two decades back, part of an ill-defined community thriving on varying mixes of Anglophilia, raves, and psych revivalism, Medicine itself was a band I detested-- one of several, granted, but because of my passion for anything even remotely shoegaze, my main one. I saw one of their first shows opening for Chapterhouse, and they bored me senseless. They opened for the Rollercoaster U.S. touring bill with the Jesus and Mary Chain, Curve, and Spiritualized, and I was in agonies. A couple of years later, Swervedriver made one of many great L.A. appearances and... yep, them again. What I heard of their studio work irritated me at best; any claims made for their being as good as the UK types made me bang my head against a wall.
Listening to all this again with distance and time under my belt is the kind of healthy exercise I should have done some time ago, something all listeners probably should do with their own comparative examples, a necessary reexamination of prejudices as much as it never hurts to reconsider fandoms. The end result's one of the more enjoyably frustrating experiences I've had in a while, in that on the one hand I can pretty readily tell you exactly why the work of Laner, singer Beth Thompson, and percussionist Jim Goodall, plus various associates and earlier bandmates, is worth investigating. Yet at the same time it often still seems somehow to not quite work, an assemblage of often-excellent parts that never gels into a whole but gets close.
For instance, Shot Forth Self Living, the band's 1992 debut, feels more like a collection of experiments than a fully cohesive release. Laner takes the initial lead vocal on "One More" and crops up here and there throughout, but it's mostly Thompson being the main voice, sweetly caught between lyrical directness and being lost in the mix over performances that set a woozy but steady pace. Occasionally things get stripped down a little, but usually to showcase the core combination of Laner's central riffs, twisted patterns that sound like they're cutting through honey-- "Christmas Song", which concluded the original album, shows this to a T-- and through Thompson's contemplations. Songs like "Sweet Explosion" and "Aruca", especially thanks to the rhythms, sound like they're rubbing shoulders as much with Madchester hangovers-- think very, very early Blur-- as much as, say, "Soon", and not exactly successfully. But things can still connect just fine when Laner and crew completely go nuts: The appropriately titled "Queen of Tension", which seems to breeze along calmly until a dropped burst of drumming, insect sounds, and at least two freakish guitar solos on top of each other, stands out here.
With The Buried Life, Medicine's path ended up matching contemporaries Curve's to a striking degree; like the UK band, Medicine followed up their debut with a stronger second album in 1993 with greater overall variety leading the way. "Slut" might as well be a Curve homage in itself, with the band finding a perfect mix of Goodall's dance-nodding percussion, Thompson's coolly dismissive singing, and Laner's guitar sounding like a circular saw looping through sheet metal. But the frazzled edges, nagging-in-the-ear guitar tones, found-sound samples, and sense of rough mantras as opposed to hyper-precision marks Medicine's work as more of its own beast, as much as even more direct accessability elsewhere. Vocal pop hooks on songs like "Babydoll" and the joyful-sounding clatter of "Never Click" are livelier, while "Something Goes Wrong" actually sounds a bit like John Waite's "Missing You" with a lot more feedback. And none other than art-pop lodestone Van Dyke Parks turns up with piano and orchestrations on "Live It Down" (as well as a bonus-track version of their almost-hit "Time Baby").
Regardless, the personal itches that Medicine seemed designed from the start to scratch ended up much more strongly satisfied elsewhere, from the pretty guitar violence of the still underrated Lovesliescrushing back then to the commanding charisma of School of Seven Bells now. Hearing these Medicine albums again is almost like encountering scar tissue that runs too deep, finding out something that could work still never exactly does.


The bedroom-pop breakout star steps up his craft on his second album, experimenting with a bigger, more opulently produced sound, but his emotional attunement remains key to his appeal.

Fantasy Gateway

Part of a new generation of bedroom-pop stars, Omar “Cuco” Banos first broke out with a cover of Santo & Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” recorded in his actual bedroom. Yet by disposition, Cuco comes across as a sleepless soul: Together with his fellow homebody hustlers Clairo, Rex Orange County, and Billie Eilish, Cuco helped cultivate a new world of up-close yet emotionally distant pop that beckoned to millions of Gen Z streamers, a restless space existing somewhere between dissociative pop and lo-fi study beats. They are the doom-scrolling faces of this planet, joy-starved hearts straining behind exhausted eyes that can only telegraph, “life is pain it’s cool tho.”
Practically overnight, Cuco’s four-walled waviness exploded onto open-air stages in front of thousands of fans. So the question that hung over the singer, rapper, and multi-instrumentalist’s 2019 debut LP, Para Mí, was how a young artist who found his voice in dimly lit solitude is supposed to adjust to the spotlight. He’s far from the only internet-native pop star to be confronted with that quandary, but so far he’s done a commendable job of maintaining his own pace. He rejected the major labels’ advances until one agreed to his terms in full. He bought himself a house on the block where he grew up, five doors away from his parents. He’s not letting life bully him into speeding up and losing control.
On Fantasy Gateway, Cuco is still wrestling with what this relatively newfound exposure means for him. His confident answer: continuing to be himself, this time under the bright lights. Recording in several studios and testing out a more elaborately produced sound, he gamely steps up his craft on his second LP without drastically altering his voice as a songwriter. He still plugs terse confessions about fighting inner demons into shuffling hooks and verses with carefree swagger, a magnetic paradox immediately apparent on the breezily bouncing “Caution.” Co-producers Manuel Lara and Andrés Rebellón—variously credited as co-writers on 11 of the 12 songs—both help to fit Cuco’s affably modest, CR-V-cruising personality into the luxurious new trappings as naturally as it gelled with his comparatively lo-fi early work. “Sitting in the Corner” may not have needed Kacey Musgraves on backing vocals, but the song delivers; the other guest vocalist, Adriel Favela, plays off Cuco’s malaise with howling, heartsick verses about lost love. A beat-driven jewel of norteño-inflected pop, it’s one of the crown achievements here, worthy of being cranked out of the windows of your Honda or Bentley for the rest of the summer.
Some awkward fits are to be expected when trying on new, bigger clothes, and Fantasy Gateway has its growing pains. They tend to come when Cuco wallows in his comfort zone of melancholic psychedelia. “Paraphonic” is rife with digital flourishes, but he sounds flat and uninspired within the excess. “When the Day Comes to an End” and “Sweet Dissociation” nod to his obvious soft spot for Tame Impala, but don’t do much more than pay homage. Cuco successfully shakes himself out of his lulls by changing pace and trying out different styles and tempos. He proves his versatility on a string of three consecutive highlights: The lush, Lionel Richie-esque slow jam “Artificial Intelligence” feeds an intricate, brassy instrumental outro into “Fin Del Mundo,” a stripped-down duet with Bratty; that song then glides into the laid-back “Time Machine,” where underneath all the spacey synths, handclaps, and arpeggios lies a plainly beautiful folk song about regret.
The album ends with one of his boldest pivots, “Decir Adios,” a ballad in which he pushes his voice out of its emotional straits to belt out his sadness. Wherever he goes from here, Cuco’s ability to break through the surface of apathy will remain important to his art—it’s been key to his appeal from the start. At one of those early festival sets a couple years back, as Cuco and his band approached the end of his wistful breakup waltz “We Had to End It,” he took a third trumpet solo. Where the first two paddled serenely along the song’s surface, now he surfed like a maniac with nothing to lose, jabbing into a trill that could resuscitate your cold, dead heart. The crowd went wild. The trumpet isn’t the point; Cuco is a former band kid, but the instrument could have been a harmonica, a theremin, a scream. The beauty of the moment was in how he momentarily shone a blacklight on the invisible ink of the “agony and pain” he’d been singing about 30 seconds earlier. Courageous moments like these, which still occasionally poke through Fantasy Gateway’s newfound shine, should serve him long after he fully breaks out of the bedroom.


Named after an architectural icon looming over South East London, the rapper’s six-track EP offers a detailed account of life at the building’s base.

Strata EP

The strip of South East London called Elephant & Castle, home to the reclusive poet-rapper Jesse James Solomon, has completely transformed in recent years, and nothing better symbolizes the area’s gentrification than the Strata building. It is a looming figure, shaped like a beard trimmer, whose three eerily glowing, famously defunct wind turbines positioned at its head peer over local housing estates, hyper-visible for anyone living nearby to see.
Strata is painted on the artwork of Solomon’s new six-track EP, and it is also its namesake; its presence suggests the way the South London MC might have watched the building’s ascent from rain-soaked windows, leaf-pressed pavements, and soggy park benches as a teenager. His newest release is a flâneur’s account of unstable life at the building’s base. By sourcing symbolism from its architecture, he suggests Strata as a reliable structure of guiding permanence, like the lighthouse in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and an ominous, all-seeing entity, like Sauron’s tall blinking eye in Lord of the Rings.
“Lionel Jesse” dives straight into tales of his past on the short introductory title track: “I see a young me, I see the moonlight on the pavement.” This sensitive allusion to way-back-when, to local life when the nearby Heygate estate still stood, housing thousands of people in its sprawling network of council flats—“Heygate was where that crane is”—is nothing new. For years, Solomon’s vividly penned memories have been the binding thread of his music, interwoven throughout his stories of young life in the neglected inner city. Throughout the new EP, the imagery of youth remains everywhere, poured out like hot wax over smoky UK hip-hop beats from soulful crate-digger Felix Joseph. Solomon looks back on playing team sports, hating the “frustration in his mother’s eyes,” and sitting on his push-bike, wrapped -up in a troubled love affair with his wintry ends.
He occasionally risks staring too hard into the rear-view mirror. It would be nice to know more about him now, after his rise to cult fame: References to Uber rides over the Thames and along the infamously hectic Walworth (“Woolie”) road, to smoking weed and reflecting on existence, to lines of coke and carelessly spilling champagne, provide a much-needed glimpse into his updated world. The fact he has dug into new caves of his consciousness shows precisely how he has grown since the buzz started to stir around his uniquely soft, piercing lyricism in 2015. His reputation is now cemented as a more philosophical affiliate of King Krule, Rejjie Snow, and Wiki—a legitimate power player among this roster of edgy transatlantic wordsmiths.
Strata’s sometimes overwhelmingly dense internal logic is thankfully simplified by patient, moody choruses from kadiata and ELIZA on “Under the Sun” and “Don’t Make Me,” respectively. The latter is an unprecedented conversation about love, and includes Solomon’s fleeting admission of being prepared to “leave the city for a weekend, if you like.” “Goat Talk,” sprinkled with muted ad-libs from man-of-the-moment Suspect, shows Solomon at his most confident and therefore purest. Less hampered by self-consciousness, he sounds happy to embark on a mission of braggadocio alongside the encouraging yelps of his friend and South London contemporary.
It is tempting to admire the emphasis on quality over quantity here. But after such a long wait, the EP should really be longer. It would also benefit from more of the rebellious energy displayed on last summer’s “Son of the Ends,” again with Suspect, or the pair’s recent hit “One Way,” featuring a verse from grime king Skepta. Going forward, if Solomon can counterweight his low-key, late-night reflections with more sparkle and experimentation, he will secure a stable seat aboard the current skyrocket of London’s rap scene. But within Strata’s modest framework, Solomon achieves what he sets out to do: jog people’s memories and offer an even more detailed roadmap for fans of his evolving introverse. You would be hard pressed to find a better lyricist in London. Surely an album is on the horizon? At least we have a clearer view ahead from the secure heights of Strata.