Of a piece with last year’s Lady Wood, the Swedish pop singer’s new album chronicles the death of a doomed, passionate love affair. It makes a powerful statement about female sexuality in the process.

Blue Lips

Tove Lo doesn’t do coy. On “bitches,” an ode to bisexual liberation smack dab in the middle of the Swedish pop singer’s new album, she pummels through the first verse without an ounce of irony. “Let me be your guide when you eat my pussy out/’Cause I’ve had one or two, even a few/Yeah, more than you,” she asserts, as laser beam keyboards sputter around her. Even without the healthy levels of Lil’ Kim-grade raunch, “bitches” is a red-hot, gut punching song by an artist who is not afraid to resoundingly state what she wants, when she wants it. “Bitches, I don’t trust ’em/But they give me what I want for the night,” she sings in the chorus, succinctly illustrating the core philosophy behind Blue Lips, and its predecessor, 2016’s Lady Wood: gone are the days when sexual dominance was the realm of men alone.
Blue Lips is subtitled [lady wood phase II], and it comprises parts three and four of Lo’s pair of concept albums. Both albums chronicle the birth and death of a tumultuous love affair, doomed by an all-consuming, self-destructive passion. Although sex is absolutely the lens through which Lo explores this relationship, it never feels as if she’s performing for the male gaze, and although she flirts with camp, it’s in a self-aware way that conveys a certain seriousness.
The first half of Blue Lips, titled “LIGHT BEAMS,” begins with the lead single, an uptempo dance track called “disco tits.” It blends 1970s disco, 1990s house, and Lo’s penchant for humor and entendre all into one neat package dripping with erotic mirth. The musical apex of Tove Lo’s career thus far, “disco tits” uses clever structural elements—like a single-bar a capella pre-chorus that ramps up the track’s energy before the stinging pulse of the refrain—to create something that is slinky, cool, and relentlessly driving. “I’m wet through all my clothes/I’m fully charged, nipples are hard/Ready to go,” she sings, almost deadpan, once again presenting herself as the central focus of her lust. The track is the quintessential example of the effect Lo wishes to achieve—songs about the complexity of female sexuality that make their point through the irreverence of pop music. Case in point: in the “disco tits” video, Lo drives a convertible down a desert highway, while receiving road head from a furry yellow puppet.
Lo wears her influences on her sleeve here. “disco sits” is an homage to shimmering ’70s dance pop, calling to mind Andrea True, the late disco diva whose 1976 hit “More, More, More” brought second-wave sex-positive feminism to light-up dancefloors across the country. Blue Lips is not a straight-up disco record, but Lo uses that genre’s soft focus sheen to recall an era grown from the sexual liberation of the ’60s, while sheltered from the excesses of the ’80s. Coupled with her evocative songwriting skills, Blue Lips elicits an air of fantasy, a defined context in which the most potent desires can be explored and examined.
“LIGHT BEAMS” is the more upbeat side of Blue Lips, the final climax before the comedown. “stranger,” another highlight from this half of the album, is built around a funky, mock-Prince guitar lick, supported by echoing snare drums and some of Lo’s most powerful vocals to date. It’s the part of the narrative where, with her relationship already in shambles, Lo goes on the prowl for a one-night stand—and the yearning in her voice, almost cracking, is the deepest point of the record.
It sets the stage for “PITCH BLACK,” the final Lady Wood suite, where Lo winds down and bottoms out after her debaucherous journey. While its stark contrast to “LIGHT BEAMS” works conceptually, the transition is a little rough. Tracks like “romantics,” with its trendy trap beats and distorted vocals, pale slightly next to the wild ride of the album’s first half. “struggle” indulges in Lo’s puzzling love for millennial slang (“The struggle is real,” she sings on the song’s hook), but it also sees Lo at her most introspective and vulnerable. If Rihanna and her army of copycats popularized tropical pop in the past few years, this is a tropical depression, its bubbly demeanor completely tempered by an encroaching darkness. “Fuck, fuck, fuck some sense into me,” Lo pleads, definitely more of a supplication than a come-on.
With Lady Wood, it seemed like Tove Lo had found a way to separate herself from the ever-growing crowd of Scandi-pop artists, expanding on real, human themes instead of by-the-numbers love ditties washed over with icy synth production. Blue Lips continues in this direction, an explicit testament to Lo’s chaotic love life, an unashamedly sexual and emotionally impactful piece of work. Lo ends up baring much more of her soul than her body.


On her fifth solo album, the Irish singer finds a new role as a dancefloor truth-teller, infusing house and disco epics with thrilling expressions of desire, regret, and self-knowledge.

Róisín Machine

Over the course of the last 30 years, Róisín Murphy has made enough classics to fill up the Top 40 of a more fabulous world. To paraphrase the one-time announcer of this awful world’s pop countdown, Murphy has kept her couture-shod feet on the ground and kept reaching for the stars—though her idea of a star is more Cosey Fanni Tutti dancing to Sylvester than your average pop idol. The Irish singer-songwriter’s fifth solo album, Róisín Machine, might seem in some ways like the same old song and dance. But it’s done with such impeccable elan that she has turned the old nightlife songbook into a book of revelations.
In Moloko, Murphy’s turn-of-the-century duo of bedroom fiddlers who ended up filling arenas, Murphy distilled awkward hedonism into intoxicants like “Sing It Back” and “Forever More.” Her subsequent solo albums, brilliant as they often were, sometimes felt more like mere representations of charisma, or deployments of charm, than, say, a confession on a dancefloor or finding love in a hopeless place or something you can’t get out of your head. In proper dance-music style, her best tracks often existed only on 12"s, like her 2014 collaboration with Freeform Five, “Leviathan,” a fierce and forthright anthem which should be played instead whenever someone requests “Titanium.” Or the series she made with boompty savant Maurice Fulton, which often sounded like house classics overheard while trapped in an adjacent rubber room.
Machine fills out a recent clutch of 12"s with new tracks, all made with Sheffield legend Parrot, whose work as Sweet Exorcist (with Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk) helped form the character of early Warp records. Here, he raises the electro-industrial psychedelia of Throbbing Gristle and the deeply considered thump of Larrys Levan and Heard into impeccable feats of sonic engineering that wisely never dare to upstage the star of the show.
After a brief prologue to set the stakes—“I will make my own happy ending,” she announces over an opening curtain of strings—the album moves psychogeographically through various dance terrains. It begins, with “Simulation,” at the beginning: the breath (layers of Murphy’s exhalations, pluming like a fog machine) and the beat. (For club kids, a heartbeat isn’t a double thump, it’s a kick and a hi-hat.) “This is a simulation,” she lilts. “This is a lonely illusion/This is my only delusion.” Disco, invented by people whose existence was uncertain, was a way to turn fantasy into fact. Here, Murphy is part Oscar Wilde, praising the artificial as a mask that tells the truth, and part Willy Wonka, all conflicted beckoning. Part riot grrrl, too: “If it’s all on my veins/It’s all in my mind/You don’t get to be unkind!” she declares, like a clarion cry of “Girls to the front!” The dancefloor is a body, Murphy’s own, and she’s too busy blissing to entertain male notions of authenticity, or the dangers their egos might engender.
“Simulation” ends with one of the album’s great builds, which on a good pair of headphones sounds like liftoff and on a behemoth of a soundsystem—at, let’s say, a busy moment of a particularly adult’s-only corner of a queer dancefloor—feels like poppers. Murphy has talked about sequencing Machine as a kind of DJ mix; a traditional one would take off even further from here. Perversely, “Kingdom of Ends” follows, a beatless heater with stacked funk-operatic vocals calling back to The ArchAndroid and P-Funk before it. The chants amass above an ooze of trance, putting to shame the thousands of so-called “deconstructed club” blobs currently clogging up Bandcamp. “This is easier than I expected,” Murphy sneers.
Only then, with an absolute stormer of a disco strut called “Something More,” is the Machine up and running at full steam. “Maybe this could be the last time I feel the strain/Of what it’s like to own everyone and everything/Life just keeps me wanting,” she announces, as if reading out loud, for the first time, a diagnosis of her own condition. The song is a masterclass of ambivalence, with a yearning bridge that settles into the chorus, once aching and now resigned.
The baggy “We Got Together” ricochets Murphy’s hoots and hollers across booming fields, a simple celebration of how tough it can be to maintain a connection. With “Game Changer,” she loosens her grip. It’s a humid pulse, that moment in a DJ set designed for a quick trip to the bar. This is Roísín Murphy, though, so it’s not that easy. The track is somehow in freefall and motionless. Her voice flashes through the air like tableaus caught in mid-strobe: “I thought I knew the way…”; “This is about to get realer….” Words smear. Just as with a slightly inappropriate outfit, or a too-intimate (or intoxicated) conversation, what holds it all together is wit.
“Incapable” is brittle, its Eurodisco rhythm sharpened into snaps and claps. Murphy unloads a history of emotional distance. She knows all about that warm Moroder/Summer swoon: “I get that there’s a sensation/Though I don’t know what it means.” She can’t feel love. “I should try and play my part,” she reproves herself, but alas, all she’s ever felt is a feverish chill. And this is what it sounds like, percussion prickling like goosebumps, when your damage hardens into a visage. She falls through a trapdoor into full disco fever. “Narcissus” marries Greek myth and a dance beat better than Xanadu ever did: Its pools of rippling strings evaporate into prance music for chatterbox Echo and selfie-obsessed Narcissus, characters familiar to anyone who’s ever waited in line for a nightclub powder room.
Disco fuels another gem: “Murphy’s Law,” a shimmering ode to a lack of self-control that she sings in a register as deep as the groove. The song is not a cover of Cheri’s insouciant 1982 boogie standard of the same name, and it is also not “Bad Girls,” though it definitely shares some DNA, but it is as good as either of them. The nerve! And one more: “Jealousy,” shorn of more than half its original 12" length, starts in thrall to that destructive emotion and stays there. “Jealousy!” she chants, as if demanding her own humanity, while the track surmounts a second great buildup, bookending “Simulation” as if to say the real drama is always human. After all the triumphs and tragedies of trying to connect to herself and other people in the dark, she finds a role she was born to play: succinct dancefloor truth-teller, a character smart enough to see the worst about herself and clever enough to make it irresistible. Róisín Murphy aims her tracks at the stars. With Róisín Machine, she’s become one.

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On their nimble new LP, the Polish quartet Trupa Trupa bring some poetry and subtlety to psychedelic rock.

Jolly New Songs

Though few of the genre’s songwriters would admit as much, lyrics tend to be an afterthought in psych-rock. They are more like a formality, setting a place for the sonic theatrics and flamboyant guitars that many bands of this sort take far more pleasure in. For the Polish psych quartet Trupa Trupa, however, lyrics are a delicacy. Frontman Grzegorz Kwiatkowski has several books of poetry to his name. And although he limits his words on Trupa Trupa’s nimble new LP Jolly New Songs, rationing them like shaved truffles, he brings a poet’s love of language to the ones he does deploy, lingering on them, repeating them, embellishing them, and savoring the space between them.
Of course, the band’s respect for language doesn’t preclude them from having a little fun at its expense. Trupa roughly translates to “corpse,” a word that presumably carries the same balance of morbidity and whimsy in Polish as it does in English, and their band name says everything you need to know about their gallows humor. Throughout Jolly New Songs, Kwiatkowski laughs in the face of defeat, mining joy from the macabre. “Think I am wounded and wounded now/Think I am wounded,” Kwiatkowski sputters like a shaken cola can on “Falling,” too delighted by the phonetic pleasures of the word “woooounded” to focus on the more pressing concern. “Lying with you/Without a move/The coffin so smooth,” he croons suavely on “Coffin,” a song that opens with a leisurely swagger before it pivots into a downpour of drone.
Trupa Trupa pack the record with those kinds of twist endings and fake-outs. “Jolly New Song,” which isn’t conventionally jolly but does initially carry a certain pep, eventually wilts into a rotted wreck of noise before it ends with the same abrupt cut to black as Dinosaur Jr.’s “Just Like Heaven” cover. Opener “Against Breaking Heart of a Breaking Heart Beauty” abandons its steady tempo to dizzy itself with a finale of seasick circus organs. In the hands of a heavier band, these disruption tactics might be played for maximum punishment, but here they feel more like mischief, an outlet for the group’s prankster energy.
Jolly New Songs blurs the lines between the wry and the genuinely unsettling so effectively that it’s rarely entirely clear when, or if, the band is joking. When Kwiatkowski’s voice takes on a bit of a punk sneer on “Never Forget,” a track with tantalizing shades of Unwound’s autumnal masterpiece Leaves Turn Inside You, he can sound a bit like Howard Devoto of Magazine, a flicked switchblade with an unclear target. “We never, we never forget humiliation,” Kwiatkowski sings, implicitly promising retribution. Even the songs that aren’t overtly nihilistic carry an ominous gloom, with bass lines that nip like a late-November frost.
The tradeoff for all that mood setting is that Jolly New Songs falls a little short in the fireworks department, especially compared to the work of showier psych bands like Dungen or Thee Oh Sees. Psych fans who seek out this music mostly for the knockout, “holy fuck!” moments aren’t going to find many here, but what they will find is a record that lingers longer than most, one that derives its power less by skirting conventions than by veiling its intentions.


The new !!! album finds them working with a slew of guest singers, exploring twitchy R&B, queasy dub-disco, romantic house, and more. As ever, their dance music is both celebratory and unsentimental.

Shake the Shudder

It’s either a highly fortuitous coincidence or extremely unfortunate timing that !!! should drop its seventh album right when LCD Soundsystem have issued their first proper new music in seven years. Now that the usual 20-year nostalgia cycle has officially shrunk to 15, and now that there’s a whole bunch of new reasons to despise Rudy Giuliani, certainly the conditions seem ripe for a post-millennial New York post-punk revival. But while the comeback narrative—and the attendant skepticism toward it—dovetail nicely with the legacy of LCD Soundsystem (whose most resonant music grapples with the impossibility of reliving the past), such associations arguably do !!! a disservice.
Sure, the two bands share common origin stories (former hardcore kids reborn as slaves to the rhythm), influences, and, at one point, even personnel (bassist Tyler Pope). But for two decades now, !!! have never stopped and never looked back, and through subtle album-to-album evolutions, the band barely resemble their 2002 selves. In that time, !!! have gone from making punk more danceable to making dance music more punk: they’ve thoroughly internalized disco’s socio-political history, embracing the idea of the club as a safe haven for misfits, and promoting the philosophy of dancing as an act of defiance. That frontman Nic Offer’s bratty sneer and profane patter so often chafe against the band’s rubbery grooves is precisely the point: you don’t need to be a seasoned diva to join this party; just speak your mind and your ass will follow.
Where James Murphy’s personality and neuroses have become increasingly entrenched in the LCD sound, Offer has become evermore willing to cede the spotlight, as if to put disco’s spirit of inclusivity into action. More than any other !!! record before it, Shake the Shudder finds Offer riffing off a rotating cast of guest vocalists. And they provide the band with multiple pivot points to explore different directions. Opening track “The One 2” is a tense, twitchy R&B showdown with singer Lea Lea that taps a more sensitive nerve than this attitude-heavy band usually allows. “Throttle Service” features a jubilant, choir-like chorus led by former Out Hud bandmate Molly Schnick over warm organ tones and a huge wrecking ball of a bassline. And on the queasy dub-disco freakout “What R U Up 2Day,” the creepily warped, Grimes-like incantations are provided by Lea Lea and multi-instrumentalist Rafael Cohen’s young daughter.
Even on the tracks where Offer takes the lead, he often doesn’t sound like his usual self. In a nod to the intertwined histories of club and drag culture, “Dancing Is the Best Revenge” finds him pitching his voice up to create a feminine alter ego, Nicole Fayu, in the tradition of Prince’s Camille. But he’s careful not to teeter into camp caricature: over a steely bass groove, he pithily dismisses the niceties of nostalgia (“The old days ain’t coming back/Ain’t coming back no more/They might as well be tied up in a sack on the ocean floor/With cement blocks”) with all the icy nonchalance of someone flicking a cigarette butt in your face.
As “Dancing Is the Best Revenge” illustrates, !!! are at their best when making dance music that’s both unabashedly celebratory and stridently unsentimental. (Even better is the hard-house banger “NRGQ,” which honors the !!! tradition of putting terrible dad-joke puns to terrific use.) When the band veer into more typically romantic house terrain (“Our Love (U Can Get)”) and starry-eyed electro-rock (“Throw Yourself in the River”), their peculiar, provocateur personality is muted.
But even if they’re more liable to greet the world with a warm embrace instead of a middle finger these days, !!! haven’t lost their flair for infusing peak-hour hysterics with sobering morning-after rumination. Atop the robust P-Funk strut of “Five Companies,” Offer laments the homogenizing effects of unchecked capitalism (“Five companies/Running everything I see around me”), but ultimately decides he’s not going to worry about worrying: “Nothing grabs attention like the latest fear/Blah blah blah, the end is near/Everyone predicts it every single year.” At first, it seems like an oddly resigned response to our current political tumult, especially when you consider Offer thought nothing of telling the previous Republican president to “suck my fucking dick.” But in light of !!!’s long history of agit-funk activism, it’s actually a form of reassurance: we’ve danced our way through the dark times before, and we’ll do it again.


The Bronx rapper’s latest project reveals little about his persona other than his approach to rapping, which is blunt and functional.

Don Talk

One of the odd ironies of Don Q’s breakthrough mixtape, Corner Stories, was that it lacked both corners and stories. Don Q gestured at, alluded to, and cited a hardscrabble Bronx upbringing, but his throaty, accented rasp tended to be the only lasting impression. Everything else was lost in transit: narratives smoldered inside dry boasts, images withered on vines of florid internal rhymes, punchlines were oversold or undercooked. Don Q channeled fire but blew smoke.
Don Talk trades scene setting for character building and is just as feckless. The main problem is that Don Q isn’t a memorable character. His approach to rapping is blunt and functional. His raps work like conveyor belts, shuffling rhymes from here to there. He rarely relishes or harnesses words. Elaborate rhyme schemes are set up like hurdles and then dashed through mechanically. Every verse is a blitz, every feature is a flex. His idea of a personality is constant pantomime: the grandiosity of Rick Ross, the mise-en-scene of JAY-Z, the bounce of A Boogie, his fellow Bronxer and labelmate. Don Q knows the right signifiers but fails to channel their significance, for himself or the listener.
The beats drive home Don Q’s identity crisis. He favors exactly two production styles: lush, pensive lounge joints and booming, trap-tinged slappers. Functionally, this means that he’s either going deep or going in and he excels at neither. When he goes deep, he raps slower and emphasizes his husky voice. The twinkly arpeggios and looped strings on “Words of Wisdom” are Maybach Music kitsch. Title track “Don Talk” is built from the same template, and on it Don Q goes full paranoiac, questioning the loyalty of friends as he evokes cinematic opulence. When Don Q goes in, he pirates ad-libs and traffics in tropes. “True Or Not” is peppered with the growled overdubs of Young Dolph; “Puddle of Water” cribs multiple Future yelps; “Trap Phone” recruits 2016 Desiigner. Riffs and modulations of established styles have sparked some of rap’s most exciting turns, but Don Q is neither charting new territories nor deconstructing sounds. He’s just... here.
Don Q is a diminutive of Donald Quilio, but Don Q is clearly both a nickname and an ambition. The Don Q of Don Talk strives for boss-hood and respect; he wants to be a capo but a more interesting journey might have been self-discovery. Don Talk posits Don Q as self-made and weary from his come-up, but his music has no arc. There’s no real sense of what he’s been made from or into, where he’s come from, where he wants to go, or where he is. A decade’s worth of assorted rap battles and lo-fi home videos show a scrappy guy using rap to assert himself and goof off. There’s no guarantee that that guy is any more intriguing than the dull Don Q of Don Talk, but there was personality in his blemishes. What’s his corner story?


The enigmatic Liverpool band returns with an album heavy on Suicide-like groove and open-ended jams. The choice of  Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never as mixer adds an additional element of experimentation.

Free Reign

Now 15 years into their career, Clinic have left their surgical masks on longer than KISS initially kept on their make-up, and this rigid visual motif makes it easy to overlook the Liverpool art-rock quartet's evolution. We've grown accustomed to conflating an artist's musical progression with their changing appearances-- like when they go through a beardo phase, or get ill-advised new-wave haircuts, or start wearing guyliner. But Clinic always look like Clinic, which reinforces the idea that they always sound like Clinic. Even when the band embraced soft-pop melody and open-hearted lyricism on 2010's knowingly titled Bubblegum, it seemed to only amplify this band's inherent, ineffable strangeness.
Those masks aren't just a gimmicky extension of Clinic's name; they're also a visual manifestation of the band's meticulous approach, as they've taken a scalpel to music from the 1960s and 70s-- the Monks, Sparks, Joe Meek, krautrock-- and stitched their favorite bits into new, mutant forms. But compared to the concise structures of their six previous albums, on Free Reign, the band behaves less like surgeons and more like scientists who favor exploration and patience. The game plan this time is to switch their analog synths to the "Suicide" setting and see where the drones take them.
The more open-ended ethos also extends to the band's choice of mixer: Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never. Lopatin's avant-electronic soundscaping has little in common with Clinic's compact collage-rock, but his influence seems less about sound than spirit. Clinic show a greater willingness to let these songs unfurl according to their own logic and pace: The slow-percolating opener, "Misty", doesn't reveal its chiming, churchly Spiritualized-like keyboard hook until a good two minutes in, which is usually the point when Clinic are wrapping a song up. It's also the first of four songs here to crack the five-minute mark, heretofore uncharted territory in the Clinic canon.
But as Free Reign shows, when Clinic take their time, they can build up a bewitching groove. The album's twin highlights, "Miss You" and "You", are similarly titled, similarly structured, and similarly libidinous exercises in disco-Can decadence; while a touch too slow for dancefloor traction, they both get impressively freakier and funkier the longer they stretch out. "Seamless Boogie Woofie BBC2 10" works the same trick in more abbreviated form, while proving that even a chorus of "you're beautiful" can sound creepily sinister when coming from ever-enigmatic vocalist Ade Blackburn.
But if Free Reign posits Clinic as unlikely heirs to the LCD Soundsystem legacy of post-punky electro-rock, it also reveals the mess they made along the way. "See Saw" practically kills the album's momentum before it even gets going, with a maddeningly repetitious caveman stomp that sounds like a practice-space goof. "Cosmic Radiation" and "Sun and the Moon" meanwhile, offer glimpses of Clinic as jam band, with Blackburn's omnipresent melodica squawking over the former's aimless, wah-wah'ed jazz-funk rhythm, while the latter's loose blues ramble imagines the late-era Doors gone dub.
But in between Free Reign's two extremes-- of taut groove and directionless doodle-- Clinic also add to their deepening catalog of disarmingly affecting ballads with "For the Season", a wistful whisper of a song that inspires scenes of slow dances in empty ballrooms. It may be the most atypical track here, but on an album that so doggedly documents the process of experimentation, it's a welcome moment where Clinic can let down the mask and enjoy a breather.


By blending everyday stories with spacey beats, the Savannah rapper makes the mundane unexpectedly entrancing.

After the Storm

Duwap Kaine is a bored teenager raised on a steady diet of memes, cartoons, Atlanta street rap, and the warbles and slurred words of Almighty So era Chief Keef, maybe the weirdest of the Chicago drill forefather’s first wave. Now 19, he was barely old enough to attend high school when his AutoTune drenched loosies first took off on SoundCloud. His 2018 mixtape Underdog is foundational to anyone immersed in airy SoundCloud rap—Lil Tecca, SoFaygo, and more consider him an influence—despite the fact that it’s a continuous stream of disjointed thoughts. He comes from Savannah, Georgia, but his music doesn’t have a particular setting. On spacey and blown-out beats, he goes over his everyday hobbies: driving his whip over the speed limit, buying new designer jeans, and securing and smoking weed like it’s a basic necessity.
If you were to listen to a single Duwap Kaine song, it might just sound like a tone deaf dude in a broom closet delivering a bunch of half-assed punchlines. He infamously said, “Family Guy I’m Peter,” on “Outside,” and 12 months later not a single person knows what it means. But the best way to experience Duwap Kaine is to click play on his SoundCloud page; eventually, it’ll unexpectedly put you into a trance like a weed edible.
His latest mixtape After the Storm should be digested similarly—you just let it run and mark the timestamps of your favorite moments. I would note the first minute of “Ludacris,” where Duwap coos (with way too much reverb), “Dance wit’ me,” over an instrumental that sounds like being slingshotted through a portal or when he picks the most petty reason to be annoyed by the girl he’s with on “25 Dollar Fanta”: “Hate this bitch she keep askin’ what my sign is.” There’s also the entirety of “The Benjamin Franklin Love Story,” a heart melting love ballad to 100 dollar bills made up of AutoTune wails cranked up to chaotic levels. It’s a tactic he picked up from Keef who embraced his lack of traditional melodic ability by emphasizing missed notes and messiness.
A few of After the Storm’s production choices can snap you out of the daze. The back to back run of drill influenced beats on “Backseat” and “No AutoTune 3” doesn’t quite work, and the hypnotic lull of the mixtape can also drag. When he’s being less playful with AutoTune, it might even put you to sleep, especially if he isn’t saying anything interesting.
Yet the more you listen to the mixtape, those punchlines and lyrics that you previously thought were insignificant begin to stick in your brain. On “Circus,” he conversationally raps, “Baby, let’s chill and watch this Netflix episode/Have you ever seen the movie Dope? I think it’s cool, lеt’s put it on,” and you’ll probably breeze right by it on your first listen. But the further you plunge into the Duwap Kaine experience, mundane moments like this somehow become hilarious in their uneventfulness.
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A cult-favorite Portuguese electronic album from the early ’90s with a pleasantly disorienting blend of instruments and textures.

Carlos Maria Trindade / Nuno Canavarro: Mr. Wollogallu

Mr. Wollogallu

Demand for the weird, wonderful and fabulously obscure has become so acute among record collectors that mythical lost albums now turn up on our shelves with a suspicious frequency. Mr. Wollogallu, freshly reissued by Barcelona label Urpa i Musell, ticks most of the boxes for this type of release—scarcity, exclusivity and a small but rabid fan base ready to talk up the record’s significance on Discogs. Better still, the album comes with a compelling lightning-in-a-bottle backstory: Carlos Maria Trindade and Nuno Canavarro were staples of the 1980s Portuguese rock scene who came together in 1990 to record this, their only collaboration.
And the music? Mr. Wollogallu doesn’t necessarily deliver the lightbulb-popping feeling of revelation that many Anglo-American listeners seek in reissues of, say, 1970s Brazilian electronic music or Japanese ambient sounds. In fact, its combination of globally disparate instruments—everything from an Okinawa flute to an African mbira—with vintage electronic production techniques fits squarely into the “Fourth World” aesthetic that Jon Hassell pioneered in the early ’80s on celebrated albums like Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics.
Luckily, Trindade and Canavarro also share Hassell’s compositional and melodic gifts. The chord patterns on many of the album’s 13 songs toy with the listeners’ feelings like kittens and string, plunging us from light into dark (as on “Guiar,” where an overly jaunty guitar riff takes a swift, melancholic tumble) or teasing the light at the end of an emotional tunnel. At times, notably on “Ven 5” and “Segredos M.,” these changes have a wonderfully dramatic feel, reminiscent of the most accomplished soundtrack music.
Dig a little deeper, and it is Mr. Wollogallu’s subtle textures that linger. Aside from the solo piano piece “West,” each song is packed with distinct, contrasting elements. Opener “The Truth,” for example, uses marimba, strings, vibraphone, trombone, organ, vocal samples and Okinawa flute to evoke a serene excursion to—where, exactly? The song feels geographically baffling in the most rewarding way, like waking up jet-lagged and clueless in a new country. Mia Brown, a friend of the duo who was present during the album’s recording process, says in the reissue’s sleeve notes that mixing Mr. Wollogallu was a painstaking procedure, and you can hear that care in the music’s warm and perfectly balanced timbre.
Allied to this are a series of brilliant production touches that trigger a faint, lingering unease,  preventing Mr. Wollogallu from becoming too self-satisfied. “Plan” features a haunting vocal effect, somewhere between a wistful sigh and a dying gasp of air, that floats around half-hidden in the song’s latter stages; “Aelux” marries a proto-Air organ melody to an unsettling vocal collage. Recording the album at their own pace, away from record company constraints, Trindade and Canavarro experimented with techniques such as sound “resampling,” “tape cutting” and “computer-controlled event reversing”—yielding the alien organ tones that introduce “S. Louise,” or the way “Em Bou-Saada” dissolves into an entirely new song in its closing moment, like a sonic mirage.
Ultimately, Mr. Wollogallu’s faults mean it's not quite a classic, lost or otherwise—the seven-minute “Blu Terra” is an atmosphere looking for a melody, and “West” is far too straight-laced to take off. But the record’s haunting grace is such that it’s easy to understand why a group of devoted listeners remain fixed on its charms, nearly three decades on.


Damon Albarn, former Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea are the core of this album of West African-style funk and psychedelia.

Rocket Juice & the Moon: Rocket Juice and the Moon

Rocket Juice and the Moon

Rocket Juice & the Moon is one of three albums steered by former Blur frontman Damon Albarn scheduled for release before this summer. For a presumably rich man, he keeps busy. He also understands the value of what I like to call the "container." The container is a set of limitations, an acknowledgement that on any given project there's no feasible way to have it all, and attempting to have it all is one of the first steps to failure. This is why the idea of "fusion" food may seem exhausting to you, or why art that professes to "defy genre" tends to end up "sucking."
Blur's most celebrated album, Parklife, was basically a series of vignettes written in different styles, and Albarn's career since has taken the same tack on an album-to-album and band-to-band scale: The sneaker-store electro of Gorillaz, the African blues of Mali Music, the moody dub-folk of The Good, the Bad & the Queen. He's worked on four film soundtracks and a couple of operas. His approach to his art has been more like a film director's than a musician's, marked by collaboration, variety, and the attitude that it's the overall trajectory of his career-- rather than any one album-- that will define him.
The core of Rocket Juice-- an album of West African-style funk and psychedelia-- is Albarn, former Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen, and Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea. As someone who has always appreciated RHCP's clean sound as temporary relief from the muddy, red-state testicle rock generally favored by my gym's sound system, Flea's involvement here is a plus. Like Allen, he is a precise, powerful player but also a nimble one, and it's their back-and-forth that defines the album's feel: Light, skipping, controlled, but slightly off-balance, the sound of a wind-up toy tottering along the sidewalk.
Twelve of RJ's 18 tracks are under three minutes long, and most function as groove capsules, sketches, ditties, many of them anchored by funny sound effects and synthesizer noises, many without a central lyric or melody. While bands are free to break the mold whenever they like, my sense is that there's an internal friction between this group's loose, jammy approach and the lengths of the tracks, which don't really have time to work up to anything. Parts of the album feel like a continuous segue with no point of arrival. There are exceptions. Erykah Badu guests on "Hey Shooter", and Albarn enlists a handful of African rappers and singers, including a few from the Africa Express exchange program: Ghana's M.anifest and M3nsa, and Mali's Fatoumata Diawara. But RJ is, as far as I can tell, designed to sound loose and off-the-cuff, sort of like a party-- and like a party, it's more concerned with collective atmosphere than any single performance. The result is that the lesser-known performers here end up sounding more like placeholders than specific people: male rapper, female crooner.
It's when Albarn sings that the album seems to break its own mold. Despite the variety of styles he's worked in over the years, there is an easy 80-minute CD-R waiting to be made of pretty, dog-eared, rainy-day songs like "Poison", starting with Parklife's "Badhead", moving through The Great Escape's "Yuko and Hiro", and stopping at just about every one of his projects up through Gorillaz's 2010 single "On Melancholy Hill". What to make of songs like "Poison" in this context, though, I'm not sure: It's one of the album's more singular, coherent moments, but it's also when RJ's container starts to feel leaky.
RJ takes its cues from Fela Kuti, Funkadelic, Sun Ra, and scads of African artists-- most of them from Nigeria, Ghana, and other countries on the western coast-- compiled or reissued over the past 15 years. Good. Okay then-- the album knows what it's doing. But as someone who confesses to having a hard time getting through hour after hour of open-ended funk jams, someone who has always been suspicious of the idea that I need to listen more patiently to every second of every Sun Ra or Funkadelic or Fela album in order to really feel the full cosmic power of the grooves, Rocket Juice & the Moon feels like a decent record, but an unfocused, meandering one-- an album, ironically, contained by its lack of containers.


On Jamie Teasdale’s third solo album, the UK musician balances razor-sharp bass music with beatless electronic sketches that could double as science-fiction soundtracks.

Infinite Window

Kuedo’s decade-plus as dubstep’s most devoted Vangelis fan paid off when the English producer was hired, along with Flying Lotus, to soundtrack the anime short Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 in 2017. It’s tantalizing to wonder what he might have done for the actual sequel to 1982’s Blade Runner, 2017’s Denis Villeneuve-directed Blade Runner 2049. Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch’s score did the job it was supposed to do, but what might the movie have sounded like if Villeneuve and collaborators had tapped the wealth of contemporary electronic artists capable of summoning the mood of the original’s rain-soaked robo-jazz dirges?
The three albums that Jamie Teasdale has put out as Kuedo since leaving the considerably gnarlier dubstep duo Vex’d all follow the basic formula of throwing drums on top of synths inspired by the throbbing scores that were Vangelis and Tangerine Dream’s métier in the ’80s. His third album, Infinite Window, sounds even more like a soundtrack than its predecessors. While “Harlequin Hallway,” “Time Glides,” and “Shadow Dance” are razor-sharp UK-bass bangers with snares that glint like katana steel, most of the rhythmic legwork is done by sequencers, basslines, and assorted synthesized palpitations that build a tremendous sense of anticipation without necessarily going anywhere. Teasdale has always included short ambient interludes on his records, but this is the first time that purely atmospheric, dancefloor-agnostic music has played such a central role. The record’s second half is almost entirely drumless except for short bursts of “Infinite Window” and “Skybleed Magic,” and Teasdale bleeds the tracks together enough for it to feel almost like a “The Long One”- or “The Ninth Wave”-style second-side suite.
A lot of the tracks are short and simple, with two or three sharply drawn sounds playing off each other. Sometimes this approach is effective, as on “Encounter (Vanish),” whose melody is just a little too prickly to be reassuring, and “Cracked Panel Glass,” which visualizes a horrifying death in space through a magnificent blast of static interference. On the slighter side are “Slipping Through Our Fingers,” on which a circling sequencer is finally joined by a rudimentary melody and a beat, and the glassy rumination “Paradise Water.” It’s clear that Teasdale has chosen to use his pro-level acumen for sound design to make everything appear crisp and sharp rather than to create sounds humans have never heard before. This was also true of his previous music, but with fewer drums to play off and less time for these ideas to develop, there’s not as much for these sounds to do, and they don’t always add up to more than the sum of their parts.
This is Kuedo’s shortest album, with the fewest tracks—11 in 39 minutes. Though the titles suggest a preoccupation with time (“Slipping Through Our Fingers,” “Time Dances,” “Never (Para Sempre)”), Infinite Window might have benefited from being longer, allowing more time for the listener to luxuriate in its washes of astral sound. It feels a bit like a collection of sketches, and indeed, a good chunk of Infinite Window was culled from an earlier, uncompleted Kuedo album. As much as Infinite Window approximates the beauty and brilliance of the Blade Runner soundtrack at its best, it’s also a reminder that that soundtrack has never been released in full; even the 25th anniversary edition failed to include the unedited title theme. Even the best soundtracks tend to be a bit jerky when heard front to back, with classics like A Charlie Brown Christmas and Superfly including “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “Junkie Chase” alongside some of the most wonderful music you’ll ever hear. Infinite Window evokes that same whiplash.


Talking Heads’ most approachable album embraced love, family, and pop music, celebrating the same simple joys they’d once approached with a sense of fear and alienation.

Little Creatures

Early in their career, Talking Heads seemed to be a manifestation of frontman David Byrne’s physiology: lean, angular, and severe. Journalists loved to point out his resemblance to Psycho’s clean-cut villain Norman Bates, especially when writing about their enduring first hit “Psycho Killer.” It was far too easy an observation, and one Byrne resented.
Having sprouted at Rhode Island School of Design and relocated to New York in the mid-’70s, Talking Heads were wedged between two worlds: They were artsy outliers of the punk community too clean-cut and high-minded to really blend in at CBGB, yet too odd for listeners accustomed to a steady diet of Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. A few early singles like “Psycho Killer” and “Life During Wartime” snuck onto the charts by the end of the ’70s, buried under glossy hits by ABBA, Bee Gees, and Michael Jackson. Listening to their early catalog now, it’s clear their sense of melody didn’t get enough credit. Byrne didn’t have the easy star appeal of Barry Gibb, but by 1985, when Talking Heads released their sixth studio album Little Creatures, they’d become more melodic, more relatable: They’d made a pop album.
“It’s so much fun to be able to relax and just play without feeling you have to be avant-garde all the time,” bassist Tina Weymouth told The New York Times’ Ken Emerson in May 1985, one month before the album’s release. “We spent so many years trying to be original that we don’t know what original is anymore.” Readers wouldn’t completely understand what she meant until July, when Little Creatures reached No. 20 on the Billboard 200. After a decade in which they’d produced five pivotal LPs, each more unexpected than the last, Talking Heads had laid down their most approachable album ever.
Little Creatures is a triumphant pop document that celebrates life’s simple joys, the exact thing Talking Heads once weaponized. By this point, the band had already run the gamut of creative endeavors. In addition to their hugely influential discography, they’d worked extensively with Brian Eno, recorded an expansive live album (1982’s The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads), and collaborated with director Jonathan Demme on the groundbreaking and now-classic concert film Stop Making Sense. Critics keenly traced the arc of their success from RISD art obsessives to downtown punk affiliates to a 10-piece band of Afrobeat enthusiasts. Talking Heads’ love of funk and Afrobeat is alive and well on this album, evident in Weymouth’s walloping basslines and a smattering of hand drums; they also experiment with country western pedal steel (on “Creatures of Love”), bubbling synths (“Walk It Down”), and drumline snare (“Road to Nowhere”). But Little Creatures was about a lot more than a new batch of instruments in the studio.
In a 1985 review, Rolling Stone insisted that Little Creatures was “the sound of David Byrne falling in love with normalcy.” Normalcy existed throughout Talking Heads’ catalog (what could be more normal than “buildings” and “food”?), but Little Creatures is their first album to examine one of normalcy’s most complicated and significant corners: Procreative sex and parental love. Such milestones in Byrne’s own life—marriage with his then-girlfriend, artist Adelle Lutz, and the birth of their daughter, Malu—were still a few years away. Meanwhile, Talking Heads’ wedded rhythm section, Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz, had a little creature of their own: Their son Robin arrived in 1982. Byrne didn’t immediately rush to write a song about him. “David’s so funny,” Frantz told Rolling Stone’s Christopher Connelly in 1983. “He sort of wants to hold the baby, but he’ll never say, ‘Can I hold the baby?’ We just say, ‘David, would you like to hold the baby?’ And David gets all stiff, like, ‘Am I doing it right?’”
By 1985, Byrne had caught the baby bug. Little Creatures is a celebration of love, procreation, and all the normal things Byrne used to treat with a sense of fear and alienation (this is a man who once sang: “They say compassion is a virtue, but I don’t have the time”). In a brief documentary from 1979, Byrne sits, half in shadow, criticizing other rock’n’rollers for singing about everyday life in “rather mythic terms.” “People get very emotional about these, sort of, very mundane things,” Byrne says. “Grand events very rarely happen.” By the time Talking Heads wrote Little Creatures, grand events were happening every day—every second, even. On the calm and clean “Creatures of Love,” Bryne does nothing but marvel at the mundane. “Well, I’ve seen sex and I think it’s alright/It makes those little creatures come to life,” he sings. “Little creatures of love/With two arms and two legs/From a moment of passion/Now they cover the bed.” Looking outside of himself, Byrne found beauty in Frantz and Weymouth’s little family.
Mid-album romp “Stay Up Late” is a far more jarring display of Byrne’s sudden fascination with toddlers. Driven by Jerry Harrison’s punching keyboard and big stadium drums, it’s the goofiest entry in Talking Heads’ catalog to date. Byrne demolishes any remaining scrap of stoicism: “Cute. Cute. Little baby/Little pee pee. Little toes,” he babbles. The song was a hit, parking on the charts for a full 10 weeks thanks to its fun, bouncing form: simple, rubbery bass, a lyrical nod to the Temptations, and a sing-along chorus. Perhaps Byrne’s paternal affections made him a more approachable frontman than the paranoid beanpole of yore. Still, no amount of artistic brilliance can justify the lyrics “little pee pee.”
“Stay Up Late” is the album’s most literal song. Little Creatures functions best when Byrne speaks in relatable abstractions, allowing the band to translate them into expansive and buoyant pop songs. Opener “And She Was” and “The Lady Don’t Mind” are prime examples. They seem driven by Byrne’s unique approach to love, affectionate but not possessive. Amid the prickly guitar riffs, brass accents, and woodblock of “And She Was,” he observes a woman at her “pleasant elevation,” in awe of her ability to just be. On “The Lady Don’t Mind,” he calmly watches her travel from place to place, admiring her autonomy from afar. The verses are slithering and mysterious, flecked with hand percussion and winding guitar licks, perhaps a nod to this woman’s independent nature. But when the chorus bursts open, Byrne is ecstatic: “I like this curious feeling!” he sings. This is the sound of Talking Heads when their leader is hopelessly in love.
In 1985, Little Creatures sounded like nothing Talking Heads had ever done before, and its staggering closer, “Road to Nowhere,” could be called their first proper anthem. It is simply enormous, with a gospel choir lead-in, Frantz’s one-man marching band, and an accordion slinking all over the place. It’s a vast, victorious ballad that builds and builds. Its titular road feels particularly significant: It is a device Byrne had once derided as just another way rock music made banality sound melodramatic. “Every trip down the highway was a huge experience,” he quipped in 1979, explaining his desire to treat such stimuli with realistic proportions. Just a few years later, he took his own trip, a metaphor for our journey through the great unknown.
Little Creatures went on to sell over 2 million copies in the United States, becoming Talking Heads’ most successful studio album. Many critics attributed their aptitude for arena-sized pop songs to Frantz and Weymouth’s disco-tinged side project Tom Tom Club, but in retrospect, the band’s fate was sealed from the beginning. Tangled in the barbs of early albums like Talking Heads 77 and Fear of Music were jagged pop songs made all the more interesting by their lack of sheen and manipulation of convention. On Little Creatures, Talking Heads polished every surface of their sound. It wasn’t so much a step in the right direction as an inevitable conclusion for a band who, like everyone, must embrace adulthood at some point. Little Creatures is not Talking Heads’ best album, but it is their case for aging gracefully, and with great fondness for life.


The glitch legend puts his past in context on lush, unabashedly beautiful pieces created with painstaking sample processing.

Romantiq

If you’re worried about the fate of your favorite musicians in the face of AI, consider the case study that is Markus Popp. In the early 1990s, recording under the name Oval, Popp became synonymous with the concept of glitch: electronic music featuring prominent elements stuttering and repeating like a worn compact disc that had been dropped too many times.
Oval started off as a group and condensed until it was just Popp, all on his texturally fractured lonesome. As time passed, that delirious ambient glitch style—Oval’s signature, even if employed by other musicians—was beset by a plight more dire than mere ubiquity. Glitch became easily available to the least self-motivated producers through a growing assortment of push-button software plug-ins, as well as through hardware emulation. And it’s only gotten easier to achieve; today’s tools promise “glitches and stutters similar to a scratched CD” and “steady rhythmic glitching reminiscent of a skipping CD player.” Sometimes the revolution isn’t televised; it’s productized.
Popp took a lengthy break from releasing music, almost a full decade, following 2001’s Ovalcommers, which came out the same year that Björk’s Vespertine sampled Oval’s 1994 album Systemisch. When Popp returned in 2010, he largely jettisoned glitch in favor of a deep engagement with the very technique that had rendered him easily mimicked: software emulation. This revival began with the one-two punch of an EP (Oh) and double LP (O), and has proceeded through a cascade of releases, culminating this year with Romantiq, perhaps the most beautiful album Popp has produced in this second phase of his career.
What’s helpful to understand about Oval’s instrumentation is that it is the result not merely of sampling, in the cut-and-paste sense, but of the highly precise reworking and simulation of musical instruments: the ability to craft what can seem real but are, at their core, digital implements. Oval pushes these playable software simulacra from the realm of the ordinary into the hyperreal, submitting them to demanding sequences and processing them beyond the physics of everyday reality, in turn weakening the wall between digital and tactile. “Rytmy,” Romantiq’s second track, is built atop a repetitive piano part that would challenge even indefatigable minimalists like Nils Frahm and Hania Rani. It then layers in an addictively funky organ bit. “Okno,” Romantiq’s most expansive entry, animates a full orchestra as if through a continuously shifting and fogging lens. It’s a blurry cybernetic fantasia, all dream-sequence weirdness.
Romantiq doesn’t dispose of the past. It just situates old habits amid a more vibrant and fully realized present. The record opens, in fact, with the same sounds that filled Oval’s post-hiatus Oh back in 2010: sharp, bright, impossibly perfect pizzicato. These digitized plectrum elements—each intricate in its extreme three-dimensionality—have the quality of brittle, tightly wound guitar strings. They crackle and spark at Popp’s command, teeming in swarms of rigorously delicate effervescence. Whereas on Oh they became the focus of experimental miniatures, here they get subsumed by lush ambient beds. Likewise, if you’re truly hungry for old-school glitch, in addition to the opening trembling of “Okno” there is “Amethyst,” which whirls and falters like it’s 1999.
The album’s cover is a still image from video work by artist Robert Seidel, with whom Popp collaborated on an early version of Romantiq as an audio-visual projection for the opening of the German Romanticism Museum in Frankfurt—hence, no doubt, the symphonic semblance of “Okno” and the highly distorted opera singer sampled to gaseous effect on the opening track, “Zauberwort,” not to mention the horn piping through “Wildwasser” and the flute (or “flute”) in “Glockenton.” The latter deserves a close listen to how the flute frays and transmogrifies as the piece unfolds. While the composition isn’t the album’s best work, the effect is a testament to Popp’s prowess. And despite the title’s appeal to human connection, Romantiq largely disposes with recognizable singing (in contrast with 2021’s Ovidono and 2013’s Calidostópia!), opting for light touches, like the sublimated vocoder quality of “Cresta.”
It’s been 30 years since Oval debuted in 1993 with Wohnton, which included glimpses of the glitch yet to come. What Popp has managed, in the ensuing decades, is to develop such a profound approach to digital music-making that it has relegated his earlier work to a footnote, just one tool in his programmable toolbox.


Label woes finally resolved, the Catalonian quartet gets its frustrations off its chest on its third album, showcasing a newfound maturity of songcraft without sacrificing youthful energy.

Sorpresa Familia

Mourn’s third full-length, Sorpresa Familia, arrives at the tail end of a professional rough patch for the Catalonian indie quartet. A year before the release of 2016’s stark Ha, Ha, He., the band went public with allegations of mismanagement on the part of their Spanish label, Sones, which Mourn accused of non-payment of income and holding the released album “hostage.” Since then, both parties have parted ways. Sorpresa Familia (which translates to “Surprise Family” in Spanish) is the resulting chronicle of the group’s frustration and eventual resolution.
Amid the lyrics’ allusions to lost investments, tour mishaps, and divorce, Sorpresa Familia conveys the kind of angry passion that comes with working through your shit. The album—unquestionably Mourn’s tightest and strongest release to date—is the latest and most aggressive progression in sound for these four very young people (co-vocalists and guitarists Carla Pérez Vas and Jazz Rodríguez Bueno, the band’s oldest members, were born in 1996). Their 2015 self-titled debut possessed a dark swagger, and Ha, Ha, He. moved Mourn’s sound into the colder territory of post-punk, but Sorpresa Familia cuts a distinctly punkish figure, the brisk pace bolstered by Antonio Postius’ ferocious drumming. There’s a level of unbothered confidence on display, which often comes from getting older and realizing your true strengths.
Mourn have previously shown that they know their way around a melody or two, but even by those standards Sorpresa Familia bursts with color. There’s a greater emphasis on melodic intricacy and detail, from the wistful, winding guitar lines of “Epilogue” to the rolling harmonies on “Candle Man,” which builds to the band’s biggest chorus to date. Even the stop-start lurch of “Doing It Right,” which in its closing seconds thrashes in a way recalling Danish punk heroes Iceage, is cut with guitar hooks that dart and weave like scrambling fighter jets. In their short careers thus far, Mourn have already proved that they can make urgent, punk-infused indie practically in their sleep. Sorpresa Familia’s strongest moments showcase a maturity of songcraft without sacrificing their youthful intensity.
The sole breather on Sorpresa Familia is the brief, haunting centerpiece “Orange,” a sub-two-minute cut that features just a few silvery guitars, Vas and Rodriguez’s distant vocals, and some controlled percussive explosions from Postius. It’s a lovely curveball that shows a different side of Mourn, and also recalls the similar versatility of 2000s Brighton rockers Electrelane. Throughout that band’s decade-long career, they continually refined their punk-meets-post-rock sound and consistently moved with ease between loud chaos and contemplative quiet. The songwriting on Sorpresa Familia suggests a similar trajectory for Mourn. If they could survive label hell to make a record like this, who knows what they’ll be capable of next time around.


Vivian Girls' third LP, recorded at the home studio of Woods' Jarvis Taveniere, finds them experimenting with self-referential songwriting and guitar solos.

Share the Joy

Good ol' brevity-- the soul of wit and arguably the Vivian Girls' greatest asset on their 2008 debut LP. That record honored some obvious predecessors-- C86, Slumberland, and K Records to name a few-- but just as importantly, it realized that those scenes had a thing for collector's items and myth-making. Starting off with a 22-minute-long LP that was originally limited to 500 copies, Vivian Girls seemed like the kind of band that would nail it the first time, flame out, and then disappear forever. Except they didn't. Everything Goes Wrong wasn't a huge drop-off, but the reception to it was muted, suggesting that they may have started to outstay their welcome. Lo-fi was quickly becoming cliché (again) and with their seemingly endless array of guest spots, side projects, and offshoots, Vivian Girls were adding to the glut of bands doing something very similar.
I'd say they're acknowledging this situation on Share the Joy by trading brevity for novelty: Opener "The Other Girls" clocks in at six and a half minutes, over two of which are filled up with guitar soloing. It's certainly an audacious move for a band that had previously constructed a song with just one word ("No") and drew battle lines about whether technical competency-- let alone proficiency-- mattered in indie rock. But is it a good song? Not really. It never really builds toward much of anything, and Cassie Ramone isn't even noodling-- her fretboard runs are flat and stiff as dry spaghetti. But it's a fitting introduction to Share the Joy, an album that's more admirable for its willingness to stretch than its execution.
It's a record saddled with contradictions-- though it's their most uneven in terms of songwriting, the diversity oddly gives it more potential replay value than their prior records. Recorded at the home studio of Woods' Jarvis Taveniere, Share the Joy borrows that band's ambling tempos, rustic instrumentation, and frazzled guitar lines. But the breathing room often puts Vivian Girls in an unflattering mid-fi space, one neither slick enough to polish their imperfect pitch or buzzy enough to hide it.
Occasionally, Vivian Girls make discussions about songwriting and instrumental ability beside the point. Placing the chippy sock-hop sing-along "Dance (If You Wanna)" back-to-back with the brooding and sinister "Lake House" makes a good case for the band's range, while "Trying to Pretend" melds the Woodsist psychedelia and galloping punk attempted on Share the Joy's epics in half the time. And whether or not "Take It as It Comes" is the best song here, it's certainly a high point that sheds light on how they probably don't take themselves as seriously as their deadpan pose might indicate. Taking the piss out of the tattered girl-group pop mode they helped re-popularize, they pull out all the stops-- they fawn over a boy named Johnny, throw in ridiculous intra-band commentary ("Cassie-- you're always right"), and offer clichéd hooks so time-honored, they make Best Coast look obtuse by comparison. I don't know if they've got beef with ex-drummer Ali Koehler's gig with Best Coast, but "Take It as It Comes" could be seen as a winking parody by upping their boy-needy desperation to hyperbolic absurdity.
So Share the Joy is an uneven third LP, and uneven third LPs usually come from bands at the crossroads. I'm not sure that much is at stake here: Vivian Girls have managed to infiltrate a hive of likeminded and supportive artistic peers, which gives them some momentum and also what looks to an outsider like an understandable whiff of back-patting scenestership. But whether it's old band members like Koehler and Frankie Rose and the Outs or more stylized successors like Dum Dum Girls, there are an increasing number of bands beating Vivian Girls at their own game. It's easy to see Share the Joy's place in the Vivian Girls discography, but their place in indie rock as a whole is becoming less clear.


In two performances spanning nearly 15 years, the avant-garde French composer and the cellist Charles Curtis investigate the allegedly unmusical sound of the wolf tone.

Naldjorlak

Éliane Radigue is drawn to the sound you cannot control. The French composer’s early pieces worked with electronic feedback; more recently, her Occam Ocean series has featured drone-like acoustic vibrations. In all her compositions, she observes how long-held tones waver and evolve, inviting us to tune into nearly imperceptible changes. Naldjorlak, composed with cellist Charles Curtis in 2005, was her first piece to be written for an acoustic instrument. Here, Radigue explores the cello’s wolf tone, a volatile note that’s very close to the resonant frequency of the instrument’s wooden body. A new release presents two versions of Naldjorlak—one recorded in Paris in 2006, and another in Los Angeles in 2020. In bringing these recordings together, the album presents the composition as a living, breathing document, illustrating how Radigue’s music embraces time’s unpredictability in both structure and performance.
The composition of Naldjorlak was a closely collaborative effort. In an essay that accompanies the album, Curtis recalls spending time with Radigue in Paris, where the two developed a routine of music making together. Like much of Radigue’s work, the piece isn’t notated; instead, it’s fluid, growing from a set of parameters that anticipate and respond to an unforeseeable future. To play the piece, Curtis tunes his cello to its wolf tone and pulls his bow across different parts of the instrument, giving every pitch a hazy shroud. The wolf tone occurs naturally in the cello, but like electronic feedback at an amplified performance, it’s typically considered ugly or flawed. “Tuning to the wolf tone inverts the conventional function of tuning, which is to link an individual instrument to a social norm—concert pitch,” Curtis writes. “The search for self-sameness reveals a unit of distance we would not have discovered without having attempted to bridge it.”
While the motion of each note is unpredictable, the piece moves in broad sections that explore different patterns and textures. At first, a distant grumble grows into a full, beating resonance; later, trilling hums and shrieks burst out of the instrument’s highest reaches. These phrases emerge from quiet pauses and crescendo into swarms, but their movement is so delicate that a drastic shift may go unnoticed until it’s already gone. Peer closer and those shifts establish a sense of presence: guideposts that point the way through the wavery drones.
Though each of the album’s featured recordings present this general structure, the two performances take on different moods and act as companions to one another. The 2006 recording feels eerie and dark, woven from low, faraway rumbles and chilly hums. It occupies a nervous headspace, building an anxiety that’s never quite released. The 2020 recording feels like an answer to that tension—it sounds more assured and resolute, the cello’s wolf tone taking a richer, more resonant stance. It also feels more patient: Curtis’ bowings sigh like exhales. By the end, his cello whistles and floats with breezy ease, marking a departure from the 2006 recording, in which the ending evokes the howl from which the wolf tone takes its name.
When Radigue was creating her early feedback pieces, she often wondered how to control the sound, or if it could be controlled at all. With Naldjorlak, Curtis and Radigue yield to the cello’s wolf tone, a note with an inherent instability that many players would seek to avoid or correct. Instead of working around the wolf tone, Naldjorlak celebrates it—the music pays close attention to its every aspect, placing it front and center yet allowing it to roam. In a 2009 essay titled “The Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal,” Radigue wrote: “This long journey through uncertain lands also enabled me to simply recognize what was already there, buried, hidden.” Naldjorlak serves as a reminder that if we listen closely enough, any sound can be music—and music, like all things, is changed in the current of time.


On her debut album, the playful Canadian rapper is bossed up, horny, or lonely as she searches for a sound to match her shrugged-off swagger.

Tommy Genesis

Vancouver rapper Tommy Genesis refers to her music as “fetish rap,” a pat description that doesn’t make it any less accurate. Genesis’ bars are almost exclusively hypersexual flexes on both men and women, as when she bragged of having to “take my mind off your dick” with “some yogurt covered pretzels and a pound of a clit,” from 2015’s “Angelina.” Her matching music videos often find her clad in Britney-riffing schoolgirl uniforms. As she told an interviewer in 2016 about the sort-of-joking tag, “I didn’t know how else to say, ‘You think I’m rapping, but I just sex talk.’”
Despite her charmingly bawdy personality, Genesis has never found a style strong enough to match her shrugged-off raps. As if in search of one, she has worked her way through several niche hip-hop scenes during the past few years, including Father’s delightfully crude Awful Records crew and a gothy underground rap trio called baby.daddi. With her self-titled debut album, she aims to fix that. Bolstered by seamless transitions and a handful of stomping pop-trap highlights, Tommy Genesis is a focused, brief, occasionally heavy-handed record packed with self-empowered bangers and ballads that define her musical persona more clearly than ever.
Genesis cycles through four moods here: She’s bossed up, horny, lonely, or some hellbent combination thereof. On the pugnacious “Tommy,” Genesis shoots off cocky one-liners with ease: “She drive a Ford, Tommy/She can’t afford Tommy.” The dance-oriented energizers “Bad Boy” and “Play With It” adopt a similarly aggro-yet-playful tone. With its elastic electro-pop backdrop and hard-hitting drums via producers Charlie Heat and Darnell Got It, “Play With It” has Top 40 flair and a deliciously in-your-face chorus: “Play wit’ the pussy, wanna play wit’ the pussy/Come get a hooky, baby, come get a hooky.” The same applies to the Charli XCX remix of “100 Bad,” another Heat production that finds Charli trying on a Genesis-like flow to invoke pool houses and purple Lambos.
The album’s early momentum comes from snappy transitions. Most of these songs are clipped at the end, so they flow into each other, giving the sequence a thrilling sense of speed. This trick spurs the rap-oriented songs along; sliding from minute-long opener “God Sent” into the twinkling pop-rap of “Rainbow” feels like moving from one raucous room at a party to the next. When Tommy Genesis tapers into guitar-driven, trap-lite ballads, that momentum falters. You forget the fingerpicked “Drive” as soon as the sing-song cadences of “It’s Ok” arrive. With diaphanous background vocals from Empress Of, “Naughty” laments a fuckboy catch-22: “I like this boy/He’s full of shit.” But with its repetitive “naughty/not enough” wordplay, the song hits a holding pattern long before its three minutes are up. Several of these tunes feel like sketches stretched to fill space.
Genesis has clearly grown into her strengths, though, dialing in a murmuring flow perfectly suited to bass-heavy beats and a brash persona unafraid of boasts. Tommy Genesis is a fun, wisely brief ride. You can now imagine Genesis landing one well-placed feature on a big-ticket song and tipping over into the mainstream. More concerned with the here and now, that’s not what she seems to want. Her invitation on the breezy, poppy closer “Miami” renders that mission plainly: “I’m living my best life/Come inside.”


Dark, ominous, but still marching forth with that same bar-rock passion, the Hold Steady feel more unified, making a place for each member within their music’s newfound sprawl.

Open Door Policy

Like the down-and-out characters in their songs, the Hold Steady have endured some rough years. After building one of the most ardent fanbases in modern rock, the group parted ways with their keyboardist Franz Nicolay in 2010, who claimed he felt like a “fox in a hedgehog band.” While the rest of the Hold Steady come off as rock purists who love double-necked guitars, beer-and-shot specials, and Major League Baseball, Nicolay is a classically-trained polymath who writes essays about Wagner, has an MFA in fiction, and uses an Isaiah Berlin reference to explain how it feels to be in the Hold Steady. The tension between him and the hedgehogs is palpable, the way it was between the gruff genius of Pete Townshend and the pretty face of Roger Daltrey, or the prickly politics of John Lennon and the homespun warmth of Paul McCartney: These mismatches are the secret weapon of great rock‘n’roll bands.
Without their keyboardist, the Hold Steady lost, well, their foxiness. After their initial run of great albums in the 2000s, they released the middling Heaven Is Whenever (2010) and the Hüsker Dü-aping Teeth Dreams (2014). These collections felt like a crash, not a comedown, leaving their fans with no new singalong songs to become their scriptures.
When Franz returned in 2016, so did the band’s cleverness and immediacy. Frontman Craig Finn had rediscovered what the Hold Steady do so well—soaring anthems, pocked with hilarious, devastating lyrics—while pursuing his increasingly excellent solo career, and the group became a sextet for 2019’s thrilling Thrashing Thru the Passion. Their rejuvenated second act continues with Open Door Policy, an ornate record that incorporates Nicolay’s ambitious compositions as an integral part of the band’s songwriting. Passion had them recognizing, to quote a lyric, “It doesn’t have to be perfect/Just sort of has to be worth it.” On Open Door Policy, they reach for something larger: if not perfection, then music with a baroqueness we haven’t quite heard from them before.
A lot of credit should go to producer Josh Kaufman, who also helped craft the luxurious, elder statesman arrangements on Finn’s last few solo albums. Accented by female backing vocals worthy of Leonard Cohen, opener “The Feelers” guides us through a narrative about ascending a mountain to visit the glitter-dusted son of a dead plutocrat with a collection of bottled ships and a fortune “he’d amassed from being ruthless yet polite.” When some palm-muted rhythm guitar enters, Finn seems to switch narrators, and his tight, tense story slips into abstraction, as the band continues layering parts: By the end, we’re left wondering what winding mountain path led us here.
Big moments appear in surprising places on Open Door Policy. The mammoth chorus of “Spices” lands after the band winds us up with an extra verse. The Hold Steady have always shown a flair for killer codas, but with multiple guitarists and a keyboardist, the contrasts are even more dynamic. On the record’s centerpiece, “Unpleasant Breakfast,” for example, riffs from guitarists Steve Selvidge and Tad Kubler set up a rollicking, piano-led send-off that shows off Nicolay’s skill for wide-ranging pastiche.
The person who sometimes takes a backseat, surprisingly, is Finn. Among the most engrossing, poignant lyricists of the 21st century, he’s strayed gradually from the specifics of the Hold Steady’s breakout concept album, 2005’s Separation Sunday. Here, his writing varies, from the blurry impressions of “The Prior Procedure” to the taut, almost Chekhovian tale of a doomed love affair on “Me and Magdalena.” What Finn has left behind is the sense that he’s clamoring for our attention with each joke and clever observation, and instead, he seems to think more consciously about how the band’s detailed playing might fill in the gaps in his sing-speaking. He spikes classic Hold Steady imagery with contemporary unease—a “crucifixion tattoo” covers “some hardline thunder/All dressed in the red, white and blue.” There are a few references to Finn’s latest geographical fixation—Scranton, Pennsylvania where a couple of the record’s characters hail from—and a newfound fascination with the West Coast, a dream for people who are “stuck out in the middle” and “figure that there’s something you’re missing.”
The true innovation on Open Door Policy, though, is one of the Hold Steady as a whole: how they play together, and what they coax out of the material by drawing our attention to musical textures as much as they do lyrical motifs. However often the band has been saddled with being “earnest,” their way of contrasting rock‘n’roll catharsis with personal devastation is also inherently ironic. This sense is more obvious than ever on Open Door Policy, in which descriptions of a woman “throwing up” and then covering it “with sawdust” are overlaid with a chorus of “Woo!,” and songs usually peak at the moment when characters are making their worst decisions. Finn’s people are software developers doubting the ethics of their jobs, aging small-towners dreaming of escape while remembering that “the doctor said he only wants to help me make more healthy decisions.” Meanwhile, a soundtrack of blisteringly happy guitar music plays in the background, their feelings totally out of sync with the grim realities of their lives.
Just before Nicolay left and the Hold Steady entered their difficult early 2010s, Kubler became ill with a case of alcohol-induced pancreatitis and was forced to sober up. “It can be really hard,” the guitarist, who writes much of the Hold Steady’s music, told Pitchfork in 2014. “When the rest of the band is six drinks into the evening and you’re not.” Years later, their lifestyles may be more far-flung than ever—a few have kids, one opened a bar in Brooklyn for fans of Minnesota sports teams—yet the Hold Steady also feel more unified, making a place for each member within their music’s newfound sprawl. If only the band’s characters could learn the qualities that are letting these rock survivors plow on as they all reach the middle-most regions of middle age—their empathy, their sanguine resolve, and their ability to work as a collective: to part ways, and then to come together, with no love lost.

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The godfather of grime’s back-to-basics swan song isn’t just a celebration of his 20 year career—it’s a victory lap for grime at large.

Godfather

To the casual listener, grime might seem like a once-dormant genre in the midst of a revival. But truth be told, the hybrid of hip-hop and UK garage never went anywhere—the only thing that changed was the genre’s visibility. Ever since grime’s emergence on British pirate radio at the turn of the millennium, the UK mainstream (not to mention American listeners) has tended to pay attention to the genre only when it produces a charismatic star. Wiley knows this better than most. He was a chief architect of grime’s early sound (his tracks were among the first to be labeled “grime”), assembled the seminal Roll Deep crew, helped his protégé Dizzee Rascal become grime’s first breakout artist and later, pushed the genre even deeper into the mainstream with a string of successful club-pop singles. He’s somehow managed to weather the interest of a fickle public for two full decades, though he has plenty of scars to show for it. In response to allegations of selling out, he’s spent a good deal of his career apologizing for and actively disowning any attempts he’s made to court a wider audience, though his frequent course-corrections have sometimes felt more like self-sabotage. He’s a survivor, if not a particularly triumphant one.
Given this history, you’d think Wiley would be frustrated to find that the latest wave of grime artists have arrived at success far more easily and on their own terms: for today’s emcees, staying true to grime’s sound and topping the charts are hardly mutually exclusive. Instead, Wiley seems reinvigorated by his peers' achievements, especially those of Skepta, the latest of his mentees to follow in Dizzee’s footsteps, Mercury Prize and all. Supposedly his parting gift to the culture he helped birth, Godfather finds Wiley attempting to pull off the same trick that Skepta did with Konnichiwa: a lifer goes back to his roots and channels the energy of a hungry upstart. It’s a tall order for a rapper pushing 40 but Godfather largely delivers, feeling at once like a return to form for Wiley and a celebration of grime’s foundational sound.
Part of the album’s success stems from its single-minded focus. Unlike many of Wiley's albums, Godfather tends to cut to the chase, that being manic, double-time rapping over chirpy 140 bpm beats. Production has always been Wiley’s primary strength but on Godfather, he mostly absolves himself of those duties, turning over the boards to young upstarts like Preditah and Swifta Beater, as well as seasoned vets like Rude Kid. Still, each of these collaborators works in service of the overarching mission: songs that update Wiley’s blocky “eskibeat” sound using modern production techniques.
Wiley has never been a great rapper per se, but on every song here he shows up with a surplus of energy, confidence and charisma. On the frantic “Bait Face,” he goes bar-for-bar with his old crewmate Scratchy without breaking a sweat. He sounds right at home on the torch-passing posse cut “Name Brand,” which brings together Roll Deep member J2K with Jme and Frisco from Boy Better Know. On tracks like “Birds N Bars” and “Can’t Go Wrong,” he borrows Skepta’s breathless flow but cuts it with a halting, staccato delivery. There are, of course, a few corny one-liners scattered throughout the record (“I stand out like one break light,” “Fresh out the oven like a Sunday roast,” “You’re plain, I’m the loaded nachos”) and even an entire song dedicated to his MacBook Pro (“Laptop”). However, at this point in Wiley’s career, it’s hard for this stuff to read as anything but endearingly goofy, more like dad jokes than genuine missteps.
Ultimately, Godfather is a thoroughly enjoyable record, one that manages to leverage grime’s elemental sounds in a way that feels vital and forward-looking. Sure, its peaks might not be quite as high as those of Konnichiwa, the record that it’s bound to be measured against (Skepta’s mastery of the massive, shout-along hook continues to give him an edge). But for anyone who’s ever rooted for Wiley, it’s a deeply satisfying listen. After all, until recently, Wiley disowned not just the “godfather of grime” nickname but the term “grime” altogether. And here he is, unapologetically owning his influence, toasting to his peers’ successes and claiming his rightful place as grime’s elder statesman. Who knows if Godfather is actually Wiley’s final solo album—we’ve certainly heard that one from him before. But if it is, he can step away knowing that his legacy has been secured.


Second album from two members of defunct slowcore outfit Duster contains a wider range of emotions than its predecessor, showcasing surprisingly sharp (but sedated) pop chops carefully preserved in amber.

The Acrobats

Not much changes in the space station Jason Albertini and Canaan Dove Amber call home. After a decade of producing celestial music unperturbed by outside stimuli, the duo's heavenly stare remains unwavering, their minds still blown by how, like, huge the universe is, man. But while their former band Duster felt content to drift through the universe in near suspended animation, Albertini and Amber are willing to make spin-off project Helvetia sweat for its cosmic bliss. Their 2006 debut The Clever North Wind barely had a pulse, but the uneasy psych leanings and dark moods made the album anything but a stroll through the galaxy. Building off that, The Acrobats culls an even wider range of emotions from the band's combined sigh, showcasing surprisingly sharp (but sedated) pop chops carefully preserved in amber.
It's no secret that scintillating guitar parts provide the fuel for Helvetia's space odyssey. On Acrobats, they're not afraid to set their axes to warp speed, even if it means sacrificing some of the lo-fi minimalism they're loved for. With guest appearances from veteran jamsters like Built to Spill's Brett Nelson and ex-Dinosaur Jr. bassist Mike Johnson, they're more than capable of pulling off densely layered gems like "Blasting Carolina", a kaleidoscopic epic traversing folk, glam, and sunny psych-pop. Standout track "Old New Bicycle" may carry the requisite stoner vibe associated with these guys, but it's more white soul than jam band. "Honest Gods" and "Summer" carry a similarly geeky libido, sounding too mathematical to be legitimately cool but, like equally stiff-postured acts the Walkmen or Kings of Convenience, pulling off the pop hooks all the same.
So where does all this fretboard brio leave the vocals? Well, for the most part, buried six feet under the mix. When there isn't a nifty effect like the tube radio crooning on "The Fever" or "Honest Gods"'s chipmunk-pitched harmonies, the melodies unfold pretty inconspicuously. Fortunately a three-note range goes a long way in Helvetia's brand of molasses pop, but when some of these songs do feel like boiling over (and yes, some actually do), the vocals aren't up to the task. That said, Acrobats proves a surprisingly engaging album from musicians who by all respects could be switching on autopilot at this point in their careers. Instead, they produce their catchiest piece of work to date while still keeping their riffs plentiful and their altitude at a steady 500,000 feet.


The Swedish singer and producer Thea Gustafsson’s latest EP creates a singular, cosmopolitan pop mood that is at once stylish and vulnerable.

Trasslig EP

Under the name Becky and the Birds, Swedish singer and producer Thea Gustafsson makes gossamer-light music threaded with R&B beats and her acrobatic, piercing falsetto. She studied at the prestigious Swedish songwriting academy Musikmakarna—even interning under EDM wunderkind Avicii—but Gustafsson resisted the formulaic pop training. Instead, she drew on the jazz and soul records of her youth to create her own stylish take, introduced on a brief 2018 self-titled EP. Embroidered with spacious beats, spoken-word segments, and slippery vocal modulations, her music adopts a lightly cinematic style to backdrop her soaring voice. On Trasslig, Gustafsson’s follow-up EP, she maintains a similar mood but brightens it up with strummed guitar and mid-tempo beats, evoking a breezy temperament that belies lyrics that explore aching vulnerability.
Gustafsson builds momentum best through her gliding melodies. Where whistle tones and other vocal feats were used more as scenery on her home-recorded debut, here she leans further into them as dramatic linchpins. On “Wondering,” she dances around a deep-pitched looped vocal and teases out vowels between words as she ponders the afterlife in an ascending melody: “Wondering where you are?/What’s it gonna be without you?” She wrote the song after her late grandmother, an inspiration she translates into a wistfulness that feels weightless and soothing. A similar sense of nostalgia colors “Pass Me By,” on which she succumbs to the “sweet surrender” of a summer romance over gentle multi-tracked vocals and a sample of Hiromasa Suzuki’s 1976 song “High-Flying.” The song graciously takes its time to unwind, extending over a minute and a half before drums roll in behind and loft it into a panoramic highlight.
Trasslig’s more earnest ballads fall flat without the same sense of movement, but Gustafsson’s risky production leaves room for surprises. The heartbroken “Paris” conjures up the sparse, acoustic moments on Frank Ocean’s Blonde, especially with Gustafsson’s voice suddenly pitched up to a high-pitched replica of Ocean’s over an organ-like synth. But when she adopts the same modulation on “Do U Miss Me,” the EP’s closing ballad, Gustafsson eventually flips the affected vocal into a backup to her own unaltered voice, melding them together in powerful harmony. Those bespoke details across Trasslig add up to their own distinct world, rendering a contemplative and tranquil look at all the complexities that come when you allow yourself to be vulnerable to your own emotions.

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Their fourth album revealed the band to be unparalleled pop architects. They were brilliant in the studio, crafting groovy, socialist call-to-actions with a sound from out of time and place.

Emperor Tomato Ketchup

Shuji Terayama’s 1971 film Tomato Kecchappu Kôtei was an abject and poetic satire of utopianism, a kind of Lord of the Flies meets Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saló, in which children enslave their parents and create new world order of ritualized sex and violence. It begins with a perhaps tongue-in-cheek quote attributed to Karl Marx, a rough translation of which would be: “A focus on accumulating pleasure, not wealth, will bring capitalism down.”
By the time Stereolab took the title of the film for their 1996 album, they’d accumulated an astonishing amount of pleasure, if not wealth. While lyricist Lætitia Sadier was more of a socialist than a Marxist, the earworms like “Ping Pong” and “Peng! 33” she and polymath guitarist Tim Gane cultivated were philosophical tracts as pop tracks, deconstructing economics with pithy verse-chorus-verse structures. Since forming in 1991, Stereolab had stocked shelves with three albums, two compilations, two mini-albums, eight EPs, and thirteen singles, each beautifully packaged, uniformly excellent, and on offer in various limited editions of colored vinyl. Were the lyrics critiquing their own delivery system? Was the medium the message?
Emperor Tomato Ketchup is a close as the Lab would ever get to a definitive answer. It documents a premillennial moment in which people—jazzbos in Chicago and red mods doing the Mashed Potato in Washington, D.C., riot grrrls in the Northwest, bass cadets in Sheffield, and the chic set in Paris and the retro-futurists in Birmingham, and especially crate-diggers in Tokyo and London and New York—wondered if record collecting and community organizing might be the same thing. Yes and no, Stereolab replies. They made dialectics you can dance to, and that was revolution enough.
While their previous work explored motorik’s horizontal momentum and the aspirational levitation of exotica, ETK was something different. Like Talking Heads’ Remain in Light or LCD Soundsystem’s self-titled debut or Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War, the album consolidated international movements into people-pleasing new forms of funk. Its 13 tracks matched polyrhythms to political slogans with results as electrifying as the needle-on-the-record/tornado-on-the-horizon cover art the Groop nicked from a 1964 Béla Bartók LP cover.
That’s not all they nicked. Opener “Metronomic Underground” utilizes bits of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and Yoko Ono’s “Mindtrain” and Don Cherry’s “Mali Doussn’Gouni” for a jam that morphs from amiable to anxious. Live, the track became a roiling headfuck of an epic that panned around the stage’s P.A. as it doubled or tripled its recorded size. “We have about five organs lying around, all plugged in and ready to go,” Tim Gane told the LA Times when the album came out, and on “Metronomic,” they all seemed to gurgle and bubble and scream at once. Singer-guitarist Mary Hansen chants “Crazy/Sturdy/A torpedo” and Sadier intones, “Untie the tangles to be vacuous, to be infinite.” The song proved that having access to everything only works if you can get it into the groove, and that marching can be dancing if you do it right.
And vice versa: First single “Cybele’s Reverie” is named for an Anatolian goddess who inspired self-castrating male devotees to hold ecstatic raves in her honor. But this reverie isn’t much of a crowd-mover; instead, it’s wistful, like a breeze over ruins with string arrangements courtesy of new Lab technician Sean O’Hagan. “What to do when we have done everything/All read, all drunk, all eaten…when we shouted on all roofs,” Sadier asks in French. Go back to the start, Hansen suggests, her pre-verbal “ba-da-bas” and “oooohs” a kind of onomatopoeic palliative.
For every rebuke of Western imperialism (“What’s society built on?” earning the chanted answer, “Blood!”), there are more personal confrontations. “Percolator” starts out urbane but quickly goes ballistic, its sophisticated point-counterpoint of organ and bass spiraling into squall as Sadier insists, “I’m very scared, that’s for sure.” Her reputation for hauteur is completely demolished by “The Noise of Carpet,” a Farfisa-driven takedown of sad-sack cynics. “I hate your state of hopelessness,” she snarls, “and that vain articulateness/You’re a loser-type wreck wannabe.” Two women, Sadier and Hanson, exorcise self-doubt with such panache in styles that alternate between egging each other on, singing different songs together, and rounding verses like ancient madrigals.
Sometimes keyboardist Morgan Lhote would join in along while the rest of the band, including a rhythm section for the ages in bassist Duncan Brown and drummer Andy Ramsay. The unit kept things moving beneath the stereo-separated guitar strums mortared together by warm organ drones, the amalgamations of electro and lovers rock, the splashes of LaBelle and Reich. This pluralism-in-practice was the point: liner notes list all the instruments used, then all the people who played them, singling out only special guests like Tortoise’s John McEntire, who co-produced and played the vibraphone on a few songs as if, should you have a unique talent or two, you might be invited next.
“You and me are molded by some things well beyond our acknowledgment,” Sadier sings on the closing “Anonymous Collective,” again and again, her register ascending beyond rocky waves of bass and bells and tumbles of drums. For a band sometimes dismissed as merely the sum of their influences, pilfered “record-collector rock,” the album that proved they could do anything ends by offering a new way forward. It’s an invocation that honors the definitional power of pleasure yet insists on its mystery. Shuji Terayama’s tiny fascists in Tomato Kecchappu Kôtei might have fallen victim to their self-indulgence, but Stereolab had higher hopes. Pleasure might not bring capitalism down, but it can definitely lift us up.


On the eve of a new full-length, the D.C. rapper releases an EP featuring reworked cuts by Bon Iver, Metronomy, Marvin Gaye, and k-os. They're remixes in the loose sense, but Oddisee treats them like duets.

Odd Renditions Vol. 001 EP

If rap is really having its big independent moment, then it stands to reason that lesser-known MCs outside of big cities and fashionable cliques will start to get some shine. One of the guys who deserves such attention is Oddisee, a producer and rapper from Washington, D.C., known for an eclectic take on soulful boom-bap. Oddisee, real name Amir Mohammed el Khalifa, has been creating compelling work outside the label system for some time now. His best release so far was last year's Rock Creek Park, a mostly instrumental ode to the District public space that crackled with warmth and nostalgia and has stayed lodged in my rotation ever since it came out.
Next up for Oddisee is the full-length People Hear What They See, but prior to that he's given away this EP featuring reworked cuts by Bon Iver, Metronomy, Marvin Gaye, and the reggae rapper k-os. They're remixes in the loose sense, but Oddisee treats them like duets, keeping the original vocals basically intact but redoing the arrangement and adding a verse or two. I like this approach because it feels more like he's building off the source material rather than chopping it up and repurposing it. In the case of "Paralyzed", which uses Bon Iver's "Re: Stacks" as its blueprint, Oddisee swaps out the guitar for a shuffling piano-jazz beat. His rhymes play off the song's lovelorn theme, and its spirit is similar, but the character is totally different.
It seems like Oddisee's a producer first but throughout the EP his lyrics are solid, alternately conscious and self-conscious without getting too didactic. He's conversational and loose and hints at bigger themes in a casual, offhand way. "Paralyzed"'s "Been a lot of places, rumors of racists/ But I can't lie, they was nice to me" is one of those good tip-of-the-iceberg lines. The EP's best cut, though, is the one where he lets the original singer do most of the talking. "Ain't That Peculiar", an update of the 1965 Marvin Gaye track of the same name, expertly blends old and new. Stripping away everything but Gaye's somber croon, Oddisee substitutes a heavy beat clap and synths-- there's a great tension between the sounds, an "Otis"-type feeling but cleaner and more reverential.
Not everything here is that good. The k-os rework "Man I Use to Be" is the limpest of the batch, and at just four songs one dud can do significant damage. Odd Renditions does accomplish a few key things, though. Certainly it's a cool teaser for Oddisee's upcoming LP,  but it also emphasizes his wide sonic range and healthy approach to genre. Also, between instrumental fare like Rock Creek Park, more straightforward hip-hop stuff, and these diverse remixes, he's starting to build a well-rounded and idiosyncratic discography. Further proof that this a guy who should definitely be on your radar.