In 1998, David Berman approached perfection. Absorbed in metaphor, ennui, and isolation, the loping music of American Water didn’t seem like it was trying to be art. It just was.

American Water

I bought Silver Jews’ third album American Water at a now-defunct record store in lower Manhattan called Kim’s. I was 15, maybe 16, and hoped—as I always hoped when I bought something at Kim’s—that the clerks might interpret my selection as a cry for help, or at least a signal that I was up for something cool after their shift. No luck.
The first time I played it—that unsteady strumming of electric guitar, David Berman’s country deadpan—I suspect it was in the living room of my dad’s apartment. He raised his eyebrow and wondered aloud if Silver Jews were the worst band he’d ever heard. I pointed out that he owned two albums by the Doors.
That my dad didn’t understand this rickety human music only brought me and American Water closer together. Berman had even written a line about this, in a way, on a song called “We Are Real”: “Repair is the dream of the broken thing,” it went. “Like a message broadcast on an overpass, all my favorite singers couldn’t sing.” Here was the implicit promise of indie rock—that you could do something even if the Figurative Dad says you sucked at it—compressed into a one-liner, the insult as a badge of honor, or a casually raised middle finger.
The band had started at the end of the 1980s, three college friends making noisy sketches in their Hoboken apartment. (Some of these sketches were recorded direct to the answering machine of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth—a kind of high-culture prank call that telegraphed Berman’s uneasy relationship to the decorum of indie rock.) One of the three friends, Stephen Malkmus, had also recently started a band called Pavement with his childhood friend Scott Kannberg; Silver Jews were—as sadly befits Berman’s fixation on runners-up and marginalia—often footnoted as a Pavement side project. (Silver Jews’ first album, Starlite Walker, came out in 1994, the same year Pavement hit MTV.)
It was Berman who came up with the phrase “slanted and enchanted,” which Malkmus borrowed for Pavement’s first album, one of the definitive statements of slackness and grandeur of early-’90s indie rock. Berman, for his part, said he got the idea from Emily Dickinson: “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.” Berman’s own world was always creakier and foggier than Pavement’s, less edgy, more rustic—not the conscious weirdness of post-punk, but the unconscious weirdness of the American frontier, of religious talk radio, bumper stickers.
“In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.” That’s American Water’s first line. It sounds like the kind of thing you’d overhear at a bar in a dream, the war story of an also-ran. You know, “they had to put me in the hospital—I was just that good.” Of course, he doesn’t attain perfection; nobody in Berman’s world does. You get the sense that 1984 was a long time ago and the man has been counting the days ever since.
The album limps along in this sassy, broken way. There’s that line about repair I mentioned before. There are duct-taped shoes and suspenders made of extension cords. There are dragging mufflers and iceboxes filled with grass. Many of the guitar solos seem to sputter out halfway through like a drunk in a foot race, a pantomime of classic rock. Try me, they say, ass-down on the pavement.
As with a lot of their peers on the Chicago label Drag City (Royal Trux, Bill Callahan, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), Silver Jews grew out of a moment in underground music when the crimes of the 1970s and ’80s seemed safely enough in the rearview that you could take from that stuff what you wanted. No longer did one have to stand in symbolic opposition to the Rolling Stones—R.E.M. and the Butthole Surfers had done that for you. If one narrative of the 1980s was underground music’s intrusion into a broader commercial space, the narrative of the 1990s was one of commercial music winding its way back into the underground. This is how American Water comes to sound more like “Dead Flowers” than Can, but also why I think my dad couldn’t process it: He figured if you’re going to sound a little like “Dead Flowers,” you might as well really go for it.
Berman seemed bent on playing against type, a sensitive man sensitive to the pretensions of sensitive men. His writing stands against urbanity and sophistication, but also against the roots-music fantasies of a home on the range where one can do things like wear denim and “be real.” He was and probably remains a football fan. In one interview, he described a reading he gave at the University of Charleston by saying, “I thought it was an extraordinarily large-breasted student body.” In the same, he described a brief interlude in Louisville by saying, “Sure, my neighborhood bar was a BW-3, but at least I didn’t have to deal with the sullen and homely hippy women that make up such a large portion of that town’s rock scene.”
Here was a songwriter absorbed by metaphor and isolation who also told funny stories about hanging out at frat houses, whose country-music preferences elided countercultural tokens like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash for artists like Charlie Rich, a ’70s singer whose violin-drenched odes to marital love and extramarital affairs could only be construed as roots music by people raised in dentist’s offices. Authenticity, the subtext runs, is a dogma just like any other. With its stylish, funny evocations of style-free concepts like dive bars and tract homes, of “suburban kids with Biblical names,” American Water didn’t seem like it was trying to be art. It just was.
Describing the sessions for the album to the Washington Post in 2008, newly sober and with religion, Berman said, “I was taking a lot of drugs at that time. And there were a lot of drugs in the studio. And all these things that would have horrified indie rock people, that I would never want them to know. I wanted to make a record that wasn’t some terrible, big, painful experience. I wanted to make records like other people make records, where you’re having fun when you’re doing it.”
What was that contextually painful experience Berman was referring to, you wonder. The band’s second album, The Natural Bridge, had been a trial. Berman, who had recently finished his MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, got so anxious and turned around during the sessions that he eventually had to be hospitalized for sleep deprivation, a state which he likened to being “constantly on the line with God.” Describing the session for the album’s last song, “Pretty Eyes,” drummer Rian Murphy said Berman looked like “a man who was being haunted by ghosts while he was singing.” At one point Berman counseled guitarist Peyton Pinkerton to play like his feet were sopping wet.
In the same Post interview, Berman said, “The Natural Bridge is me finding out that random rules and I can’t handle it. It’s too painful that that’s the way life is. And then in American Water I’m trying to re-say it again, to someone else, after having accepted it.”
But for all its wit, disaffection and wonder, American Water is also an album of disappointment and angst, of what the writer Thomas Beller, in his appreciation of Berman, called “the bitterness of knowledge.” Like the fiction of Thomas McGuane circa 92 in the Shade or some of Barry Hannah’s darker stuff, these are visions of people with nothing left to lose, New South scenes rippling with Old Testament violence. “My mama named me after a king,” Berman sings on the “Send in the Clouds,” biting off the end of the line. “I’m gonna bury my name in you.” Elsewhere, on “Blue Arrangements,” he and Malkmus describe a father coming home and trashing his son’s room, concluding, “In the end the boy raises himself.” The laziness of the music only cinches the scene’s gothic inevitability: Dad’s going to fuck you up no matter what you do.
The climax of the album comes paradoxically early, on a song called “Smith & Jones Forever.” These are the shadowy men with the duct-taped shoes and extension-cable suspenders. Like some arcane hillbilly disco, the song is at once dreamy and dreadful, a crystal ball wherein all one sees is fire. Toward the middle, they quiet, dispersed in a fog. “Got two tickets to a midnight execution,” Berman sings, “hitchhike our way from Odessa to Houston. When they turn on the chair, something’s added to the air/When they turn on the chair, something’s added to the air forever.” Suddenly they alight, fiery and ragged. We are still in the world of glue-sniffers and weekend fishermen, of country-club pools, companion dogs, and fast-food lobbyists, but we are also in the world of ghosts, of good and of evil. Berman seems to see one just behind the other, like transparencies laid on an overhead projector.
His and the band's delivery—dry, creaky, but filled with soul—doesn’t try to hide the pain of these songs with polish or sleights of hand. It’s actually impossible to imagine American Water performed with conventional finesse, by a singer who could sing, by a band who could turn on a dime. It would sound too correct, too rehearsed, the insights of entertainers instead of the revelations of ordinary men.
Shortly after Berman disbanded Silver Jews in 2009—their final show was in a cave about 300 feet below McMinnville, Tennessee—he offered a public note, part-explanation, part-confession, part-origin story, explaining his relationship to his own father, a powerful, conservative lobbyist named Rick Berman. “He attacks animal lovers, ecologists, civil action attorneys, scientists, dieticians, doctors, teachers,” Berman wrote. “His clients include everyone from the makers of Agent Orange to the Tanning Salon Owners of America.” The note continued, funny, imperiled, self-critical, angry, despairing, the bully and the victim at war in one head. “This winter I decided that the SJs were too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm he has caused,” he wrote. Judging from the punch lines alone you would’ve never known he was at war.
Berman’s stated epiphany about American Water—“I’m trying to re-say it again, to someone else, after having accepted it”—didn’t quite stick. He got deeper into drugs—Dilaudid, crack, the kinds of things that vault one into strange company. Shortly before going on tour in late 1998—something Berman was famously reticent about doing, and didn’t end up actually doing until 2006—he got into a fistfight in Spain and had his eardrum ruptured. Tour was canceled. In 2001 he put out a very funny, dark, fragile-sounding Silver Jews album called Bright Flight. “The people that I was writing for were for the audience from [American Water],” Berman told the Post. “An indie rock crowd. But my companions were crooks and prostitutes. All manner of sick, sick, despairing, falling apart lives. And I think that there is a major problem in there because I’m not focused, and I reached a point where a lot of my friends that year died, a couple friends. I didn’t have any perspective. For instance, the idea of me being alive right now wasn’t really feasible. It just wasn’t possible to me. At that point I had just lost the plot and I didn’t care.”
When Berman attempted suicide in 2003—walking into the Nashville hotel in which Al Gore watched the 2000 election and requesting Gore’s suite on account of wanting to die where American democracy did—I felt, melodramatically but not for the last time, that ending one’s life was the only logical conclusion for someone who saw life the way he did: filled with precious things about which nobody but him seemed to care, not an expression of isolation so much as unbearable connection. Who will tend to this stuff, the moment seemed to ask. Who will nurse the world.
I’m projecting, of course, and also probably overestimating the capacity of someone so far gone he had come to believe the vodka was actually cleaning his organs. Still, almost 20 years after the day I descended into Kim’s, I pick through Berman’s writing with Kabbalistic interest, like a backpack out of which I continuously manage to shake lost keys and other useful things. My best friend sometimes cautions me against these conclusions—equating sadness with glory, equating weakness with truth. At the very least, there is the concern of giving undue weight to the insights of someone who later tried to die. I agree it makes only an awful kind of sense. But growing up in America one gets so tired of hearing about winning. Here is the story of a bright morning after you lose.


Kanye teams with Ty Dolla $ign for a project that actually sounds finished, but hardly puts anything worth remembering onto it.

¥$ / Kanye West / Ty Dolla $ign: VULTURES 1

VULTURES 1

It’s fitting that the Yeezus album cover is a blank CD. It marked the end of an era in which Kanye West’s creative process was governed by the requirements of mass-producing a consumer good. Over the first decade of his career—culminating with that album in 2013—West was frequently divisive for reasons both musical and non-, but enjoyed an unbroken deluge of critical adoration. His grip on the culture began to loosen, however, right around the time paid streaming platforms collapsed the amount of time required to prepare a finished record for release to virtually nothing.
Beginning with 2016’s The Life of Pablo, West’s albums have evidently become the products of frantic bursts of writing and recording. Twitter and Instagram document rappers and producers flying to meet West at the 11th hour or emailing songs back and forth; tracklists are adjusted after the files are uploaded to DSPs; things never really cohere. For example, 2021’s sprawling Donda circles a fascinating musical idea (the collision of gospel and digital, as distilled in the moment in “Hurricane” when a choir is cut off as if on a sampler) that would perfectly complement its lyrical concerns. But the album is too rushed and overstuffed to consistently articulate it.
VULTURES 1—his collaborative album with Ty Dolla $ign—arrives at the end of a second, far more fraught decade for West. As the long, considered processes that yielded the songs on 2005’s Late Registration and 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy disappeared, he began instead to draw attention for saying things like “slavery was a choice” and then apologizing; for making antisemitic remarks and then apologizing; for cozying up to Donald Trump and then apologizing—and then, on Monday, endorsing Trump for the 2024 presidential election. He has communicated erratically about his struggles with mental health, about his divorce from Kim Kardashian, and about those who have abandoned him and those who have, by God, remained loyal. Each new controversy frequently overshadowed the music he was trying to intermittently promote.
In light of all this, VULTURES sounds almost disorientingly complete. The mix is crisp and it bears mentioning that there are no mumbled reference tracks. This is a value-neutral observation—some of the most interesting work from the second half of West’s career is unfinished, or sounds like it—but it gets at one of the most confusing aspects of the last few Kanye West albums: that the apparently unedited vocals of a person closely covered by tabloids have come to sound less distinct, occasionally even anonymous. Recall Ghana/Mali, Dior Homme, “These the Red Octobers.” Frequently, on 2018’s ye and on Donda, West sounded like an actor rehearsing his lines, only hinting at the way he would emote when the camera was turned on.
There are no such loose ends here. VULTURES is filled with moments where West breaks into his airy, endearing singing voice—an ideal counterpoint to Ty’s delivery which sounds, as ever, like silk and sandpaper at once. The Donna Summer-sampling “Good (Don’t Die)” is a worthy spiritual sequel to 808s and Heartbreaks’ pleading “Street Lights”; the lilt he adopts on opener “Stars” is at wonderful odds with that song’s martial drums.
And when he raps, West is perhaps more technically precise than he has ever been. If you were to strip the timbre from his voice, or place the waveforms of his verses on a 4/4 grid, you might conclude that he’s significantly improved as an MC. But save for the nimble “Burn,” there is a confusing flatness to his verses that exacerbates (or is exacerbated by) the sameness of the writing. The opening bars of his verse on “Do It” (“You don’t like it? That’s your loss/Your opinion don’t change the show cost/Let me know what these hoes cost/I ain’t finna pay the whole cost”) could have been written by any of the dozens of people who presumably shuffled through West’s famously collaborative recording sessions. Where other rappers once provided him with frameworks for songs that would become deeply personal—“Jesus Walks,” after all, was originally a Rhymefest song—many of these are unmistakably off-the-rack. The generous reading of this dynamic would see the songs as genre studies, West trying on different styles without imposing himself on them. But by the time, on “Fuk Sumn,” he raps, “This the real, not a version,” that argument has already been lost.
There is not one verse from West on this album that distinguishes itself as the best part of its song. But there are far worse things to be drowned out by. With the exception of the truly terrible “Problematic,” the beats on VULTURES are mesmerizing, rhythmically complex, a little industrial. “Paid,” with its steady pulse, somehow manages to be both cathartic and foreboding; the Playboi Carti- and Rich the Kid-featuring “Carnival” is titanic but wobbles just enough. Even when there is no laundering of influences—the Brazilian funk of “Paperwork” suggests little beyond the vague idea that he should dabble in Brazilian funk—there is enough commitment behind the boards to sell nearly anything.
Despite those varied textures and that breathless pacing, the writing on any given song, and certainly on the album when considered as a whole, is shapeless, indistinct, and nearly interchangeable. Put another way: VULTURES is pretty forgettable. The raps about money sound exhausted, and the ones about sex—such a constant focus as to be nearly pathological—ultimately sterile.
I am not typing this with a backpack on. I am not. This is a problem not of morality, or even political consciousness, but of style: Yeezus is just as fixated on sex, but treats it as an alien force lurking just beneath domestic life, ready to swallow it whole. On VULTURES it’s rote. It wouldn’t do any good to pick lyrics out of context to make a point about the album’s shallowness; it’s impossible to prove that West’s old notions of sexuality are completely absent. But consider that the moment on “Hoodrat” when he raps, “I hit it from the back/Whore, whore” is not presented with any real anger, contrition, sensuality, or wit. It’s just sort of something he says, in the way that lapses into incredibly obvious samples (“Back That Azz Up,” “Can It Be All So Simple”) scan as stunts without a hint of recontextualization or subversion.
There is an uncanny, even hollow air to the album. It can feel a bit like watching a Super Bowl commercial: the budget is all there on the screen, the lighting and set dressing and sound design just so, but you can’t shake the nagging sense that there is no center, just a clot of references without a referent. Whatever moments of exuberance or inspiration slip through are drowned out by the din of professionalism.
A little over a decade ago—the exact midpoint between The College Dropout and VULTURES—West was wandering through a Rick Owens exhibit in Switzerland when he was moved to play the then-unreleased Yeezus for a crowd of people. Before he triggered the album from his laptop, he recounted to the audience his realization, as a young man, that his primary role as an artist would be that of the interpreter. “I found that when I would drop samples, my friends would react to it more” than to original music, he said. He compared himself to Warhol; he joked about how skeptical, racist gallery crowds might scoff at “a Black guy” invoking “the most obvious artist in the world.” For nearly the entirety of his career, West has twisted raw material from his subconscious and the world outside alike into singular records. VULTURES is a supremely competent album dotted by beats that are truly irresistible; it also feels, for the first time in West’s career, profoundly cynical, as if he’s prodding your brain stem with a surgical instrument, hoping to elicit the basest reaction: How about there?


Congolese singer Makara Bianko and French producer Débruit craft polyglot techno-punk with a bustling, metropolitan atmosphere.

Butu

The first sound on KOKOKO!’s Butu is the sound of bustling traffic. It takes about a minute for the outline of the opening song, “Butu Ezo Ya,” to emerge from the hubbub, as siren synths and shouts that could be mistaken for those of drivers and angry pedestrians reveal themselves as the sound of the band and their instruments. Maybe it’s second nature for a group formed in Kinshasa, the most populous French-speaking city in the world, but this ostensible party music suggests an almost Untrue-like level of metropolitan density. Stereogum’s Tom Breihan said that Usher’s “Yeah!” sounds like it’s playing in a club, no matter where you encounter it. I thought something similar while listening to Butu: This music could turn anyplace into a teeming street corner.
KOKOKO! started out as an unconventional quartet making twitchy techno-punk with objects like typewriters and oil barrels—a workaround for the high cost of gear in Kinshasa. Now the duo of Congolese vocalist Makara Bianko and French producer Débruit, the band brings a polyglot perspective to a long lineage of paranoid electronic rock. Both collaborators come from the dance-music universe, yet Bianko’s sweaty shouts and Débruit’s tarnished production impart an unmistakable whiff of punk; fans of electro-punk upstarts Special Interest and Lip Critic will find plenty to love here.
“Butu” is a word for “night” in Lingala, one of several languages used by Bianko on the record. Butu’s aesthetic is often associated with clubs and bars, and producer Débruit—a DJ since the late 2000s—flexes his house muscle here, setting Bianko’s voice against irregular snares and overdriven basslines. Sometimes Bianko sounds like a rapper, as when he slips into an impressive triplet flow on “Telema.” Other times he’s a shirtless hardcore shouter, an arch goth crooner, or a relentless human sample. Cloaked in an evocative swath of reverb, Bianko’s competing layers of shouts and ad-libs create the impression of a small posse rather than a single singer.
The illusion of continuous chatter and conversation is compelling enough even if you don’t understand any of the languages spoken therein. The band performed in Devo-like hazmat suits early on, and like Devo, KOKOKO! like catchphrases that double as party chants and political statements: “Donne-Moi” (“Give Me”) can refer either to the give and take between a performer and the audience or the exploitation of the Congo’s musical and natural resources by foreign intervenors. “Move the world,” Bianko entreats listeners on “Mokili.” Maybe he’s talking about dancing, maybe political involvement—either way, the tumult of humanity KOKOKO! conjure on Butu sounds capable of shaking the planet off its axis.


Playing like a flawlessly sequenced and paced greatest hits album, this live set finds Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo connecting the booms among their three albums while officially cementing one of the year's most rewarding and welcomed comebacks.

Alive 2007

The blitzing “Pimp My Pyramid” scheme. The pulsing honeycomb. The tiny metal heads bobbing up and down. The Lite-Brite leather jacket reveal. The dude in front of me who wouldn’t let a pair of crutches stop him from dancing as if the apocalypse were mere minutes away. The sensual explosion that was Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 show is difficult to overstate—or reproduce. Even with the biggest, flattest, sharpest HD setup, there's no way to sufficiently recreate the most exuberant LED-laden music blowout ever staged. So Daft Punk didn’t even try: There will be no Alive 2007 DVD.
Commenting on the decision, Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter recently told Pitchfork, “The thousands of clips on the internet are better to us than any DVD that could have been released.” And, in many ways, the Alive tour is a perfect match for YouTube—the ancient Egypt by-way-of “The Jetsons” spectacle barrelling its way through shitty compression quality with blinding force. But still, even the most hectic web clip can’t equal the French duo’s visceral sound-and-vision assault, so the focus of Alive 2007 falls on the reason why Daft Punk were allowed to lug 11 tons of equipment around the world for the last 19 months in the first place: their music. Playing like a flawlessly sequenced and paced greatest hits album, this full-set Paris recording from June finds Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo connecting the booms among their three albums while officially cementing one of the year’s most rewarding and welcomed comebacks.
Lest we forget, before the out-of-nowhere debut of the now-iconic 3D triangle in April 2006, it seemed like Daft Punk lost the plot. The monster riffage and mind-numbing gloom of 2005’s Human After All had our favorite party-starters turning downright nihilistic. And early screenings of their art-house opus, Electroma, evoked (unfortunately accurate) comparisons to Vincent Gallo’s on-the-road/oral sex epic Brown Bunny (except with endless scenes of hunk-o-metal ennui filling in for the graphic oral sex). After the shattering pop breakthrough of 2001’s Discovery, Daft Punk were going through an especially angsty adolescence—their spit-shined heads way up their own asses. But then, amped-up with enough electricity to illuminate a black hole, French house’s masked men upstaged Madonna, previous electronic pioneers Depeche Mode, and (ironically) Kanye West at 2006’s Coachella. And now, they’re everywhere (except Gap ads, thankfully)—getting sampled on No. 1 hip-hop songs, filling magazine spreads, spawning worthy would-be successors and, of course, owning the internet (on Flickr, Daft Punk photos currently outnumber Justin Timberlake snaps 2:1). With a bounty of latent good will on their side thanks to the incredible re-playability of their first two albums, Daft Punk finally gave fans a million flashing reasons to fall in love with them all over again.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Alive 2007 is how well it recontextualizes career nadir Human After All, turning previously leaden songs into ebullient rock’n’roll manifestos; injected with Homework’s air-tight Moroder-style anthems or Discovery’s flamboyant funk, Human After All tracks are constantly improved and born anew. The live set doesn’t simply run through the hits, mindlessly segueing from one smash to another. Instead, well-worn favorites are glued together, cut-up and mashed into pieces. The titular refrains of “Television Rules the Nation” and “Around the World” combine to form the globe’s most dance-friendly TV station theme song before the Black Sabbath crunch of “Television” is sent down upon the impossibly buoyant “Crescendolls,” resulting in the disc’s most unlikely-yet-spectacular roller coaster peak. Meanwhile, the creepy hiss of “Steam Machine” is atomized and given space-age dynamics, turning it from a oddball bore into a fist-pumping celebration of the industrial age. Wisely, the duo also know when to let the bass be, allowing large portions of unfuckwithable classics like “Da Funk” and “Burnin’” to work their magic with little robo-meddling. Even without video, Alive 2007 is an exercise in exacting excess, from the blaring “Robot Rock” intro to a wide-eyed power-booster of a encore that layers “One More Time" atop “Music Sounds Better With You”—a combination so “holy shit” ecstatic it would seem downright cocky if it wasn’t so blissful.
Talking about the relationship between artist and audience, Bangalter told Paper, “Robots don’t make people feel like there’s an idol on stage. It’s more like a rave party where the DJ isn’t important. We are two robots in this pyramid with this light show, but everything is [meant] for you to have fun and enjoy yourself.” He’s absolutely right about the “have fun and enjoy yourself” bit, but the Alive tour separated itself from the millions of DJ parties before it by drawing attention to a fixed point while incorporating everything from Kiss-esque pomp to Space Invaders retro-future shock. The results were massive—the myriad “best show ever” kudos deserved. And, just as they hold back their identities at every chance, it makes sense for Daft Punk to hold back the Alive visuals; when more and more mystery is constantly being sucked out of popular music thanks to the insatiable hunger for fresh product and up-to-the-nanosecond information, the duo aren’t about to release an imagination-stifling DVD filled with behind-the-scenes tour bus inanity. It’s a noble choice, especially when the consolation prize happens to be the Ultimate Daft Punk Mixtape.


On their collaboration with the Alchemist, the duo of ELUCID and billy woods drag postcolonial wounds onto the examination table. They don't just embrace the darkness; they wear it as a protective cloak.

Haram

The duo of ELUCID and billy woods, standing at the vanguard of the NYC underground rap scene, make claustrophobic rap songs that are at once hypercritical of society and empathetic towards its humanity. Their latest LP, Haram, a collaboration with mafioso rap maven the Alchemist, might be their most accessible yet, a beacon for the like-minded, a way for creatively gifted kooks to feel less alone. But while some rappers will go to great lengths to break down their rhymes and coded imagery into digestible bits for the mainstream listener, this is an educational exchange with which Armand Hammer seem wholly uninterested in engaging.
ELUCID and woods manage to wield irony without becoming poisoned by it; This is rap music decrying gentrification and capitalist oppression made by a group named after a billionaire industrialist with ties to the Soviet Union. They exude a general distrust of governments and the world at large through a cannabis-tinged cloud of paranoia, dropping periodic reminders from the past that these sentiments are not unreasonable. Armand Hammer make Brooklyn rap by way of Africa, pulling the wounds of postcolonialism out of the history books and onto the examination table.
Haram is an Arabic term—analogous to the Hebrew traif—that represents everything forbidden by Islam. The album’s packaging is covered in graphic depictions of its most common signifiers; butchered pig heads, marijuana cigarettes, a firearm, alcohol. The record itself is a jump-off for explorations of taboo, an examination of the dogma that tends to codify our lives. On “Chicharrones,” they skewer latent homophobia (“Got caught with the pork/But you gotta kill the cop in your thoughts still saying ‘pause.’”), on “Roaches Don’t Fly,” they implore us to rethink our sense of meaning (“Bounce per ounce, more, what counts?/Kill your landlord, no doubt, asymmetric unconventional extremist/make meaning”).
The Alchemist’s hypnotic loops give this record a more subdued texture than a typical Armand Hammer album. A master of mood, the producer paints an abstract noir with morose piano samples and plodding bass lines. On “Falling Out the Sky,” a sampled David Lynch ponders the semi-consciousness of daydreams, and Earl Sweatshirt sounds even more lethargic than usual—though his wit remains as sharp as ever. Haram is uncharacteristically jazzy, alternating between smoky downtown lounge vibes (“Robert Moses”) and disjointed trumpet croons and operatic vocal loops (“Peppertree”). For someone with such a distinct and recognizable style, Al seems to embrace the chaos that woods and ELUCID manifest; each song feels like a puzzle with all its pieces snipped and trimmed and reassembled.
Armand Hammer are breathtakingly prolific, with solo albums and various distinct collaborations in addition to the four records they’ve made together in the last four years. They write story raps, political screeds, even love songs. Yet the common thread is a sense that they constantly seek to challenge, not so much the listener, but themselves. Colored by the Alchemist’s palette, Haram offers another perspective of New York City’s hard heart, rooted in ruminations on power and how it’s wielded. These are the spiritual descendants of Def Jux, rappers that not only embrace the darkness, but wear it as a protective cloak.

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Airplane Mode is a purposely unfinished project, meant to tide us over until Ty Dolla $ign's major-label debut Free TC arrives. It doesn't reveal much about the singer/rapper that we don’t already know: He’s still caught up in a tidal wave of women, drugs, money, and never-ending parties. But it's effortless and engaging, and on a few moments, he offers a hint of soul.

Airplane Mode

Ty Dolla $ign (born Tyrone Griffin, Jr.) has cultivated an aesthetic as grimy as it is sexy: His party songs feel sleazy, and his sex songs feel like they're happening in public. You could see glimpses of this direction from his beginnings as one half of the duo Ty & Kory, but it wasn’t until he went solo that he developed the persona that made him a star. He has the skill to make his woozy, grainy songs about parties and women seem so effortless that sometimes it looks like he’s not even trying, which is evident on his latest tape, Airplane Mode.
Airplane Mode feels designed as an afterthought, a placeholder to keep Ty’s buzz afloat until his major label debut, Free TC, arrives. Yet it’s cohesive and engaging even when multiple songs cut out in the middle of verses. This is a purposely unfinished project, one that doesn’t reveal much about Ty that we don’t already know: "I’m a pop a molly, pop a percocet, sippin' Actavis/ My momma mad at me, told me I spend too much money/ I’ve been buying bottles like sure, what, you only live once," he raps on "Do Thangs". He’s still caught up in a tidal wave of women, drugs, money, and never-ending parties. "Back in the City" and "Money Ruin Friendships" are satisfying records that showcase both Ty’s charming singing voice and his gift for making a DJ Mustard beat feel fresh again.
But songs like "No Fake Shit" and "All" are more intriguing, because they hint at a larger "there" with Ty Dolla $ign. "No Fake Shit" is a deeply caring love song and "All" hints at the trappings and boredom of fame. More importantly, the latter ends with a voicemail from his brother TC, who is currently serving a life sentence. The brief moment gives the EP a hint of soul and signals that Ty might have something more to say to us.
Airplane Mode isn't quite that place, though. There are two references to the EP title here, both telling: "These days gotta keep my phone on airplane mode/ To dodge these hoes," Ty croons on the title track. The second comes from TC’s message from jail. In it, TC he acknowledges that Ty’s phone probably went straight to voicemail because it’s on airplane mode, as if this is a common occurrence. Airplane mode is the setting you put your electrical device in to completely disconnect it from the network. You can’t get text messages, phone calls, or access any apps needing the Internet and, at the risk of sounding precious, it is a bit of a metaphor for Ty Dolla $ign the persona. Disconnected from the outside world, yet still functioning in it, he’s garnered a steady buzz and made plenty of great songs by projecting a disaffected cool.


The rapper's collaborative album with British producer Paul White finds them both in fine form, with Eagle's peculiar sense of storytelling fitting perfectly with White's ’70s-inspired beats.

Paul White / Open Mike Eagle: Hella Personal Film Festival

Hella Personal Film Festival

Mike Eagle doesn’t rap; he talks to you in rhythmic form, calmly unpacking his narrative as the world around him spirals out of control. Emcees like Eagle, Action Bronson, Aesop Rock, and Homeboy Sandman have this uncanny way of drawing you into what they say, despite unusual references that don’t always connect. Theirs is a conversational cadence full of random observations; and with Eagle, he can discuss wrestler Rick Martel’s cologne and the struggles of being a black man with the same verve, even if those topics are completely dissimilar. Eagle comes off like the everyman with whom you can talk about anything, an alternative to trap-rap, although he’s dexterous enough to drift in all sorts of directions.
Take last year’s “Raps for When It’s Just You and the Abyss” as an example: Beneath a slow churning instrumental, you can see Eagle methodically pacing back and forth, pulling disparate factoids from his brain: “Was pretty geeked about my L.A. Weekly feature/ I showed it to my dad, my barber and my piano teacher.” On “A History of Modern Dance,” the Jeremiah Jae-produced standout of Eagle’s Dark Comedy LP, he connects equally scattered thoughts using melodic flows: “People walk into circles … every audience listens … they taking turns judging … everybody got issues.” It doesn’t matter how Eagle conveys his messages, the songs end up feeling direct and honest, as if he’s looking you squarely in the face to make sure you get the point.
There’s no shortage of peculiar insight on Hella Personal Film Festival, Eagle’s collaborative album with British producer Paul White. On “Drunk Dreaming,” he envisions President Obama in a small drone and sees Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on a moving bus. He flubs rhymes on “I Went Outside Today” and trails off slightly on “Dive Bar Support Group.” The mistakes probably wouldn’t work for most rappers, but in Eagle’s case, it makes him even more relatable. For roughly 46 minutes, he observes life with the same gusto he always has, except these songs play like short movies set in a different era. The track titles are quirky—“Dang is Invincible,” “A Short About a Guy That Dies Every Night,” “Admitting the Endorphin Addiction”—and the content is largely esoteric, yet Eagle tempers it just enough for broader consumption.
On “Check to Check,” for instance, he riffs on society’s obsession with smartphones, the fact that we can’t function without looking at our devices every few minutes. White creates a frenetic cosmic funk beat that exemplifies life’s rapid pace, and Eagle darts through it with a nervous energy that complements the track: “Battery getting low, but it’s not quite out yet/ So check, I’m in ya house now checkin’ for outlets/ I need to use maps ‘cause I don’t know the route yet/ I need to see an email, I don’t know when the soundcheck.” The song, which sits near the album’s beginning, is the best example of Eagle and White’s synergy. The beat shifts with each verse, growing more infectious as the rapper grows more restless.
Festival feels steeped in ’70s soul—from the guitar lick on “Admitting the Endorphin Addiction” to the Curtis Mayfield-style harp on “I Went Outside Today.” White’s music fades further back as the album plays; songs like “Protectors of the Heat” and “Insecurity Part II” are made up of simple mouth clicks, light drums, and scant keys. Overall, the album begins quickly before it slows to a moderate pace, on which Eagle fills the second half with self-assessing thoughts on race (“Smiling”) and societal despair (“Reprieve”).
It makes sense that Eagle and White would come together for a project like this. Separately, they hit similar creative marks and speak to the same alt-rap demographic, despite taking divergent paths to get there. Festival is refreshingly cohesive, exploring varied themes without drifting off-course. Then again, that’s not saying much for Eagle and White, who’ve long established their own unique lanes. These songs foreshadow a much larger story, one that only these two can tell.


EVOL arrives less than a month after Future's surprise mixtape Purple Reign, and while it has slightly more misses than hits, the highs are high—arguably higher than Purple Reign's—and ultimately, the lows aren't enough to break his current all-timer run.

EVOL

There's a hilarious Photoshopped image of Future posed with all of the Lakers' Larry O'Brien trophies, and it underlines a point: Greatness is often measured by how consistently it is delivered, and until he releases something genuinely bad, every album, EP, mixtape, or loose track Nayvadius Cash releases is just another morsel in his current all-timer run. When this run ends, we can look back and sort out what was transcendent, what only seemed good, and what kinda sucked. EVOL, his surprise album, arrives less than a month after his surprise mixtape* Purple Reign,* and while it has slightly more misses than hits, the highs are high—arguably higher than Purple Reign's—and ultimately, the lows don't matter. The 1995-96 Bulls are one of the three best teams of all time, but that doesn't make the 1998 Bulls' championship mean less than the other five.
Purple Reign went to some dark places, but something about its brevity, and the finality of its closing duo of solemn tracks, felt like an attempt at turning the page, finding a new way forward. Future had seen the dark wood, and now he was sorting it out. EVOL stalls at this fork. It's billed as something of a minor release (in the same way What a Time to Be Alive was minor but they still wanted your money for it), but it's still an "official" one, meaning Future swings for a few radio hits here. They feel more obligatory than outright bad: Of the big brash odes to decadence Future has been doing post-Honest, "Lil Haiti Baby" is the keeper, with a punishing low end recalling the extreme maximalism Lex Luger perfected in 2011. Future stretches his voice to the breaking point, and while it's often been the thing carrying his pathos, here he's screaming "I just wanna go back to the Bentley store" like an addict who's totally fallen off the path.
The album boasts some of Future's more interesting beats since 56 Nights or "I Serve the Base," particularly "Photo Copied," which pops and boops like "Beez in the Trap"'s cousin, and the sing-song patter of "Xanny Family" which uses an ultra-repetitive hook to mesmerizing effect. "Low Life" has the sultriness of House of Balloons/*Thursday-*era Weeknd, when Abel still seemed like a mysterious, hedonistic force, and Future's by-the-numbers bars reinforce the feeling that it is, in fact, a Weeknd track featuring Future. It ends up an album highlight.
"Lie to Me," arguably the album's best song, scrapes the maximal, spacey landscape Future's so skillfully explored before, and it's the moment where Future communicates most clearly what's behind his tremendous output—it's not the breakup, it's not the decadence, it's not the success, it's the combination of all three. He sounds paranoid, protective, and manipulative, flatly admitting "I got way, way too many issues." As Future stretches this championship run as far as he can, we can wonder: How good can he get? How much longer can this last? When does this become numbing? The answers remain to be seen, but two months into 2016, two minor-yet-good releases don't show a sign of slowing down.


Anchored by inquisitive musicianship and the mercurial vocals of Isaac Wood, the London-based group’s debut creates a post-punk safe haven for unfiltered pretension and paranoia.

Black Country, New Road: For the first time

For the first time

When Black Country, New Road perform live, any member of the septet can take the spotlight. No sooner than a bassline has rumbled in, an antic guitar riff grabs the mic, followed by another, each slipping into conversation before working up a temper. Keys tumble from swooshing violins into the abyss of a tooting saxophone. Off to one side, a figure recites chronicles of youthful arrogance and sexual dysfunction, like Nick Cave if he read Twitter instead of the Bible. Their handiwork is hammered together by what sounds like a supercut of prog-rock drum solos.
On record, the London-based group’s pounding heart is unmistakably Isaac Wood. The 22-year-old wordsmith commands the studio while enunciating lyrics with a pompous-prefect quiver. Hearing their recordings for the first time, you might oscillate between irritation and intrigue. You might cringe, then cringe harder, almost enjoying it this time. It may feel like catching a sworn enemy at an open-mic night and realizing, aghast, that he is destined for brilliance.
Paradoxically, it is Wood’s mercurial character—his flamboyant self-scrutiny, deft comic instinct, immunity to embarrassment—that anchors the mania of Black Country, New Road’s debut album For the first time. Their portentous crescendos and surges of Jewish klezmer music set the pace, making post-rock sound improbably carnivalesque. That none of their experiments feel gimmicky speaks to a diverse and inquisitive musicianship; violinist Georgia Ellery, for one, also plays in outfits like the pliable pop duo Jockstrap and a wily ensemble called the Happy Bagel Klezmer Orkester. As with contemporaries Squid, Black Country, New Road are releasing their debut on a vaunted electronic label, escaping the constraints—whether symbolic or actual—of the indie-rock ecosystem.
Recorded quickly last March, when the members were barely 20, For the first time documents the first 18 months of the band’s output. Debut single “Athens, France,” originally released by the high-concept label and monologue-rock incubator Speedy Wunderground, is rerecorded and shorn of Wood’s copious lines about fucking, perhaps to expunge the “regrettably one-dimensional female characters” he says populated the band’s early songs. In truth, the rewrite could have gone further, because a new-notepad smell lingers behind his moreish couplets. “It’s a one-size-fits-all hardcore cyber-fetish early noughties ’zine,” begins one. “She sells matcha shots to pay for printing costs and a PR team.” A delightful snapshot, but without some development—or a glossy melody to pucker it up—the image pixelates, stuck between story and poem.
Wood’s most alluring lyrics offer glimpses of a higher, often sinister logic. The unreliable narrator of “Science Fair” (having performed, winkingly, with “the world’s second-best Slint tribute act”) attends the Cirque Du Soleil and leaves us a breadcrumb trail of clues. There is a seductive acrobat—the narrator, drunk, believes she is eyeing him up. A moment later, he snaps from a trance and stages a panicked exit. Why are children crying? And how, in all this, did he end up with “sticky hands”?
The three-act, nine-minute single “Sunglasses” is no less confounding. The narrator is in his wealthy girlfriend’s kitchen, contemplating a brilliantly naff future together: “I become her father/And complain of mediocre theater in the daytime/And ice in single malt whiskey at night.” Then the camera pivots: first to a sauntering character who is “invincible in these sunglasses”—cue saxophonist Lewis Evans with a deliciously mocking counter-melody—and later to a romantic quarrel, just ludicrous enough to ring true. “I’m more than adequate,” snaps the outraged lover, rebuking some off-camera slight. “Leave Kanye out of this!”
These dizzyingly ambitious capers are where Black Country, New Road come into their own: wordy, abrasive, rhapsodic, absurd. They epitomize the recent wave of British “sprechgesang”—mostly young, sardonic speaker-songwriters using flinty post-punk to skewer suspect worldviews, starting with their own. Wood’s self-portraits exaggerate not only rote neuroses but also status anxieties and delusions of grandeur. When the haughty “Sunglasses” narrator admits to a fear of “roadmen”—similar to the classist “chav” archetype—Wood is satirizing both thin-skinned snobs and the band’s own middle-class presentation. Instead of pursuing relatability, this comic autofiction creates a haven for unfiltered pretension and paranoia—somewhere to write from and about privilege without insincere self-flagellation, but without quite being a dick about it, either.
Given their meticulous songwriting perspective, it is curious that the band’s most soulful song, “Track X,” is a total curveball: an orchestral ballad of confessional lyrics and Reichian precision. As strings, sax, and piano putter out a percussive dreamscape, Wood murmurs about a Biblical sacrifice and issues a romantic declaration “in front of black midi.” Instead of something witty, his chorus is a fragment: “I guess/In some way...” Maybe he is holding back, or perhaps the ellipsis is a final subversion—this time of his own schtick. For the tirelessly articulate, to be lost for words is the greatest freedom of all.

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One of the de facto leaders of the resurgent movement of John Fahey devotees, Jack Rose recorded this triumph shortly before his recent death.

Luck in the Valley

In the early 2000s, while still a member of avant-drone group Pelt, Jack Rose found himself unemployed. Hunkering down at home with his acoustic guitar, he returned to the country blues he had abandoned years before when a teacher told him it wasn't worth trying if he couldn't sing. Woodshedding diligently, Rose became a masterful finger-style player, adept at bluegrass, ragtime, pre-war folk, Indian ragas, and more-- and started a solo career that would eventually make other employment unnecessary.
His timing was fortuitous. The 1990s/2000s resurgence of John Fahey as an underground guitar hero inspired reams of skilled new players, including Glenn Jones, Ben Chasny, Harris Newman, James Blackshaw, and Nick Schillace. Rose became one of the de facto leaders of this loose movement, and his music seemed to grow and expand because of the company, or perhaps the competition. Each subsequent solo album revealed advances in technique and imagination, culminating in 2005's wide-ranging Kensington Blues.
Rose also toured and collaborated more frequently as the decade progressed, sharing space and sounds with everyone from Mogwai to British folk legend Michael Chapman to Black Twig Pickers, a bluegrass offshoot of Pelt. That's why the shock of his sudden death last December at age 38 was so resonant, rippling through the many corners of underground music he had visited. That shock is even more palpable now that his final album, Luck in the Valley, has been released. It's a big, bold work, just the way Rose was a big, bold guy-- confident, honest, and forthright, sometimes to a fault, but always with huge heart.
This forceful poise is what distinguished him from his predecessors and peers. Though his playing was often intricate and subtle, it was never hesitant, always supremely assured. And Luck in particular was intended to be big. As Rose told Foxy Digitalis in 2007, "Kensington Blues is a really hard record to live up to. So [the next one]'s just gotta be really good." Indeed, he outdid himself-- Luck isn't just good, it's great. And it makes the stunning silence of his absence, already as large as his burly persona, feel even larger.
Luck's size comes from the diversity of its sounds and the wealth of its partnerships. Rose winds through a range of instrumentation and lineups, adding the braying fiddle of Mike Gangloff (of Pelt and Black Twig Pickers) to the hoe-down of "Lick Mountain Ramble", the downbeat banjo of Glenn Jones to the wistful "Moon in the Gutter", the ragtime piano of Hans Chew to the woozy waltz of W.C. Handy's classic "St. Louis Blues". But the jumps in style and context never jar, making the album less like a compendium then a suite of related themes. Many ideas and moods make up those themes, but the one that stands out most is joy. Rose injects a celebratory energy into every note, so even the most wistful moments-- my favorite is his poignant slide guitar on "Woodpiles on the Side of the Road"-- sound excited by the mere fact of their own existence.
Of course, it's easy to see the work of those no longer with us through a sentimental prism, letting emotion bleed over into the perceived profundity of the music. But Luck in the Valley is so vibrant, engaging, and alive, it's hard to overestimate it. In fact, we've been robbed of how much greater it would sound if we could look forward to Rose playing these songs live, or building on them tomorrow the way he did yesterday. But no matter what the past has taken or the future holds, this is simply great music from a great musician. That, luckily, is something that neither life nor death can change.


The Australian trio’s debut album deals in radiant, anthemic indie rock, balancing doubt-ridden lyrics with clear-eyed execution.

For a new band, Middle Kids come to the table with some ready-made talking points. Their lead singer, Hannah Joy, is a classically trained pianist who grew up singing church hymns. She recently married her multi-instrumentalist bandmate, Tim Fitz. Their drummer, Harry Day, studied jazz at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. And in short order, they’ve found an enthusiastic supporter in none other than Elton John. And yet none of these CV highlights have any bearing on what the Australian trio actually sounds like. Despite their highbrow credentials, Middle Kids are, at heart, a band for the people. With Joy largely forsaking the piano for guitar, they deal in the sort of radiant, anthemic indie rock that sounds right at home on in-store satellite-radio playlists or in the background of pivotal scenes on prime-time dramedies. And lest you think Joy and Fitz’s matrimonial dynamic puts Middle Kids in an advantageous position to usurp Yo La Tengo as the most unabashedly romantic trio in the indie-verse, their debut album uses its lacquered sound as a bonding agent to hold together vivid portraits of relationships falling apart.
Lost Friends follows last year’s self-titled EP, whose rousing, Sir Elton-approved single “Edge of Town” reappears here to provide the thematic anchor for a record that’s all about fumbling your way through insecurities, indecision, and embarrassments. In singer/guitarist Joy, the band has a captivating mouthpiece who deftly navigates these emotional minefields with equal parts panic and poise, thanks to a naturally trembling voice that can harden into tough-love sentiment. Often, it’s directed at herself: On the country-tinged title track, she despondently waltzes through the wreckage of friendships she deliberately destroyed by “saying things I wouldn’t say” with just enough palpable regret to elicit our sympathies, while the inviting nocturnal atmosphere of “Bought It” conceals a cry for help from the back of the cab she used to escape an uncomfortable encounter with an ex. Joy’s no-filter straight talk can also be a source of comfort: On the rootsy rave-up “Don’t Be Hiding,” she offers warm assurance to a lover with body-image issues by singing, “You don’t have to sell it, I am sold/So give me all your garbage and your gold.”
But the sound of Lost Friends is as celebratory as its lyrical tone is serious. The trio often comes off like a band twice its size, coloring in the standard guitar/bass/drums arrangements with a rich palette of piano, strings, pedal steel, and electronic textures. With breezy sing-alongs like “Mistake” and “On My Knees,” they effectively thread the winsome early-’90s alt pop of Belly and the Cranberries with the big-tent ambitions of ’00s-era ensembles like Arcade Fire and the National (whose go-to mixer, Peter Katis, rides the faders here). But while Lost Friends’ slow-building ascents and soaring choruses function as necessary release valves for the unrest bubbling up from Joy’s lyrics, over the course of 12 tracks, a certain identikit quality takes hold. A number of tracks rely on the same trick, dropping out the instrumentation on the final chorus for dramatic effect (or, in the case of “Maryland,” resorting to the ol’ truck-driver gear change for extra uplift). “Please” is especially shameless in its bid for festival-conquering glory, as it rides the rumbling-tractor intro groove of Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” en route to a generically glossy chorus that sounds like it was grafted on by a Top 40 song doctor.
If Lost Friends is ultimately defined by the contrast between its doubt-ridden lyrics and its confident, clear-eyed musical execution, the closing track, “So Long, Farewell, I’m Gone,” provides a tantalizing glimpse of what Middle Kids are capable of when they situate Joy’s nervous ruminations within an equally turbulent backdrop. Building up from an ominous repeated piano chord into a swirl of militaristic drum patterns, electronic oscillations, and crashing crescendos, the song foregrounds Middle Kids’ latent experimental tendencies without obscuring their intrinsic sing-along appeal. “When I was young I decided I was weird,” Joy declares; hopefully, she’ll stay true to her inner child, and in a few years time, we’ll be looking back at Lost Friends as Middle Kids’ Pablo Honey-style precursor to a more unpredictable path.


On his new EP, producer Floating Points (nee Sam Shepherd) offers two extended tracks that occasionally sound like Neu! with steroids and 40 years of additional recording technology on their side.

Kuiper

Musicians work under different aliases for a number of reasons, the most prominent being to reset or deter expectations. This happens often in the world of dance or electronic music. There’s often a certain utility to it, with producers siloing off their house and techno works, knowing they’ll appeal to different audiences. Sometimes the reasoning is more pragmatic: to avoid legal problems or, for the prolific, to ease DJs into buying multiple records by a single artist. Floating Points, nee Sam Shepherd, has avoided hitting the moniker-reset button despite vast differences between his early work (soulful house music), last year’s Elaenia (jazzy, electronic composition) and his work as a DJ (in which he spins anything he can get you to dance to, from Brazilian obscurities to disco edits to dub).
On his new EP Kuiper, Shepherd makes radical moves even between the two side-long tracks. First up is the title track, a burly, 18-minute groove recorded with his Elaenia touring band. The least polite moment in a well-mannered discography, “Kuiper” finds the band clenching its fist and revving up to a stormy kosmische pace, like Neu! with steroids and 40 years of additional recording technology on their side. It’s a setup that downplays Shepherd’s modular synthesizer in favor of a squall of live-sounding drums and eighth-note bass plucks. The feel is not dissimilar to the extended jams that other live/electronics bands like LCD Soundsystem and Caribou (Dan Snaith and Shepherd often DJ together) end songs with, though the pealing guitar adds a dash of prog. The moody guitar solo at the end is deflating endpoint to a well-trodden path, but Shepherd’s band nonetheless exhibits a rare combination of restraint and brawn.
The second track, “For Marmish Part II,” is nominally a riff on the Elaenia track of the same name. It’s a return to the composed elegance of that album, 14 minutes of Shepherd varying short, meditative riffs on his Rhodes piano and cooing wordlessly. There’s very little build, and the overall feel is almost Reich-ian in its simplicity and focus, at least until the massive, subby kick drum ruptures the surface, Shepherd's synthesizer circling above like a flock of gulls. It’s a beautiful contrast, and one that highlights Shepherd’s continued interest in clarity and fidelity. These are masterful recordings that, despite their style, shouldn’t really be seen as headphone music; a good stereo system will reveal additional detail, especially in the low end. “For Marmish Part II” climaxes with a series of massively distorted kicks, rending the calm Shepherd’s organ so meticulously created.
Shepherd has made an odd transformation, originally working in a medium (house music) largely reliant on samples, and ending up the maestro of a band playing the types of obscure styles—post-rock, minimal composition, jazzy prog—that often end up as sample fodder. His commitment to quality and easy lilting melodies help him stand out, but it’s a little disappointing that his polyglot taste as a DJ doesn’t rear its head more often in his recorded material. Still, Kuiper extends the graceful Elaenia, even mussing its well-kept hair on the title track. For now, at least, this is what we can think of when we think of Floating Points.


The UK duo of vocalist Aluna Francis and producer George Reid make future-pop songs that mix their love of old Timbaland and Neptunes-produced hits with an indie-leaning sensibility. Their full-length debut shares songs with their well-received EP and further streamlines their sound.

Body Music

Music fandom often follows a slow boomerang trajectory: listen to top-40 radio through your tween and early teen years, reject those impulses in favor of more cerebral, left-of-center music as you're growing up, lean back toward pop as you settle into adulthood. The last couple of years have found a crop of young independent artists boldly attempting to reconcile those stages of their own listening life cycles, walking a tightrope of poptimism and experimentalism to create confectionary, homespun electronic music that’s sometimes described as future-pop. Grimes gushes about Mariah Carey and Aphex Twin in the same breath; Canadian duo Purity Ring have listed “Justin Timberlake, Clams Casino, and Holy Other” as inspirational forces behind their prismatic fairy tales; Glaswegian electro trio Chvrches have spoken about loving Fugazi and the Cure in interviews before divulging plans to cover Whitney Houston’s “It’s Not Right, But It’s Okay” in live shows. These omnivorous tendencies-- along with the breakdown of genre boundaries and advancement of affordable home recording technology-- have created inviting territory for the cleverest and most enterprising young musicians to explore.
Another intriguing act within the growing corral of future-pop artists is AlunaGeorge, a UK duo comprised of vocalist Aluna Francis and producer George Reid. When the two began giving interviews last year, they mentioned their love of old Timbaland and Neptunes-produced hits along with affinities for Radiohead, the Knife, and Joanna Newsom. Together the pair have adeptly synthesized those tastes and perfected a futuristic sound that blends wonky, wobbly beats drawn from 2-step and glitch with the irresistible hooks of “TRL”-era pop and the 90s R&B it was heavily indebted to. A decade ago, Aluna Francis might have been a long-lost member of Dream, the all-girl group behind the sleeper hit “He Loves U Not”, or a contestant on Diddy’s ill-fated “Making the Band”. The pair’s lyrics can even feel as though they were written for young teens of an era before smartphones and social media platforms mediated pubescent growing pains. “I usually wait for you to call/ But it’s getting closer between me and you,” Francis laments on the balladesque new song “Friends to Lovers”. “How do you make the change from friends to lovers/ When you risk looking like a fool?”
Following last year’s EP on Brooklyn label Tri Angle, their debut album Body Music arrives on a major (Island in the UK, the indie Vagrant in the U.S.); about half of its songs are new. The collection is a remarkably seamless extension of their early songs, an expert execution of a concept and aesthetic that felt perfectly crystallized even before anyone knew who the duo were. While there’s nothing on Body Music that hits quite as hard as their breakout hit, the crystalline R&B song “You Know You Like It”, there’s hardly a weak track to be found (save a misguided bonus cover of Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It”). They tinker with a bit of balladry (“Friends to Lovers”), niche dance genres (“Lost & Found”), and lite disco-funk (“Kaleidescope Love”), but everything retains a uniformly slick veneer, propelled by Francis’ slightly warped, nasal vocals and ice-princess posture. There’s an enticing liquidity that carries over from the earlier material-- beyond lyrics like “I want to be a diver into the sea” and “I've been treading water for your love”, the songs can sound like water hitting hard, shiny surfaces, or like ice chips being shot though narrow chrome tubes. The entire album is sexy and strange and sugary all at once. That these songs were recorded over the course of a couple years (straddling a major-label deal) and still maintain total fluidity throughout speaks to the strength and maturity of the duo’s initial formula.
But there, in the word formula, lies the catch. There's not much wrong with Body Music, but its constellation of contemporary electro-pop elements can sometimes feel too slick for its own good. Francis and Reid almost do themselves a disservice by being so competent, by executing a single, well-defined sound so consistently and so tidily that the record can begin to create a lull. That’s been the fate of some of AlunaGeorge’s peers as well: Purity Ring’s 2012 debut possessed the same paradoxically frustrating one-note perfection; Chvrches’ sound is crisp and singular enough that they could face a similar challenge. It’s also possible that the sheer number of artists springing up and inhabiting this sphere slackens the future angle in all this future-pop. For Francis and Reid, one possible escape from their shiny little box might be to further experiment with blossoming dance music trends-- something they successfully tried their hand at on a recent collaboration with Disclosure, another UK duo doing exciting, retro-futuristic things with newly malleable genre boundaries. But for now, it's hard to complain about AlunaGeorge being a little bit too focused.


Liz Phair: Exile in Guyville [15th Anniversary Edition]

You break all kinds of unwritten rules when you're a guy who admires a girl. The white suburban kids who idolize gangster rappers are old news, and the rich kids have always loved to rub elbows with the poor. But when a man tries to identify with a woman, he doesn't just hit the normal problems of "white male gaze" and "exploitation of the other" and "being a jackass": There's also the third rail of male sexuality, where identifying too closely with a woman might make you seem, perish the thought, sensitive. So instead, the guys who dig a girl like Liz Phair have to play up the attraction, the lust, the submission to a rock'n'roll goddess-- even when, for many of them, the lust ain't the main draw.
The other tactic is to take credit for what she's done. And guys can take plenty of credit for Phair's early career. Rock critics like Bill Wyman brought Phair to Chicago's attention when they ranted and raved about Guyville weeks before the thing came out. The Rolling Stones recorded Exile on Main Street, the loose template for Guyville's 18 tracks-- and one of the blues-rock genomes that saved this from being just another singer-songwriter set. And a couple other guys, co-producer Brad Wood and engineer Casey Rice, helped nail the minimalist production of Guyville and its follow-up, the underrated Whip-Smart.
It was the guys like her Johnny or her Joe-- the titular guys in the indie boy's club centered in and around Chicago's Wicker Park-- who preened for her, dicked her over, and taught her how to push back, inspiring her and making it necessary for her to write these songs in the first place. And it was guys who took the piss when she started headlining at venues that were too big for an amateur. Playing a New Year's Eve show at the Metro as your sixth or seventh gig is a lot to bite off. And if I recall correctly, she bit. But stagecraft and starpower weren't the point: Those of us who were taken in by Phair loved her because she was-- sorry to use the word-- real.
Men and women have written paeons to Phair since Guyville was released, putting her swagger, strength, and mundanity in whatever context meant the most to them-- "girl next door," "older sister," "younger sister," "easy lay," "slut next door," "bitch." But let's start with "female rocker." Guyville still runs up your spine on track one with its full-on opener, "6'1'", which is the best song she's ever recorded: tough but exposed, with cute feints in the lyrics, a wicked riff, and the door slamming open on her sassy tomboy vocals. On cuts like these, guys can dig Phair because she's one of the guys.
The songs are mostly sprints or drones, and on relistening to it, it's striking to hear the full-band cuts next to the solitary head space of songs like "Glory" or "Shatter", where she's backed more by a memory of guitar than by the raunchy blues-rock of the album's other half. The production of the ballads replicates the intimacy of a bedroom recording without the tape hiss or bum notes, which is an awesome illusion; and only a beginning songwriter could make such elemental riffs sound so exciting.
Phair has famously struggled to become a star, and never quite made it. Guyville turned her into an object of fascination, but those early gigs revealed she wasn't a superstar: She had to get by on talent, and perceptiveness. She has the gift of turning everyday downers into rock, and the shock came when she sang about things that nobody else discussed in public.
The cover shot nipple, "I want to be your blow job queen," the outro of "Fuck and Run" ("...even when I was 12")-- this stuff was startling at the time, but I'm guessing it won't register with any teenagers who discover this today. You can get Savage Love right on your cell phone, and young adults today can browse mainstream blogs and read about machines that will fuck you. Sad to say that at the time, it was shocking to talk about non-missionary sex with the girl you could take home to mom, but today, on "Flower"-- the one about blow jobs-- the line that surprises is her Dungeons & Dragons-like reference to "minions.” (On the original, she said she'd fuck the guy's girlfriend.)
Also hard to explain would be the sound, which is grey and wedged entirely in the midrange. When a "remastered" edition was announced, I had to wonder if the remasterer had actually heard the thing before taking the job-- but hearing it now, the treatment works: the rhythm section, when there is one, has more punch, and Phair's vocals come a little closer to your earlobe. The package also comes with a poorly-made DVD of interviews that Phair conducted with people from Chicago who knew her when-- Steve Albini, Ira Glass, the Urge Overkill guys. It makes a scene that fancied itself "the next Seattle" seem exactly as insular and provincial as it really was.
More useful would have been a tighter focus on Phair-- say, a better set of her B-sides and demos. Would it have killed ATO to throw in more of her early, even less-inhibited Girly Sounds material? Three B-sides grace this reissue, including the meandering "Ant in Alaska" and a curious cover of Lynn Tait's "Say You". They're nice throwaways, but they explain little about what was going on around the making of her debut.
Fifteen years on, Guyville occasionally sounds dated-- for its particular sexiness, and its particular indieness. But the songwriting holds up. She ticks off all the bruises and embarrassments of relationships, and never lets her defenses get in the way. Naturally as a guy, I can't speak for what women saw in the record back then, or how young women will take it now. But of all the albums written from a woman's perspective, this is one of the most accessible to men. It's intriguing to watch her deal with us-- not as a mere revolutionary, but as someone who knows that sex will always be tough, so she always has to be tougher. She's been tested in ways we never will be, and we understand just enough to admire her for it. Men don't get what it's like to be a woman. But spinning this record, you swear that you could.


The neoclassical ambient duo’s first proper album in nine years pays tribute to the mystical painter Hilma af Klint in stirring strings, melancholy fanfare, and a winking hint of self-awareness.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen: The Undivided Five

The Undivided Five

To ambient fans, Adam Wiltzie is the marquee name in A Winged Victory for the Sullen, simply because he was also in Stars of the Lid. But to everyone else, it would probably be pianist Dustin O’Halloran. He won an Emmy for his Debussy-redolent Transparent theme, which wrings unaccountable amounts of nostalgia, sadness, and hope from a simple waltz. Shaping emotional resonance around other people’s art has been the neoclassical ambient duo’s main pastime since its self-titled debut in 2011. Following scores for film and one for the prominent choreographer Wayne McGregor, The Undivided Five is the second album to showcase what they can do working off of their own images and concepts.
One might expect themes for an imaginary film, but this isn’t film music. It takes too long. Opener “Our Lord Debussy” traverses more than nine minutes at a kingly pace, the piano marching under high-flown regalia of strings and modular synths. There are few extractable moments because everything is interwoven; any time something is resolving, something else is taking shape. The effect is lush and orchestral, with rich bass notes in the piano and intimations of violin solos, but also mystically steeped in ambient music’s eternal present.
Like everyone else since the Guggenheim retrospective, Wiltzie and O’Halloran have apparently fallen under the spell of Hilma af Klint, the proto-abstract painter and theosophist who partly developed her visual language in séances with a group of women called “The Five.” This accounts for the album’s predominance of perfect fifths—which girdle the timbral complexity in rings of harmonic stability—as well as its almost ecstatic, almost painful lyricism.
If it’s not obvious, this is catnip for fans of Max Richter, Tim Hecker, and especially Jóhann Jóhannsson, the duo’s friend and collaborator, who died near the beginning of work on the album. Studio sessions ranged across several countries—Germany, Hungary, Belgium, a grand piano in the Italian woods, overdubs at Ben Frost’s Iceland digs—in search of arcane reverbs and other fine acoustical qualities, which Francesco Donadello’s analog mix gives a supple finish.
Around the time of Jóhannsson’s death, O’Halloran found out he was having his first child, and The Undivided Five trembles on a threshold between sorrow and joy, ending and beginning, life and afterlife. Aching strings emerge like fated events from the everyday seep and curl of passing time. Long minutes pass by dredging up one vast, submerged chord. Each track is its own study in loneliness, yet each is in communication with the others, like spirit mediums.
“Aqualung, Motherfucker” is an endless beginning, with a few purposeful strides trailing off in mid-air again and again. It doesn’t really take flight until the next song, “A Minor Fifth Is Made of Phantoms,” where melancholy fanfare is packed into growling sub-basses that will explode halfway through “Adios, Florida.” It’s a softly shocking climax before the music swiftly resumes its giant-tortoise composure.
Yes, “Aqualung, Motherfucker.” Wiltzie and O’Halloran have a funny habit of impeccably observing the solemn, elevated conventions of ambient music, and then writing song titles that mock elevated solemnity. As their debut offered “Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears” and “We Played Some Open Chords,” The Undivided Five sad-trombones itself with “The Haunted Victorian Pencil” and “The Slow Descent Has Begun.”
I’ve never quite figured out how to interpret this incongruity, which I kind of love. Maybe they’re just terrible at song titles? But I think they know what they’re doing. I like to imagine that it’s a reminder to themselves and us not to take all this mortal pomp too seriously, even as they aim to leave no soul unstirred.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Having relocated to L.A., the Atlanta rapper rapper brings his deadpan flow and subversive sense of humor to some of the strongest production he’s had yet, yielding a refreshingly mischievous album.

Awful Swim

Father’s music has always been flippant. That was part of the draw: He absorbed bleak topics like police brutality, selling drugs, and gun violence and warped them into shrug-worthy fodder with his alluring black humor. The nasal monotone of his flow is so blithe and dry that everything, no matter how weighty, sounds as casual as eating dinner. His breakout project, 2014’s Young Hot Ebony, built its momentum around the cult hit “Look at Wrist,” in which the Awful Records patriarch plainly admits, “Never had to flip a brick, but I get the gist.” Songs like “2 Dead, 6 Wounded” or “Everybody in the Club Gettin Shot” (from 2015’s Who’s Gonna Get Fucked First?) were similarly glib. But that trait is what makes Father so magnetic; he practically begs people to be offended—if only they could stop nodding.
Mischief abounds on Awful Swim, his latest album. He takes the same acerbic style and adds more money, swag, and nonchalance. “Wrist got too heavy to pick up that bitch’s calls,” goes one line of the hook on opening track “Mirror, Mirror.” It lands as both a callback to that breakout single and a delight in how far he’s come. The Atlanta native and his crew inked a new deal with RCA earlier this year, and he’s relocated to Los Angeles. As far as major label debuts go, Awful Swim, which is also in partnership with Adult Swim, is a strong and remarkably vintage showing. It is a reflection of an artist with so little to worry about that all he can do is watch cartoons and crack jokes; it is also, perhaps, the refuge of a person who hasn’t lost touch with the real world.
The album is fitted around ’90s-kid and millennial pop-culture staples. A sampling of the array of references includes “Empire,” Mulan, Justin Bieber, Talladega Nights, Vampire in Brooklyn, Blade, “Rick and Morty” (of course), and one clever turn of the mid-aughts Trap-A-Holics drop. The hook of the cartoonish-sounding “Sephiroth” is built around the waist-length hair of the “Final Fantasy” character. Meltycanon’s video-game-inspired production is a fitting backdrop for Father’s zippy lines (their earliest collaboration was 2016’s “Heartthrob,” which features Father rapping over a jewelry-box melody), and he handles the bulk of the production here, with six total credits. He and Father, who self-produced five tracks, have a symbiotic relationship: Meltycanon’s toy-chest style set against Father’s slurred delivery sounds like an alternate universe or a pleasant trip.
“Only You” is a subdued haze of a club banger, propelled by guitar and a twinkling music-box sound, where Father’s idea of “romance” is something like “All these drugs in this bitch/But only you I wanna do.” The Rico Nasty-assisted “On One” chooses the drugs instead; her bursts of energy pop in contrast to his laidback cadence. But tucked into all the vice and hedonism are offhand comments that suggest Father isn’t interested in completely checking out. He may have graduated to Hollywood, but on the slinky “Private Show,” he knows nothing has truly changed: “Scary nigga, I’m a spooky black/You should probably alert your neighborhood watch/Every time a nigga move on the block/Crackers pull up with that burning cross.” A keen sense of racial awareness pops up over and over—particularly where the police are involved. “Keep starin’ in the rearview/Hope 12 don’t get me too,” he declares on “Sephiroth,” and, later, on “Dragons,” “12 shoot at me nigga, bet I shoot back.”
Despite those fleeting moments, Awful Swim is, by and large, a playful release. As Father counts his money, collects women, and lobs threats to no one in particular, he genuinely sounds like he’s having a good time—inasmuch as his deadpan flow can suggest excitement. It’s a further realized version of his subversive humor combined with some of the strongest production he’s had yet. The time he spent away, slowing his releases from prolific to occasional, proved beneficial. He has managed the often-complicated feat of refining without compromising the unique qualities that drew so many to him in the first place. Free of the self-loathing emotion that many SoundCloud rappers default to and the self-righteous commentary that exists at the other end of the binary, Awful Swim is truly lighthearted at a time when a lot of rap really isn’t.


Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment serve as Chance the Rapper's touring band, and on Surf, he and the group tap into a wide-ranging, joyfully meandering spirit. The album touches on a multitude of ideas and moods, but above all, it's a celebration of friendship and a tribute to the alchemic power of collaboration.

Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment: Surf

Surf

Surf begins like the Beach Boys and ends with the loping pop melody of a lost 1970s AM radio record. These moments bookend a world and a worldview; as its title suggests, the album is a musical vacation. Instead of following a straightforward path, Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment spill outward, finding new inlets and tributaries to explore. Surf contains multitudes, contradictions: ambitious, but playfully so; lighthearted in spirit but fiercely moral; wide-ranging in its influences, mapped onto a coherent whole. It's a new sound built on lots of older ones—indie, hip-hop, funk, rock, gospel, various strains of R&B, The Lion King soundtrack—and despite bringing on a large cast and letting each person play their part, the guests all exist on the Social Experiment's terrain. The album touches on many ideas and moods, but above all, is a celebration of friendship, and a tribute to the alchemic power of collaboration.
Chance the Rapper's success allowed the group the space to take such a purposefully meandering approach. In the wake of his hugely successful sophomore tape Acid Rap, Chance ignored the industry's baits and lures. Freed from its constraints and pressures, with a devoted flock waiting eagerly behind him, he's directed his time and energy to his friends. So as you may have heard, this album does not belong to Chance the Rapper, but to Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment (that's Nico Segal and Peter "Cottontale" Wilkins, Nate Fox, Greg "Stix" Landfair Jr., and Chancelor Bennett himself). The group has extraordinary range, and thanks to time on the road as Chance's touring band, the chops to execute. But whatever the name on the packaging, this project does belong to Chance the Rapper: He is still the album's main draw, and despite the number of guests and the cover art billing, its guiding spirit feels reflective of his own ideas and values—albeit in a less intensive, less personal form than on Acid Rap.
Donnie Trumpet, though, is our official headliner, and as such, the album intermittently features his horn's impressionistic interludes. On "Nothing Came to Me" and "Something Came to Me", his smeared, effects-laden playing recalls Don Ellis or Jon Hassell. But Donnie Trumpet also makes his presence known throughout the record, punctuating the marching band-meets-MJ dancefloor record "Slip Slide", or taking a fiery solo on "Just Wait". The overall sonic blueprint coheres gradually, as a diverse range of records bundle up a diverse range of sounds: say, a Bone Thugs-style harmony ("Just Wait"), a Rick James-style funk groove ("Wanna Be Cool"), or an "American Boy"-style disco record ("Go").
Despite the variety of influences and ideas, the vision coheres in the details: use of space, rhythmic variation, creative whimsy, a musicality that feels consciously shaped to convey levity, comfort, and freedom. Certain tracks feel more like frames without pictures, melted sandcastles rather than the fully functioning parapets of actual songs. In some sense, the constellation of sounds isn't far from a DJ mix. Think, maybe, of the beachfront party eclecticism of the Avalanches as produced by the Mizell Brothers and Kirk Franklin, heavily featuring the Art Ensemble of Chicago's Lester Bowie.
But these pieces are linked in large part by the quirks of Chance's personality. And these quirks can sometimes be divisive. It's hard to imagine anyone could be mad at Chance: as rap stars go, he appears about as decent and well-adjusted as a person can possibly be. But he boldly and unapologetically embraces aesthetics that, historically, aren't fashionable, or are seen as uncool: the affected staginess of musical theater, the lyrical pretensions of slam poetry, a nostalgia not just for the memories of childhood, but the very feelings of childhood innocence. His debut project 10 Day stood out so starkly in its innocence, it was easy to see it as unconscious naivete; now, it seems quite purposeful, a point Chance makes explicit on "Wanna Be Cool", a song featuring Big Sean and KYLE with vocals from Jeremih. The record's message of self-love in the face of social pressure, and the fruitlessness of cool-chasing, aren't merely "Hip to Be Square" updates for 2015, but represents Chance's wider philosophical approach.
Acid Rap, an easy critical favorite, dealt with "serious" subjects, autobiographical and sociopolitical, and implied a looming darkness: an artist who'd created a space for himself and his friends to flourish wrestled with the encroaching troubles of the outside world. Here, the anxiety is tamped down (we're on vacation, after all), and many songs indulge in the rhetoric of self-affirmation and positivity, like the gleeful release of a submerged balloon rushing to the surface. But this isn't a blind, didactic positivity: it often takes the shape of wisdom, and is actually quite practical, an argument and set of tools for living in the real world, as on the coda of "Slip Side": "It ain’t so easy, but it’s not so hard/ To stand up, stand up, but it’s just too easy to sit back down." (Alternately, the hook to "Just Wait"—"Good things come to those that wait"—repeated in a similar mantra format, is the rare moment more suited to a coffee mug.)
But just as this album suggest a coherent personal philosophy, Chance resists taking himself too seriously, most explicitly on the ambiguous "Windows", which he's called his favorite song on the tape: "Don't trust a word I say." That record itself is driven primarily by its enigmatic lyrics and unusual composition, its vocals a tonal color, with foregrounded percussion. But if we are not to listen to his words, his actions provide an equally responsible blueprint: his generosity with the guest list is democratic in the extreme. Chance and Donnie elevate friends from his hometown (rappers Saba and Joey Purp, King Louie and Noname Gypsy) to equal footing with musical legends (Erykah Badu, Busta Rhymes) and established stars (Quavo from Migos, J. Cole). In several instances, it is the locals whose parts shine brightest: poet and singer Jamila Woods' feature on "Questions", in addition to providing tonal balance, is the album's emotive heart, a moment of elegiac reflection.
The core of Chance's principled approach might suggest a line of continuity with Kendrick Lamar, and what the writer Reggie Ugwu described as his "radical Christianity." And certainly, his music is rooted in gospel, and he stakes a moral position when such stances are readily dismissed in certain corners. Church is even referenced explicitly in "Sunday Candy". But Chance's position on religion is elusive. "Sunday Candy" could certainly be read as a statement of religious intent, but it's first and foremost a song about familial love, and all of the particulars of Christianity become vivid, evocative associations not with spiritual life through religion, but through love of friends and family.
There's a classic disco record by Dinosaur L—a group built around the avant-garde cellist and disco producer/songwriter Arthur Russell—called "Go Bang", popular at the Paradise Garage, in which vocalists shout out: "I want to see, all my friends at once!/ I'd do anything, to get the chance to go back!" In many ways, what feels fulfilling about Surf is in the fantasy of its creation: of musicians and friends who've secured the fanbase to experiment, working together to explore their creative impulses, letting each artist's fingerprints help shape a singular product. It's that sense of collaboration that energizes this project, and as much as this feels like an accomplishment already, it points equally to future possibilities. Chance has admitted to fantasies of Michael Jackson-level pop success, and while he's taking his time here, there's an element of looking to the future even in his rapping. While written with absolute precision and poetic skill that rivals the best rappers currently working, Chance's words tumble from his mouth effortlessly, as if he's already done with the verse by the time he recites it, looking to what's next.


The Man in Black's vision of the American west is one of a rugged, mournful land, where outlaws carry ...

Johnny Cash: American IV: The Man Comes Around

American IV: The Man Comes Around

The Man in Black's vision of the American west is one of a rugged, mournful land, where outlaws carry bibles over their hearts, and where sometimes, the good book even stops a bullet. The Man Comes Around is poised as the next chapter in Cash's darkling fairy tale, the fourth in an ongoing series of mostly-covers albums on which he gives material by some of today's most talented (or alternately, best-selling) artists his own aged slant.
Now, time was, Johnny Cash covering a song like Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" was a clever novelty made impressive by his ability to infuse these modern-day rockers with overwhelming emotion. Cash's renditions of songs like Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat" and Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a Wire" weren't so surprising, but far more powerful, as the spirit of those songs was so close to his own. The simple truth, of course, is that Cash's talent is such that he can elevate nearly any song to which he turns his ear. But on this, his fourth go-round on the same theme, it hardly seems necessary anymore; the songs of this record are taken from the most disparate ends of the musical spectrum, to no apparent end but show that he can do it.
The first tragic subject of this case study is, almost predictably, Trent Reznor. (We knew it was just a matter of time, didn't we? I give it one more album before he gets around to Tool's "Schism.") The curriculum: "Hurt". Now, I'm not a big advocator of the NIN sound, but I'll give "Hurt" that it's got a fine melody, and its arrangement here is fantastic. Cash treats the song with such sincerity and honesty that it takes on a power that it never held in Reznor's hands, infusing it with genuine heart to accompany the bitterness. But that's just it-- could Cash really fail to bring something to this desolate ballad? It's like taking target practice at the Empire State Building. There's no challenge here-- it's just driving home a point. (And incidentally, those of you anticipating the line, "I wear this crown of shit," will be sorely disappointed.)
Still, from the slithering blues groove of "Personal Jesus" to a surprisingly subtle duet with Fiona Apple on "Bridge Over Troubled Water", Cash never falters. Gorgeous, minimal arrangements highlight his emotive baritone and distill each track to its finest essentials. However, when an album consists of twelve covers and only three originals, something more than pretty arrangements is necessary, and it's called cohesion. Cash's renditions are often breathtaking in their simplicity, but rarely do they justify their presence among a dozen other similarly afflicted songs.
A few exceptions are able to rise above, of course. "Hung My Head" is, and always has been, more Johnny Cash's than Sting's, and there's no disputing it now. And Cash and his understudy Nick Cave do justice to fellow Country hall-of-famer Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry". In these tracks, Cash finds something more than excellent composition and heartfelt regret-- he taps into the essence of each song and truly makes it his own. If he could have done this more often, and with a better selection of songs, the bulk of this record wouldn't be overshadowed by the cataclysmic magnitude of its original title track.
And the weaknesses of the covers wouldn't be half as apparent if they weren't thrown into such stark contrast with an original that could stand proudly alongside "Folsom Prison Blues" or "I Walk the Line". The Cash-penned "The Man Comes Around" is an epic tale of apocalypse, interpreting Revelations with uplifting exuberance. Restraint, resignation, and a hope of peace pervade the prophetic imagery. Truly, the subdued fury and beauty of this track reduces everything that follows. The immediate question posed is: if this man can still write and perform works of this caliber, why is he resorting to the words and music of others? Ideally, the covers should speak this answer for themselves. Unfortunately, Cash fails to give them voice to do so, and as such, they remain unfortunately silent.


The restive jazz star, who went on to work with Jack White, Danger Mouse, and others after her multiplatinum debut, returns with a no-frills record that fades into the background without much fuss.

Day Breaks

At this point of her career, it’s easy to forget that Norah Jones was once considered a jazz singer. Back in 2002, long before she worked with Jack White and Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, Jones released Come Away With Me, an understated gem that went on to sell over 11 million units and earn eight Grammy awards—including Album of the Year and Song of the Year for “Don’t Know Why.” Armed with that voice—a wry, simmering inflection—the Texas native has proven she can sing anything, and sound natural doing so, no matter where the road has taken her.
That said, it’s been tough to assess Jones’ creative arc. Feels Like Home, her 2004 sophomore LP, eschewed the traditional jazz of the first record for a folk/country sound. She’s released two honky-tonk country albums as a member of the Little Willies; and in 2012, Jones dropped Little Broken Hearts, a concept record about emotional anguish, set against Danger Mouse’s soulful pop arrangements. Elsewhere, Jones had notable features on Mouse and composer Daniele Luppi’s Rome; with Q-Tip, OutKast and Talib Kweli on their respective albums; and on the Robert Glasper Experiment’s Black Radio 2. Throughout all this, Jones has remained somewhat anonymous, mainly because she’s never appealed to pop and hip-hop consumers. Her music speaks to the adult contemporary crowd, those who actually buy CDs instead of streaming online. Jones has maintained a nice career largely out of the public eye; now 14 years removed from her seminal work, the musician returns to initial form on Day Breaks, her sixth studio album.
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Jones said the genesis of the LP can be traced back to a 2014 performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., during a 75th anniversary concert for her label, Blue Note Records. She was performing a cover of songwriter Jesse Harris’ “I’ve Got to See You Again” with iconic saxophonist Wayne Shorter, drummer Brian Blade, and bassist John Patitucci. “When I started thinking about making a ‘jazz record,’ mostly I was thinking about recording with Wayne and Brian,” Jones told the Times. “I didn’t want it to be standards. I was hoping for something very rhythmic, with Wayne floating over the top.” Shorter, Blade, and organist Dr. Lonnie Smith appear throughout Day Breaks, an efficient 12-track set featuring nine original songs and three covers: Horace Silver’s “Peace,” Duke Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine” and Neil Young’s “Don’t Be Denied.” Day Breaks is especially sparse, a no-frills record that fades into the background without much fuss. It seems to reflect the singer’s personal and professional comfort, that—after 15 years as a signed artist with more than 50 million records sold—Jones doesn’t need to adhere to industry pressures to remain relevant. Whereas some artists revert to their best-received work as a way to reignite past glory, Day Breaks feels like the logical next step for a singer who’s done just about everything there is to do musically. This one isn't a barn-burner, but it's not supposed to be.
Unfortunately, though, Day Breaks grows a bit tedious near the middle, and it's easy to forget it's playing if you aren't paying attention. Lyrically, Day Breaks embraces a hazy—if not melancholy—vibe, similar to the Billie Holiday albums Jones listened to as a child. These tracks address some level of perseverance, a pushing through to better days whether romantically or socially. Jones uses a conversational cadence to tell these stories, bolstering the narrative and giving her words better impact. On “Flipside,” a song about racial and civic injustice, Jones and the band sound especially poignant. The other songs slow to a crawl, but this one is hard-charging with a strong message. “If we’re all free, then why does it seem we can’t just be?” Jones asks. “Put the guns away or we’re all gonna lose.” (As of this review, two more unarmed black men—Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina—were shot and killed by police for no reason.) And while Jones didn’t write the lyrics to “Peace”—it is a cover, after all—she effectively owns the message. “Peace,” she hums, “is for everyone.” Sure that’s a noble idea, but we’ve got a long way to go.