Veering from bubblegum house to shoegaze, the producer and singer captures the intimacy of the dancefloor.

4 New Hit Songs

Who is Doss? The question has popped up repeatedly on internet communities devoted to leftfield club music, but she’s never released much personal information. When she announced 4 New Hit Songs, her first new EP in over seven years, the news read, simply, “It’s the music.” What is known about the New York/Baltimore producer and songwriter is that over the past decade she has occasionally worked as a DJ, released an EP (her 2014 self-titled debut), and made a few remixes. At first glance, 4 New Hit Songs doesn’t offer much more information; its title seems intentionally generic, and its singles were accompanied only by cheekily opaque slogans. Yet, in its own way, 4 New Hit Songs is revealing—an invitation to join Doss as she experiences life’s tribulations and the rapturous realizations that come from navigating hard times.
Despite the fogginess surrounding these songs, they’re clearly Doss’ most personal and intimate to date. 4 New Hit Songs is built with the same forward-thinking sounds that filled her debut: gleaming trance refractions, shards of bubblegum house, and delicate wisps of shoegaze. And though her voice appeared on some of her previous songs, it never rang as clearly or resonated as deeply as it does here. The candy-coated club track “Look” sounds a little like Doss’ old friends and associates at PC Music—but even when it’s buoyant and bright, it feels insular and brooding, too. Over techno drum programming, she mutters about isolation and abandonment, about feeling watched and alone. She repeats the words “on my own” over and over until they begin to sound anxious, the insistence lending weight to a track that might otherwise have floated away with dancefloor euphoria.
Part of the joy of 4 New Hit Songs is in just how much emotion it packs into its few tracks. “Puppy”—a song about rekindling feelings with a lost love—feels desperate yet hopeful, drifting through stormy rave beats as Doss sings in the distance about “holding on.” The title is a reference to a nickname given to her by an ex, a personal touch that mirrors the yearning in her voice. “Strawberry” too is misty and longing, built around an instrumental as breezy and blunted as Slowdive’s more electronic experiments, but it’s also comforting. Its chorus—“maybe this song won’t leave you”—underscores Doss’ slogan: “It’s the music.” In a world that feels overwhelming, maybe you don’t need more than a song to keep you company.
Veering between distance and intimacy, dreamy introspection and extroverted club ecstasy, Doss’ style of dance music is both veiled and vulnerable. And though she holds back on concrete details, the songs are enough—they feel intimate and empathetic, a window into her head from across a crowded dancefloor. It’s a feeling that echoes one of the most enduring appeals of the rave, a place where, for a moment, you can share the same energy as a room full of strangers. You may not know a thing about their lives outside the club, but for the length of a track, you’re all in motion together. This is the feeling 4 New Hit Songs captures vividly.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


After helping David Bowie realize his harrowing final statement Blackstar, saxophonist Donny McCaslin offers a bracing record with two Bowie tunes and a pair of covers of electronic acts.

Beyond Now

Not long after the release of Blackstar, saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s jazz group became internationally famous as the collective that had helped David Bowie create his last triumph in the studio. The flexibility of McCaslin’s playing—as well as that of bassist Tim Lefebvre, drummer Mark Guiliana, and keyboardist Jason Lindner—allowed tracks like “Lazarus” to juggle a variety of moods and textures, without ever straying too far from the underlying motifs.
In the aftermath of Bowie’s death, the band gave interviews about Bowie’s working methods, and also bade him farewell with a set at New York’s fabled Village Vanguard club. That same feeling of tribute anchors this band’s latest studio recording. Aside from playing two Bowie tunes, the set also includes a pair of covers of other electronic acts. Appropriately, the overall sound of Beyond Now leans more heavily into pop sonics than McCaslin’s previous recording with these same players.
It’s an understandable move, though not always a successful one. The first Bowie cover, “A Small Plot of Land,” takes a jazz-tinged track from Bowie’s underrated album Outside, and updates it via the fusion sound found on Blackstar. It’s an able retrofitting of the tune. And guest-vocalist Jeff Taylor does yeoman’s work with the thankless task of standing in for Bowie. Still, not much new is discovered during this approach, and the rendition never moves beyond sounding like the work of a highly skilled cover band. Likewise, interpretations of Deadmau5’s “Coelacanth 1” and Mutemath’s “Remain” sound less like full-throated performances than atmospheric reminders that this is a group with pop crossover potential.
This band’s range is better demonstrated during investigations of McCaslin’s own compositions. His “Bright Abyss” inspires the ensemble’s best collective performance on the album. As the piece moves from a low-key, druggy opening to McCaslin’s bracing tenor saxophone solo, Guiliana’s beat-division skills gradually raise the level of intensity. “Faceplant” has a barnstorming, punk-like energy that shows off several of Lindner’s most imaginative keyboard effects. And the bandleader has lots of room to roam during “Shake Loose” and the title track—moving with dexterity between fluid, fast figures and slurred-sounding passages that contain the occasional bit of multiphonic harshness.
Overall, the half of Beyond Now that focuses on McCaslin’s original material fares far better, and should be sought out by anyone who wants another experience of the invention heard on Blackstar. Together with an effective, emotional reimagining of “Warszawa,” this portion of the album works as a welcome reminder of what they brought to Bowie’s final studio album: Not a facility for impersonating pop formats that were already well established, but rather the ability to create memorable, fresh forms.


Roberto Lange’s fourth installment in his Island Universe series contains subconscious whisperings that provide a map for the music he’s been making as Helado Negro for the last eight years.

Helado Negro: Island Universe Story Four

Island Universe Story Four

At the heart of Chinese Philosophy lies the yin and yang, the equal and complementary parts of the Tao, the journey of life. For Roberto Carlos Lange and his Helado Negro project, his multipart Island Universe Story has served as the moon (yin) to his albums’ sun (yang), a “shadow narrative” within his discography that runs parallel to the distinct statements of each album. Placed in this context, they reveal more about the artist than any one work ever could.
Island Universe Story Four’s 11 tracks feel looser and freer than his albums, themselves self-contained worlds that communicate a specific feeling. His last album, 2016’s Private Energy, looked inward to examine his relationship with the world at large. Island Universe Story Four—his first entry in the series in more than four years—appears to reflect an examination of that process, subconscious whisperings that provide a sonic map for the music he’s been making as Helado Negro for the last eight years.
A brilliant beat constructor with a preternatural sense of rhythm, Lange’s compositions tend to be built upon a beat, from which flows the melody. On “Echo 2,” synthesized tones swirl around a steady boom-bap bass and snare, giving the instrumental’s melody an alien vocal inflection. A descending bass line takes center stage on “Glow You,” a beautifully layered work that continuously builds and sheds layers of accompaniment over two minutes. There’s a sense of space in these compositions that reveal each track’s building blocks, and illuminate how the pieces of Lange’s various projects over the years fit together to create Helado Negro—those Epstein beats, the beeps of Boom & Birds, the swirl of OMBRE’s strings, and the sound sculptures he releases under his own name.
And while his instrumentals can certainly stand on their own, Helado Negro songs are most revealing when accompanied by Lange’s rolling baritone. Island Universe Story Four only features two tracks with vocals and lyrics: The lament for a relationship’s end that is “Come Be Me”—originally released as part of Adult Swim’s Singles series—and “Guardar Our Are.” The latter, a Spanglish phrase which translates literally into “Tend Our Are,” was written during the Private Energy sessions. Its lyrics serve as an encryption key to that record’s creation: “Píntame otra vez/que ya llegaron/tus papeles” he sings, which translates to “Paint me again/they’ve arrived, your papers.” It’s as if he views his music as a canvas on which his listeners paint, the artwork inherently incomplete until it’s been shared with others. And that was indeed the process of making Private Energy, which was written, recorded, workshopped on tour, deconstructed and arranged for a massive string ensemble, then reconstructed before a final re-recording and subsequent release.
Lange says he intended this music to feel and sound elastic, a circular composition evocative of the conversation between creator and consumer, or as he says, “The constant feeling of revalidation of what you are working on for yourself and how it bounces back and forth with other folks on this planet or on your block.” It’s also a conversation with his peers; Island Universe Story Four shares sonic lineage with its predecessors, but also with Lange’s contemporaries, such as Four Tet, Mouse on Mars, and Prefuse 73, a close friend and collaborator. The thread that unites them is a proficiency at imbuing electronic music with a human soul, a reminder that behind the boards of all those machines is a beating heart. With each chapter of Lange’s Island Universe Story, its narrator peels back another layer of his skin, revealing an artist driven by compassion, empathy, and humanity’s eternal search for meaning.


On the 52-minute vision quest that is their new double LP, the world’s most earnest arena band sound looser than they have in years.

Everyday Life

Chris Martin is backstage at Saturday Night Live discussing the Syrian refugee crisis with a group of teenagers. A few feet away, his longtime bandmate Jonny Buckland briefly drowns out the conversation to check his guitar tone, and Martin outstretches an arm to silence him in a somewhat papal display of intraband passive aggression. Buckland mutes his strings; Martin returns to the teens. “You see all these pictures of young people like you—and a bit older people like us—having to leave their countries,” he says, “and everyone calls them ‘refugees’ instead of just people.” So, he explains, Coldplay’s new song “Orphans” is his attempt to communicate how any of us could be in their position, longing to return to our normal existence. Its walloping chorus goes, “I want to know/When I can go/Back and get drunk with my friends.” Tonight when the cameras roll, Martin instructs the teenagers to dance accordingly, with abandon.
And yet, even by poorly mixed SNL standards, the performance falls flat. The song itself is solid: a style of traditional character-driven folk storytelling and pure pop bliss that Martin has aged gracefully into. And his bandmates—guitarist Buckland, bassist Guy Berryman, and drummer Will Champion—remain as emphatic and unobtrusive as ever as they lay out his runway. But the very thing Martin asks from the young dancers doesn’t quite ring true. Somewhere amid their joyful choreography, the pro-forma Coldplay anthem, and the humanitarian crisis that inspired it lies a disconnect: After spending two decades trying to transcend the throes of our humdrum existence, how do Coldplay find their place within it?
It’s the challenge they face on their new double album, Everyday Life. The moody 52-minute vision quest is spread over two distinct halves, titled Sunrise and Sunset, giving the band enough space for an unadorned voice memo and a multi-part epic with a two-minute saxophone solo. Some songs are their softest, most understated compositions since their debut, 2000’s Parachutes, while two others feature contributions from ubiquitous pop formalist Max Martin. There’s a sarcastic, seething folk song about gun violence and a deeply earnest ballad called “Daddy,” sung from the perspective of a neglected child. “It’s all about being human,” Martin said in an early interview about the record. “Every day is great and every day is terrible and every day is a blessing.” Yes it’s a cliche, but he also has tears in his eyes while he says it.
Despite its sprawling architecture, the album is one of the band’s most consistent, unified works. The music is filled with other voices: Nigerian vocalist Tiwa Savage, the late qawwali singer Amjad Sabri, Alice Coltrane, Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison, and three generations of Kutis (Fela, Femi, and Made) are credited in the liner notes. While it can feel cluttered at times, overflowing with annotations and footnotes, it rarely feels heavy; the sequencing seems to inhale and exhale with each song, its attempts at arena peaks (“Church,” “Orphans”) followed by moments of mournful ambience. The dynamics help create a sense of space that’s been missing from nearly everything this band has recorded over the past 10 years.
Each of this decade’s Coldplay albums has been packaged as its own (relative) experiment, a direct reaction to its predecessor: the pop one, the sad one, the happy one. And after 2015’s jubilant but uninspired A Head Full of Dreams, the largely somber tone of Everyday Life feels like its own statement: a stark gray palette that makes abundantly clear what’s absent. Without the ghastly, trend-hopping singles that have weighed down their latest releases, my favorite part of the album is also its most unprocessed portion, halfway through Sunset, where the fragments “Èkó,” “Cry Cry Cry,” and “Old Friends” roll into each other like a medley at rehearsal, something they’re just testing out for potential. The melodies don’t always stick, but the performances highlight just how long it’s been since Coldplay sounded like this: a quiet band in a small room, their characteristic enthusiasm drawn from simply making music together.
These unguarded moments make Martin’s lyrics—a sore spot for this band for as long as they’ve existed—easier to forgive. “Èkó” in particular, with its lapping “Bird Song” rhythm, feels so natural and breezy that you forget the chorus reads, “In Africa, the rivers are perfectly deep and beautifully wide.” More fleshed-out political songs like “Trouble in Town,” where the band’s show-stopping climax is juxtaposed with a disturbing recording of police harassment, and “Guns,” where Martin explodes in a chorus how “everything’s gone fucking crazy,” channel similar feelings of urgency. It’s as if he realized his everyman musings would sound more compelling if they were offered as the in-progress thoughts they are.
Accordingly, when it’s time to sum everything up, he finds himself at a loss. The last two tracks on the record, “Champion of the World” and “Everyday Life,” are its most traditional moments, each its own attempt to deliver a happy ending (and possibly a radio hit). “Champion of the World” finds resolution in a few mixed metaphors—a hard-won boxing match, a majestic bicycle ride, a soaring rocket ship—that all dissolve in a twinkling, singalong refrain. “Everyday Life” is less graceful in its ascent. Martin has admitted that the song itself came to him long after the band settled on the album title, and it does feel a bit like a half-filled template. For all its vague gestures toward what it means to be alive right now (“Everyone hurts, everyone cries,” Martin offers), he actually comes closest to nailing it in the opening line: “What in the world are we going to do?” Even if their answers come up short, it’s refreshing to hear Coldplay searching again, with all the rest of us.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


On a visceral new album, the Japanese sound artist blends field recordings with glitches and loops to conjure the push-pull flow of a world in flux.

Landscape and Voice

The work of Toshiya Tsunoda, the Japanese sound artist widely considered one of the most important field recordists of the past quarter century, is distinguished by its startling precision of thought and sound, united in the belief that our settings are always living, never fixed or frozen in time. In his words: “Place is always moving, like a sleeping cat.” Not content to treat the field recording as a rigid document or abstract sound material, Tsunoda—who has a background in oil painting—prefers to zero in on the complexities of human perception and consciousness. His music positions the “field” as not merely physical but also a subjective mental map created in real time by the listener.
On his latest album, Landscape and Voice, Tsunoda applies a glitching technique—most notably used on 2013’s o kokos tis anixis (Grains of Spring)—that pauses the free passage of time by looping tiny segments of the “field” for varying durations and pairing those grains with short, vowel-like human utterances. Whereas the glitches on Grains of Spring were sometimes so subtle they were unnoticeable, on Landscape and Voice—a 25-minute culmination of Tsunoda’s aesthetic and philosophical research—they take center stage, constantly disrupting the listening experience and making it one of his most visceral works. While many sound artists like Francisco Lopez work along similarly noisy lines, Tsunoda’s work stands alone in its measured, tactical fracturing of reality; here, water, wind, and birdsong are recognizable as such, but they somehow bear traces of the inaudible—air itself, sun and shadow—with a nearly psychedelic intensity.
Opener “At the port” begins almost conventionally, with a gurgling lap of water in the right ear and scattered birdsong arcing from left to center. However, a mere 30 seconds in, the pristine field is shattered by the glitch: A disembodied voice loops “eh” in tandem with the stuttering field recording, and we are thrust into a seemingly artificial space. Tsunoda phases landscape and voice out of sync with one another; the two gradually separate by infinitesimal degrees before the landscape—water dripping from leaves, wind rippling through foliage—comes flooding back. While some of these interruptions are soothing and almost humorous, like the looped boing of droplets halfway through “At the port,” others, like the shrill whistle of sparrows on “In the grass field,” pierce with shocking force. It becomes clear that the human experience is always relational: What we might ignore in one context crashes harshly in another.
On “Studies,” Tsunoda centers the glitch, silencing the landscape and only working in short looped phrases. By cycling through these frozen moments in an overtly mechanical way, Tsunoda highlights process versus result, making clear that even in stasis there is motion. The push-pull flow of the music itself communicates this flux: Because “Studies” comes after “At the port,” each glitch conjures glimpses of the unaltered landscape, which rapidly burst and dissipate like flares in the mind. Meanwhile, the percussive vocal repetitions—each of which catches a slice of landscape as if by accident—establish rhythmic patterns that linger in the web of rumbling vehicles, chirping insects, and the disembodied scraping of metal pipes on concrete, encouraging us to make connections between human and nature, subject and object, synthetic and organic. More than simply attuning us to background noise we may have previously ignored, Landscape and Voice reminds us that we are active subjects, shaping the world just as it shapes us.


The L.A.-based singer and violinist makes her boldest and most fully formed statement yet.

Athena

As the Greek myth goes, the goddess Athena sprang fully formed from Zeus’ forehead, wearing a suit of armor. Her purview included wisdom, the arts, wartime strategy, and cities, and she was revered as a model of righteousness and justice; her namesake city endured as a space for exploratory thought and bold ideas. The Ohio-born, Los Angeles-based Sudan Archives is the latest in a centuries-long parade of Athena enthusiasts, christening her first full-length album with the goddess’ name. The songs, her best yet, have the quality of revelation, and the album earns its namesake.
Between her 2017 self-titled EP and last year’s Sink EP, Brittney Parks—the woman behind Sudan Archives—had already exhibited palpable growth as a musician. She one-upped the looping charm of songs like “Come Meh Way” and “Paid” with the rippling lilt of “Nont for Sale” and “Escape.” Those songs now feel more like sketches against Athena. Parks keeps her toolkit of hip-hop beats, millennial R&B gloss, and self-taught fiddling inspired by Sudanese and Ghanaian traditions.
On Athena, she fuses them with even greater acuity, building songs that boast an impressive depth of field. The bass scoops lower, the grooves get deeper and funkier, and the layers of her violin parts give the illusion of a full orchestra. She shares producer credits on most of her songs, joined by Washed Out’s Ernest Greene, Scottish producer Rodaidh McDonald (the XX, King Krule, Sampha) and Paul White, a London-based producer whose credits include work with Open Mike Eagle and Danny Brown. Collectively, these big-deal producers never tip the scales too far in any direction. It’s a testament to Parks’ own vision that she can work with so many producers within a single album and emerge with her singular creative voice intact.
Within her highly synthesized songs, Parks details sumptuous natural imagery in verdant metaphors (“Iceland Moss”), and in her parallels between a youthful relationship and the unorthodox grace of sea birds on “Pelicans in the Summer.” “Glorious” feels like a prime contender for crossover —a guest verse from rapper D-8 comes and goes without any serious impact, but the track builds a stronger case for her secret-weapon capabilities as a hip-hop collaborator.
It’s a rare thrill to be able to hear an artist making leaps and bounds in their work in such a short span of time, to follow along as their explorations get deeper and weirder. Having developed a sound so distinctly her own, Parks has liberated herself from any preset expectations of genre or style. She warns listeners as much on Athena opener “Did You Know,” where her reflections on childhood ambitions to rule the world are muddled by adult insecurities. Her resolution is promising within the context of the song as much as her whole catalog: “At the end of the day, I’mma get my way.”

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


The Seattle band’s fourth record, their first for Sub Pop, is forward-thinking pop-punk that successfully—albeit narrowly—manages to dodge the obvious pitfalls.

This Mess Is a Place

When Tacocat first entered indie rock’s collective consciousness, “pastel goth” and flasks laminated in Lisa Frank stickers were very cool, and “resting bitch face” had yet to become a pop-feminism cliché. The Seattle-based four-piece came up in perhaps the simpler times of the early 2010s. Consistent but not exactly prolific, Tacocat could’ve easily fallen into the trap of sounding like any other unabashedly twee group that ripened in the first half of the decade. Thankfully, This Mess Is a Place, the group’s fourth record and their first for Sub Pop, is a forward-thinking pop-punk that successfully—albeit narrowly—manages to dodge the obvious pitfalls.
On This Mess Is a Place, Tacocat play with a familiar set of girl-group and grunge-rock influences, adding inklings of straight-up pop. Album opener “Hologram” is a sort of Dressy Bessy meets the Marine Girls situation, with goopy, multi-part harmonies and saccharine guitars. The song asks the big questions in life: “How did we come to be so jaded?” and, “Is numb even a feeling?” Instead of answering these profundities with equally anesthetized sonics, the band’s pure indie bubblegum does the exact opposite. If Tacocat feel life is stagnant and stale, their own art might be the antidote.
Tacocat have always encapsulated the kind of cheerfully campy aesthetic that encourages “shoveling yourself out of the shit” on bad days. They make fun music in a time when goofing off seems almost antediluvian, and being earnest is worse. On “New World,” a song as sugary as shotgunned Mountain Dew, Tacocat ask listeners to imagine waking up to beauty, rather than dread. Life might suck, lead vocalist Emily Nokes seems to say, but what if for one day it didn’t? “I woke up today/And all my friends were happy/No one to tell them when to stop,” she sings with an affect that is both wry and daring, as bandmates join in with jaunty rockabilly rhythms. “Rose-Colored Sky” brings Tacocat’s feminist sensibilities to the forefront. Though it sounds unsettlingly cheery, the song roasts the ambivalent rich who get “first prize just to participate,” turning a lazy explanation of millennial malaise back on the real threat: people wholly uninterested in politics so long as the world looks good to them.
That’s not to say Tacocat don’t indulge in fun for fun’s sake, which sometimes makes for surface-level songwriting. “Meet Me at La Palma” is, after all, a song about getting wasted on giant margaritas and dancing “the foxtrot” with someone who just broke an engagement, and there’s not much more to it than that. Tacocat has released songs with similar content throughout the past decade, writing music that’s consistently both sloppy and serious. Sometimes they trust the formula a little too much, and This Mess Is a Place can occasionally feel overly safe. But at other moments, the album radiates sneakily subversive fuck-you attitude. Most of the time, it feels like taking a joyride with four bonafide party experts egging you on as you drunk-text an ex. It’s fun and messy and you might forget it completely by the next day. No regrets, though.


The Icelandic post-rock band's longest-gestating LP abandons both the pop leanings of more recent releases and the volcanic dynamics of their earliest material but still sounds like the work of no other group.

Valtari

Let's start with an understatement: things tend to move quite slowly in the world of Sigur Rós. This is true whether we're talking about the glacial pace of their songs, the glacial pace at which they release them, or their artistic progression. In the 13 years since Ágætis Byrjun became the first and possibly only post-rock crossover record, Sigur Rós have edged closer to actual pop while still maintaining their singular place amongst many consumers' record collections: The band's stamp of approval is pretty much the only way a lot of people are dealing with 10-minute songs or an invented language. It's a tremendous example of a band that's managed to own its lane while making it incrementally wider, and their consistently positive reception gives you the idea that the only way Sigur Rós could make a bad record is if they made one that was wholly unrecognizable as their own. Well, you won't confuse Valtari as being the work of anyone else, if only because their sixth studio album so flattens and narrows Sigur Rós' aesthetic to the point where the title scans as self-parody. "Valtari" is Icelandic for "steamroller," by the way.
"It sounds corny, but when I listen to it, it puts images in my head. I feel like I'm walking up a mountain alone." This is how bassist Georg Holm recently described Valtari to Rolling Stone, and I find that to be interesting on two fronts, the initial being there's a good chance you had no idea that Sigur Rós had a bassist, let alone what his name is. All too ironic that it's perhaps the only time Holm makes any sort of statement on Valtari, which unfortunately gives weight to the unfair perception of Sigur Rós as Jónsi and anonymous conjurers. It's a disappointment and a missed opportunity, since after the release of 2005's vibrant Takk-- still their most diverse and consistently accessible record-- the most interesting music Sigur Rós have made is relative to their implementation of rhythm, culminating with 2008's clodhopping Animal Collective homage "Gobbledigook" and Jónsi's hypercolored solo album, Go. It's debatable whether the rhythm section was jettisoned in the composition stages or whether they're simply rendered immobile under thick layers of orchestral amber. Either way, Valtari forgoes the promising lean toward pop songcraft of their recent LPs and the volcanic dynamics of their earliest material with only pretty vacancy as a replacement.
About two minutes into Valtari, Jónsi's vocals rise out of a brackish pool of strings, choirs, and piano to tease out a melody. About two minutes later, there's a small rupture of distorted bowed guitars and organ, and two minutes after that, it glides to a serene denouement. That describes opener "Êg Anda" and also basically more than half of Valtari, leaving you to fashion highlights out of relativity. The positive side of Valtari's four-year incubation period is evidenced by "Varúð", the way it effortlessly combines waterlogged piano chords and a brassy fanfare. Yet while the cymbal-bashing crescendo it builds toward is the most viscerally rewarding thing here, anyone familiar with the past decade of Sigur Rós has heard it dozens of times.
Which brings me back to "it puts images in my head." The evocative nature of Sigur Rós' music has always been a major draw, but I think the more telling part of Holm's quote is "I feel like I'm walking up a mountain." Indeed, due to Sigur Rós' unwillingness to exert any sort of artistic will on the listener, Valtari feels like work, a trudge, asking for too much by way of demanding nothing concrete. Even the controversially blank () had staunch conviction in its commitment to supernatural ethereality-- not to mention subtly impressive melodies and some of their most unsettling peaks. If you're familiar only with Sigur Rós' studio albums, you might hear Valtari as a maximalist version of ()-- which would essentially negate the entire point of (). Too loud to truly pass for ambient music, yet too invertebrate to accommodate visceral pleasures, Valtari is most often simply there, the passage of time distinguished only by the occasional shift in texture. The drum sounds that close out "Rembihnûtur" are a nice touch and establish a possible connection between Sigur Rós and the likes of Balam Acab, as do the gamelan-like, detuned bells of the title track. But if you get to that point, Jónsi all but disappears on the final two tracks, and consequently, Valtari's tether to sounding like Sigur Rós rather than indistinct audio Calgon.
I suppose it's always worth remembering to review what you got as opposed to what you wanted, and as Jónsi explained to Q magazine, "the music kind of just rolls over you… in a good way." So it can all sound incredibly grumpy to take issue with Valtari for staying in cruise control, no different from criticizing a day at the beach for being too hot. Well, if we're gonna continue down the path of that metaphor for Sigur Rós' longest-gestating record, it's more like the first beach day of the year and you find out you can't go surfing, can't throw a Frisbee, can't start a bonfire, can't even go in the ocean. The problem isn't that Valtari aspires to beauty, even if it's a commonplace, celestial understanding of it. Sigur Rós have proven they can make indelible music that's pretty and unpredictable, pretty and melodic, pretty and unnerving, pretty and inspiring. Valtari wants to be pretty and that's it.


On Slow Focus, Fuck Buttons' first album in four years, Ben Power and Andy Hung remain devoted to forbidding, elemental sensations. Their slow-moving pieces inspire the kinds of big feelings that double as reminders of our smallness, and they've never sounded this massive before.

Slow Focus

Benjamin Power and Andrew Hung, the duo behind Fuck Buttons, are restless, inveterate equipment scavengers: They've worked on computer software, on Casio keyboards, on children's toys, on old karaoke machines. In interviews, they come off as eager, curious, and transparent about their process and their gear, but their music is about as approachable as an Egyptian tomb. On Slow Focus, their first album in four years, Fuck Buttons remain devoted to forbidding, elemental sensations, and their slow-moving pieces inspire the kinds of big feelings-- exhilaration, majesty, awe-- that double as reminders of our smallness.
Listening to their progression, from 2008's Street Horrrsing to now, you get the sense of tinkerers building obsessively retooled versions of the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, each bigger than the last. (We are the apes in this equation.) They got their start in the noise-rock community, but transcended that niche almost immediately, and their earliest material, some of featuring distorted, screaming vocals, sounds positively quaint in light of what followed. Tarot Sport was so much larger and more ambitious than their debut that it gave them an unlikely career as festival headliners, and a piece of the album ("Surf Solar") snuck its way into Opening Ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. Slow Focus feels like a logical endpoint to their journey: Tarot Sport might have gotten them to the Olympics, but they've never sounded this, well, Olympian before.
The difference is apparent from the opening seconds of the nine-minute "Brainfreeze." The massive sounds we hear-- a warped synth figure being pounded into shapes by hammering drums and a pistoning rhythm track-- are lonelier and more remote than anything Fuck Buttons have made before. Tarot Sport, big as it was, gestured vaguely at human bodies, with airy, glittering sounds on "Surf Solar" evoking an outdoor festival or a rave. There are no human bodies left on Slow Focus, just open space and hard surfaces, and the sounds resound for miles in all directions.
Power and Hung self-produced the record, and judging from the results, they should start producing for other acts as well. Every sound on Slow Focus is smooth, polished, and lovingly molded, like a factory-shaped piece of steel. The album's tone is a curious mix of juiced and muted, like Hung and Power have rewired the maximalism of stadium EDM to arrive at the minimalist emptiness of someone like Detroit's Robert Hood. This is perfectionist's music: Dr. Dre, who has been holed up for years vacuuming pathogens off of Detox like dead skin cells from a computer keyboard, might be chasing a sound like this-- deep and resonant and beautifully emptied-out.
The seven tracks tend to move in simple, navigational arcs: Open widescreen on an empty vista, pull back even further. Midway through "Brainfreeze", the synths shift up an octave and widen outward until they slowly swallow the track, a giant space cruiser blotting out the sky. "The Red Wing" begins with percussive pops and adds layers until the percussion all but disappears, a city shrinking to pinprick in a shuttle window. This journey might grow wearying if the textures on the album weren't so fascinating and dimensional; a piece like "Stalker" seems to be operating on six different planes at once, and it's a pleasure just to be able to walk through the space.
The song titles -- "Sentients", "The Red Wing", "Hidden XS"-- are unusually instructive for Fuck Buttons, who normally make a point of avoiding specific cues for their music. But Slow Focus plays like a utopian nightmare of mechanization-- on "Year of the Dog," György Ligeti strings screech beneath a Giorgio Moroder synth, while the first sound on the ten-minute "Stalker" is a bland, lasering synth, like a printer whirring away at a thousand-page document. Slow Focus is pointedly pitiless, inexorable: There are no human feelings here, at least of the squishy kind. If you are fascinated by the people around you the same way you are fascinated by protozoa, you might identify uncomfortably with the world Slow Focus depicts. When at the next TED Conference, a clicker-brandishing, headset-wearing speaker argues that harvesting organs from the rest of the human population is the logical way to progress, "Stalker" will probably be playing on the slideshow.
There has always been menace in Fuck Buttons' music, but it used to exist in balance with lighter, leavening moments, like "Bright Tomorrow" or "The Lisbon Maru". With the exception of the manic, squeegeeing synths that dance through "Prince's Prize", that touch is absent on Slow Focus. It's missed, slightly, but a little humor would have punctured the purity of the world they've built. Power and Hung have made either the year's most introverted party album or the most expansive loner's album; either way, there are few albums this year that offer this much space to get lost in.


Double LP Exai is Autechre's eleventh record, and the Manchester duo's longest by a margin of about 40 minutes. As ever, it shows Rob Brown and Sean Booth to be top-notch sonic magpies and brilliant technicians, but it fully justifies their reputation for being poor editors.

Exai

Autechre neither make casual music, nor do they make music casually: The English duo of Rob Brown and Sean Booth have released 11 albums under the name in the last 20 years, along with a chain of EPs that have generally been as integral to their evolution as the long-players. All of those albums easily pass the one-hour hurdle; 2008's excellent Quaristice comprised 20 relatively brief tracks cut from hours of extended jamming, but it still clocked in just shy of 74 minutes. In 2010, the two enthusiasts offered a webcast of an exhilarating 12-hour DJ set, pogoing from hip-hop and indie rock to industrial and electronica. (One short and emblematic sequence incorporated Eno and Byrne, RZA, Coil, and Boards of Canada.) A certain charm of Autechre has always been that they love music and they love making music; even at their most clinical, this zeal has remained an inherent premise.
In the last decade, the Manchester duo rewrote their own rules, leaning on the risks of their early works until, by their eighth LP Untilted, it was clear that their intention was no longer simply making bodies move, though that was sometimes a by-product. If Autechre's earliest records were typically classified as intelligent dance music, their later efforts might best be dubbed intelligence-enabled dance music-- with eclectic touchstones absorbed and dissolved, they did whatever they wanted. "I think there's always this competitive freshness that we're trying to achieve," Brown told an interviewer around the time of Quaristice's release. "That's all there is in terms of statement or communication."
But for all their influence, energy and innovation, Autechre have never been very good editors. Their EPs are the length of most bands' albums, while their albums run about as long as short feature films. If you hear an interesting sound or idea from Autechre, you're bound to hear it again and again before a track's end. Despite their creative restlessness, Brown and Booth have never been very good at moving on their music itself. These qualities dovetail to the detriment of Exai, the band's eleventh record-- and, by a margin of about 40 minutes, its longest. Though it's often interesting, Exai is insufferably exhausting, a record imprisoned by the obsessions of those who made it.
Five years ago, in an interview with Pitchfork, Brown said that the possibilities of technology had made music production intimidatingly infinite. A key to productivity, he implied, was setting limits and aims. "You've got to be realistic," he said. "You can sit in front of a computer and have a blank slate and be completely overwhelmed by the possibilities and not get anywhere." Whereas 2010's wonderfully muted and warm Oversteps found a path and followed it, Exai is a behemoth devoid of focus, an album on which the tough decisions about direction and, later, elimination have not been made. There are bass-heavy beaters that suggest the pair's earlier works, and amorphous drone numbers that don't; there are glitchy sprints that chirp, and menacing slogs that haunt. Just one of its 17 tracks doesn't break the four-minute mark, and many slingshot between various sounds and schemes, meaning that the transitions within the album and the songs themselves are weak, if not nonexistent. Pieces shift into bridges that lead nowhere ("T ess xi"), suddenly mix their metaphors and mechanics (the end of "recks on") and wallow in aesthetic indecision (tone-setting opener "FLeure").
There's nothing actually wrong with the sounds on Exai: Though they don't turn many new tricks, Autechre have once again proven to be top-notch sonic magpies and brilliant technicians. "Irlite (get 0)" makes a synthesizer sound like a church organ overrun by the ghosts in the graveyard, while "T ess xi" employs fluorescent soul keyboards as its basic building block. "deco Loc" turns someone's voice inside out, creating beautiful textures and themes from a sound salvaged and forcibly repurposed. The drums splashed over the surface of "Runrepik" suggest sun-warped crunk singles. Its chaser, "spl9", is an industrial crucible where the ruptures of power electronics and the force of dubstep are heated until they ricochet off one another. Brown and Booth are familiar with each other's habits, and wary of them, too. "T ess xi" showcases a sort of rhythmic volleyball between the pair, where several seemingly simple beats tease one another, shifting so as to avoid anything so obvious as a groove. Likewise, "vekoS" ends when its subaquatic beat surrenders slowly to a tide of overwhelming static. On an album of erratic shifts and very few segues, it's a moment of impossible tension.
Arguing that an album offers too much music seems passé at best, entirely irrelevant at worst. Aren't records just old-fashioned methods of assembling information, arbitrary holding tanks for material that could be released in online formats that don't adhere to time limitations or sequencing expectations? Possibly, and perhaps Autechre is once again ahead of a curve that we barely recognize. But that doesn't solve Exai's fundamental problem: Some of its songs deserve to be cut into halves, while others should have been chopped wholesale. With those snips, Exai would be a really good Autechre album that summarizes the various successes of their career in an hour or so. As is, it's as much a frustrating obstacle course as it is a grueling marathon.


Working with John Congleton, the folk trio makes their most personal and energetic statement yet, sacrificing some of their clarion intimacy along the way.

Good Woman

The Staveley-Taylor sisters have spent the past decade gently pushing the musical boundaries of folk. Their debut, Dead & Born & Grown, was traditional, bare-bones, and acoustic, but they started evolving almost immediately. When Justin Vernon took over for 2015’s If I Was, their sound expanded drastically, incorporating synths and more dramatic arrangements on songs like the four-minute mini-epic “Blood I Bled.” Working again with Vernon and BJ Burton on 2017’s The Way Is Read, they expanded even further, collaborating with the contemporary classical group yMusic and interlocking their pristine harmonies with flailing woodwinds and strings.
Good Woman show the sisters pushing even further into the unknown. The music was primarily produced by the Staves after a series of life-changing events, including the loss of their mother, the birth of Emily Staveley-Taylor’s child. and the end of a five-year relationship. The three of them (they call themselves a “three-headed-monster”) began writing about those events, bringing forth songs about undue emotional burdens, controlling exes, and gender roles. Late in the process, they recruited John Congleton, someone whose crunchy, heavy sound (heard on St. Vincent and Sharon Van Etten records) doesn’t quite gel with the Staves. Even though the record often sounds like a battle between the musicians and their engineer, the songs on Good Woman are strong enough to overcome any friction.
Congleton encouraged the trio to write more honestly about their emotions. The Staves could be surprisingly acerbic in the past, but they haven’t bared their feelings on record like they do here. On “Paralysed,” the sisters sing “I used to be/Something you made and admired/I used to be fire, I used to be magic,” and on “Failure,” they internalize the criticisms of an ex before realizing he’s no better. Both these songs show women handling emotional labor while their partners don’t hold themselves accountable. Previous Staves records often seemed to use lyrics as a vehicle for the music, so the specificity is welcome.
Right from the title track, Congleton’s influence is obvious—the dry drum thud used on his Bombay Bicycle Club and Everything Everything records, the distortion from Sharon Van Etten. When Congleton and the Staves line up, it’s on more uptempo songs where the Staves push themselves. “Best Friend” is lovely, euphoric indie pop as earnest as its title. The band has cheekily referred to “Black & White” from If I Was as “the first Staves rock song,” and on this record, they make up for what feels like lost time: even the ballads like “Satisfied” and “Trying” are louder and more extroverted than before.
Unfortunately, that means their usual intimacy goes missing. Ethan Johns brought the minimalism of early Laura Marling records to his Staves sessions, and Vernon hadn’t yet gone for 22, A Million intensity, but Congleton doesn’t adjust his go-for-the-rafters approach. “Careful Kid” kicks off with a wheezing sound effect that dooms the song even before Congleton’s cavernous drums crowd out the chorus. Similarly, “Sparks,” otherwise a highlight, layers on synth pads until it begins to sound like several songs at once. The most disappointing moment on the record is the final version of “Nothing’s Gonna Happen,” which buries a gorgeous demo they released a year ago in too many woodwinds and distorted effects. The backing vocals on “Sparks” repeat “...and I feel it all,” but Congleton does his damndest to obscure a direct connection to those feelings.
The Staves manage to overcome Congleton's production and mixing tics because their voices can cut through anything. Whether they appear on Lucy Rose, Leonard Cohen, or Bruce Hornsby records, their harmonies always stand out. It’s heartening to hear them turn their attention inward; maybe next time, they’ll trust that sound to do its work without the input—or intrusions—from a collaborator.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Bastards gathers remixes from Björk's ambitious multi-media project Biophilia, including contributions from Death Grips, Hudson Mohawke, Matthew Herbert, and Omar Souleyman.

Bastards

Björk has earned a certain amount of deference. She released a string of masterpieces that redefined, on a grand scale, what a "pop star" looks and sounds like and how the avant-garde relates to the mainstream, as well as changing our conception of what makes a voice beautiful. Her earlier albums were so good they warped the light around all that has followed; as visible as Björk has become, she's getting harder and harder to see.
Increasingly, her albums reach us as the eye of a storm of extracurricular activities. With all this diversifying, Björk seems on a "post pop-stardom public intellectual" tenure track that brings to mind David Byrne. Starting at around 2007's Volta, her new albums began to feel less like events themselves and more like the musical arm of some broader project. This tendency reached its peak on 2011's Biophilia, an album celebrating the wonders of natural science that was also a series of interactive iPad apps that was also a series of shows at the New York Hall of Science. For me, this was where the signal-to-noise ratio in Björk's work finally, definitively tipped. As a series of ideas, Biophilia was glorious -- fascinating to think about, awe-inspiring in its reach. As an album, it was often turgid, frankly boring, and rarely worth leaving on.
The Biophilia remixes you find on Bastards have been commercially available  in other forms for months; they began trickling out shortly after the album was released in a series of 12-inches, released periodically. Bastards represents a capstone on the Biophilia project, but it is also the end of a dizzying breadcrumb-trail of packaging and repackaging. Pity the hardcore Björk fan; like the lifelong Trent Reznor or Radiohead fan, they are faced with an idol whose musical creativity  is only matched by their ingenuity in dreaming up new ways to separate their faithful from disposable income.
As a standalone product, Bastards feels distressingly unnecessary. But if you didn't want to scoop up these remixes piecemeal and were waiting for a handy package, it is here for you. They occasionally offer new angles from the somewhat-blocky Biophilia material; the album's three most dynamic songs, "Crystalline", "Virus", and "Mutual Core", receive the most attention. Hudson Mohawke gives "Virus" a gleaming new coat of paint built from of comet-trails synths and massive synthesized horns; it generates the same stonerish awe that anyone who has ever gaped at a planetarium ceiling will recognize.
Death Grips contribute a pair of remixes, one to "Sacrifice" and one to "Thunderbolt", both of which send a shot of bad-coke energy skittering through the material. "Sacrifice"'s margins are filled with mortar-round percussion sounds and sampled snuffling-creature noises, while the glacial church-organ dirge of "Thunderbolt", is given a shot of adrenaline through that brings to mind a New Order song hyperventilating. These New Puritans strip all the elements out from underneath Björk's astonishing vocal take and surround her with drizzly bits of bass, piano, and a mournfully chanting vocal ensemble.  Omar Souleyman more or less ditches all the elements that make Björk's songs her own and throws Björk's "Crystalline" vocals over a piece of his signature dabke music, transforming it into Syrian New Wave.
The best remixes here remind that Björk's voice remains an endlessly malleable instrument, capable of mapping itself onto nearly any context. But apart from Hudson Mohawke's luminous "Virus", there are few revelations wrung from this thin material. In 30 tantalizing seconds Matthew Herbert offers us a breath-caught, ecstatic recasting of "Sacrifice", in which the song suddenly feels like an outpouring on the order of "Joga". But it disappears just as quickly as it hits, and Bastards does little to counteract the sensation that latter-day Björk records are more fulfilling to read about than listen to.


Earlier this year, a test pressing of a previously unreleased LP by Caustic Window, one of Aphex Twin mastermind Richard James’ many pseudonyms, appeared for sale on Discogs, followed by a crowd-funded release sanctioned by James. The backstory stands as proof of the connectedness of fandom in the digital era, but the music also has its own rewards.

Caustic Window LP

When Richard D. James released 2001’s Drukqs, the last proper Aphex Twin album, it was considered a massive disappointment. The 2xCD set mixed frenetic drill’n’bass tracks with gorgeous Satie-like miniatures for prepared piano, and the feeling at the time was that he’d been here before and done it all better. After 1999’s “Windowlicker”, a landmark track that was both deeply strange and also somehow a pop hit, there was an unspoken dream that James might just might change popular music completely, remake it in his image. Drukqs didn’t come close to fulfilling that promise, but listening to it 13 years later, perhaps not surprisingly, it sounds more interesting than it did at the time. Could this have something to do with it being the last Aphex Twin album? When we heard it in 2001, we had every reason to think that there might be another around the corner in a year or two.
So Drukqs seemed more like a bump in the road, maybe, than an artist coasting for a minute. It wasn’t the last we heard from James—there were the many Analord releases in 2005, some stray tracks, additional work as the Tuss—but James’ unbelievable 10-year run as a creative force mostly ended just after the turn of the millennium. Since we’re still left wondering if and when he’ll make a full return to the world of recorded music, the huge clutch of music he did release seems more classic with each passing day. He’s become something like electronic music’s post-retirement Miles Davis: from the vantage point of the 1980s and later, say, everything Miles released through his 1975 hiatus sounded amazing. An artist who quits can become so revered, what output there is becomes enveloped in a kind of aura, and you start to hear it differently. Tracks that don’t necessarily connect in a big way on their own become understood as an important part of a bigger picture, and its perceived importance grows exponentially.
I mention all this by way of saying that the “new” album by Richard James, the Caustic Window LP, sounds very good, but there’s so much wrapped up in hearing new/old music from him it can be hard to puzzle out. That this set has such a strange genesis also seems appropriate, given James’ very low public profile and long history of “Is this him or someone else?” releases. Earlier this year, a test pressing of a previously unreleased LP by Caustic Window, one of James’ many pseudonyms, originally intended for release on Rephlex, the label he owns with Grant Wilson-Claridge, appeared for sale on Discogs. Members of the We Are the Music Makers forum, an active message board dedicated to electronic music in general and Aphex Twin in particular, persuaded Rephlex to sanction an unusual idea for distributing the music: they would raise money through Kickstarter and those who contributed would get a high-quality digital copy of the record, recorded from a needle-drop of the test pressing. After the project was funded and the music digitized, the test pressing was auctioned on eBay. Some of the money went to the label, some went to charity. But 4,000 people got lossless files of the record from donating, and then of course it leaked. It’s a long way for music to travel in 20 years, and it’d be an interesting story based only on the crowd-funding angle, showing the connectedness of fandom in the digital era. But the music has its own rewards.
It helps to understand where James was in 1994. For the previous three years, he’d been issuing a string of 12"s and EPs under various names, most of which were firmly under the umbrella of acid house and techno. You can find these tracks scattered across the Caustic Window set Compilation, the Aphex Twin collection Classics, the Polygon Window album Surfing on Sine Waves, and the Analogue Bubblebath EPs. In addition to functional dance music, James had also put out Selected Ambient Works 85–92 and, around the time this album would have come out, the legendary Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, so we’re talking about some serious output in just a couple of years.
During the early days, James tended to go to extremes. He made dance music that was often harsh and repetitive and then he made ambient music that was stirring in its simple beauty. He was exploring the edges, figuring out where the boundaries were, and in the second half of the 1990s he figured out how to make it all work together. What’s interesting about the Caustic Window LP, especially relative to the abrasive material collected on Compilation, is that it’s generally measured, never too harsh or too fast and also never especially lyrical. It feels like an album, with tracks that were not singles meant to be heard together. James uses this middle ground as a showcase for his unerring feel for structure and his ability to make electronic tracks there were futuristic but also imbued with personality, where you get a sense of the man behind the controls.
So the highlights here, which include the bouncy electro-cruncher “Mumbly” (later a live staple), the spacious and easily tuneful “Fingertrips”, the salsa-inflected acid house “Squidge in the Fridge”, and the chilled-out and playful neo-trip-hop “Jazzphase”, sound best in the context of the record as a complete listen, with its gradually shifting palette and BPMs. James’ work during this era had a slightly crude, homemade quality that brought it down to earth but also, with its contrasts, served to highlight the overall musicality. If these are not necessarily the prettiest melodies he created, Caustic Window LP is still filled with tunes that work brilliantly as tunes, with memorable chord progressions that move through clearly delineated sections. One of James’ defining qualities is that he’s almost never boring; there’s almost always some element of fascination in his tracks, whether it’s an oddball sample, a weird texture, an impossibly heavy percussion line, or tune that won’t leave your head.
It’s only on the album’s final third that the record takes a sharp turn, as the nice but ultimately too-long mood piece “101 Rainbows (Ambient Mix)” leads into the hyper-distorted “Phlaps” and the blistering acid of “Cunt” and then into a listen-once track of phone pranks. It’s tempting to speculate on how the record would have been received at the time and why it might have been shelved. James was moving fast in those days, so it’s possible that this album felt too much like where he’d been before, especially given the new ground he was breaking with SAW II. By the following year’s I Care Because You Do his sound was again changing rapidly, and the rest of the decade saw him attaining the status of a serious composer. Given all that, Caustic Window LP probably wouldn’t have left a significant mark, and would have been heard as second-tier James. Twenty years later, though, we’re hearing it with that aura, that extra bit of longing that comes from how scarce music from James has become. And in that light, second tier is still very good indeed.


The Norwegian duo gave up on black metal a long time ago, turning instead to an open-ended interest in the metal they loved as kids: thrash and crust punk, high-flying British metal, and blustery hardcore. It's hard to imagine two middle-aged men having more fun than Darkthrone do on their propulsive sixteenth studio album.

The Underground Resistance

When you think of Darkthrone, you think of fun, right? If you scoffed, guffawed, or simply disagreed, don't worry-- you're safely in the majority. The Norwegian band are best known, of course, for what their 1999 album labeled "ravishing grimness"-- savage, belligerent, and unfiltered black metal, epitomized by a blitz of icy hot classics that started with 1992's A Blaze in the Northern Sky and end, depending upon your stance on Second Wave orthodoxy and eclecticism, sometime just before or after the turn of the millennium. They're the dudes that epitomized ghoulish corpsespaint covers, brandished the credo "True Norwegian Black Metal," and fended off Aryan allegations as Varg Vikernes headed to jail. So, no, maybe fun isn't the first adjective Darkthrone conjures.
But it's hard to imagine two middle-aged men having more fun than Fenriz and Nocturno Culto-- the band's lone multi-instrumentalists, songwriters, and singers for two decades now-- do on The Underground Resistance, their inescapably enthusiastic 16th studio album. Darkthrone long ago gave up on black metal, turning instead to an open-ended and unmitigated interest in recombining the metal they loved as kids: thrash and crust punk, high-flying British metal and blustery hardcore. Those influences were always tucked within Darkthrone's most famous albums, but lately they've given over to them entirely. The simple joy of these influences is the thread that ties together The Underground Resistance, an album about unfit enemies and deserved death that nevertheless delights in its own music-making élan. Darkthrone's already been involved in a movement that revolutionized heavy metal both sonically and stylistically; The Underground Resistance, then, is simply the latest and most propulsive homage to the bands that sparked that revolution for them.
In the early days of Darkthrone, Fenriz didn't give many interviews, or at least he didn't say much in them. These days, though, he writes liner notes in which he conveys his influences and intentions. And his Metal Band of the Week blog advocates for young acts he likes and older acts he thinks went overlooked. He's made up for that early media quiet by seemingly giving interviews to most anyone who has asked. In doing so, he's often surprised journalists with his forthrightness and humor. "Isn't it normal to want to communicate your life's work?” he asked That’s How Kids Die, questioning those surprised by his newfound verbosity. For a guy who once posed in corpsepaint, he sure uses a lot of emoticons and knows a lot about Pink Panther.
But Fenriz rightly insists that there's not a lot of humor in Darkthrone's new music. (With a song sporting a name like "Leave No Cross Unturned", though, there is certainly some.) Still, The Underground Resistance flaunts the sort of vigor you'd expect from old friends out to have a good time: "Dead Early" is a menacing five-minute race that suggests Motörhead loaded on piss and vinegar, while the relentless chug of "Lesser Men" pogoes from circle-pit invocations to head-down, horns-up headbanging. "Valkyrie" begins with a classic doom feint, craggy acoustic guitars introducing a riff that unfurls over cascading drums. They return to that slow burn for the coda, but the middle is all blustery thrash, with Fenriz chasing himself in circles behind the drums while his falsetto peaks above the din. The album's real clincher, "Come Warfare, the Entire Doom", is a series of swivels and sprints, once again teasing doom before harnessing the band’s death metal past in an eight-minute anthem. The aforementioned "Leave No Cross Unturned", the disc's 14-minute finale and the longest song ever in the Darkthrone catalog, confirms the band’s gumption to simply go for anything. They hint at Saxon and Maiden with operatic vocals and an incredibly sharp hook and then at punk with the blissfully simple but successful outro. What’s more, Fenriz and Nocturnal Culto even circle back toward their weighty black metal reputation with the blanket of serrated guitars near the song’s start. A few minutes later, Fenriz howls from some deep abyss. In turn, they leave no relevant idea unturned.
Fenriz and Nocturno Culto own one of the great unimpeachable brands in all of heavy metal, and they've protected it not by limiting it but by letting it expand and fluctuate as need be. Rather than retread what's made them famous, Darkthrone have continually confirmed their status by refusing to kowtow to old expectations. They don't play live, and they don't depend on this band for their income; therefore, they don’t need this band to sound like it did it 1993 so they can cash in on the past rather than risk their image on the present. Amid tides of ceaseless band reunions and reissues that more often than not repeat what we already knew, Darkthrone in 2013 find themselves in an extremely enviable position because they have done exactly what they've wanted. Legends encumbered by being legends, they stick true to the title of The Underground Resistance-- they are two veterans having fun by continuing to play like they're carefree teenage rebels.


The supposed final chapter in the late country star's career-capping sessions with producer Rick Rubin is released and fashioned as a tearjerker.

Johnny Cash: American Recordings VI: Ain't No Grave

American Recordings VI: Ain't No Grave

Johnny Cash recorded most of the tracks for the fifth and sixth installments of his American Recordings series between his wife June Carter Cash's death in May 2003 and his own just four months later. He was in poor health, and the effects of Shy-Drager syndrome prevented him from working most days. But when he felt up to it, he recorded; when he felt too weak, he wished he were recording. The able-bodied A Hundred Highways, released in 2006, was the first product of all that working and wishing, and Ain't No Grave is now the second. It doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know about Cash in his final months, nor does it sound like an attempt to re-brand an icon or re-shape a legacy. Instead, it plays like a desperate means of keeping Cash alive just a little longer. As such, it may say more about producer Rick Rubin, who has guided this series for 16 years, than it does about Cash himself.
Rubin comes across as deeply sentimental and fashions Ain't No Grave-- rumored to be the final installment in the series-- as a tearjerker. Listen as Cash ponders the delicate seam separating life from death on his own arrangement of "I Corinthians 15:55". Listen as he reminisces sweetly about life and love on Kris Kristofferson's "For the Good Times". Listen as he realizes he has a long past and little future on Tom Paxton's "Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound". It can be manipulative and obvious: Just the title of "I Don't Hurt Anymore" looms ominously on the tracklist. Cash's weak but determined performance aside, it's meant as a beyond-the-grave pronouncement, a consolation from the afterlife. The song itself was never about heaven. It's about numbness as a salve for heartache, so in this context it feels like a great tune that cannot carry such a heavy conceptual burden. Between that and all the other tracks about mortality, Ain't No Grave has the feel of a séance-- morose and possibly even staged.
And yet, we want to believe. We want Cash to go out on top, with a strong batch of songs created in the interval between hardship and grace. Even so, it's hard not to question some of the choices made in assembling and arranging these new songs. The album begins with its two clumsiest tracks: Cash's vocal is strong on the title track, weaker on Sheryl Crow's "Redemption Day", and here's where Rubin shows his influence over the project. He overloads both with goth-country instrumentation meant to recall "The Man Comes Around" and "God's Gonna Cut You Down", but the nail-in-coffin percussion, the eerie organ, and the blues guitar playing through an old radio all sound like clichés by now. The Old Testament ambience has lost its impact, contrasting sharply with the hands-off approach that defined the first and still best American Recordings album.
When Rubin leaves the fire and brimstone behind, Ain't No Grave picks up considerably, revealing itself as a personal rather than preacherly album. Even in those final days, when his spirit was strong but his voice weak, Cash remained a charismatic and commanding singer, with an easy gravity and a friendly, grandfatherly presence. He draws out the long syllables and sustained vowels of Bob Nolan's "Cool Water" gracefully and even joyfully, and sounds particularly invigorated on Joe "Red" Hayes and Jack Rhodes' "A Satisfied Mind" (given the relative robustness of his voice, the track actually seems like it's from a different session altogether). And of course, it wouldn't be a final American Recordings album without a weepy send-off. No one, not even Cash, could pull off Ed McCurdy's "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" without sounding sappy, and Queen Lili'uokalani's "Aloha Oe" is the studiously unsentimental sentimental send-off we all knew was coming. Ain't No Grave isn't really Cash's farewell as much as it is Rubin's memorial mixtape.


The underground New York rapper's noisy, corroded new mixtape is also uniquely attuned to melody and song structure. It's thoughtful, spiritual, and above all, ambitious.

Valley of Grace

When he was growing up, Chaz Hall’s parents dragged him to church every Sunday—back-to-back services in the morning, and a third after a brief reprieve at Old Country Buffet. At some point, he started skipping dinner, slinking to the back of the sanctuary, teaching himself how to operate the equipment at the mixing board. Soon he was recording himself, alone in a empty room.
Over the course of the aughts, Hall—aka Elucid—embedded himself in the labyrinthine world of underground rap in New York. His music can be difficult to find: much of it came out under short-lived or one-off artist names, as collaborations with producers, other rappers, or both. But in the past few years, Elucid’s name has come to the forefront, both as a solo artist and as one-half of the duo Armand Hammer, with his Backwoodz Studioz label mate, billy woods.
Elucid’s music can also be difficult, or at least seem unapproachable. It’s full of knotty, dense writing and supremely technical passages. Yet unlike plenty of underground rappers (and major-label artists, for that matter), he’s uniquely attuned to melody and song structure. Even when he breaks convention, his intent seems to be clear; his delivery is an intoxicating blend of the gruff and guttural and something more melodic. His LP from last year, Save Yourself, was a collage of heartbreak and ambition that takes dozens of listens to properly unpack; it grappled with love, gentrification, and the corrosive nature of religious institutions.
His latest work, a half-hour dispatch called Valley of Grace, has songs titled “self care is a revolutionary act” and “strength is admired humanity is denied.” Where Save Yourself was in certain ways inextricable from New York (Elucid has made camp in Brooklyn, Queens, and elsewhere over the last couple of decades), Valley of Grace was written and recorded in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and taps into something more ethereal. It’s thoughtful, considered, and among the most ambitious rap records to come out this year.
“Colonizers corpse,” for example, sounds straightforward and up-tempo, but is written in a way that throws Elucid into a series of scenes where the spiritual stakes keep increasing: at first, roadside vendors are running after escaped chickens with cleavers, later a “gunned-down” child’s soul runs with the same desperation. He ends the song with “Self-appointed poet laureate of the Niggerati/hard copy/I am not my body,” allowing those words to give way to forty seconds of ear-splitting distortion that open the next track before hopping back in: “Watching America burn from distant shores/I learned to walk hot coals before I left the East coast.”
Valley also features some of Elucid’s most adventurous production: see “talk disruptive for me,” which sounds like the climaxes of three different movies played on top of one another. “she’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” which accounts for fully one-third of the tape’s running time, flits back and forth between (and occasionally merges) cold, industrial textures with warmer tones, the latter coming via very lo-fi samples.
Along with frequent appraisals of America’s current state and deeply entrenched hypocrisy on race, the topic that Elucid returns to most is the state of his body. From the hot coals under his feet to the “clear and present danger” to his physical form (“no release”), Valley of Grace frequently feels, by its very existence, like an act of defiance. Perhaps he says it best himself: “I’m no prisoner/Your indifference and silence speaks volumes/I pray the wrath of my ancestors surrounds you.” With this record, Elucid has taken sharp, maximalist writing, music that’s very nearly avant-garde, and distilled each down to its core elements.


On its four-track, roughly hour-long debut album, this English band adheres closely to the tension/release kind of post-rock.

Enjoy Eternal Bliss

Consider the branch of post-rock that was more or less introduced by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Mogwai in the late 1990s, and is now practiced by Explosions in the Sky, Mono, and others. This music focuses on songs with slow, spare beginnings that steadily climb to huge crescendos bursting at the seems with guitar strums and, often, violin swells. It's easy to forget just how powerful this stuff sounded on first exposure. All of a sudden the direct and emotionally charged communication of film soundtracks was available from instrumental rock bands. And live, man, with the loud climaxes even louder, it was something to behold.
Still, something strange has happened with this sort of music since. It's almost as if the sense of structure laid out in the late 90s proved to be so winning, bands grew afraid to mess with it. Some do what they can to branch out, such as Mogwai, who on record moved on to other things long ago. But it's strange how predictable this music, which depends partly on surprise for those big moments to resonate, has become.
You could almost compare it to 12-bar blues, where after the second repetition of the first couplet you can feel in your body which chord is coming next; when bands of this ilk stick to the quintessence-- which is most of the time-- you can anticipate every modulation of sound well before it arrives. Here on their debut record, England's Yndi Halda adhere closely to the "classic" form of this kind of post-rock. Over four tracks that average about 15 minutes per, they milk the formula for everything it's worth.
How much is left to milk, and exactly what it's worth at this point, will vary a lot from listener to listener. Suffice to say Yndi Halda generally do this thing pretty well. The production is nice, the crescendos crash, the strings and guitar distortion are impressively loud. It's a well-established form, and they hit their marks. They even add a new wrinkle in the form of wordless vocals that crop up here and there, most notably on the last section of the 17-minute "Dash and Blast". Hearing the mass of voices belting out "Dah-da-dah-du-dah" in time with the guitar melody sounds a bit cheesy when it first hits, but then begins to sound pretty great, in part because it sounds a bit cheesy. The voices are a tad clumsy but in a charming way, which, after all the by-the-book moves in a form that takes itself so seriously, is welcome.
Still, the changes from bar to bar on Enjoy Eternal Bliss are so telegraphed, it's hard to get excited, especially if you've heard a good bit of this kind of thing already. They can play their instruments, and they've mastered the sound. Yndi Halda know their way around the build, so here's hoping they spend their next record thinking out how the music might be taken apart.


After a clumsy attempt at goth-tinged guitar-based rock, New Order enjoy a slight return to form by going back to what they do best-- create mournful and ebullient pop.

Waiting for the Sirens' Call

For a group of folks nearing the half-century mark, Get Ready was pretty damn good; but for New Order, that return-from-wherever effort was a bit meh. New Order's "meh" is often better than most group's "hell yeah," but that doesn't disguise their shortcomings, and "Who's Joe"-- the first track from New Order's latest album, Waiting for the Sirens' Call-- is a continuation of the underwhelming competence of the band's previous album. That track isn't as in love with the sound of space-age guitars as Get Ready, but it's still a three-minute song that's given an extra two minutes' worth of rope to turn stiff and tepid. Combine that with the unwarranted focus on Bernard Sumner and his lyrical stylings-- not often a main attraction for New Order (and for good reason)-- and I'm settling in for another reasonably competent, mildly underwhelming effort from a group that doesn't need to prove a damn thing to anyone.
But then the second track, "Hey Now What You Doing", manages to make its five-minute length seem like half that. Credit the pronounced presence of that nifty Peter Hook basswork, or the pithier words Sumner spits ("You have the brightest future/ Writing songs on your computer"-- believe me, it sounds better in context), but this sounds more like a group that's doing the damn thing and not just coasting on their own coattails. And then the title track comes on, and it's this gorgeous effortless shimmering thing, mournful and ebullient all at once. And then the first single, "Krafty", with its synth flourishes and corny pop-perfect sentiment ("But out there the world is a beautiful place/ With mountains, lakes and the human race") blows the doors wide open, and any trepidation I had regarding this record dies on the vine.
In his review of Get Ready, Pitchfork's own Joe Tangari makes note of how much the album rocked, which is probably why it felt to me as if the group went astray. First and foremost, New Order is a pop band-- just ask Frente!-- and for them to try their hand at loud guitars and loud beats doesn't play to the group's strengths. Nor does such a maneuver do them any favors when compared to their contemporaries-- Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie made a guest appearance on Get Ready, which is fitting, since his group's XTRMNTR did what Get Ready attempted to do, only bigger, louder, and-- most importantly-- better.
In comparison, Sirens' Call features the Scissor Sisters' Ana Matronic-- she gets a verse and a few background lines in "Jetstream", a chirpy, flippant track where "you are my jetstream lover" and a sense of laconic confidence out-Kylies Ms. Minogue at her own coy game. When it's firing on all cylinders, Sirens' Call offers manic pop thrills that either recall the group's heyday, or slyly recalls the noise made by other people that were touched by New Order-- dig that Ace of Base action in "I Told You So". The track lengths don't lend themselves to a tidy, hit-and-run pop experience, but they do offer a taste of what the inevitable extended dance remix would sound like.
The one track that most conforms to the three-minute radio oligarchy is closer "Working Overtime". It's a garagey barn-burner, not too dissimilar to Get Ready single "Crystal". These track's placements on their respective albums are a telling sign of New Order's confidence level. "Crystal" was Get Ready's centerpiece and calling card, the document that was supposed to announce to the world that New Order Is Back and could ably play ball with the kids they fathered. In some sense, it was a capitulation by a group that had no need to capitulate. "Working Overtime" is an afterthought, a track that does what "Crystal" did with less pomp and exerted effort, announcing to all those aforementioned indebted groups that, oh by the way, they can write these sorts of songs in their sleep, and they can put them at the end of their records, because they don't need to play ball with the other kids. They invented the game. In other words, they're New Order. And you're not.


Slug returns, stripping some of the more larger-than-life traits of misspent youth away from his approach and tilting more towards plainspoken sincerity.

The Family Sign

Lots of indie-rap figures wallow in self-pity, bemoan their own bad habits, snap at those who make life hard for them, and somehow find a way to wrap all those emotions up into a resilient shell. But Atmopshere's Slug established a particular knack for it when he broke outside the Twin Cities about a decade back-- every heartfelt line about lonely people or fractured relations was offset by an offhand remark that took some the sting out of his lamentations. Atmosphere got tagged as "emo rap" because there wasn't an easier go-to term for a barfly raconteur with female troubles, but while Slug's lyrics spoke to the same sour impulses that drove teenage misery, they did so through the experiences of someone who discovers to that misery when you grow up.
The catch is that growing up also means growing out of a few things, and The Family Sign catches Slug at a point where he seems to be tilting more towards plainspoken sincerity. The hard-drinking, love-stressed, party-fatigued persona that made him a breakout cult figure 10 years ago might sound somewhere between disingenuous and ridiculous coming from a 38-year-old today. But in stripping some of the more larger-than-life traits of misspent youth away from his approach, he's also lost some of the outsized arrogance and aw-shucks smartassedness that gave his more po-faced moments a three-dimensional context or sharp emotional counterpoint. While The Family Sign has a specific titular focus on loved (and formerly loved) ones and the way people define themselves through them, the real conceptual leap on this album is how patriarch maturity means less jokiness, more earnestness, and a traveled perspective that doesn't leave much room for not giving a fuck.
What room is left winds up parceled out over a couple of highlights. As blunt as the premise is, the negligent alky father meets stoner pickpockets of "Bad Bad Daddy" has a certain caustic bite to it. And the road-ravaged, detail-rich narrative of "Millennium Dodo" evokes the same harebrained excitement-slash-disorientation that made the best moments of 2003's fantastic Seven's Travels stand out. Pointing out his car's mirror-ball décor as an homage to Escape From New York or noting the resemblance between a Best Western clerk and "WKRP in Cincinnati" nebbish Les Nessman is the sort of pop-culture debris that's evocative enough to transcend reference-dropping and hint at the metaphorical reserves in Slug's brain. But the track also starts out with a couplet-- "I only act like an asshole/ Why don't ch'y'all stand back, let the man grow"-- that explains the rest of the album's almost total lack of sardonic edge.
Heartfelt moments haven't necessarily been beyond Slug's grasp-- When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold highlight "Wild Wild Horses" and "Lifter Puller" off Seven's Travels are genuinely moving in a way that few indie-rap love songs are. But here love songs are deployed a bit blank-facedly, strings of clichés, shrugging platitudes and half-thoughts drawn together into a husk of what used to be a compellingly contradictory personality. The idea of a banal yet subtly tense reunion with a long-forgotten ex in "Your Name Here" is undercut by the fact that there's not enough interesting personal details to make Slug's rejected reconnection come across like anything more than a petty dismissal. And while "The Last to Say" is 100% worth hearing if it convinces just one woman to leave the abusive asshole that blackens her eyes, it's weird that it sounds less emotionally invested than the sharp-spitting breakup kissoff "Just for Show".
As Slug's performative role dials down the emotional resonance, the beats have followed suit into a low-intensity churn, one that undercuts what could've been a set of adventurous live-band hip-hop with a uniform lethargy that tops out at mid-tempo. While the instrumentation of When Life Gives You Lemons signaled a wealth of potential new directions for Atmosphere's production, The Family Sign runs almost entirely on gloomy ballads heavy on maudlin piano chords and keening guitar riffs. That latter instrument's maybe the most interesting sonic component of Ant's post-sampling compositional phase, and Nate Collis cranks out Black Keys-ian twang ("Bad Bad Daddy"), psychedelic noir ("My Key"), and eerie slide ("The Last to Say") with versatile ease. And if Erick Anderson's keyboards tend to provide more texture than melody, at least he's as handy with Jackie Mittoo reggae riffs ("Just for Show") as he is with new wave glow ("I Don't Need Brighter Days"). But there's little to cut through the fog-- with the exception of the joy-buzzer jolt of "She's Enough" and the flailing attempt at Nilsson-style AM pop on "Ain't Nobody", this is music that conflates maturity with exhaustion.


Beirut's defiantly small third studio album finds a restrained, stately Zach Condon displaying his antiquated fantasies on slightly shrunken canvases.

The Rip Tide

Zach Condon's been wonderfully stuck in the past since 2006, when he first arrived on the scene armed with a ukulele and dreams of old Europe-- in 2011, though, he and his art suddenly seem especially out of place. In the five years since Gulag Orkestar became a surprise success, the dialog surrounding indie culture has drastically shifted away from flesh-and-blood odysseys like Condon's and toward synth textures and vague electronic sighs. (Arguably, Condon and the current crop of emotionally distanced indie stars share nostalgia for experiences not necessarily known first-hand, but that's another conversation.) What's more, many of his peers are in drastically different places, both aesthetically and commercially, since Beirut's last full-length, 2007's excellent The Flying Club Cup. The National and Arcade Fire have successfully settled into the arena-rocking stage of their respective careers, while Owen Pallett and Sufjan Stevens have embraced idiosyncratic conceptual weirdness-- Stevens especially: Just last week, the pair of Brooklyn shows closing his extraordinary tour behind last year's glitchy, restorative LP The Age of Adz were a complete cosmic blowout, embracing an Etsy-gone-neon ethos and electronic expansiveness alike.
Back in 2009, it seemed like Zach Condon was considering a similar synthetic transformation. The back half of Beirut's mini-LP released that year credited to his Realpeople alias, March of the Zapotec/Holland, suggested a move away from his baroque stylings and toward homespun electronic pop in the vein of the Magnetic Fields circa The House of Tomorrow. Apparently, the experiments were just that, as those sounds are nowhere to be found on Beirut's third proper full-length, The Rip Tide. Instead, the project has turned inward, ditching the frilly drama of The Flying Club Cup for more plaintive, understated arrangements. Condon told The New York Times earlier this year that the relatively stripped-down approach was a response to his feeling like "a dilettante with instruments. For years I was picking up new instruments once a month, and for this I was trying to focus a little more, stick with piano, ukulele and trumpet." You're still going to find a pump organ part or two on this record, but otherwise, The Rip Tide's reliance on the Basic Beirut Food Groups (piano, horns, strings) keep Condon true to his word.
Leading up to The Rip Tide's release, Condon also hinted at the album's "sunny" disposition. I'm not sure if I'm hearing that. The Rip Tide was recorded in upstate New York two winters ago, and although there's a handful of upbeat cuts (notably, the infinite earworm and LP highlight "Santa Fe"), a good part of the album sounds especially soft and melancholy, a possible result of the fact that the winter of 2010 was especially snowy and brutal for the greater New York area. If you prefer Condon's balladeer side, then, this isn't a bad thing at all, especially if you are drawn to his richest, most melodrama-dripping highlights ("The Penalty", "After the Curtain"). Arrangement-wise, The Rip Tide is slightly more complicated than those past glories, with a few moments ("Payne's Bay", the swelling title track) that, at times, recall the wooden psychedelic weirdness of Grizzly Bear. Things never get too strange, though: This is still a Beirut album, so declarative horns and impassioned strumming are frequent visitors.
There's a newfound sense of restraint and stateliness on display here, and it's impressive that within five years and at such a young age, Condon's developed so quickly as an arranger and songwriter. Watching him ease into adulthood (he was 19 when Gulag Orkestar dropped) means we've been able to track the maturation of that rich, golden voice he possesses; On The Rip Tide, it occasionally sounds huskier and, in the case of his slight trembles of "Santa Fe" and "Goshen", a little more unstable. These little cracks in the drywall actually make him seem more human; his voice has always seemed almost too sonorous and perfectly dusty to be real, and hearing him falter (if ever so slightly) is a positive reminder that, not too long ago, this was a kid who, as he told the NYT, "just want[ed] to swig whiskey and drink beer and go onstage and have a ball." Still, he's a commanding presence, as his powerful pipes swing to and fro on the robust album bookends "A Candle's Fire" and "Port of Call". Vocally, The Zach Condon Show is nowhere near cancellation, to a point where the usually distinctive contributing vocals of slow-burning singer/songwriter Sharon Van Etten (who pitches in on "A Candle's Fire" and "Payne's Bay") are smothered and unnoticeable.
Despite Condon's clear development, The Rip Tide is a defiantly small effort-- the shortest LP in Beirut's catalog (nine songs, clocking in at just over 33 minutes), self-released on Condon's own label, Pompeii. As such, it's a record that's easier to slip by unnoticed than Beirut's two other LPs. (The lack of the previously present heavy affectation contributes to this as well.) However, our own Marc Hogan put it best in his recent Playlist item on "East Harlem"-- you get as much out of Condon's creations as you put time into them, and familiarity eventually becomes its own reward. Near the end of the album's beautifully mournful, penultimate cut "The Peacock", Condon repeats this telling admission into the face of fading horns: "He's the only one who knows the words." His antiquated fantasies still very much belong to him, but it's still a joy to peer inside them-- even if the canvases they're displayed on have shrunk ever so slightly.


Collection of unreleased material from the late producer runs the gamut from 90s Ummah-era loops to beats he put together from his hospital bed.

Jay Stay Paid

Dilla will always be with us. I don't mean that in just the spiritual sense, or in the way that people are going to be feeling his legacy for a while, though god knows I must've reviewed a dozen albums over the past year that were either in tribute to him or featured some of his beats or both. What I'm talking about is that he'll always be with us in the sense that the amount of material he recorded over the decade-plus before his death was completely overwhelming. When Los Angeles blogger and music journalist Jeff Weiss interviewed the Pharcyde back in May, Imani mentioned that when Labcabincalifornia was being recorded, Dilla gave them "hundreds of beats" to choose from. And since Donuts became the last album issued in his lifetime, it's been followed by a flood of releases-- sanctioned and otherwise-- that've raided his archives and spilled forth a flood of previously-unheard detritus that rivals the early-1970s post-mortem output of Jimi Hendrix.
Sadly, not all of that detritus has resulted in James Yancey's bills getting paid. His mother's been infamously entangled in rights issues with the executor of Dilla's estate, who has blocked the releases of more than a few projects that might've helped his family financially and brought some of his vault material to light. But Jay Stay Paid should hopefully circumvent that, since it puts a new piece of Dilla's musical legacy in good hands and creates a life-spanning statement in a way that previous memorial assemblages like 2006's The Shining could only hint at. Jay Stay Paid isn't a cash-in piece of vulturework, but a labor of love executive produced by his mother and assembled, arranged, and mixed by Pete Rock, one of Dilla's greatest influences. You couldn't come up with two people more qualified to help turn the DAT-stored scraps and sketches of Dilla's ideas into a full-fledged work of art.
The source material on Jay Stay Paid runs the gamut from 90s Ummah-era loops to beats Dilla was putting together from his hospital bed, but it stylistically falls in a general area that fits best between the dense but crisp boom-bap of his early-aughts material (i.e., Welcome 2 Detroit and Slum Village's Fantastic, Vol. 2) and the grimier, more frenetic beat-tape rawness of his Jaylib/Donuts L.A. phase. That latter aesthetic tends to permeate the surface here, filtered through a loose radio-show concept that interjects some actual disk jockey shoutouts, comedic asides, and brief interjections from the man himself. That bugged-out hyperkineticism keeps things moving, but it doesn't reduce the beats to ADD afterthoughts: Early scene-setting moments like the stuttering elasticity of the organ-riff loop in "King", the glowering Minimoog g-funk retrofuturism of "I Told Y'all", and the Morse-code keyboard of "Lazer Gunne Funke" don't run too long, but they sink in deeply.
Like The Shining, Jay Stay Paid breaks up the instrumental passages with a number of guest appearances by various MCs, most of whom either worked with Dilla in the past or otherwise have some level of simpatico compatibility with his aesthetic. Raekwon, whose upcoming Only Built for Cuban Linx II will also feature a repurposed Dilla production, teams up with Mobb Deep's Havoc in a pairing that might seem at odds with Dilla's conscious-rap-friendly Ummah/Soulquarian rep, but the skittering beat, skulking bass, and late-night creeping atmospherics in "24K Rap" fit them perfectly. And the usual suspects-- DOOM muttering acerbic wordplay on "Fire Wood Drumstix", Black Thought throwing around reality show namedrops on the Latin guitar-driven bump of "Reality TV", a host of raw-spitting Detroit cohorts from Frank Nitti to Phat Kat to Dilla's own brother Illa J-- come at it with the reverence and enthusiasm of longtime friends and admirers who fully understand the gravity of the project they're doing.
But Jay Stay Paid's biggest strengths don't lie in its guest roster, impressive as it is. It's the way these reconstructed, reassembled beats so vividly show off how left-field he was willing to get in the service of finding new ways to make a beat knock. Hearing "Make It Fast Mega Mix" turn the spooky burble of David Essex's "Rock On" into a sinuous players' anthem for up-and-comer Diz Gibran makes it sound like an obvious idea turned novel, and anyone who's paid attention to what Donuts brought to the table should find some welcome familiarity in the vintage 60s and 70s electronics that flicker across large swaths of the album; "Spacecowboy vs. Bobblehead", "In the Night (Owl N Out) - While You Slept (I Crept)", and "On Stilts" provide the brightest examples. But even for diehards, there's something on nearly every track here that gives his production some strange, intriguing angle: swooping astral choirs ("Milk Money"), a bizarre, fuzzed-out and pitched-up mutation of the Mothers of Invention's "Oh No" in "9th Caller", and the closing statement of "KJay and We Out", one of Dilla's characteristic glowing boom-clap beats overlaid with a faint psych-soul guitar that might be the most elegiac beat dropped since his passing. This may not be the last we hear of some long-lost, recently-unearthed material of Dilla's, but you can consider this the most heartfelt eulogy Pete Rock's had a hand in since "They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)", and the definitive document so far from the family that misses him.