Located at the midpoint between UK bass and swooning lounge pop, Jamie Woon follows Katy B and James Blake as justifiably big-deal potential crossovers.

Mirrorwriting

Is 2011 turning out to be the year UK bass music goes semi-mainstream? Well, kinda. Sorta. Not exactly. For one thing, genres like dubstep and funky have been moving away from the club fringe and toward the center of the pop conversation for a while now. (In the UK itself, they've been at the center for some time already.) Dubstep sonics, however toned-down or disguised, can be heard in all sorts of chart music these days. And now we have a full slate of singers with (sometimes very loose) connections to bass culture, several of whom have released albums in 2011 aimed as much as folks who need songs as folks who obsessively collect dubplates.
Thing is, and not a little ironically, the singer whose songs have the strongest sonic connection to UK bass is also the most pop, Katy B, where the hard-hitting drums and wobbler bass effects are sweetened by her I-wanna-be-a-star delivery. Meanwhile, dubstep fans, juiced on the weird rhythmic experiments of his early singles, have been scratching their heads trying to figure out why James Blake's album so firmly lashed itself to the mast of indie-crooner culture. And in the middle, we have Jamie Woon.
Almost the exact middle, actually. Young and school-trained London singer Woon's debut album, Mirrorwriting, sits between Katy B and James B, pop theatricality and singer-songwriter calm, club culture and bedroom indie, old-school soul and modern electronic R&B, extroverted and introverted. And tying it all together is the language of UK bass. His first major single, 2010's justly lauded "Night Air", announced him as one of a number of young English artists for whom garage, and everything that came after, was just another bit of pop language to use. And from the slow-motion jungle syncopations and muted bass blare of "Street" to the stuttering retro-rave breakbeats that drive "Spirits", the computer-assisted Woon makes sorta-pop from the last 20 years of UK dance the way current U.S. guitar kids draw from surf-rock and girl-groups.
But if that's all Woon was doing, he'd be just another indie one-man-band with a full software suite, making specialist music with materials from stuff with more pop-appeal. A couple things about Mirrorwriting make you wonder though if Woon really is destined for crossover success. One is his voice, which is the instrument that turns many of these songs from sorta-pop to real-deal pop. Much has been made that Woon went to the same school that gave us Amy Winehouse. His delivery is low-key for most of Mirrorwriting, far from her roadhouse belting, but the guy's clearly got chops, and an elastic way with a number of styles.
And unlike a lot of guys making a murky late-night brand of indie-soul right now, Woon's pleasingly warm and smooth tone, mixed mostly up-front with little obscuring reverb or distortion, gives you the feeling that he could have a straight R&B career if he wanted. His restraint and lack of melisma trickery seems more like a choice to fit the slow drift of the music, not a limitation, and his use of HTDW/Blake style heavily processed vocals is careful, like Burial samples deployed as background harmonies. Woon wants these songs to appeal to folks for whom digitally tweaked singing is an occasional fun special effect, rather than the whole draw. And while the album's mostly full of left-field R&B, there are also hints of Hall and Oates, 80s Brit synth-pop, house, and more. There's also an occasional and unfortunate tendency toward limp VH1-ready MOR ballads, which it must be said comprises the album's weakest stuff, though thankfully Woon doesn't indulge this side as much as a truly crossover-minded hack might.
Woon's attempted to bridge so many opposed vibes here that you'd want to praise his ambition, even if he couldn't pull it off. The fact that Mirrorwriting really does manage to blur so many different musical worlds into something so smoothly unified is Woon's real achievement. But because of that very in-betweenness, Mirrorwriting is still likely to rankle genre partisans of all stripes. Too slick and synth-heavy and modern for fans of Winehouse-style retro-soul. Too subtle for true dubstep fans wanting more club thunder. Not subtle enough for those heart-on-sleeve beat weirdos who've made James Blake a cause celeb. So it'll be interesting to see if it really is the wide mass of pop and indie listeners that winds up embracing Woon's everything-at-once approach. Whoever his audience turns out to be, Woon's managed one assured and beguiling hybrid of UK bass pressure and slick blue-eyed soul.


Nearly five years after their debut marked the peak convergence of late-2000s bass music and its myriad influences—dubstep, R&B, footwork, house, ambient, hardcore—Sepalcure return with a second album.

Folding Time

If Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma are indeed more concerned with refining their sound than developing it, Folding Time is Sepalcure polished to a textureless patina of reference points. Nearly five years after their self-titled debut album marked the peak convergence of late-2000s bass music and its myriad influences—dubstep, R&B, footwork, house, ambient, hardcore—the duo's second full-length returns to that once vital style to find it rendered prosaic. “Inside me, inside of you/I've been going backwards,” sings Body Language's Angelica Bess amidst the swaying UK funky-lite of “Devil Inside.” It's surely all too perfect that she wraps up Folding Time's complications so succinctly, and yet the music's dearth of adventure can only be traced to an unflinching myopia.
Maybe it's unfair to fault a rose for having thorns: Sepalcure offered such a gorgeous example of pancultural electronica in 2011 that they have every reason to reclaim their past successes. Besides, “Pencil Pimp” and “The One” aren't being rinsed for nostalgia just yet, so why not transpose their clubby effervescence and disembodied soul to another colorful, balanced stretch of tunes? These guys certainly have the fans for it, and the kind of dubwise dynamism in “Hearts in Danger,” “Loosen Up,” and “Brother Forest” is a textbook execution of hybrid sensibilities made seamless. But when those ideas sound underexplored (“Dub Of”), detached (“Hurts So Bad”), or superfluous (“Ask Me”), it's as if Sepalcure see their self-imposed genre as exemplary in electronic music's constantly changing ecosystem.
Stewart and Sharma have said that Folding Time's writing process was like “connecting the present with the past…digging through old memories.” How listeners interface with the refurbished music hinges on their value of that past and the currency it holds. The vocal samples in these tracks offer a reliable barometer in that regard (nothing says 2010 UK bass like an Aaliyah stand-in tossed over some kick-and-stick). Both Sepalcure and their solo projects, Machinedrum and Braille, have always fixated on vocals—sampling the likes of Whitney Houston, Jocelyn Brown, Monica, and KC & JoJo, among others—so their heavy presence is no surprise here. Unlike the Burials and Four Tets and James Blakes out there, however, Sepalcure have never been much for abstraction, lifting lyrics and their sentiments wholesale (maybe pitched down a couple steps) instead of flipping them into a unique translation. “Not Gonna Make It” grabs the opening line of Gladys Knight's “Neither One of Us”; “Been So True” samples liberally from “Heard It All Before” by Sunshine Anderson; hooky and animated as they are, neither song manages to speak new meaning from the vibrant source material. Such handling of samples can relegate empowering and soul-searching music to props for a stunt.
Folding Time's original vocals meet that issue head on. Canadian singer Rochelle Jordan and Brooklynite Angelica Bess each give a nuanced, personalized performance that nudges the music into a pop context. Whiffs of SBTRKT and Bonobo linger in the lush, chilled-out motifs of “Fight for Us” and “Devil Inside,” but their dubby atmospheres and injured melodicism are Sepalcure hallmarks writ sync-friendly. The verse-chorus structures and downtempo arrangements don't offer a way forward for Stewart and Sharma so much as point towards an alternate space for their music to inhabit, well-adjusted and respectably commercial. Likewise, Folding Time serves as a stopgap for an aging sound without a firm grasp on its bearings. Should Sepalcure continue writing from their fixed point, they'll have to project further and further from its origin.


Exhaustive, dense, and detailed, Sufjan Stevens’ electro-opus is another huge artistic leap that speaks plainly to complicated emotions and attempts to rebuild his sound from the ground up.

The Ascension

The title track on The Ascension is one of the best songs Sufjan Stevens has ever written. Accompanying himself on keyboard with a sad, pulsing melody, Stevens uses precise and empathetic language to address faith and hopelessness, regret and revelations. He shouts out a character from King Lear. He rhymes “confess” with “confess.” He declares life to be meaningless—and he sounds like he means it. “To think I was acting like a believer,” he sings in his feathery, heartbroken way, “when I was just angry and depressed.” It is the only song on the album that fits squarely into his comfort zone, where questions of life and death feel as intimate as the words to a love song.
Also worth noting: It takes more than an hour to get here. Along the way, there are slow jams and dancefloor singalongs, a panic attack set to creeping industrial music and what sounds like Stevens’ score for a campy ’80s horror movie. It is exhaustive and dense and detailed—which, of course, is nothing new. From his 2005 breakthrough Illinois to his last proper solo album, 2015’s grief-stricken Carrie & Lowell, Stevens has always worked best when he immerses himself in his subjects, encouraging the same devotion from listeners. And while The Ascension lacks the direct throughline of these high-water marks, it is another huge leap, an attempt at rebuilding his sound from the ground up.
The majority of the album was recorded with a drum machine and several Prophet synthesizers while Stevens’ more characteristic equipment—acoustic guitars and banjos—were in storage during a move. Leaving his longtime Brooklyn home for a more scenic and remote spot in the Catskills, the 45-year-old songwriter found new hobbies, like getting off the internet and buying a tractor. Consciously or not, these songs follow a similarly picturesque voyage, zooming out from the daily grind toward the kinds of refrains that have become pop music clichés, largely because of how good they feel to say and hear: I wanna love you. Run away with me. Tell me you love me.
It’s one of the first things that strikes you about this blocky, electronic music—the pared-down language and echoed refrains from radio hits and pop culture. The cerebral, ambitious songwriter—whose tracklists once looked like stage directions to a quirky play—now seems intent on speaking directly, sweeping you away with him. It leads to seductions (“Make love to me/Surrender your spirit/Sing my eulogy”), threats (“Go on wipe that look off your face”), and bare confessions. At one point, he sings in a breathy whisper, “I shit my pants and wet the bed”—a hard thing to imagine coming from a performer who has worn enormous angel wings on stage.
Stevens attempted something similar on another major pivot, 2010’s The Age of Adz. In those songs, he sang over buzzing synths and clattering rhythms, gravitated toward conversational language, and steered away from the nuanced storytelling and character studies of his past. At the same time, the compositions on Adz were a continuation of his more symphonic work, surrounding his voice with countermelodies and choirs, building to flute-accompanied crescendos and multi-part epics. It felt new for him but still played to his strengths: heartfelt, ecstatic, too much.
The Ascension, in comparison, is spare and sad, purposefully repetitive and almost entirely down-tempo. Many of its arrangements evoke steep, neon-lit half-pipes that Stevens glides up and down, sometimes shouting along the way and other times muttering anxiously to himself. A song called “Die Happy” features just one lyric—“I want to die happy”—which he sings over and over, relying on the twists and layers of synths to add new dimensions to his mantra. The whole thing works best when you approach it like a big-budget IMAX movie set in space with a great leading actor: Don’t get too hung up on the plot—just tilt back your head and watch him float.
Once in a while, Stevens lands on something magical and his writing transcends. This happens in the final 70 seconds of the otherwise dirge-like “Tell Me You Love Me,” and it happens again in “Landslide,” when he wails the title in a desperate warble, incorporating his own vocals into the arrangement like a sample. In these moments, the steady slow-burn pays off. He lets you in on the feeling of breaking free from something heavy and monotonous pulling you under.
Stevens has spoken about feeling emotionally depleted after making Carrie & Lowell, a quiet album that uncovered childhood trauma with vivid memories and hushed, acoustic arrangements. It makes sense that he would follow it with something less revealing, more open to interpretation. Multiple songs discuss crises of faith and coming apocalypses, and they employ their pop choruses to offset the gravity, to place his stories in the present tense, to give us something to dance to. “I also think this record, because it is political and bossy and bitchy,” Stevens told The Atlantic, “needed to be somewhat fun, sonically.”
But despite its allusions to pop music escapism, The Ascension is, by design, kind of a drag: a dark and emotionally distant mood piece whose lyrics rarely touch on the specifics necessary to anchor the music, and whose music is rarely exciting enough to elevate his words. “Every song title on the album is a cliche,” he admitted to The Quietus. “...I’m desperate for some kind of platitude that tells me where to go, and how to go about my business in a way that’s healthy and sustainable.” It’s a relatable anxiety, although, purposefully or not, he mostly sounds stuck in place. Not to mention, he’s been here before, and too few of these thoughts approach the prayer-like resonance of, say, “All things go,” or “I want to be well,” or “We’re all gonna die.”
In its search for direction, The Ascension fares best when Stevens looks inward. He finds momentum in the bittersweet “Goodbye to All That,” returning to one his most familiar settings: on the road, despondent, “hopelessness incorporated.” And just before the sweeping curtain call of “America,” there’s the title track—the point when Stevens accepts his strengths and speaks to the moment. “But now,” he sings in the most heart-tugging reaches of his falsetto, “it strikes me far too late again/That I was asking far too much of everyone around me.” Whatever perspective he may be singing from, he sounds tapped into something elemental, filled with purpose and clarity, following wherever his vision leads. He sounds like himself.

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With a piercing countertenor somewhere between Prince masquerading as Camille and the cracking adolescent soul of the teenage Michael Jackson, 19-year-old North Las Vegas native Shamir exudes agile, fluttering performances. His debut EP, Northtown, finds Shamir moving back and forth between sweet, almost holy purity and unearthly hysteria over churning, minimal house tracks.

Northtown EP

"I consistently felt myself to be not male or female, but the 11-year-old gender: protagonist." The words are poet Patricia Lockwood's, as quoted in a recent New York Times Magazine feature, and they come to mind when hearing the music made by Shamir Bailey. With a piercing countertenor somewhere between Prince masquerading as Camille and the cracking adolescent soul of the teenage Michael Jackson, the 19-year-old North Las Vegas native dismantles the expectations maintained for vocalists based on their gender, demanding instead that the focus be placed on his agile, fluttering performances. His debut EP, Northtown, is named for the dusty suburban neighborhood where he grew up; it finds Shamir moving back and forth between sweet, almost holy purity and unearthly hysteria over churning, minimal house tracks.
Shamir is still a new hand at writing and recording dance music; raised on an omnivorous musical diet of rock, hip-hop, jazz, and R&B, the first explicitly beat-driven track he wrote ended up launching his career. “If It Wasn’t True” remains a stunning opening salvo, one that plays on the tension between Shamir’s slender vocal and lyrical naiveté and grimy, threatening instrumental tones before devolving into a chaotic mess, swallowed by a haphazardly firing synth corroding in real-time. It’s a contrast that’s employed several times throughout Northtown, and it manages to retain its effectiveness because it’s so stark and clear, as Shamir’s fragile, yearning voice is pitted against aggressive, hard-charging electronics that actively warp and decay as the songs develop.
The toughness and rigidity of the instrumentation plays well against his lyrics, too. Shamir spends most of Northtown in a state of constant romantic turmoil, and thanks to the delicacy of his voice it sounds like he’s exploring new depths of disappointment with each new track. On “If It Wasn’t True”, he’s trying to process a relationship that quickly soured, eventually settling into a tenuous but deadened peace; the core of the filthy, pulsing “Sometimes a Man” is his resigned sigh, “Sometimes a man ain’t what he says he is/ Sometimes a man is just a man.” You can picture him rolling his eyes and exhaling slowly while a synth spirals out of control, leaping around like a Roomba gone rogue before falling into a dead-eyed pulse. The volatile electronics seem like windows into Shamir’s psyche: anger and resentment made into ferocious backing tracks, shielding his heartbreak.
The one song on Northtown that deviates from the distorted electronics first glimpsed on “If It Wasn’t True” is its closer, a cover of Canadian country singer Lindi Ortega’s 2013 track “Lived and Died Alone” that Shamir cut with a single microphone in just one take. Accompanied by just an acoustic guitar, it’s a lonely lament that quickly blackens into something a little more sinister: resigned to a solitary existence, he journeys in the dead of night and excavates a bunch of graves, giving the deserted dead the love he never had the chance to receive himself. It’s strange, surprisingly tender, and blessed with an alien beauty; in other words, a perfect fit for Shamir.


Suzanne Kraft is an alias of the L.A.-based dublab DJ Diego Herrera. His new Kraft collection, Talk From Home, isn't a homage to new age music, but it take cues from the more chilled-out end of the ECM and EG catalogs and sits at the border between breezy and cheesy.

Talk From Home

In 2011, an L.A. producer blipped into view thanks to a well-received debut EP on Gerd Janson's Running Back imprint. Credited to Suzanne Kraft, an alias of dublab DJ Diego Herrera, Green Flash did nu-disco infused with a low-slung pacing and a warmth not unlike a cassette tape left on the dashboard at midday. It was soon followed by the Horoscope EP and a handful of more Balearic cuts from Herrera's other band, Pharaohs, suggesting that more floor-filling tracks lay ahead.
But when Missum, Kraft's next release for Running Back, came out last year, it showed Herrera not leaning in but rather taking a step back. The record was actually a reissue, but it showed a different side of him: The drums turned down to register as gentle pulses, samples of old boogie records gave way to chord organs and saxophone lines that mimicked deep breathing exercises, unfurling slowly and deeply across each track. Missum revealed the mellow, contemplative side of Suzanne Kraft, which in comparison to the DJ tracks, might have sounded anomalous. With Talk From Home, it instead illuminates that the unhurried pacing of those first dance singles might be the outliers.
Released on the Melody As Truth imprint out of the UK, Talk From Home isn't an homage to new age music per se, but it does take cues from the more chilled-out end of the ECM and EG catalogs. "Two Chord Wake", with its brushed hi-hat programming and measured snares, might have the most pronounced beat of the album, yet even with flares of guitar spiking above the rhythms, it pads about gently like music for children’s television.
"Never Heated" might be carved out of Julee Cruise’s exhales, a wordless vocal paired with a simple figure on bass guitar and a tube amp buzzing like cicadas. Throughout, Kraft gets the most out of the simplest of ingredients, "Male Intuition" imparting its contemplative vibe with little more than a guitar line couched in reverb and echo that brings to mind Durutti Column.
Other moments of the album sound like something Mark Isham might have cut around the time of Vapor Drawings, just at the border between breezy and cheesy. The pads of the title track at first bring to mind a Muzak version of "King of Pain" but as the track evolves, a bath-warm depth is revealed. The beatific slow swells of closer "The Result" brings this all too-brief outing to a close, but Talk From Home is the ideal soundtrack for taking a leisurely stroll rather than frantically Ubering to reach a destination.


YYY is a collaboration between the minimalist techno of Tyler Friedman and the improvised jazz drumming of Samuel Rohrer, split across two long, flowing tracks.

YYY EP

YYY is essentially a 12-inch single that functions more like a 2-track EP, with each side lasting in the neighborhood of 12 minutes. It super-imposes Tyler Friedman's minimalist-techno framework over the organic, improvisation-heavy approach of Swiss-born jazz drummer Samuel Rohrer (Laurie Anderson, Skúli Sverrisson, Charles Gayle) and then flips the script somewhat when you flip the record. But, though both pieces are titled "YYY," the two different versions— the "Original Mix" and "Drum & Vocal Dub"—they don't draw from any of the same source material and aren't the same besides a shared core basis in overlapping rhythms.
Rohrer doesn't even appear on the original version of the piece, but the sensitivity to timbre that he shows on the alternate version undoubtedly influenced Friedman's structure and choice of sounds, most notably a synthesized percussion pattern that by the pair's own description resembles a digitized cross between a vibraphone and a kalimba. Friedman created all the sounds on the original "YYY" using a modular synth setup, and the kalimba-vibes hybrid tone is also drenched in pitch modulation so that the various hits sound like different-sized drops of water dunking into reverberant pools. When Rohrer does enter the picture on side 2, he supplies a vaguely tribal meshwork of hand- and stick-tapped beats, one of which gives the impression of a drum head whose tension is always changing so that the pitch bends up and down in a circular pattern.
On hearing them together, it's easy to see how the second version started out as a remix/re-imagining of Friedman's original but then evolved into its own separate piece. Both versions start out as a set of skeletal components and then swell as more and more layers of sound stream into the stereo field until, at their peak, each piece becomes quite busy. Both also make optimal use of the stereo field. But for all the thought that went into the juxtapositions here—synthetic vs. organic, improvised vs. composed—Friedman arguably covers more ground and creates a more fertile set of contrasts on his own. Rohrer would likely have matched him had he added his own, third version consisting entirely of acoustic-based sounds, or had he been left to his own devices on side 2.
On side 1, it's easy to get lost in the endless shifting between the kalimba-like pattern and the steady-hissing techno beat. On much of side 2, however, the robotic and human sounds cause more friction as they collide. Perhaps this was intentional, but since side 1 derives much of its energy from Friedman's interpretation of Rohrer's style, the drum-vocal dub leaves the listener wondering what could have happened had Rohrer returned the favor in isolation. The duo shares a rehearsal space, so the temptation to team up makes sense. And to mimic the effect of haunting sine-wave swells on the original mix, Friedman and Rohrer brought in Norwegian singer Tora Augestad, whose voice they manipulate at times so that it sounds like, say, a screeching saxophone reed or a swarm-like cloud of distortion.
Clearly, Rohrer and Friedman have been mindful of ambience and space in their separate careers up to this point—Friedman with his installations and works for film, and Rohrer doing the rounds in a number groups in the experimental jazz and ECM records orbits. Interestingly, they've chosen to give YYY a flat, almost space-less quality—the musical equivalent of a green screen. That decision serves as one of this EPs defining characteristics, but if there's one knock on this music, it's that it's quite literally out of place without a spacial, visual, or extra-musical dimension to go with it.
In spite of its steady pulse and proximity to dance music, YYY is ultimately coming from a ponderous rather than sweaty place. While there are spots, particularly on side 2, that speak to something innate in the hips that wants to move, it's hard to see this music ever making an appearance in a club. On the other hand, Friedman and Rohrer favor a kind repetition that's ultimately too active to encourage trance-like zoning out. Dance fans might find it too stiff and jazz fans might find it too electronic. But alienating genre loyalists is usually a good sign that an artist is onto something. Let's hope that he and Friedman expand on this initial dalliance and come up with more.


A satisfying collection of the obscure synth-based music that drew from post-punk and early new wave in a decidedly low-budget and DIY style.

Various Artists: Wierd Presents: Cold Waves and Minimal Electronics, Vol. 1

Though its chilly sound owed an obvious debt to Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and Depeche Mode's Speak & Spell, the music now grouped as minimal synth was more simplistic and primal in execution, existing well outside the expensive, studio-honed aesthetic of the time. The relatively short-lived genre ran concurrent with guitar-based post-punk and early new wave from the late 1970s to the mid 80s without enjoying the commercial success of either. Featuring the analog synthesizer as a foundation, minimal synth tracks were fleshed out with little more than a drum machine, vocals, and occasionally, a bass line. The limited sonic palette arguably enabled the ultimate DIY movement, with solo and duo minimal synth projects cropping up all across Europe.
Paradoxically, the ubiquity of minimal synth in the European underground may have worked against its broader acceptance: the sheer number of acts made it difficult to form a consensus around its leading practitioners. Furthermore, many of the artists preferred singing in their native tongues, creating regional pockets-- in France and Belgium in particular-- as opposed to a truly pan-European movement. As a result, while minimal synth flourished on the stage, its recorded works were often consigned to regional European labels and quickly went out of print. The fragmented nature of the movement has also posed a formidable challenge to anyone hoping to offer a representative compilation.
Cold Waves is not the first minimal synth retrospective, though it certainly stands as one of the best and most accessible. Assembled by Pieter Schoolwerth, founder of the Brooklyn-based Wierd Records, along with Joe Daniel of Angular, the compilation leans heavily toward DJ-friendly material. Wierd has been championing minimal synth, along with guitar-driven cold wave, since 2003, as part of its series of DJ nights in Brooklyn called Wierd Nights. Schoolwerth, meanwhile, has been an avid minimal synth collector for years, making him uniquely qualified to oversee Cold Waves for London label Angular.
The album opens with the ferocious and sinisterly assertive "Figures", from Belgium's Absolute Body Control. An early tone-setter, "Figures" portends the aggressive fare to follow, and lithe, sinewy tracks like End of Data's "Danse Votre Monde" and Ausgang Verboten's "Consumer" deliver on that promise, favoring immediacy over subtle shading. Even the few restrained and pensive tracks, like "A Gift of Tears", from Italy's Jeunesse d'Ivoire, remain hauntingly elemental in construction. In this respect, Cold Waves remains true to minimal synth's fundamental tenet of simplicity, never sacrificing raw emotion for complex arrangements.
While minimal synth is typically classified as a strictly European movement, two of the most arresting songs on Cold Waves come courtesy of North American artists. "Watching Trees" from New York's Eleven Pond has been a staple at Wierd Nights almost since its inception, and with its eerie, icy veneer, it's easy to hear why its become an anthem of sorts for Schoolwerth's weekly parties. Canada's Land of Giants offer the somewhat less severe but no less engrossing "Cannibal Dolls". The 1982 single features a playful, pinball rhythm that hints at the new wave movement that would follow even as Anya Varda's tense, strained vocal keeps it squarely within minimal synth's darkly paranoid tradition.
That neither song sounds out of place is fairly remarkable considering their creators were an ocean removed from the epicenter of minimal synth, even if the seamlessness also suggests that, as minimal synth compilations go, Cold Waves might be a little too convenient. As other retrospectives have demonstrated, including the recent Minimal Wave Tapes, this music isn't as singularly focused or narrowly defined as Cold Waves might lead a newcomer to believe. However, as an introduction to this obscure movement, Cold Waves is tough to top. These songs may not have been popular in their day, but Wierd and Angular together have ensured they won't soon be forgotten.


His purported final posthumous album is more of monument to XXXTentacion’s brand rather than his artistry.

Bad Vibes Forever

“You are literally entering my mind,” said XXXTentacion at the beginning of 17, his debut album. On its follow-up, ?, he issued a caveat, insisting listeners must “open their minds” to grasp his vision: “This album is far different, far more versatile, far more uplifting than the last.” Both statements were overblown bids for empathy and acknowledgment from an artist whose notoriety preceded him. He was trying to project that he was more than his pain, more than his worst actions, and experiencing the stylistic sprawl of his music would prove it, allowing listeners to see Jahseh Onfroy as he saw himself.
The late rapper makes a similar petition on his second posthumous album, billed as his “final” release. “I’m tryna to tell the world to fucking relax, bro… Let me be a prince, let me be a king, nigga,” he says in a rambling snippet repurposed as the album’s introduction. XXXTentacion’s estate clearly chose this clip to honor and preserve the self-image that the rapper was cultivating when he was shot and killed in 2018 while awaiting trial for domestic abuse charges. But like ? and his first posthumous record, Skins, Bad Vibes Forever fails to make his personal perception and aesthetic ideas cohere into anything other than generic kingmaking. This flimsy, haphazard album attempts to memorialize the rapper as a martyr and renaissance man when he is neither.
At his best, XXXTentacion was a reductionist. Favoring blunt, undermixed songs with slapdash structures and high-octane performances, his music turned crudeness into a kind of honesty. In his world, to be broken and distorted was to be real. This approach could approximate intimacy, but the flip side was that it prioritized his “truth” alone, cropping out the world beyond his rage and pain and fizzing into drivel whenever he attempted storytelling beyond “I’m hurt.” As he began to extend himself beyond emo crooning and mosh rap into full-on rock balladry and thrash ragers, his solipsism remained his main tool, resulting in genre-straddling that never amounted to more than cosplay.
“He wanted to be the artist that literally conquers all genres,” his manager Solomon Sobonde said. But he’s more tourist than conqueror, a one-man karaoke performance. From the diet dancehall of “Hot Gyal” and “Royalty” to the off-brand Chief Keef-isms of “Eat It Up” to the Cudi hums of “before i realize,” for all his versatility, XXXTentacion largely comes across as rudderless and indistinct. His constant hopscotching reveals no new dimensions to his songwriting, no larger artistic vision. His legacy, as presented by Bad Vibes Forever, is that he used SoundCloud between 2011 and 2018 and he listened to everything, even country.
The expansive features list heightens this lack of cohesion, resulting in jumbled songs that treat XXXTentacion like an accent rather than the marquee artist. On “School Shooters,” reportedly recorded as a response to the Parkland shooting, XXXTentacion threatens to drink the blood of school shooters while Lil Wayne empathizes with them, ending with XXX screaming gibberish. They sound like high-schoolers trying to shit-talk their way through detention. The boisterous, swaggering “Voss,” on loan from Sauce Walka’s 2018 mixtape Drip God, feels like a Sauce Walka song, a common problem when XXXTentacion is paired with artists whose versatility is rooted in technique and perspective rather than pantomime. The dark, soul-bearing Kemba verse on “Daemons” so thoroughly outclasses XXXTentacion’s vague occultisms (“Torture victims are due to scripture”) that its appearance feels like a pity offering.
It’s never clear what XXXTentacion represents to the artists who show up to support him. Despite their shared Miami origins, Rick Ross mentions XXXTentacion alongside Nipsey Hussle as if reading from a teleprompter list of recently deceased rappers. The Blink-182 feature that closes the album is clearly meant as a nod to XXXTentacion’s love of pop-punk, but the only thing Mark Hoppus seems to know about XXXTentacion is that he died. “Do you still dream about me late at night?/Or are you out there living better times?” he reads from his Cameo inbox. Compared to the atmosphere of grief and loss on January’s Members Only, Vol. 4, recorded by the rapper’s Members Only clique, Bad Vibes Forever feels like a Hallmark card adapted into a tribute concert.
This empty mythmaking draws attention to XXXTentacion’s dubious requests for listeners to absolve him of choices and actions he doesn’t even express. He seeks forgiveness without contrition, context, or self-awareness, claiming, “I’m not with the torturing shit” one moment and then boasting, “Dove into the pussy, caught a battery” the next. His desire to be purged through his art is untenable--not just because it’s self-serving and evasive even in absentia, but because his posturing isn’t remotely consistent. His music has never even attempted to address the way his charges of strangulating a pregnant woman, domestic battery, and witness tampering fueled his blustering persona. Of course, a posthumous album will try to flatter its subject, but this album is a hoodwink from start to finish.
XXXtentacion as a polyglot is an especially tough sell in an era where border crossing and cross-wiring are standard. It’s hard to square the hollow way Bad Vibes Forever falls back on the aesthetic alibi with the way stronger records from this year, like Denzel Curry’s ZUU, Beyoncé’s Homecoming, and Rapsody’s Eve, use range as a means of refinement. This idea that XXXTentacion was some kind of precocious savant with a natural talent for hybridity (producer John Cunningham claims XXXTentacion is “a far more versatile artist” than 2Pac) ignores the free-wheeling SoundCloud cohort that he was apart of, the rowdy South Florida scene that shaped him, and the broader permeability of contemporary music since average internet bandwidth crossed 1 mbps.
Ultimately, the songs XXXTentacion has left behind are insubstantial and narrow, and Bad Vibes Forever only weakens the case that his view of himself was ever a worthwhile lens with which to process his art. His legacy is as defined by his heinous actions as it is by his hamfisted music, and in death, as in life, he makes no attempt to suture that fissure. Why should we?


The New York band’s first album in seven years sounds like a post-rock orchestra playing around a campfire. It’s the sound of hard-won peace of mind, rendered in the lightest brushstrokes.

Green to Gold

A decade ago, the Antlers were a deadly fucking serious band working at an unsustainable emotional pitch. Their preferred metaphors for doomed relationships included, but were not limited to, a terminal cancer patient, a dead dog, and a fire that claimed the lives of three children. By their fifth album, 2014’s Familiars, Antlers occupied a fascinating space between slinky jazz and smoked-out space-rock. But the past eventually caught up to them. Suffering from tinnitus, vocal lesions, and physical exhaustion, bandleader Peter Silberman quietly put Antlers aside, took up gardening and meditation, fostered a fulfilling relationship, and made a solo album, Impermanence, that used silence as an instrument. He brings the past seven years with him on Antlers’ latest album, Green to Gold, finding a peace that once seemed incompatible with this band.
“I set out to make Sunday morning music,” Silberman explained, a laid-back posture that forms the foundation of the album’s artistic vision. Green to Gold is designed for the part of the week with the lowest stakes and the strongest indication of where someone’s at in their lives: Are you waking up with a splitting hangover? Lying in with a loved one? Getting up early to work on the yard? As with Impermanence, Green to Gold begins with nearly 10 seconds of silence, paying homage to Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock, a foundational text for artists considering a life off the grid, and for everything Antlers have done since breaking out of Silberman’s bedroom.
But for the most part, Antlers sound influenced by themselves. When they came out of hiding for the 10-year anniversary of Hospice, the band played unplugged at venues like Hollywood Forever Cemetery, reconfiguring songs out of necessity. No longer able to rely on the surges of distortion or Silberman’s shattering falsetto peaks to deliver the emotional death blow, Antlers eased back and let the devastating beauty of the songs speak in a whisper.
That approach carries over to singles “Wheels Roll Home” and “Solstice,” where Silberman’s vocals dissipate rather than surge on the chorus, striking a tone of awestruck wonder. Green to Gold works with only the lightest brushstrokes, its ambience either a spring breeze or a slight winter chill, or in the case of “Volunteer,” a distant crackle of heat lightning. The instrumentation is unerringly lustrous and brilliant—12-string guitars, capos at a perilously high fret, saxophones, slide guitars, a post-rock orchestra playing a campfire gig. At times, this concept is rendered literally: Silberman spends the seven-minute title track narrating the change of the seasons and follows it with a song called “Porchlight.” Nearly every moment of quiet is a field recording from his upstate New York home, filled with the sounds of crickets and cicadas.
For all of its soft-focus beauty, Green to Gold is not subtle; Antlers never have been. “Keepin’ bright, bright, bright,” Silberman coos on “Solstice,” an uncomplicated song about uncomplicated summer days. Yet no matter how much Antlers try to serve as a magic-hour backdrop, Green to Gold is just as anchored in conflict as its more overtly conceptual predecessors. If “Stubborn Man” and “Just One Sec” strain a bit to fit into their classic soul rhyme structures, it parallels the central struggle of Antlers’ long-awaited return. “For just one sec, free me from me,” Silberman pleads, one of many intimate moments that can easily be extrapolated to a larger conversation between the band and its audience. Green to Gold isn’t likely to be anyone’s introduction to Antlers, which is why a song like “It Is What It Is” is not a dismissive cliché but instead the album’s centerpiece. We are hearing someone who risked his physical and emotional well-being searching for catharsis with “Two” and “Bear” and “Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out” and discovered freedom in acceptance. Green to Gold might feel peaceful, but it didn’t come easy.

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For the first time since the mid-1990s, Dylan Carlson's slow-handed metal project has added vocals into their doomy mix. Mark Lanegan and others contribute.

Primitive and Deadly

No matter what phase of Earth you’re considering, be it the enormous and electrostatic drones of the band’s earliest and heaviest days or the swaddled blues elegance of their post-millennial reboot, there’s one simple and unifying link: Dylan Carlson is a paragon of guitar control. On Earth 2, he wielded his instrument and amplifiers with a powerful precision, creating sounds that weren’t only big but also topographically rich; you could study the curves and crags of his sound as if you were reading a three-dimensional map of the Cascade Range. When Carlson rebuilt Earth as an instrumental rock band a decade ago, he used his guitar to cut a filigree of exquisite riffs through the bedrock of Adrienne Davies’ patient drumming. Hearing him play during The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull suggested a woodworker cutting soft, delicate shapes into an enormous oaken block. Whether working on the monolithic scale of Earth’s origins or through the microcosmic scope of its rejuvenation, Carlson has always handled his duties like a master puppeteer with supreme, expressive sway.
The most telling moment, then, of Earth’s latest LP arrives with “Even Hell Has Its Heroes”, an instrumental that finds Carlson fighting against Earth’s need for stricture and structure with bona fide guitar solos. Above a bed of dense, multi-tracked guitars, he even trades licks with Built to Spill's Brett Netson. The song begins as archetypal latter-day Earth, the notes pneumatically bolted to the beat. Carlson’s tone, however, is a bit more pointed than usual, and he and Netson soon unspool the song’s theme into spirals of variations, taking liberties with their leads rather than submitting to Earth's usual economy. Supported by Netson and producer Randall Dunn, Carlson is free to step out near the seven-minute mark; you can almost picture him with his eyes closed and jaw titled skyward, fingers feeling the strings and flying across them rather than calculating where and when the melody must land. It’s one of the most electrifying moments in Earth’s inconsistent quarter-century history, a genuine rock ’n’ roll climax for a band that’s mostly marched slowly, steadily into the middle distance.
Those licks speak to a restlessness that defines Primitive and Deadly, the first Earth album to feature vocalists since Carlson sang a little in the mid-’90s and since Kurt Cobain and Kelly Canary signed on for the group’s earliest work. Former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan slips inside two tracks, sending up his dark-eyed observations about destructive dawns and grim landscapes with his static, speak-sing clip. Despite Lanegan’s stentorian voice, he gets lost inside Earth’s latticework, his voice often feeling more like a footnote than a new feature. “Children, children, get ready/ You better get ready/ It’s new revelation time,” he musters during “The Serpent is Coming”, trying to twist some soulful cadence into his stiff proclamations but coming across like a revival preacher being overrun by his congregation. During “Rooks Across the Gate”, he reads the text of some macabre fever dream, the Carlson-penned lyrics suggesting the murder ballads he’s encountered in his studies of European folk. Despite the scare of the material, though, Lanegan undersells the images. It’s possible to ignore his echo-enhanced voice altogether, to overlook it in favor of the sharp rhythmic interplay between Carlson, Davies, and bassist Bill Herzog. The idea of Earth’s desolate music augmented by harrowing visions solemnly delivered is an intriguing one, but Lanegan’s execution is inchoate and underwhelming. Next time, perhaps Nick Cave, David Tibet and Julian Cope can be on standby?
Where Lanegan missteps by giving Earth a kind of deferential distance, Rose Windows singer Rabia Shaheen Qazi succeeds by using their music as a platform. She commands during “From the Zodiacal Light”, the album’s first single and 11-minute centerpiece. Invoking Ozzy Osbourne and Sandy Denny, she perches above the band to deliver a sermon of fear and salvation. Bewitching and intimate, she represents the vocal fulfillment of the balance between black, white, and gray that Earth has pursued with guitars, drums, and bass for the last decade. The band moves perfectly with her and the words. During the song’s more fraught moments, the trio tenses into moments of feedback and pause; late in the track, when Qazi lingers between the future and failure, the band slinks into a similarly indecisive circle. This is doom metal, delivered with the very grace and meticulous design that’s characterized Earth’s second life.
Earth has now existed for longer and made more records as a set of subtle, almost-quiet instrumentalists than as the jolting, pioneering volume lords that first earned Carlson a reputation. And though the albums made between 2005’s Hex; Or Printing in the Infernal Method and the two-volume Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light set offered variation with a rotation of keyboards, basses and cellos, they all mined a similar aesthetic. Primitive and Deadly even begins by recapitulating every phase of the band’s career, as opener “Torn by the Fox of the Crescent Moon” attaches the finesse of latter-day Earth to a touch of downtrodden, heavy doom. But Earth have seemed overdue for a change, and these songs collectively represent a promising half-step toward it. This is the closest Carlson has ever been to leading a rock band, to fully offloading his exceptional sense of control into a systemic and thorough whole. This isn’t quite, as Lanegan suggests, “a new revelation,” but sure, children, go ahead and get ready: This might be the beginning of a new Earth.


I'm not the first to imagine a parallel-universe version of Being John Malkovich entitled Being Stephen Malkmus-- that credit ...

Stephen Malkmus

I'm not the first to imagine a parallel-universe version of Being John Malkovich entitled Being Stephen Malkmus-- that credit goes to weblogger Adam Kempa, although he neglected to take the concept to its logical extreme and consider the ramifications of Malkmus going through his own portal. Of course, one would expect there'd be a lot of "Malkmus Malkmus Malkmus. Malkmus? Malkmus, Malkmus!"-type carrying on, but the punchline would have to be that he'd actually enjoy the experience, so much so that he'd abandon Pavement and the rest of the outside world to stay in there, maybe form a band with other himselves, and record an album called, oh, I don't know, Stephen Malkmus.
I won't presume to be able to gauge how much influence Malkmus' new bandmates (Portland gadabouts Joanna Bolme and John Moen) had on this, his eponymous solo debut; anyway, it's his name and mug plastered on the album's cover, so he's going to get the majority of praise and blame.
There are two immediately apparent differences between Stephen Malkmus and Pavement's catalog: First and least surprisingly, there's less of a group dynamic. It definitely has the sonic hallmarks of a "solo" album-- the songs are less jammy and spontaneous, more rigidly structured. Second, it's a lot more fun-sounding than Pavement was near the end of its shelf-life. Let's face it, Pavement hadn't really sounded "fun" since Wowee Zowee-- Brighten the Corners and Terror Twilight had occasional moments of playfulness, but on the whole they were considerably more sober, bordering on ponderous.
As Malkmus has noted in interviews, this increasing lack of fun was one important factor in Pavement's dissolution; now having escaped from the handcuffs of "band"-dom, the solo Malkmus is savoring his freedom, the spring back in his step. He's not indulging in that freedom to the extent that he would confound all expectations and, say, record an album of Swedish reggae; Stephen Malkmus is Stephen Malkmus as Stephen Malkmus, splitting time (as always) between smirky loopiness and wistful melancholy. The whimsy factor may have been turned way up, but Malkmus spends his time on the album learning how to focus that whimsy towards specific ends, not just for its own sake.
If Pavement fans were grinding their teeth over the prospect of Stephen Malkmus being a flop, the first single, "Discretion Grove", didn't help matters much. It's about as MOR a song as he's ever written (with the exception of, perhaps, "Major Leagues"), chugging along mindlessly when it should be building toward a more satisfying climax. Also in the less-than-desirable category is "Jo Jo's Jacket", a prime example of Malkmus at his least appealing. In what is ostensibly a song about Yul Brynner, he doesn't do much beyond tack a sample of a Brynner interview at the beginning and namecheck Westworld, abandoning the subject matter entirely by the second verse and freestyling his way to the end. Let's be clear about something: songs about nothing in particular are fine if done right, as are songs about specific subjects, but switching between the two formats doesn't speak well of properly realized intentions.
Fortunately, Malkmus doesn't let his whimsy get the better of him elsewhere on the album; "Phantasies" is so unremittingly goony with its annoying samples, rubbery guitar and gratuitous falsettos that I can't help but love it. Likewise, "Troubbble"'s farting keyboards and guitar spasms make it a quick spurt of inspired head-bobbery. Ever since "Zurich is Stained" and "Here", I've always preferred Malkmus' achier, laid-back songs, of which this album has an abundance: "Church on White" is a lush, tender tribute to a deceased friend, and "Deado" and "Trojan Curfew" balance sublime, shimmery beauty with gentle humor.
Malkmus' biggest departure from his work with Pavement, however, lies in "The Hook" and "Jenny and the Ess-Dog", where he puts his gift for non-sequitur detail in the employ of an actual storyline. I've heard some people describe "The Hook" as Malkmus' "Lou Reed song," which seems sort of appropriate given his speak-sing delivery and deceptively simple, classic-sounding guitar solo. Naturally, it's a song about pirates, and an unromantic one at that: "We had no wooden legs or steel hooks/ We had no black eyepatches or a starving cook/ We were just killers with the cold eyes of a sailor." "Jenny and the Ess-Dog" unrolls a relationship between a young rich girl and an older slacker; the song's resolution initially feels like a shrug, with the things between them sputtering out when she goes off to college. But it speaks to something deeper about relationships as a temporary escape from the expectations of real life, and the eventual obligation to face "real life" again, albeit with a slightly different perspective.
Stephen Malkmus is a more coherent album than any one Pavement release, which can be seen as both a good and bad quality. There's less variation between the songs in terms of structure, but it's the minor tweaks to the sound that are the things to savor-- the ghostly sample that ties together "Deado", the silly but completely apropos steel drum bit on "Vague Space", the flute that swoops through the snarling trudge of "Black Book". Malkmus has regained his songwriting stride, and he sounds more confident than he's been in a long time. There aren't as many extremes or chances taken as some Pavement fans might like; it's not "important" or "groundbreaking," and it probably won't make many best-of lists come December. But it's still an enjoyable album with its share of Malkmus-worthy moments.


Clocking in at almost 100 minutes, the Italian producer’s latest is a muted effort that was originally designed as a sound installation for a bridge in Rome.

12H

For over 15 years, Italian producer Donato Dozzy has masterfully ranged from tech house to trance to straight techno. But at his core, he is a minimalist, gleefully finding the strangest, most archaic element to zoom in on, turning any mole hill into Monte Bianco. His beatific ambient techno collaboration with fellow producer Neel, 2012’s Voices From the Lake, took as its starting point a single incident, a live set to be performed at Japan’s infamous Labyrinth festival. And in the past few years, Dozzy’s zoomed in even further, relentlessly exploring every imaginable facet of the mouth harp, the 303, and Anna Caragnano’s singing voice across full-length albums.
So it makes a certain kind of sense that a single object lies at the heart of his latest epic, 12H: the Armando Trovajoli - Music Bridge in Rome. While plans for the structure date back to 1929, the bridge was only completed in 2008. It’s the lone steel bridge that runs over the River Tiber into the historic center of Rome. This release on Lorenzo Senni’s Presto!? label is culled from material that Dozzy recorded and assembled for a sound installation designed for 24 speakers that ran the length of the colonnade of the bridge. 12H clocks in at almost 100 minutes, at times evoking the immersive, exquisitely detailed ambience of Voices from the Lake, but without the same breathtaking vistas and sumptuous peaks.
The set opens with Dozzy in resplendent, shimmering ambient mode, all body-dissolving washes, tingling small bells, electronics that mimic the sound of frogs at night, and slow-moving arpeggios. Other elements pop up, like running water and clattering wind chimes, before “12H.3” introduces a gentle pulse and quivering synth line, only to have it splash back into gurgly water sounds and electronics.
A magnificent highlight comes on “12H.5,” which could be a leftover from Sintetizzatrice, his collaboration with Caragnano. The track painstakingly layers her gossamer breaths, building a sigh into a skyscraper.  As that piece dissipates, the first smattering of percussion finally enters, nearly 45 minutes into the album, the hand drums pinging about the stereo field like a gentle tribute to E2-E4. Usually when drums enter Dozzy’s mixes, they elevate the proceedings to an unimaginable new high. Here, they don’t really add much in the way of emotion or release.
The throbs of “12H.8” soon get submerged by field recordings of insects rustling in the distance. The metallic thrums and acid stabs that punctuate “12H.9” are texturally intriguing, though they too soon fall to the wayside. We’re left to wonder what it might have sounded like had Dozzy pushed a few elements further or higher (as when Dozzy dropped a masterful techno rework of “12H.5” as a single earlier this year), rather than let the strictures of minimalism tamp everything down. The sounds of bridge traffic dovetail nicely with 12H’s kosmische-esque closing track, but like most urban congestion problems, it just takes far too long to get there.


Eighteen-year-old Atlanta songwriter Raury is exactly the type of performer that makes record companies salivate in 2014. His free debut, I**ndigo Child, serves as a perfect introduction to Raury’s style-sampling aesthetic, as well as the blizzard of sometimes-undercooked ideas he brings to the table.

Indigo Child

Eighteen-year-old Atlanta songwriter Raury is exactly the type of performer that makes record companies salivate in 2014. Though the sound of his full-length debut Indigo Child is tough to pin down, listening to his music easily conjures comparison to beloved acts of this generation: André 3000, Bon Iver, Kid Cudi, Frank Ocean. He is reminiscent of Lorde, another teenage shuffling disparate interests—rap, folk, EDM—into something logical. And like Lorde, Raury has a nose for the sky-scraping moment and knows how to make a big song seem personal. If you had to bet on an artist-on-the-verge becoming a big star, there are worse bets.
I**ndigo Child serves as a perfect introduction to Raury’s style-sampling aesthetic, as well as the blizzard of sometimes-undercooked ideas he brings to the table. On “Superfly”, he borrows liberally from the melody of Kid Cudi’s “Day 'n' Nite”, switching from rapping to reaching for the heavens with a soulful breakdown. “God’s Whisper” aims unabashedly for an exultant campfire singalong and mostly nails it; “Wildfire” is a string-laden track resembling something a teenage André 3000 would have made if he had never met Big Boi, steering Raury into a trance-like climax where he paraphrases Lil Wayne’s “The Block Is Hot”. Though the ideas come from a variety of points existing on the pop music spectrum, Raury’s warm production helps Indigo Child achieve a general coherence, a testament to his ability to organize the swirling nature of his sound.
Indigo Child shows all the hallmarks of promise, but the music doesn't always live up to the prevailing comparisons that have been thrust upon the teenager. Though many of Raury’s ideas are strong and linked together in interesting ways, sometimes he doesn't quite hit his mark. Album closer “Seven Suns” is an eight-minute, staring-at-the-sun style melter that feels gratuitous, while the record's other large-sized, orchestrated moments feel a little hollow ("Chariots of Fire") with lyrics that take on the form of of empty teenage philosophizing (“I shared my cigarette with her/ I fucked her every Wednesday evening/ Why do you always use that word/ When you don't even know its meaning?”). Overall, Indigo Child is an intriguing blueprint for Raury's talent, and watching Raury continue to put it all together going forward will definitely prove fascinating.


After a 17-year hiatus, Mazzy Star are back, and they haven’t lost a thing in the interim. Their fourth album Seasons of Your Day is so faithful to the band's established sound, and is rendered so perfectly, that it’s almost hard to believe.

Seasons of Your Day

Mazzy Star went away in 1996 and even a few years ago there was no reason to think they would return. They made three very solid records that explored a small handful of musical ideas and those records seemed to say all the group had to to say. In that sense (and a few others—both were on Rough Trade in 1991), they bring to mind Galaxie 500, another band that created slow, expansive, and gorgeously atmospheric music. In each case, their brief arc was complete; for anyone interested in that Mazzy Star feeling, She Hangs Brightly, So Tonight That I Might See, and Among My Swan were still there, ready to provide a distinctive mix of of psych-tinged folk, blues, Laurel Canyon glide, and Hope Sandoval’s captivating voice, which expressed hushed, lean-in intimacy and aloof distance simultaneously. In the years since, the sound of those albums proved surprisingly influential, though in an appropriately small-scale way, and that influence crested in the last few years. Mazzy Star may have benefited retroactively from a renewed interest in the darkly sexy side of David Lynch’s aesthetic; their first three records captured that feeling perfectly and artists from Beach House to Widowspeak to Lana Del Rey have offered variations on that particular theme.
But they did come back, and unlike recent records from other bands that made their names in the 1980s and 90s, they haven’t lost a thing in the interim. Seasons of Your Day is so faithful to Mazzy Star’s established sound and is rendered so perfectly that it’s almost hard to believe. There is no sign of age or intrusion of an additional influence; if word emerged that this record was actually recorded in 1997, a year after the release of Among My Swan, there would be no reason to doubt it. The tone and phrasing of Sandoval’s voice are exactly where we left them when Bill Clinton was seeking a second term as President. The slide guitar, brushed drums, and tambourine hits are all recorded beautifully, and there is enough space around every element to suggest a lack of sonic trickery.
David Roback, Mazzy Star’s musical driving force and a veteran of 1980s L.A. bands from Rain Parade to Opal, hasn’t been in the public eye since Among My Swan, but whatever he’s been up to, he remembers how to make a record sound good and how to write simple and effective chord changes. The craftsmanship of the songs—their mix of longing, weary resignation, and dusty cracks of sunlight—remains at a high level. To hear this Mazzy Star record is to understand why the modest and enjoyable Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions never really took off; Roback studied the work of Lou Reed, Neil Young, and Jagger/Richards in their prime, and he’s retained those lessons all these years later. The reverb forming a halo around Sandoval’s voice on “California” is warm and haunted, Roback’s guitar tone on “Common Burn” is impossibly lonesome and beautiful, and the acoustic slide imparting a sense of “Wild Horses” blusiness on “Sparrow” and “Does Someone Have Your Baby Now” cuts through yawning canyons of silence. The record is sonically impressive in an elemental way, and the songs are memorable and distinct.
But if Mazzy Star have done amazingly well bringing back their initial sound and spirit, they also haven’t done anything to transcend its limitations. As gorgeous as the music can be, it still tends to work best in the background, a mood or vibe to give a dim room a nice tint. “Fade Into You”, their one hit and the only song most of the world has heard by them, with its “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” progression and pronounced romantic ache, did manage to connect with a lot of people on a deeply emotional level, but that wasn't necessarily the point of Mazzy Star as a whole. There was always some remove to the project, a certain formalism; still, to my ear, none of these qualities detract from what makes Mazzy Star so listenable and appealing. Those first three albums have always been easy to put on and enjoy, and now we have a fourth to go with them.


Working primarily with the 1975’s George Daniel, the English songwriter crafts a breakup album that’s vibrant and playful while exploring nuanced emotional threads.

The Japanese House: In the End It Always Does

In the End It Always Does

In the End It Always Does, Amber Bain’s second album as the Japanese House, strikes a beautiful equilibrium, wedding perceptive writing with bright, buoyant production. Reveling in the raw sting of a breakup, it continues Bain’s collaboration with the 1975 drummer and producer George Daniel, who, along with London-based producer and engineer Chloe Kraemer (Lava La Rue, Glass Animals) co-produces every song. While Bain’s early music tended toward hazy tones that occasionally overwhelmed her contemplative vocals, the music here is emotional and danceable, elevating her forlorn melodies and nuanced thematic through-lines.
With brief appearances from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, MUNA’s Katie Gavin, Matty Healy, and Charli XCX, Bain bends heartbreak into new shapes. One moment she basks in horny reverie, the next she’s catatonically depressed. The extravagant pop-rock of “Touching Yourself” attempts to square sexual desire with the sensation of not being truly seen. “I want to touch you, but you’re too far away,” she belts in the hook, an exuberant climax softened by Bain’s aching delivery. Throughout the album, the bubbly production is freighted with hurt, like on lead single “Boyhood,” which explores the loss of self that can come with loving others. Bain describes trying to find love amid the possibility of change and the fear of being alone. But the twiddly acoustic guitars, thumping kick drums, and swooning falsetto infuse the song with a sense of optimism.
In some of the most affecting tracks, Bain considers how to build a meaningful life without the support of a romantic partner. She’s reading The Artist’s Way, birdwatching, tending to a garden, and spending time with her dog. The production slows and strips down in these reflective moments. On “Over There,” co-written with Vernon, or “Morning Pages,” Bain’s patient melodies slink across airy keys and muted guitars, her lyrics capturing still lifes of days lost in despair: “She came by to get some things she left behind/She keeps her shoes on/There’s not a lot to lose when you’ve lost someone.”
In the End is sharpest when Bain’s writing and Kramer and Daniel’s production meet at opposite ends, when the feelings of sadness are punctured with vibrant instrumentation. Take the Healy-assisted “Sunshine Baby,” in which a gorgeously somber hook—“I don’t know what’s right anymore/I don’t want to fight anymore”—is spliced with sunny, effervescent production. Even “Sad to Breathe,” with its heart-wrenching chorus, doesn’t take off until the tempo picks up in the second verse, the beat erupting with Daniel’s punchy drums, a thwapping bass, and a plucky guitar. Bain has crafted her share of evocative ballads, but the ones on In the End tend to zap the momentum. Bain is at her best when she’s embracing a sense of playfulness, winking as subtly as she cries, sashaying between humor and hurt.


Nearly every song on Currents is a statement of leader Kevin Parker's range and increasing expertise as a producer, arranger, songwriter, and a vocalist. Parker is writing pop songs here, and doing them justice, and Currents is the result of a supernaturally talented obsessive trying to perfect music.

Currents

After two Tame Impala albums that centered on Kevin Parker's withdrawal from society, he has entered the stream of life on Currents. And he's lonelier than ever. The bemused, occasionally melancholy isolation that defined Innerspeaker and Lonerism has metastasized into heartbreak, bitterness, regret—feelings that can actually kill you if left untended. This is a breakup record on a number of levels—the most obvious one being the dissolution of a romantic relationship, but also a split with the guitar as a primary instrument of expression and even the end of the notion that Tame Impala is anything besides Kevin Parker and a touring band of hired guns. Because of these shifts, the question of whether Currents is better than his first two albums is beside the point: it stands completely apart.
Parker has never minced words about his intentions, and there's a song here called "Yes I'm Changing". The music communicates even more clearly: Currents' opening salvo "Let It Happen" has barely any audible guitars and makes ingenious use of a passage where it sounds like a half-second loop is accidentally stuck on repeat. It's a despairing, open-ended psych-disco hybrid whose closest modern analog is Daft Punk's Random Access Memories—a record that cast disco, yacht rock, and dance pop as shared founts of old-school, hands-on music-making. In this sense, the album reimagines and expands Tame Impala's relationship to album rock—like Loveless or Kid A or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it's the result of a supernaturally talented obsessive trying to perfect music while redefining their relationship to album-oriented rock. There's more care and nuance put into the drum filtering on "Let It Happen" than most bands manage in an entire career of recording.
Currents is the result of many structural changes, most of which exchange maximalist, hallucinatory swirl for intricacy, clean lines. As we knew from "Elephant", the song that Parker sheepishly admitted "[paid] for half my house," Parker is good at writing catchy, simple guitar riffs. But he’s also somehow the best and most underrated rock bassist of the 21st century, and it’s not even close on either front. The near total absence of guitars means there is nothing remotely like "Elephant" here. But this allows the bass to serve as every song’s melodic chassis as well as the engine and the wheels: "The Moment" actually shuffles along to the same beat as "Elephant", though it's a schaffel rather than a trunk-swinging plod, its effervescent lope and pearly synths instantly recalling "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" or even Gwen Stefani and Akon's "The Sweet Escape". "The Less I Know the Better" merges Thriller's nocturnal, hard funk with the toxic paranoia of Bad.
And make no mistake, Parker is writing pop songs here, and doing them justice. During the lead-up to Lonerism, he claimed he wrote an entire album of songs for Kylie Minogue and had to stress he wasn't joking. Perhaps appearing on one of 2015's biggest pop records inspired him. Either way, the external or internal pressure to keep his pop impulses at bay are gone.
Nearly every proper song on Currents is a revelatory statement of Parker’s range and increasing expertise as a producer, arranger, songwriter, and vocalist while maintaining the essence of Tame Impala: Parker is just as irreverent working in soul and R&B as he is with psych-rock. "Nangs" and "Gossip" function as production segues, pure displays of "How'd he do that?" synth modulation that prove Parker sees himself as a friendly rival of Jamie xx rather than someone who sees a strict DJ/"musician" binary. While the sitar-like frill on "New Person, Same Old Mistakes" has hints of shimmering Philly soul, there's also engagement with the dubby textures and repetitive melodies of purple R&B. And for good measure, there's a bridge where Parker makes a modern studio take sound like a forgotten, vinyl breakbeat and drops it mid-track like a jarring DJ transition—a trick most effectively used on Yeezus' "On Sight" and "I Am a God".
While Parker will never not sound like John Lennon, this time, he imagines a fascinating alternate history where the most famous Beatle forsakes marriage and the avant-garde for "Soul Train" and Studio 54. On Innerspeaker, Parker's melodies were effectively smudged with reverb and layering—once drawn with charcoal, now they're etched with exacto knives. As a result, the singles on Currents could be covered by anyone, and Parker has advanced to the point where he can write and sing an immaculate choral melody on "'Cause I'm a Man" and have it sound like a soul standard.
"'Cause I'm a Man" also puts Parker's personal life front and center in a new way. The chorus ("I'm a man, woman/ Don't always think before I do") finds him in league with Father John Misty's I Love You, Honeybear and My Morning Jacket's The Waterfall, taking an unsparing and often unflattering look at masculinity and romance, examining what qualifies as biological instinct and what qualifies as mere rationalization for wanting to fuck around and/or be left alone.
The emotional power of Currents comes from its willingness to accept that relationships will expose an introvert's every character defect. Parker's lopsided inventory is revealed on "Eventually", which exposes the false altruism often used to justify "it's not you, it's me." The structure of the chorus ("But I know that I'll be happier/ And I know you will, too/ Eventually") makes it plain that it's always about me first. And even if Parker honestly wishes eventual happiness for "you," he wants it to arrive on his schedule. On "The Less I Know the Better", he calls out an ex's new lover by name and plots his empty revenge (his "Heather" to her "Trevor"). By the next song ("Past Life"), Parker passes her on the street and considers giving her a call not because he cares or wants to get back together, just because he can. He fools himself into thinking a new routine of picking up dry cleaning and walking around the block, which he enumerates in a mumbled, pitched-down monologue, constitutes a new existence, but it's all part of the same continuum.
Currents could be called a "transitional album," but what Parker seems to realize is that all albums should be so named, because life is transitional. This is why "Let It Happen" leads off Currents rather than serving as its climactic laser-light show. It's a dazzling, impossibly intricate song about resisting the temptation to micromanage your life. And it may be a companion piece to "Feels Like We Only Go Backwards". Notice that Parker presciently phrased the lyric with *we—*whether it's about a partner, a fanbase, or just the construct of one's self, there's always the tendency to seek comfort and stability rather than dealing with the dissonance between two entities that are inevitably subject to changing at different frequencies. The kicker was even more prescient—"Every part of me says, 'go ahead'." And so Currents ends up being Parker's most convincing case for solitude yet—he knows that perfection can only be achieved inside the studio and progress is the ultimate goal outside of it.


The debut from the experimental indie pop duo of Lily Konigsberg and Nate Amos is a textured, intimate, blurry account of being in the throes of a relationship and having it fall apart.

Cry MFer

When Lily Konigsberg and Nate Amos began writing Cry Mfer, their debut album as the eccentric indie pop duo My Idea, they were in the trenches of a let’s say ambiguous mutual fascination that they didn’t fully understand: “We definitely were like, oh, maybe we’re in love?” Konigsberg said in a press release. And perhaps the scariest part of being in love with someone else is your newfound and mutual ability to really hurt one another. This is My Idea’s raison d’être: scrawled between its moments of whimsy, Cry Mfer reads like a journal entry of all the things you wanted to say in the throes of a relationship but never did.
My Idea formed after Konigsberg, of the arty punk trio Palberta, brought in Amos, of the experimental pop duo Water From Your Eyes, to produce her spunky solo record, Lily We Need to Talk Now. Cry Mfer is expectedly eclectic, hurdling between indie folk, electro-pop, and one piano ballad for good measure—while the differences may feel jarring, the common thread is Konigsberg and Amos’ unflappable chemistry, and their willingness to put even some of the most difficult sentiments to tape. Though they’ve made amends with one another, Cry Mfer is, almost literally, the soundtrack of a situationship that is falling apart.
Each of the songs on Cry Mfer loosely navigates the nuances of this companionship with self-awareness and brutal honesty. Konigsberg and Amos trade vocal and writing duties across the album, each putting the things that are often left unsaid in the spotlight. “I will be the one to say goodbye this time,” Konigsberg sings in the album’s opening lines, insinuating all the other farewells that have preceded and followed. Over a sleek, country-pop chug that evokes a more subdued version of Taylor Swift’s “Style,” Konigsberg has a harsh reality check: “Nothing ever lasts that feels amazing/Circumstances bury what your heart’s saying.”
Cry Mfer is full of confessions that it’s hard to imagine the band members truly wanted to share. On the minimal slow jam “Breathe You,” Amos seems to liken his lover’s addictive nature to that of a cigarette, alluring and slowly destructive: “I can’t wait for the next time I get to fuck you,” he sings through a Vocoder (Amos admittedly wrote the song while “high as shit,” poking fun at Justin Bieber’s unflatteringly earnest odes to lovemaking.) Meanwhile, on “Lily’s Phone,” Konigsberg alludes to making inebriated booty calls over a no-frills guitar riff that recalls the playful candor of early Liz Phair. That sense of humor keeps Cry Mfer from feeling too morose, a refreshing reminder that this jilted storyline is about friends, after all.
Cry Mfer is largely self-reflective, and perhaps the best example of this is “Crutch,” a burst of jangle-pop on which Konigsberg admits to her own codependency: “If punishment is a crime/Then I’m a bad guy almost all of the time,” she sings between apologies. It’s a twisted love song that appears to mirror Konigsberg and Amos’ relationship with each other as much as it does their relationship with alcohol, a substance they’ve both abandoned since completing the album. To what extent will we distance ourselves from what we really need in order to pursue what we want in the moment? And what happens when that discordance blurs our better judgment? Cry Mfer doesn’t attempt to find any clear-cut conclusions, but it’s a portrait of a mess caught in real-time. Maybe the only way to make it out is to make it through.


Her first solo record since 1999 is mildly ambitious and sounds spectacular, but Windy City is not a great showcase of Allison Krauss' crossover sound.

Windy City

The easy listening criticism has dogged Alison Krauss for more than twenty years, and she does nothing to dispel it on Windy City, her first solo record since 1999. Her music is thoughtfully poised between the bluegrass she grew up playing as a fiddle prodigy and the jazzy mainstream adult pop popularized by Norah Jones. At least since the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack made her voice so famous, she has focused more on singing than playing the fiddle. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as Krauss has a bright, soft soprano that at its best blends Dolly Parton’s cheery expressiveness with Willie Nelson’s dexterous phrasing. The downside, however, is that her music, while expertly performed and recorded, is often blanched of any distinguishing twang or genre character. The listening becomes too easy.
As though addressing that criticism directly, Windy City includes a cover of the 1967 crossover hit “Gentle on My Mind,” written by John Hartford but made famous by Glen Campbell. The song lives right at the intersection of pop and country, its lyrics even describing how the music should operate: “You’re movin’ on the back roads by the rivers of my memory/And for hours you’re just gentle on my mind.” Krauss isn’t the first female singer to take a shot at the song—Aretha, Patti Page, and the Band Perry have all recorded versions—but she does unintentionally show just how tricky the song can be. While her voice is perfectly suited to the song’s rosy nostalgia, she can’t quite navigate the narrative twist in the last verse, when the narrator is revealed to be not just a wanderer but literally homeless, haunting trainyards and barrel fires with a coal-dark beard and a dirty hat.
Krauss doesn't conjure that kind of character of setting, but then again, Campbell himself barely could. Still, he knew enough to play up the contrast between the grittiness of the circumstances and the gentleness of the memory. This version is all gentle: technically sharp but emotionally blunted. That’s a problem throughout Windy City, as her pursuit of a viable crossover sound opens up new musical possibilities even as it burnishes away the genre edges of these songs. Working with Nashville producer Buddy Cannon, Krauss displays a broad palette, covering left-of-center choices from the Osborne Brothers and Roger Miller, Brenda Lee and country songwriting legend Cindy Walker. But the arrangements on opener “Losing You” and the title track don’t even bother to evoke the messiness of actual loss. They’re stately and elegant, but also cold and detached.
Windy City sounds liveliest whenever Krauss gets away from crossover pop. She navigates the twisting rhythms of the honky-tonk hit “It’s Good-Bye and So Long To You” with a jazzy agility and actually sounds like she’s having fun with it. Likewise, her version of the bluegrass chestnut “Poison Love” has a calypso pulse that seems to defy gravity. Even “River in the Rain” retains its showtune determinism: If this Roger Miller obscurity, penned for a Huck Finn musical, is the album’s centerpiece, it’s because Krauss keeps it anchored to the stage. She sounds more at home with that kind of theatrical drama than she does with a story-song like the title track or “Gentle on My Mind.”
Windy City is not the best place for newcomers to start with Krauss. The curious should search out the 1995 retrospective Now That I’ve Found You, which features a savvier, more imaginative crossover sound. Windy City never quite reconciles her genre history with her populist ambitions, creating an album that toggles back and forth between the two poles and then ends abruptly. Krauss conveys a stately heartbreak in her closing cover of the Cindy Walker/Eddy Arnold classic “You Don’t Know Me,” striking the ideal balance between elegant countrypolitan backing, eccentric piano and pedal steel flourishes, and vocals that convey both power and personality. It’d be a fine starting point for a follow-up.


Armed with a caustic wit and a poetic eye, Open Mike Eagle builds a small, quiet monument to a housing project in Chicago across a diverse and singular piece of contemporary hip-hop.

Open Mike Eagle: Brick Body Kids Still Daydream

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream

The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development finally demolished the last building of the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s South Side in 2007, but by then, the more than 11,000 people that formerly occupied its 28 buildings had long been written off. After a 1969 shift in public housing policy that made rent commensurate with one’s income, working-class families were replaced with new tenants on public assistance paying nearly nothing. As operating income plummeted, resources became scarce, tenant screening almost non-existent, and crime ubiquitous. HUD’s solution, the HOPE VI program, dealt with the project buildings the same way HUD dealt with black bodies—discarding them when they become inconvenient, marking the Robert Taylor Homes for demolition and redevelopment. For Michael Eagle II, who had grown up in the community and whose aunt was displaced by the demolition, the metaphor was not subtle. And neither is the cover of his new album as Open Mike Eagle, Brick Body Kids Still Daydream.
The record lives quietly in the daydreams of a kid in the Robert Taylor Homes, the life of a child with an active imagination in a hardened environment often actively hostile toward creativity. Tonally, it evokes Tupac Shakur’s posthumous collection of poetry, The Rose That Grew From Concrete, and the rich history of art born from black pain. It’s a colorful portrait of lives that are typically rendered in one dimension. And yet somehow, he can still make us laugh.
Eagle is a late-30s indie rapper on his fifth solo LP, no small feat in and of itself. A graduate of LA’s Project Blowed collective, he’s carved out his own lane with a successful podcast and a live show that’s since been optioned as a program on Comedy Central. He’s long been an advocate for the wealth of diversity in the black experience in hip-hop, wielding the morose truth-telling aesthetic of stand-up comedy to bring levity to the often tragic circumstances of his social commentary.
Brick Body Kids Still Daydream serves as an antidote to dystopian depictions of the neighborhoods and communities on Chicago’s South Side that are often one-dimensional, serving as a glimpse into the mind of a poet who can see the beauty and articulate it through the eyes of a child. It’s a very specific brand of ’90s nostalgia—wistful remembrance of a life he left behind, one that inexorably shaped him.
Impressively, Eagle maintains a coherent aesthetic across 12 tracks by ten different producers, a muted brood that resists the default loudness of mainstream hip-pop. There’s a lushness to the production absent some of his earlier work, but he’s still comfortable pulling sounds from anywhere: guitars and wind instruments, analog synthesizers, or distorted vocal samples. His voice is soulful and reserved, and his sing-raps are smooth.
Eagle’s strength is as a writer, and Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is chock full of witty one-liners (“Been woke so long I might need to take a nap,” he raps on “TLDR (Smithing)”). But unlike actual comedians, he doesn’t seem too invested in lingering on the punch lines. His flow is slow but always nimble, packing verses with complicated rhyme schemes while maintaining crystal clear diction. He has the writer’s gift for detail, the ability to articulate ephemeral concepts rooted in nostalgia. On “(How Could Anybody) Feel At Home,” he raps: “I’m avoiding my nose/It smells like you should imagine you boiled a rose/And the oven is on/And the coil’s exposed.” He mints poignant aphorisms with ease (“An apple a day/What apple sellers say”) and as he dabbles in casual misandry (“If there was justice all men would have to die/Patricide/Tweet at the void and heart the at replies”) it’s as if you can see the smirk on his face that hides all the pain.
At the heart of the album’s concept is the “Legendary Iron Hood,” a too-smart-for-his-own-good ghetto child who’s been trampled underfoot by life. He’s become an expert at keeping his head down, his hood a protective shroud from the dangers that surround him. On “No Selling,” we see him force himself to play it cool amid the chaos, remaining steely in the face of pain and fear. The LP’s centerpiece, “Brick Body Complex,” is about as forceful as Eagle gets, promising “I will never fit in your descriptions/I’m giant/Don’t let nobody tell you nothing different/They lying/A giant and my body is a building.” The projects are more than just a collection of buildings at this point; they’re tied up in his identity, even his physical self. The bricks are his armor.
If “Brick Body Complex” is the LP’s centerpiece, then “My Auntie’s Building” is its coda. Swirling static and dissonant noise seethe over boom-bap drums as he begs some higher power not to knock him down, bitter that the destruction seems only to find bodies that look like his: “They say America fights fair/But they won't demolish your timeshare.” And as he repeats the record’s final line—“That’s the sound of them tearing my body down”—the distorted sounds of demolition rumble in the background.
On a recent flight, Eagle was transfixed by a pair of documentaries on his auntie’s projects, and moved to write something about the place where much of his youth played out. In this way, a strange parallel can be found with Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra, who wrote about the since-demolished Bronx high-rise of her youth on The Navigator’s “Fourteen Floors,” exploring the existential limbo of returning home, only to be unable to recognize it. But as much as demolition of the Robert Taylor Homes altered the landscape of Chicago’s South Side, it’s hard to say that much has changed. The violence that plagued the project still plagues the community, and ghetto children still dream of iron hoods with their heads in the clouds, and Open Mike Eagle builds a small monument where the Robert Taylor Homes once stood.


The Washington D.C. producer’s drum tracks are bold, burly numbers that move with abandon. Even without melodies, no two sound remotely alike.

DOLO 4

Andrew Field-Pickering’s music as Max D (aka Maxmillion Dunbar) represents a kind of cheerful excess. Bursting with energy and ideas, it’s scrappy in spirit and also execution, cobbled together from a motley array of daisy-chained drum machines and outmoded synths. With rhythms variously modeled on 1980s house, techno, new jack swing, and the sorts of percussive dub mixes that used to come standard on the B-sides of pop and R&B 12"s, it’s rooted in classic dance music without being expressly retro (despite the occasional shakuhachi flute sample that might come sailing out of the murk).
The music’s kinetic overload is rivaled only by its super-saturated tone colors, sticky as squished berries. So what happens when Field-Pickering strips out all the musical bits—the opalescent pads, glassy leads, and squelchy basslines—and narrows his focus to the drums? You get Dolo Percussion, the name he’s used for an occasional series of drum tracks and DJ tools since 2013. The first installment came out as a four-track EP on L.I.E.S.; Dolo 2 followed in 2014 on his own Future Times label, and Dolo 3 popped up last year on The Trilogy Tapes. Dolo 4 gathers all three EPs and rounds them out with four new tracks. Together, they make for a masterful display of Field-Pickering’s rhythmic chops.
No staid boom-tickers or pokey pitter-patterers here. These are bold, burly numbers that move with abandon: swinging, lunging, barreling, lurching. He likes his kicks beefy and his cymbals clanging, and he rides the pitch of individual drum hits like a bush pilot hopped up on pep pills, soaring and plunging with scant regard for weak stomachs. Even without melodies, no two tracks sound remotely alike. That’s thanks in part to his ear for distinctively syncopated grooves that unspool with the propulsive force of a tightly wound spring; it has just as much to do with his textural instincts. In “DOLO 4,” the hi-hats and snares take on the liquid quality of Baka water drumming; the drums in “DOLO 7” seem to be coated with a fine film of ash; in “DOLO 9,” they vibrate like a mouthful of Pop Rocks.
Drum tracks have a rich history in DJ culture; long before Serato and CDJs made it easy for DJs to extend a looped beat for as long as they’d like, dance producers pressed up percussive edits to facilitate long, intricate blends. But Dolo Percussion cuts aren’t mere DJ tools (though a creative DJ could presumably get plenty of dancefloor mileage out of these 16 flights of rhythmic fancy). Some tracks extend to six, seven, even 11 minutes, and they earn every second of their run time, drum patterns morphing like amoeba under an electronic microscope.
The final four tracks, which are exclusive to this release, are the most inventive and varied of the lot. “DOLO 16” suggests dub reggae with all the reverb sopped up by silica packets; “DOLO 15” is slow-motion drum’n’bass suffused in finger cymbals and ring modulator; the quick-stepping “DOLO 13,” all wind chimes and electronic buzz, could almost be mistaken for something off Perlon, the iconic German minimal-techno label. Best of the bunch is “DOLO 14,” a slow, heady funk cut that’s steeped in D.C. go-go (a palpable influence on Field-Pickering’s dynamic sense of swing), and whose disorienting array of hissing cymbals and clacking woodblocks give the impression of surround sound, even on just two speakers. The conventional wisdom might say that drum tracks are an inherently limited form. But rather than exhausting their possibilities, Field-Pickering has clearly become more inspired as he continued the series. As the Slits once sang, “Silence is a rhythm too”: By muting his melodies, Field-Pickering keeps finding new ways to make his beats sing.


According to the members of Bloodiest, the Chicago sextet’s music is related to metal, but has more in common with composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Morricone. On their second album, they venture into an art-metal terrain that not many other acts have visited.

Bloodiest

If you've ever set foot in an art gallery, then you know what it's like when an artist's description of their work turns out to be way more compelling than the work itself. Clearly, the act of creating something distorts the perspective of the person making it, which means that artists can sometimes be the least qualified people to shed light on the things they make.
According to the members of Bloodiest, the Chicago sextet's music is related to metal, but has more in common with composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Morricone. That sounds enticing on paper, but it's not what you hear on album opener "Mesmerize," a fairly straightahead number built on an insistent riff that manages to borrow from Tool guitarist Adam Jones while leaving out the intangibles that distinguished Jones' playing from the riffmongers of his era. The fact that a band so focused on mood and dynamics would emulate the most superficial and brutish aspects of Jones' playing makes you scratch your head—and also speaks to the pitfalls of playing musical dress-up.
Though they're enthusiastic fans of metal, the members of Bloodiest aren't dyed-in-the-wool metalheads. The group identifies as underground indie/post-rock at heart, which makes sense considering that at various points its membership has included alums from experimental Chicago acts like 90 Day Men, Lustre King, and Russian Circles. Founding guitarists Tony Lazzara and Eric Chaleff played together in Sterling and Follows, and vocalist Bruce Lamont plays sax and howls in the more jaggedly experimental quartet Yakuza. For better or worse, they have little collective experience playing heavy stuff that openly identifies as such.
To be fair, sometimes you get very "authentic" results from people who aren't "natives" to the style they play. In fact, several of metal's most iconic trailblazers never actually listened to the stuff much. But as you make your way through Bloodiest, the band’s follow-up to its 2011 debut Descent, it's hard to shake the feeling that Lazzara, Chaleff, and their cohorts handle these riffs with the same combination of fascination and distance that tourists show when they're in the gift shop of a foreign country, where the untrained eye has a hard time spotting the difference between cliché, truth, and the gray area where most cultural hallmarks are actually both.
There are times on Bloodiest where the band does twist otherwise conventional riffs into shapes they wouldn't have assumed in their usual habitat. On "Broken Teeth," for example, one of the guitarists takes the familiar theme from Holst's "Mars" (the same melody you hear at the beginning of Metallica's "Am I Evil" cover), puts it on a cutting board, and dices it up. Later in the same song, Chaleff and Lazzara counterpose another coiling Adam Jones-esque riff against a drum pattern that former 90 Day Men drummer Cayce Key purposely drags so far behind the beat that it makes the whole band sound like it's stuttering. Meanwhile, pianist Nandini Khaund underlays the dense, sludgy wall of sound with elegant chords that hint at what Dixieland jazz might sound like in a cough-syrup induced nightmare. At moments like these, regardless of whether this band falls as close to modern classical, post-rock, or film scores as it would have you believe, it does manage to find itself in art-metal terrain that's still mostly untouched.
When fringe musicians with indie sensibilities dabble in metal, they tend to either put a ponderous spin on it (Liturgy) or a campy one (Dave Pajo's one-off group Dead Child). Bloodiest most definitely leans towards the former, especially during its lengthy stretches of classical-tinged guitar spiked with ethereal chanting. Almost three decades since John Zorn compared Napalm Death to free jazz, the genre still has a way of luring dilettantes who can't resist what they perceive as its lowbrow/junk-culture temptations. Never mind that, musically speaking, Zorn's comparison was totally fair; it still smacked of unintended snobbery.
But Bloodiest doesn't come off as the product of well-intentioned but privileged slumming. After all, this band is from Chicago, where musicians inclined to shuttle between various genres have long felt free to do so. Most of the members of Bloodiest have roots in bands that operate or operated at the outskirts of metal anyway. With this album, they stake their claim to a musical inheritance left behind by predecessors who flouted boundaries and bastardized conventional notions of heaviness. Fittingly, they make the best of that inheritance by striking out on their own.