The debut album from Moses Sumney is a soulful, cosmic embrace of aloneness. His deep blue songwriting examines the blasé cruelty that defines intimacy in our swipe-left era.

Aromanticism

African-American writer and activist Langston Hughes penned these unsentimental lyrics in 1946: “The night for me is not romantic/Unhook the stars and take them down.”  On Moses Sumney’s full-length debut, the art-soul singer-songwriter taps into the enduring resonance of Hughes’ blues melancholy. What does it mean to never experience romantic love in a world so structured by the need for it?
Alongside other post-Arthur Russell auteurs like Arca or Perfume Genius, Sumney’s got a jones for drifty, slo-mo songcraft and ambient production. Across a couple of EPs, including last year’s Lamentations, he’s explored these drifting, spare environments while distinguishing himself with his austere guitar arrangements and performances. His tricky harmonic progressions recall Brazilian jazz deities like Gilberto Gil as much as they do the contemporary neo-jazz of Flying Lotus. Sumney’s emotionalism and rapturous crooning also connect him to the legacy of underappreciated post-’90s neo-soul like India.Arie, Lianne La Havas, and Bilal. His hip Los Angeles take on navel-gazing boho blackness makes his music the perfect soundtrack for Issa Rae’s sad-sack HBO comedy series “Insecure” and his 2014 ballad “Plastic,” included on Aromanticism, was once featured on the show. Fused together from disparate stylistic influences, his idiosyncratic sound borrows from the musical style of every decade since the 1970s, but doesn’t seem beholden to any specific one.
The concept of aromanticism—the incapacity or unwillingness to reciprocate romantic feelings or love—runs throughout Sumney’s fragile, existential lyrics: Broken, disappointed, and isolated, Sumney is like Melville’s forlorn Bartleby staring somberly out the window into the void—or, perhaps, a 21st-century version of Tina Turner whispering “What’s love got to do with it?” But he finds radical politics in foreclosing the possibility of finding lasting intimacy and love with a partner. On the burnished “Doomed,” he sings: “If lovelessness is godlessness/Will you cast me to the wayside?” Then there’s the ressentiment of “Indulge Me”: “Nobody troubles my body after/All my old others have found lovers.” In these moments, Sumney is decidedly more downer Friedrich Nietzsche than liberationist James Baldwin.
Sumney’s cosmic embrace of aloneness and dissociation—his nihilismus, to borrow a phrase from writer and poet Amiri Baraka—has particular resonance in our current cultural moment in which the leader of the so-called free world sees no problem in putting down black men for protesting their own derogation. Sumney has no patience for the façade of respectability politics or knee-jerk uplift narratives. You won’t find kumbayas on the inconsolable “Don’t Bother Calling,” and there’s no Hollywood ending on “Quarrel,” where attraction between partners of unequal backgrounds only results in incongruity: “We cannot be lovers/Long as I’m the other.”
Sumney’s deep blue songwriting examines the blasé cruelty that defines our swipe-left era. It also reminds us how much same-sex marriage battles have managed to reshift millennials’ interest in normalcy and the pursuit of intimacy in the age of Tinder. Does love need to be desired, much less found? Sumney’s music is woeful, but it’s still erotic and sexy: libidinous tryst-song “Make Out in My Car,” replete with jazz flute, repeats the hook: “I’m not tryna go to bed with you/I just wanna make out in my car.” Aromanticism envisions a loveless universe by way of sensuous musicianship: I suspect some couples will probably fall deeper in love while bumping and grinding to these songs. The exquisite production is atmospheric and bold: There’s lots of negative space, and you can’t help but dig the dreamlike harmonies and the curiously-EQ’d neo-classical strings. And Sumney’s gossamer falsetto, equal parts Smokey Robinson and Thom Yorke, is the album’s fertile throughline. Aromanticism’s quietude and calm sensitivity deliver a musical detoxification from the exhausting stream of information that now constitutes a normal day of news.
“Can I tell you a secret,” Sumney coos on “Plastic,” stretching his voice over a moment of musical silence. Aromanticism wins points for delivering intense, raw feeling in a global moment defined by sinister cruelty and the ongoing repression of black bodies. If there’s a critique to be made of this collection of songs, it’s that Sumney doesn’t summon the fierce wit and ebullient humanism of some of the classic-era jazz he musically draws from (think: Andy Razaf, Billy Strayhorn, or Fran Landesman). The album caters to pessimists who argue that our culture’s brain-dead emphasis on romance and love distracts from the inevitability of racial and class power struggle. It might confound others who don’t think the pursuit of those things is necessarily diametrically opposed. Frantz Fanon, the greatest writer on colonial politics and colonial love in the 20th century, was also a skeptic, not unlike Sumney: “Oh my body,” he famously wrote in 1952’s Black Skin, White Masks, “always make me a man who questions.” But Fanon believed that romantic love was possible—that, above all else, was why love was worthy of critique and dismantling. Sumney, for his part, seems to have gone down a different path: diving into the bleak void in search of answers, giving us sumptuous music along the way.


Hot Chip's fifth full-length, a meditation on positivity, is their most playful and colorful record to date.

In Our Heads

It's easy to forget that, when they first started out, Hot Chip operated with a devilish grin. "I'm like Stevie Wonder/ but I can see things," Alexis Taylor sang on "Keep Fallin'", from the band's 2004 debut, Coming on Strong. In the same breath he compared himself and compatriot Joe Goddard to Gene and Dean Ween: "We're like brothers who make records who can't play things." There was a boast about blasting Yo La Tengo from expensive cars, a heartbroken lament centered around prepackaged macaroni and cheese, and a cheeky proclamation about remembering Prince play with Vanity 6 when the narrator was still in diapers. And, I mean, that album title: If naming a fairly minimalistic, handmade electro-soul album Coming on Strong isn't having a laugh, then I don't know what is.
Over the years, Hot Chip retained their sense of humor, largely in the visual sense (funhouse torture devices, boy bands getting attacked by laser beams), but something not-so-funny also started to take place: As they perfected a savvy alchemy of dance and modern pop, their music became more serious. Amidst the big, beating heaters, dancefloor deconstructions, and "Simpsons"-soundtracking anthems, there emerged sincere ruminations on love, protection, and the pleasure that one derives from simply experiencing life, all of which were fully realized on 2010's excellent One Life Stand. The band's most concise and uniformly gorgeous album to date, One Life Stand also represented Hot Chip's most clear-eyed material yet, suggesting that the group was, somewhat soberly, growing up.
Luckily, growing up in Hot Chip's world is a fucking blast. In Our Heads, the group's fifth full-length, is their most playful and colorful record yet, an album-length manifestation of that "sounds of the studio" game that cut straight through the middle of "Shake a Fist". Fittingly, the record that In Our Heads bears most resemblance to in Hot Chip's catalog is the one that bore that single, 2008's Made in the Dark. That album's audacious genre-flaunting was softly tsk-tsk'd at the time of release for being too uneven and grab-baggy, but its bold charms have lent it a fond longevity. In Our Heads is similarly shaggy-- it kicks off with a tuba-heavy anthem and sails off into the sunset in delicious, wispy yacht-rock glory, with nine detailed detours in between-- but the upward progression in quality from One Life Stand is apparent. The songwriting is as strong and intricate than on 2006's classic The Warning, even if it takes a few listens for the finer points to sink in.
A good word to describe One Life Stand's overall vibe was "devotional," where the practice of worship was solemn and the higher power being worshiped was love, whether for a partner or your fellow man. In its own way, In Our Heads is a religious album, too, a fact that could be gleaned before hearing a single note, courtesy of the colorful cover art and inside-package designs that strongly resemble stained glass. On this collection, worship is celebratory, a point driven home by the LP's mission statement tucked within the sped-up house of "How Do You Do?": "A church is not for praying/ It's for celebrating the light that bleeds through the pain." Clubgoing agnostics might stay in forever as an act of protest, but the act of believing in something-- whether everlasting love, family, finality, or the essence of self-- is presented throughout as euphoria, the absolute definition of getting high off your own supply.
More than anything else, Hot Chip believe in music itself. On the outset, that statement comes across as a tad obvious, considering the band's career-long demonstration of impeccably executed taste has lent them the somewhat double-edged tag of "your favorite music nerd's favorite band." However, In Our Heads' benevolent generosity stretches beyond well-placed reference points, becoming an act of celebration that relates to making music. Joe Goddard told us back in March that much of the album's inspiration came from the "ecstatic moments" found on maxi-12" extended mixes from the 1980s. Although the slow jams on display (especially the affecting closer "Always Been Your Love", featuring Gang Gang Dance's Lizzi Bougatsos on backing vocals) find the band further spinning their love of R&B and soft-rock staples into the type of sonic gold that would be impressive on its own, it's the psychedelic blowout of In Our Heads' back half, which nicely compliments the front end's squelchy pop pleasures, that embraces that extended-mix ideal.
There's the dark, swirling techno of "Flutes", the up-with-movement electro-gospel of "Ends of the Earth", and, most notably, "Let Me Be Him". The song's a seven-minute-plus odyssey that lovingly glides through miles of endless warmth, its final destination a tropical utopia slathered in snatches of Balearic guitar that drip with sticky nectar. "Let Me Be Him" is one of the finest songs Hot Chip have put to tape, and from Goddard's lyrical genuflection to a higher power to an Alexis-sung line that doubles as a plea for fertile creativity ("Work hard, play hard at work/ Lend me your ideas/ But not too fully formed"), it beats with a bejeweled heart.
As a culture, dance music is sometimes perceived to be exclusionary, but its most basic pleasures lie in the escapism that the raw materials provide. Whether you're getting pummeled by a club's soundsystem or enjoying the comforts that a decent pair of headphones provide, the right tune can turn you starry-eyed, wiping your mind totally blank and making you happy to be alive just so you could be present to experience that very moment. Hot Chip understand that feeling, and through the broad populist strokes that frequently make up their work, they want everyone to experience it. That's why they're an important band, but In Our Heads isn't the work of a band that's attempting to assert its relevance. It's a meditation on positivity, a hedonistic joyride that isn't afraid to get deep, and a reminder that any band-- any album, any song-- can be your life, even for just a moment. Hot Chip do this for themselves, but also, for us.


Following last year's excellent Kindred EP, Burial's latest effort showcases 25 minutes of new work that hews closer to his much-imitated future-garage sound while also exploring fresh territory that at times feels almost celebratory.

Truant / Rough Sleeper

From the time of his first single in 2005 until he revealed his identity in August 2008, Burial maintained a carefully cultivated anonymity, arguably inventing the idea of the unknown but well-branded producer in the age of too much information. After the release of the landmark Untrue in 2007, Burial went quiet for almost two years. There was a lot of talk then about where his music might go next, about whether there was anywhere left for it to go. It's become a familiar problem in electronic music: when you create and own a sound completely, how do you continue to grow? Does growth matter? Until his first 12" collaboration with Four Tet in 2009, it seemed like the man born William Bevan might just avoid addressing the question at all. The steady series of collaborative and solo 12"s he's released since are an inspiring example of how to re-draw the borders of one's aesthetic. He's still Burial, and he still owns this sound, but he's slowly and surely expanding the idea of what Burial means.
Bevan has accomplished this, in part, through his creative use of the 12" format. If Untrue was an album that sometimes felt like a single masterful song, Burial's best work since consists of long tracks that feel like miniature albums. "Truant", the A-side of his latest 12", is nearly 12 minutes long and unfolds in distinct sections that, taken together, form a riveting narrative. The track immediately establishes itself as prototypical Burial: It moves from a brief opening drone to the familiar clattering snare; the crackles, the mournful synths, and the brief vocal sample are all there. Then, the idea of "prototypical Burial" is taken on a journey. Four minutes in, the tempo and rhythm shifts completely, the vocals change, and the mood moves away from bleary contemplation towards sharp-edged anxiety. When garbled orchestral samples enter in the final third, Burial is exploring completely new territory with fanfare-like music that feels almost celebratory. This is not the stuff of empty 5 a.m. streets, the echoing sense of comedown and loss. The music feels deep and wide and grand, and yet it still sounds like no one else. "Truant" is the Burial track as wide-ranging suite, and the progression from Untrue's "Archangel" to here is staggering.
The B-side, "Rough Sleeper", covers just as much territory. Shifting into an up-tempo beat, the track folds in organ chords, pitch-shifted vocals, and, ultimately, a repeating music-box refrain that sounds like a bummed-out and broken version of a Latin-inflected piano refrain from a house track. The word "soulful" means different things to different people, but this earns that designation; there's a touch of gospel warmth to it, something that feels even optimistic. Usually, when Burial samples a voice saying something like, "There's a light surrounding you," it sounds like a dying memory. Here, it sounds like an acknowledgement of the glory of the here-and now. "Rough Sleeper"'s emotional world is quite different from that of "Truant"; where the latter feels deep and wide, it oozes intimacy.
Truant/Rough Sleeper doesn't have the intensity of last year's Kindred EP, and it leans closer to the classic Burial sound, but its subtlety is its own reward. Who knows if or when a full-length follow-up to Untrue will arrive, but as long as Bevan continues to release smaller missives of this quality, it hardly matters. Taken together, this 12" and the Kindred EP are roughly the same length as Untrue; the form and content are in perfect sync.


Prolific singer/songwriter issues his third full-length of the year, a conceptual work on which each track portrays the singer, now 31, at a different year in his twenties.

29

More often than not, Ryan Adams' prolificacy-- check the three full-length records he released in 2005 alone-- is snorted away as a feat of spectacular cockiness, worthy only of eye-rolls and disenchanted sighs. Adams' avalanching output certainly perverts common notions about art-as-pain, perplexing folks who think songwriting should be all clenched fists and bloody fingernails-- but no matter where you land on Adams' preposterous pacing, there's still something compelling (fearless, even) about the display.
Produced by Ethan Johns (who worked with Adams on 2000's Heartbreaker and 2001's Gold), 29 features nine songs, each of which portrays Adams, now 31, at a different year in his twenties. The album might be murky and inconsistent, but it's also an eerily apt encapsulation of country-trotting, post-collegiate confusion, and flitting relentlessly between styles, moods, cities, and fucked-up affairs. Scattered, slow-building, and occasionally soporific, 29 is also unfortunately easy to dismiss-- meaning naysayers will miss a handful of perfectly transcendent tracks.
Adams has never been particularly skilled at masking his influences, and opener "29" is a walloping reinterpretation of the Grateful Dead's "Truckin'", with the same squished vocals (including the roll call of American locales), guitar noodles, and thump-thumping percussion. Adams may howl "singin'" instead of "truckin,'" but the sentiment and the sound remain the same. "Strawberry Wine" is eight minutes of muffled acoustic guitar and falsetto, a slow-burning, lyrically-meandering rumination on west coast slumps, high and sad, nodding to both Devendra Banhart and Neil Young. On first listen, "Strawberry Wine" plods, but the track is impeccably recorded (Johns manages to tangle a 12-string and a eukele into Adams' guitar lines, building a tingly, strummy haze), and Adams' penchant for storytelling is awfully well-showcased. Even the song's sluggish pacing is ultimately justified, as Adams' whimpers "I'm getting older/ Gotta break out," wailing desperately, incessantly-- as if he doesn't quite know how to stop himself from making noise.
The thick, elegiac "Night Birds" is 29's most memorable track, and one of Adams' better vocal performances, as he moans over hollow piano riffs, lamenting all the stagnation and hopelessness of being 26: "I feel like a body stuffed into a trunk/ From a million years of light/ And getting drunk." "Night Birds" is a haunting dirge (and introduces themes-- sinking, especially-- that pop up over the course of 29), but Johns leans too heavily on volume and echo here; Adams already has a habit of coordinating sounds and lyrics in a way that's distractingly deliberate, and by song's end, the chorus ("We were supposed to rise above/ But we sink/ Into the ocean") is so bloated with reverb it's hard not to cringe a little, fighting off the implied portrait of Adams splashing helplessly into the sea.
The pedal steel-riddled "Carolina Rain" follows in the country-travelogue footsteps of Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights, all railway lines, fried eggs, southern cities, and freight cars teeming with granite. "The Sadness" is full of wiggly, Ennio Morricone-inspired spaghetti guitar, while "Elizabeth, You Were Born to Play That Part" is a piano-and-vocals meditation on loss and depression. Stunning closer "Voices" sees Adams employing Biblical players to convey proper despondency, howling "Elijah/ Don't you call," repeatedly invoking the messenger's miraculous firestorm (battling the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel, Elijah shot fire from heaven to prove God's power.) "We're never coming back, once the signal's been fired," Adams roars, over barely-there acoustic strums. "Run away from the light."
Self-serious and wildly inconsistent (in both ingenuity and style), 29 is hard to swallow without acknowledging and appreciating the record's overarching storyline: getting through your twenties is way hard. Adams may churn out heaps of uneven tracks-- unfiltered and unedited, scrappy and undercooked, too long, too earnest, too much-- but 29 still fulfils its narrative promise, in terrifically failed, oddly beautiful ways.


Notions of place and displacement feature strongly in the works of Fatima Al Qadiri. The Brooklyn-based producer refers to her debut full-length as a “virtual road trip through ‘imagined China,’” refracting the skewed manner in which Asian motifs have sunk into Western pop culture.

Asiatisch

Notions of place and displacement feature strongly in the works of Fatima Al Qadiri. Her clearly realized Desert Strike EP, which was based around the experience of playing a videogame based around Operation Desert Storm—an event she lived through as a child growing up in Kuwait—and Asiatisch arrives with a new cloud of conceptual thought hovering over it. Now based in Brooklyn, Al Qadiri uses her debut full-length as a lens to refract the skewed manner in which Asian motifs have sunk into Western pop culture. She calls it a “virtual road trip through ‘imagined China,’” a country she has never visited, but has extensively experienced through a barrage of appropriated thoughts, images, and sounds. It’s set to a musical backing so bare it feels like someone scooped out most of the contents and dumped them out, providing an intriguing counterpoint to the dense flood of thought the record carries on its back.
The ideas surrounding Desert Strike were inspired by the rapid bastardization of other cultural experiences by the West, dealing with a particular form of accelerated baton-handing that effectively transforms horror into fun in rapid time. Asiatisch—its title taken from the German word for Asian—broadcasts from a similar space, only with a stronger sense of remove at work. In a sense, it’s a forebear for how the West will dilute something like the first Gulf War 40 or 50 years from now, slowly contorting it and shaping it until it becomes something few who were actually there will have experienced. If Desert Strike was about feeling an immediate sense of personal remove, Asiatisch observes the long-term effects of societal remove, where great blocks of culture are siphoned off then progressively diluted until they have as much significance as an empty Coke can.
The tiny sub-genre of sinogrime—essentially the sound of London producers briefly looking East for inspiration circa 2002-3—has been vaunted as an influence on this record, although Al Qadiri admits she wasn’t familiar with the style until after this album was finished. Still, there are ties, although most sinogrime efforts were denser in structure than these songs. Sometimes there’s little more than a crisp trap snare and a bass welt or two; often there are glassy, MIDI-indebted synth lines padding away. “Jade Stars” sounds like a sci-fi Vangelis fantasy ripped straight out of Blade Runner, while “Wudang” features music so hollow it perfectly reflects the sunken feeling of binging on low culture for too long. Journalist Dan Hancox described sinogrime as a sub-genre “that barely ever existed”, which is fitting because Al Qadiri also makes music that barely exists, to the point where the gaps between notes almost become the songs themselves.
The best tracks further dilute culture in themselves, acting like real-time examples of the disintegration Al Qadiri is interested in. “Shanzhai” is titled after the word used to describe pirated goods produced by Chinese companies, which she turns into a cover of Sinead O’Connor’s version of “Nothing Compares 2 U” (itself a cover), using a vocal she describes as a “nonsense version” of the song sent to her by friends. It’s only a political record in a faint sense, making few overt statements outside of “Dragon Tattoo”, which observes Disney's racist co-opting of Asian culture by borrowing lines from “We Are Siamese” from Lady and the Tramp. Certainly it’s not always so easy to trace Al Qadiri’s intentions, and the largely dynamic-free range she operates in can grate at times. But the immaculate emptiness is, in a sense, Asiatisch’s masterstroke, helping bolster the pervading sense of dislocation of being exposed to a society that’s been fed through the photocopier one too many times.


John Darnielle offers up a concept album based on Biblical verses, and the theme leads to an intense collection of songs that yields more with every listen.

The Mountain Goats: The Life of the World to Come

The Life of the World to Come

It's Halloween, 2005, and John Darnielle-- preparing to lead another show as the Mountain Goats-- pulls on his costume: a priest's robe. If it's a joke, it's a kind-hearted one: Most people at Mountain Goats shows know the words and aren't afraid to sing them. Some weep while doing it. Darnielle has power over his audience, but he doesn't wield it-- instead, he posits himself as one of them: Someone moved by small stories of liquor-store clerks struggling with big concerns like salvation; a cautious optimist with empathy for the last gasp and the broken promise; someone who holds a melting candle for four-chord American folk music; a "lyrics guy."
He sings a song about best friends whose dreams of death-metal stardom are crushed when one is shipped off to school. The story ends with Darnielle crowing, "hail Satan!" Everyone under the roof crows with him. Darnielle's voice swells and his face fills with light. The irony is obvious, but I don't think that's why he's happy. (And I doubt he even registers it-- during performances, he squints, bucks, shouts "yeah!" before just about every instrumental break, and is in general totally unselfconscious.) My guess is he's happy because he's singing about two people who have found god for themselves, even if they couldn't decide whether to call their band Satan's Fingers or the Killers or the Hospital Bombers.
This is how he works: Imposing grand themes on squalor, lending dignity to those who have none, passing gentle hands over people who probably deserve the lash. He's written an album about the salvation of meth-heads and another about the bond between codependent alcoholics. Under a canopy of violins on last year's "Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident", he detailed what was either a rape or a murder with a voice a prosecutor might point out as sounding almost sympathetic. On 2005's "Love Love Love", the sick feeling in Raskolnikov's stomach-- after murdering Alyona Ivanovna in Crime and Punishment-- is posited as a reflex of love. Hallmark may disagree.
This keeps him honest and makes it almost impossible for him to be sentimental. In an interview early last year, I asked him if he loved his characters. "I have loads of affection for them all, for sure," he said. "But my relationship to most of them is the relationship you have with a close friend who you know is also a chronic liar."
These themes-- forgiveness, redemption, religion generally, and the Bible specifically-- have backlit his writing since the early 1990s, from boombox-recorded albums for tape-only labels like Shrimper to full-band albums like Tallahassee, which Darnielle started releasing in 2002 for 4AD. (I've told curious friends that his music was "alt-Christian," which ends the conversation pretty quickly.) But he's never been as explicit about the Bible as on The Life of the World to Come, 12 songs about "hard lessons" he learned from specific verses.
Thankfully he's not a pedant about it, and his songs aren't songs of praise. He's a lapsed Catholic and professed nonbeliever who told Pitchfork he still chants the Hare Krishna. He is, in his own words, "into" the Bible. He makes use of the book for what it is: A series of stories used to comfort and instruct us. Joan Didion once wrote that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live." Darnielle is a professed fan.
Life's tone is quiet and contemplative. The raw-nerve hollering of his early music is gone (except on "Psalms 40:2", where there's a blast of raw-nerve hollering so forceful that he's basically excused from straining himself in perpetuity). But over the past few albums he's filed his whisper into a tool as unique as his shout. The cataclysmic shutter-rattling of fan favorites like "Going to Georgia" is replaced with songs like "Genesis 30:3" and "Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace"-- in the latter (based on a verse where god promises total fucking disaster), Darnielle's narrator ties up a hostage, drives through torrential rain, shoots up in the car as the world ends, and still never breaks out of his library voice. In these cases, the music's intensity comes from Darnielle's restraint instead of being undermined it.
He still drives at uncomfortable dissonance: A vandal realizes vandalism is his way of standing closer to god; someone all but sings "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" from a hospital bed. In general, though, Darnielle's presence is ruminative and gentle. The arrangements are simpler, too-- mostly acoustic guitar, bass, and drums, occasionally accompanied by a small string section. Sometimes, just his voice and a piano, an instrument Darnielle was trained on as a child but didn't play with the Mountain Goats until 2005. (His self-taught guitar playing was a big part of the music's primitive appeal.) Life has no marimba jollies or effects-box glitter. No reggae-esque songs like "New Zion" or anthemic alt-rock like "Autoclave". This isn't a good, bad, or even surprising thing-- its simplicity actually echoes early Mountain Goats albums more clearly than anything he's released in the past few years.
While he might elicit the specific from his listeners, his music-- especially here-- is general. This is his gift and the gift of effective storytellers: to build toward the general by using the specific. Jacob works for seven years to marry Rachel. Rachel is barren. Rachel asks him to sleep with her servant, Bilhah, so they can raise children. And now there's a Mountain Goats song called "Genesis 30:3" about the cheeks we turn and the tasks we take on for the people we love most. In a way, it's like he's giving back to his fans or anyone who wants to listen: He spends an album relating to some of his favorite stories and tacitly invites us to do the same-- to consider what we've lived through and what we've learned.
At a recent Q&A with the filmmaker Rian Johnson, who'd shot him playing Life in a Pomona College auditorium, Darnielle talked about how we'd hunted certain species to extinction, losing a relative to cancer, and valleys of paralyzing depression. He knew when to make a joke, and he made them often-- he has a really vigilant sense of humor, actually, which people who find him whiny probably don't expect. But his intensity radiates even when he's joking: One story he told involved a sound guy who'd asked him if he'd seen a particular film, and his response was, "Does it have a guy in a hockey mask hacking up teenagers?" The guy said no. "Then I probably haven't seen it."
"I'm not great with personal boundaries," he said later, "so I'm sorry if I'm making anyone here uncomfortable." Well, a little. But the discomfort isn't without redemption; it's part and parcel. It's probably what most of us came for.


His guest-heavy sophomore album sees Travis Scott amplifying the fun and theater of his projects as he finds his true home as a host for others.

Travis Scott: Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight

Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight

First presented in 2014, Vetements is among the buzziest new fashion lines. Created by the Margiela and Louis Vuitton-trained designer Demna Gvasalia, the line takes inspiration from the common; its name is even just French for “clothing.” Non-luxury materials often highlight Gvasalia’s runway shows, which take ordinary items and brands and fit them to haute couture with extreme, unnatural silhouettes. Among Gvasalia’s admirers is Kanye West, and with his taste goes the rest of contemporary hip-hop. Long West’s mimic, Travis Scott has performed in the clothing and attended Vetements runway shows with his mentor. He embodies its ethos: take the artificial and common, then distort, re-contextualize, and exaggerate to make it something beautiful.
Scott’s second studio album, Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight, is the Houston rapper’s most concise and cohesive project to date. On last year’s Rodeo, Scott struggled to balance ambition, quality, and star power. Songs ran much longer than they needed, letting the vibes simmer until you realized they were trite. Further, his production selection showed little growth from his largely self-produced 2013 debut Owl Pharaoh, and its well-received follow-up mixtape Days Before Rodeo. Both those tapes featured a recognizable “Travis Scott Sound”—an even larger, even more gothic take on Lex Luger’s trap anthems. Rodeo simply amped up the grandeur with little substance or variation.
Scott remains committed to his signature sound on Birds but has finally made small tweaks to make it his own. Most Travis Scott songs sound very serious, and Birds finds him at his most melodramatic. Even the peak ridiculous moments on Birds are delivered with a completely straight face. On “through the late night,” he utters, “Relieve my heart of malice,” but offers no reason why that may be necessary. Because he does not provide great detail or context as to why he’s in dire need of salvation, it comes off as both grandiose and vacuous, which, at best, is just really fun to listen to. His apocalyptic vanity is less high art than it is camp, but his commitment is similar to Lana Del Rey’s high-stakes ennui ballads on Ultraviolence, or all of the soapy affairs across David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks.”
The use of synthetic sound curios across Birds also help define this world, this pre-fab movie studio lot where Scott’s antics start to make more sense. The production across Birds’ 14 tracks is as big and important as any across Scott’s discography, but every outsourced producer here creates something bespoke to Scott’s developing aesthetic, with at least one alien soundbite making an otherwise conventional beat something special. “sweet sweet,” for example, opens with a glossy noise recalling mid-2000s AIM sound effects and the standout “pick up the phone” features a hollowed-out synth that sounds like it’s been digitized 10 times over. The latter culminates with that effect turned into a beautiful glissando that cuts off abruptly. Better to do more with less than try to pack as many flourishes as possible onto one track.
The two main criticisms that have followed Scott his entire career are that he doesn’t rap about anything, and when he does rap, he doesn’t do it well. It’s easy to tell when Travis Scott is “trying to rap,” as on album opener “the ends,” because he really turns down the Auto-Tune. And when given too much time on the mic, Scott reverts to bad hashtag rapper. But when the verses are short, he offers, at the very least, intriguing bits of imagery: spending “a Sunday morning in a brothel,” or lacking cell “service in the mountains.” The scenes never materialize into anything, but they help decorate an album and keep the artificial stakes high and the energy up.
It’s also telling that each major guest highlights a key component that Scott lacks. André 3000, delivering a new trap flow, paints a vivid picture on “the ends.” Kendrick Lamar puts on a technical clinic, annunciating and shifting pitches on “goosebumps.” 21 Savage is plainspoken, straightforward, and fierce on “outside.” On “pick up the phone,” Quavo even delivers the titular “Birds in the Trap Sing Brian McKnight.” Despite even more vocal contributions from the Weeknd, Young Thug, Cassie, Kid Cudi, Swizz Beatz, Bryson Tiller, and others, Travis Scott remains at the center because he’s finally found his calling. He’s no longer a biter or an up-and-coming protege or an industry plant. He’s the rich and often ineffectual host of the party, overlooking the grounds from his dubious veranda, here to make sure everyone comes in and goes out looking and sounding spectacular. He has always been a mood-setter and a vocalist, and he is in full command of the vibe, tone, and mood of this entire project more than ever.
It’s a triumph that Travis Scott sources from different parts to turn Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight into his unified vision. The cover art (shot by Nick Knight) shows Scott as something between a bird, a fallen angel, and a video game character—his eyes pure white with plumes of equally white smoke rising above. It’s a ridiculous image to cover an album that includes a song called “beibs in the trap”—a misspelling of Justin Bieber as slang for cocaine—but that’s the point. Travis Scott repurposes conventional subjects and sounds, making them compelling with his panache. Like his mentor, he seems keenly aware of his place in the genre. At one point, he literally says, “Shout my tropes!” By and large, the whole record is about rampant drug abuse, yet he transcends the rote topic with how forcefully and pompously he indulges. Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight escapes as Travis Scott’s best work yet: a combination of elevated significance, self-awareness, and the old trick of spinning something so plain into something so luxurious.


On his first new album since 2018, the longtime Detroit beatmaker unites rap, soul, funk, rock, and ghettotech with meticulous craftsmanship and a wonky-yet-smooth touch.

Everybody Good?

Detroit rapper-producer Black Milk floats into his eighth studio album, Everybody Good?, on a bed of the lushest synthetic funk this side of Thundercat. Intro “God Willing” sets a frenetic bassline against strata of electronic keys, soft background vocals, and drums hard enough to knock a filling loose. It’s a stone-cold groove with a hip-hop twist, the kind that compresses 60 years of Black music into a sound equally fit for a sweaty dancefloor as head nods in AirPods. Following in the footsteps of multihyphenates like Q-Tip and the late J Dilla, Milk has spent the years since 2018’s FEVER closing the already small gaps between rap, soul, funk, rock, and ghettotech while honing an anxious, socially conscious writing style. On Everybody Good?, he sounds more comfortable than ever as both a bandleader and an astute everyman.
He remains a producer first and foremost. The music of Everybody Good? was produced, arranged, and mixed pre-COVID, and the beats, as ever, are gorgeous and meticulously crafted. Splitting the difference between traditional and live-band hip-hop, Milk often samples session players and then chops up the recordings the old-fashioned way. What separates him from fellow era-blending contemporaries like Oddisee is his love for the rakish, crooked bliss of Dilla time. Drums pop seconds before and after you expect; the low end is turned up in the mix, looming over the arrangements of “Wait Til Fate” and “Downs Got Up.” Lead single “Is It Just Me?” gives the vintage Black Milk sound a stickier feel with a beehive of synths, bass, and keyboards whirring around stilted drum claps.
There’s a proggy sprawl to these songs only hinted at on previous Black Milk records. Several feature long instrumental bookends that let the song marinate before any voices are heard. “Ain’t Nobody Coming Down to Save You” turns an interpolation of Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” into a rapturous stomp that echoes and wails like a Parliament-Funkadelic song. The flickering notes and muted bass of “Feelings Don’t Feel” and “The Black Surf (Everybody Good?)” are disrupted by crunchy drum fills that punch through the mix. The scale of these beats is impressive enough to sequence alongside legends like Karriem Riggins, who co-produces “Fews & Trues,” and Raphael Saadiq, who provides the one beat not touched by Black Milk on “No Wish.” Milk’s growing ambition helps his work slot seamlessly next to theirs.
Milk has struggled in the past with indistinct writing, but with every project since 2010’s Album of the Year, his perspective has sharpened. The lyrics for Everybody Good? came after the beats were made, and they refine the anxieties and joys of navigating the world as a Black man previously explored on FEVER. Sometimes, they’re presented as “tightrope walking in the sky” (“Downs Got Up”); at others, funneled through outlets like money (“For How Much?”) and social media (“Feelings Don’t Feel”). On “Wait Til Fate,” he alludes to a health issue that landed him in the hospital, forcing him to consider whether or not to worry his mother with the news. He’s dealt with life issues directly on record before, but it’s rarely been this tender and exposed. Despite the occasional forced punchline (“came up short like a dress in June”)—and being outclassed by scene-stealing verses from Mick Jenkins on “Feelings Don’t Feel” and Phonte on “No Wish”—Milk’s bars are more fleshed-out than before. Still, the beats are the main attraction. It’s invigorating to hear musical ideas that started out as sample-based noodling on 2005’s Sound of the City and 2008’s Tronic arrive full-formed. In a world gripped by paranoia and mistrust, Black Milk finds solace in the one aspect of life he can control.


The four-LP box containing everything Newman recorded for his Songbook series is a self-made and ever-shifting canon from songwriting's most charming cynic.

The Randy Newman Songbook

Randy Newman started strolling through his back pages for Nonesuch in 2003 following a commercially disappointing stint at DreamWorks, the mega-label that never was. Recorded while Newman labored on songs that would become 2008’s Harps and Angels, The Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 1 also provided some insight on what the composer considered to be his canon.
Bypassing his 1977 neo-novelty hit “Short People,” along with anything else a wider audience may know, he concentrated on songs other singers covered. Among those featured were “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” a ’60s standard sung by everyone from Dusty Springfield to Leonard Nimoy; “You Can Leave Your Hat on,” a big hit for Joe Cocker; and “Sail Away,” previously by Bobby Darin, Linda Ronstadt, and Ray Charles. Newman trod lightly upon his soundtrack work and offered just enough cynical jokes to offset the beautiful melancholy of the ballads. The spartan arrangements helped showcase not only his songcraft—his wry lyrical turns, how the verses interlocked with the bridges—but also Newman’s musicianship, how he slurs his vocals in a manner not dissimilar to his New Orleans barrelhouse piano roll.
*The Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 2, *released in 2011, emphasized sly, laconic performances, possibly because Randy’s longtime associate Lenny Waronker signed on as a co-producer with Mitchell Froom. Either way, Vol. 2 lacked the austere overtones of the first, as does 2016’s brand-new The Randy Newman Songbook, Vol. 3. Such playful laziness is an attribute here because Newman finally revisits the Randy Newman songs you know if you don’t know Randy Newman.
First up is “Short People,” a song he once dismissed as a “bad break,” followed by Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me (Not to Come),” the Toy Story theme “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” “I Love to See You Smile” from *Parenthood *that later worked its way into a Colgate commercial, and “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear,” which Scooter once performed with Fozzie Bear on “The Muppet Show.” It’s the sunny side of Newman. However, the spartan arrangements and light touch on Vol. 3 undercut the sentimentality and whimsy since they’re executed with the same sense of mischief as the idiosyncratic renditions of deep cuts on Vol. 2.
Such aesthetic continuity becomes evident on the four-LP collection The Randy Newman Songbook, which consolidates and reshuffles all three albums, adding five exclusive bonus tracks to the whole shebang (initially available as a vinyl-only set, the box will later be released on CD and as a download). Allegedly reassembled according to theme, the four LPs still roughly correspond to the sequencing of the three initial volumes, which means it gains momentum as it progresses, with buoyancy eventually overtaking precision.
As the four albums play, a whirl of character sketches, satire, sincerity, and heartbreak float by, the work of a writer who values economy over all else. But most impressive is how Newman plays with and rearranges his own songs. Sometimes he finds them so perfectly crafted he can’t stray from his original template, other times he gives them a distinctly different spin. Take “Rollin’,” the bittersweet conclusion to 1974’s Good Old Boys newly recorded for Vol. 3. As a bemused antithesis to the gloss of “I Love L.A.,” its irony shines as bright as Newman’s earnest love for his hometown.
The ease of *Vol. 3 *allows it to stand on its own as straight-up entertainment, but better to take the four-LP box as a whole. It captures so many different elements of Newman in one hefty set. But don’t mistake these latter-day renditions for the definitive versions. For some reason or another, Newman hasn’t gotten around to revisiting a few major songs off his ’70s albums, which were masterpieces of the golden age of major labels, exquisitely produced that thrived on their California sheen. Instead, The Randy Newman Songbook, especially in its four-LP incarnation, is proof that a songbook isn’t something carved in concrete. It’s a living, breathing thing whose contents and meanings can change over time, even for its own author.
Correction: This review originally included a statement suggesting that Newman conceived Vol. 1 of the Songbook series to buy time while writing his album Harps and Angels. However, the conception of the Songbook series pre-dates his work on that album.


My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden headlines the three-woman team behind this original and hauntingly vivid psychological portrait.

Shara Worden / Sarah Kirkland Snider / Signal: Penelope

Penelope

The quietly devastating song cycle Penelope begins with an unexpected homecoming. A man returns to his wife's doorstep after 20 years in an unnamed war, suffering brain damage-- a shadow of his former self. The woman takes this mournful figure in gravely, sorting through her ambivalence, bitterness, and grief by reading to him from Homer's Odyssey. The story's parallels to their lives-- a husband striving heroically over vast distances and years to return to his wife-- become a psychological probe for the woman to sound the depths of her shell-shocked husband's ruined mind. Speaking to him through the poem, she is able to gently coax him back from oblivion.
This eloquent meditation on death, memory, being lost, and homecoming is the work of three women. Playwright and poet Ellen McLaughlin wrote the incisive lyrics; Sarah Kirkland Snider composed the dreamily disquieting score; and Shara Worden, the smoky-voiced contralto of My Brightest Diamond, sings it. Together, they render the titular woman's voice with unsettling clarity. Penelope is a gorgeous piece of music, but it is more-- it is also a hauntingly vivid psychological portrait, one that explores a dark scenario with a light, almost quizzical touch, finding poetic resonances everywhere.
Snider's score, written for the new-music ensemble Signal, is the work's worried heart. Penelope lives entirely inside the heads of two people who can't communicate, and her music, coursing with mute anxiety, reflects that solitude. The strings hover like low-hanging fog, repeating a few harmonically troubled chords in softly insistent strokes-- the veil of confusion that clouds the man's memories, perhaps, or the heavy silence that settles in between the newly estranged married couple.
This fraught suggestibility between music and theme takes Penelope deep beneath your skin. On "This Is What You're Like", Worden's character tries to remind her husband of the man he once was; when she sings the line, "you are a man who, when the music dies away, you keep on dancing," the music stumbles briefly into a few bars of a half-remembered waltz. The story opens on the woman's house by the sea; a lapping and receding violin [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| figure traces the shore while quiet gull-like cries circle overhead.
Snider's music lives in a netherland between richly orchestrated indie rock and straight chamber music, an increasingly populous inter-genre space that, as of yet, has produced only a few clear, confident voices. Snider is perhaps the most sophisticated of them all: No matter what perspective you bring to this album, it bears profound rewards. Shara Worden's eerily poised singing will raise the hackles of St. Vincent fans, while Snider's ambiguous sense of harmony might put classical listeners in mind of Charles Ives' similarly memory-haunted Three Places in New England or Arvo Pärt's elegant simplicity. The work doesn't straddle a stylistic crossroads so much as swirl together artistic currents, creating a slipstream where electric guitar, chimes, strings, drum kit, and subtle electronic touches interchange fluidly.
There is an obsessive quality to Penelope's cellular, repeating mini-melodies, and it is echoed in McLaughlin's mantra-like lyrics. Songs hinge on poetically elusive but piercingly direct turns of phrase-- "Can't you do that?/ Can't you hide me, God?"; "The world is never done with you/ The world wants her travelers to stay lost." Worden sings these words with enigmatic wisdom, investing something as vague as "I am known for who I am" with palpable regret. McLaughlin's words speak with wry frankness about the burdens of waiting on, and caring for, men, and this touch makes Penelope a feminist story, a sly reappraisal of a male-centric tale on the order of Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. Like a siren song, it cloaks rocky edges in something soft and lyrical. Beneath the placid surface, you can hear the sound of one woman's thoughts, rendered with such care and intimacy that you can sense her staring out of the record back at you.


This 2xCD reissue of brilliant, reclusive L.A. songwriter Shuggie Otis' 1974 masterwork Inspiration Information includes four extra tracks from that session along with Wings of Love, comprising 14 tracks that Otis recorded between 1975 and 2000. Combined, the collections feel like a parallel universe greatest-hits compilation, from a world where a label embraced Otis’s genius and eccentricity, instead of driving him away.

Shuggie Otis: Inspiration Information / Wings of Love

Inspiration Information / Wings of Love

It’s an unfortunate trick of the life of a musician that a single cover version can supercede its original author’s career. One job of the reissue is to hopefully right such wrongs. Such has been the fate of Shuggie Otis, who, at the time of writing, has an All Music Guide entry with the album art of the band who took “Strawberry Letter 23” to #5 on the 1977 pop charts featured before any image of Otis himself. What had become a minor cult around Otis’ short-but-overlooked career surfaced for the first time a quarter-century later. The 2001 Luaka Bop reissue of Otis’ 1974 masterwork Inspiration Information was the first time many heard the original version of “Strawberry”, but that release managed to muddy Otis’ discography, as well. “Strawberry” was originally included on Otis’ previous album, 1971’s Freedom Flight, though it and four other Freedom songs were tacked onto the end of Inspiration. Their provenance was noted as such, but new Otis converts could be forgiven for slotting “Strawberry” as a late-album Inspiration track*.*
Those extra tracks did no favors to Inspiration, which works incredibly well as its own statement, without the need for bonus material. Originally, it was to be the coming-out party for a tremendous new talent, though one who was no stranger to the music business. A blues guitar prodigy who’d been playing with his father (pioneering R&B bandleader Johnny Otis) since he was 11, Otis played on Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats when he was 16, and released an album with blues-rock gadabout Al Kooper before he was 20. Though he stayed out of the recording process, Johnny Otis served as the executive producer for his son’s work, and he convinced Columbia to build Shuggie a home studio to record Inspiration, which took the better part of three years. Upon release in October 1974, Inspiration certainly sounded like the work of an isolated L.A. savant. Smooth, organ-driven California funk, quasi-new age psychedelia, loungey jazz instrumentals, string interludes-- all propelled by the same kind of analog drum machine that had piqued Ralf & Florian's interest at the same time.
Inspiration instantly earned comparisons to Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, and reportedly made Sly Stone’s jaw drop upon hearing it. The LP’s title track-- every bit as good as “Strawberry”-- was issued to radio, though it only reached #56 on the R&B chart. The album failed to live up to Columbia’s expectations, such as they were, and Otis was unceremoniously dropped from the label after its release. In August 1977, as the Brothers Johnson version of “Strawberry” was emanating from car stereos and DJ booths, no one had heard a peep from Otis for more than two years. He wouldn’t return to public life for nearly 40 more.
Reissues are weird things, particularly for albums that don’t instantly announce themselves along clear genre lines, and especially for artists who don’t show any interest in adding to the conversations themselves. Which is why Epic/Legacy’s 2xCD reissue is the definitive version. On the first CD, Inspiration is included as its own entity, and appended with four extra tracks from those sessions-- solid B-sides, but impossible to imagine on the original album. The second CD, Wings of Love, is the collection’s real revelation, comprising 14 tracks that Otis recorded between 1975 and 2000. Wings reveals that while Otis was reclusive, he was far from idle. Listening in 2013, it’s hard not to compare it to the year’s other album, m b v, that’s composed of tracks that theoretically could have been written anytime over a period of decades. Reissues are pop music’s preeminent form of historical revisionism, but the great thing about the Inspiration and Wings set is that combined, they’re closer to a parallel universe greatest-hits compilation, in a world where a label embraced Otis’ genius and eccentricity, instead of driving him away altogether.
It may have killed his career, but what a way to go out-- Inspiration ranks among the 1970s most unique and personal musical statements. In the album, it’s possible to hear the kaleidoscopic ambition and bruised optimism of What’s Going On and Innervisions, hints of Miles Davis’ prolific funk-fusion period and Bob Marley’s ascendant good vibrations, the lingering specter of Love’s death-of-innocence opus Forever Changes, and the drawn-out, spaced-out folk-rock sigh emanating from Laurel Canyon. The month Inspiration was released, Otis’ friend Billy Preston hit #1 with his single “Nothing From Nothing,” and Inspiration’s beatific title track channels that same generous spread-the-good-word spirit, which he refracts through the kind of sleek, jazz-derived rock that NYC transplants Steely Dan were mastering at the time.
Otis was no druggie, but admitted in a recent interview that Inspiration highlight “Aht Uh Mi Hed” arose from one of his three acid trips, colored by the isolation-derived depression he was suffering during the album’s multi-year recording process. It’s a testament to Otis’ character that “Hed” is the opposite of dark. Instead, it serenely shimmers, like “Strawberry”: a drum machine and organ form a foundation for Otis to float above, buoyed by flutes and broken up by an orchestral interlude before segueing into a choppy funk coda. Even under such a spell, Otis convinces himself “it’s about time for something new,” and that he’s “got to grow.” Inspiration has long been cited as the symbolic birthplace of Prince, but the reissue’s timing and penchant for dream-logic also suggests that Channel Orange is among the album’s most prominent descendants.
“Hed”s otherworldly air is due in part to the Rhythm King drum machine, a gadget that Otis had fallen for when writing “Strawberry”. In late 1971, Sly Stone blended a Rhythm King track with a wah-wah guitar on “Family Affair”, lending that track its irresistible effervescence, and in February 1973, Timmy Thomas rode the Rhythm King to #1, via his single “Why Can't We Live Together”. The machine’s unique analog warmth allowed savants like Otis and Stone to do everything themselves, starting one of its simple metronomic presets and building a song around it. This is how “Pling!”-- Inspiration’s penultimate track and the centerpiece of its experimental b-side-- took shape. With only the Rhythm King keeping rhythm like a clock in the next room, Otis layers on a quiet Fender Rhodes line, stirs in a hodgepodge of instumentation-- a harp, a sax-- but never brings the track over the level of a whisper. Along with the jazzy, film-score style instrumental “Rainy Day” and percolating Esquivel-style lounge-funk of “XL-30” preceding it, “Pling!” moves Inspiration far away from Otis’ blues and R&B roots, aiming toward a space at the time only occupied by his imagination. It’s this angle that many indie fans in 2001 were drawn to-- the Luaka Bop reissue featured pull-quotes from Sean O’Hagan, the kitsch-obsessed mastermind of the high-minded 90s British ensemble High Llamas, and Stereolab founder Tim Gane.
It’s also possible to imagine Columbia’s befuddled reaction upon hearing these tracks-- as great as they sound to music fans now as then, they must have signaled something closer to a break with reality, or perhaps one of those nettlesome “creative” types who release new material every 4-5 years. When Columbia dropped him from their roster, Otis retreated and regrouped, recording new tracks and sending them to labels, who uniformly showed no interest--to their detriment. As a compilation, Wings of Love plays like a bonafide album-- it’s got an “intro” and everything-- and a good one, at that.If it doesn’t quite show the knack for experimentation and variety hinted at via Inspiration, Wings is a quietly amazing document of Otis’ doggged determination over the quarter century between leaving the business and the first Inspiration reissue.
It’s a fair bet that Otis has never come into contact with the retromaniacal AM Gold-worshipping weirdos who’ve been lingering around the L.A. fringes for the better part of a decade now, but delightfully lo-fi, echo-laden Wings tracks like “Special”, “Tryin’ To Get Close To You”, and the Prince-styled “If You’d Be Mine” bear a striking (if entirely coincidental) resemblance to Ariel Pink and Nite Jewel. It’s easy to parallel Otis dreaming of these demos winding up on Top 40 radio during the actual 1980s, with the recent chillwave contingent dreaming similar dreams from a fully nostalgic register. Elsewhere on the album, there are nods backward to Drifters-style soul (“Walkin’ Down the Country”), gaudy synth monsters (“Give Me A Chance”), and even a couple cuts closing the album that nod back to Otis’ blues-rock roots. Yes, Wings is packaged as an addendum to a reissue, but it’s no simple B-sides collection.
If all this isn't convincing enough, perhaps Wings’ outlandish 11 minute title track, sequenced right in the middle of the album, will. At once, it’s a reminder that Otis had few peers as a shredder (at his peak, both Bowie and the Stones offered him sideman gigs), and the sort of wild, proggy imagination that would make Yes album-art designer Roger Dean blush. It starts with seashore sound effects-- waves crashing, seagulls squawking-- and blossoms into the kind of earnestly majestic, new age prog-funk that might not be everyone’s bag, but which is impossible not to appreciate on its own merits, because it’s performed with such conviction. It only adds to the song's allure that it's been kept private for so long. Such is the wholly unique career trajectory of Shuggie Otis, who is now touring for the first time in 40 years. The Child Prodigy, the Next Big Thing, the Cultishly Admired LA Recluse. Johnny Alexander Veliotes, Jr., the man who vanished, but never stopped.


Mariah Carey, the cultural attaché of Christmas, offers a reissue of her 1994 album, which sounds as timeless as possible for music passed through the innocuous filters of mid-’90s adult pop.

Mariah Carey: Merry Christmas: Deluxe Anniversary Edition

Living by the adage, “Go where you’re celebrated, not tolerated,” Mariah Carey has established a veritable empire around Christmastime. There are the annual holiday concerts, the yuletide-themed children’s book, the animated movie featuring her CGI likeness, the Hallmark movie she directed, and enough merch to fill a sleigh. The day after Halloween this year, she posted a video on Instagram to usher in the commencement of the Christmas season. There’s something archetypical about her performed love of Christmas. Like horse girls, Carey’s identity has absorbed her interest. She is the epitomized Christmas girl.
And to think it all nearly didn’t happen. Carey said she initially balked when her future ex-husband/label boss Tommy Mottola presented her the idea of recording the Christmas album on which she’d eventually build her merry brand. Just a few years into her major-label career, it was too early, she thought, for such a legacy-artist flex. Once convinced, she threw herself into the process. In a method approach to recording, she kept a tree up for the majority of 1994 as she rifled through the Christmas canon, devising new arrangements for old classics, mashing-up secular with spiritual (a pop-house riff on “Joy to the World” was given a Three Dog Night injection), and writing three new songs alongside her longtime collaborator Walter Afanasieff.
The result, 1994’s Merry Christmas, sounds as timeless as possible for music passed through the consciously innocuous filters of mid-’90s adult pop. Though constructed with a utilitarian hand to stand the test of time across demographics, Carey said the album gave her opportunity to dabble in areas her other albums hadn’t; namely, gospel and overt retroism. At the time, her label saw her as a franchise and clipped her wings leading up to 1997’s Butterfly. That a Christmas album was Carey’s laboratory for experimentation says everything about the intensity of her struggle for creative control early in her career.
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Merry Christmas, Carey has released a two-disc Deluxe Anniversary Edition. The original album returns untouched, anchored by her perennial smash “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” which is, at this point, a total cultural anomaly, a phenomenon unto itself, a singular sensation, if you will. It might be the happiest song about heartache. The joy of this indefatigable song casts Christmas both as an exacerbation of preexisting melancholy and a salve—Carey’s yearning, belting narrator is fine by virtue of her yuletide surroundings. Snow makes a fine cushion. The song is a multivalent blur of sensibilities, yet simple enough for a child to understand, like Disney at its most optimal. Multiple in-depth dissections of its inherent appeal have yet to explain it adequately or sap it of its magic. It is the apotheosis of the nearly diabolical populist ambitions of Carey’s early work. No mere chestnut of recurrent radio, it re-becomes a smash hit year after year, as it’s propelled into the upper echelons of the Billboard Hot 100 alongside contemporary songs. (Last year, it hit a new peak: No. 3.)
It become the definitive Wall of Sound carol—Carey cited the legendary producer Phil Spector’s influence in the initial press cycle for Merry Christmas (she generally referenced the Ronettes), though her riff is decidedly cleaner with a dynamic range that gives its parts even more room as they bounce off the song’s walls. Carey’s version must be just what the style sounds like to recent generations of listeners. An oft-cited study claims that when you remember something repeatedly, you don’t actually remember the event, per se, but your last memory of it. Here’s the musical equivalent, a flagrant copy that redefined the aesthetic of its source material. Further establishing this dominion are covers of Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” and “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town.”
And then there were the nonsecular songs. Unlike her predecessor Whitney Houston, Carey did not come up through singing in the black church, but her debt to its musical traditions had never been more explicit than on Merry Christmas. For the gospel-tinged songs like “Silent Night,” “O Holy Night,” and “Jesus Oh What a Wonderful Child,” Carey showed up touting her signature melismatic flair and emotional acrobatics. Sure, she’d hit a sharp note so gleaming as to be objectively holy and she might really take it to church in a one-off praise break, but vocally, Merry Christmas was Carey doing her thing. The major musical shift occurred in subject matter and backdrop—organs, bouncy pianos, and choirs (Carey’s handful of backup singers was itself a small choir that had the power of a midsize one).
Like the greatest snapshot Sears ever produced, the album is a holiday portrait of Carey’s voice in its prime. She took words that had one syllable and gave them five. She hit the ground enraptured, attacking first verses with gusto, and then swung back around, aiming at the melody like she was attempting to cut off its head at an angle. She made it look easy, but at the same time, hard. The manner in which her pipes seized around a note, as if to cradle it as delicately as possible, telegraphed effort. Even back then, Carey was singing as if her career depended on each and every phrase coming out of her mouth.
Her aptitude and technique may have shifted over the years, but that fraught delivery stayed consistent, disc two of the Deluxe Anniversary Edition contests. Spread across the bonus disc are yuletide odds and ends Carey has recorded since the original release of Merry Christmas. Like a stocking filled by an overenthusiastic parent, it’s teeming with stuff you don’t really need. There’s a mini-concert Carey performed at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine a few weeks after the release of Merry Christmas, back when she aimed to recreate verbatim live the vocals on her albums. On top of a muddy sound mix, there’s simply not enough variation to make the live cuts essential. Most of the remixes are merely novel with the exception of David Morales’ transcendent “Celebration Mix” of “Joy to the World,” released the same year as Merry Christmas. It’s a titanic slice of stomping gospel house somewhere between a track and a song that finds early Carey at her loosest. It’s a true gift, this one.
The only strictly new thing here is the “Sugar Plum Fairy Introlude,” 45 eccentric seconds in which Carey vocalizes along to “The Nutcracker Suite” selection mostly using her whistle register. It sounds like Christmas getting kicked in the shins. There are a handful of post-Merry Christmas originals, too—three songs from her 2010 follow-up Merry Christmas II You and some soundtrack cuts. Their inclusion telegraphs some attempt to collect all of the Christmas songs Carey wrote in one place, but there are things missing, like another Merry Christmas II You cut (“One Child”) as well as “Where Are You Christmas,” which Faith Hill recorded for the 2000 live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The affectation of completism is, in fact, half-assed.
Still, taken as a (near) whole, the thesis spread out over these 29 tracks is simple: Mariah Carey loves Christmas very much indeed. One repeating theme in her original compositions is the suggestion that Christmas is a group project largely defined by a collective attitude. Christmastime is in the air again, everyone is singing, the whole world is rejoicing, we gon’ help the world become a better place, every year forever and ever, amen. While Carey’s faith is explicit in much of her music, she remains fixated on the granular, secular aspects of Christmas: twinkling lights, mistletoe, the exchange of gifts. Given the amount of space these totems occupy in our world (arguably more than the religious ones), it’s not illogical that an icon would rise up as a sort of cultural attaché, rounding out a holiday trinity. Santa Claus, Jesus Christ, and Mariah Carey: Father Christmas, the son of God, and the merry spirit.


Most musicians have their own toy boxes, the places they hide away all the obsessions and experiments that don't ...

Demon Days

Most musicians have their own toy boxes, the places they hide away all the obsessions and experiments that don't fit comfortably under the umbrella of their main projects. Compared to other artists', Damon Albarn's playroom chest must be filled to bursting: the cultural drawer cluttered with horror films, anime, and rock'n'roll stereotypes; the musical drawer crammed full of dub, hip-hop, dancehall, and afropop. In fact, Albarn seems to have so many creative distractions tempting his muse, he can't even keep them from occasionally invading the conservative environs of his day job-- each Blur album manages to squeeze in at least one ill-fitting endeavor like Think Tank's "Crazy Beat".
Fortunately, Gorillaz provides Albarn an outlet to vent his taste for sci-fi kitsch, and satiate his urge to break free from rock with guitars-- and it's a surprisingly successful outlet, at that. (Did anyone really expect an edgy street-cred Banana Splits to be worth discussing four years into its discography?) Rather than falling flat, Gorillaz have strangely become a therapeutic and clever way for Albarn to subvert the usual egolympics associated with a solo project. Coyly hiding behind Jamie Hewlett's thick-inked pop caricatures and a phalanx of guest stars, Gorillaz allows Albarn to practice self-indulgence under heavy personality camouflage-- though never so heavy that there's any question as to who's really pulling the strings.
Like the Gorillaz's self-titled debut, Demon Days goes the way of most auteur projects, its oversize idea load making for a trip equal parts peak and valley. But also like the debut, Demon Days is better than it has any right to be, featuring singles stronger than anything released under the Blur banner since, you know, that "Woo-hoo" song. For a project that could easily have been little more than Damon Albarn Remakes "Ghost Town" 15 Times (With More Rapping & Cartoons), this is a follow-up that proves Gorillaz, weirdly, has legs-- not that the four-year break hurt any.
In order to keep things fresh, however, Albarn made a few exchanges at the hip-hop Wal-Mart, trading in his sputtering old Dan the Automator model for Danger "as seen on CNN!" Mouse, and swapping out Del tha Funkee Homosapien for MF Doom and... Dennis Hopper. These new collaborators add more to the proceedings than just increasing the comic-dork factor by about 10, particularly Danger Mouse, whose colorfully dense production helps buoy the occasionally slight genre sketches scripted by Albarn and his fleet of retro keyboards.
For most of the album, Danger Mouse & Albarn make like they're Dario Argento & Goblin, to the point that this Fangoria neophyte can't tell the difference between the sampled zombie-flick scores and the facsimile ones (I'm pretty sure "Last Living Souls" is the former). Obviously, this agenda cues me to resort to adjectives like "foreboding," "ominous," and "sinister," but Albarn can't help making his haunted house a discotheque. As with the standouts from the debut album, the best tracks here strike a unique balance between slacker detachment and dance-floor bounce: "Feel Good Inc." swerves through an anxious bassline to a choice De La Soul drive-by, while "DARE" defibrillates Shaun Ryder to shout along while Albarn channels Prince's synths and falsettos.
Of course, there are a few blown-up test tubes amid the successful experiments, too: undercooked genre dalliances (the robo-punk "White Light"), a few dull, unfortunately frontloaded Xanax lopes ("Kids With Guns", "O Green World"), and the truly bizarre (Hopper's once-is-enough spoken word on "Fire Coming Out of a Monkey's Head"). Albarn also occasionally gets too distracted trying on the outfits of other bands, like on Beach Boys replicant "Don't Get Lost in Heaven", and fires his one radio dud with his second shrine to Clint Eastwood, a collaboration with Booty Brown and a children's choir called "Dirty Harry".
On the album-closing title track, the appearance of a choir genuinely works, accomplishing the amazing task of being the second time (after "Tender") that Albarn has gotten away with effectively employing that ultimate lazy rock add-on. In fact, if the Gorillaz concept achieves anything beyond keeping Hewlett employed and producing some snazzy videos and websites, it's proving that Albarn can successfully wield the sonic toys he's mostly kept partitioned apart from his flesh band. Though the results of his exuberant mixing and matching are uneven at times, Albarn's obsessions fit together just often enough to again make Gorillaz more than mere Adult Swim novelty.


This film's soundtrack features contributions from Johnny Jewel projects including Chromatics and a score by Steven Soderbergh's go-to composer Cliff Martinez. All told, it has as much neon camp and sex as the film itself.

Drive OST

A few weeks ago, the film Drive opened to wide release. Nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes, it's a pulpy story about a stoic wheelman (Ryan Gosling) who digs himself even deeper into the Los Angeles criminal underworld on behalf of a woman and her son. Drive is a genre film, heavy on style and short on dialog, complete with finger-shuttering spurts of violence and, despite being set in the present, a pointed focus on retro-cool and classic car films. The Monday morning after Drive's opening weekend, the soundtrack-- anchored by a few unknown but choice 1980s-indebted synth-pop songs and a score by Cliff Martinez (Steven Soderbergh's go-to guy)-- went to number four on the iTunes music charts, its success credited to good word-of-mouth thanks to Twitter. If you've seen the film, it makes sense: The Drive soundtrack pops with just as much neon camp and sex as the lipstick-scrawled opening credits.
Effective and memorable soundtracks need to either introduce you to new music that works on its own or transport you into the world of the film. Drive manages to do both, mostly thanks to the five songs that come early in the album, preceding Martinez's score. Director Nicolas Winding Refn (known for ambitious indies Bronson and Valhalla Rising) pre-selected these tunes before the score was written. Most of them catalog key moments in the film and are-- for the sake of getting this thing on folks' radars-- the real draw.
These songs follow such a similar format, you could almost mistake them for the work of a single band. All have hyper-literal lyrics, dry-pulsing beats, and subdued, comely female vocals. Sounding like a more sinister second coming of the Human League is opener "Nightcall" from French electronic artist Kavinsky, featuring vocals from CSS's Lovefoxxx. "I want to drive you through the night down the hills/ I will tell you something you don't want to hear," purrs an almost demoniacally mechanized voice, and it's hard not to imagine yourself double-clutching it down Mulholland. Lovefoxxx's tender counter, "There's something inside you, it's hard to explain," feels like a perfect encapsulation of the film's juxtaposing moments of benevolence and brutality.
Glass Candy's Johnny Jewel gets his hands on two tracks here, with his Desire and Chromatics projects, respectively. However, Jewel could've played a larger part: In a recent interview with Box Office Magazine, he revealed being approached by both Refn and Gosling to score the film (Glass Candy's "Digital Versicolor" plays a big part in Bronson), but wires were crossed, and, despite having finished "the whole score," conflicting interests left Martinez with the job. It's hard not to speculate what Jewel's music could have brought to the film but Martinez's muted yet deft approach makes it hard to imagine anyone else smearing such wonderfully subtle hues across the screen.
On the album's second half, Martinez's score works like a patient, engaging ambient record with a dramatic arc that works independently of the film. Keyboards plink back and forth like turn signals and human heartbeats, with atmospheres that hang in the air like ghosted taillight streaks. As things get grittier onscreen, so does the music, with industrial grindings and craggy booms slowly working their way into the mix. It's long-- 50 minutes to be exact-- and obviously not the selling point, but where other soundtracks weave bits of score around the proper songs, Martinez's vision, while challenging, smartly gets its fair shake being presented as a whole.
By far the most notable thing about the Drive soundtrack is "A Real Hero", a collaboration between French producer College and Toronto duo Electric Youth, both of whose phones are no doubt ringing off the hook. Working as a theme and mantra for Gosling's Driver, it's a shimmering, deeply romantic track that, thanks to its repeated use in the film, sticks in your head. "Try getting behind the wheel without hearing that 'Real Hero' song," a friend mentioned to me after I saw the film. Luckily, I had a four-hour slog ahead of me the next day, and while a clogged New Jersey Turnpike at noon is about as far away from a driving experience as the blinking sprawl of Los Angeles at 3 a.m., I couldn't help but feel the stitching from a phantom, scorpion-emblazoned satin jacket itching at my back.


If there’s anything The Pinkprint makes clear over its sprawling 22 tracks (six of which appear only on deluxe editions), it’s that Nicki Minaj is exhausted. The 2014 singles underwhelm, even in proper context, but the real gems are in the bonus tracks.

The Pinkprint

Nicki Minaj is fed up. It’s 2010, six weeks before the release of her debut album, Pink Friday. She’s working on the album’s finishing touches, though it’s just gone up for presale on Amazon, and people are blowing up her phone, asking for favors. She’s pissed, but she composes herself for the camera crew—they’re in the studio shooting footage for a documentary MTV will premiere a few years later, called "My Time Now"—to explain. She’s wearing a goofy, cotton-candy beehive wig, but her tone is serious. "When you’re a girl, you have to be, like, everything. You have to be dope at what you do, but you have to be super sweet, and you have to be sexy, and you have to be this, and you have to be that, and you have to be nice—it’s like, I can’t be all those things at once!" She pauses for a single dramatic blink, and for a moment, she goes somewhere else: "I’m a human beiiiinnnnngggggg!" She draws the word out for three full seconds, the same way she would a year later in her song-stealing verse on Big Sean’s "Dance (A$$)" ("In the islands of Waikikiiiiiiiiii…"). It’s sort of a joke—her inflection is completely alien, or like a robot malfunctioning—but nobody laughs, and she quickly apologizes for ranting and goes back to fixing her eyeliner.
Until this year, that side of Nicki didn’t get out much, at least on record. Over the course of three official mixtapes, two studio albums (plus one Re-Up), and countless features, we’ve been acquainted with Nicki Lewinsky, Roman Zolanski, the Female Weezy, the Harajuku Barbie, and most of all, with Nicki Minaj LLC ("I’m a brand, bitch! I’m a brand!"). But we know surprisingly little about Onika Maraj, the 11th-highest paid rapper in America according to this year’s Forbes list, whose first and second platinum-selling albums were critically panned for appealing more to teenage girls than middle-aged guardians of Hip-Hop Culture. Onstage at 2012’s Summer Jam, Hot 97’s Peter Rosenberg openly trashed Minaj, the headlining act: "I know there’s some chicks here waiting to sing 'Starships' later: I’m not talking to y’all right now, fuck that bullshit. I’m here to talk about real hip-hop shit." Minaj dipped out; today, "Nicki Minaj controversy" is one of four sub-categories of the "Career" section of Rosenberg’s Wikipedia page.
Minaj entered 2014 with an agenda. She toned down the technicolor costumes and wigs, making headlines when she debuted her natural hair at the premiere for The Other Woman, her first film role. She spent the winter unleashing a string of remixes hard enough to re-invigorate the "Best Rapper Alive" claims sparked years ago by her "Monster" verse and subsequently abandoned by rap fans whose delicate sensibilities were no match for glossy RedOne beats and Bud Light plugs. She railed against "non-mogul ass niggas" on the snarling misandry anthem "Lookin Ass", toting twin machine guns in the video; she recruited Lil Herb, Chicago drill’s rookie of the year, for gritty loosie "Chi-Raq", where she promised to "smack bitches, no Smack Cam, closed fists, no backhands." Longtime fans, and those freshly back on the bandwagon, postulated that third album The Pinkprint would be a return to "Mixtape Nicki," the one from Southside Jamaica, Queens, who had more substantial concerns than pink wigs and global entrepreneurship.
Of course, then came "Pills N Potions", a simpering Dr. Luke piano ballad, and "Anaconda", by Minaj’s own admission a novelty song and perhaps her most explicitly girl-oriented single to date. There was that confusing anecdote tucked into her BET Awards acceptance speech that almost felt like a cry for help: "The other day, literally I didn’t tell anyone this, I really thought I was about to die. Like I was saying my prayers to die. And I didn’t even wanna call the ambulance because I thought, well if I call the ambulance, it’s gonna be on TMZ." Months later, TMZ alleged that Minaj had smashed the windows of maybe-fiancé Safaree Samuels’ Benz; their exceedingly private 14-year relationship seemed to be over. Whether her jarring 2014 trajectory was an elaborate scheme to dangle a "real hip-hop" carrot in front of naysayers only to yank it away, or a plan gone awry as her personal life imploded, The Pinkprint defies expectations from both poles of her fanbase. It’s not a return to Mixtape Nicki, or a third round of Nicki The Brand’s world-conquering dance-pop. It’s an album by Onika Maraj. And it’s a serious album, in the sense that it asks to be taken seriously. If that seems audacious, consider that most rappers don’t have to ask.
If there’s anything The Pinkprint makes clear over its sprawling 22 tracks (six of which appear only on deluxe editions), it’s that Nicki Minaj is exhausted. On intro "All Things Go", her delivery is pointedly plain as she reflects on her cousin Nicholas Telemaque’s 2011 murder, for which she blames herself, and references what may have been an abortion 16 years ago. "I Lied" grasps despondently at the loose ends of her unraveled relationship over Mike WiLL Made-It’s most haunting production of 2014. Later, Minaj convincingly paints her ex as an opportunistic scrub: "You can never make eye contact, everything you got was based off of my contact," she snaps on "Bed of Lies". The closest thing to the carefree rave of Roman Reloaded here is "The Night Is Still Young", but even there she’s consumed with creeping nostalgia for a party that has yet to end. It’s impossible to ignore her frequent mentions of pill-popping. "I popped a perc and I said thonk youuuu!" she crows on "Want Some More"; it’s the most fucked up Minaj has sounded on wax, and she used to rap from the perspective of the lunatic child that lived in her brain.
As with Drake and masculinity, Minaj’s music has long centered around the performance of femininity. On her first two albums, that performance centered around femininity as a spectacle: the elaborate costumes, the affinity for lurid Barbie pink, the cartoonishly exaggerated "SIGH" on "Super Bass". For an artist repeatedly defined by her gender in an art form historically biased against it, the preoccupation made sense. But on The Pinkprint, Minaj addresses a different performance: that of the "strong woman," the self-sufficient bad bitch role model who works twice as hard as her male peers and looks good doing it (in other words, the performance of the "only rap bitch on the Forbes list"). This, Minaj declares, is what the weight of your expectations has wrought, as she emerges from underneath them for the first time, as a heartbroken 32-year old who has sacrificed having a family to become the best rapper alive.
Which raises the eternal question: is she, though? Minaj’s rapping on The Pinkprint is hardly a revival of her Smack DVD days, but the long-upheld fallacy of Mixtape Nicki as the gold standard against which her raps must be measured was due to be put to bed anyway. Under scrutiny, the habit of neatly dividing Minaj’s music into "rap" or "pop" doesn’t hold up. Few songs from her mixtape era can hold a torch to her bars on Re-Up bonus track "The Boys", the verbal acrobatics on "Starships" B-side "Stupid Hoe", or the upper-handed smirk of her "Boss Ass Bitch (Remix)". Though they might be delivered over sparkly pop synths, her rap skills have only sharpened over the last five years, and on The Pinkprint, they change form constantly. You want punchline-oriented Mixtape Nicki? She’s right there on "The Crying Game": "Blood dripping out your arm, on my Asian rugs/ We was just planning a wedding, Caucasian doves" cribs a flow straight from 2009. More impressive is "Feeling Myself", a show-stopping Beyoncé duet that reads as a divine premonition of Bey’s eventual Gangsta Grillz installment. "Bitches ain’t got punchlines or flow; I have both, and an empire also," Nicki repeats slowly and emphatically, as though she’s speaking to an idiot; they’re lines from Re-Up bonus track "Up In Flames", but maybe you didn’t hear her the first time.
Then there’s "Four Door Aventador", an uncanny Biggie impression slipped in between twisted Atlanta homage "Want Some More" and R&B floater "Favorite", with what feels like a knowing wink towards Rosenberg’s legion of "serious hip-hop" proponents. Rosenberg atoned for his remarks on air when Minaj returned to Hot 97 last year, but his apology (the "sorry if you were offended" type, peppered with qualifiers like "underground" and "mainstream") only amplified the source of the problem. Of course he only came at Minaj because, as a believer in her potential, he expected more from her. "I was a women’s studies minor in college," he stressed. "I’m the antithesis of that dude!" His language will sound familiar to any woman who has been patronizingly told, "I’m not sure if you have the capacity to understand what you’re doing the same way I do" (presumably, then, to every woman on earth). On The Pinkprint, Minaj inches closer toward her goal of not just destroying the rap/pop binary, but smashing sexist challenges of her agency along with it, deading any lingering questions as to whether the most objectively successful female rapper of all time truly understands where her strengths lie. "THIS is The Pinkprint," she declares on "All Things Go", and it’s loaded beyond a simple introduction a la "This Is the Carter". It’s an outright rejection of any authority besides her own: "No, THIS is what my music sounds like."
For an artist repeatedly accused of pandering to the unrefined palates of teenyboppers, The Pinkprint’s production and feature roster is surprisingly sophisticated, if a bit scattershot. The crew of collaborators ranges from trap innovator Zaytoven to casual diva Jessie Ware to house producer Maya Jane Coles to someone credited simply as "The Mad Violinist." Though she hasn’t always worn it on her sleeve, Minaj has always had an acute understanding of what’s "cool" in rap and beyond, and it’s finally started to click. She slips sly contemporary references into The Pinkprint as little gifts for those paying attention: a quick nod, on "Feeling Myself", to O.T. Genasis’ viral hit "CoCo", or the built-in inside joke of "Want Some More", its title a riff on Metro Boomin’s producer tag.
Still, The Pinkprint’s singles underwhelm, even in proper context. "Pills N Potions" is cute but hollow, its sentimentality trumped by the album’s deeply personal opening triptych. "Anaconda" makes more sense recontextualized as post-breakup stress release, but that doesn’t make it much more listenable. "Only" remains vile, a jizz-fest masquerading as an unfunny in-joke over a photocopy of a photocopy of a trap beat.
But they’re redeemed by the bonus tracks—a thrilling, confounding six-song set that elevates The Pinkprint from an occasionally transcendent, if unbalanced, break-up album to something far more intriguing. On "Shanghai", Minaj barks red-blooded bars, the kind "real heads" froth over, on a beat that could’ve been an outtake from Fatima Al Qadiri’s Asiatisch. Sequenced differently, "Win Again" may have been the album’s triumphant centerpiece, simultaneously a mission statement, victory lap, and warning shot (and there should be no confusion as to whom Minaj is inferring with "Don’t write they raps and plus they flow shitty"). Stream-of-consciousness Auto-Tune freak-out "Mona Lisa" might be Minaj’s most bizarre album cut to date, gurgling "I’ll fuck around and shoot youuuu" through a Detail-produced benzodiazepine haze. "Truffle Butter" with Drake and Lil Wayne is such a lay-up of a radio hit, instantly 100 times more likeable than "Only", that it’s hard to understand its bonus track placement as anything other than mischievous trolling—Minaj giggling to herself as she tosses off precisely what her critics craved as little more than an afterthought. It’s the ultimate statement as to whether anyone but Minaj herself understands what’s best for her career. When many thought they’d had her pegged—as a New York battle-rapper, a predictable pop diva, a brand—The Pinkprint presents Minaj in her most unexpected role yet: a human being.

Cash Money / Republic / Young Money Entertainment


After an unpredictable decade, the rock vet starts off a new one with a near-solo record helmed by famed producer Daniel Lanois.

Le Noise

Even by his own unpredictable standards, Neil Young's had a pretty contradictory decade. The confusingly titled Chrome Dreams II was one highlight, but some of its best tracks were decades-old. Last year's Fork in the Road was a lark, a neo-concept album about electric cars whose humor undersold Young's convictions. His angriest albums, Living With War and Greendale, were each instantly dated time capsules. His prettiest, Silver & Gold and Prairie Wind, were also pretty disposable, and there are likely about as many people who pull out Are You Passionate? as there are those waiting for a Road Rock Vol. 2.
Yet all those subpar, uneven, or just plain odd releases matter, because they show the guy's still trying to bottle whatever it is that's been swimming in his soul for the better part of five full decades. Which brings us to Le Noise, Young's perhaps inevitable team-up with famed producer Daniel Lanois. The album features mostly just Young, electric guitar, and a battery of effects-- echoing, resonating, occasionally roaring, and raging. Not that Young necessarily needs all that. With his sneering warble and ragged but right guitar playing, he's always been his own best effect, but here Young and Lanois relish the happy accidents both producer and artist have always embraced, resisting the urge to sand off the jagged edges into the ambient ether.
Of course, ambience is a big part of Le Noise's widescreen appeal, and Young's playing is as intriguingly exploratory as it is sometimes explosive, taking advantage of Lanois' trademark bag of tricks like a kid testing pedals in a guitar store. Still, given its familiar crunch and gait, it's hard to hear Le Noise without imagining the famously ramshackle backing of Crazy Horse anchoring the riffy murk of songs like "Walk With Me", "Sign of Love", "Angry World" or even the queasy, off-kilter "Rumblin'".
Admittedly, the lyrical nod in the long unreleased drug epic "Hitchhiker" (which has been floating around in some form for years) to Trans' "Like an Inca" implies Young understands he's working in curveball mode. Regardless, there's never any denying the guy on the mound-- Le Noise is as closely linked to Young's primal instincts as anything in his catalog. Like many of Young's most formidable works, the specter of death hangs over the record, too, specifically his recently passed collaborators Larry "L.A." Johnson and especially long-serving guitarist Ben Keith.
Considering the demons creeping deep through the disc, it's perhaps no surprise that the sole pair of acoustic tracks, "Love and War" and "Peaceful Valley Boulevard", are as heavy as the louder tracks, their relative clarity almost disconcertingly intimate compared to the surrounding racket. In fact, for all its hushed restraint, the eerie "Peaceful Valley Boulevard" is a real highlight, a paean to a doomed America that plays like a tragic lyrical descendent of "Pocahontas" and "Cortez the Killer". Young may be famous for his maelstrom guitar, but in this case the apocalypse sneaks up on us with a whisper, Young's voice steeped in decades of watching the world go to hell. "When will I learn how to heal?" he later implores in "Rumblin'", knowing full well that the damage has already been done.