Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the singular comedic thrill of the Los Angeles rap group’s debut.

The Pharcyde: Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde

Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde

In 1992, legendary stand-up comic Richard Pryor began work on new material in preparation for a tour. Appearing drawn and frail from multiple sclerosis and years of unruly living, Pryor performed sets at Los Angeles’ Comedy Store while sitting in an easy chair. He sometimes relied on the arm of his assistant to guide him to his place under the lights on stage.
Like the first heart attack in ’77 or the horrifying freebasing incident in ’80, the trials of his disease became part of the routine, and he joked freely about his body turning on him. How his 51-year-old dick no longer worked how he wanted. How it wasn’t unusual now, to piss himself. The personal moments of weakness and shame became a source of laughter among strangers at the small venue on the Sunset Strip.
Nearby, in a graffitied house near the USC campus of South Central L.A., the original members of the Pharcyde absorbed the eye-popping honesty and absurdity of the ribald albums Pryor cut in the ’70s. Holed up at the digs they dubbed the Pharcyde Manor, they worked on their debut album Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde over the better part of 1992, elaborating on a demo made up of three gems: “Passin’ Me By,” “Officer,” and “Ya Mama.” Pryor’s language, gathered from bits like “White and Black People” and “Black Funerals,” showed up in their lyrics and in the production, sampled from vinyl. He was their spiritual kin.
Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde remains one of the most boisterous and creative acts of adolescent knuckleheadedness and confession in hip-hop history. The album, released in November of 1992, is as much the product of the Black comedic tradition as it is a continuation of the sample-drunk playfulness of De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, or the Digital Underground’s Sex Packets. It borrows from the past, delights in the present, and anticipates the future. One song (“Ya Mama”) consists entirely of the Dozens, a dissing game that leaves no mother spared and no friend free from embarrassment. It’s an album of outrageousness, the kind that brings tears squeezing through the creases around your eyes because your friend just said the smartest stupid shit you’ve ever heard. And instead of the moment dissipating like weed smoke, it’s laid down permanently on wax.
“I suppose the first thing I was allowed to laugh at without fear of repercussion was myself,” the L.A.-born novelist and poet Paul Beatty wrote in the introduction to Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor. Pryor recounts a similar realization in his autobiography, Pryor Convictions: “I sat on a railing of bricks and found that when I fell off on purpose everyone laughed.” A dog walked through the yard to defecate and Pryor improvised: “I got up, ran to my grandmother, and slipped in the dog poop. It made Mama and the rest laugh again. Shit, I was really onto something then. So I did it a second time….That was my first joke. All in shit.”
Running counter to the steely-eyed displays of power on Ice-T and N.W.A. records, Bizarre Ride is full of self-deprecation and ego deflation; the group is almost aggressive in their willingness to talk about masturbation and STDs (“If Magic can admit he got AIDS, fuck it: I got herpes”), about the molecular-level hurt of heartbreak, about generally coming off as weirdo punks. Like Pryor, they’d found that “human untidiness” (to use Hilton Als’ apt description) was good fodder, especially when you didn’t take the dripping, nasty stuff very seriously.
Before getting into rapping full time, most of the MCs in the Pharcyde entered the revolving door of show business through dance, and none could be accused of taking shit too seriously. Trevant “Slimkid3” Hardson linked with Emandu “Imani” Wilcox at Torrance’s El Camino College in the late 1980s—Tre an Elco student, and Imani still a high school senior. Both made their living as dancers, frequenting local clubs, chasing after young ladies, and scoping other crews. They had some interest in making music, but in a lackadaisical, adolescent fashion; they needed guidance.
A local after-school music program for aspiring musicians and entertainers called the South Central Unit (SCU) would provide a new structure and setting for their ambition. Juan Manuel Martinez, a teenage R&B producer known as J-Swift, introduced them to SCU, which occupied three bungalows in Inglewood and housed a mirrored room for dance rehearsals, a recording studio, and various musical equipment. Bankrolled by Reggie Andrews, who had produced and co-written smashes like the Dazz Band’s “Let It Whip,” SCU became the Pharcyde’s home base and incubator. (Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, and Terrace Martin also studied at SCU.)
Soon, Romye “Bootie Brown” Robinson, from Pasadena, and Derrick “Fatlip” Stewart, from Fairfax, rounded out the crew. Most of the guys still danced in music videos and at competitions to make money, but with Andrews and J-Swift in the picture, music became the mission. J-Swift would produce (using samples culled from Andrews’ massive record collection); Tre, Imani, Romye, and Fatlip would rap; and Andrews would help navigate the industry side. (Andrews was soon replaced by a younger guy, Paul Stewart, who had managed House of Pain and was more familiar with the rap game.)
“We danced for Tone Loc,” Romye told journalist Andrew Barker in his 33 1/3 book on Bizarre Ride. “You know how rappers used to have all these niggas boogying in the background? We were the niggas in the background, boogying.” The dance circuit, with all its auditions, was a grind, even if it did earn them a couple appearances as “Fly Guys” on In Living Color. By the time the crew was ready for record label auditions, they’d started to feel the burnout. “I feel like we performed for every record label that meant anything,” Tre recalled to Barker. “We got fed up.”
Maxed out on performing for industry suits, the group put together a different routine for one memorable audition. They bought one-piece mechanic’s coveralls and wore them without anything underneath. “And on our asses we wrote the name of our band, right down to the last ass,” Tre told Barker—one letter per cheek. When the performance was over, they doffed the coveralls and literally showed their asses. Then they walked out.
The accounts differ, but at some point in the late ’60s, Richard Pryor reached a breaking point onstage at a Las Vegas club. He couldn’t do the whitewashed, punchline-dependent comedy he’d been told was the only way he would make it, and he abruptly quit at the start of his set. As he recalled in his autobiography, “I asked myself, ‘Who’re they looking at, Rich?’... And in that flash of introspection when I was unable to find an answer, I crashed… I turned and walked off the stage.” After that, he started being Richard Pryor.
He released albums with titles like That Nigger’s Crazy and Craps (After Hours). The cover of the latter depicted Pryor among an intergenerational group of Black people, throwing dice on a felt table under cheap yellow light, in casual defiance of the “No Gambling” sign hanging in the background. It’s the kind of grubby and fertile nightlife scene he knew from his childhood in Peoria, Illinois, where he was raised by his grandmother among the network of whorehouses she ran. This is the material the Pharcyde used for inspiration when recording their debut.
The first voice heard on Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde is Pryor’s. Sampled from a bit about Sugar Ray Robinson on Craps, he delivers the project’s mission statement: “Oh shit!” After J-Swift’s brief instrumental intro fades out, Pryor’s exclamation cuts into the dead air. Then the drums come in as the group incredulously repeats the phrase after him, introducing their premier posse cut, “Oh Shit.” Tre jumps in first, beginning his verse by flipping the “Little Sally Walker” nursery rhyme into something dirty, fitting only for the back of the school bus or the loudest table in the lunchroom.
Tre’s voice undulates with melodic possibility—he’s on the verge of becoming a singer, if only he’d let a little more vibrato in. (His bittersweet solo cut “Otha Fish” is a perfect song in part because he finally does.) His verse reaches its punchline when, while seemingly alone with a "brown-eyed bombshell," he’s instead caught having sex by his entire school; J-Swift embellishes the moment with another wry Pryor bit: “He came and went at the same time.”
Sampling aside, J-Swift’s musicality is one of the most impressive parts of his production. His beats are never simple loops, but almost always complex productions that evolve over the course of the song. Bouncing in like a rubber ball, Imani joyfully squeaks through a verse about sleeping with his friend Greg’s mom, who is eager but also sort of frightening, undercutting the alleged bravado of the act a bit. (Of course, Greg catches them, doggy-style, on the living room couch: “Oh shit!”) Then, after Imani’s verse, a darker piano bit enters the mix to set up Fatlip.
Another Pryor sample appears—“son of a bitch”—and Fatlip describes one summer evening on Crenshaw Boulevard with a trans woman. It’s not difficult to imagine the verse devolving into something violent in the hands of a different artist; Fatlip, on the other hand, feels tricked but laughs at his situation. The verse isn’t exactly sensitive—it clumsily distorts transphobia into a punchline—but its ignorance acknowledges his own insecurity. Each verse of “Oh Shit” gestures to the anxiety underneath macho posturing about sex. (Coincidentally, their muse also once spun a bit about guys too afraid to ask if their partners had come.)
That soft underbelly is exposed fully on “Passin’ Me By,” the group’s highest-charting single and that rare sort of song that can reasonably take credit for entire careers. (Where would the puppy-dog wistfulness of early Drake have come from if “Passin’ Me By” hadn’t existed?) A miraculous simp anthem, “Passin’ Me By” tells four tales of unrequited love that leaves everyone with their dignity intact. J-Swift’s beat is a marvel of wonky craftsmanship, combining several different samples into a creaky framework for the guys to empty the lowest moments of their young lives into. They share their wisdom too: “I guess a twinkle in her eye is just a twinkle in her eye”—cold comfort to live by.
“Passin’ Me By” isn’t the first rap song about wanting love, but it refuses the smooth bravado of LL Cool J or the ridiculousness of Biz Markie. The guys sound sincerely wounded by unrequited desire. It’s the sort of tenderness that was not very hip-hop—or, as Fatlip used to say during the recording of the album: “This shit ain’t bangin’ in the hood.”
On their Bizarre Ride, the members of the Pharcyde gleefully run around a cartoonish version of Southern California with pins, popping norms like balloons. Traditional masculinity, being hard, being a player: pop, pop, pop. At a time when Los Angeles hip-hop was typified by gangsta rap as heard on Straight Outta Compton and The Chronic, Bizarre Ride is fearlessly quotidian and relatively low-stakes. Even “Officer,” their irreverent homage to Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos,” turns the real peril of operating a motor vehicle as a Black male into a comic escapade.
Though the album is not without its tensions. Immediately after “Oh Shit,” the first skit, “It’s Jigaboo Time,” begins. It’s a queasy number that lists the acts that would earn an artist the titular epithet and was surely inspired by the group’s experience on the dance-and-rap audition track. “You’re rapping for the white man,” Fatlip spits out. At one point, the guys discussed naming themselves the Jigaboos instead of the Pharcyde. “We just felt like no matter what, when you’re up there on stage you’re definitely being exploited, and you’re definitely lining someone else’s pockets,” Imani told Brian Coleman in his book Check the Technique. Musically, the skit shakes itself to pieces, with brutal piano stabs and cymbal crashes before the final line: “But we’re all jigaboos in our way,” delivered sweetly, like a deranged kindergarten teacher. “So might as well just get paid.” Then it’s back to the show.
Simply put, every track plays its part; the skits just as necessary as the songs. If De La Soul’s Prince Paul admired the heart-rendering audio journey that concludes Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” for its virtuosity and verisimilitude, the skits on Bizarre Ride succeed because they are absolutely what they appear to be: the pure shenanigans of friends fucking around. Recorded during an hours-long jam session arranged by J-Swift and edited into digestible interludes after the fact, the skits find the guys rethinking the U.S. presidency and improvising a blunted Tin Pan Alley ditty about the impending arrival of their beloved weed dealer, Quinton. It’s “Happy Days Are Here Again” for indica enthusiasts, wedged tightly into the sofa cushions.
For an album with so many jokes, it may come as a surprise to learn that in the first days of recording Tre stood in the booth at Hollywood Sound and cried. Suddenly overcome by the enormity of creating an album—“This is gonna exist forever,” he thought—Tre broke down. Granted, he was very high, but still, there’s something important to acknowledge here. Being funny is hard work that can be too easily dismissed, especially in hip-hop. Maybe it’s because the genre has fought for artistic credibility for so long, maybe it’s because of rock-critic values, but “serious” work tends to get the accolades. Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde is the exception that proves the rule.
The early work of Kanye West, so willing to make the corny joke or memorialize a mundane experience like wanting to fight the manager at your lousy job, bears Bizarre Ride’s influence (Kanye once named it his favorite album). What is J. Cole’s “Wet Dreamz” if not a Pharcyde song with less slapstick? Is it not possible to draw a direct line from Fatlip’s deranged prank-call verse on “4 Better or 4 Worse” to Eminem’s murderous fantasies to the first releases from Odd Future?
After the album’s release, the group spoke with The Source. “Your album didn’t really have a message, right?” the interviewer began. “There’s lots of hidden, secret messages. You can’t hear them?” Romye replied. It was easy to mistake their jokes for a lack of substance. But on Bizarre Ride, humor was a way of processing anxiety and pain; a tool to show self-deprecation isn’t always the inverse of self-aggrandizement. Like their hero Pryor, it was a way to make themselves the larger-than-life center of attention, to give their struggles and fears their due.

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An avant-garde cellist and a great turntablist collaborate on a 36-minute, fully improvised set that blurs the line between her strings and his samples.

Okkyung Lee / Christian Marclay: Amalgam

Amalgam

Christian Marclay was one of turntablism’s earliest pioneers. Throughout the 1980s, the multimedia artist plundered the discographies of others: scratching and refracting one Hendrix jam into a fresh psychedelic swirl, or layering several pieces by Chopin or Louis Armstrong into new soundscapes. Less indebted to hip-hop sonics than to the genre-blending aesthetics of John Zorn, Marclay eventually began to collaborate with a range of players that included Thurston Moore and Ikue Mori.
Since his 24-hour installation film The Clock became a smash hit in contemporary art circles, Marclay has noticeably scaled back his turntablist practice. In recent years, he’s collaborated more with musicians through the interface of his collage-style “graphic scores.” But he still occasionally busts out his cartons of vinyl, as he did with the cellist Okkyung Lee for a 2014 performance at London’s Cafe Oto. Now released under the title Amalgam, the concert is easily one of Marclay’s most invigorating performances as a turntablist this century—and leagues more interesting than a pair of gigs released on limited-edition vinyl in conjunction with a 2015 gallery show in London.
A good deal of Amalgam’s success has to do with Marclay’s duet partner, Okkyung Lee. The cellist has demonstrated her avant-improv bona fides on her collaboration with piano great Cecil Taylor. And her own compositions display Lee’s skills with lyricism and melody, in between passages of crunch and noise. Appropriately, she has as many ideas for coaxing sounds from the cello as Marclay has strategies for abusing vinyl. This mutual acuity gives solid shape to their 36-minute, fully improvised performance.
After Marclay opens with samples that employ shifts in playback speed, Lee’s cello can be heard quietly, insistently repeating a short jagged phrase—a cellist’s imitation of a turntable scratch. Lee’s development of this brief figure gradually incorporates longer-held tones and broader fingerboard swoops, both of which help a listener identify her cello as the source of these particular sounds. By then, Marclay has begun splicing together noisier shards.
Not long after these discrete positions have been staked out by the two players, they pivot to blend their approaches. Occasionally, a figure that could have been produced by the live string player is revealed to be a Marclay sample, plucked from some string-laden LP. Metallic scrapings or atmospheric trails of sound production can seem like fodder from a vintage recording—until an expressive, violent burst in the line shows that this has all come from Lee’s cello.
This back and forth journey, between easy recognition of the different players and more ambiguous duo textures, creates much of the performance’s excitement at a minute-by-minute level. The larger structure follows a loose, three-movement style, with a quieter middle section that takes over in the fourteenth minute. Unlike many of Marclay’s past duo recordings with other artists, this session with Lee doesn’t include many recognizable samples. (You don’t even get any Anthony Braxton breaks that have cropped up in the turntablist’s collaborations with Elliott Sharp or Günter Müller.) But after this inspired performance, what lingers is the dazzling newness that Lee and Marclay create by exploring the outer fringes of timbre.


Ayman Rostom’s debut album under his house music alias covers a surprisingly large amount of ground with lumbering grooves, off-kilter rhythms, and impish sample play.

01DEAS

In 2006, the British producer Ayman Rostom put out an album under his hip-hop alias, Dr. Zygote, called Beats to Make You Frown. The title suited the mood his guest rappers conjured: nervous, combative, screw-faced. But a playful spirit lurked in Rostom’s production choices: squiggly sci-fi samples, dizzy hot-jazz riffs, breakbeats that jiggled like plates of Jell-O. Even at his most glowering, Rostom couldn’t hide his essential M.O. as a wily maker of beats to make you smile—or, at the very least, arch a quizzical brow.
Those instincts are particularly evident in the music he releases as the Maghreban, an alias dedicated to house music and its offshoots. Between the throwback classicism and the perennial obligation to keep dancers moving, house music has become conservative in recent years, but the Maghreban’s tracks resist settling into complacency. Perhaps because he came to house music only recently as a self-described outsider, or perhaps it’s simply his natural inclination, but the Maghreban’s records are stranger and squirrellier than your average dancefloor filler. They’re full of lumbering grooves, off-kilter rhythms, and impish sample play—yet they still bang.
There is much to smile about on the Maghreban’s debut album. Take “Hi Top Remix,” an early highlight. The vinyl scratching lurches like a drunken sailor; the sax bleats invoke the shouts of the oft-sampled “Think (About It)” break, and the L.A. rapper A-F-R-O’s lickety-split rhyming is a giddy riff on old-school hip-house. But with a beat that splinters like kindling and a woozy layer of dub delay, it’s too weird to scan as merely retro. Some of his samples feel almost unfashionable: “Crime Jazz” sports the kinds of jazz licks and film dialogue reminiscent of the early years of Mo Wax and Ninja Tune. But instead of spy-movie kitsch, the song courts full-on psychedelia as a tremolo-riddled synth pulls the proceedings steadily off the rails.
Rostom is the son of Egyptian immigrants—his handle refers to the region of North Africa bordering the Mediterranean Sea—and he frequently draws upon African music for melody and tone color. “Sham” is a kind of lo-fi Afrobeat overlaid with a tumbling marimba melody; “Mbira” is an ambient sketch for synths and thumb piano; and “Revenge,” featuring the Zimbabwean singer and mbira player Rutendo Machiridza, is a slow, stomping triplet jam reminiscent of Africaine 808’s cross-border fusions. In all these songs, the warm timbres and lilting rhythms are a welcome contrast with his occasionally knotty programming. And when he really lets loose, those melodies (particularly on “Revenge” and “Mike’s Afro,” a bumping Afro-disco jam with Gatto Fritto) make for the album’s most freeing moments, where weirdo studio experiments give way to communal dancefloor bliss.
01DEAS is over in less than three-quarters of an hour, but it covers so much ground that it’s easy to miss some of its more intriguing tangents, particularly as the album staggers into its idea-stuffed back half. There’s “Strings,” which pairs a Larry Heard-inspired bassline with dissonant string samples and airy free-jazz saxophone; “Needy,” a dark dub number; and “Broken,” an understated house groove whose splotchy chords and loosey-goosey timekeeping recall DJ Koze’s manner of finger-painting all over the rhythmic grid. Rostom doesn’t dwell too long on any of these; just a few minutes apiece, and he’s on to the next thing. Occasionally, though, his short attention span gives way to greater focus. That’s the case with “Mr. Brown,” a late-album standout that pairs hypnotic ride-cymbal taps with meandering Ethio-jazz keys. If elsewhere he delights in pulling the rug out, here he gives the listener something buoyant to fall into. If some of his beats trigger manic grins, the smile he elicits here is positively beatific.


The debut LP from the Australian group F ingers features a cadaverous aesthetic: spider-web guitars billow and glisten, cheap synths drip like melting icicles, and Carla dal Forno sings as if she’s in a death trance, emotionless and distant. The results are distinctly chilling.

Hide Before Dinner

In the phenomenon known as "spirit photography," which rose to prominence in the 19th century, ghosts are said to be captured on film by unsuspecting cameramen during the course of a normal day’s shooting. Some of them are clearly the result of double exposure or trickery—the photographer William H. Mumler built a career on such forgeries—but the most effective ones have an eerie realism, as if you’re catching a momentary glimpse into another, darker world that exists just below the surface of our own.
That’s more or less the effect of listening to Hide Before Dinner, the debut LP from the Australian group F ingers. That’s largely because each of its seven songs strictly adhere to their own cadaverous aesthetic: spider-web guitars billow and glisten, cheap synths drip like melting icicles, and Carla dal Forno—who, like F ingers’ Tarquin Manek, is also a member of the gloomy electronic outfit Tarcar—sings as if she’s in a death trance, emotionless and distant.
That kind of deliberate spookiness in clumsier hands can feel affected or, worse, just dull, but Hide Before Dinner is instead distinctly chilling, mostly because del Forno, Manek, and Samuel Karmel seem to be following specific, supernatural sheet music. Opener "Escape Into the Bushes" starts like something from the Cure’s Faith, with a mournful, two-chord guitar pattern ringing out in pitch-black open air. But the minute del Forno enters, it becomes something else. The words she’s singing are indistinct, but that hardly matters: she sings them like they’re the familiar intro to some occult ritual—purposeful, reverent, and with grim anticipation. Whatever weird conjuring is about to take place, del Forno’s determined tone implies that it’s happened before, and there’s no stopping it from happening again.
That mood carries throughout Dinner. There’s not much to "Mum’s Caress After Trip" beyond a ghoul-calliope keyboard line and del Forno’s baleful alto, but it inches under the skin. Del Forno sounds like she’s moved past sorrow into something worse—depressive catatonia—and the music’s ruthless blankness seems to mirror the condition of her spirit. "Useless Treasure" takes this same aesthetic of emptiness and stretches it out to a full seven minutes. Here, del Forno’s voice is lacquered with effects and then stretched and twisted, lurching zombie-like through blue bars of bass. There are echoes of the same funereal mood that pervaded Nico’s Marble Index, but compared to F ingers’ whispery instrumentation and miles of cold empty air, that album seems like an exercise in maximalism. The title track milks a simple, four-chord minor-key guitar line for all it’s worth, dragging it miserably across the song’s six minutes, del Forno’s suffocated vocals so far in the background it sounds like she’s singing from another room, downstairs, beneath a thick wool blanket.
F ingers are even more disquieting when they purposefully ratchet up the darkness. The electronic wind chimes that ripple throughout "Tantrum Time" sound like they’re being stirred up by a warm night breeze outside the devil’s back door, and del Forno’s diced-up and detuned vocals are distinctly menacing; as the song progresses, it slowly fills with more and more digital apparitions—warped bass tones, suffocating static—summoning more horror than dread.
Because its primary goal is sustaining a mood rather than delivering concrete songs, Hide Before Dinner works best when taken as a whole, like outsider art from the afterlife. It’s a bleak and focused exercise in misery—traveling music for a long boat ride down the river Styx.


The Mars Volta's new album is partially a Lynchian pro-immigration statement that, we assume, will thrill lovers of musical onanism.

Amputechture

The Mars Volta's piss-soaked indulgence often pushes critics to similarly bombastic, mouth-foaming performances. It's understandable. The boys have created an oeuvre that, while technically adventurous, is more or less a hodgepodge of ADD prog trope noodles. That said, I carefully cross my heart at the news of each release, hoping that approaching these guys with an open mind will unearth the pleasures that make bong-toting college boys and Total Guitar subscribers purr. But hard as I tried (again), Amputechture tested, bent, and eventually broke me: Synths lap, strings weep soppingly, ham-fisted fingers tap, time signatures flash, and the amphetamine Beat poetry...is amphetamine Beat poetry.
Now, I dig indulgence when it's done well (see: Finnegans Wake, that skinny guy who wins all the hot-dog eating contests), and what got me through multiple listens to Frances the Mute was the album's overall ludicrousness, that weirdo King Crimson corn-dogging. I enjoyed some of the vocal lines, and it had an intriguing concept-- characters flesh-out from found objects-- but the endless boogie eventually flatlined. It wasn't good rock music, but it was fun in a beer-helmet sorta way. But unless you do keg stands for a living, party tricks usually only work once. To the band's credit, at least they didn't aim for another classic-rock crapper like Frances's "The Widow"-- if your raison d'être is sitcom-length epics, why plop in that one radio-ready single?
Here, the closest the Mars Volta come to a stadium-sized anthem is opener "Vicarious Atonement", in which slow-drip Led Zeppelin histrionics and drama-queen guitar wanks waddle over space ambiance, modem sounds, piano swirls, and free-jazzercise horns. The effect? Climbing a mountain with a noodling Sam Ash balladeer. (Actually, it's probably John Frusciante, who plays guitar on just about every track here.) Of course, the 7+ minute "Been Caught Stealin'"-on-DXM shower ballad could've been trimmed by three minutes, but that's not a bad percentage for these guys.
As is illustrated by the 17-minute "Tetragrammaton". The move from "Vicarious Atonement"'s saxophone bleats and Cedric Bixler-Zavala's mutant whine to the hyperspeed Dream Theater schlep is nice enough: The track's first few minutes show promise, but before long it's veered off into unlistenable, meth-addled Rich Little territory. "Tetragrammaton", of course, is the Hebrew name for God, but seriously, there's no reason to try to squeeze the entire dude into one track. How many scales can a person take? Leave the room, come back, go to sleep, take a walk: They're still at it.
This isn't to say Amputechture is without redemption: "Vermicide" has a couple mellow and pretty guitar parts; actually, though, that's snuffed by the word "sacrosanct," a ricocheting vocal effect, and late-period funk spunk. Heady hand drums, acoustic guitar flumes, and drifty gleams at "Asilos Magdalena"'s opening are promising, but a quivering Cedric gets weepy on us. My guess: Mary Magdalene's pissed at Jesus for not taking her with him. Then I thought of Devendra Banhart for a second, before wiping off my windshield. The religious imagery's knee-deep in each track: "Viscera Eyes" rages about "a crown of maggots" and "the border we're watching." Somewhere Fred Durst nods along with a copy of The Dharma Bums in his back pocket.
The demonizing, idol-worshipping "Day of the Baphomets" opens with and sustains the most energy, but then comes a number of unnecessary shifts, including fun-house vocal effects and wavy gravy Lynchian midget sounds. The song features a legitimately kinetic vocal turn-- "Poachers in your home/ Poachers in your home"-- that echoes Nation of Ulysses, but my finger's still off a few inches.
None of this is surprsing: It's the Mars Volta's third proper album and a blizzard of onanism is expected-- to quite a few people, it'll be highly anticipated. Hell, it even had me interested: This is ex-At the Drive In bassist Paul Hinojos' first studio stint with the band after he started touring with them in 2005. Maybe he'd turn back the clock and force his comrades to look in the mirror and see how far they've strayed off course? Sadly not. Which reminds me: Bixler-Zavala and Volta keyboardist Ikey Owens guest on Mastodon's new Blood Mountain album. Maybe they'll brainwash Atlanta's finest metal band into this kinda bullshit so the world can celebrate the crushing loss of two great bands together.


The new album from New York’s Immolation is a masterclass in death metal songwriting. It pairs a queasy feeling of gloom with melodies you can actually hum along to.

Atonement

In the early ’90s, death metal luminaries like Death’s Chuck Schuldiner and Morbid Angel’s Trey Azagthoth introduced technicality to the raw, guttural template they’d pioneered a few years earlier. At that point, death metal became a haven for artists who not only placed a high premium on chops but also thought of themselves as capital-C composers. (Gorguts bandleader Luc Lemay, for example, actually took private lessons in composition from a nun.) But over the genre’s 30-year creep from the fringes to respectability, we still don’t think of it as a songwriter’s artform. That’s not necessarily fair, as it takes enormous skill to wrest hooks from such harsh tones.
On Atonement, the 10th long-player from the New York-based second wave death metal outfit Immolation, guitarist Robert Vigna delivers a masterclass on songwriting in this framework. A cohesive listen from start to finish, Atonement contains twists, turns, peaks, and valleys galore—a remarkable achievement considering that Immolation haven’t modified their approach all that much since their 1991 debut Dawn of Possession. Atonement, in fact, begins with a short, detuned clean guitar phrase that reacquaints listeners with Vigna’s preference for scales that sound as if they’re warping under his fingertips.
As with so many of his peers, Vigna likes to play squealing leads that he double-tracks in discordant harmonies to create a queasy feeling of gloom. But he also possesses an unparalleled knack for injecting melody into his riffs without watering-down the heaviness or resorting to the inflated bombast of symphonic death metal. (Though former Goreaphobia/Incantation guitarist Alex Bouks joined Immolation last year, Vigna still plays all of the parts on the album, as he’s done for much of the band’s history.) Vigna crafted the album as a batch of songs you can actually hum along to. Looking back, how many of the genre’s all-time classics can we say that about?
Even when compared to Immolation’s back catalog, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more riveting string of transitions between songs. After a series of blast beats and double bassdrum rolls, second track “When the Jackals Come” opens out onto an epic climax where Vigna guitars wail like a chorus of air raid sirens. Here, in a drawn-out ending that takes nearly as long as the song’s main section, the music lends itself to the apocalyptic scenery the album cover depicts. “Their war is already won,” sings vocalist/bassist Ross Dolan, “your world will end when the jackals come”—a typical death metal lyric about societal collapse that takes on an unusually profound sense of tragedy thanks to the dolefulness in the music.
In a great sequencing move, “When the Jackals Come” simmers down onto the eerie drone that introduces “Fostering the Divide,” which hints at Vigna and Dolan’s affinity for the gothy ambient darkness of non-metal acts like Dead Can Dance. And though the drone component remains quite subtle throughout the album, mixer Zack Ohren leaves ample room for drummer Steve Shalaty’s intricate cymbal patterns to come to the front and color even the most dense passages. Ohren’s mix is beefy but not outsized or over-processed like so much modern metal can be. The music reveals endless contours over repeat listens.
Immolation have recorded with producer Paul Orofino since their third album, 1999’s Failures for Gods. By this point, the band’s work flow is well entrenched. Likewise, Dolan’s preoccupation with religious and political institutions as agents of evil is still as fervent as it was from day one. At times, Dolan breathes a contemporary edge into his lyrics. “Jackals” was inspired by John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, while “Fostering the Divide” aligns perfectly with the contentious tone of American politics (even if it doesn’t explicitly address the recent presidential election). Mostly, though, Dolan isn’t saying anything he hasn’t said before. In a sense, neither is Vigna. But in death metal, consistency is the name of the game, and it’s harder than it looks. If a band can “say” the same thing for 30 years while delivering it with more flourish than they ever have, as Immolation have done with Atonement, then that really says something.


The fifth album from the hypnotic Moon Duo is their breeziest to date. Its combination of sweetness and substance is blissed-out and pillowy, like soft-core shoegaze.

Occult Architecture Vol. 2

Moon Duo makes rock’n’roll comfort food. Since they debuted in 2009, their sound has progressively gotten smoother and more sugary. Ripley Johnson melts his singing into the music, rarely breaking character with yelps or screams, while his guitar stays mellifluous even as its fuzz gets denser. Sanae Yamada’s keyboard melodies lilt snugly, while simple beats—once executed with a drum machine, now handled by John Jeffrey—swing like a hammock. If you have a taste for German motorik drive, Velvet Underground chug, Spacemen 3 hypnotism, and blissful psych-rock, Moon Duo hit an irresistible sweet spot.
Occult Architecture Vol. 2, their fifth full-length, is their sweetest spot so far. It’s intended as a brighter counterpart to the darker Vol. 1 released in February, and while the two albums aren’t radically divergent, Vol. 2 is definitely the lightest, breeziest Moon Duo record to date. Everything flows ahead at mid tempo, with no tangential digressions or disruptive curveballs. Nearly half the album is taken up by two instrumentals that suggest the band jamming on a sunny, worry-free afternoon. It’d be easy to say music this pleasant is also fleeting, but just because Moon Duo indulge a sweet tooth doesn’t mean Vol. 2 is weightless. Think of them as sonic pastry chefs: you can’t live off their songs alone, but they’re not all empty calories either.
That combination of sweetness and substance is crystallized by “Lost in Light,” an eight-and-a-half minute tune so blissed-out and pillowy, it’s like soft-core shoegaze. Over a melody that hints at Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle”—and Spacemen 3’s ode to same—Moon Duo slowly climb toward the clouds, settling into a chorus so dreamy it’s like they’re swimming in cotton candy. As Johnson’s words (again evoking Spacemen 3) mix religious tones with drug references—“What a feeling to be saved,” “I’m a servant to the wind,” “Roll another, you want it”—“Lost in Light” sounds like a stab at rapture via lysergic guitar chords.
The rest of Vol. 2 isn’t quite that euphoric, but enchantment persists. On the two other songs in which Johnson sings, he spools out more paeans to easy drift. “It’s sweet, that Southern roll,” he purrs on see-sawing opener “New Dawn,” while waxing beatific on “Sevens”: “Walk on, the river said...We’re out on the boulevard/Lost in a feeling on the run.” Such serene sentiments aren’t verbalized on instrumental “Mirror’s Edge,” but the tune’s swaying jangle is so laid-back that it begs you to recline your seat and let the music guide you down its own desert highway.
Continuing to chase a sound this sweet and floaty might not be Moon Duo’s best option moving forward. Though they’re nowhere near saccharine on Vol. 2, it’s not hard to imagine them drifting into tooth decay territory if they maintain this path. As Vol. 1 showed, this group is still capable of the kind of darker edges that they’ll surely revisit in the future—all they really need to do is let Yamada work in some descending keyboard chords and things suddenly get a lot spookier. But as an exercise in baking their sound into a decadent dessert, Vol. 2 is pretty convincing—and, more importantly, totally satisfying.


The Compton rapper’s latest is a sequel to his 2014 debut mixtape. Boogie steps into the California sun, embracing a brighter sound with a flow that sharpens year after year.

Thirst 48 Pt. II

At the wild, cramped party that is Los Angeles rap, Boogie’s the guy sitting in the corner, sermonizing about the desperate conditions black parents in his neighborhood face while flicking through photos of his son on his iPhone. The deep-thinking lyricist might be straight outta Compton at a time when the city is the center of the hip-hop universe again, but he’s kept his lens focused on his own. Even the one unequivocal banger in his canon, “Oh My,” was about poverty and police brutality when you stripped out the high-rise keys and booming bass.
The impressive Thirst 48 and The Reach mixtapes—released in 2014 and 2015, respectively—found Boogie pondering the kind of issues that keep South Los Angeles parents up at night. That both were released on his young son’s birthday signaled their heavily personal nature. Thirst 48 Pt. II might be presented as a sequel to his debut, but it feels like an advancement of his style. Boogie has emerged from behind his living room curtain and stepped into the California sun, slickly shifting from the blurry synths and lurid drum machines that punctuate most of his catalog to a brighter sound that embraces his geographical roots.
It’s not like Boogie has dropped the pen, though. On opener “Still Thirsty,” he shuffles through all the issues weighing on his mind: the pressure to succeed, fear of poverty, relationship hang-ups, parental struggles. “We went from tears at the bottom ’til we almost top tier,” he raps, “my biggest fear is I don’t finish through.” Moments on Thirst 48 Pt. II underline what we already knew: the South Angelino is one of the sharpest West Coast writers right now.
Boogie raps over piano chords with the same open-book sentiment that Tupac once did. The sweetly caressed keys of “Won’t Be the Same” channel the spirit of “I Ain’t Mad at ‘Cha,” if ‘Pac rapped about his girl instead of an old friend. That line connecting past to present is crystallized on the DJ Quik-featuring “Fuck ‘Em All.” With Sacramento’s Mozzy brought along for the trip, the trio rib over the kind of wonky, tweaked-out beat Snoop and posse would have jumped on and had a ball with in the mid-’90s. Boogie adapts to these good-time flavors as easily as he once skulked in the sonic shadows.
Elsewhere, “Slide on You” sees him go down in the DMs over some smooth ratchet finger snaps. “Sunroof,” meanwhile, is better than any rap song that rides an acoustic guitar has any right to be. Boogie shows California love on the West Coast anthem, which channels everything from ‘Pac’s odes to his home state to the sweet ’60s harmonies of the Mamas & the Papas. But he’s not in a such a positive mood that he can’t work in a line like, “You a good day, you like a hood day with no police.”
With this shift in lanes, Boogie sometimes sounds like he’s trying to run the modern-day commercial rap gambit. He gives a report on a new relationship through the prism of their social media interactions on “Two Days,” and ponders stealing his friend’s girl on “Just Might.” (“I just might fuck your wifey out of spite,” he sneers). There’s a newfound level of steel in his voice on the latter. It’s evidence that his flow has sharpened year after year. Pt. II’s free throw percentage would have been bolstered by the inclusion of pre-release singles “Out My Way (Bitter Raps II)” and “Man Down.” But the tape does something more crucial: it proves that even when he falls into line, Boogie still stands out from the crowd.


G-Eazy is a white indie rapper from the Bay Area who has built a sizable cult fanbase. His second record, When It's Dark Out, is a deliberately serious affair that refuses to play to his strengths.

When It's Dark Out

It's easy to write G-Eazy off as a Macklemore that simply grew up further south: He's a white indie rapper from the Bay Area who has built a sizable fan base producing the same kind of sober wordplay, one that carefully articulates individual syllables and slots them into grooves, expressing thoughts in straight lines. Each artist has taken each painstaking step to address his whiteness (and subsequently how that makes them outliers and commodities all at once) and they both present themselves as very for the culture, a phrase which here means aligned with conservative rap values and in tune with hip-hop culture's history and innermost workings. But upon closer examination, G-Eazy isn't much like Macklemore at all; in fact, he's more like Bizarro Macklemore, a self-serious, self-absorbed swag rapper who shuns the thrifty for the bourgeois.
His debut album, 2014's These Things Happen, articulated this identity through the prism of the sounds of the moment: mostly the sadness of Drake and somberness of Kendrick Lamar. It was a decent first offering, but the music had no pulse: It was carefully dressed mannequin rap, standing stiff without feeling. His sophomore effort When It's Dark Out makes a lot of the same mistakes: This is a deliberately serious record that refuses to play to his strength, a sharply turning flow that pivots on his buoyant pronunciations, which are naturally comical. Instead, it opts to move cautiously and without jest. It's fitting that one of the singles is titled "Sad Boy" because that's the plainest way to express the basic idea of this record: Even something as cool as being famous can be humorless and miserable.
Rapping and being a rapper often feel like chores for G-Eazy, and it can be a chore to listen to him. There's a certain earnestness to his writing, which focuses in on the things he wants—whether that's a Ferrari, a Grammy, or just for his grandmother to stay in her old home—and he's a very capable lyricist. But when he raps, "And fuck it, I'm the coldest white rapper in the game since the one with the bleached hair," on "Calm Down" it somehow feels less like a boast and more like an admission of a shallow field. When he's sharing space with someone as engaging as E-40, the holes really start to show.
When It's Dark Out is a marked sonic improvement from his debut. The majority of These Things Happen was produced by frequent collaborator Christoph Andersson and G-Eazy himself, and it dragged throughout. Though they do share production credits on "Sad Boy", "Some Kind of Drug", and "Think About You", the beats come primarily from an ensemble cast highlighted by 808 Mafia co-founder Southside, Boi-1da, and DJ Dahi. There are productions from electronic producer Cashmere Cat, longtime Future cohorts Nard & B, and rap radio regulars KeY Wane and Kane Beatz. This all seems like a conscious effort on G-Eazy's part to flesh out his sound into something more dynamic and less one-note, and there are effective tonal shifts, especially the Kehlani-featuring "Everything Will Be OK".
G-Eazy is at his best when he steps out of the shadows and raps assuredly, and there are signs of that on When It's Dark Out. On "Random", he asserts that his surprise indie success isn't the result of some lucky breaks but a byproduct of hard work. ("What If" posits an interesting counter theory before coming to the same conclusion: "What if the game didn't care I was white/ Would I still be selling out shows every night/ Would they all believe in the hype/ Regardless of image/ I'm askin' would people still love me despite/ I'd still be right here in these shoes cuz I fit 'em, I worked for this life.") The Big Sean-assisted "One of Them" boasts one of his more elastic flows. He gets his closest to passing off his Sad Boy aesthetic on "Don't Let Me Go", which pairs Nard & B up with KeY Wane for a clattering beat that flattens a drowsy vocal sample into a sprawling canvas. "Troubled mind of an artist/ But the star comes alive in the darkness," he raps, as if to justify his status. It's one of the few moments that give any credence to his burgeoning base.


The Chicago multi-instrumentalist and jazz-rap artist’s self-titled double album conceals a reflective sorrow within its blissful swirl of beats and blips.

Sen Morimoto

Sen Morimoto’s music is an open book. Diaristic, fragmented lyrics and layers upon layers of harmonies pile into his kinetic jazz rap. It’s a heavy book—an encyclopedia, probably. A jazz saxophonist since childhood, Morimoto gobbled up other instruments and disciplines along the way from his birthplace of Kyoto to small-town Massachusetts, where he grew up and began gravitating towards hip-hop, and then to his current home in Chicago. Or maybe it’s a phone book: In just the past couple of years, Morimoto has collaborated in an impressive range of circles, playing on albums by jazz ensemble Resavoir, pop singer KAINA, rappers Ric Wilson and Joseph Chilliams, and indie bands Lala Lala and Vagabon.
In July, Morimoto took his openness to a new level. When the City of Chicago invited him to appear on the “Millennium Park at Home” virtual series, Morimoto took the chance to call out his mayor—and was promptly removed from the bill. “I would like to add my extreme disappointment in the lack of action that has been taken by Mayor Lightfoot and our elected officials here in response to over 100,000 protesters here in Chicago demanding the police be defunded and CPAC [the Civilian Police Accountability Council] be enacted,” he said in his submitted video. The city gave him a chance to recant; he declined, and his colleague Tasha followed him out the door.
Disappointment permeates the lyrics of Morimoto’s self-titled second album, too. He imagines a future where everyone has left for Jupiter; he raps about being too tired to feign happiness and crying so loudly it upsets his dog. But you might not notice any of that, because musically, the dominant mood is blissful and relentlessly hyperactive—more suggestive of happy daydreams than the flat, grey slog of this year’s bad-news parade. The album’s sound is downright optimistic; if you knew nothing else of him, you might wonder if he has been living on Jupiter for the past several months.
Morimoto turns his imagination loose, filling up a double album that bursts with vivid color and gnarly chord structures, as well as a laundry list of guest features—some of which serve his love of working with friends a little more than they serve the song. Where his debut album, Cannonball!, was built by subtraction (as he explained, he wrote by overcrowding his songs with parts, then stripping them away one by one), Sen Morimoto lets it all fly. Bigger drums and lavish beats take over for the less adorned boom-bap propulsion of his last effort, and songs are washed, but not often drowned, in rainfalls of keys and blips.
One of the biggest surprises here is that Morimoto mostly leaves his sax at home, with the exception of the album’s bookends—he blares it loud enough to set off a car alarm on the opener, spins a few upward-spiraling phrases on the closer, and that’s pretty much it. Instead he  branches out with other tools, playing around with different guitars, synths, and production techniques, manning everything himself except for the live drums. But the album’s riskiest, and often best, moments come when he sings. He tries his hand, respectably, at being a full-on crooner on “Wrecked” and casually ascends a tower of harmonies on the breezy highlight “Symbols, Tokens,” taking two or three extra steps up that build into one glorious payoff note. “Everything reminds me of you,” he sings; the whole song feels like a warped, digital “God Only Knows” sung from a convertible.
With each sharp twist, Morimoto racks up originality points—whether they land or not, they are certifiably, uncompromisingly out there. And while his progressions and arrangements can be breathtakingly kaleidoscopic, they’re also occasionally coupled with the sense that he’s trying too many things at once. You can’t help but wonder what his instrumental album would sound like, or one where he stretches his voice beyond perpetual chillness, or where he narrows and focuses his words. Sen Morimoto’s hindrances arise from the same place as its distinguishing qualities: an atmosphere of infinite possibility.

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The new album from crushers Full of Hell is an impressive show of stylistic transcendence—featuring a standout collaboration with art-pop auteur Nicole Dollanganger.

Trumpeting Ecstasy

Compared to the other branches of the heavy-metal family tree, grindcore bands face a disproportionately uphill battle when it comes to leaving an impact. As inheritors of both hardcore’s blistering short-form and death metal’s ear-splitting volume, they readily renounce sonic wiggle room, and by extension, conventional dynamics. In the right hands, grindcore’s shock-and-awe can feel dreamlike, even sublime. But fumble it, and the uniformity renders the whole storm moot, another passing flurry.
Maryland/Pennsylvania crushers Full of Hell are well aware of these limitations, and have strived—and for the most part, succeeded—to overcome them since their 2009 inception. On their first two releases, 2011’s Roots of Earth Are Consuming My Home and 2013’s Rudiments of Mutilation, the band subverted sameness by tracing their basement fury with industrial touches (crackling samples, glitchy effects), filling out the din with textural frisson. Since then, Full of Hell have spent the bulk of their time in crossover mode. They’ve penned joint LPs with the avant-garde elite (Merzbow, The Body) and released splits with rabid contemporaries like Nails and Psywarfare, assembling a diverse arsenal of noisemakers in the process.
Full of Hell’s upgraded toolbox is on full display on Trumpeting Ecstasy, their third and best solo album. With the coaching of hardcore luminary Kurt Ballou, the band barrel through a thrilling 23-minute gauntlet, all mosh-pits, sludge piles, and—because this is a Full of Hell album—bone-chilling reminders that we’re all going to die. While it’s anything but a crossover in the traditional sense (if you didn’t like grindcore before, this one probably won’t change your mind), the 11-song effort marks an impressive show of stylistic transcendence.
Trumpeting Ecstasy is Full of Hell’s first studio album without Brandon Brown, the band’s co-founding bassist and one half of its unparalleled tag-team behind the mic; his demonic, guttural register is the ying to frontman Dylan Walker’s piercing yang, a hellish interplay that’s easily one of grindcore’s national treasures. But Brown’s replacement, Sam DiGristine, maintains this tradition with aplomb on “Gnawed Flesh” and “Crawling Back to God,” bellowing from the gut as his bandmate screams his head off. On “Branches of Yew” and “Bound Sphynx,” guitarist and effects wizard Spencer Hazard accelerates the jagged see-saw with tremoring, dread-laden riffs, matched note-for-note by drummer Dave Bland. Ballou rounds out the interstitial space—however few seconds that are left, anyway—with sinister, crackled melodrama: “The trees are in misery,” sighs a sampled Werner Herzog before the first peals of “Deluminate,” the album’s opening peal of Nordic Thunder.
Although Full of Hell spend the majority of Trumpeting Ecstasy examining their usual tricks through an expanded prism, their overall approach remains the same. They take a sweeping panorama of the abyss, compress it down to a single point, and shade it in until it breaks. Towards the end of the album, the band momentarily loosen their grip, to great effect: art-pop auteur Nicole Dollanganger swoops into the static with an otherworldly aria, flooding the void with light. Less than a minute later—which can feel like an eternity in grindcore time—we’re back into oblivion. Following the sludgy closer “At the Cauldron’s Bottom,” the album chugs to a close, but that angelic interlude remains—an unsettling, unshakable magic. Such is the album’s spell.


Allison Crutchfield’s debut solo LP jettisons punky guitars for pirouetting synths, vast open spaces, and lyrics that explore haunted memories and still-fresh heartache.

Allison Crutchfield: Tourist in This Town

Tourist in This Town

In 2014, between projects, Allison Crutchfield released Lean in to It, a synth-led EP of private epiphanies on love and heartbreak. From an artist given to collaboration—not least with her sister, Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield—its starkness was intriguing. Allison and Katie’s first major outfit was Birmingham, Alabama’s P.S. Eliot, a raucous pop-punk band whose busy lyrics and zipwire melodies seemed, in brief moments, to make the planet spin twice as fast. In 2012, a year after they split, Allison moved from drums to the mic with Swearin’, still reveling in the racket of ferocious guitars. She began work on Tourist in This Town after Swearin’ played their last show, in 2015, due to her split with co-songwriter Kyle Gilbride. After years touring with her sister and boyfriend, the 28-year-old’s Lean in to It follow-up—and debut solo LP—might have occasioned a reckoning with independence and her unmapped future. Instead, she finds her compasses jammed by existential drift and haunting memories.
As on Lean in to It, which corralled tales of youth romance gone awry, Tourist in This Town is a breakup record whose ennui goes beyond romance. Couched in her stories are trials of self-acceptance, psychic grappling, physical dislocation. Cleanly produced by Philly synth-whisperer Jeff Zeigler, the LP channels the kind of late-80s synth pop that jettisoned style in favor of vastness and grace—skyline synths pirouette, vocals implore, pensive guitars sporadically erupt. The effect is to coalesce Crutchfield’s anecdotes and soliloquies into a blur of fury and melancholy.
Like her sister, Crutchfield has a knack for sardonic observations designed to bore through the bullshit of young adulthood (mostly emanating from other young adults). With less room for stormy punk guitars, Tourist proceeds with a new lightness of touch. Instead of steel-plating her tongue, the music consoles and reveres the heart-on-sleeve lyrics. On “Sightseeing,” as piano chords sprout reverb, Crutchfield recounts an awkward face-to-face encounter (“You say nothing/You just come sit next to me”) in an anguished tone that suggests a divine experience. It’s oddly dramatic, and a little jarring, but the lyrics’ psychological layers—“Baby, you are not as sad as you want me to think”—somehow bring you to her level.
Rather than submit to the inevitability of breakups, Crutchfield obsessively autopsies what went wrong: she purports to be “selfish” “shallow,” and “unstable” on “Broad Daylight”; on “Mile Away,” she seethes to her partner, “You assume you understand because your voice is the loudest.” These scenes often occur in public—waiters refill glasses, onlookers mock her tears. More than heated blow-outs, they sound like scrappy internal monologues, filling silences made unbearable by the weight and breadth of what’s unsaid. On “Charlie,” Crutchfield and her partner inhabit a domestic space flooded with conflicting memories—their touching pillow-talk, his yelling in her face. When she concludes, “You bite me on my neck like I was something you could eat/You bite me ’cos you like the way I feel in your teeth,” her tone taints the cuteness with a dash of something sinister.
If there’s a drawback to this psychic dredging, it’s a slightly limited emotional range. Crutchfield frames scenes vividly, yet we rarely feel the weight of the mutual devastation, the perverse thrill of love discarded. When her post-romantic tumult subsides, on “Expatriate,” a moment of introspective honesty is warranted—one that might carry more weight had the tone ventured further afield elsewhere. “The things you used to hate about me are all heightened now,” she sings, with a measure of contentment. “But I love myself, or I’m figuring out how.” The line still resonates, but it’s more satisfying, in this case, to see her meticulous, anxiety-parsing work as its own redemption—entombing the past in a reliquary of sad matters settled.


After a few years in limbo, the Atlanta rapper reestablishes himself as one of the genre’s most innovative stylists and its most heartfelt writers.

Back to the Basics

Rich Homie Quan is determined to lay it all on the line. “Never Made It,” the two-minute opening song from his latest record, Back to the Basics, isn’t a prelude or a teaser, it’s a top-to-bottom referendum on his life and career. Quan raps about his “situation,” which is likely about being caught in label limbo, settling lawsuits, and watching his former peers blow past him by all commercial metrics. He rattles off important professional moments from the last few years, including “Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh)” going double-platinum and a disappointing freestyle on Tim Westwood’s show that invited jokes and jabs, only to remind the listener: “Never forget—I still got me a little family to feed.” As Big Boi would say, that’s only the intro.
There was a time not too long ago when Rich Homie Quan figured to be Atlanta’s next breakout star. In 2013, “Type Of Way” made him an instant sensation. The song was vicious and skull-rattling, but had a strangely conspicuous softer side: “I’ve got a hideaway, and I go there sometimes/To give my mind a break/Still I find a way.” That was Quan, injecting heart and vulnerability into styles that don’t demand it. His mixtapes, especially that year's I Promise I Will Never Stop Going In, generated considerable buzz, and the following year, he teamed up with fellow Atlantan Young Thug for Tha Tour, Part One, issued by Cash Money under the Rich Gang moniker.
Tha Tour was a staggering record, and seemed to position Quan for further success: Songs like “Freestyle” cast him as the emotional center of a new wave of rap stars. But a number of factors, including and perhaps especially a legal battle with his former label, T.I.G. Entertainment, have kept him from breaking through. “Flex” was a massive hit (that video has over 100 million views), but failed to land him a commercial album release date; his last trio of mixtapes, though solid, has yet to further his public stature, and to an outsider, Quan seems to have been running in place.
So he went back to the basics. Over 11 tracks and 35 minutes, Quan reestablishes himself as one of the genre’s most innovative stylists and its most heartfelt writers. “Heart Cold” throws you back into the trap houses Quan detailed so vividly in 2013, but now the timeline is blurry—is this a half-remembered scene, or is he selling a mid-2000s Clipse thing, where the rap money is so slow he’s diversifying? He makes sex and money sound dull and vaguely annoying, but blows his paranoia up in Technicolor and raps intensely about affixing trackers to cell phones. It would sound like a well-executed writing exercise if it didn’t also sound like an exorcism.
Quan is still a pure, unmitigated joy to hear rap. “Money Fold” resurrects the Rich Gang trick of making a mansion party sound like a haunted house. Closer “Str8” carries his style to its natural, irresistible conclusion, where he raps in a half-dozen different modes, but each of them could very well serve as the song’s chorus. Back to the Basics is well-curated, and certainly serves as a mission statement for the second phase of Quan’s career, but just as often functions as a masterclass.
Before he starts rapping on “Replay,” Quan says into the mic: “I’m so content with the person I am. I can give a fuck about what you think about me, honestly, bro.” Somehow, it seems earned. Back to the Basics is a lot of things, but it isn’t confused; it plays like a long therapy session, where Quan lays out his regrets and paranoias—something he has to do to arrive at this place. It’s possible that Quan never gets bigger than he is right now, and it sounds like he knows it. But he’s rapping on his terms, and doing it on a level that almost none of his peers can match.


The veteran South African DJ and producer broadens his sound and his global reach, but his own smooth, moody grooves are more reliably rewarding than his highest-profile collaborations.

Subconsciously

Black Coffee’s music rarely calls for stillness. The narratives pieced together across his discography concern movement, like the journeys of transient workers on 2005 standout “Stimela,” an intoxicating rendition of the Hugh Masekela joint. Black Coffee’s work also touches on another form of movement: The inheritance of sounds and melodies, of generational experiences bridged by familiar notes. In the DJ and singer-songwriter’s hometown of Durban, South Africa, people are constantly on the move, hustling from one job to another, packed in omnibuses. But as COVID-19 continues to surge, any type of motion, physical or mental, has been drastically altered. Black Coffee’s latest release, Subconsciously, is aware of the challenges of stillness. Its heavy, syncopated house beats channel the barely restrained frustration of staying put when all you want to do is move: towards your lover, towards a different version of yourself, towards anywhere but your present.
To trace these inevitable fractures, Black Coffee calls on artists who don’t readily evoke solace, yet settle confidently into their role as the voices in our heads. Jozzy, who co-wrote the remix to the monster hit “Old Town Road,” is an unexpected, haltingly earnest presence on the Pharrell-featuring “10 Missed Calls,” a take on a late-night voicemail. Her pleas for intimacy and clarity swing from desperation to assertiveness, never truly aligning with either: “Did you, did you know/That I tried my best just to let it roll, it roll?/I had 10 missed calls/And not one from you.” There’s nothing quite like feeling alone in a relationship, and Black Coffee treads a thin line between frustration and fits of ecstasy, peaking with Jozzy’s anxious cries. Echoes of Thandiswa Mazwai’s “Kwanele,” remixed on Coffee’s 2005 self-titled debut, are evident: an unfulfilled partner who wants to leave but can’t bear to lose the time invested.
Black Coffee’s 2017 rendezvous with Drake on the More Life single “Get It Together” seems to have rubbed off on “Flava,” which could easily fit into the perpetually lovelorn rapper’s playlist. Tellaman, a singer-songwriter who also hails from Durban, and Una Rams, from the Limpopo region, croon about a woman who’s been mistreated and now feels incapable of accepting a deserving suitor. It’s a basic enough concept that doesn’t quite work coming from an artist who, four tracks earlier, called on Sabrina Claudio to meld her heartbroken lyrics with a reminder that “she’ll love when she’s ready.”
In the past decade, as international pop stars have pivoted to African beats and rhythms in search of inspiration with a global reach, Black Coffee has found a heightened level of visibility. He has shared the stage with Usher (who’s featured on “LaLaLa”) and performed at Coachella in 2016 and 2018. Moving from regional to mainstream fame brings a familiar challenge: balancing the skills that brought you acclaim with those that will put you on the charts. Rarely do these two work in tandem, and Subconsciously falters when it tries to provide what it thinks the people want. “Never Gonna Forget,” with Diplo and an assist from English artist Elderbrook, is empty and monotonous instead of intentionally sparse. And while on-and-off R&B star Cassie delivers some of her better rhymes and tones on the groovy “Time,” Black Coffee is hardly noticeable on a song that’s keenly aware of its narrator’s vocal limitations, and so dutifully plays to her strengths.
A better example of the emotion Black Coffee can invoke with a capable storyteller is his 2018 single “Ilala,” featuring Mondli Ngcobo. Subconsciously gives a similar sense of symbiosis on “Ready for You,” with English soul singer and songwriter Celeste. Black Coffee gives her room to lead the story, allowing her warm, rounded tone to thread between his kwaito-influenced Afropop and jazz studies. Having released six studio albums and several genre-blending mixes, Black Coffee has built a formidable map of the musical geography of the place he calls home. Subconsciously isn’t the type of album that offers bangers through and through, but the standout tracks are compelling enough to stay the course.

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The noise duo’s seventh album is the most life-affirming and accessible music they’ve ever made.

Sonic Citadel

For 25 years now, Lightning Bolt has made a career out of indulging only the most gnarled riffs, covering every sound in brittle distortion, and playing live shows so loud and destructive that they—literally—blow out the power and leave the performers covered in blood. The duo’s dedication to this “move fast, break everything” mentality is still strong on Sonic Citadel, their seventh full-length album. The first song is called “Blow to the Head,” a three-minute blast of punishing kick drum, acrid bass riffs, and squealed vocals like a pile of styrofoam plates tossed on a bonfire. It’s as wonderfully ugly as anything they’ve ever made.
They keep up this energy—standouts include the surreal anthems  “Bouncy House” and the Tilt-a-Whirl hardcore of “Tom Thump”—adding a handful of tracks to the pantheon of Lightning Bolt jams designed to keep your local audiologist in business. But where Sonic Citadel really takes off is in the moments where they deviate hardest from their formula. Underneath all the fuzz, there’s always been pop sensibility at work; Lightning Bolt riffs have been catchy in their own warped way since Ride the Skies. But at points, they allow those instincts to come into startling focus.
That’s telegraphed, in part, in some of the song titles, which reference Don Henley, Husker Dü, and Van Halen. None of these jams especially sound like classic rock or hair metal, but they are some of the most memorable moments in the band’s catalog. “Don Henley in the Park” is an especially notable curveball, built around overlapping bass riffs that sound like a Durutti Column song as played by the Tasmanian Devil. Chippendale’s nursery-rhyme vocals would almost be fit for a sing-along, if you could make out what he’s saying. (The lyric sheet isn’t especially helpful on this score; it reads “[improvised lyrics].”)
The record’s last vocal track, “All Insane,” is among the more straightforward songs in the Lightning Bolt catalog. Gibson does away with the frills and flourishes that often accompany his bass work as Chippendale settles into a steady mid-tempo beat, singing passionately of living life while the living is good. It’s surprising, but not unprecedented: Somewhere in the flailing limbs and searing volume of Lightning Bolt’s music was a call to squeeze everything you can out a moment, to do whatever it takes to feel something and to do so for as long as you can.

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Impressive, precocious debut from this Brookyln-based teenager pairs his acrobatic, emotionally nuanced voice with Eastern European and NMH-like accoutrements.

Gulag Orkestar

My grandparents were Russian immigrants who spent their lives working in factories; when they got too old for that, they graduated to the cafeteria of a Queens high school. Visiting them as a kid, the thick accents of their incomprehensible language were, to me, the music of the so-called "motherland." When grandpa was spinning records, though, he opted for melancholic horns and voices or polka. He may have dug Gulag Orkestar, the debut album by Zach Condon aka Beirut.
Beirut's received quite a bit of pre-release buzz. He deserves some of it. His tuneful Balkan stomp is fairly unique within the indie realm, an aesthetic shared with Man Man, Gogol Bordello, and Barbez but few others. That, and for a 19-year-old from Albuquerque (now living in Brooklyn), he sounds like an old man sipping vodka and humming along to Tchaikovsky while the neighborhood kids play stick ball or drink egg creams. The sound is there, but beneath the atmospherics his themes of war, fallen curtains, bunkers, life on the Rhine-- his song titles are more fixated on Germany (and Slovakia and an imaginary Eastern Bloc) than Russia-- and Gulags, are vague and sometimes less than effective. That makes sense: He doesn't have the lived experience for those situations. Perhaps he studied W.G. Sebald to add some color, and in a very Sebaldian move the album's anonymous cover photos were found in a library in Leipzig, Germany. In the liner notes, Condon asks if anyone knows the photographer's whereabouts.
Beirut's brassy In the Aeroplane Over the Sea-like instrumental accents have garnered Neutral Milk Hotel comparisons. There's also guilt by association-- ex-NMH player Jeremy Barnes and his A Hawk and a Hacksaw compatriot Heather Toast contribute accordion, violins, and percussion. But while Condon writes generally spare, pretty tableau that can lodge themselves in your ear like hazy memories, his words aren't as intellectually, emotionally, or erotically invested as Mangum's feverish, tear-jerky lyrics. And that's OK-- it's unfair to hold a debut record up to one of the bona fide indie classics of the past 10 years. I mention it only to squash the impulse at the root, because exaggerated expectations shouldn't dissuade anyone from enjoying Beirut's best work, chiefly the gorgeous triumph "Postcards From Italy", an infectious, Rufus Wainwright-tinged love/death story accented by loping majorette drumming, a menagerie of horns, and a plucky ukulele lilt that mixes perfectly with Condon's airy croon.
Elsewhere, "Bratislava" is a celebratory march for the Slovakian capital-- a sweaty, saw-dusted cabaret jam with Gogol Bordello. It's at moments like these, his vocals placed further back in the mix, that you realize the kid sounds truly authentic and captivating. In the bubblier chill of "Scenic World", Condon arms the troops with dinky Six Cents & Natalie Casio drum machines and brings them into Magnetic Fields and Jens Lekman territory. It's two minutes of pretty pop, plain and simple. At the end, amid horn flourishes, accordion, and doubled vocals he sings, "I try to imagine a careless life/ A scenic world where the sunsets are all breathtaking"-- he holds the last word, letting it swoon and flutter, like Morrissey with a hammer-and-sickle Band-Aid on his nipple.
Time and again, the most powerful element of Gulag Orkestar, and what ought to be emphasized, is Condon's acrobatic, powerful, emotionally nuanced voice. It could carry any style of music. Fixate for a second on the stuff he's doing on "Rhineland (Heartland)". The lyrics are dopey, but his trills and whirls are mind-blowing. Pairing these melodies with Eastern European accouterments in lieu of standard guitar-pop creates an obvious appeal. Still, the question ought to be asked: Are the songs really so incredible or do they simply mimic and mine musical traditions unfamiliar to the average indie rock fan? That said, the best songs here are a joy and the average and ho-hum tunes even have a thick and aesthetically appealing atmosphere-- in other words, it's an impressive and precocious debut.


Ultimate Painting is centered on the wiry guitar lines of Jack Cooper (Mazes) and James Hoare (Veronica Falls). Their economical three-minute songs echo the patient melodies of the Velvet Underground's self-titled third album and the workingman's garage-pop of New Zealand bands like the Chills and the Bats.

Green Lanes

Ultimate Painting named their first album Ultimate Painting, and opened it with a song called "Ultimate Painting". Those neutral titles matched the duo's no-frills music. Centered on the wiry guitar lines of Jack Cooper (Mazes) and James Hoare (Veronica Falls), their economical three-minute songs echoed the patient melodies of the Velvet Underground's self-titled third album and the workingman's garage-pop of New Zealand bands like the Chills and the Bats. Ultimate Painting was winningly casual, the sound of two congenial dudes psyched to roll out easygoing melodies. But repeat listens revealed intriguing tensions inside basic templates.
The group's follow-up, Green Lanes, sounds even more casual. It's mellower and more subdued, with most songs ticking along at medium tempo or slower. At first it even seems that Ultimate Painting might have gotten too relaxed, drifting into zoned-out territory (they did recently use a modified Grateful Dead logo as their Twitter avatar). But much like its predecessor, Green Lanes grows more interesting and distinctive with each subsequent rotation. Cooper and Hoare's deceptively simple interplay slowly worms into your synapses, as their seemingly anonymous melodies gain personality.
That's part of what makes Green Lanes so cohesive, since its lyrical themes are as simple as its moods. Many songs focus on the austere pleasures of nature—words such as ocean, beach, fog, and sun recur—as well as the plain details of daily life. One of the catchiest tunes, the lament "(I've Got the) Sanctioned Blues", plays like the song about unemployment benefits VU never wrote.
Songs like that could easily come off as run-of-the-mill, but Ultimate Paining infuse their short, spartan verses with deep contemplation. Just as Real Estate's music gathers meaning in nostalgia, Cooper and Hoare tap into universal experiences that approach profundity rather than mundanity. This gives their songs a vintage hue, most obvious in the Beatles-esque piano of "Break the Chain" and the Beach Boys-like vocal harmonies of "Paying the Price".
Such classic reference points make it tempting to call Green Lanes a low-stakes record. Music this devoid of attention-seeking flash or overt ambition can sometimes appear risk-averse. But truly committing to any style means taking a chance, even if that style is inherently low-key. American Analog Set and Low built a wide palate with an understated approach, and the quietude of that third Velvet Underground album seemed daring at the time. Ultimate Painting are similarly devoted to a calm, subtle cause, and on Green Lanes that humble gamble again pays off handsomely.


Featuring songs by Frank Ocean, Lana Del Rey, Nick Cave, and more, Chan Marshall’s third collection of covers is her widest ranging yet, illustrating her talent for radical reinvention.

Covers

It can take a keen set of ears to tell when Chan Marshall is singing someone else’s tune. Take her rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which opens 2000’s The Covers Record. Her voice dragging over spindly guitar, she sounds like a broken bird in a burned-out nest. Where the Stones’ swaggering anthem was a hot-blooded rush, Marshall’s version is hushed and dolorous, a wilted lily in an airless mausoleum. It’s not just a question of mood: She excises the song’s entire chorus, leaving only vignettes that feel like disconnected snapshots of a deep and unrelenting depression. Where the Stones’ song revels in a surfeit of emotion, Cat Power’s anhedonic dirge is a lament for the very impossibility of feeling anything at all.
To render a song so unrecognizable can appear irreverent, but Marshall has never come off as ironic or trolling. Even her most radical reinterpretations feel tender, searching, and, above all, thoughtful. And there are many: In addition to what are now three collections of cover songs, with the arrival of her latest album, Covers, most of her releases contain at least one song made famous by another singer. Her choices can be canonical or idiosyncratic: She’s tackled Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, and Billie Holiday, but also Liza Minelli, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Ca$h Money rappers Hot Boys. Long before indie rock’s cloistered scene had given way to a more diverse and dynamic landscape, Marshall reminded her listeners that life didn’t begin with the Velvet Underground (even though she covered them too). The widest ranging of any of her covers collections yet, Covers pushes beyond the habitual melancholy that has marked much of her work. In bold colors and vivid relief, it illustrates her talent for radical reinvention.
Her choices are audacious right from the opening track: “Bad Religion,” a total teardown of Frank Ocean’s 2012 single about nursing emotional wounds. In place of the original’s gospel organs and ’60s soul strings, Marshall swaps in piano backed by a subtle but muscular rock rhythm section. She not only changes the song’s key; she writes new chords and even a new melody. And while some of her lyrical edits might seem minor on the page—“Praise the Lord/Hallelujah, little girl” in place of “Allahu akbar”—her delivery brings these lines to the forefront, drawing out “Lord” into four agonized syllables that feel like a physical bloodletting. The most striking line of all is her own addition: “All just stuck in the mud/Praying to the invisible above,” an act of supplication that teases out the song’s implicit theme of faith and illuminates it like a cross up on the wall.
Rarely content with merely rearranging the decor of a given song, Marshall seems happier tearing up floorboards and pulling down drywall, as though she were intent upon revealing structures that were there all along, just hidden from view. On “Unhate,” she covers herself, translating the skeletal blues of The Greatest’s “Hate” into a smoldering, psychedelic whorl of Rhodes and multi-tracked vocals. To revisit a song where the key line is “I hate myself and I want to die” is no small thing; here, it feels like a statement of defiance, as though only by saying the words could she rob them of their power. Where the original is fragile and dejected, this song pulses with life. It’s striking, in fact, how forceful so many of the songs are. She turns the motorik chug of Iggy Pop’s “The Endless Sea” into an eerie electric blues, woozy but hi-def, that takes additional cues from the Stooges’ “Dirt”; she remakes the rolling psychobilly of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds’ “I Had a Dream Joe” into a seething, churning drone that feels cut from Swans’ ritualistic cloth.
Of course, this being Cat Power, there’s plenty of material that is simple and bittersweet, like a downy pump-organ update of the Pogues’ “A Pair of Brown Eyes” or a starkly sentimental rendition of “These Days,” a Jackson Browne song first made famous by Nico. Marshall’s fingerpicked version of the latter is one of the album’s most faithful tributes; ironically, that makes it one of Covers’ riskier moves, given how many times the soft-rock standard has been interpreted by other singers. But Marshall’s weary tone is such a lovely fit for its downcast air, it might as well have been written expressly for her. Her voice has never sounded better than it does on Covers; her greatest interpretive talent might be her ability to slip between the lines of the stave and capture shades of emotion so subtle that they defy naming. Consider “I’ll Be Seeing You,” a love song popularized in the 1940s. Billie Holiday’s version is wistfully but gracefully resigned, a fond farewell to a bygone love. But Cat Power’s husky enunciation and mournful blue notes make it sound less like a ballad than an obituary. It’s devastating.
One of the album’s best tracks is also its most unexpected. The song “Pa Pa Power” is by Dead Man’s Bones, a Halloween-themed project from 2009 featuring actor Ryan Gosling and a children’s choir founded by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea. Their song, if it’s about anything, might be about deceitful robots. (“We won’t destroy you,” promises the chipper chorus, but the verses tell another tale: “Burn the street, burn the cars… Broken glass, broken hearts.”) The tone is quirky and low-stakes, faintly ironic—imagine Man or Astro-Man? as sung by the Langley Schools Music Project, perhaps—and largely forgettable. But in Marshall’s hands, it becomes something else entirely. Though she’s barely changed the words, it sounds like she’s singing about revolution, turning Gosling’s band’s flat affect into a plea of anguish: “Burn the streets, burn the cars/Power/Broken glass, but what about our broken hearts?” Lingering on every broken syllable, the grain of her voice gone smooth, she sounds bone tired, as though worn down by the past few years of social upheaval and daunted by the long, uphill climb to come. Again, her voice does the heavy lifting, every sigh and pause and halting melisma expressing as much as, or more than, any of her couplets. When I hear her singing “Pa Pa Power,” I can’t help but wonder: What did she hear in Dead Man’s Bones’ song in order to turn it into this? In moments like these, the unusual nature of her approach reveals itself. On Covers, we don’t just hear Marshall singing to us; we hear her listening to the world.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In 1973, producer Craig Leon went to see an exhibit of ancient art made by the Dogon people, a Malian tribe. He took what he learned and made Anthology of Interplanetary Folk, a masterpiece of early electronic music that acts as a precursor to later explorations in industrial music, new age, and ambient techno.

Craig Leon: Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1: Nommos/Visiting

In the 1970s—the decade during which he'd produced groundbreaking debut records by Suicide, the Ramones, Richard Hell, and Blondie—Craig Leon went to see an exhibit of ancient art made by a tribe from Mali, the Dogon. Although their people have lived in relative seclusion for centuries, their ancestors developed an impressively complex system of astronomy. The Dogon worship amphibious, extraterrestrial creatures called Nommos, who are believed to have travelled to earth from the distant star Sirius B. All of which might sound a little out there—until you learn that in the 20th century, modern astronomers were astonished to find how accurate the Dogon's ancient calculations were; somehow, centuries before telescopes, their ancestors had identified stars that were invisible to the naked eye. Leon was as taken with this mystery as he was with his growing collection of synthesizers. He decided to make an album of what he imagined would be playing "on the Nommos's Walkman" ("They would have had to listen to something on an interplanetary flight… otherwise it would have been very boring") and, in a cosmic nod to Harry Smith, give it the playful title Anthology of Interplanetary Folk.
The resulting collection is a masterpiece of early electronic music—a precursor to later explorations in industrial music, new age, and ambient techno—but up until now, it's never been heard exactly how Leon intended. Leon composed the Anthology as two "mirror image" parts: The driving and metallic Nommos came out on John Fahey's Takoma label as a standalone LP in 1981, and its sequel, the softer and more subdued Visiting came out a year later. In the decades it's been out of print, Nommos in particular has been bootlegged repeatedly, and late last year the California label Superior Viaduct put out a reissue of Nommos against Leon's wishes. "I had always envisioned a different version of the album being the definitive version," Leon said, and so the 2013 release spurred him into taking control of the record's legacy. This new authorized reissue, put out with care by the Brooklyn label RVNG, finally presents Leon's otherworldly achievement exactly as he wanted it to be heard, with Nommos and Visiting side by side for the first time.
A cliche you often hear about early synth-based music is that it "still sounds like something from the future," but what's interesting about Anthology is that it was always meant to sound like a transmission from the past. As his invented genre of "interplanetary folk" attests, Leon was drawn to the interplay of apparent opposites: antiquity and progress, earth and space, and, of course, new age and punk. Anthology is not an anthropological attempt to replicate (or colonize) the sounds of the Dogon tribe, but rather something more creative and personal—a sonic work of speculative fiction that uses "new" technology to imagine a time before recorded music. Neither primitive nor futuristic, it still has this uncanny feel of music that exists somewhere outside of time.
The atmosphere of Nommos is clanging and aqueous (because the Nommos could swim, Leon wanted to make it sound like music heard underwater). Driven by a mesmerizing polyrhythmic beat, "Donkeys Bearing Cups" is punctuated by sudden spurts of jagged-aluminum synths, while the incandescent "Nommo" lulls you into a gentler (though no less immersive) trance. Anthology's centerpiece is Nommos' penultimate track, the haunting 15-minute reverie "Four Eyes to See the Afterlife", the last two-thirds of which build on a tinny loop and a wordless, interplanetary siren song voiced by Leon's wife and collaborator Cassell Webb.
Although it still captures a feeling of intergalactic awe, Visiting is meant to evoke a more terrestrial vibe than its companion piece. The bright and lively "Region of Fleeing Civilians" is the closest the collection comes to a straight-ahead synth-pop instrumental (complete with percussion that sounds like handclaps), and "Visiting" introduces a tranquilly lilting guitar into the atmosphere. As far as its earth-bound kindred spirits go, Anthology sounds attuned to the frequencies that had been coming out of Germany that decade: Nommos' "She Wears a Hemispherical Skullcap" has an "Autobahn"-esque luminosity about it, while Anthology's more muted moments echo Brian Eno's work with Cluster. Still, as Leon explains, the spirit of New York punk is pulsing through it, too. "The Lower East Side scene was very involved in counterculture art and poetry," he recalled in a recent interview. "It became populist later, but if you look at Patti Smith, Television, Talking Heads, even the Ramones… Nommos fit in with that."
The timing of this reissue couldn't be better. We're in middle of a modest but notable new age revival, when a new generation of listeners are reassessing this often-misunderstood genre, discovering its pioneers, and uncovering its hidden DIY roots. Leon is a perfect embodiment of new age's unexpected punk past, and it would seem the world is only now catching up with his vision, over thirty years after his Anthology was released. A few months ago, I had the pleasure of seeing Leon play Nommos in full at the Greenwich Village venue Le Poisson Rouge, a short walk from the downtown clubs where he first saw Suicide and Patti Smith decades ago. His set featured spacey visual projections, and he and Webb were joined by the stylistically adventurous string ensemble ACME—which, actually, was how he envisioned this supposed synth-classic all along. "It was meant to be orchestral," he admitted in a recent interview, "but we didn't have any money!" Like these performances, the definitive reissue finally brings Leon's landmark work full circle. Anthology of Interplanetary Folk is far from some kitschy relic of electronic music past; in fact, there may have never been a better time to join Leon for the ride.


Chicago R&B singer Ravyn Lenae’s impressive new EP brims with quiet intensity, as her subtle falsetto glides over a blend of modern bounce, dream pop, and electro-soul.

Midnight Moonlight EP

As a kid growing up in Chicago, Ravyn Lenae listened to a steady stream of R&B, alt-rap, and neo-soul—in a 2016 interview, she called out OutKast, Timbaland, India.Arie, and Erykah Badu as some of her influences. Now a member of the Zero Fatigue crew with rapper Smino and producer Monte Booker, the vocalist captures a robust spectrum of black art while establishing her own aesthetic. Lenae doesn’t sing, per se; instead, her blend of atmospheric hums speaks directly to you, even as Booker’s swirling beats threaten to take most of the attention. There’s a strong nostalgia to Lenae’s music that borrows from her late ’90s and early ’00s influences, but she doesn’t simply mimic them. Lenae’s art feels current.
For her impressive new EP, Midnight Moonlight, Lenae treads the same path she began on 2015’s Moon Shoes, her excellent debut. But where that collection was far brighter, Midnight carries a methodical late-night vibe suitable for Quiet Storm radio. Lenae reemerges having signed to Atlantic Records and garnered praise from the likes of Badu and Nas; she’s the latest in a recent line of Chicago musicians (Noname, Jamila Woods, Saba) to make national waves. And she’s still a teenager, studying classical music at the Chicago High School for the Arts.
With Booker on production once again, Midnight brims with quiet intensity, bringing singers like Syd and Aaliyah to mind. Yet while their art focuses strictly on hip-hop and R&B, Lenae’s sound feels a bit more atmospheric, blending modern bounce, dream pop, and electronica, encompassing those subgenres without leaning too heavily on one in particular. These words feel equally assertive and despondent, coming off like sweet one-liners scribbled in the margins of crumpled notebook paper.
There’s a nomadic nature to this work that grows stronger as the album plays, as if Lenae is still trying to find her voice among the colors. Her timbre—a soft, subtle falsetto—isn’t built for long runs or exaggerated solos, but when mixed within Booker’s nuanced electro-soul, the results are especially soothing. On “Hiatus,” the composer crafts a Brainfeeder-inspired track over which Lenae’s airy sighs set a romantic mood: “When your heart won’t grow, on you I’ll rain.” Then, on “Last Breath,” it seems Lenae wades into political terrain. “Are you willing/To sacrifice your life?” she sings, her tone more prominent. “Are you willing/To give it up tonight?” On an album full of subtlety, this is easily its most defiant stance. Lenae fills the romantic and political with grace and gravity, a dazzling feat that she's thankfully just beginning to explore.


Mono's ninth album looks to nothing less than the mother of all epics, Dante's The Divine Comedy, for inspiration.

Requiem For Hell

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Mono making a record inspired by Dante’s The Divine Comedy is that it took them nine albums to do it. Since their dramatic 2001 debut Under the Pipal Tree, the Japanese ensemble’s arrangements have only swelled, growing ever grander and more orchestral—like a lot of instrumental post-rock bands, they’ve often struggled with how to one-up themselves. So on Requiem for Hell, their ninth album, they look to nothing less than the mother of all epics, Dante’s account of the journey of man’s soul, on a song cycle patterned around the rhythms of life and death. If that all sounds lofty, it is, but no more so than any other Mono album from the last decade. At this point in their career, going big is their default play.
Hell’s title makes it clear which installment of The Divine Comedy most captured Mono’s imagination. There’s a reason why every high school English curriculum assigns Inferno but hardly anybody makes it through Paradiso. Graphic depictions of sinners submerged in shit and gnawed at by three-headed dogs are inherently more exciting than scenes of celestial figures politely discussing theological doctrine. Like Dante, then, Mono cut right to the lurid stuff, the peeling flesh and showers of scalding sand. Opener “Death in Rebirth” speeds up the band’s usual slow build a bit, its guitars taking only a few minutes to reach a sinister, Locrian-esque squall. The song runs with the heavier influences Mono played up on 2014’s Rays of Darkness, but it’s more convincingly fierce than anything on that record, one of their most effective flirtations with metal.
The kinder, gentler strings and glockenspiels of the album’s shortest piece “Stellar” initially seem like an attempt to sooth some of the burn of that opener, but really it’s just a misdirection, a pause for the band to reset the stage just so Requiem for Hell’s title track can pour kerosene all over it again. That 18-minute centerpiece is a mixed bag, encompassing the album’s showiest thrills but also its most tedious stretches. Its payoff comes early, when the guitars erupt around the five-minute mark, and the acrobatics that follow are exhilarating. But eventually the track begins to play out like an Aristocrats joke, an exercise in how needlessly long you can stretch out an idea without it collapsing under its own excess. By its shrill final stretch, the song is no longer intensifying so much as simply sustaining the illusion that it’s intensifying; the noise circles around itself in a kind of infinity loop, like a GIF of an M.C. Escher staircase. The only payoff is that it ends.
Hell’s overloaded title track doesn’t do any favors to the album’s more subtle, paradise-inspired closing compositions. Lovely as they are, “Ely’s Heartbeat” (set to a sample of the in-utero heartbeat of a friend’s child) and the ponderous closer “The Last Scene” barely even register after all that noise. And really, that’s the story of the band’s whole catalogue: When you go full hog so readily, the smaller moments inevitably get dwarfed. It’s a trap Mono have always struggled with, and anybody expecting them to figure out a way around it on album number nine probably should have moved on years ago.
The harshest knock against Mono has long been that, consistent as they are, they haven’t contributed a single original idea to the genre. And it’s true: They’ve never attempted anything that hasn’t been done before and better by Sigur Rós, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, or Explosions in the Sky—instead they merely shuffle those same tropes into something comfortingly familiar. It’s not as glamorous as recording classics, yet in a way their prolificacy seems tuned to the way music is consumed now. In the streaming era, where albums are no longer pricey investments but essentially free to anybody with a Spotify or Apple Music plan, there’s a lot more room in the market for this kind of mid-tier post-rock. If you’re in the mood for a good-enough orchestral rock album that lifts and falls in all the expected ways, you might as well queue up one you haven’t heard before. Mono are doing their part to keep you in a steady supply of them.