This L.A. collective boasting 20 notable Latin-folk and Afro-groove musicians and vocalists constructs a monster antiwar opus.

Peace With Every Step

This is a record best played in near-fatal situations. New Year's Eve 2004: I skittered down to Elk Grove, Calif., on Highway 99 with rain boiling my windshield; obscuring my view save for suburban neons, crimson taillights, and scant highlights of freeway signs only legible from 10 feet away. I was concentrating not on the road but on an office door that I forgot to lock before I left for the weekend; my mind was so focused that I felt I was standing by that door waiting for myself to show up.
During that drive, Build an Ark's mantra of "You gotta have peace and love" seemed poetic and meaningful-- not that it was ever shallow before.
The Ark recorded their antiwar opus, Peace with Every Step, during Operation Iraqi Freedom. The L.A. collective boasts 20 Latin-folk and Afro-groove musicians and singers, all rotating duties on songs that range from duets to drum-circles to all-hands-on-deck jams. Among the ranks are 1970s Black Liberation-jazz vets like percussionist Derf Reklaw (the Pharaohs), ex-Motown trombonist Phil Ranelin (Tribe), and vocalist Dwight Trible (Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra). Together, Build an Ark emulate the pantheistic awe of Sun Ra and John Coltrane. Leftfield hip-hop producer Carlos Nino (Ammoncontact) helms the street fair that only ends when the National Guardsman come.
The music mainly dwells on the psych-groove tip: Rhodes chords bathe the skies in indigos and golds, brass sections introduce the gospel in veteran's hospitals, and congas and trapkits keep the dance-circle going through dawn and dusk. Hell, they made my New Year's predicament of facing certain death seem like a swinging time.
Opener "You've Gotta Have Freedom" would make any agrophobe shake hands with everyone who enters a subway station. The tune grooves in a steady bebop cadence with Nate Morgan's Rhodes telling everyone that better days are ahead, ecstatic chants of "You gotta have peace and love," and Joshua Spiegelman's bass clarinet stands in a corner, sees the Light, and then speaks in tongues. "Vibes From the Tribe" paints a Latin-groove in pure Technicolor with Ranelin and Spiegelman quipping "you outta know something" phrases on trombone and flute. "Conversations" and "Precious, Priceless" perform a fine, wartime blues as Morgan shimmers his Rhodes like two-second news-clips of butcher's bills in Iraq. "Don't you feel our wailing?/ Can't you see our cries?/ Our glass is empty/ Oh, please be wise," Trible croons to the self-proclaimed guardians of the Free World.
"Love Is Our Nationality" could be the Ark's most polarizing trac: Peter Harris delivers a pacifist proclamation, ordering soldiers to "strip off your uniform/ Salute your equal...put down your gun and pick up your baby." He then declares, "We are sweet-talking freedom fighters/ We are literary to curious children." Many people could dismiss Harris and the rest of the Ark as hippies who'd answer an enemy attack by blowing bubbles at them. But there is strength in his voice that cannot be denied-- it's a conviction that can cause warrior societies to fear for their children as their parents view peacetime as dead-time. Baba Alade then picks up a guitar to give a soulful rendition of Willy Wonka's "Pure Imagination"-- where utopia now goes beyond all edible materialism. It's a great power.


On Building A Beginning, Jamie Lidell unplugs his laptop for the most conventional R&B album of his career.

Building a Beginning

Even as he came into his own as a soul singer, Jamie Lidell never seemed ready to completely let go of his identity as a laptop experimentalist. At times over the last decade Lidell has seemed torn over the kind of artist he’s wanted to be, a prestige IDM producer or a mass-appeal blue-eyed soul act, and on recent albums those two visions have seemed increasingly irreconcilable. Rather than building a reputation as a shapeshifter in the vein of his sometime-collaborator Beck, he began to come across as just kind of erratic—especially on the misguided, Morris Day-by-way-of-Squarepusher fusion of his 2013 self-titled effort, a peanut butter-and-olive-sandwich of a record that tried to play to both of his skillsets but flattered neither. On Building A Beginning, though, Lidell stops trying to have it both ways, unplugging his laptop for the most conventional R&B album of his career.
The album’s title could refer to a number of fresh starts. It’s Lidell’s first since splitting from Warp Records, the label he’s called home since his solo debut and whose cache gave him cover to crossover without alienating his old electronic audience, and it’s filled with ruminations on his rekindled romance with his wife (who co-wrote the album’s lyrics) and, even more significantly, the birth of his first son. The album’s most direct tribute to his newborn, “Julian” is one of the most unabashedly jubilant songs he’s ever written, equal parts Jackson 5 and Maroon 5. “There’s no way to un-see the harshest things I’ve ever seen, but now you’re here and life’s a dream,” Lidell sings like a man born again. “Now my life’s worth living.”
So Lidell’s in a good place these days, and he spends the album in awe of his good fortune, high off of familial bliss. Never shy about borrowing from Stevie Wonder, he pens his own “I Was Made to Love Her” for his son with “I Live to Make You Smile.” Elsewhere he looks to other soul greats. The title track swoons with the weightless grace of Al Green’s heyday records, introducing the distinctly Hi Records-esque backup singers who support him throughout the record, while “Find It Hard to Say” looks to the afterhours quiet storm of Smokey Robinson. There are flashes of more modern R&B, too. “Don’t Let Me Let You Go” lifts the blissed-out piano plinks of the-Dream’s early singles, and the album highlight “Walk Right Back” offers a tighter, more tasteful take on the ’80s electro-R&B that came across so jumbled on Lidell’s self-titled record. That track is suave enough to be an Anthony Hamilton song, and really, Hamilton is probably the best possible model for Lidell when he's working in this lane, since nobody else is making records that span so many eras of soul quite so effortlessly.
But game as he is, Lidell isn’t nearly the singer Hamilton is, and his performances usually revert to the same two notes, either mawkish sentimentalism or overeager gleefulness. He attacks many of these songs with the unflappable cheer that other artists reserve for Target-exclusive Christmas albums, and while there’s some pleasure in satisfaction in Lidell’s joy, beyond that Beginning doesn’t offer many thrills. If this is his new beginning, it’s an unambitious one: Lidell has never sounded like more of a traditionalist than he does on this amiable but uncomplicated record.


Cory Hanson and his SoCal cohorts continue their transformation from manic garage rockers to shape-shifting innovators on an EP as eclectic as White Light/White Heat.

Perfume EP

Last year, Wand pulled off a magic trick. For their fourth album, Plum, founder Cory Hanson disappeared the manic band responsible for three raucous LPs in two years—a creative clip familiar to some of their SoCal garage-rock associates—and summoned in its place apparitions of several different bands. Adding two permanent members, guitarist Robbie Cody and Sofia Arreguin, on keyboards and vocals, provided them with new sonic bulk and flexibility. But Plum was more remarkable for demonstrating that Wand could shape-shift in a snap of their fingers.
It seemed as though they’d benefitted from taking an extra year to design a more thoughtful work. But Hanson didn’t rest for a moment, following their Plum tour, before announcing that Wand’s next release was already in the bag. On their EP Perfume, they return to their original bustling pace without losing any of their new-found ingenuity.
The band sounds filthy and pristine in equal measure, just as it did on Plum. Again, multiple Wands show up, bearing songs varied enough to have come from several discrete seasons of writing. It’s rare to find transitions this agile on a single album, or even across the same career: Perfume resembles a retrospective compilation from an act that’s been around for 20 years—not five—and has spent significant chunks of that time workshopping different sounds. Whether gritty or pretty, each song could pass for the work of a genre specialist.
It’s Hanson’s lyrics that bind the tracks together, detailing the inebriating effects of romance. Closer “I Will Keep You Up” spins Primal Scream’s love-as-addiction ballad “Damaged” into a mutually supportive duet, with Hanson and Arreguin enumerating the small joys of spending time together: “Telling tales to pass along the things we can’t keep/From the things we can’t forget.” “Pure Romance” takes a sledgehammer to the creeping dread built up by the twitchy, skronking “Town Meeting.” “Lost in timeless pure romance,” Hanson repeats in the chorus, but Wand have never sounded less lost—or more uplifting. With its blunt power chords and spotless production, the track comes practically gift-wrapped for playlists.
But that blissful vibe can’t last. “Train Whistle,” the screeching instrumental that follows “Pure Romance,” makes for a jarring transition reminiscent of the violence with which “I Heard Her Call My Name” elbows its way into the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat, on the heels of comedown ballad “There She Comes Now.” That wildly eclectic album seems to be a reference point for the new Wand. (Perfume even has a track called “The Gift,” although instead of drowsy spoken word, it showcases fervent guitars that glimmer and swell.) A proud devotee of classic rock, Hanson has also cited the Beatles’ White Album as his “favorite record ever.” That choice may be common, but it doesn’t seem so basic in light of Plum and Perfume—two releases that confirm the enduring appeal of bands with the vision, talent, and confidence to keep transforming into something new.


The Los Angeles-via-Toronto singer offers a finely wrought EP that showcases her oceanic voice and her austere songwriting.

Finally EP

In the summer of 2015, in the back of a tiny bar in Toronto, I heard Elissa Mielke sing for the first time. An opener for an opener, she stood before a crowd of perhaps 20 people and played three unadorned songs on an electric keyboard. It’s a testament to her voice—an immense ocean of an instrument, as complex in its sweetness as raw honey—that I still think of that performance six years later. The title of this EP, Finally, is apt.
The production on Finally is almost monastic. Apart from “Palace,” which includes just a gossamer wisp of a synthesizer, the only instruments on the record are Mielke’s piano and a guitar. It’s as though her accompaniment is nothing more than a dry riverbed for her astonishing voice to roll through. Any more intricate production would only get in the way, as it did on her 2015 EP, which she released as Mieke. She sounded just fine on that record, but nothing like she does on Finally: uncontainable, spilling out of herself, flooding cities.
“Kind of Thing” opens with a rolling piano to wipe clean Mielke’s romantic slate. “You’re the kind of thing I used to sing about,” she sings, dismissing someone intent on saving her from her “sinful way of living.” Prior knowledge of her catalogue and its break-up songs isn’t necessary; she wears her heart and her history on her sleeve. She sometimes blurs simple phrases—“It doesn’t, and it won’t, and I’m great”—into long, painterly smears, the impression of her feeling more powerful than the literal meaning of the words she’s singing. She delivers the next song, “Homesick,” like a bow drawing itself slowly across strings. Her voice is flowery and ornamental, but her lyrics couldn’t be more frank or direct: “I’m still angry, but I’m homesick for you.” Though her lyrics can stray to clichés—“God, these walls I built/Think they could cave”—their simplicity can serve as an anchor in the intense, wide-open sea she creates with her singing.
The additional production touches on “Palace” are an honest jolt after the aggressively acoustic first three songs, but not an entirely welcome one. Her voice is still the main attraction, and her observations on love and relationships are as fierce and pointed as ever. “Trying,” however, is a rare thing, an ode to regression. She sings of “feeling old in [her] twenties,” growing weary of chasing love and friendship. “Why are you always giving up on me?” she sings, her voice growing huge, indomitable, as she pleads at the chorus: “Can’t you see I’m trying?” As with Mitski’s “Geyser,” she could be singing to a lover or to the very institution of the music business.
Mielke previously worked as a fashion model, and, in 2013, signed with a major label that sought to make her a pop star à la Katy Perry or Ellie Goulding. Scouring the internet, it’s possible to see vestiges of this past life of hers, like her appearance in full glam in the Weeknd’s 2012 video for “The Zone.” But Mielke had no desire to become a pop star. Instead, she chose her own path and made her goals clear: to create beautiful, affecting music, with only her voice and her simple instruments. No bells, no whistles, no buzz. There is a defiance in the record’s simplicity, and an incredible confidence, that takes me right back to that incredible gig six years ago. Finally, indeed.

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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 Waterboys’ definitive statement, a sweeping rock album from 1985 that pours its heart out from start to finish.

This Is the Sea

When the Waterboys founder Mike Scott was a teenager living in Edinburgh, he published a fanzine called Jungleland. The sixth issue, which came out at the end of 1977, had Richard Hell on the cover and teased articles about the Sex Pistols and Graham Parker. That Scott named his zine after the final song on Bruce Springsteen’s album Born to Run suggested that the angry energy of punk—a force that exerts an outsized pull on the young—was tempered by a yearning spirituality. For Scott, music offered a portal into a new way of seeing the world, one charged with romance, something you could get swept up in, where life seems so full of excitement and possibility it’s like a swelling container just about to burst.
Another coverline for “Jungleland” No. 6 is Patti Smith. When the Patti Smith Group came to London while touring Easter in 1978, Scott, on a hunch, called the hotel where he thought the singer might be staying and asked to speak with her, and the front desk patched him through. He asked if she’d received a package of zines he’d sent (she hadn’t), and after a brief chat she invited him down to London to cover the show. He took the train down, met his hero, hung out with her band, befriended her guitarist, Lenny Kaye, and stayed in a room in the fancy hotel she had arranged. Five years later, when Scott placed an advertisement in the NME classifieds seeking bandmates, he described what he was looking for:
THE WATERBOYS REQUIRE LEAD/RHYTHM GUITAR PLAYER. 18-24. Ability, own style, and appreciation of Patti Smith essential.
A few additional data points to help us understand Scott: When on holiday with his mother to London at age 16, he popped into a studio advertised in Melody Maker and recorded a version of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” playing most of the instruments himself. He wanted to see how records were made. Scott’s first band was called White Heat, named after Lou Reed’s song, and the name of the Waterboys was taken from a line in Reed’s “The Kids,” from Berlin. Other fixations during his youth were David Bowie and Van Morrison.
So that’s Dylan, Patti, Bruce, Van, Lou, Bowie, and punk rock—inspirations that all seemed in conversation with one another. Springsteen was once the New Dylan, and Patti was taking rock’n’roll poetics into strange places; Bruce and Patti had met each other in song on “Because the Night”; Springsteen’s second LP was deeply indebted to Van Morrison, and Patti had of course had transformed “Gloria,” the signature tune of Van’s early days, on her album Horses; Bowie had covered Reed and Springsteen both, and was, like the latter, punk rock royalty; Springsteen had shown up on Reed’s “Street Hassle.”
Borrow from Born to Run, Horses, “Like a Rolling Stone,” Astral Weeks, throw in the repetition and dirty grandeur of “Heroin” and the piss and vinegar of punk. What would you get? Perhaps “Big Music,” which was the title of a track on the Waterboys’ second album, 1984’s A Pagan Place. It was the rare case of a band inadvertently naming its own approach while describing the small scene springing up around them. Scott’s song, an appropriately widescreen epic with horns and crashing drums, describes a sound-fueled epiphany: “I have heard the big music/And I’ll never be the same/Something so pure/Just called my name.”
Big music is the chill down your spine and the sudden eruption of gooseflesh. It’s a feeling one usually encounters when young, describing that moment when you hear a song for the first time and it’s so overwhelming you feel like a changed person after it ends. For many musicians, an early experience with such an epiphany meant they could no longer imagine a future in the straight world—going to school, getting a job, settling down were out the window. All that mattered now was making a life in a band. Those who have had the experience but don’t perform themselves might subsequently spend their lives building a social scene around shows, collecting records, or reading and writing long essays about the power of music.
For a time, journalists looking for a hook used Big Music to describe a clutch of earnest young bands from Ireland and the UK who borrowed from the murky rumble and artful dissonance of post-punk while writing spiritually minded and cathartic songs about hope, endurance, and redemption. U2, Big Country, Simple Minds, the Alarm, and the Waterboys themselves were ambitious acts that emerged during the first half of the ’80s, groups that grappled with the period’s grim economy and frightened turn to conservatism by searching for spiritual transcendence. George Orwell’s nightmare vision seemed as if it might come true. “It was 1984, after all,” Scott wrote in the notes for the band’s recently released box set, 1985. “Fifteen years after a golden age, Kev and I were underground-literate post-punk adventurers, lingering in gray 1980s London, hanging on to the last vestiges of the counterculture.”
The music of the Waterboys and their cohorts was anguished, but it never veered toward nihilism—these acts never gave up on the ’60s ideal that music could usher in a better world. The bleak street-level reality was an essential part of their work, but they also had their eyes trained on the stars. “Because I was young and the world stood open before me,” he writes, setting the scene in the opening notes for the 1985 box, “it seems to me now to have taken place in an endless springtime.”
By the time Scott gathered the Waterboys to cut their third album, This Is the Sea, in early 1985, he was ready, alongside co-producer Mick Glossop, to take his already enormous aesthetic someplace even more grand. Other members at the time included multi-instrumentalists Anthony Thistlethwaite, whose piercing sax playing sounds something like his last name, and Karl Wallinger, who would soon depart to form the psych-pop band World Party.
While visiting New York City in January, Scott had purchased a large black book from an occult shop—the owner had said it was intended for witches to record their spells—and, brimming with confidence, filled its blank pages with lyrics for his next record. The Black Book, a volume designed to aid in channeling forces from beyond, became an important totem of the Waterboys’ mythology. It’s almost too perfect: At this point in his young life, Scott’s lyrics and music were hell-bent on capturing the hidden magic that seemed to exist all around him, the stuff that was so clear to him but so elusive to everyone else.
The opening “Don’t Bang the Drum” is our first experience of Scott’s dark magic. It’s a song about the animalistic side of human nature, about reverting to primal impulses. Streaks of Thistlethwaite’s sax give the track its color. It’s not a jazz saxophone, nor is it directly connected to the R&B sax that took root in the United States in the ’40s and led to rock bands of a certain bearing—like those that played on the Jersey Shore—to include the instruments alongside guitar and organ. The sax on This Is the Sea doesn’t carry or embellish the melody—it intensifies it. When you deploy a saxophone like this, any notion of “cool” is out of the question.
An artist growing in confidence wants to know just how good they are, whether this surge of ideas and new way of seeing things carries as much power as they suspect. A songwriter in the throes of such a moment might indulge composer’s version of a heat-check, to challenge themselves to do something great. Around the time This Is the Sea was coming together, Johnny Marr of the Smiths engaged in such a test. He had been reading praise in the music press of his and Morrissey’s songwriting genius and he thought to himself, “Right, if you’re so great, first thing in the morning, sit down and write a great song.” And so he did—the next day, the music for “Cemetry Gates” was complete. It’s a perfect song.
Scott’s challenge to write something great came from a girlfriend as the pair were walking in Manhattan. She asked him if writing songs was easy. To impress his new partner, he pulled a pen and a scrap of paper from his pocket and instantly scribbled the title and the chorus—“I saw the crescent, you saw the whole of the moon.” Back in London, he returned to the fragment and fleshed it out, eventually laying it down on a demo at the piano. It’s another perfect song.
Everything about the finished version of “The Whole of the Moon,” from lyric to melody to harmonic structure to arrangement, reinforces its essential expression. It’s a bright production, the track closest to the sound of mainstream British pop from the time, with a synthesizer sparkle from Wallinger that would have fit on a Thompson Twins or Eurythmics record. And as the dozens of the song’s covers show, Scott’s tune invites a stadium singalong while being flexible enough to support a melancholic reading or one pocked with the rage that follows loss.
As often happens with an evocative song written about a character with sensitivity and specificity, people have long wondered who “The Whole of the Moon” might be about. Scott’s friend Nikki Sudden of Swell Maps wondered if he might be the subject, and others speculated it was written about C.S. Lewis, whom Scott had read voraciously since childhood. But the beauty of “The Whole of the Moon” is in how it maps so easily onto all our lives. It’s about an archetypical person so many of us encounter when young, the figure a few steps ahead of where we are now, who seems unafraid and inspires us to overcome our fears and take in life’s full measure, all the beauty and the horror. And in a characteristically romantic turn, the song suggests that access to such insights comes with a price.
“The Whole of the Moon” zeroes in on a single person, but the canvas for much of This Is the Sea is considerably larger. These are songs about mystical revelation powered by fire and wind, set on mountaintops. The brief fragment “Spirit” is a perfectly lovely coda to “The Whole of the Moon,” with couplets like “Man is tethered/Spirit is free” (we’ll hear more about this duality later). “The Pan Within” is about sex, but Scott frames the act in holy terms, positing the pleasure of the body as a path to a parallel universe. And the crashing “Medicine Bow” is about leaving the mundane behind to take in the mad world in one huge gulp: “I’m gonna burn all the words and letters and cards that I ever wrote/And you can sail with me where the current flows.”
When Scott turns a clear eye to life outside in sober moments, he doesn’t always like what he sees. “Old England” has a circular progression on piano that frames Scott’s rumination on the sorry state of the political landscape he inhabits, imagining the country as a broken-down old man whose best days are behind him. The melody and arrangement are gorgeous, but the view is ugly, filled with imperial hubris and forgotten children. Thistlethwaite’s sax cuts through the song like an alarm, or a whistle blown after a long day of brutal work. The winds that carried the life force on “Medicine Bow” now cut right through you.
The world-outside blues continue with “Be My Enemy,” a direct homage to a mid-’60s Dylan with a rollicking 12-bar blues progression that’s about being hated by God and hating Him right back. “I keep on findin’ hate mail/In the pockets of my coat,” goes one of many choice lines, suggesting no escape from these malevolent forces. But “Trumpets,” a love song that unfolds in front of a backdrop of churches and the ocean during high summer, puts us back in the album’s special place.
By this point in This Is the Sea, we have to ask what’s real—is it the electric romance of Scott’s dreams or the dreary bad vibes of “Old England” and “Be My Enemy”? The closing title track takes it all in and suggests a third path. It’s a simple song, just two chords, the first two, in fact, that you learned the day you first picked up a guitar. But in the early Waterboys, Scott made those two simple chords sound massive, layering multiple 12-string instruments into a symphony of wood and steel.
Two chords that sway back and forth—the perfect harmonic expression of contemplating the past and the present simultaneously. To borrow words that Dylan uttered in another context, one chord says, “It used to go like that” while the next replies with, “Now it goes like this.” Scott uses these two chords to suspend us in the moment of this album’s creation, that place where he shows us a way of looking at life and now realizes its limitations. The saxophone has moved down in the mix, and Scott transposes its reed-splitting pressure to his own vocal cords. The result sounds like “Street Hassle” played by buskers on a cobblestone street in Galway, a drone-powered expression of a new idea zooming toward the horizon.
“This Is the Sea” freezes and then amplifies the moment where romantic swallow-the-world energy, the force that powers the record and Scott’s life to this point—smashes into reality. It’s a paradox because freedom comes from releasing your connection to that youthful verve rather than wallowing in it. “Once you were tethered, now you are free,” Scott sings in the first verse, and he’s not talking about what your family or government has handed you but the limitations you’ve constructed in your own mind. “You’re tryin’ to remember how fine your life used to be/Banging a drum like it’s 1973,” he sings, connecting us not only to “Don’t Bang the Drum” but to a year when he would have been 13, a year or two away from his zine and dreaming of his own future in music. It’s not that those visions from childhood didn’t matter—they opened his eyes, now it was time to do something with them.
In a 2002 interview with Spin, Leonard Cohen, relaying a thought shared by his Buddhist teacher, said that one eventually reaches a point of spiritual crisis where the “hero that you’re trying to maintain as the central figure in the drama of your life—this hero is not enjoying the life of a hero.” The only way out, according to Cohen, is to let this hero die. “From there,” he said, “you just live your life as if it’s real—as if you have to make decisions even though you have absolutely no guarantee of any of the consequences of your decisions.”
This Is the Sea is filled with such characters, those burning with youth trying to walk like the heroes they thought they had to be. Both he and his label had grand designs for the record, thinking it might boost the band to the upper echelon of the rock scene. But Scott was a bit too restless to make that happen. Reaction in the States was enthusiastic, but unlike U2 and Simple Minds, the Waterboys would remain there in the realm of college radio. Which was OK, because Scott himself was ready to move on.
“I’d taken the rock sound of the first three Waterboys albums as far as I could,” he wrote in his memoir. “After This Is the Sea—the song itself, with nine acoustic guitars simulating an ocean and an accompanying soundscape of brass and string orchestrations—I stood on top of the sonic mountain with nowhere else to climb.” Scott’s next epiphany arrived when he realized that the greatest possible experience with music just might involve banging out ancient traditional numbers with a few strangers in the corner of a small-town pub, a revelation that would lead him over the next three years to the equally great Fisherman’s Blues. So This Is the Sea, the final product of Scott’s early musical obsessions, was both a new beginning and an ending, the kind of beautiful dream you don’t mind waking up from.


The deluge of material from the long-dormant electronic experimentalist continues with a 2xCD set that builds on the new sound unveiled on his Oh EP.

O

It's hard to talk about Oval's recordings without using phrases like "raises questions." In the 1990s, Markus Popp used the Oval name to make contemporary art that took sound as its form and the relationship between music and technology as its subject, which is to say music scrubbed (partially) clean of the bourgeois idea of the "musician." It was interesting to hear, sometimes even pleasant or dreamy or emotionally affecting, but that always seemed like a side effect rather than a goal. The records he made in that era supposedly made use of generative sound; the idea was that he set up the software and let it rip, and at some point the pieces that ended up on the albums came out of the machine like so many punch-cards.
Popp's role, of course, also included selecting, editing, and sequencing the material the software generated, which of course raised various questions. And the recordings themselves prominently featured the sounds of technology hitting its limits: digital distortion, glitchy microsecond-long tones and, more than anything else, skipping-CD noise. (For years, the standard joke when any CD skipped was "I didn't know Oval had done a remix of this!")
Popp took the better part of the past decade off from recording, and now he's returned with a deluge of new material. Oval's various 2010 releases-- the Oh EP, the two "Ringtone" EPs that have turned up as free downloads, and now O-- are built around digitally manipulated sounds that sound very much like they were originally made with human hands and metal strings. Possibly even bits of a guitar, if such an archaic device existed here in the future. The even-numbered tracks on the new album's first disc go one step further: they've got drumming on them, created by Popp using computer software.
However he's making it, Oval's new music is functionally much closer to his older music than to anything else, if a bit more skeletal-- nicely harmonized blips and smears of abstracted noise (with some relationship to plucked-string timbres a lot of the time), rhythms that sometimes splatter freely and sometimes snap to a regular pulse. It's lovely, it's pleasantly unsettling, and there's a hell of a lot of it. The "songs"-with-drumming on the first disc alternate with briefer sketches, and the second disc is 50 "ringtones" that are just a minute or so long and explore a single texture or cluster of notes. So "abundance" is a concept in play too, along with "acoustic sound," "modern listening span," and "hope you like our new direction!"
Popp has noted that "riff" is another one of the ideas he's engaging these days, although he apparently has an unusual definition of "riff"; most of the tone patterns here could easily pass for an automatic sewing machine with a corrupted programming chip let loose on a hammer dulcimer. (About the only riff here that inspires "oh, this one!" reactions on a third or fourth listen belongs to the singsongy second-disc ringtone "Jank"). But the O/Oh/Ringtone cluster of releases genuinely is a stretch from an artist who'd previously seemed like he'd worked himself into a corner. It takes a very different route from his earlier work. If it ends up in a very similar place, that just suggests his musical sensibilities have been asserting themselves all along.


They existed for less than two years, but the Chris Knox-fronted post-punk band Toy Love are immeasurably important to New Zealand music. Goner's Live at the Gluepot is a ripping double LP of recordings from their final shows. And, as part of its reissue program with Flying Nun, Captured Tracks has compiled two discs’ worth of singles and demos.

Toy Love

Though they existed for less than two years, Toy Love are immeasurably important to the history of New Zealand music. They helped inspire the creation of Flying Nun-- perhaps the most important independent label in the country’s history-- and last year their influence was recognized via induction into the New Zealand Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s odd, then, that for decades after their 1980 demise, their music was represented primarily by a record they didn’t even like. That’s because the production on their sole, self-titled album (issued on major label WEA) buffed the edges off their melodic but raucous post-punk.
Flying Nun rectified that a bit in 2005 by reissuing a newly-mixed version of Toy Love, adding singles and demos in a 2xCD package called Cuts. But for anyone curious about the band’s reputation as a vital, high-wire garage act, now is truly the time to dive in. A few months ago, Goner issued Live at the Gluepot, a ripping double LP of recordings from the band’s final shows. And now Captured Tracks, as part of its new reissue program with Flying Nun, has compiled two discs’ worth of singles and demos under the name Toy Love (a slightly confusing move, since the original self-titled album is not included).
Of the two, Live at the Gluepot is more immediately impressive, just in terms of sheer speed and momentum. Amazingly, Toy Love played nearly 500 shows in their brief existence, and here that experience is loudly obvious. Each of the record’s 25 short, sharp songs flies by so quickly you might find have trouble remembering any single one. But that’s likely the point--- Toy Love doesn’t sound interested in finding perfectly-crafted melodies, but in cranking out tightly-wound tunes with as much snarling energy and coursing blood as possible. That head-down approach is reflected in the between-song banter of singer Chris Knox. His wry intros-- “this next one we found on a back of a chewing gum wrapper in 1939”-- suggest the music should be taken just seriously enough to enjoy the hell out of it.
Toy Love did bury some memorable gems inside their quick-shot post-punk, and that’s clearer on Captured Tracks’ compilation. Punchy tunes like the winding “Squeeze”, the rising stomp “Sheep”, and the swaying “Swimming Pool” (in which Knox oddly parodies Bob Dylan’s nasal croon) all rival the best of contemporaries like the Buzzcocks and the Undertones. I’m most partial to “Amputee Song”, an anthem for the limbless that predicts both the organ-driven garage of the Clean and the weird monster tales of Tall Dwarfs, the equally-vital act that Knox and guitarist Alec Bathgate went on to form. It also highlights Toy Love’s unique combination of bold enthusiasm and dark humor-- it’s hard to imagine anyone besides Knox making a nihilistic chorus like “We don’t exist!” sound so exultant.
Enthused humor has been a Knox/Bathgate trademark since the days of their first group the Enemy, from which Toy Love was spawned. And Knox has valiantly maintained that attitude since suffering a stroke in 2009. Many artists rallied around him after that tragic event, creating a tribute compilation and rekindling interest in his great body of work. Hopefully this pair of Toy Love releases will do the same, but you don’t have to know who Chris Knox is to appreciate Toy Love and Live at the Gluepot. All you really need is a pair of working ears.__
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On its first album in 12 years, the veteran instrumental trio discovers a newfound spontaneity, summoning some of the most beautiful and emotional work of the group’s career.

Love Changes Everything

At their best, Dirty Three can sound like they might fall apart in an instant. Listen to the way “Ember,” from 2005’s expansive Cinder, seems forever to wobble, as if Warren Ellis’ violin were about to stumble into the canyon created by Jim White’s loping drums. Or ponder how Ellis and guitarist Mick Turner skirt the void while upbraiding their strings during “Red,” from 1996’s breakthrough Horse Stories. An unusually expressive instrumental trio, these three longtime Melbourne chums have always used the tension between their respective playing to foster collective feelings of annoyance or ecstasy, boredom or wonder, anxiety or amusement. In doing so, they have often suggested some ornate mobile hanging from an art museum’s ceiling, its three bejeweled pieces bound together only by rusted wire, perpetually at risk of clattering to the ground. The thrill has been hearing them hold it together.
On Love Changes Everything, Dirty Three’s first album in a dozen years, those corroded wires finally snap, leaving the pieces to smash to the floor and reorient themselves in new relationships. And they do: Ellis, White, and Turner have never sounded so alternately tight and loose, so unified and amorphous, capturing an emotional ambiguity that drifts between hope and despair. Forgoing their usual evocative song titles in favor of a suite of numbered pieces that often flow into and out of one another, Dirty Three have made not only their most absorbing album but also the one that’s most open to interpretation. It is a convincing case study in how a veteran band, each member now nearing or beyond 60, can evolve—letting go, once and for all, of preconceptions and self-perceptions and simply meeting where they are.
Dirty Three emerged in the early ’90s from exuberant youthful squalor, playing long hours in Australian bars for crowds that found them perplexing or polarizing. But international attention, especially in the United States, became their passport. They toured doggedly and collaborated promiscuously. White and Turner joined Cat Power for 1998’s Moon Pix. Ellis partnered with another expat, Nick Cave, in a prolific ongoing relationship. As the years passed, Dirty Three themselves became more focused, as if the band were a repository for a specific subset of sounds and ideas for musicians who were otherwise busy doing lots of things—painting and making exquisite solo records, playing with Bill Callahan and dozens of others, becoming a score-writing Bad Seed.
These days, Ellis, Turner, and White are scattered across continents and hemispheres—Turner in Melbourne, White in Brooklyn, Ellis in Paris. Their separate careers and lives have made them less subservient to outstanding notions of what the Dirty Three are meant to be. “We sat down and played, which is what we used to do in the early days,” as Ellis told The Guardian of the 2022 session that rendered Love Changes Everything, “informed by the sort of Impulse! records where they just got in and blew, you know?”
This looseness is Love Changes Everything’s new boon, as if the Dirty Three have finally obtained permission to be whatever they want. Ellis actually sings on the second piece. His looped sighs and plaintive piano chords serve as the soft canvas for a kind of fragmented duet between White and Turner. Bandmates since the mid-’80s, the two size one another up after reuniting in a cozy Melbourne studio, as if nodding their greetings. It feels like a bittersweet hymn for aging and surviving. Its successor suggests a group hug or a lazy late-night conversation after a long day of work, each member of the trio contributing a bit that interlaces with the rest of the band. In the last minute, especially, Ellis’ pizzicato plucks casually slip into perfect lockstep with the slow sway shared between Turner and White.
But the key to Dirty Three remains unchanged: the way each member can somehow play something that seems largely unrelated to the rest of the band, yet still works within the whole. Zoom in on an individual part or zoom out for the gestalt of it all: Dirty Three’s music suits either perspective. It’s like staring at a Clyfford Still painting, as mesmerized by each discrete block of color as the entire enormous piece.
During the opener, you can follow Turner’s clinched guitar part from its beginning amplifier groan to its introductory coiled riff to its final splenetic variation. White first taps in as if to take the group’s temperature, mostly disappears for the better part of a minute, and then rumbles back in with Keith Moon-sized might. The whole track is a demented and joyous leap into kosmische oblivion, each player pushing the others deeper into a trance. With Dirty Three, and especially on Love Changes Everything, the whole is not necessarily greater than the sum of its parts; it’s just perplexingly different, the quality that makes this music feel like a discovery every time you listen.
Love Changes Everything ends with two interconnected pieces that, together, constitute 16 of Dirty Three’s most beautiful and emotional minutes in 32 years. At the start, they steadily ratchet the intensity, Ellis’ violin wailing like a mourner over drum-and-guitar interplay that conjures the devotional tizzy of Gnaoua music. Just when it becomes feverish, though, the spell breaks, pieces falling again to the floor. Ellis is the first to return for the finale, his call-and-response violin pulling the rest of the band toward the center. By the track’s end, his piano flurries, White’s circular drums, and Turner’s guitar shards coil into one, moving as a peristaltic wave. Dirty Three have rarely sounded as triumphant as they do here, locked into the pure communion of making music together. They steadily rise, stretching back toward the ceiling until, without warning, they collapse one more time.


The group’s fourth record is a pummeling collection of mosh-pit conductors, crowded songs, and fleeting moments of delicacy.

iridescence

The working title of this record was the best year of our lives. This sunny appellation was announced less than a month after the group ousted founding member Ameer Vann for lying about details related to allegations of sexual misconduct—an occurrence about which frontman Kevin Abstract said “fucking hurts and sucks.” The original name could have been an attempt at twisted irony or simply a spotlight toward the positive: Until Vann’s departure, the group was experiencing a period of massive success, signing a $15 million record contract with RCA, booking a year-long world tour, and landing a 10-day recording session at London’s historic Abbey Road Studios to make their new album. By all accounts, the young DIYers, who had handled the heavy lifting behind their first three records themselves, were finally reaping the fruits of their hard labor.
But the band, known for their unharnessed energy and unchecked emotion, could only stifle a smile for so long. The renamed project, iridescence, is their most pummeling album, a collection of mosh-pit conductors, crowded songs, and fleeting moments of delicacy. Outside of the clear-eyed admissions of Abstract, the vocalists often get swallowed in the heavy mix, making the absence of Vann, their sharpest MC on past releases, noticeable. The balance BROCKHAMPTON had carefully calibrated by the final installment of its Saturation trilogy is out of whack here, with its rappers and producers biting off more than they can chew. It’s as if the group tries to drown transcendent moments in noise for fear of slowing down.
The band’s music has always been categorically loud—Saturation III standout single “BOOGIE” was built around a cop-car siren loop—but here it feels less purposeful and grooving. “NEW ORLEANS” is an endless grinder built on dissonant hums and a similar distorted bass kick like those used by Travis Scott on Astroworld standout “Sicko Mode.” Whereas Scott balances the tension of his sonics with a light keyboard melody and a little bit of Drake, producers bearface and Jabari Manwa construct an airtight wall of sound that stretches on for far too long. By the song’s fourth verse, with Merlyn Wood in his Ghanaian-tinged dancehall delivery, the track miserably tries to keep punching you in the solar plexus.
Close to half of iridescence’s 15 tracks follow this blueprint of auditory brutalism; “DISTRICT” blends together pitch-shifted vocals, a woozy siren synth line, airy guitar licks, and verses by six of the group’s members to create a morass of sound. Single “J’OUVERT” is equally ambitious, a mishmash of distorted bass pounds, robotic squeaks, and horn wails that engulf the song’s mad-at-the-world vocals. It’s like this often with BROCKHAMPTON: They happily present a mosaic of ideas that do not reveal a larger picture.
Even on the album’s quieter and more melodic moments, when the band momentarily veers into the still eye of the hurricane, the vocalists fail to make an impression. On “THUG LIFE,” the pretty, piano-driven relief from the pressure cooker energy of “NEW ORLEANS,” MC Dom McLennon squeaks out faux sad-boy deepness like, “They put my head in the water and it’s so beautiful under,” in a shaky delivery. Elsewhere, on the ballad “SAN MARCOS,” which is undoubtedly meant to inspire cell phones to sway at shows with its chorus-heavy guitar melody and London Community Gospel Choir outro, the group’s MCs pass cardboard confessions back and forth like, “Could be stronger than vibranium/Don’t mean that I ain’t fragile” by McLennon, and, “Suicidal thoughts, but I know I won’t do it,” by rapper and engineer JOBA.
BROCKHAMPTON’s work has always had a scatterbrain feel, the result of having 14 creative minds in the same studio. On each successive album, the band had become more economical in their movements. They figured out when to stop adding instrumental layers, like on the III  highlight “JOHNNY,” built on a simple jazz loop, or made sure their writing was tight as possible, like on the confessional “JUNKY.” They can still sew in small pockets of delights, most clearly demonstrated on iridescence when the stage is given to Abstract, whose songwriting has grown from being shockingly honest to emotionally moving.
His opening verse on “WEIGHT” is the stirring centerpiece of the album, a candid examination of guilt and insecurity. “And she was mad cause I never wanna show her off/And every time she took her bra off my dick would get soft,” he raps in a sincere croak. The way he writes about and colors his shame—one of the least-examined feelings in hip-hop—is profound. “WEIGHT” also happens to be the album’s most complete composition, as a glittery string section gives Abstract’s vocals room to breathe before a reverb-drenched breakdown bursts the song open. At that point, a trip-hop drum break barges in under thick piano chords and chaotic turntable scratches. Against all odds, it coheres into something sublime and beautiful. The rest of the album is just not that lucky.


Despite being-- along with Beyonce and Rihanna-- one of the most charismatic and accomplished modern r&b singers, Amerie's latest album still is somehow unreleased in the U.S.

Because I Love It

Amerie's 2002 debut album All I Have was so startlingly, sparklingly perfect that it was difficult to imagine that she could even make another album. All I Have simply didn't sound like the beginning of a particular artist's story: The album's irresistibility resided in its consummately generic take on r&b at all levels, writer/producer Rich Harrison constructing familiar-sounding but astonishingly voluptuous soul-loop grooves, and lyrically wresting the most exquisite sensations from clichés and universalist platitudes, while Amerie's equivocations between sweet clarity and ragged soul conveyed an idealist snapshot of an entire genre's arsenal of affects.
Despite containing her breakout hit "1 Thing", 2005's follow-up Touch was a weaker affair: A handful of stunners and an ill-advised Lil' Jon collaboration aside, it felt like a retread of her debut in broader, less nuanced brushstrokes. Having now parted ways from Harrison, on the more successful Because I Love It Amerie attempts to fashion for herself an individual persona, a quest that carries her further away from the attractions of her debut. *Because I Love It'*s big, risky strategic manoeuvre is a plush, post-coital riposte to Ciara's recent electro-pop revivalism, with many of the songs here investing in a deliberately frothy eighties sound that smears together Prince, Jam & Lewis, and the SOS Band.
As with Ciara, Amerie's tying herself so resolutely to the retro mast pays mixed dividends. She pulls off this gloriously inconsequential sound on "Crush" and "Crazy Wonderful", combining sugar-rush explosions of fizzy synth clouds with charmingly twee vocals. The danger for her is that in trying so hard to clinch this new style she leaves little room to assert her own individual qualities: most worryingly, the self-consciously fun "Some Like It" is a gruesome pastiche, assembling dozens of hooks and reference points, but with no heart to pump life into them.
This sense of making staged set-pieces rather than songs carries over into more familiar territory. The enjoyable but overrated "Gotta Work", an energetic funk number that liberally samples Sam & Dave's "Hold On I'm Coming", verges on empty formalism: one senses that its signifiers have been pressed into service primarily to remind listeners of how much they enjoyed "1 Thing" or J Lo's "Get Right", and coalesce into a song only as an afterthought. She does better when she doesn't try so hard: The more clipped disco-funk of "Take Control" might be closer to "anonymous" r&b (one could just as easily imagine it coming from Nicole Scherzinger or Christina Milian) but it's also a much better song; the enjoyment comes from listening to how Amerie still makes it her own, the song's own excitement strained through her expressive, almost hesitant phrasing.
Perhaps the secret ingredient which enlivens Amerie's best work is her quality of earnestness: The best songs here are a trio of dead-serious ballads in the second half, all of which relinquish the urge to score points with savvy listeners. "When Loving U Was Easy" verges on Idol material, its sobbing accusations culminating in a gloriously indiscreet, almost painful climax worthy of Fantasia or Kelly Hudson. Meanwhile "All Roads" is garishly coloured, widescreen utopian wonder, somewhere between Mariah Carey and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'".
Best of all is the fragile, frustrated "Paint Me Over", a contender for Amerie's finest track to date, and a timely reminder of her longstanding secret weapons: the interplay between the breathy delicacy of her solo lines and the accusatory perfection and strength of the multi-tracked chorus lines. "Chorus" in both senses of the word: Amerie's finest moments flow seamlessly between the lost and befuddled Amerie singing alone, overwhelmed by the mysteries of love, and the righteous auto-harmonizing Ameries, whose clarity of vision is accompanied by exuberance or vengefulness. I prefer the vengeful moments: no r&b singer can make the listener feel as judged as Amerie can, like the world itself has risen up in anger against your uncaring ways.
All three of these songs extend the album's dominant palatial 80s sound, but in a subtler and less self-conscious fashion, more focused on being vehicles for Amerie's emoting. Sonic revivalism in r&b usually works best when it sounds breezy and incidental-- think of the gorgeous effervescence of Cassie's sweet mid-tempo numbers, or Teedra Moses's own, less self-conscious evocations of Prince and Jam & Lewis. Perhaps it's simply that you have to believe in these songs to take them into your heart, believe that the riotous drum breaks or frosty synthesisers being deployed are a true extension of the singer's own feelings. The balance between success and failure rests on the tension between the style, the singer and the song: Amerie is at her best when the three levels become indistinguishable.


On the young singer’s second major label album, PnB struggles to push past the boundaries of his previous work, but with a few solid tunes, it shows him finding his way in the major-label apparatus.

Catch These Vibes

This summer, PnB Rock’s rendition of French Montana’s “Unforgettable” infiltrated radio giving the 25-year-old Philidelphia singer a prime spot on one of hip-hop’s hottest songs of the year. Just off the heels of his feature on YFN Lucci’s ”Everyday We Lit,” the 2017 XXL Freshman just wants to be the soundtrack to your complicated relationship on his second major label album, Catch These Vibes. Although his knack for melody is notable, it’s less daring than the work of Ty Dolla $ign and dangerously teeters along the monotony of Fetty Wap. It’s an album of symmetry bouncing between hip-hop and R&B, and while PnB struggles to push past the boundaries of his previous work, it shows a young singer slowly finding his way in the major-label apparatus.
At the start, PnB doesn’t want to confuse you with his intentions. Opener “Friends” reads as a text thread from a “Where is this going?” conversation gone wrong. “I wish I could cuff you but I can’t/I wish I could love you but I can’t,” he sings. A relationship is the furthest thing from his mind, and fame is too potent to be sobered by monogamy. PnB’s honesty is admirable and could serve as a comprehensive guide to the conversations you’ve avoided well into your twentysomethings. Towards the end, “You know you my ride or die” is repeated in a distorted loop, somehow undoing all of the transparency he professed for much of the song. Catch These Vibes sits in that warped space of emotion, engulfed in lust, infatuation, and remorse.
PnB Rock is a bit heavy-handed with 10 guest features on an 18-track album, many of which add little to the overall project. Buried nine songs deep is PnB’s melody against the Diplo-inspired track crafted by NGHTMRE. The LA producer challenges PnB, stretching him across his version of EDM, juxtaposing jaded lyrics about an ex who “talks too much.” On “1Day,” PnB sounds as if he’s floating, reverberating over the loops and dips of the production. He remembers the days he received the harshest criticism from someone closest to him: “Mama told me that I wouldn’t be shit/Told her one day, I’ma be rich.” He and Ugly God channel the cadence of Gucci Mane, down to the adlibs, a formula that creates a larger-than-life energy for the usually mellow singer.
Of the eight songs that PnB rides solo, “Pressure” and “Rewind” offer some introspection amid the salaciousness that purveys Catch These Vibes. “Pressure” reflects on the friends he’s lost to the streets, whether it be to death or in jail. “Thinking ’bout my brother, man, I miss that nigga/When he got killed that night I wish that I was with that nigga/Swear I wish heaven was like jail and I could visit niggas.” On the hook, he’s pushing past the pain, trying not to acknowledge it at all: “I gotta stay strong through it all, and act like I ain’t going through it all, through this pressure.” Here, PnB takes a page out of his old notebooks, recounting events like the stories he used to tell during his 33-month prison stint, a moment of honest sentimentality in a way that has been distorted by PnB’s quick rise to fame.
As a closer, “Rewind” feels like the perfect complement to “Friends.” PnB croons over a guitar as he reminisces about the girl who got away. On much of Catch These Vibes, PnB leans on repetition in his songwriting, which at times is underwhelming and a little lazy. This works only on “Rewind,” where repeating elements of the song reinforces the notion of looking at relationships in reverse. He interpolates Usher’s “Confessions” an appropriate melody for the amount of transparency he offers on the record. In his better moments, it’s obvious that PnB Rock could tap into a candid, cohesive project. But the range of emotions Catch These Vibes takes you on feels a little like a Sunday morning hangover—the kind where you promise you’ll never drink again, but are back at the bar next Saturday.


The 19-year-old singer-songwriter’s dual EP branches out from bedroom pop in a set of songs that consider the nuanced ways acting is tucked into our everyday lives.

Nicole Kidman / Anne Hathaway

Hana Vu wrote the songs for her dual EP, Nicole Kidman/Anne Hathaway by watching episodes of The Hollywood Reporter’s “The Actress Roundtable” and then conjuring backstories for the women on screen. For Vu, the project’s premise is an entry point for her to do what she does best: crystalize a wisp of an emotion, until the sentiment feels so tactile it could break.
Vu’s first EP, the perfectly titled Crying on the Subway, was rooted in bedroom pop, but these EPs explore other genres. She layers and reverbs her vocals on  “Worm” until they sound like a hymn, while “Order” descends into full-on, guitar-thrashing rock. Each track feels like a contained performance, and the lyrics consider the nuanced ways in which acting is tucked into our everyday lives.
These aren’t necessarily love songs, and it’s hard to map a narrative onto any track in particular. She wishes someone would cry about her. She croons about “disguises.” “Outside,” which could be a Paramore or Lorde track, comes the closest to feeling personal: “If I look at my phone all day, does it really help my chances?” she asks, waiting for a text that never comes.
Vu produced the record herself, and the muted, minimalist fizz matches the distant monotone of her voice. Each track builds around a wrenching line that dissolves into the soundscape. “I’ll never be good enough,” ends the first song, “At the Party,” as a synth sputters and fades. “I wanna be a hero/I want to save you, I wanna save me,” she sings on “Fighter,” with all traces of actual desire drained from her voice.
No track on the compact, 10-song project feels unnecessary, but most blend into each other without sounding distinct. (The glaring exception is her cover of “Reflection,” from the Disney movie Mulan, which is thematically relevant but still seems out of place.) That’s not the worst quality in an album that is equally sparse and lush, simple and shimmering, but it shows a space Vu can grow into.


The latest album from the Dallas trio is a trove of middle-class rap flexes. It sounds like a dark realm all to itself, the full-on encapsulation of their long-running operation.

Little World

The Outfit, TX have been warping the sounds of Texas rap for almost a decade now, their music varying from smooth, split-screen introspection to deep, dank ghost whispers to “cooly fooly space-age funk.” The Dallas trio, consisting of Jayhawk, Mel, and Dorian, reinterprets the legacy sounds of Third Coast hip-hop through a wide range of tints. Their new album, Little World, a trove of middle-class rap flexes, sounds like a dark realm all to itself, the full-on encapsulation of their operation.
Their last album, 2017’s Fuel City, an homage to an off-kilter Dallas staple, was trunk-rattling rap with a hometown bent. Little World retrofits Fuel City’s firing pistons onto gnarled synth patches to power ominous crawlers, channeling the energy of 2015’s foreboding Down by the Trinity, a sound influenced by the heaviness of Deftones and the murkiness of Scarface—but entirely its own. This is still slab music, robust and booming, but instead of candy-painted, it’s matte black. Little World is an anomaly from previous TOTX projects in that it can be strobing and trance-inducing one minute and boisterous and disorienting the next. But there’s always a strong through-line facilitated by the disparate but complementary modes of its frontmen.
Dorian mixed and mastered the record, but he rarely appears as a performer. Though he is missed, Jayhawk and Mel have found a wonky sort of balance in their contrasting styles, performing in tandem from opposite ends of the spectrum. Jayhawk’s raps are in-your-face and combustible, so loud that, when the group was recording Down by the Trinity at Mel’s grandmother’s house, they’d have to cut sessions early for fear that he might disturb her. He chews up the scenery, always foregrounding himself in the mix, and his natural inclination is to be caustic. Mel is more withdrawn, quietly sinister, a mischievous tenor he’s characterized as “the purple devil emoji.” He lurches through like a prowler. So much of TOTX’s allure, and Little World specifically, is wrapped up in this disparity of sound: how they knife through beats at different angles, the ways their almost peculiar voice-work supplements their flows.
Whether going it alone or performing as a tag-team, the members of TOTX leave indelible marks on everything they touch; even as their words leave the mind, their voices linger. On “Name on the Wall,” Jayhawk rumbles through his raps, each utterance bounding between seismic ripples of the 808 drum kit. Mel seems to faze through the translucent synths on “Big Bet,” every syllable implying a certain intangibility. Often, phrases are merely a function of fluidity, waves ridden through the troughs of their immense productions. But even when setting up a specific moment, words ebb and flow, as on this casual Jayhawk scene from “The Woah”: “Lil baby booted up/On god, lil baby cute as fuck/I walked up rude as fuck/I said, ‘Is this your dude, or what?’” There is an immediacy to the writing, but the sensation of it lingers like an afterimage.
Thunderous, abnormal, and sublime, Little World is emblematic of The Outfit, TX as a group. Despite a stellar track record, they’re still fighting for bandwidth in rap conversations, but they will themselves forth with undeniable music, vowing to secure a spot for themselves and the Dallas scene they claim. “Looked straight at my nigga, told him we gon’ make it/Looked straight at my nigga, told him if not, we gon’ take it,” Mel declares on “Conviction,” a song about staying the course. With Little World, The Outfit, TX continue to expand their small but no less significant domain, existing proudly on the outer edges of Texas rap as they always have.


The outstanding Chicago-based drummer incorporates ideas from the city’s iconic forebears and ever-evolving jazz scene into his own fluid style.

Quin Kirchner: The Shadows and the Light

The Shadows and the Light

Drummer Quin Kirchner revels in contrasts and juxtapositions. These qualities are deeply embedded in the music of his new album, The Shadows and the Light,  which jumps between numerous strains of exploratory jazz with an impressive fluency. There are many playful moments, as well as passages of mystery and melancholy, and it unfolds with an ease that suggests an eager journey through disparate terrains. The album’s wild stylistic range squashes time while giving the illusion of being infinite in scope. Kirchner acts as both instigator and agitator as he slides into an elastic swing or propels his group through the whirling syncopation of Afro-Cuban rhythms. Regardless of style, his playing always feels fluid, constantly in flux.
That sense of flow is crucial to the structure of The Shadows and the Light. Several pieces cascade into one another while others are punctuated by transitory percussive palate-cleansers. At the album’s center are two suites, both of which establish an air of formless drift before coalescing into groove and motion. “Pathways” plays out against a backdrop of a kalimba fed through delay, with bassist Matt Ulery channeling Charlie Haden for a solo of contemplative modal runs up and down his instrument before being joined by Nate Lepine’s searching flute. As the metallic chime of the kalimba loops, the piece seamlessly transforms into a version of Kelan Phil Cohran’s “Sahara,” its ostinato bass line passed around the ensemble as Kirchner dances around his kit. Similarly, “Star Cluster,” a gooey mess of sax, trombone, and bass clarinet, morphs into “Moon Vision,” a steady, backbeat-heavy piece with lush horn hits. For an album that travels in so many directions at once, these moments provide a cohesion that points to a definitive arc.
Though Kirchner cut his teeth in New Orleans and spent time in New York, he grew up in Chicago and the majority of his career has been centered around that city’s multi-faceted, ever-evolving jazz scene. He sits comfortably alongside contemporaries like Damon Locks, Jeff Parker, and Ben Lamar Gay, as well as labelmates Chicago Underground Quartet and Charles Rumback. What sets Kirchner’s music apart from that of his peers is his focus on incorporating the music and ideas of the iconic forebears of that community into his own individualistic style. In addition to Cohran, his group covers Sun Ra’s late-’50s composition “Planet Earth,” and his use of a more fleshed out horn section—at times ballooning to an octet—allows him to approximate the kind of large-ensemble cosmic swing that defined that early Ra era, with additional touches of Charles Mingus’ outré arrangements for big band shining through.
Though deep debts are owed to those mid-century jazz touchpoints, Kirchner puts various traditions into conversation with each other in a way that feels postmodern, almost collaged, rooting the music firmly in the now. Throughout The Shadows and the Light there’s a sense that anything could happen next—a drum and electronics free for all, a poignant ballad, fusion infused with free improvisation, a polyrhythmic blur of Latin percussion and wurlitzer—but nothing feels out of place. Kirchner’s compositions are built around tight grooves but flourish in moments of spontaneity and uninhibited fervency. A big part of this is due to his band, which features alto player Nick Mazzarella and bass clarinetist Jason Stein of Hearts & Minds, among others from the Chicago jazz underground. They are nimble ensemble players, but also powerful improvisers on their own, capable of wild melodic tangents and expressive outbursts, and Kirchner’s compositions demand full command of both of these modes.
The Shadows and The Light, along with recent albums by Makaya McCraven, Junius Paul, Dustin Laurenzi, and Tomeka Reid, serve to document a true renaissance in Chicago jazz and improvisation. More than just an overview of different experimental idioms, Kirchner is able to rewrite the rules of a wide swath of traditions in his own language, drawing on the grammar of ever-shifting groove and dynamic rhythmic interplay as the basis for his interpretations. There is equal parts joy and reverence in this music, and while listening to Kirchner rejoice in those passions it is hard not to experience them as well.


Joyful, euphoric, and free, these new songs from the Miami party-starters are all produced by SOPHIE and are full of potential energy and the excitement of exploration.

Fuck It Up EP

After the tragic death of SOPHIE earlier this year, the Miami duo Basside wrote in memoriam that the artist “wasn’t from this planet.” They were far from the first to observe the galactic magic of SOPHIE’s music, but the phrasing hints at something that was always at its core. No matter how close SOPHIE songs approached the mainstream—whether on elastic tracks with Madonna or gleaming trap refractions with experimental rappers—the music had an otherworldly perspective, as if SOPHIE was hearing the sounds of pop’s past through interstellar radiation. SOPHIE’s catalog presented passage to new realms, where the music was a little more uncanny, more staticky, more absurd. Through SOPHIE’s music, as one of the songs implied, listeners could access a whole new world.
Basside—the duo of South Florida party-starters Que Linda and Caro Loka—got to experience this approach firsthand. SOPHIE caught one of their performances at a Miami music festival in 2016 and, taken by the way they channeled the vibrant histories of Miami Bass, freestyle, and East Coast club music, invited them out to Los Angeles, where they made the six songs that eventually ended up on the new EP Fuck It Up.
Over the years, the songs became staples of SOPHIE’s DJ sets, the sorts of elusive tracks that fans obsess over. But due to a miscommunication between the artists, the music never officially saw the light of day until after SOPHIE’s passing. Basside said in an interview they’re finally sharing Fuck It Up as “a gift to everyone that’s heartbroken,” and, at its best, it really does feel like one. Joyful, euphoric, and free, these new songs feel like a lot of SOPHIE’s best beats over the years, full of potential energy and the excitement of exploration.
Que Linda and Caro Loka’s work as Basside is charismatic and playful, full of hilarious come-ons and delirious sloganeering inspired by their city’s unapologetically horny musical history. (One memorable cheerleader chant from Basside’s debut EP goes, simply, “I like bass cause it has ass in it.”) They largely bring the same energy to Fuck It Up, but when paired with SOPHIE’s mystical production, it has a different effect. Opening track “NYC2MIA,” the EP’s easy standout, uses a hopscotching kick drum as the skeleton for a collection of surreal gulps and clangs and squeaks. As Que Linda and Caro Loka repeat one of their credos (“New York to Miami/No bras, no panties”), SOPHIE nods to the rhythmic histories of Jersey and Baltimore club while looking deep into the future, scribbling gnarled new sounds in all the margins.
Across the rest of the EP, they apply a similar approach to other sounds, like the boisterous party-trap of “Swipe” and the Auto-Tuned R&B balladry of “Girl.” Que Linda and Caro Loka’s bars are full of easy confidence and memorable one-liners, but they occasionally run into the problem that a lot of people do over SOPHIE beats. When something is as unearthly as the club mutations of “Crazy Expensive,” it’s hard for anyone, even rappers as magnetic as Basside, to keep up, they just become tiny human figures lost in an alien landscape. On the whole, Basside hold their own. It’s a tragedy they won’t be able to do more with SOPHIE at their side because together, all three artists feel in their element. Feet on the dancefloor, head in the clouds, together they dream of a world where the club is a little more wondrous, a little more strange.

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The third LP from San Francisco garage-poppers came to be after main man Sonny Smith and his girlfriend of a decade parted ways. But where most breakup albums aim for the rawest nerve, Smith keeps a characteristically cool head.

Sonny and the Sunsets: Longtime Companion

Longtime Companion

Longtime Companion, the third LP from San Francisco garage-poppers Sonny and the Sunsets, came to be after main man Sonny Smith and his girlfriend of a decade parted ways. Breakup records tend toward the the maudlin and the oversharey, a place to air out all that dark-night-of-the-soul stuff over a couple of heartbroken chords. It's a loose template, to be sure, but it's all a far cry from the eternally bemused Smith's perma-grin. For Longtime Companion, Smith and his Sunsets have upended their warm, worn-in oldies-nodding pop for an expansive, lightly psychedelic spin on 1970s country-rock, while whittling away much of the charmingly goofy eccentric uncle humor that peppered 2010's Tomorrow Is Alright and last year's Hit After Hit. But where most breakup albums aim directly for the rawest nerve, throughout Longtime, Smith keeps a characteristically cool head.
Smith's best songs often take the form of wily character studies or bizarro Vonnegutian inventions, like the murderous unguent at the heart of "Death Cream". Delving directly into affairs of the heart for Longtime Companion is quite a leap for the often one-step-removed Smith, and it's one he gamely sidesteps. Whether it's the (slightly randy) zoological metaphors of "Year of the Cock" or the "funny kind of sad joy" expressed amidst the blank shuffle of "I See the Void", Smith seems to be keeping most of the hows and whys to himself, dodging confession with emotional fence-sitting and silly stuff about roosters.
Oh, sure, there are at least a couple of clues as to what happened: His ex-baby's a divorcee, and Smith's the one who made her that way, and when they see each other around town, he's going to pretend that they're still together. But the more pointed stuff is outmatched by a well-worn, broadly drawn malaise that, in this age of Harvey Levin, doesn't give much away. This is where Longtime gets frustrating; a Blood on the Tracks-style bile-spew might be asking too much from a laidback character like Smith, but he's leaving more out of provocatively titled songs like "Dried Blood" or "My Mind Messed Up" than he's keeping in, holding the listener at just enough distance to make it easy to sympathize but next to impossible to truly relate.
Still, taken as a set of would-be sad-sack standards, Longtime perks up considerably. The record's sound is warm and lush; with its gorgeous swaths of flute and halo-encircled backup vocals, "Pretend You Love Me"-- having first appeared in tauter form on last year's Hit-- is the kind of song you want to float around in for a while. The Sunsets are, as ever, a subtly dazzling musical unit, and there's nary a wasted note throughout Longtime's half hour and change. And, though Smith's cool demeanor and apparent aversion to letting it all hang out keep Longtime Companion from feeling particularly personal, it just makes the few moments where his voice breaks all the more affecting. The record's easygoing pace, sturdy songwriting, and sunbaked production make it the third solid effort from the Sunsets. Still, it's the least of the three, retreating from Smith's stellar story-songs for an album that seems somewhat reluctant to tell its own tale.


The UK psych-pop band stretches out to embrace hip-hop production and personal biography. It comes across like a guy trying to tell you his life story in a packed Coachella tent.

Dreamland

Glass Animals have achieved an enviable and increasingly unusual form of modern success: They’re both wildly ubiquitous and anonymous. The Oxford band’s streaming numbers can be measured in billions, and they’ve popped up on every late-night show and festival fairground without revealing anything that might immediately distinguish them from, say, Electric Guest or Neon Trees. But Dave Bayley intends to fix that on Dreamland, describing the creation of the band’s third LP on the opening track and later referring to himself as “Wavey Davey.” In place of the sci-fi leanings and character studies of 2016’s How to Be a Human Being, Bayley makes his own humanity the story: a global citizen born to Welsh and Israeli parents, raised in Massachusetts and Texas before moving to the UK at 14, equally transfixed by the reclusive studio geniuses behind Pet Sounds and The Chronic 2001. But Glass Animals albums were never an ideal place to bare one’s soul, and Dreamland comes across like a guy trying to tell you his life story in a packed Coachella tent.
Though it’s as steeped in late-Clinton referentiality as any vaporwave record—witness Glass Animals’ ingenious Windows 98-styled website—Dreamland lives in a near future that will never happen. Less than two months ago, Glass Animals were still set to debut Dreamland at Bonnaroo 2020, the kind of environment that’s been very kind to bands like them: the ones who can filter more distinct variants of indie-leaning hip-hop, pop, and electronic music into a smooth, white caulk filling in the gaps between a Live Nation or Goldenvoice-financed lineup headlined by some permutation of Run the Jewels, Tame Impala, Chance the Rapper, and the Strokes.
Glass Animals have wisely updated their approach by wringing out the more waterlogged psych-pop elements of breakthrough hit “Gooey,” revealing a band more conversant with rap, more American than proudly British nerdlinger polymaths like alt-J and Everything Everything. After putting in behind-the-scenes work with Joey Bada$$, 6lack, and Wale, Bayley flaunts his connections in moments that provide jarring contrast with Glass Animals’ reliably sync-able synth-pop. Denzel Curry brings his fire-breathing energy to a guest verse on “Tokyo Drifting” that sounds beamed in from a completely different festival stage. The inclusion of Top Dawg engineer Derek Ali almost justifies a Dr. Dre namedrop on “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” though I’m sure Bayley would justify rhyming “big dicks and big ol’ titties on the sly” with “bonafide Aquemini” (from “Waterfalls Coming Out of Your Mouth”) in any case.
For the most part, Dreamland’s use of hip-hop production is less obtrusive and off-putting, taking advantage of a particular memory loophole that causes 2016 to feel more distant than 1999. The rippling, Malibu-scented beat on “Tangerine” is blatant “Hotline Bling” homage, while the gelatinous guitars on “Heat Wave” could be plucked from any number of “wavy hip-hop” sample packs meant to emulate Frank Ocean’s “Ivy” on a bedroom producer’s budget. Two years ago, such sounds would’ve had the foul smell of something just beyond its use-by date. Now, they’re basically public domain.
None of the musical choices really align with Bayley’s attempts at world-building: The lyric sheet is densely packed with references to Scooby-Doo, “The Price Is Right,” Dunkaroos, Capri Sun, Pokémon, kickball, GoldenEye 007, Hot Pockets, Mr. Miyagi, hologram glasses, and Doom, like so many “only ’90s kids will remember this” memes. A more generous take is that Dreamland’s comprehensive survey of late-2010s algorithmic pop is Bayley’s strategy to become a Matty Healy or Frank Ocean-style double agent: a guy whose music frequently soundtracks the boutique-hotel pool parties, VIP pop-up lounges, and upscale clothing stores populated by the targets of his social critique. He chides someone for “posting aerial photos of you and your smoothie,” while confiding that “sometimes B-sides are the best songs,” calling back to more insightful singles by the 1975 and Frank Ocean. Meanwhile, Bayley’s own “too much quinoa and online shopping” feels plucked out of an iPhone 5S note full of manbun and cronut jokes.
Made by people too young to remember a pre-internet society, Dreamland instead indulges in that relatable and ultimately feeble longing for a time where we were just less online and more present in our personal relationships. But what’s the difference between scrolling through your Instagram feed and watching Bayley get lost in his memory bank? His sense of alienation isn’t particularly original or all that contemporary, and worse, Dreamland falls prey to the unfortunate mode of modern branding that conflates personal nostalgia with making a point. Glass Animals want to talk about The Way We Live, when it’s really just Let’s Remember Some Stuff.

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When you first hear this album, you'll be transported into the Martin Sheen role in Apocalypse Calvin,\n\ surrounded ...

What Was Me

When you first hear this album, you'll be transported into the Martin Sheen role in Apocalypse Calvin, surrounded by affable brass and a CIA spook at a meeting so classified it doesn't even exist. A young Harrison Ford will be playing this album's a capella paean to dispassionate mobility, "Nothing to Hold Us Here," on a reel-to-reel, sweating and dreaming of making out with Kate Capshaw years later in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. When the album finishes, the older guy across the table from you will utter some you-had-to-be-there blarney about the human heart and some vicissitudes he noticed it had. Then he'll say, "We think it is quite clear that Calvin Johnson has... gone insane," an assessment you'll be obliged to affirm. Then you will be told that you should "terminate his command... with extreme prejudice," and then there's some strippers in a helicopter, and then Larry Fishburne dies, etc etc.
During all the jinx on the boat, you'll read Calvin's dossier and sustain an intriguing inner dialogue: "This guy was in Beat Happening back in the day. He's a beacon of the unpindownable punk spirit. He's seminal. He opened for Black Flag. He's got the last chapter in Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991. He launched the Halo Benders and Dub Narcotic Sound System. Criminy-shanks, man, DubNarcSS released 'Booty Run,' as randily pragmatic a seven-inch to come out on this planet. Johnson's an institution, like marriage and Astroglide. His fingerprints pock the legacies of a stable including artists as diverse as Beck and Modest Mouse. He has his own respected label. So why the hell would he go back into the fray, alone, with just an acoustic guitar and his acquired-taste throatations?"
When you arrive at Johnson's bizarre Olympia compound, you'll find a zonked Phil Elvrum waving his hands around, welcoming you, calming but also alarming you, explaining that he was Calvin's 'engineer,' though he sounds more like a hagiographer. He will compare Calvin to poets and legends, and shudder when extolling the debilitating oomph of Calvin's voice. When you finally meet Calvin, he'll have been expecting you. He knew you were sent to nix him. In fact, he'd already started marketing his new album as 'posthumous.' He will sit in the dark, rubbing his head and explaining to you via a 4\xBD-minute (ahem) a capella song, how "The Past Comes Back to Haunt." By Calvin's side are the mysterious women Mirah and the Gossip's Beth Ditto. They join him in the also (cough) a capella "Ode to St. Valentine" and "Lightnin Rod for Jesus," respectively, which are gorgeous and grating, respectively.
Hi! Thanks for reading! You know, we've had a lot of fun here today, but sometimes a feller ort to shoot straight: the above was an attempt to disqualify myself from having to deduct whether or not this album is an achievement or embarrassment. I can't figure it out. The album sounds as tossed-off as it does deliberate. The songs are as preposterously conceived as they are straightforwardly delivered, as jokey as they are sincere. Did you catch my drift re: the perplexing amount of a capella stuff? Even as a fan of "the voice," I can't wholeheartedly recommend that you purchase this disc, which at points suggests that Johnson is eager to join Irwin Chusid's freak collection and become, like Daniel Johnston, someone whose work is better when covered (which is as good a tangent as any on which to propose that the seeds of the greatest Chris Isaak or Anonymous Crooner album ever are resting here).
But see: one point on this here CD, which is largely a 'love' project, provides a satisfying bellow of desire reminiscent of the first Smiths album. It comes right after the three-minute mark on "Can We Kiss?" which is otherwise essentially a remake of a similarly themed but more imperative Halo Benders song. Suddenly, Johnson emits an "ohohhhhohhhh" followed by an "uhooohhohhhowwwohh," that redeems the status of commingling foodholes; the kitsch is automatically baptized out of celebrating an old-fashion liptangle. "Love Will Come Back Again," despite offering the popular redundancy of back-againness, is equally convincing, especially when Johnson booms subtle hints to his intended such as "unbuckle that Gingham dress." The aforementioned "Valentine" will melt the sentimental lobe of anyone lingering in love's potential orbit when both vocalists collide to plead, "Ooooh, give me a sign."
Despite some increments during which the vocal loudness is poorly modulated, What Was Me is easily Johnson's best harnessing of his divisive foghorn. If I'd heard the avant-Guthrie of the scrappy, miss-me-when-I'm-gone title track on Internet radio, I'd run out to buy this album, being sure to topple several senior citizens en route to the store where the jaded hippie half-mans the register. Same goes for "Lies Goodbye," an exercise in the elasticity of enunciation (e.g. "rage" becomes "rayeeyayeeyage"). The individual songs may be more than the sum of their aggravatingly drumless parts, but this album as a whole is less than that sum. Choruses are repeated ad comatosium, and one is left to wonder what even a provisional backing band could have offered material like the six-minute, no-key-change, basic-chord "Palriga." Many of us are so pathetic that we want the album playing in our car after the club closes to be cool and gregarious-- What Was Me's sweet bloviations might get you snickered at.
Still, these songs have bullied my head for weeks. The island-strum of "Warm Days" has soundtracked my fascination with a hyper-gesticulating woman in the opposite lane who flips her cellphone the bird. "The Past Comes Back to Haunt," for some reason, was my mantra as I stared at an SUV sporting a Jason Voorhees glow-in-the-dark hockey mask hanging from its rear-view, with two pine-shaped air-fresheners in the eyeholes. Even "Lightnin Rod for Jesus" colonized my brain as I watched crows eat fries out of a McBin. Which brings me back to wondering if this occasionally-acoustic-only album is just a nominee for the time capsule labeled "Crazy Shit We Did With Our Freedom," or the masterwork of an aimless Cupid.


On his first album in nine years, the zen party master uses his operatically excessive music to challenge you to give in to positivity and get over yourself.

You’re Not Alone

Andrew W.K. hasn’t changed. He insists he has, and is typically earnest in his belief that he’s endured great tribulations and gained new wisdom to share. But by all outward appearances, he has been trapped in amber since 2001, still shouting feel-good, or feel-better, homilies over hyper-driven synth-metal riffage in his uniform of white T-shirt and white jeans. This is no slight—his bumper-sticker affirmations are perfectly suited to the current bleakness and uncertainty, and this is a good moment to seize for any enterprising guru with unblinking optimism to spare. He’s a cartoon, but a useful, benevolent, familiar one; the motor-mouthed genie in the lamp you didn’t mean to rub, but fuck it, now that you ask.
So much of Andrew W.K.’s career has been marked by trying to gauge whether he’s for real, whether he’s some pop concoction packaged by some unseen svengali, whether his happy hedonist routine is a joke or merely schtick. Tired: Cracking wise about how many Andrew W.K. songs have the word “party” in the title. Wired: Wishing you could be a little more like Andrew W.K.
You’re Not Alone, his first album in nine years, sounds the way getting bludgeoned to death with a pillowcase full of hardcover Tony Robbins books feels. The self-help angle, honed by years of motivational speaking and advice-column side-hustle, is made explicit via three-minute spoken-word interludes—pep talks to help get you through your day, or maybe just the album itself. It is the Gronk of listening experiences and loathes subtlety with as much holy fervor as it loathes negativity.
W.K. writes, performs, and produces in an operatically excessive style that makes Mutt Lange seem like Steve Albini. Compared to the frenetic industrial-lite 2001 breakthrough “Party Hard,” the tempo here is generally more leaden; every song sounds like it’s trying to put “The Final Countdown” out of work. There are a few standouts among the crowded field of aspiring forever-anthems: “I Don’t Know Anything” is a raucous, aggressively cheery Springsteen-on-MDMA fist-pumper about learning to accept and overcome self-doubt, and “Total Freedom” aims for group-sing-along nirvana, a nostalgia-driven lament that’s an “All My Friends” for the rest of the world. “You’re Not Alone,” the big finish, manages to wring poignancy out of the most obvious and obviously stated sentiment.
In Andrew W.K.’s dojo, pain and adversity aren’t to be avoided or feared, they are to be embraced, and regardless of what you think of the delivery method, that’s… not unhelpful advice. You don’t need to be told what an Andrew W.K. song called “Music Is Worth Living For” sounds like or is about; its mantra is cheesier than anything you might say out loud, but not necessarily cheesier than anything you might think to yourself.
And therein is the closest an album like this gets to subtext: He’s challenging you to make peace with the bad times and celebrate good times come on, but he’s also challenging you to give in to these resolutely simple pleasures and get over yourself. Being shouted at for 53 minutes to find some agency in the midst of chaos may not make for highly nuanced music, but it would be hard to argue that you couldn’t use it. This is kitchen-sink maximalism as refuge—just throw everything in there, there’s no time.
As such, the album is slyly backlash-proof; calling the platitudes banal just makes you part of the problem. Are you too cool for this? Are you above needing a little encouragement or zoning out to some mindless 1988-ass arena pablum? Do you think you’re in on the joke and just get a kick out of his power of positive winking? Well, sounds like you have some shit you need to work out. The message wouldn’t hit any harder if the music and lyrics were more understated or artful; the bluntness is the point, the medium is the message. Party on.


The singer, reality star, and social-media icon is joyous and defiant, projecting realness and flaunting considerable vocal chops.

K. Michelle: KIMBERLY: The People I Used to Know

KIMBERLY: The People I Used to Know

Not long after K. Michelle released Anybody Wanna Buy a Heart in 2014, I got into a spat with a student who threw shade at the singer. “She’s Kmart,” he said, wrinkling his nose. Of course she is, I said, but that’s description, not criticism. The star of “Love & Hip Hop Atlanta” and “K. Michelle: My Life,” whose R&B career has thrived despite the absence of pop crossovers, has no pretensions toward high culture. She’s your older sis or youngest aunt, laughing her ass off at Thanksgiving over a glass of wine.
Even as the Billboard Hot 100 becomes, thanks to Cardi B and Camila Cabello, more receptive to women of color who aren’t cooing support on a rapper’s tuff-love track, KIMBERLY: The People I Used to Know won’t get Michelle into the singles Top 10. Hell, at this point it won’t make many year-end top 10s either; a 21-track album may leave listeners winded. But she gives fewer fucks than she ever did, which results in a vocal commitment that makes her three previous albums look like warm-ups.
Vituperative but joyous in its command, “Kim K” is the album’s centerpiece. Besides her considerable vocal chops, a large part of her appeal is the projection of realness. “Black girl who’s angry/Media can’t stand me,” she sings over chopped-up piano chords and a sample of DeBarge’s “A Dream,” “I get to be in my feelings.” And it’s for those feelings that black women like Michelle are dismissed while, in her reckoning, black men pull the same shit yet are awarded Grammys. As usual with Michelle, she eschews psychobabble for blunt talk; there’s little trace of Mary J. Blige’s influence on this Memphis native, whose cadences evince a deeper affinity for hip-hop. Keyed to a beat mimicking submarine sonar, opening track “Alert” makes those affinities clear, with “clarity” always her lodestar. In a call-out to “HUMBLE.,” Michelle even gives Kendrick Lamar what-for. “Fuck them rappers who mumble,” she spits, perhaps scowling at fellow Georgians Future and Migos.
Whatever else, Michelle’s her own person, free to revel in her often splendid bad taste. No doubt some listeners will recoil from the thought of Michelle working with Chris Brown—I did, especially on a track called “Either Way” dedicated to thumbing its nose at haters. As we learned in “Kim K,” she relishes her independence. If a Chris Brown collaboration will get her streams and urban radio play, then she’ll do it: “I may never get this Grammy/But I’mma feed my family.” And she enjoys the perks, which include “Sleeping good at night, in the morning eating eggs and steak.” Producer Lil Ronnie’s stuttering beat hammers in every boast.
Included in this projection of realness is a submission to lust, even if she ends up looking abject; Michelle may have recorded “Talk to God,” but her desires are of the toned legs and hot butt variety. As she admits on another track, “Heaven couldn’t save me.” Finger snaps and gospel piano chords color Eric Hudson’s “Brain on Love,” a valentine to a lover who insists on his pound of flesh: “I know I’m a handful/That’s why you’ve got two hands.”
Bawdy, courting foolishness, K. Michelle is a throwback to an earlier era of R&B and an ideal social media personality. Her voice is the unguent. KIMBERLY: The People I Used to Know may lack a thumper like “V.S.O.P.” or a slow jam as urgent as “Drake Would Love Me,” still her greatest performance, but it continues a remarkable four-album streak. And we need her as much as she needs us.