Denmark’s DJ Sports makes experimental dance music with a hazy patina and a healthy appreciation for the 1990s. His new album is among the dreamiest, most heartfelt dance music this year.

Modern Species

Like a lot of artists in underground dance music right now, Aarhus, Denmark’s 11-person Regelbau collective are happy to keep things mysterious. Their releases, spread across a handful of artist-run labels including Regelbau, Help Recordings, No Hands, and PARTNERS, are mostly available only on vinyl or cassette, although a few titles have also turned up digitally on Bandcamp. You won’t find their releases on Spotify, which is to say that they’re also happy to keep things intimate: They helpfully sell directly to customers via their in-house distribution arm, SAFE Distribution—a mom-and-pop operation whose rudimentary website feels like the modern equivalent of buying punk 7”s out of Xeroxed mail-order catalogs back in the ’90s.
At first, the collective’s identity overshadowed its individual members, but over the past couple of years, two artists have steadily distinguished themselves: DJ Sports, aka Milán Zaks, and Central, Milan’s brother Natal. DJ Sports’ debut album, Modern Species, might represent a breakout moment for the Aarhus scene, coming as it does via Firecracker Recordings, an Edinburgh label with a marginally higher profile than the brothers’ clandestine network. (You can find its releases on Spotify, for one thing.) Like his colleagues, Sports makes experimental dance music with a hazy patina and a healthy appreciation for the 1990s. Despite what his deadpan alias might suggest, though, there’s nothing particularly ironic about his retro fixation. Harnessing club tropes for home-listening contexts, Modern Species is among the dreamiest, most heartfelt dance music this year.
Much of DJ Sports’ previous work has been suffused in tape hiss, but there’s nothing outwardly lo-fi about his debut album, which looks back at a moment when innovations in digital technology were bringing wild new rhythms and unprecedented polish to electronic music. Some of his influences are unexpected, if not downright unfashionable. The opening “World A” is a rolling drum ‘n’ bass cut whose ethereal synthesizers and coolly ecstatic vocal samples bring to mind LTJ Bukem, long one of jungle’s smoothest operators, and “For Real For You” returns to the breakbeats-on-cloud-nine vibe. This isn’t the first time Sports has delved into drum ’n’ bass; much of last year’s Phases of Winds cassette also took inspiration from the intersection of breakbeat science and IDM. What’s different this time out is how unabashedly he goes after a billowy, new age vibe: The last time you heard synths as luminous as the ones in “World A,” there were probably dolphins and underwater pyramids on the sleeve. Instead of using the same oft-rinsed breakbeats as classic drum ‘n’ bass, though, Sports is crafting his own rhythms from scratch out of a motley collection of percussion samples and drum-machine hits, giving his grooves a wonky quality you won’t find elsewhere.
The album’s house tracks have a similar aesthetic. “Fertile Crescent” features shuffling drum programming, flickering synths, and a hint of a breakbeat in the background; the whole thing twinkles like a field full of fireflies. Its palette is descended from acts like 808 State, and its wistful qualities aren’t too far off from the clubbier output of Kettenkarussell and the Giegling crew. “Parallax,” meanwhile, harks back to the frictionless glide of West Coast deep house from the ‘90s, with a silky, sax-like synth lead fluttering gently over a quick-stepping groove with lots of toms and tambourine; the slowly unfurling pads sound like new age with a jazz pedigree.
The rest of the album explores a diverse range of beats and tempos, all of it rendered with the same sumptuous sound design and playful drum programming. The eight-minute long “Ascension” is a dubby, meditative deep house jam whose percussive accents slap like raindrops on the surface of a lake; even more Balearic in vibe, the downbeat “Stellar Clusters” sounds a little like Shy Layers remixing Nassau studio wiz Wally Badarou, with rolling hand percussion dotted across glassy synths and a patient arpeggio that gives the track the air of walking contentedly in circles. Both “Entry Mode” and the closing “Reluctant Memory” evoke the intricate rhythms and shimmering synths of Plaid, Sun Electric, or Mouse on Mars—‘90s-rooted acts that all invented their own respective fusions of techno, ambient, and breakbeat. “Reluctant Memory,” suffused in burbling electronic tones and synthetic bird calls, is particularly striking: Lush rainforest techno at its most sumptuous, it's a reminder of the world-building sense of place that was inherent in the most adventurous electronic music of the '90s. With that experimental spirit finally creeping back into dance music, Modern Species feels like a long-overdue passing of the baton.


Featuring guest spots from Kendrick Lamar, RZA, and A$AP Rocky as well as Father John Misty and Michael Bolton, Kid Cudi's 70-minute third album Indicud has all the sheen of a cinematic event, but no substance.

Indicud

Kid Cudi's an undeniably popular rapper. Though his 2009 debut Man on the Moon and its slightly better sequel weren't exactly critical darlings, he’s been a reliable Soundscan dent-maker and the type of figure that easily inspires 379-page threads on message board and hype thermometer KanyeToThe. And even if Cudi rarely lines it all up, his ability's evident: The music's production, which is for the most part self-generated, is usually interesting, and his fuck-the-world posturing resonates with a certain angsty personality type. When he finds the right balance-- Man on the Moon II’s “Ghost!” is the best example-- it can add up to an effective cocktail of blurred anguish. Three years after the overstuffed Man on the Moon II and several outside dalliances-- the rock/rap sideproject WZRD, a small role in HBO’s cancelled "Entourage" spin-off "How to Make it in America"-- Cudi’s back with Indicud, which aims for a little bit of everything: It's an 18-song collection that features guests from the indie rock world (HAIM, Father John Misty) as well as new-school demigods Kendrick Lamar and A$AP Rocky. And Michael Bolton.
Factoring in all of that, Indicud has the sheen of a cinematic blockbuster. At 70 minutes, it certainly has cinematic length, too: "Guess I'm just a star of my movie," Cudi thinks aloud on "Mad Solar". Unfortunately, it also has no substance. From the first notes of the melodramatic opening instrumental "The Resurrection of Scott Mescudi", it's pretty easy to size up where Cudi's head is at these days, thanks to serrated, booming production underscored by a heartbeat-like drum lurch. It's ominous but hollow stuff. Ever prone to grandiose proclamations, Cudi wastes no time on Indicud; "You know I'm unfuckwittable!" he belts, his chest fully puffed. He's certainly putting his money where his mouth is, but to ill effect; though A$AP Rocky and Kendrick drop by, they do just enough to collect the paycheck and hit the door. Old heads RZA and Too $hort roll through and check in and out just as unremarkably. Nothing sticks. From the outset, he's more concerned with the soundscape shrapnel left over from WZRD than he is with synthesizers, a tool with which he's more effective.
For someone who's attained such a following, Cudi is remarkably unlikeable. Confessions like "Just What I Am"'s  "In my spare time, punching walls, fucking up my hand/ I know that shit sound super cray, but if you had my life you’d understand" come off as humblebrags about just how tough it is to be famous. He seethes about being G.O.O.D. Music's "black sheep" and calls haters "pussies." Outside of the occasional nugget of calm-- the HAIM and Hit-Boy collab "Red Eye", maybe-- Indicud is one long, increasingly grating vent. And if rage isn't your thing, don't worry about sifting through Indicud's softer side, capped by the nine-minute slog "Afterwards (Bring Yo' Friends)". Fashioned as a late-night dance-party jam, it's built around sensationally off-putting come-hithers by soft rock titan Michael Bolton as well as Cudi's woozy synths kicking up dirt in the name of "atmosphere."
Long gone are the days of the spongy "Pursuit of Happiness" as well as the Trojan Horse that initially brought Kid Cudi through our gates, "Day 'n' Nite". "I look for peace, but see, I don't attain," he chanted on that song. Now, he's officially off Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music imprint-- it's amicable, Cudi insists, and he'll carry on with his own label, Wicked Awesome. Still, he looks for war in Indicud; he can't find anyone to fight, but he rages anyway.


Eluvium's commanding new double LP was supposed to be the immediate successor to the drone artist's 2007 album Copia. Although there's been five years of mixed successes in between, it's Copia's contemporary at least in terms of quality, providing an alternately delicate and deluging take on Matthew Cooper's penchant for elegant piano and dreamy electronics.

Nightmare Ending

Ambient music has plenty of stargazers, but not many stars. There are so many people working in subtly different but broadly similar styles, and so much of their music is less keen to develop the individual persona than to dissolve it in a universalist hum. One exception is Matthew Cooper, who has spent the past decade becoming a touchstone for contemporary indie ambient music. As Eluvium, Cooper has staked out an ambient brand that blends piano-playing in the styles of classical minimalism and French Impressionism with dreamy electronics and guitar drones derived from IDM and shoegaze. It should not diminish his talent as an arranger to hazard that his centralizing influence probably rests on his impulse for accessibility above intricacy. Cooper's music can be light or dark, vehement or mild, romantic or hopeless, but it is always shaped into emotionally lucid, easily habitable spaces.
Still, Cooper's stature is surprising when you consider that he hasn't released a great record since 2007. Copia was the highlight because it combined modes that were isolated on his prior releases-- from the Satie-like piano jingles of An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death to the grainy, radiant drones of Talk Amongst the Trees-- with expanded acoustic instrumentation, resulting in a majestic statement that sounded like the work of an artistic thinker rather than a fine technician of incidental sound. Copia at last meets its match in Nightmare Ending, Eluvium’s commanding new double LP. That it was supposed to be Copia's immediate successor might make you slap your forehead over Cooper's five years of mixed successes: the low-impact ambient techno of his Martin Eden alias, the tepid vocal-centric pop of Similes, and the dark, noisy Static Nocturne (the best of the bunch). But perhaps Cooper couldn't finish Nightmare Ending until he repeated the process that produced Copia, gathering new fuel for this bonfire of an album. The bided time pays off in what feels like a career-spanning best-of that happens to contain all new music.
Alternately delicate and deluging, the 80-plus minutes of music that compose Nightmare Ending are wrought together with a heft and thrust that banish the aftertaste of Cooper's most recent EPs, which collected leftover dregs from Similes. This tremendous collection holds electronics-encased piano themes (e.g. the breathtaking dawn of "Don’t Get Any Closer" and the Harold Budd-like "Covered in Writing"), rich orchestral fogs that recall Copia ("Warm"and "Unknown Variation"), and rhythmically roiling dark clouds resembling Static Nocturne ("By the Rails", "Envenom Mettle"). Elegant little solo piano compositions, insistent with nostalgic repetitions, periodically surface through the heavy drapings of texture and harmony, proving refreshing for it. Cooper even redeems the ambient pop that derailed him on Similes by roping in a ringer, Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan, to sing on the tender closer "Happiness".
Cooper reportedly first conceived of Nightmare Ending as "a way of helping loosen his self-imposed ideals of perfection," which provides a clue as to why the record makes such an impact. Cooper has never made anything terrible, but the greatest danger to which his music succumbs is to be too perfect, too placid and undisturbed, too perfunctorily lovely and sad. Nightmare Ending, on the other hand, is always bursting out through its own imperfections and impulsive gestures, with a wide emotional spectrum pumped full of fresh life from when Cooper returned to finish it years later. It's a long glorious exhalation of energies not actually dissipated, as it seemed for a while, but only multiplying in force under suppression.


The veteran DJ’s first solo EP confidently navigates a full spectrum of emotion, imbuing her tracks with a sense of wonder.

Fluids of Emotion

Sweat, saliva, tears—at peak time, the dancefloor brings all fluids to the fore. For Eris Drew, whose adolescence was soundtracked by the distinct mix of industrial, house, garage, and trance at mid-’90s Chicago raves, the scene behind the DJ booth is similarly visceral. As a primarily vinyl DJ, Drew leans into the physicality of mixing—dragging a record across the needle to scratch; pressing, with some force, to pitch-match tracks on the fly. Her ideal live setup involves decks stacked on top of cinder blocks. But for all her visceral performances, Drew speaks with effusive sensitivity about crying while mixing. To Drew, certain songs carry deep-seated traces of former lovers and past traumas. On Fluids of Emotion, the veteran DJ’s first solo EP, she confidently navigates that spectrum of sentiments, imbuing her tracks with a similar sense of wonder.
In a world of high-fidelity dance parties and listening bars, Drew stands defiantly against audiophile puritanism. To her, raving is about pushing one’s body past its healthy breaking point—“Every soundsystem that I heard in Chicago was made to crack you open,” she’s remarked. That raw intensity is evident from the first snare hit on the titular opening track. Powered by a shuffling breakbeat so taut it sounds like it might snap, “Fluids of Emotion” carries the tactile qualities of live mixing—the drums might cut out entirely for a four-count, leaving a bouncing synthesizer to hang in the air playfully, before an exaggerated scratch brings the drum record back in. By reproducing the patterns of turntablism—scratching, doubling, pitch manipulation—in the controlled environment of a recording studio, small imperfections become intentional. The track’s vocal sample—a flat, alien-like voice that names various reasons for crying (“joy...pain”)—vacillates between emotional extremes, further distancing Drew from traditional hierarchies of taste and restraint.
“Transcendental Access Point,” with its locomotive synths and snappy four-on-the-floor beat, initially plays things a bit closer to the vest. But then, just as the synthesizers begin to build to a crescendo, Drew removes the melody, and an extended spoken passage takes center stage. In a soft, even tone, ethnobotanist Kathleen Harris describes bearing witness to “a beautiful storm of harpsichord notes that were moving and dancing with an apparent individual and collective will.” We soon discover she’s under the influence of DMT; she tries the “pure substance” again in 1975, the year of Drew’s birth, nodding to the DJ’s belief in divine symbols and patterns. “You can choose to ignore the coincidences in your life, or you choose to let them give it meaning, kind of like dreams,” Drew has said, describing her almost devotional commitment to certain beliefs.
Drew’s work is informed by an interwoven series of faith systems, some self-generated and others more widely known. Her concept of a divine feminine rhythm called The Motherbeat stands at the center of her work; for Drew, this LSD-induced realization came to represent the healing qualities of music more broadly. She also espouses Discordianism, a belief in chaos as the guiding force of society. These ideas coalesce on the EP’s only B-side track, the slow-burning “So Much Love to Give.” With soaring Orbital synths, a deep, diva-esque vocal, and a wooden beat that seems ready to collapse on itself, the track is at once spacious and precarious.
In a vacuum, those heady dogmas might overshadow the understated elegance that Drew hones on Fluids of Emotion—seamlessly connecting genres like trance and jungle with a playfulness that speaks to her love for underground dance music and deep roots in the community. There’s no esoteric belief system required to appreciate a moment of unexpected brightness like the bird calls that close the album, evoking the euphoric exhaustion of leaving the club at dawn. Her aggressive style of mixing may alienate listeners accustomed to subtle fade-ins and precise beat-matching. But those comfortable with the sweaty, porous, chaotic nature of the rave will find moments of transcendence in its flaws.


On his latest album of country-influenced indie rock, Dave Benton takes surprising, subtle turns in songs of indecision, introspection, and alienation.

HOUSE OF CONFUSION

HOUSE OF CONFUSION, the third studio album from Trace Mountains, is the fruit of joblessness. After being laid off from his position at a warehouse, primary songwriter Dave Benton, formerly of LVL UP, continued to rise early, devoting his morning hours to writing songs and practicing guitar. His latest album is a tribute to the transience of the past year, a tattooed heart enclosing the word “uncertainty.”
In the time that Benton might have spent touring behind 2020’s warmly received Lost in the Country, he instead traveled “on the road in my mind.” He’s at his happiest imagining the freedom of a rural highway, and at his very lowest on the sad, stunning “LATE.” “The city makes you nervous,” he sings—and so do the synths, interrupting the record’s earthy acoustic and pedal steel guitars with eerie artificiality. The moon, a friend on many tracks, here casts “cruel, sharp” light; the sun, by contrast, is “stark,” casting “dark, long shadows” down a city street during a miserable run for coffee. It’s as though his proximity to the modern world is leeching his spirit, making him anxious and paranoid. By the next track, “AMERICA,” he escapes, driving alone beneath a starry sky. The darkness that menaced him back in the city is a comfort now, welcoming and shielding him.
There’s a thrilling indecision in many of these songs. “I can’t be your friend,” he sings on one track, and then on the next, “You and I, we’re always friends, though.” In the sweet ballad “EYES ON THE ROAD,” home to one of the year’s greatest bridges, Benton calls the person in the driver’s seat “Daddy,” and then “buddy,” and then “honey.” He’ll take a risk in one line and then leap back, protecting himself in the next. You are left unsure exactly where he’ll come down; he doesn’t seem to know, either.
He plays a clever trick on “MORNINGSTAR”: Slow, droning guitars stretch like saltwater taffy across the lyrics about being “gone a while,” driving down “a “long, dark mile.” And then he sings the phrase “checking my phone,” and the instrumentation suddenly becomes staccato and fragmented, the same way the mere fact of having a phone in your hand can shift your attention. It’s a gorgeous, subtle move.
The full-band arrangements offer a compelling mirror to Benton’s inward-facing lyrics: His accompanists provide rich pillows for his fragile songs to rest in. Drummer Greg Rutkin, also formerly of LVL UP, spreads a low fog of cymbals over the opening and closing tracks. Drops of what sounds like a xylophone drift into the mix like motes of dust in morning light. Listening to the album end to end is like closing a loop, or drifting off to sleep and then waking again, finding that the shadows have shifted around you.
Benton may have written HOUSE OF CONFUSION in isolation, but it’s clear he yearns for connection. His choruses were built for campfire-style singalongs; his arrangements will echo to the very furthest, darkest corners of crowded venues. “The hardest part,” he sings, in the closing moments of this album, “is over now.” Listening to these generous, openhearted songs, it’s easy to believe him.

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Sarah Kirkland Snider's Penelope cemented her as one of the decade’s most gifted up-and-coming modern classical composers*.* Her new group of songs, Unremembered, is more restrained than Penelope, but no less haunting. It features Shara Worden on vocals, alongside DM Stith and members of So Percussion and ICE.

Unremembered

Released five years ago, Sarah Kirkland Snider's Penelope cemented her as one of the decade’s more gifted, up-and-coming modern classical composers for the voice. Emotionally fraught and cloudy, the words used an amnesiac soldier’s past as a lens to explore memory and mortality over muted explosions of electronics and a weighty, restless orchestra. Her new group of songs, Unremembered, is more restrained than Penelope, but no less haunting.
Like Penelope, Unremembered features Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond on vocals. This time, Asthmatic Kitty vet DM Stith and Clogs’ Padma Newsome join her, while the ensemble is a collection of all-star new music players from ICE and So Percussion. Its vague stories are set in shadowy old houses, endless meadows, sinister thickets and forests lost souls enter to never emerge from. Snider’s multiple narrators spiral deep into dark memories of these places. The libretto comes from the poet Nathaniel Bellows, who takes his formal cues from 20th century imagists like Emily Dickinson and William Wordsworth, describing gothic New England vistas.
The foreboding and chaotic tenor of the music mirrors the fear and horror of the characters: Ghosts are ever-present, evoked by the constant surges of soupy, heavily reverbed background vocals that rise and fall behind each song’s primary narrator—either Worden, Stith, or both. Often, these anonymous voices assume a role in the story: In the pastoral "The Song", they are echoing bird calls, but on the more macabre "The Estate", they become taunting spirits ("The field has breath, the pond a voice...They told me then to leave this place/ Or stay and lose it all"). Eventually, they become buried underneath Snider’s mournful, kinetic instrumental figures (glissandi-punctuated violin lines, chimes, harp, or Snider’s own celeste), which sometimes recall the work of Snider’s former teacher, David Lang, and at more tuneful moments, Max Richter. Most songs build to booming climaxes, that dissipate along with the "vapor of the dead" at the end of each song.
The record is best when Snider’s music captures both the beauty and foreboding of Bellows’ setting at once; in restrained pieces like "The Orchard" and "The Past", she lets subversive dissonance creep slowly into her simple accompaniments. Many of Bellows' poems feature images of mirroring, water, and hazy vantages of landscapes or spirits, and Snider’s musical landscape complements this with a rippling, echoing quality. Her melodic shapes are as vague as the scenes she is describing: It is intelligent and evocative, but it takes a focused listen, and is best enjoyed with Bellows’ words on hand for reference. His poetry interacts closely with the musical pivots. Unremembered definitely lacks the haute tension and the fierce musical contrasts of Penelope, but there are plenty of pleasurably uncanny moments. Even in these more contemplative scenarios, Snider still keeps visceral emotion on the surface of her music.


To tell you the truth, it never even occurred to me. Sure, there were the countless nights spent listening only ...

Give Up

To tell you the truth, it never even occurred to me. Sure, there were the countless nights spent listening only to "(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan", the apparent one-off collaboration between Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello that served as the brilliant centerpiece of Dntel's Life Is Full of Possibilities. And there were my frequent, semi-coherent rants about how "Evan and Chan" was not only one of the best songs of 2001, but perhaps the perfect synthesis of IDM production and indie pop songwriting. The thought of further collaboration between Tamborello and Gibbard, however, never crossed my mind, so when I heard last year that they were collaborating on another single, I shit a brick-- and when it was later revealed that the single had evolved into a full-length album, I practically shit a whole firehouse.
First, the bad news: Give Up doesn't offer 45 solid minutes of the same wholesale excellence that appeared in condensed form on "(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan"; if anything, the album's occasional missteps serve to elucidate what exactly made the first collaboration between Tamborello and Gibbard so effective. Still, the core tension between Tamborello's intricate production and Gibbard's cutting voice makes Give Up a pretty damned strong record, and one with enough transcendent moments to forgive it its few substandard tracks and ungodly lyrical blunders.
Tamborello and Gibbard put their best foot forward with "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight", which exemplifies the two best elements of this entire collaboration: contrast and subtlety. Here, Gibbard's vocal melody and Tamborello's instrumentation build independently to a perfectly orchestrated emotional climax, replete with hiss-laden sampled strings and ethereal background vocals. There's a noticeable clash between Gibbard's emotive singing and the upbeat drum machine line that drives the track's second half, but Tamborello's production is loaded with enough warm, melodic instrumentation to provide a surprisingly apt background for Gibbard's sincere tenor. The song also benefits from possessing some of the album's stronger lyrics.
"Such Great Heights", the album's debut single, offers Give Up's strongest melody, but its lyrical parallels to N'Sync's "God Must Have Spent a Little More Time on You" make it just a bit hard to swallow. It hurts me to hear the words, "I am thinking it's a sign/ That the freckles in our eyes are mirror images/ And when we kiss they're perfectly aligned," sung to such a unique and riveting melody. Of course, the song is a fine work of literature compared to "Sleeping In", which claims the record's most thoroughly cringe-worthy lines: "Last night I had the strangest dream/ Where everything was exactly how it seemed/ Where there was never any mystery/ About who shot John F. Kennedy." I realize there were probably some time constraints, but the vivid and intriguing lyrics of "Evan and Chan" proved Gibbard capable of much, much better than "I want so badly to believe that there is truth and love is real."
Fortunately, Give Up overcomes its highly questionable lyrical choices, and the sometimes painful duets between Gibbard and indie folkster Jen Wood, purely on the strength of Gibbard's consistently strong melodies, which carry far greater impact in the context of Tamborello's hyperactive electro-pop than they have on recent Death Cab for Cutie releases. And Tamborello's production gives the intricate precision of Life Is Full of Possibilities a caffeinated overhaul, here forsaking the time-honored glitch of that album for bright, danceable beats. While it may be impressive that the unified and cohesive vision of Give Up was the result of a par avion collaboration, it's anything but surprising given the talent behind it and the immense chemistry shared by these two musicians.


Chicago rapper Saba is a frequent collaborator with Chance the Rapper. His latest mixtape, Bucket List Project, is about the experiences we long to pack into one lifetime.

Bucket List Project

Many were first introduced to Chicago rapper Saba as another local artist in Chance the Rapper’s orbit: he was a standout voice on Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment’s Surf (with an uncredited verse on “SmthnthtIwnt”) and more recently he guested on Coloring Book’s “Angels.” Both songs create a decent-enough sample size to assess what exactly Saba is all about: spirituality. He isn’t just fascinated by religion and its role in black families and communities, he’s fixated on the human spirit and the soul, too—both in the eternal sense and the mortal one. His latest mixtape, Bucket List Project, is about the experiences we long to pack into one lifetime. “They ask me ‘why Bucket List?’’’ he raps on “California.” “You know the bucket list: I finally climbed the rock, made it to the top of the precipice/I came from the pessimism of inner city as it is,” detailing the obstacles he’s hurdled to come within arm’s reach of his dream. To that end, the mixtape encourages listeners and guests to find the spirit necessary to achieve their own goals before they die.
Saba has always dealt in a hopeful optimism steeped in pragmatism. Chance’s joy overflows, rooted in an unshakable confidence that no matter what, we gon’ be alright. Saba isn’t always so sure about that, but he wants to believe it. His writing is more analytical, taking stock of everything from the flawed U.S. education system to his own value, grading on a weighted scale. On his breakout project, 2014’s ComfortZone, he recounted the observations he’s accrued living on Chicago’s West Side, revealing uncanny abilities to scrutinize and to self-assess in the process (on “401k” “All my niggas did time and got beat up/But I was never street enough to grow up and be a thug”). Bucket List Project, which shares similar sonic space, picks up where its predecessor left off, telling West Side stories that expose the runoff of American corruption. But with death seemingly lurking around every city corner, it wonders, openly, about impermanence, too.
The imagery is overwhelmingly theological on Bucket List—paradise, demons, heaven, prayers, blessings, preachers—usually with intent to make sense of a chaotic natural order. He seeks an ear from anyone listening (human or divine), and solutions from anyone who has them. “Call Obama, Jesus, Yeezus/He can save Chicago from the demons and the deacons,” Saba raps sarcastically on the Noname-assisted “Church/Liquor Store,” a Common-esque hood log that notes the role community institutions play in creating a toxic atmosphere. The lyric pinpoints a very particular, and prevalent, response to social inequity: passing the buck. Saba doesn’t really offer any answers, either, opting instead to witness, but what he does offer are insights.
Bucket List Project isn’t as complete a journey as ComfortZone, but for the much of its groovy runtime, it is superbly written and performed. Saba is a crafty storyteller who makes full use of his long memory and slithering wordplay. On the xylophone-laden “Stoney,” a ride in a new car becomes a time machine back to past journeys that helped to inform his present. Some of his lyrics have devastating impact. He can open wounds with one-liners as simply as “How you lonely in a room with God?” or “I wish I didn’t have to be famous to be important,” but he’s just as capable of rattling off a razor-sharp diagnosis like this one from “American Hypnosis,” a reliving of personal traumas: “Had to learn my mama depression wasn’t my own/Had to feel the pressures of the pessimism/Trying to convince me that realism was a better vision.”
In Bucket List Project’s margins, Saba has several people, some of them notable Chicagoan musicians, sharing their personal bucket lists. Among them: Chance, Lupe Fiasco, guest Jean Deaux, and local rapper Stunt Taylor. One fan wants to go one-on-one with former Chicago Bulls guard Derrick Rose. Another wants to play soccer on rooftops in Tokyo. Deaux wants to smoke a blunt with Beyoncé and de-gentrify Chicago neighborhoods. It’s a wishing well filled to the brim with unfulfilled dreams, further exploring the underlying thesis that inactivity is, in a way, similar to death. One outro speaks to the core of that message: “Hailin’ from the West Side, nigga tryna make it to the Grammys...at least somewhere. Somewhere more than where a muthafucka been.” Bucket List Project finds Saba going somewhere specific: forward.


After a long hiatus, the big-tent UK pop band returns with a joyful but middling album that’s a little bit of everything they’ve always been.

Bombay Bicycle Club: Everything Else Has Gone Wrong

Everything Else Has Gone Wrong

Ask 10 people to describe the sound of Bombay Bicycle Club you’ll probably get 10 different answers; it all depends when they got into them. Perhaps you thrashed along to Bombay Bicycle Club’s post-punk jams at the pub in 2009, when they released their debut I Had The Blues But I Shook Them Loose; or maybe you were more into the stark genre-flip of their 2010 follow-up, Flaws, which was more freakish whisper-folk. If you got into them around 2012-2014, you’d have heard more expansive ideas, and a rush of electronic lifeblood—particularly on their best record to date, 2014’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. Throughout their career, the UK band shifted from one identity to the next, and when they hit their peak, they announced they were going to take an indefinite hiatus.
But as hiatuses in music are wont to do, it didn’t last very long. The band reconvened in 2018 to discuss playing some celebratory shows for the 10th anniversary of their debut album. But doing a reunion tour without new music didn’t feel right. The result is Everything Else Has Gone Wrong, a brightly hued record that combines frontman Jack Steadman’s crate-digging and synth-noodling with guitar-driven hooks. With its full-chested choruses, it’s a record that—like the eerie video for the title track in which his bandmates literally dig Steadman out of a grave—seems to cheer: “We’re not dead yet! We’re not dead yet!”
The palpable joy of Everything Else indicates that the hiatus was healthy for the band. It was a decision that was born of the fact that, having found success while still at school, the four-piece has never known any other career, and were getting complacent. This is a playful record, from the swooning brass that opens the album on “Get Up” to the squiggly synth-flute sample on the shuffling “Do You Feel Loved?” Its propulsive rhythms often feel perfectly engineered for sunset slots at summer festivals. As the hook of “Is It Real” swells into a call-and-response chant, it’s easy to imagine muddy feet having fun with its frantic rhythm in a Glastonbury field. As they did on So Long, the band take great delight in disappearing down into rabbit holes of sound, as with “Let You Go,” which crescendoes in a flurry of chopped vocals, guitars, and synths.
While the sound is more swaggering and unashamedly stadium-sized, Bombay Bicycle Club’s lyrics remain decidedly introverted. Steadman will sing of obsessively thinking of someone while listening to music on headphones or not being able to speak due to shyness. In the album announcement, the band indicated that this would be an album of “music in a time of crisis” and “finding kernels of hope and renewal in dire situations.” However, these strongly worded descriptions belie the fact that Steadman’s lyrics largely seem to deal with internal mutterings and a kind of personal, low-level malaise. On the muted, downbeat “Good Day,” he briefly touches on “the melting ice caps in my drink” but tosses it aside to dwell on aging, the loss of friends, and the listless refrain: “I just want to have a good day/And it’s only me that’s standing in my way”.
To what extent has it become fashionable to frame music in the context of generalized “crisis”? Many of these songs don’t sound specific to 2020 in any sense other than that the Bombay Bicycle Club that made them as a grown, arena-filling version of itself. Their greatest triumph is the title track—a song that, it could be argued, adheres most closely to their theme of hope in a crisis, thanks to the hand-clap-driven, lackadaisical hook that’s an absolute joy to sing along to: “Keep the stereo on/Everything else has gone wrong.” With a synth melody that blooms red like a siren, the song builds to a fantastically proggy conclusion.
But the song, which climaxes with Steadman crying out that he’s “found [his] second wind”, is ultimately about writer’s block. This is what holds Bombay Bicycle Club’s latest iteration back: a tendency for the self-referential. On “Is It Real,” they deal in nostalgia, singing about watching old tape reels, while musically weaving together strands of their different sounds through the ages: skittering drums, sweet-voiced indie singalongs, and a psychedelic break. It’s masterfully handled, but ultimately, not a “kernel of hope or renewal in a dire situation.” On Everything Else, the band reminds us why it is that they’re still so beloved after 10 years in the game (those earworm melodies are unshakeable!) but they also cling to their upper-tier festival billing without ever truly being controversial or pushing boundaries. This is the sound of an ever-curious, shape-shifting band finally finding the confidence to tell us who they really are. But they are not telling us anything we didn’t already know.

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The cantankerous Smashing Pumpkin embraces his vision of country music, but the lightest, breeziest songs of his career come with their own peculiar Corganian paradox.

Cotillions

Billy Corgan has forced his fans to reconcile a whole mess of contradictions over the past 30 years. He’s the self-branded zero who became a hero to millions. He’s the would-be Vince McMahon who also owned a tea shop. He’s a friend to cute cats and ugly monsters alike. He is both the bull-headed autocrat who does and says whatever he wants regardless of what anyone thinks, and the thin-skinned reactionary who seems to care very much. His days as a multi-platinum, game-changing force are two decades in the rear view, yet he remains a towering figure in the pop-cultural landscape, if only because he’s been one of this century’s most reliable sources of WTF clickbait.
So it’s telling that, in the thick of the most recent Smashing Pumpkins reunion drama, Corgan resurrected—and rebranded—his long-dormant solo career. In 2017, he issued Ogilala under his birth name, William Patrick Corgan, making it his first solo effort since The Future Embrace was released 12 years prior. It was a surprising move; the various recombinant versions of the Pumpkins he had fielded in the interim underscored the fact that Corgan was the last musician on Earth who needed a solo vehicle. But the understated Ogilala suggested that Corgan wasn’t just seeking an outlet for quieter music (something his main band has always been happy to accommodate). Rather, its acoustic and piano-based meditations represented both a dismantling of the Pumpkins’ wall of sound, and of the Billy Corgan persona itself, by projecting a grace and humility at odds with his combative public image.
Still, an acoustic Corgan album couldn’t help but sound like Smashing Pumpkins Unplugged, and the string arrangements woven through Ogilala offered not-too-distant echoes of his band’s epic bombast. So on his second William Patrick Corgan effort, Cotillions, he takes that same busker aesthetic to a place even the Pumpkins feared to tread: deep into the heartland. Cotillions presents Corgan’s vision of country music, a genre he had long dismissed until he recently realized that its sepia-toned portraits of America’s past offered insight into his family’s hardscrabble history. And like everything he does, Corgan goes all in: The album was written following a road trip through America and recorded with a crew of Nashville session veterans (along with current Pumpkins guitarist Jeff Schroeder and one-time touring bassist Katie Cole). It’s rife with impressionistic Southern-gothic images of old-time religion, girls named Clementine, and suicides in the desert. But beyond the novelty of Corgan donning his cowboy hat in earnest, what distinguishes Cotillions from anything in his discography is its mood. Quite simply, these are some of the most casual and contented songs he’s ever produced.
Corgan’s droning voice isn’t the most natural fit for these rustic settings. But he embraces his fish-out-of-water position by letting his unvarnished vocals playfully scuff against the fiddlin’, pedal-steel sweeps, and female backing vocals that gussy up these tunes. Off-the-cuff charmers like the ’69-Stones honky tonk of “Buffalo Boys” and the Depression-themed dustbowl ballad “Hard Times” function as a sort of Westworld simulacrum of country music, where the close attention to period authenticity ultimately amplifies their uncanny qualities. (Few country songs open with a line like “scream like jets off to Orion,” as the latter does.) But the album also proves Corgan is at his most disarming in intimate spaces: The delicate, finger-picked lullaby “Fragile, the Spark” is a reminder that he covered Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” way before it was cool, while “Neptulius” is a work of soft-focus beauty whose banjo-kissed melody line ebbs and flows like the gentlest of ocean waves.
According to Pumpkins lore, “Neptulius” is a title that’s been bouncing around Corgan’s head for quite some time—it was reportedly the original proposed name of the band’s 1994 castaways collection Pisces Iscariot, a record that showed, for all his musical excesses, Corgan was a shrewd editor when it came to sequencing his proper albums. Alas, that acumen fails him here. At 17 tracks and 62 minutes, Cotillions is advertised as a double album, but it never really forms a discernible dramatic arc or a logical flow that suggests four discrete sides. Instead, the most cataclysmic songs (like the title track) arrive too early and the most languid ones (like the piano reverie “6+7”) turn up when the record should be building to a climax. The sense of stasis is compounded by the fact that, like Ogilala, Cotillions is 100 percent drum-free, and Corgan’s laidback strums aren’t enough to keep the momentum going once fiddle-inflected serenades like “Dancehall” and “Cri De Coeur” start to blur into one another. For all its surface simplicity, Cotillions is saddled with its own peculiar Corganian paradox: the lightest, breeziest songs of his career add up to a demanding slog of a record.


With “Kiss” as its lead single, Parade reeled in listeners. The rest of the album featured fresh turns of minimalist funk. Prince isn’t known for his subtlety, but Parade proves perhaps he should be.

Prince / The Revolution: Parade (Music From the Motion Picture Under the Cherry Moon)

Sometime in April, 1985, as Prince was waiting for Around the World in a Day to show up in stores, he walked into a studio, sat down at the drum kit, and began the sessions for his next album by recording the drum parts for its first four songs, consecutively, in a single take. That seems like the practice of a genius auteur who knows exactly what he wants, which Prince of course was—except for the times when he was a genius auteur who kept changing his mind.
After Purple Rain, Prince spent the rest of the decade trying to repeat its success in theaters (he came closest with Batman, in which he doesn’t even appear). Under the Cherry Moon, his second film, is an indulgent stinkeroo: a black-and-white tragicomedy that’s not quite a musical. Its soundtrack album, Parade, on the other hand, is breathtaking. Raw, spare, and unflaggingly eccentric, it sounds radically unlike Purple Rain, Around the World, and everything else released in 1986, but it's baited with that year’s most brilliant No. 1 single, “Kiss”—a song that taught its listeners how to hear the rest of the album.
“Kiss” is a slash in the air surrounded by negative space. Whenever the song is played, it seems to open up a vacuum around it. It’s almost unfathomably funky, but it keeps going silent, and its silence yanks the groove forward. Prince famously gave the song to protege group Mazarati as a demo, then snatched it back once he heard the remarkable arrangement that producer David Z had come up with (most of Prince’s version is actually Mazarati’s recording, including their “aah-AAA-aah” backing vocals). Still, it would never have occurred to anyone else to make the recording’s groove deeper and the performance more thrilling by mixing out the bass altogether and singing it in a delicate falsetto. (That’s why he was Prince and we aren’t.)
The rest of Parade makes similarly ingenious use of the zero mark on the mixing desk’s faders. Prince asked jazz arranger Clare Fischer to score and record orchestrations for every song on the album except “Kiss,” then (mostly) peeled them right back off. Even so, the orchestra is fully present and flickering between dissonance and consonance for the opening track, “Christopher Tracy’s Parade”—although they’ve still got Prince’s mammoth, processed drum sound keeping them in shadow.
Christopher Tracy had been Prince’s character in the movie; “Christopher” was also the pseudonym he chose to be credit by as writer for the Bangles’ “Manic Monday,” released a couple of months earlier. But “Christopher Tracy’s Parade” had formerly been about an actual member of Prince’s band: he’d initially recorded it as “Wendy’s Parade,” a title that survives via a shoutout in the middle of “Kiss.” It echoes the form and subject of the Beatles’ “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!,” but as soon as its horns and flutes fade (and that gigantic beat pauses for a breath, then continues as before), Prince shakes off the psychedelic dreamcoat of Around the World in a Day. When he grabs the mic again and lets loose a whoop and a groan, we’re in an even starker groove than “Kiss”: the brief, insistent “New Position,” which is mostly about sex and also kind of about the realignment Prince was demanding of his listeners. There’s nothing behind him but the bass-and-drum groove, some steel percussion, and eventually the voices of his invaluable bandmates Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman. (He sings, “I can make u happy,” and they harmonize back at him: “H.A.P.P.Y.!” Then he rhymes it with “I won’t be your pappy,” to which they chirp “P.U.S.S.Y.!”)
Parade was a Top Five album. Given how fresh it still sounds, you might imagine that it would have inspired other artists to try what Prince called his “new funk,” but you’d be wrong. The direction R&B took in the wake of Parade had a lot more to do with Prince’s former associates Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, whose production work for Janet Jackson, the Human League and Force M.D.’s was pointing toward New Jack Swing. What did endure beyond Parade was Prince’s new habit of perpetually tinkering with his albums after they seemed to be finished. The album as initially sequenced would have been very different and significantly less fun: All four songs that were released as singles were added later on. As it is, there are still a few throwaways on it, like the formless instrumental “Venus de Milo” and the interstitial doodle “I Wonder U,” as well as incongruous if charming moments like “Do U Lie?,” a ridiculous stroll through bistro jazz that lets Prince try on a few silly accents for flirtation's sake.
Still, the slow, elegiac “Sometimes It Snows in April” stayed in Prince’s live repertoire right up to his final show. And the core of the album is its dance tracks, bracingly crisp and airy, with those offhanded register-vaulting vocals and that peculiar rhythmic lurch no other artist could duplicate. With “Kiss” as its key and signpost, Parade makes the case that the secret engine of Prince’s funk was what it left out.


What is the difference between American and Italian minimalism? A preeminent example of the latter is this 1979 record, one of the most sumptuous, spiritual ambient albums of any era or provenance.

Motore Immobile

Italian progressive rock icon and all-around renaissance man Franco Battiato once sought out violinist Giusto Pio for violin lessons. A member of Orchestra Sinfonica Di Milano Della RAI, Pio assisted Battiato as his sound was undergoing a furious metamorphosis, from the prog rock of his earliest albums to a more minimalist sound of the late ’70s (in this regard, Battiato is Italy’s Brian Eno). Soon after, the duo would pivot towards pop song, with some of Battiato’s early ’80s albums selling over a million copies, which led to the two collaborating on a Eurovision hit by 1984.
In 1979, the same year Battiato made L'Era Del Cinghiale Bianco (with Pio handling arrangements), Battiato also produced Pio’s first solo album, Motore Immobile, two diametrically opposed efforts that showcased the duo’s musical range. And while the former marked the tandem’s first foray into pop, the latter stands as one of the towering beacons of Italian minimalism and one of the most sumptuous ambient albums of any era. Recently, there’s been a greater appreciation for that era in Italian music with the Milanese label Die Schachtel reissuing stark classics like Luciano Cilio’s Dell’Universo Assente and Raul Lovisonni and Franceso Messina’s Prati baganati del Monte Analogo. But Pio’s debut has long been unobtainable. Originally released on the revered Cramps Records label (home to operatic progressives like Area and Demetrio Stratos as well as albums by American composers like John Cage and Robert Ashley), Motore Immobile has been near impossible to track down since its release. And with Pio’s recent passing earlier this year, it’s a fitting tribute to the man to have his greatest work see reissue now courtesy of the newcomer Soave label.
Motore Immobile is one of Italian minimalism’s most beatific iterations, with an approach that brings to mind Italian cuisine, meaning a concentration on a handful of quality ingredients so as to reveal the profundities contained within such simple material. Though with food it’s to reveal the essence of the earth; with this music, it’s to experience something more celestial. The first side of the album features the seventeen-minute title track, wherein Pio explores the sonorities to be had in two church organs, a hum originating from the soft palette of vocalist Martin Kleist, and Pio’s own violin. A burst of organ opens “Motore Immobile” as if the start of a Sunday service, though it soon seems as if the keys are stuck, holding the note well past the breaking point. Ever so carefully, the keys of that chord peel off and the hum of a voice in harmony can be heard alongside that drone. A minute in, Pio’s violin ever so gently sneaks in alongside the two organs.
It is then that the piece appears to reach a standstill. There’s not much in the way of an “event,” but that’s beside the point. The held keys of the organs resemble the op-art of Bridget Riley, the drones producing an aural moiré. Pio’s patience is remarkable throughout, letting the horsehair of his bow move exquisitely slow across the strings, ever so subtly keying a shift in the drones. And so subtle and subliminal are the exhalations of Kleist that if you listen on headphones, you might wonder if you’re actually humming along with these held tones. When the organs again revert back to their opening chord, it gives the impression that “Motore Immobile” could just as easily continue on into infinity.
“Ananta” which comprises the second side, again uses a similar approach to suspended tones, this time with just piano and organ. With just the sparest of ingredients, Pio makes something delectable. A glissade of piano notes opens the piece before again settling into the sustained drone of the organ. The piano then carefully moves one note at a time against that continuum, to the point of where the piece seems to reach a stasis, only to have the piano break that stillness with a flurry of notes. And with every new cascade, the organ’s drone shifts its center ever so slightly. But again, the piece’s greatest attribute is that it again gives the illusion of suspending the passage of time.
It’s hard to put a finger one just what distinguishes Italian minimalism from its American counterparts, but to my ears, it ultimately boils down to lineage. While Americans trace back to the rugged and mischievous works of La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, the Italians go back to the compositions of Giacinto Scelsi, whose microtonal sound edges toward the mystic. As a result, Italian minimalism tends to be more crystalline and ascetic (read: pure) than what can be found elsewhere. It’s telling that Pio grounds both of these extended compositions not in his violin work, but in the tones of the church organ. It’s a sound that still resonates during services throughout the duomos of Italy, and one on Pio’s Motore Immobile that too evokes a sense of the divine.


At age 69, Lana Del Rey’s father—boating enthusiast, real-estate agent, domain-name investor—makes his piano-playing debut on a major label. It’s totally fine.

Lost at Sea

I am writing about the pianist Rob Grant for the same reason you are likely reading about the 69-year-old serial entrepreneur: He is the father of Lizzy Grant, or Lana Del Rey, the American pop star who has expertly made and managed a mythical cosmology for more than a dozen years. Lana’s career has hinged repeatedly upon inverting tropes from America’s most gilded ages; the daughter landing the daddy a major-label debut late in life fits that inside-out paradigm, a dynastic flip-flop that suggests the family has always deserved what it did not already get.
Grant, the father, seems thrilled to play his part. In the rollout for his balmy piano LP, Lost at Sea, the lifelong boat enthusiast and son of a Navy aviator has cavorted up the Hudson River wearing Hawaiian shirts aboard a borrowed yacht with Lana at his side. Looking like a maritime Mike Pence, he has done his best Brian Wilson while donning Prada leather in a pristine Los Angeles xeriscape. A canny internet huckster with a profitable past, Grant even bought nepodaddy.com, a phrase now festooned across crop tops and badge sets. If Lost at Sea feels like some cosmic joke, kudos to Grant for being its winning and willing punchline, especially a week before his 70th birthday.
Thing is, Lost at Sea is a nice little album. Its 40 minutes are a self-contained wellness playlist of lovely piano miniatures, swaddled in lavish strings from the Budapest Art Orchestra and the graceful electronics of collaborators like Jack Antonoff, the ostensible guy Friday of the Lana empire. “I know I’m not Joni Mitchell/But I’ve got a Dad who plays like Billy Joel,” Lana slyly sings at the start of “Hollywood Bowl,” the second of their two songs together here. But Grant is not that kind of piano man, or at least not on Lost at Sea. Evoking the distant ambient music of Harold Budd and the virally confessional instrumentals of Joep Beving, the gentle Lost at Sea is more sylvan creek than turbulent tide or River of Dreams.
It is also not some austere solo meditation. The party line runs that Lost at Sea stems from an uninterrupted 75-minute improvisation cut in a California studio as workers waited on Lana to arrive during the Blue Bannisters sessions. (That’s Grant playing the piano on closer “Sweet Carolina,” using the same tender touch he displays on his own album.) Sure, that happened, but these 14 tracks were stitched together from sessions on three continents with an oft-sprawling cast.
The bulk of the work rests with Luke Howard, an Australian polyglot of minimalism who specializes in surfeits of the soporific. For most of these tracks, Howard ensconces snippets of Grant’s stepwise melodies inside orchestral tumescence or undergirds them with wispy circuitry. Some pieces are subtle, like “A Beautiful Delirium,” where Mellotron traces the piano like a gray highlighter. Others, like “The Poetry of Wind and Waves,” are only a few turns of the dial from Hollywood score grandeur. In both cases, this is high-production, low-stakes instrumental ambience. If this music of limited opalescence passed you by on a modern Windham Hill sampler during a stony Sunday afternoon, your reverie wouldn’t crack.
The truly captivating tracks avoid that compromised middle-ground. “A Delicate Mist Surrounds Me” is a 61-second solo gem, Grant playing a slow-motion round of chutes and ladders with a simple but reassuring theme. This is the lone moment where it feels like you’re resting your head against the piano’s bulwark while a loved one conjures comfort through the keys. Like those studio hands, I too could sit still in this space for 75 minutes.
To make “The Mermaid’s Lullaby,” which follows, Howard slows and stretches a piece Grant had intended to be a “brief piano interlude” (how most of these songs feel, anyway) until the instrument nearly disappears. It is gorgeous and ghostly, the extended undulations recalling Gavin Bryars’ landmark The Sinking of the Titanic and Nicholas Szczepanik’s wondrous obscurity Please Stop Loving Me. This tandem represents the extremes of Grant’s piano playing—the former as the output itself, the latter as mere input. They’re the pieces that make you consider new possibilities, not merely rest inside instrumental retreads.
For better and worse, Lost at Sea slides comfortably into the Decca Records roster and the wider ranks of contemporary classical crossover—pleasant and inoffensive, a landscape painting fit for the wall behind the couch. It is not an embarrassment, a punchline, or a gimmick. It is also not distinctive enough to transcend its backstory.
Really, what’s most vexing about Grant’s debut is a kind of reverse paternalism, where the father seems incapable of speaking or playing for himself. Lana is the lure to his marquee interviews, the mysterious star tantalizing with familial normalcy. And Howard, Antonoff, and all the rest pad his actual music like they’re a fastidious moving crew, so scared his delicate sounds will break when they encounter the rest of the world that they’ve smothered them in unnecessary padding. Grant’s plaintive and vulnerable piano lines, however modest they may be, are the best thing about an album in turn built and sold around them. Now that the novelty is gone, perhaps everyone can get out of the way and just let Nepo Daddy be Rob Grant.


Stop-gap EP from Justin Broadrick's most pop-oriented project foregrounds his memorable riffs and ringing climaxes.

Opiate Sun

The EP might be the ideal format for Justin Broadrick's music, regardless of his alias. Whether he's trying to erase your head via concrete-slab guitars in Napalm Death, reduce techno to a series of clockwork hammerblows with Final, or massage your pleasure centers with neo-shoegaze in Godflesh, Broadrick's music has a laudable singularity. The three-or-four-song dose mainlines his all-consuming mood of the moment without the potential dilution of trying to fill up a CD.
Broadrick claims to be channeling his long-unused (or presumed non-existent) pop instincts via Jesu, and the band's DNA always has too much of hard rock's cathartic oomph and pop's peaks and valleys to pass for ambient. But Jesu's extended-players like Silver, Lifeline, and now Opiate Sun do seem to bring out Broadrick's more memorable riffs and choruses. If nothing else, they foreground those riffs and ringing climaxes in a way that the hour-plus ebb-and-flow of Jesu or Conqueror isn't designed to do.
Opiate Sun isn't as good as the all-over bodiless sparkle of Lifeline, which may be the best non-collaborative release in Broadrick's unwieldy discography. It's more of a Jesu sampler, a four-song distillation of the band's major modes, with some of Broadrick's most accessible, ingratiating songwriting-- radio-ready if not for the tempos and the fuzz.
"Losing Streak" and the title track are more or less arena alt-rock at a snail's pace, almost cuddly and triumphant enough to be a Foo Fighters single, or maybe Probot if Dave Grohl had drafted Kevin Shields instead of Lemmy. (Plus, I swear, a hint of slow-motion southern rock grandeur in "Losing Streak"'s mid-song solo.) "Deflated" is one of those oxymorons Jesu do so well-- the angelic dirge-- with bass skirting doom metal while the guitar auditions for some early-1990s Creation Records A&R dude. "Morning Light" really is doom, the only out-and-out metal tune here, skewed only by Broadrick's multi-tracked sad-dude vox. Add it all up and (more or less) you've got Jesu.
So Opiate Sun is both the most recent fix for Jesu addicts anxiously awaiting album número tres, and an easy-access jump-on point for not-quite-yet-fans. Opiate Sun's heavy enough to act as gateway drug for those who still know Broadrick only as the guy behind Godflesh's decade-long bad day (if such creatures even exist). It will please the post-'gaze guitar-texture freaks who cream on contact with sonorous feedback. And it's memorable enough to hook those one-and-done consumers of the album-abjuring age. Not bad for four songs.


Music for Listening to Music to is La Sera's fourth album and its first with singer/bassist Katy Goodman's husband Todd Wisenbaker officially on board. Produced by Ryan Adams, it finds its way to a blend of Adams' alt-country and their winsome take on alt-rock.

La Sera: Music for Listening to Music to

Music for Listening to Music to

Calling an album Music for Listening to Music to seems at best a throwaway line, at worst an unfortunate, self-directed neg. La Sera's fourth album, its first with singer/bassist Katy Goodman's husband Todd Wisenbaker officially on board, does itself at least one disservice with it, subtly highlighting that this is La Sera's most tentative-sounding outing. Produced by Ryan Adams in the sole week he was able to spare from a demanding schedule, Music finds the line separating "casual-sounding" from "underbaked" and plays hopscotch.
That concentrated week with Adams produced a coherent sound, one that cleaves to Adams' alt-country wheelhouse. At their best, the duo harnesses wavering Ennio Morricone guitar and pairs it with indie pop pathos. "That's my mistake," Goodman allows mournfully in "Begins to Rain," as duelling bright guitars whine. Yet Adams' whims might be responsible for some of the weaker inclinations of the record: "I was certain that I could help her lose control a little bit more," he said of Goodman's vocal performance.
He's done that, but it wasn't a favor. On jangling opener "High Notes," Goodman's trill is less poised than we're accustomed to hearing. Whether losing purchase on a sustained note or dashing off the final syllables of a verse ("I'm sorry/ Is the song too slow?" goes one breathless, ironic phrase), the ex-Vivian Girls bassist's warble feels thin and skittish. Instead of embodying the pursed-lips defiance of its lyrics, the song lands like a just-OK bet thrown onto the bar. The difference between the voice pushed beyond its limits here and its smooth nonchalance on 2012's Sees the Light or the breezy multitracked comings and goings on the self-titled 2011 LP is noticeable.
The band still has a good feel for a certain kind of song: Wisenbaker's nimble, reverb'ed guitars and Goodman's coltish vocal line makes Music sound like nothing so much as the soundtrack to a '90s high-school dance. From the descending bluesy riff of "I Need an Angel" to the languid sway of "Take My Heart," the best songs recall nervous sweat, skittish dancing, and hopeful heartbreak. A notable exception to this mood is "Shadow of Your Love," which echoes hauntingly as if from a jukebox somewhere in Gene Pitney's West.
Wisenbaker turns a few of the record's songs into duets, with mixed results. "I would do anything for you to love me," he beseeches Goodman in "Angel," a boy whose snarl disguises pain. The spurning-and-supplication interplay in this duet is fun, but the song peters out, turning the time-honored two-chord guitar outro into an extended shrug. In "One True Love" his singing battles his guitar low in the mix, bringing to mind the guy from accounts who doesn't really want to be at karaoke. By contrast, Goodman's angelic peal soars, her counterposition distant as a mirage.
As with the record's title, closing track, "Too Little Too Late" accidentally invites you to agree with the sentiment. Over simple, pretty arpeggiation, Goodman sings with assurance, finally settled and at ease. La Sera's experiment with a new musical direction, line-up, and producer is by no means a failure, but, being the product of a logistical opportunity, comes across as more like a short stop on the way to something more solid and definitive.


On her debut album, the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and her extraordinary voice search for a place to call home.

Sara Bug

Sara Bug fills her songs with stories about self-discovery, set in scenes from the California coast to New Orleans, trying on different places, lovers, and selves as she eventually makes her way back to her home in Nashville. For her debut album, the New Orleans-raised singer-songwriter homes in on an emotive indie alt-country sound, a little pastoral, a little ragged. It’s a meandering but always welcoming journey that’s as mesmerizing as dandelion spores floating to the ground.
Across the record, Bug wanders around the geographic and emotional map looking for meaning. Her trip begins with the very first lyric: “I wanna be happy/I wanna be with you,” she sings on “Die With You,” as she elongates “I” with a touch of vibrato. Her voice sounds like the ding of a bell, bringing to mind the clarity of folk singers like Adrianne Lenker or Florist. When she sings about wanting to be someone—anyone, it seems—she trills urgently, dipping into an alto register as fuzzy electric guitar, bass, and horns crescendo into a soundscape that lasts over half the song. Even if she had some moment of clarity, it’s as if Bug isn’t fully ready to reveal herself yet.
Bug is absolutely luminous at the intersection of indie and alt-country. On “The Beholder,” one of the album’s strongest tracks, her stylized harmonies over jangly rock riffs and a drawling lap steel create a mix of dust and glamour, like stilettos stepping on a tumbleweed. As the album continues, Bug’s voice gradually gets twangier, like the way someone’s accent gets stronger when they cross their home state line. Along with the twang comes palpable confidence. By “Back In Nashville,” the album’s closer, Bug has transformed to a heady voice that recalls Dolly Parton on a few milliliters of helium. It’s a cartoonish, very fun, two-step track with steel guitars and exaggerated harmonies that sound like glitter erupting in a barn. The song departs from the cool indie rock tone that glosses the rest of the album, but it never feels like an exercise; not only does Bug fully inhabit the country setting but, importantly, she is such an extraordinarily precise vocalist.
That’s the real star of the show. Bug sounds like she’s both classically trained and accidentally good, able to toss in vibrato for some catharsis and take it out just as easily for hollowness. She can ascend to mountain-high notes or croon swampy alto ballads at the drop of a hat. Bug uses that dexterity to gradually build to the twanged-out, most confident version of herself at the end of the album, where she sings triumphantly, “I’m back in Nashville/Year after year/Tryin’ to make a family/In the dirt out here.” Of course she sounds best when she’s at home.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Producers Armando Martinez and Rey Rubio focus on electro's Latin roots with an album that's all about percussion.

Afro-Cuban Electronics

The style known as electro has no single origin, but its lineage can be traced back to a few fairly clear antecedents. Afrika Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force’s 1982 single “Planet Rock” canonized the syncopated rhythmic cadence, played on the Roland TR-808 drum machine, that is central to the style; that song was partly inspired by the lurching, snapping beat of Kraftwerk’s “Numbers,” from 1981. The Germans had probably been listening to Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Ryuichi Sakamoto, who deployed the same whip-crack syncopations on 1980’s “Riot in Lagos.” But beating them all to the punch was a Miami group called Herman Kelly & Life, who laid down that signature beat in 1978, in a rousing Latin funk song called “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat” that would go on to be a major influence on Miami bass, a regional variant of electro.
Electro’s Latin roots have often been overlooked, but they’re at the center of Afro-Cuban Electronics, the debut album from Miami’s Alpha 606, which fuses the booming and hissing 808s of classic electro with congas, clave, guiro, and other Afro-Cuban percussion instruments. The project dates back to the early 2000s. Originally, it was a group comprising producers Armando Martinez and Rey Rubio and percussionists Marino Hernandez and Danny Chirino, all of Cuban descent (Hernandez, in fact, arrived on Floridian shores in 1980’s Mariel boatlift). They put out their debut EP in 2005, with a remix from fellow Miami electro experimentalists Phoenecia. By 2008, when Detroit’s Interdimensional Transmissions label released the Electrónica Afro-Cubano EP, only Martinez remained, and he continues solo on Afro-Cuban Electronics.
The sound of the music will be familiar to anyone who has heard Hashim’s “Al Naafiysh (The Soul),” Newcleus’ “Jam on It,” or any other classic in the electro pantheon; one of electro’s salient features it that it simply doesn’t change very much. It all comes down to syncopated 808 patterns, skeletal synth bass, and not much more, and Martinez remains faithful to the blueprint. Even without the Afro-Cuban addition, electro enthusiasts would find plenty to love here: His rhythms move with the easy grace of a jungle cat flicking its tail; his drums are as crisp as you could ask for, and his synthesizers shimmer with a vivid, sci-fi sheen.
But the added percussion greatly adds to the music’s dynamism, filling in the empty space with rolling rhythmic counterpoints. On “Shake,” the two opposing rhythmic figures—guiro and clave patterns against snapping kicks and claps—bob like double needles on a sewing machine, zipping in and out of each other’s way. The Latin percussion also does wonders for the music’s tone colors, lending a warm, glassy glow to the Roland’s dry thump and scratch. Often, Martinez leaves his percussion elements relatively unadulterated, but occasionally, as on “Endangered Cuban Crocodile,” he leans hard on the effects, running the congas through heavy compression and reverb; the results sound a little like if Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilations had an explicit Latin underpinning.
Martinez does his best to keep things varied; tempos range from a skulking, 110-BPM four-to-the-floor up to 170-BPM rollers. Still, at 13 tracks and nearly an hour (plus a different bonus cut on both the vinyl and digital editions), the album feels a little long. For the most part, these are drum workouts, not songs, per se, and the palette begins to blur together by the record’s end, even with two vocal tracks to break things up.
On “Engineered Floatation Device” (sic), the heavily processed vocals speak to the experience of Cuban exiles who fled their island home in small boats and rafts, and the song is dark and alluring, with a silver lining of a synthesizer arpeggio. “Defection” covers similar ground, but its chanted couplets and militant theme—“Defection was our only choice/It happened when you first oppressed our voice/We did not retreat from the attack/ We’ve been deep in the swamp working our way back”—feel a little like empty bravado. And the fact that Cuba’s exiled “freedom fighters” left a trail of blood behind them might leave a bad taste in the listener’s mouth: Alpha 606 is named in tribute to Alpha 66, an anti-Castro paramilitary group, founded by Cuban exiles, that allegedly carried out terrorist attacks on tourist targets in Cuba. The style of the track is clearly meant to recall Drexciya, the Detroit electro act who created an Afrofuturist mythology around a supposed race of subaquatic beings who were born to pregnant women thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. But Drexciya’s underwater resistance was an imaginary conceit, and a utopian one at that. Alpha 606 is best when it lets the drums do the talking, and the only thing that goes boom is the kick on the 808.


The latest from chillwave pioneer Ernest Greene, aka Washed Out, is a visual album for Stones Throw Records. But it doesn’t say anything new about Washed Out.

Mister Mellow

You’d be hard pressed to find a more flagrant example of truth in advertising this year than a Washed Out album called Mister Mellow. This dude even put a neon, airbrushed “chillwave” hat on the cover. No surprise, really: Washed Out has been right on the nose since the beginning, even though he lands there with the softness of a light summer breeze. Hell, even his parents might be in on the act. Given his solemn, devout adherence to the subgenre he pioneered, as well as his guileless vocals and lyrics, you could describe his entire approach by his birth name: Ernest Greene. Considering the lengths this new “visual album” goes to take relaxation as seriously as possible, it feels like the very thing Greene was born to make.
That said, in light of the more renowned recent examples of the “visual album”—Lemonade, JAY-Z’s upcoming 4:44—do not mistake this as Greene’s declaration of auteurism. Like Greene’s music itself, the visuals don’t ask for your undivided attention, and they don’t quite say anything new about Washed Out either. Compared to the deep ocean blues of his earliest work and the “daytime psychedelia” of 2013’s Paracosm, Mister Mellow is filled with warm browns and yellows. In the multimedia set, it’s all presented through Claymation, collage, clips of guys smoking weed, and other things that tend to visually pair well with your strain of choice: clocks, geodes, cheeseburgers, and blurred out images of Greene as a youth, wearing his prom tux and assorted Georgia sports gear.
None of this feels random. Witness the bric-a-brac on the album cover: a Xanax bar, a toy panic button, and bumper stickers reading “Work/Life Balance,” “I Never Get a Break,” “Feeling Fine.” Mister Mellow, then, is a kind of concept album about The Way We Live. In fact, Mister Mellow might be viewed as a hero of superhuman chill who has come to save us all from the mid-afternoon blahs at work. Given the modest demands of sensory immersion and time (about a half hour), the optimal viewing experience is “eating a salad in front of your computer during lunch,” or in five or 10 minute increments when someone can’t snoop at your cubicle.
This doesn’t make Mister Mellow all that different than other Washed Out releases. It’s just a deeper dive on the subject closest to his heart: the despair and boredom of an otherwise stress-free life, and how that very despair and boredom is compounded by the full awareness of being someone who doesn’t stand to lose much immediately in the current climate. As a pitched-down sample slurs “I go to work, I try my best” on “Floating By,” Washed Out comes this close to quoting Toro Y Moi’s “Blessa” and achieving chillwave singularity.
The most important development on Mister Mellow is that Washed Out has moved from Sub Pop Records and is releasing the album on Stones Throw—a label best known for weeded-out hip-hop. In 2009, the most interesting chillwave drew from the warbly beat science of Stones Throw patron saints like J Dilla and Madlib. Likewise, a good portion of Mister Mellow is earmarked for crate-digging reveries, with titles that read like Batman word bubbles (“Zonked,” “Instant Calm,” “Time Off”). Mister Mellow also contains about an EP’s worth of Washed Out pop songs that deviate from the acoustic-toting, college quad aspirations of Paracosm: “Get Lost” and “Floating By” touch on the psychedelic soul and jazz that often serves as Stones Throw source material, while the cruise-disco highlight “Hard to Say Goodbye” almost sounds like a slowed-down take on Anthony Naples’ “Mad Disrespect,” showing how far Greene has come as a sample-based artist since his earliest days.
Truly, it all feels right on Mister Mellow, which is why it doesn’t leave much of an impression. Even if Mister Mellow asked more of Greene than any prior Washed Out album, it lacks the artistic ambition and tension that made his work endure beyond a blurry moment in the sun. The intrigue of every Washed Out release was created in the gap between what Greene was going for and what he could actually achieve: he had a clear vision for his art on Life of Leisure with only a rudimentary knowledge of his toolkit; Within and Without was a modest guy all of a sudden having to become cool; Paracosm felt like his bid to be seen as a songwriter rather than a creator of vibes. Greene simply tries to fit in here, presenting Mister Mellow as the work of a Stones Throw beatminer in the sturdy, reliable manner of, say, Quakers or Koushik. Mister Mellow may well be Greene’s moment of self-actualization, but it could’ve been more.


The rapper’s joyless debut is the sound of a scam artist. It is unoriginal, outdated, and one of the most stylistically unappealing projects to come from the SoundCloud scene.

Bawskee

Put a team of desperate record executives looking to cash-in on a demographic that looks at No Jumper podcast host Adam22 as this generation’s Barbara Walters, and the result is Comethazine. The 20-year old St. Louis rapper is designed to be an amalgamation of everything that has worked on SoundCloud before him: edgy, polarizing, iconoclastic. The result is anything but, an unoriginal and outdated rip-off attempting to fool a generation obsessed with stardom into thinking he is a star. These qualities contribute to Comethazine’s debut album Bawskee, a project that tries so badly to force its way into the SoundCloud upper echelon that it ends up birthing one of the most wretched and stylistically unappealing projects to come from the scene.
In early 2018, Comethazine’s blatant attempts at manipulating his way into the limelight came to a head when his early single “Bands” bait-and-switched its way into the elusive No. 1 spot on the SoundCloud charts. A SoundCloud page by the name of SoundClout had posted YBN Nahmir’s “Bounce Out With That,” which was making waves on YouTube but had yet to be posted to SoundCloud. Almost instantly, it shot up to the platform’s top spot. Once there, the page took advantage of SoundCloud’s ability to swap sound files at any time and replaced “Bounce Out With That” with Comethazine’s “Bands,” making it appear that this relatively new rapper had hot-shotted all the way to having the most popular song on the platform. The song was eventually removed, and his label Alamo Records put out a vague “oops oh well” quote laughing off the foolery.
Quickly on Bawskee, it becomes evident that the SoundCloud file-swapping scheme was the only original idea ever associated with Comethazine. Borrowing flows and aesthetics has always been a part of hip-hop, but there is not a single point throughout the 18-track album—loaded with short little ad-lib marathons—where we get any insight to who the hell Comethazine actually is. The thievery is soulless as Comethazine doesn’t just reach for a flow but instead tries to copy the entire essence of an artist. Over the empty and heartless drums of “V12” he rips every aspect of Lil Pump: the jumpy ad-libs, the flow, and even the obsession with a former child star: “Demi Lovato my bitch but I’m still out here fucking these females.” His burglary extends to artists throughout the SoundCloud world: the BHUNNA-produced “Sick Shit” sounds like a Pi’erre Bourne type beat that’s been left on the shelf and Comethazine’s voice is hardly recognizable like a low-quality Playboi Carti leak that was never meant to see the light.
Essentially, Comethazine is not engaged with the genre of music he makes. The album is out of touch with the current direction of SoundCloud as if Comethazine hasn’t logged onto the site since the 2016 XXL Freshman List. The drums on tracks like “No Ex” sound leftover from an ancient 808 Mafia drum kit. And the speaker-blaring kicks on “Blicky” belong on an XXXTentacion project from his “Look At Me!” era. Even the features feel like hail marys, a last-ditch effort for some clicks by recruiting a tired Lil Yachty and a lost Ugly God clinging to relevance.
Comethazine seems to think that to be a SoundCloud star you need to be edgy. He creates a running gag throughout Bawskee about how he wants to sleep with Demi Lovato that plays out uncomfortably. On “Demi,” Comethazine’s trollish obsession with the pop singer is just not charming, at all: “I just wanna fuck Demi, nut on her titties/Whip out my cock, ayy, make that bitch lick it.” He then leans on some homophobic jabs on “Let It Eat” which don’t make an attempt at sounding the least bit clever: “Sweet ass nigga, you belong in a Gay bar.” And his humor rubs off on Yachty who drops a line on “Bring Dat Bag Out” (”Got them white folks saying ni**er/Got them black folks saying cracker”) that makes you ask the question: What the hell is fun about any of this?
It’s rare you come across an album as hollow as Bawskee. It’s so worthless across the board that you fear it might tarnish everything the SoundCloud scene has built from association alone. Comethazine is joyless, making an album that some executive must’ve told him will make his Instagram Live numbers spike. He is a vapid figure who has not developed a personality, direction, or sense of his own style, left to collect dust once the No Jumper diehards and out of touch label heads move on to their next cash-grab obsession.


Andy Butler’s fourth album as Hercules and Love Affair delivers the subtle genre pivot that was so needed to reinvigorate their standing as the elder gatekeepers of club music history.

Omnion

When Hercules and Love Affair, the ongoing semi-retro dance music project of musician and producer Andy Butler, released their gorgeous debut album in 2008, it was the perfect environment for them to flourish. Disco and house music were experiencing a robust underground revival, lead by collectives like Horse Meat Disco and Honey Soundsystem, and a real appreciation for the detailed history of dance music was front and center in clubs across the country. Bolstered by A-list vocal talent like ANOHNI and Nomi Ruiz, seeing Hercules and Love Affair ascent to the top of the zeitgeist that year was like watching an up-and-coming athlete crush it at the Olympics—raw, undeniable talent rewarded with universal acclaim.
In the near-decade since Hercules and Love Affair was released, the dance scene has undergone several more cultural shifts. A late-’00s interest in techno and pop begat EDM, celebrity DJ culture became more and more prevalent, and a younger generation, perhaps less versed in the gospel of Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles, began to assert their dominance. While solid, Hercules’ last album, 2014’s The Feast of the Broken Heart, felt like a blurry reflection of stronger tracks from previous years. For a group that is so reliant on a pure interpretation of classic genres, Hercules’ main challenge would be to find a way to continue honoring the sounds of the past while exploring a new version of themselves, in a landscape where disco revivalism might not be as thrilling as it once was.
Omnion, Hercules’ fourth LP, thankfully delivers the subtle genre pivot that was so needed to reinvigorate their standing as the elder gatekeepers of club music history. The disco and house influences are there, for certain, but they are more general overtones than color-by-numbers rehashes. Instead, huge swathes of the record take their cue from ’80s pop, easy listening, techno, and ambient—a hodge-podge that ends up lending a deeper color and dimension to the group almost immediately.
Butler has always done an incredible job at choosing which vocalists would best suit his compositions, and Omnion is no different. The album’s eponymous opening track has Sharon Van Etten using her blown-glass voice to draw circles around keyboards and swelling trumpets. Butler’s use of horns is striking—instead of the staccato disco brass we’ve been used to, he uses them throughout the record as warm accents to quieter moments. It may seem simple, but it’s a conscious move away from his comfort zone, which is what makes Omnion’s production so intriguing for a listener that’s been following his work.
Faris Badwan of the Horrors appears on a few tracks, shedding his typical post-punk tenor and sounding more like Marc Almond or Dave Gahan, sinewy and sexual. “Move me/It’s all I want/Use me/It’s all I want,” he croons on “Controller,” pleading with the listener to engage in a sensual game of master and servant. The dark synth-pop tones continue through the record, from “Rejoice”—in which regular Hercules player Rouge Mary’s distorted diva vocals get compressed under a drum beat worthy of Nitzer Ebb’s grittiest moments—to “Through Your Atmosphere,” another Badwan track that could have been a Vince Clarke-penned ballad if not for a recurring techno flourish during the chorus. With a less knowledgeable producer, these references could seem heavy-handed, but Butler’s flair for extracting the juiciest parts of his favorite sonic touchstones and reassembling them around his own signatures has always been the most exciting aspect of his production skills.
The true test of Butler’s maturity, however, is “Fools Wear Crowns,” the first Hercules song ever in which he sings lead vocals. It’s a song about addiction, about making mistakes, forgiveness, and redemption—for a man who consistently gives his lyrics to other people to sing, it’s a giant leap towards the unknown. Butler’s voice isn’t strong, especially compared to singers he’s worked with, but it’s unpolished, unnerving, searching for its footing with every line and almost tumbling into nothingness. In a few notes, it encapsulates the element that makes Omnion such an interesting chapter for Hercules and Love Affair: risk. With this album, Butler has thrown caution to the wind and his soul-searching has created some of his best dancefloor experimentation in years.


Despite the best efforts of Yukimi Nagano's dynamic voice, the Swedish band's fifth album of cautiously controlled, luxury mood music remains flat on the page.

Season High

Little Dragon singer Yukimi Nagano must have a separate phone line just for fielding feature requests. Since their breakout appearances on Gorillaz’s Plastic Beach and Big Boi’s Vicious Lies and Dangerous Rumors, Nagano and her electronic-pop band have become the go-to collaborators for any artist looking to make a statement about how eclectic their tastes are. Over the last two years, the Swedish group has popped up on albums by De La Soul, Flume, Mac Miller, and Kaytranada, lending each an air of sophistication and modernity.
It’s a wonder they haven’t called on more of those artists to return the favor. For a band best known for their work on genre-blurring albums with huge casts, Little Dragon’s own albums have become surprisingly hermetic and narrow in scope. Like its predecessors, their fifth full-length Season High purposefully avoids marquee guests and wild stylistic leaps in favor of cautiously controlled, luxury mood music. It commits even further to the ’80s slow jam vibe of 2014’s Nabuma Rubberband—a look that didn’t completely flatter them the first time around, and feels even more restrictive here.
While Little Dragon pull off the record’s throwback sounds with their usual technical precision, that’s less of a selling point than it might have been five years ago. There was a time when artists scored points for the mere novelty of recreating that decade’s soft aesthetic. But in a post-“Hold on, We’re Going Home,” post-Rhye, post-Blood Orange, post-that one Justin Vernon side project with all the saxophones world, where every third song on the radio channels the ghost of a Reagan-era homecoming dance, those production tropes have become familiar to the point of exhaustion. The sounds of the ’80s are so thick in the air right now that even when the Weeknd and Daft Punk are put in the same room it’s what they come up with.
It doesn’t help that Little Dragon’s take on sensual R&B is strangely dispassionate. Though Season High references touchstones like Prince, Janet Jackson, and Sade, icons that musicians tend to develop intensely personal relationships with, those influences do little to fire up Nagano. In the past, she’s carried entire albums largely on the strength of her winning presence, but here her performances feel less like loving homages than like genre exercises. She’s also been tasked with breathing life into the group’s flattest, most literal songs yet. It’s too great a challenge even for her.
Songwriting is such an afterthought that many song titles simply telegraph the mood the track is meant to evoke: “Sweet” is the record’s sugar rush, “Butterflies” is a nervous slow burn, “Strobe Light” is a dance track, and so forth. Every convention is presented at face value. “Push” sounds like it was commissioned for a salon commercial or fashion shoot, so of course its lyrics touch on the nature of fame. “Angling for the big win, you want the world to know,” Nagano sings over a RuPaul runway beat, “Magazine star/Your name lit up in gold/All eyes on you.” That song wears its emptiness on its sleeve, but Season High’s attempts at profundity don’t land any more gracefully. “Butterflies” wallows in moodiness for six minutes with no end game, and the even grimmer “Gravity” similarly writes itself into a corner. These aren’t songs in search of a payoff; they’re songs that forget to look altogether.
In interviews this album cycle, the band has tried to walk back its reputation as ringers for hire. “Working with other people is fun, but it always makes us more focused on our work because otherwise, we’ll always be ‘that band that always does collaborations,’” Nagano told Dazed magazine. And as frustrating as it must be for the group that their own records are eclipsed by their outside work, Season High won’t do anything to reverse the narrative. It's so clinical that it works better as an audition reel for their next round of features than it does its own statement. Looking to capture that smooth, ’80s feel that’s all the rage right now? Yeah, Little Dragon can do that for you.


The Peruvian producer’s debut album is a shimmery collection of protest chants, club rhythms, and sunlit synths that testifies to dance music’s spiritual nourishment.

Madres

The ecstatic house music of Sofia Kourtesis suggests places that are full of people, but not necessarily crowded. Think of a time when you were closely surrounded by more heads than you would normally tolerate, but it wasn’t a problem, and actually made your environment that much better. On her debut full-length, Madres, Kourtesis invites us inside every version of this space that she knows. That includes, but also extends far beyond, the transcendent dancefloors that she summons through her enraptured, hair-on-fire performances. Madres travels from intimate nightclubs in Berlin to sunny beaches on the Spanish coast to booming demonstrations on the streets of Lima. It’s a rich collage of foraged samples that beg to be rewound and heard anew, a dance album that will jolt you with jumper cables, and a stirring statement on maternal patience in its many possible forms. Madres fulfills the promise of Kourtesis’ string of effervescent EPs and exceptional remixes over the past five years.
With her eye for texture, Kourtesis practically drops you into the middle of these gatherings—sometimes through field recordings culled directly from those scenes. But it’s her meticulous composition style that heightens the album’s sense of bounty. On the title track, gentle synths splash and scatter like thick sunshower drops on a windshield, vocal arpeggios loop into an angelic backing choir, and a door hinge creaks in distress. Kourtesis eventually sighs a tender and glowing refrain, introduced by the song’s crown jewel: a grainy, vintage sample of a nasal voice yelping a mysterious broken phrase, calling out from beyond. She treats the sample like it’s a torn-off corner of an old photograph: damaged and decontextualized, then reframed and reconsidered.
That approach pays off most of all on the clamorous protest track “Estación Esperanza,” which features her lifelong role model and the first musician she ever saw in concert, Manu Chao. When Kourtesis released “Estación Esperanza” as a single nearly two years ago, it illustrated her noisiest side, clanging like an old radiator warming up—and in the context of Madres, it’s ripping hot. Alongside chants from a Peruvian anti-homophobia protest, Kourtesis dices up and echoes a rhyme that Chao repeats throughout his 2001 album Próxima Estación: Esperanza. The line—“¿Qué horas son, mi corazón?”—could be interpreted as a parent asking a child for the time, or a personal mantra, or nifty nonsense. Chao named his album after its recurring sample of the Madrid metro intercom announcing Esperanza station; written out, the words appear to say “Next Station: Hope.” But Kourtesis takes a page from Chao’s book and spins the title into a rallying cry: Here, “Estación Esperanza” could be read as “Hope Season.” Her gift for pulling new meaning out of aged audio fragments is one of Madres’ foremost delights.
So is her growth as a singer and lyricist. Kourtesis fully broke out of that shell on Fresia Magdalena opener “La Perla,” and Madres begins with a heart-to-body sequence reminiscent of that EP’s first two songs. “Si Te Portas Bonito” flips the switch from daytime to nighttime Balearic pop bliss, laying a Top 40-style verse-chorus structure over a silky, sexy house beat. “Vas a querer escucharme” (“You’re going to want to listen to me”) is one of its first lyrics, and while she’s singing about physical intimacy, the shot-calling carries its own punch, too.
Madres moves in some familiar dance music patterns, but also harbors a sudden tidal shift. On the icy, desolate “Moving Houses,” she briefly abandons her signature multi-layered house; the song is a tempo-less experiment in crispy static and lonely, sporadic chimes, recalling the sonic dabblings of renowned German photographer and artist Wolfgang Tillmans as well as the voice of Björk. The atmosphere is a world apart, but the individualized care remains: She cherishes each sound like her own child.
Nothing could be more fitting, given the hardship that preceded Madres. While she toured off the acclaim of Fresia Magdalena, Kourtesis was also constantly flying home to Peru to see her mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer. In desperation, Kourtesis posted a clip of Madres’ title track on Instagram with a public plea to be introduced to the world-renowned neurosurgeon Peter Vajkoczy. He replied the next day, performed a high-risk surgery, and extended her mom’s life. She honors him on the soulful and melancholy “Vajkoczy,” which doubles as something of an extended lead-in to “How Music Makes You Feel Better,” the album’s biggest endorphin release. Together, the tracks climb to the clouds, peaking with a sky-high synth line that squiggles like an airplane banner in the wind. As a token of her gratitude, Kourtesis took Vajkoczy to the Berlin techno hub Berghain and blew a brain surgeon’s mind.
Such is the good karma of someone who once trusted her dentist to remove a wisdom tooth a few hours after she encountered him nude in the club. Kourtesis is always seeking out new stories, whether she’s pulling strangers onstage to dance with her, or flipping traditional cumbia rhythms into a metallic, blaring album closer. It takes a special kind of force to get so many different voices in one place to coalesce. Maybe a common goal. Maybe a shared spirit. Sometimes, it’s as simple as having somebody at the center who’s willing and able to care for everyone—and who’s as magnetic as Sofia Kourtesis is here.