Sunny Day Real Estate admired Fugazi's ethics, but dreamed of being Led Zeppelin and U2, bands that aspired for total transcendence—something they finally achieved on How It Feels to Be Something O**n.

Sunny Day Real Estate: How It Feels to Be Something On

How It Feels to Be Something On

Put aside their status as the genre’s definitive act and perhaps the only one who didn’t find it necessary to apologize for the term: Sunny Day Real Estate don’t make a very convincing case to be considered an emo band at all. If they had any kind of punk ideals, they were agents of mythmaking rather than social change—avoiding interviews and restricting their promo to a single, out-of-focus photo at a time when that made coverage a major pain in the ass for press; refusing to play shows in the entire state of California; presumably posing for a Nordstrom ad as a form of trolling before the word “trolling” existed. Their extracurriculars had more in common with Death Grips than Rites of Spring. Jeremy Enigk’s vocals were passionate and earnest, but he only occasionally screamed and the lyrics were often inscrutable, intentional nonsense or plainly about Jesus Christ. And while Diary drew on the earliest ideas of true “post-hardcore,” it was filled with grand and expansive anthems that weren’t all too far removed from what was on the radio at the time; the video for “In Circles” was filmed in the same sound studio as “Sex Type Thing,” and they sold over 200,000 copies on Sub Pop, a label that really hasn’t come anywhere near this stuff ever since.
Maybe their greatest demerit: even the most revered bands of emo’s first two waves were accessible and dorky, whereas Sunny Day Real Estate were the only ones that had an aura of actual magic about them: The incomparable triad that began Diary are supposedly the first three songs they ever wrote together, while some even consider LP2 to be the band's highest peak despite it having to be forced into existence with placeholder lyrics and cover art. Sunny Day Real Estate admired Fugazi’s ethics, but dreamed of being Led Zeppelin and U2, bands that aspired for total transcendence—something they finally achieved on How It Feels to Be Something On.
Even with their past accomplishments, this kind of a growth was unexpected specifically from Sunny Day Real Estate. Most engage in their quest for spiritual enlightenment alone, and SDRE were no exception: Jeremy Enigk’s devotion to born-again Christianity was announced in one of the first indie-rock open letters to the internet and was assumed to be a serious wedge issue for a band that had reservations about him joining in the first place. Guitarist and co-lyricist Dan Hoerner would often retreat to a Waldenesque parcel of land in rural Washington to engage in sustainable farming. And it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that Sunny Day Real Estate broke up after each one of their four albums. “All our problems had been personality based...musically, we never had a problem,” drummer William Goldsmith claimed in a 1998 interview. Rumor has it that their 2009 reunion was on the verge of producing an entire record rather than the one-off “Lipton Witch” before said problems reemerged.
How It Feels came after their most eventful breakup; in 1996, Enigk released his stirring, under-appreciated solo album Return of the Frog Queen, which indulged in psych-pop leanings, prog, and obtuse spirituality that had little place in Sunny Day Real Estate at the time. Meanwhile, bassist Nate Mendel and Goldsmith had chanced upon the opportunity to join Foo Fighters as Dave Grohl’s solo project started to take off and both contributed to The Colour and the Shape, which should probably be grandfathered into emo the same way Pinkerton has been— its gleaming production, razored dual guitars and the gooey, awkward romanticism of lyrics were a more accurate predictor of the genre’s alt-rock takeover than anything Sunny Day Real Estate ever did.
But if you ever want to counter the idea of Grohl as the Nicest Guy in Rock, ask Goldsmith about the Colour and the Shape sessions—the passive-aggressive bullying and ensuing disillusion led to him rejoining Sunny Day Real Estate, while Mendel, who perhaps knew the band dynamic all too well, wasn’t willing to give up one of rock music's cushiest gigs: He’s still the Foo Fighters bassist to this day.
How It Feels To Be Something On still sounds like a reinvigorated band entering a tentative détente. Enigk’s voice had developed into a much more confident and voluminous instrument, one that didn’t need to rely on basic grunge dynamics: when hitting the high notes of “Two Promises” or “100 Million,” the throaty heft of the title track or the weightless, joyous chanting of “Every Shining Time You Arrive,” Enigk communes with Jeff Buckley and Robert Plant. The band predicted their future entries into straight-up prog rock with the 9/8 verses of “Roses in Water” and ditching Brad Wood’s deadening thud on Diary for a production best described by closer “Days Were Golden,” It’s a honeyed, ambered record with a timeless, autumnal glow.
There are still clear remnants of each member’s idiosyncratic sensibilities; Hoerner’s social conscience had always been intrinsic to Sunny Day Real Estate, as the band name itself—wisely revised from Chewbacca Kaboom—stemmed from his concern that eventually, anything could be sold, even a sunny day. The Hoerner-penned “100 Million” is definitive SDRE in its own way, a mantra of “pay for everything” unifying every part of the life cycle in a consumerist society, from the hospital to the hole you’re buried in.
As with so many earnest frontmen conflicted about commercializing art and the messianic role thrust upon them in the ’90s, Enigk looked east for spiritual sonic inspiration: His melodies are almost microtonal during “Roses in Water” and “Two Promises,” and the supposedly improvised, one-take “The Prophet” is a straight-up channeling of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Originally intended for Enigk’s solo album, “Every Shining Time You Arrive” easily translates to an acoustic, ecclesiastical strummer, a devotional to that certain someone who’s always there when you need them.
This all could’ve very easily resulted in a try-hard, pedantic exercise, i.e., emo’s answer to No Code—and perhaps you could argue that’s what Sunny Day Real Estate unintentionally achieved on their alternately bracing and bombastic swan song The Rising Tide. But as with Diary’s “Song About an Angel”—which the band has stressed should be taken literally—How It Feels rarely scans as evangelical, even when it clearly is. Sunny Day Real Estate’s willingness to actually engage with the press during the lead-up to How It Feels helped to tease out a sense of humor to their work that would’ve almost certainly gone unnoticed given their reputation. That euphonious, evocative phrase of “mondrary fields” during …“Guitar and Video Games?” Completely made up. “The Shark’s Own Private Fuck” underwent the same song-titling process as B-side “Bucket of Chicken,” the band’s ill-fated submission for the soundtrack of The Crow 2: City of Angels.
Hell, they might even have gotten kinda meta about where emo had gone since Diary. Enigk could be referring to his older, more dramatically chest-clutching self from “In Circles” on the opening “Pillars”: “I walk in circles, I’ve seen a million things that tell me so.” And is it possible that Enigk is mocking performative sadness on “Two Promises?” (“He thinks, ‘I gave her my heart, she tasted my soul, now she’s gone again’”).
This could all be speculation, of course—Sunny Day Real Estate certainly loved to keep things open to interpretation (just witness the futile LP2 lyric analysis on Songmeanings.net). But Enigk quickly abandoned that quality after How It Feels to Be Something On: 2000’s The Rising Tide is thrilling in points, but closer to the Jesus Christ pose of Creed than most would care to ever admit. Meanwhile, the Fire Theft was essentially The Rising Tide minus Hoerner, plus dry ice and black lights.
So as Sunny Day Real Estate started sounding like mystical rock beings, their actual legend receded. Diary still tops nearly every “best albums” list, yet the contemporary influence of Sunny Day Real Estate has become secondary to that of American Football, the sprawling, exploratory ambience of the Appleseed Cast or even the rawer Mineral, who were often tagged as a SDRE ripoff in their time. And the newer bands that have a religious component are more likely to tap into the distinct dichotomy of the sacred and profane, of heaven and hell, that was clearly expressed on Brand New’s The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me.
Despite it being a quantifiable improvement in many ways over Diary, the importance of How It Feels is far more difficult to ascertain than its predecessor. Diary, from its title on down, is basically a textbook, something tangible: bands who want to target a host of RIYLs can easily draw on Enigk’s grainy howl and/or limpid mewl, tune their guitars down to D, write endless variants on diaristic confessionals like “I dream to heal your wounds, but I bleed myself."
But how does a band conjure warmth, empathy, scope, worldliness, the essence of How It Feels to Be Something On? The only indie rock record that’s come anywhere near the pastoral, passionate splendor is the Hotelier’s Goodness, which should explain any question regarding the oft-remarked fanaticism of their audience. “When this began, this was a thing that we could both share/A bit of shade, the goodness fades, and we begin there,” Christian Holden brays, echoing Enigk’s like-minded assessment of the edenic promise of the romantic and religious: “All this time looking for love and you want to find peace, but you find me.”
It’s kind of a funny lyric, especially given Sunny Day Real Estate’s reputation, but not as funny as their most beautiful, essential ballad being called “Guitar and Video Games.” “What if we refused to follow the rules of fashion,” Enigk asks. As counterculture mission statements go, “Guitar and Video Games” isn’t exactly “Out of Step”—in fact, drinking, dancing, making out and video games were the exact opposite of what Minor Threat stood for. But isn’t that how “emotional hardcore” got started to begin with? In that sense, How It Feels to Be Something On is proof that Sunny Day Real Estate is emo after all—total transcendence is a never-ending quest, but as in guitars and video games and your relationship to that certain someone, you can fence in your own plot of heaven on earth.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore the Kinks’ wistful 1967 classic Something Else.

Something Else

If you were an average American pop consumer in 1967, you very likely had a confused impression of the Kinks. If what you knew were the hits you heard on Top 40 radio, you knew them as prophets of the power chord, or by contrast wry social satirists. There was even “Tired of Waiting,” a softly undulating plaint that could plausibly have worn a Motown arrangement. The Kinks were one of those British moptop bands, but unlike the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, they seemed to lack a clear narrative.
There were several reasons for this. You couldn’t hear album cuts without actually buying the thing yourself. Many songs, released as singles, tanked before you got a chance to hear them. The British still liked EPs—box-office poison in the States—and Americans favored shorter LPs, so the Kinks’ U.S. albums were randomly-sequenced jumbles of songs from different British platters. And then, crucially, in mid-1965, the Kinks were banned from touring for four years by the American Federation of Musicians, following a brawl on the set of Dick Clark’s “Where the Action Is.”
Would the great picture of the Kinks have been clearer if you had had a chance to hear the raga-drone “See My Friends”? Or “Stop Your Sobbing,” hidden deep inside their first album and ignored by all until Chrissie Hynde (onetime Ray Davies paramour) scored a hit with her cover 15 years later? Or the potentially groundbreaking “I’m Not Like Everybody Else,” which got its first American release seven years after it was recorded? Well, yes, actually. For one thing, you might have noticed that lead singer and chief songwriter Ray Davies was establishing himself as a sensibility—an auteur—at a time when the Beatles were still addressing themselves to teenagers and the Rolling Stones still working their way through the Chess back catalog.
Ray could and did address teenagers, but he primarily dwelt in an adult world, so adult that it comprised the dead past as well as the drab present. He addressed potentially everybody (at least everybody in the United Kingdom; he made no concession to American listeners and their points of reference). He was sometimes taken to task for condescension to his subjects, but although he could stiffly upbraid a well-respected man, he clearly felt deep sympathy and compassion for the woman who bought a hat like Princess Marina, and the tenants on Dead End Street, and the little mortgage-holder of Shangri-La, which might not be much but at least has indoor plumbing. He wrote songs about “Rosy” and “Arthur”; he had a sister named Rosie, who married a man named Arthur, and they emigrated to Australia—he wrote a song called “Australia.” He spoke about, and perhaps for and to, the working class, the lower-middle and middle-middle classes, the old and feeble, and—strikingly for the time—women.
He had just begun exploring this rich vein of character-driven songwriting when the band’s fifth official LP Something Else came out in 1967. The liner notes of the U.S.-only Kinkdom (1965) imagined the Kinks as “national heroes” of a land of mods, where there are no “waltzes, acne, grinds, anemia, eggplant, curfews, alarm clocks, violins, loneliness, diets, make-up exams, squares, callouses, [or] losers,” but within a year, Ray had begun building a lyrical world that encompassed all those things. The band’s previous album, 1966’s Face to Face, was the turning point, when Ray decided to make music entirely in his own image rather than for an imagined audience of mods.
The story is that Ray began writing the songs when he was coming out from under a nervous breakdown, presumably brought on by too much high life. On Face to Face, they include songs in the voice of a toff (“Dandy”), and more significantly, a ruined toff (the trio of “House in the Country,” “Most Exclusive Residence for Sale,” and “Sunny Afternoon”). The theme of failure shades the record, from the downmarket protests “Party Line” to the oceanically sad “Too Much on My Mind” to the elegiac “I’ll Remember.” Musically, Face to Face still hews very much to rock’n’roll, although the old sounds of music hall are beginning to creep in. Something Else, by contrast, is deeply and thoroughly colored by the musical past.
In 1960s Britain, music hall was the sound of the grandparents’ generation, but it was still a living thing. Your mods would have seen relics of the scene sharing stages with the forebears of beat music Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Music hall is not a style or a genre as much as it is an enormous circus tent, which takes in the demonically earworming sing-songs of the 1890s, the ragtime that started coming in around 1910, the various jazz forms that arrived after the Great War, children’s songs, saloon-bar ballads, patriotic anthems, and the often dark and even noir lounge-crooner styles that prevailed during the 1930s. Most significant beat combos had their stab at the form at some point, including the Who (parts of “A Quick One, While He’s Away”), the Stones (“Something Happened to Me Yesterday”), and the Beatles (“Yellow Submarine,” at least half of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and much, much more). Music hall was not only redolent of grandparents, and memories of stacked bills seen at the Kursaal in the late ’40s; it also suited the thrift-shop look that mods started sporting when they remade themselves as hippies, from top hats to ballgowns to brass-band uniforms.
Although Something Else is colored by music hall and its historical coevals, its explicit musical references are few: the galloping, Cossack-dance “David Watts”; the closing-time singalong “Harry Rag”; the oleaginous “End of the Season,” on which Ray sometimes sounds as if he’s singing through a megaphone. Nothing on the record is as proudly and emphatically nostalgic as the next single the band produced, “Autumn Almanac,” let alone the next album, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society. And even though this was a time when the musical vocabulary was expanding dramatically and rock’n’roll had receded to become merely one of a vast selection of stylistic possibilities, the word that popped up in almost every contemporaneous review of Something Else was “nostalgia.”
What is nostalgic about Something Else is something that runs far deeper than mere style. As much as Face to Face was concerned with ruin and failure, this album is about loss; the passage of time hovers over every cut. The loss is personal, historical, societal, existential, even anticipatory. While the momentum of change was sweeping across Western society, gathering the steam that would result in a wave of abortive revolutions the following year, four guys in their early 20s were meditating on the transience of all things. They don’t seem especially reactionary about it—they do remain hippie mods, after all. And they are not protesting change, at least not yet; their attitude toward the historical past is rather more nuanced. The so-called Little Englanders that are evoked tend toward the pathetic: the easily-mocked conformist (“Tin Soldier Man”), the man whose life is systematically destroyed by his mother-in-law (“Situation Vacant”), the degenerate smokers in “Harry Rag” (which is rhyming slang for “fag,” as in cigarette).
Even the paragon David Watts, the schoolboy hero character, does not quite exemplify the Edwardian Boy’s Own verities. He spurns the girls’ advances ostensibly because he is “of pure and noble breed,” but really because he is “gay and fancy-free.” There’s “Afternoon Tea,” a hard-sell promotion for that ritual, as if it were endangered. But it is “Death of a Clown,” a rare collaboration by Ray and his brother Dave, that truly tolls the bell for the demoted ex-empire. The lions and tigers have given up, the fleas have deserted, no one bothers to get their fortunes read anymore, so we might as well break up the crown.
An even deeper loss is inscribed in “Two Sisters,” a memorial to the sacrifice of autonomy. The single sister looks into her mirror on a rising note, the married sister into the washing machine on a falling one; among triumphal chords, the married sister imagines her sibling’s liberty, then muted resolution arrives as she regards her children. An analogue to the carefree party-going single sister (who turns up in various guises in the Kinks’ repertoire, e.g. “Polly” and “Big Black Smoke”) can perhaps be glimpsed in Dave’s “Funny Face,” her “pill-shaped eyes” now blurred behind frosted hospital glass, access to her forbidden by doctors, and although Dave is insistent that she’s “all right,” we don’t entirely believe him.
At this point, Ray is still tinkering with the Tin Pan Alley dictum that every song be required to accommodate romance, but he is doing increasingly odd things with the assignment. “No Return” is a bossa nova, the last word in middle-class drinks music, evocative of sandy beaches bestrode by young women in colorful wraps, but it casts its heartbreak in the subjunctive (it begins with the word “if”). It only broaches the declarative in its non-bossa nova bridge with few quintessentially Ray bars that appear like a parenthesis. “End of the Season” superficially pretends to concern itself with lost love, but it’s really a portrait of a rich twat who has been cast into the cold by time, too old for the “chicks” and too right-wing for clubland. Ray affixes an audible pencil mustache, pushes his larynx upward to achieve a croon, and lets fall the crocodile tears. “Lazy Old Sun” romantically teases the listener with its gliding notes, double-tracked answering lines, and fervent chorus, but, like Mayakovsky and Frank O’Hara, Ray is literally addressing the sun. As he once said, it’s a joke, but it’s also not.
But true love does appear, resoundingly, on the record’s concluding number and hit single, “Waterloo Sunset.” American listeners perhaps did not appreciate that Waterloo is a large and not terribly picturesque train station, but they instinctively understood how the song binds together the ordinary and the transcendent. For all the talk about how Terry and Julie were Terence Stamp and Julie Christie in Far From the Madding Crowd, they were fill-ins (“I wanted to use the names Bernard and Dorothy,” Ray claimed to Jonathan Cott in 1970). “Waterloo Sunset” is a hymn to the kind of workaday beauty that lies beneath notice but can hold its own in the cosmos. It makes the heart swell, and unlike most such pop songs does not turn out to consist mostly of corn syrup. Coming at the end of this album of romantically buoyant mourning, “Waterloo Sunset” is both immediate and far removed, forever contemplating its loss even as it celebrates its actuality.


Fusing ultra-vivid digital production with hazy vocals and acoustic guitars, the Irish-Chilean producer makes music inspired by sleepless nights, lethargic days, and the omnipresent internet.

Dennis

On March 12, 1951, Hank Ketcham debuted Dennis the Menace in the Post-Hall Syndicate, which supplied content to newspapers across America. In the UK, on the same day, David Law published a comic strip of the same name in The Beano, a children’s magazine. The odd anecdote inspired the title of Sega Bodega’s third and latest album, Dennis. For Sega, aka Salvador Navarrete, the coincidence is a precursor to what today we might call the internet hive mind. “I have this theory that all of our brains are connected to a machine that is pumping out information to all of us all at the same time,” Navarrete told Interview. His statement might bring smartphones to mind, but the Irish-Chilean producer means something more enigmatic, predating Google and social media—closer to divine fate than a viral meme.
Dennis is the most recent entry in Sega Bodega’s increasingly personal body of work, framed through his singular lens of murky, club-ready pop and confessional lyrics. Where Navarrete has always balanced ballads and euphoric production, often in the same song, on Dennis the line is practically nonexistent. From the one-two punch of early standouts “Adulter8” and “Elk Skin,” Dennis puts dark pop in the service of visceral pleasure, pairing addictive, tactile synth arpeggios with muffled vocals and acoustic guitars. Inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (see “Tears & Sighs,” whose title comes from two of the Three Mothers), sleepless nights, lethargic days, and the internet’s omnipresence, Dennis is an album of floor-fillers, especially in its first half, that plays out like a bad hangover, one song shifting into the next like Dante passing through the circles of Hell.
Where other artists might shy from fusing acoustic and electronic sounds so closely, Navarette embraces them as equally worthy of attention, although his palette is distinctly digital in color. Much as in his contribution to Caroline Polachek’s “Sunset,” trance motifs and acoustic guitars effortlessly converge, particularly on “Elk Skin” and “Tears & Sighs.” Dennis is more playful than Navarrete’s first two albums, incorporating cryptic spoken-word “sleep talking” interludes from Miranda July and others. “Elk Skin” opens with a Greek fan asking Navarrete to sample her voice; “Dirt” concludes with July repeating, “My water bottle is bird transition”—the kind of “beautiful nonsense,” Navarrete has said, that “comes out when someone is absolutely comatose.” He seems to be using these voices more for their sonics than for the words’ literal meanings; the same applies to Navarrete’s lyrics, which take a back seat to his dazzling, sometimes unpredictable production.
While pulling inspiration from Dennis the Menace, the album’s title is also meant as a reversal of “sinned,” since Heaven, angels, and salvation have always been some of Navarrete’s lyrical preoccupations. But for cosmic, existential concerns, Navarrete is equally drawn to macabre body horror and foreboding titles that suggest a suffocating sense of dread. “Humiliation Doesn’t Leave a Mark” and “Set Me Free, I’m an Animal” both convey a vague kind of emotional harm that’s largely left unexplained. But dig deeper into the album’s dream logic, and a wounded desire for intimacy and connection emerges from its byzantine, watery depths. An expression of Navarrete’s search for communion in the global collective consciousness, Dennis—with its euphoric trance synths and nods to club music’s global lingua franca—speaks to the utopian potential of electronic music’s hive mind.


Years in the making, U2’s 14th studio album finds the band straining to reassert its relevance in a world where rock music has long since ceded its vanguard status.

Songs of Experience

In the late 1980s, en route to Memphis on the mission that would be dubiously immortalized by the documentary U2: Rattle and Hum, Bono hitched a ride with a stranger whose car stereo dashed his spirits. The young driver had been listening to Def Leppard’s Mutt Lange-produced glam-metal opus Hysteria—and it sounded magnificent. Bono was awed. When at last it dawned on the driver who exactly he’d picked up, he switched out the Def Leppard tape for some vintage U2. By comparison, it couldn’t help but sound dull. “I think we were a little out of touch,” Bono reflected later, having heard what U2 lacked. “We weren’t as great as we figured we were.”
It is hard to believe that U2 were galvanized to write Achtung Baby! by a chance encounter with “Pour Some Sugar on Me” on cassette. But then that’s U2: Their art is fundamentally, inveterately emulous. The pursuit of relevance seems above all what motivates them to create. What are they doing, really, when time and again they endeavor to reinvent themselves, if not trying to remain fashionable—or, more precisely, to stave off obsolescence? In 1989, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. told Bono he worried the band was “turning into the world’s most expensive jukebox.” The band could not abide it. “They became so bored playing U2’s greatest hits that one night they went out and played the whole set backward,” Bill Flanagan writes in his biography U2 at the End of the World. “It didn’t seem to make any difference.” It’s this inclination toward boredom and restlessness that has always secretly been U2’s animating force.
The fear of seeming “a little out of touch”: Nearly 30 years after Bono declared on stage that the band had to “go away and dream it all up again,” this is still the prime creative catalyst. And on Songs of Experience, U2’s 14th studio album, the anxiety is more apparent than ever. Bono, it seems, has been spending a lot of time around a lot of strangers’ car stereos, and what he’s concluded U2 lacks he’s undertaken resolutely to embrace. Behold the album’s many hallmarks of the modern: There are contributions by Kendrick Lamar (“American Soul”) and Haim (“Lights of Home”), and there are flourishes that conspicuously recall the xx (“Red Flag Day”) and Arcade Fire (“Get Out of Your Own Way”). Opening track “Love Is All We Have Left” invokes a distinctly Justin Vernon-ish vocoder, an homage we might dub “Bono Iver.” And “Summer of Love”—on which Bono croons “I been thinkin’ ‘bout the West Coast/Not the one that everyone knows”—suggests someone just discovered Born to Die.
Bono and the Edge have said that lately, innovation has been less evident in rock music than elsewhere—in “R&B, hip-hop, and pop,” according to a profile of the band in the New York Times. This academic interest in other genres is manifest across Songs of Experience. It’s clear in the subwoofer-trashing bass that undergirds “The Blackout,” the liveliest Adam Clayton has sounded in ages. It’s clear in the thick slabs of lurid distortion that course through “American Soul,” which last appeared, in much different form, as “XXX” on Kendrick’s DAMN. And it’s clear in the sumptuous, waterlogged beat that concludes the final track, “13 (There Is a Light),” reminiscent of Noah “40” Shebib and his legions of imitators. These are brazen attempts to capture the zeitgeist, even by U2’s standards. Their combined effect is dire: Songs of Experience is the shameless effort of four men in their late 50s to muster a contemporary, youthful sound.
Of course, the band’s aspirations toward relevance are tempered by a competing pursuit: Here they strive, as usual, to guarantee longevity. They want to seem in touch; they also want to canonize another classic. This, one presumes, accounts for the inclusion of more familiar-sounding U2 barn-burners such as “Love Is Bigger Than Anything in its Way,” which sounds almost exactly like one expects a U2 song with that title would, and lead single “You’re the Best Thing About Me,” which has already failed to take hold of the popular imagination.
“The problem with rock now is that it’s trying to be cool,” Bono said recently. “But clear thoughts and big melodies—if they come from a true place, they not only capture the instant, they become eternal in a way.” The Edge, meanwhile, said the band was concerned with whether these songs would “be played by people in a bar in 25 years.” Well, Songs of Experience does not much “capture the instant,” hunger to as it might, and it is safe to assume that while, say, “Pride (In the Name of Love)” or “New Year’s Day” have proven something like timeless, “Red Flag Day” and “The Showman (Little More Better)” will fall rather short of eternal. “How long must we sing this song?” Bono asked on “Sunday Bloody Sunday”—and they’ve been obliged to sing it nightly since 1983. With these songs, about a single tour should do.
Despite the blatant bid to sound modish and rejuvenated, U2 cannot help in certain respects but sound the same. Bono still writes Bono-brand howlers: He still lapses into prosaic platitudes (“Are you tough enough to be kind?/Do you know your heart has its own mind?”), moony cliche (“Free yourself to be yourself/If only you could see yourself”), and arena-rock patois (“You! Are! Rock’n’roll!”—the “you” there is America, naturally). Politics are addressed in earnest, to ludicrously ill-judged effect. Which is more vicariously embarrassing: the stretch of “Red Flag Day” that contrasts a tryst on the beaches of the Mediterranean with the deaths of Syrian refugees (“Baby let’s get in the water… so many lost in the sea last night”), or the portmanteau punchline that ends “American Soul,” which is simply: “refujesus”?
It is tempting to praise Songs of Experience on the basis of its mawkish wholeheartedness. It does indeed seem like the product of considerable toil: This thing has been in progress for something like three years now, and between its revisions, reconstructions, and post-election rewritings, it plainly benefits from more attention and effort than any U2 album since All That You Can’t Leave Behind. But it’s precisely this manifest ambition that makes Songs of Experience dispiriting. The music itself isn’t any better merely because this time around the band actually cares; all the industrious fervor amounts to meager flailing. It’s one thing to fail when you’re phoning it in: You leave hope that you could pull it off if only you tried. It’s quite another to fail when you’re giving it everything.


The second collaboration between the two experimental metal bands feels necessary. They bands flood the gap between doom and grindcore with all kinds of stunts, risks, and tricks.

The Body / Full of Hell: Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light

Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light

The very idea of a second full-length collaboration between the Body and Full of Hell seems laughably redundant. Just last year, the two bands reached across the aisle of experimental metal subgenres for the malevolent and strong One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache, an overwhelming outburst that distilled and forcibly synthesized what had long been best about both bands. The depth-charge doom of Portland duo the Body supplied the foundation, with drums that rattled like cannon fire and guitars that groaned as if from an abyss. The menacing grindcore of Maryland quartet Full of Hell shot and scattered across that frame, with blast beats arriving unannounced and high-treble riffs jutting from the din. The pitched squeals of the Body’s Chip King and the feverish vitriol of Full of Hell’s Dylan Walker made for excellent foils, just as both bands’ embrace of electronics allowed one to warp the other. It was a powerful doom-and-grindcore hybrid, built on a mutual fondness for overloading the senses and the speakers at every appropriate moment. So, why do it again?
But Ascending a Mountain of Heavy Light bests its predecessor by doing something much different—acknowledging the fundamental rift between the bands’ respective styles and flooding the valley between them with all kinds of stunts, risks, and tricks. Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale, for instance, helms a drum orchestra during “Our Love Conducted With Shields Aloft,” a riot of sound so aggressive it would make John Zorn blush. Full of Hell bassist Sam DiGristine even adds squawking soprano saxophone at the close of “Light Penetrates.” Harsh noise outbursts, stroboscopic electronic editing, drum & bass beats: The Body and Full of Hell lace them throughout Heavy Light, unexpected oases in a disorienting musical minefield. If Ache was an obvious intersection between these two prolific and restless bands, Heavy Light documents wild detours taken to get back to the same place.
The Body and Full of Hell are avid collaborators, and they funnel those collective experiences into these eight tracks. “The King Laid Bare” combines both bands’ respective doom and grindcore powers, but buttresses it with a bludgeoning four-on-the-floor beat. King’s screams and Walker’s growls crisscross frantically, a duet for broken angels. Lined with feedback and caked in static, closer “I Did Not Want to Love You So” is an uncommon exercise in restraint, both bands locked into a dirge that terrorizes only through suggestion. In a sense, it’s a heavy metal reprise of the Haxan Cloak’s “Excavation” suite. The Body and Full of Hell at last manage to make one another more interesting and involved.
While Heavy Light itself is a strange delight, there’s an implicit lesson to these eight tracks that’s perhaps more important and enduring: For a decade, the Body have sometimes seemed like the most absurdly dark band around, whether that meant appearing armed in promotional photos, naming a record No One Deserves Happiness, or putting Japanese terrorist Shoko Asahara on T-shirts that also read “Hate All Life.” On the surface, they’ve never seemed for the faint- or light-hearted. But on stage and in conversation, Lee Buford and King are playful and even cartoonish, two fundamentally approachable people who explore the dark to share the light.
Heavy Light might be their clearest recorded indication of that complex personality, of how there’s often a sense of zeal and color in what seem like obscenely dark moments. The Body and Full of Hell sound delighted while making this record, new partners becoming comfortable enough to admit just how weird they are. Yes, Heavy Light is destructive music, streaked with shrieked lyrics about prey and death, age and tears. But it’s also an inspiring, instructive record, too, where two brutal bands find solidarity and something to celebrate in the darkness. Even if every thought here isn’t complete, Heavy Light is as exciting as either band has ever been. A second collaboration between the Body and Full of Hell seemed unnecessary; the third, somehow, now seems imperative.


La Luz's second LP was inspired by Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, in which the teenagers of 1970s Seattle spread a bizarre sexually transmitted disease with varying symptoms. Produced by Ty Segall, the album brings surf-rock riffs and girl-group harmonies to songs that are darker than they seem.

Weirdo Shrine

In Charles Burns' graphic novel Black Hole, the teenagers of 1970s Seattle are spreading a bizarre sexually transmitted disease with varying symptoms. One might grow a tail or shed their skin, or sprout a tiny mouth below the collarbone that whispers secrets while you sleep. Some kids become extremely deformed, while others manage to hide their disfigurement beneath bandages and clothes. Black Hole was the inspiration behind La Luz's Weirdo Shrine, and there are oblique references to Burns' work littered throughout: its title alludes to the artwork built out of trash and human parts that Black Hole's characters stumble upon in the forest, and lyrics like "Cool kids/ Telling lies/ I can't hold their gazes in mine," (from opening track "Sleep Till They Die") hint at the shame and deceit in Burns' world.
What makes Weirdo Shrine interesting is that all this existential dread is wrapped up in classic-sounding surf rock, topped with enough "ooohhhs", "aaahhhs", and vocal harmonies to fill your girl group quota for an entire year. Lead singer and guitarist Shana Cleveland tosses out bright, airy guitar riffs, tinged with just the right amount of reverb, as easy as breathing. But the surfer girl guise is a front. If La Luz are a rum punch drink served in a pineapple, be careful lifting the tiny drink umbrella: There's probably a black widow spider underneath.
Nowhere is this more apparent than the ballad, "I'll Be True". Cleveland croons, "No one else treats me like you do/ And I'll be true to you/ Just as long as you want me to," while keyboardist Alice Sandahl tries to wrestle the good name of organ solos from the hands of Ray Manzarek. But the lingering effect of the song is not the declaration of loyalty, it's the minor chord progression that blends with the ladies' descending voices. It begs the question: If the love in the song is so pure and innocent then why does it come tinged with such eeriness?
La Luz recorded It's Alive in the back of their friend's trailer. For Weirdo Shrine, producer Ty Segall constructed a makeshift studio out of an old surfboard factory. At first, this tactic can come across almost like a cheap gimmick, a soundbite for press releases. But once you realize Segall also chose to keep a persistent hissing overlay on the entire record (it's hard to ignore once you hear it)—the occasional, lingering odd note or glitch will also tend to appear during the transitions between tracks—his methods become less a cute anecdote, and more a way to keep the group firmly grounded in their DIY roots. The ladies might have perfect pitch, but this is not an album for cleaning up mistakes.
It's frustrating that the record doesn't fully convey the energy of La Luz's live shows, where the band members will crowd surf and request the audience make space for a line dance à la "Soul Train". But if you choose to focus on La Luz's doo-wop harmonizing, then you're only looking at the frilly, pink bow that tops the whole package. The undercurrent of darkness in La Luz's music is what makes their work so fierce and intelligent. You could blink and miss their sneaky, underhanded way of slipping unease into their cheerful-sounding songs. Which is why you should give them more of your attention. Much like a car accident, it's always the ones we didn't see coming that hit the hardest.


After two records of democratic production and sampled voices arranged inside compositions for sliced-and-diced guitar, banjo, and cello, the Books make vocals and song structures this LP's centerpiece.

Lost and Safe

Over two albums, the Books have plucked sampled voices from their original context and arranged them inside simple compositions for sliced-and-diced guitar, banjo, and cello. They've taken moments of contemplation-- when one understands something on an emotional level but can't quite articulate his thoughts-- and dressed it up in a melodic frame. By transmitting at the frequency of pre-conscious association and intuition, Thought for Food and The Lemon of Pink were immediately accessible despite absences of obvious reference points. Both records felt like gifts, demanding little from the listener but paying out handsomely.
With their fresh sound and economic construction (the first two releases were each under 40 minutes), the Books did well to stick to a similar template on back-to-back records. But in preparing for their third album, one senses Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong felt as if they'd mastered this approach and needed to try something different. On Lost and Safe, the Books take the vocals and song structures hinted at on Thought for Food and fleshed out on The Lemon of Pink and make them the centerpiece.
This time it's Zammuto alone on the mic; Anne Doerner, whose spare vocal contributions to The Lemon of Pink wound up being a highlight, doesn't sing any lead. There's more processed electric guitar (often used in a clicking, repetitive manner reminiscent of classical minimalism) and far less cello. Despite live vocals on nearly every track and the shifts in texture, the approach is still very recognizably the Books. In a way, the original lyrics aim for the same level of engagement as the odd samples, finding and skirting the edge between different meanings. "Yes and no are just distinguished by distinction, so we chose the in-between" are the first words Zammuto sings in his hushed whisper on the opening "A Little Longing Goes Away", and that sort of ambiguity sets the tone for the record. Words for the Books have been a subject in and of themselves, worth hearing purely as sound, and the written lyrics here have a similar character.
Most of Lost and Safe is pleasant enough but not much more. "Be Good to Them Always" is the record's lone great track, one that hints at potential interesting directions down the road. As clicky electric guitar with some backward reverb pans across the stereo field, Zammuto sings in concert with the sampled voices, finding the hidden melody in the deadpan newsman deliver of lines like "I can hear a collective rumbling in America" and "This great society is going smash." Reminiscent of Steve Reich's "Different Trains", which built tunes from the speech inflections of interviewed holocaust survivors, "Be Good to Them Always" is a fantastic reminder of the musicality of the spoken word, an idea that lurks constantly inside the music of the Books.
One of the more interesting things about the Books first two records was their democratic production; the music never seems to push the listeners ear toward any one element. But now Zammuto's voice is clearly the focus, and though his quiet and half-spoken phrasing works well with the arrangements, the "tunes," as such, don't necessarily warrant the added attention. It's as though, with a few exceptions, the Books weren't quite sure what they wanted to do and they wound up stuck halfway between proper songs and the ambiguity of samples. Though the Books do a nice job here bending lyrics to fit the open-ended tone of their compositional style, the original vocals wind up draining their sound of mystery, and Lost and Safe seems by far more conventional than their previous two records.


The band’s open-armed fifth album looks to make amends, situating our human responsibilities within a natural world no less powerful and vulnerable than we are.

11:11

Pinegrove released their breakthrough record Cardinal in early 2016, a moment which, in rose-colored retrospect, we might call the good old days. An air of promise hung around these newcomers from New Jersey, a certainty that they were the next big benevolent thing in indie rock. It didn’t last. “Reality explodes,” goes one lyric on the band’s new album, 11:11, “and suddenly, we’re sinking/And I’m singing/And I’m old.”
No band’s longevity has ever been certain, least of all Pinegrove’s, after a member of the band’s crew accused lead singer Evan Stephens Hall of inappropriate conduct. At her request, Hall completed a course of therapy and suspended the band’s touring schedule for 12 months. 11:11 is Pinegrove’s third release since that hiatus, and the first to clarify what Hall learned from it: When you hurt somebody, you make amends. “I’m not gonna let you down,” sings Hall, in the closing moments of “Respirate,” before opening the next song with, “I let you down today.” It is hard to reckon with having hurt someone; these songs understand that repairing that hurt is both possible and necessary.
But Pinegrove aren’t just looking inward on 11:11. There are sweeping indictments of the ruling class on this album that would have been wildly out of place on the cozy Cardinal. Their scope extends back and forward in time—long before “corona hit” (“Respirate”) and far ahead, on “Orange,” to climate apocalypse. The record is open-armed, inclusive, with instrumentation echoing comfort-food folk and the rootsier elements of recent indie rock. Anyone from a teenage Alex G devotee to an older generation brought up on Neil and Joni will find themselves welcome into this broad musical tent. (Hall’s father plays throughout the album, contributing piano and a particularly stirring organ strain on standout “Alaska.”) The band is reaching out, both asking for support and extending it to anyone who wants in.
Pinegrove’s chief lyrical focus, the place where they see the most urgent need for repair, is the vulnerable space of nature. The album’s scenes—an old-growth forest where “trees repeat like numerals do,” a beach circled by birds, an “opalescent open road” of a sky—are situated in vivid outdoor spaces. We are a long way from the smoggy Port Authority of “Old Friends.” Human beings are animals, the band argues, integral moving parts of the natural world rather than interlopers within it. We have the power to choke the ocean with trash, but the ocean has the power to choke us, too. The best song on this record, “Swimming,” narrates a small child’s narrow escape from drowning. After emerging on the beach, “sputtering,” coughing into the sand, the child takes stock of the scene around him: “the moving trees, and birds above, and clouds.” Hall sings, “I wanna be a part of it/I’m not ready to die/Yet.”
Within this advocacy is the understanding that nature is not a panacea. It is a powerful force, occasionally a malevolent one; it can create sadness as well as cure it. In the lyrics of “Flora,” a depressed person takes “a blue meander into the woods,” only to find that “nothing’s shining like I feel it should.” He collapses—“bowing down,” “bending down”—beneath the trees, and ends the song on the floor. The scrubby undergrowth assumes the texture of Tracey Emin’s blue rug. The birds sound “dissident”—he may have meant “dissonant”—and the sun, in the grass, is red.
Still, the band urges, though “nothing feels good” even in the splendor of nature, to stand by and allow its destruction like so many do-nothing senators is not an option. “Today, the sky is orange,” Hall sings. “And you and I know why.” 11:11 is replete with pilots asleep at the wheel and elected officials ignoring the obvious. Yet the record’s most compelling figure is that dazed child on the beach, vomiting sand and seawater, insisting, “I want to be alive.” Hall, in working to make amends, and working once more to make music, seems to have reached the same conclusion as this child: Healing the world requires one to remain in the world.

Buy: Rough Trade


The Kenyan noise band’s debut is inventive and abrasive, a timely distillation of global chaos and techno-dystopian dread.

Duma

The duo of Martin Khanja and Sam Karugu make music that’s manic, heavy, and impossible to categorize. It’s electronic and caustic, though it can also feel pensive. Machine-gun drums and piercing shrieks form the foundation of most songs; there are occasionally little ribbons of melody to cling to, but more often than not, static, synth drones and sculpted feedback provide the only adornment. This is music that comes apart at the seams, that glitches and convulses, that revels in the sounds of people and machines stretched to their breaking points.
Both Khanja and Karugu are veterans of Nairobi’s thriving metal scene. Khanja’s previous band, Lust of a Dying Breed, pushed speed metal into industrial territory: their final release traded in blast beats for the jittery sound of programmed drums. Duma goes even further, dispensing with any allegiance to genre, though the band draws liberally from black metal, power electronics, grindcore, drone and even hip-hop. As a composer, Karugu is an agent of chaos: these songs are crammed full of pummeling bass hits, stacked polyrhythms and other violently rhythmic sounds—it’s easy to picture an Ableton grid crowded with overlapping drum tracks. He sometimes employs recordings of hand drums as well, though even these are usually played at inhuman tempos. Khanja, meanwhile, can howl like a black metal vocalist, bark like a metalcore singer, or even yelp with a kind of frenzied glee. His throat-shredding vocals are often the only constant in these songs as tempos shift, tracks drop in and out of the mix, and waves of noise advance and recede.
With a few exceptions, Duma has two distinct halves: the most frantic songs are front loaded while the songs on the back half are more meditative, though just as unflinchingly dark. In practice, this can feel a bit like putting on a soothing face mask after an exfoliating scrub. “Omni” opens with a skipping pulse that feels like it could induce tachycardia, eventually settles into a trap beat and then plunges back into discord—it sounds a bit like a corrupted MP3 of a TNGHT song. Lead single “Lionsblood'' buries black metal vocals under an assault of manic hand drums, while “Uganda With Sam” sounds like minimalist electronic music overlaid with hardcore growls. There are spookily atmospheric songs as well. “Pembe 666” marries mechanical-sounding drones to a spoken word piece, a reading of Revelation 5:6 in Kiswahili. It sounds every bit as haunting as the verse it quotes (“...[A]nd in the midst of the elders, stood a lamb as it had been slain, having seven horns and seven eyes”).
While it's hard to point to any one act that Duma sound like, their music does have some analogues. The breakneck polyrhythms of Tanzanian singeli music (as heard on their label,  Nyege Nyege Tapes’ releases of artists affiliated with Sisso Studios) aim for a similar sonic overload. And in ethos and ambition, Duma seem to draw from some of the most iconoclastic acts from the past decade of extreme music: they are elementally similar to early Fuck Buttons and as willing to fail the black metal purity test as Deafheaven and Liturgy. But where all of those bands aim for some kind of transcendence, Duma is content to frolic in the ugliness found here on earth. The textures they employ on Duma evoke overloaded circuits, corroded machinery, and heavy metals leaking into groundwater. This is the sound of human dread and misery, soundtracked by devices destined for the trash heap. Few records released this year better capture both the chaos and anxiety of our current moment.

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One of Kompakt's cornerstone artists returns to making slow, bleary, moody, spooky sounds just as they find favor in the U.S. electro-pop underground.

Kilimanjaro

Of the formative sounds most associated with the epochal electronic-music label Kompakt, none has had as long a shelf-life as the zoned-out house of Superpitcher. Worthy competitors have crept up and either faded away (shuffling "schaffel" techno) or been assimilated so fully as to become part of the general dance-music weather (Wolfgang Voigt's minimalism, Michael Mayer's precision trance). But Superpitcher-- nobody does what he does quite as well. Nobody even really tries. What he does has also proven very prescient, especially as we hear more and more slow, bleary, moody, spooky sounds from the haunted and/or wasted outer edges of genres like chillwave and witch-house. Such is the style that Superpitcher has worked within since breaking out in 2001 with a single called "Heroin". And such is the style of his fine return to form, Kilimanjaro.
It's been a few years since Superpitcher churned out his last essential material, having chosen instead to mess around in the studio and explore ideas of "singing" and playing "instruments" on a string of admirable but ultimately disappointing projects, most notably his Michael Mayer-collaboration album Supermayer Save the World. None of his work was ever exactly bad, but none of the energy or joy evident in the making of it found a corollary in the energy or joy receptors of those of us who endeavored to listen to it. Worthy lesson for all aspiring music-makers: Just because you can play a slide whistle doesn't mean you necessarily should.
But there's a slide whistle early on Kilimanjaro, and it sounds great-- and not only great but integral, as if time spent playing slide whistle and sounding a little lame in the past paid off in the form of a sound now worth exploring even more down the line. Not to overstate the slide whistle, though. It's just one tool among many used in "Voodoo", a track that opens Kilimanjaro on a notably dubby note, with all kinds of sounds-- sensuous singing, falsetto yelps, ominous chimes, rattling trash-can taps-- spread across an incredibly deep sound-field and arranged in time with a sort of lilting quasi-reggae beat.
There's a lot going on, but one of Superpitcher's strengths as a producer is the way he employs everything he does, big and small, in service of a consistently melancholy and often menacing mood. His drum tracks, like the ones in "Country Boy", are great examples of how subtle changes of timing and inflection can affect machine music as much as strings or piano. And the rhythms have a way of accentuating the weariness at the heart of Superpitcher's sound by falling invariably behind the beat, always a little slower and gloomier than they should-- like a slump-shouldered teenager clomping a few steps behind his mom at the mall while humming Cure songs in his head.
The mood comes across explicitly in lyrics that center on loneliness and disconnection with a breathy simplicity. But the mood proves even more unmistakable in the music, whether loping at an almost Portishead-like speed or amped up in the sultry, suggestive funk of "Black Magic" and the anthemic rave-piano torch song "Joanna". It's hard to imagine anyone not being moved in some divergent but certain way by those last two tracks in succession. And it's even harder to imagine Superpitcher being gone again for as long as he was.


After nearly two decades of on-off collaborations, the veteran musicians finally reach the finish line with their first full-length together, yielding a dozen tracks of solid, bare-bones hip-hop.

Danger Mouse / Black Thought : Cheat Codes

Cheat Codes

Producer Danger Mouse and rapper Black Thought have both made careers out of bridging cultural gaps. Danger Mouse first broke big as a producer with 2004’s The Grey Album, his mashup of vocals from JAY-Z’s then-swan song The Black Album with the instrumentals from the Beatles’ self-titled ninth full-length—colloquially known as The White Album. The Grey Album’s success led to production work with rappers like CeeLo Green—with whom he released two albums as the soul group Gnarls Barkley—and the late MF DOOM, as well as indie-rock polymaths like Damon Albarn and Beck. Black Thought, meanwhile, is a 30-year rap veteran and lead MC of the Roots who draws connections between capos, politicians, and pop culture in ruthless freestyles as often as he soothes and tickles audiences on The Tonight Show and Sesame Street. They each use music to bend time and history to their respective wills, finding the playful and the profane in every space they occupy.
The pair recognized each other as kindred spirits as far back as the mid-aughts. After working together on what would ultimately become a campy bonus track for Danger Mouse and DOOM’s 2005 Adult Swim collaboration The Mouse and The Mask, they began crafting an album originally called Dangerous Thoughts. Busy schedules eventually forced them to shelve the project for over a decade: Danger Mouse formed the duo Broken Bells with James Mercer of the Shins and produced albums for the Black Keys and Karen O, while Black Thought settled into his role in Jimmy Fallon’s house band and began his Streams of Thought EP series in 2018. After several false starts, the duo finally reaches the finish line with their first full-length collab, now called Cheat Codes. Their faith in each other is well placed, breeding a dozen tracks of solid, bare-bones hip-hop.
A reunion at this point in their respective careers is peculiar because they’re approaching it from different ends. The three volumes of Streams of Thought have rendered Black Thought more prolific as a solo artist than ever before; and while Danger Mouse has certainly worked with rappers since The Mouse and The Mask, he hasn’t produced an entire album for one in nearly 20 years. Luckily, they have natural chemistry. Mouse dives back into grainy loops that will be familiar to fans of his older rap work, though they’re generally less playful than you may be expecting. Tongue-in-cheek flourishes pop up every once in a while, like the twangy guitar lick grating against the crisp drums on “No Gold Teeth” or the patch of rhythmic hums on the hook of “Strangers.” On “Saltwater,” he even takes a stab at the sloping rhythms associated with Griselda to accommodate guest Conway the Machine. But most of these beats are standard boom-bap, handsome but not particularly adventurous.
Take opening song “Sometimes,” which turns a bed of violins, piano, guitar, and maudlin vocals into a pulpit for Black Thought to draw lines across Black history: “Images of grandeur from Jamel Shabazz, Dapper Dan/Clap your hands whether you’re in Paterson or Pakistan/Richard Wright, Black boy who grew into a Blacker man.” Black Thought’s flows are more rigid than those of a rapper like DOOM, whose syllable count and meter phase through dimensions, and the beats reflect his steady posture. This puts as much emphasis on his words as his technique, and Black Thought continues to rap his ass off. On “The Darkest Part” and “Aquamarine,” he taps into the same energy well as his famous Hot 97 freestyle to flip Public Enemy references and the constant struggles between science and religion into short parables of preservation. There’s a buzz to Black Thought’s rich baritone that amplifies each song’s sense of scale, whether he’s proclaiming his greatness from the mountaintops or sifting through personal trauma on a track like “Identical Deaths.”
And yet, as entertaining as this project is, there’s a sense that it could’ve been bigger, more substantial. Some songs are hampered by the decision to turn Black Thought’s vocals way down in the mix. Sometimes, it lends his voice a ghostly affect that serves the mood (“Because”). Other times, he sounds like he’s recording while standing 10 feet away from the mic (“The Darkest Part,” “Strangers”). Black Thought has gone on record as saying Cheat Codes isn’t another entry in the Streams of Thought series, but the album is so structurally and thematically similar to that series, it often becomes difficult to see the difference. Outside of its length and nearly two-decade incubation period—which, granted, resulted in an excellent posthumous DOOM verse on “Belize”—this would comfortably fit as Streams of Thought: Vol. 4.
But regardless of its scope, Danger Mouse and Black Thought bring good things out of each other. At Cheat Codes’ best, it’s electrifying to see the ways their respective obsessions with history and time inform the whole. Over the strobing synths and strings of “Saltwater,” Black Thought claims he’ll be “over 70 flipping the script regularly” before comparing himself to the late actor and activist Dick Gregory. Like that song, the album feels both modern and vintage—a swirl of distant touchstones happening all at once.


These New Puritans aren’t ones to half-ass anything and that holds true for their new live set: they perform with a 35-piece orchestra, at "Europe's largest multi-arts and conference venue." They play songs from across their catalog in addition to their album Field of Reeds in its entirety.

These New Puritans: Expanded (Live at the Barbican)

Expanded (Live at the Barbican)

These New Puritans are "post-rock" in an unusually literal way—since encrypting post-punk on 2008’s wiry, caustic Beat Pyramid, they’ve been an avant-garde band with a major-label budget, integrating classical composition, jazz instrumentation, musique concrete, primitive folk, dancehall, basically everything but rock'n'roll. More importantly, while they’ve maintained something of a power trio lineup, no one asks them a question so often posed to “rock bands”—“How are they going to pull this off live?” The apt comparisons to the otherwise incomparable Talk Talk are warranted, as the creation of Hidden and Field of Reeds were similarly defined by the trio’s isolation—from trends, from budgetary constraints and from the mundanity of the album cycle. Likewise, they use near-mythical tales of studio trickery to tease fans rather than singles, as Victoria’s Secret money gets funneled into Foley effects and falconry, Britain’s lowest voice and eight-foot Japanese taiko drums. But if they are going to pull this off live, These New Puritans aren’t ones to half-ass anything and so, this is how we arrive at Expanded—performing with a 35-piece orchestra, at "Europe's largest multi-arts and conference venue."
This isn’t just the best means of presenting Field of Reeds live, it might be the only way. Another commonality These New Puritans share with late-period Talk Talk is a status of being commercial non-entities in the States and believe me, no matter how suave they look on stage, this is awkward as hell in a rock club that might otherwise host, say, Finch or Marilyn Manson in 2014—earlier this year, I saw an impeccable performance interrupted by Sunset Strip stragglers and a Brazilian guy on Molly who kept requesting “Elvis”. By comparison, the polite clapping that accompanies Expanded may puncture the hermetic seal, but it doesn’t take all of the air out; if anything, it serves as a reminder that this is not a typical rock show.
Jack Barnett has been forthcoming about his lack of instrumental or compositional knowledge, but he is an exacting boss; these musicians are trained to not fuck up and they are not held to lower standards because These New Puritans are technically a pop band. So the alterations are minor, if any: “Fragment Two” was Field of Reeds’ most conventional moment and that’s obviously relative. And so it’s subject to the most conventional effect of live performance, which is that it plays slightly faster and looser than its studio counterpart. Meanwhile, “Island Song” goes straight into the incantatory portion of its mesmerizing coda rather than teasing it out as it does on the record.
Even the most inscrutable sounds on Field of Reeds evolved from an organic source and the most “how’d they do that?” moments are captured with startling clarity—the undulating, magnetic resonator-piano melody that snakes throughout “Island Song”, the hypnotic motifs of “Organ Eternal”, the glass-shattering crescendo of “The Light in Your Name”. In fact, Barnett and his charges are so adept at recreating the subtle complexities of Field of Reeds, that they don’t just render Expanded a total misnomer. They call its entire reason for existence into question.
With the exception of a two-minute “Intro Tape”, These New Puritans play Field of Reeds almost verbatim—in its exact order, with little, if any variation from the original versions. So why listen to this instead of Field of Reeds? Barnett considers Expanded to be on the level of TNP’s albums and called these performances improvements over the originals; but it’s too close to call even for those who’ve completely immersed within Field of Reeds’ otherworldly environs, which is even more disappointing than the typical refractory release, i.e., the well-intentioned and often terribly-executed remix album. Considering the austerity of its arrangements and their open-ended structure, Field of Reeds actually stands as a rare instance of a record that could lend itself to total teardowns.
The price of admission is warranted once the record-setting basso profundo of “Field of Reeds” fades out; new composition “Spitting Stars” is another lovely, pastoral collaboration with Graham Sutton, but considering the long latency periods and wild deviations from one These New Puritans record to the next, it’s likely an appendage to Field of Reeds rather than an indication of where they might go next. There are also two selections from Hidden, the more intimidating, less “orchestral” predecessor to Field of Reeds and the record that would have been better suited to this format.
For all of its stunt sonics—smashed watermelons, sharpened knives, M.I.A. interpolations—much of it was proudly composed on cheap keyboards. As such, “We Want War” embodies the entire timeline of human combat, from sticks and stones to modern digital strikes. But with the addition of Portuguese fado singer Elisa Rodrigues and the orchestral replacements for those digital dancehall patches, the textures of “We Want War” and proto-Yeezus banger “Three Thousand” are too cohesive, sounding closer to the overblown bombast of Michael Bay or Metallica’s S&M.
But it's more of a disappointment than a failure—at the very least, it might serve as someone's introduction to These New Puritans. But there is precedent for bands just as studiocentric properly utilizing this style of live performance: Kraftwerk's Minimum-Maximum, Portishead’s PNYC, Spiritualized’s Royal Albert Hall, October 10, 1997: Live —and if Expanded doesn’t reach that level by any means, at least it’s more worthwhile than the track-by-track, aggressively redundant cash-ins of the Cure’s Trilogy or Depeche Mode’s Songs of Faith and Devotion Live. But if it takes a classic rock cliche to emphasize how far beyond rock These New Puritans really are, then Expanded is a total success.


The Belo Horizonte-based producer has developed an eerie, minimalist take on Brazilian funk that’s a world away from the heavier strains associated with Río de Janeiro or São Paulo.

Queridão

Once associated mainly with Río de Janeiro, Brazilian funk has exploded stylistically in recent years; countless tributaries have branched out across the country’s vast landscape. DJ Anderson do Paraíso hails from Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third largest metropolitan area. While Belo Horizonte’s funk scene is as raucous and lyrically scandalous as those in the larger cities, it has become defined by an almost elegant minimalism, sparser and more refined than the heavy distortion of Paulista bruxaria or Río’s more hip-hop-oriented sound. Back in 2017, when the more experimentally minded BH scene was still getting started, Brazilian critic GG Albuquerques described its sound as resembling “ambient space funk.”
While many of these tracks have been previously available as loosies, Kampala, Uganda-based Nyege Nyege Tapes has collected DJ Anderson’s work into a single package. Queridão is part of a growing wave of compilations that translate the lawless edges of Brazilian funk into an album format that’s more easily accessible to curious listeners far removed from the local scene. Anderson’s skeletal tracks are more conducive to armchair listening than a great deal of funk, which typically compels the body to move. His slightly more downtempo style reduces the music to its barest necessities, hollowed out into a spacious cavern of metallic clanks and unsettling moans.
Anderson regularly incorporates classical instrumentation, like the razor-sharp cello on opener “Sadomasoquista” or the muted horns on “Joga Leite.” “Se Faz de Samantha” opens with strings that almost sound like they’re about to break into “Amazing Grace” before the sample cuts off and loops back. On “Paty Trem Barbie,” which incorporates a plunky bassline and the seductions of vocalist MC Magrella, he triggers the infamous squeaking sound effect familiar to fans of Jersey and Baltimore club—commonly misidentified as a mattress spring, but actually the sound of a chair in the studio where Lil Jon was working on Trillville’s “Some Cut.” Typically, though, when he deploys contemporary hip-hop tropes, like the drill wubs and trappy hi-hats on “Pincelada de Angolano,” they sound more off-kilter than familiar, drums scattering into chaos.
The voices are mixed more cleanly than many of the bass-boosted funk transmissions that go viral stateside, but the repetition—like the chant-like delivery of MC PR and MC Bim on “Todas Elas ao Mesmo Tempo”—is hypnotic, and so are Anderson’s robotic loops. On “Quarenta Cheio de Odio,” a haunted vocal sample and choral chants echo back and forth over a trance-like instrumental that recalls new age-tinged rave from the 1990s. But instead of building to a cathartic drop or ecstatic chorus, Anderson keeps us in a state of perpetual motion.
What’s most disarming about Queridão is the way Anderson plays with silence. In contrast to the extremity inherent in the genre, whether in the parties’ sensory overload or the production itself, he constructs an almost reflective space amidst the fray, voices frequently hanging in midair. While DJ Anderson do Paraíso’s music is sweaty and horny—both trademark qualities of the music—it frequently toys with the listener by denying release, like the apparition of a lover that you can’t reach. On Queridão, Anderson translates funk’s physical intensity to the heady rush of an out-of-body experience.


Assembled by Hyperdub’s Steve Goodman and filmmaker Nick Dwyer, this 34-track compilation offers a retro-futurist deep dive into a lost world of incidental music of surprising power and poignancy.

Various Artists: Diggin’ in the Carts: A Collection of Pioneering Japanese Video Game Music

Electronics are today so thoroughly and seamlessly integrated into our daily lives that it’s difficult to imagine a time when video games were silent. In Red Bull Music Academy’s six-part documentary Diggin’ in the Carts, the game-music expert Haruhisa Tanaka, aka Hally, pinpoints Atari’s onomatopoeic “Pong” as marking the advent of sound in game consoles in the early 1980s. Those blips gave way to “Space Invaders”’ four-note melody, and from there, an explosion of musical and technological innovation was unleashed across Japanese video-game music. The extreme limits of the games’ 8- and 16-bit chips forced the in-house composers at Nintendo, Sega, Konami, and other companies to push their creativity in making music that would enhance the player’s experience without overstaying its welcome. Now Hyperdub’s Steve Goodman, aka Kode9, and Diggin’ writer and co-director Nick Dwyer have culled the best of that work into this 34-track compilation. Gleaming with optimism and imagination, Diggin’ in the Carts is a deep dive into a lost world of incidental music that retains surprising power and poignancy.
From the first note of “Opening,” from “Cosmic Wars,” there’s a sense of the uncanny that lingers over the music. Though humble in their construction, these miniatures gesture toward the grand statements of classical, progressive rock, and film soundtracks. With only a handful of simple waveforms at their disposal, the composers drew out something essential in these short pieces. They hint at the driving funk of reggae, the playful swagger of jazz, and the aggression of heavy metal and industrial. There’s a marvelous economy at work: Momentum is driven by crisp arpeggios and only a fraction of a drum kit, and ingenious flourishes and turnarounds keep the energy from lagging. On paper they might seem slight, but once you acclimate, they fill out, growing in scale by virtue of their clarity and space.
Diggin’ can be divided roughly into two camps. On the one hand there are tracks that seem purely synthetic, using warm waveforms to create the sorts of rich, moody sounds that “Stranger Things” now fetishizes. Elsewhere there are tracks that seek to faithfully mimic acoustic instruments. Texturally complex pieces like “Mister Diviner” (from “The Mahjong Touhhaiden”) or “Temple” (from “Actraiser”) go for a symphonic flavor, with strings, brass, winds, guitar, timpani, and voice. They press right up against the limits of the format, with nuanced details sitting next to jagged cuts and unavoidable artifacts. For a young gamer at the time, perhaps the music went unnoticed in the excitement of play. (For parents it was almost certainly an irritant). Now it sounds like a message in a bottle, not an inch of paper wasted.
Certain tracks stand out. Hiroto Saitou’s work for “Metal Stoker” is a great place to start: The shimmering melodies recall Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator,” pinging and chiming with infectious artifice, while the drum programing owes a debt to King Crimson’s Bill Bruford. Tadahiro Nitta’s contributions to “Xak II” and “Illusion City,” “An-Un (Ominous Clouds)” and “Metal Area,” both pulsate with gritty aggression worthy of Chuck Norris’ Delta Force movies. And Manabu Saito’s whimsical “Telepathy,” from the game “Chatty,” is one of the sweetest earworms I’ve heard in recent memory. Its hollowed-out square waves and skipping rhythm telegraph an ephemeral lightness.
RBMA’s series interviews a handful of producers and musicians, including Flying Lotus and Thundercat, who sing the praises of these soundtracks and declare their lasting influence. There’s certainly a direct link to grime’s spartan first wave; some of that genre’s earliest tracks were made on Playstation consoles, and this track from Wolverine: Adamantium Rage directly prefigures the genre by almost a decade. More recently, the hazy memory worlds of Actress and Oneohtrix Point Never feel inexorably tinted by these past futures.
But there’s something in Diggin’ in the Carts that defies interpretation or modernization. As with library-music treasure troves, beloved hold music, and even certain pared-back DJ tools, the commercial, functional nature of this work sets it free from from the stranglehold of auteurism. The juxtaposition of undeniable ambition with now-discarded and obsolete technology makes for a potent and nostalgic listening experience. Even if you never played these games, it’s hard to resist the music’s allure. Yet its combination of ingenuity and earnestness makes for a formula that’s difficult to recreate. Artists may reference, reinterpret, or sample this material; they may modify their old Gameboys and perform with them, or spend thousands on the vintage synths of the era. Yet our reflections on the past remain skewed by our own biases. Diggin’ is a remarkable transmission: a document of a wave of heady creativity swept under our headlong rush toward tomorrow.


Opeth's first album in three years lacks the absolute willpower and prevailing ambition of the band’s best work. These eight songs run cold on new energies and ideas, a rarity for a catalogue custom-made to overwhelm.

Pale Communion

Can you name a band that's less cool than Opeth? For a quarter-century, Mikael Åkerfeldt’s ever-amorphous set of Swedes has let the effort show with every sound, song, and surprising genre twist. At various points in Opeth’s career, their style has been categorized as progressive rock, death metal, or progressive metal, though each of those terms felt, at best, like undersized umbrellas for a band actively coercing bits of jazz, Romanticism, blues, British folk, pop, and new age into their musical madhouse. Opeth is so demanding that, a decade ago, they opted to issued two separate albums—the clenched Deliverance and the much more calm Damnation—rather than package them as an intended, insurmountable double album; still, sold separately, each half of the dichotomous pair broke or pushed the one-hour mark and twisted and turned with a maniacal and delightful zeal. Åkerfeldt’s work has never sounded unaffected or effortless; Opeth have, instead, worn labor and fastidiousness as badges of honor, open rebuttals to any sense of classical cool.
In turn, Opeth is one of modern music’s great paradoxes. They are one of the world’s most popular and enduring heavy acts, having charted every album they’ve made since Damnation in at least half-a-dozen countries. And their international following is a cult of often-unwavering allegiance. To wit, should you arrive at an Opeth show without an Opeth shirt printed in thick and vivid paint, you’ll find that the aforementioned code of cool has been temporarily reversed. Even among the faithful, though, the feeling that Opeth can be forced, overindulgent or obtuse is an abiding one; it is the baggage concomitant to the band’s audacity, the side effect of the quest to shoehorn a dozen things into ultra-dynamic metal. But that same effort enables one of Opeth’s greatest unifying assets: the overwhelming rush that their best music can provide, where a tizzy of elements sends the listener into a tailspin. Line up their catalog from one end to the other, press play, and be stunned by the number of moments (however calculated and meticulous they may be) where audience orientation vanishes. Their complications are their bait.
But Pale Communion, Opeth’s first album in three years, lacks the absolute willpower and prevailing ambition of the band’s best work—that is, the core that made the awkwardness sufferable. This is only the third album where Åkerfeldt foregoes his versatile death metal vocal delivery, following the path of 2011’s Heritage and 2003’s Damnation. He alternately supplants it instead with a singsong lilt, a folk-rock affability and an alt-rock theatricality. Notably, this is the first Opeth LP to arrive since Storm Corrosion, Åkerfeldt’s 2012 full-length release with longtime collaborator Steven Wilson. Half of that album featured the London Session Orchestra, an influence that resurfaces throughout Pale Communion.
In fact, such strings web together the record’s two-song finale—and, really, the 16 minutes of music that save Pale Communion from abject disappointment. “Voice of Treason” is dramatic and lunging, with tumescent strings providing the ballast beneath the song’s seven-minute rise toward the thrall. Just ahead of the end, there’s a momentary blast beat, an enormous wash of strings, and a burst of heroic vocals from Åkerfeldt. “Have you ever seen the aftermath of giving up?” he howls, the band exploding around him. And the stately strings that sweep beneath closer “Faith in Others” are the platform from which Opeth lifts toward a post-rock surge. It dissipates slowly, as though the sound is being peeled apart layer by layer. Opeth surprises and engrosses here, ending this album better than they do most anything else.
Pale Communion often feels too polite to overrun and too guarded to sustain Opeth’s familiar sense of total upheaval, where the listener struggles to remember which end is up and which way is forward. Take opener “Eternal Rains Will Come.” The song first weaves complicated rhythmic shifts against spools of sharp guitar and distorted organ, a compelling mix that suggests a florid spin on math-rock. But after a pause, the quintet springs ahead into a straight beat, flimsy funk dancing beneath quick harmonies cribbed from “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes." The instruments coil again toward the end, with the guitar and drums pirouetting in sudden sync. But it’s a hyperactive soft-rock climax, an effete attempt to reach new heights.
Much the same holds for “Elysian Woes,” a trickle of acoustics backed by flute-like synthesizers  and led by Åkerfeldt in a rather miserable crooner guise. And “River” is the stiff Swedish approximation of fluid Southern guitar rock. Padded again by acoustic guitar and generous organ, the first half is more pure prairie league than Allman Brothers anthem. But even the ricocheting instrumental midsection and spring-loaded coda feel preordained, like the very blatant ends of Opeth’s Southern rock trial. Likewise, “Goblin,” Opeth’s carousel-like horror score tribute, is as obvious as its name, while “Cusp of Eternity” implies Bono taking an acute, unfortunate interest in the power of djent guitars. Even as it twists and turns through several solos, the destination feels fated, Opeth’s usual inexplicable intricacy given over to plug-and-play automation.
These arrivals of the expected are Pale Communion’s most damning symptom. In the past, Opeth have made their inspirations and aspirations obvious, but their avid recombinations suggested an array of infinite possibilities. Even if you couldn’t abide the inflexibility of their methodical grandeur, it was hard to condemn the immense effort and imagination involved. But Pale Communion only toys with the building blocks, revealing influences that were already apparent but refusing to invigorate them alongside each other. It’s not that Opeth isn’t cool here. It’s that these eight songs run cold on new energies and ideas, a rarity for a catalog custom-made to overwhelm.


Minimalist force is what Seattle punk band So Pitted does. They excel at it. On neo, their debut, the trio sound like the proverbial (mechanical) bull in a china shop—except that bull is intentionally there to fuck up some fine dinnerware and is determined to have a hell of a time doing it.

neo

Punk is officially over the hill at this point, having passed its 40th birthday: Blow out the candles and buy it some gag gifts. As the oldest musicians reckon with maturity in a genre that was developed for and by their young and reactionary selves, and successive generations of musicians discover the grit and power of an increasing number of subgenre styles, the dialogue about what's punk and what isn't gets increasingly tangled. At the core of every single one of those subgenres, though, and therefore residing somewhere at the core of punk itself, is minimalist force—sometimes pure id, sometimes reflexive egoic commentary thereon, sometimes both at once. Minimalist force is what Seattle's So Pitted does. They excel at it.
On neo, their debut, the trio sound like the proverbial (mechanical) bull in a china shop—except that bull is intentionally there to fuck up some fine dinnerware and is determined to have a hell of a time doing it. Guitarist Jeannine Koewler's melodic lines, lower on the scale and blown out through a bass amp, bulk out their nasty sound. Drummer Liam Downey, who also shares some of the vocal duties, is what a punk drummer needs to be: both a hard hitter and nimbly able to keep quick time when necessary. Vocalist and guitarist Nathan Rodriguez snarls his way through his scratchy, dissonant, percussive instrumental work just as much as he does in his robotic, distorted singing.
There's certainly a lot of Touch & Go and AmRep (and early Sub Pop, too, which makes their choice of label perfectly logical) back catalog mining to what So Pitted does, as there is for any contemporary noise rock band. But songs like "i'm not over it," which is half sludgy instrumental and half incitement to circle pit; "the sickness," which slides from noise-rock gnarl to post-punk precariousness in a way that seems wholly natural; and "holding the void," in which layers of noise and screel are added and peeled away to reckless effect, pay their homages without walking in the footsteps of those who came before.
Best of all, So Pitted sound like they move as a unit. This is where their true energy derives—from their internal communication. You don't hear the gears grinding or see the wires—you only see the bull in all its terrifying, joyful glory and the destruction it causes.


The singer and guitarist takes a new, rangy, proggy direction with an artful touch, finding some psychedelic wisdom between the profound and the mundane.

Course in Fable

There is always some undiscovered land in Ryley Walker’s vast world. In one hemisphere resides a full-album reinterpretation of Dave Matthews Band’s The Lillywhite Sessions that the New York-based guitarist covered with unerring reverence and sincerity; in another, he is a living historian cum poet of bathrooms. Just this February, he released Deep Fried Grandeur*—*an improvised live set that’s like a kosmische ramble cut with Japanese psychedelic explorers Kikagaku Moyo. Course in Fable exists somewhere new, yet again, as if the freedom afforded by releasing music on his own Husky Pants label has spurred him to always be creating on the frontier. Produced by Tortoise’s John McEntire (who also contributed synth and keyboards), Course in Fable is Walker’s most ambitious and satisfying solo album to date.
Another factor in Walker’s artistic resurgence has been resolving his substance abuse problems. As he admitted in an interview conducted in early April, he’d been sabotaging himself for years, saying that “redemption, joy, and gratitude” inform Course in Fable. After a failed suicide attempt in 2019, Walker sought help through meds, therapy, sobriety, and he saved himself. He got happy, but, mercifully, not sappy.
On opening track “Striking Down Your Big Premiere,” though, you may gasp at the outrageously bold intro that leads into a motif of Keith Emersonian grandiosity, bolstered by rococo, fiery guitar riffing from Bill MacKay. The song soon downshifts into a dulcet burble of folk-rock with an earnest, Sebadoh-esque melodic contour that later splays out into surging proggy climaxes. “We’re all lot lizards parked outside your door,” Walker sings, later concluding, “Always shit-brained when I’m pissed.” Longtime fans may wonder, how did we get to this pomp? But “Rang Dizzy” floats things back to Earth with cello-augmented baroque ’n’ roll. The refrain, “I am wise/I am so fried/Rang dizzy inside/Fuck me, I’m alive,” points to Walker’s amazement at reversing his downward spiral. These are undoubtedly the album’s most straightforward lyrics.
Elsewhere, it’s clear that Walker has developed into a writer who turns the mundane into the profound. He obliquely poeticizes around his subjects, speaking in riddles as esoteric as they are memorable. None of the lyrics on Fable lands as bluntly as “I’d rather be dead than to see you cry” from Primrose Green’s “Sweet Satisfaction.” Rather, idiosyncratic details abound and veiled meanings reign. “A Lenticular Slap” exemplifies Walker’s sloshed-on-words approach. Sounding like an homage to the big-vocabulary rock of Slovenly, SST Records’ unsung ’80s heroes, the track writhes with rhythmic switchbacks, unexpected acoustic flourishes, and eccentric vocal phrasing. It appears to chronicle a drug-induced breakdown, but lines such as “A lenticular slap/To the cross-eyed seeker/The bridge written off the map/News crawl from a goddamn tweaker” don’t telegraph it. The mantra “Hold on to the loose ends” chanted as a freaky wah-wah guitar exults to the fadeout ranks as a harrowing highlight. “I’m not a good storyteller,” Walker said in an interview this year. “I write couplets in a journal and stitch them together. It’s all sort of non sequitur, stream-of-consciousness crazy talk. I don’t have any big revelations or answers.”
Another promising new direction emerges on the weird epic “Pond Scum Ocean.” MacKay’s electric guitar skitters in strange directions and in odd modes, then shifts into trance-inducing chimes hinting at both The Twilight Zone theme and John Berberian’s Middle Eastern Rock. Who else writes like this? Perversely, Fable’s last song is its catchiest—“Shiva with Dustpan,” a gorgeous orchestral folk tune and a testament to strings arranger and cellist Douglas Jenkins’s delicate touch. Shiva is an ascetic Hindu god known as “The Destroyer,” but also as a prodigious creator with world-transforming powers. Walker equips the deity with that most humble of implements, another contrast of the mundane and profound.
Up through 2016’s Golden Sings That Have Been Sung, Walker was on course to become a 21st-century Tim Buckley, or John Martyn, or Bert Jansch. But he soured on being beholden to freak-folk masters and going through the indie-rock golden-boy grinder, so he diversified and started jamming with musicians such as drummer Ryan Jewell, who helped to nudge him down stranger paths. Course in Fable bears the ripe fruit of this impulse, cohering into the most impressive of many surprising recent triumphs from an artist who’s faced down oblivion and has emerged more inspired than ever.

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The Brooklyn band's seventh album features more disciplined songwriting, and the production offers more clarity and variety than ever before. While 2011's Sun and Shade exhibited Woods' jammy side amid the usual folk-pop gems, Bend Beyond is all pop, all the time.

Bend Beyond

In the world of Woods, minor refinements mean a lot. Bend Beyond is the Brooklyn band's seventh album in seven years, and in broad terms it isn't all that different from Woods' other records. The group's reference points remain the same: 1960s sunshine pop, the Grateful Dead's improvisational explorations, and 90s lo-fi. The most immediately distinctive attribute of Woods' music-- and its most decisive point of demarcation-- is singer Jeremy Earl's childlike falsetto; if you can't appreciate Earl's voice, Woods' rapidly growing discography (which is also rounded out by various EPs and singles) will be a non-starter. Otherwise, that body of work is among the most consistently enjoyable from any young indie rock band in the past several years, and Bend Beyond is Woods' most approachable gateway yet.
As for the minor refinements made on Bend Beyond, they aren't all that minor at all, actually-- the songwriting is more disciplined, and the production offers more clarity and variety than ever before. While 2011's Sun and Shade exhibited Woods' jammy side amid the usual folk-pop gems, Bend Beyond is all pop, all the time, with only one song running past the four-minute mark, and only by 25 seconds. That song happens to be the foreboding title track, already one of the all-time great Woods tracks and an in-concert highlight that runs two or three times longer live than on record. But even in truncated form, "Bend Beyond" is a thrilling example of Woods' ability (in spite of living thousands of miles away on the opposite coast) to conjure the spirits of L.A. folk rock and the dark vibes emanating from the scene's seamy underbelly. If "Bend Beyond" is the album's best song, "Is It Honest?" sounds like the record's surest hit, opening with a shimmering electric-guitar riff that might be the single catchiest moment on any Woods album. (Though it's rivaled by the harmonica blowing like a train whistle through "Cali in a Cup".) But darkness lingers in "Is It Honest?", too-- "It's so fucking hard to see," Earl spits in the chorus, an uncommonly aggressive moment in this group's otherwise peaceful, pastoral universe.
Whatever battles are being waged in the lyrics against demons real and imagined don't carry over to the music, which is effervescent and sweetly touching and unmistakably presented with well-earned confidence and new-found polish. On past records, Woods might have obscured the delicate campfire ballad "It Ain't Easy" in layers of tape hiss. (Tape manipulator G. Lucas Crane is mostly absent throughout Bend Beyond.) But here it shines in crystal-clear fidelity, and the stunning melody earns such treatment, carried on sparkling acoustic guitar and Earl's tender, heart-tugging vocal.
In an interview with Pitchfork earlier this year, Earl said the idea on Bend Beyond was to spend a little more time on the songs than usual, as opposed to the extemporaneous approach of past releases: "That was always our style: embrace the spontaneous energy of recording a song the minute after it's written, do the overdubs really fast, mix while recording. For this album, we decided to re-record stuff more." You can hear that extra care in the fantastically menacing organ riff on "Find Them Empty" and the chiming guitar riff that lifts the chorus of the charming "Impossible Sky". For the first time, Woods have given their own songs their full due on record.
Fans of Woods' "spontaneous energy" might lament the relative straight-forwardness of Bend Beyond (even if the band's recent self-titled split release with Amps For Christ suggests they haven't entirely left that approach behind). But Woods' greatest strength has always been songwriting, and sharpening the focus and cleaning up the production has only enhanced the band's welcoming melodies. Besides, it's about time this chronically undervalued group broadened its audience a bit. After Bend Beyond, there are plenty of other great Woods records that await neophytes.


The second installment of a planned trilogy is a fleet-footed journey throughout many styles and moods, yet frames the 23-year-old artist fully as herself.

Tkay Maidza: Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 2

Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 2

The line between what is alternative and what is mainstream becomes blurrier every day, which is good news for artists who don’t occupy one space or another. Things have especially been opening up for Black women, who historically have had to contend with even narrower expectations from the music industry than other female artists. It’s hard not to see this trend in the trajectory of Tkay Maidza’s career. Initially signed to Universal Australia and moving among smaller labels tied to majors, the Adelaide-based singer and rapper is now signed to the London indie label 4AD. Maidza’s first release with them, Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 2, is an EP/mixtape that feels like a second debut at a moment when the world might be more ready to process an artist with her unique combination of ambition, pop aptitude, and quirkiness than it was when she released her actual debut four years ago.
During her early development as an artist and slow rise to international recognition, Maidza seemed at times unsure of how to position herself. As a Zimbabwean-born Australian with a knack for gliding across the borders that separate pop, hip-hop, and electronic music, she can be forgiven for her uncertainty. On her 2016 debut album, Tkay, she channeled Santigold and M.I.A. in a sing-song derived from soundsystem culture on electro-rap party jams. Her rapped verses were fluent and vivid but a bit too indebted to Azealia Banks. “Castle in the Sky,” leaned strongly in the direction of Little Dragon’s sound at the time.
Last Year Was Weird, Vol. 2, the second installment of a planned trilogy, frames the 23-year-old artist fully as herself. She’s reunited with Tkay and Last Year Was Weird Vol. 1 producer Dan Farber for this release, who crafts eight varied tracks that allow her to showcase her versatility. “Awake,” featuring JPEGMAFIA, and “Grasshopper,” two dark and filthy trap productions with a case of UK drill envy, give Maidza the opportunity to rap hard while nimbly switching up flows. On the minimal, mid-tempo “Shook” and bouncy house number “24k” she goes for speed. Amid these different modes, she finds room to move freely, eventually touching down in terra firma of her own.
Movement, particularly flight, is a motif on Vol. 2. The album opens with a lo-fi hip-hop track titled “My Flowers” where Maidza drawls reflectively about her petals taking flight. Later, “24k” is introduced by an announcer for “LYWW radio” speaking from “30,000 feet in the air.” It’s a theme that suits her well in this moment, where the first-generation Australian who has spent the past several years touring and travelling displays a sensibility that’s a little bit of everywhere and also nowhere specific. While a hint of grime creeps into her style on “Grasshopper,” she strikes a distinctly Californian tone when crooning cooly to the sunny bedroom pop of “You Sad” and the trippy funk of “PB Jam.” You can almost hear Maidza’s passport getting stamped as she goes from song to song.
Adventurous as it is, Vol. 2 ultimately lands in a pop space and Maidza is, indeed, a pop star — albeit a habitually code switching one making third-culture pop music. It’s something her influences pioneered and something she’s learning to do her way in this series of mixtapes. In addition to flight, metaphors of blossoming and emerging from a chrysalis crop up throughout this release, underscoring themes of growth, lessons learned, and flexing newfound confidence. The narrative is convincing. Well into her career at 23, she sounds wise but not jaded, armed now with as much self-knowledge as raw talent.
Vol. 2 arrives in an era where self-created alt-pop stars such as FKA twigs and Grimes are commonplace, left-field rappers like Princess Nokia, with whom Maidza has toured, have real clout, and electro-flamenco artist Rosalía wins Grammys. Each artist who bends the conventions of their genre widens the possibilities for the next artist who enters the field, allowing them to work without worrying as much about how they will be categorized. It’s an atmosphere more conducive to the expansion of Maidza’s gifts than the one she started out in, which bodes well for Vol. 3.

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