Backed by his live band, the rapper remixes and elaborates the autobiographical themes and gospel uplift of 2023’s Michael.

Killer Mike: Michael & the Mighty Midnight Revival, Songs for Sinners and Saints

Twenty years ago, Killer Mike was the upstart landing I’m-up-next spots on Jay-Z and Outkast records. His verse on Big Boi’s “Flip Flop Rock,” which features Jay, casts Mike’s good fortune as both salvation and destiny. “I foregoed the crime and I focused on rhyme/Focused on every word and line/Like a young Cassius Clay in his prime/I was born to talk shit and prove mine,” he raps with brio. This sense of deliverance has remained a fixture of his work, from the hopeful “gospel music for the ghetto” of his mixtape days, to the rowdy agitprop of R.A.P. Music and Run the Jewels, through last year’s ponderous bildungsroman Michael. He often likens music to a religious experience, zooming in on the ways his career has transported him mentally and materially to a better life.
Michael & the Mighty Midnight Revival, Songs for Sinners and Saints continues this tradition. Part remix album, part somber coda to the gospel-influenced Michael, it burrows further into Mike’s formative memories, beliefs, and sounds. Backed by his touring band the Mighty Midnight Revival, and producers and guests from the many eras of his career, Killer Mike cycles through trap, gospel, and Memphis rap as he extols the virtues of staying the course. “I’m bearin’ witness,” he says on the intro, invoking the custom of Southern Black church testimonies. This is rap as outreach.
The album comes six months after a whirlwind Grammy night during which Killer Mike won three awards and got arrested for an altercation with a security guard. He describes the evening’s whiplash on the bluesy “Humble Me,” likening his booking to the biblical story of Daniel in the lion’s den and boasting that he was proud to be handcuffed because he shares the experience with his civil rights heroes. After spending the night praying, he’s seemingly rewarded when the next day, his son is confirmed for a kidney transplant. Like many Killer Mike stories, the tale is dramatic and a bit self-aggrandizing—is getting cuffed at the Grammys really the same as being targeted by the FBI?—but Mike’s faith powers his performance. He raps with the conviction of someone who has been touched by the divine and feels newly attuned to its power.
The production, mostly helmed by Cuz Lightyear, plays up the feeling of spiritual awakening. The slow, open arrangements use jubilant choir fills, warm keyboard and organ melodies, and swinging rhythms to channel gospel uplift. While a few songs boom and rattle, most sway with relief. “Slummer 4 Junkies” combines the Michael tracks “Slummer” and “Something for Junkies” into a slow-burning epic that swells with the Mighty Midnight Revival’s joyful harmonies and then contracts into a penitent elegy. The songs felt episodic on Michael, but combined they evoke the haze of memory, the narratives blurring together.
Mike is still an unabashed Black capitalist preaching a queasy prosperity gospel, but compared to Michael, Songs for Sinners and Saints prioritizes gratitude. Mike dials back the hater screeds and straw man- (and gay-) bashing to revisit his own battles and count his blessings. The shift loosens his rapping, which was somewhat stiff on Michael. On “Had to Go Get It,” he casually transitions from hitting the downbeat to chopping: “Used to sell grams of that white coke on Ponce de Leon to white folk/Knew to do better, but I wanted cheddar, so dance with the devil/Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did it.” Over a slick flip of Trillville’s crunk anthem “Neva Eva” on the bouncy standout “Higher Level,” Mike thanks his wife for confronting him about cheating. “I had a white girlfriend and mistress, good fella like I was Henry/’Til I woke up with that trey-eight to my face held by my missus,” he raps.
Songs for Sinners and Saints doesn’t cover as much ground as Michael, which offered the rich multi-genre sprawl of a classic Dungeon Family release. But the narrower palette and lower stakes of the project restore the focus and play of his “Snappin’ & Trappin” days, when he approached rap as a calling rather than a pulpit. “’97 3-6 Freestyle,” produced by DJ Paul and TWhy, delivers all the hallmarks of a Killer Mike song: Jesus, Martin Luther King Jr., and Coretta Scott King; Memphis-inspired triplets; sneers about elitists and broke people. But even the familiar beats exist in service of his relentless soul-searching. He sounds like a believer—in his God, in his talent, and in rap as a hallowed art.


Sharing passing similarities to two of modern indie hip-hop's top producers, Madlib and the late J Dilla, L.A.-based Warp recording artist Flying Lotus has created a darkly meditative fusion of debris and warmth, b-boy head-nod, and laptopper experimentalism out of static, texture, and rhythm.

Los Angeles

Hip-hop's earliest records often relied on faded, scratchy source material run through entry-level equipment. Even as technology advanced, the grain and the gristle stuck around-- sometimes out of necessity, sometimes as an extra ingredient. Over time, those aged, decaying sounds burrowed their way underground to crop up in pockets of IDM, dubstep, and indie hip-hop, resulting in music, built around texture more than bass or treble, that often sounded ragged at birth.
With his second album, Flying Lotus (aka Steven Ellison) has mastered this texture. Los Angeles is filled with the crackle of static, but there's something about this ambient noise-- a nuisance to audiophiles, a sign of weakness in radio signals-- that feels oddly comforting. Rather than audio damage or interference, this deceptively entrancing record (stick with it, it's a grower) feels like nature; it's almost as though Ellison went out of his way to digitize and filter the sound of rain hitting a sidewalk to accompany its beats. Opener "Brainfeeder" bristles with sharp rattling taps, while "Breathe. Something/Stellar STar" transmutes it into boiling-water burble, and even the 1960s sci-fi foley-room chatter on the 43-second "Orbit 405" is underpinned by snarling, distorted, pre-amp buzz. It sounds less like an album built on damaged, beat-up, pre-existing vinyl loops than a clean, shiny new LP put through four decades' worth of wear and mishandling.
The static, of course, is just a single (if crucial) ingredient in the character of Los Angeles: What this album relies on specifically is the way that crackle and buzz reacts to the rhythm at the core. Flying Lotus shares passing similarities to the late J Dilla and fellow Cali beat creator Madlib in the way he puts together his beats, and it's not hard to hear touches of James Yancey's Ummah-era production tricks infused with the same off-kilter slipperiness you might find on a recent Beat Konducta release. And in Ellison's hands, these tricks are stridently odd where they could have been safely derivative, revealing a deep affinity for psychedelic lushness and digital distortion that puts him in his own class.
Los Angeles is also prone to letting its beats hang loosely in the air. Ellison often slips empty space inside the rhythm (another place where the ambient static comes in handy), and even when the tempo accelerates past the album's typical leisurely pace and finds itself driving a track packed with wall-to-wall bass, little of it seems hectic or jarring-- even the jittery tweaker-electro of "Parisian Goldfish" smoothes out into a pleasant pulse once it sets in. At its most stirring moments, the music can be soothingly meditative, though the booming low-end, sharp drums, and all that crackle and fuzz keep it from sounding too polite. With its accomplished fusion of debris and warmth in a place somewhere between b-boy head-nod and laptopper experimentalism, Los Angeles is a big step forward for a still-young career, an album well worth revisiting years from now-- preferably on vinyl, where the pops and clicks can only multiply.


Reissued here as a wood-paneled box set with 25 bonus tracks, Louisiana singer Robert Charles' lone album from the 1970s, featuring four members of the Band as his backup group, is one of the most sublime Americana records ever cut.

Bobby Charles

On the third disc of this wood-paneled box set of Louisiana singer Robert "Bobby" Charles Guidry's lone album from the 1970s, there's a half-hour interview with radio disc jockey Barry Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento. They laundry-list the records released that week in 1972, ranging from a posthumous Jimi Hendrix LP to John Fahey, Tim Buckley, Bonnie Raitt, Nazareth, Wet Willie, and Martin Mull. To which Bobby Charles comments in his gentle, stoned Cajun drawl: "It's too bad, a lot of good ones just have to get lost. It's unexplainable, but they just do." To which Hansen replies: "Well... a lot of times they get picked up the second or third time around."
Warm and crackling as a campfire, easeful and understated, all of it suffused with Charles' nuanced blend of humor and empathy, this 1972 eponymous album was one of the "good ones" that got lost. Think of this as the second or third time around for the album to finally find its people-- and there should be plenty of them. Considering that 4/5ths of the Band served as Charles' back up group here (augmented by Dr. John and Neil Young pedal steel guitarist Ben E. Keith), this is-- simply put-- one of the most sublime Americana records ever cut.
Charles' story started two decades earlier, when he wrote and recorded R&B standards like "See You Later, Alligator" and "Walking to New Orleans". The story goes that Chess Records signed the then-14-year-old sight unseen after he sang them "Alligator" over the phone. When he arrived in their Chicago offices, though, Leonard Chess flipped out: Not because Charles was underage, but because he was white. After touring through a pre-integration South, he wound up in Nashville by the late 1960s. A marijuana rap led him to head further north, where he ultimately fell in with the musical community centered around Woodstock, N.Y., recording at Dylan manager Albert Grossman's Bearsville Studios.
From the opening twang and snare snap of "Street People", it's clear Charles' songwriting acumen had grown beyond his early R&B roots. Over the slinking beat, he details an itinerant life of what one would label a "bum." But rather than spin some tale of hard luck and woe, Charles makes drifting from town to town and panhandling for spare change sound idyllic. "Wouldn't trade places with no one I know/ I'm happy with where I'm at," he drawls. A cowbell accents the punchline: "Some people would rather work/ We need people like that."
Elsewhere, there are organ-gurgling numbers about new love and community gossip, lilting ballads about watching butterflies, honking barroom numbers about growing old, and gentle, country-tinged numbers about spending all day in bed with your honey. And then there's the ode to Jesus to save him from his followers. All of it gets delivered with a sly grin and at a pace with which you might sip a beer on a back porch, cast a fishing line into a creek, or barbecue a rack of ribs: slow, unhurried, a sunny afternoon ahead of you.
Some 25 previously unreleased tracks augment the original 10-song album, ranging from the pleasant to revelatory. There are differently mixed singles, three songs released only on a Japanese box set, some half-baked songs, but also the sound of Charles' shuffling toward a follow-up album that he never quite got around to finishing. Or, as he put his M.O. on one chorus: "(I'm) staying stoned and singing homemade songs." There's the Band's telltale funk on "Why Are People Like That?", Dr. John's piano commingling with Garth Hudson's gospel organ swells on the elegant crest of "You Came Along". Fans of Will Oldham's Arise Therefore will swoon for demos of Charles dueting with the Band's Rick Danko over a sputtering drum machine.
When this set was originally made available through Rhino Handmade back in August (it's in stores now via distribution partner Light in the Attic), mid-album track "He's Got All the Whiskey" was already an album highlight. So it's uncanny hearing both it and "Street People" in a post-Occupy mindset. About as loud as "Chappelle's Show"'s intro, Dixieland horns, Danko's bass, and a snare's pop skitter about as Charles gripes: "He got all the money." It, of course, follows that "The Man" also has all the "whiskey/ power/ women," the biggest crime of it being that "he won't give me none." It's a simple protest from Bobby Charles-- good-natured at its heart-- and hopefully it won't get ignored this time around.


Over a woozy mixture of house, funk, and R&B, the Los Angeles rapper-producer recalls the pleasures of life before lockdown.

I Can’t Go Outside

As the pandemic creeps into its second year, the minutiae of social interactions begin to feel less familiar. Dinners, hookups, and long drives with unmasked passengers are distant memories. Channel Tres’ i can’t go outside is a hazy recollection of life before everything changed. Inspired by his time in lockdown, the Compton-born producer and rapper uses thumping West Coast g-funk and the sensual swagger of Chicago and Detroit house as backdrops for odes to the simple things in life—cruising in his Chevy, roller skating to Frankie Beverly, even waiting in line at IKEA—interspersed with reflections on ambition and growing up Black in America.
These songs are all about vibe. As a storyteller, Tres favors fragments over narrative, sprinkling biographical hints into the mix like breadcrumbs. On “2000 chevy malibu,” Tres recalls his first car and the newfound independence of being a teenager with endless miles at his disposal. It unfolds like a rose-colored dream sequence, leaning heavily into Tres’ R&B background via woozy backing vocals that complement his mumbly talk-rap delivery. “skate depot,” a sparkling ode to Los Angeles’ namesake roller-skating destination, which closed in 2014, captures the funk-filled joy that has made roller rinks a sacred destination for many Black Americans.
The EP’s collaborations are its highlights. Tyler, the Creator briefly snaps back into his Goblin days on “fuego” as the two swap snapshots of quarantine horniness that devolve into Tres’ realization, “Human contact don’t exist/Human contact is a risk.” On “take your time,” an R&B/house hybrid that’s begging for placement on summer 2021’s late-night playlists, Tinashe commands the spotlight over a lush, slowed-down groove. But Channel Tres’ vocals too often feel like an afterthought, which is a shame considering the potential he showed in 2020 with his one-off single “Weedman” and his collaboration with SG Lewis and Robyn.
There are hints of vulnerability here—particularly on “broke down kid interlude,” where Tres ponders survivor’s guilt over a gliding house groove—but the EP is missing the spark of his best singles, like “Controller” and “Black Moses.” He’s at his best when he toys with the cadence of his rhyming, as on “fuego,” but when it comes to grappling with the loneliness of isolation, he pushes up against the limits of his comfort zone. “I miss the time we had shows,” he raps on the closing “unfinished business,” but then gets stuck in a looping half-thought: “More than what it seems.” Tres’ pursuit of the vibe can only take him so far.

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The Philly band's rousing punk anthems lose a little luster on an album that feels more motivated by desperation than starry-eyed belief.

Beach Slang: The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City

The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City

If you feel embarrassed to identify as a Beach Slang fan in 2020, rest assured that for frontman James Alex, embarrassment is the whole point. He has an umbilical connection to the awkward and tender teenage sentiments of bands like the Replacements or Jawbreaker and he carries the flag for adults who feel ashamed of their younger selves. Most Beach Slang fans would admit that their 2015 debut, The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us, was pandering to a certain kind of washed-up rock fan, but hey, at least someone was actually pandering to them.
Coming after nearly four years of lost momentum and squandered goodwill, The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City lacks the near-delusional devotion to the redemptive possibilities of rock music that sustained Beach Slang’s early work. There’s something far less communal at play here: a desperation to keep Beach Slang alive. When Alex shouts “Did you come to watch me choke...again” on “Let It Ride,” he raises the unexpected possibility of finding pathos in all of this—in the shame and moral trade-offs that come with a white-knuckle grip on fleeting relevance, in his own band’s troubled history—the near-breakups, the personnel controversies, the erratic shows, the disdain from peers. Though “Let It Ride” is virtually indistinguishable from 90 percent of other Beach Slang songs—maybe intentionally so—a lyric like “Rock ‘n’ roll’s my favorite sin/Man, I don’t know if I’m good at it/But I’m too in love or dumb to quit” hits differently than any number of Beach Slang lyrics that uses virtually the same exact words. Maybe the backhanded compliments suggesting Alex is willfully dumb or naive were off-base; maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing.
The announcement of lead single “Bam Rang Rang”—basically a repeat of “Atom Bomb,” except twice as long for some reason—accompanied a run of dates opening for the Goo Goo Dolls, a band whose pre-“Name” Westerberg cosplay is a more apt reference point for Beach Slang than the Mats themselves. After years of writing de facto Replacements fanfic, Alex actually rips off the one Replacement song about fanfic itself with “Tommy in the ’80s.” “I figured if Westerberg could write about Alex Chilton, for all those right reasons, I could write something about Tommy Keene for all the same ones,” Alex explained, preemptively correcting a valid assumption that “Tommy in the ‘80s” is about Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson—now an actual member of Beach Slang—and saving the thing from total contextual collapse. He is also the only artist in 2020 still namedropping Fast Times at Ridgemont High and “Jessie’s Girl” as fresh sources of inspiration. Imagine what life could be like if you could silence your inner (or outer) critic the way Alex does. It’s kind of inspiring.
On the other hand, a little self-censoring could prevent Alex from continuing to try his hand at modes almost completely incompatible with his strengths. On past albums, his stabs at shoegaze and chamber-pop were endearingly clumsy nudges against Beach Slang’s hard limitations. But the mismatch is even more pronounced on The Deadbeat Bang’s attempts at glam, a subversive subgenre by definition that requires sex or sneer to pull off, while all Alex has to work with is his adamantine earnestness.  Best case scenario, he’s able to turn out something as lovably goofy as Def Leppard’s “Rocket,” but “Sticky Thumbs” and “Born to Raise Hell” are passable facsimile at best, and the nicest thing you can say about “Stiff” is that it isn’t called “Moist.” I’m not sure who was asking for a six-minute piano ballad or more acoustic solo tracks after Quiet Slang, and yet here are “Bar No One” and “Nobody Say Nothing,” both notable solely for isolated moments of real human interactions strewn amongst the garden-variety Beach Slang-isms (“I’m murdering songs on a dead guitar,” “I’m a skeleton wrapped in gasoline”).
The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City is too harmless to hate, but it’s hard to feel much of anything about it—which is a fatal flaw for a band that leverages an uncanny ability to rid people of inhibitions against their better judgment. This is why the soused, sudsy production of The Things We Do is much better suited to them than the polished professionalism of Brad Wood. Ever since Beach Slang made its name on making people feel seen, everything they’ve done since had one job, and it’s one that The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City barely accomplishes: to make us feel like we weren’t suckers for believing in the first place.

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The Wand frontman’s third solo album offers a funhouse-mirror take on classic rock, combining surreal lyrical vignettes and laid-back delivery with incendiary guitar shredding.

Western Cum

Classic rock, as it has come down to us from decades of radio play, is less a defined genre than a no-worries vibe, an invitation to blissfully relive past glories real or imagined. Wand frontman Cory Hanson’s third solo album may sound at first like a bid to join that tradition—Neil Young, the Allman Brothers, and Thin Lizzy are just a few of the FM-radio warhorses that his playing and singing bring to mind—but Western Cum isn’t really a classic-rock album. (For one thing, that NSFW title would probably get your local Morning Zoo crew fired for saying it on air.) While the record bears all the guitar-charged euphoria and carefree spirit of a ’70s rock staple, Hanson’s absurdist lyrical vignettes and counterintuitive arrangements don’t exactly induce a peaceful, easy feeling. Western Cum is a perfect road-trip album, but it’s one that encourages sudden accelerations, sharp left turns, and the occasional swerve into the ditch.
Compared to the dazed Americana travelogs of Hanson’s previous solo outing, Pale Horse Rider, Western Cum is more flagrant in its pursuit of pleasure, making its high-voltage riffs and hair-raising solos the featured attraction of every track. For a genre founded on a premise of anti-virtuosity, indie rock has nonetheless produced its share of Guitar World-worthy string-benders over the past 40 years, and Western Cum constitutes Hanson’s induction to that fretboard fraternity. But where J Mascis or Doug Martsch or Jim James might use a squealing solo to wring out extra pathos from their crestfallen tunes, Hanson likes to let ’er rip for a more basic reason: because it’s fun as fuck. He layers leads upon leads as if he were drizzling syrup on his breakfast bacon, gleefully gorging himself on the gluttony of it all.
Where guitar riffs often function as a preamble to the vocal melody, Hanson’s turns at the mic feel like mere warm-up exercises for his guitar solos, which serve as his off-ramps into alternate dimensions and altered states. His effects-laden excursions practically function as stand-alone mini-songs within the songs: He spends the first half of “Wings” singing along to his restless noodling, as if his guitar were his backing vocalist, before putting on an extended clinic in the unsung art of fusing Southern rock guitar harmonics with proggy mathematics. The whiplashing “Persuasion Architecture” is part Ace of Spades thrasher, part After the Gold Rush reverie, finding common ground between those extremes in a puddle of gooey arpeggios. And while “Horsebait Sabotage” initially busts out the boogie like a Texan T. Rex, it lands somewhere a million miles away, floating off in a rippling infinity pool of new-age textures.
But for all the guitar heroism on display, Hanson maintains a humble, soft-spoken presence as a singer—so much so, you may not initially notice all the strange shit he’s singing about. He’s got the gentle demeanor of a kindergarten circle-time storybook reader and the mind of a cubist poet, framing everyday scenes in wondrous terms (“Housefly” could be the most heroic song you’ll ever hear about about swatting a household pest), or infusing fragmented folk tales with contemporary plot twists. The seafaring “Ghost Ship” could easily pass for some bygone Lauren Canyon country-rock ballad, at least until you get to the line about the guy smuggling cocaine by taping it under his junk; the pedal-steel-smeared “Twins” has the timeless feel of a Gram Parsons cosmic-cowboy odyssey, yet its existential musings revolve around a shout-out to the namesake Schwarzenegger/DeVito flick. But rather than disrupt the album’s mood, those sort of oddball lines enhance its absorbing sense of surreality. Hanson blurs the line between reality and dreaming, and fact and fable, like a documentarian filming a fantasy feature.
Once you spend enough time seeing the world through Hanson’s looking glass, Western Cum seems less like a crass joke of an album title and more like an artisanal spin on the crude language so often applied to displays of six-string excess (cock-rock, etc.)—a reflection of Hanson’s sincere attempt at elevating the rusted-out gold sounds of yesteryear into something artfully modern. If there was ever a song to redeem the art of the guitar solo in this day and age, it’s Western Cum’s 10-minute climax, “Driving Through Heaven,” an ecstatic open-road anthem on which Hanson outruns killer hitchhikers, storm clouds, and wildfire blazes before achieving liftoff in a sustained, cyclonic surge of majestic shredding. It’s Hanson’s “Free Bird” and “Marquee Moon” and “Real Emotional Trash” and “Let’s Call It Love” all rolled into one, a song that not only makes you think epic guitar solos belong back in fashion, but that they could damn well save the world, too. Classic rock is a genre that’s endured through its mythology. With Western Cum, Cory Hanson gives us some new myths to believe in.


Miguel’s fourth album has a kinetic sexual and political energy. With less digital funk and more reverbed-out guitar, his R&B psychedelia for uncertain times shows his maturation as a songwriter.

War & Leisure

Miguel’s ascent into the position of freaky-deaky, celestial sex mystic has been inevitable. Prince Rogers Nelson paved this path so guys like Miguel could thrive, and in Prince’s absence the parallels between the two are even starker and more urgent: a rich voice and richer songwriting extolling eroticism as a balm to heal the vicissitudes of our time and get through this thing called life. Flange and echo pedals are their shared sensual vessels. There’s always going to be a place in contemporary American music for musicians like Miguel, a stony guitarist with an innate sense of the desire behind R&B psychedelia. It’s escapism as a stand-in for freedom both spiritual and actual, a way to shake loose within ever-lusher soundscapes. As Miguel sings on War & Leisure’s homage to his Purpleness, “Pineapple Skies”: “Can we look up, look up, baby/There’s pineapple purple skies/Promise everything’s goin’ be all right.”
Like his musical predecessors—Prince, Hendrix, collaborator Lenny Kravitz—all deepened their erotic pull with a sense of justice and moral fortitude, War & Leisure would imply Miguel’s got more than your body on his mind. He’s said as much, at least; in early November, he told Billboard that War & Leisure “is intentionally about the ethos right now, that we are right in the middle of all this.” This would imply a more overtly political album than, say, 2015’s sublime Wildheart, which made Congressional lobbying and the 42nd President into a slinky simile for a come-on, and parsed the feeling of being misplaced in a rigid society; or more political than “Candles in the Sun,” his 2012 call for peace and harmony.
But Miguel is a savvy songwriter, and so he swerves on those expectations. His allusions to “the ethos right now” are so far mostly visual, with the video for “I Told You So” featuring clips of Trump protests and earthly ills like nuclear missile launches and glacial melt, as he croons to “baby” about the freedom and pleasure in his love. (In October, Miguel also debuted “Now,” War & Leisure’s most overt social-conscious joint, at a benefit for Schools Not Prisons, a California public education campaign). Instead of offering the more woke/political album he’s been suggesting, this fraught moment has infused Miguel with a kinetic energy that is still mostly centered in his sacral chakra, a pelvic mind concern. It’s juiced-up sex Miguel but with a fire in it, less digital funk and more reverbed-out guitar, a virile, wavy palette and a clear step forward in his maturation as a writer. He’s weaved an album that’s taut and economical, like a featherweight champion landing smoothly choreographed jabs in the form of powerfully raspy harmonies and tight, lusty blues runs.
He’s also, like most of us, a bit more on edge this year. Miguel has employed guns-as-sex-metaphors before, in 2010’s “My Piece” and 2015’s too-smoking-to-deal “Coffee,” which characterized cis hetero sex as “gunplay” a flip on the guitar-as-cock trope. On “Banana Clip,” a sneaky grin of a mid-tempo romance serenade, he asserts that he’d do just about anything for his love, up to and including homicide: “M-16 on my lap/Missiles in the sky/No matter where I go on the map/You got my protection/Banana clip on my love for you/Let it ring like braapp.” And on “Criminal,” an evocative Rick Ross-featuring track for when the stroke game’s just too good, it seems like despite the copious pleasure he’s spouting, everything might just be getting to him. Over a chunky guitar riff and the requisite sex-reverb with a Tame Impala-style psych-harmony propping it all up, Miguel declares, “I got a mind like Columbine/Vigilante, I’m volatile/...I just want someone that I can trust,” before the chorus: “It’s so good it feels criminal/This shit’s gotta be criminal.”
Yet behind Miguel’s addled thoughts and swaggering cocksmanship, he’s still a consummate dreamer, mitigating his darker impulses with a perpetually sunny sound. Even his more post-apocalyptic songs take an optimistic bent, like “City of Angels,” a pared-down blues croon about doing a woman wrong that also celebrates a deeper outcome. On the upbeat “Caramelo Duro,” assisted by Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis, Miguel sings in Spanish about a sweet and freaky sucia he’s trying to flow down, and while the español is fine, his hefty vocal depth places him in another distinct musical lineage, that of romantic Mexican crooners like Juan Gabriel and Vicente Fernández. Let’s all will a Miguel/Romeo Santos full-length collaboration into existence, too, if only because bachata's falsetto king could use his West Coast, low-end counterpoint.
While Miguel, who is black and Mexican American, has sung in Spanish before, the inclusion feels like a statement in and of itself when his very existence is politicized, and perhaps a resolution to the questions he posed on Wildheart’s “What’s Normal Anyway”—the answer to people rejecting your multiplicities is to be yourself even harder. It’s something that Miguel has always done, as an iconoclast in a musical landscape where genres are ever flattening and merging into each other. On War & Leisure, he sounds unconflicted and ready to rumble. The freedom he promises his lovers in his music extends to himself, and he’s better than ever at just letting go.


The latest album from the Tampa duo is a hard rap record made by and for music geeks.

Finally, New

In the late 1980s, the world experienced a second Summer of Love, when the spirit of freedom—and hedonism—once shared by psychedelic San Francisco hippies in 1967 was revitalized in the United Kingdom, fostered in illegal underground raves fueled by MDMA and acid house imported from the shores of Ibiza. Rave culture spread around the world like wildfire, and few places embraced it like Florida, where scenes coalesced in places like Miami, Tampa, Orlando, and Gainesville, making the state a rave capital for much of the ’90s. They Hate Change, a rap duo from Tampa steeped in the myriad electronic subgenres that permeated their home state, represent the latest stage in the evolution of sounds that traveled from Chicago to Ibiza, from London to Miami. On their latest LP, Finally, New, they spit aggressive, East Coast-flavored braggadocio raps over UK breaks and drum’n’bass beats filtered through local styles like Tampa jook and Miami bass. Even amid a deluge of rap music made with sounds from the club, little else sounds like this.
THC’s Vonne Parks and Andre Gainey self-produce bedroom rap records with dance beats, producing bouncy, propulsive records with syncopated percussion that stutters and skitters, creating pockets big enough for them to slide in and out of with a casual flair. They’re certainly not the first artists at the intersection of rap and electronic dance music, but they’ve somehow managed to synthesize the dialogue between Florida and the UK, adding a Southern hip-hop swagger that scans more art school than Magic City. Vonne and Andre got their first taste of the club scene at all-ages “teen night” dance parties in Tampa soundtracked by jook and krank music; if you squint you can hear the homage to Iceberg’s stripper anthem “Naked Hustle” on “Certi.” They tip their caps throughout to the Tampa scene in which they came up, even granting a guest spot to local MC Sarge, who first taught Vonne how to rap. But mostly, Finally, New is the result of a group that outgrew its local scene—one they never truly fit into anyway.
Many of the references will be intimately familiar to a certain subset of club denizens; the album’s lone instrumental track “Perm” is their version of a Schematic record, an IDM-obsessed Miami label that bridged the gap between the sample-and-static-heavy sounds of Boards of Canada and Autechre and the “ghetto bass” that was taking over South Florida.
The most fun parts of Finally, New are distinctly Floridian: Miami Bass slaps and nods to the various substyles that sprouted in Tampa. There’s hints of jook legends Tom G and Khia, who had the subgenre’s biggest hit in 2002 with “My Neck, My Back,” and they once again sample the iconic “Come on baby…” hook from Duice’s classic booty bass jam “Dazzey Duks.” And while they produced the record themselves, they managed to find a kindred spirit in Nick León, a Miami producer who has also carved out space at the intersection of European club music and rap on solo albums and early tracks with Denzel Curry. León contributes co-production to the record’s final tracks (“X-Ray Spex” and “From the Floor”), sending the album out in a swirl of fluttering snares that owes as much to Chicago footwork as the bass does to Bristol.
A surface scan of the tough talk and boasts that pepper Finally, New can obscure the fact that it’s a hard rap record made by music geeks; Vonne and Andre are internet seekers, curious aesthetes diving into the deepest nether regions of a culture they’ve only ever been able to observe from afar, even as they immersed themselves in their local scene. Their lyrics reflect their outsider status, with signifiers meant to place them in opposition to the mainstream. Instead of private jets and gold jewelry, they flex vintage instant cameras and designer dogs. Vonne references their gender fluidity with flip references to makeup and Fenty lingerie, name dropping icons like Jackie Shane, X-Ray Spex’s Poly Styrene, and 100 Gecs’ Laura Les. The result is a significant amount of dissonance; swagger with obscure signifiers, tough guy talk from someone experiencing dysmorphia.
It’s in these moments that They Hate Change transcend the sum of their influences and find something truly new. On the standout “Some Days I Hate My Voice,” co-produced by Titmouse, Vonne explores the latent power of an identity in flux. “Some days I hate my voice, some days I feel like I’m the Metatron/Some days I’m basic, some days I’m dolled up like a debutante/Some day I’ll have a closet full of tweed Chanel, pastel on my Black self/Showed up like can’t these cats tell how to rap well?” Holding vulnerability with the same hands as power, Vonne renders their queerness in three dimensions, seeking neither pity nor praise. On a record full of boasts, it’s the moment with the most impact.
Finally, New is They Hate Change’s first LP for Jagjaguwar—a storied indie label better known for Bon Iver and Sharon Van Etten than any hip-hop or electronic music—but they are no rookies, having dropped eight releases since debuting in 2015 with Cycles. So while they may benefit from a nostalgic dance music resurgence embraced by reggaetón stars and TikTok zoomers alike, they’ve distilled an encyclopedia worth of references into a sound distinct enough that it’s unlikely to wash out when the wave recedes.


This classically trained Brit's debut album has seen her compared to the likes of Nina Simone and David Axelrod. Although her lyrics sometimes communicate an impersonal strain of melancholy, the music is anything but, dazzling with powerful, vibrant arrangements.

Sing to the Moon

Birmingham singer Laura Mvula has been garnering plenty of adoring reviews across the pond. Even before her debut album Sing to the Moon was released in Britain, she was shortlisted for the prestigious Critics Choice Award at the 2013 BRIT awards. Since the album was released, Mvula’s bright-hued retro-soul has been praised to the heavens for originality while simultaneously being compared to the luminary likes of Nina Simone and David Axelrod. Much of the praise is richly deserved. Sing to the Moon, which was just released here in the States, is a triumph of arrangement and melody: Songs like opener “Like the Morning Dew”, or the gorgeous title track, combine earworm hooks with beautiful, uniquely shaped verses, and showcase the open-hearted faith in the world that is clearly Mvula’s calling card. Even when her lyrics communicate melancholy, it seems the singer has no choice but to sound defiantly anti-blue.
The formal complexity of Mvula’s best songs is testament to an education at the esteemed Birmingham Conservatoire, whose graduates often stray towards jazz, opera, and classical composition. You can hear that training in the stately processional entrance of “Make Me Lovely”, which soon blooms into a full-fledged, powerful chorus, or in the prettily drawn piano and alternating tones of “I Don’t Know What the Weather Will Be”. Beyond her studied compositional ear, Mvula’s voice is also a winning draw. There’s a hitch in her dusky alto that recalls a mix of Jill Scott and a demure version of Amy Winehouse. Her voice is classically beautiful but there’s enough oddity-- a sort of gravelly undertone-- in her pronunciation to keep it interesting throughout the album.
A lot of anonymity is built into Mvula’s topics of choice: beauty, love, faith, heartbreak, and hardship are all discussed on the album with the same generalized air. This can be a strength when it comes to pop songwriting-- the stories here are universal enough to be broadly relatable. But Mvula shines when she gets a bit more personal: She shows a snappy attitude on the show tune-like “That’s Alright”, an affirmation of her faith in who she is, which doubles as one of the most exciting tracks here. Mvula sounds best on her more upbeat songs, so it's a shame there are so few of them.
It’s an odd choice, given the success of singles "Green Garden" and "Like the Morning Dew", to fill the album with so many slow-burning, hopeful anthems. Though they show off Mvula’s vocal talents as well as anything else here, over the full record they can become mundane and somewhat repetitious. “Is There Anybody Out There?” and “Father Father” might work as one-offs for someone encountering Mvula’s voice and compositional abilities for the first time. But they sink in comparison to the songs they follow, leaving the album with almost 10 minutes of under-utilized space.
Mvula's music hearkens back to an earlier era than that of her many British contemporaries: She hovers on the edge of pop, but the majority of her songs are too reserved to fully break through. Mvula's debut is filled with visceral and musical beauty--that is its strong spot. Once she rids her work of thematic repetition and lyrical mundanity, she'll be on to something truly special.


Working with Jeff Tweedy, the soul veteran sounds energetic and artful on a collection of covers and re-imagined hits from her past.

You Are Not Alone

Mavis Staples has a mighty voice. Even into her 70s, she still has dynamic range that goes from a full-throated shout to an intimate whisper without losing her easy authority over a song. Over the decades, many musicians and producers have tried to wrangle that voice onto record, with varying degrees of success. With her father, Pops Staples, she recorded a string of songs that combined gospel and folk music, many of which-- "Respect Yourself" and the sublime "(If You're Ready) Come Go with Me"-- became hits that soundtracked the tumultuous civil rights movement. In the 1970s and 80s, she worked with Curtis Mayfield, Steve Cropper, and Prince, even signing to his Purpleness' Paisley Park label for a brief period.
In the 2000s, Staples has entered an unlikely third stage in her career, with a string of inspired albums that exhibit new range. We'll Never Turn Back, recorded with producer Ry Cooder, revived civil rights anthems for the dying days of the Bush era, and they still sound prescient and powerful. Following the fierce Live: Hope at the Hideout in 2008, her latest album, You Are Not Alone, was recorded with Wilco frontman and fellow Chicago resident Jeff Tweedy. Tweedy clearly has a deep knowledge of and appreciation for Staples' career, and he gives her a warmly textured backdrop that's both familiar and inventive, with nods to past glories. He cherrypicks a number of her old hits to revive and chooses some new covers for her to sing, with a keen understanding of her strengths and weaknesses. In turn, Staples gives him intuitive and moving performances on each song, whether she's celebrating her own salvation or bemoaning a lost love.
On "Downward Road", a Pops favorite that the Staples Singers recorded decades ago, she's casually scolding as she relates the story of a woman who revels in sin and pays a hefty price. A fat bass thwacks along, creating a strange gospel plod that makes Staples sound like she's marching against the downward tide. By contrast, "In Christ There Is No East or West" is so delicate that it threatens to blow away with the breeze. It's a risky tack, as Staples could very easily have bulldozed such light accompaniment, but she adjusts her delivery to convey her awe in God's unfathomable omnipresence. This, she seems to say, is something to celebrate, and "I Belong to the Band - Hallelujah" and "Creep Along Moses" sound like party gospel-- jubilant cries heavenward.
As covers go, Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Wrote a Song for Everyone" is an obvious choice considering the public quality of Staples' music, and she sings it with such humility that it's surprising she's never recorded it before. On the other hand, Randy Newman's "Losing You" is much more private, and Staples communicates stoic, dignified heartbreak with every syllable. It's a remarkable performance, matched only by the reassuring title track, which Tweedy wrote especially for her. "You Are Not Alone", as its title suggests, intends to be a salve in hard times, and Staples rallies her most sympathetic delivery, as if comforting her listeners individually.
Rather than protest the state of the world, Staples is toasting human endurance-- hers as well as ours. After decades in the music industry, she still sounds invigorated and ecstatic, unburdened by cynicism or disappointment. With Tweedy, she has created a record that is mindful of her own past, yet these songs sound fresh, original, and often inspiring.


On a new piano trio album, the jazz visionary delights in reverent arrangements from the Great American Songbook and beyond.

Mesmerism

Tyshawn Sorey is a renowned drummer, known for accompanying artists such as Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman, and John Zorn, but over the past decade, he has made increasing critical waves for his work as a composer and bandleader, creating vivid landscapes for players and listeners to inhabit. With his latest album, Mesmerism, Sorey continues branching out, with a collection of six covers performed by a newly-formed piano trio. Instead of deconstructing the songs, he approaches each composition with reverence. Staying mostly faithful to the spirit of the originals, Mesmerism aligns itself with Bill Evans’ piano trio albums or Duke Ellington’s collaboration with Max Roach and Charles Mingus on Money Jungle.
The sound of the new trio is warm and intimate, putting melody and rhythm at the forefront. Matt Brewer’s bass playing is adventurous, poking and prodding the songs with contrapuntal grooves, while Aaron Diehl brings the melody, both under the guidance of Sorey’s supervision and percussive voice. Mesmerism is more accessible in contrast to Sorey’s previous piano trio albums, Alloy and Verisimilitude, which shared a focus on sophisticated harmony and texture.
The songs that Sorey has selected for Mesmerism range in style and time period. “For a long time, I felt an intense desire to record some of my favorite songs from the Great American Songbook as well as those by composers whose work I feel should also exist in this canon,” he has stated, and the selections range from standards like “Autumn Leaves” to modern compositions like Muhal Richard Abrams’ “Two Over One” and Paul Motian’s “From Time to Time.” Like Sorey, Abrams was a renowned composer who also taught composition, while Paul Motian was the drummer of the Bill Evans Trio. Sorey makes it clear they belong alongside older classics.
Depending on the song, the trio varies their approach. On “REM Blues,” they stick close to the original, leaning into the melodic lead. With “From Time to Time,” they transform the song into a dense fog as bass and piano notes bump into one another, searching for an exit. Only in the final moments do they introduce the central melody of the original composition. Meanwhile, for their take on “Detour Ahead,” the trio relishes the song’s title, allowing Diehl an extended piano solo that unhurriedly explores every possible avenue while Sorey and Brewer egg him on.
Sorey’s love for each of these songs is on full-window display. He explores them inside and out, with a group of collaborators who have never performed together on stage. Given his penchant for exciting, sprawling compositions, the project might seem like a bit of a trifle. But Sorey’s career thus far has offered proof that composition and improvisation, standards and the avant-garde, experimentation and tradition, are not different universes. They all exist in the same solar system, waiting to be rediscovered.


Neither rigidly authentic nor conspicuously modern, the North Carolina folk scholar honors the past through transformation rather than reinvention.

Out of Sight

Musicians like Jake Xerxes Fussell are nearly as rare nowadays as the material he performs. “All songs are traditional & in the public domain,” reads the sole composition credit on Out of Sight, Fussell’s often-transcendent third album. Put another way: Each of these nine songs survived the great folk-pop copyright round-up of the 1950s and ’60s (and beyond), when publishers hunted down and claimed untold numbers of “traditional” melodies as their own. Fussell, as well as contemporaries like House and Land, Marisa Anderson, and others, are folk’s equivalent of organic farmers, reclaiming the genre from clever songwriters and pop mutators alike and expressing their voices by different parameters. Calling something “traditional” can be misleading—as House and Land’s Sarah Louise recently pointed out—but Out of Sight is a powerful reminder of music’s many vital, noncommercial pathways.
More than a mere interpreter, Fussell is a folkie in the preservationist, pre-Bob Dylan sense—learning from field recordings, folklorists’ transcriptions, archives, other musicians, and even YouTube videos, notating his sources, and reanimating the music through rites of joyous antiquarianism. Arrangements like “Jubilee” and “The River St. Johns” honor the past through transformation rather than reinvention, placing Fussell closer to the ideals of the reverent ’50s folk revivalists than their radical ’60s counterparts. Most often playing a clean electric guitar rather than the expected acoustic, a subtle and effective twist, Fussell’s touch is light and dreamy. While the tempo and density might scan as “chill,” the music is so elegant as to resist stereotyping. It’s relaxing in the way that pondering a Zen koan is relaxing, and sweet in the way that the wounded, honey-voiced blues of Mississippi John Hurt are sweet.
At its best, Out of Sight is timeless, both contemporary and not, its logic and concerns relatable, its arrangements neither rigidly authentic nor conspicuously modern. While this strategy might yield middlebrow twang in lesser hands, Fussell steps into the space naturally. On his earlier solo recordings, he created an ambience with only his guitar and voice; this album is his first to feature a band on all tracks. Drums make any patch of folk melody sound “new,” but can be a challenge to pull off without diminishing the music’s atemporal mysteries. On “The Rainbow Willow,” especially, Fussell’s next-level mellowness seems to emanate through the surrounding players, particularly pedal steel guitarist Nathan Golub and drummer Nathan Bowles (himself an acclaimed modern folk revivifier). When the rhythm section falls into this mode, they find that ambience, too—a warm and collective musical charisma that defines the sound of Out of Sight.
On occasion, the album hovers at the fine line between laid-back and merely tasteful. The Irish song “Michael Was Hearty” (“See: ‘The Grand Match,’ Moira O’Neill, Songs of the Glens of Antrim, 1900”) edges on pub-folk fare. The music loses some of Fussell’s glow when it builds more on Bowles’ drums, finding grooves that veer towards the earthier sides of classic rock. “Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues” (learned via Pete Seeger) sounds a bit like the Band, and the conversational pocket of “Oh Captain” (“a variant of deckhand’s song” first recorded in 1927) isn’t far from off-brand early-’70s Grateful Dead. It’s all enjoyable, but Fussell’s uniqueness gets lost.
Most often, his bliss comes through in the atmosphere, which is when the music transcends notions of new or old, and Fussell’s particular creative voice rings most clearly. On “16-20,” a minimalist interpretation of a folk dance, Libby Rodenbough’s violin, Casey Toll’s bowed upright bass, and James Anthony Wallace’s organ combine and shift under Fussell’s guitar. It is perhaps the album’s most startling and contemporary-sounding moment, the instruments locking together into a powerful and nearly electronic vibration. It’s easiest to call it folk music, but it also resembles some of Yo La Tengo’s dronier moments.
Though the music isn’t always urgent, Fussell is no nostalgic channeler, either, even if the songs are nearly 100 years old. For all its wholesome ingredients and folk-on-sleeve earnestness, Out of Sight settles into a space out of time, one immediately adjacent to our own, where perhaps the ancient magic hasn’t dissipated. The past is always present; Fussell’s trick is to reveal that—if you know how to look—the present is always past, too.


In my nascent days of free-jazz lapping, it was much easier to hear of Sonny Sharrock than to actually hear ...

Sonny Sharrock / Linda Sharrock: Paradise

Paradise

In my nascent days of free-jazz lapping, it was much easier to hear of Sonny Sharrock than to actually hear him. Sure, there were snatches, be it from his last (and convolutedly enough, most popular) work, the theme to Space Ghost, or his extra-dimensional tremors as sideman on Pharoah Sanders' Tauhid. But unless you felt like digging for some buried moments on Herbie Mann records (or his unaccredited turn on Miles' Jack Johnson), you were stuck with his 80s and 90s work. While Ask the Ages was furious (again teaming him with Sanders), and Guitar burned through Bill Laswell's slickness, most of us were stuck gleaming his six-string prophecies from the sludgy supergroup Last Exit, where he shared earspace with Laswell, Peter Brötzmann, and Ronald Shannon Jackson.
Only in the last two years has this changed, with a CD version of Black Woman finally unveiling the free-jazz fury that Sharrock concocted at the end of the 60s with wife Linda, pianist Don Pullen, and percussive octopus Milford Graves. A singular testament in the proto-forms of fire music's freedom skronk and feral rock howl, a follow-up would be daunting to any artist. And so, when he next turned up, in the BYG-Actuel series with Monkey Pocky Boo, Sharrock avoided the instrument that he reinvented for the free jazz genre, instead reaching for the, uh... slide whistle for half of side one.
Paradise was released five years later, and it headed straight for the cutout bins, rarely even filed under the "jazz" section in record stores. Looking like a disco-diva record, it came at a time when George Benson and Chuck Mangione were what "jazz" sounded like. And while the free and furious improvising of Sharrock's past two records could arguably not be called jazz, either, this time around the Sharrocks did away with their own history, as well as that of the genre, letting out something that defiantly remains unclassifiable and as outside of human time as that oft-idealized Paradise itself.
Taking their cue from modern R&B; radio and slick funk, "Apollo" commences with a dusted Diana Ross-like sighing before Linda decides to have a deep-throating contest, taking the mic far down her gullet for some gurgling. Meanwhile, the backing band starts acting like a zooted Gap Band before morphing into a prog band midway through, escalating into the upper registers of the synth. Sonny Sharrock starts off with a jubilant, almost African guitar tone, but then performs some positively dripping primordial No-Wave slobber in endlessly cascading/ascending guitar lines that slurp and go just far enough out, setting the table for the next 20 years of New York guitarists-- right up to Sonic Youth's shredding on "100%". By the time Linda's punched back into the track, with her salving vocal sighs and soft instrumental bedding, the crazy jag that just occurred is all but forgotten.
Producer (and noted tape composer in his own right) Ilhan Mimaroglu has a definite hand here in mashing the disparate strands of "Apollo" together, somewhere between his graceful massaging of the exotic jungle into the hairy back of Mingus' Cumbia & Jazz Fusion and his political acid-trip tape-splicing frenzy of Freddie Hubbard's Sing a Song of Song My, but it still makes little sense in the overall scheme of things, a belle confusion.
Continuing the schizophrenic oscillations between barbed Ono-outburst and velvety vowel abstraction is the beautiful respite of "End of the Rainbow", where Linda's wordless serenity swirls with washes of cymbals. The concord doesn't remain for long-- "Miss Doris" comes along clanking cowbells and timbales that bleed into a clavinet quiver. The sound quickly reaches g-funk frequencies as piercing as the continued caterwauls of the Missus, which go to that unholy place between Diamanda Galas and Curly of the Three Stooges. For more glottal oddities, she turns her lingua into a wah pedal on "1953 Blue Boogie Children", mixing Mellotron with Morse code as Sonny alternates channels of ping and pulverization brilliantly. The climax comes with the closer, "Gary's Step", which continually crescendos and then levitates even higher into the stratosphere for eight minutes, invoking the Ecclesiastics of classic free jazz's soulful wail, the one such piece that harkens to their past.
This is a strain of funk far from that of the Mothership, or even the tumultuous punched-in lurch of Miles' On the Corner. It's somewhat like the proto no-wave achieved on Yoko Ono's Plastic Ono Band, combining Yin yips with hubby's masculine string malevolence over a rock-solid rhythmic pulse. No matter how much gibberish is splattered about by the couple, the bass and drums chugs along intact, greasing the broken chunks of tongue and guitar so that it's easier to swallow down. A quarter of a century on, Paradise is coming to be delectably digestible.


01 Intro
\n\ For Shawn Carter, the last seven years have been ridiculous. In 1996, he came up from an ...

The Black Album

01 Intro [w. Ryan Schreiber]
For Shawn Carter, the last seven years have been ridiculous. In 1996, he came up from an impoverished childhood in New York's Marcy projects to record a debut that would eventually come to be considered one of hip-hop's landmark albums, and spent the succeeding six years dominating Billboard charts, filling the East Coast void left by Biggie's death, and building a hip-hop empire to rival Puffy's Bad Boy Entertainment. In that time, he's seen as many failures as successes-- critics panned him for selling out after the critical reverence of Reasonable Doubt, La Roc Familia was a disaster from any angle, and, by Jay's standards, last year's The Blueprint 2 couldn't even claim to be a commercial success. Still, he's come out on top time and again: Today, he's reclaimed the title as hip-hop's reigning emcee, and his Rocafella record label, clothing line, and film company together are said to be valued at more than $4.4 billion.
So why would he want out now, at the peak of his popularity? The Black Album, touted as his final release, offers some answers, though none as clear-cut as what may or may not be the truth: that it's all an elaborate publicity stunt. Or maybe it's not: Jay has cut an album every year for the past seven years; that he'd want a break of some sort now is understandable. Certain lyrics hint that this isn't the last record he'll cut, but if that's true, will his game still be as tight when gets around to the comeback? It's anyone's guess, and that mystery is part of what makes this album such an intriguing listen.
The prospect of hip-hop's finest producers laying down tracks for the final LP from the rap world's brightest talent has made The Black Album one of the most anticipated rap records of the decade. What's stunning is that it delivers rap's greatest career-ender since Outkast's Stankonia. Even in falling short of Jay's classics, Reasonable Doubt and 2001's The Blueprint, it manages to eclipse 1999's brilliant Vol. 3: Life and Times of S. Carter as his third-best album-- which in itself makes it one of the year's best.
In light of the hype this record's received for its choice of beatmakers, we egomaniacally matched the personalities of our staff writers to Jay's producers. (However, we regret that we could not take the concept to its logical extreme and cease operations after publishing it.)
02 December 4th [p. Just Blaze; w. Rollie Pemberton]
In this game of stick-and-move with triumphantly spiraling Chi-Lites strings, Hova's mother Gloria narrates a dizzying tale of growth through adversity, unusual childhood circumstances, and the catalysts for our protagonist's career. The victorious overtone gives Carter the opportunity to apply his unwavering flow and powerful control of conceptual direction to his own personal experiences: When he details that he "had demons deep inside that would raise when confronted" and that "this is the life I chose, or rather, the life that chose me," the emotional context of the lines quickly turns to dumbstruck awe. Regardless of the reasonably simple Blueprint-tempered backing and familiar topical terrain, "December 4th" stands not just as one of Jay's finest performances to date, but Blaze's, too.
03 What More Can I Say [p. The Buchannans; w. Hartley Goldstein]
"What More Can I Say" is the sprawling pinnacle of every element that makes The Black Album an unrelentingly inspired future classic. Buchannans, one of two unknown producers featured here, supplies a triumphant instrumental that serves as a perfect counterpoint to Jay's trademark hubris and incendiary braggadocio. I mean, the track is introduced by a sample of dialogue from Gladiator: It doesn't get more epic than that, people! Merciless horn blasts, tender guitar licks, and turbulent string crescendos distract you when he identifies Martha Stewart as "Jewish," but the one element that makes "What More Can I Say" a true marvel is that, despite it serving as Jay-Z's alleged last hurrah, it manages to sound more like a celebratory changing of the guard than a self-penned elegy by one of hip-hop's greatest emcees.
04 Encore [p. Kanye West; w. Rob Mitchum]
It's a little hard to take Jay's claims of retirement at face value when The Black Album's first three songs all claim to be his last and this one makes reference to "when I come back like Jordan wearing the 45." But the concept of "Encore" makes such nitpicking irrelevant-- a track like this leaves you waiting for the comeback. Kanye West whips up a soul revue backing band complete with melancholy trumpet line and miasma-happy backup singers ("Hooo-woahhh-WOAHHH-ohvveee") for an imaginary mini-gig, while Jay contributes a very live-sounding performance. A posse chants for the hook while an emcee encourages crowd participation and the band idles between verses two and three. Sure, it sounds gimmicky on paper, but if anyone can pull it off it's "rap's Grateful Dead"... whatever that's supposed to mean. Keep on truckin', Jay.
05 Change Clothes [p. Neptunes; w. Ryan Schreiber]
The first single! And you know it's a hit already 'cause it's rocking the world's most reliable (and expensive) hip-hop production team. But no, and here's why not: The Neptunes, talented though they may be, have spread themselves a bit thin lately, coasting on Neptunes-by-numbers beats and Pharrell's by-now-goddamn-insidious falsetto. "Change Clothes" is, unfortunately, one of their worst productions since Busta's "Pass the Courvoisier"-- the vapid, forgettable chorus and cheesy piano loop are the obvious product of an off day in the studio. Jay fares no better, like he almost knows it's subpar-- just spits out a couple recycled lines, and forgoes his visual style to make room for crap like, "Young Hov in the house it's so necessary/ No bra with the blouse it's so necessary/ No panties and jeans that's so necessary." If they could afford to cut the Dre-produced "The Theater", surely this-- one of two Neptunes productions on a 14-track album-- could have been scrapped, too.
06 Dirt Off Your Shoulder [p. Timbaland; w. William Bowers]
If you're old, you probably macked in a maroon Fiero ten years ago, listening to Timbaland "get sticky" with Jodeci. If you're young, you could still spot him behind the curtain of this anthem's anti-syncopation and arcade-shogun keyboard coils. Don't be fooled by the title; the song is not a cave-in to Charlotte Beers (the dandruff-shampoo ad-exec who was until recently Bush's Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs), but that doesn't stop it from being a commercial for itself and its brand. Recapping the story of how Jay clambered from shooting birds at God while holding his testicles to being synonymous with overexposure, the song lives and dies by Timbaland's battering-ram beat and laser-tag riff. "Dirt" is gregarious but exclusive: It's meant to shake balcony barstools, but it coyly congratulates only those who have been beaten down. The chorus is about shedding a stigma, about the actualization of a capitalist dream, about legitimacy, about arrival-- for a guy ending his career, Jay's tone is suspiciously akin to pre-game smack. Because I'm old, I hear the Joeski Love ("Pee Wee's Dance") in Jay-Z's obtuse voice. Because I'm young, I acknowledge that he's larger than, er, life.
07 The Threat [p. 9th Wonder; w. Sam Chennault]
I can't decide what's stranger: that Little Brother producer 9th Wonder contributed a track on Jay-Z's final album, or that he's flipping a sample of R. Kelly. But it's 2003, and the entire underground/mainstream divide has been so flipped and conflated that it should come as no surprise. Nor should 9th's tendency to sound both hopelessly derivative and endlessly enjoyable; the track's rolling piano line and classic boom-bap breakbeat recall a smoother Primo, or a Pete Rock on autopilot.
Given a title like "The Threat" and Jigga's infamous street credentials, you'd expect a fairly macabre affair, but remember: This is a post-therapy Jigga (who dates Beyoncé and listens to Coldplay), not the crack slinger Reasonable Doubt introduced us to in '96. As such, the tone of the track is more comical than maudlin, and Cedric the Entertainer's guest spot won't let you forget it. Here, Jigga puts Larry King on his ass and namedrops Christina Aguilera, Bill O'Reilly, George Bush, Halle Berry, Warren Buffet, Joe Pesci, Sammy Davis Jr., Jet Li, David Blaine, and Frank Sinatra, and, in the second verse, even tries (only half-successfully) to twist them into verbs a la GZA's "Fame". The song is a disappointment, unfortunately-- an easy concept lazily executed. There are a couple of decent lines (e.g. "I will kill you, commit suicide, and kill you again"), but it's far from Jay's finest hour.
08 Moment of Clarity [p. Eminem; w. Ryan Schreiber, c/o Mullah Omar]
We asked Mullah Omar to write this part but he wanted all kinds of special treatment. Man, you should have seen his rider, it was totally nuts! It just proves Mullah makes the perfect Eminem: he's got his gimmick ("I WILL NOT BE EDITED!!!") and he just keeps beating you with it over and over. But for his outrageous demands, he still hits it out of the park; the same can't be said for Em, whose shit is all just the same these days: You get your minor-chord, downtempo horror-esque piano sample (a white boy copping a white boy-- where's Shadow's kickback on that shit?), your loping/plodding canned beat, some ominous strings, and you're done. The only difference between this and his Blueprint track, "Renagade", is that his sound was slightly less tired two years ago. Jay, fortunately, delivers a determined verse about his father's death, and one for Beanie Sigel. But saying he wants to "rhyme like Common Sense"? I cannot express my disappointment.
09 99 Problems [p. Rick Rubin; w. Brent DiCrescenzo]
Ain't-It-Cool rumor has it Hollywood plans for a live-action Transformers film. Feasibility of visual effects aside, the true question of the production is how to modernize Soundwave, the behemoth audio cassette "ghetto blaster" Transformer, for the MP3 generation. To the director, take a note from Rick Rubin's Jay-Z soundbomb: Keep it old school. Some studio suit surely wants a giant robot iPod smashing trucks, but the original concept still slays. Likewise, "99 Problems" towers over The Black Album's supposedly forward-looking tracks. Carrying the Decepticon analogy: The 808 kick quakes like Rumble's pistons. As the back of his toy box boasts, Frenzy's "screaming voice and belligerent manner alone could shake up an opponent, but he can enhance this effect by spinning the drum-like devices in his torso." So, too, does Rubin eject seismic, metallic blasts from his deck's chest like tornado-thrown telephone poles taking out a, um, transformer.
After years of intimate, acoustic productions for Johnny Cash and Tom Petty and his sawing work with Slayer and System of a Down, "99 Problems" re-establishes Rubin as THE mutherfucker with a swami's beard who invented this minimalist trunk rumble. And unlike any other track on this record, it can be said that Jay's vocals matter little. Close inspection reveals dubious claims such as, "Got beef with radio/ If I don't play their show/ They don't play my hits/ Well, I don't give a shit." His lips rip like Lazerbeak, but the meaning is inconsequential. Do Jay's problems run deeper than Rocawear inseam durability or Bentley electrical recalls? His self-aware braggadocio goes back to those days of comedic Jamaican toasts, which potentially amuse if you're ever tempted to turn down the volume.
10 Public Service Announcement [p. Just Blaze; w. Rollie Pemberton]
Dictating to a labored ringing piano roll and a thunderously high-toned extended organ riff, Jay-Z once again decimates his peers in their own game, handling the school of violent hubris in a manner that embodies not just mere lyrical supremacy but actual metaphorical depth. Hova is one of few artists who can ask his listenership to follow his fashion sense while simultaneously schooling the talent pool on rhyming style in a single line: "I got a hustler's spirit, nigga, period/ Check out my hat, yo, peep the way I wear it." It's also a way of saying that the genre's old hat to him these days, even while it was his style that so ridiculously raised the bar. A bold statement among bold statements, this track is mastery of a style, regardless of brevity, repetition, or random use of quotations.
11 Justify My Thug [p. DJ Quik; w. Chris Dahlen]
The big story behind this track is that Madonna was supposed to give it live vocals but couldn't make the deadline. Instead, they went with Sharlotte Gibson, a longtime backup vocalist for Whitney Houston, who pulls off an adequate impression. The track is all about DJ Quik's electro beat, though, which starts out whomping and wears itself out through repetition. Sadly, not much else happens. It's easy to tag this as the simplest, weakest moment on the record-- I don't think anyone could reasonably contest that-- but on the other hand, it is nice 'n' nasty, and hilarious for how it makes Jay's thug life lyrics so unromantic and just-for-show. The lyrics moan on about gangsta code and social ills, but over that beat, he just sounds like he wants to get some ass on his face.
12 Lucifer [p. Kanye West; w. Rob Mitchum]
On first listen, "Lucifer" comes off a bit too close to flavor-of-the-month material for an album that promised to avoid easy singles: The accelerated Max Romeo sample could be construed as pandering to the Jamaican influences back in favor with hip-hop, and the refrain, "I'm from the murder capitol where we murder for capital," is wordplay a little too beginner's-level for Hov. Fortunately, his verses make up for these slights by following an incredibly intricate structure, somehow managing to land on religious imagery every time the sample comes up, while Kanye's beat retains a snaky bounce without going down the obvious ragga route. If it does indeed end up a single, like "Beware of the Boys" it'll still be jagged enough to stand out in the trend-pile.
13 Allure [p. Neptunes; w. Ryan Schreiber]
This is more like it. The Neptunes come back hard from their substandard earlier offering, riding a string section slick enough to rival Love Unlimited, a pulsing kick/snare combo, and gunshots for percussive effect and good measure. Jay is particularly on point, killing line after line like a Blueprint standout. It's the penultimate Jay-Z track ever, and buoyed on that stormy, oceanic orchestra, Hov comes damn close to teary-eyed: "Shit, I know how this movie ends/ Still I play/ The starring role in Hovito's Way." "Allure" is Jay in eternal struggle with his vices, confident as ever he can give up the game, but even the title forebodes. He knows, and when the Neptunes downshift and the chorus kicks in, reality strikes: "But every time I felt that was that, it called me right back/ OHHH NOOOO!" This is the sound of a career high.
14 My 1st Song [p. Aqua and Joe "3H" Weinberger; w. Scott Plagenhoef]
After spending most of the record summing up his life and career, Jay thankfully doesn't try to end it with the Cliff's Notes version. He instead handles his "second major breakup" by coupling his typically self-celebratory language with avuncular advice-- from himself and Biggie, who drops in from the afterlife-- and a rare display of humility. Throughout the sentimental closer, Jay keeps his chin up and makes the song cry with emotive, bolero-tinged production from the previously unknown team of Aqua and Joe "3H" Weinberger. Always the entrepreneur, Hova abdicates his throne and slips into his full-time CEO role with a series of almost memoir-like shoutouts that double as teasers for his upcoming bio, The Black Book-- in stores soon!


The first spoils of the fabled Dreamville sessions feature J. Cole and his label mostly thriving in a collaborative environment.

Various Artists: Revenge of the Dreamers III

Revenge of the Dreamers III

The only person to rap on three J. Cole albums released over the last five years has been, well, J. Cole. “I’m reaching a point in my career over this past year where I don’t want to look back 20 years from now and be like, ‘I never worked with nobody; I never had no fun’,” he says early in the new making-of documentary REVENGE. What started as an empty gesture flaunted by a passionate fanbase soon became a meme wielded by his haters. Going it solo affords you full credit for your ideas and successes, to be sure, but the flip side of that coin is isolation. When you’re the only voice in the studio, or at least the only one that matters, the booth can become an echo chamber.
The Revenge of the Dreamers III compilation is an attempt to reconnect J. Cole with his peers. He seems humbled by his interactions with younger rappers in the wake of the abstinence-core of KOD and the schoolmarmish “1985 (Intro to The Fall Off).” He’s hungry for collaborative energy, to find a new sense of community that can both enlighten and inspire him. Though not always unified in vision, Dreamers III reveals new bonds born of passion, circumstance, and shared experience.
J. Cole’s label Dreamville touts itself as “the label of the connected age,” but it has been all but sequestered from the wider rap community until earlier this year. After previous Dreamville comps were produced as an assortment of solo songs with a few features spliced in over email, the label heads wanted to get everyone in the same room. So for 10 days in January, the Dreamville roster convened at Tree Sound Studios in Atlanta. Gilded posters requesting the “presence and participation” of over 100 rappers, singers, and producers were sent out. Invited participants started posting their summons on Twitter and Instagram, and the mystique and intrigue of the thing started to take hold. But the Dreamville bosses never imagined these sessions would turn from a label summit to massive assembly of the rap Avengers.
Of the more than 124 songs created during those creative powwows, Cole and Dreamville president Ibrahim Hamad settled on 18 for the final Revenge of the Dreamers  III project. A handful are big posse cuts, but it’s largely run-of-the-mill team-ups, solo singles, and a few songs split into two. The Dreamville natives take precedence on the comp, pushing everyone else into the margins. Atlanta’s J.I.D gets to chop it up with one-time king T.I. over old flames, their “Ladies, Ladies, Ladies” a more cordial spin on JAY-Z’s “Girls, Girls, Girls.” “Down Bad” cuts a Young Nudy verse short to get into a Dreamville posse cut. Though the outsiders sometimes feel like window-dressing, they do get some quality time. The idea of the comp is perfectly realized on “Got Me,” where three producers warp Faith Evans’ “Come Over” into an aphrodisiac for mixed company; Ari Lennox, Ty Dolla $ign, Omen, and Dreezy pair off for a jam that feels like being wrapped in the embrace at a slow dance.
Then there’s “1993,” a cypher inside a smoke session, where each rapper’s verse gets interrupted by someone yelling to pass the blunt and keep the rotation moving. It’s an apt and unwitting commentary on how the compilation is at its most organic when the rotations are fluid, no one says too much, and everyone’s on the same page. The best parts of DreamersIII are when Cole & Friends mix it up with their guests and step outside of their comfort zones. “Don’t Hit Me Right Now” pairs Dreamville’s Bas, Cozz, and Ari Lennox with Buddy, Guapdad 4000, and Yung Baby Tate and they mesh into a muggy Galimatias production. On “LamboTruck,” Dreamville’s Cozz and TDE’s Reason brainstorm robbing each other’s respective label bosses in one of the few coherent ideas that extends beyond just outrapping one another.
Few verses on the album are particularly memorable outside of spots from Maxo Kream, Vince Staples, a string of appearances from the consistently good J.I.D, and the standalone moments of introspection from J. Cole himself. But the comp works because it never feels forced or closed off to ideas. Cole sheds the trap parody of KOD to really identify with those younger than him, even if it’s just to reach an understanding: We’ll all be better off if we work together. “Everything grows/It’s destined to change/I love you lil niggas/I’m glad that you came,” Cole raps on “Middle Child,” and though he’s speaking generally, it feels representative of this successful meeting of the minds.


The singer’s seventh album moves between frothy pop-R&B and stale empowerment anthems that leave her talents largely underused.

Beauty Marks

Over the past 15 years, Ciara’s career has become emblematic of a certain kind of pop star resilience: With six albums totaling over 23 million sales and a Grammy to her name, Ciara endures as a radio mainstay, but following the highs of her stellar 2013 self-titled fifth album, she reverted to momentum-killing, paint-by-number songwriting on follow-up Jackie. Beauty Marks is Ciara’s seventh album and first release since signing to Warner Bros. and forming her own company, Beauty Marks Entertainment, a creative departure that should have paved the way for the singer to create music more firmly in her own image. Yet despite a handful of highlights, Beauty Marks is marred by filler, moving between frothy pop-R&B and stale empowerment anthems that leave Ciara’s talents largely underused.
Beauty Marks prolongs the breakup and redemption narrative Ciara introduced on Jackie, focusing on a steadfast dedication to marriage, friendship, and emotional catharsis. But the message of persevering through struggle is kneecapped instantly by “I Love Myself,” a stiff ballad with a mystifying feature from Macklemore, here to complete his evolution into the John Mayer of rap: “Don’t want the ’Gram telling my daughters what beauty is, nah/I ain’t raising princesses/I’m raising warriors.” The song is negligible next to the frantic Jersey club beat of “Level Up,” a polyrhythmic romp and far better conduit for Ciara’s energetic self-encouragement. The DJ Telly Tellz–sampling song inspired a bonafide dance challenge last summer, evoking the vitalizing heyday of Ciara’s breakthrough single “Goodies” even despite its goofy lyrics (“Know you want this yummy, yummy all in your tummy”).
That divide, however, exemplifies Beauty Marks: Own your self-love with bouncy verve, but keep it all just beige enough for radio. She recruits a guest verse from Kelly Rowland over a flurry of sampled horns and trap beats on squad highlight “Girl Gang,” but it’s at odds with “Set,” a merely serviceable club song that sounds like a watered-down version of hard-hitting singles like “I’m Out” or “Gimmie Dat.” Still, Ciara is at her freest on Beauty Marks, both personally and professionally. On “Dose,” a Darkchild production with marching band horns and a stomping drumline, she quite literally cheerleads you on your journey to the same triumphant state of mind. Unfortunately, it sounds like a gimmick fit for an NFL commercial. The title track, a heartfelt ballad, is less overdone and better for it. The song paints her marriage to quarterback Russell Wilson in refreshingly earnest, real terms: “What did I do to deserve someone to hold me like you do?”
Despite the unevenness, Ciara manages to add a few new wrinkles to her career with Beauty Marks. She relaxes into a featherlight flow alongside Nigerian pop star Tekno on the balmy “Freak Me,” and she shines on the bubbly single “Thinkin Bout You,” a full-on Whitney confection that’s her most capital-P pop moment in recent memory. “Thinkin Bout You” is a snug fit for her fluttering vocals, revealing a side of Ciara we haven’t heard before—breezy and lovestruck, with chintzy, ’80s production as a glittering backdrop. It just happens to be a brief bright spot on an otherwise minor entry in her catalog.


The Australian singer-songwriter’s debut album brings her captivating voice and keen eye to songs that demolish expectations. Fierce, funny, and unsettling, her music is empathetic to the core.

Beware of the Dogs

Stella Donnelly arrived on American shores with a message that cut through a noisy indie-rock landscape. In the U.S., the Perth-based songwriter’s debut was “Boys Will Be Boys,” a commanding song about rape culture that landed in the fall of 2017, just as #MeToo crescendoed. In that moment, Donnelly’s indictment of victim-blamers echoed the sentiment of the thousands of women called upon to publicly excavate their trauma. The single introduced then 25-year-old Donnelly—who already had a following and an EP (Thrush Metal, reissued in the U.S. last year) back at home—as an artist with a captivating voice and a powerful message.
“Boys Will Be Boys” feels as vital and affecting today as when it first came out, but it divulges just a fraction of what makes Donnelly’s songwriting so special. On Beware of the Dogs, her first full-length, a more robust picture emerges. Her songs are complex and surprising, full of sharp corners poised to bruise unsuspecting limbs. Trading in humor as well as gravitas, they are often pulled taut with genuine pain and then snapped with a well-placed punch line. Opener “Old Man,” where Donnelly inveighs against abusers, sets the tone for the record. Its weighty subject matter grates against the chipper guitar tone and Donnelly’s breezy delivery of the song’s most vivid line: “Your personality traits don’t count if you put your dick in someone’s face.” Is she going for a laugh, or a cringe, or both? It sounds like a crass joke, even as it lays out a grim reality.
This sort of irony is the crux of Donnelly’s songwriting. It inserts a consistent point of view across an album whose songs range considerably in scope, at times contracting around the singer’s idle thoughts, at others expanding to bigger sociopolitical topics. Donnelly loves the element of surprise so much she’s built it right into the track list, writing songs that demolish the expectations set by their titles—like “Die,” an upbeat take on a crumbling relationship that likens a partner’s inconsistency to errant driving, and ends with Donnelly gleefully chanting, “I don’t wanna die!” You can picture her drop-and-rolling, Lady Bird-style, from the passenger seat. “Watching Telly,” on the other hand, isn’t at all about the titular activity; it’s a jittery synth number addressing men who rob women of corporeal agency (“They tape dollar signs to our bodies/And tell us not to show our skin”).
The way Donnelly wields her humor can be uplifting, empowering listeners to find the levity in tough situations. It can also be deeply unnerving. Devoid of context, the line “Like a mower in the morning/I will never let you rest”—a legitimate threat couched in language befitting suburban dads—is a hoot. When I first heard Donnelly sing it on “Boys Will Be Boys,” I giggled, then squirmed in my seat, furious at myself for having laughed aloud at a song about rape. Then again, that may just be the point—discomfort is perhaps the most appropriate sensation to experience while listening to this song.
In some ways, Beware of the Dogs feels like a relative of recent work by Donnelly’s countrywoman Courtney Barnett. Both writers wander between the mundane and the momentous; they showcase their wit and punkish attitudes in songs known to turn on a dime. Donnelly has one tool in her kit which Barnett lacks—an impressively dexterous voice, which she puts to work in service of some of her album’s most winsome moments. She can coax out a lovely vibrato, as on “Allergies,” a forlorn breakup tune that unfolds over delicate solo guitar; she can yelp and tease like she does on “Tricks,” a cheerful caricature of moronic Australian men. Donnelly got her start in cover bands, singing AC/DC and Aretha to drunk pharmaceutical reps (whose lewd behavior, incidentally, inspired “Tricks”) at conventions, which explains her versatility and range. That’s not to say that Donnelly’s an imitator—what she accomplishes with these 13 tracks is distinctive.
Fierce as Donnelly’s writing can be, it’s empathetic to the core. Her concern for vulnerable bodies surfaces repeatedly; she sings for friends who have suffered abuse, for women who feel the pinch of objectification, and, on the album’s title track, for her country’s First Nations population and the injustices they have endured. These songs don’t contain much promise of resolution—how could they, really—but they offer solidarity and, in their humor, grace, and rampant unpredictability, are perfectly human. “I like the way that you tell all your tales,” Donnelly sings to her companion on one track; “Would it kill you to listen for once?” With Beware of the Dogs, she shows off a singular talent in both arenas.


Originally conceived for a New Year's Eve show, the Flaming Lips and guests Peaches and Henry Rollins cover the Pink Floyd classic.

The Flaming Lips / Stardeath and White Dwarfs: The Dark Side of the Moon

The Dark Side of the Moon

Like the prism on the iconic cover of Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd's legacy can be refracted many different ways. For one, there's the different eras marked by different bandleaders, from Syd Barrett's storybook psychedelia to Roger Waters misanthropic art-rock to David Gilmour's inoffensive arena-filling stuff. But there are also more subjective takes on the Floyd's influence: you could view them as psych-prog pioneers or the bloat that inspired punk, the band that pushed the limit of the rock concert or the band that made the concert more about theatrics than music, studio wizards or mere inventors of a popular stereo test record.
You might divine then why Floyd appeals to the Flaming Lips right now. I count at least five of those things on that list that could be lobbed (fairly or un-) at the Lips after 27 years; being hated by Johnny Rotten is the only one (probably) beyond their reach. And their appreciation runs deep-- in an interview with Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal, Wayne Coyne remembered goofing on Jesus and Mary Chain fans by covering "Wish You Were Here", when the bands toured together in 1984. But why tackle hoary old Dark Side now, on the heels of the band's triumphant return to in-your-face psychedelic weirdness on last year's Embryonic? And why invite a cavalcade of characters-- Peaches, Henry Rollins, Coyne's nephew's band-- certain to make people think it's all a gag?
After all, Dark Side of the Moon is an album so ingrained in the collective consciousness your grandma can probably call "Money” from the first ring of the cash register. It was also, arguably, Floyd's big money play-- a strange thing to say for a 40-minute continuous song cycle, but a clear conclusion when you look at the swollen 20-minute epics and found-sound experiments that came before it on Meddle and Atom Heart Mother. Ambitious and as tightly wound as a symphony, Dark Side is nevertheless made up of detachable movements that can double as standalone pop songs and classic rock staples.
The Lips, of course, don't go for precision or radio-friendliness, even as they seem to be paying tribute rather than taking the piss out of Pink Floyd. Perhaps the Soft Bulletin-era Lips would've had some interest in recreating the grandeur of the Floyd's original, but the run-through sometimes resembles a sibling of Embyronic's oddities. "Breathe", in both its appearances, reprises the jagged bass grooves and guitar sqwonk of "Convinced of the Hex" and "See the Leaves", while "On the Run" and "Any Colour You Like" are fractured space-boogie that echo the gloriously messy sprawl of "Powerless" and "The Ego's Last Stand".
Those standout instrumentals are collaborations with Stardeath and White Dwarfs, the band fronted by Wayne Coyne's nephew Dennis Coyne, and both make Coyne family reunions sound like good, illegal fun-- jammy affairs that sprinkle some much needed disco dust on Floyd's austere originals. Left to their own devices, Stardeath's take on "Time" and "Brain Damage" are less inspired, the former replacing the clockwork rhythm with coughing and panting and lost lyrics, the latter coming off relatively flat compared to the original, despite well-deployed singing saw. The kids shouldn't feel so bad, as the old guys don't fare too well themselves, neutering "Money" into a mechanized 8-bit lope, and minimally adjusting the track that needs the most help, the plodding "Us and Them".
The second tier of guests are also a split decision. Peaches' job is basically to moan orgasmically through "Great Gig in the Sky". But Henry Rollins, tasked with recreating the snippets of dialogue from Floyd's crew that float around the original, contributes all the line-reading talent you'd expect from the star of "The Chase" and "Feast". At least he doesn't attempt an English accent.
The guest star clusterfuck brings to mind the similar project of the Lips' former tourmate Beck, whose Record Club series brings a random cast of characters to record an album in one day. The comparison doesn't reflect well on this Dark Side though, which comes off stiffer than Beck's ramshackle recreations, but without much in the way of thoughtful annotations to add to the original text. At its best, it's a more unhinged take on Floyd's song cycle of insanity-- like putting the Floyd that played "Interstellar Overdrive" into a time machine to meet the Floyd that wrote "Money". But the Flaming Lips and their co-conspirators can't settle on a color of the Floyd spectrum and run with it, leaving this Dark Side as a lunar capsule lost somewhere between a love letter and a joke.


True Panther collects 7" tracks released over the past few years by Seth Bogart's homoerotic, rock'n'roll throwbacks.

Gay Singles

Despite the fact that Gay Singles is Hunx and His Punx's trashy-excellent first full-length, you may be familiar with the group's frontman Hunx, aka Seth Bogart, whether you know it or not. Perhaps you know him from his keyboard and vocal duties in Oakland's garishly theatrical, ambisexual band Gravy Train!!!!. Or perhaps you recognize him from his very naked appearance in the "hardcore" version of his labelmates Girls' "Lust For Life" video. Or maybe you're one of the fans that have been trolling eBay for the five hard-to-find, sold-out Hunx and His Punx singles that have been released (and just as quickly snapped up) over the past two years.
If you count yourself in the latter category, then you're in luck; this album collects the tunes from those 7”s, presenting them (along with new bonus track "Do the Make Up") together for the first time. If you count yourself in the first category, however, you may be quite surprised by Gay Singles. There are no cartoonish synthesizer melodies, cheap Casio beats, or party-starting cacophonies of cowbell. There's no tongue-in-cheek rapping, either. Yes, the content is still overtly sexual, but it is softer and sweeter-- both lyrically and musically-- than anything you'd expect from a Gravy Train!!!! member.
Hunx and His Punx make swooning bubblegum-punk, and though they aren't the first group to marry the effortless, sugary pop of 60s girl groups with the garage-rock revival, they might be the first whose skuzzy "My Boyfriend's Back"-like songs are explicitly homoerotic. There is a wry dissonance between the songs' easy three-chord strums, resonant vintage organ flourishes, and hand-clapped percussion and their plainspoken lyrics about getting into someone's pants. The songwriters (most tracks are credited to a combination of Bogart and Justin Champlin, the garage-punk character known as Nobunny) may think they're being shocking, but the lyrics are actually charmingly innocent. While Gravy Train!!!! sing explicitly raunchy lyrics about masturbation, lap dances, and hand jobs, Hunx are more interested in winning over straight guys ("I don't think he's gonna miss her/ Cuz I'm a really good kisser," Bogart sings on "Good Kisser"), and flipping 60s girl-pop tropes like waiting for boys to call.
The outrageously tarty presentation plus faux naïve musical content highlights a winning group of influences-- John Waters, the Shangri-Las, the Ramones-- and the collection is surprisingly cohesive for a singles compilation. Bogart sings with a whining, nasal bray that may be off-putting or gratingly flat to some, but swathed in cheap, tinny reverb, it gets the rebellious, adolescent vibe right. After all the homoeroticism, this is at heart a record about the thrust and vitality of rock'n'roll: "You like Morrissey, you like U2/ What the fuck is wrong with you?" Bogart sings on opener "You Don't Like Rock'n'Roll", and if you think it's a legit question you might want to sing it along with him.


On her second album, the New Jersey singer-songwriter recenters her romantic anguish through a more muted delivery, but her plaintive songwriting hasn’t lost its intoxicating touch.

You Can’t Kill Me

070 Shake’s tormented, cathartic blend of rap and R&B was a thrilling anomaly in 2020, when a pair of star-turn guest features on GOOD Music albums led to her striking debut, Modus Vivendi. Two years later, Shake’s despairing, rafters-reaching voice still holds the same weight, but it’s accrued a more subtle context. On You Can’t Kill Me, her second album, the New Jersey singer-songwriter retains her style while also reining it in, recentering the push-and-pull of romantic anguish that lives at the heart of her music through a more muted delivery. Here, her sound is full of keening synths, electric guitars, and heavy drum beats, furnished by co-executive producer and regular collaborator Dave Hamelin. Even Shake’s delivery is more measured on You Can’t Kill Me, as she reaches for mumbled melodies rather than shout-along choruses, but her woozy, plaintive songwriting doesn’t lose its intoxicating touch.
You Can’t Kill Me is at its best when it offers surprising, welcome wrinkles to Shake’s sound. “Vibrations” opens with over a minute of echoing, ambient vocal experimentation before pivoting into triumphant, head-nodding rap-pop; “Blue Velvet” coasts on breezy, bossa nova strings and hand percussion, a deviation in style that Shake uses for a tormented ballad about a lover’s dress. On the sultry “Body,” a co-production between Dave Sitek and Mike Dean, Héloïse Letissier of Christine and the Queens offers a punchy counterbalance, matching her low-key vocals with Shake’s to evoke the pangs of physical attraction. Yet she rarely stays in a contented frame of mind for long before the eventual spiral. “I wanted your body,” Shake insists in a frayed, last-ditch plea, “but it came with your soul.”
Like Modus Vivendi, most of the lyrics on You Can’t Kill Me focus on difficult heartache and self-reflection, but here she comes to sharper realizations about becoming another source of her own pain. “I wanna drink all night and stay inside/I think I been the problem,” she croons on early standout “Invited,” the words sparse against a billowing, delicately plucked melody. The album traces a loose arc toward moving on from a past flame. By “Vibrations,” a confident Shake is ready to bet on herself and reach the other side: “You will never lead me to where you want me.”
The contemplation and growth takes You Can’t Kill Me a little deeper than her past work, but sometimes the softened vocal delivery underscores her weaker songwriting. Songs vacillate between affecting ruminations on romantic confusion and mushy philosophical musings. On the frictionless “Wine and Spirits,” a dirgey ballad about how fame has deteriorated a relationship, she fumbles over repeated clumsy phrasing. “Yin and the yang is more than just a symbol,” she trills beneath melodramatic peals of guitar. “Life is ’bout balance, war and harmony.” The koan-like setups frustratingly hinder the album’s more gripping moments of self-examination.
Whether in art or in life, Shake appears exceedingly aware of impending criticism. “It don’t matter what you’re doin’/People gonna judge you too,” she warns on “Come Back Home.” Plainspokenness is part of her charm; she sings from the heart of whatever anxious moment is troubling her. On the tense highlight “Cocoon,” she proves it—over a hypnotic, nervous synth line, she describes coming into her own through the uneasy process of outgrowing a partner. “Why you didn’t grow now I don’t know/It’s making me so emotional,” she sings with coolly detached restraint, just before the song detonates with an earthshaking bassline at the last word. Even when she sounds like she’s nearing the end of her rope, Shake stabilizes the chaos with a sharp sense of control.