The toad's internal organs surged from its mouth as Brian's mother accidentally stepped on it. Brian had noticed ...

The Invisible Man

The toad's internal organs surged from its mouth as Brian's mother accidentally stepped on it. Brian had noticed the toad sitting on the grass just in time to witness its gruesome death, and stared for a few seconds before throwing up his hands and shouting, "The universe sucks!" Brian is fond of decrying the injustices of our chaotic environment, and perhaps no other single anecdote supports his rantings better. There was no reason for what happened to that toad. It just happened.
Of course, Brian's simple three-word theory is applicable everywhere, and not just in the natural world. It was at work when Beta succumbed to VHS, despite being the superior format. It's at work every time Fox cancels a good TV show and replaces it with police chase videos. And it's at work almost constantly in the music industry, a world where the Britneys and the Backstreets rule the charts while so many true artists toil in the depths of commercial hell, neglected by a public hungry for eye candy and a quick thrill.
While many artists have suffered similar fates, few have typified it the way Mark Eitzel has. Put simply, Eitzel possesses one of the most impressive oeuvres of any songwriter, living or dead. Even the perpetually clueless Rolling Stone couldn't ignore the man's genius, naming him Songwriter of the Year back in 1991. Despite his complete mastery of the craft, though, he's never seen his day in the spotlight, and at this point in his career, it seems unlikely that he ever will. The public at large isn't interested in music this brutally honest. All the more for you and me, I suppose.
Transplanted in the early 80's from his boyhood home of Columbus, Ohio to the San Francisco Bay Area, Eitzel fronted the tragically overlooked American Music Club. Over the course of AMC's seven albums, Eitzel penned some of the greatest, most heartfelt tales of degradation, struggle, and sadness in modern music, finding his muse in dank bars, empty beds and lonely nights. When AMC finally called it quits in 1994 after a stalled deal with Reprise, Eitzel struck out on his own, releasing the jazzy 60 Watt Silver Lining and the fantastic Peter Buck collaboration West on Warner before the label left him on the curb.
The good folks at Matador picked him up for 1998's cheekily titled Caught in a Trap and I Can't Back Out 'Cause I Love You Too Much Baby, a starkly beautiful album that was almost aborted due to the difficulty of making it. Three years later, Eitzel is still on his feet, though the weight of the world has hardly been lifted from his shoulders. The Invisible Man is perhaps his best solo effort yet, and nearly the equal of AMC's greatest triumph, Everclear.
Greatness, of course, is a given where Eitzel is involved, but perhaps the most stunning thing about The Invisible Man is the fact that, so many years on, he's embraced electronics and emerged with an album that sounds utterly contemporary and vital. "The Boy with the Hammer" starts things off with deeply echoed piano and Eitzel's powerful voice singing, "When the boy with the hammer in the bag stands up to cheer/ Then you stand up to cheer," as ambient washes rise like an ether fog, pushed along by a mix of skittering beats and live percussion. Eitzel has always checked Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream as influences, but they've never come to the fore like this in the past.
"Can You See?" finds Eitzel balancing his world-weariness with a newfound trace of optimism: "You say that another man's hell could be your heaven/ And if this is being blind and wrong give me more and more/ And let me light up the hand and let me pull the truth through/ But if the truth won't make you happy/ What would you do?/ The truth is that I'm happy when I'm with you." The understated electronics burbling underneath combine with knockout horn arrangement to wrap around Eitzel's confessions like a warm blanket. Goosebumps ensue.
The hilarious march of "Christian Science Reading Room" is Eitzel's black humor at its best. "I was so high/ I stood for an hour outside the Christian Science Reading Room/ And suddenly I could not resist/ I became a Christian Scientist/ And I studied light and I studied sound/ And every question that I asked was suddenly profound." He goes on to convert his cat before declaring, "I love all seven deadly sins," in the opening of "Sleep."
This is the point, where, as a reviewer, my job becomes difficult. There are thirteen songs on this album and every single one of them is tremendous in its own right. I could spend the rest of this review quoting lyrics and never truly convey the power of these songs. Eitzel has a creepy way of finding all the thoughts you have hanging next to the skeletons in your closet and conveying them succinctly and effortlessly. So rather than participate in a futile exercise like trying to describe how good this music is, I'll go for the big wrap-up and hope that I can convince you that this is totally worth listening to.
It's way too early to declare anything the Album of the Year, but I will say that this one holds the top spot on my list by a long shot so far. Eitzel and his small group of talented cohorts have created a textured soundtrack to the outpourings of a broken heart that never once intrudes on the honesty of the proceedings. Every bleep and skitter is there to serve the song. Exploring new territory while maintaining the emotional weight of your material is rarely a working prospect for an artist, but The Invisible Man pulls it off nicely.
Eitzel may still be the invisible man in many respects, but as long as he keeps translating his sorrow and suffering into batches of killer songs like this, we as listeners get to be the lucky beneficiaries. On the drunkenly jubilant closer, "Proclaim Your Joy," Eitzel exhorts us half-seriously that "it is important throughout your life to proclaim your joy." And with this album in your stereo, I think it's safe to say that you will.


This eight-song mini-LP from the veteran post-punks includes tracks that didn’t fit on their self-titled 2015 album and is marked by an unsettling, dead-of-night calm.

Nocturnal Koreans

Throughout their 40-year existence, Wire have striven to both obliterate and preserve their past. The post-punk pioneers’ discography is one of abrupt but clean breaks, with prolonged periods of inactivity that neatly group their records into distinct phases—which the band and fans cheekily refer to as Marks, like upgraded models of the same sports car. It’s almost as if they’ve always approached their work as discrete discs in a career-retrospective box set, with each era defined by a specific aesthetic approach or change in personnel.
Not surprisingly, for a band so self-aware of their legacy, Wire have been very selective about what songs make it onto their official albums. At the same time, they’re not ones to let leftovers go to waste—they’re committed to giving aborted material its proper due and consideration, no matter if it takes several years to work it into proper shape. Their 2013 release, Change Become Us, comprised updated versions of songs written in 1980 but only captured on a crude live recording from the era. The new Nocturnal Koreans likewise salvages scrapped material, though its shelf life can be measured in months rather than decades—the mini-LP features eight songs that were recorded alongside the 11 featured on Wire’s 2015 self-titled effort, but didn’t make it onto the album.
According to the band, the songs featured on Wire lent themselves to more of a live approach, whereas the tracks compiled on and reworked for Nocturnal Koreans encouraged a greater degree of studio manipulation. But the two releases still sound like byproducts of the same moment—Wire was hardly lacking for textural trickery, while Nocturnal Koreans accommodates a couple of rockers. Furthermore, the atypical tools employed here (trumpet, lap-steel guitar) are treated less as feature attractions than soluble materials to be mutated and absorbed into the band’s soundstream. Whereas Wire effectively found this perennially re-inventive band settling into a comfort zone of sorts, forging the melodic middle ground between post-punk whirr and Krautrock swirl, Nocturnal Koreans uses that album’s brisk, motorik pop as its jumping-off point. Chronicling an experience with mid-tour insomnia, the opening title track masterfully mediates between inner-city tension and dream-world reverie, with frontman Colin Newman’s bleary-eyed mental haze (“I dressed in my shower before I awoke”) rendered through an encroaching, droning buzz that gradually blurs the edges of the song’s incessant backbeat.
True to that nighttime scene-setter, Nocturnal Koreans ranks among Wire’s most musically relaxed releases, with Newman mostly singing in calm, sometimes hushed tones. But it’s only relaxed in the sense that a sleepless night in your bedroom is relaxed—the pillows and sheets feel familiar, but your thoughts are riddled with anxieties over the unknown. While the droll, dry “Internal Exile” may deliver its critique of cutthroat capitalism with a smirk (“Hearts of gold/ No pot to piss in/ Join the queue of future has-beens”), its tense acoustic stalk and prodding chorus apply palpable pressure. The more wiry—and typically Wire-y— “Numbered” packs in a cheeky callback to one of the band’s signature songs (“You think I’m a number/ Still willing to rhumba”), yet that knowing nod only reinforces the new track’s doomsday messaging. Those apocalyptic intimations are rendered all the more starkly through the dead-of-night stillness of “Forward Motion,” whose eerie, frosty ambience swells into a mushroom cloud of lingering cold-war paranoia.
It’s easy to see how something like “Forward Position” was deemed too much of an aesthetic outlier to fit in with the Wire tracklist. But there are also a handful of tracks here (“Dead Weight,” “Still,” “Pilgrim Trade”) that seem like mere victims of attrition—functional, pro-forma songs that try to boost their mid-tempo pulse by piling on synth and noise textures. So when bassist Graham Lewis steps up to take his lone, lead vocal on the closing “Fishes Bones,” it’s a welcome jolt, his leering lyrics (“The back door’s open, are you needing a boost?/ Inside is where my chicken roost”) providing an absurdist counterpoint to Newman’s more contemplative observations. As per Wire’s 21st century M.O., it’s a song that obliquely references the band’s prior work—in this case, the strobe-lit, lockstep assault of late-’80s standards like “(A Berlin) Drill.” But it uses nostalgia like a slingshot, pulling back to the past as a means to shoot forth into the future.


With more ambitious melodies, bolder harmonies, and compositional complexity, the Chicago trio’s new album hypercharges their already electric sound.

Poetry

Dehd is as much a rock band as they are a viable alternative to Red Bull. The Chicago trio’s previous two—great, but relatively interchangeable—albums, 2020’s Flower of Devotion and 2022’s Blue Skies, established Dehd as something you reach for when you want to feel hypercharged. Singer Emily Kempf’s vocals have the endearing, squealing quality of a hog call, and Jason Balla makes the guitar sound like his strings are fruit-colored rubber bands. Their music offers a reliable path to sun-kissed paradise, if your version necessitates dirty knees and sticky fingers. But on Dehd’s latest album, Poetry, the band tries the backroads. With more ambitious melodies and compositional complexity, Dehd sends a lightning bolt through their already electric sound.
All they needed was a binding agent. Balla notes in press materials that he, Kempf, and drummer Eric McGrady approached writing Poetry differently than past albums. They abandoned their typical roles—McGrady exercising his yogic restraint over the drum kit, Kempf spilling her voice all over the mic—in favor of experimentation. Balla recalls how they’d all “bounce around the room playing different instruments, dreaming up different ideas” and summoning the red-hot energy they felt when the band was younger. The result is worthwhile: Poetry still pulses like summer, but Dehd sounds more cohesive than ever.
Forest layers of guitar and echoed vocals replace the ponytail swing of Blue Skies. Still, Balla often sings with charming indifference, like he found the lyrics crumpled in his back pocket. “It’s a lover, soft undressing,” he muses with Kempf on the headrush “Dog Days,” only to finish the next line with a statement of apathy: “It’s a, ugh, whatever.” His reedy voice and Kempf’s gunshot shouting have always mixed together well, like sparkling water and soda syrup. But Poetry elevates their natural chemistry with bold harmonies. The two trade light da-da-da’s and lazy ahh’s on the yearning “So Good,” as if they’re playing dentist. When McGrady’s drum starts to rumble, it feels like Earth is parting for the song’s true message: “I’m bad at this love thing/You’ll probably mean nothing.”
Dehd tackle the same topics with a missing-tooth grin: addictive love, pain, being a happy outsider in spite of these things. Despite the cringey loftiness that a title like Poetry suggests, they consistently deliver sensible Bob Seger jams, like “Shake,” on which Kempf huffs out big breaths, as if she’s using them to keep herself cool. The poetry is in the mundane, they suggest. It’s in all the disparate pieces that come together to form one mosaic, your one life. That sense of quotidian beauty is especially palpable on “Pure Gold,” in which McGrady’s drums sway like blossoms in a windy wildflower field. Kempf and Balla chant triumphantly, proclaiming that it’s all “Easy, breezy/Ooh, yeah/We laugh so freely.” Their instruments no longer rub against each other like dry sticks, as they would on past albums—instead, they melt together like popsicles.


After two albums of solo recording, the Love Language's Stuart McLamb enlisted a small army of collaborators on his third album. McLamb seems to be relishing the chance to get outside of his head, making music that is gorgeous and unashamedly fun.

Ruby Red

The Love Language's self-titled 2009 debut was endearingly frayed collection of alt-country pop, 1960s garage-rock swagger, and Spector-esque swells of melodrama, all recorded by leader Stuart McLamb, alone on his four-track. McLamb scrounged together seven-piece band to tour the record, and the adaptation of the rough-hewn debut album to a live setting was a revelation, as the motley lineup made each of McLamb’s songs pop in high-contrast technicolor. But McLamb's 2010 Merge debut, Libraries, found him continuing to record solo, crafting nuggets of Burt Bacharach inspired baroque pop if never quite moving beyond mid-tempo indie rock competency. McLamb’ took two years to record his third LP as the Love Language, Ruby Red, this time with the help over over 20 musicians across a handful of timezones. This album’s recording process was the complete antithesis of McLamb’s previous efforts, and the collaborative spirit has led to a record of relaxed confidence.
The production details and influences that produced the most interesting moments from the previous albums-- Spector’s orchestral swathes, Bacharach’s deceptively simple pop compositions, a steely garage rock nerve, the twangy alt-country stomp-- have coalesced and hardened into a full-bodied dynamic sound that bristles with excitement and pleasure. Ruby Red is a willfully effervescent record that wears its pop music heart on its sleeve; string and horn sections are used liberally to crest and smash with the motion of McLamb’s melodies, while anthemic guitar figures and radio-ready hooks whistle through each song like they were designed to pour out of a set of car speakers.
The lingering mopiness that permeated Libraries’ is swapped for the unabashed enthusiasm in songs like track one “Calm Down”, a bass-chugging thrasher that erupts into a piano/tambourine driven chorus. "Calm Down", along with the family-friendly garage rock of “Kids”, along with the loungey, sunkissed harmonies of “Hi Life” and the classical crooning vibe of “Golden Age”, make for a solid tour through McLamb’s M.O. on Ruby Red, as he filters a handful of faithfully rendered canonical styles from pop music’s history through his indie rock sensibilities. Even the weaker ballad “Knots”--which is marred by a shaky vocal performance early on-- slowly transforms into a heart-melting, jaunty, string-laden sing-along. This is the album that should have followed McLamb’s quaintly lo-fi debut and ensuing tours, as the small army of collaborators brings his pop music vision to life. McLamb seems to be relishing the chance to get outside of his head, making music that is gorgeous and unashamedly fun.


On her debut solo album, the Best Coast leader draws inspiration from classic country and glossy pop-rock. It’s the brightest her music has ever sounded but the songwriting doesn’t rise to the occasion.

Natural Disaster

Bethany Cosentino chose the name Best Coast in her early 20s, freshly appreciative of the California sun after a brief, wintery stint in New York. Her first album with bandmate Bobb Bruno introduced her as a lovelorn stoner who sang about boys, California, weed, and her late cat, Snacks (please, a moment for Snacks), over Bruno’s fuzzy take on Phil Spector. But long enough into an artist’s career, personas can become cages. Cosentino was tired of being, as she put it on 2020’s Always Tomorrow, the “lazy, crazy baby”—Best Coast had grown musically from the easy three-chord melodies and anodyne harmonies of their first album, but their image was stuck in 2009.
For her first record under her own name, Cosentino returned to the music of her childhood: Bonnie Raitt (who gets a shout-out on “Outta Time”), Linda Ronstadt, and Indigo Girls. She recruited producer Butch Walker, who has helmed radio-friendly pop for everyone from Weezer to Taylor Swift, to help her realize her visions of Americana, and left the comforts of Los Angeles for his studio in Nashville. The approach is reminiscent of Best Coast’s second album, The Only Place, where they partnered with Jon Brion to fill in the gaps in their sound. Walker’s production builds from the blues rock of Always Tomorrow with a bevy of percussive elements and glimmering guitars. It’s the brightest and catchiest she’s ever sounded—if only her lyrics could rise to the occasion.
Even before she decided to embark on a solo career, Cosentino’s writing had started to veer from sunny run-on sentences about West Coast supremacy to weightier topics: depression, isolation, sobriety. “I guess this is what they mean when they say people can change,” she sang about her own self-actualization on her last album as Best Coast. To Cosentino, growing older is a process of trading hedonism for disillusionment, or trying to find acceptance somewhere in between. That ennui is still present—“If nothing's guaranteed/Then what's the point of doing anything?” she muses on “For a Moment”—but her existential quandaries are almost always met with rote solutions: a kiss that can silence anxiety, if only fleetingly.
Hackneyed lyrics seem to be part of a larger strategy: “I tried really hard with this record to leave certain things so that they could be a little bit more universally relatable,” Cosentino said. But the resulting songs are so broadly written that they become meaningless. “Everything’s insane,” she sings on the Train homage “Calling on Angels”; on “My Own City,” she gestures at some broader authority—“They say relax, gotta stay on track”— without hinting at who “they” might be. “Easy,” a piano-driven love ballad, makes the most obvious choice at every turn: “It’s always easy,” she sings. “I hate to sound cliché and cheesy.”
Natural Disaster’s title track reads like a global warming update on the Beach Boys’ “All Summer Long”: “This is the hottest summer I can ever remember/‘Cause the world is on fire,” she belts on the chorus. But rather than use those anxieties as an axis for contemplation or change, Cosentino settles on nihilism: “Hey, if we’re all dying, then what does it matter?” Cosentino has said the song was “inspired by the energy of 2020, when there was crazy political unrest and people were dying in massive amounts,” but it’s hard to hear that fervor as she sings, unvaryingly upbeat, about the world ending. The chorus’s central phrase— “We’re a natural disaster”—attempts to link the destruction of the planet with the messy problems of growing up, but dismisses the unique struggles of the two in the process.
Cosentino’s writing about more personal changes doesn’t fare any better. “It’s Fine,” a warm ode to taking the high road, stumbles when Cosentino sings “I am evolved,” on the closest thing the album ever gets to a bridge. The grammatical choices —“am” instead of “have”—come off more like self-help gibberish than a declaration of self-improvement. When we get to the chorus, an airy reiteration that “it’s fine” (what rhymes with “it’s fine?” Well, “it’s not fine,” of course!), her stratospheric belting feels unearned by the flimsy build-up. Cosentino’s voice—a robust, rich tone that made her a perfect fit for the National Anthem at Dodgers stadium—is unwavering throughout most of the album. She sounds just as effusive singing about global warming on “Natural Disaster” as she does singing about fleeting love on “For a Moment”—and stretches the 12-song album to feel twice its length.
Elsewhere, songs sound like Linda Ronstadt mad libs: “I was born in the sign of water/But that don't mean I can save us now,” she sings on “Hope You’re Happy Now.” Her couplets beg you not to think too deeply about them: “It's a journey/And I think I'll stick around,” she sings on “It’s a Journey.” Cosentino often grabs for the same phrases over and over again; she uses some version of “the sky is falling” across multiple songs. These missteps might be growing pains: While it might have been straightforward to rhyme “baby” and “maybe” in a sendup to the Ronettes, putting her own spin on the heart wrenching power of country legends is a taller order.
When Cosentino slows down and strips her voice back to its barest parts, though, a soft vision of pop folk comes into clearer view: “A Single Day” opens with just guitar and vocals, in medias res, as she’s “thinking a lot about how it’s all gonna disappear.” As the instrumentation builds slowly—a guiro here, a banjo there—she talks about singing the Mamas & the Papas in her car as she plans her escape. It’s a more subtle approach to songwriting than she takes on the rest of the album, and the chorus feels properly explosive as a result: “If the whole thing is going out and ending like they say/ Well we better live a million lifetimes in a single day,” she sings, her voice taking on a miasmatic quality as she stretches the last word of each line. Cosentino sounds strongest when she gives herself permission to veer from her influences and find her own voice.


The upstart Alabama rapper has big hype and a personality to match. His new full-length shows off a more human side.

P.S. Fuck You

Yhapojj has the kind of outsized persona where he takes on the identity of a wolf, is anointed to knighthood via sword emojis in TikTok comments, and has a show shut down by NYPD—only to take the music into the streets and the skate park. Since 2020, he’s been triangulating his sound, somewhere between Isley Brothers, ILoveMakonnen, and Bangerz-era Miley Cyrus. On P.S. Fuck You, the 20-year-old Huntsville, Alabama rapper comes back down to Earth with a vulnerable and sometimes silly project that’s ultimately sort of fun but not that deep.
Alongside teenage phenom Nettspend, Yhapojj has popularized “jerk” rap, a genre known for pitched-up, layered vocals and bass that will make your speakers sound broken. With many of jerk rap’s major players barely beyond their teens, its lyrics tend to capture classic adolescent attitudes like “no one understands me,” “I need her so bad,” and “let’s get fucked up tonight.” Yhapojj’s fans admire his combination of sad, crooning lyrics over loud, kinetic beats. Call it crying while acing your math exam, but that duality is foundational to P.S. Fuck You, where Yhapojj weaves between blaring horns, melodic piano, and thick bass as he reflects on his relationships and mindset.

On the standout “Turnin Lane,” produced by Charlotte, North Carolina’s ok, Yhapojj ruminates about a lover he doesn’t want to leave, asking her which way she’s going to go in the turn lane—as well as complimenting her feet. He’s trying to convince us that he doesn’t care, but the song’s anxious desperation betrays him. Atop a triumphant horn-filled beat on “Feelings,” Yhapojj hopes all his friends get married—if only so he gets a chance to see his crush at the reception, which is sweet in a rom-com type of way.
His change of vocal effects and the tone of his voice create different versions of Yhapojj to represent different parts of his personality. His delivery has a mountain of charisma to stand on, but a lack of musical variety is what really drags P.S. Fuck You down. The album features work by a number of young producers, like Atlanta’s FearDorian and jerk rap beatmaker Hhhcra, but it starts to run out of gas towards the end, and piano-based tracks like “Whats Up Wit” and “Touch Evb” blend together. While Yhapojj has used angel or werewolf imagery to create a hyperreal version of himself that made zany music, P.S. Fuck You portrays him as just a guy going through it. It feels raw and complex, but it leaves you hoping for just a touch more magic.


In what is billed as the emo band’s farewell album, Max Bemis concocts a tangled rock opera about a burnt-out singer grappling with his rage and his sexuality.

Oliver Appropriate

An emo rock opera might provoke some well-deserved eye-rolls in a post-American Idiot era. But Say Anything’s Max Bemis is no stranger to the form: His 2004 cult hit, ...Is a Real Boy, for all of its goofy pop-punk hooks and lyrics about phone sex, was originally conceived as a play, right down to its producer, Hedwig and the Angry Inch writer Stephen Trask. So it’s fitting that Bemis returned to the format for the band’s final record, Oliver Appropriate. For Say Anything, the outlandish nature of the stage—the heightened emotions, the unsubtle criticisms of politics and culture—lends structure to what might otherwise be unbridled hormonal rage.
And in case it has to be said about a man who frequently screams “I hate everyone” on stage, Bemis has rage in spades. Enough rage for a nine-page screed ahead of their final record. Enough rage for a double-album about mid-aughts emo. Enough rage for a line like, “You are a vacuous soldier of the thrift-store Gestapo.” On Oliver Appropriate, he channels his rage into Oliver, the album’s protagonist, a suspiciously familiar “singer of a burnt-out emo/indie punk band past their peak,” as he put it in the record’s manifesto. But this dissonance between “Max” and “Oliver” means that Bemis, finally, can write about himself without really writing about himself. It means that Oliver—who’s also described as “the bastard son of Columbine” and “a thinly veiled critique of new age masculinity”—could really be any beanie-wearing dude doing mental backflips to reconcile his sexual proclivities with his self-image.
The 14 songs on Oliver Appropriate detail two days in the life of this prototypical millennial with the specificity of a good script, down to the scene-setting he sings on album opener “The Band Fuel”: “The dream of Julian Casablancas, gyro salesmen and a stranger in my blankets. Awoken by Amazon Drones.” As has become tradition, the record also includes its fair share of digs at his fellow failed indie musicians—“I know a lot of men in hardcore bands who collectively fund the Colombians,” he sneers on “Pink Snot.”
But all of this score-settling is really a bait-and-switch for the crux of the album, a sexual confrontation that finds seemingly straight Oliver/Max confusingly in love with a man. Bemis himself came out as bisexual in 2018. Max dealt with it by writing this record. Oliver deals with it by slitting his lover’s throat.
Don’t be surprised, though, if you miss that morbid detail upon first listen. It’s a tossed off line—“I’ll slit your throat and leave you gaping”—that seems commonplace in a discography full of macabre lyrics sung with the pithy delivery of mediocre karaoke. The undertones of sexual confusion, made explicit in Bemis’ manifesto, are only briefly mentioned in the record itself. The most frank discussion of Oliver’s internalized, violent homophobia is on “Your Father,” a song about parental disapproval sung, somewhat ironically, by a man and a woman, neither of which are Bemis (creative partner Karl Kuehn and Bemis’ wife Sherri DuPree, respectively). Without the context that Bemis’ personal life and highly detailed essay provide, the record’s plotline is muddied and morally ambiguous at best.
But in its sharpest moments, it is exciting to see Bemis really wrestle with himself again. Over the past decade, Say Anything slowly lost their lyrical might; their words still cut, but the blade was dull. By contrast, Oliver Appropriate is almost uncomfortably rich with verbose specificity, from the Paul Walker movies Oliver half-watches with a girl to the excuses he makes for his shitty behavior post-hookup: “Bowie’s my excuse so I can brag of how I tried, when all I want to do is send you off and get you high,” he sings on “Send You Off.” It’s hackneyed at times (lines about rock stars who “ramble about Trump over Stellas and headline Coachella” are dusty disses), but the record showcases the dark humor and narrative knack that set the band apart on ...Is a Real Boy.
It’s refreshing to hear guitar on a Say Anything album after half a decade of the token failed experiments of latter-day emo (a “hip hop” record, an attempt at piano-driven ballads). The acoustic guitar, recorded so closely that you can hear the textured abrasion of fingertips against nylon, sounds romantic and nostalgic next to Bemis’ shredded whine on songs like “Daze.” Say Anything’s contemporaries from the mid-2000s are remembered as a series of slick pop-punk bands mixed into oblivion. But Oliver Appropriate, with its clap-along drumming patterns and stripped-back production, sounds like an elder statesman of emo gathering his fellow washed up frontmen around a campfire for a story or two. It’s a fitting ending for a band that always stood a step or two outside the scene, pointing and laughing.


The sound of Puerto Rican-born, NYC-based duo Buscabulla is post-chillwave but decidedly Caribbean, with nods to salsa, reggaeton, and bachata. Their sophomore EP features a duet with Helado Negro.

EP II

In many ways, the Buscabulla story is indicative of the new paradigm in independent music: an indie spirit buttressed by corporate sponsorship. The Puerto Rican-born, Brooklyn-based couple of Raquel Berrios and Luis Alfredo Del Valle won a Guitar Center contest for the privilege of having Dev Hynes produce their first EP, which was recorded with help from Converse, and released by the hybrid clothing/record label Kitsuné. Berrios still holds down a day job as a designer, while raising her two-year-old with Del Valle.
Their breaks are representative of the kind of opportunity that millions of American citizens in Puerto Rico have sought out as they’ve left their homes on the island to pursue new lives in the states. But the exchange runs both ways. Just as NYC’s global market and culture has shaped their lives, they help ingrain Boricua culture into America’s, bringing the sounds and stories of the islands to mainland and, often, to English-speaking audiences.
You can count the recorded Buscabulla songs on two hands, and they all sound like love songs to their homeland; Berrios’ lyrics convey a longing, distant gaze that buffers out the island’s rough edges, a magical oasis that exists only in dreams. These themes permeate Buscabulla’s self-released second EP, a continuation of the first, both in concept and aesthetic. “Frío” is a duet with Helado Negro’s Roberto Carlos Lange, in which the “Young, Latin, and Proud” singer tries to comfort Berrios as they weather the winter’s biting cold, yearning for the warm embrace of their hometowns. “El frío éste duele/(Duele en tu mente),” they sing, or “This cold hurts/(The pain is in your mind.)” “Perdón” considers the closure of leaving things, and people, behind. And “Tártaro,” the ode to “salsa erotica” legend Frankie Ruiz, romanticizes the island’s seedier corners with a nostalgic fondness for sleaze that can quickly be punctured by the grimness of reality (like when the band found used towels and condom wrappers in the room they booked at an infamous Puerto Rican love hotel to shoot the video).
But Ruiz is an excellent analogue to the vibe that Buscabulla seeks to create. He sings about adultery and promiscuity, but with a croon that sounds too pretty to be wrong. While Buscabulla’s live shows are considerably more high-energy than the lounge vibes on the records, they still draw from the same the sonic palette. Their aesthetic is post-chillwave but decidedly Caribbean, with percussion that skews towards salsa, and there are discernible nods to reggaeton, bachata, and even hints of Sade’s new age soul (if she was an alto). Del Valle has admitted to being drawn to the “peculiar type of charm” of Ruiz’s music, a kitschiness wrapped in a beautiful voice, reminding us it’s still fun to be naughty.


The German musician Christian Naujoks makes pensive, idiosyncratic pieces somewhere between electronic and chamber music, and his new album is his most exquisitely melancholy work yet.

Wave

A maker of pensive, idiosyncratic music that blurs the boundaries between indie, electronic, and classical, the German musician Christian Naujoks would be an outlier in most contexts, and he certainly is on Hamburg's Dial label, which is nevertheless his longtime home. Founded in 2000, Dial is primarily a hub for the kind of moody minimal techno and crisp deep house espoused by co-founders Lawrence, Carsten Jost, and Turner, along with a roster that includes Pantha du Prince, Efdemin, and Roman Flügel. You'd be hard-pressed to find anything resembling a dance beat in Naujoks' catalog, however. His untitled 2009 debut, recorded on piano, marimba, strings, and flute, betrays the influence of composers like Steve Reich and Wim Mertens, while his 2012 album True Life / In Flames, for piano and marimba alone and recorded in Hamburg's storied Laeiszhalle, comes even closer to modern chamber music, right down to a reworking of John Cage's "Experiences No. 2."
What Naujoks shares with his label mates is a propensity for melancholy—his debut album features an acoustic version of New Order's "Leave Me Alone," retitled as "Off the Rose," that drives home the impression of Naujoks as a moody romantic with his hands stuffed in a tattered wool coat, staring out at the rainclouds over the harbor—and his third album, Wave, is the most exquisitely melancholy thing he's done yet. It's also the most expertly crafted, demonstrating a significant step up as both a songwriter and an instrumentalist. Shifting and narrowing his focus, this time he concentrates on the electric guitar, which is accompanied on a few tracks by his typically spare, searching piano arrangements. This time, there are no vocals at all—a not unwise move, given that Naujok's slightly quavering voice has never been his strong suit.
He avoids distortion for the most part, save some occasional, subtle overdrive, and though he occasionally multi-tracks his guitar parts, you wouldn't necessarily know it without listening closely. There's little in the way of artifice or obfuscation, just ringing delay and reverb that suggest an expanse as wide as the horizon. This is music that presents itself as the sound of things as they really are: metal strings, ivory keys, tape hiss, tube amps. The occasional squeaking of fingers against guitar strings, or the muted clunk of a piano pedal being lifted and lowered, lends to the music's grounded sense of physicality.
Both rhythmically and tonally, these are fairly simple songs, gently tugged between consonance and dissonance, and lullingly repetitive. The moments that stand out against this placid backdrop are often nothing more than small, brief riffs—a trill that pulls against the root note like white foam peeling off the crest of a wave. Lyrical, meditative, and faintly bittersweet, Wave traffics in affect: It is good music for hiking in the high sierra, for late-night drives through rural Maine, for sunsets on the Pacific, for rainstorms anywhere. Favoring major thirds and fifths and major sevenths, it leaves plenty of open space for the listener to project her own emotions into, and it is never cluttered: In the patient "Playback Room," a sedate call and response between piano and guitar, the guitar is only touched some 20 times in the song's nearly four-minute run.
Wave frequently brings to mind the work of Factory Records' Durutti Column. Naujoks' wistful melodies and rounded, jewel-toned chords are often strikingly similar to those of Vini Reilly, that group's mastermind and eventual sole member, and so are his atmospheric choices of guitar tone and effects, like the rippling delay of "Little Dume" and the burled flanger of "96 Frames Per Second." But that's hardly a drawback. The Durutti Column catalog itself often feels a bit like a set of variations on a single theme; that someone new should pick up the torch is a welcome development. And Naujoks' homage breaks new ground on songs like "Playback Room" and the title track, in which ruminative piano and guitar figures are spun into gauzy abstraction. The album's only real limitation is that the majority of its songs are all in the same key; given the uniformity of its palette, the songs begin to blend together by the record's end. But if we consider them as a set of variations themselves, that's hardly a grave flaw. It's not surprising that Naujoks is also a visual artist, because ultimately Wave feels like a one-room exhibition: a small gallery full of line drawings or watercolors all in a given style, matted in white and framed in blond wood—tasteful to a fault but still genuinely, even surprisingly, moving.


Faithfull pairs her forever-soothing voice with the words of the Romantic poets who inspired her, over tasteful accompaniments from Bad Seeds sonic architect Warren Ellis.

Marianne Faithfull / Warren Ellis: She Walks in Beauty

She Walks in Beauty

John Keats was at the tail end of a very short life when he coined the term “Negative Capability.” The best artists, wrote the 22-year-old Romantic poet, don’t concern themselves with logical arguments or scientific proof. They pursue something far more uncertain: beauty. The originality of Keats’ 1817 idea feels dulled in the 21st century, considering it influenced the next 200 years of literature, and provided a precedent for such shameless pleasure-seekers and starry-eyed psychedelics as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles—as probably too many scholarly articles have pointed out. Yet of all the ’60s musical icons, perhaps none is more inclined toward the Romantic poets than Marianne Faithfull. Her lyrics are chockablock with literary references that feel comfortable, lived-in: She even titled her 2018 album, which concluded the most prolific and artistically consistent period of her career, Negative Capability.
Her latest, She Walks in Beauty, is a passion project of the highest order. Faithfull reads 11 Romantic poems over settings constructed by Warren Ellis, the longtime sonic architect of the Bad Seeds. If She Walks in Beauty feels underwhelming, it’s because the album doesn’t do a whole lot to transcend this concept. Faithfull could read a legal brief and make it sound beautiful, and part of the record’s appeal stems from hearing her posh British elocution wrap itself around outdated words like “contumely” and “thatch-eves.” Yet at its best, She Walks at least gestures toward something greater, an unusual merging of lieder and ambient music, like a pastoral Robert Ashley.
Ellis’ settings demonstrate the same gentle, stately sensibility he brought to Nick Cave’s Ghosteen, reproduced with acousmatic methods. You can pick out birdsong in the beginning, and there’s a lot of piano—some of it courtesy of Cave himself—but largely Ellis snips found sounds from their real-world referents, pasting them back together into an abstract collage. Faithfull manages to cull the emotion from Lord Byron and Thomas Hood without hamming it up, and she never lapses into contemporary speech patterns, recognizing that the old-fashioned colloquialisms of Wordsworth must be nailed with our best approximation of a person from his time. Listening to her say “yon azure sky” pries open a past as mutable and imagined as the source material. We might be sitting in our English gardens waiting for the sun, or fleeing the soot-covered streets of early industrial London: She brings her knowledge of the 19th century to these poems, while leaving space for their time-bending splendor.
The ceaseless lull of her voice accounts for the record’s ambient feel, but it also makes She Walks in Beauty seem like an actual poetry reading that drags on for a quarter hour too long. This sense might not be quite so strong if the record didn’t conclude with a 12-minute rendition of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallott,” which seems especially interminable because it follows a suite of much shorter readings, and also because it shows Ellis at his most reserved. He often approaches the poems cautiously, though the record works best when his arrangements intrude. His mournful violin coda to Wordsworth’s “Prelude: Book One Introduction” gives the album some much-needed space, while the vocal filter he lays on Shelley’s “To the Moon” offers us a modern reminder that this is music, not just a literary recitation.
She Walks in Beauty never quite determines its place on the long continuum between the two, and in an era when so many musicians are incorporating spoken word in exciting ways, this lack of consideration is puzzling. Yet Faithfull and Ellis encourage us to bend our imaginations toward the 19th century in ways that feel powerfully ambiguous. Of course we can draw many literal parallels: Our opioid epidemic echoes their opium eaters, our digital fatigue reflects their newspaper-obsessed cities, our coronavirus mirrors the tuberculosis that killed a quarter of the adult population in Europe, including the 25-year-old Keats. But we don’t need a history lesson, and we don’t need to know that Faithfull almost died of COVID-19 last year, to feel how She Walks in Beauty is pulled by the polarities that life shares with Romantic poetry: death and wonder. If you were once lucky enough to be protected from the former, the past year has been a stark reminder that death is never far away. But wonder is also there, in the same azure sky that impressed the writers of yore, in their poetry and our music.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


This expansive collection follows songwriter Roddy Frame from his second album Knife through his decision to retire the Aztec Camera moniker, highlighting forays into sophistipop, electronica, and soul.

Aztec Camera: Backwards and Forwards (The WEA Recordings 1984-1995)

Roddy Frame’s songwriting feels like an effortless extension of his restless internal monologue. From the career-defining arc of his band Aztec Camera through the many studio albums he’s released under his given name, the starry-eyed songwriter has assembled a vast catalog of honest, open-hearted love songs. Just 17 years old when he released Aztec’s debut single “Just Like Gold,” Frame emerged fully-formed, an indie poet laureate and brilliant instrumentalist, somehow Morrissey and Johnny Marr as one. The 1981 single was a natural fit for Postcard Records, where acts like Josef K and Orange Juice helped recast post-industrial Glasgow as a bookish, art school outpost ready-made for youthful dreaming. With its jangly, jazz-inflected chords and soaring, larger-than-life chorus, the single’s B-side, “We Could Send Letters,” felt like a naked defense of everything fun and pure about pop music, couched in a delightful complexity. The track later appeared on C81, the compilation series from NME and Rough Trade Records, and the infamous London label went on to release Aztec Camera’s full-length debut, High Land, Hard Rain, in 1983. Such was the start of one of the more promising careers in U.K. indie history, which included gushing profiles in NME and Melody Maker, multiple appearances on the beloved performance series Top of the Pops, and a multi-album deal with Warner-Elektra-Atlantic.
While Aztec’s beginnings on Postcard and Rough Trade have been fairly well-documented, with elaborate reissues and reunion tours to mark the 30th anniversary of the band’s debut album, Frame’s move to WEA feels like an important second chapter, one that’s remained largely underexplored in coverage of the band. Backwards and Forwards (The WEA Recordings 1984-1995) amends this historical oversight, shedding light on Frame’s wildly inventive mid-to-late career. The 9-disc, 112-song collection—which follows the songwriter from his sophomore album, Knife, through his decision to retire the Aztec Camera moniker in 1995—offers a portrait of the artist as a committed experimentalist. From his dizzying forays into lounge, sophistipop, and electronica to collaborations with Mick Jones, Edwyn Collins, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, Backward and Forwards complicates assumptions about Frame’s breakthrough success, revealing the songwriter as a force in constant motion.
His major label debut, 1984’s Knife, follows Frame in unexpected directions that break with the indie ethos of High Land, Hard Rain. Produced by Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler, the release feels like a send-up to anyone who expected Aztec to become jangle-pop superstars. Instead, Frame explores pop songwriting by way of its roots in American soul and R&B, with detours through the kind of sappy, DX7-drenched pop ballads so inescapable in the early ‘80s. A New Wave throwback by way of Elvis Costello, “Just Like the USA,” trades the colder elements of British post-punk for an earnest attempt at feel-good Americana—one that, in true Costello fashion, pokes fun at American exceptionalism in the chorus. Others like “All I Need Is Everything” and “Backwards And Forwards” expand on Aztec’s palette with the kind of synth flourishes and drum machine clatter that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Peter Gabriel record. It’s a broad attempt to emphasize the pining, lovesick aspects of Frame’s songwriting, now wrapped in sleeker packaging.
Knife would be the first in a series of Aztec Camera releases that cribbed sounds from mainstream pop music, as Frame refracted his sincere approach to songwriting through new trends in adult contemporary. Love, his third studio album and second with WEA, largely abandons Frame’s scrappy acoustic strumming in favor of slower synth-pop and a newfound attention to craft. A tasteful Quiet Storm ballad, “How Men Are” recasts Frame as a sensitive crooner with insight on male chauvinism. Like plenty of Frame’s contemporaries in the late 1980s, the song feels like a self-conscious attempt to evoke timelessness and a sense of maturity. Frame’s lyrics deal mostly in abstraction, using the language of pop to achieve a heartfelt universalism.
Times change, and Frame’s success with sophistipop would not outlast his evolving taste. Three years after 1987’s Love, Frame returned with Stray, a collection of nine tracks largely guided by the vocalist’s propulsive guitar. Recorded in Wales at Rockfield Studios, the album feels uniquely nostalgic for the rock and jazz records that informed Aztec Camera from the start. Frame recruited The Clash’s Mick Jones for the joint single “Good Morning Britain,” a rock-radio anthem that took aim at Margaret Thatcher and England’s historically domineering relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom. The loutish single peaked at No. 19 on the U.K. music charts, but always felt out of place from the mouth of an artist otherwise so committed to introspection.
Despite the album’s stylistic inconsistencies, Stray was proof that Frame was still at the height of his celebrity, and after less than a year on the road in support of the album, he was ready to return to the studio—this time with Ryuichi Sakamoto. The musicians first crossed paths in Ibiza before reconnecting at a 1991 performance in London, and later decamped to New York to begin working on the followup to Stray. “I consciously tried to hand over the reins a bit,” Frame told The Scotsman in 1999. “It kind of backfired in a way, I suppose, because he wanted to make a record that sounded like High Land, Hard Rain and I wanted to make one that sounded like Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.”
The resulting release, 1993’s Dreamland, departs from the swaggering politics of Stray and introduces elements of trip-hop and electronica. While much of this influence likely came from Sakamoto, whose solo albums were flush with similar textures throughout the early ‘90s, Frame remains an intrepid lyricist unafraid to take his ballads into uncharted territory. On “Birds,” Frame steers clear of clumsy Madchester psychedelia in favor of a simple love song just as light as his teenage material. “How sweet to fly, to touch the sky/To feel in the flow, like the one who glides there,” he sings over icy synths in the hook. As much as the album aspires to keep up with changing times, it’s Frame’s persistent melancholia that shines through in its strongest moments.
Dreamland isn’t completely devoid of the indie rock arrangements that characterized earlier Aztec Camera releases, and even its most experimental tendencies feel firmly at home within the band’s extended catalog. For every song like “Birds” or “Vertigo,” there’s a bluesy “Safe in Sorrow” or “Black Lucia” that emphasizes Frame’s storytelling ability over any investment in electronic experimentalism. Less musically adventurous than its predecessor, Aztec’s 1995 album Frestonia is strongest in its softest moments, trading the sonic ambition of Dreamland for a classic approach to solo songwriting. Tracks like “Crazy” and “On The Avenue” are delicate and refined, with Frame finding peace where he once seemed so uneasy. While the album would remain among the band’s least successful commercially, peaking at No. 100 on the U.K. music charts without a charting single, Frestonia shows a songwriter content with his place in the universe, free from the anxieties of youth.
This freedom has long been the driving force behind Aztec Camera’s live shows, where Frame seems to cherish the opportunity to look back on his earlier music. Live recordings included with the collection reveal how thrilling this music sounded on stage; the care and joy with which Frame cues up a fan favorite like “Oblivious,” or banters on about the profound sadness of his song “Backwards and Forwards” show that even the most comprehensive collection of studio releases still fails to capture the true dynamism of Frame in his prime. Nine discs and nearly a hundred songs later, you still can’t help but wonder how much still never made it to tape.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


On this fully-improvised session, the jazz duo of drummer Bobby Kapp and pianist Matthew Shipp lock in and never lose focus.

Cactus

The improvising jazz duo is a potent form, offering chances for dialogue, battle, and confluence. There’s immediate pressure on both players since neither can hide, so the opportunity to create tense, vital music is palpable. This seems especially true for piano and drum collaborations, since the piano—more so than horns or strings—is often a percussive instrument, and thus can intersect and connect with drums in unique ways.
On Cactus, drummer Bobby Kapp and pianist Matthew Shipp take advantage of the possibilities inherent in their setup, persistently passing ideas back and forth in a wordless conversation. The quality level matches the participants’ pedigrees. Kapp came up in the middle of the ’60s free jazz groundswell, playing with saxophone legends Pharoah Sanders, Marion Brown, and Noah Howard. Shipp, meanwhile, has been a mainstay in New York’s improvising scene since the mid-’80s, best known for his work alongside bassist William Parker in saxophonist David S. Ware’s quartet.
Yet* Cactus* represents only the second time Kapp and Shipp have recorded together—following 2015’s Kapp-led quartet album *Themes 4 Transmutation—*and they had never played as a duo until they pushed the record button on this fully-improvised session. Given that level of unfamiliarity, their quick reaction time and thoughtful interplay are impressive. The pair lock in immediately and never lose their keen eye-to-eye focus, engaging in such thorough dialogue that it’s hard to find a moment where one isn’t responding to the other.
The responses that Kapp draws out of Shipp are some of the latter’s most percussive playing on record. There has always been a heavy rhythmic bent to the pianist’s music, but here he’s so inspired by Kapp’s versatile work that at times it sounds like he wants to be a second drummer. Passages in the rolling “Money” and the meditative “After” find Shipp tapping chords between Kapp’s snare strikes in an impromptu call-and-response. In other spots, the pair’s exchanged pulses shift into less orderly flights, such as when Shipp’s hard-beat notes dissolve into Kapp’s cymbal runs on the gripping “Before.”
That last example demonstrates the most compelling aspect of Cactus: the duo’s precise tonal control. Kapp and Shipp move from calm to urgent to portentous in single turns of musical phrase, bringing a wide range of moods completely and assuredly within their grasp. They certainly push each other, but they never overreach (one particularly dissonant passage in the aptly-titled “Snow Storm Coming” could be a mess in shakier hands, but here it feels like humans controlling weather). The thrill of *Cactus *is not that the music could fall apart at any moment, but that this duo can handle anything they throw at each other.


The Knife producer returns with his first major solo release in over a decade, a giddy, slippery EP that explodes into the sunlight.

Rosa Rugosa EP

Between 2008 and 2010, the Knife’s Olof Dreijer—under the alias Oni Ayhun—released some of the freakiest dance music that this century has yet to produce. On eight untitled tracks spread across four cryptic 12"s, he veered between clean-lined techno and squalling white noise, slow-motion industrial and beehive drones, folk melodies and shards of shrapnel—sometimes all within the span of a single 15-minute track. Then, having carved his iconoclastic mark across a stagnating European techno scene, he went dark, at least as a solo artist. Beyond his work in the Knife, he put out little beyond the occasional remix or collaboration.
But in recent years, Dreijer has gotten busier. He has produced a few rising artists (as well as a handful of tracks on his sibling Karin’s last album as Fever Ray) and remixed a few more; earlier this year, he and longtime collaborator Mt. Sims put out a beguiling ambient-adjacent record made entirely using Trinidadian steel drums. Now he returns with Rosa Rugosa, his first major solo release since 2010. The EP’s three tracks are, in one sense, textbook Dreijer: He’s still using the same eerie, pitch-bending synth riffs and jittery arpeggios. But a distinct shift has taken place. Where Oni Ayhun’s records felt like they emanated from some demonic dungeon, Rosa Rugosa comes exploding into the sunlight.
All three tracks feel like variations upon a single theme: They’re all in the same key, and their side-winding melodies feel like funhouse-mirror reflections of one another. The title track sounds the most like Dreijer’s previous work, punctuating a lean, snapping drum groove with staccato synth stabs that hark back to some of Carl Craig’s floor-filling anthems of the mid ’00s. The syncopated lead takes the high-strung energy of a song like Fever Ray’s Olof-produced “What They Call Us” and dials up the nervousness; bright and colorful, it dances like a butterfly caught in a gust of wind, whipped around by tight spirals of echo. It might take a number of listens to realize just how minimalist the song actually is: There are almost no drums, save for a steady kick and some slippery shakers, yet every inch of the spectrum bursts with kinetic energy.
Dreijer is clearly influenced by contemporary African and Afro-diasporic electronic music; his recent collaborators include artists from Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan, and South Africa, and his DJ mixes are peppered with the sounds of kuduro and batida. Those influences come to the fore on the EP’s other two tracks, with their loping log-drum rhythms. “Cassica,” like the title track, is mostly empty space, with a mosquito synth lead buzzing drunkenly through a dappled canopy of glancing chords and quivering accents. “Camelia” might be the most ebullient thing here, and not just because the drums are a riot of dizzyingly syncopated rimshots and crash cymbals. The synthesizer melody positively sings, imbued with an expressive sensibility I associate with virtuoso R&B vocalists; that might be due in part to the peculiar qualities of the synth patch, which feels like a strangely organic hybrid of woodwind, brass, and wordless voice. As the song crests toward its high-flying climax, it transmits an unmistakably giddy sense of joy. Whatever its echoes of other contemporary global dance-music styles, it couldn’t be the work of anyone but Olof Dreijer. Fifteen years since the first Oni Ayhun record, he’s still in a class of his own.


The dub innovator reworks 2019’s Rainford, stripping the original down into a form that is warmer and weirder.

Heavy Rain

For many artists, releasing a remixed version of your album just six months after it drops would be frivolous. For reggae legend Lee “Scratch” Perry, a man who helped invent the remix with his 1970s experiments in dub, this kind of rapid turnover runs in the blood. Heavy Rain turns out to be a stronger release than parent album Rainford: warmer, more inventive, and a great deal weirder.
Not that Rainford was a failure: Billed as a Johnny Cash-style reinvention, it proved a decent stab at marrying contemporary production to Perry’s rare moments of personal reflection. But Heavy Rain, essentially a dubbed-out reinterpretation of Rainford from Perry and UK producer Adrian Sherwood plus occasional guests, plays to Rainford’s considerable strengths while papering over its weaknesses.
Sometimes these are closely related. Perry’s iconic vocal tone, growling and soft, like a bear in a Björk video, is one of the key attractions of any of his records. But he does tend to ramble in his dotage, making many songs on Rainford resemble strings of non sequiturs. Heavy Rain is hardly compact or fat-free, but Perry’s often nonsensical lyrics are less jarring when treated as another instrument to be rolled about in the mix, while his gravelly vocal timbre is perfectly suited for the regimen of echo and delay that it receives on songs like “Mindworker.” By contrast, the “Heavy Rainford” remake of Rainford’s “Autobiography of the Upsetter”—one of the few overtly autobiographical songs in the latter-day Scratch catalog—feels slight in comparison to the original song’s mood of profound nostalgia.
A similar logic of enhanced reduction applies to Heavy Rain’s musical bed. Perry and Sherwood strip Rainford down to its bones to better play about with individual elements, meaning that the dubs on Heavy Rain are both more minimal and more involved than their Rainford counterparts. “Here Come the Warm Dreads” (a remake of Rainford’s “Makumba Rock”) is a wonderful example. There’s not a great deal to the song—rolling bassline, shuffling drums, guitar skank, plaintive horn, and the occasional vocal interjection—but featured guest Brian Eno (on the right channel) and Adrian Sherwood (on the left) play merry hell with the mix, subjecting these elements to a magical mystery tour of production sorcery whose detail demands to be heard on good headphones. This approach also helps to highlight moments of individual brilliance: The plaintive refrain of Rainford’s “Children of the Light” works far better on Heavy Rain’s “Enlightened,” where it is untangled from Perry’s circuitous vocal and left to drift on a cloud of effects.
Trombonist Vin Gordon, best known for his work with Bob Marley, is another notable highlight throughout Heavy Rain, adding such lilting melancholy to “Crickets in Moonlight” that the absence of vocal barely registers, while his instrument’s conversational tone on “Rattling Bones and Crowns” conveys more humanity than many singers’ most heartfelt confessions.
That Perry’s octogenarian genius is better suited to dub than reggae (and to moods over songs) is evident in the two new tracks towards the end of Heavy Rain—“Dreams Come True” and “Above and Beyond”—whose songwriting feels overly polite compared to the album’s prevailing air of anarchic fun. That’s no big stumbling block, though: Heavy Rain is a surprisingly inspired piece of late-period dabbling from a dub master.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Edinburgh indie-pop quartet the Spook School embrace life's misinterpretations and messiness. On their sophomore record Try to Be Hopeful, they are not naively optimistic; instead, as the title insinuates, they attempt positivity with a grain of salt.

Try to Be Hopeful

Edinburgh quartet the Spook School take their name from another group of four, a late 19th Century sect of the Glasgow School of Art who were given the nickname after the critically unpopular ghostly figures in their work. Later, their style helped inspire Art Nouveau, and thus the underdogs became the influencers. It is an appropriate title for a theatrical indie pop band that embraces life's misinterpretations and messiness, and their message has never been more apparent than on their sophomore record Try to Be Hopeful*.* Although it was still a defining theme on their 2013 debut, Dress Up, Try to Be Hopeful finds the group writing much more explicitly about queerness and identity. As singer and guitarist Nye Todd explained in an interview, "A lot of the lyrics I wrote on our first record were about coming to terms with being trans, whereas on this one the songs are more about a feeling of 'Yeah, this is an identity! This is GOOD!"
"This is GOOD" is the overwhelming attitude of the record, given the sense that all of the depicted experiences—whether body dysmorphia, gigantic crushes, or the realization that identity is bigger than a hexadecimal—contain the possibility to be validating or enriching. This is not to say that the tracks on Try to Be Hopeful are naively optimistic; instead, as the title insinuates, they attempt positivity with a grain of salt. However, there is still plenty of room for fear to sneak in, as expressed in the album's eponymous track: "I've been waiting outside for what seems like years/ When I finally get inside I'll give in to the fear/ Of finally having what I want, I'll finally know/ If this really really will fix me/ If my problems will all sail away."
"Burn Masculinity" defends the title's proclamation with the rationale that those of a certain gender should recognize their inherent, systematic privilege because "what good has it ever done?" Meanwhile, the penultimate track "Binary" claims that humans are not computers and thusly should not be "limited to binary desires." The journey from "Burn Masculinity" to "Binary" offers a literal marker of growth. While recording, Nye began taking testosterone treatment, and the change in his voice is evident over the course of 11 tracks.
Much of Try to Be Hopeful is spent digging into the complexities of self and society with a lens that is simultaneously critical, sensitive, and goofy. Perhaps this final descriptor is most crucial: the Spook School's eagerness to grow is comforting and inclusive. Lyrically, the band appears more serious on Try to Be Hopeful, but their noise-pop jams remain as joyful as ever. Take "I Want to Kiss You", a track celebrating, clearly, desire with an unrestrained joy. "I want to run my fingers through your hair/ And you would say you've never done this before/ With someone like me," the four sing in unison. It's great fun, but the "with someone like me" phrase is a constant reminder that there is great risk in vulnerability. To layer these sentiments with shredding doesn't minimize the meaning: it just shows that humans contain the capacity for multitudes.


On their bashed-out new album of blues covers, the Stones sound, for the first time in eons, like a band playing together in the same room rather than one that travels on separate jets.

Blue & Lonesome

The Rolling Stones have been the World’s Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Band™ for so long that, over the past three decades, they haven’t had to worry about being an especially good one. Since the mid-’80s, they’ve been releasing forgettable records at increasingly protracted intervals, all while their ever-extravagant world tours have taken on the feel of a traveling Hard Rock Café resort—a glitzy simulacrum of a rock’n’roll show catering to those who can afford to experience it. Fittingly, earlier this year the band went from being a proverbial museum piece to becoming an actual one.
The knock on the Stones isn’t that they’re too old to play a young man’s game—even at 73, Mick Jagger can still run laps around performers a third his age—but that aging has brought no greater depth or texture to their music. What the Stones have lost over the years is not their capacity for raunchy rock’n’roll, but their ability to invest it with purpose and meaning. Jagger and Keith Richards used to be among the best (and most underrated) lyricists in rock; their last album was called A Bigger Bang and kicked off with a tune that included a “cock” pun in the opening verse.
However, the Stones’ new album is as introspective as we can expect them to get in 2016—even if it they are playing songs that are nearly as old as they are. Blue & Lonesome is a covers collection that pays tribute to the post-war Chicago blues that first got the Stones rolling and inspired their very name. And since then, the blues have served as the foundation the band can dig into whenever their sound threatens to turn too au courant, whether they were reacting to the hippy-dippy whimsy of Their Satanic Majesties Request with the sleazy acoustic struts of Beggars Banquet, or devoting a side of Black and Blue-era concert document Love You Live to Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon worship.
But Blue & Lonesome represents more than just a back-to-basics mission, It’s the most honest music the Stones have released in years—not because the source material confers it with the patina of authenticity, but because the entire blues-covers concept is a tacit admission that they don’t really give a shit about being a contemporary concern anymore, so they’re just going to do something that feels good. (The record was reportedly spawned as a warm-up exercise for a postponed album of new material.) And now that the band are older than Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf ever lived to be, they can fully inhabit the grizzled-bluesman archetype to which they've always aspired, and exude a genuine get-offa-my-lawn imperviousness to the modern world.
Blue & Lonesome was bashed out in three days, and for the first time in eons, the Stones sound like a band playing together in the same room rather than one that travels on separate jets. Jagger is, naturally the star of the show—but not in his usual vampish ways. Whether he’s embodying the down-on-his-knees despair of Memphis Slim’s title track or playfully assuming the role of sad-sack cuckold on Little Johnny Taylor’s “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing,” his ageless voice sounds like it’s emanating from the middle of the band scrum rather than the lip of a catwalk. And while Chicago blues may have introduced the concept of jamming and guitar gods to the rock lexicon, Richards and Ronnie Wood’s grinding interplay ultimately plays a supporting role to Jagger’s harmonica honks, which cut through these songs like a rusty hacksaw with “Midnight Rambler”-worthy gusto.
But as much as Blue & Lonesome plays it raw, it’s not all that raucous—the energy here is less rip-this-joint than rocking-chair steady. On paper, the idea of the Stones running roughshod over a set of classic blues tunes seems like a long-suffering fan’s dream. (The “best Stones album since Some Girls!” headlines practically write themselves.) However, what made the Stones the Stones wasn’t their purism—it was the sacrilegious impulse to corrupt their influences with their own singular swagger. But Blue & Lonesome is more about adhering to tradition than encouraging sedition. The Stones may be drinking from their fountain of youth here, but they’re content to just savor it rather than spit it back in our faces.
On their best blues covers—Beggars Banquets’ “Prodigal Son,” Sticky Fingers’ “You Gotta Move,” Exile on Main Street’s “Shake Your Hips”—the Stones handled the songs like Ouija boards; they were less about paying homage to their heroes than channeling their sinister essence. Blue & Lonesome has flashes of that insidious inspiration: On the revved-up run through Howlin’ Wolf’s “Commit a Crime,” Jagger’s vocal oozes with implied violence overtop a repetitive, trance-inducing riff that rings like a police siren; on Little Walter’s “Hate to See You Go,” his pained baby-please-don’t-go pleas climax with an extended harmonica drone that threatens to swallow the song whole.
But for the most part, Blue & Lonesome doesn’t aspire to be anything more than a good-time frolic among old pals (Eric Clapton cameos included), with the interchangeable, upbeat takes on Buddy Johnson’s “Just Your Fool” and Eddie Taylor’s “Ride ‘Em on Down” more conducive to knee-tapping in a seated supper club than tearing the roof off a juke joint. For an album rife with tales of heartache, duplicity, and death threats, it’s positively brimming with bonhomie. And, hey, given all the shit-talking Keith did at Mick’s expense in his autobiography, Life, that audible camaraderie is something of a minor miracle in and of itself.  On its own modest terms, Blue & Lonesome offers promising proof the Stones can still be a band instead of a brand.


Ryan DeRobertis, aka Skylar Spence, has ditched his previous corporation-provoking moniker, Saint Pepsi, and started singing himself instead of simply remixing others' voices. Prom King is his slickest project to date, brimming with as much confidence as its title suggests.

Prom King

"I was working, tried my hardest," Ryan DeRobertis, aka Skylar Spence, sings on Prom King’s disco-tinged ode to self-love "Can’t You See". "Slowed some music down and called myself an artist." The lyric is a recognizable jab at the musician’s own past, a career built on choppy dance remixes of pop songs labeled as "experimental" or "vaporwave," collected and stacked up like bricks in a well-supported corner of Bandcamp.
But now DeRobertis has made moves to ground himself. He signed to Carpark Records, ditched his previous corporation-provoking moniker, Saint Pepsi, and started singing himself instead of simply remixing others voices. While "Can’t You See" is directed at grabbing the attention of a girl, as DeRobertis’ first statement on the record it's pointed just as much at his fans. And Prom King is his slickest project to date, brimming with as much confidence as its title suggests. This is dance music that’s almost a late-'00s throwback, with the record’s synth arrangements and affinity for Chic basslines more in line with the early music of artists like Miami Horror, Neon Indian, and Cut Copy than what clubs are playing now. No bass drops, no house revival, no costumed persona; this is highly warped nu-disco that’s frantically aggressive in its pacing and composition.
Prom King vibrates at all times with hyperactivity. On songs like "Cash Wednesday" and "Bounce Is Back" it sounds like someone restlessly flipping between radio stations, with violins, new wave synths, and fluttery sampled R&B vocals rolling into one another. "My album is sort of about the narcissism that comes with nostalgia," DeRobertis said in an interview. "You have to have some sort of audacity to claim a certain time as ‘the best’ and throw out everything in the present and everything in the future."
In this sense, Skylar Spence isn’t making pop music, but making music about pop. You don’t just hear it in how he mixes his songs, but also in how he writes them. "Oh darling, won’t you believe me," DeRobertis’ sings on the infectiously groovy, "Degrassi"-referencing "Fiona Coyne", first released as a single last year. "I’ll love you ‘til the record stops." And every "I’m in love, I’m in love, I’m in love" on "Can’t You See" is directed at his own reflection in the mirror.
DeRobertis could plausibly have built an album of could-be radio hits like "Fiona Coyne" if he toned down the freakiness of the music beneath him, but that doesn’t seem to be his objective. The spliced-together samples and glitchy collages makes Prom King distinctive, although sometimes it feels over-indulgent. Even with DeRobertis’ distanced, conceptual take on pop nostalgia, he's still made a great pop record in itself. It doesn’t matter what noises or instruments he’s appropriating from, in his hands it’s all good to dance to right now.


On their first album since member Stepa J. Groggs’ death, the Phoenix rap trio reintroduces themselves as wide-eyed explorers, a rep that suits their fascination with rap’s mechanics, its margins, and its future.

Injury Reserve: By the Time I Get to Phoenix

By the Time I Get to Phoenix

Across nearly 19 minutes, Isaac Hayes’ cover of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” expands Webb’s lovelorn tale into a soul epic, dilating the original’s neat pop structure into a smoldering haze. On their first album following the death of member Stepa J. Groggs, Injury Reserve channels the spirit of Hayes’ remake, stretching their signature noise rap into freeform thickets of texture and tension. Shunning form and legibility, the Arizona group fully embraces the noise, trip-hop, and post-rock influences that loitered on the fringes of their past work.
The keystone for By the Time I Get to Phoenix is an improvised DJ set Injury Reserve performed on tour in 2019. Building on a recording of that set, the group wrote the album early in the pandemic, mostly completing it by the time Stepa died in late June 2020. This more performance-driven approach—less “Let’s make a weird rap song,” and more “Let’s create”—completely rewires their songwriting. The songs are immediate and intuitive, brimming with personality and ideas.
Ritchie With a T’s manic verse on opener “Outside” is an anxious stream of stutters, gasps, and chants that bob across a drumless void of sirens, keys, and distorted voices. Rhymes are scant, but his performance is engaging, the lack of percussion accenting his subtly metered flows. “What’s the elephant in the room?/Let’s talk to ’em,” he says, a line that could be a wink or just a transcription of his thoughts. When the drums appear nearly four minutes in, they’re the coda to the verse, not its foundation.
“Ground Zero” takes a different approach. The drums fade out midway through as Ritchie jabbers about touchdowns, iced out jewelry, and Anquan Boldin routes. In the past, Injury Reserve’s outsized eccentricity could scan as a gimmick, with Stepa and Ritchie’s everyman rapping oversold by producer Parker Corey’s oddball beats. The mood here is loose and exploratory rather than declarative, the trio never planting their feet. They feel uninhibited.

Ratking and Standing on the Corner come to mind as Ritchie, who provides most of the vocals, raps, sings, and growls over Parker’s shifting arrangements. But where those groups situated their restlessness in the palpable energy and voices of a cityscape, Injury Reserve often evokes the intangible. Stepa’s verse on “Footwork in a Forest Fire” is pure disorientation. “There’s panic in the sky/Even when it’s down below/There’s nowhere to go/You better run and hide,” he raps, his directions a koan. “Top Picks for You” is similarly abstract. “Your blood run through this home/And your habits through much after/Grab the remote, pops up something you would’a watched/I’m like, ‘Classic,’” Ritchie raps, adopting increasingly disembodied language—blood, habits, a remote control, a television show—to describe a departed loved one. Throughout Phoenix, images and sounds dissolve and flicker in this way, quicksand in a dust bowl.
It’s a testament to Corey’s production that the record maintains a center as it constantly unspools. Whereas his past beats could turn overstuffed (“All This Money”) or needlessly outré and showy (“GTFU,” “Eeny Meeny Miny Moe”), here, he’s more hands-off, emphasizing atmosphere. “Smoke Don’t Clear” has some of the most understated drum programming of his catalog, its thick, dubby bassline guiding Ritchie’s theatrical whispers. Both “Knees” and “Superman That” are built around jagged guitar and drum loops that create crags of rhythm and melody. It doesn’t feel accidental that Zeroh, noted unifier of disparate sounds, mixed this. Even when it grows muddled, the album invites immersion.
Injury Reserve’s reputation as a group for people who aren’t rap fans has always been overstated. But like many alt-rap acts, they lacked self-possession, their style defined more by their eclectic posturing than their vision. On By the Time I Get to Phoenix, they reintroduce themselves as wide-eyed explorers, a rep that suits their fascination with rap’s mechanics, its margins, and its future.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The debut long-player from UK funky pioneer Reiss Hanson, aka Champion, is high-energy bass music as bare-knuckled pointillism. His recordings have rarely sounded more dynamic or more colorful.

Snapshot

Reiss Hanson, who works as Champion, is a veteran of the dance-music style known as UK funky—a boisterous, syncopation-heavy variant of house music that flourished in the UK in the latter half of the 2000s. Funky didn’t last long. “By 2011 it was done,” Roska, a fellow pioneer of the scene, told The Guardian in 2014. That hasn’t stopped Hanson, though. His first white label came out in 2009, but his recording career took off in earnest around 2011, when he began releasing a string of singles and EPs that married funky’s swinging congas with grime’s chilly sonics and, increasingly, the live-wire low end of the northern UK style called bassline house.
Like many of his peers, he’s prone to tagging his own name across his tunes (“Champion sound!”), like a kind of sonic logo that leaves no doubt as to who’s responsible. That might not even be necessary; his work tends to stand out on its own, thanks to the controlled fury of his drums and the shadowy depth of his bass. Diamond-tipped hi-hats and snares sparkle against a matte-black background, lending a darkly lustrous, almost minimalist tinge to his palette. The same qualities define Snapshot, his debut album—a 12-track set of stonkingly high-energy bass music.
The album’s opening “Intro” leaves no doubt that this is club music first and foremost, as crowd noise gives way to an MC barking, “When I say ‘Champion,’ you say ‘sound!’”; a call-and-response with the audience leads to bright, flickering soca chords that alternate with one of his characteristically bruising basslines. The glimmer of major-key uplift is a fake-out. “One Time,” which follows, is a better indicator of the album’s energy level, peppering a writhing bass riff with Caribbean-inspired MC chat. Most of his vocal features are gruff and glowering, and his rhythms are punctuated with the chorused shouts of trap music and the dub-siren eruptions of reggae and drum ‘n’ bass, both of which lend to the slightly manic, menacing air.
It all amounts to a kind of bare-knuckled pointillism: The grime-tinged “Duppy Show” is riddled with gunshot samples; shrieking string vamps top its lurching drum groove like streaks of Windex over cracked glass. Fortunately, there are lighter elements at work, too: Miss Fire turns “Taste” into a sweet, slinky R&B-funky fusion, and BKAT brings a similarly dulcet energy to “Galaxy.” (Likewise, all those macho “Hey!” shouts are balanced by a more lighthearted interjection, seemingly—and rather incongruously—sampled from Art of Noise’s “Close (To the Edit).”)
Even on the heaviest cuts, Champion’s music has rarely sounded more dynamic or more colorful. Thick with harmonics, his synthesizers are practically iridescent, and he harnesses all of bass music’s technical tricks to yield riffs as mutable as drops of quicksilver. A listener interested in understanding Champion’s virtuosity might begin with the bassline of “Kill Alla Dem.” If you were really serious, you could transcribe it in the way that jazz disciples used to notate exemplary horn solos. Start with the almost inaudible rumble of its opening salvo, and then, step by step, trace its sanded-down attack, its legato slide. A fleeting explosion of overtones is followed by a momentary fibrillation, and later, it will go from the consistency of tree sap to obsidian-sharp in the course of a heartbeat.
It’s often exhilarating stuff, although how well it holds up across the length of an album will depend largely upon your predilection for sternum-thumping, gut-rearranging basslines. Fortunately, one song points to areas for potential exploration off the dancefloor. On “World,” Champion teams up with Four Tet, revisiting a partnership that has yielded several tracks over the past few years, including a Champion remix of Four Tet’s “Kool FM” and the collaborative tracks “Flip Side” and “Disparate” in 2016. (In fact, says Champion, it was Four Tet who encouraged him to undertake the album in the first place.) Though their roles blurred on last year’s 12”, there’s not much doubt about the division of labor in this one: The cycling marimba and wordless vocal sample are straight out of Four Tet’s woozy wheelhouse, while the shouts and bassline are pretty clearly Champion’s handiwork. That lumbering low end makes it as rugged as any of Champion’s productions, but the more ambient touches have the welcome effect of leavening the atmosphere. Instead of barreling its way across the dancefloor, the tune seems to float on air. It’s a smart move—and a neat way of transcending bass music’s genre divisions.


Midlake's fourth album, the first since the departure of singer-songwriter Tim Smith, finds the Denton, Tex., band revisiting the sound of their earlier work, including the folky soft-rock of 2006 sleeper hit The Trials of Van Occupanther and the burlier psychedelia of 2004 debut Bamnan and Slivercork.

Antiphon

Midlake don’t get enough credit for being ahead of their time. Actually, they don’t get any credit, understandable in light of the Denton, Tex., sextet's antiquated imagery and sepia-drunk sound. But the formula that made The Trials of Van Occupanther a sleeper hit in 2006—bearded indie-folk meets California soft-rock meets Fleetwood Mac at their most glassy-eyed—would likely make it a massive success in 2013. It’s certainly in their best interest to revisit that style after the clock-stopping Tull torpor of The Courage of Others, and guitarist Eric Pulido claims their fourth LP Antiphon “is the most honest representation of the band as a whole.” Except he goes on to say, “as opposed to one person’s vision that we were trying to facilitate.” Pulido got an internal promotion to frontman after the departure of singer-songwriter Tim Smith in 2012, and...shots fired?
Antiphon does somehow manage to be a “forget everything you know about Midlake!” album as well as a “return to form,” at least if you remember that Van Occupanther was preceded by the burlier, less precious (title aside) Bamnan and Silvercork in 2004. Pulido’s words foreshadow a more aggressive tack on the part of Midlake and they certainly oblige during the first half of Antiphon. If the title track and “Provider” don’t exactly boogie, they’re at least rollin’ and tumblin’, with the shuffling beats and sticky, distorted guitar leads that invert Midlake’s previous ratio of rock to folk. More notably, the flutes and other non-strung instruments are pushed to the periphery, foregrounding a lightly psychedelic blues that I suppose recalls Fleetwood Mac before their big personnel shakeup. Likewise, Pulido begins the record asking the listener to “start a war,” and goes on to speak of foxholes and space shuttles. There’s even one song called “It’s Going Down”, which doesn’t sound all that more vigorous than what came before it, but hey, make your own Yung Joc "meet me at the farmer's market" jokes.
But throughout, it’s clear that Smith’s departure is an amputation that doesn’t change Midlake’s DNA. They’ve got a couple of opening gigs for Pearl Jam in the near future, so that should give you an idea of whether they’ve retained the earnestness of their previous work. Pulido doesn’t have Smith’s distinct, dulcet tone, though it’s actually to Midlake’s advantage on Antiphon. His vocals are alopecia-stricken, almost fascinating in their lack of texture even when layered in harmony, offering no resistance to the bulkier music backing him. So Antiphon never sounds awkward even when he sings about space travel on “Corruption” (“we went to the moon/ with a tycoon”) in a way that comes off as quaint as the more typically Midlake-y concerns like sorting out “The Old and the Young” and having a good woman waiting at home by the fire.
The bigger shift is in the production, provided by Grammy-nominated Tony Hoffer. His most frequently cited credits are Beck and Air, who both ended up working with Nigel Godrich on their very next albums, so I’ve come to think of his aesthetic as a kind of Radiohead starter kit. Midlake get that kind of sound here—you wouldn’t call it overproduced, but there’s tons of production if you know where to listen for it, as the stereo panning is neatly utilized, the percussion crisp and non-obtrusive, while all of the folk instruments are spit-shined and shellacked. It’s a retro-modernist (or modernist-retro) schematic, aspiring for Laurel Canyon decor while paying West Hollywood rent.
As far as, the songs themselves—well, to Antiphon’s credit, it's a very consistent record. And to its detriment, it's a very consistent record. While Antiphon might be the most honest representation of Midlake, Smith’s ostensible iron fist penned songs like “Roscoe” and “We Gathered In Spring”, songs that bore a personality and vision that the overly democratic Antiphon eschews. The nice things I thought I was going to say about the title track are actually applicable to “Provider” once I remembered which one was which. “It’s Going Down” also stood out mainly because it repeats the title, “Vale” only because it’s an instrumental and thus the most memorable song here by default. After “Vale”, side B of Antiphon has about as much melodic grounding as a drone record, and if it wasn’t for a reprise of “Provider” at the close, you’d be hard pressed to recall the goodwill generated at the beginning.
And that’s problematic, because if they aren’t going to offer much in the way of innovation or currency, Midlake should at the very least be tuneful enough to counterbalance it. In our review of Swans’ pulverizing two-hour art-rock opus The Seer, Mike Powell explained its appeal by paraphrasing a quote from Ben Marcus regarding the nature of experimental fiction: it wasn't a record for someone deciding whether or not they'd rather be listening to music or playing paintball. By the same token, Midlake isn’t competing with Swans records. Considering who they are competing with makes for an even less flattering comparison. It’s not hard to find folky rock bands with stronger melodies, bolder personae, or even ones that are just flat-out weirder while operating squarely within the mainstream: let’s not forget that Fleet Foxes used a couple minutes of saxophone on their last album and purists flipped the fuck out. That doesn’t change the fact that Antiphon is still a likeable, pleasant listen that will always wait for you by the hearth after a long day. But for a “forget everything you know about Midlake!” album, it's almost exactly how you remember them.


Gathering a trio of EPs into a single sprawling package, the experimental club producer offers a nightmarish tour of late capitalism that’s dark, disorienting, and at times, draining.

Lee Gamble: Flush Real Pharynx 2019-2021

Flush Real Pharynx 2019-2021

For a place that’s meant to be fun, the club is home to a lot of demons. How we seek release can be a mirror of what made us so tense in the first place, and some of the most forward-thinking producers in dance music have used the club as a jumping-off point to interrogate our desires, dreams, and nightmares. Theorist Mark Fisher described Burial’s music as “like walking into the abandoned spaces once carnivalized by raves and finding them returned to depopulated dereliction.” If Burial’s music is an elegy for empty rooms that once pulsed with energy, Lee Gamble’s music is like the phantoms slowly emerging from that space, becoming some twisted new half-alive being.
Fisher, who died in 2017, is on Gamble’s mind throughout Flush Real Pharynx 2019-2021, a collection of three EPs dedicated to Fisher’s concept of the “semioblitz”—what Gamble interprets as “the aggressive onslaught of visual and sonic stimuli of contemporary cities and virtual spaces.” Starting in 2019 with In a Paraventral Scale, continued later that year with Exhaust, and now concluding with A Million Pieces of You, the project represents a shift in Gamble’s focus to the overstimulated ecstasy and dread of urban consumerism. Whereas earlier releases like KOCH and Diversions 1994-1996 consisted of gaseous loops and decayed jungle samples that spun out into distended horrors, here Gamble crafts his music out of disarmingly clean textures. You can hear the unnerving silent space creeping around the edges of this music, each shimmering synth line and mangled acid loop floating like a detatched limb. If his earliest work was in conversation with tape-hiss connoisseurs like Actress, Flush Real Pharynx takes its pages from the deconstructed-club school of Amnesia Scanner, leading us through a nightmare of late capitalism that’s dark, disorienting, and at times, draining.
Assembled into one dense 77-minute package here, the three individual EPs that make up Flush Real Pharynx each bear a distinct character. The first EP, In a Paraventral Scale, is the smoothest of the bunch, luring the listener in with the seductive, silvery drones of “Fata Morgana.” A cybernetic meditation that gives way to panning, vertigo-inducing flangers, it slowly spins the senses in multiple directions at once, an effect as uncomfortable as it is hypnotizing. Gamble’s uncanny approach to the sounds of modern life greatly benefits from headphones: On “BMW Shuanghuan X5,” he creates a strange lullaby out of the sound of speeding cars, transforming their engine hum into something almost soothing, like ocean waves crashing against the shore. The effect is not unlike watching ASMR unboxing videos: a surgically precise serotonin release broadcast in eerie 4K.
Gamble returns to the club on Exhaust, the trilogy’s second (and strongest) installment. Literally starting with a bang, Exhaust seamlessly folds Gamble’s sound-design ambitions into the context of rave music, to dizzying effect. “Envenom” leaps from one breakbeat to the next like a broken television skipping between channels, each loop more erratic than the last, until the whole thing collapses in a cacophony of information overload. Gamble’s drill and jungle rhythms constantly feel as if they’re being torn apart (quite literally, on the endlessly dissociating skips of “Saccades”). Their pounding bass alludes to an ecstatic release that might come if there weren’t so many different sonic threads to get lost in. Perhaps most gleeful is “Tyre,” a double-time techno workout by way of Jazz From Hell whose cartoonish marimbas speed by with a manic grin, an accelerationist funhouse mirror too fast for the mind to adequately keep up with.
Not all of Gamble’s ideas stick the landing, particularly when he gets caught up in overwrought samples advertising luxury cars and perfume, along with other hackneyed tropes. The final EP, A Million Pieces of You, begins with a deepfake of Gamble’s own voice reciting indecipherable gibberish about selfies, and for much of the remainder of the collection, the fatigue Gamble implies about the digital world begins to bleed into the music. The only installment recorded during the pandemic, A Million Pieces of You strikes a balance between the first two EPs, achieving neither the preternatural calm of the first nor the frenzied movement of the second. At its best, on gently swelling tracks like “Hyperpassive” and “Balloon Copy,” a newfound melodic softness injects some warmth, capping off the trilogy on a refreshingly human note.
Like the commercialist society it mirrors, Flush Real Pharynx is as dazzling as it is exhausting, offering a plethora of options to engage with, yet triggering a strangely hollow feeling. Its concept isn’t exactly the most original—many of these ideas have been played out through the deconstructed club and vaporwave movements for years—but even so, Gamble’s sound design remains evocative, a radiant, ever-shifting collage of sonic images to swipe through. It may ultimately be as surface-level as the culture it critiques, but even surfaces can be beautiful sometimes.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The East Atlanta rapper and his producers distill their sci-fi flows and alien sensibilities into their most cohesive project yet.

EA Monster

Young Nudy sometimes sounds like he hails from another planet, but he's rooted in a real place on Earth. The neighborhood that Nudy represents in the title of his new album EA Monster is East Atlanta—more specifically, Zone 6. As one of the many trap stars with experimental flows to arise from Atlanta in recent years (a wave that includes Gunna and the late Lil Keed), Nudy often garners comparisons to Young Thug and Future, and his artistic kinship with hip-hop auteur Pi’erre Bourne has inevitably sparked mentions of Playboi Carti. But it’s Zone 6’s most famous son whose influence reverberates throughout his music: You can hear a hint of Gucci Mane not just in Nudy’s drawl and “Yeah” ad-libs, but also in his effortless confidence, which drips off him like melting ice.
Nudy’s flow is like quicksilver, but he’s typically averse to clout-chasing co-signs or pop hooks, so his projects are often laser-focused. EA Monster clocks in at only 34 minutes, and Nudy keeps his circle tight here. There’s only one feature—a back-and-forth relay race with up-and-coming Atlanta rapper BabyDrill on “Duntsane,” evidence that Nudy has now built enough of a platform to share it with newer voices. The production team includes regular collaborators, like COUPE, Mojo Krazy, and his bosom buddy Pi’erre Bourne, who lends his inventive and futuristic touch to roughly half the tracks. The watery, Moog-like tones on “Kit Kat'' are curiously reminiscent of MeowSynth, a 2000s virtual synthesizer plug-in that drew on the meows of a cat named Baksik—an appropriate digital relic revived by a producer who grew up on MySpace and message boards. Elsewhere, the wet bass on “No Chaser” resembles someone squishing their fingers into slime, another moment where Bourne’s alien style is as unexpected as Nudy’s cadence.
The cohesiveness is due in part to seamless sequencing, with each track promptly sliding into the next, no bar a breath too long. Opening track “Nun To Do” is almost all bass and sturdy 808 kicks, with the synth line reduced to background buzz. At times, EA Monster plays with a vintage sonic palette, an unexpected move for a rapper who so often lives in the future. “Impala” combines a driving Memphis-type drum pattern with a MIDI bass guitar that wouldn’t feel out of a place on a 1990s No Limit cut; “Fresh as Fuck” blends vibrato-modulated synths and warbly, theremin-like special effects, the kind you’d hear in a 1950s B movie.
As relentless and in-your-face as Nudy can be, his voice rarely strays from a consistent volume or pitch, always sounding like he’s spitting while still holding the smoke in his lungs from a particularly fierce bong rip. When the daily grind ends, Nudy punches out with chilled-out stoner rap on “Ready.” “My Gang” opens with an inhale, before an echoing guitar swaddles Nudy, a hypnagogic, chillwave-adjacent piano line swaying in the background.
After nearly eight years together, Nudy’s creative unit is now closely bonded, which makes his music feel much more complete and organic than so much of the Atlanta scene. This crew knows how to translate Nudy's visions into reality: Not a beat or verse is phoned in or farmed out, and there’s no pressure to skew to other styles or latch onto trends. The production on EA Monster is a refined package, bottling his electric slime into a gleaming container, distilled to its purest essence. East Atlanta might define Young Nudy down to his album titles, but he remains somewhat mysterious and alienated, a phantom drifter who exists in a world of his own. The flavor of his hometown might be unmistakable, but EA Monster is a reminder that Nudy operates on a singular wavelength.