Max Turnbull’s newest group takes its name from a song co-written by Eric Clapton and George Harrison—then stretches it from a three-minute pop song into a 14-minute improvisatory mission statement.

Badge Époque Ensemble: Nature, Man & Woman EP

Nature, Man & Woman EP

If the past decade has taught us anything, it’s that no dad-rock deity is too square to be reclaimed as cool. In recent years, the lodestars for contemporary indie rock have gradually shifted from the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, Gang of Four, and Sonic Youth to Michael McDonald, Bruce Hornsby, Phil Collins, and Dire Straits. But there remains one boomer icon who’s never been considered for hipster rehabilitation: Eric Clapton. Maybe it’s the fact that Clapton is forever tethered to a blues-guitar tradition that’s increasingly unfashionable in the 21st century, or maybe it’s the unshakeable bitter aftertaste of his alcohol-fuelled misadventures in racism, but to date we have seen no chillwave cover of “Tears in Heaven,” no onstage duet with Mac DeMarco on “Wonderful Tonight”; even the Black Keys haven’t touched the guy. But on the second release from Toronto’s Badge Époque Ensemble, not only does Clapton receive a rare acknowledgement from an experimental underground act normally besotted with left-field jazz, we learn that his legacy is stitched right into the band’s name.
Badge Époque Ensemble is the latest project from Max Turnbull, an artist whose DIY, Madlib-inspired approach to sound design is completely at odds with Clapton’s technical precision, yet the two share unlikely career parallels. Turnbull first surfaced in the late 2000s as Slim Twig, a highly stylized, pompadoured persona that was equal parts rockabilly rebel, avant-punk provocateur, and hip-hop-schooled sound collagist. But since the release of 2015’s Thank You for Stickin’ With Twig, he’s dropped the alias and receded into more anonymous roles, whether backing wife Meg Remy in U.S. Girls, joining her in the mondo-rock supergroup Darlene Shrugg, or moonlighting with astral-jazz travellers the Cosmic Range. Badge Époque Ensemble represents his most extreme act of self-negation yet. Where Slim Twig channelled outsized personalities like Nick Cave and Jon Spencer, Turnbull is now forging kinship with the unsung composers and faceless session players of library music, the funky, fusion-flavored stock soundtracks that permeated documentaries, cop shows, and sports telecasts in the ’70s.
It’s an evolution that oddly reflects Clapton’s own sidestep out of the spotlight in the late ’60s, when—having tired of Cream’s acid-rock excess—he sought refuge in the more tuneful Blind Faith and Delaney & Bonnie, before obscuring his identity altogether in Derek and the Dominoes. So it’s rather fitting that Nature, Man & Woman should climax with a cover of “Badge,” a song that Clapton co-wrote with George Harrison for Cream’s final album—and, some 40 years later, has provided Turnbull with the inspiration for his new group’s handle. In this case, “cover” is a gross understatement—Turnbull and co. stretch “Badge” from a three-minute pop song into a 14-minute improvisatory mission statement that wholly earns its self-edifying rebrand as “Badge Theme.” After faithfully mirroring the original’s structure for three verse reps (with Alia O’Brien’s flute tracing Clapton’s vocal melody), Badge Époque leave the song in the dust and embark on an extended funk odyssey atop a lithe congas’n’clavinet groove. But while the two versions of the song couldn’t be more different, they serve the same transformative function for their creators: For Clapton, “Badge” was a gateway between his guitar-god roots and the pop-oriented songcraft that would define his career from thereon out; for Turnbull, “Badge Theme” charts a record collector’s journey from the comforts of classic rock into the bottomless abyss of rare-groove crate-digging and private-press psychedelia.
If “Badge Theme” represents the totality of the Badge Époque experience, the other two tracks on Nature, Man & Woman respectively provide more discrete showcases of the band’s wandering impulses and compositional ingenuity. The smoke-covered title track doesn’t waver from its foot-dragging, 16-rpm rhythm for its entire six-minute duration, but there’s no lack of action: O’Brien’s flute alternates between sustained squeals and cosmic clusters, guitarist Chris Bezant chips off shards of bluesy guitar skronk as if he were carving a shiv, and the appearance of a high-pitched synth frequency sends the whole thing swishing left to right like a stomach in the early throes of food poisoning. By sharp contrast, the hair-raising “Zealous Child” nods more vigorously in the direction of O’Brien’s main gig in Blood Ceremony, as guest singer Dorothea Paas lends her eerie, hypnotized-cult-member voice to a song that gallops along the tightrope between pastoral prog and proto-metal. It’s the closest this band has veered toward a formal rock song, and perhaps not surprisingly, “Zealous Child” recently received the greatest validation that a group of Canadian library-music heads could ask for: last month, it was used as bumper music on a broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada. But Badge Époque’s natural utility as a soundtrack to slap shots and body checks shouldn’t obscure their true appeal: this is background music that demands your full attention.


Conor Oberst acolyte continues to question everything from marriage to love to religion to sex but wraps much of it in a ponderous alt-rock framework.

Simple Math

As with many young songwriters prone to lyrically oversharing, Manchester Orchestra's Andy Hull has often been paid the loaded compliment of being "precocious." It's a term that implies unfulfilled potential. But now that his latest album, Simple Math, aspires to be a culmination of his prior two bombastically titled and performed LPs, I can revisit them knowing they were fully conceived steps towards the logical endpoint, "a story about a 23-year old who questions everything from marriage to love to religion to sex." In other words, a concept album about the experience of being Andy Hull, written by Andy Hull.
But hell, if there's any Conor Oberst acolyte capable of making The Merrimack to Titus Andronicus' The Monitor, it's Hull. As a frontman, he does his peers proud-- while his astringent, high lonesome warble immediately recalls the Jim James/Ben Bridwell dialect, it's flexible enough to handle both rebel yells and vulnerable self-flagellation. Hull's got a thing for drunken fuck-ups who own up to their failures, though he's far more interested in using it for autobiography rather than storytelling. His belief in his own profundity is kind of endearing as Manchester Orchestra's driving force. It's hard to imagine something like the title track, which uses infidelity as a jumping-off point to question the entire basis of human existence, even standing a chance without it.
The problem lies in where Hull ends and Manchester Orchestra begins, and it's a space populated by lesser sons of the south, post-grunge good ol' boys like 3 Doors Down and Collective Soul-- tellingly, the most immediately hooky riffs of the lot ("April Fool") lay mere inches down the fretboard from those of "Shine", and "Leave It Alone" flirts too briefly with a raw tenderness before diving headfirst into the sugary dross of truck-selling power ballad "The World That I Know".
It's that ponderous alt-rock framework that makes Simple Math such a drag even as the lyrics and production feel like they're racing to out-sensationalize each other. While the burly guitars on "Mighty" and "Pale Black Eye" flex some swamp-rock muscle, as a full outfit, Manchester Orchestra simply plod instead of groove, bogged down by Simple Math's favorite artificial flavor, a charmlessly and coldly recorded string section. It's indicative of Simple Math's overcooking: Most of the time, the band can't find a moment of empty space it doesn't fill with that extra guitar overdub, more string cues, or another intimacy-sapping vocal harmony. Or you get something like "Pensacola", whose stein-swinging coda comes off like a fun idea they were dying to get in somewhere rather than an organic conclusion, to say nothing of its clear resemblance to a Modest Mouse song that happens to be called "Florida".
And then there's "Virgin". It clearly announces itself as Simple Math's "ambitious centerpiece" by going all in on the epic signifiers: daunting strings, a horn section at the bridge, massed vocals, and, of course, a kiddie choir to drive the hook home. But melodically and tonally, they're simply piling onto what, at its core, is an incredibly simple arrangement-- its juddering, drop-D Alice in Chains riff is too repetitive not to be catchy, but taken as a whole, it's the most glaring example of a record that's too quick to cut corners and cheat its way toward unhinged transcendence despite so convincingly having its shit together. Which ultimately is where Simple Math falters despite its admirable ambition; as the saying goes, "men plan, God laughs," and Simple Math is proof that your existential crises and epiphanies can't be micromanaged.


Earlier this year Kieran Hebden opened a Bandcamp account, offering streams and downloads of three early Four Tet EPs and the full-length Dialogue. The material dates to the late 1990s, when Four Tet was more of a side project for Hebden, and when his attention fell mostly on his three-piece band, Fridge.

Four Tet: Thirtysixtwentyfive / Misnomer / Glasshead / Dialogue

Kieran Hebden's been in a reflective mood of late, perhaps triggered by the fact that the benchmark Four Tet album Rounds turned 10 years old last year. Among the collection of archival material suddenly made available has been a stream of a 1999 mix for Gilles Peterson's BBC radio show, a big data dump of remix work, and the 0181 collection spanning 1997-2001. Earlier this year Hebden opened a Bandcamp account, offering streams and cheap downloads of three early EPs and the full-length Dialogue. The material dates back to the late 1990s, a period when Four Tet was more of a side project for Hebden, with his attention mostly falling on the post-rock emulation of his three-piece band, Fridge. With Rounds symbolizing the moment everything zoomed into sharp focus, this work resembles the obstacles he had to navigate to get to that place.
If Hebden's group work sounded like a bunch of guys who had clutched copies of Tortoise's Millions Now Living Will Never Die a little too closely to their hearts, Four Tet hinted at a far wider range of listening happening behind the scenes. All four of these releases came out in the span of a year, but an evolutionary arc emerges over their collected two-hour runtime. Still, there's a lack of clarity, with only subtle allusions to the vision that would ultimately take Hebden out of the small circles he was running in during this era. If that sounds a little harsh, it's a fault he's acutely aware of, explaining in an interview last year that his pre-Rounds work "just sounds like I've heard some records that are really cool."
Although Hebden is aware of his earlier shortcomings, he's clearly not intent on shying away from them completely. His Bandcamp page in its current state simply contains these four releases plus a series of images, one of which features a Spotify page compressed and turned upside-down. Needless to say, most of Hebden's music is not available on the service at time of writing. Objections to streaming media aside, what we get here are a series of rough sketches that highlight Hebden's obsessions over a particular period. There are trappings of the time, including shades of trip-hop and the cut-up collage of DJ Shadow, bombastic drum sounds that bear echoes of big beat, and elements of the post-rock grooves Hebden was practicing elsewhere.
These records work as a sort of time capsule. There's a dip into the post-dub sound of the shortlasting illbient sub-genre on the first part of "Thirtysixtwentyfive", and it's not a stretch to imagine Hebden coming across artists such as DJ Olive, Doug Scharin, and Techno Animal during his investigations into the outer reaches of post-rock. He also touches on jazz, with a barrage of sax and drum samples providing a neat loop around to Hebden's future collaborations with drummer Steve Reid. The sense of struggle is palpable at times, indicating someone with a wide open mind who knows where he wants to go but falling just short somewhere between conception and execution.
It's striking just how uneven this material can be, with little pockets of inspiration surfacing amid a tangle of material that shows an artist learning his trade. The tranquil middle section of "Fume" from the Misnomer EP has some of the itchy ambience and crisp beats that would become a hallmark of Hebden's later work. But over its 10 minute runtime it also works in hackneyed hip-hop samples and screaming sax that doesn't sit well in the mix, ultimately resembling a junior What Does Your Soul Look Like without the same sense of wild exploration. There are other tracks that attempt to pull off the same kind of epic journey-into-sound feel here, but the feeling is of an artist interested in musical transportation without fully having the skills to get there yet.
Hebden's jazz impulses solidify into some of the most satisfying tracks here, notably on "Chiron" from Dialogue, which builds off a drum lift from the much-sampled Bernard Purdie, pushing it into a tranquil place that's utterly meditative by its close. Similarly, "Aying" from Misnomer (which was tacked on as a bonus cut on the CD version of Dialogue) works as a wonky pile-up of saxophone riffs and jazzy drum fills, gaining a drunken stride that resembles little Hebden has done before or since. It's noticeable that those two tracks are among the shortest over these four releases, with Hebden able to reach greater points of revelation when he got sharper with his editing. He's rarely ventured over the 10-minute mark in his subsequent output; in contrast, the longest track here ("Thirtysixtwentyfive (Part 1)") last for almost 20 minutes.
The collection signs off with "Glasshead" from 1999, which finds a greater sense of purpose than Hebden's prior long-groove efforts. Over 11 minutes he keeps within a narrow frame of sound instead of taking pointless deviations into tiny cul-de-sacs, most of which fit into his self-diagnosed tendency of merely aping other records he liked at the time. "Glashead" is far from his best material, but it does hint at a way forward, where all the clutter is stripped from his music, in turn helping to bring out the refinement in his work. Hebden's use of space in Rounds is key to its success. The acres of room between beats in "Unspoken", or the way "Hands" beautifully drifts into dying embers of glazy electronics, are vital parts of that album. These tracks reflect someone with the ability to deconstruct music history, but yet to find the fantastical place that talent would take him.


Dirty Projectors are once again a group effort. Their new EP is helmed by singer Felicia Douglass, whose smooth voice is an antidote to the unrelenting weirdness of Dave Longstreth’s arrangements.

Flight Tower EP

Dirty Projectors has always been a balancing act—an experiment in counterweights, and the calibrated chaos that results from tipping the scales. Frontman Dave Longstreth deals in reds and blues, innocence and experience, assembling strange geometries from the building blocks of the pop idiom. But what’s remarkable about Flight Tower, the second of five planned EPs from a reinvigorated Dirty Projectors, is just how stable it feels. Across four tracks, Longstreth and his collaborators grasp at defined boundaries and solid forms, drawing on the freed-up sensibility of 2018’s Lamp Lit Prose to present long-held affectations with renewed immediacy.
With three new members now officially in the lineup—Maia Friedman, Felicia Douglass, and Kristin Slipp, all accomplished solo musicians with their own projects—Dirty Projectors are a group effort for the first time since the early 2010s. Their harmonies swirl, punctuate, and hang in the air. Where Windows Open, the first of the five EPs, featured Friedman on lead vocals, Flight Tower centers Douglass (Slipp will steer the third and Longstreth the fourth, with “everyone trading verses” on the fifth). The Dirty Projectors catalog is full of flashy vocal performances and declarative multi-part harmonies, but Douglass’ voice runs cooler and subtler, its smoothness an antidote Dave Longstreth’s ceaselessly complicated arrangements. Under her aegis, the music breathes.
At just over 10 minutes, the EP is short enough that its appeal is mainly textural; these are isolated glimpses of a larger sequence, vignettes that point to something more fully formed. But Flight Tower is assured enough to evoke its own themes: songs about wonder and change, the peculiar magic of involving yourself in another person and of involving that person in you. Even at their most unmoored, they’re always gesturing toward connection. The loose, jittery “Lose Your Love” recalls “Cool Your Heart,” the Dirty Projectors highlight co-written with Solange, though the palette here is softer, and hews closer to R&B. A relatively traditional verse-chorus structure anchors the track’s lovestruck, free-associative lyrics. “Inner World” takes a similar tack to more fraught emotional territory, smoldering over keyboards and wind-up clicks. “Where is it taking me?/I can only know/After the tides recede/And we are free to grow,” coos Douglass, yielding to the ebb and flow of certainty. Though it’s freighted with apprehension, its titular refrain feels like a refuge.
The second half of Flight Tower is more self-consciously experimental and ambiguous, leaning harder on glitchy, splintered surfaces; the emphasis is on the fact of feeling, rather than its precise expression. On the propulsive “Empty Vessel,” Douglass carves out another moment of psychic and aesthetic respite. “We’re facing forward/Or/With our eyes closed/We are dreaming/Of the coast,” she sings, syllables shadowed by warped, echoing fragments of memory. As on Windows Open, the band eschews ten dollar words—those “grayscale conjurers” and “lifelike perjurers”—in favor of simpler confessions. The effect is mesmeric and, in spite of its fussy architecture, newly grounded. “Self Design” explores that tension with more overt digital tricks, teasing a sample of Ravel’s Miroirs before lapsing into staggered, recursive melodies. Meaning slips, but puns persist: “What’s your love but/Safe design? Self design.” Douglass’ pronunciation renders “safe” and “self” identical.
There’s a line in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 about a “high magic to low puns,” the secret power of the false familiar. It was there in Bitte Orca’s “Two Doves,” as Angel Deradoorian collapsed “feather” and “failure” into a single, mystifying hybrid word. And it’s here, too, channeled through a new set of musicians. As the world folds in on itself and language fails, these songs hold fast to what’s real, to conventions and people we can be sure of. It’s no coincidence that “inner world” sounds so much like “in a world…,” a kind of call to imagination; Flight Tower is an invitation to complete the thought.

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Lorely Rodriguez’s fourth album is a dazzling showcase for her unexpected vocal and production approach as she experiences the peaks and valleys of heated romance.

For Your Consideration

As Empress Of, Lorely Rodriguez has spent the past decade moving between punchy, upbeat synth-pop and introspective ballads with unselfconscious ease. Even when she’s leaned toward more mainstream pop, as on 2022’s Save Me EP, the Honduran American producer and singer-songwriter’s key influences have shined through. Whether she’s channeling the vertiginous serenades of Cocteau Twins or the contorted stylings of Imogen Heap, her catalog bursts with fizzy, unpredictable love songs in English and Spanish, which have landed her spots opening for pop stars like Carly Rae Jepsen and Rina Sawayama. On her fourth album, the independently released For Your Consideration, Rodriguez dials into an insatiable new groove, reprising an effusive, sensual point of view over propulsive dance and electropop. It’s the most intricate Empress Of album to date, a dazzling showcase for Rodriguez’s unexpected vocal and production approach as she experiences the peaks and valleys of heated romance.
Rodriguez executive-produced For Your Consideration and tapped a fleet of other rising songwriters and producers to assist, including Casey MQ, Umru, Cecile Believe, and Nick León. The diverse spread helps map out the album’s mischievously unpredictable backdrops: These songs corkscrew and pull Rodriguez’s vocals like taffy, twisting into structures of their own; it’s as if she took Björk’s Medúlla as a conceptual north star and ran with it at full speed to the club. An opening suite of whispers morphs into a pitch-shifted pattern on the seductive “Sucia,” whose bilingual singsong verses lead to a deliciously bawdy chorus, her voice rising to a vibrant whoop. Later, her backing vocals swarm into a more ominous, chittering turn on the standout “Preciosa,” adding texture to the song’s deep bass and passionate come-ons. “Entra a mi mar/Mójate ya/Ya tú verás/Que te enamoras” (Enter my sea/Get wet/You’ll see that you’ll fall in love) she sings gently, before her voice crumples into a cooing, stuttering rhythm.
For Your Consideration thrives on the elasticity of the human voice, while its lyrics turn from underhanded lovers to the flush of new affairs. Gasps and hiccups shape the fricative beat on the tender opening title track, which dissects a series of red flags, letting her words linger with fading desire. Here she riffs on the awards-season “for your consideration” campaigns that actors and directors run as a metaphor for an unbalanced relationship; the line, repeated during the chorus, takes on a pleading tone that slowly grows more steely with confidence. “You wrote the script,” she allows, coming to the realization with sharp lucidity. “Your words, not mine.”
The rest of the album bears out that romantic push-pull, narrating lustful euphoria and restless longing over an electropop framework. Mid-album highlights, like the warped “Femenine” and woozy “Fácil,” pulse with the heat of a club night packed to the walls, gilding the album with her most memorable, straight-ahead dance-pop songs since her debut. On the former track, her Spanish lyrics play with the feminine and masculine in an assertive, lustful search for a man to dom, chirping in rapid succession over a surging beat as snippets of her pitch-shifted voice skitter about during its delirious finale. Rodriguez is utterly comfortable in the flirtatious role, opening up dynamic avenues for her style to flourish while maintaining a roguish attitude.
When Rodriguez leans into a more vulnerable frame of mind, the album doesn’t lose momentum. The bittersweet “Lorelei” takes on the persona of a jilted lover, adding details to her partner’s infidelity over a prickly synth flurry. “I wanna believe/That someone wasn’t here,” she implores. “I smell it on the sheets/Found earrings I don’t wear.” The song’s percussive chorus taps into an intoxicating well of jealousy: “What’s her name? What’s her name?” Rodriguez begs over a dizzying beat. “Does she know how much she made me cry?”
Rodriguez’s conceptual vision and pirouetting vocals throughout hold For Your Consideration’s deft balancing act together. Even on the album’s more typical ballads, like the syrupy, 2000s pop-tinged “Kiss Me” with Rina Sawayama, or the charging closer “What’s Love” with indie pop trio MUNA, she consistently pulls you deeper into her orbit. During the latter, Rodriguez finds solace in the intricacies of loving and having loved despite being burned in the process. For Your Consideration’s prismatic palette and unabashed candor proves her point, finding beauty and vigor in every little fluctuation that desire has to offer.


This is Lil B’s most head-turning proposition in years: an avant-garde electro-jazz album seemingly recorded with the cheapest MIDI presets on the market.

Afrikantis

Perhaps you’ve lost track of Lil B. For over a decade, the Berkeley entity born Brandon McCartney held a vise grip on the internet’s attention, whether he was being crowned as hip-hop’s future or its death. Even his nonbelievers had to admit that there simply was no one else like him, and the passage of time has further vindicated his vision. Lil B’s fingerprints are everywhere today: Whether you follow Drain Gang’s transcendentally positive mantras, RXK Nephew’s never-ending stream of biblical conspiracy theories, or Certified Trapper’s self-produced DIY cartoon rap, all roads lead back to the Based God.
As his offspring have seized the spotlight, Lil B has stepped into the role of godfather. He’s still released at least 15 mixtapes over the last five years (a relatively slow period for him), but for the first time since he initially unleashed his absurd self-empowerment treatises onto the rap world, it’s felt as if the sun might finally be setting on the Lil B empire. The Based economy runs on attention, and while fellow prodigal memelord Viper has continued to grab stray eyeballs with heady retrospective compilations and bizarre takes on astral drum’n’bass, Lil B’s recent tapes have offered little in the way of surprises. Afrikantis, however, is Lil B’s most head-turning proposition in years: an avant-garde electro-jazz album seemingly recorded with the cheapest MIDI presets on the market. Where his earlier “classical music” releases Choices & Flowers and Tears 4 God wafted about in a lo-fi, ambient drift, Afrikantis is even less tethered to basic concepts of melody and harmony, as Lil B’s scatterbrained digital jams spill out into Casio chaos.
In spite of its putative classification as jazz, the closest comparison point for Afrikantis lies in the chintzy, orchestral vaporwave purveyed by James Ferraro and Orange Milk Records. It’s an odd full-circle moment to see Lil B, an artist who irreversibly reshaped online culture, create a record that mirrors a completely different aspect of the early 2010s internet. Afrikantis’ adventurousness is admirable, even if actually listening to it may give you minor brain damage. Amateurish, dissonant trumpets squawk endlessly over a stampede of hammering GarageBand cymbal crashes on the opening tracks, “My Fathers Drums” and “A Song for Mom.” The latter would be a struggle to get through at half of its eight grueling minutes; the entire album is 72 minutes, which sounds long until you consider that a normal Lil B mixtape runs about two hours.
Afrikantis nevertheless contains flashes of Lil B’s peculiar, restless creativity. “Cricket” is the most dialed-in of the bunch, its panpipe synths leading a new-age groove that cruises into a 16-bit sunset. The pounding bongos that open “Kim” suggest what might happen if the DK Crew got ahold of Frank Zappa’s Jazz From Hell, and “Solano Stroll” rides a strange, slanted guitar riff that wouldn’t make you blink if it popped up on a Foodman record. Even the brutal atonality of “Welcome to Oakland California” feels purposeful: Arriving after a series of similarly Bay Area-themed tracks that toss warped, hip-hop-ish beats into the mix, the song’s noodling percussion unspools into a cacophony of car alarms, shattering glass, and police sirens. The cheapness of the instrumentation imbues the music with a deep uncanniness and dread, like a desperate call for help signaled on a Fisher-Price See N’ Say.
It takes patience to tolerate all the blaring plastic horn samples, and even the album’s most curiously experimental gestures can’t put up a fight against the ocean of hopelessly annoying slop. Yet there is something vaguely aspirational about Lil B’s willingness to throw himself into ideas so far outside the realm of what anybody else in hip-hop is currently doing. Afrikantis reduces his free-flowing, anything-goes philosophy to purely instrumental form; the ratio of bad to good tracks is secondary to the audacity of the project, and the eccentricity of it all leaves a far deeper impression than the music itself. At a time when Lil B’s influence is arguably more relevant than ever (“based” has fully entered the public lexicon, whether or not that public knows where the term originated), Afrikantis serves as proof of his enduring outsider status. The results may be laughable, but no one ever accused Lil B of not being entertaining.


Spencer Stephenson's second full-length under the Botany moniker, Dimming Awe, the Light Is Raw scours away the haze of his underrated 2013 debut. Stephenson's biggest strength is his ability to weave all of his influences—Eastern-based samples, throbbing hip-hop beats, stretches of noodly ambient—into alternatingly danceable and meditative psychedelia.

Dimming Awe, the Light Is Raw

Austin producer Spencer Stephenson, aka Botany, has lofty ambitions for his brand of warm, psych-inflected electronic music. Initially born as a side project from Stephenson's gig drumming for Denton electro-acoustic outfit Sleep Whale, Botany has since grown into a full-fledged solo act with a peculiar net of influences: sci-fi pulp novels, "emergent" music, beat architects Madlib and J Dilla, psych and krautrock, free jazz virtuosos. It’s no wonder Stephenson has described his music as "studious," and often provides long, sometimes brainy explanations in interviews about what his mood-driven soundscapes are all about.
Dimming Awe, the Light Is Raw, Stephenson’s second full-length under the Botany moniker, scours away the haze of his underrated 2013 debut Lava Diviner (True Story). That album, the soundtrack to an imagined sci-fi film about a "geological religious sect hell-bent on destruction", was dazed and occasionally too dense, but on Dimming Awe he winnows the widescreen approach down into what feels like a clear step forward in both quality and execution.
Stephenson’s biggest strength as a producer is his ability to weave all of his influences—Eastern-based samples, throbbing hip-hop beats, stretches of noodly ambient—into alternatingly danceable and meditative psychedelia. Opening instrumental tracks "Sungblood" and "Raw Light Overture" bounce appealingly between xylophones, bright-eyed melodies, and lilting vocals, even if they hew a little close to Adult-Swim-commercial territory. The circuitous and unpredictable Chicago rapper Milo enlivens "Au Revoir" and the soporific "No Translator", the latter of which distinctly recalls FlyLo circa When the Quiet Comes. Milo is a good foil for Stephenson: The looped sampling of a laugh track and French chansons on "Au Revoir" neatly align with Milo’s meandering, stream-of-consciousness verses. "Au Revoir" and "No Translator" are also Stephenson's first time working with a rapper, an experiment that bodes well for a collaborative EP with Lushlife (featuring appearances from Shabazz Palaces and Open Mike Eagle) slated for next year.
Stephenson has said that much of this album was improvised, his way of taking cues from jazz favorites like Herbie Hancock and Pharoah Sanders. You can hear it in the improv drumming that clatters around in the background of "Birthjays" and the synth ad libbing that drives "All Is Rite", little touches of ingenuity that insist upon repeat listens in order to catch all the different nuances at play. In a world as carefully constructed and satisfying as Dimming Awe, it's a worthwhile requirement.


A lot of what I own by Wolf Eyes is broken: Dead Hills' packaging is held together with scotch tape ...

Slicer

A lot of what I own by Wolf Eyes is broken: Dead Hills' packaging is held together with scotch tape; Dread has no cover at all; the Slicer CD's cracked, and a couple split singles have literally fallen apart. I'm not usually such a mess with my record collection, but I figure this disrepair rests well within the spirit of the Ann Arbor trio's continually expanding, forever growling discography. Wolf Eyes has fifty-some releases since 1997, and so much music is kind of intimidating if you haven't heard them yet. Like waking up and deciding to dive into one of the hundred or so linked stories and novels comprising Honore de Balzac's La Comedie Humaine. Slicer-- a reissue of a 2001 cassette-only release of the same name-- is a good starting point for the uninitiated: the liner notes list their output up to Slicer, stylistically, it's a Wolf Eyes greatest hits, and more importantly, it's pretty damn solid.
I only have a couple bones to pick, actually. At a basic aesthetic level, there are no song titles, which sucks because I always saw those tags as pictograms for or overall description and dissection of each exercise. In the past, "Burn Your House Down" from Dread became a call to arms for silly gas huffers and "Dead Hills" erupted as the earth-toned backdrop for an empty, mill-whistling middle America, because I had these brief titles as points of departure. The other downer is the first track, a two-minute vocal-splice thing redolent of The Cave, Steve Reich's overwrought Old Testament oratory. Imagining it as perversely manipulated answering machine messages made it creepier and therefore more interesting, but really, it's weak. Maybe it's a warm up for an upcoming remake of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate?
On the upswing-- and what a glorious upswing!-- track two is a variation on the fuzzed-out cicada stomp I've grown to adore: six minutes of splayed horns, crackling tapes, spring-reverb, sputtering shards of salty glass door hinges and that standard high-end knob-twisting that approximates a reconstituted air-raid siren. Track three uses a bass-heavy start/stop burp/blurt that begins too tightly, but shifts to a percussive two-channel palimpsest, which grows increasingly Throbbing Gristle-sinister as the song progresses. Track four's a ten minute complication of a demonic Matmos, stalking the countryside looking for kids to rip apart while archiving the ensuing sounds with well-placed contact microphones. (And the kids who escape could break-dance to the last section of this beauty while dousing themselves with battery acid!) It's as dark and driving as Joy Division or early Swans, and as patently mute as Nurse With Wound.
The penultimate track, number six, is a three-minute pop song based on the sounds of the interior of ghosts and shadows. It shifts halfway through, of course, and momentarily sputters and skips into twisted high-pitch noise land before leveling back out to an ominous whisper. The crazed horn at the end doesn't make sense compositionally, but it's a nice exclamation point. Track seven will hurt your dog's ear, I can almost guarantee that. Not much percussion for the coda, just lots and lots of singularly high-end distortion: turn your amp as high as it can go, lean your guitar against the amp, return to the room in five minutes. There you go. Besides track one, these pieces are largely without discernible human voices, which is how I prefer my Wolf Eyes: things remain more mysterious that way. Slicer's varied palette of late-night creepiness doesn't lean too much towards any stylistic trope, which makes it both a solid introduction and a fine archive to remind you why you fell so hard for these guys in the first place. Coupled with the just-released Covered in Bugs DVD-- an esoteric document offering an off-kilter look into the band's process (as well as a strangely tentative art-house moshpit comprised of giggling teenagers)-- you've got yourself a certifiable Wolf Eyes starter kit!


The intensely serious post-hardcore band marks the turn from death and loss to life and love with nimble musicianship, inventive rhythms, and Kyle Durfey’s most accomplished singing yet.

Wait for Love

Pianos Become the Teeth have spent a solid decade reaffirming their reputation as popular post-hardcore’s most deadly serious band. On the centerpiece of their 2009 debut, Old Pride, Kyle Durfey gave an unflinching account of his father suffering from multiple sclerosis, and he commemorated him two years later on “Liquid Courage”: “On the day you died/I cut my hair for the funeral/And on Memorial Day, I started drinking.” His subject matter was rarely any less intense. But in the time since 2014’s Keep You, Durfey got married, became a dad, cut his hair for good, and greenlit videos for uptempo singles with vibrant choreography and his band in neon body paint, daring diehards to make Coldplay comparisons.
Yet Wait for Love defies any expectation that this might be Pianos’ happy album, a move that would likely have alienated their fans even more than Durfey’s decision to stop screaming on Keep You. “Would you believe it? I’m a family man now,” he croons on the closing “Blue,” and he isn’t just overcome by wonder or realizing the grim inheritance of generational trauma. He’s both, and “Blue” reiterates what Wait for Love has made clear: that Pianos Become the Teeth are just as deadly serious about new life and new love as they were about death and loss.
While previous Pianos Become the Teeth albums were never intended to shut people out, they weren’t exactly waiting for an audience to get on their level. Emo standards The Lack Long After and Keep You boast the most devastating music produced by this scene, but they’d be completely impenetrable to listeners who couldn’t withstand their respective scorched-earth swelter and mid-Atlantic winter chill. Wait for Love is the first time a Pianos Become the Teeth album can spin whenever the mood suits. With Will Yip behind the boards, the band hasn’t strayed too far beyond the sound that defined its jump from Topshelf to Epitaph: clean vocals and drums pushed way to the front; crosshatched guitars; a husky, muscular, but never macho sound that could’ve made them post-grunge icons in another era. But the grays in their funereal ambience are now polished silver and the fog has lifted—whereas last time around they drew unexpected comparisons to Scottish mope rock, Wait for Love sounds more like Meet Me in the Bathroom-era New York.
All of these changes become clear in the first minute of “Fake Lighting.” The big reveal on Keep You was that Durfey could actually sing, though melodic craftsmanship was a secondary concern. With a brief falsetto run in his first line, Durfey announces his advancement to singer, and throughout, he’s more economical with his lyrics and more generous with melody. If lacking the conceptual heft of past releases, Wait for Love is a richer, more versatile experience. Only “Blue” is subject to the same hardball tactics of Keep You, matching Durfey’s most brutally, beautifully honest lyrics with a dirge that mirrors his post-confessional exhaustion.
Otherwise, Wait for Love exchanges the deadlift exertion for more nimble musicianship. Having drummer David Haik function in a purely textural or timekeeping capacity was previously a major misallocation of resources, though it was necessary on Keep You to maintain the mournful mood. While the vocals and guitars remain resonant and steely, Haik is given the freedom to set the pulse for these odd and entirely new sensations with his most inventive playing yet.
While Durfey’s subject matter is universal, he still doesn’t write in a universal way. Wait for Love is about his experience, and Durfey took the unusual step of posting a preface on the band’s website that either serves as a collection of cheat codes for his densely referential lyrics. But they’re all love songs, and while Durfey freely includes suggestive post-coital imagery, Wait for Love is about love-making in the metaphysical sense: All of the empty glasses, bleary sunrises, and half-shut blinds are symbols for a kind of intimacy that’s only possible after discovering the difference between being emotional and truly vulnerable.
Yet in the only funny moment to ever occur on a Pianos Become the Teeth album, the chorus of “Charisma” (“The Magothy days slip away”) could easily be heard as “my gothy days slip away,” which might actually be a better way to describe what the song is all about. The physicality of “Charisma” doesn’t appear to leave much to interpretation. It rides a straightforward, locked-in bass thrum, the kind that’s served crushed-out emo songs since Cap’n Jazz took shape. “I caught a stranger’s eye/And what a way you won me over,” Durfey yells on the chorus, and the entirety of his earlier work makes the event all the more impressive: He’s not the type that’s easily won over.
“Charisma” is that kind of love song, for people who never quite saw themselves in the pop fantasy until they were blindsided by reality. And here’s the kicker: If we’re to take Durfey at his word, it’s a love song twice over, of “seeing your son pulled from the womb of the love of your life.” On their beloved “I’ll Get By,” Durfey felt resigned to a life with “no mirth, no levity, no amazing grace” while yelling, “I want to live!” The waiting was the hardest part; accepting and living in love is where Pianos find the will to go fearlessly forward.


Featuring several collaborations with Bruce Springsteen, the self-produced new album from the 70-year-old songwriter is overwhelmingly bleak—but its best moments prove he can still surprise us.

John Mellencamp: Strictly a One-Eyed Jack

Strictly a One-Eyed Jack

A self-described Midwestern socialist who campaigned for Bloomberg. A songwriter beloved by Republicans, who wrote multiple radio anthems criticizing the Republican party. A commercial-soundtracking 1980s icon who has collaborated on art shows with Miles Davis and Southern gothic musicals with Stephen King. John Mellencamp has always thrived in contradictions, and he makes his best music when he seems just out of step with the mainstream. In the mid-’80s, Mellencamp just happened to be what the mainstream wanted: a non-coastal elitist attacking Reagan-era greed while landing on every Midwesterner’s lake mixtape during heartland rock’s golden age. 1985’s Scarecrow, his commercial and critical peak, was the scruffy foil to the blockbuster sheen of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. If Springsteen’s record felt like the dramatic, high-stakes movie version of small-town struggles, listening to Mellencamp was more like the documentary: an earthy and straightforward snapshot of well-meaning people just trying to get through another long day.
Written around the time that he co-founded Farm Aid with Willie Nelson and Neil Young, Mellencamp’s work during this period marked a shift from his role as Seymour, Indiana’s biggest  pop star to a heartland spokesperson, someone who paid more attention to John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie than to his peers on the charts. In recent years, he can still find his way around a singalong chorus, but beginning with 2008’s T-Bone Burnett collaboration Life, Death, Love and Freedom, Mellencamp has settled into a comfortable zone of traditional rock’n’roll, folk, and blues.
Strictly a One-Eyed Jack, his self-produced 25th album, continues Mellencamp’s journey through the past, this time offering a stark take on Americana that harkens to darker times before the 70-year-old songwriter was born: less late-career depression and more Great Depression. Indeed, many of these songs sound like they could have been written and performed before World War II. Take the opener, “I Always Lie to Strangers.” Singing in a voice as old as the desert, Mellencamp is accompanied by melancholy touches of violin, piano, and upright bass, as he laments that no, the church bells will not chime for thee. As with many songs on the first half of the record, Mellencamp’s cigarette growl eerily evokes that of Tom Waits. But these songs lack Waits’ warmth and humor—the signs of a performer who knows he’s putting on a show. This is the most direct and confident that Mellencamp has sounded in years, and yet, he also sounds like he’d rather be anywhere else, with his lyrics acting as lists of grievances against modern society. Any light in the darkness comes from Mellencamp’s excellent backing band, especially Troye Kinnett’s accordion and organ playing.
With a greater sense of momentum, the back half of the record acts as a rescue mission. This is where Springsteen shows up, providing welcome vocal harmonies on the electric “Did You Say Such a Thing,” climactic guitar solos on album closer “A Life Full of Rain,” and lead vocals on the main attraction, “Wasted Days.” When Mellencamp asks “How many days are lost in vain,” he sounds like someone who’s seen too much and little change; Springsteen counters with “How much sorrow is there left to climb,” summoning his belief that we’re all still capable of transcending our circumstance. Their harmonies in the chorus—“We watch our lives just fade away”—illustrate their common ground: Life is hard, and it’s worth it. It’s a touching moment, and it offers a portrait of Mellencamp’s gift for simple, intuitive melody and songwriting that has proven influential on a new generation of heartland-inspired rockers like the War on Drugs and Waxahatchee.
While the rest of the record settles into a mid-tempo dirge, there are several other surprising highlights to justify a new Mellencamp album. The upbeat campfire feeling of "Chasing Rainbows" is a welcome change of pace on such a dark record, and “Lie to Me” has the potent riffs and keys of a long-lost Exile on Main St. demo. Mellencamp’s career is dotted with flawed but lovable albums, and this one lacks the consistency of more nuanced late-career gems like Life, Death, Love and Freedom or 2010’s No Better Than This. Despite the overt bleakness, Strictly a One-Eyed Jack shines when Mellencamp invites other people into his world—proof that he can still surprise us this deep into his career.

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On his latest carefree and careworn album, the Chicago rapper turns softer and more melodic, exploring his provisional success and the unanswered questions it keeps raising.

Few Good Things

Early on in Few Good Things, a flicker of disquiet plays across Saba’s face as he drives through his new neighborhood: “I still get nostalgic driving past houses my family lost/They wished upon a star, I caught it like I’m Randy Moss.” There’s a lot packed into that couplet—bittersweet acknowledgment, lingering fear, uneasy pride. A moment later, the music surges into the foreground again, and Saba’s moment of doubt is washed away, a passing shadow on a perfect night.
Like Lupe Fiasco, one of his heroes, Saba’s muse is ambivalence. He’s attuned to the moments where a smile freezes, where two thoughts collide painfully and ripple across life’s surface. “Jesus got killed for his sins/Walter got killed for a coat,” he rapped on 2018’s CARE FOR ME, an album-length eulogy for his dead cousin. You could feel his roving mind searching for meaning the way a tongue probes a sore spot inside your mouth. On Few Good Things, Saba remains haunted, not by grief, but by his own provisional success and the unanswered questions it keeps raising.
Across the album, Saba endeavors to enjoy his spoils—new houses, nice clothes, days spent doing nothing but “playing Madden”—while trying not to glance back where he came from. Every new trapping, his lyrics suggest, might just be a trap: “New crib by the seaside/On a one-way street though” (“One Way or Every Nigga With a Budget”). Over the near-bossa-nova lilt of “Simpler Time,” a beautiful song featuring the Atlanta singer-songwriter Mereba, he raps, “White picket fence and a wreath on the door/We from the basement concrete on the floor.” Like anyone traumatized by scarcity, Saba can’t quite stop retracing his fraught path to abundance, scanning for land mines.
He continues to split duties on keyboards, guitars, bass, and drum programming with longtime producing partners Daoud and daedaePIVOT, and at its best, the music splits the difference between carefree and careworn. Remarkably, despite the looping, layered feel and the suggestion of vinyl crackle, almost no samples are used. Everything is handmade, from the muted boom of the kicks to the busy percussion in the margins, suggesting slapped kitchen tables and clinked spoons. Mimicking Noah “40” Shebib, they scoop out the keyboards’ midrange, leaving them to flutter from above. The overall feeling is of dreamy reverie—near the end of “2012,” we hear birds chirping.
As the trio has forged their sound, Saba’s flow has softened and turned more melodic. He works best when his voice is another instrument in the mix, freely mixing up registers between melody and rhythm. He sounded incredible on his 2016 debut next to fellow Chicago legend Twista, tucking his syllables into jazzy off-beats on “GPS”; he sounds equally natural here next to Krayzie Bone, the Bone Thugz legend who he’s cited as inspiration, on “Come My Way.”
He’s less convincing when attempting to follow in another idol’s footsteps. On “Survivor’s Guilt,” he clenches his teeth and spits a “DNA”-style Kendrick flow without ever quite catching K-Dot’s speaking-in-tongues fire. On “If I Had a Dollar,” he cops Kendrick’s high-pitched gremlin flow (what Schoolboy Q once dubbed his “Lord of the Rings voice”) from tracks like “Institutionalized.” In both cases, Saba comes off like an understudy.
Unlike Kendrick, whose music seethes and nearly thrashes itself apart with effort, Saba stands out when he leans back. His ideal register is gentler, his scale smaller. Late in Few Good Things, Black Thought appears, foregoing his militaristic snap for a disarming verse about his “South Carolina gullah” mother, who would “dip into a mental capoeira/When she staring into your soul, and you trying not to let her.” It’s as tender and low-key as the old Roots crew capo has ever let himself sound on record, and it’s a minor revelation. You have to assume that Saba’s music, with its will towards gentleness and belief in everyday redemption, pulled it out of him.


The virtuosic beatboxer and comedian Reggie Watts teams with techno legend John Tejada for a loose, punchy set of house anthems.

Don’t Let Get You Down

On paper, Reggie Watts and John Tejada make a strange pair. Watts is now a household name to millions of Americans, after his virtuosic beatboxing and stand-up comedy landed him a regular gig as bandleader on The Late Late Show with James Corden. By contrast, John Tejada is a beloved techno legend whose reticent nature would make it difficult for even the most ardent raver to pick him out in a lineup. What they have in common is casual mastery of their respective crafts: performance and production. With their joint project Wajatta, the two Los Angelenos stretch out and show off that formidable musicianship.
While their 2018 debut Casual High Technology was haphazard, showing off its makers’ respective talents without ever synthesizing them, Don’t Let Get You Down feels more refined. It places Watts firmly in the role of lead singer, but also percussionist, lead synthesizer, and master of ceremonies. The album’s title might look like it’s missing a word, but the absence of the noun summarizes the duo’s studio ethos: Throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks, don’t sweat the details, have fun.
Wajatta certainly deliver on that last principle. The title track—described by Watts as “the poppiest song we’ve ever done”—opens with a whistled melody that’s wince-inducing at first, but becomes pleasant when Watts counters it with a falsetto. So much of Watts’ artistry is wrapped up in deft improvisation that it feels somehow natural when he slips into different accents or goes on an extended riff about the cool features on his new refrigerator, as he does on “Marmite.” On that same tune, Tejada loops a segment of his bandmate’s scatting voice until it resembles a maraca.
Watt’s effects-pedal-centric live show, with its vocal looping and chopping, exerts a tremendous influence on the structure of the songs. On the opening moments of “Renegade,” murmured syllables patter against Tejada’s immaculate drums; on the loping, arpeggio-heavy “Another Sun,” Watts flexes his vocal range atop his own beatboxing. He makes a refreshing sparring partner for Tejada, whose 2019 Performance Review EP only hinted at the bright, punchy house music they coalesce around on “Tonight” or “138.”
Lest we forget Tejada’s years spent dabbling in hip-hop and electro, Wajatta also bring the BPM down for a few songs. Watts channels Moodymann over a subby, minimal track on “Little Man,” but neither he nor the production are quite as menacing or seductive as they could be. “Depth Has a Focus” makes great use of Watts’ versatility, but the track as a whole falls apart any time the vocal loops become focal points rather than auxiliary percussion. The most memorable song to stray from four-on-the-floor is “January,” with synth-funk grooves and R&B coos that Watts builds into stacks of lovely background vocals.
Ultimately, Wajatta find the most success when they both play to their strengths, as they do on the album closer “All I Need Is You.” Watts crosses over from imitating a house diva to embodying one—dancefloor callouts and all—while Tejada shakes off any pretension to unleash some deeply satisfying tech house. Just as Tejada’s meticulous productions are a boon to Watts’ voice, the comedian-singer’s unique character and energy give Don’t Let Get You Down an ebullience. They might not be innovating the form, but their shared creative spirit has its own irresistible charm.

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On the latest Baths album, Will Wiesenfeld launches his beats and synths into the realm of vibrant fantasy. Of all his releases, it’s the one most rife with pure pleasure.

Romaplasm

When Will Wiesenfeld announced that he had recorded the theme song to a game called “Dream Daddy”—a gay-dad dating simulator where “you play as a Dad and your goal is to meet and romance other hot Dads”—he repaired a curious schism that had lingered between the music he made as Baths and the persona he’d cultivated on platforms like Twitter and Vine. Looking back, the 2013 album Obsidian scans almost shockingly dark. There are songs about suicidal ideation, existential worry, and failed relationships in there, told in desaturated realism over intricate matrices of beats and synths. That darkness chased Wiesenfeld into 2014’s Ocean Death EP, but something in that five-song collection started to open up into a wider space. Instead of singing about sharing a toilet seat with a boyfriend for whom he’d lost all feeling, Wiesenfeld sang about being the entire damn ocean, inviting sailors to come drown themselves in his depths. Sure, it’s heavy, but “Ocean Death” mirrors the fantastical obsessions that populate Wiesenfeld’s imagination as he presents it to his social media followers. There, he delights in anime, cartoons, and video games, delirious in his escapism from the grey and somber world we call “real.”
Romaplasm, Baths’ first LP in four years and third overall, dives head first into that same reverie. Of all Wiesenfeld’s music, including his muted side project Geotic, it’s the most rife with pure pleasure. Synthesizers toot like gasps from an ancient hand-cranked pneumatic organ on “Extrasolar.” They chirp and burble among intermittent piano motifs on “Abscond,” and they swarm, sparkle, and itch on “Adam Copies.” Wiesenfeld has always had an ear for delightfully complex systems of sound. Instead of draping his voice over a beat and some accompaniment, he prefers to loop it through impossible Rube Goldberg machines, making even the music he composes with no game in mind sound as though it’s intended to soundtrack a hyperkinetic pixel platformer. The bleeps, the clicks, the compressive modulations of voice—they all belong to those worlds accessed with a vintage controller and a Sega emulator.
Lyrically, Wiesenfeld also launches himself into the realm of vibrant fantasy. He sets Romaplasm’s opener “Yeoman” on an airship (an airship!) as the song’s speaker and the object of his affections together traverse the skies. It’s easy enough to hear the lyrics to the ebulliently catchy hook as a metaphor for the high of falling for someone new: “Left my life on the ground/To dance with you in the clouds,” Wiesenfeld sings. Then again, it’s just as easy (and maybe more fun) to take the song literally as a story about a couple voyaging on an airship, soaring above the towns where they lived before they commanded the power of flight.
While plenty of the album’s tracks invoke imagery from RPGs (“Abscond” seems to take place inside one of those evergreen, picturesque towns where wise anthropomorphic animals sell you healing potions), Wiesenfeld also indulges some of the self-doubt and self-interrogation that rippled through Obsidian. “What am I gonna do with me?” he wonders on “Out,” seeing his own failures refracted through a prism of his exes’ eye colors. On “Wilt,” he asks, “Who will house my sentiment?” And through the miasmic production of “Human Bog,” he laments himself as “queer in a way that’s failing me/I’m not enough of anything.” Wiesenfeld floats these thoughts, but he never pursues them with as much self-destructive aggression as he did four years ago. He’s gentler with himself here, as though the fantasy spaces he investigates allow him some relief from the person he plays in reality, and he can come back to himself with more patience, more compassion.
Baths isn’t the first artist to write music from a place of high fantasy, but he’s arrived here in a way that inverts the paths of a few of his escapist peers. Romaplasm shares some of its vernacular with Sufjan Stevens and Owen Pallett records released before both those artists ultimately whittled down their lyrics to blunt, spare realism. Wiesenfeld, conversely, soared away from the melancholic details of his real life to see what he could absorb from fantasy. Without abandoning the conundrums that made Obsidian so emotionally indelible, he’s embellished the worlds of his songs with color from the dreams in which he’s immersed himself over the years. The setting may not be real, but the sentiment rings true.


Joey Anderson's take on house and techno is at once chaotic and elegant, and fluid above all. It's hard to put your finger on the emotions his music evokes, but you're moved all the same.

Invisible Switch

Joey Anderson came to house music first as a dancer: Not your average weekend clubber, but a devoted student of a vernacular form, house dancing, that thrived in New York and New Jersey nightclubs in the 1990s—expressive, fluid, acrobatic, and competitive. You can hear that influence in the sparse, wiry productions that he has been recording since the beginning of this decade. They're not made for fist-pumping, and they don't follow neat verse/chorus structures. They ripple and writhe unpredictably, marked by an improvisational sense of movement. They seem to move of their own accord.
Anderson comes from the same corner of the house and techno universe that has given us artists like Levon Vincent, Anthony Parasole, and DJ Qu, a fellow dancer. Like them, he favors analog drum machines, hardware synthesizers, and what sounds, above all, like a lot of playing of keys and twisting of knobs in real time. Much contemporary electronic music is composed visually, assembled brick by brick on a computer screen, but Anderson's snake-in-the-grass meanderings suggest live takes stacked one on top of another, thanks to the magic of multi-tracking.
"18 Arms" goes straight to the heart of his approach. True to its name (leave it to a dancer to come up with a title like that), it opens with a synthesizer pattern that squirms like an octopus' tentacles, and as the track accrues its fistfuls of counterpoints and layers, it becomes easy to imagine the producer as a one-man band. At any given point on the album, three or more synthesizer parts are being woven together; drum hits are flaring up and being muted again; a hi-hat's pitch seesaws up and down. The cumulative effect of all these techniques is at once chaotic and elegant, and fluid above all.
But how the music is put together is ultimately less important than how it feels, and Anderson's music is all about feel. It's hard to put your finger on the emotions they evoke, but you're moved all the same. ("'Deep' to me is like the human condition that you don't talk about, that you hold in forever until you are in front of that right person" Anderson told Resident Advisor, which might go some way towards explaining the slipperiness of his music's emotional register.) A song might be calm and meditative: the spacious "Organ to Dust" is a study in stillness in which quietly accelerating figures move like quarters spinning to a halt on the floor. "Nabta Playa", named for a drained basin in the Egyptian desert, is fleet and mysterious; in both sound and mood, it's reminiscent of Drexciya's Afro-futurist fantasies, and the Detroit icons' fizzy textures and frantic movements also inform "Amarna", whose title refers to the tomb of the Pharaoh Akhenaten. It's the album's most unhinged track, with wildly filtered drums that thrash desperately about. It sounds like music for punching mirrors; it moves like someone trying to escape his own shadow. True to the corporeal bent of Anderson's album, it locates emotion not in the mind but in the muscles.


With garbled singing, shuffling electronics, and fragments of conversation, the Brooklyn band’s new album dwells on ordinary and universal moments of alienation.

farawayfromeveryoneyouknow

Drifting through altopalo’s farawayfromeveryoneyouknow evokes twin feelings of isolation and unity: One imagines astronauts gazing at the marbled surface of the Earth, so luminous and fragile, and remembering the place is home. Though the quartet of old friends is based in Brooklyn, in recent years they’ve toured separately with other acts to pay the bills. So in late 2018, when they collectively decamped to a family cabin beside a frozen lake in Indiana to record a new album, it was a rare opportunity to congregate under the same roof. While there, they kept the tape rolling. On “funny thoughts…,” a delicate piano line is interrupted by the clink of a metal spoon.“It’s literally louder than the fucking piano, your fucking eating,” someone yells. Stifled laughter. “Love you!” “Love you too.”
altopalo’s previous record, frozenthere, also recorded in Indiana, was inspired by the intimate estrangement of laggy FaceTime calls and unblinking stares into a screen. To mimic this state, they warped and corroded the human voice, sometimes to gorgeous effect: one passage sounded like overhearing a man cry from the other side of a wall, the tragedy heightening as the wail grew soft. Farawayfromeveryoneyouknow retains many of its predecessor’s signature effects—the garbled singing, shuffling electronics, and light pentatonic flourishes—but it’s a warmer and more spacious album, thanks in part to Mike Haldeman’s languid, echoey guitar. altopalo’s glitchy blend of ambient, indie rock, and R&B recalls the work of  “genre-less” auteurs like Justin Vernon or James Blake, though lead singer Rahm Silverglade’s voice is less howling and more numb, which lends the music an appealing anonymity.
The group made a conscious effort to eliminate possessive language from their sessions—my bass, his drum—and so what you hear is less a singular display of virtuosity than a collective blur of experience. Farawayfromeveryoneyouknow has no proper nouns, no prickly clues from which to patch together a personal history. Instead, it dwells on ordinary and universal moments of alienation: the tedium of doing chores with a foggy mind, or the difficulty of falling asleep at night. Songs are addressed to a disembodied “you.” On “Honey,” a song inspired by bassist Jesse Bielenberg’s struggle with depression, Silverglade murmurs words of devotion to the drug Lexapro: “Never said love and then I did,” he recites hoarsely, over frayed drums and atmospheric swirls. “Never saw color and you dropped in.”
Off-kilter accents, like the harsh blasts of static on “am i am,” or the hospital monitor pings that open several songs, accentuate the private strangeness of these liminal moments. Halfway through “Mud” is an absurd, wordless jumble that resembles a baby garbling through a tube. And while this particular bit seems random, other vocal fragments can be wrenchingly profound. On “Lub,” Silverglade warbles the album title in a rapidly ascending vocal line, so that syllables domino into each other. “Maybe/Stop at Safeway/Get some Pringles/And then/Maybe wander/Feeling sorry/For myself,” he screeches later, pushed to the brink by AutoTune. The mundane familiarity of the scene seems incongruous with the severity of the wail. It’s like the world you once knew has become foreign and inhospitable.
farawayfromeveryoneyouknow closes on a gentler melancholy. Awash in static and feedback, the final song, “now that you’re here…,” recalls the sound of an old clock chiming slowly in the distance. It’s like staring out at the city at the crack of dawn, briefly feeling as though you have all the time in the world. It’s also designed to thwart Spotify from automatically queuing up a different album and jolting you into another landscape. Sit with me longer, it says. Stay. For all of its remoteness, farawayfromeveryoneyouknow is strangely comforting.


The East Atlanta artist is typically an excellent mood curator, but on his first full-length in five years, he feels uncharacteristically dull.

Since I Have a Lover

In 2023, every rapper sings and every singer raps, but 6LACK is one of the few who truly stands in the middle. Growing up in Atlanta’s infamous Zone 6, the artist born Ricardo Valentine was obsessed with battle rap. He started rhyming when he was a small child, and by middle school, he was taking on challengers in the lunchroom (including a pre-fame Young Thug). His voice felt metallic back then, but somewhere along the way, it became more melodic, more nonchalant: He wasn’t quite singing, but he wasn’t quite rapping, either.
He signed a predatory deal with Flo Rida’s International Music Group in 2011, which forced him to live out of the studio for a time. It was his transition to Interscope and his triple-platinum hit “PRBLMS” that solidified his place in a new generation of high-fashion, ain’t-shit crooners who wear their bleeding hearts on their sleeves. He’s made a habit of bouncing between breakup songs that suck the air out of the room, or stunting on one-night stands for kicks. But Since I Have a Lover, 6LACK’s third album and first full-length in five years, considers what it’d be like to leave the player lifestyle behind for good. It’s a question with no easy answers, and one that occasionally gets lost in a sea of uncharacteristically dull songs.
Lover is far from the first record to explore what happens when a wounded lothario grapples with the urge to settle down, but for 6LACK, it marks a slight change in direction. Much of his writing draws on heartbreaks and missed connections—what does it sound like when he’s locked in on new love? On “Inwood Hill Park,” he contemplates marriage before digging a bit deeper into his romantic obsession: “Can’t you see that I’ve been hostile for weeks?/Don’t you know you change the patterns of my sleep?” There’s talk of unpacking trauma and of him “gambling on paradise” in spite of himself. It isn’t exactly wife-guy R&B, but it’s new territory for a man who once compared his penis to a loaded gun. In his delivery, you can feel the excitement of building a new life with someone; his voice darts through nostalgic bars about being with his partner since they were cozy on her mother’s couch. He’s not immune to the occasional bout of backhanded honesty about past relationships (“Update your life on some iOS shit/Came three times, ain’t gotta buy yo’ ass shit,” he hisses on “Fatal Attraction”), but a more reflective stance is a good look on him.
The first third of the album is its strongest, but halfway through, its grip starts to weaken. And it’s not just because some of his bars feel like they came from the Cassidy playbook he so reveres (“Never let your mouth get that diarrhea,” he sings on “Talkback”). His vocals never strain, but songs like the bubbly late album highlight “B4L,” or his collabs with now-girlfriend QUIN, are few and far between, with the writing slipping into bland—and occasionally creepy—romantic posturing. On “Decatur,” he takes credit for helping a woman see “the brighter side of things,” only to follow that up with “You mine every day, don’t try to file no restraint.” It’s a completely unromantic gesture that kills the vibe immediately. “Rent Free” revolves around the ubiquitous meme, but leaves the actual reason a person lives in your head unclear. There’s tension, but the emotional distance makes it hard to invest. At its worst, 6LACK’s songwriting here reads like ChatGPT trying to recreate a steamy text thread from memory, lines AI-generated for maximum I-feel-you-zaddy moods.
Production-wise, Lover slightly elevates the Noah “40” Shebib school of aqueous, lo-fi R&B; producers Sounwave, Kill September, longtime collaborator Fwdslxsh, and EarthGang’s Olu center guitars and shimmering piano keys more than ever before in 6LACK’s music. Crisp kick drums and guitar strums add a casual spring air to the new love of the title track. “Talkback” features a fast-paced interpolation of Sting’s 1993 ballad “Shape of My Heart,” offering some much-needed vitality to the middle of the album. The skittering drums of “Temporary” bring 6LACK and Don Toliver’s generic “you’re not like other girls” platitudes to a cinematic level. But like a handful of the lyrics, some of these beats blur together, dissolving into a stream of playlist fodder.
It’s unfortunate, because 6LACK is usually a fantastic mood curator. Previous projects, like Free 6LACK, East Atlanta Love Letter, and 6pc Hot, hit hard because of their brooding atmospheres and deliciously petty relationship drama. With mixed results, Lover tries to bring that eye and ear to a brighter musical palette and greener romantic pastures. To paraphrase the great Roy Kent, real love should make you feel like you’ve been struck by lightning. 6LACK manages some sparks here and there, but the tingles fade fast.


On her first new release in almost 20 years, Japanese composer Midori Takada joins London-based musician Lafawndah on a short but fascinating multimedia project with mythical overtones.

Midori Takada / Lafawndah: Le Renard Bleu EP

Le Renard Bleu EP

Myths, like drum patterns, accrue force with repetition and meaning with reinterpretation. Take the myth of the blue fox, an animal with a coat so white it can turn a different color entirely. In Senegal’s Serer religion, it’s believed foxes were mischievous tricksters. The Icelandic poet and Björk collaborator Sjón devoted a novel to the blue fox, in which the beast gives the protagonist, the Reverend, a reason for living. In 20th-century Britain, the Blue Fox became a nuclear warhead. The animal particularly charmed Japan, where, fittingly, given its provocative and transitory nature, it was variously a messenger of the divine and a god itself. And now, it reappears again as Le Renard Bleu, the first new release in almost 20 years by Japanese composer Midori Takada, who knows a thing or two herself about myths and patterns.
Takada’s landmark, limited-run 1983 album Through the Looking Glass sat for 35 years on the wishlists of fans who’d heard only tales of the four-track wonder. Takada created and produced the album herself, overdubbing lines of marimba, harmonium, Coke bottles, and cowbells into unsettling reveries. Its 2017 reissue established a place for her in the pantheon of minimalist composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich, along with experimental performers like Meredith Monk—and perhaps even solo studio wizards like Prince. In a way, Looking Glass was a Music for 18 Musicians, made by just one.
Le Renard Bleu is something different: a series of collaborations in both content and form. Sonically, Takada has joined forces with the London-based singer/producer Lafawndah, best known for her 2016 pan-global (or even post-global) pop EP Tan. Visually, the pair took up with filmmakers and artistic directors Partel Oliva for an accompanying film, of interest mainly as a chance to see how Takada creates her sounds, and a one-sided 12" with a flip etched by Parisian illustrator Neila Czermak. Logistically, the crew found funding and distribution from cult fashion house KENZO, whose runway shows Lafawndah has soundtracked.
This glittering crowd is a far cry from Takada’s nights spent alone Scotch-Taping percussive arpeggios in the 1980s. But those riffs reappear in Le Renard Bleu, after an introductory scene-setting of solitary bells. Metallic resonances like hair-raising flares cut across the eerie calm. And then Lafawndah stalks in, her voice shapeshifting between Lisa Gerrard, Anita Baker, and Kelela. “Fox sing for me,” she demands, “about how one mind learned to read another.” A conversation—between Lafawndah and the fox, and between Lafawndah and Takada—begins to take shape.
Over the next 20 minutes, Takada maps for the singer vast grounds of handbells; antique cymbals; myochin hibachi, a kind of highly resonant wind chime; various drums and marimba; and even the water phone, a stainless steel and bronze ring of tonal rods surrounding an echoing pool of water, created by the fortuitously named Richard Waters. A gang of drums joins the hunt, as marimba lines play hide and seek with the vocals, and while things never quite reach the expository thrust of, say, Peter and the Wolf, it’s clear there are actions, with consequences, afoot. Eventually, bright metallic peals of bells, friendlier cousins to the early flares, cleanse the air with soft exhalations.
It’s one hell of a trip, even if Le Renard Bleu’s profile might pale compared to the epic, four-part Looking Glass and its legacy. Hopefully, it’s no epigraph to Takada’s storied career. Perhaps like Sjón’s Reverend, this fox gave her something to believe in, a reason to rejoin the material world in search of new adventures. In the end, we’re just lucky to hear the tale.


Following up the viral hit “Vibe (If I Back It Up),” the New Jersey singer’s official debut aims to render the fast-paced, energetic sound of Jersey club in her own image.

Vanice

Jersey club hinges on breathless, exhilarating speed. It’s a style of music almost impossible to listen to without wanting to dance: The jittery, sped-up samples and seamless blend of house, R&B, and hip-hop insist on movement, even if you can’t quite keep up with the tempo. The genre has achieved mainstream recognition in fits and starts, most recently through Ciara’s DJ Telly Tellz-sampling “Level Up.” But for years the regional scene in New Jersey has been a hotbed of talent, including Irvington native Cookiee Kawaii, who’s been making club music for a decade. Kawaii’s sultry spin on the style assumed a life of its own last summer through TikTok: The ass-shaking “Vibe (If I Back It Up),” from her Club Soda, Vol. 2 EP, soundtracked footage of dancing ducks and live-action Sailor Moon riffs. With a perfectly looped hook and wispy vocals, the short, instantly gratifying track fomented enough hype to net a Tyga feature and a gold record certification.
Now Kawaii returns with Vanice, an official debut that aims to spotlight the Jersey club scene as rendered in her own image. Executive-produced by house legend Junior Sanchez, the 16-song set is very much designed for turning up. The minimalist foundations that give the genre its satisfying punch—stuttering breakbeats, aggressive tempos—show up, though they’re often rooted in more offbeat production choices. Familiar percussive woofs and a bed-squeaking sample (the same one that powers “Vibe”) establish the album’s lineage and supply a welcome reminder of Kawaii’s own heat-seeking breakthrough. “H@ters Anonymous” takes those basic elements and applies them to a ballroom banger that brushes off online trolls with ease: “I ain’t worried about you but you worried about mine,” she trills over a stomping house beat, proving her ability to twist Jersey club into different shapes at will.
Elsewhere, Kawaii’s pop and R&B instincts are on full display. “Planet Us,” a lovestruck ode to dancing on the moon with your boo, opens with plucky synths and speeds up at the chorus. On “Love Your Body,” Kawaii trades seductive verses with Los Angeles-based neo-soul artist Oya Noire, moving towards a laid-back R&B sound that suits her shrugged-off come-ons. The shifts don’t always land: Opener “Cookiee & the Monsters (Turn Me Up)” tries on a Rico Nasty-style emo backdrop, complete with overworked guitar riffs. The looped strings on “Violin” fare better, as Kawaii reels off a mile-a-minute verse: “I hit the bank then I cash out/Same way I hit the booth and I lash out,” she raps, giving proof in the tenacious performance.
Titled after the artist’s given name, Vanice is also intended to reveal more facets of her personality alongside the self-assured floor-fillers; the album is “the root to all of this... who I am outside of being Cookiee Kawaii,” she explained in a statement. Yet for all of its delightful, shape-shifting blasts of Jersey club, the record doesn’t stretch so far in its lyrics, which remain firmly in a bossed-up mode that’s less interested in introspection. As a magnetic party-starter, Vanice clearly succeeds, but there’s room for the personality who created these songs to animate them, too.

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Sharper songwriting, unbridled vocal performances, and more austere industrial textures give Luis Vasquez’s fifth album a new level of depth and candor.

Exister

With 2018’s Criminal, Luis Vasquez fully committed to the industrial sounds he’d long buried under his hissing, reverb-drenched post-punk. The artist better known as the Soft Moon first brought these elements to the surface on his third album, 2015’s Deeper, where he mixed mechanical darkwave into the droning, watery palette of his earlier releases. His style owes a clear debt to Nine Inch Nails, and his lyrics, which can be cringe-inducing at times, instantly transport former teen goths back to their angsty past. Over the last seven years, his push into industrial terrain has imbued these screeds of disdain and violence with body-rocking, ear-gripping urgency.
But this goth aesthetic isn’t just a phase, mom: Vasquez has carried it into adulthood precisely because so much of his adolescent trauma remains unresolved. Criminal’s “Like a Father” was about his absent dad, and on the follow-up Exister, he puts his whole family in the spotlight. Here, he cautiously pulls the curtain back while deepening his foundation in industrial noise and abrasion. This reinforced commitment to the genre partially stems from his new place of residence: After Criminal, Vasquez relocated from his longtime home of Berlin to the town of Joshua Tree, California, much closer to his hometown of Oakland. It was there that he could record at full volume without bothering any neighbors for the first time, so he added live drums to the mix, pushed his voice outside of his comfort zone, and wrote his most forceful arrangements yet. Exister is his strongest work to date, even if revisiting his troubled past isn’t ridding him of his bleeding-heart, spiked-sleeve lyricism.
On previous records, Vasquez usually delivered his lyrics with a sneer, within roughly the same low-pitched half-octave; his under-the-breath singing style conveyed self-loathing, but rarely righteous anger. By expanding his vocal range on Exister, his stories swell in intensity. “I’m starting to become/My other self/Again,” he growls in a pitch-shifted baritone on “Monster,” right before reaching into a new, higher register that lands with striking severity. “And I’m sorry for the lies/I told you so,” he sings, staccato synth stabs evoking a transformation from an ordinary person into an untamable beast. By the track’s end, he’s all but screaming. Where he was once content to whisper as though he was guarding dark secrets, he’s now unafraid to demand attention.
Vasquez paints his past more clearly on Exister. He’s said that the album partially stems from trying to reconcile his family trauma once and for all, experiencing a “roller coaster of conflicts” with his mom, and uncovering buried secrets that caused him new pain. “Mother, will you ever let me in?” he asks on “Answers.” It’s the most directly he’s ever addressed the wounds that surround his decade-plus career; here, his voice is conversational rather than defeated and tight to the chest, which was often his default on previous records. Atop the pummeling industrial groove of “Become the Lies,” his falsetto embodies his father and the ghosts he left behind: “Won’t be long/You know, son/Once I’m gone/You’ll know.” It’s shockingly heartrending for a song this cold and austere.
There are still some unimaginative turns of phrase, like “Burn my soul away” and “My face is gone, now I’m faceless” on “Sad Song” and “Face Is Gone.” In these moments, his production does the heavy lifting. “Face Is Gone” is a tornado of tumbling synths and clattering percussion, among the steeliest Soft Moon compositions to date. “The Pit” is a moshing anthem, Vasquez’s first outright venture into industrial techno. The song is entirely instrumental, minus a few “oohs” and “aahs,” and it’s so ballistic and pitch-black that he doesn’t need words to express his agony. After a brief pause toward the end of the song, the music returns, this time more distorted and convulsive. Vasquez has taken a deep breath, composed himself, stared his past right in the eye, and projected the turmoil outward.
Exister is home to the Soft Moon’s first-ever guest features—it seems that Vasquez has finally learned to call in help when he needs to remove himself from his subject matter. The pop-punk musician fish narc gnashes his teeth on “Him,” a throbbing darkwave number that trembles with anxiety. Vasquez lets out his most bloodcurdling shout ever near the start of “Unforgiven,” and Special Interest’s Alli Logout continues to seethe with rage, as synths and drum machines ricochet off each other. Inviting guests into the fold is a huge step for a longtime solo artist who has previously distanced himself from the world; alongside his sharper songwriting and unrestrained performances, it’s a sign that he’s ready to welcome others into his healing process. By opening up the pit, he’s opening his heart, too.


The experimental rapper from Richmond, Virginia raps, speaks, and sings over a strange amalgamation of beat sculptures, glitchy melodies, and found audio. The effect is dizzying and alluring.

Seeds, Thy Divine Thresher

If the music that 38Kea makes can be broadly qualified as hip-hop, then it should probably be consigned to the wilder, stranger regions of that expansive territory. Throughout Seeds, Thy Divine Thresher, 38Kea raps, speaks, and sings over a strange amalgamation of beat sculptures, glitchy melodies, and found audio. Sometimes he’ll muse over a deconstructed ’90s golden age beat, while other times he’ll sing along to an elongated rock melody. His music is more concerned with the individual raw materials rather than what they might add up to. It may be ironic to call this heavily altered electronic music elemental, but that’s what it is: Beats are neglected for passages of improvised drum machines, and rapping devolves into muttered statements about the incoherence of the world. Though it may sometimes resemble an unruly sprawl, Seeds, Thy Divine Thresher contains gems of clarity for the patient listener.
The album opens with spoken word by Retta Vendetta who provides a statement of purpose over a gently distorted jazz piano: “They want us to sell ourselves/Just so they can buy us back/But I don’t think I’m with that.” 38Kea is fully aware of the commodification of contemporary art (perhaps contemporary life as well), but his response is to fully isolate himself in the raw potentiality of the process of creation. A song like “Fill the Cup Up” gets its power from continual misdirection: From its title to its sample of a cup literally being filled, you might expect a party track, but instead, you get a contemplative synthetic drum stunner filled with almost quiet rhymes. Over a battery of cut-up vocals, 38Kea mixes satirical commentary (“Niggas in the system always eating up the grub”) with political critique (“They oversee the killings/Counting up they billions”), casting a side-eye both at society while also recognizing that we are all too eager to lap it up when we aren’t criticizing it. It makes complete sense that the song ends with a sample of Donald Trump trying to denigrate the Black Lives Matter movement: “You remember pigs in a blanket, fry them like bacon.” It’s presented with the understanding that no caricature could be as warped as the original.
38Kea’s response to being made into a consumable product is to hide, using a series of sounds as cover. It’s a risky proposition because his occlusion may seem needlessly cryptic; to put it more simply, there’s always the possibility of noise negating what you say because no one can understand what on earth you’re talking about. The heavy instrumental of a song like “Brutalaton the Murderer” (produced by collaborator Jak3) envelops 38Kea’s words in reverbed guitar and ambient static. Mood is as important here as lyrics—maybe even more so. When you do hear words, it feels like glancing at droplets of rain in a storm, you almost wonder if they would be relevant to anyone else besides you. 38Kea refuses to get specific even as he tells a narrative: “Brutalaton did do heinous wrongs to tell upon such crimes I would name/But that would make the story hella long/I must make room to harp to you about the other side of the dark moon/Far beneath the weeds, Brutalaton indeed did have seeds.” It’s uninteresting for him to give you the rap sheet of a killer, but he’s still interested in beginnings.
This focus can be somewhat unnerving if you want clear answers, but 38Kea manages to make the search stimulating. Part of this comes from the sheer versatility of the production, with help from collaborators Lampgod (aka Loretta Aberdeen) and Jak3, 38Kea gets abstract. They move from doomed boom bap (“Legacy” and “The Power Inherent”) to pitch-shifted blues (“God Bless the Child”) with ease, as if they laugh at the idea of placing these sounds into separate categories. Combining this experimentation with whimsical reflections on growth might seem self-indulgent, but this rhizomatic tendency has a point. On “Spliff in Hand,” this is illustrated by the opening chorus (“Take the seeds and watch them grow so tall”) and from 38Kea’s closing lines (“Can’t stop them populating/Populating seeds/Populating seeds”). He lingers on the smallest parts of the whole, and his hope is generated by their potential. You can’t stop him from becoming enamored with a particular line or repeated drum pattern any more than you can stop a plant from winding its way to the light. It’s his nature.

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Dave Cloud was a cult artist in Nashville, playing the raging id to Nashville's massive ego: the wild, demented offspring chained in the basement, never spoken of in polite company. Singing in a low, grainy voice that sounds like Captain Beefheart, Cloud played garage rock and noise as though the Sonics and Sonic Youth were the same band. Today Is the Day surveys his brief recording career.

Dave Cloud & The Gospel of Power: Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away

Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away

During the day, Dave Cloud read books to the visually impaired for the Nashville Talking Library. At night, however, he preached the gospel of rock'n'roll at small venues around town, with his crack-backing band the Gospel of Power in tow. Singing in a low, grainy voice that sounds like Captain Beefheart, Cloud played garage rock and noise as though the Sonics and Sonic Youth were the same band, adding drone and distortion to his three-minute rave-ups and pop tunes. His guitar usually sported only one string, two if he was feeling adventurous, and onstage he transmogrified into the raging id to Nashville's massive ego: the wild, demented offspring chained in the basement, never spoken of in polite company.
Cloud's handful of records comprise a modest catalog that barely sold in the U.S. but established him as something of a hero in Scandinavia. There is a strong you had to be there, man aspect to artists like Cloud, whose charisma is most intense onstage and yet whose live shows don't always translate to YouTube clips or vinyl. And yet, even without the secondhand stories of onstage shenanigans, there is a great deal to admire in his brand of grouty garage rock, from his rusted-tailpipe vocals to the Gospel of Power's grimy reimaginings of '60s pop riffs and grooves.
Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away surveys the breadth of Cloud's relatively brief recording career. He may have started performing at local record stores back in the '70s and his previous band the Psychotic Night Auditors may have been banned for life from the Springwater, but he finally released his debut album in 1999, followed by three more studio albums, one compilation, and a live album recorded just down I-40 at GonerFest in Memphis. Rather than mapping out the development of his sound over 16 tracks (27 on the digital version), Today Is the Day instead reveals an artist who had already refined his aesthetic and had utmost confidence in its viability over the years. In fact, he makes that small patch of garage rock sound unreasonably large: "Party Doll" sounds like Buddy Holly back from the dead, playing guitar until his hands literally fall off, while the title track layers his paranoid ramblings into a kind of incantatory warning that picks up where Napoleon XIV left off.
We've heard songs like "Bimbo" and "400 Girls" before, reiterations of omnivorous male sexuality that innervated early rock'n'roll but soon became a tired ritual, a means of oppression rather than liberation. But there's something so exaggerated in Cloud's delivery that the songs sound like parodies: hetero-dude desire exploded to Tex Avery proportions. Cloud sings so often about unattainable women that romantic longing becomes the de facto theme of this collection, undermining the jokiness of "Thieving Love Bandit" and "Damn Damn Damn Damn" and suggesting a very real sense of loneliness motivating these songs.
Today Is the Day That They Take Me Away is an epitaph for an unusual career, because Dave Cloud died earlier this year, age 58, of melanoma. He never achieved the fame and fortune many believed was his due, but his true destiny was to be Nashville's glorious cult icon. He obviously relished the role, and this affectionate tribute reveals an artist who managed—amazingly enough—to remake rock'n'roll in his own image.


The inexhaustible compilation series reaches the pot of gold at the end of Rainbow Capitalism with a bulging 84-track compendium for Pride. Even a cynical corporate package can’t quash the music’s joy.

Various Artists: NOW That’s What I Call Pride

NOW That’s What I Call Pride

Who is the I who calls this Pride? Originally, the phrase “Now that’s what I call music” appeared on an antique poster advertising Danish bacon, written in the voice of a pig listening to a squawking hen. Then, it was British media mogul Richard Branson, who saw the poster and borrowed its sentiment for the long-running compilation series. The annual compendium of mainstream hits began in 1983 and runs to this day, as does the American version that launched in 1998. NOW’s authority is popularity, and that’s part of its appeal: If the market supports a track, on it goes. People around the world have bought some 250 million copies of NOW compilations. The albums have topped the U.S. Billboard charts 19 times. In the flagship series, the I is a kind of we.
At times, the I became political. The American series embraced popular right-wing movements like evangelical Christianity (NOW That’s What I Call Faith) and nationalism (NOW That’s What I Call the USA: The Patriotic Country Collection, which culminates with country music’s own Triumph of the Will, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.”). This summer, whether as atonement or a pot of gold at the end of Rainbow Capitalism, I is proud.
NOW That’s What I Call Pride comes out in two ways: an 18-track U.S. version, and a bulging UK edition with 84 tracks spread across four CDs. Neither claim to be NOW That’s What I Call the LGBTQ+ Community. It’s about “celebrating and paying tribute to Pride,” per the press release, an orientation that allows the UK edition to slide in artists like the Weeknd as allies despite their iffy history. It includes undisputed allies, like Liza Minnelli, feeling her “Love Pains” in collaboration with the gay heroes Pet Shop Boys, who offer their revolutionary cover of “Go West” by Village People. With Village People’s own ode to cruising, “Y.M.C.A.,” positioned between Baccara’s tantalizing “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie” and Chaka Khan’s masterpiece “I’m Every Woman,” the three-way is a good time.
The sounds of celebration fill the fourth UK disc, which concludes on a truly fabulous run of the Scissor Sisters’ aptly-titled “Filthy/Gorgeous,” CeCe Peniston’s eternal “Finally,” and Ultra Naté’s “Free,” a pledge of allegiance to a truly queer nation. Tributes arrive on the third and strongest disc, which centers queer saints like Divine (“You Think You’re a Man,” a song that eviscerates toxic masculinity with a shit-eating grin), Grace Jones (“I Need a Man,” still voracious), and Patrick Cowley and Sylvester with their ribald, rhetorical “Do You Wanna Funk?” George Michael’s homage to public sex, “Outside” is, to this day, the fiercest retort to homophobia to ever make the pop charts.
The other UK discs plumb those pop charts for fresher fruit. Disc two’s run of Miley Cyrus’ “Midnight Sky” into Christine and the Queens’ “Tilted” into Fletcher and Hayley Kiyoko’s “Cherry” into Kim Petras’ “Coconuts” seeds a new queer canon. Disc one struggles, with Lady Gaga’s earnest but counterrevolutionary paean to essentialism “Born This Way” leading into Kylie Minogue’s “Better the Devil You Know,” which is a perfect song but nothing to do with feeling proud. Both Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin have legendary queer anthems, but their “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” goes out of its way to assert that feminism is for opposite-sex lovers. Read the room.
Which brings us to the conundrum of the compilation, distilled by the American single-disc version. A thesis could be written on the differences: Where the UK has bangers, the U.S. has ballads. Apart from supercharged entries by Frankie Goes to Hollywood and a censored Lil Nas X, the U.S. disc privileges this country’s tenderqueer longing for no kink at pride, swapping out George Michael’s camp house “Outside” for the fierce self-determination of “Freedom! ’90.” There seems to be not a trans person in the lineup. And while a Pride flag flaps on the UK cover, the front cover of the U.S. version is a series of rainbow-colored hearts, neither asking nor telling but relying on IYKYK.
Perhaps this is by design. As the conservative takeover of America continues, a phone in a Florida classroom playing NOW’s anodyne Katy Perry ballad “Roar” might violate “Don’t Say Gay” laws. UK’s NOW includes Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down,” and now is the moment when I mention that Universal Music Group, Swift’s publisher and label, distributes the U.S. version. UMG exceeded the maximum allowable political donations to national embarrassment and Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn’s 2024 campaign. In Swift’s 2020 documentary, Miss Americana, Swift describes Blackburn as “a homophobic racist.” This is accurate. “I think it is so frilly and spineless of me to stand on stage and go, ‘Happy Pride Month, you guys’ and then not say this, when someone’s literally coming for their neck,” Swift said then. She does not appear on the U.S. compilation.
It’s easy—realistic, even—to be cynical about all this. I, if not I, am guilty of it here. But if we believe in music, that pleasure is political and representation matters, that art changes and challenges its makers and audience, then we must surely marvel at this album’s existence. The UK is roiling with TERFs. The U.S. is terrorized by gun-toting bigots. And a multinational conglomerate has seen fit to stock shelves with a textbook of queer cultural production. The pinnacles are breathtaking, and none are higher than the ecstatic revelation of the late Peter Rauhofer and his Club 69 mix of Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All.” Over nearly 12 minutes, we hear the best-case back-and-forth between white gay men and Black women; in the swish and boom of his circuit house and the call and response of her miraculous voice there are churches and closets, dancefloors and doctor’s offices, partners and friends. Only the dead of spirit could deny finding its strength in love. Or being given its sense of pride, even. Who is this for? Whoever needs it.