Let me come out of the gate stating the obvious: The summer of 1996 was a fucking long time ago ...

The Meadowlands

Let me come out of the gate stating the obvious: The summer of 1996 was a fucking long time ago. I was fresh out of high school then, living with my parents in the outlying suburbs of Minneapolis, trying to craft an embryonic Pitchfork into something respectable without any prior writing experience. In the throes of that disgustingly humid, buggy summer in which it seemed I would one day die as I'd lived-- navigating the road construction obstacle course on Hwy 5 and despising an oppressive day job, yet forever hopeful of some distant, supernatural delivery-- Secaucus was sunwarmed bliss, the infinite pleasure zone I couldn't stop hitting.
Bursting immediately at its seams with the serrated dual guitar blast of "Yellow Number Three" and "Built in Girls"' steam-engine roar, Secaucus welcomes with a warm immediacy rare in even the most revered pop treasures, and a density whose every layer hides another secret synth melody, jagged hook or vocal harmony. The depth of realization in this record is unparalleled: every angle is perfected. Its surplus of pristine pop hooks and energetic discharge rivals the best of Built to Spill, Guided by Voices, Pavement, or any other heralded indie rock band, and tracks like the anthemic, accelerating "I've Made Enough Friends", the wistful malaise of "Won't Get Too Far", the hurtling "Surprise, Honeycomb", and the emotive high-school slowdance number "Jane Fakes a Hug" reveal proof in spades: Beyond their euphoric harmonies, melodic rapture, and marblemouthed vocals lie some of the greatest lyrics the genre's seen yet. Respectively, these songs contain tales of a nationwide murder rampage ("Being good made me burst/ The killing got worse/ It almost got fun"), a lovestruck abandonment of social lives ("A rush of wonder/ This charm we're under might last/ Are we too hoping/ Our years are showing and fast"), a hopeless high school graduate who fears he won't live up to his father's achievements ("I can't believe I'm grown/ None of my friends live at home/ Not since fall"), and the harrowing play-by-play of a brutal divorce ("Our oaths, our realty, a good job, a husband/ A husband or what/ Christ, Jane, I'm not/ I never was").
But as long ago as all of that was for me, for The Wrens, it's been an eternity. The band always made themselves accessible via Internet, and as the years passed, I would frequently email to wonder when a follow-up was due-- and even as I knew they had respectable careers and families, I didn't expect it would take seven years to see release. I also hadn't known that, at the height of their 1996 U.S. tour, all promotion for Secaucus was, allegedly, pulled in a huff by Grass Records labelhead Alan Melzter when the band dared question a million-dollar contract he'd tried to strongarm them into signing. It was just another in a long string of sloppy breakups that would eventually sour the band on the music industry. After endless reassurances that their third album would be out "in a few months, we promise," hope began to fade that the record would ever see light of day at all. Then came word that they had actually finished the record, and-- to celebrate and prevent them from further second-guessing-- were holding a party to destroy the master tapes.
The package finally arrived from the band themselves: an advance, unmastered CD-R labeled The Meadowlands with makeshift artwork and tentative song titles. Excitedly, I threw it into the car stereo, and waited. Waiting. Waiting. What the fuck happened to these guys? It had been seven years, sure-- no one was expecting anything as powerful as Secaucus from middle-agers, but to say The Wrens had mellowed would almost be a joke: There was little trace of the youthful, resonant joy or ecstatic intensity of Secaucus. This was a completely different band. These Wrens were defeated, miserable, hopeless, and-- in their own words-- exhausted.
Disappointed, I shelved the disc and stubbornly refused to listen to the final pressing, even after it arrived at the Pitchfork P.O. box loving wrapped in Tiffany-blue ribbon and paper. Which was about when everyone I knew began raving. People were stunned at my reaction: Surely we'd just heard different albums? And we had, but upon finally listening to the finished version after heavy persuasion from friends, it began to make more sense. This was a completely different band, defeated, miserable, and exhausted, absolutely, but not hopeless. Defying the unwritten rule that any band breaking a five-plus year hiatus must return lethargic and sapped of inspiration before retreating again to obscurity, here The Wrens prove themselves even more shockingly relevant than before-- they have survived extinction, and, fully inspired, they are telling the tale: The Meadowlands is a crushing confessional, documenting every disappointment of the past seven years, every difficult breakup, every bad gig.
If The Wrens were lyrically powerful when writing from third-person perspectives about trivial fantasies on Secaucus, they're devastating delivering their own personal failures, hardships and resignations. The breakup tracks are the least of it, and even those are masochistically autobiographical with recurring characters and story arcs bridging songs. "She Sends Kisses" opens on an acoustic strum and reflective accordion, increasingly piling on layers of instrumentation (electric guitar, drums, piano, vocal harmonies) while Charles Bissell reflectively croons, "A sophomore at Brown/ She worked lost and found/ I put your face on her all year." "Ex-Girl Collection" is upbeat on the surface and conflict beneath: "Ann slams in/ Another lightning round begins.../ 'Charles, I found out/ Wipe that smile off your mouth/ I think it's tell-me time.'" "13 Months in 6 Minutes" is somber and damp-eyed, dewy guitars drenched in wet reverb and whispered vocals at the end of a relationship: "I'm a footnote at best/ I envy who comes next."
But the first-hand accounts of the band's own struggles are what really hit hard, particularly for listeners who've waited the full seven years or who have intimate familiarity with similar situations. "Everyone Choose Sides"-- backed by crusty guitar fighting determinedly through tape falloff, electric piano, and Jerry MacDonnell's insistent, urgent drumming-- is a notable album peak: "Bored and rural-poor at 35/ I'm the best 17-year-old ever.../ We're losing sand/ A Wrens' ditch battle plan.../ Everyone choose sides/ The whole to-do of what to do for money/ Poorer or not this year and hell's the difference." And then there's "This Boy Is Exhausted", which blends the record's brightest hooks with its bleakest lines: Over two layers of blaring guitars (one pulsing, the other jangling), more of MacDonnell's colossal drumwork, and resolute background vocals, Bissell's hardened vocal buzzes: "I can't write what I know/ It's not worth writing/ I can't tell a hit from hell from one sing-along.../ But then once a while/ We'll play a show that makes it worthwhile."
The Wrens are now old enough to be considered indie rock's elder statesmen (their ages range from 33 to 40), and in trading the adolescent kick of Secaucus for ripened resignation, meticulous refinement for crippling maturation, they have realized their magnum opus-- the only album to eclipse Broken Social Scene's staggering You Forgot It in People on my year-end list. The Meadowlands exemplifies what every fan hopes for when a band announces a reunion or returns from more than a half-decade of silence: that they might have somehow improved exponentially each year they hid from the limelight, resulting in a payoff so cultivated it could be called their defining achievement by consensus. It's the reason we continue to harbor mixed feelings about a Pixies comeback: odds are, it ends in disappointment-- it always does-- but The Meadowlands is that one example left standing to offer a glimmer of hope. Black Francis, tomorrow this could be you.


Phish’s instinctive new studio album is a pleasant surprise, a small joy, and an unlikely course correction.

Sigma Oasis

Something interesting happens halfway through “Everything’s Right,” a 12-minute track on Sigma Oasis. For a while, it’s everything you might expect from a Phish record nearly 40 years into their career: an intentionally mind-numbing chorus (“Everything’s right/So just hold tight”) set to a melody that cycles between sunny major chords like a beach ball infinitely bobbing through a crowd of outstretched arms. It’s light and goofy—sorta funky. But then it shifts. Around the five-minute mark, after Trey Anastasio finishes a polite vamp on the word “alright,” he kicks off a guitar solo. Page McConnell follows on the organ. Soon, the whole band is in on it, listening intently to one another and changing shape, one note at a time. Suddenly, Phish is jamming, and you’re right there with them.
On a studio record by this band, it sounds like a total breakthrough. For longer than most groups have been around, the accepted wisdom was that Phish were unable to capture their spontaneous energy off the stage. Combined with their unremarkable songwriting, this failure has resulted in a discography that feels secondary to their actual legacy, best understood through decades of bootlegs, and even better by attending one of their inventive, Odyssean live shows. Maybe their last album, 2016’s obnoxious Big Boat, was rock bottom, the moment they knew something had to change. Maybe veteran producer Bob Ezrin, who departed after helming their past few releases, was to blame. Maybe Anastasio’s solo detour with Ghosts of the Forest was an actual creative reckoning as depicted in 2019’s fawning documentary, Between Me and My Mind. Whatever the case, Sigma Oasis is a pleasant surprise, a small joy, an unlikely course correction.
Its success is also the result of several smart creative decisions. The first was to bring these songs on the road for a couple years before solidifying them. The practice shows; these performances are lived-in and confident, at turns adventurous and refined. The second good idea was to limit the tracklist to just nine songs, all contributions from Anastasio and lyricists Tom Marshall and Scott Herman, with none of the failed experiments and pastiches that drag down nearly all their other albums. The third good idea was to keep the sessions brief and in-house: the whole album was recorded in just one week at Anastasio’s Vermont studio. The plan was to rehearse for their upcoming tour but they quickly realized there was something worth documenting. They trusted their first takes. They had fun.
Sigma Oasis cruises in the relaxed, muted groove this band has settled into over the past few years. None of these songs are new territory for them—the crunchy escapism of the title track, the rock opera Hallmark card of “A Life Beyond the Dream”—but they top anything they’ve recorded in the past decade-and-a-half by capturing their comfortable dynamic with a positivity that radiates from every note. Along the way, they nod to the stylistic diversions that pop up in their live shows: intricate prog (“Mercury”), Zappa freakouts (“Thread”), singing-in-the-shower balladry (“Leaves”), sci-fi atmospherics (the final moments of “Everything’s Right”). You can listen from beginning to end and get a sense of the buoyant, utopian universe they create when they’re playing at their best. And as jam band culture seeps into indie music and beyond, it’s a more concise introduction to their current state of euphoria than, say, a 36-disc box set.
Of course, there will always be people for whom Phish are irredeemable—the punchline in the great joke that is music fandom. Maybe you will tap out by the third time Anastasio tells you that “the tomb of the red queen is painted in vermilion” in “Mercury.” Maybe it’ll be when Page grabs the mic to sing a sad little verse near the beginning of “Leaves.” Maybe it will be during the breakdown in “Thread” that sounds like the house band at a suburban planetarium soundtracking their Halloween light show. These moments are ridiculous—but there’s also triumph in them. Part of the joy in Sigma Oasis is how Phish have learned to bridge their absurd side and their tasteful side, acknowledging that their best ideas have always lurked just one measure ahead of their dumbest ones. Credit also goes to Vance Powell’s production that seems more influenced by soundboard recordings than the slick, big-budget rock albums that this band will never successfully make.
Not everything works. The studio version of “Mercury” fails to live up to the marathon renditions they’ve been playing on tour. And at 11 minutes, “Thread” closes the album by overstaying its welcome with a lurching, menacing coda that punctuates an otherwise uplifting record like a question mark. Plus, there are those lyrics I mentioned earlier from “Everything’s Right” and plenty of others that wouldn’t fare much better printed out of context. But these are minor complaints. “When we recorded the album, we didn’t plan to release it this way,” Phish announced after debuting it with little warning during an April Fools livestream. “But today, because of the environment we’re all in, it just feels right.” This deep into their career, most bands could do a lot worse than sticking together, looking inward, and following their instincts. The rest, they have time to figure out.


Luke Wyatt, the Brooklyn-based Va. transplant behind Torn Hawk, releases an astonishing amount of music, some of it beat-oriented, some of it close to the VHS nostalgia feel of chillwave, much of it accompanied by collaged YouTube clips. On his newest effort, things don't lead where you expect them to on first glance.

Through Force of Will

Tracks by Torn Hawk draw on various strains of nostalgia, chopping up thoughts and feelings into a mazy whole that inhabits a ground somewhere between sincerity and amusement. Luke Wyatt, the Brooklyn-based Virginia transplant who is the man behind the name, puts an astonishing amount of music out into the world, some of it beat-oriented, some of it edging close to the VHS nostalgia feel of chillwave. L.I.E.S., Rush Hour, and now Not Not Fun are among the many labels to have released his work. Film plays an important part in Wyatt's world—a recent Rising feature noted how his stepmother operated a movie theater, his music is often complemented by a mish-mash of grainy YouTube clips heavy on collage, and his song titles frequently reference the silver screen ("Born to Win (Life After Ghostbusters)", "Damage with Jeremy Irons").
Wyatt calls his experiments in the visual realm "video mulching," most of which consist of a barrage of imagery of an 80s hue. Those clips fall somewhere between the late-night disorientation of John C. Reilly's Steve Brule character and Daniel Lopatin's experiments with sound and vision under his SunsetCorp moniker. Lopatin took tiny loops of 80s music and set them to fuzzed-out visuals, drawing on two fascinations he undoubtedly shares with the Torn Hawk project. Dire Straits, Don Henley, and Christopher Cross have all been sampled by Wyatt, and his off-the-wall work includes "Sundays CD, Skipping" (based around a glitched CD by indie pop icons the Sundays) and a track titled "The Music You Hear at Sea World and Never Forget".
The humor has been dialed down a notch on Through Force of Will, the latest Torn Hawk transmission, although the feeling of looking back to utopian visions of the past is firmly intact. What sets this apart from most chillwave is the strong sweep of romantic feeling that flows through Wyatt's mesh of guitar and electronics—there's palpable emotion here amid the tinny drum machines and twists of industrial synth. It doesn't all come out that way, especially when "Streets on Fire" begins with a hollowed-out drum sound that could have been ripped from a peak Jam & Lewis production. But Wyatt frequently uses his guitar tone, aligned somewhere between the dreamy strum of Mark McGuire and the type of squelchy soloing found on longer Spacemen 3 tracks, to give his music a vital sense of yearn.
Torn Hawk's emotional impact is offset by the visual package, which is all rugged photos of Wyatt, who looks more stud-like than his tender playing might suggest, especially when he's deep into the intricate picking on a track like "To Overthrow". But Through Force of Will partly works because of its intentional signal jamming, where things don't lead where you expect them to on first glance, with Wyatt guiding his audience through the drone-y ambiance of "Hutchison" and ending up in the altered-states pop of "Blindsided". The VHS aesthetics may have a touch of over-familiarity about them, but there's just enough in Wyatt’s beefcake poses to suggest another twist being wrung out of the template, giving his persona the air of an alien outsider invited to the drugs party.
It's in the parameters Wyatt throws around this project that he breaks away from the vagaries of chillwave, substituting ambiguity with personality. Or, as he put it himself in an interview: "I'm not going to restrict my impulses and make stuff in an anonymous fashion with some sort of minimal cover and numbered track titles." The only counterpoint to that is in the sheer weight of material being released, which can make it hard to get a handle on who he is and where he's going. There's already a follow-up to this record due imminently, and doubtless more will surface. But Wyatt clearly delights in setting things up in contrast to one another, particularly when polar opposites are involved, which gives him an incredibly broad field in which to play around. Somehow he's able to retain a sense of self even when looping his material over the blandest strains of 80s rock, and that's where he really succeeds, in defining a pallett that's recognizably his that concurrently allows him to go wandering in boundless directions.


No Age's strikingly spare third album proves that all the reverb, feedback, and velocity of their past work were hardly afterthoughts or subversive tactics to disguise pop songs. For the most part, An Object consists of potential rock songs denied everything they need to actually rock*.*

An Object

An Object is protest music. Though their crusade is more principled than political, No Age employ a common countercultural tactic on their third proper LP, reappropriating a derogatory term: what are you calling an object? This is art, with an intrinsic value that cannot be quantified or commoditized and society is worse off when any record is treated differently. But the irony is that it's a clever marketing tactic whether intentional or not; No Age’s music, successful as it’s been, never tells their whole story. Whether it’s the Smell, the T-shirts, the "planned contradictory action," Dean Spunt’s Post-Present Medium label, or anything else bearing their imprimatur, the band’s always been a multimedia affair. They are a bundle of righteous affiliations, “lifestyle music” for people who shudder at the term because their lifestyle is an ethos, upholding certain ideas about DIY, local scenes and anti-corporatism.
When speaking to us earlier this year, Randy Randall promised a total teardown and the time did feel right for the duo to sell high on the “dream-punk” sound they’ve cultivated since Weirdo Rippers. Strikingly spare compared to their previous releases, An Object ensures the shortest distance between the listener and the songs, but with an idealistic corollary that still momentarily shifts the focus away from the music-- with Sub Pop’s blessing, the duo packaged and shipped the record with their own four hands. But what’s left of No Age when you take away the “dream-“ and “-punk”? An Object proves that all the reverb, shrieking noise, and velocity of their past work were hardly afterthoughts or subversive tactics to disguise pop songs. They were essential and the actual mechanics of songwriting-- melody, harmony, structure, instrumental chops-- are exposed on An Object as something that’s far down the list of No Age’s strengths.
You sense that in the three year hiatus between Everything in Between and now, the songs came quickly and most of the time was spent painstakingly turning them inside out-- to mute the drums or excise them completely, use feedback as a backdrop rather than an overlay, to turn rhythms into melody, bass into treble. This is the album that might’ve better earned the title Everything in Between, as the songs are composed of scraps, MacGyver tricks achieved with contact mics, bass guitars, and doctored amps. Occasionally, the effort manifests in notable progress. “An Impression” has a novel rhythmic swing that could actually pass for dancehall and the miniature bumps and bleeps bleed into sighing strings-- it’s No Age’s most typical “pretty” moment, something that could sway people who don’t seek out beauty in harmonic feedback.
But for the most part, An Object consists of potential rock songs denied everything they need to actually rock*.* The minimalism doesn’t make for a fighting trim No Age-- they sound emaciated, subject to a crash diet equally fueled by asceticism and stubbornness. None of which is helped by the clammy production, which casts a green-grey, sickly pallor over An Object rather than clarity. On past records, Spunt’s rigid vocals could most kindly be described as “effective in context,” but freed from the obligations of beating the shit out of his drums, he shrinks in the spotlight. There aren’t vocal melodies on An Object, so much as 11 iterations of one note being budged until it moves in the slightest one way or the other. Meanwhile, Randall forgoes riffs for granular, ephemeral textures and rather than building tension through restraint, the lack of rhythmic, tonal or melodic variation causes the album’s midsection to drone more than their past work which intended to be drone music.
No Age attempt to compensate by making An Object their most lyrically direct album, and at the outset, most of Spunt’s words are pointed towards “you.” You know who “you” are-- “Who do you think you are/ trying so hard/ to make that stage/ but it’s not made that way,” “When I see you/ underneath your lies,” “You’re a broken leg/ a knife with no blade.” It’s “us vs. the man, maaaan” boilerplate for sure, though the generality can work in the favor of a band that’s always had a cause but not much of a rallying cry. When Spunt sings “I won’t be your generator/ you get no power from me,” odds are it’s a bird flip to corporations who co-opt underground art, gentrify scenes, and buy out idealism, or whatever. But if you don’t know the first thing about No Age’s extracurriculars, “I Won’t Be Your Generator” is a multi-purpose rager at parents, bosses, boyfriends, girlfriends, whatever’s harshing your buzz. Much like ditching the drums, it’s an obdurate artistic move that’s effective three minutes at a time. But when a band that’s taken up the role of indie’s moral compass gets stuck in the same black and white thinking on “No Ground” and “C’mon, Stimmung”, the pervasive “you” becomes a strawman version of actual No Age enemies like Kings of Leon and Walmart-- certainly worthy of derision, but too big to bother fighting back in a way that might put those principles to the test.
As An Object trudges forward, a strange and welcome change slowly occurs; you can sense No Age growing fatigued enough to let their guard down. After spending the first half of An Object raging against shadowy power brokers, they’ve retained their autonomy only to find out they can’t outrun their own shadows. “Running From A-Go-Go” is the first point where the drab tone matches the mood; when Spunt complains about “bullshit on the stereo,” he’s probably not taking shots at Imagine Dragons or Macklemore or anyone else specific. It’s just a mundane acknowledgement of a touring musician’s crippling boredom, abject, incapacitating loneliness and how inadequate the moral high ground from earlier can be against emotional encroachment--  “There’s no escaping when it pays your way/ I tell myself it’s one more day/ and one more night alone again.”
On Nouns, Spunt shouted “with passion, it’s true!” So does the pervasive disillusionment of An Object make it false? Of course, not-- the subjects at hand are taken straight from Spunt and Randall’s lives, they've never dealt in fictional songwriting. But perhaps it’s too real, as you get the sense that the hot-button topics that can sustain a punk rocker through their 20s-- art vs. commerce, stability vs. freedom, underground vs. mainstream-- eventually grow tiresome and repetitive and best left to those who have the time and energy for endless debate. That doesn’t mean these conversations shouldn’t happen and perhaps An Object can spark a few. But as a musical document more utile and enjoyable as a conversation piece than for its intended purpose of listening, An Object sadly lives up to its own name.


The Chicago band amicably parted ways with Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley after the release of 2012's Pre Language. This tougher, noisier three-song EP is far more compelling than anything from that full-length.

Kone EP

Chicago's Disappears are one of those bands that promise so much, but too often fall short of the high benchmark set by their best material. Sometimes it even feels like they're sabotaging themselves. A 2011 tour with the Psychic Paramount seemed like a great idea in theory, but the reality of trying to compete with the sheer force and invention of their touring buddies left them sounding like wimpy traditionalists. The band's 2012 album, Pre Language, didn't help matters, somehow losing the magnetic force that made the preceding Guider worthy of many repeat plays. Fortunately, changes are afoot. Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley has amicably departed from the lineup, and the band has returned to working in great breadth on "Kone", a 10-minute track that builds on the promise of "Revisiting" from Guider.
There's something old fashioned about Disappears' approach, perhaps a natural consequence of the fact that singer Brian Case has been around the block more than a few times, first with 90 Day Men and then the Ponys. This is music that comes from a place where there's no shame in trying ideas out in public view, where it's perfectly natural to arrive less-than fully formed. Kone has dropped from out of nowhere, not giving any real idea whether this is a hint of things to come, or a standalone diversion from whatever the band is plotting next. Either way, it's far more compelling than anything from Pre Language, opening up the suggestion that Disappears are fully aware that they function far better when working in repetition than they do when hacking everything down into more compact forms.
This three-track 12-inch simply offers up two versions of "Kone" and the additional "Kontakt". The version named "Kone (edit)" even ends in a locked groove, emphasizing the band's fondness for looking backward and firming up the suspicion that they're finally throwing up their hands and playing to their strengths. The main track is all air-raid siren drones, choppy guitar lines, heavily echoed vocal passages and, toward the close, a steady build of synthesized noise. It's a masterclass in control, never veering into sheer bludgeoning power, always maintaining a steady pace that helps lay out the underlying mood of unease. It goes precisely nowhere and is all the better for it; Disappears' best music sets a mood and pulls you down in it, leaving the listener suspended in a static state.
The same trick works to less effect on "Kontakt", especially when an ill-advised Duane Eddy guitar line surfaces, and the blurred version of "Kone" at the close of the EP doesn't add much to what came before. But there's an overall sense of bridges being rebuilt here, of a band renewed and galvanized for a bigger project ahead. Another album is promised later in the year, and "Kone" should be the natural launch point, a place from which to light the fuse. This is a tougher, more fully realized version of Disappears, operating where their most obvious influences (Spacemen 3, 13th Floor Elevators, Can) have propelled them somewhere instead of bearing down too heavily on their sound. They've regained some attention here. Now, they just need to capitalize on the forward momentum.


Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye’s head-spinning vocal processing and unusual fusion of influences form a well of deep feeling, even when the meaning is obscured.

Wicked City

A first encounter with the UK duo Jockstrap can seem like a dispatch from a renegade shuffle play. Here’s singer-songwriter Georgia Ellery lilting sweetly over Casiotone bossa nova; here’s producer Taylor Skye mimicking a scratched-up copy of Now That’s What I Call EDM; here are the two of them laying down vintage orchestral pop courtesy of their classmates at Guildhall, a London conservatory. There’s more than a whiff of art-school hijinks to the project—particularly when you factor in that name, a predictable talking point in the duo’s interviews. (“I like that kind of gross shock factor,” says Ellery, who often sings in a cherubic coo.) But Jockstrap don’t come off like they’re trying to prove that they’re clever. Beneath the head-spinning vocal processing and surrealist wordplay, Ellery’s songwriting is a well of deep feeling, even when the precise meaning is walled off by layers of abstraction. This is particularly true on Wicked City, their second EP, on which her voice and lyrics soar confidently forward, no matter how jagged the path that Skye blazes.
In their short time together, Jockstrap have fashioned a singular sound from an unusual fusion of influences. The two met in composition class and began trading demos, finding inspiration in the overlap between Ellery’s imagistic character studies, Skye’s dubstep roots, and their shared classical training: not so much a Venn diagram as a wadded-up Moebius strip. On their debut EP, 2018’s Love Is the Key to the City, they toyed with easy-listening strings and space-age bachelor-pad vibes, setting Ellery’s carefully rendered tales of sexual awakening to wheezy electronic lounge jazz reminiscent of James Blake’s first EPs. With “Robert,” Wicked City’s opening song, they announce a marked shift. The strings and the dulcet harmonies are gone; in their place, a lumbering hip-hop beat, part Skrillex and part SOPHIE, that’s full of stop-start changes and sudden silences. Ellery’s cryptic spoken-word bits are digitally stretched and garbled, and the Arizona rapper Stepa J. Groggs, of Injury Reserve, drops 32 bars of pure non sequitur. Even Ellery’s verses are more about sound than sense: What begins as an address to an artist acquaintance (“You’re provoking me Robert/I want to be your playmate/I want my own portrait”) devolves into pitch-shifted gibberish with choice bits (“I want to/Be the bitch, be the masochist”) jutting like rusty iron bars from a scrap heap.
“Robert” sounds virtually nothing like Jockstrap’s debut EP, but with the next song, “Acid,” they’re back to their nostalgic silver-screen fantasies—strings fluttering, Ellery’s voice softer than a mink stole. The song shifts into a melancholy waltz; the lyrics, addressed to Ellery’s brother, are as ominous as they are enigmatic, leading from images of smashed vases, acid, and blood to a couplet of chilling clarity: “What if you kill me off/Or worse, yourself?” These juxtapositions are an essential part of Jockstrap’s aesthetic, and the duo spends the rest of the EP zigging and zagging, playing up every jarring contrast.
The record’s loveliest cut, “Yellow in Green,” distills the carnal sweetness of young love into lyrical piano glissandi redolent of Debussy, all salty skin and lavender breeze. The two-part “The City” begins with just voice and piano and sheds its skin to become a gnarly, distorted hip-hop beat; the first half is a stirringly vivid love letter to the city, a rush of sensations written with all the innocence of Ellery’s coastal upbringing, while the second half is an incomprehensible tale about a bear, a beaver, and a “hideous monster,” spun out like lysergic taffy. It’s beautiful, and also bewildering. The closing “City Hell” goes for a similar kind of discombulation, but to lesser effect, building from a winsome ballad for ersatz harp into a pyrotechnic display of trap beats and guitar solo that’s about as subtle as DJ Mustard remixing Queen.
There are precedents for this in the plasti-pop tomfoolery of PC Music and the stone-faced humor of Dean Blunt; in Jockstrap’s more wistful moments, you can also hear echoes of Julia Holter’s time-traveling chamber pop, a throwback to a world before color TV. But unlike the throw-everything-at-the-wall approach of 100 gecs, a group similarly interested in clashing textures and referential supercollisions, Jockstrap have a more sparing and inviting musical sensibility. It doesn’t always work; the severity of their switchbacks can make for an exhausting listen, and they don’t always know when to rein in the excess. There’s actually a false ending in “City Hell”: a trick fade-out, a moment of silence, and then a reprise of those pinwheeling guitars and buzzing synths, as though the first four minutes of major-key bombast hadn’t been enough. Jockstrap are young—Ellery and Skye are in their fourth year of music school—and they are still finding their way. But when they nail it, as on “The City,” their first-thought-best-thought creative bursts sound not just thrilling but genuinely new. For a group so steeped in retro modes, that’s no small thing.

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


Comprised of Dieter Möbius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius of astral synth explorers Cluster and guitarist Michael Rother of Neu!, Harmonia lived, practiced, and recorded in the hamlet of Forst, Germany during their short lifetime. This boxset gathers everything the group recorded, augmenting the audio with a book of photos and other goodies. It offers the definitive portrait of the band.

Harmonia / Harmonia & Eno '76: Complete Works

Complete Works

Digging into the music of Can, Neu!, Cluster, and early Kraftwerk has become a record-collector rite of passage, but during the early '70s, when these bands were in their most active and exploratory years, very few people knew this music existed. Of the many German bands from the period that would later be called "krautrock", Harmonia, though ostensibly a "supergroup," were among the most obscure. Comprised of Dieter Möbius and Hans-Joachim Roedelius of astral synth explorers Cluster and guitarist Michael Rother of Neu!, Harmonia was less a band than a two-year-long Iron John retreat, with electronics swapped out for the customary hand drums. Living, practicing, and recording in the hamlet of Forst, Germany, Harmonia managed two full-length records in their short lifetime, and neither made a dent in the consciousness of your average German music fan. But copies of their records found their way into some famously open-eared and influential fans in the UK—Brian Eno and David Bowie, among others—and Harmonia’s music has been part of the experimental rock canon ever since.
As with many krautrock O.G.s, Harmonia’s initial standing was enhanced by the fact that their records were never easy to find, even after they were discovered by cognoscenti. That was especially true in the U.S., where their records were reissued sporadically, sometimes on dodgy labels. This heavy box set from Gronland fixes that. Gathering everything the group recorded together in one place—and it turns out to be quite a lot, with more music than they managed to release in their lifetime, including newly unearthed fragments released here as Documents 1975—and augmenting the audio with a book of photos and an essay by krautrock expert Geeta Dayal and other goodies, it offers the definitive portrait of the band. With a group as odd as Harmonia, you take all the context you can get.
Harmonia were a key krautrock band because they brought together the most familiar strands of the sound and effectively perfected the whole. Krautrock in its platonic ideal should be basically instrumental; it should should seamlessly meld electronics and rock instruments;  it should favor long, drawn-over structures over short dynamic shifts, and steady-state rhythms over syncopation. Can were too funky and had too much of an ear for pop; Neu!’s albums had jarring shifts in noise; early Kraftwerk leaned too heavily on flute and mid-period Kraftwerk was too heavy on synths; Ash Ra Tempel had a weakness for bluesy soloing, Popol Vuh changed their sound too often, and Amon Düül II were really a prog-rock band. Harmonia, in the midst of too much, was just right. And if that means their music could sometimes be pleasant and ambient instead of bold and challenging, that’s not a slight. They made virtues of control, understatement, shading, and texture.
Musik von Harmonia, the group’s 1974 debut, was a precise meeting of their constituent parts—Roedelius’ eerie beauty, Möbius’ sense of tension, Rother’s cool exploration—with each member contributing to the sound equally. It’s a shade darker and a half-turn more tense than what would follow, and was also more crudely recorded. Tracks like "Sonnenschein" and "Watussi" are already underway when we first hear them, making them feel like they’ve always existed and go on forever. __"__Dino"’s trebly rhythm brings to mind Lou Reed’s hypnotic major-chord strum in the Velvet Underground, and on top of the rhythm bed Michael Rother’s leads seem guided more than played, like he’s directing the flow of water through a maze. The meditative "Ahoi" is both futuristic and folky with its piano chords and gently plucked guitar, channeling the type of new age that taps into something ancient while warmly embracing current technology. From the beginning, Harmonia could take what sounded like an interlude and make it hold your attention for minutes on end.
If Musik von Harmonia mapped the range of everything Harmonia would ever do, 1975’s Deluxe used a more limited palette to paint a more beautiful picture. Working with master engineer Conny Plank and adding the deeper bottom end of drummer Mani Neumeier from Guru Guru, Harmonia refined their approach into a kind of shimmering pastoral dub. "Walky-Talky" is right there with Kraftwerk’s "Autobahn" and Neu!’s "Hallogallo" for the definitive smooth-humming motorway anthem; "Notre Dame" is an electro-pop update on Terry Riley in joyfully trippy "Rainbow in Curved Air" mode, and "Gollum" is a startlingly minimal and precise look ahead at the sound the Too Pure catalog would be known for two decades hence. Even when adding new wrinkles, as with the chanted vocals on the opening "Deluxe (Immer wieder)", Harmonia sound tremendously self-assured and comfortable in their sound. And their integration of something approaching proper songcraft intersected quite closely with experiments being done some distance away by the former keyboardist of Roxy Music, a young man who became enamored of Harmonia named Brian Eno.
Harmonia was pretty much always on the verge of breaking up, but not because of personal animosity; since the group was not well known, rarely played live, and was made up of three musicians who had other projects close at hand, their status was always tenuous. After Deluxe, they had no plans to continue, but Brian Eno asked to record with them and they re-grouped once more in Forst in 1976. The sessions with Eno were not released at the time, but have been re-packaged in various configurations since, and they are included here as Tracks & Traces. Eno’s presence is clear and the music is more atmospheric, feeling more like soundscapes than the low-key minimalist rock songs they band made their name with. Not surprisingly, the set also sounds a lot like the electro-acoustic work of the Rother-less Cluster & Eno, a collaboration that would extend into the late '70s over several more records. Tracks & Traces is enjoyable, but serves more as a look ahead to those records rather than something that builds on what came before.
The real heart of the box, a disc that sums up the band as well as any, is the 1974 live set. It’s both surprisingly high quality in its recording and also speaks to what made this band special. Rather than recreating tracks they had recorded for this album, they apply their music-making principles to a set of jams that are as beautiful as anything on their proper records. Thick with drones, highly repetitious, and often flat-out gorgeous, Live 1974 throbs, tumbles, pulsates, and twinkles, a gentle explosion in super slo-mo that unfolds over an hour.
Taken as a whole, The Complete Works doesn’t reveal Harmonia to be an especially varied group, but it does demonstrate that they did a small handful of things brilliantly well, and those happened to be things that no one else was doing. They also happened to sound like what various kinds of experimental music would sound like 20 years later and, I’m guessing, what some strains of it will sound like 20 years from now.


On her second album, Lillie West retains the charming simplicity of her songs, but she finds new depth as a songwriter as she explores the act of standing up to herself.

The Lamb

Lillie West has not been writing songs or playing guitar seriously for very long. The idea of doing so only dawned on her in 2014, while tagging along during a tour with brazen dance-pop outfit Supermagical. But her first record, 2016’s Sleepyhead, delivered on the simple promise of her band’s name, with melodies and rhymes easy enough to land on first listen. West’s songs tend to come in four-bar phrases, each in two distinct halves, a resolving “Lala” for every tension-building one. That formula remains for West’s first album for Hardly Art, The Lamb, but the scheme has been refashioned to uphold something new: a budding maturity.
West doesn’t write in a fundamental fashion just because she likes how it sounds; the approach serves a directness that seems non-negotiable. West’s songs are startlingly forthcoming, laying bare her life in plain terms. On Sleepyhead, West openly divulged her personal struggles in a wrung-out voice over baby-stepping riffs. “I drink more than I want to/’cause it makes you easier to talk to/And what you’re saying is boring,” began “Fuck With Your Friends.”
But West has given up drinking and other vices, the fact that propels much of The Lamb—a major leap musically and an unflinching reflection on the courage of rejecting easy comforts. Small pledges to self-control speckle the album. “If I’m using my hands, can you cut them off?/You’re a light turned on, and I’m a moth,” she sings during opener “Destroyer,” addressing the threats of internal push-back against sobriety. She even names a song “Water Over Sex.” The Lamb features less of West confessing, more of her making commitments to herself.
These frills-averse songs work because West has the gift of economy, choosing just the right word or note to find the center of the matter. “Scary Movie” sounds both intimate and galactic, like a handwritten letter read aloud from a space shuttle. The charged-up “I Get Cut” is perfectly elemental indie rock, as satisfying as a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich. (In a full-circle moment, Supermagical’s Emily Kempf, who now plays bass in the band, adds wonderful backing vocals.) “See You at Home” ends The Lamb with a rare flourish, a saxophone solo that points to the personal change found within the preceding 30 minutes.
In the music video for “Destroyer,” West roams the town with a baseball bat. She takes some swings in a batting cage, lounges with it on a mattress, goes Gallagher on a watermelon by the lake, and poses beside the bat in a photo booth, as though they’re best friends on a big day out. It all seems fun, but last year, West slept through a home invasion, which she references during “I Get Cut.” “I bought a bat to keep me safe at home,” she sings. “And I’m so lucky that I’m never alone.” These are distilled glimpses into the album’s core and Lala Lala’s new sense of purpose: reclaiming something that represents fear, including life itself.


Producer Huerco S.'s latest ambient release feels like something heard from the other end of a long, dark tunnel that you no longer remember how to find your way back across.

QTT4

Huerco S.’s music is mostly a process of addition-as-subtraction, piling up layers until the faintest outline of the original forms remains—something like Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea” but with magnetic tape in place of feather mattresses. Obscure shapes lurk beneath a dark, oil-slicked surface, and when they poke their heads out of the murk, the glimpse you get is like a grainy photo of the Loch Ness Monster—mostly just shadows and guesswork.
On this cassette for New York’s Quiet Time, he takes the technique to a new extreme. These objects, whatever they may be, have disappeared far beneath the surface, until even their shadows have dissolved into the cold water, and all that is left is the merest ripple on the surface. In keeping with the series’ emphasis on long-form pieces, the tape consists of just one track. It is 31 minutes long, and at first it seems to consist of nothing more than a single held chord run through subtle effects. The other tapes in the series, by Aquarian, Baby, and Money, tend to be structured more like mixtapes. Aquarian’s veers between drone, footwork, and acid; Baby, a Los Angeles trio of RISD grads, massage bassy rumble, heavy metal samples, and massing choirs into an ominous and enveloping head trip.
Huerco S.’s tape is the softest of any of them so far, but with its unrelenting focus, it conveys a different kind of intensity. Turn it up loud enough and its atmospheres are all-enveloping; they invite you to dissolve into them. The longer and more intently you listen, the more detail opens up, although “detail” might not be the right word for a sound like this, worn smooth as limestone. But somewhere, deep down beneath all that reverb, the chord occasionally modulates, and slowly shifting EQ variously highlights different parts of the spectrum: swollen bass, burnished midrange, and bright, silvery highs.
The Kansas City-raised, New York-based musician has done something like this before on Colonial Patterns’ “ChunKee Player,” in which reverb, EQ, and tape compression sanded down the contours of a slow-moving chord progression—maybe strings, maybe synths, maybe something else entirely—to a pebbly blur. But that sketch wasn’t even two minutes long, and it still betrayed the hint of a pulse. Drawing out the technique half an hour’s length and pacing its changes in extreme slow motion exert an entirely different kind of force on the listener. It is a kind of deep-freeze ambient; it is beautiful in a way that tends to obliterate distinctions. Depending upon your mood, you may find it calming, gloomy, or perhaps even strangely emotionally blank. It is an empty shell around a fathomless, sourceless echo. There are no musical events to speak of, no attacks, no moments of distinction; just remnants of sounds, a memory of where a sound once was, like something heard from the other end of a long, dark tunnel that you no longer remember how to find your way back across.


With the deserved accolades accompanying their 2001 double-disc magnum opus, Southern Rock Opera, newcomers the Drive-By Truckers have the unenviable ...

Decoration Day

With the deserved accolades accompanying their 2001 double-disc magnum opus, Southern Rock Opera, newcomers the Drive-By Truckers have the unenviable task of following up one of the more ambitious records of the (very) early 21st century with a critical spotlight shining directly into their eyes. Despite the pressure, they've managed to avoid repeating themselves-- or worse, buying into the hype that made them a flagship band of the newly re-energized southern rock scene. Decoration Day is possessed by an entirely different kind of energy: one that appears to be the result of a complete emotional U-turn.
Lead Trucker Patterson Hood and cohorts (guitarists/vocalists Mike Cooley and Jason Isbell, bassist Earl Hicks and drummer Brad Morgan) are still channeling that old Van Zandt spirit to come to grips with their "Southern-ness," but where Southern Rock Opera focused its attention on big Men-- capital-M Men like longtime Alabama governor George Wallace, whose iconic personas have strongly informed the Southern culture for the better part of the last quarter-century-- Decoration Day casts a much smaller net, grappling with more personal struggles.
The title and cover art, which depicts a decorated grave, give a hint of insight into the album's somber, mood-- several of its tracks draw sketches of down-on-luck Southerners facing some of life's biggest decisions and deepest losses. Opener "The Deeper In", the story of two siblings serving time for their incestuous relationship, is remarkably sparse, with Hood leading the song in a cappella before being joined by skeletal guitars and Brad Morgan's slow, martial drums. The thunderous "Sink Hole", loosely based on filmmaker Ray McKinnon's short film The Accountant (a 2002 Oscar winner), finds the narrator wishing death on the unctuous banker foreclosing on his struggling family farm.
Even the songs that a New England-raised, East Coast liberal-college-attending snark (er, not me, really) might find "rednecky" are propped up by the unwavering dignity of their narrators. Sure, new guitarist Jason Isbell's contribution, "Outfit", has its more than its share of bastard children, blue-collar housepainters and cars pawned for wedding rings, but there's also fatherly advice like, "Don't worry about losin' your accent/ Southern men tell better jokes," and, "Call home on your sister's birthday."
But it's not until we reach the two full-fledged epics-- Hood's nearly seven-minute "Your Daddy Hates Me" and the Isbell-penned title track-- which lead the charge on the album's second half that the Truckers' vision for the album fully crystallizes. The former follows a hard-drinking, self-loathing narrator ("I'd probably hate me, too") as he finds redemption in his faithfulness to women, backed by a slow-cooking dirge that mimics the beating he's taken in his lifetime. The roiling title track, meanwhile, recounts a son's relationship with his dead father, both of whom were involved in a generation-spanning blood feud. The confusion surrounding the origin of the decades-old battle boils over in a roaring coda that easily stands as the album's emotional core. Which is when it becomes clear: this album is about pride-- regional and personal-- and honor.
Some may insist that Decoration Day's cohesiveness suffers from Hood, Cooley and Isbell continually trading off lead vocals, but I find it adds an essential component of plausibility. That each of the record's protagonists is given his own unique voice only lends conviction to this record's examination of life in the South-- one of the best since, well, Southern Rock Opera, actually. And while its peaks fall just a whit short of those on its predecessor, Decoration Day's inward journeys nicely balance out Southern Rock Opera's bombastic expansiveness, and further confirm the Drive-By Truckers' status as the most poetic and insightful Southern rockers in existence today.


The British songwriter’s excellent debut mines the gentle and detailed sounds of soft rock’s past, while his lucid yet uncomplicated lyrics interrogate the uncertainty of the present.

Your Hero Is Not Dead

On Your Hero Is Not Dead, Will Westerman creates gentle music made up of elements from experimental pop albums. Talk Talk is an obvious influence (the hero alluded to in the album’s title refers to the band’s late vocalist Marc Hollis), but so are folk musicians like John Martyn and Joni Mitchell. Martyn’s synthesizer explorations led to his 1977 album One World, and Mitchell’s 1985 record Dog Eat Dog combined hypnotic production and lyrics in service of pop prophecies of doom. With the help of Nathan Jenkins, aka producer Bullion, Westerman achieves a synthesis of these previous experiments, fusing together whimsical curiosity and technical proficiency. Over a backdrop made of the sounds of the past, his lucid yet uncomplicated lyrics interrogate the uncertainty of the present.
When Westerman asks, “Am I taking it too far?” on “The Line,” it feels like he is questioning a choir made up of himself; later in the song, he engages in a one-man call and response. Bullion’s production matches Westerman’s ambivalence. “The Line” takes several detours before returning to its original route; it is music prone to glitches. A distended guitar opens the track and floats around Westerman’s ruminations, which are both concrete and fantastical. The soundworld recalls the work of ’80s producer Thomas Dolby, full of small changes that lead to strange moments: a voice stretched at the beginning of the bar is suddenly paired with bongos; a cut-up chorus is utilized as the backbeat to a new lyric. It’s like hearing Westerman question himself in real time. These alterations don’t overwhelm the central contemplation; instead, they make what could be a simple chord-strummer into a revelation. When a small guitar solo appears halfway through, it calls attention to itself through its sheer normality.
Westerman’s voice functions as a guide. Take “Easy Money,” an energetic, angry kiss-off to someone or something. Its opening swirl of guitar and synth dissipates once Westerman finally says, “I don’t doubt/Somebody’s working harder now.” His words are mirrored by a drum machine and the suggestion of a guitar. As the aggression grows, so does the anxiety; beeps appear and disappear, while a synthetic clatter threatens to overtake his voice. At moments, Westerman slows down and repeats a phrase like “stay still” or “that’s enough,” allowing the machinery of the production to whirl around him. The electronic interruptions can be traced back to Martyn’s One World, and the vocal percussion wouldn’t sound out of place on New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies. Yet the tossed-off lyricism and world-weary contempt are all Westerman.
On the album closer and title track, Westerman melds the cast-off nature of his songwriting to the bric-a-brac of Bullion’s production. The instrumentation hovers around his guitar playing; it’s the album’s clearest folk song and his most direct statement. The basic structure and lyrics sound as though they were improvised in the back of a van, close to the end of a tour: “Busy working/Busy avoiding.” Bullion pairs Westerman’s rumination with subtle production, isolating piano notes, throttling synths, and gently doubling the chorus. Mutual devotion to perennially out-of-vogue styles has allowed Bullion and Westerman to create an album that sounds novel; the beauty they make is secondhand and stumbled upon. It’s a product of obsession that can be engaged without knowing all the references; it sounds good, sometimes even better than its antecedents. Bullion’s production reworks elements from ’80s AOR records; Westerman creates songs out of leftover sentences. Their music proposes that the judgments of yesterday aren’t written in stone, and that what we believe today is only as stable as we think it is.

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


Trading away the dance-pop trifles of their hits for a faceless stylistic shuffle, the duo seems to be tiring of itself, too.

Sick Boy

We’re going to be stuck with the Chainsmokers forever. Though the unctuous duo of Drew Taggart and Alex Pall are probably not destined for decades of unqualified success, their insipid spin on EDM’s big-money boom has become as much an eye-rollingly omnipresent part of our national fabric as “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Most living humans in the Western world have likely had the unfortunate sensation of having a Chainsmokers hit stuck in their head, as gross as gum on a hot bus seat; after all, their Coldplay collaboration, “Something Just Like This,” seems made only to ooze from department-store speakers for eternity. There’s even a goddamn feature-length film based on the M83-aping “Paris” in development. Like so many modern American atrocities, the Chainsmokers are just something we’re going to have to endure.
Less than three years removed from “Closer,” their massive collaboration with Halsey, it reasons that, though the Chainsmokers didn’t kill EDM themselves, they gave the knife an extra twist before the cops arrived. Their airless take on dance-pop as a marketing ploy—ignominiously captured on their 2017 debut LP, Memories...Do Not Open—crumpled the squelching bro-downs of past hits “Selfie” and “Don’t Let Me Down” for a vaguely adult-contemporary sound with all the personality of Purell. Like a Vertical Horizon for the tank-tops-and-furry-boots set, the Chainsmokers stumbled on a form of devilish pop alchemy that made them, for a moment, instant pop heavyweights.
But the Chainsmokers’ second album, Sick Boy, largely abandons the vanilla skies of Memories...Do Not Open for more aggressive, beat-driven songs that recall their Ultra beginnings more than their recent past. This about-face aligns with new blood in the Chainsmokers’ collaborative ranks. Toronto’s DJ Swivel co-produced the majority of Memories...Do Not Open, but he’s nowhere to be found on this album, replaced instead by a bevy of industry heads and EDM toilers like bassface enthusiast NGHTMRE and Parisian DJ Aazar.
The closest Sick Boy gets to “Closer” is the Kelsea Ballerini-led opener “This Feeling,” a red herring that gestures toward the growing trend of EDM expats turning to country in hopes of beating back total obsolescence. Otherwise, Sick Boy sounds designed for festival season: “Siren” and “Save Yourself” embrace the lost art of “the drop” with showy vocal samples and buzzsaw synths, while the trop-house mist of “Hope” unfolds into a soporific groove. The scattered, try-anything-once approach suggests a sense of nervous anxiety, as Taggart and Pall attempt various sonic styles with the conviction of Bella Hadid talking about sneakers.
Oddly, the drifting, emo-tinged sound of modern rock-not-rockers twenty one pilots reigns supreme here. “Beach House”—a you-know-who-namecheck that stands as these lunkheads’ greatest troll job to date—ticks and tocks before revealing a gaping synth maw. The title track resembles the conscious, reflective anti-rock of twenty one pilots’ Trench; when Taggart pleads “Don’t believe the narcissism,” he sounds like a dead ringer for lead pilot Tyler Joseph. But the lyrical comparisons end there: “They say that I am the sick boy/Easy to say when you don’t take the risk, boy,” Taggart sneers, his sense of bitter entitlement reflecting Sick Boy as a whole. During “You Owe Me,” Taggart whines, “Don’t you think that I get lonely?” before turning an exquisitely rank phrase of blame-passing: “When it gets dark inside your head/Check my pulse/And if I’m dead, you owe me.” Devoid of any real personal reflection, the self-pity is suffocating.
No one expected Taggart and Pall to crack open a copy of bell hooks’ The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love between albums, but the Chainsmokers’ determination to double down on their reputation for toxic masculinity is impressively disturbing. They add a dash of self-crucifixion for good measure. “Everybody Hates Me” is chiefly concerned with downing tequila and ignoring the haters, while “Beach House” references a red pill and a “Paranoid cutie with a dark past” before, like a blasé horndog, Taggart sighs, “She gets bored of everything/Not the type you can ignore.” Earlier in the song, he unintentionally highlights how tired his lyrical frat-boy misogyny remains with the line “I’ve been there before.”
At least there’s one diamond in this increasingly over-mined rough: Emily Warren, the pop songwriter and presumptive “third Chainsmoker.” She similarly livened up the aural wallpaper of Memories...Do Not Open; one would hope, at this point, the irony of a woman being responsible for some of the Chainsmokers’ most competent material is not lost on Taggart or Pall. Warren nabs several song credits on Sick Boy, most notably on “Side Effects,” a propulsive and cynically tasteful indie-disco facsimile featuring her most effective vocal turn yet. Her cool but punchy performance moves beyond the mid-tempo wisps and whispers of her past. Recalling the hedonistic days of bloghouse, “Side Effects” is fun, sharp, and nothing like anything the Chainsmokers have ever done. Given the self-loathing and stylistic anonymity of Sick Boy at large, it’s enough to suggest that maybe the Chainsmokers are starting to get sick of themselves, too.


On his debut album, the L.I.E.S. mainstay makes house music that’s dubby and lo-fi, like club tracks heard through a pillow.

Plant Age

Matt Gardner’s understated, fuzzy house music as Terekke often feels greater than the sum of its parts. His 2013 track “Amaze” was a veritable underground ambient house hit: A highlight of L.I.E.S.’ Music for Shut-Ins compilation, it also kicked off a mix CD from Sven Väth’s Cocoon Recordings, an Ibiza perennial. At that time, L.I.E.S. was still in its infancy, and the role that dusty, hardware-based bedroom techno from Bushwick would play in the proliferation of this sound across the world was still undetermined. These days, Terekke calls Amsterdam home, but he remains a key part of the label family. Now on its 100th release, L.I.E.S. brought Gardner back for his debut album, and its eight tracks are an elegant and sedate summation of Terekke’s lo-fi oeuvre, pushing his sound into even deeper territory with a subtle, singular touch.
Terekke’s music is like a warped, alternate-reality version of Burial. Though the two producers conjure disparate moods (where Burial is rainy and despondent, Terekke is warm and hopeful), they take a similar approach to abstracting dance music into its own world, inside your headphones and your head. The two producers also share an affinity for using samples from pop stars like Mariah Carey or Beyoncé, melting their voices into gooey echoes that feel familiar but unplaceable. On last year’s “i wanna what love is,” Terekke molded Carey’s voice into a spectral image, and on 2014’s “Untitled B1,” under his X alias, he sampled Sade’s “Is It a Crime” into a loose, rippling club jam. Terekke’s skeletal, dubby approximations of house reflect the same deconstruction-reconstruction of dance music as Burial, though Gardner meshes inspiration from Chicago house and Berlin dub techno, where Burial reflects the musical legacy of the UK underground.
Plant Age is an album as comfortable and versatile as your favorite sweater—it’s lived-in, welcoming, and warm. Recorded sporadically over the past five years, it’s considerately sequenced and is glued together in a fairly uniform haze. The congruousness of Plant Age, the ubiquitous smoky gel that cushions all of his tracks, speaks to Terekke’s fondness for recording to cassette tape. The album effectively sets a mood and continues to reveal itself more deeply upon repeated listens. “BB2” is the clubbiest cut on the release, a muted yet pounding house track that sounds like it’s being played through a pillow. “BB2” hews closest to Terekke’s older material, with gorgeous oozy chords peeking through a smoky haze, and a ghostly vocal sample makes the song both spooky and forlorn.
Parts of Plant Age pass through inconspicuously—the ambient gestures of “Swim,” “Padi,” and “Closer” are lush and unassuming. A surface-level listen can find respite in the calm atmospheres, while closer attention reveals hidden layers of smudged melody and endless detail in the lo-fi fuzz. The generous, thumping dub of single “Mix 91” features little more than ricocheting drums, a minimal bassline, and a featherlight synth, but Terekke’s effects conjure sublime spaciousness with surprising economy. With everything in the studio plugged in and synced up, it feels like these tracks write themselves, pouring out as effortlessly as smoke.
The intricacies of Terekke’s dubbed-out mixing rival the spacey sensuousness of Basic Channel or Huerco S.: Each track seemingly extends from horizon to horizon, bouncing and echoing to infinity. No track on Plant Age reaches six minutes, yet the atmospheres are so engrossing, each cut is a world in itself. The album’s 33 minutes both feel like an eternity and a blip—once through, you wonder where the time went and how it could have passed so quickly.


The soundtrack for the Netflix drama The Get Down, which tells the story of the birth of hip-hop in '70s NYC, mixes disco classics with contributions from Nas, Miguel, Kamasi Washington, and others.

The Get Down OST

In 1977, New York City was in turmoil: the crime rate was high, morale was low and a serial killer was on the loose. Yet, as the social fabric was disintegrating across the five boroughs, artistic creativity was thriving. Punk rock shows attracted crowds too large for even the scene’s most popular venues, disco music flowed into the mainstream and the nascent hip-hop movement was gaining traction in the South Bronx. This is the setting for The Get Down, the Baz Luhrmann-produced series that was reportedly ten years in the making.
The show’s first six episodes premiered on Netflix on August 12 and its soundtrack was delivered on the same day, featuring a mix of disco-era classics and original compositions. These songs are woven through the episodes that retell the adventures of the protagonist (Ezekiel Figuero, played by a watchful Justice Smith) as a teenager in 1977, as narrated by his older self in 1996. Regrettably, despite a roster of all-star musicians, the album falls short as a standalone work and even shorter when considered as the accompaniment to a musical drama.
It’s very frustrating when a song has all the elements for success, but you can hear them getting in each other’s way. Twice, on two different songs, Michael Kiwanuka is derailed by verses from an apathetic Nas. The first instance is “Rule The World (I Came From the City),” which starts out as a brooding ballad bookended by Kiwanuka’s dark, bluesy timbre. But the second foul, “Black Man in a White World (Ghetto Gettysburg Address),” is flagrant, because the original version would’ve been a perfect addition to this soundtrack if left untouched. Its lyrics, recounting the malaise of disenfranchised minority citizens, ring as true in 2016 as they would have in 1977.
Though it’s tempting to blame the dischord on a somewhat unlikely pairing, this strategy proves quite effective effective elsewhere on the album. The tracklist smartly matches up artists who were born long after disco had died with musicians who lived through and even defined the era. Zayn and Teddy Pendergrass come together on a Grandmaster Flash-helmed rework of “You Can’t Hide From Yourself,” from Pendergrass’ debut album. Zayn commendably pushes his voice to the upper reaches of his range on the first half, but then steps aside to let Teddy P bring it home. “Telepathy,” a simple love song made grander through an arrangement of horns and strings, is one of Christina Aguilera’s best performances in recent years. The vocal is restrained by her standards, but it still comes through strong and measured—guided by the incomparable Nile Rodgers. Leon Bridges offers an amped-up tribute to “Ball of Confusion,” and he succeeds by respecting the Temptations’ 1970 hit single while somehow emulating their energy in a solo performance.
Some more relief comes around the soundtrack’s midsection, in the form of five unedited grooves. Among them, Lyn Collins’ funk classic “Think (About It)” and Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls,” which you either recognize because of her long-lasting influence as the Queen of Disco or from a manic Girl Talk album. While these tracks haven’t lost any of their floor-filling lustre through the years, they are almost outdone by two original compositions from Miguel and Janelle Monáe. Miguel flips a disco beat into something much trippier on “Cadillac,” which shares a name with the sinister coked-out club owner played by relative newcomer Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. The song comes complete with an esoteric bridge (“That unicorn, that lush/That savage baby, that rush”) and a dreamlike outro that lasts for over a minute. But Monáe’s “Hum Along & Dance (Gotta Get Down)” is the showstopper, built from uplifting brass, a dirty bassline and a chorus that name checks the series title. If the show were to have an official theme song this should be it, rather than Jaden Smith’s middling “Welcome to the Get Down.”
Monáe’s song is wedged between “Bad Girls” and CJ & Co.’s “Devil’s Gun” on a five-song throwback stretch that ends with Hector Lavoe’s “Que Lio,” but everything that follows feels like filler. The soundtrack is on sale as a deluxe version, a term that often foretells a sequence of unrelated bonus tracks tacked on to the end. Starting with “Just You, Not Now (Love Theme)” by Australian singer Grace, we shift away abruptly from the overarching disco theme and wade through a cluster of songs that are tough to appreciate when divorced from their context (although three of them showcase newcomer Herizen Guardiola who is definitely one to watch.) The entire thing clocks in at roughly an hour and a half—the average length of a feature film that would need to tell a much more cohesive and complete story to keep an audience engaged.
It’s rare for a soundtrack to exceed the performance of the work that it’s meant to complement. Superfly and Shaft are two notable exceptions from the same decade depicted in The Get Down—Pharrell’s “Happy” is a more modern example*.* The show will go down in history for many reasons, unfortunately it doesn’t seem like this album will be one of them.


The Filipino black metal trio Deiphago embrace a sound that is chaotic even by black-metal standards. On Into the Eye of Satan, they worked with noted metal producer Colin Marston, resulting in their cleanest-sounding release yet. In this form, their chaos isn't squelched, just illuminated.

Into the Eye of Satan

Filipino black metal trio Deiphago, who formed in Manila but have been based in Costa Rica since 2004, are but one testament to the global reach of metal. They're indebted to the black metal of two Canadian bands, Blasphemy and Conqueror, as well as the Brazilian primitivism of Sarcofago, but play with a looseness not quite fitting any of those groups. Even by the lo-fi fetish standards of black metal, Deiphago commit to a chaos few bands could match. A more polished Deiphago record seems antithetical, but that's what Into the Eye of Satan, their fourth full-length, is to an extent. In the hand of noted metal producer Colin Marston, we see a more complete version of the band.
In Eyes, the chaos isn't squelched, just illuminated. From "Evil and Adverse", it's obvious their actual playing hasn't changed much, but Marston's production makes you better appreciate their muscularity. Guitarist Sidapa's leads are more prominent in the mix. "Bloodbath of Genocide" features wah-wah swaths in the beginning that would have gone unnoticed before, and these minor details add up. His mini-solos in "6x6x6/3" sound more like the playing of a college kid obsessed with free jazz and Thurston Moore than conventional shredding. Sidapa sounds most bizarre in "Calculated Acts of Cruelty" and the title track closer, abandoning any conceits of fluidity. Peaks become valleys without warning and notes criss-cross into tangled weaves.
With improved production, Eye inadvertently reveals the hardcore influence—especially that of d-beat groups like Discharge—that's always been latent in Deiphago's music. Drummer Savnok opts for a looser, punkier style. Vocalist/bassist Voltaire 666's bass may sound less distorted, but it's never sounded meaner. Deiphago may be the true successors of Venom, who brought endearing sloppiness and fuck-all attitude to the creation of black metal. All this, combined with Sidapa's guitar work, finds Deiphago oddly, if pleasingly, working against their own credo. They're not afraid to proclaim "Fuck off to the false!", but Eye is less straitlaced than many of their peers' works. Deiphago's other records may have served as a litmus test for how much discordance you can handle in metal; this is where you fully realize just how serious they are.


The Australian noise musician has long used the guitar as a textural element, but here he puts it front and center, sculpting a claustrophobic landscape out of chugging metal riffs.

Scope Neglect

What if 4'33" went to 11? That’s one thought experiment posed by Ben Frost’s radical new album of deconstructed metal, in which the riffs are only as important as the silence that yawns between them. Strange things happen in the interstices: Microsecond-long reverb tails assume an almost physical form, jutting out against the vacuum in eerie bas-relief. Wisps of electricity sweep through filters and phasers, leaving smudgy fingerprints. But turn it up loud enough to hear those whisper-soft details and risk your neighbors’ wrath. This is a brutally loud album, its low end practically steroidal; downstrokes are accompanied by walloping thwacks, rendering the guitar a percussive instrument as much as a tonal one. Few records—certainly few records that take their cues from the heaviest strains of metal—can boast such a vast dynamic range.
The guitar has long played a central role in the Australian-born, Iceland-based musician’s work. On his 2009 breakout, By the Throat, one of the first sounds we hear is a gravelly crunch familiar from metal and hardcore. While the arrangements cycle through strings, horns, choir, electronics, and even wolf growls, the telltale rumble of guitar distortion is never far off; the whole album feels perfumed by the smoke of burning Marshall stacks. Frost leaned even further into both metal grandeur and textural swirl on A U R O R A’s fuzzed-out snapshots of the sublime. But he’s never foregrounded the guitar quite like he does here. To create Scope Neglect he enlisted bassist Liam Andrews, of Australian post-punks My Disco, and Greg Kubacki, guitarist of the Long Island progressive metal band Car Bomb. It’s Kubacki’s playing that gives the album its unique character: His chugging, disembodied riffs are treated as seedlings, nourished by Frost’s electronic treatments and left to blossom in the arid emptiness, like desert flowers sprung from sere volcanic soil.
Framing atonal bursts of guitar against inky silence, the album begins as a tug-of-war between being and nothingness. More prosaically, it sounds like someone trying out gear in Guitar Center—the riffs feel tentative, disconnected, uninterested in the sort of meaning-making that takes place when phrases are woven into an overarching continuity. But this Guitar Center would also have to be an anechoic chamber, a space so free of extraneous noise that you can hear the blood pumping through your own veins. That’s where the album’s profound strangeness begins to assert itself—in the dead spaces between the notes, the void that seems to swallow every sound as soon as it’s been made.
The album plays out like a loose theme and variations. Following the desiccated knots of the opening “Lamb Shift,” those same elements are stretched and manipulated on “Chimera,” filigreed with white noise and wreathed in reverb. “The River of Light and Radiation” brings a pulse to the table; its truncated explosions of guitar and kick drum bring to mind Oval remixing Helmet, while a softly melodic synthesizer adds a fetchingly gothic contrast. “_1993” smears the guitar’s tones into a doleful ambient drone; “Turning the Prism” returns the focus to Kubacki’s muscular playing and the mutant forms that multiply in its shadows.
The subtlety with which Frost treats his source material—with help from Tim Hecker, Paul Corley, Lawrence English and Daniel Rejmer, all longtime friends and accomplices credited with “additional production”—is dazzling. Heard on headphones, it suggests a mazelike path lined with trick mirrors and psychoacoustic trapdoors. But while Scope Neglect is technically impressive, it’s so austere that it can be an endurance test. If you don’t have an appetite for bludgeoning force, its relentlessness can turn suffocating. Where even the most extreme metal typically conveys a feeling of exhilaration, Scope Neglect feels dour and cramped and weirdly enervating—a foul mood in a windowless room.
The album’s biggest surprise occurs on the penultimate track, “Tritium Bath,” in which an undistorted guitar figure—it sounds uncannily like Raphael Rogiński’s muted tone—meanders through a minefield of metallic sturm und drang. Its timing feels untethered from the rest of the track; I checked, multiple times, to make sure I hadn’t left something playing in an open browser tab. That moment of disorientation makes for a strange and welcome highlight of an already inscrutable album: a moment in which Frost’s claustrophobic architecture briefly opens up, offering a glimpse of another dimension hovering just out of reach.


Recording in a studio, the Chicago DIY trio sound newly airy and lush, but no less direct and sincere. Their confidence in their concision is the best part.

Flower of Devotion

One night last summer, at a 19th-century opera house, Dehd were playing in the middle of the room. Headlining a label showcase configured for 360-degree views, the bleeding-hearted indie-rock trio followed their steelier, more poker-faced peers Patio and Deeper. As the latter finished their set, all three bands convened for a cover of The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry,” on which Dehd guitarist Jason Balla and bassist Emily Kempf took the mics with their typical on-stage abandon. That night—eye-to-eye with their listeners, hiding no side of themselves, and taking cues from Robert Smith by bending the rigid edges of post-punk with the brightness and zeal of pop—Dehd were exactly in their element.
This direct connection carries through Flower of Devotion, the band’s biggest-sounding album yet. Rather than hooking your attention with mystery, Dehd look you straight in the eye, sing you something discomfitingly simple and sincere, and dare you not to look at the floor. Kempf comes out of the gate screaming, “Baby, I love ya/Always thinking of ya,” and ends the album with, “If this is all that we get, so be it/It was worth it to know you exist.” Though it was finished before 2020 came to be defined by immense loss, Flower of Devotion makes the case for reaching out and being direct with the people who should hear it, while the opportunity exists.
Flower of Devotion’s sound is tightly tailored to its lyrics, but in a different way than the band’s previous album was. Water, which was self-recorded, sounded thin and tinny, a raw sonic quality amplified by the rawness of Balla and Kempf singing about how they had literally just broken up. But Flower of Devotion, recorded in a studio, goes in on saturation, dialing up reverb and echo effects and adding touches of synth and tambourine to their minimal set-up. It’s lush and inviting end-to-end, even as it gets uncomfortably close. These ringing, sustained sounds agree with the two singers’ fondness for squeezing every drop out of a single word. Kempf’s warbling, exaggerated “bay-ey-BAY” at the tipping point of “Letter” says more than any carefully worded text message could.
That moment is one of a few that sound almost straight from the songbook of Roy Orbison, one of Flower of Devotion’s key influences. Orbison—whose cover art for his own third LP might be referenced here, but whose knack for articulating yearning with efficient pop verses and potent vibrato definitely is—may as well be Dehd’s patron saint of heartache. “Loner,” for instance, feels at first like something of a spiritual cousin to “Only the Lonely.” But Orbison’s standard was an ode to heartbreak’s dubious consolation prize: the self-righteous comfort of belonging to a club. When Kempf sings about wanting “nothing more than to be a loner,” it’s an embrace of loneliness’s inevitability and the limitations of partnership—an affirmation of desire, but especially of desire to be comfortably alone. Her voice cracks upward when she holds the word “loner,” like a lone wolf howling at the moon, like Orbison when he was crying over you.
Kempf’s singing voice has steadily gotten stronger and more versatile with every Dehd release, and here it’s a flat-out force. She adapts it a dozen different ways to sell a feeling: a cautioning bellow when singing about being protective of her ex on “Letter”; a deteriorating tremble to grieve that “the house is burning, while I sit here drowning” on “Flood”; yelping and screeching and tongue-clicking when that’s just what feels fitting. It’s Flower of Devotion’s primary instrument, alongside Balla’s newly airy guitar. Whether soloing or providing counterpoint to the vocal melodies, Balla picks which notes to play like he’s picking vegetables from the produce section: selectively but without overthinking it, not opposed to a bruise or dent if the size and color are right, and if he touches it, he commits to it.
At first blush, Flower of Devotion can feel like it’s missing something. There’s a nagging instinct that pop songs are supposed to have more pieces to them, or that drummer Eric McGrady is supposed to be using more than half of a drum set. Stick with it, though, and something even better emerges from those gaps. By leaving their songs exposed, Dehd show how much they believe in them, and rightfully so. Their confidence in their concision is the best part. You can hear it when they observe the simple passage of time, when Balla sings about a calendar page’s impermanence on “Month” or when McGrady notices grey hairs and fading memory on “Apart”—his first song written and sung for the band. You can hear it when they ask a question, looking right at you: Why do you hide? Do you want to disappear? Is this living? Flower of Devotion generously rewards not looking away.

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

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


All three installments of Wilco and Billy Bragg's tribute to Woody Guthrie are collected in this compilation, which lovingly-- and in timely fashion-- shows there was more to the Okie folkie than protest music.

Billy Bragg / Wilco: Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions

Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions

With the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations reviving interest in American protest music over the last six months, it seems inevitable that Woody Guthrie would enjoy a resurgence in popularity and relevance-- and just in time for what would have been his 100th birthday. The Okie folkie's example has guided many musicians as they set the 99% to song: Tom Morello wandered Zuccotti Park strumming "This Land Is Your Land", which won something called the Occupy Wall Street Award from MTV. Others, including Jackson Browne and Bruce Springsteen, have debuted starkly acoustic, highly rhetorical songs squarely in the Guthrie vein, suggesting that the OWS generation (or, more precisely, the pre-OWS generation with closer ties to the 1960s folkies like Dylan, who considered Woody a secular saint) equates Guthrie strictly with protest music and protest music strictly with Guthrie. On one level it might seem like a colossal failure of imagination: By devising a form of dissent music that relies exclusively on historical examples rather than on the leader-less ethos of OWS, these artists not only dilute their dissent but grasp only one facet of the multi-faceted Guthrie. If you weren't familiar with him, you might think Guthrie was some humorless scold who spoke only in grand pronouncements against The Man.
In fact, Guthrie was a complicated and contradictory artist who explored many subjects and displayed a ribald sense of humor to temper his guiding sense of outrage; in other words, he could be just as silly as he was serious. Crucially, he understood the effect of a constructed public persona, adopting a faux rural accent not only onstage but in his famed autobiography Bound for Glory as well. No other posthumous reconsideration has captured Guthrie in all his compelling contradictions as precisely or as affectionately as Billy Bragg and Wilco's Mermaid Avenue did in 1998. At the behest of Guthrie's daughter Nora, the UK folk singer and the U.S. rock band, along with Natalie Merchant, took scribbles of lyrics and filled in the melodies, arrangements, performances and ultimately our understanding of the man himself. As Nora writes in the liners to this new anthology collecting the three instalments of Mermaid Avenue sessions, "The lyrics exposed him so absolutely it was like walking into a shower and finding him naked. Or like finding his little black book where every confession, every desire, every fantasy, every love, every pain, every hate, every hope poured out through purple and brown fountain pens…. Guess what. Turns out he's just the like the rest of us fools."
So the man who famously penned "This Land Is Your Land" and "Grand Coulee Dam" also waxed bawdy about Ingrid Bergman and Walt Whitman's niece (who reads aloud from Leaves of Grass in bed). He wrote nonsense verse for his kids and penned a sympathetic ode to exiled Austrian composer Hanns Eisler. He missed California and understood that a movement is only as good as it treats its womenfolk: "Women are equal and they may be ahead of the men," Bragg sings on "She Came Along to Me"-- and that Eisenhower-era proclamation remains remarkably relevant during an election that makes gender such a divisive issue.
The liveliness of Guthrie's lyrics precludes any deadening reverence, and Bragg and Wilco rise to the occasion with music that respects the source material but never sounds beholden to any particular conception of Woody Guthrie. The loping melody and longing vocals by Jeff Tweedy turn "California Stars" into an especially wistful West Coast reminiscence as well as one of Wilco's best songs. Opener "Walt Whitman's Niece" and "Hoodoo Voodoo" sound rambunctious and loose, while Bragg turns "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key", a duet with Merchant, into a bittersweet reverie about the boldness of youth. "Ain't nobody that can sing like me," Bragg boasts as Eliza Carthy's delicate fiddle colors in the years between adolescence and adulthood.
Mermaid Avenue was such a deeply nuanced and humanizing portrait of a larger-than-life character that it significantly shifted how listeners thought of Guthrie, especially at the end of the decade that produced the criminally reverent alt-country movement. It was almost impossible to follow up such a project, and Mermaid Avenue, Volume 2, arriving in 2000, lacked the impact and import of its predecessor. Musically, however, it might actually be more expansive, with the hootenanny country of "Joe DiMaggio Done it Again" and the somber doom folk of "Blood of the Lamb" jostling elbows against the proto-punk of "All You Fascists" and the spry rural blues of "Aginst th' Law" (sung by Corey Harris).
There's a sense of diminishing returns on Volume 2, as well as on the third volume that fills out the new Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions. But that's only natural: Of course you put your best material on the initial release. What's remarkable is the wealth of material available to these artists and the number of gems these sessions produced. Taken together, the collected, reissued Sessions may not have the same impact as Mermaid Avenue did 14 years ago, but they suggest a group of musicians emboldened and excited by their shared undertaking and their proximity to Guthrie himself (in reality, the sessions were rumored to be contentious).
And of course, there are a great many songs about the powers that be, about facing down the hypocrites and fascists, the totalitarians and even the Klan. In this context-- alongside so many songs about family, movies, baseball, sex, drugs, and other everyday concerns-- "All You Fascists" and "The Jolly Bankers" and the Swiftian "Christ for President" resonate more powerfully than they might on their own or even sung from a podium before likeminded citizens. By presenting a more rounded portrait of Guthrie in which politics is only one subject among so many, The Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions shows just what Guthrie was fighting for and provides a persuasive rebuke to anyone who might whittle the man down to just one dimension.


Stepping back from the clubbier styles he’s best known for, the prolific electronic polymath turns his attentions to a moody ambient album that shows remarkable restraint.

The Four Worlds

The circle of musicians who have worked with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, grime godfather Wiley, and the 1970s folk singer Linda Perhacs is so small that it probably doesn't stretch any further than Mark Pritchard, a 46-year-old polymath from Somerset, England, whose three decades in electronic music have seen him master genres from techno to grime and deep house to drum ‘n’ bass. That unusually diverse set of collaborators nicely illustrates Pritchard’s peripatetic tendencies. But The Four Worlds, his second solo album for Warp, sees him settle down into what might actually resemble a groove after years of wandering.
The new album shares a simple melodic elegance with Under the Sun, his excellent 2016 solo release, even recreating that record’s medieval air on “The Arched Window,” a track that combines harpsichord with Kraftwerk-like melodies. But where Under the Sun had a whiff of grandeur, courtesy of a Thom Yorke guest spot and its 67-minute run time, The Four Worlds is more understated. Only two of the eight tracks pass the four-minute barrier, while guest spots come from outsider musician the Space Lady—a singer whose Greatest Hits was named by The Guardian as one of the 101 strangest records on Spotify—and the audio artist Gregory Whitehead.
There’s something smaller about the sound of The Four Worlds, too. Everything feels hushed, as if Pritchard had composed the music so as not to upset someone sleeping in the next room. On the only song that has drums, the opening “Glasspops,” they sound more like a comforting digital throb than an invocation to throw off your troubles and dance. Pritchard’s skill, which has been evident since his days in the ambient duo Global Communication, lies in selecting precisely the right tonal elements. Instruments on the album include a musical saw (on “Parkstone Melody II”) and a waterphone (on the filmic title track); each noise is notable for its perfectly honed timbre, and the results frequently blur the line between electronic and acoustic instrumentation. When paired with Pritchard’s considerable melodic nous, the effect is particularly moving.
“Glasspops,” a track Pritchard first laid down in a German air-raid shelter and then refined over the five years, is ample evidence of this. The track consists of little more than a simple electronic rhythm, mournful synth chords, a theremin-like lead, and a small handful of effects. That doesn’t sound like much to sustain a song that’s more than 11 minutes long, but the track’s rhythmic layers are beautifully arranged and the synths hugely rousing. The effect is both epic and strangely cosy, like snuggling up underneath the sheets with only the Carl Craig remix of Theo Parrish’s “Falling Up” and a flashlight for company.
After “Glasspops” eases the listener into a landscape of lunar melancholy, cinematic despair, and astral ambience, Gregory Whitehead’s faltering vocal on the droning “Come Let Us” resembles the last communication from a dying planet, while “Circle of Fear” evokes the shifting Martian sand in its softly circling melody. The album hangs together beautifully. Every song enhances the next, and shuffle feels like an instrument of vandalism. Ripped from the context of the album, “S.O.S.”—with its haunting chords and the Space Lady’s heartfelt plea for alien intervention—could feel naive. Instead, it tickles the tear ducts once they’ve been softened up by the album’s opening 20 minutes.
In a musical world where albums creak at their digital seams, it is refreshing to hear a release as artfully restrained as The Four Worlds. Warp seems almost self-conscious about its unassuming character, assuring that Pritchard is currently working “on the full album follow up” to Under the Sun. But there is no need for apology: A wonderfully poignant album that leaves you wanting more, The Four Worlds is proof that restraint can sing louder than excess.