Following compilations of Japanese city pop and ambient, Light in the Attic unearths a set of songs lying outside familiar genres. It’s a vital addition to the label’s broader historical project.

Various Artists: Somewhere Between: Mutant Pop, Electronic Minimalism & Shadow Sounds of Japan 1980-1988

These are unprecedented times for 20th century Japanese music in Western culture. Exports in various styles have recently ballooned in popularity, with out-of-print vinyl rarities selling for hundreds of dollars on Discogs and long-forgotten ambient albums racking up millions of views on YouTube. This enthusiasm has been amplified by the team at Light in the Attic, who have spent nearly 20 years reissuing obscurities from around the world on heavily researched compilations packed with hidden gems. Their 2017 compilation Even a Tree Can Shed Tears: Japanese Folk & Rock 1969-1973 explored the way that American musical traditions were received in the island country, with artists like Kenji Endo and Haruomi Hosono taking direct inspiration from Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and the Band. Hosono, whose work with groups like Happy End and Yellow Magic Orchestra established him as a leading figure in Japanese pop music, became a particular source of intrigue for the label’s archivists, who went on to publish essential reissues of his solo material. The diversity of Hosono’s musical output landed him on the label’s ambient and city pop compilations in 2019, and his legacy continues on their latest release, which attempts to close the gap between these disparate genres.
Somewhere Between: Mutant Pop, Electronic Minimalism & Shadow Sounds of Japan 1980-1988 assembles 14 tracks that don’t adhere to the rules of city pop but aren’t quite environmental music either. Where the former style tends to rely on steady funk and disco licks to establish danceable grooves, this “mutant pop” (or, for the real heads, “techno-pop”) is more electronic, using grainy synths and drum machines to create a colder, more robotic feel. Equally distant from the sparse, wintry tones of ambient composers like Hiroshi Yoshimura, the collection is still mostly legible as dance music, even if it never quite erupts into the kaleidoscopic funk jams of city-pop classics like Tatsuro Yamashita’s For You.
The unifying thread for much of the compilation instead comes from Yellow Magic Orchestra, whose members Haruomi Hosono and Hideki Matsutake make appearances on three of the album’s early tracks. “Hikari No Ito Kin No Ito,” Hosono’s collaboration with the pop vocalist Mishio Ogawa, offers the clearest continuation of the YMO template, using the rigid structure of a drum machine as a foundation from which to build its motorik collage. The track’s soft, minor-key synth lines and melismatic vocals echo YMO albums like Technodelic and ×∞ Multiplies, with lyrical asides that recall the latter’s comedy skits. Noriko Miyamoto’s “Arrows & Eyes” features a similar aesthetic palette, with synth arrangements and programming by Matsutake that bear a close resemblance to his work with YMO. Both tracks feel like clear attempts to expand on YMO’s success at the turn of the 1980s, pairing up-and-coming vocalists with backing music that had a proven ability to top the charts.
YMO’s presence on these recordings also demonstrates the Japanese music industry’s willingness to experiment with new, unconventional forms. Hosono notably produced records for acts like Miharu Koshi, Chiemi Manabe, and Sandii & the Sunsetz throughout the 1980s, and his work with Ogawa’s band Chakra on their 1981 album Satekoso remains among the best prog- and psych-inflected new wave to ever grace Tokyo record bins. “Tira-Rin,” Matsutake’s other contribution to the collection, through his work with the percussionist Midori Takada and her Mkwaju Ensemble, is guided by a similar penchant for experimentalism, pairing Takada’s virtuosity as a performer with a thumping electronic kick drum that almost anticipates the rise of minimal techno. Layers of tonal percussion weave tighter and tighter together as the track rises in speed and intensity, and the ensemble becomes a dizzying blur of performers in perfect sync. An outlier on an album otherwise dominated by muted synth pop, the song reflects an encounter between Takada’s foundation in the Western art-music tradition and Matsutake’s more commercial compositions, one that still sounds great amid the compilation’s warbling electronics.
Beyond cataloging Ogawa and Miyamoto’s pop-star aspirations, Somewhere Between also documents the rising prominence in the early ’80s of independent labels and boutique specialty imprints, which played a key role in bringing this experimental spirit to Japanese audiences. Labels like the Nippon Columbia Co., Ltd. subsidiary Better Days and rock critic Yuzuru Agi’s Vanity Records are featured as prominently as their big-budget counterparts, and Agi himself makes an appearance on the compilation through his work with the band R.N.A.-ORGANISM. Taken from their 1980 album R.N.A.O MEETS P.O.P.O., “Weimar 22” channels the noisy experiments of West German conceptualists like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig into something more approachable, as twinkling chimes and handclaps lighten an otherwise dry composition. The song introduces a stretch of heavier synth tracks that more successfully bridge the gap between noise and pop music, even as it becomes overwhelmingly clear that their creators don’t share the same commitment to genre. Wha Ha Ha’s “Akatere” opens with a chaotic free-jazz breakdown complete with crashing cymbals, saxophone screeches, and babbling water samples before transitioning into a strange piece of dubby electro, while others, like “Hasu No Enishi,” from the Rough Trade and Visible Cloaks-affiliated new-age duo Dip in the Pool, provide the kind of straightforward synth pop that wouldn’t sound out of place on an Ultravox record.
Comparisons to the German experimental tradition feel especially apt in light of the lasting international influence of bands like Neu!, Can, and Kraftwerk. While Japan largely missed out on a comparable global boom beyond the singular success of YMO, these recordings feel like an important attempt to correct the historical record, making space for forgotten artists without resorting to the built-in appeal of familiar genres. While city pop and environmental music thrive in functional settings that immediately translate across cultures, Somewhere Between feels part of a broader refusal to be understood on the same terms, forcing listeners to engage with a history that goes deeper than immediate feeling. Taken together, these are recordings that can’t be reduced to their play counts on streaming platforms or soaring prices in online auctions, with endless mystery—and reward—lurking just beneath the surface.

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Played by the five-piece ensemble Transit (plus guests including Julia Holter) Corps Exquis is an album of compositions by the Paris-born composer Daniel Wohl. It rallies together a tiny army's worth of interesting sounds, a zone of confusion between digital glitch and bow-on-string screech.

Corps Exquis

To listen to Corps Exquis, an album of compositions by the Paris-born composer Daniel Wohl, is to be mowed over by a tiny army's worth of interesting sounds. It's hard to tell, sometimes, if those noises represent the crackle of cell phone interference or the creaky floor of an old house: The opening piece, "Neighborhood", churns together little bits of composer and performer Aaron Roche's processed voice with furious scribbles of tremolo'd string, a waveform that Wohl snags with his software and distends, so that we no longer picture human arms generating the sound. There are an abundance of other noises here, too, all of them of hazy origin-- some percussive clicks, some radiant, soft-edged keyboard arpeggios, a shimmer effect that resembles locusts or a lawn sprinkler. There is some groaning, burping electronic noise in the music's low end that could be a groaning double bass or electronics. This zone of confusion, between the digital glitch and bow-on-string screech, is where Wohl lives, and Corps Exquis gets more interesting the more confused you get.
The album, recorded by the modern classical guitarist and composer Andrew McKenna Lee, is beautiful and maze-like, with sounds emanating from all directions in your listening space. It is performed by the excellent five-piece ensemble Transit (percussion, clarinet and bass clarinet, violin, cello, and piano), which Wohl co-founded. The album is a kind of all-star affair, at least as far as the tight-knit world of NYC contemporary classical is concerned: So Percussion show up on "Neighborhood"; Julia Holter drops by on "Corpus". They render Wohl's music as a world overrun with small scrapes and fidgets, constantly scurrying across the floorboards while larger, more patient sounds operate above. "Insext" opens on a digital storm of white noise, overlaid with wisps of bowed string harmonics. A little string melody eventually rises out of the din, like someone whispering some half-remembered Copland, but it's promptly buffeted by waves of digital percussion. This push and pull, this sense that the music Transit plays is being sucked into the void and spit out transformed, like the tennis-ball scene in Poltergeist, is part of what makes Wohl such an original voice.
His voice is not manic, however, and his canvas is not seething: Even as it's surrounded by a clattering of pots and pans, the center of "323" is a radiant, booming nimbus of major chords, moving slowly. "Cantus" meanwhile, opens on a gently piling snowdrift of strings, all bowing in different pattern to create a gorgeously featureless expanse similar to Arvo Pärt's Fratres For Eight Cellos. Slowly, other noises creep into the frame-- a sharp, stabbing cello sound, some hollow rattles, like bottles being racked up at a bar counter. The piece dissolves, near the end, into a distressed racket of competing cries from all players, but Wohl leaves us with a contemplatively cool sound in its last seconds, a small sigh. In each piece, clamor briefly overwhelms serenity, but each time, clamor loses.
Most pieces operate on both planes at once: "Ouverture" generates a hushed, expectant mood that recalls George Crumb's "Star-Child". That piece builds its most fearsome roar from an old-fashioned pedaled piano, then fans out into a soothing hum of manipulated string textures. Whatever Wohl's vision is, about the noise of digital lives, and how they affect the mind, it isn't binary: Solace, these pieces seem to argue, can come from anywhere we look for it.


On his first album of new material in six years, Sam Beam mines the onset of middle age for sharp-eyed songs that are lively and relatively breezy, despite the melancholy subject matter.

Light Verse

How do you measure the time between albums? The calendar says that Iron & Wine’s latest studio effort, Light Verses, arrives exactly six years, eight months, and one day after its previous one, 2017’s Beast Epic. Your record shelf, on the other hand, says it’s been two EPs, one Archive Series release, one collab with Calexico, one reissue of his breakthrough album, two live albums, and a documentary. Maybe it’s more useful to tally up all the mundane moments when you’ve tried to be a good partner or patient father or productive artist or engaged citizen—tasks all complicated by a global pandemic that, for Sam Beam, anyway, proved creatively crippling. These various metrics are all bouncing around his skull on Light Verse, an album very much aware of time passing. Beam’s own abacus can be startlingly gruesome: “Time likes pulling my teeth,” he sings on the wry, spry “Cutting It Close.” “I never knew how many teeth I would need.”
All of those yanked molars add up to a new perspective on pretty much everything. Beam reemerges on Light Verse with a dry sense of humor and a newfound ability to laugh off certain tragedies, like death—both others’ and your own—precisely because they are inevitable. Even back on Iron & Wine’s relatively lo-fi 2002 debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle, he had a flair for dressing up bleak truths in warm melodies and reassuringly measured vocals, not only making them palatable but finding beauty in sorrow. Beam can still pull off that sleight of hand gracefully enough to make the title Light Verse sound queasily ironic, but now he’s looking backwards over 49 years. These new songs are about tracing your steps, taking stock, and raising a glass to lovers and friends who pass through your life only briefly. He spends much of the album wondering about people’s whereabouts: “I knew someone long ago, whether I wanted to or not,” he sings on the stark “Taken by Surprise.” “We never said goodbye that I remember.” That person didn’t stay long, but it was enough to provoke gratitude half a lifetime later.
The new outlook of middle age animates these songs and allows Beam to tinker with tone and form. Light Verse is a lively, relatively breezy album, despite its somber subject matter. He worked with a new crew of musicians, including bassist Sebastian Steinberg and multi-instrumentalist Davíd Garza, who make sure their flourishes never distract from the pith of his songs. “Sweet Talk” has the bouncy pomp of ’60s bubblegum psych, which feels new for Beam, and “Yellow Jacket” builds so patiently that it sounds epic despite clocking in at a mere three and a half minutes.
“All in Good Time,” a duet with Fiona Apple, surveys the full arc of a relationship as they repeat the title like a mantra and milk it of every possible implication. “All in good time my angel came back/Made us some money but that didn’t last,” he sings to her. “All in good time and that’s what it was/Mistook that cash in the mattress for love,” she sings back. The imagery becomes outlandish, and it’s fun to think of Apple and Beam holding up banks and stealing cars, but a distinct melancholy underscores each note. Even the good times will end eventually. That idea gestures toward the bittersweet irony of this fine late-career album: All the years have pulled Beam’s teeth, but they have also sharpened his pen.


This is Sarah Lipstate’s biggest record as Noveller yet. Mixing genres to create her epic version of noise, what it loses in detail it makes up for in grandiosity.

A Pink Sunset For No One

With each successive release, the self-sustaining universe that is Sarah Lipstate’s output as Noveller pushes outward. Her instrumental sound—built from guitar loops run through pedals—has evolved well past its drone-anchored early incarnation. That relied on layers of distortion to create meditative spaces that enveloped the listener; more recently, synths and percussion have entered her sprawling compositions. A Pink Sunset for No One is ruled by a newly epic sense of scale and narrative. For better or for worse, the album’s more intricate details are at times overshadowed by its glimmering crescendos.
However, the tension between Noveller’s roots as an intimate bedroom project and the outsize shape it takes here is compelling: even if her style has grown to fill the kind of rooms one might play opening for Iggy Pop, it still feels like a dreamworld Lipstate has built primarily for herself. Opener “Deep Shelter” begins with a low-pitched four-note phrase that repeats throughout, accumulating iterative details that begin to soar outward from the humble introduction. Four minutes in, these loops pull back to make way for a gently cinematic piano bridge: self-soothing, yes, but executed in a remarkably high-definition way.
There’s also a heightened sense of energy, Lipstate spending less time luxuriating in her guitar’s textures and more on developing big-picture structure. “Rituals,” which winks at Steve Reich, is anchored by soft, distant percussion and a small chorus of staccato riffing, punctuated by blasts of rippling sustained notes. On “Trials and Trails,” perhaps the album’s most technically impressive track, Lipstate solos heroically over distorted passages, the juxtaposition throwing the liquidity of her playing into relief.
The variety of genres and sounds that emerge within her compositions give Lipstate’s work a multitextured feel, but in moments I found myself wishing for more concision in the way such ideas are digested. Experimental forebears like Reich or Rhys Chatham (with whom she’s performed, in his Guitar Army) are a natural influence, but on songs like “The Unveiling” and “Corridors,” Lipstate’s usual spaciness takes on an almost-proggy feel; meanwhile, the title track feels like a crisp take on a Slowdive instrumental. Clearly, Lipstate has the technical prowess to pull off a near-infinite range of styles. As she shakes off the distortion that might have once smoothed over their messier intersections, the issue becomes, perhaps, how to tastefully marry them.
But that’s not to say that there isn’t a solid sense of self at this record’s core. Its closer “Emergence” is slow but not sleepy, fluttering melodies dancing around its murky base. It’s a pleasure to listen in to the small melodic details folded into its dominant humid texture, but it also feels, as a whole, reassuring: a sound that’s big and confident without relying on excess to sway its listeners, or itself.


The Wu-Tang Clan’s seminal debut turned 20 last fall; it was commemorated in glowing reminiscences and a lengthy festival tour, along with word of a new album on the way. A Better Tomorrow took a while and it sounds labored: where overbearing arrangements don’t get in the way, a cloying sentimentality does.

A Better Tomorrow

The Wu-Tang Clan’s seminal debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) turned 20 last fall, commemorated in a litany of glowing reminiscences and a lengthy intercontinental festival tour. There was a clean-cut finality to the proceedings, a sense that the group was sending off a movement that had finally run its course. Producer and de facto group leader RZA thought he’d get the guys together for one last job and spent the year trying to will a new Wu-Tang album into existence in time for 36 Chambers’ November anniversary. The date came and went, but no album surfaced (though we did get "Family Reunion", a sentimental homecoming over a perhaps-too-chunky slice of the O’Jays’ 1975 hit of the same name). Work was plagued by old complaints about RZA’s lush live band arrangements flying in the face of the claustrophobic kung fu grit of the Clan’s classics. Raekwon publicly challenged RZA’s authority and boycotted the sessions. The new album had a name (A Better Tomorrow, after the emotional Wu-Tang Forever cut) but no fully functioning group to record it.
Tense negotiations and a reconciliation followed, but A Better Tomorrow arrives this week illuminating the early apprehensions. The production here is more of a piece with the muscular soundtrack work of RZA’s 2012 directorial debut The Man With the Iron Fists than anything bearing the Wu-Tang name, barring the heavily orchestrated bits of 2007’s 8 Diagrams that inspired Raekwon’s last mutiny attempt. But A Better Tomorrow’s thick and moody soundscapes run off-puttingly perpendicular to the group’s cerebral storytelling. "Felt" practically drowns memorable turns from Ghostface Killah and Method Man in unnecessary drum-n-bass flourishes. Inspectah Deck and Cappadonna come off uncharacteristically plodding over the fluid, proggy groove of "Mistaken Identity". Sounds that were once punishing, tumbling out of shoddy recording equipment in a home studio, are distractingly pretty, pumped full of all the crack session playing A Better Tomorrow favors.
Where overbearing arrangements don’t get in the way, a cloying sentimentality does. 4th Disciple delivers one of the album’s better productions with "Miracle", but a drippy, beatless chorus and melodramatic coda hack the momentum out from under suspenseful verses. "Felt" nicks a chorus from the mawkish '70s weeper "Feelings", and the hokey, swinging Dusty Springfield homage of "Preacher’s Daughter" is only listenable for Meth and Ghost’s flexible senses of humor. The title track fits the methodical build of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ "Wake Up Everybody" under suitably socially conscious verses, but right as you start to hope they’re not just going to play the actual chorus of the original in full, they do, strings ramped noxiously high in the mix. By the time "Family Reunion" hits, A Better Tomorrow will have felt more like a karaoke bar’s old school night than a new album by the guys who gave us "C.R.E.A.M." and "Triumph".
When A Better Tomorrow commits to sounding like an actual Wu-Tang affair it starts to cook. Longtime Wu associate Mathematics brings Meth and GZA to life with a lively soul chop on the album’s lead single "Keep Watch" and imbues "40th Street Black/We Will Fight" with the spirit of The W’s upbeat but by no means peppy "Gravel Pit". "Pioneer the Frontier" fashions the energy of ramshackle W deep cut "Careful (Click, Click)" into a menace RZA can’t even kill when he signs verse one off with "Holla at the moon, my goons at Coachella." "Necklace" and "Ron O’Neal" follow suit in piling on the soot, and for a moment, this thing is heavy enough to bear the weight of the name on the cover. But all too often, A Better Tomorrow prefers to bask in those idyllic blue skies instead.
Raekwon was right: RZA’s vision no longer suits the rabid, renegade spirit the Wu-Tang Clan represents. He’s helmed a record that’s drunk on its own musicality, one that seems to befuddle the very guys rapping on it. It’s impossible to say how engaged the rest of the members were in recording, whether the wonkier moments here are the result of rappers disinterested in their own beats or production crafted awkwardly around pre-existing verses. But it’s deeply telling that the night the Wu-Tang Clan was set to release its first album in seven years (and possibly, its last one ever), Raekwon was already pushing something else entirely on Twitter. The union hasn’t worked in a while, and rather than hiding irreparable fissures by posting up a unified front to tickle fan nostalgia, better to let it crystallize unblemished in memory. Keep up appearances for the kids if you like, but trust and believe that they can tell when something is off.


Following in the footsteps of 2013’s Twelve Reasons to Die, Ghostface Killah’s new album tells the story of Tony Starks’ revenge on his enemies. Like that earlier record, it plays out over live-band, time-stamped soul music and with the guidance of a young collaborator.

36 Seasons

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: dashing bon vivant Tony Stark is mangled in a horrifying accident on the job, is resurrected by a confluence of mad science and divine intervention, strikes out to defend his turf and smite his enemies. This is the basic origin story of “Iron Man”, the comic book franchise that gave Ghostface Killah, aka Tony Starks, his first album title and likely, his last shot at a major movie role. It is also the essence of 2013’s Twelve Reasons to Die, where a linear narrative of revenge was told over live-band, time-stamped soul music with the guidance of a young and new collaborator. Does that also sound familiar? It should if you’ve heard anything about 36 Seasons; the main difference is that Adrian Younge is exchanged for Brooklyn revivalists the Revelations and that Tony Starks doesn’t actually die before he rains vengeance upon those who have wronged him.
One can see this continuous and considerable narrowing of Ghostface Killah’s artistic scope as a course correction or an apology to his hardcore fanbase; penance for the shameless bids for commercial relevance on The Big Doe Rehab and Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City. The sadder truth is that Ghostface has been in an artistic tailspin for the past seven years and, as with Twelve Reasons to Die, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that he can’t pull out unless someone else takes the controls.
Though still credited to Ghostface Killah, 36 Seasons is a truly collaborative work. Comic book artist Matthew Rosenberg returns to provide the storyline and Ghostface doesn’t even appear on nearly a third of the tracks, which are earmarked for character introductions and a chance for the Revelations to show their neo-soul credentials. While nowhere near as fantastical as Twelve Reasons’ supernatural storyline—Ghostface was a hired gun murdered by his employees and his remains were melted into 12 vinyl albums—36 Seasons is far more promising. In short, Tony Starks was keeping Staten Island in check just with his presence, but for reasons that aren’t quite clear, he’s exiled for nine years; that amounts to “36 seasons,” as Ghostface constantly reminds the listener throughout. He returns home and sees his girl take up with a local drug kingpin (played by Kool G Rap) and his former running buddy (voiced by AZ) joins the boys in blue. He’s determined to clean up the streets, but has to do some dirt first, which lands him back in jail after he’s double-crossed by those he trusted.
This is straight-up criminology and the potential is off the charts if you have even the slightest shred of hope that Ghost could regain his gifts for plot twists, jaw-dropping detail, and character sketches that resulted in the most vivid storytelling hip-hop has ever witnessed. But that Ghostface disappeared nearly a decade ago. As such, there was no reason to say "spoiler alert" for any of the above. For one thing, it will be mentioned in every single review of 36 Seasons, because the entire story is laid out in a four-panel comic included in the CD’s insert. All of it.
And 36 Seasons is more in line with the spirit of Ghostface’s recent output, where he’s more prolific and "for the love" than ever and somehow lazier at the same time. His lyrics barely deviate from the plot points laid in a comic book that can be read in 20 seconds, reverting to Twelve Reasons’ childlike literalism and chronology. The first line is, "Ayo, I’m back after nine years/ That’s 36 seasons/ Shit is changed up for all types of reasons" and from there on out, potentially graphic scenes are often similarly reduced to, "this happened and then this happened."
How has shit changed and what are these reasons? We’re told that the streets are being overrun with petty thieves and drug dealers, but also that Ghostface’s exile was likely the result of a bid in the Tombs. So who are these kids? Are they like the Polo rubgy-stealing turncoat from "R.A.G.U." or the incompetent, petty drug dealer from "Maxine"? No, on "The Dogs of War" (not to be confused with the Fishscale highlight "Dogs of War"), they’re selling drugs in a way that Ghostface merely finds unacceptable for aesthetic reasons.
When he confronts his estranged lover Bamboo (played by Kandace Springs) on "Love Don’t Live Here", we don’t get the shocking invective of "Wildflower", the wounded alpha wolf cry of "Never Be the Same Again", or a combination of the two as on "Back Like That". It literally goes nowhere; Tony Starks arrives at Bamboo's house; she is surprised. She has moved on. He feels disrespected. He rhymes "the crib" with "the kid" twice in the same verse. It’s actually painful to hear him attempt to modulate his voice trying to muster some kind of emotion during this thing. Starks retells his betrayal ("Double Cross"), his lightbulb moment ("Pieces to the Puzzle"), and his murder plot ("Homicide") in similarly unembellished terms and once the climactic shootout arrives, it’s presented as damn near an afterthought—"I’m filling funeral homes and graves/ It’s no surprise GFK the only one that survive." And then he wins back Bamboo. The end.
Maybe the reference to his past work is unfair and 36 Seasons should be taken at face value. But after you hear the story once, at face value, 36 Seasons is a serviceable, New York soul-rap album that has limited replay value. The frequent absence of Ghostface might actually be the best thing going for it, as he’s consistently outdone by Kool G Rap and AZ; maybe their characters are more well-defined and maybe their relative lack of celebrity makes them more capable of merging with character. More accurately, they simply write better raps in 2014. Likewise, Pharoahe Monch appears as "Dr. X." on "Emergency Procedure", and spits typical tongue-twisting linguistics about the periodic table. But once it’s done, you’re still left with a track about creating a gas mask, which is otherwise useless outside the context of 36 Seasons.
Otherwise, the high points of 36 Seasons often seem unintentional—during the rising action of "The Dogs of War", Theodore Unit lackey Shawn Wigs offers, "you know how we do, O.G. style, I'll dress up like the pizza man," which is hilarious because it’s Shawn Wigs. Likewise, the undercurrent of New York City police corruption somehow makes 36 Seasons uncomfortably prescient, especially when Ghostface complains of "illegal chokeholds" in a moment that feels way too hot to the touch right now. But the peak of 36 Seasons comes during the outro of "Homicide", where Ghostface promises swift retribution and yells, "I’ll wipe my dick on your spaghetti fork!" Once you try to figure out what a spaghetti fork is and the astonishing insult of having someone do that to it, once that... evocative image fades, there’s a lingering sadness that it’s the first time you really hear Ghostface on 36 Seasons instead of the increasingly mundane Tony Starks.


Everything But the Girl singer continues to play the matriarch of love-lorn electronic music on her latest solo album. Ewan Pearson again produces.

Love and Its Opposite

If you've known Tracey Thorn over the last 20-odd years, you've known her as the maven, if not matriarch, of love-lorn electronic music. With Everything But the Girl, it seemed like her every long-held note wore away the ideal of the stable relationship-- ironic considering that Thorn ended up marrying her co-collaborator Ben Watt. Considering that she and Watt are on a presumably happy course, what with the marriage and the kids and all, Love and Its Opposite seems a unusual effort. The opening cut, "Oh, the Divorces!", says it all: With spare and folksly instrumentation behind her, Thorn pleads "Who's next? Who's next?" implying love's unfortunately serial nature. She's certainly playing a character here, but her resigned candor convincingly suggests that she's been burned enough to carry a record suspicious of love's charms.
Take the title. Thorn invites poetic discussion of what love's opposite actually is, and it sure as shit doesn't have to be hate or war. On "Long White Dress", Thorn suggests that romance does little but gunk up her head, and at this point it's better to settle. Love's opposite? Might as well be reality. Whether she herself believes it or not, the record all over laments the perfectionist disappointment of eluding true love. The curiously ham-fisted "Singles Bar" has Thorn's narrator just past her prime but still trying to fit into the Sexy Jeans, desperate to reel in a guy and the satisfaction to which she once felt entitled but somehow missed. The cliché "I wish you'd help me out of this mess/ I wish you'd help me out of this dress" sums up the shortsighted, long-in-the-tooth gal 20 years removed from the Everything But the Girl heyday.
Working once again with British producer Ewan Pearson, Thorn further dials down the synthesizer-based production that garnered her and Watt their greatest fame. 2007's Out of the Woods was a relatively low-key affair, but Love and Its Opposite plays more like a conventional singer-songwriter album. The shift in gears isn't unwelcome: Thorn, as always, exercises that smoky voice to great effect. It's not especially clear how much self-aware Thorn's hammy singer-songwriter character is, because if you don't suspend a bit of disbelief, then "Singles Bar" and "You Are a Lover" seem more a stilted narration of an unhappily independent woman inhabiting Lilith Fair's second stage. It's nice to think, however, that Thorn's earnest, middle-aged concept album, saddled as it is with its middle-of-the-road folksiness, illustrates that it's not all about love vs. hate, but the truly adult idea of still caring vs. no longer giving a shit.


The veteran rapper continues to leverage the same well-worn blueprint on his latest album, which plays like a back-to-basics revue.

Hidden Treasure

After years spent languishing in industry purgatory, it was only natural that Knowledge the Pirate would hitch his wagon to Roc Marciano’s train. Both sullen New York street rhymers, they’d each been chewed up and spit out by labels who couldn’t market them in the age of Napster and boy bands. But Marciano’s 2010 debut Marcberg gave the lie to their boardroom logic. An insular, self-produced triumph circulated almost entirely through torrents and word-of-mouth, the album presaged a decade’s worth of self-referential East Coast hip-hop, and without any marketing. There was built-in demand for Marciano’s brand of stripped-down neoclassicism—even if it took a miracle like Marcberg to prove it—and Knowledge was along for the ride, appearing on Marcberg’s follow-ups and releasing his Marci-produced full-length, Flintlock, in 2018. In a crowded field, Knowledge continues to leverage the same well-worn blueprint on his latest album.
Hidden Treasure is a great-sounding record, even if that doesn’t always translate to memorable songs. Knowledge’s go-to producer E.L.E.M.N.T. has a knack for squeezing evocative phrasing from concise loops, alternating between muscular horn samples and understated piano instrumentals. As is the case across Marciano’s oeuvre, the percussion is spare, hooks lean and infrequent, and the tempo barely vacillates from 70bpm. E.L.E.M.N.T.’s best arrangements—the shimmering “Bloody Steps,” the contemplative “Righteous Tongue”—augment Knowledge’s noirscapes without being overly prescriptive. “Smoke & Mirrors,” with its chunky snare and choral sample, is the finest of the bunch. While E.L.E.M.N.T. can’t claim the Alchemist and Harry Fraud’s cinematic arcs, his steely loops place him solidly in the second tier of neoclassical producers alongside Giallo Point, Camoflauge Monk, Daringer, Big Ghost Ltd, and Nicholas Craven.
What’s fun about these producers’ roomy arrangements is that pockets abound for rappers who seek them, but Knowledge is akin to MC Eiht and Planet Asia in that he doesn’t flow so much as declaim. Like Marciano, he’s a dour vocalist and methodical scene-setter, slowly embellishing verbal snapshots with context and acuity. But where Marci’s verses burgeon with callbacks and tricky asides, Knowledge’s are mainly static, punctuated by free-standing couplets that impede narrative progress. “He used to be up, now be broke lookin’ lame/And them new gangstas rockin’ skinny jeans and choker chains,” he rhymes on “Righteous Tongue”; in another verse, he name-drops “Freeway” Ricky Ross. The settings—bricks here, narcos there, jewels and femmes fatale everywhere—are by now familiar, and the way he stacks images on top of one another makes them feel like bullet-pointed lists. It’s technically sound—there just aren’t many quotables to write home about.
The post-Marcberg aesthetic increasingly relies on contrasts: vivid stylists rapping over minimalist beats, resplendent narratives relayed by wheezing drug dealers. And when Knowledge and E.L.E.M.N.T. switch up the pace, it really clicks. The sax loop on “Chairman of the Board” rings out like a clarion call, richly foregrounding Knowledge’s lifestyle bars. Fellow Marci protégé Stove God Cooks provides comic relief on “Grenades,” playing the wild-eyed triggerman opposite Knowledge’s wizened street survivor: “Big homie said don’t even speak on it, just lie back/He Rodman with the Pistons, he just ain’t dyed yet.” A flamboyant caricature of a Giuliani-era trafficker, Stove God is a brilliant foil for Knowledge’s deliberate raconteur—they should be a duo.
As a contributor to Reloaded and Marci Beaucoup, Knowledge helped lay the foundation for a sound that’s since become a dominant force in hip-hop. The bar’s been set extremely high, and in light of Mach-Hommy’s immersive world-building, Rome Streetz’s vocal acrobatics, and Crimeapple’s oddball humor, Hidden Treasure plays like a back-to-basics revue: no Goodfellas punchlines or gimmicky ad-libs, just solid rhymes over-expressive loops. With Marciano still at the top of his game, Knowledge’s output can feel apocryphal in a way that the personality-driven work of their more animated peers doesn’t, but there’s truth to the adage that a rising tide lifts all boats.

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The Messenger is the big, bright, jangly guitar rock LP that Smiths fans would have killed for in 1994, full of fantastic guitar tones and cavernous choruses. But in 2013, it exists in its own, hermetically sealed context.

The Messenger

Declaring a man to be a "god-like genius" several months shy of his 5oth birthday implies he has no more worlds left to conquer. It's been like this for Johnny Marr since before his 25th birthday, when he co-wrote a couple dozen perfect pop songs with Morrissey and then departed for a series of celebrity rocker odd jobs in other people's bands (including Modest Mouse, the Pretenders, Talking Heads, and Pet Shop Boys). To say Marr ran up the score on his legacy with the Smiths, and has been treading water ever since, would be reductive. But Marr has been playing with house money for as long as many of today's indie-poppers chasing "Hand in Glove" and "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out" have been alive. Johnny Marr is an institution now-- and institutions are supposed to stay in the same place, right where we left them, until they topple over.
Marr (hopefully) has a long way to go before that happens. So, now that his extended tenure as a gun for hire appears to have been put on hold, he's set about making his first proper solo record, The Messenger. (Marr's 2003 album with the Healers, Boomslang, is apparently being passed off as an equal collaboration between Marr and whoever else was in the Healers.) If it seems like a strange time for Johnny Marr to finally make a record under his own name, that's because it is. The Messenger is precisely the big, bright, jangly guitar rock LP that Smiths fans would have killed for in 1994. The record's immediately appealing "Smiths plus 20 pounds of muscle" sound would have fit in perfectly alongside Oasis' Definitely Maybe and the Verve's A Storm in Heaven on a typical Anglophile's CD rack 20 years ago*.* In 2013, though, The Messenger exists in its own, hermetically sealed context.
As Marr recently told Pitchfork, The Messenger was consciously crafted to appeal to his old fans. "I wanted it to sound effortless, not like I was trying to reinvent the wheel," he said. "I'm not interested in trying to have people who might like other kinds of music follow me. I don't want to please them." Based on this criteria, The Messenger is a success. The guitar tones on this record are fantastic-- which is to say, they instantly bring to mind the dense, intricate, and yet lightly airy riffs that Marr strummed over Morrissey's asexual witticisms in the mid-1980s. "European Me" is manna for Marr obsessives, opening with a stuttering six-string barrage that quickly blossoms into a wondrous expanse of chiming Rickenbackers. The title track is another instant grabber, marrying disco rhythms with Marr's spidery guitar over a bed of mood-setting synths. Lead-off track "The Right Thing Right" is pretty awesomely Smiths-like, too, with Johnny throwing in some frisky Keith Richards licks in for good measure.
The Messenger begs to be received on its own modest terms and its pleasures-- Marr's guitar playing, the no-frills production, those big and cavernous choruses-- wear off after prolonged exposure. Marr is still a top-flight musician, but he's not really a true solo artist. As a vocalist, he's a warm if unexceptional presence; he tends to get lost inside his own immaculately constructed guitar cathedrals, particularly when he has nothing to say in his lyrics. For "I Want the Heartbeat", Marr effectively grinds a metallic bass line against his own over-amped guitar, but the song's narrative about a man falling in love with a machine is a dopey metaphor for our culture's obsession with technology. In the latter half of The Messenger, even Marr's playing starts to lose some of its vigor; "Say Demesne" is draggy, late-period U2 balladry for aging Gen-Xers.
The best parts of The Messenger have a sideman's sensibility; Marr is great at doodling in the margins but falters when it comes to filling up the center with substance. The result is a record that grabs your attention initially, but is unlikely to hold it in the long view. Not that it matters-- Marr was a legend before this record, and he'll still be one after it. The Messenger won't be included in the body of work that made Marr great, but it's a solid approximation of his strengths.


With adrenaline, heart, and an unmistakable Baltimore accent, Deetranada breathes fresh life into the familiar struggles of the up-and-coming rapper.

NADAWORLD 2

Is realness in rap about your subject matter and wit on the mic? Your style and image? The people you surround yourself with? Does it stem from a Teflon social media presence, or a willingness to stay 10 toes during a RICO trial? Whether it comes down to living your raps or just being the funniest in the room, any play at realness is an extension of being true to yourself (or at least the version you present to the world). By that criteria, Baltimore rapper Deetranada is as real as it gets.
Since starting out as a teenager recording YouTube videos in secret, her spitfire flows and seamless blend of braggadocio and introspection have made her a powerful force within her city’s underground and in the minds of BET’s Hip-Hop Awards cypher scouts alike. On “Forgiveness,” the first track from her latest mixtape, NADAWORLD 2, she offers a snapshot from her ride on the industry roller coaster: “Just hit a play and they comin’ again/I was just crying ’bout making the rent/Bitches that hate prolly live in a tent.” Managing the successes and anxieties of a rap upstart and sorting out the difference between Deetranada, the budding star, and Diamond Barmer, the woman—if indeed there’s any difference at all—has always been at the core of her music. NADAWORLD 2 continues down that path with adrenaline and heart.
No matter what she’s rapping about, Deetranada’s bullish voice and thick Baltimore accent anchor her songs. She frequently bends the “o” in words like “too” and “you” to give it an “-ew” sound that propels her verses forward like a skateboarder gaining speed down a halfpipe. Notice the way she pronounces “choosing” and “juice” during the first verse of “Chosen”: Her diction is distinctive but subtle, a far cry from exaggerated Baltimore parodies and accent challenges. Her hometown is as much a part of her music as anything, down to the fact that all three of NADAWORLD 2’s guests—Ky$hia, Juan Pachino, and Benji Badazz—are locals.
The stories Deetranada brings to life are both celebratory and fraught. There’s talk of Telfar bags and hitting donuts in luxury cars but also memories of violence and gunshots exposing brains “like lo mein.” Backstabbings, betrayals, and misunderstandings color stories about her ops (“Trust Nobody”) and trying to find emotional middle ground with a partner (“Dark Tango”). But she’s no defeatist. Deetranada sounds energized by her growing success, ready to move the pieces she’s slid into place. “All them times I called you back-to-back and you ain’t pick up nigga/Please don’t hit my phone when I get richer,” she says on “Cold World.” For now, she’s more adept at straight-ahead rapping than singing—sung hooks like “Switched on Me” and “Take Money” lack the heft of the rapped hooks on “Anna Mae” or “Check In”—but each song plays out like an episode of Power that she can’t believe she had to live through.
For all of Deetranada’s gains in recent years—a spot on the Lifetime reality show The Rap Game, freestyles for BET and On the Radar Radio—she has yet to drop the hit record or receive the big cosign that would put her alongside likeminded peers like Glorilla and Rico Nasty. But she’s earned her stripes and become one of her city’s brightest prospects. “The struggle it really excites me/One year, one mil most likely,” she brags on “AF1,” with energy bold enough to make clichés land like revelations. Though she feels primed for stardom, Deetranada’s urgency is more hungry than flashy. She sounds like she could rap forever, regardless of who’s listening.


The Massachusetts-based trio featuring guitarist Wendy Eisenberg is a gnarled, shred-heavy, meta-comment on indie rock that also creates some pretty great indie rock songs along the way.

Tell Me I’m Bad

Wendy Eisenberg shreds. The guitarist peels off several spectacular solos on Editrix’s debut album Tell Me I’m Bad, most of them chaotic and raw, a couple winding and lyrical, and all inspiring visions of fretboards melting in terrible ecstasy. Eisenberg also shreds in the sense of tearing things up. As an instrumental soloist, singer-songwriter, and member of various ad hoc improv ensembles, they specialize in deconstruction: of compositional forms, orthodox approaches to their instrument, and arbitrary distinctions between the conservatory concert hall and the punk house basement as venues for strange and dissonant music.
Editrix, a Massachusetts-based trio with bassist Steve Cameron and drummer Josh Daniel, is Eisenberg’s most straightforwardly rock-oriented project, though it presents itself in playfully conceptual terms. The band has self-selected “avant butt rock” as a genre tag, and their stated intent is to “annihilate indie rock.” But Tell Me I’m Bad doesn’t sound like an academic exercise or a joke. Instead, it comes across as an exuberant and virtuosic take on the sort of grinding, noisy post-hardcore that has thrived in DIY spaces across the country ever since the late 1980s or so. This is rock neither butt nor avant, but a lot closer to the latter than the former. For the most part, it requires no annihilation to accommodate the weirdness Eisenberg and crew have in mind for it; the weirdness is built right in. And if the moments of guitar worship are intended on some level as a critique of the form, that doesn’t change the fact that they fucking rip.
The players composed the music of Tell Me I’m Bad collaboratively, with Eisenberg penning lyrics and singing. They make impressive use of the trio format, emphasizing the independence of their instruments and the negative space between them. Sometimes, they return to verses and choruses, but just as often their songs unfold in a series of violent breaks, without the comfort of repeated material. On “Torture,” Eisenberg’s guitar buffets their partners like a fierce crosswind, threatening to divert their 4/4 groove into murkier rhythmic waters. “Instant” is lurching and abrasive, its lyrics hinting at some trauma of youth without naming it directly. It sounds like Shellac, if Shellac songs didn’t have predators for protagonists and instead focused on the efforts to pick up the pieces by those that survived their attacks.
In one subtle deviation from the basement sludge tradition, Eisenberg does not strain to be heard over the music, but follows the same conversational delivery of their much quieter recent solo records. The approach feels like a refutation of punk’s macho posturing, and also of its insistence on naturalism and authenticity. Hearing Eisenberg’s voice at the front of the mix, cool and collected above instruments whose roar might obscure it in the room, gives it a certain artificial remove from the rest of the music. This distance in turn affords Eisenberg room for more ambiguity of perspective than your average earnestly bellowing front-dude. On “Chelsea,” one of several songs that juxtapose singsong melody with pummelling instrumental force, they observe a woman whose politics aren’t sufficiently progressive: “Chelsea veers to the left, but not far enough/In this way she’s nothing like me.” From another singer, the line might seem smug. Eisenberg’s taunts suggest that the narrator may be more like Chelsea than they think.
Tell Me I’m Bad comes closest to fulfilling its promise of annihilation in a three-song stretch near its close. “She Wants to Go and Party,” “The History of Dance,” and “Chillwave” are the album’s most conventionally approachable songs, but also the most complex, indulging in various rock’n’roll stock gestures in ways that highlight both their silliness and their power. “Chillwave,” my favorite of the three, has a reggae-ish half-time groove that reminds me equally of Fugazi, 311, and “Watching the Detectives.” When a droning high note from a synth appears halfway through—the only incursion of electronics on the album’s power-trio palette, as far as I can tell—the whole thing begins to feel like it’s hanging in suspended animation, and I’m tempted to add Talk Talk to the list of unlikely reference points. Drifting and borderless, it sounds, at last, like something other than rock. Even the guitar solo, when it arrives moments later, can’t break the spell.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The eighth album from the Australian psych-rockers is their most melodically realized of their career. The strains of pop offer a lovely imprint of a band in a constant state of flux.

Tasmania

The world’s in such a bad state that even psych-rockers are starting to get a little freaked out. “While the whole world melts, am I just meant to watch?” Nick Allbrook of Australian mind-melters Pond asks on “Sixteen Days,” one of a few deceptively groovy tracks on the band’s eighth album, Tasmania. Over the stretched-out glam of the title track, he promises with a wistful ache in his voice, “I might go and shack up in Tasmania before the ozone goes/And paradise burns in Australia, who knows?”
The band described their latest—which also marks their international major-label debut, on the perpetually alt-friendly Interscope—as a “sister album” to 2017’s zonked-out The Weather, an album that Allbrook described to NME as “laying out all the dark things underneath the shimmering exterior of cranes, development, money and white privilege.” This demonstration of social awareness is relatively new to Pond, a fact that Allbrook self-reflexively addresses over the oscillating synths of “Hand Mouth Dancer”: “So you got political, can you speak on that?/I didn’t get political, I just faced the facts.” Ideologically, it’s heavy stuff from a band who once wrote a song called “Heroic Shart.”
Growth comes in many forms, and the increasingly clued-in lyrical trajectory isn’t the only way in which Pond are changing. Through their career, the revolving-door outfit has reliably pumped out albums chock full of psych-rock featuring more twists and turns than a waterslide—the Aussie analogue to Ty Segall’s own dutiful commitment to acid-fried garage rock. But The Weather marked a point in the band’s decade-long career when their pop instincts—previously experienced in brief fits between static obscurities and the acoustic left-turn or two—approached the point of full bloom; on Tasmania, Pond’s melodic gifts are as richly realized as the cherry blossoms name-checked in the album’s opening moments.
If you’ve made it this far into this review, you’re well aware that Pond shares a few members with the touring lineup of Tame Impala—godhead Kevin Parker has produced the Pond’s previous five albums, including Tasmania. Until now, any similarities between the two acts have been purely cosmetic—a colorful guitar doodle here, a widescreen synth-bomb there—but Tasmania marks the point in which Pond seem to be directly taking cues from Tame Impala. Specifically: the rubbery R&B-pop of 2015’s shimmering, emotive Currents, a sound that fits Pond surprisingly well. “The Boys Are Killing Me” is a lovely slow-jam that effortlessly transitions into the kind of massive, mind-expanding breakdown that’s become Parker’s calling card; even the album’s trippiest epic, the eight-minute “Burnt Out Star,” resembles less a full-on freakout than it does a few seamlessly edited melodic suites a la Currents’ squishy, sprawling “Let It Happen.”
On that latter song, Allbrook takes a break from Tasmania’s contemplative doom-and-gloom to wax lyrical on carnal concerns, turning out one of the album’s cleverest lyrics in the process: “She said it’d be romantic if you didn’t use the door/Safe to say I don’t see windows the same no more.” The louche observation calls to mind the seedy, hetero-centric ’80s evocations found on Sydney sax-a-holic Alex Cameron’s Forced Witness from 2017. The soft-rock glow that Tasmania frequently adopts represents a triangulation between Cameron’s yacht-rock yarns, Tame Impala’s starry-eyed neurotic daydreams, and Pond’s wonderfully knotty guitar fantasias. It’s a more straightforward and accessible sound that might leave past admirers missing the all-out weirdness of albums past, but the evolution that Tasmania represents also speaks to the fact that the main constant in Pond’s approach is change. Even as the sea levels keep rising, they’ll doubtless find new waves to ride.


The legendary MC has made a career out of evading definition, which he continues to do alongside an array of guests who are all here to simply and inimitably just rap.

Feature Magnetic

Kool Keith is the kind of rapper who, instead of telling you he’s a Mets fan, says, “The Yankees lost but the blue-and-orange team amuse us.” He doesn’t meet new love interests, he has flight attendants cooking salmon cakes in high-heeled shoes; wack MCs don’t get booed off stage, they get shipped to deli meat plants in Quebec. In October, Kool Keith will turn 53. He’s been a legacy act for three different generations of rap fans, written off and resurrected innumerable times. He’s been deemed a goofy eccentric by those who won’t tease out the grim humanity in his writing, he’s been hermetically sealed in the space stations of his most devoted fans’ imaginations. But on his newest album, Feature Magnetic, he shirks off all those constraints to, simply and inimitably, just rap.
The premise is clear: Kool Keith trades verses with an array of guest stars, packaged with bare hooks and brisk running times. In most cases, he pulls his collaborators into his own orbit. Necro spits, “You’re emo and you bump Brian Eno.” Slug sounds like he woke up in the early George W. Bush years, laughing about your insecurities over drinks with your therapist. Even the twice-a-decade DOOM appearance feels like it’s supposed to exist in this universe. Though his voice is at a slightly lower register and his delivery rough around the edges, it’s always a minor thrill to hear the villain fly in from Tulsa and drag a mark to the ATM.
That said, Feature Magnetic’s standout track is the one that pulls Keith furthest from his home planet—specifically, to Vallejo, California with Mac Mall on “Bonneville.” The two split the difference between hyphy revivalism and existential dread, with Mac turning in a supremely tongue-twisting verse. Keith slips back and forth from a copper Continental to his private planes, cufflinks always matching the wheel (or yoke). In fact, the Bronx-bred legend is so agile on the album that when the bounce of “Bonneville” gives way to the stone-faced “Tired,” he’s able to stitch together the fantasy and the fatigue in a way that strengthens both.
“Tired” is an elegy of sorts for his contemporaries who haven’t stepped in a booth in years, who “get surprised when I come up and shine like the sun.” And it’s more than that—it’s couched in the fear that Keith will become them, that he’ll sink into a La-Z-Boy and start firing off bitter tweets. Not that he’s showing signs of slowing down; *Feature Magnetic *catches him at his most vivid, steering Lady Gaga through the corporate labyrinth and ransacking the Burlington Coat Factory with his alter-ego. But for all the ways Keith can warp reality and carve out alternate timelines, there's the lingering sense that death is coming for us all.
That point is driven home by Sadat X in the album’s strongest guest verse. After a clip of Malcolm X talking about JFK’s assassination, Sadat renders pools of blood and swarming ambulances, empty wakes and crowded unemployment offices. It’s unnerving to hear a member of Brand Nubian say he should have gone to dentistry school “and took the steady check.” Yet just when you think the album’s come to a head, when Keith is going to fully pull back the curtain and peer through the fourth wall, he follows Sadat’s verse with a wink. “Sounds like it’s a hard time,” he laughs. “I guess I gotta step out the Phantom.” You can’t pin him down.
All the years with Ultramagnetic MCs, all the one-off concept albums and blood feuds with the record industry have left Keith with wisdom that he dispenses through off-kilter parables: “If you see a junkie kneeling, give him cold water and tell him, ‘Little kids is looking, get up’/I’ma sweat and do a lot of sit-ups.” Though he is, at his heart, that craftsman, stacking high his tower of jump-off-the-screen set pieces, there's something darker that lurks underneath. Lest “people get cozy and sit inside the paragraph,” as he sneers on “MC Voltron,” he litters the album with details from Koch-era New York, revealed in the manner of sci-fi world building. Maybe it’s a stylistic choice. Or maybe it's because Keith is from somewhere else entirely.


With a pitch-black sense of humor, the Cleveland death metal quartet boils the genre down to its essence but lands just shy of its potential.

Slave to the Scalpel

There’s nothing subtle about 200 Stab Wounds. The Cleveland quartet plays death metal with all the nuance of a power drill to the temple—an experience they describe in detail on “Drilling Your Head,” the lead single from their debut, Slave to the Scalpel. Alongside their Maggot Stomp labelmates Sanguisugabogg and Inoculation, 200 Stab Wounds are helping to establish Ohio as a new headquarters for brutal, bludgeoning death metal. Slave to the Scalpel demonstrates the band’s outstanding command over the core elements of the sound. The album rumbles by in a concise 28 minutes, only relenting in its barrage of knuckle-dragging riffs and pummeling drums to deploy the occasional gross-out sample or chintzy keyboard melody. It also suggests that the band has room to grow.
Like most of their peers in the death metal scene, 200 Stab Wounds are heavily indebted to the genre’s past. Slave to the Scalpel borrows from the bone-dry lurch of Chris Barnes-era Cannibal Corpse, the over-the-top brutality of Dying Fetus, and the guttural ignorance of Mortician, among others. The album can feel like a game of spot-the-influence, but that’s not uncommon in the old-school death metal revival. It’s the execution that matters most, and 200 Stab Wounds clearly know what they’re doing. Guitarists Lance Buckley and Steve Buhl trade chunky, bottom-heavy riffs and frenetic solos, while bassist Ezra Cook and drummer Owen Pooley hold the songs together with lockstep precision, whether riding a groove or inciting a breakdown. A dialed-in rhythm section is critical in death metal, and that’s already 200 Stab Wounds’ greatest strength.
Buoying the band’s tight playing is their pitch-black sense of humor. Slave to the Scalpel’s opening track is called “Skin Milk,” and, yes, that is a pun on “skim milk.” Our narrator pours it over his cereal, which he eats out of a bowl fashioned from a split-open skull. Cannibalism is a tried-and-true motif in death metal, and for longtime fans of the genre, it’s all but lost its ability to shock. 200 Stab Wounds are smart to lean into its comedic potential instead. The “stew made out of you” they cook up on “Stifling Stew” isn’t particularly unsettling—but it is darkly funny.
“Itty Bitty Pieces” is the best song on Slave to the Scalpel, as well as the most vivid rendering of the 200 Stab Wounds aesthetic. It’s built around a chugging, groovy riff that stomps down a path of destruction while squealing guitar harmonics stab around its edges. Buhl moans a surprisingly catchy hook in his deep growl: “Turn your bones into dust/Flay your skin into mush/Cut you up into itty bitty pieces/I’ll save you for lunch.” Then, the song takes a strange detour. For a full minute, all we hear is pitch-shifted retching noises, synthesizer bloops, and sustained, atonal notes from Buhl and Buckley’s guitars. It seems like the song might fade from there, but it’s a false ending. When the full band kicks back in for a vicious coda, it’s the most intense passage on the album.
More often, the songs on Slave to the Scalpel land just shy of their potential. 200 Stab Wounds boil down death metal to its essence, which means they live and die by the riff—and not every riff on the album is memorable. There’s a kind of unpretentious brilliance in the simplicity of their compositions, but too often, that simplicity is all they’re bringing to the table. This is solidly executed death metal for people already devoted to the genre. Still, 200 Stab Wounds are too talented not to eventually stumble upon the spark that will set them apart. In the meantime, Slave to the Scalpel is an offering to the heads.

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Miles Davis' "Lost Quintet" (saxophonist Wayne Shorter, keyboardist Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette) never made a proper studio album as a unit, but this previously unissued set shows what they were capable of live.

Miles Davis: The Bootleg Series, Volume 2: Live in Europe 1969

"It was really a bad motherfucker," Miles Davis wrote in his autobiography of the live band he led in 1969. With somewhat less panache, Davis completists have pegged the group the Lost Quintet, since, unlike the two longstanding Davis five-pieces that preceded it, this one never made a proper studio recording. All of the members-- saxophonist Wayne Shorter, keyboardist Chick Corea, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Jack DeJohnette-- appear on 1970's landmark Bitches Brew and other scattered sessions from the time, but only as part of larger ensembles; until now, if you wanted to hear them as a stripped-down unit, you had to consult imports, bootlegs and YouTube. This second installment in the Miles Davis Bootleg Series, which follows an excellent 2011 set focusing on the trumpeter's prior working band, gives us three complete Lost Quintet gigs, plus the majority of a fourth, on three CDs and one DVD.
It's a real trove, and not just because this lineup is relatively obscure. In a very clear way, the Lost Quintet is the pivot point between the two main phases of Miles' 40-plus-year career: the acoustic jazz idiom he inhabited, and eventually revolutionized, from the mid-'40s through the late '60s, and the plugged-in ensembles he would lead until his death in 1991. In other words, if you've ever wondered exactly how the dapper jazzman of Kind of Blue morphed into a loudly attired icon in wraparound shades, this set offers some crucial clues. When we last left Miles, on The Bootleg Series, Volume 1, he was leading the world's most advanced and telepathic acoustic jazz group (the so-called Second Great Quintet); by the time of the gigs on Live in Europe 1969, Miles was straddling the fault line. He had already traded acoustic piano for overdriven electric keys and had begun taking rhythmic and textural cues from contemporary funk, but he hadn't yet entered his psychedelic-groove-machine phase in earnest. (For an early taste of the latter, try the 2001 Miles archival release Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970): It's About that Time, which features Shorter, Corea, Holland-- who had switched to electric bass in the interim-- and DeJohnette, as well as percussionist Airto Moreira.) Unlike the groups that succeeded it, the Lost Quintet shared a significant portion of its DNA with the acoustic, jazz-centric Miles ensembles that came before.
This is especially apparent on the first two sets here: good-sounding, often-bootlegged performances recorded over successive July nights at the 1969 Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festival in Antibes, France. The scope of these concerts is remarkable. You hear pieces from the yet-unrecorded Bitches Brew ("Spanish Key," "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down"); a track from the ethereal masterpiece In a Silent Way ("It's About That Time"), recorded that past February but not yet released; staples of the Second Great Quintet repertoire (including "Masqualero" and "Footprints," both by Shorter, the sole holdover from that band); and themes Miles had favored since the late 50s ("Milestones," "Round Midnight")-- all flowing together in the expertly paced suites that were Miles' onstage trademark. But the repertoire is only half of the story; as always with Miles groups, the personnel is the thing. Like the members of the Second Great Quintet, these musicians, aside from the relatively unknown Holland, were already rising or established stars when Miles recruited them. They make for a deadly team, equally at home with low-down groove, in-the-pocket swing and feverish abstraction.
The group displays its raucous intensity right from the start of the first Antibes set. During opener "Directions," Corea, Holland and DeJohnette send some serious whitewater their boss's way, in the form of a near-chaotic proto-breakbeat. Miles responds with a brief but explosive solo, full of blaring peaks and bravura runs. If drummer Tony Williams was the chief upsetter in the Second Great Quintet-- furnishing near-constant turbulence to the delight of his employer-- the entire rhythm section takes on that role in the Lost Quintet. When Davis isn't playing, they get straight-up Dionysian. The night-two version of "Miles Runs the Voodoo Down" starts off as crackling uptempo funk. But following Shorter's solo, Corea and Holland engage in a free-form duel between bleepy keyboard and scratchy bowed bass that rivals Sun Ra's freakiest excursions. Here you can hear Corea-- who has gone on record saying he distrusted the electric piano when Miles first suggested he play it-- forgetting about technique and reveling in an alien sound palette.
The band isn't just about disruption. The versions of familiar pieces like "Footprints" and "Round Midnight," both from from the first Antibes set, feature bashing DeJohnette crescendos and bracingly gritty Shorter solos, but they also demonstrate the band's knack for extraordinarily supple, dynamically controlled swing. A brief Miles/Corea duet on "I Fall in Love Too Easily," from night two, is another shrewd pace-changer. On The Bootleg Series, Volume 1, Miles and Herbie Hancock introduce this same piece as an unaccompanied duo, but here, Corea's electric piano lends it a newly dreamlike aura. In retrospect, this interlude plays like a stealthy sneak preview of In a Silent Way's proto-ambient brain massage; like the versions of Shorter's "Sanctuary" that close each Antibes set, it's part jazz balladry, part immersive soundscape.
The material on disc three, portions of two sets from November 5 in Stockholm, contrasts nicely with the fierce, sprawling Antibes shows. Because of an electric-piano malfunction, Corea plays acoustic piano for most of the first set, a swap that has a major effect on the group dynamic. This performance has its dark, unruly moments, including an early take on the ominous title track of Bitches Brew, recorded that past August but not yet released, but overall, it's a surprisingly tame outing. The version of Shorter's "Nefertiti" sounds both elegant and almost quaint, about as close as the Lost Quintet ever came to jazz orthodoxy. The one sample we get of the second Stockholm set offers a tantalizing contrast: a rare take on "This", a Corea composition which the pianist had first recorded in May of '69 with a band that included both Holland and DeJohnette. After a brief group theme statement-- with Corea back on electric piano-- the ensemble embarks on a series of atomized improvisations, including a dense Davis/DeJohnette face-off and a pointillist Shorter/Holland/DeJohnette excursion. This single track, possibly the most concentrated example on record of a Miles Davis group playing free jazz, demonstrates how the members of the Lost Quintet spurred the leader toward the avant-garde even as they helped him achieve a deeper engagement with funk and psychedelia.
The DVD, containing a complete Berlin concert from November 7, is essential; the clarity and intimacy of this pristine multicamera document should assure that no one ever again pegs this band as obscure. The in-progress shift in Miles' aesthetic, already apparent in the music, is right there to behold in the men's dress: Whereas the Second Great Quintet always turned up in black tie, the Lost Quintet looks like it's fresh from a Williamsburg vintage shop. (Holland's ensemble—a cow-skin-pattern vest over a purple sweatsuit—is either a facepalmer or a triumph, depending on your tastes.) The band takes a while to warm up here, turning in an unusually subdued "Directions." But by a mid-set "It's About That Time," the feral magic is back; Shorter's brilliantly jittery, speaking-in-tongues soprano solo and a low-volume, high-intensity free-improv duet between Corea and a mallets-wielding DeJohnette make this piece one of the highlights of the entire box set.
Shorter, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette eventually left Miles' band in turn, and Davis began constructing the psych-funk juggernaut heard on records like 1974's aptly titled Dark Magus. As Miles outfitted his trumpet with a wah-wah effect, enlisted a phalanx of guitars and began doubling on organ, the atmosphere thickened and the grooves grew more colossal, but the trumpeter would never again lead a group as thrillingly virtuosic and diabolically mutable as the Lost Quintet. (It's a testament to Miles' eye for talent that Shorter, Corea, Holland and DeJohnette still rank among the most popular and esteemed jazz musicians on earth; Shorter's current working quartet, heard on the new Blue Note release Without a Net, exemplifies a volatility that's directly traceable to the Lost Quintet.) That fact is now duly noted in the official record, thanks to this set-- a bad motherfucker in its own right.


With his debut album, this young Canadian R&B singer signed to Drake’s OVO Sound imprint has trouble escaping the shadow of his brooding musical forebears.

Waking at Dawn

At 20, Roy Wood$ is the youngest artist signed to Drake’s OVO Sound label. Like the rest of the mostly Toronto-based roster, the singer born Denzel Spencer has the skills of a malleable R&B crossover: a capable and identifiable voice, practiced comfort riding a beat, a knack for moody melody. But these same talents are frequently squandered on his debut album Waking at Dawn, which offers a polished dose of brooding unoriginality.
Up to this point, OVO Sound has been a cautiously experimental vehicle for new musicians, many of whom churned out hits for Drake before struggling to do the same for themselves. Spencer, on the other hand, hasn’t provided a creative burst for his boss yet, and Waking at Dawn finds the artist more interested in conforming to the house style than pushing it forward. Nonetheless, he has enjoyed the benefits of OVO’s infrastructure over the last year: a Drake feature, song premieres on Drake’s Apple Music radio show, Drake retweets, an opening slot on Drake’s upcoming summer tour. Correspondingly, his aesthetic is perilously Drake-adjacent.
Spencer sings confidently in a smooth, thin tenor that he commands with a pattering agility. He also frequently puts on a strained Michael Jackson impression. You can hear the imitation on songs like “How I Feel,” where he hiccups, gasps, and adds breathy grit into an otherwise pure tone. It’s a technically accomplished trick that does nothing in the way of character development; because he slips in and out of these vocal tics, they sound like shticky put-on instead of resourceful identity-building. Elsewhere, on a track called “Why,” he channels the Weeknd in both vocal tone and emotional despondency. He nails the mood via dark and legato synth work, but the upshot is severe: Spencer isn’t doing anything new.
The most troubling shortfall of Waking at Dawn is the songwriter’s lyricism. Instead of coming off as mysterious or suffered, the Ontario native spins drama that is too often dull and vague. On “Why,” a song that tiptoes around the singer’s emotional crimes to a lover, he almost never anchors the romantic separation in specifics, so when he moans a repetitive apology during the outro—“I’m sorry for so much”—it doesn’t mean much. (To his credit, he at least mentions that time he showed up late for prom.) The more gut-wrenching missteps manifest as corniness. “Can I speak some Spanish? Te amo my darling, babe,” he croons for no reason to a distant love interest on “Menace.” There are tedious reference-points of a night out. “I could pop another pill tonight/Even though I don’t really want one,” he sings, sounding both bored and boring.
The ambient production on Waking at Dawn is consistent to a fault, and the best songs switch gears and pace. Spencer slips comfortably into patois for the album’s softly bouncing lead single “Gwan Big Up Urself” (which was premiered alongside a radio respin of Drake’s own dancehall-infused “Controlla”). The isolated lean into the Caribbean sound isn’t forced— the track’s Jamaican producer Krs. expertly colors many of his R&B tracks with dancehall and soca rhythms and textures—but given the style’s singularity in Spencer’s catalog and its current rise in the mainstream, the single seems like a calculated quota-filler. Still, the song is a rare and gratifyingly airy moment on this oppressively swampy album; even when tracks like “Got Me” and “She Knows About Me” threaten to break open into dance numbers, they instead loop back into plodding gloom. Besides his raw talent, Spencer’s greatest asset might be his consistent mood-building, but there’s an obvious peril in his manufactured sameness: Waking at Dawn just sounds sleepy.


Nyege Nyege’s latest snapshot of Tanzanian singeli pairs an avant-garde producer with a local keyboardist; the high-BPM results sound like a loose, extremely weird jam session.

Singeli Ya Maajabu

Tanzanian producer Sisso’s eponymous Dar es Salaam studio represents the cutting edge of the singeli genre. Singeli is hardly underground in Tanzania, but its relentless speeds of over 200 BPM provide ample room for experimentation, and thanks to the efforts of Uganda’s Nyege Nyege label—started by two European expats to chronicle East Africa’s fertile electronic underground—its more extreme exponents have picked up more steam abroad than relatively pop-friendly artists like Msaga Sumu. Records like Bamba Pana’s Poaa, DJ Travella’s Mr. Mixondo or Sisso’s own Mateso showcased the Terminator-tough side of the genre, but Singeli Ya Maajabu, Sisso’s new collaboration with keyboardist Maiko, sounds more like an informal, extremely weird jam session.
Drum-machine loops gallop forward with the momentum of a cursorial prey animal, while gobstopping sounds sketch out simple musical motifs. “Kivinje” opens with a blitz of sirens and horn-honk synths, and it might take a few listens to notice that they’re playing a classic set of chord changes, I-IV-V-IV, the same as rock classics like “Louie Louie” and “Wild Thing.” Later, the duo eschews “musical” cues entirely, enriching the landscape with aqueous effects (“Mizuka”) and bubble noises (“Kazi Ipo”). Maiko’s synth leads ascend to an almost neoclassical beauty, finding new and simple ways to trace familiar chord progressions.
While regional club scenes like singeli are often praised abroad for their supposedly sui generis futurism, Sisso and Maiko draw from a wide palette, maintaining a running conversation with other experimental club scenes. The influence of juke is unmistakable on “Kiboko”; “Mizuka” is a desolate expanse of glass-shard sounds and horror-movie creaks not far removed from Marie Davidson’s “The Tunnel”; and the minute-long “Mangwale” pastes together fluttering choir samples into the album’s only ambient respite. Yet these distinctions tend to vanish beneath the sheer onslaught of the music. Even at a hair shy of 40 minutes, this is a maelstrom of an album, and in an environment devoid of opportunities to go as decisively buck as your typical singeli crowd, listening to Singeli Ya Maajabu might feel like hiking up a mountain through a hailstorm, or maybe playing an N64 game based on Gorguts’ Obscura.
There’s nothing like the almost Charlemagne Palestine-like relentlessness of Bamba Pana’s “Biti Three,” but Singeli Ya Maajabu still requires a high tolerance for treble and abrasion. This is true of much of the most cutting-edge pop music in the last few years, from the blown-out rage-rap on Opium to the mind-boggling breakdowns of Brazilian funk to the chipmunk fantasias of hyperpop. Maybe “annoying” is one of the last frontiers the modern-day listener has to cross to find the world’s most vital music, but then, rock’n’roll sounded like noise to Frank Sinatra. Your parents probably aren’t going to enjoy Singeli Ya Maajabu, but once it teaches you how to listen to it, it twists the brain like nothing else.


The Pennsylvania emo stalwarts never found much fame in their own time, but a decade later, these reissues testify to their influence, idiosyncrasy, and proudly uncommercial spirit.

Algernon Cadwallader: Some Kind of Cadwallader

Some Kind of Cadwallader / Parrot Flies / Algernon Cadwallader

Suppose someone tells you about a night they were four beers deep at an Algernon Cadwallader basement show in 2008 and predicted the following: Within the next 10 years, the critical reevaluation of emo would lead to Philadelphia being anointed the epicenter of American indie rock; the Phillies would win the World Series; and the Eagles’ backup quarterback would outgun the Patriots in the Super Bowl, which would be extra satisfying given Tom Brady’s golf dates with President Donald Trump. Which part is least believable? Probably being at the Algernon Cadwallader show in the first place: The trio achieved a decent level of visibility during their short run, but nowadays “that Algernon basement show” is the sort of thing scene diehards will either lie about or never shut the fuck up about. Due to a quintessentially punk combination of DIY ethics and administrative laziness, the majority of Algernon Cadwallader’s output has long been out of print and unavailable on streaming services. Yeah, you could’ve streamed most of it on YouTube or Bandcamp, but Lauren and Asian Man Records’ reissue of Algernon’s entire discography is necessary because it provides something so rarely granted to bands of this nature: a chance to publicly honor its legacy.
The recent 10-year anniversaries celebrated by contemporaries and tourmates like Tigers Jaw, the Menzingers, La Dispute, and Touché Amoré have shone a retrospective spotlight on a parallel universe of underground rock that went largely ignored in the time between MySpace and Twitter. Any future recollections will probably have to be an oral history, as most of the e-zines, message boards, and websites where Mediafire links and show information were passed along have been relegated to history’s digital dustbin. Archived original album and live reviews are virtually nonexistent, whereas interviews from that period languish on blogs that haven’t been updated in years.
One such blog is Alter the Press, where bassist/screamer (he is not a singer) Peter Helmis joked in 2008, “We’re a DIY band from Pennsylvania. We sound like Cap’n Jazz.” It was a deliberately self-deprecating quip, but Algernon’s self-determination played a significant role in their legend. They sidestepped the label ladder to release their records and their friends’ records on Hot Green, never hired a major booking agent or manager, and decided to call it quits in 2012 rather than being beholden to the expectations and budding hype of an emo revival they were largely credited with starting. Bands like Tigers Jaw, Joyce Manor, and the World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die worshipped Algernon for their iconoclasm, which also prevented them from ever being as successful as their acolytes.
Notice how Helmis says they were from Pennsylvania, not Philly. Specifically Yardley, a small town in Bucks County, whose first citizen was named Algernon Cadwallader. Many of the bands responsible for creating this scene were specifically from Keystone State suburbs and not Philadelphia at the outset: the Wonder Years (Lansdale), Balance and Composure (Doylestown), the Menzingers and Tigers Jaw (Scranton), Snowing (Lehigh Valley), and Title Fight (Kingston). Like most of those bands, Algernon would eventually move to the city proper, but even then, Philadelphia was mostly a non-factor in indie-rock conversation; the lack of attention allowed them to go at their own pace, just enough outside the cruel microscope of hype that incinerated bands thrust upon stages they weren’t ready to occupy.
And Cap’n Jazz is clearly the first comparison anyone would make for Algernon Cadwallader. There’s one archived review popping up for Some Kind of Cadwallader on Google and here’s first sentence: “Algernon Cadwallader have studied ’90s Kinsella recordings like they were on tomorrow's final exam.” In that case, “Katie’s Conscious” aces it and gets extra credit, mashing together the shifty hooks of Shmap’n Shmazz with a tribute to the halftime landslide of American Football’s “Honestly?,” all while honoring Joan of Arc’s lean towards conceptual non sequitur: “Radio rap is back for a reason!,” shrieks Helmis, a guy who helped revive uncommercial emo for reasons that still baffle most critics.
Helmis had about as dysfunctional of a relationship with perfect pitch as Tim Kinsella, and the bespoke nature of his vocals is best exemplified by Algernon’s cover of Elvis Costello’s “No Action,” which appears on the patchworked, “new” compilation Algernon Cadwallader alongside their take on the Beatles’ “This Boy.” “No Action” itself is embryonic emo—yelpy, twitchy, and prone to some extremely petty bon mots at an ex’s expense, while “This Boy” plays more toward the emasculated longing for an ex that typified emo’s early-2000s pop phase. But songs that tightly structured and lyrically transparent are a complete mismatch for Algernon’s scattershot energy and antipathy towards straight melody. If Elvis Costello ever hears Helmis’ defilement of the high notes on the chorus of “No Action,” he might seek legal action.
But there’s a right way to sing “THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE” on a song titled “Horror,” and then there’s Helmis’ wrong way, which is the best way, wringing out every last bit of cartoonish, splattered gore the sentiment deserves. It’s worth pointing out that if you read the lyrics straight, it’s a song inspired by studying up on the cruelty of man while sitting on the toilet. Helmis also shared Kinsella’s taste for gnomic, lysergic metaphysical musings (“Dinosaurs died quite a while ago/We still fascinate and look at their bones”; “Try and plant a tree on top of a computer/That’s not happening”). And here’s a song title from their 7” demo, which is bundled with 2009’s Fun EP and a few B-sides on Algernon Cadwallader: “Look Down (Because the Ground Is Easier to Understand and Doesn't Take So Much Work to Figure Out But I'd Rather Not Know Where I'm Standing and Have An Idea of What Life Is All About).”
Still, like most comparisons that arrive early and never really leave, the Cap’n Jazz one is helpful, but becomes less justifiable with distance. The Kinsellas’ group had no choice but to sound like themselves—a bunch of mismatched teenagers dealing with childhood trauma and drug abuse, figuring out their sound in real time, an abstract poetry slam disguised as a “weirdo punk band.” The members of Algernon were beerier and bouncier; more importantly, they purposefully chose Midwestern emo over other forms of punk and hardcore, a choice that liberated from the professionalism, earnestness, and striving that defines indie rock.
Ten years and many label rosters’ worth of imitators later, Some Kind of Cadwallader still leaps out of the speakers, an album that treats its songs like secrets they’re dying to share—they can barely contain themselves even during the starstruck ballads and the 13-minute jam. Some Kind of Cadwallader is always in motion, as a matter of fact. Guitarist Joe Reinhart tossed off riffs like banana peels for Helmis, the elements of what would define fourth-wave emo: spindly arpeggios, finger-tapping, wandering harmonies, rapid-fire hammer-and-pull figures, oblong time signatures, capos where capos aren’t meant to tread. It’s both tossed off and astoundingly technical, even nerdier than the metal and math rock it pulls from, reflected by the dubiously (but accurately) named “twinklecore” subgenre that take shape on labels like Count Your Lucky Stars, Topshelf, and Big Scary Monsters.
Algernon Cadwallader were a band that never really tried to sound like just three guys in a studio, but they didn’t try to sound bigger, either. Some Kind of Cadwallader doesn’t go orchestral; it finds the abandoned toy chest in the basement—a brief hint of melodica on the title track, shakers and maracas on “On Up,” the most canonical use of slide whistle this side of “Groove Is in the Heart.” For all the immediate pleasures, there are moments of real poignancy where Algernon imagine these basement shows as something to grab onto for dear life: “Horror” feints at a tingling, post-rock crescendo before it ends with an a cappella group hug that wants to go on forever; it could just as easily pass for a field recording from a Super Bowl celebration on Broad Street. “Motivational Song” spends its last two minutes collapsing, the sound of a band trying to break down its equipment and load out while an acoustic plays in the background, unwilling to leave the stage and go home. The closing “In Response to Irresponsibility” is 13 minutes of wayward jamming, and if it went on three times as long, no one would mind—if they learned anything from the short and sensational existence of Cap’n Jazz, it’s that this stuff never lasts as long as anyone wants it to.
The modest, grassroots success of Some Kind of Cadwallader sparked label interest, most notably from Jade Tree. This partnership would’ve been a powerful symbolic gesture—Algernon joining a label responsible for many of their primary influences and reestablishing Jade Tree at the forefront of emo after a run of aimless years. Instead, Algernon started their own Hot Green record label, which would release Everything/Nothing, the debut from post-Everyone Everywhere project Hurry, and Get Disowned, the first proper album from Hop Along. In between, Algernon bode their time with 2009’s Fun EP. The endlessly excitable “Spit Fountain” alone makes it essential, proof that Algernon could’ve stayed squarely within the parameters of Some Kind and maybe even improved on it. Fun also includes “Black Clouds,” which some have called “perhaps the least engaging song Algernon ever recorded”—and they work for Be Happy Records, the label who put the damn tape out.
Algernon Cadwallader gave themselves all the time they wanted to work on a follow-up, and Parrot Flies was eventually released three years after Some Kind of Cadwallader. Helmis claims they recorded the album twice, and the results are in the vein of LP2 (The Pink Album) and EndSerenading: a gnarlier, more esoteric successor that spends its immediacy cowering  in the shadow of its cult-classic debut and usually ends up being the contrarian’s choice.
In some ways, Algernon became a better band on Parrot Flies. The production is cleaner, the songs less beholden to their influences. Opener “Springing Leaks” reintroduces the band’s proprietary slip-n-slide instrumental interplay and foreshadows Helmis’ and Reinhart’s future transitions towards more standardized indie rock (in Dogs on Acid and Hop Along, respectively) by slowly tailing off into dueling guitars that could pass for Pavement at their shaggiest. It’s an impressive showing for the new two-guitar attack of Algernon that doesn’t arise again until the self-explanatory closing jam “Cruisin’.” In between, Parrot Flies is distinctively Algernon, but more mannered. Aside from a nearly banjo-like acoustic run on “Sad,” it lacks the jack-in-the-box instrumental surprises, and the hooks seem to be stumbled upon rather than confidently projected; likewise, some of Helmis’ more quotable lyrics (“Smoke and mirrors are good for barbecues and vanity”) can feel forced. At the time, Parrot Flies could be viewed as Algernon coming into their own, but in hindsight, it’s a band trying to break free of a movement they started and probably unable to do so as long as the name was attached.
Instead, the band called it quits in 2012—third-wave history repeating itself. Maybe they didn’t spawn American Football and the Promise Ring, but, like Cap’n Jazz, Algernon Cadwallader fractured right before they could capitalize on the swelling public interest in a scene they fostered as things were skewing towards a more pop-oriented format. See Miami-to-Philly transplant Glocca Morra’s Just Married, and also the debuts from Joyce Manor, You Blew It!, Modern Baseball, and a band from Western Massachusetts going by the Hotel Year, to name a few. Helmis recently admitted he was relieved by the timing of Algernon’s breakup, as they never had to be judged by how much they catered to the idea of “emo revival.” And the proof is in what followed: Helmis stayed the course with the trad indie of Dogs on Acid and Yankee Bluff, while Reinhart became a fixture in the full-band version of Hop Along and provided production and engineering on Modern Baseball’s Holy Ghost, Joyce Manor’s Never Hungover Again, and Foxing’s Nearer My God—the kind of “level up” third album Algernon Cadwallader never got to make themselves.
Yet these reissues present Algernon Cadwallader not as a band cruelly cut short in their prime, but one that accomplished everything they set out to do within the span of six years. It’s worth remembering that this kind of thing was probably the least likely candidate for any kind of longevity or success in the mid-2000s. No, Algernon Cadwallader and their peers weren’t intended as an alternative to the MySpace and Fueled By Ramen emo bands who were already starting to hit a lull in popularity by the release of Some Kind of Cadwallader. Nor were they in direct competition with the prevailing trends of indie rock that seem to cycle like Zodiac signs. But Some Kind of Cadwallader makes it easy to think that this was all by design. “If fucking up feels right/Fuck it up,” Helmis screamed on “Motivational Song”—an intracardiac injection not just for emo but for indie rock any time it’s taken to heart.