Former Stereolab member Laetitia Sadier just released two new albums, one solo effort and one with her latest outfit Little Tornados. Both albums are full of seemingly simple, subversively sophisticated avant-pop, with Sadier’s breathy, balmy voice as the high point.

Laetitia Sadier / Little Tornados: Something Shines/We Are Divine

Something Shines/We Are Divine

“We want to be able to be inspired, contemplate beauty, achieve excellence, and live life to the fullest. But we are governed by an exploitative economic system which is keeping this from happening”. So states Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier—in her native French—in “Manifest”, a track from We Are Divine, the debut album by her latest outfit Little Tornados. It’s far from her first extracurricular project; she previously played in Monade, and she’s also just released her third solo album, Something Shines. Regardless of how these various projects have been played, produced, packaged, and presented over the years, Sadier’s songs remain similar at their core, and that goes double for We Are Divine and Something Shines. Both albums are full of seemingly simple, subversively sophisticated avant-pop, with Sadier’s breathy, balmy voice as the high point. And as “Manifest” almost painfully demonstrates, both albums follow Stereolab’s tradition of unabashed leftist sloganeering.
In Stereolab, those slogans have always felt more abstract than literal, swirled as they are into pulsing Krautrock, bubbly yé-yé, retro-futurist exotica, and post-C86 jangle. But Sadier always sold her Marxist lullabies with a straight face, and if there’s one thing We Are Divine in particular conclusively proves, it’s that she was never even remotely joking. Little Tornados are a collective of instrumentalists formed around the core of filmmaker (and longtime Stereolab photographer) David Thayer, as well as Sadier; she’s on vocals and bass, while he handles vocals and guitar. In other words, it’s a similar group dynamic to the one Stereolab uses—only with Thayer assuming the role of Tim Gane. We Are Divine tracks like “In the Garden”, “How Many,” and “Space Liner”, laden with jazzy chords and playful ambience, could pass for decent, latter-day Stereolab outtakes, only looser and less densely layered. But it’s the lyrics of “Manifest” that hew closest to Stereolab’s alchemy of politics and pop, only it gets the balance wrong; over bouquets of vintage synths, Sadier’s pamphleteer-level pleas for freedom, equality, and brotherhood come off as canned, regardless of how exquisitely phrased they are in French.
We Are Divine, however, is not simply a cloned version of Stereolab; Thayer weighs in often with his distinct, low-key, mystic-bohemian ramble, and it brings a winning prog vibe to “Unicorn”; “Ben’s Boat” is a twangy, twinkling instrumental that borders on kosmische-country. The album’s definitive moment, “Have a Balloon”, is dashed and dotted with Sadier’s signature ba-ba-bas and da-da-das, with the occasional jazz-fusion fanfare on horns. The song is gorgeous, but it also gently mocks: like day-glo highlighting in a used Guy Debord textbook, the title and melody work together to magnify the Society-of-the-Spectacle message Sadier has been whispering into our ears all along.
Balloons aplenty can be found on Something Shines, too. Sadier’s third solo album smoothly continues her arc as an artist over the past three decades; like 2012’s Silencio and 2010’s The Trip before it, Something Shines is a satellite orbiting the Stereolab home world. “Quantum Soup” remixes the same elements she’s been surrounded with for three decades: sonar synths, chanson delight, Françoise Hardy-through-a-CB vocals. But here she impishly dissolves the glue that holds them together, until the song fades into a wash of spacious chaos. It’s the inverse of a noise breakdown, and when it all comes back together at the end, it feels less like a reinvention than a reaffirmation. During Stereolab’s prime in the 1990s, Sadier was part of one of the most exciting ensembles in music, genre notwithstanding. She doesn’t fight that overshadowing fact, but she doesn't let it slip by unchallenged, either.
Something Shines abounds with warm, swaying breezes that carry with them the smell of winter. “All of the roots we grew/ We will pull out,” she warns with a lash of her tongue in “Then, I Will Love You Again”; her voice has never sounded so near, let alone so large. The stiff, sci-fi samba of “The Scene of the Lie” and “Echo Port”, on the other hand, reveals the album’s biggest weakness, and that of Sadier’s solo work as a whole: there’s no avoiding that it comes off like Stereolab with too many of its pieces missing. The chords don’t stick, the melody doesn’t hook, and the delicate, intimate strength of tracks like “Butter Side Up” wind up lost in the shuffle. The slogans pop up again, naturally; couplets like “Meanwhile the ultra-rich in all impunity/ Rots our society” are harrowingly enunciated on the eerie, semi-acoustic “Oscuridad"—but in terms of depth, they don't rise above the quality of radical bookstore bumper stickers. As ardent and inviting as Something Shines and We Are Divine both are, Sadier seems content at this point to coo to the converted.


This Nashville based guitarist, a member of Lambchop who has worked with Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Silver Jews, and more, has crafted a stunning solo debut.

Behold the Spirit

Every genre has its icons and its iconoclasts. Rock'n'roll will likely always have both bands that sound like Led Zeppelin and bands that absorbed Led Zeppelin but marched proudly in an unforeseen direction. Country music has chicken grease-and-cheap beer adherents in addition to pop crossover darlings, while rap brims with boom-bap purists and backpacking sonic explorers. These divisions are rarely as evident or amusing as they are in the world of guitar instrumentalists, a realm where either John Fahey is some sanctified combination of Zeus, Athena, and Poseidon or the brilliant dude who has become annoying because he's the only touchstone most people have. You either fully embrace Fahey-- like, say, the late Jack Rose-- or you run the other way, like Ben Chasny with his work as Six Organs of Admittance. A middle ground exists, certainly, but it's rarely been claimed with the grace and elocution of Behold the Spirit, the debut from young Nashville guitarist William Tyler. Arguably the most vital, energized album by an American solo guitarist in a decade or more, it accepts Fahey's legacy while escaping its shadow. Moreover, it's simply a joy to hear.
You might recognize Tyler's name from his long stint as a multi-instrumentalist in Lambchop, or from album credits alongside Charlie Louvin, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Silver Jews, and Wooden Wand. Lambchop's oeuvre should give you some hint as to what makes Tyler special. Just as Lambchop's pan-American indie incorporates soul, rock, country and outsider music into one weirdly warped mold, Tyler integrates a dozen different approaches. He's as comfortable with an electric as an acoustic, as accomplished conducting a long, coruscated drone as he is gliding through fingerpicked hymns. The English folk of Pentangle and the American hum of Tom Carter are clear references, as are Indian ragas and Appalachian ballads. Unlike the work of fellow polyglot Sir Richard Bishop, though, Tyler engages all of those muses at once, consistently folding them into surprising revelations.
Behold the Spirit is a sterling mixture of bravado and dexterity. Tyler could be an ace in any rock band, so crafted are his chops and developed is his taste. During the elegant climber "Missionary Ridge", Tyler winds through a complex circuit of melodies and variations with perfect clarity, the low notes resonating and the high ones shimmering resplendently. "The Green Pastures" feels like some sort of tantric test of his skill, as Tyler picks the notes from a handful of chords while an ace country band-- pedal steel, then drums, then piano-- threads melodies and tones through the lines of his acoustic. His guitar always prevails. But if technique were enough to recommend an instrumentalist, we could all save a lot of money on records by applying for a job at Guitar Center. Tyler tempers his skills with patience and ease, delivering these winding passages with unimpeachable composure. "Tears and Saints" for instance, is a rugged waltz for electric guitar that depends as much on the rests as it does on the notes. Tyler takes his time with the tune, giving each phrase time to radiate.
The nine numbers collected here never, however, feel like expressions of Tyler's skill. Rather, each feels like its own compositional springboard, where Tyler's guitar simply happens to take the lead. Each of these pieces seems to suggest a story, too, whether through the arc of its music or the sound of its instruments. Opener "Terrace of the Leper King" admittedly keys on flurries of acoustic guitar notes, but the song peaks when a chorus of horns and fiddle wail between guitar breaks. It sounds like quiet conquest. In "Oashpe", a 12-string guitar breaks through the still of field recordings only to create the same atmosphere with a listless but meticulous drift of chords. Tyler takes advantage of that torpor, though, eventually racing ahead, pulling fleet strings of melody from a cloud of overtones. As with the roaring electric drone that follows or the workmanlike acoustic hymn that closes the album, or really like all of Behold the Spirit, both the sounds and the stories they imply are mesmerizing.
Back to the question of icons and iconoclasts among guitar instrumentalists, it's no secret that neither lot courts a very big audience. John Fahey died a legend, sure, but he didn't die a superstar. Behold the Spirit doesn't feel marginal, though; rather, it feels like the sort of album that can achieve crossover success without alienating that core who can hum "Imaginational Anthem" from memory. These spry melodies and generous arrangements are the stuff of pop fantasy, while the reach of Tyler's music offers calling cards for fans of folk and more textural avant garde pieces. Behold the Spirit works as well on a lethargic Sunday afternoon as it does after dark, on headphones in a still space. It's the sort of achievement that acknowledges and challenges the expectations of its form-- and smiles knowingly the whole time. It's iconoclastic, then, just classically so.


The Norwegian producer, once at the nexus between pop and electronic music, offers many new collaborations but little in the way of new thrills on his latest album.

9

In the late-’00s, Magnus August Høiberg repped for his native Norway at the DMC World DJ Championships under the handle of DJ Final. But by a few years later, Høiberg went with a name more befitting of his playful musical style. As Cashmere Cat, he began uploading to Soundcloud his spin on the fixtures in the pop firmament—be it Lana Del Ray, Drake, or 2 Chainz—materializing in the spaces between R&B, pop, trap, EDM, and indie, never quite beholden to any one sound. Moving against type is one of Cashmere Cat’s keenest tricks: garlanding Starrah, 2 Chainz, and Tory Lanez in stately harpsichords, swaddling Britney in whispers and echoes, twining Kanye’s vocoder vocals with Pulitzer Prize-winning vocalist/composer Caroline Shaw on “Wolves.” So the prospect of him finally having some major label clout to put such curious ideas before Ariana Grande, Travis Scott, and the Weeknd was tantalizing.
A few of his previous employers appear on 9, an album chock full of guests but few of the notable features that originally put Cashmere Cat at the nexus of pop and electronic music. For most of this slender ten-track, 34-minute album, Høiberg winds up at the median of the mainstream, nimbly padding away from both the gluttonous hooks and towering thrills of either sound. And almost every voice within is processed to the point of being indistinguishable from one another. Rather than the upending of norms on his previous work, 9 offers little in the way of new thrills.
No drop no problem, as EDM has moved away from that rollercoaster trick the past few years, but Cashmere Cat still tries to wring drama out of the faux builds. After the wheezing, Auto-Tuned proclamation from Kehlani “to go all damned night” on opener “Night Night,” Cashmere Cat builds up not to a frenzied, Red Bull-raising anthem, but rather a latticework of string quartet and choral voices. On the standout “Quit,” he again works with Ariana Grande, dropping her yearning vocal into a near-void of a track. As a muffled snare ratchets up the tension, the song then dissolves into fluttering butterflies and what may as well be a nose flute patch.
Cashmere Cat’s collaboration with Selena Gomez and Tory Lanez on “Trust Nobody” is 9’s best pop moment. It's low-key, toning down Cashmere Cat’s excesses while accentuating his nimble way of a flipping a trap beat into something slick as massage oil. The mashing of trap-pop gunshots, ethereal ambience, and owl hoot on “Love Incredible” (co-produced with SOPHIE) finds a good counterpart in former Fifth Harmony member Camila Cabello, delivering mellifluous high notes and growls alike.
The closest Cashmere Cat comes to big tent festival fare is on “Victoria’s Veil,” an instrumental that tweaks tiny blips and jazz finger keys and cagily builds towards a much-promised peak. In a few months time, it might soon be better known for making hundreds of thousands of festivalgoers put their hands in the air for…the Alan Parsons Project. “Wild Love,” foregoes beats entirely, Cashmere Cat instead suspending the Weeknd’s warped voice and Francis and the Lights’ Prismizer in a zero-G field. If only Høiberg could have refrained from triggering a maddening squelch not unlike Q*Bert hopping around a pyramid, rupturing the otherwise gaseous effect of the track.
But it’s not as cringeworthy as “9 (After Coachella)” his team-up with MØ and second track with SOPHIE. MØ’s voice easily segues towards the confessional singer-songwriter mode (versus her turn as near-anonymous EDM vocalist), but is the 2017 admission that “I like the way you spread confusion” an ode to a rowdy bro or to Putin-sown discord? In the hands of some, Japanese digital tones are judiciously deployed to tasteful effect, but the sound that Cashmere Cat and co-producers Benny Blanco and SOPHIE go for here plops “9 (After Coachella)” between the flippers of Flower Drum Song: The Pinball Game. It is an instance of Cashmere Cat’s album being hijacked by the PC Music aesthetic, clanging and cloying in equal measure. Like so much of this album. his sound becomes muddled in the mainstream and dissolves into the background.

Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly implied that SOPHIE has recorded for the PC Music label.


The unreleased songs Springsteen wrote during the time of Darkness on the Edge of Town form the basis of a new 2xCD collection and a lavish box set.

Bruce Springsteen: The Promise: The Darkness on the Edge of Town Story / The Promise

Sometimes reissues add a few demos or outtakes, sometimes they add a bonus disc with a live show or additional music, and sometimes they go so far with the bonus material they become something else entirely. The Promise, a name given to two sets based around unheard music from Bruce Springsteen dating to 1977 and 1978, when he was writing and recording the seminal Darkness on the Edge of Town, doesn't fit easily into typical reissue categories. There's a 2xCD, 3xLP set that contains 22 unreleased songs from the period, and then there's a deluxe box set that augments the unreleased material with a remastered version of Darkness and three DVDs. And the latter is housed in a faux spiral-bound notebook with facsimiles of Springsteen's handwritten studio notes from the time. Taken all together, we're talking 10 hours plus of video and audio, along with the booklet. So calling this a reissue of Darkness on the Edge of Town is not accurate. This is a trove, a vast clearinghouse from a fertile period, the product of which turned out to be one terrific album. And in addition to containing its share of treasure, The Promise ultimately confirms that Springsteen is a brilliant editor of his own material.
That much is clear when listening to the album itself, which is in danger of being overshadowed by everything released around it. Where the Born to Run box from 2005 looked intently at the album proper (there were few outtakes from those sessions anyway) and portrayed what resulted as a landmark, The Promise focuses on a period of time that produced one memorable album but could have produced others. Much of the material was written when Springsteen was embroiled in a lawsuit with his former manager, and a lot has been made of the impact the legal proceedings were said to have on Springsteen's muse. He made a bleak and bombed-out album, the story goes, because he was feeling lost in the world himself, fearful that he was losing control of his career. And since the lawsuit kept him out of the studio when he wanted so badly to record, he kept piling up songs while he waited for the smoke to clear.
Even more than the lawsuit, Darkness seems like Springsteen's instinctive recoil from the Born to Run hype. That's partly why he burned to cut another record-- to "find out what he's got," to quote a line from "Badlands" that particularly appealed to him. The Promise documentary included with the box, which combines black-and-white video footage taken in the studio while the album was recorded with recent interviews, makes clear that he wanted to make an "honest" record that people would take seriously. He was embarrassed by the hype that had put him on the cover of Time and Newsweek simultaneously in 1975, and he didn't want to be the "next big thing."
Indeed, it's striking just how different Darkness is from its predecessor in tone and theme. Where Born to Run was about drama, with a sense of bombast that pushed past cinematic and wound up somewhere closer to Broadway, Darkness, despite its share of rockers, is about grim acceptance and pressing on in the face of doubt. In "Racing in the Street", the bittersweet ballad that ranks with the best songs Springsteen has ever written, the narrator's girlfriend "Stares off alone into the night/ With the eyes of one who hates for just being born." But she's not going anywhere. The darkness that envelops the town keeps the characters in and the rest of the world out. Where the characters in Born to Run were racing against death, the characters here are cursed with the burden of survival. So like all Springsteen records in the early part of his career, there are many songs about cars and driving, but these people seem to be going in circles, idly moving from one place to the next. "You can ride this road 'til dawn, without another human being in sight," goes a line in the richly emotional mid-tempo rocker "Something in the Night". With no chance of escape, you have to figure out how to deal with what's in front of you.
The stark reality of the songs is reinforced by the album's production. Darkness is in its own way as sonically consistent and coherent as Born to Run; but where that album drew inspiration from Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, Darkness tries to do as much as possible with a minimum of embellishment. A few tracks break from this dry and barren template. "Candy's Room" and "Something in the Night" have the tinkling piano and glockenspiel that might have helped them to fit on Born to Run, while "Racing in the Street" has a very particular and hugely effective atmosphere, with just the right touches of reverb and backing vocals to make it sound like an elegy. As for the remastering, I'm not hearing a lot of difference here, but Darkness always sounded good. From the opening drum fill of "Badlands" to the grim fade of the title track, there's not a weak song on the album and it deservedly ranks with Springsteen's classics. Which means that it ranks with rock's classic albums, full stop.
And it took a long time to get it that way. The music on the 2xCD set The Promise, which was written during the Darkness sessions, shows what Springsteen had to leave behind to get the record that he wanted. That meant no big pop songs. There's "Because the Night", given to Patti Smith before being completed, which she then improved and turned into her biggest hit. And then "Fire", which Springsteen gave to the Pointer Sisters, and which went to No. 2 on Billboard. It also means no songs about easy times, hope, and escape. So "Gotta Get That Feeling", an appealing mid-tempo track with horns and sweet backing vocals and lines like "We ain't got no money but we don't care" was shelved. (In Darkness, people have no money but they do care, a lot.) And "Save My Love", a catchy piano-led tune, isn't going to make Darkness with lines like "If we open up our hearts/ Love won't forsake us." Tell that to the couple in "Racing in the Street".
The Promise is also a good demonstration of how Springsteen mines his unused songs for material, and shows how many ways he tried to record things before figuring out how they worked best. The set kicks off with "Racing in the Street ('78)", a version that begins as an austere ballad but builds into a rock song. It's nowhere near as effective as what came to be on the record, but it is riveting, showing just how elastic Springsteen's melodic and thematic ideas could be. An early version of "Candy's Room" is here, too, and it's called "Candy's Boy"; instead of the original's dark and explosive sensuality, here it's a clean, shuffling guitar-pop tune, charming but without a lot at stake.
The tracks on The Promise CD aren't left out just because of subject matter or tone-- they also sound different. As with some songs on Tracks, some of these songs had parts added later. "Where needed, I worked on them to bring them to fruition," Springsteen writes in the notes. "Many stand as they were recorded all those years ago." The re-touching is at its most extreme on "Save My Love", which was written in the 70s but cut in 2010. In other places, the vocals and music sound fundamentally different from the recordings of the era. Certainly, the arrangements are thicker than what wound up on Darkness, which makes sense since some of the songs left behind were R&B-based bar-band songs and swooning songs of love and lust. Still, despite the lack of consistency, the 22 new songs (there are 21 tracks, but "The Way" is a hidden bonus track at the end) are mostly very good and occasionally great. None feel like they should have been on Darkness, but almost all of them hold up to repeat plays and stand on their own as very good Springsteen-- easily on the level of mid-level stuff on The River, say.
On the visual side, one DVD has a bizarre recording of Springsteen and the E Street Band playing Darkness on the Edge of Town straight through in an empty theater in Asbury Park in December 2009. I suspect that this decision was inspired in part by the notion that the album is about loneliness and open spaces, but there's something off about seeing this band, known so well for its deep connection to its audience, playing by themselves in a large room without people.
More interesting on the same disc are the live odds-and-ends from rehearsals at Springsteen's rented Jersey home in the 70s. The band is packed into what looks like a small bedroom, Springsteen is shirtless, with the familiar guitar around his neck, standing before a microphone taped to a stand. And the band is running through a couple new songs in an intimate space with no sense at all of posterity. (They are so casual, Steve Van Zant isn't even wearing a hat!) Also on this disc are songs from a 1978 show in Phoenix, including the famous clip for "Rosalita" that got some play in the early days of MTV. These Phoenix performances are generally superior to the three-hour set from a 1978 show in Houston included on a separate DVD. The video comes from the arena's video feed and, given the quality of video in 1978, quality could be better. But it is a multi-camera shoot with good coverage and Springsteen and the E Street band were in amazing form throughout that year. So no complaints about more live Springsteen.
Which leaves the documentary, which in one sense serves as the centerpiece of the project. As with the film included with the Born to Run box, there are interesting details about the technical aspects of the album. Chuck Plotkin's theory behind his approach to mixing vocals is fascinating, and explains why this album feels so balanced. We see fragments of songs, lots of exhaustion and sitting around, and get a look at how Springsteen works as a bandleader. There's a moment in the first scene where he looks tired and frustrated and a little pissed off and you realize that it would be scary to have him mad at you. He's not always an easy guy to work for. It's refreshing to see such a simple display of humanity when the documentary obviously has very specific points that it wants to hit.
Still, there's something odd about these "making of" documentaries about albums coming from the artist themselves. In part because they seem so intent on directing how the music is heard. Sets like this and Neil Young's Archives reflect a desire for artists to take control of their legacy and shape the narrative of their careers. It's easy to understand this impulse, and doubly so when you are talking about people as controlling as Springsteen or Neil Young. And yet it's also futile. As listeners, our stories are what will ultimately matter, and by having the music in our lives, we give it significance and form. Darkness is the kind of record you sink into, an album of power and dignity and loss and just a hint at the possibility of transcendence, which is something Springsteen's fans have known all along, even without hearing a single detail of how it is made. We'll take it all and have loads of fun exploring all the ephemera, but Springsteen carved through all this-- the pile of songs, the legal bullshit, the media image he wasn't comfortable with-- to make that one magical record, which is the most impressive part of it all.


The Long Island prog-metal band bursts with enthusiasm and rabid energy, as if Mastodon's apocalyptic visions were replaced with cosmic wonder.

Crux

Moon Tooth draw attention like the big, bold letters of a comic book: Their technical prowess, rabid energy, and pristine-sounding records all work in favor of making your eyes light up, your heart rate accelerate. The Long Island quartet’s sophomore album, Crux, pairs down the hyperactive whimsy of 2016’s self-released Chromaparagon in favor of simpler pleasures. Hooks abound. Lighters are raised. The last decade’s rock heavyweights—from radio titans like Foo Fighters and Incubus to more progressive acts like Tool and the Dillinger Escape Plan—all seem, at various points, like fair comparisons. It’s rock music built from familiar sounds, all drawn together by an ability to swerve suddenly into pyrotechnics.
What separates Moon Tooth from legions of shred-happy colleagues is their emotional urgency and the unexpected ways in which they contort their influences. The lyrics do little to offset the band’s cartoonish ferocity—one of the best choruses culminates in a cry of, “Not today, motherfucker!”—and yet they never sound like they’re just screaming slogans in wild time signatures. They’re always reaching toward the audience with the hopes of pulling you up, an intimacy that’s almost entirely derived from the performance of frontman John Carbone. His soulful, clean singing weaves through the imaginative riffs of guitarist Nick Lee, like if Mastodon’s apocalyptic visions were replaced with pure cosmic wonder.
This style would collapse under the weight of too much seriousness, and Crux tightens Chromaparagon’s scope without sanding away the fun. It’s energetic enough for each song to feel like its own distinct action sequence but concise enough to avoid monotony. The wailing chorus of “Awe at All Angles” takes cues from pop-punk, while “Musketeers” spreads messages of solidarity over a frantic new-wave pulse. In the opening “Trust,” Carbone sings about drifting through life, but his bandmates demand his full presence, lest he miss the half-time breakdown or the saxophone-accompanied finale. If Chromaparagon was the sound of a band showing off all their tricks at once, then Crux radiates with a sleeker and starker energy.
It’s also a blast. Carbone is destined to become a polarizing metal vocalist, though it’s hard to deny the strange passages he draws through the maze his bandmates lay out for him. Highlights like “Motionless in Sky” and “Omega Days” are deceptively intense compositions and Carbone is able to connect their various parts with the lucidity of a pop songwriter. The dazzling, waltz-time closer “Raise a Light (Epilogue)” is wobbly and off-center, with a momentum like a deranged animal barreling toward you. “I’ll rage my way home,” Carbone sings in its closing refrain. “But I’m not going there alone.” For all Moon Tooth’s left turns and explosive ambition, the biggest thrill is in knowing they’re just getting started.


Just eight months after the release of their debut album, Los Campesinos! already return with the follow-up-- a messy, glorious, noisy document of internet café-era indie life that sounds best when sung by heart.

Los Campesinos!: We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed

We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed

First there's the rule about not naming your band with an exclamation point, period. Then there's the one about not changing your last names so they're all the same as the band's, unless you're the Ramones (or arguably the Pastels). Referring to yourselves in a language not spoken in your country of origin? Another bad idea. Welsh boy/girl septet Los Campesinos! proved themselves an exception to all those rules this spring with Hold on Now, Youngster..., a debut album that encapsulated the best of three decades of indie's participatory culture.
There's no rule yet about not releasing a follow-up to your debut album in the same year, mostly because few bands have had the audacity to try it. Los Campesinos! are hedging their bets: they have yet to refer to We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed as their "second album," even when they announced it would come in a limited pressing with a DVD documentary, poster, and 30-page zine (including contributions from members of Xiu Xiu, Grandaddy, Tender Forever, Menomena, Parenthetical Girls, and the Beautiful South). There will be no singles (and to these ears, there are none), and some online retailers have taken to listing the 10-track, 32-minute release as a "mini-album." Forget the technicalities and call it what it is: a messy, glorious, and cohesive artistic document of internet café-era indie life that sounds best when sung by heart.
Recorded in Seattle with John Goodmanson (Bikini Kill, Sleater-Kinney, Wu-Tang Clan), We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed is a fittingly noisy release from a band who recently spent time on the "Shred Yr Face" tour with No Age and Times New Viking. The seismic instrumental "Between an Erupting Earth and an Exploding Sky" is reminiscent of a Swell Maps soundscape, and leads directly into the motorik-locked melancholia of "You'll Need Those Fingers for Crossing". Standout "Heart Swells/Pacific Daylight Time" is a lovelorn miniature epic, with gusting guitars and Parenthetical Girls-quoting lo-fi vocals which shift midway through to folky strums and scratchy, indecipherable mumbling. If you mistakenly dismissed the band as another set of childish twee-poppers, our special today is crow.
Los Campesinos! haven't changed drastically, though. Their self-loathing, anti-romantic bitterness, and LiveJournal detail have only intensified. Several songs sound like scuffed-up, feedback-streaked versions of the first record's shouty, strings- and glockenspiel-touched punk-pop, only the despair is now less deceptively perky, and more, um, desperate. Crashing opener "Ways to Make It Through the Wall" resigns itself to hopelessness, death, and the inevitability of becoming like our parents, even as it wonders "how you break the rules that you yourself imposed." Bleaker still, "The End of the Asterisk" rages of another person's self-deprecation, "It's spot on, and I'm better."
The precocious youngsters of the debut have become increasingly like the prematurely old man of Weezer's classic Pinkerton. Vomit is a recurring theme, on the cathartic title track and on "Miserabilia", which describes kneeling at urinals and imagines an ex masturbating. From 4 a.m. drunk dialing, "It's Never That Easy Though, Is It? (Song for the Other Kurt)" goes on to contemplate which is worse: "To see my ex-girlfriend/ Who by the way, I'm still in love with/ Sucking the face of some pretty boy"? Or to watch it happen "with my favorite band's most popular song in the background"? The finale, "All Your Kayfabe Friends", screeches to a halt after a fateful closing line: "I love the look of lust between your thighs."
Los Campesinos! know their history; they may be doomed, but not just to repeat it. We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed's ragged sound and distinctive packaging, like the band's propensity for non-album 7"s, hearken back to previous decades, but they're also an attempt to develop a new underground community in the here and now. "We want this to feel like a proper event, the sort of thing that you're going to be hyped about going to see for days or weeks before, and the sort of thing that when you leave will stick long in your memory, and that you'll be happy to have been a part of," co-lead singer Gareth Campesinos! says ramblingly of the Shred Yr Face tour, addressing us-- as rappers often do but indie rockers so far usually haven't-- via YouTube. "It is, undoubtedly, a little narcissistic," he adds. It ain't trickin' if you got it.


After a forgettable Def Jam debut, 2x realizes Durk’s full potential as drill’s last major-label hope.

Lil Durk 2X

Few artists withstood the peaks and valleys of the short-lived drill surge better than Lil Durk, who got a major label deal, landed two breakout hits, weathered a string of bad breaks and later an underwhelming debut album, all before he turned 23. He also lost his manager OTF Chino and his cousin OTF NuNu to gun violence during that stretch. His Def Jam debut, Remember My Name, was uneven and largely forgettable, but he didn’t stay down long, opting instead to refocus. Durk seemed to turn a corner months later on 300 Days 300 Nights, an action-packed mixtape led by the Dej Loaf duet “My Beyoncé” (which felt refreshingly out of character for the rapper, who once made a song called “Bang Bros.”) He found his footing within the tape’s 19 tracks, regaining his grasp on Auto-Tune and rediscovering his range. It serves as a lead-in to Lil Durk 2X, a continuously-delayed mixtape turned sophomore album that realizes Durk’s full potential as drill’s last major-label hope.
Durk has ascribed several different meanings to the title 2X—in an interview with XXL, he said it represents his “second chance,” and it’s also a reference to his two sons (who are pictured on the album’s cover) and how they’ll follow his lead—but the concept might be best explained by the opening moments of the title track: “I’m doing me/I get it by myself, I get this money by myself/I swear I do it like there’s two of me.” The premise is simple: this Durk is twice as good. And 2x supports that thesis with a renewed commitment to hammering cadences lathered in a bittersweet candy varnish. In fact, this is the best Durk has ever been, as a writer, rapper, and performer, for the duration of any project. All three angles intersect on songs like “Glock Up” and “Check,” which allow Durk to operate freely inside hollowed-out beats.
Sonically speaking, there is a great deal of variety on 2X, a project that still revolves primarily around gun violence—shootouts, revenge killings, and even gangland posturing (“Lil Booka will drop you”)—but isn’t beholden to its gloom. It can, at times, be just as dark as past projects, like on the bloodthirsty “True” (“Real killas, they don’t leave witness … Call my shooters, they got no limits”), but a more colorful tonal palette provides relief. Lighter tracks, like the Ty Dolla $ign-featuring love song “She Just Wanna” and the strutting “Money Walk” with its pixiphone-toned backbone, provide balance “My Beyoncé” gets slotted in as the closer, and its sweet tone, accented by chirping birds, is a welcome addition. Atlanta mainstays Wheezy, Cassius Jay, and Zaytoven, along with longtime Durk collaborator C-Sick bring a mix of distant, atmospheric mood inducers, MIDI keyboard-driven trap soul (adorned in the increasingly popular sample from Nelly’s “Dilemma”), and plush, full-bodied pop crossovers__,__ but Young Chop and ChopSquad DJ step outside themselves to provide the brightest spots.
By his own admission, this is the happiest Durk has ever been in his life, and you can hear it in fragments on 2X: “Spent eight on the section, said fuck Section 8/I bought my mom a new crib/No more rent being late,” on “Set It Off;” “Thank God for my mama/Thank the lord for my brothers/We gonna take on the world,” on “Super Powers;” “You and I, White dress, flowers, and a suit and tie/Me and you like Bonnie and Clyde,” on “My Beyoncé.” There’s positive energy sprinkled throughout, which helps to cut through the shadows cast by a lifelong exposure to death. When he raps “Made it out ‘cause I had to,” it’s a reminder of the tightrope he’s walking. Passing mentions of surviving the summer—the season where murder rates spike in inner cities—reveal that he’s still entrenched in the streets, tied to a community plagued by an endless cycle of murders. Those still fighting the battle are never far from his thoughts; he’s still fighting it, too. There are no reprieves from the harsh realities of the war zone that is Chicago’s South Side.
But there’s one moment on 2X where Durk manages to completely untether from this reality, the world that took his cousin, his manager, and his friends and demands he respond with barbarism: The standout “Super Powers,” a Young Chop-produced opus that makes the strongest case for Durk’s growth as a musician and a young man. It’s an escapist anthem that champions inner strength and considers resilience superhuman. The reverb from his Auto-Tuned croons bleed into strobing Simon-esque synth notes, selling the euphoria. It’s introspective and optimistic. As Durk grapples with leaving his old life behind to create a better life for his sons, he creates his most gratifying and moving work yet. Lil Dirk 2X seeks rehabilitation but finds evolution.


The Melbourne quartet’s catchy, plainspoken post-punk songs speak to the drudgery of life under capitalism, marrying poetics and politics without an ounce of pretension.

Sogni

In 2004, socialist feminist icon Barbara Ehrenreich offered an astute piece of advice to the women reading her work: “No matter how many degrees the experts dangle in front of you, no matter how many studies they cite,” she wrote, “dig deeper, value your own real-life experiences, and think for yourself.” This advice spoke to an often unmentioned truth: when so many of the so-called experts installed to govern the lives of women are men, every seemingly arbitrary choice becomes significant, an opportunity to escape the grip of unseen, often malevolent, forces.
Melbourne quartet Primo! make music guided by an almost Ehrenreich-ian ethos: Catchy and plainspoken post-punk songs that, while not as grandly political as the anarchist polemics of scene compatriots Total Control or Terry, place significance in day-to-day choices. With their second record Sogni, Primo! sharpen their vision, continuing to write songs that find mystery and magic in otherwise-mundane life while honing in on a surreal, romantic aesthetic.
Ideologically, not much has changed for Primo! since the 2018 release of their debut album Amici; their songs still speak to the drudgery of life under capitalism, and feel built from the aphorisms we feed ourselves in order to keep going. (“Onwards and upwards, say bye to the day, say bye to the night,” sings guitarist Violetta Del Conte-Race on “Comedy Show.”) Structurally, the band has expanded, bringing in Amy Hill of Constant Mongrel and Terry on bass, a change that, along with a newfound clarity in recording, rounds out the band’s sound.
Stylistically, one only has to look at Sogni’s cover art to clock the shift the band has made: Where Amici’s artwork was in stark black and white, Sogni is lit up with neons, a change in palette that feels in tune with the new breadth of Primo!’s sound. Building on the synth-gilded post-punk of Amici, Sogni is artier and less linear than its predecessor, with a handful of jolting production choices—a squeaking saxophone on “Perfect Paper,” shrill vocal compression on “Machine”—deployed sparingly but effectively.
The pummelling “Machine” is Sogni’s most out-and-out punk track, and one that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Constant Mongrel record. A diatribe against the increasing automation of “low-skill” jobs, “Machine” is as camp as it is bracing, the silly, Dalek-y scream of the song’s hook (“Machine! Machine! Machine!”) injecting surreal humor despite the song’s weight. Closer “Reverie” pushes the boundaries of Primo!’s style, the wandering synths that underscore the band’s chanting vocal conjuring memory of Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks score.
The song that best encapsulates Primo!’s plainly philosophical spirit is “Best and Fairest.” Over Suzanne Walker’s spritely drumming, guitarist Xanthe Waite ponders the decisions one must grapple with in order to mold a good life: “What company will you be keeping?” she asks, “Who will you pay? And who will pay you?” Key words in the lyrics point to the jargon of capitalism and its associated doctrine—rich, company, pay, best—with the melancholy dream of a family floating far beneath: “Motherhood and other dreams slowly come out of hiding,” Waite sings. In this way, they are able to evoke the ruthless exceptionalism of western neoliberal capitalism without writing song-length pamphlets about it.
The central metaphor at play reinforces this common touch. “Best and fairest” refers to the trophy awarded to the best player at the end of an Australian football season. No matter how skilled a player you are, you can’t win best and fairest if you’ve incurred even the most minor reprimand. The prize rewards good sportsmanship—in other words, a collectivist spirit—as much as it does talent. This is Sogni’s linchpin: the ability to seamlessly marry poetics and politics without an ounce of pretension. In the process, they conjure something galvanizing, class-conscious, and profound.

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Sonny Smith's final installment in his 100 Records project, in which he inhabits a universe of fictional musicians, has the feel of a compilation sourced by grabbing random 45s from a bargain bin. But importantly, he always sounds decidedly like himself.

100 Records Vol. 3

With the third volume of Sonny Smith's 100 Records project, he's once again ditched the Sunsets and inhabited a universe of fictional musicians. He's back as Hank Champion, the poet who talks about his sex life over a quaint country instrumental. Zig Speck and the Specktones, the garage rock band formerly fronted by Ty Segall in Volume II, return with an earwormy nugget called "Fruitcakes". He's a soul group, a reggae band, a folkie guitar picker, and a country balladeer. The LP has a similar aesthetic to one you might find from grabbing several 45s out of a bargain bin and putting them on a compilation. But here's the important bit-- even when he travels outside his comfort zone, Smith sounds decidedly like himself.
In an interview about the project back in 2010, Smith hinted that he was less than confident in his ability to deliver such a wide range of songs. "There was one guy that was kind of a reggae guy, and I don't play reggae music or whatever, so that was kind of tricky." And in reference to the soul characters, "I can't sing like Otis Redding or anything." On paper, it makes sense that Smith's voice could potentially pose a limitation for those genres-- his voice is distinctively his own. But by side-stepping vocal affectations and delivering strong, tight arrangements, he's crafted some legitimately catchy reggae and soul songs. With a strong organ solo and a quiet, echoing piano driving the beat, "Half Boy Half Girl" is a reggae ballad that smacks of early American R&B. (Makes sense-- the Wailers, after all, were inspired by that stuff.) And with a killer hook and some on-point back-up singers, "A Steady Stream of Love" is one of the best country soul throwbacks in recent memory.
The tinges of country in Smith's soul music make sense-- the most recent Sunsets album, Longtime Companion, featured some beautiful country songs ("Year of the Cock" appears there and here), and by letting himself stretch out under the guise of different personae, Vol. 3 is a great venue for his knack with the genre. His two songs as Bobby Hawkins are maybe a bit too simplistic-- he delivers a lonesome howl on "Minimum Wage" and drawls out the titular lyrics of "Difficulties, Mistakes and Errors". He offers 1970s country rock barn burners ("Cosmorama") alongside quiet Johnny Cash-like acoustic tracks ("Some Women Artists All Around Town").
Vol. 3 is at its best when Smith is at his boldest, like when he's offering a cautionary tale to the masses (and the president) on "If You Don't Make a Change". Although the instrumental tracks "Medication" and "Wolf Like Howls From the Bathhouse" are subdued by comparison, they serve the crucial role of offering a palate cleanser between stylistic shifts. And while you can almost always predict the genre by looking at the track and fake artist name (the Wayward Youth are behind the reggae song, Little Antoine and the Sparrows did the soul song), it's to Smith's credit that only one track, "Space Travel's in My Blood" by Earth Girl Helen Brown, feels like a throwaway novelty song due to its cartoonish sci-fi sonics. For an art project that's in constant danger of veering into gimmickry, his final 100 Records collection is much stronger than it has any right to be.


This remix set, based on Glasper’s 2016 album, moves with the freewheeling rhythm of a beat tape. It’s a low-stakes but very fun session.

Robert Glasper / Kaytranada: The ArtScience Remixes EP

The ArtScience Remixes EP

You can trust Robert Glasper to honor your favorite throwback sounds. He’s the cool custodian of old-school grooves who, with his band, the Robert Glasper Experiment, has built a flourishing career out of reinterpreting African-American music history, bridging jazz, soul, R&B, and hip-hop. The two installments of his guest-heavy Black Radio series in 2012-2013 and 2016’s Artscience all flowed like curated mixtapes of the finest vintage. On The Artscience Remixes, the keyboardist and producer probes another vital form of Black musical expression: the remix.
Glasper has bowed down to the concept before. Black Radio Recovered: The Remix EP saw his tracks flipped by old-world heads like Pete Rock, 9th Wonder, Georgia Anne Muldrow, and Questlove. For The Artscience Remixes, the keyboardist plumps for just a single collaborator in 25-year-old Canadian Kaytranada. Given his youth and his affinity for fizzing electronic textures, it’s not necessarily the most obvious choice. Yet Kaytranada has in the past shown plenty of respect for his golden age hip-hop forefathers, and that serves him well on this set. The remit of the remixer has always been simple enough to be scrawled on the back of a pack of cigarettes: keep the cuts fresh and keep them glorious. Here, Kaytranada finds enough new angles to make the project meaningful while staying true to Glasper’s long-term modus operandi. Spin these tracks out of context and the thought of alternative versions existing might never enter your head.
The Artscience Remixes moves with the freewheeling rhythm of a beat tape. The drums are crisp and the keys flow like liquid gold. These are tracks that would sound great crackling through your old Sony Walkman on a beat-up C-90. Take “Find You”: The jittery arcade electronics of the original have been dramatically stripped out and replaced by a cool, dusty groove that echoes J Dilla’s early beats. The thick, 1980s boogie-style orchestration of “Thinkin Bout You”—a sweet love song that captures being in a relationship when you’re touring—is now a fluid, dapper R&B number. “Written in Stone” features some classical-style piano chords before falling out of step as the vocals are slowed and screwed. It’s a welcome moment of tension in an otherwise satin-smooth set.
The only real disappointment is “No One Like You.” The original nine-minute version focused on spontaneous jazz expression. Here, the borders of the song are reined in, with the vocals replaced by those of Alex Isley, imbuing the track with a more contemporary R&B feel. It’s fine in concept, but spoiled by a hyperactive drum loop that blemishes the record’s otherwise urbane groove.
The Artscience Remixes lasts for just 28 minutes and eight tracks, only five of which are fully functional songs. It’s even bookended by two daft but enjoyably absurd skits featuring Don Cheadle, who worked with Glasper on the Miles Davis biopic Miles Ahead. As the stakes never feel particularly high, this will go down as a minor release in both Glasper and Kaytranada’s discographies.  Never mind—the timeless nature of these grooves is hard to grow bored of.


On their third full-length, Baltimore drone-rockers Horse Lords prove the rewards of "difficult" music.

Interventions

Horse Lords make music with guitar, bass, drums, and sometimes saxophone, but you couldn't really call what they do rock music. Rock is just a small piece of the greater amalgamation—a simple-yet-complex affair that welds repetitive riffing in strange time signatures to microtonal harmonies that glint like flecks of mica. It might be tempting to call it math rock, but these aren't problems to be solved—they're patterns that unfold as if of their own accord. Maybe "biology rock" would be more apt. It's fluid, not angular, and instead of architecture, branches and rivers and spiraling sunflower heads feel like its analogues in the physical world.
The Baltimore band has released two albums up to this point, both of which alternate switchbacking studies in rhythm and drone with noisy, knotty studio experiments. They've also released three freeform "mixtapes" containing sidelong collages of full-throttle rave-ups, modular synth sketches, and live recordings whose audio fidelity suggests that they may have been recorded to a Dictaphone at the bottom of someone's gym bag.
Interventions marks a major step forward in every way: The jams are both more focused and more hypnotic, while the quality of the recordings has a newfound clarity and fullness that does wonders for the music. Guitarist Owen Gardner and bassist Max Eilbacher play instruments re-fretted according to the principles of just intonation, and their curious tuning—intermingled with saxophonist Andrew Bernstein's complementary bleat—yields an unusual and visceral sound. It's subtle, but you can feel it vibrating in the air all around you.
"Truthers," which opens the album, plunges you straight into the band's muscular minimalism. Drummer Sam Haberman doles out a lurching rhythm in 6/8 time while guitar, bass, and saxophone pile up in teetering heaps. Their scales have an odd, in-between quality, neither major nor minor, that makes me think of Sahara Desert blues crossed with the smoldering skronk of the Stooges' Fun House. Throughout the album, they'll return again and again to the same essential themes, and the fact that "Toward the Omega Point," "Time Slip," and "Bending to the Lash" sound like they are in the same key as "Truthers" lends to Interventions' deep sense of structural integrity. But they never stop pushing forward: The unhinged "Toward the Omega Point," in which Bernstein sets aside his saxophone in order to lay down complex polyrhythms on percussion, veers into an unexpected country blues before pivoting back into Glenn Branca territory, while the brooding "Time Slip" overdubs guitars and sax in creamy waves over a toe-scuffing groove in five.
Much like their mixtapes, the excellently sequenced album is broken up by shorter, sketch-like pieces. "Encounter I / Transfinite Flow" braids taut guitar plucks and staccato sax blasts around one another like the strands of a double helix; "Intervention I" is a chiming modular synth miniature that feels like standing in the lobby of a Reno casino; and "Encounter II / Intervention II," the album's still center, is a mournful saxophone solo, suffused in reverb, that sounds like it was recorded in a dank underground chamber.
Following the punishing onslaught of "Bending to the Lash," the album closes with "Never Ended," a disorienting swirl of chants and street noise recorded at the Baltimore protests following the death of Freddie Gray. You wouldn't necessarily recognize the source material, but knowing its provenance helps explain some of the album's urgency. This is a band that believes that experimental music has the potential to be more than merely aesthetic, and every one of their choices—like taking apart their instruments and rebuilding them according to an alternate musical logic—speaks to a desire to upend the status quo. Sometimes difficult and always thrilling, Interventions asks listeners to meet it halfway—and rewards them copiously when they do.


On his second solo album, the Norwegian saxophonist continues to develop an entirely new vocabulary for his instrument, using electronic treatments to yield a curiously disembodied sound.

Cracks

When Norwegian saxophonist Bendik Giske surfaced on the scene three years ago, he instantly fit in with Oslo’s Smalltown Supersound label. The label’s adventurous, polyglot roster, home to mavericks such as Supersilent and Deathprod, has a long history blurring the parameters of “ambient” and “jazz.” Giske’s 2019 debut album, Surrender, summoned an interiorized soundworld in which the sax, rather than a conveyor of melody, becomes a generator of fractalized sonic microbes that coalesce into mesmerizing shapes. That release established him as one of the label’s most fascinating artists.
Giske’s approach has more in common with the otherworldly fever-dreamscapes of the late trumpeter Jon Hassell and his young sax acolyte Sam Gendel than with any jazz traditionalists. Assisted by André Bratten’s electronic treatments, what issues out of Giske’s horn are miniaturist Joan Miró paintings made out of Nordic breath, aswirl with dazzling ripples and angular abstractions. Cracks delves deeper still into this bizarre approach, which is highly disciplined while maintaining a baseline calmness.
The drama in Giske’s tracks is informed by his keen ear for when to recede and when to surge. It’s the familiar quiet-loud-quiet ethos, but micromanaged on a second-by-second basis. Similarities exist with the music of circular-breathing master saxophonist Colin Stetson, as loads of reply guys under Giske’s YouTube clips have observed, but the Norwegian musician’s work lacks the bravado and the “elephant with a spear lodged in its hindquarters” anguish of his American predecessor. Where you vividly sense the intense physical effort that Stetson brings to his recordings, Giske’s sounds, by contrast, seem more disembodied.
Ironically, bodily movement played a foundational role for Giske: As a youngster, he practiced dance while dividing his time between Bali and Oslo, and when he moved to Berlin as an adult, he expanded his horizons in the discipline by immersing himself in that city’s vital club milieu, though what he’s created on Cracks cannot by any stretch of the imagination be called dance music—unless your limbs are made out of liquid. Opening cut “Flutter” rides in on insular whorls and intimate taps of the sax’s leather pads, weaving a delicate tapestry of almost flute-like trills fibrillating in an expanse of celestial ambience. The title track conjures profound spectral strangeness, something akin to distant demons in a wind tunnel, bringing neck hairs to attention and then frosting them. It is doubtful that saxophone inventor Adolphe Sax would recognize anything in this piece as deriving from his brainchild. “Cracks” could be a contender for placement on a long-awaited second volume of Kevin Martin’s Ambient 4: Isolationism comp.
It’s on “Cruising” where Giske comes closest to the earthy rhythms and mellow oscillations of Hassell’s arcane ecosphere. As the song progresses, Giske’s sax gradually becomes more unruly and echoplexed, haloed in ghost notes that tint the air like exhalations in sub-zero temperatures. It’s the album’s tour de force, an expansive journey to a zone where spiritual jazz meets polar ambience. Throughout Cracks, Giske appears to be striving for an alien, private vocabulary with an instrument saddled with 175 years of tradition and tropes. Against great odds, he succeeds.

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Continuing Thee Oh Sees' impressive run of the last couple of years, the John Dwyer-fronted garage rock band's newest album is another resounding success. With its dark undertones, and lyrics about splattered blood and dead children, it's also sort of a sadistic success.

Floating Coffin

For John Dwyer’s “5-10-15-20” interview, the Oh Sees frontman talked about discovering the work of the Mexican psych prog band Los Dug Dug’s. The legend behind their 1972 album Smog, as Dwyer heard it, goes like this: Armando Nava went up to the mountains, took acid, and conceptualized that LP. “He came back and taught it to the band, and it is by far their biggest triumph,” Dwyer said. Although Thee Oh Sees sound almost nothing like Los Dug Dug’s-- the latter laying on the flute solos a bit too thick-- the opening track on Floating Coffin is called “I Come From the Mountain”. Like most of Dwyer's best songs, it's got muscle and drive. As usual, the story is fractured, abstracted, and therein, too nonspecific to be exclusively about Nava. But the spirit of the myth is there: “I come from the mountain, I return again,” Dwyer sings. Yes, but is he emerging from the mountain with his masterwork?
Based on their output from the past two years alone, it's hard to fathom what “biggest triumph” would even look like for Thee Oh Sees at this point. Castlemania had Dwyer bleating “I Need Seed” in a strained toad voice; the centerpiece of Carrion Crawler/The Dream was a blistering Krautrock masterwork; “Goodnight Baby” from Putrifiers II was a Nuggets lullaby capped by field recordings of chirping birds. Each of those albums are triumphs, and picking the "best" one feels like an arbitrary decision-- they suit different moods, different purposes. In that tradition, Floating Coffin is another resounding success.
And it's sort of a sadistic success. In the tradition of tracks like “The Dream”, “Tunnel Time” is carried by an adrenaline-fueled drive. But this time, the lyrics are about murdering a whole bunch of people, and the central hook is the band singing an evil laugh: “HA HA HA HA HA, HA HA HA HA HAAAA HA!.” Behind every infectious riff, there's a dark undertone. What's behind the strawberries on the album's cover? A murderous gaze. What's behind the earworm hooks and vamp-filled rock'n'roll? Lyrics about splattered blood and dead children. There are a few references to “the maze” as it relates to the narrator's descent into madness. In “Maze Fancier”, he's trapped and sings that there's “nothing inside of me.” Perhaps that dispassionate void manifests later on “Sweet Helicopter” when he takes a dementedly detached view of murder: “I look down and see them looking up.” With his unsettling disconnect between sweet falsetto and portrayal of a glazed-eyed killer, Dwyer definitely earns his spot in the prestigious club of murder balladeers.
Of course, you have to listen pretty carefully to hear Dwyer as demon or serial killer. The lyrics are run through the band's go-to filter of falsetto, voice effects, and extremely loud guitars. The title track is a chaotic burner that sounds like it could fall apart at any moment-- each element is barely held together by the bassline-- so any vocals are pretty well obliterated by volume. But for an album stuffed with great melodies, smooth transitions, shredding guitar solos, and stellar percussion work (the spastic percussion simmering in the background of “Sweet Helicopter” is a particular highlight), it's hard to mind when the lyrics take a backseat. That said, although Floating Coffin does quite well with its searing powerhouses, the quieter moments add a much-needed sonic diversity. The viola melody that introduces “Minotaur” is gorgeous, and once again, that's for a song that tells a fairly miserable story.
Arguably, the most powerful song on Floating Coffin is “No Spell”. The majority of the track features a gentle melody, buoyed by a soft rhythm section, and some ethereal vocals. There are words on the lyrics sheet for the song, but they appear more as a series of evaporating vowel sounds. And naturally, the quiet is broken by a WOO, a series of hefty power chords, and a guitar solo-- a thrilling stab of power amid the quiet warmth. It's a sweet melody that offers a brief respite from the bloodshed. It also illustrates that there's no pre-established blueprint for an Oh Sees album, which means there's no telling what's next. As usual, that's an exciting prospect.


The California producer’s debut album channels new-age synths and retro dance styles into a dreamlike synthesis of disparate musical modes.

FEMINISTA

In late 2019, the California-based producer Tomu DJ was driving down I-5 when her back tire blew out. Her car flipped three times—the windshield shattered; her airbags exploded. Though she walked away relatively physically unscathed, the accident left her with psychological trauma and, eventually, a period of psychosis. She turned to music to regain a sense of self, retreading the breakbeats that spawned her love of electronic music and exploring the palliative effervescence of Balearic beat and piano house. After a series of EPs, her debut album, FEMINISTA, is a synthesis of her disparate musical modes, floating in the dreamlike space between ambient and techno.
Tomu DJ shelved her first attempts at a full-length, and FEMINISTA jitters with the nervous energy of a postponed debut. After a relatively subdued first half—the reggaetón of “Dula Peep,” the introspective synths of “Schizoaffective” and “Rock69”—”Exposed Nerve” digs into her musical roots as a DJ, a passion she developed after meeting Chicago’s famed Teklife crew in 2015. The sub-bass, breakbeats, and featherlight flutes combine the influence of her current collaborators—for instance, the weightlessness of Toronto-based producer Ciel, who hosted Tomu DJ on her Rinse.fm show earlier this year—with her love of ghetto house, juke, and footwork. “Pretty Stuff,” with its rapid-fire rhythms and delicate synth overlay, sounds like a Teklife spa, pushing the Chicago producers’ penchant for experimental melodies further into the realms of ambient bliss.
The album also plays with nostalgia and memory, appropriating the sounds of ’90s pop without ever fully diving into pastiche. “Cali / Florida” feels like a warm, comforting hug from childhood, layering synths that evoke the breeziness of Steely Dan’s saxophone over a whirring and clicking sound reminiscent of a music box. “What’s Next” answers the question posed by its title with a retro-futuristic soundscape, fusing the shuffling beats of drum’n’bass with the washed synths of new age. Buzzing with the sidechain compression of Eurodance, it feels like a secret doorway to EDM’s past.
It can be difficult to successfully crack a joke within the typically self-serious spaces of new age and dance music, but Tomu DJ has already carved out a uniquely ironic, occasionally absurd voice. It takes a degree of humbling self-deprecation to call your 2020 single “Goes To Bossa During Covid Once,” title your May 2021 followup “Second Dose,” or tag an EP about psychological distress as both “420” and “schizophrenia.” In her typically wordless music, such wordplay comes off as an attempt to add clarity and signal the inspirations behind her work. That carries over to FEMINISTA, whose opening track is named for Wendy Williams’ mispronunciation of Dua Lipa’s name. But just as on her previous releases, jokes provide context—“Dula Peep,” with its downtempo, dembow-inspired beat, might be an opaque reference to the British singer’s penchant for reggaetón and Latin trap. The chintzy smooth-jazz melodies of “Rock69” similarly reflect its tongue-in-cheek title, layering schmaltz onto an already sentimental song.
Tomu DJ has said that the album was influenced by Janet Jackson’s legendary The Velvet Rope, and though there’s little directly reminiscent of the R&B classic, there is a clear throughline to that album’s breadth. FEMINISTA’s eight songs aren’t so much in active conversation as they are pulled from the same subconscious. The timbres and textures of Tomu DJs music, which she tends to coat with luminous reverb, often feel like attempts to translate a mental state into sound. The wobbling synths on “Schizoaffective,” the uneven melodies on “Confundida”—they sound off-balance, as if mimicking her tilted headspace in the months after her accident. But when that same filtered echo appears across her juke and drum’n’bass tracks, it also evokes the woozy afterglow of a night out—the way the thump of the rave rings in your ear as you walk home at daybreak. FEMINISTA is as much an album about recovery as it is about longing to safely return home to the dancefloor.

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Glorified/vilified: I don't give a shit what anyone thinks of Tim Kinsella. I don't care if he ...

Joan of Arc: In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust

In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust

Glorified/vilified: I don't give a shit what anyone thinks of Tim Kinsella. I don't care if he's pretentious, I don't care if he does retarded airplane dances onstage, I don't care if he squats over a mirror with two fingers up his ass. I don't care if his self-martyring lyrics are written and performed for the sole purpose of getting pussy, or if he's a tortured genius making esoteric-surreal-referential art, or if he wrote this entire album while sniffing rails of coke and listening to Louis Armstrong records (whose voice he approximates on "No Corporate News Is Good News", and which is probably one of the most offensive/creepy moments on In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust). I'm just glad he's given up the gory melodrama of How Memory Works, even if that means we get the fractured poetic dadaist freakout stuff on recent JOA records-- including Rape Fantasy-- instead.
The fact is, Tim Kinsella is a figurehead in the realm of independent music because of the vehement reaction of his critics, fans, and deriders. There's just no in between: people either love him with frothing passion or hate him with ferocious vitriol, to the point that he matters at least as much as any other artist in the increasingly gray area of what we call indie rock, purely because of indie rock's cultural reaction to him.
So. In interviews, Kinsella has said this record consists of outtakes from their February full-length So Much Staying Alive and Lovelessness-- the ones that Jade Tree thought sucked. This is a cursed way for a piece of art to come into the world, with the knowledge of being unwanted and second-best. But one lady's trash is another lady's treasure, as they say, and to me, the cache of "weird" songs on Rape Fantasy is better than the tracks collected on Staying Alive.
Maybe it seems stronger because there's less pained singing and more instrumentation, which can be awfully pretty at times (even when it oscillates in noise wankouts), or maybe it's because of the personas Kinsella tests out on different tracks: he sings, "Ignorance is my privileged right," in a protest of American apathy and suddenly, he's Frank Zappa; the aforementioned Louis Armstrong impression is, if nothing else, uncharted territory; and then there's Tim's old failsafe, the grating, wailing juvenile toddler, which he's channeled at every opportunity for the better half of Joan of Arc's career.
Kinsella's toddler persona comes directly to the fore on "Happy 1984 and 2001", as he begins intoning the "shadow government" chorus in that scrawly whine (you know the one), and then lists other kinds of shadows in a children's theater-style singsong ("sidewalk shadow, cowboy shadow, BBQ shadow, hackeysack shadow)-- a sort of "Now I Know My ABC's" of the illuminati. Kinsella's harped on the government a lot recently, which fits in nicely with his contempt for authority (boyhood Catholicism seems to be at the core of "Dinosaur Constellations Part 1", when he repeatedly screams, "God is the bomb"), and also with his inner conspiracy theorist. But you know. I don't care about those things.
Here's what I do care about, really: a semblance of human emotion, a snippet of beauty, a boatload of comedy, some musical friction and a good story. In Rape Fantasy and Terror Sex We Trust-- and by extension, Tim Kinsella-- possesses those things at varying points, and sometimes all at once. On "Them Brainwash Days", someone credited as "Ingersol Torniquet" reads unintelligible poetry while a graceful guitar blossoms quietly, a steady drum beats, and a piano unfurls-- and to paraphrase Kinsella, it's just nice. On "Them Heartache Nights", austere vocal samples and another burst of pretty guitar fill out the emotion requirement. In the simple beauty of these moments, the question has to be asked: what could Joan of Arc accomplish if they tossed aside their shock-rock tactics and primal scream therapy, and aimed for this instead?
It seems to me that when they're just spazzing the fuck out, it's not for a lack of talent on the behalf of the players-- which, this time out includes members of Califone, Friend/Enemy, 90 Day Men, Ghosts and Vodka, Chicago Underground, Bent Leg Fatima, and just about every other Chicago-based indie session player you can think of-- it's just a lack of attention span. The formula is for everyone to play what sounds like random measures at once; it's not about applying the aesthetics of free jazz to indie rock, so much as getting a bunch of kids on Kool-Aid to jam out together in the basement. The results are never brilliant or violently disagreeable-- just kind of funny and weird.
In Rape Fantasy is more of a curio than anything-- think of it as Duchamp's suitcase meets Richard Pryor's Bicentennial Nigger. But for all the squawky, experimental shit that gives this band its divisive controversy, there are some genuinely nice arty folk moments that would probably get more credit were it not for Kinsella's by-now well established persona. I don't care what side you're on-- if you think this man is this generation's Ginsberg or an idiot fooling no one; when he lets his act slip and indulges his melodic vice, he proves himself far more talented than he otherwise lets on.


This live album, consisting mostly of late-career highlights, emphasizes what Sleater-Kinney does best: playing not just with urgent feeling, but in service of immense meaning.

Sleater-Kinney: Sleater-Kinney: Live in Paris

Sleater-Kinney: Live in Paris

In the recently released video for “Surface Envy,” there’s a “stop Bush” sign in the background of one of the many live performances that comprise the clip. Written about their reunion after about eight years apart, “Surface Envy” is the story of Sleater-Kinney in that it is the story of bands—groups of people, really—that attempt to go against the grain: “We win, we lose, only together do we break the rules,” goes the chorus. So while  the No Cities to Love standout is not about “the system” per se, it is one of the best fight songs they’ve ever written—a fact underscored by the pummeling version that appears on their new live album.
If there is one unifying thread among many of the songs that make the cut on Live in Paris, it’s not just that they’re late-era Sleater-Kinney highlights (five of the 13 songs come from No Cities to Love, four from 2005’s The Woods). From the post-recession terror of opening track “Price Tag” to the sly sendup of capitalist femininity on closing song “Modern Girl,” the tracklist emphasizes what Sleater-Kinney does best: playing not just with urgent feeling, but in service of immense meaning. Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein, and Janet Weiss came back swinging in 2015 as strongly as they ever had—a gift considering how rarely it happens in rock. Live in Paris is the victory lap leaving us wanting more.
The setlists for S-K’s comeback tour throughout 2015 were maximized to show the band’s power after the better part of a decade away, and Live in Paris—recorded at the historic venue La Cigale about a month into the trek—has enough of it to make anthems out of lesser S-K songs. Girl-gang harmonies originally made One Beat’s “Oh!” sound delightfully bratty, but Tucker’s exaggerated vocals on the chorus resemble a demented Mickey Mouse; it’ll stick with you like a childhood trip to Orlando. Old live footage suggests she hasn’t always sang it so idiosyncratically, which can be said of numerous vocal takes here from both Tucker and Brownstein.  The latter’s blood-curdling bird squawks on “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” will make you A.) wonder why Carrie Brownstein hasn’t formed some avant-garde metal band for the sole purpose of squawk-singing (could also work as a “Portlandia” sketch); B.) love it even more.
Listening to Brownstein and Tucker sing together now, 20+ years after Sleater-Kinney’s founding, you can hear how their voices have changed. On early Sleater-Kinney records, their vocals often recklessly (and joyfully) clashed, like a pit of dance-punks tossing their bodies at one another. These days, it's more common that their voices fall into worn, soulful grooves when they harmonize, like in the chorus of No Cities’ “A New Wave”; Tucker hoists her voice up above Brownstein’s like she’s casually hopping out of a pool.
The obvious downside of being a band with serious history is that fans who prefer the old stuff are probably always going to be a given. Sleater-Kinney toured around the January 2015 release of eighth LP No Cities to Love, so clearly those songs were prized. It was an excellent album, but S-K also played older fan favorites like “You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun,” “Words and Guitar,” and “Little Babies” throughout the tour and they don’t end up here. That’s the only real downside to what is surprisingly the first live album from a touring rock band that remains one of America's best.
Sleater-Kinney’s existence as, in their own mocking words, “the girl band” may seem less revolutionary now than it did on the other side of their hiatus, but it’s partially because S-K helped pave a way for the women who now lead indie rock. In this sense, their presence is inherently political, even when they’re playing a characteristically Corin love song like “Turn It On.” With that and with our current world in mind, Live in Paris makes an inspiring mixtape for the various battles at hand. Like Tucker belts on “Surface Envy,” “We've got so much to do, let me make that clear.”


Pusha T's sophomore studio album is an exercise in pure craft for everyone involved. The beats sound like money, and the raps are whip smart and cleanly tailored; imagine Tony Montana slipping out of the country scot-free ahead of his career-ending Scarface raid, and you arrive at the cocktail of spite and incredulity fueling Darkest Before Dawn.

Darkest Before Dawn

Pusha T occupies a unique spot in hip-hop. He's a twenty-year veteran with access to the swankiest production but very little of the nagging pressure to surf mainstream trends that runs his peers ragged. He wrestled the major label rap machine and won, and his scathing sneer has menaced a decade of hip-hop top dogs, from Lil Wayne to Drake. He's the rare instance of a rap talent sharpening over time; few who made their first recordings in the late '90s, as he did as one half of the Clipse, can be argued to possess a firmer grasp on their voice today than in their youth. Since jumping to Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music after the Clipse began a now-permanent hiatus, Pusha T has zeroed in on a mercenary style both weathered and totally disrespectful; he's seen whole labels, crews, and organizations dissolve, and he's happy to tell you how yours will come apart on you if you're not careful.
A popular rapper with a disdain for the machinery of hip-hop fame is a dangerous assassin, and Pusha spends a good piece of his sophomore studio album Ki**ng Push – Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude pulling back the curtain on rap stardom to reveal it for smoke and mirrors. "M.F.T.R." razzes rappers who'd "rather be more famous than rich," and "Crutches, Crosses, Caskets" shames a platinum rapper whose "momma lives in squalor," before smirking that Push's own mother is "in the Bahamas for the month/ She probably sittin' in her pajamas, having lunch." In a year where a multi-platform media mogul like 50 Cent declared bankruptcy, and Drake and Lil Wayne grumble publicly about Cash Money not paying up, Push's dart in the Biggie-sampling lead single "Untouchable" about which companies' checks don't bounce is sound business advice as savage quip (or vice versa).
Darkest Before Dawn isn't all trash talk; Pusha still takes inspiration from his dealer days, both good and bad. Some of the more revealing corners of the record delve into how he coped when things went sour. "The crash don't kill, it's how you survives it," he raps on "Keep Dealing." Early on in "F.I.F.A." he snaps "I'm my city's Willy Falcon/ How you niggas celebrating Alpo?" in reference to the Floridian coke trafficker who once beat charges of pushing nearly 80 tons of white by bribing the jury and the Harlem shooter Alpo Martinez, subject of the movie Paid in Full. Pusha's second act, both after his group folded and after the Clipse's former manager pled guilty to charges alleging he was a drug kingpin, is a rebirth few inside rap or out have enjoyed. Irv Gotti was never the same after the Feds ran into the Inc offices, and try as he might, Family Hustle Tip will never be King again.
Imagine Tony Montana slipping out of the country scot-free ahead of his career-ending Scarface raid, and you arrive at the cocktail of spite and incredulity fueling Darkest Before Dawn. The swing from moneyed gall to grizzled paranoia is a well-trodden path in hip-hop and elsewhere, but the eye for detail in the writing and the claustrophobic, foreboding sonics set it apart from other rote goon rap fare. That these 10 songs hang together is testament to the writer's bleak vision, since they're technically flotsam from the forthcoming King Push (hence the protracted The Prelude subtitle). Perhaps the prevailing feeling he's not trying to impress us comes from the records he really intends to impact radio being saved for a different project. Whatever the case, Pusha dragged a crack team of rap maestros well outside their respective comfort zones for the occasion.
The production on Darkest Before Dawn is uncompromising headphone boom bap from people who don't really make it anymore. The curt "Intro" is a Metro Boomin beat uncharacteristically light on hellacious synths and heavy on cavernous, tribal stomp. For "Untouchable," Timbaland leaves his trademark bells and whistles behind for a skeletal array of dizzyingly tricky bass and snare hits. "M.P.A." is the most unfussed Kanye West production since "Otis." "F.I.F.A." gets a sputtering Rick Rubin style breakbeat from Q-Tip. Rap producers are dying to make and sell weird shit like this, but thirst for easily recognizable signature sounds pigeonholes rapper and beatsmith alike. Pusha T getting his collaborators to set aside their pet sounds is the mark of fearless showmen and inimitable chemistry.
To that end, Darkest Before Dawn is best explained as an exercise in pure craft for everyone involved, the kind of record being scared out of existence because chickenshit execs won't fund what they can't see topping the charts. The beats sound like money, and the raps are whip smart and cleanly tailored. Like Pusha's career post-Clipse, it's godly providence everything has gone as swimmingly as it has here. The resourceful hustler always finds his way.


In the wake of a family tragedy, the producer crafts a genuinely transportive work, seamlessly mixing Jersey club with Middle Eastern instruments.

Grace EP

In the wake of a family tragedy, Discwoman affiliate DJ Haram uses her debut EP, Grace, as an escape valve. Grace soundtracks a mythological world that hangs between paradise and hell, drawing on Haram’s New Jersey upbringing and her Middle Eastern roots.
This duality plays out everywhere across the EP. The darbuka, a goblet-shaped drum commonly associated with Egypt, rubs up against against the raucous, percussive crunch of New Jersey club and ballroom, and celestial melodies share space with dark, distorted riffs that fuse hardcore rave with Middle Eastern souk. Often in electronic music, this kind of dichotomy is characterised as x versus y, with elements pitted against each other. On Grace, these seemingly contrary elements interact respectfully, each taking a turn to bask in the limelight and play a supporting role.
Haram has said that drums are “the invisible soul and feeling” of her songs and it shows. “Body Count” and “No Idol (Remix),” two of the record’s most striking songs, are essentially drum jams, in which the sub bass, earthen thump, and sound effects of Jersey club lead a dazzling dance around Haram’s elastic darbuka lines, their interplay coated with the slightest hint of melody. At other times, melody takes the lead: On the original “No Idol,” a breezily evocative Middle Eastern flute riff shares space with an anxious string line, while the mesmerising synth on “Gemini Rising” is pitched somewhere between ethereal and uneasy, like walking through a deserted city park at sunset.
Haram leaves enough space for the various elements to breathe, so the listener is never overwhelmed or beaten over the head by the ingenuity of it all. Grace’s only real misstep comes, perhaps surprisingly, in the contribution from 700 Bliss, Haram’s collaborative project with poet, musician, and activist Moor Mother. The 700 Bliss remix of “Candle Light,” the only track here with a full vocal, feels cramped and unwieldy, its distortion oddly flat on a record of impressive peaks, troughs and wide range.
Maybe the main problem with the “Candle Light” remix is that amid an EP of reverie, it feels too earthbound. Grace is a record for star gazers, romantics and wanderers, a genuinely transportive work that flies from the mundane.


Twenty-three-year-old producer Henry Steinway first made his name as Clockwork, featuring brash, energetic electro-house for labels like Dim Mak and Mad Decent. His RL Grime alias is said to be inspired by equal parts James Blake and Lex Luger.

Void

Dance music has always been fiercely tribalist in nature, but those inclinations seem to be breaking down in the era of EDM—a movement whose very name speaks to its purportedly all-inclusive nature. The Internet has facilitated links between geographically distant scenes and structurally distinct styles, and it has given fans instant access to the whole sweep of dance music's history. And then there's the food-court model of the contemporary festival, in which attendees can sample a range of styles with relative ease—sometimes, without so much as wandering from one stage to the next.
The budding career of a 23-year-old producer named Henry Steinway is exemplary of this shift in dance music's politics. For a time, he was known principally as Clockwork, a maker of brash, energetic electro-house for labels like Steve Aoki's Dim Mak and Diplo's Mad Decent. Clockwork fit the profile of an EDM main-stager: he bootlegged Avicii's "Levels", dealt in crowd-stoking mashups (Wolfgang Gartner's "Nuke" with the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army", for instance), and harnessed the usual array of atom-smashing snares, roller-coaster crescendos, and supersonic whoosh.
Around the same time that he first signed to Dim Mak, Steinway began exploring a different sound under the alias RL Grime. Inspired, he has said, by both James Blake and Lex Luger, he set about attempting to connect those worlds with a cat's-cradle of pitched-up vocals, chiming keys, diamond-cutter snares, and clickety-clackety hi-hats. A 2011 mix sketched the outlines of his adopted terrain: Rustie, Untold, and Joy Orbison on the one hand, and Drake, D'Angelo, and Missy Elliott on the other. Recently, RL Grime's profile has risen considerably via his interpretation of "trap," a gruff, swaggering style informed by Southern hip-hop and Dutch hardstyle.
With VOID, his debut album, he's clearly keen to showcase his versatility. Roughly half of the album forsakes trap in favor of various bass-heavy strains of club music or its home-listening variants. It's refreshing to see him unbound by genre strictures, but it can seem like he's trying too hard to please too many people. The opening "Always" features a pitch-shifted Janet Jackson sample over moody minor chords and 2-steppy drum programming that invariably bring to mind Four Tet and Burial; it's followed by the Boys Noize co-production "Danger", a taut-electro-techno stormer aimed at Boddika's sullen corner of the dance floor.
Both tracks sound like attempts to shore up his underground bona fides, but neither are exactly best-in-class productions, which is a problem that plagues the album: RL Grime may have range, but he doesn't have a terribly original voice. Too many of these feel like items on an imaginary checklist of requirements for any "serious" dance album. Pensive scene-setter? Check. Non-beat-gridded "cosmic" interlude? Check. Ecstatic drum'n'bass roller? Come and get it! Then there's "Reminder", Steinway's contribution to the burgeoning canon of gauzy R&B, complete with guest vocals from How to Dress Well himself. Tom Krell's falsetto is strained and pitchy, and there are points where it might be confused for an ungenerous parody of Bon Iver. Steinway overcompensates by piling on turgid synths, trap hi-hats, and pitch-shifted echoes of Krell's voice run through oodles of reverb. It's a mess.
Steinway sounds far more at home when he's making trap. Had he stuck to his favored lane, in fact, he could have gotten a potent six-track EP out of VOID. "Core", with its Middle Eastern reed melody and jump-up vocal refrain, is a veritable earthquake of a tune; it comes on like a .gif of a landslide demolishing a house, over and over—awe-inspiring violence reduced to a few elegant strokes. "Scylla", with its Koyaanisqatsi-inspired arpeggios and drum'n'bass undercurrents, is busier and maybe even heavier, with horn riffs that could go toe to toe with Hudson Mohawke's gnarliest anthems.
Given that Steinway is still, apparently, making music as Clockwork—his last single under the alias, "Signals", came out in July, on Dim Mak, and it sounds like more of a sop to the EDM middle ground than ever—it does seem curious that there's such a wide gulf between that project and the music showcased on Void. In an electronic-music scene distinguished by its blurred lines, and on an album allegedly meant to celebrate the same, why does he continue to compartmentalize? Discussing how his sets vary from city to city, he told Resident Advisor, "In the UK people may expect different things because they've grown up in a different scene and less of the EDM stuff has come through there. I guess I try to tone down the EDM stuff when I'm in Europe." The comment, like Void itself, sounds like he's hedging his bets.


If anyone had told me in 1992 that ten years later I'd be stepping up to praise this record ...

Dirty: Deluxe Edition

If anyone had told me in 1992 that ten years later I'd be stepping up to praise this record, I'd probably have shot him. When Dirty first came out, it was an almost universal disappointment to anyone who'd listened to Sonic Youth beyond Goo-- and amidst the cries bemoaning what a major-label contract had done to their music, it wasn't as clear then that, beneath the glossy sheen Butch Vig and Andy Wallace had inflicted upon their beloved chaos, there was a damn good record waiting to be heard. Sure, it won them the seeds of a new fanbase-- though the majority had probably been re-alienated by the time they got around to Washing Machine-- but back then, it felt like a slap in the face from David Geffen himself.
Listening to the instrumental B-sides and rehearsal takes that make up the second disc of this deluxe reissue, though, the final Dirty product makes a lot more sense. Even if they're mostly meandering jams with cells of future songs congealing here and there, these tracks show how the big-league production simply smoothed out the frayed edges of the group's sound. Of course, the noisier parts of songs like "On the Strip" still feel more calculated than the ecstatic beauty that seemed to organically materialize in the past, but the record really isn't anything worse than the band beginning to play with some of the toys they suddenly had at their disposal.
But is the second disc worth more than a cursory listen? Not really, at least beyond the covers. Hearing Kim Gordon grunt her way through Alice Cooper's "Is It My Body" or flatly drone above the acoustic shambles of the New York Dolls' "Personality Crisis" is a pleasure to which I'll gladly return, but once the insight is absorbed from blueprints of "Wish Fulfillment", "Youth Against Fascism" and "Drunken Butterfly", among others, they don't make for the most compelling of repeat visits.
It's also worth re-examining the subject matter of these songs because, as Byron Coley points out in the liner notes, Dirty marked the first record where Thurston, Lee and Kim made direct statements with their lyrics instead of using a Beat-like detachment to throw smoke clouds over their true targets. Where lyrical content in the past had dealt with surreal portraits of unlikely pop icons or had offered subverted political commentary like "Total Trash", Dirty had them throwing pointed barbs like "Youth Against Fascism" or offering elegiac tributes to murdered friends ("100%" and "JC")-- not to mention that Kim's prior feminist manifestos had never been so bitingly succinct as they are on "Swimsuit Issue" and "Shoot".
Even among the less confrontational tracks, there are still so many more great songs on Dirty than a lot of people ever realized. "Theresa's Sound World" fuses some of the better guitar interplay of Daydream Nation and Goo into a concise proclamation, while "Sugar Kane" and "Purr" are pure pop songs dressed up with a thousand pounds of overdrive; even a near throwaway like "Crème Brulee" is salvaged by Kim's sultry delivery. The four B-sides that accompany the original tracks on the first disc are enormous finds, too-- especially the LP bonus track "Stalker" that shows how only Sonic Youth could conjure the Sex Pistols covering Lynyrd Skynyrd. They might be a little rougher around the edges, but each of these tracks is as good as anything that made it onto Dirty proper.
The only thing that really stands out as worthy of true criticism now is the tendency toward mining and repackaging some of the older material that becomes visible through the cracks of this reissue. "Orange Rolls, Angels Spit" recycles the riff from "Stereo Sanctity" into a grungy vehicle for Kim's angst, while "Shoot" fails to look any farther back than "Kool Thing", slowing the trendy alterna-hit down to an unsettling dirge about a woman ready to gun her way out from under some asshole's thumb. Several other tracks have that familiar vibe to them without borrowing outright from previous songs, showing that even if they weren't entirely catering to the new ears Nirvana's success was sending their way, they were at least taking it into consideration on a semi-conscious level.
Of course, we should be clear about one thing: there's no chance of Dirty usurping Evol, Sister or Daydream Nation on my list of favorite Sonic Youth records, and even this 180-degree change of heart won't make me apologize for all the shit I've talked about it over the years. Still, even if there's a distinct possibility that I'm in the minority of Dirty-haters who'll eventually come around, this package at least makes a good case for reassessment. But if I'm talking like this when the expanded remaster of Experimental Jet Set, Trash & No Star comes around, just do me a favor and put me out of my misery.


The Ontario musician caps a prolific year with his tenth album of 2020: a rip-roaring rock record that draws on a hodgepodge of styles and sounds, from blustery horns to roadtrip folk-rock.

Daniel Romano: How Ill Thy World Is Ordered

How Ill Thy World Is Ordered

Already this year, Daniel Romano has released nine records, possibly with more on the way. Technology has made prolificity less impressive, but what distinguishes this Ontario firebrand’s flooding of the market isn’t the quantity of new music, but the quality. Everything he’s done this year—including a book of love poetry—is reasonably good to pretty great, and at best a compelling document of a musician working at the height of his imaginative powers. More than that, there’s the dizzying range of sounds and styles on those nine releases, none of which even dig into the neo-trad country on which he staked his reputation in the 2010s. On Forever Love’s Fool, a single, 20-minute song featuring Tool’s Danny Carey, Romano wears prog rock like an oversize foam cowboy hat. His Super Pollen EP is a power-pop extravaganza recorded with members of Fucked Up and Jade Hairpins, while Spider Bite is a one-off punk explosion featuring the Constantines’ Steve Lambke (his You’ve Changed co-founder).
How Ill Thy World Is Ordered is the culmination of this hodgepodge of side hustles, mostly because Romano manages to integrate so many disparate genres into one rip-roaring rock record. He’s not always successful in his syntheses—the whimsy sometimes feels shoehorned in—but a seamless integration of styles isn’t what he’s after. Romano wants you to hear these songs as high-wire acts, feats of derring-do with real stakes. The album leaps jubilantly between the styles covered on his previous nine releases, and just for kicks he adds a few more. One minute he’s Gram Parsons reciting Shakespearean sonnets; the next Romano and his backing band the Outfit sound like the Raspberries protesting in front of the White House. “Joys Too Often Hollow” begins as roadtrip folk-rock, with Ian Romano’s drum counting the highway lines and Mark Lalama’s organ evoking the sunset they’re driving into. The song fades out, then fades in again when you flip the record: The guitar fuzz on side two opener “Joys Too Often Hollow Pt. Two” suggests they’re now traversing rockier terrain.
These are deeply, and in some cases overly, familiar sounds, yet through sheer force of will Romano and his Outfit put them across as fresh, often exciting, occasionally subversive. When he and his backing band met in the studio, they decided to record the album live and in order of sequencing. More dauntingly, they gave themselves only three takes to get it right and denied themselves any overdubs. The seat-of-pants strategy feeds the album’s sense of urgency, speeding from one riff, melody, and idea to the next. The pace can be dizzying. It’s as though the band can’t wait to finish a song, and once they do, they don’t pause for breath before jumping into the next one. They’ve barely had a chance to hit the final note of “Green Eye-Shade” before the blustery horns of “First Yoke” burst in.
Even before “Drugged Vinegar” breaks down into a round of rapturous applause, How Ill has already succumbed to and recovered from its own cleverness many times. But the album is never just clever. Romano might write in knotty syntax (check the album title) with archaic words (check the album title again), but the power he’s speaking truth to feels current and real. His anger and his worry sound genuine. And while there’s always risk in reading an album in light of current events—especially particularly dire ones—it’s not hard to hear Romano’s songs about perseverance and confusion as pandemic consolations, a warm hand on your shoulder from a guy kick-jumping off a drum riser. By the time the second-to-last song rolls around, a barbed and wounded tune called “No More Disheartened by the Dawn,” he manages to summon a bit of hard-won hope, which bleeds into the gentle closer “Amaretto and Coke.” “No matter what the days provoke, amaretto and Coke,” Romano sings over the band’s sloshed sway. It’s a fitting end to an album about doing whatever it takes to get by, whether that’s a cocktail or another weirdo record.

Buy: Rough Trade
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