Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the highlight of Jonathan Richman’s rich and varied solo career.

I, Jonathan

When Jonathan Richman was 19, he arrived at an epiphany in the Israeli desert. The scruffy salesman’s son from Natick, Massachusetts, was traveling after a short-lived stab as a solo musician in New York, home of his heroes the Velvet Underground. There, in the miles of sand, gazing at a full moon, Richman had a vision: he would form a band. When he returned home he assembled the group that would become the Modern Lovers, and their story is one of the greatest in rock. They helped invent punk and new wave, and they broke up before they ever released a record. Their brilliant self-titled debut, cobbled together from demos and issued in 1976, is acclaimed as one of the best albums ever.
What happened immediately afterward is another great rock story: Just as the Modern Lovers’ belated popularity was cresting on the punk wave, Richman formed a new version of the group and pushed it in a different direction, with prominent acoustic guitar and what seemed like songs for children. By 1978, Richman and these Modern Lovers had parted ways, too, and here’s where some accounts of Richman’s decades-long career lose the thread. But he actually had some of his very best work in front of him.
More than 40 years on, what happened after the Modern Lovers’ rise and fall might turn out to be the best Richman story of them all. He used his kid-friendly ditties from the late ’70s to home in on a not-so-humble goal: to really connect with an audience by just singing what he felt. “People think that what I do can’t be done because it’s too simple,” Richman told art critic Kristine McKenna in 1980. “A lot of people think I’m being sarcastic. But if people can see that I’m not afraid to entertain them just by being myself—just walk up there and sing what I feel and they can dance to it, and enjoy it, with me doing nothing more than being myself—then that’s my mission.” Richman’s solo career can best be understood as a continual expansion of this quest, using intimate live shows to communicate joy and sadness with a stripped-down sincerity and generous charm. His fourth solo album, 1992’s I, Jonathan, is his defining recorded statement as a solo artist, and it offers a natural entry point into his scattered but rewarding catalog.
The albums Richman had released in the ’80s and early ’90s had already gone a long way to challenge the widespread impression that his post-Modern Lovers music was innocent or naive. His lyrics could be plainspoken or filled with wry wonder, but his best songs might be about standing up to nosy neighbors, say, or retaining individuality during marriage. In keeping with the improvisational, no-setlist nature of his live shows, Richman began to rework songs across multiple albums. He would also sing in different languages, dust off unexpected covers, and throw in the occasional moody instrumental. The approach to recording might vary, but the basic sensibility was strummy garage-pop with hints of surf, rockabilly, and doo-wop. I, Jonathan brought these strands together for a beach party so sparsely accoutered it could be dropped into your living room. And despite its title, the album took a village to create—there are about a dozen musicians credited overall. Richman told one interviewer at the time that the album was his best because he’d had so many friends helping make it.
But I, Jonathan also succeeds because it places Richman’s solo-era whimsies firmly in the context of the one-hit wonders and uncompromising noise-rock that inspired him to make music in the first place. Throughout the album, Richman uses ’60s rock’n’roll tropes and images to illuminate his vision of a better life in the present. He gets right to point on the opening track, “Parties in the U.S.A.,” greeting listeners and declaring at that he’s “from the ’60s, the time of ‘Louie Louie’ and ‘Little Latin Lupe Lu.’” Though this song borrows shamelessly from the McCoys’ 1965 hit “Hang On Sloopy,” it tells a story about our increasing isolation from each other amid technological advancements. Richman isn’t longing for the old days, only the parties and the sense of connection they brought. It’s a feeling that hasn’t aged much in the 26 years since it was recorded.
I, Jonathan is full of these transformations, where something old starts to look new through Richman’s wise, wide eyes. In “Rooming House on Venice Beach,” he revisits a famous L.A. hippie haven but what he remembers are early-’70s holdovers—drunks, beardos, weirdos—and a dirt-cheap crash pad right next to the ocean. “It was wild and free,” he concludes the hiccupy boardwalk romp, “and that appealed to me.”
An even bigger revelation is found in the rickety Chuck Berry crunch of “Velvet Underground.” The song explains, in terms a child could understand immediately and an adult can spend a lifetime pondering, how a work of art can be so personally moving. VU’s “Sister Ray” is, famously, a 15-minute feedback dirge with lyrics about injecting heroin and sucking on someone’s ding-dong, and it’s also the song that influenced a teenage Richman to write the chugging guitar part to the most enduring Modern Lovers song, the nervy highway anthem “Roadrunner.” In “Velvet Underground,” he celebrates the band for being not only wild and free, but also for creating their own unmistakable atmosphere, and for describing the world they saw vividly without flinching. When he works bits of “Sister Ray” into his own song, it’s a strange and beautiful tribute from the closest person they ever had to a protégé.
Sometimes Richman refreshes the familiar just by bringing the song’s concept into the modern age. Disheveled stomper “You Can’t Talk to the Dude” sympathizes with a woman who’s stuck in a doomed relationship with a guy who won’t share his feelings—not a common Nuggets compilation theme, as I recall. With low-tech sound effects, “Tandem Jump” updates novelty surf-rock for a world where there’s skydiving, and the effect is positively exhilarating. “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar,” perhaps Richman’s best-known solo song, borrows liberally from the Impressions’ “Gypsy Woman,” but this ode to un-self-conscious dancing happens to take place in a venue where older songs couldn’t dare tread. It’s pure joie de vivre, political merely by its existence, and its sweetness spreads through a crowd as surely as if they were standing downwind from a chocolate factory.
As the songs unspool, I, Jonathan continues to find inventive links between Richman’s past and present. “A Higher Power” channels the Lovin’ Spoonful’s belief in magic and finds proof of its existence in what seems to be Richman’s real-life romance (“I knew it from afar in that lonely rock and roll bar,” he sings, a description that matches how he reportedly first saw his then-wife Gail). “That Summer Feeling,” one of Richman’s most gently devastating songs, is about knowing that the good old days really weren’t, but finding yourself longing for those sensations anyway. On the dream-like closing track, “Twilight in Boston,” where Richman vividly narrates a walk through his long-ago stomping grounds, he signs off, “Time for adventure.”
After I, Jonathan, Richman’s solo act slowly gained a cultural foothold. In 1993, “Saturday Night Live” cast member Julia Sweeney did an endearing interview with him for SPIN. That same year, Richman was the second-ever musical guest on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” after Radiohead, and he’d appear on the show several more times, including the YouTube-famous performance of “I Was Dancing in the Lesbian Bar.” By the end of the decade, those ’70s kiddie songs like “I’m a Little Airplane” had become staples on “Sesame Street,” and Richman had appeared in two Farrelly Brothers films, most prominently as a Greek chorus in There’s Something About Mary. He divorced and remarried, kept touring and, every now and then, he quietly released an album, many of which are very good.
Richman’s work is about being fully present in the moment with other people, and that’s difficult to capture in a studio for all time. But I, Jonathan is as close as he’s come, and it’s a perfect gateway to all that his music promises. In recent years, he has revised the Modern Lovers’ “Old World,” which originally took aim at hippie drug culture by declaring his love for his parents and full engagement with reality; now he clarifies, “I don’t want to go back to the old world,” what with its “mustard gas and women not being allowed to vote.” Just this year, when an interviewer asked Richman about a much-circulated 1973 letter he’d sent to Creem titled “Masculine Arrogance Blows,” he admitted to still having to work on that arrogance in himself.
Richman challenges us to experience pain and pleasure at their fullest. To embrace progress, but not when it dehumanizes us. To be ourselves completely, in the knowledge that we’re all in this together. To be free, like “Roadrunner”: I feel alone I feel alive I feel a love. He has been dissected by gifted critics from Lillian Roxon and Lester Bangs to Ellen Willis and Greil Marcus, but the most illuminating writing I’ve found about Richman’s I, Jonathan era comes from the closing line of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch concert review: “He simply played and sang with love and joy, and he made his audience feel good.”
Richman recently translated a book of Italian poetry, by the Bologna-based writer Alberto Masala. A blog post announcing the project includes these verses: “An old man went every night to sing the sunset in a cave on the mountain top/And every night a child followed him to observe him from a distance. One day the child asked: ‘You sing alone. Your people are scattered, broken up, exterminated by alcohol, fatigue, hunger, drugs, prison… Now only they speak the language of the empire, and are not even able to understand you… they laugh at you… why do you continue to sing? You’re left alone…’/The old man replied: ‘If I do not sing would mean that they also took me.’” They haven’t taken Richman yet.


Who even cares about the ocean anymore? Or the beach, for that matter? If I want to deal with dead ...

Yo La Tengo: The Sounds of the Sounds of Science

The Sounds of the Sounds of Science

Who even cares about the ocean anymore? Or the beach, for that matter? If I want to deal with dead fish and syringes I'll take my dad to the supermarket (he has a problem). And that doesn't even address all those alien-style face-huggery things that call the water their home. At least on land animals can be relied upon to have things like eyes; half the crap in the briny deep hasn't even discovered the joys of internal organs. Apparently, though, there are at least a few people who enjoy the ocean-- the French have been particularly enamored of it for several years now, sparking a long tradition of strange and disturbing films documenting the behavior of its contents.
Jacques Cousteau may have gotten all the glory on that front, but Jean Painleve had more art in a single reel of his work than Cousteau had in his whole pruny body. Declaring that "science is fiction," Painleve wasn't content to tamely document the exploits of octopi "doing it" as were so many of his contemporaries, preferring instead to arrange his films to not only be enlightening, but entertaining as well (he was hung up on invertebrate intimacy, too-- they all were-- but he was funnier about it). Painleve ventured nearer to his subjects than scientific interest would dictate, artificially imbuing them with distinctly human characteristics like rage and sexuality through the careful editing and scoring of his films. It didn't win him any points with the scientists, but the French surrealists invited him to all their picnics.
Flash forward to April 2001, the San Francisco Film Festival: eight of Painleve's most famous shorts (films, that is) are scheduled to be displayed, and Yo La Tengo is asked to write and perform a live score. Long story short, history is born. In case you missed it, don't fret-- your friends in Yo La Tengo have gone to great lengths in the studio to bring you The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, and you ought to thank them. It's not a throwback to their earlier scattershot aesthetics, but that's obvious (it's a score for underwater documentaries, after all), and anyone who's well-versed with the dream-inspiring tunes from And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out should have no trouble submerging themselves within these soothing aural vignettes.
Each track was written to accompany a specific piece of Painleve's work, and Yo la Tengo's level of success ranges from impressive to downright incredible. For the few of these films that I've been fortunate enough to see, the Hoboken three captured the feel of each short damn near perfectly, and crafted songs so moving and evocative for the remainder that by the end of the album I felt as though I'd seen them all. Even when the album 'picks up,' it still never strays far from a relaxed exploration of the lush organics they're able to draw from their standard rock setup, aided here by assorted percussive oddities (vibraphones, chimes, etc).
As calm as their most recent work has been, a more natural touchstone for The Sounds of the Sounds of Science is the Future Sound of London's Lifeforms. Some ambient music seems to want nothing more than to be the next employee pick at Natural Wonders or some other ridiculous hippy emporium, but the best of this genre isn't willing to fade into the wasteland of new-age background music. Brilliance along the lines of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II isn't so passive-- listening creates a sense of revelation, completely enfolding the listener in its wet, glowy womb. The Sounds of the Sounds of Science, over the course of 77 minutes, manages to do that.
In fact, within the realm of organic ambient, Yo La Tengo may even have an advantage over a few of the reigning techno acts. If the techno-organic creatures of Lifeforms come from Mars, Yo La Tengo's are distinctly Earthbound in keeping with the subject matter of these documentaries, owing mainly to the human qualities of the sprawling, emotive performance. Each song is an epic, sometimes changing course two or more times before concluding. "The Sea Horse" chronicles the male sea horse giving birth in dramatic fashion; "How Jellyfishes are Born" illustrates the diversity among jellyfishes, um, giving birth; and for a change of pace, "The Love Life of the Octopus" is about birth preliminaries (I promised you octopus sex). Naturally, Yo La Tengo doesn't let the thematic similarity stifle them-- each cut is vibrant and unique, capturing its scene with colorful tonality.
"Shrimp Stories" may be the album's single fault. Some of Yo La Tengo's famous diversity shows up in this free-jazz inspired standout, but for this record's purposes it just seems out of place. Mainly, The Sounds of the Sounds of Science is a document of new environments being unveiled, and "Shrimp Stories" seems painfully mundane in contrast. It's solid, and does well at breaking the pace, but isn't exactly compelling. But this lone misstep aside, the album is remarkably powerful, showing not only that Yo La Tengo are fully capable of penning elaborate film scores, but that their years have earned them a unique adeptness at communicating real emotion, human and otherwise, with conventional instrumentation. Animal porn never sounded so good.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the Japanese band’s technically masterful, tremendously expensive 1981 album, a record that looms over 40 years’ worth of electronic production.

BGM

As a Japanese initialism, “BGM” stands for “background music.” It’s meant to evoke the blissful ’80s ambient work of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono, the kind of idyllic music that wafts from hip mass-market clothing stores or loops quietly under television dialogue. So it was with more than a hint of irony that YMO repurposed this term for their flashy, futuristic fourth album. BGM hones in on the “techno” aspect of the groundbreaking trio’s “techno-pop,” channeling each member’s unique personality into a monument of electronic music history, all captured with state-of-the-art recording gear. Four decades on, the album is a foundation for all manner of “synthetic” music that would follow, from synth-pop and IDM to hip-hop and well beyond.
This is the story of YMO’s formation in the late 1970s, in brief: Hosono, already a musical force in Japan after leading the influential rock group Happy End, assembles a crew of session players for his next solo album. This group includes a friend from college named Yukihiro Takahashi, as well as an up-and-coming arranger named Ryuichi Sakamoto. The jazzy exotica masterwork Paraiso, credited to Harry Hosono and the Yellow Magic Band, is released in 1978. That same year, Hosono asks Takahashi and Sakamoto if they want to start a new project together. He proposes the new band as a “stepping stone” to greater heights in each of their solo careers. Takahashi agrees; after some initial hesitation, Sakamoto does, too.
By the end of 1980, with three albums under their belts, YMO were indisputably the most successful pop band in Japan—big enough to tour the world and then come home to pack out the Budokan. But when Hosono spoke to the Los Angeles Times that year, he portended a shift to come: “We don’t see ourselves as a dance band. YMO was planned as an electronics band from the beginning because that was the sound we were all looking for…. Something out of the ordinary.”
Though Hosono had stuck to Japanese-language lyrics in Happy End, YMO recorded in English with assistance from a translator. Seeking more control over their next endeavor, Hosono and Takahashi found a new lyrical collaborator on their bandmate’s solo album: The sole vocal track from Sakamoto’s 1980 record B-2 Unit, “Thatness and Thereness,” featured translation help from one Peter Barakan, an Englishman with a job in Japanese broadcasting. Barakan had never worked as a lyricist before, but that didn’t matter much; he was quickly hired by Sakamoto’s management in an admin role, one that covered all matters involving English, including songwriting. His first project: BGM.
The enormous success of the 1979 Japan-only release of Solid State Survivor meant that YMO’s label, Alfa, was willing to shell out big bucks for the follow-up. According to the itemized receipt printed on its back cover, BGM cost ¥51,250,000 to make. Once you convert to U.S. dollars and adjust for inflation, that’s a staggering $730,106.93—and that’s just for the gear. Before a listener slipped the vinyl out of its sleeve, they could look through the music’s discrete components in molecular detail: YMO accounted for every Moog, electronic drum, and effects processor, as if to suggest their own technical virtuosity as the standard against which future generations would compete. (Over three decades later, Aphex Twin would pull the same move on Syro.)
These songs and their sounds are intrinsically tied to the machines used to craft them. Alongside Sakamoto’s debut, BGM was one of the first albums to feature the Roland TR-808 drum machine. The high price tag of the 808 upon its release in 1980 (almost $4,000 in 2021 dollars) made it prohibitively expensive for most, but not for YMO. The glories of its use in the hip-hop and dance music of decades to come—relentless mechanical hi-hats, claps crisp enough to cut through any mix—are on full display on Takahashi’s “Camouflage” and Sakamoto’s searing, mechanical cover of his own “1000 Knives.”
But no amount of expensive gear could alleviate YMO’s interpersonal strain. The working relationship between Hosono and Sakamoto had deteriorated to the point where the two men could barely stand to be in the studio at the same time. Sakamoto was thus absent for much of the BGM sessions, leaving the bulk of the songwriting to Hosono and Takahashi. His contributions to the final tracklist are nonetheless striking. Along with “1000 Knives,” two other songs are credited to Sakamoto: The meta-referential vocoder jam “Music Plans” and a remix of another solo track, “Happy End,” which feels like a progenitor of the ambient techno that would emerge in the following decade from artists like Carl Craig or the Orb. The composer smears out his hyper-melodic, Tchaikovsky-esque chord rotations with resonant signal modulation until the piece is practically unrecognizable, allowing an icy drum loop to pierce the midsection for just a brief moment before it vanishes again.
Sakamoto is rightfully credited for much of YMO’s forward-thinking sound design, but Hosono and Takahashi give the band its earnest heart. The first voice you hear on BGM is Takahashi, singing in English, trembling ever so slightly as he paints the portrait of a melancholic dancer pirouetting through the night on “Ballet.” Where previous YMO hits like “Firecracker” were cheeky subversions of Western exotica artists who traded in Orientalism, BGM immediately presents itself as something new: a more sterile, hyper-modern musical document, an innovation empowered by their burgeoning technopolis. “Dancing with sadness, just for yourself,” Takahashi sings on “Ballet,” masking his vocal with layers of digital filtering. “Lost in the motion, a mime with no end.”
“Out of the three, Takahashi was probably the best-versed in Western pop music,” Peter Barakan recounted in an interview years later. As he tells it, Sakamoto desired more clear-cut translations and Hosono knew “pretty much what he wanted” when it came to songwriting, whereas Takahashi was open to a more collaborative dialogue, even asking Barakan for pronunciation notes during recording. “He knew that whatever he wrote, I was going to translate into English anyway—so he would write Japanese lyric ideas in a fairly ‘English’ sort of way, because he was listening to pop music in English as well.”
This all comes together on “Cue,” the album’s most (and possibly only) radio-friendly single. Takahashi’s lead vocals and drums are front and center, propelled forward by robotic, sequenced bass and wiggling synthesizers. YMO often left lyrics until late in the process, opting to spend countless hours tweaking drum rhythms and synth sounds before rushing to finalize the words—so it only makes sense that “Cue,” like “Music Plans,” is another song about playing songs, an idea that coalesced near the end of months of sometimes-tense studio grind. After staying in the background, Hosono finally joins Takahashi in full voice near the end for a final refrain: “I’m sick and tired of the same old chaos/Must be a way to get out of this cul-de-sac.”
“Cue” was the first single from BGM and it eventually became a fan favorite, earning a place on setlists from YMO’s scattered reunion gigs in the 2000s. But neither audiences nor critics regarded this album as highly as their prior work, and it failed to match the success of Solid State Survivor in Japan. Western music critics in particular seemed to fundamentally misunderstand the band, even before the new album arrived in the spring of 1981. When discussing YMO, writers frequently evoked the names of other synth-wielding acts who had preceded them—Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, Roxy Music—but few were able to regard the band as anything other than a foreign oddity. Instead of innovators, they saw only a Japanese facsimile of something that had come before, stripping the band of their humanity in the process.
“It wasn’t clear whether the men were playing the machines or vice versa,” declared a writer for the Washington Post after a YMO performance in 1979. A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times compared them favorably to Kraftwerk and then proceeded to deride the band’s “severe presentation.” Some reviews were explicitly racist (“If this band didn’t already exist, some fiendish Japanese technicians would go and invent them,” read the Guardian), while others were simply misguided. As one Chicago Tribune journalist wrote of YMO in late 1980: “Even the most imaginative use of synthesized instrumentation has its limitations…. there [are] strong feelings in many quarters that synthesized music is on the verge of running its course.”
With the benefit of hindsight, even BGM’s “dodgy” tracks have aged well. Hosono’s “Rap Phenomena,” with its chanted lyrics and atonal synths, is construed by some as a rare misstep from the otherwise meticulous producer. Cynics write it off as a cringey attempt at trend-chasing from across the Pacific, a bizarre misinterpretation of the developing rap scene in New York City. What they overlook is that from the moment YMO chose their name, they operated with a sense of humor. For their 1980 mini-album X∞Multiplies, they interspersed the tracklist with comedy skits and recorded a new wave cover of Archie Bell & the Drells’ R&B classic “Tighten Up,” which gave us one of the funniest Don Cornelius interviews in Soul Train history. (Differences between the Japanese and U.S. release of the album didn’t help the disconnect; the sketches on X∞Multiplies were replaced by songs from the Japan-only Solid State Survivor.)
While YMO’s first three albums were space-age, synthesized takes on the past, BGM presented a startlingly prescient glimpse into electronic music’s future. Listen to “Rap Phenomena” now and hear subtle echoes of its resonant groove and polyrhythmic vocal sample manipulation everywhere in today’s electronic music. The back half of BGM gestures at entire nascent styles; the skittering drum programming of Aphex Twin (“U.T.,” “Camouflage”), the ominous drama of synthwave (“Mass”). Ambient closer “Loom” might have been the only track to fit the traditional criteria for “BGM,” had it not opened with a patiently ascending, two-minute-long Shepard’s tone. Today, the intro evokes the trademark THX “Deep Note,” though the song predates it. With the help of Hideki Matsutake, the computer whiz who served as YMO’s unofficial “fourth member,” the band deployed some of the most cutting-edge recording technologies available, unearthing their emotive possibilities years before others would do the same.
BGM also hinted at the future of YMO itself. Tensions between Sakamoto and Hosono never fully resolved, leading the band to go their separate ways in 1984 before reuniting decades later. (“We lost our energy and we stopped fighting,” Takahashi explained with a laugh in 2008. Sakamoto remarked: “Well, if I met my past self, I’d punch him.”) In terms of legacy, it’s perhaps the most important album they ever made as a unit. Each member’s subsequent solo work, at one point or another, subsumed the influence of BGM’s palette. It’s there in Takahashi’s heartfelt synth-pop records, Hosono’s ambient work, Sakamoto’s later collaborations with David Sylvian—a splash of drum machine, an unnatural texture. It’s the thrill of a tranquil synthesizer made loud, then aggressive, and then serene again.

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After 2022’s stripped-back Sewaside II, the Montreal rapper-producer opts for stranger beats, a packed guest list, and what sound like real instruments to balance his beguiling sample flips.

Sewaside III

Mike Shabb has been a secret weapon in Montreal’s rap scene for years. Rather than turning out other staple sounds of the city—the danceable electro funk of Kaytranada or Planet Giza, the industrial and metal-tinged catharsis of Zambian transplant Backxwash—Shabb leans toward the new-age formalism of producer Nicholas Craven and rappers like Chung. He started out making trap around 2017, but he was also a fan of the classic boom-bap and airy, drumless loops that still define certain corners of underground hip-hop. After connecting with Griselda affiliate Craven, Shabb worked to refine his diverse sounds, dropping vibey turn-up joints like 2021’s Quarantine Flow and 2023’s Hood Olympics while doing ad hoc engineering for Boldy James and earning multiple beat placements on Westside Gunn’s 10.
Shabb has an ear for beguiling samples and knows how to work them into beats spacious enough for scenery-chewers like Estee Nack to stomp through. After the handsome and stripped-back production of Sewaside II, which emphasized boasts, koans, and confessions told through his slick Montreal slur, he reaches higher and digs deeper on this year’s Sewaside III. The beats are stranger, the guest list is more packed, and there even seem to be live instruments in the mix. Shabb goes grander without trying to fix what isn’t broken, letting gnarled tendrils grow out of an already solid foundation.
As a rapper, Shabb takes the lifestyle route, detailing his day-to-day in the 514. He isn’t concisely poetic like Boldy or a cartoonish bruiser like Gunn or Nack; depending on whether he’s slinging metaphors or simply storytelling, his croak of a voice oscillates between chill and despondent. Most of the time, he’s posted on the block and plotting out next moves while fear and regret linger in the margins. On “Grinchy,” where he’s masked up like MF DOOM and carrying a dog on him like Jim Carrey in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a stray line sticks out from the warbling piano and betrays Shabb’s true feelings: “I keep my head high in situations I can’t cope.” That sentiment ripples under every moment on the album—from spliff tugs in the middle of shootouts where marks are running like Forrest Gump (“Free Cars”) to memorializing fallen friends and looking after their sons like Shep in Above the Rim (“Julie”). Fleeting moments of sadness prove that he’s only lowered the mask so much, and that intrigue keeps every vignette compelling.
But outside of any deeper readings, Shabb is here to rap while expanding the boundaries of his production. Sewaside III’s beats shift from woozy, Conductor Williams-style dirges to lusher arrangements that will have you second-guessing whether these are samples or live-band interpolations. Some songs, like the spellbinding “Free YSL,” split the difference between competing strategies while Shabb and New Jersey rapper Da$h trade war stories and scars. There are meat-and-potatoes rap tracks like the Lord Sko-featuring “Milk Crate,” loose interludes like “We Live in Montreal” that add regional kick-back flair, and peppy hype tracks like “Ben Wallace”; Shabb approaches each with style and finesse. Thirteen of the album’s 17 songs are entirely self-produced. He’s ambitious, but not so self-absorbed that he takes himself too seriously, giving even the more ponderous tracks a breezy pace.
Boasting the adventurousness and variety of a mixtape, Sewaside III is the most sprawling project in Shabb’s discography. On the penultimate track, “Free Jazz,” he yelps from inside a jazz-quartet whirlwind about the uncertainty of fame before a more sedate beat gives way to crooning about love and self-harm. It doesn’t quite have the focus and polish of his mentor Craven’s work, but he’s aiming for something bigger, more representative of his divergent tastes and thus slightly harder to categorize; he’s taking the hallmarks of traditional hip-hop and pushing them through filters attuned to Montreal’s cultural mix of jazz, dance, rap, and diasporic African influences. If this is what it sounds like for Mike Shabb to come into his own, he’s moving in the right direction.


Twelve years is a long time to hold a job. Any elderly engineer or factory worker\n\ can attest to ...

Here's to Shutting Up

Twelve years is a long time to hold a job. Any elderly engineer or factory worker can attest to the banality of the same tired day-to-day routines. Eventually, wasted months trail behind like a dense fog in your hazy memory, leaving you wondering if there was even any point to it all. Fortunately for Superchunk, their job entails being a highly influential rock band with a devoted fanbase, their own record label, and a legacy that most of the nation's wealthiest 1% would trade in their multi-millions for. For Superchunk, twelve years is a dream come true.
Their humble beginnings as a small-time Chapel Hill pop band in 1989 have, over the years, given way to next-big-thing status, major label bidding wars, and eight studio albums, several of which have become heralded as indie classics. Now in their 30s, the long-standing lineup of Mac McCaughan, guitarist Jim Wilbur, bassist Laura Ballance and drummer Jon Wurster is still making music with the same heart of their early records, even while time has begun to change them into a subtler incarnation of their former selves.
Signs of the new, more refined Superchunk first appeared on 1999's Jim O'Rourke-produced Come Pick Me Up with tracks like "Tiny Bombs" and "Hello Hawk." But they were just signs, as raucous, infectiously upbeat songs like "Good Dreams" and "June Showers" dominated the album with anthemic bliss. On Here's to Shutting Up, though, the once-tightly wound hyper heroes have foregone the distortion in lieu of smoothed-out balladry and reflective repose.
While often sung from the point of view of fictional characters, McCaughan's lyrics on Here's to Shutting Up often reveal his wist for days gone by. This is perhaps most notable in one of the album's rare rockers, "Out on the Wing," in which a person confides, "All the music that I love is out of date/ So take me to the place/ Where there's no such thing as taste," a sentiment most thirty-something ex-music fans can bitterly relate to. Several of these songs also dwell on young love and history, such as the subdued, pedal-steel-infused "Phone Sex," which addresses a teenager stood up for a date, and the despondent 7\xBD-minute-long "What Do You Look Forward To," where McCaughan recalls seeing "anticipation and a smile on the face of this girl/ And her mother through the glare on the glass of the windshield as they drove away."
But even though this album exhibits a softer, more melancholy side of Superchunk, a handful of old-school rockers fill the album out nicely. It's with one of these, the not-necessarily full-force, but nonetheless aggressive "Art Class (Song for Yayoi Kusama)," that the album's clear standout comes. Amidst a pounding rhythm section, McCaughan seems to deride art schools more than that classic time-wasting high school elective with lines like, "Why so serious/ When it's only your life that's at stake/ Why so serious/ When your life is the art that you make," and, "So shit in a can but your art is not free." Elsewhere, the almost Guided by Voices-length slab of raging guitars and crashing drum fills, "Rainy Streets," provides some early relief from the album's pensive meditations.
Producer Brian Paulson, who worked with the band on 1993's Foolish, is back behind the decks for Here's to Shutting Up, and despite the band's maturing songcraft, his recording techniques give the record more of a classic Superchunk feel. Jim O'Rourke may have added some meaty soundwork to Come Pick Me Up, but Paulson seems more comfortable with the guys, mixing Mac McCaughan's still-boyish tenor amongst the instrumentation rather than up in your face. It's a seemingly small touch, but an unexpected one, and it makes all the difference in the album's long-term listenability.
Of course, at the end of the day, Here's to Shutting Up isn't anything spectacular. The new direction of these songs seems logical enough, and will likely sit well with longtime fans who are, by now, also growing somewhat less excitable. Still, you can't help but miss the youthful ambition of Superchunk's glory days, when they seemed so relevant shouting out simple songs of love and boredom, and blared constantly from college stations across the country. On the other hand, twelve years is a long time to hold a job. It's just nice to see that they're still inspired by what they do.


Recorded over three long, inspired days in a studio north of Rio and newly remastered for its 15th anniversary, this is as solid a dub outing as has issued from anywhere beyond Jamaica.

Lucas Santtana: 3 Sessions in a Greenhouse

3 Sessions in a Greenhouse

Born in Bahia but long based in Rio de Janeiro, Lucas Santtana should have had both ears plenty full from those two centers of Brazilian culture. With his colloquial, imagistic Portuguese and references to all manner of regional and historical Brazilian styles—plus early career affiliations with Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Chico Science, and Arto Lindsay—Santtana’s music invites comparisons to tropicália’s heady fusions of local and foreign styles, manguebeat’s collisions of rock, rap, and maracatu in the 1990s, or yet another wave of bossa nova. But the textures and timbres of Santtana’s songs point to an even stronger site of influence: Jamaican reggae, especially the pulsing basslines, hazy echoes, and layered mixing techniques of dub. With the 15th anniversary reissue of 3 Sessions in a Greenhouse, remastered red-hot by German dub-techno wizard Stefan Betke (aka Pole), a pillar of Brazil’s 21st-century new wave digs into the roots of his sound, revealing a foundational reverence for dub reggae.
Recorded over three long, inspired days in a studio north of Rio, 3 Sessions in a Greenhouse is as solid a dub outing as has issued from Brazil, or just about anywhere beyond Jamaica’s shores, evincing a studied mastery of the musical and technical approaches developed by Lee “Scratch” Perry, King Tubby, and their peers and acolytes. This is not dub as cliché overload of fragment and reverb, but as attentive and creative engineering, on-the-spot arrangement, and improvised interplay. With the help of Recife’s Buguinha Dub on the boards, the album was recorded and mixed entirely live by Santtana and his touring group, Seleção Natural. The sessions produced a handful of stellar Santtana originals and several “dubs,” or covers performed as live dub versions—a soundcheck practice the band developed together and decided to lean into. We hear no overdubs, though occasional banter between tracks evokes the warm studio ambience. The liveness and lightness of the sessions shines through: not too serious, not too rigid, yet still rigorous. It’s dub as practice, process, and style.
Santtana’s embrace of dub as a mixing method accommodates his incorporation of rock, Afrobeat, samba, and so on. But he and the band also embrace dub as a musical style: bass enjoys pride of place with drums a close second, while spiky guitars, harmonized brass, and voice take turns in the foreground, echoing into muted silence at the stroke of a fader. Album opener “Awô Dub” is a prime example of this tendency, an unhurried instrumental led by a bubbling bassline, Nyabinghi-adjacent percussion, horns that duck in and out of the mix, and judicious use of effects to support the shifting arrangement. “Lycra-Limão,” on the other hand, applies dub aesthetics—especially deep bass, echo, and use of space—to an upbeat ska number that could get suspendered kids dancing in any number of cities and eras.
For all the Jamaican touches, Brazilian accents emerge as both subtle and explicit nods to local traditions and icons. On “Tijolo a Tijolo, Dinheiro a Dinheiro,” a high-pitched guitar evokes the cavaquinho, Brazil’s signature four-string lute, and the drummer’s rimshots call back to bossa nova even as the beat leans more toward the rolling grooves of Tony Allen. Tropicália pioneer and alt-MBP stalwart Tom Zé stops by to sing on a dub cover of his own “Ogodô Ano 2000.” As on the original, a misleadingly Zeppelin-esque riff is reconfigured by Zé’s snaky, surprising rhythms—led here by the bass, of course—but then a soupier texture swirls in: Dueling guitars and dense percussion span the stereo field as a cowbell pans from left to right, and a chording instrument with no attack echoes on offbeats while Zé’s own voice bounces around the room.
Perhaps more than any other track, “Pela Orla Dos Velhos Tempos” blurs lines between copy and original, import and indigenous. The opening TR-808 beat may suggest early funk carioca—or the stateside electrofunk and Miami bass that inspired it—but the primary reference for this “dub” is a manguebeat classic, a Nação Zumbi song reanimated here by the group’s own Gilmar Bola 8, who sings and raps “old school” style (“antigamente,” as the chorus goes) for a track about the good ol’ days. The strikingly bare electronic percussion is soon submerged in a larger ensemble sound that never stops accruing and shedding layers. The song winds down with whispers over 808 cowbells and a single pummeling bass note; the final word falls to the hand drums, calling out to Rio, Salvador, Kingston, Miami, Havana, and more.
While clearly in the spirit of the sessions, one intertextual experiment falls flat. “A Natureza Espera” begins as a promising, meditative piece of reggae em português but goes off the rails with a lengthy English recitation of the opening of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. Maybe it sounded better in a second language, or in that inspired studio atmosphere, but what might’ve seemed like a trippy complement turns into a dreary detour.
The tropicália movement of the ’60s and ’70s and Recife’s manguebeat scene of the ’90s are clear touchstones here. But while Santtana’s music has much in common with kindred attempts to fuse Brazilian folk and pop styles with rock, rap, and everything else, 3 Sessions in a Greenhouse illustrates how his songwriting is less motivated by the idea of fusion per se than by the expressive capacities of a familiar but putatively foreign musical language like dub. In that sense, the choice of Stefan Betke to remaster the album—i.e., to remix it at the level of foregrounded frequencies—is a fitting one: In dub tradition, Betke goes bold, showing his hand while reshaping the sound, and highlighting how Berlin’s regard for and distinctive take on dub parallel those of Brazil. In both we hear mutual intelligibility, but also many wonderful things to be found in translation.

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The rap radio pleasure-seekers grow up, exploring new sounds and real-world themes. It’s sometimes formulaic, but maturity looks good on them.

Sremm 4 Life

The repeat reveler learns that partygoing is as much a skill as an activity. At some mundane but critical point—having a kid, dropping a phone into a bar toilet, turning 30, falling asleep in a work meeting, having a second kid—life demands a game plan. To party without incident, substances have to be diluted or avoided; comfortable shoes must supplant cute ones; rides home need to be pre-arranged. On their fourth album, veteran socialites Rae Sremmurd reach this humbling stage of partying without sacrificing their irreverence or glee, finding new delights, sounds, and topics in the crucible of adulthood.
Brothers Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi are both dads now, a detail not explicitly mentioned on Sremm 4 Life, but one that contextualizes the album’s frequent acknowledgement that consequences exist. Almost a decade ago, Rae Sremmurd were youthful insurgents storming rap radio. Though they rhymed over the same druggy trap beats as Future and iLoveMakonnen, they ducked the numbed recoil that pulsed through that era’s music, turning up without ever coming down. Their giddy squeals and impish barks ricocheted across their mentor Mike WiLL Made-It’s eccentric beats like billiard balls. After an extended childhood, age has caught up with them. “It’s time to show people we’re more than just some party boys,” Jxmmi told i-D last year.
“Shots, shots, shots, yeah we’ll feel them in the morning,” Jxmmi shouts on weary opener “Origami (Hotties),” a world away from a similar and much more enthused chant on “Safe Sex Pay Checks” from their 2015 debut. “Everything unfolding like the chapter in the children’s book/From the window of the plane, I can tell that the city crooked,” exhales Swae Lee on the pensive “Something I’m Not.” On different songs, each of them mentions the killing of their stepdad in 2021, for which their younger brother was charged and sentenced to prison. The tragedy comes up only twice, but the gravity of the experience seems to snake through the songwriting, which can be as anguished as it is exuberant.
If Rae Sremmurd growing up and partying responsibly sounds depressing, don’t worry; Jxmmi still takes the shot. They continue to be a bacchanalian group prone to cartoonish flexes and rakish debauchery, as seen on “Sexy” and “Royal Flush.” Here, they match their boasts with confessions and doubts, a development that complicates their jubilant party tunes. “ADHD Anthem (2 Many Emotions)” is full-blown emo rap, Rae Sremmurd wailing over squiggly video game synths and seismic bass kicks.
“Not So Bad (Leans Gone Cold),” a sample drill track that trades the tea of Dido’s “Thank You” for a cup of lean, is melancholy but swaggering, the pair’s strained voices springing off of gliding bass and weepy keys. Historically, most of the darkness in Rae Sremmurd songs has stemmed from the spacey melodies and eerie drum programming of Ear Drummers’ nocturnal production style; here, the rappers are the ones who cast the shadows.
Compared to the careful sprawl of triple-LP Sr3mm, which artfully unwound the brothers’ divergent styles and production tastes while avoiding lulls, this outing can feel formulaic and less adventurous at times. The duo (or sometimes a featured guest) typically plays off a Swae Lee chorus, a structure that anchors most of the songs here. When the hook bricks, as on the uninspired “Activate,” the song collapses. The brothers’ middling showings just barely best yet another phoned-in Future verse. “Got empty bottles and models, my heart empty,” he sings flatly. Single “Torpedo” is just as inert, with Swae Lee not even committing to the tepid chorus: “Takin’ off for that cash, like torpedo/And ya pockets too tight, just like a speedo.”
When Swae Lee’s hooks connect, things fall into place. He floats through the misty bounce of the Zaytoven- and Mike WiLL-produced “Mississippi Slide,” while Jxmmi tumbles across it like a bowling ball. For the squeaky twerk joint “Bend Ya Knees,” Swae Lee dispenses cool playboy flexes while Jxmmi gushes Auto-Tuned punchlines. “I’m a bald-head nigga, just like Mr. Clean/And they know it’s me, hit the dro and shoulder lean,” Jxmmi raps, one of his many standout lines. He needs his brother’s cool melodies as much as Swae Lee needs his spry rapping, but interesting things tend to happen when he takes the lead, a potential first teased on his solo debut Jxmtro.
“Flaunt It/Cheap,” the album’s highlight, consciously discards the batting order of most Rae Sremmurd songs—Swae Lee on the hook and first verse, with Jxmmi on cleanup. The result is delightful. It begins with a drum’n’bass beat that slows into a minimal drum track, then flows into woozy Miami bass. Jxmmi struts across the shifting ground like a drum major, his swagger carrying the song even after Swae Lee takes the wheel. If Rae Sremmurd is truly a lifelong commitment, as this album’s title suggests, this kind of shuffling will be key to the group’s longevity. As their widened outlook and refreshed palette show, they’ve got plenty more parties planned.


The young German-Haitian singer-songwriter, who has famously written songs for Rihanna, basks in the gangly freedom of developing her own voice.

Free the Real (Pt. 2)

The music industry is rarely generous with fairytale successes, but the closest thing to one was bequeathed last year upon 22-year-old German-Haitian songwriter Bibi Bourelly. Discovered on Instagram, Bourelly was introduced to Kanye West and, more broadly, to the songwriting industry in perpetual need of young creatives to lend the stars some trickle-up swag. After some abortive writing for Usher, Bourelly found a taker in Rihanna, whose albums are a pretty reliable microcosm of songwriting trends; of her prolific output, Rih cut the brash pre-Anti single “Bitch Better Have My Money” and the sloshed torch song “Higher.” The songs could scarcely be different in production—the former set to grinding trap by Travis Scott, the latter to relatively tranquil soul—but Bourelly’s influence is stark and clear.
Where former Rih surrogates like Ester Dean assembled songs explicitly around hooks, retrofitting words and meaning later, Bourelly’s approach is more that of an open-mic songwriter: sprawling, unfiltered, every lyric sung to the breaking point. The Rihanna stint turned into a deal with Def Jam and several solo singles, compiled on an EP this May: the on-the-nose Free the Real (Pt. 1). Unfiltered was certainly the aim, or at least a version of authenticity filtered through folk and acoustic rock. Single “Sally” is a bluesy ruckus of handclaps and scuzzed-up guitar, “Ego” twangy and stalking, “What If” almost grunge. Though the EP perhaps demonstrated more promise than mastery, it was certainly her own.
Pt. 2 is much of the same: more notebook sketches of titles (“Poet,” “Untitled”) and more acoustic cuts that bear little resemblance to pop, R&B, or—refreshingly—the vast swath of alt-pop artists tipped as her peers. Bourelly’s age and pop gigs have saddled her with comparisons to precocious pop quirkers like Alessia Cara and Lorde, but they’re a poor fit. Her actual predecessors are closer to PJ Harvey or Janis Joplin, and—for better and worse—she comes off less as a pre-branded star and more as a writer finding her voice in real time. Her literal voice is unsurprisingly strong and versatile: sometimes zero-fucks blasé, sometimes scratchy and vulnerable, and sometimes—as on her Rihanna ballads—a confrontational belt.
But her writing voice is the main draw: the voice of a girl who grew up on hip-hop and saw no reason why it couldn’t coexist with folk-rock or country. There’s perennial talk, of course, about young artists growing up in the streaming era being unbound by genres; in particular, 2016 has found almost every pop star dabbling in acoustic genres (cynically, perhaps driven by Top 40’s playlists shrinking and the increasing dominance of country and AC formats). Bourelly sounds like it was her idea all along.
The downside to being unformed is there’s still a lot you’ve got to get out of your system. On this EP, that’s “Poet.” It’s got the slickest production on the album: rock-radio sheen, with precisely timed strings and backing-singer interjections. But it’s also got the hook “you’re my Kurt Cobain,” and its other metaphors—cocaine, rock’n’roll—aren’t much better. Bourelly’s other material, thankfully, is far more compelling: the prickly guitar intro and plainspoken disses of “Flowers” (“I may smoke a lot of marijuana/But I’m not your little whore”); the assured stomp of “Fool,” and especially the single “Ballin.”
It’s the best song written to date about the precarious quasi-fame one can fall into as a rising artist, where you can write multiple Rihanna hits, make the magazine rounds and 25 Under 25 roundups, sing on Colbert, be highly Googleable, and yet still be broke as fuck. Bourelly begins the track by announcing, as casually as you’d mention a papercut, getting fired from Old Navy; then, with this-too-will-pass assurance, she continues through the details: dodging landlords, jumping subway turnstiles, living off ramen and hot sauce, feeling ambivalent about the paparazzi who are one degree of separation away. As a montage of the music-industry fairytale as it looks to those living it, it’s striking. But as a snapshot of Bibi Bourelly’s career, judging by her material it may soon prove itself quite modest.


On their third album, the Philadelphia shoegaze band’s tried-and-true arrangements are not terribly original, but they are deeply felt.

Dance on the Blacktop

Dream pop and shoegaze, with their diffuse atmospheres and negative space, invite us to fill in the blanks with our own baggage. The Philadelphia band Nothing do a lot of that filling-in for us—these shoegazers do not look down; they stare you in the eye. It can feel suspect, imposing too much of Nothing’s bleak history onto the blank canvas. But when the saga involves incarceration, pharmaceutical sadist Martin Shkreli, and permanent brain damage—as it does for Nothing frontman Domenic Palermo, who was jumped outside a show in Oakland in 2015 and barely survived—the narrative becomes knotted inextricably into the gentle music. Nothing’s dismal backstory both colors in their sound and accounts for its sadness, its heaviness, its palliative effect. A reputable magazine recently called Nothing “the world’s unluckiest band,” and a journalist once began an interview with the apt question: “Do you feel cursed?” If there’s a hex on Nothing, they embrace it. “I’m living in a dream world,” Palermo sang on 2016’s “Nineteen Ninety Heaven.” “Life’s a nightmare.” That could be Nothing’s manifesto.
The title of Nothing’s third record, Dance on the Blacktop, is a phrase Palermo learned while serving two years in prison in the early 2000s (he stabbed someone in a brawl, claiming self-defense). It is slang for fighting, but Palermo adopts it to mean something like riding the inevitable chaos of existence with grace. Dance on the Blacktop tempers its self-defeatist lyrics with pummeling light, and while the songs here hew closer to billowing 1990s alt-rock than on previous records, there’s still an appealing minimalism to the sound. That might come from the band’s backgrounds in hardcore: Palermo was in Horror Show, on Deathwish; new bassist Aaron Heard also fronts the brutalist Jesus Piece; drummer Kyle Kimball was in the gothier Salvation.
Dance’s tried-and-true arrangements—simmering and erupting, despondent and ecstatic—are not terribly original, but they are deeply felt. “Zero Day” is a decently melancholy Smashing Pumpkins impression, as Palermo sings of “infinity, oblivion” and his “empty sky of everlasting misfortune.” “You Wind Me Up” recalls Dinosaur Jr.’s dry, drawling “Feel the Pain” to an extreme (John Agnello produced both) though its raw character distinguishes it: “We were sitting in the sun/Smoldering a love/The drugs were never strong enough.” There’s an uncomplicated, slackerish romanticism to most Nothing lyrics, as Palermo sings of faded souls and inscrutable stars. Amid the thundering swirl of “I Hate the Flowers,” Palermo is “shook outta heaven, fell into hell.”
The album contains some gorgeous, subtle shifts, almost micro-sized, as if feeling the world after a handful of edibles. With a disarmingly sweet vocal turn, the strummy dynamism of “Us/We/Are” oddly recalls Third Eye Blind’s Stephan Jenkins. “I know it sounds crazy/There’s static in my head/Everything red,” Palermo sings, likely reflecting on his brain trauma. “Blueline Baby” is the album’s highlight, exploding like green fireworks. Palermo wrote it, he says, “about a girl [he] knew who OD’d when she was 13,” and it is a work of pure pathos. On a deluxe edition of Dance, Nothing faithfully cover Grouper’s drone-folk mini-masterpiece “Heavy Water/I’d Rather Be Sleeping,” and if they learned something about the restorative qualities of music from it, “Blueline Baby” is proof.
The cover art for Dance on the Blacktop features a photograph of the New York author Chelsea Hodson in a blank mask, looking hyperreal and obscured at once. Listening to Nothing, I think of a line from her excellent recent essay collection, Tonight I’m Someone Else, which presents a similar mix of elegance and destruction: “How much can a body endure?” she writes. “Almost everything.” Dance on the Blacktop is music at the edge of Hodson’s “everything.” Its theme might be resolve, tenacity, or redemption itself—the sound of hitting rock bottom, looking up, and still catching a glimpse of beauty above.


Mike Kinsella expresses ugly sentiments with inverse beauty in Owen's acoustic-heavy return.

The King of Whys

To nearly the same degree that Mike Kinsella once influenced the aesthetic of modern emo, his solo project Owen deconstructs it. His projects American Football and Owls channeled effusive lyricism and intricate instrumental interplay in short, brilliant bursts of creativity; by contrast, Owen albums usually find Kinsella alone with his acoustic guitar, making plainspoken assessments of the accruing obligations and disappointments of adulthood.
The King of Whys is Kinsella’s first collection of new material since the wildly successful American Football reunion in 2014, which put him in front of audiences that dwarfed any he saw during that band’s initial late-‘90s run. It might be tough for those newcomers to make the transition from that band’s gentle single “Never Meant” to King’s lead one, “Lost,” on which he sings roughly, “Stay poor and die trying/Take the drugs I didn’t take/Lay the whores I didn’t lay/’Cause I was too afraid that I might like it.” This is Kinsella’s most extreme Owen album yet, the most bitter, the funniest, the saddest, and the most ambitious.
It’s also the first time one might assume that Owen is a full band. The King of Whys was mostly written and recorded in two nine-day sessions with S. Carey, a member of Bon Iver who opened for several of American Football’s reunion dates. It’s Kinsella’s first time working with an outside producer and a backing set of musicians (as well as the first time he’s recorded an album outside Chicagoland), and Carey’s imprint is strong in the brassy orchestration, textural found sound, and a layer of aloed reverb that soothes rough edges in the mix. It could easily be confused for Kinsella walking in on a Volcano Choir or Bon Iver session, and amplifies the newfound emotional urgency in Kinsella’s lyrics.
The King of Whys is never not magnificent, maybe too much for its own good–despite Kinsella’s unsparing account of his father's alcoholism and depression, the handclaps and chipper strumming of “A Burning Soul” could’ve made it a mid-‘90s college hit à la Guster. Many of the initially novel aspects of The King of Whys teased out by Carey–wisely utilized trumpet, percolating polyrhythms, mid-song digressions into gorgeous guitar lattices–nod back to American Football. The King of Whys can often seem like an answer to that band’s self-titled debut album, inverting that record’s youthful insouciance to express a tenderized, emotionally exhausted adult mindset. “Don’t worry about the money, we’ll get by or we won’t,” Kinsella sighs on “Sleep Is a Myth,” before seemingly muttering into his sleeve, “You look better hungry.”
Much of The King of Whys takes that tone of one-sided mental arguments, ones that could probably decimate any relationship if they were verbalized. But for better or worse, Kinsella’s had too many drinks or worked too many hours to take it there. “If you give me this battle, I’ll give you the war/I’m tired of being someone’s, tired of keeping score,” Kinsella sings on “Tourniquet,” a transaction in emotional economics that could’ve been voiced on any previous Owen record. But then he summarizes the album’s overall shift in tone: “Give me that goddamn bottle and then leave me alone,” he snipes. It actually sounds reasonable to let him destroy himself for awhile; it’s a small price to pay if he’ll feel those involuntary bouts of bitterness and hatred without acting on them.
There are some incredibly ugly things expressed on The King of Whys, but the tone never suggest Kinsella endorses them–it’s hard to imagine “Tourniquet” getting the emo sing-a-long treatment of, say, Bright Eyes’ “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” or Death Cab for Cutie’s “Tiny Vessels.” He’s just as likely to use the insularity of The King of Whys to make jokes about the futility of expression: “I’m so settled down, it feels like the earth moves if I do,” he cracks. Meanwhile, “Empty Bottle” is damn near acoustic stoner rock, invoking two separate but related escape valves for Kinsella in Chicago. In his head, hell is a crowded goth night; heaven is dreaming of being asleep, speaking French, and a jukebox that plays nothing but Isn’t Anything. Whether or not Kinsella can actually remember his teenage feelings, The King of Whys proves that he can still experience them.


Darkside’s Dave Harrington and Benoit & Sergio’s Benjamin Jay join forces on an introspective album that fuses treated guitar and ambient electronics with obliquely confessional lyrics.

Lights Fluorescent: The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons

The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons

The musical partnership of Dave Harrington and Benjamin Jay, a duo that calls itself Lights Fluorescent, may seem completely disjunctive. Harrington, best known as one half of Darkside, with Nicolas Jaar, has built a pedigree as an improvisatory guitarist with an avowed love for jam bands and a deft way of reframing jazz history for his own ends. Benjamin Jay makes house music, most famously with Benoit & Sergio, although his work with occasional outfit NDF expanded into more explicitly experimental terrain. Jay’s contribution to dance music has always been idiosyncratic and deeply human: He sings about loving girls who never apologize, hating DJs who focus too much on “color frequencies or resonance,” and following your principles.
Along with his impeccable phrasing, this slanted yet highly credible lyrical perspective is the principal sliver of Jay’s previous projects that survives in Lights Fluorescent. A drum-free record, their debut, The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons, locates itself far from the dancefloor; the lyrics inhabit a nostalgic, obliquely confessional mode that, along with the heavy electronic soundscape, points toward something like chillwave. “I’ve been listening to Neil Young,” sings Jay on the standout track “Neil Young/Cues,” voice splitting the difference between nasal and husky as he completes the thought: “Those Baltimore afternoons.”
Once a PhD candidate studying Renaissance literature in the aforementioned city, Jay sings like a grown son only just understanding that his Another Green World references (on the powerful “Palace Walls”) might age him out of being a kid. Harrington uses his guitar more sparingly than fans of his sprawling—both in size and ambition—ensemble the Dave Harrington Group might expect. Yet even if the skittery, allegro, electric-Miles sensibility Harrington fostered in his band is apparently absent from Lights Fluorescent, strong traces of his previous work remain, particularly his liberal and creative use of feedback. The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons demonstrates the growth of Harrington the producer, not Harrington the jazz musician.
His embrace of the studio, paired with Jay’s always evident, albeit still nascent, ability as a pop singer-songwriter, make for a surprising, successful alchemy. The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons is a clinic in how to pace an album’s rhythms without using drums. Synthesizers are employed consistently yet simply, hugging tightly to chord changes. The feeling of tension and release is bound up in whether the keys—and the occasional structural bass, as on the short and sad “Epitaph”—provide a pulse, or if they serve to deepen the duo’s sense of texture, like most of the instrumentation. The record’s forays into traditional musicianship are illusory: The spiky, bright guitar line on the title track is a loop, and unlike Harrington’s jazz-fusion predecessors, whose studio embellishments were often hidden beneath a heap of instruments, the sparsity of Lights Fluorescent’s compositions does little to conceal their means of production.
Some may point out that the duo looks backward musically, and certainly aspects of its sound will be familiar to anyone who surveyed the synth-happy surfaces of early 2010s indie. Yet the trajectory of the two minds behind Lights Fluorescent suggests that this project is one lucky meeting in a couple of long, omnivorous careers. Jay has decided to scale the introspective scaffolding that buttressed the dancefloor mantras of his past. Harrington, like a number of artists who cut their teeth in the jazz world—John Zorn and David Torn among them—has furthered his understanding that working in the amorphous genre of jazz fusion entails fusing with the innovations of the present, even when that means leaving jazz behind entirely. The Oldest Sons of the Oldest Sons is a fusion few would expect, which finds its makers comfortable together: on the near side of experimentation, and on the far side of pop.


An anthology of the emo pioneers’ complete works testifies to their thrift, their seriousness, and their towering legacy; it captures the essence of a crucial era in the genre’s history.

Giving Birth to Thunder

Indian Summer are a quintessential Numero Group salvage project: Toiling in obscurity, the Oakland band founded a subgenre and produced a small, influential body of work that quickly went out of print. Today their records serve as both stylistic textbooks and collector’s items. But this is the first time the esteemed archival label felt weird about the optics. “Give emo a chance,” they recently tweeted, offering a playlist of formative genre tracks that ends in 1995, the year Cap’n Jazz broke up and months after Indian Summer did the same. Giving Birth to Thunder is Indian Summer in its entirety, but it’s also the essence of an entire era where emo was still strictly post-hardcore, before it started to cross-breed with pop and assume the form that today inspires such reverent nostalgia.
Giving Birth to Thunder doesn’t unearth any new gems, as 90% of it already exists as Science 1994—an undisputed classic of second-wave emo, though nearly everything else about that 2002 anthology is up for debate. The versions available on CD and YouTube have completely different track titles than the one frontman Adam Nanaa posted on Bandcamp; those comprise a nine-word poem that inspired this collection’s name. The band was famous for declining to name any of its songs, leaving the business of titles to its fans. Setlists would read like hieroglyphs, with songs designated by guns, planes, and angels; the band members went either uncredited or by their first initials.
The idea of an actual full-length was likely anathema to the band, or maybe just an economic impossibility. Indian Summer scraped by moment to moment during their one-year existence; they played approximately 100 shows on wretched tours guided by a tattered copy of Book Your Own Fuckin’ Life, fueled by the minimal amount of fast food and stolen gas to make it to the next gig and whatever else it took to get home and cut the next track before money ran out. And then they’d do it all over again. In the liner notes, Nanaa is upfront about dollars and cents, in terms that seem stark even for 1994—a $50 bass, 30-minute sessions at a $75-per-day studio, $175 monthly rent in Emeryville split among the four members, driving 12 hours to play a gig for $20, making it from Vancouver back to the Bay with only $10 between them. Their stage setup was reliant on duct tape, cinder blocks, and a microcassette playing back a dubbed copy of a Bessie Smith record.
Smith’s voice was the binding agent on Science 1994, appearing intermittently throughout the post-hoc collection of the band’s scattered works. It’s tempting to think that Nanaa imagined future crate diggers rescuing his own band’s 7"s—enticed by the cryptic cover and overwhelmed by the pure torment in the voice—the same way he’d plucked the blues LP from an Oakland junkyard. With Indian Summer, the most pretentious explanation is usually the correct one. But not here: Like any number of rap producers around the same time, they simply liked the crackle and spectral presence—they felt it would add color, and that a 70-year old blues recording could do that is a testament to their unrelenting austerity. They wanted, Nanaa writes, to “emulate the nights in Oakland we spent fucked up and passed out with the needle dragging at the end of the LP.”
On a prior release of Science 1994, Nanaa made a similar claim, specifying, “the needle dragging on the Slint LP,” which describes a good portion of Giving Birth to Thunder in its meditative moments. It’s metal music in a literal sense—guitars strung with pipe cleaners playing barbed note clusters, splash cymbals covered in tinfoil, the dulled meat-locker reverb of “Orchard.” Traversing the quiet moments of Giving Birth to Thunder is like walking on a polluted beach. It does sound a hell of a lot like Slint, which was probably the point—Indian Summer were deadly serious young men, but also punk rock fanboys, their enterprise guided by entirely by their favorite bands, not authors, not poets, not abstract painters, not philosophical tracts. They nicked as much from Slint and Fugazi as they did from Texaco and Denny’s, seeing how much they could get away with before being caught and discarding anything that didn’t suit an immediate need.
The name Indian Summer itself was on loan from a deep cut from the Doors’ Morrison Hotel, though they took nothing else from that band. Nearly their entire identity was derived from Dischord and SST: Nanaa’s pre-Indian Summer band was named Sinker, in tribute to an Ignition 7", and he coined their last tour “Celebrated Summer” (after the Hüsker Dü song). They had principles, but no politics. “Emotional revolution. Fucking pain,” an old Sinker ad proclaimed. For his Repercussion Records imprint, “Emotional, angry, or pissed music preferred.” The Nanaa brothers and Marc Bianchi aspired to Fugazi’s democratic vocal delegation, but they foreswore call-and-response or even alternating leads; they just all crammed together behind one mic and shouted whenever they saw fit. Even their use of octaves attests to their thrift: It’s the easiest, most economic way to make a riff sound bigger than it really is, leaving no space for thirds or fourths or anything else that would complete an actual triad.
But this all worked in favor of a band that prioritized immediacy above all else. There are no builds on Giving Birth to Thunder, no clever transitions. There is nothing medium about Indian Summer. Though Nanaa described Indian Summer as “quiet thunderstorm” on his Bandcamp, their defining moments are like a flash flood—torrential, merciless, and not even remotely beautiful, mowing down everything in its path. Nanaa often reads his lyrics rather than pruning them for melodic contours, and his words are elegant in their violence: People are walking weapons in “mm.,” and “Woolworm,” alternately known as “Angry Son” or “Sleeping,” is not a biblical parable. Nanaa was abandoned by his father and he’s extremely pissed off about it. “When you start screaming ‘I am the angry son,’ it’s hard to read that any other way,” he admits in the liner notes.
There’s only one song that isn’t already available on Science 1994, a closing squall titled with three lightning bolts. The liner notes and “propaganda” included in the physical edition are the real draw here, creating context for a band who had a blast making exquisitely bleak music about not having a friend in the world. They were more expansive than their peers Antioch Arrow and Heroin, who were making primordial screamo in “white belt country” (i.e., San Diego ca. 1992), more artful than the punk that their occasional roommate David Hayes was releasing on Lookout!, more experimental than the ascetic Ebullition bands from Goleta.
Most notably, Indian Summer struck up a friendship with Cap’n Jazz through Mark Pearsall, a sonic and spiritual guide for the band and Midwest emo ambassador who ran Man With Gun, the imprint that released Shmap’n Shmazz and almost nothing else. The parallels between Cap’n Jazz and Indian Summer are unmistakable: two brothers forming a band to process the trauma of their broken homes (the Kinsellas grew up with an abusive, alcoholic father, the Nanaas’ was an absentee), self-styled weirdo punks that unwittingly defined emo for the rest of the decade and quickly called it quits after touring broke their spirits and friendships.
But otherwise, they’re distinct products of their environment: Cap’n Jazz were led by a future college professor and University of Illinois students who would soon discover post-rock, jazz, and Steve Reich. Their music was anxious but approachable and exuberant, well-suited for house parties and basements throughout the Midwest. Conversely, Nanaa was a high-school dropout who ended up in the Bay Area after three days on a Greyhound bus, and Giving Birth to Thunder is shaped by crushing poverty and omnidirectional anger. The offshoots of Cap’n Jazz shaped nearly every form of popular emo for the next 25 years, while the members of Indian Summer mostly played in even more obscure punk bands, with the exception of Bianchi, whose Her Space Holiday was something of an inverse Postal Service at their artistic peak. An instrumental version of 2003’s The Young Machines would’ve been a minor classic in the burgeoning lap-pop subgenre, but Bianchi’s off-key, beyond-TMI lyrics about his sex life and distaste for music critics (occasionally both) were more in line with The Ugly Organ and ...Is a Real Boy at the time.
Like most formative bands from emo’s first and second waves—Cap’n Jazz, Moss Icon, Rites of Spring, the Hated, Embrace—their scant output is celebrated for its purity as much as its innovation. Still, Indian Summer’s imprint is unmistakable on the thornier outgrowths of emo; as Nanaa mutters over his band’s tensile anti-grooves, he establishes a template for the literary, conceptual post-hardcore of La Dispute and Defeater. Isolate “mm.” in a petri dish and a Bay Area version of Thursday might sprout—perhaps their late-career highlight “Millimeter” isn’t a direct tribute, but “I Am the Killer” may well be. Brand New shrewdly pointed out Steve Albini’s work on In Utero and Goat as guides for their post-emo pivot on 2009’s Daisy, but that indelible trick on “Vices” that knocked everyone on their collective ass, where a gospel vinyl crumbled under a violent blitz of guitar distortion? Pretty much a verbatim rip of “Aren’t You Angel?” If the intention of Giving Birth to Thunder was to present Indian Summer as something separate from current-day emo, it only proved that the genre is right where they left it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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CORRECTION: A previous version of this review attributed the inspiration of the name “Celebrated Summer” to Revolution Summer instead of Hüsker Dü.


At a time when dance music is pop and pop is rap and rap is emo and everything is electronic, the Los Angeles-based artist synthesizes it all into a gaudy yet distinctive sound.

boy

2hollis is a beloved fixture in a music scene with no name. What do you call a mash of Bladee, Chief Keef, Max Martin, Skrillex, and the Geometry Dash computer game soundtrack, anyway? The 20-year-old, Los Angeles-based singer, rapper, and producer, whose real name is Hollis Frazier Herndon, makes wildly processed industrial dance pop and rap: His pyrotechnic production is the stuff of a cooped-up prodigy whose mind can’t help but move a million miles an hour.
Early releases garnered a fervent internet following, his sub-Reddit and Discord channel filled with kids obsessing over his personal history, production techniques, and eerie aesthetic, which I can only describe as Roscoe Dash does medieval. His early content, though, has been scrubbed from the internet. Past projects and music videos now live via aliases and alt accounts; scrapped Instagram stories and deleted tweets are archived on fan forums. His official pages include only a sliver of his catalog, the few pictures he shares of himself a selection of highly filtered headshots. He’s hardly done any interviews, rarely posts on social media, and barely promotes his music. So why, on a niche corner of the internet, are kids calling him a messiah?
Hollis didn’t come out of nowhere. His mom, Kathryn Frazier, is the founder of the PR firm Biz 3, whose roster includes the Weeknd, J. Cole, and Daft Punk. She also co-owns a record label with Skrillex, while his dad, John Herndon, was the drummer for Tortoise and releases solo music as A Grape Dope. While Hollis has likely benefited from a life spent around musicians, his work feels most influenced by internet addiction and multimedia fluency. It might be tempting to peg him as just another kid with bleach-blond hair uploading iterative computer music to SoundCloud—an offshoot of whatever it was we decided hyperpop meant. But Hollis’ latest full-length album, boy, establishes him as a remarkably distinctive, eagerly experimental savant whose sound never stalls or stagnates.
Before his recent pivot to industrial dance and electropop, Hollis’ music mostly resembled that of Drain Gang stalwarts Yung Lean and Bladee, Swedish accent and all (although Hollis is from Chicago). Cloud rap suited him; his 2022 EP, As Within, So Without, made with producer kimj, features some of his best songs. Last year, when he dropped 2, an electroclash house record, the switch at first felt stark. The album is all shook-up soda and manic bravado: warp-speed synth leads and arpeggios, wet columns of bass and angsty singing, skittery four-on-the-floor drums and explosive FX. On closer inspection, Hollis’ idiosyncratic take on dance music isn’t all that different from his quirky interpolations of trap and drill. At a time when dance music is pop and pop is rap and rap is emo and everything is electronic, Hollis’ ability to swerve and synthesize his scatter-brained source material into a unique amalgam of genre-blurring music stands out. It’s an exciting development for an artist who may just be scratching the surface of his best work.
boy surpasses 2 as an even clubbier, gummier electropop record. “two bad” is brighter and more radio-ready than anything in Hollis’ discography—a huge gated synth lead supports his urgent, insistent singing, which sounds like Justin Bieber after seven cigarettes. And while the track could certainly be played at big-tent EDM festivals, what differentiates “two bad” from your standard glowstick banger is how relentlessly it reinvents itself. Drums shift tempos and textures mid-song, an endless supply of synth patches roving madly around the mix. On “say it again,” another rave-destined track, Hollis resists simple patterns and structures—a lo-fi piano breakdown interrupts the song’s midpoint; a whole verse is dedicated to Hollis muttering “I want you to say it again” above a pulsing bass and stuttering synth pluck. The mutating compositions make for an exhilarating listen, whether you tune in on headphones, while driving, or as you thrash around a neon-streaked club.
One of Hollis’ more obvious strengths as a vocalist is how powerfully he can distill visceral emotions through seemingly simple means. Opener “you once said my name for the first time” may be the most elegantly constructed song in his catalog, a whiny digital organ giving way to soaring choral harmonies before the song bursts into a droning, deranged drop that lasts nearly two minutes. “One day I’ll say your name for the last time,” he sings with conviction, extending the final note until his voice falters. Even when he returns to his trusted bag of blustery, bit-crushed rap, like on late album highlight “lie,” he communicates anguish and longing despite cycling through clichés (“cross my eyes, I hope to die/I’ll never lie”). Hollis can communicate lust, regret, rage, or despair with a snicker or sigh, a screech or vocal chop, a melody so disorientingly strange it elicits an emotional reaction, even if the writing’s puerile and unspecific.
This transference isn’t always rendered so smoothly. “promise” is a forgettable attempt at a bombastic piano ballad, and “sister,” though one of boy’s finer beats, is fraught with a peculiar analogy about loving your girlfriend like a sibling. Languishing too long in Hollis’ world can drain as much as it enlivens, simulating the sensation of replenishing your serotonin stores after doing too much molly. But Hollis isn’t in the business of pacing himself. He’s racing full speed ahead, threatening to blast open any preconceptions you may have had about what a kid making music on a laptop can accomplish.


The nocturnal, comforting Illumination Ritual offers up a definitive portrait of the Appleseed Cast, a record that can serve as an entryway to the post-rock/emo band's sprawling discography as well as a culmination of it.

Illumination Ritual

The Appleseed Cast were tagged as an emo band in their earliest days and that's likely to stick in 2013. It says as much about the elasticity of the genre as it does about how Chris Crisci's mercurial band hasn't allowed anything else to define them since. Over the past decade and a half, they haven't made two consecutive recordings without shuffling their lineup, their sonic focus, and often both: In the late 90s, the Lawrence, Kansas, band were peers of Mineral and Planes Mistaken For Stars, earnest Midwesterners expanding on the template set by Sunny Day Real Estate. By the time they dropped their critically acclaimed, two-volume series Low Level Owl in 2001, they were receiving Radiohead comparisons, but then again, so was anyone who laid plaintive vocals over electronics and guitars treated with more than two effects pedals. As the 2000s progressed, they moved towards a centrist indie-rock sound before going off the grid into full-on, post-rock moodiness on 2009’s Sagarmatha. By 2011’s Middle States EP, you could sense them circling back towards their original sound, and Illumination Ritual sticks the landing. Whether or not it’s Appleseed Cast’s best record feels irrelevant, though it’s certainly in contention. At this point, it offers a definitive Appleseed Cast, something that can serve as an entryway to their sprawling discography as well as a culmination of it.
Illumination Ritual can certainly be a potent nostalgia trip: the clean, interlocking guitars, Crisci’s rounded vocals and nervous percussion rhythms are pure Deep Elm and Jade Tree throwbacks that thankfully avoid a similar tendency towards unwieldy verbiage or grating affectation. Even if there aren’t too many singalong moments, Crisci’s vocals remain warm and melodic throughout and the production is crisp without being brittle. The concision carries over to the instrumentals; “Branches on the Arrow Peak Revelation” and “Simple Forms” recall Peregrine or Sagarmatha with their fluttery guitar delay, subtle electronic manipulation, and floating ambience.
Crisci kept unusual hours writing much of Illumination Ritual-- as indicated by centerpiece “30 Degrees 3 AM”, the liminal feeling expressed in many of his lyrics are a result of walking the razor-thin line between “up too late” and “up too early.” There’s an unmistakably nocturnal mood to it all and it’s not the kind of wakefulness that’s a result of panic or some other insatiable mania: Crisci’s halting, elliptical lines evoke a moment where you can’t quite decide whether to take your waking state as a sign that you should start that novel or just try one more time to drift back to sleep.
This might not sound all that exciting and for the most part, Appleseed Cast don’t excite so much as they comfort; Illumination Ritual is more a soundtrack for thinking about feelings rather than being in the thrall of emotion. "Adriatic To Black Sea", “Great Lake Derelict”, and “Cathedral Ring” provide Illumination Ritual’s most forceful moments out of insistent builds rather than sudden movement-- it’s unclear what Crisci’s getting at besides a certain sense of yearning (lines like "I feel so akin to rain," “the only girl is shooting for gold,” “a new cathedral, burn it down” are typical) that’s abetted by the satisfying effect the trio achieves by pushing the tempo and lunging forward musically.
It all makes for a consistent listen, as the longer instrumental passages and more melodic material draw from the same tones and structures. But it can lead to Illumination Ritual washing over you rather than creating immersion. While they’re capable of calming ambience, the Appleseed Cast lack the sort of striking dynamics that can serve as a substitute for its lack of immediacy. Nor are they particularly innovative in creating texture; Nathan Wilder is an active and pugilistic drummer who often serves as the “lead” when Crisci steps away from the mic, but too often they resort to the kind of clean, ringing peals of delayed guitar that’s going to sound like something the Edge has already done more memorably.
None of this should be surprising or even disappointing for listeners holding the torch for the Appleseed Cast eight albums and several EPs in. But for the curious listener, the definitive nature of Illumination Ritual can cut both ways, as Appleseed Cast demonstrate their capabilities without having too many definitive strengths come to the fore, consolidating a decade and a half of intriguing, and occasionally compelling experimentation into a manageable 45 minutes.


Will Wiesenfeld's latest EP as Baths, Ocean Death, hits you in the head with enormous, blunt impact. Following his most recent record, last year's Obsidian, the EP showcases the singer’s continued focus on mortality and heartbreak.

Ocean Death EP

On Cerulean, Baths’ 2010 debut LP, songs sounded splintered, shot through with percussive interruptions that were unwieldy yet ear-catching. These arrangements made Will Wiesenfeld, then loosely associated with Los Angeles’ Low End Theory scene, stand out in a company of seemingly likeminded beat-heads. Since then, his output has become deceptively simple, retaining the signature characteristics of his earlier work, and Baths' latest EP, Ocean Death, hits you in the head with enormous, blunt impact.
Following Will Wiesenfeld’s most recent record, last year's Obsidian, the EP showcases the singer’s continued focus on mortality and heartbreak. He approaches each subject with the misdirection of an experienced comedian: death is discussed with morbid joy, and heartbreak is met with anger instead of sadness or self-pity. Wiesenfeld’s songwriting remains evocative as ever, and while Ocean Death lacks the thematic cohesion of its predecessor, it’s another beguiling offering from a singer and beatmaker who continues to evolve into a singular artist.
At points, Ocean Death takes cues from dance music, evoking '90s dub techno while slowing things down and revealing a darkly humorous streak. The title track at once resembles Vincent Floyd and early Four Tet; it's a whirring, humming paean to death that sounds eerily ceremonial. A baroque atmosphere lingers throughout the EP, even as Wiesenfeld's subject and sound shifts track-by-track. Wiesenfeld's an admirer of Björk and Kate Bush, artists whose surface approachability offers passageway into complicated songs; on Ocean Death, he’s working in a similar way, adding static prickles to represent a growing contempt for a lover on “Yawn” and burnishing the otherwise dour “Voyeur” with what sounds like harp strings.
Obsidian was informed by Wiesenfeld’s battle with a deadly strain of E. coli, and its lyrics were both gruesome and vulnerable in a way that bred a unique intimacy. For the majority of Ocean Death, he's moved away from the pain and venom that he expressed so vehemently last time. Compare Obsidian's “Earth Death” to the EP’s title track: where “Earth Death” described the fear of a person trapped in his own dying body, “Ocean Death” is gleeful, as Wiesenfeld takes on the role of the ocean, asking for someone to be sacrificed to him. It's a fitting image on a release where Wiesenfeld widens his scope.
There are still hints of Wiesenfeld's scorched-earth songwriting. The cruelest couplet here, on “Yawn”, masterfully combines the mundane and the vicious: “Your steady breath when you’re reading/ I think about our love and its lack of meaning.” Wiesenfeld’s sharp sense of humor pokes through elsewhere, especially in the coy attitude on “Fade White,” which finds him coaxing a companion to join him in the embrace of nonexistence.
Ocean Death scan as less personal than Wiesenfeld’s earlier work, but the more generalized approach suits the music's expanse. He no longer seems obsessed with his own death: the perspective here suggests a broader apocalypse, and in that sense, the EP represents something larger than anything Wiesenfeld's done previously. Dark and painful at points, Ocean Death is still filled with wonder at the largeness of the world and the awesome power of endings.


Released by the Russian label Gost Zvuk, producer Aleksei Nikitin offers a 16-track portrait of IDM, atmospheric sketches, and weightless techno inspired by six-month-long St. Petersburg winters.

Ledyanoy Album

No matter the sanctions, headlines, or politics, there’s a steady trickle of music making its way out of Russia. Platforms like Soundcloud and mega-giant Facebook clone VK allow a mostly unencumbered flow of mp3s from the world’s largest country to western markets, and the Gost Zvuk label is one of the foremost purveyors of underground electronic music seeping into the US.
Familiar names like Buttechno (aka Pavel Milyakov), OL (Oleg Buyanov) and Piper Spray have already graced Gost Zvuk’s 12 releases to date across their three sister imprints. Gost Zvuk’s releases often feel austere and impenetrable to non-Russophones, each record hand-stamped with Cyrillic text. However hard it is to translate, Gost Zvuk has been a reliable source of heady, otherworldly beats and sketches since their first release in 2014, a four-track EP from one Aleksei Nikitin—better known as Nocow. Now on their seventh release, Gost Zvuk brought Nocow back into the fold with Ledyanoy Album, a shimmering 16-track portrait of IDM, atmospheric sketches, and weightless techno inspired by the six-month long St. Petersburg winters.
With a title that roughly translates to the “Ice Album,” Ledyanoy uses a thumping techno pulse—cold, but not quite hypothermic. “Alunogen” rides a breakneck 160bpm beat, like a train running off its tracks, while opener “Stalaktit” (“Stalactite”) lingers in two minutes of feverish polyphonic static. In spite of such a division in tempo and having written some tracks as many as seven years ago, Ledyanoy Album coheres around the rich atmospheres Nocow creates. The delicate, minimal-techno pulse of  “Satew” (“Network”) pumps warm blood through veins as frosty bells spin around your head. Cold air is no threat when you’re properly bundled up. In a recent interview, Nocow said the album feels cold, but “not in terms of an absence of emotion. Space is also cold but it is not frightening, more so mysterious.”
This relationship between cold sounds, cosmic textures, and warm feelings pervade Ledyanoy, and the album’s most rewarding moments are also its most emotional. The uplifting flute and punchy tech-house beat of centerpiece “Tayut Ogni” (“Melting Flames”) reflect a sunny Ibiza imagined from midwinter St. Petersburg. The atmospheric electro jam “Uskoreine” (“Acceleration”) similarly benefits from its warm emotional core as the gliding strings and hand drums bring a lively, tropical feel to an empty crater on the moon.
When the clubby beats disappear on Ledyanoy Album, Nocow conjures dense interludes that recall the rich, lo-fi textures of Huerco S. and Aphex Twin’s SAW II. From the slow-motion plunge of “Ledorub” (“Ice Axe”) to the return-to-earth fireball “Plachushchaya Kometa” (“Crying Comet”) and meditative echoes of closing cut “MIR,” the atmospheres are feather-light and all-encompassing. Aside from “MIR,” Nocow seems to have abstained from the inclusion of field recordings in the tracks, leaving the album without any terrestrial reference. Nocow’s kick drums bang his tracks back down to earth, but across Ledyanoy, you’re either being whipped around by the frozen wind, or floating in the abyss.
The artwork for Ledyanoy features a winter landscape by the 19th-century post-impressionist Russian painter Igor Grabar, whose evocative scenes are both static and bursting with life. Grabar himself, like Nocow and countless other Russian artists, was fascinated by the complex and often surreal experience of the Russian winter. “There is nothing to compare with a colorful polyphonic moment,” Grabar once wrote, “such as a winter day full of frost, where color scale is changing every minute, evolving into fantastic shades.” Where one might see a winter’s day frozen, still and white, Nocow weaves a restless and vibrant collage of a frozen land ready to inherit the thaw of spring.


For the final installment in his years-long genre study of house music, the L.A. funk prophet takes a different structural approach while maintaining a minimalist spirit.

Architecture III

In many ways, DāM-FunK’s career has been hyper-focused on a single object. Modern funk is so tied to his name that it’s easy to reduce him to that alone. But the legendary California musician hasn’t been off on an island so much as he’s been developing a neural network of Black music in its many forms. It’s not just that DāM-FunK’s music is influenced by bass funk and boogie and disco. It’s not even that he’s collapsed those genres into one tidy box. It’s that he’s been carving out new ways of intoning and connecting with them through funk.
His latest EP, Architect III, is the third and final installment in a years-long genre study of house music. It may not be a significant milestone or an entirely unexpected turn in his discography, but the Architect series’ experiment brings to the surface what’s often bubbling beneath DāM-FunK’s music: the rabbit holes of sub-genres he famously explores, which often lead to a well of Black electronic music. That gravitation towards rhythmic intersections may be one reason that DāM-Funk’s records are equally timeless and futuristic. (It should come as no surprise that he has frequently cited the future-funk of Prince’s 1999 as the initial spark for his career.) The six pieces on Architect III take a different structural approach to track mechanics and soundscapes than DāM’s usual output, but the minimalist four-on-the-floor songs here aren’t such a departure for him in the grand scheme.
The spacy woosh and ambient soundscape that floats atop “Think” wouldn’t give him away, but the dense, bulbous sound of the bass synth is pure DāM-FunK. That bass is a straight line through the track that leaves nothing in its wake. A few times across the song’s nine-minute stretch, it bubbles out of its groove and, without missing a beat, adds or removes a note that makes it swing momentarily with the same forward momentum. “Night Kruise” is straight-ahead electro-funk, immediately familiar terrain to any DāM-Funk fan, though a more rugged and minimalist version of his standard pocket. It also takes the same balanced approach as “Think,” where the bassline is the center of gravity, and everything else hovers loosely around its orbit.
Other tracks are more aggressive and wear their structures on the outside. Neither “Feel” nor “Shine” scaffold towards or obscure their 4/4 foundations, but they’re not empty beats as much as they are vessels, dancefloor canvases for the shimmering, euphoric synth work that DāM-Funk paints over the top. Those synth sounds—both the watercolor-like ambient effects that blend in the background and the weightier foundational elements—are DāM-FunK’s calling card. It’s tempting to point to the artist’s brushstrokes (the synth sounds) as the end goal. But that would undersell the genius, simple chord progressions and melody writing that DāM-Funk bends those synths towards. DāM-Funk, after all, has never struggled to find substance with his music. One of his extraordinary talents as a DJ is how he invites listeners to share his perspective and look at familiar sounds in a new way or position them in unexpected contexts. Architect III isn’t some foreign object in his catalog; it’s just a different object for his gaze.

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