This Michigan-based duo have been working with shoegaze, dream pop, and ambient music for 15 years, and their mastery of their craft-- and their expression of feeling-- sounds effortless.

Windy & Carl: Songs for the Broken Hearted

Songs for the Broken Hearted

Like another married and long-running team, Yo La Tengo's Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan, Windy & Carl's focus on craft means they can be trusted to continually improve. The Michigan-based duo have been working with shoegaze, dream pop, and ambient music for 15 years, and their mastery sounds effortless. Maybe it has something to do with working with a spouse-- there's always someone around to call you on your bullshit. Intimacy whittles away at the ego-driven blind spots where poor artistic decisions happen. It's like working with a mirror. You can't fool yourself.
And intimacy suffuses Songs for the Broken Hearted, a hushed, ascetic collection of long-form ambient compositions. Some of them are purely instrumental; great banks of fog lit softly from within. Sometimes Windy moves through them like a small figure with a lantern, as if searching for a way out, her voice a whisper amid a slow, steady gale. In turn, we feel as lost and lonesome as she sounds. That might not read like commendation, but it is. The album is sad, but not melodramatic; it's the quiet, complex suspension of feelings that informs adult sadness. Anyone who's been in a long-term relationship knows that intimacy and loneliness are not mutually exclusive.
There's nothing flashy about "Btwn You + Me", but its airily opaque drone (comparable to works by Christopher Bissonnette and Belong) is formidable, and Windy breathes into it so subtly that her voice sounds like part of its shapeless mass until it fragments into wisps of language. "La Douleur" is just as uncompromising, a work in low rumble and high shine that seems continually to surge over a 12-minute arc. "My Love" breaks the colossal structures of the first two tracks into glittering shards, with discernible traces of the guitars Windy & Carl process into impenetrable sheets; "Rhodes" striates them like a Growing track; "When We Were" bends them into monkish hymns. Throughout the formal variations, nothing feels out place or breaks the mood. That sort of refinement simply comes with practice.
But craft will only get you so far, especially in ambient music, which becomes blanker as it approaches the ideal. To fill that blankness, you need feeling, of which this album has a surplus. Its genesis looks something like this, according to a blog post by Windy: They made the initial recordings for Songs the same weekend she began her solo album, the equally austere I Hate People. As she worked obsessively on her solo album, Carl worked obsessively on these recordings. (This was a period of unspecified sadness for the couple.) Eventually, Carl gave Windy a CDR of the finished tracks; she listened to them and cried. Finally, she turned to her journals and found the words she couldn't seem to write. "What was happening/ Between you and me?"
Picture them: Windy & Carl, pursuing their private obsessions on different sides of a wall, trying to say in music what they couldn't say to each other in words. Even when the lyrics are hard to make out-- which they often are-- there's no mistaking their meaning. You can hear it in the distance between the words and the sounds, the beginning of each track and the end, what's said and what isn't. And that depth, those vast empty spaces, is what makes Songs for the Broken Hearted so enveloping and so remote at once.


Puff Daddy released this themed mixtape in advance of his upcoming No Way Out 2, but this project has enough weight to serve as a follow-up to his enduring 2010 album Diddy Dirty Money.

MMM

When an artist—especially an established one—releases a "mixtape," it's typically an album in all senses but the price tag.  And free music is never a bad thing; it keeps news cycles busy and 7-Zip installed on your computer. But why did Puff Daddy release MMM as a mixtape? At 44 minutes and containing at least three great songs, with a concept to boot (MMM tangentially tells a story loosely based on the movie Paid in Full), it has enough weight and heft that it could have served as a direct sequel to Diddy Dirty Money's enduring 2010 album Last Train to Paris. Instead, it lives in a low-stakes no-man's-land between Mixtape and Album (despite being free on Datpiff, it was somehow released in an "Edited" version), eliciting slight confusion.
MMM has been publicly hyped since at least this summer, but from the first track, Puff Daddy is already shouting out his "real" album No Way Out 2, ostensibly forthcoming sometime soon. What follows is 13 tracks of sometimes great, sometimes anonymous music. Obviously an abundance of free "good enough" albums is a First World Problem to the nth degree, but the glut of them this year in rap is symptomatic of over-consumption by the listeners.  Shouldn't we be thrilled Puff has, in effect, finally followed up Last Train to Paris? Is it churlish to complain about free music? But the fact remains, if you subtract three filler tracks and a song not credited to Puff (closer "Blow a Check", by Zoey Dollaz) what you have are nine new Diddy songs that add up to "OK."
However, to stress: MMM is not bad. Its concept provides a coherence that keeps the album interesting even when suffering through an interminable Wiz Khalifa guest verse. After the intro, an ominous, low-end rattling Chromatics sample breathes life into the album on the second track, "Harlem", a thrilling moment that establishes Puff Daddy's spin of his home neighborhood as a strange, almost dystopian urban setting, which is befitting a sample most closely associated with Drive and that movie's vision of seedy, night-time Los Angeles.
True to Puff form, MMM does a great job of gathering veteran New York voices and pulling decent performances from them. Between his frequent toasts to Biggie and the appearance of 2/3 of the Lox, Lil' Kim, and DJ Brucie B, MMM qualifies as something of a throwback late-'90s New York album: the whole crew (including several new voices) trade verses with Puff, including the Lil' Kim-assisted "Auction", one of MMM's brightest highlights, constructed on a bombastic sample recalling the best, most classically-maximalist Diddy productions, somewhere between No Way Out and Press Play.
The best song here is "You Could Be My Lover" featuring Ty Dolla $ign and Gizzle, which prominently samples Cody Chesnutt's "Boylife in America", cleverly and subtly drawing a connect between two generations of off-kilter, non-traditional R&B artists. It's a springy, sprightly track, stunning in its warm analog simplicity and also for bursting out of the album's brooding, synth-heavy palette. It also in some ways recalls the giddy highs of Last Train to Paris, which a half-decade ago pretty much perfected a potent and prescient mix of blunt romanticism and inspired, indelible production, and a knack for getting the right guest verse, the right hook, the right tone at the same time—just ask Jeremih, or revisit Trey Songz's overlooked 2014 record Trigga.
The song also contains what ultimately redeems MMM—Puff Daddy's fountain-of-youth charm. On "Help Me", he says "young nigga told me I'm old, I said 'old and rich.'" From someone else, this line doesn't add up to much, but from Puff, it banks its charm on his reputation as a no-apologies capitalist. On "Workin'" he says, "if you see us in the club with Ciroc by the tub we workin'," then right after that "in the DJ booth like an independent group like 'look at this record we workin'". That is the appeal of Puff Daddy right there—the personable opportunist that recalls American, Gatsby-ian myths of self-made success, and then his obsessive love of music. He's "old" now, but to many still the guy in a shiny suit somewhere. Puff released MMM as a mixtape because he loves making and releasing obsessively fussed-over music as much as keeping his stock high. He still commands attention from hip-hop heads and the casual music fan alike. That's worth something.


An adventurous, globe-spanning collection of remixes embraces the hungry and curious spirit of Fever Ray’s 2017 album Plunge.

Plunge Remix

Nothing is fixed, nothing is final. This is the promise of the remix—fluidity. Turn a good song upside down or inside out, and you’ll discover something new every time. Ghanaian duo Jowaa demonstrate as much with their remix of Fever Ray’s “To the Moon and Back”: Working off the original’s squiggly background sounds, their anime-like “Ay ay ay ay” provides an irresistible lead vocal in the first half of the remix. The track is a highlight of Plunge Remix, a new collection of previously released and brand new remixes of songs from Plunge, Fever Ray’s 2017 album about swerving conformity and finding new ways to express one’s sexuality. In the Ghanaian language Ga, jo waa means something like dance hard—a message celebrated in queer communities the world over. To dance is to not stagnate.
For a while in the late 2000s and early ’10s, remixes were almost like a form of payola for mp3 bloggers, who required an endless stream of tracks to give away to readers. Multiple remixes could generate multiple posts and help stoke buzz. While Plunge Remix will serve to remind you of Plunge, that’s not what drives it. Instead, the collection nudges the remix closer to its dancehall and disco origins; each version is in conversation with the club scene that the remixer knows best. From Lisbon’s DJ Marfox to NYC’s NAR, the producers selected to recontextualize Plunge span the globe, opening the possibility for the album’s invigorating depictions of sex and desire to reach dancefloors far and wide. As Fever Ray’s Karin Dreijer noted in a 2017 interview, “There’s a lot of fucking on the album—fuck, fuck, fuck the whole time!—but it’s important because the ways of fucking that don’t make up heterosexual sex are super-stigmatised.”
If you have a little imagination, there are infinite ways of sharing intimacy. As if to nod in that direction, Plunge Remix features not one but five reworks of the cocoon-cracking “Mustn’t Hurry” (co-produced by Paula Temple, who remixes another track here). Swedish artist Tami T disregards the title and nearly triples the pace, bringing the beat to a gallop. STAYCORE collective member Dinamarca respects the bpm but shifts the perspective to widescreen. N.A.A.F.I’s Lao employs echo and acoustic percussion to delectable effect, while Shanghai producer Tzusing’s grinding version includes an existential roar. Completing the quintet, Aasthma (the duo of Pär Grindvik and frequent Fever Ray collaborator Peder Mannerfelt) turns in a dusty rave take.
In total, the digital version of Plunge Remix features 21 remixes by 18 producers (three pull a double shift, including Dreijer themself). Between them, they explore seven tracks from Plunge, plus “I’m Not Done,” a holdover from 2009’s Fever Ray that enjoyed a new life on the Plunge tour. On paper, the repetitions stack up, but listening to the compilation somehow never feels that way. With its circling lyrical motifs and wide spread of tempos and textures, Plunge Remix comes off as the type of mixtape you could put on at a house party to inspire both limb-shaking and love-making. Björk’s industrial interpretation of “This Country” skews furthest from simple pleasure—its abrasive metallic tones are an articulation of the song’s central lyric (“this country makes it hard to fuck”)—but hold out for Johannesburg duo FAKA, who add vocals to the instrumental “Plunge” and turn it into a sacred slow jam.
Being a good remixer requires being a good listener: to take a song somewhere new, you have to know where it’s coming from. What makes Plunge Remix such an enjoyable listen is how warmly each remixer embraces the original’s hungry and curious spirit. One might almost wonder which really came first, Plunge or Plunge Remix? Of course, Plunge Remix was the response—but the nighttime spaces it inhabits, the world it lives and breathes and fucks in, is where Plunge was born in the first place.

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Taylor Swift’s catalog re-recording campaign continues with a thoughtful version of 2010’s Speak Now that tempers teen angst with the ageless quality of lullabies and folk songs.

Taylor Swift: Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)

Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)

Taylor Swift emerged in 2006 as a 16-year-old wunderkind with a gift for articulating all the intimacies and humiliations of falling in love. But throughout her early career, her image was predicated on her youthful innocence as much as her outsized wisdom. Swift “does not drink or swear or flash cleavage,” remarked a profile from around the time of her third studio album, Speak Now—a point that stood in opposition to peers like Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato, who were quick to jettison their tween-friendly branding. Swift seemed to take up the mantle of youth role model with pride. Though she was careful to never disparage anyone directly, she told The New Yorker in 2010, “I don’t feel completely overcome by the relentless desire to put out a dark and sexy ‘I’m grown up now’ album.”
Speak Now, released in 2010, emerged at an inflection point in Swift’s life. She had recently turned 20 and moved out of her parents’ home, had toured the world, and, as evidenced by gut-wrenching tracks like “Dear John” and “Last Kiss,” had experienced heartbreak that shook her sense of emotional security. On this album, she struggles to balance her love of fantasy and escapism with her new responsibilities. Throughout Speak Now, she asks, How do you believe in fairytales and also acknowledge the depth of your pain?
As with her previous re-recordings of early work, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) remains largely faithful to the arrangements and lyrics of the original. But Swift is not the same singer she was at 20. In more recent material, her starry-eyed optimism has been replaced with nuance and caution. She’s learned to voice regret as much as rage; in songs like Lover’s “Death by a Thousand Cuts” and Reputation’s “Dress,” she drinks and allows her sexual fantasies to run wild. On the new recordings of old Speak Now songs, her maturity is revealed not through the words themselves, but how she chooses to deliver them. The angry songs are presented with a sigh rather than a vindictive grin. The songs about heartache are sung carefully and patiently. It feels less like she’s sending a message to any particular ex than she is conveying a generalized weariness about how draining young adulthood can be.
Written between the ages of 18 and 20, the original tracks on Speak Now depict Swift clinging to her girlhood like someone trying to hold water in their palms. “Never Grow Up,” an acoustic ballad, was ostensibly written for young female fans. But by the end the song reveals itself as a means of mourning her past self. She promises the impossible: that no one will ever leave her deserted, that there will be no pain in her life. “Innocent,” a song about forgiving someone who wronged her, evokes the subject’s childhood—chasing fireflies, relying on someone bigger to get things off the shelf—in order to find something worth redeeming in them. Thumping rocker “Long Live” uses images of castles and dragons to celebrate the larger-than-life experience of touring with her band. It’s full of love but sung in the past tense, as if to memorialize the moment while it was still happening. Hearing these songs on Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), there’s less fear and more gentleness. Losing some of that teenage angst makes the songs less immediately enthralling: In the originals’ jagged inhales, sneered words, and ad-libbed laughter, you could hear how deeply these stories affected their author. Hearing her sing them now, they sound slightly anonymous, more like lullabies and folk songs than expressions of pressing concern.
Swift’s youthful naivete peeks through in the way she sings about other women. In her professional life, she had benefited—however passively—from comparisons to women deemed less wholesome and pure. And in her songwriting, she depicted them as unworthy rivals and master manipulators. In “Speak Now,” Swift’s narrator disrupts a marriage ceremony in hopes of separating the groom from his snotty, overdressed bride. On “Better Than Revenge,” she chastises a woman who supposedly stole her boyfriend. She later revised the sentiment, saying in 2014, “No one can take someone from you if they don’t want to leave.” Since the announcement of the re-recording, it has been speculated that she might edit the song’s most cutting and criticized lyrics: “She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.” On Taylor’s Version, this line becomes, “He was a moth to a flame/She was holding the matches.” The change feels half-hearted: Diss tracks aren’t supposed to be respectful. No one listens to “Better Than Revenge” expecting a measured response or nuanced feminist take. The song was satisfying precisely because Swift captured the nearsighted perspective of a teenager; in the attempt to distance herself from that person, she sacrifices resonance for optics.
“Dear John” remains the emotional centerpiece of the album, and one of the most devastating songs Swift has ever written. Across a lonely, warbling guitar lick and patiently unfurling blues-rock arrangement, she details mistreatment from an older partner: his wild oscillations between hot and cold, his ever-moving goal posts. John Mayer, whom the song is ostensibly about, was 32 when he dated a 19-year-old Swift in 2009. The new version, released by Swift at the same age that Mayer was then, is more powerful than ever. It provides a showcase for her deeper vocal range, and the way she enunciates each syllable adds weight to every word. When she belts out his name in the chorus, she sounds completely in control.
Since 2010, Swift has written another song about a torturous relationship she was in at age 19, presumably the same one. “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” from last year’s Midnights, reveals the lasting impact of the memory. She wails, “Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.” It’s colored the way I hear “Dear John” and all of Speak Now: This wasn’t run-of-the-mill teen angst or ego that Swift was singing about back then. It was a coming-of-age moment turned crisis of faith, the kind of experience that reveals people’s capacity to inflict hurt. When you’re a 19-year-old girl curious about the world, it’s often implied that older men with deep eyes and brooding stares should be your teachers. But the lessons they offer are not always the ones you expect. Growing up is learning how to hold that knowledge without giving up hope of finding the pleasure and love you deserve.
Like prior album re-recordings, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) includes a handful of newly released tracks that emerge “from the vault.” Hayley Williams joins for “Castles Crumbling,” which repurposes the same fairytale imagery from “Long Live” to relay her paranoia about a dramatic fall from grace. On “I Can See You,” which sounds more like the inky, lilting trap-pop on Reputation than anything on Speak Now, Swift describes an illicit workplace romance with sultriness and authority that stand apart from the album’s otherwise chaste perspective. On the breezy country-pop song “Foolish One,” Swift reminds herself that she is not the exception to the general rule that if someone is acting disinterested, they probably don’t want to be with you. Just one album prior, she was so confident in her exceptionalism that she re-wrote Romeo and Juliet as a love story starring her. Now, she tempers her romantic fantasies with pragmatism and a sense of jubilant freedom, encouraging a younger self to broaden the scope of her desire.
This re-release doesn’t benefit from the same novelty as Fearless (Taylor’s Version) in 2021, when the endeavor of re-recording her catalog to regain control over her masters felt rare and exciting. And musically, the Speak Now material doesn’t stand up to Red (Taylor’s Version), which presented perhaps her strongest album along with an extended version of fan-favorite “All Too Well” and a number of excellent vault tracks. In recent weeks, news of the latest re-release has been overshadowed by intrigue and minutiae from her current Eras tour. Throughout Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), Swift sometimes mutes the messy adolescent impulses that gave these songs their spark. But elsewhere, she divests from fantasy archetypes—the knight on a white horse, the helpless child—that once limited her. Think of the new Speak Now as a call and response between who she was and who she is: a teenager full of questions about what it means to grow up and an adult woman who’s still turning them over to find new answers.
Correction: Taylor Swift and John Mayer were first reported to be dating in 2009, not 2010.


What's alternative R&B alternative to anymore? Perhaps suffering from the same symptons of B- and C-level grunge bands in the '90s, Lion Babe fail to make good on the strides made by many of their weirder, better genre compatriots.

Begin

You’ve seen plenty of press photos like Lion Babe’s over the last few years: A glamorous singer, eyes locked on the camera as she shares the frame with an unassuming, narrow-shouldered guy who doesn’t look like he talks very much. Even if you’re only fleetingly familiar with acts like AlunaGeorge or Quadron, you probably have a good sense of what to expect from this kind of singer/producer pairing: posh, slightly left-field R&B with one foot in the past and the other in future. And sure enough, that’s more or less what Lion Babe deliver—except that compared to their similarly styled peers, their sound isn’t actually all that left-field at all.
On their debut album Begin, singer Jillian Hervey (the daughter of actress Vanessa Williams) and producer Lucas Goodman (who records under the deceptively Def Jux-y sounding nom de plume Astro Raw) shuffle between disco, house, and neo-soul. And while they update these styles with the airy, wide-open production aesthetic of modern alternative R&B, their songs are rooted squarely in pop. There are no experimental digressions that might alienate the dance floor, no nods to the salad days of Brainfeeder or Ice Cream Records simply for the sake of bolstering the duo’s music-nerd cred. Lion Babe aren’t after cred. They’re after hits.
So far they don’t have those hits, of course, but they’ve come up with enough passable facsimiles to fill a pretty likeable album. "Wonder Woman," an anti-cat calling song produced by Pharrell (his atonement, perhaps, for "Blurred Lines"?), doesn’t ping the brain’s pleasure centers like his top-shelf work, but it’s pleasantly slinky, a nice throwback to the snappy R&B tracks the Neptunes used to pump out in the mid-'00s. "Jump Hi"'s kinetic funk loop makes up for a lazy Childish Gambino guest verse, pasted onto the track like a placeholder for a better substitute the label never delivered. Opener "Whole" doubles down on the funk, with a jabbing groove that feels like a 2016 update of Nikka Costa’s forgotten hit "Like a Feather." There’s no rigid vision tying together this grab bag. Lion Babe are open to any style that might lend itself to a personable, three-minute song, and that flexibility generally works for them.
In some ways it’s refreshing to see that, after a half-decade of aggressive experimentation, sometimes seemingly for the sake of experimentation, alternative R&B is returning to the basics. Why take R&B to strange new places, Lion Babe seem to be saying, when it’s already in a good place to begin with? That conservatism might be a little easier to appreciate, though, if Hervey’s voice wasn’t a near dead-ringer for one of R&B’s great risk takers, Erykah Badu. There’s no mistaking the similarities: the jazzy flutter, the way her voice glides under words then curls around them to pull them closer. It’s as if Hervey prepped for each session by listening to "Bag Lady" on loop, and that resemblance can work against her. It’s a constant reminder of just how safe Lion Babe play it, as well as the shortcuts they take. Where Badu cultivated a voice that’s distinctly her own, Hervey is content to simply borrow somebody else’s.


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 Van Morrison’s 1970 classic.

Moondance

“Will you shut the fuck up and listen?” Van Morrison asked the crowd of chatty teenyboppers gathered at the Whisky A Go Go in Los Angeles in February 1969. The kids answered his question with more talking. The unceremonious Astral Weeks promotional tour was unfolding with the kind of dues-paying, shit-eating milestones that the Belfast singer had sadly become accustomed to in the previous few years. Sure, some signs of positive change were afoot: Warner Bros. had successfully purchased his Bang Records contract from mobbed-up charlatans on the edge of the music industry, and his surprising acoustic rebirth in Astral Weeks had been breathlessly noticed by some critics, even if you could barely find a copy in a record store. But nine-minute, three-chord jams backed by jazz players don’t often become radio hits, and Morrison knew that what he now needed was to generate material that would be played over the airwaves. As his piano player at the time Jef Labes noted, “I think Warners had pretty much told him, ‘You have one more chance.’”
Outside of these industry demands, Morrison was also about to become a father, his wife Janet Planet was then pregnant with their first and only child. Under distinct pressures and backed into a corner, Morrison did what he did best: deliver the goods while remaining his unmistakably eccentric self. The new songs would, of course, be informed by dreams and visions; a casual fan of the record might be surprised if you told them that the tracks on Morrison’s 1970 LP Moondance contained instances of young boys experiencing religious ecstasy merely by sipping water or a recounted dream in which singer Ray Charles is gunned down in public, only to get up and declare he’s A-OK. Somehow, in defiance of conventional wisdom, it all works. The album would solidify Van Morrison as an FM radio mainstay, act as a midwife for the burgeoning genre of “soft rock,” and help usher in the ’70s in America, where the beautiful hippie couples of the late ’60s would soundtrack their developing newfound domestic comfort with the sweet sounds of Morrison’s mystical love-anthems. But before any of that could happen, Morrison would need to fire everyone who had helped him create his 1968 masterpiece, Astral Weeks. Van the Man was tired of floating in space; it was time to dance.
“Van fully intended to become [Bob] Dylan’s best friend,” Janet Planet recalled of the couple’s move to Woodstock, New York in the lead up to Moondance. “Every time we’d drive past Dylan’s house… Van would just stare wistfully out the window at the gravel road leading to Dylan’s place. He thought Dylan was the only contemporary worthy of his attention.” Even if Morrison had dared to wander down that hallowed driveway, it was a moot daydream: Dylan had recently moved out of town. What was left in his wake was a house for Van and Janet on top of a mountain with no running water and Dylan’s former backing backing band—the Band—who treated the Irish singer like a drunken court-jester with some peculiar musical ideas. When Morrison would travel down to Manhattan, he’d sit in Warner Bros’s George Lee’s office and try to express his frustrations without much success. “[He would] just sit and not talk,” Lee recalled, “he wanted to say things, but he didn’t say them.” The only place anyone could count on a fully lucid, expressive, communicative Van Morrison was inside one his own songs.
On Astral Weeks, it was producer Lewis Merenstein who did most of the communicating for the singer when tape wasn’t rolling. Merenstein had chosen which of Morrison’s songs would appear on Astral Weeks, the players who would back Morrison up, and even the final album sequence. Morrison’s revisionist history in regards to this artistic collaboration would reach its apex in 2009 when he glibly told radio host Don Imus that all Merenstein did during Astral Weeks was fetch the musicians sandwiches, but in 1969, Morrison’s rejection of his producer would be protracted and painful. Sessions for Moondance began at Century Sound studio with most of the musicians from Astral Weeks and engineer Brooks Arthur back on the boards as well. In one outtake from these first sessions, you hear Morrison beg Arthur to let him out of the isolation booth: “I feel separated in here. Can’t I go out there and do it?” “I hate to sound like a bad guy,” Arthur tells him, “but it’s not gonna work.” Arthur couldn’t have known it, but his assessment would soon extend far beyond Van’s geographical placement in the studio.
By summer 1969, Morrison had excised the Weeks players from the process and began to pull away from Merenstein, too. Suddenly, the painfully shy man who could barely look at or talk to his musicians on his prior record had started firing players, selecting new ones, and doing something that was almost unheard of at the time: producing his own record. “Van certainly had much more sense of himself,” Merenstein recalled. “He had more confidence.” Merenstein was heartbroken, Morrison was emboldened.
Out went the jazzers, in came the horn section and the big choruses. The only finished song on the record that would bare Merenstein’s fingerprints at all was the  title track. Now so ubiquitous that one has to consciously focus to experience it as anything more than the audio equivalent of wallpaper, “Moondance” was belabored over in the studio, attempted dozens of times in different tempos and styles before finding its sweet spot. “It’s so strong you almost can’t mess with it,” said musician Jef Labes of the track that has become the official anthem of your cousin dancing with his new bride at their wedding. Morrison was especially proud of this new “sophisticated” composition, noting that even Frank Sinatra could perform it.
Morrison had more bold moves up his sleeve. For album opener “And It Stoned Me” the singer invokes the universal term for being high on drugs and then proceeds to paint vignettes that had nothing to do whatsoever with chemical intake. “I went to this little stone house, and there was an old man there with dark weather-beaten skin, and we asked him if he had any water,” Morrison recalled about the real childhood encounter that inspired the song. “He gave us some water which he said he’d got from the stream. We drank some and everything seemed to stop for me. Time stood still. For five minutes everything was really quiet and I was in this ‘other dimension.’ That’s what the song is about.” It’s worth noting that Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Moondance both open with a track repeatedly referencing the “stoned” term, but while Dylan’s usage couldn’t be more tongue-in-cheek, and is sung with a billboard-sized wink, Van Morrison is sincerely wailing about the time that some stream water caused him to enter another dimension. You tell me which one is the braver artistic move.
Morrison’s lyrical interests on Moondance turn towards the preoccupations of gypsies and sailors. For someone so far from home and constantly on the move during the time of writing the album, it doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to piece together why these lifestyles suddenly became such an accessible lyrical touchstone for the songwriter. One of these transient-songs, “Into the Mystic” functions as the album’s moving-spiritual-quest-centerpiece, just as “Madame George” did on Astral Weeks. “Into the Mystic” is such a soothing and reassuring track that a poll conducted by the BBC in the late ’90s found that it had become—no joke—a popular song for surgeons to listen to while operating on patients. In classic Morrison form, his explanation of the meaning behind the song is both so bland and broad that it could be applied to literally anything, anywhere, at anytime: “I guess the song is just about being part of the universe.” Ain’t that the truth.
Elsewhere, the Moondance version of “Caravan” now seems forever tame and reserved in comparison to its infamous live take performed at the Band’s 1976 The Last Waltz concert, filmed by Martin Scorsese and released in 1978; it would not be an exaggeration to call this the “definitive” version of this Morrison classic. While it has become a popular pastime of music fans to conjecture “who’s on what drug and how much” during the various performances in Waltz, what’s most evident in Morrison’s “Caravan” performance in the film is witnessing someone who has finally been accepted by his peer group and is completely exuberant about it. No longer the Band’s drunken mascot, Morrison’s delivery here is nothing short of show-stopping (there’s a reason his stage-exiting high kicks have become such a mainstay GIF on social media). Add on top of this the fact that Morrison is literally singing about building a circle of friends that will stick by his side (“And the caravan has all my friends/It will stay with me until the end”) and you’ve got one of the most triumphant, redemptive moments in rock’n’roll. Robbie Robertson and Rick Danko even seem to exchange a look as he leaves the stage that conveys, “Wow, what the hell was that?” Who needs cocaine when Bob Dylan might be watching from the wings as you defiantly mispronounce radio (“rah-dio”) and bust-out the most soulful, electrifying performance of the star-studded concert? Side note: he might have also been on cocaine.
Fulfilling her role as Van Morrison’s personal and public muse, Janet Planet wrote the liner notes for Moondance, turning her husband’s career into a literal fairytale. “Once upon a time, there lived a very young man who was, as they say, gifted,” it begins. “[Warner Bros.] believed that my image, precisely because it was so enigmatic, was the perfect visual to describe what was going on musically,” she later noted about her role in the myth-building of Van Morrison. Decades later, with hindsight about how misguided all of it had been underneath the PR sheen, Janet Planet confessed to me during an interview that “being a muse is a thankless job, and the pay is lousy.”
More Dylan dot-connecting occurred when it was time to take the cover photo; Elliott Landy, fresh off his iconic snapshot used on the cover of Nashville Skyline, was dispatched to capture Morrison for Moondance. “When I went up to his home on the day of the photo shoot, Van had a large pimple in the middle of his forehead,” Landy recalled, “so I had to photograph him up close cutting off the top of his forehead.” Behind every iconic image, dreamy liner note, and romantic torch song is a less than pristine reality, it seems.
“Something’s been made; it stands; it won’t be broken down,” Greil Marcus and Lester Bangs excitedly announced in Rolling Stone’s review of Moondance in March of 1970. Both critics were already fans of Morrison and especially Astral Weeks, and it’s heartening to read their enthusiasm extending to the well-earned success that was awaiting Morrison around the corner. “This one will be immensely popular,” they wrote. “Van’s picture already fills the windows of record stores and his new music is getting more airplay on FM stations than anything in recent memory.” In July 1970, Morrison, clad in sunglasses, appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone. It was too late to stop now; Van Morrison was about to become famous.
“Make dreams come true if we want them to,” Morrison sings on the album’s penultimate track, “Everyone.” For the singer from Belfast, the long delayed dream-come-true would become an ongoing Catch-22. Finally, Morrison could provide for his new family and create the precise kind of music he wished to make, but there was a downside to the success. “Being famous is not great for the creative process,” Morrison said in 2015. “Not for me, anyway.” In 1973, Janet Planet left Van Morrison. Their daughter, Shana, a singer like her father, often opens for Morrison at live concerts. When, in 2013, Warner Bros. announced an expanded edition of the album that, by that time, had gone triple platinum, Morrison’s response was almost predictable. In a moment when he could have celebrated one of his greatest triumphs, he could only recall the behind-the-scenes business dealings that soured the set of gorgeous songs for him over the decades. “My management company at that time gave this music away 42 years ago,” he announced on his website, “and now I feel as though it’s being stolen from me again.” He told his fans not to buy the new release. Just like the teenyboppers at the Whisky had in 1969, his plea went unheard. Some things never change.


Another trio of remastered Sonic Youth-related reissues has surfaced, offering a glance at the band and its side projects amid this current period of serious downtown New York nostalgia and speculation. Why certain projects and albums were chosen over others isn't clear, but for now Geffen/Universal has spit-shined the 1982 self-titled debut EP, 1989's Madonna-fixated *The Whitey Album* (credited to Ciccone Youth), and Thurston's 1995 solo debut, *Psychic Hearts*. Beyond the requisite history lesson and catalogue gap-filling, the triad's dropped in anticipation of the band's 15th studio album, *Rather Ripped*, which is out in June, and maybe as a nod

Thurston Moore: Sonic Youth / The Whitey Album / Psychic Hearts

Another trio of remastered Sonic Youth-related reissues has surfaced, offering a glance at the band and its side projects amid this current period of serious downtown New York nostalgia and speculation. Why certain projects and albums were chosen over others isn't clear, but for now Geffen/Universal has spit-shined the 1982 self-titled debut EP, 1989's Madonna-fixated The Whitey Album (credited to Ciccone Youth), and Thurston's 1995 solo debut, Psychic Hearts. Beyond the requisite history lesson and catalogue gap-filling, the triad's dropped in anticipation of the band's 15th studio album, Rather Ripped, which is out in June, and maybe as a nod to Ecstatic Peace!, Moore's excellent experimental and noise label, teaming with Universal.
All three albums have their moments, but the five-song debut gives the most band for your buck. Packaged with extensive (and worthwhile) liner notes from Byron Coley, Glenn Branca, original Sonic Youth drummer Richard Edson, and a note from Moore regarding the relation of reggae and Can to the tracks contained therein, Sonic Youth is also bolstered by seven live tracks and an early demo, all from 1981. Obviously more primitive than the quartet's later work, the recordings offer a ghostly, mesmerizing locked groove. My favorite aspect of the EP is the band's willingness to take its time: "Burning Spear" tries a hand at post-punk dub that swivels with Gordon's bass line and Edson's drum breaks. As Coley thoughtfully notes, that song's amazing sound of an airplane lift-off or wind filtering through a crumbled lofts is actually Ranaldo's "contact mic'd electric drill" filtered through wah. On the track, Moore's vocals are haunting and urgent, like he's pinned to a mattress on the floor of his East Village apartment: "I'm not afraid to say I'm scared/ In my bed I'm deep in prayer/ I trust the speed/ I love the fear."
This is SY at their most icy; it's an erudite, windswept set, wrapping distortion inside danceable half-frozen Liquid Liquid beats. Even the EP's hand-drum rocker, "I Don't Want to Push It", is a gust of slush in a Bowery puddle. Moore takes over bass duties on the lengthy, jumpy instrumental closer "The Good and the Bad". Elsewhere, the bonus live stuff swelters: a super elastic "Burning Spear" is impressive and a rip-roaring version of "She Is Not Alone" contrasts the restrained studio take.
If Sonic Youth's a chilly midnight haze, The Whitey Album tilts toward a confetti-lined karaoke jamboree. Finding the crew, along with Mike Watt (who offers liner notes penned in 1993), adopting Madonna's surname, Ciccone Youth are hopped-up on hand claps, drum machinations, lo-fi industrial, repetitious loops, and wily cover tunes. All that, and you get to hear Moore rap. Critics tend to highlight the sight gags like the meta "Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu", with Gordon and friend talking over a stereo about the possibilities of managing Dinosaur (Mascis shows up with a humongous guitar wail), that minute of Cagean silence, and Watt's cow-polk cover version of "Burnin' Up", which hits me like a disco take on his cover of Daniel Johnston's "Walking the Cow". (Historical note: Greg Ginn lays down an extra guitar.) That's fine-- these oddities are pretty choice-- but there are much better musical bits.
Something you might not remember: The Whitey Album's packed with gorgeous instrumentals like "Macbeth", which piles up drum machines, fuzzing guitars, and catchy Cure-like chord rings. Opener "Needle-Gun" is Fat Albert-style No-Wave. There's also a bit of self-sampling: "Platoon II"'s echo drums and gentle guitar drabs are a vocal-free take of the Gordon-fronted "G-Force". Of course, you'll also hear Gordon's cheesy, but wonderfully droll "Addicted to Love" and their most famous cover, an echo-dub implosion of Madonna's "Into the Groove", recast as "Into the Groovey".
Released after Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star and joined by Steve Shelley on drums and Tim Foljahn on second guitar, Moore's femme-themed solo debut, Psychic Hearts, is a collection of often-beautiful sunset guitar rock. Of his vocal turns, my favorite is the caffeinated, teen-angst/dysfunction of the propulsive title track. Moore's vocals are also particularly swoon-worthy on the whispery "Pretty Bad" and breathy "Ono Soul".
Most of Psychic Hearts, however, works because of the simple repetitions of instrumentals like lilting opener "Blues From Beyond the Grave" and the gently paranoid "(I Got a) Catholic Block" patterning that surfaces between Moore's voice in "Feathers". The centerpiece is the 20-minute instrumental exeunt, "Elegy for All the Dead Rock *s". The track's distinct movements mingle fluidly, swerving into a sideways cascade before bursting and blooming until notes sharpen and a final tidal wave arcs and releases. The noise implosions of its final third are anti-climactic, but after some gentle plucks and slides, Moore grabs his pick and glides into that dark night as gorgeously as he began, only this time with more triumphal drums.
God, Sonic Youth's catalogue is vast. For even the biggest fans, it can take a reissue to suggest refocusing on something you've previously taken for granted. (Proust fans are nodding in agreement.) Psychic Hearts was, for whatever reason, still pretty embedded in my memory, but I had mostly forgotten the precise, trashcan regality of the EP. The Whitey Album, something I'd relegated to the Mr. T Experience section of my memory, was the biggest surprise: Collecting dust in my closet, this fucker has some incredibly catchy and flat-out kick ass and moving moments. If you've never heard any of this stuff, take a peak at what your guitar heroes were up to when they were a tad younger. If, like me, you assumed you'd moved past it: Go back and realize you haven't.


Tony Molina’s fat-free, minute-long missives give you everything you might want in a rock song in a third of the time. This rarities collection is the perfect entry point.

Tony Molina: Songs From San Mateo County

Songs From San Mateo County

Tony Molina’s fat-free, minute-long missives blend ’60s jangle, ’70s power-pop, ’80s metal riffs and ’90s indie-rock fuzz. They give you everything you might want in a rock song, in other words, in about a third of the time. His songs feel tailor-made for a streaming-on-demand culture where the words “Skip Intro” have become ingrained in our entertainment-consumption rituals. The Bay Area hardcore vet has issued a stream of compact, tunefully oversaturated albums that are rivaled only by episodes of “I Think You Should Leave” for the most fun you can have in quarter-hour intervals.
Songs From San Mateo County collects 14 rarities recorded from 2009-2015, encompassing unreleased material, songs salvaged from out-of-print cassettes, and solo takes of tracks later recorded with his bands Ovens and Violent Change. But unlike many similar compilations, the album fits seamlessly into Molina’s existing canon—his work already blurs the line between “impulse” and “finished track.” And where his official albums tend to focus on a specific aesthetic, Songs From San Mateo County touches on every style he’s explored, making it the ideal entry point.
While Molina’s 2018 album Kill the Lights showed him occasionally creeping past the 120-second mark, Songs From San Mateo County captures him at his most brutally economical. Even by Molina’s microdosing standards, some of these tracks are so brief they challenge the very notion of what you’re allowed to call a song. Even the leanest scraps feel purposeful—the arpeggiated instrumental “Intro” runs for all of 13 seconds, but still manages to answer the question: what if Queen played Warped Tour? And “#1 Riff” is less self-aggrandizing display than spiritual communion with Big Star’s No. 1 Record, with shimmering acoustic textures that vividly recreate that album’s bittersweet, before-sunrise mood in 28 seconds flat.
The core of Songs From San Mateo County lands squarely in the DIY-via-DGC zone Molina staked out on his 2014 solo debut Dissed and Dismissed, and a handful of these tracks (like “Can’t Find My Way” and “Hard to Know”) actually feel like trial runs for that record’s delicate balance of Teenage Fanclub hooks and Thin Lizzy flourishes. It’s also a showcase for his dexterity within confined spaces: “I’m Not Down” chimes like something out of Bob Mould’s Sugar songbook, slips into gloriously metallic riffs, and then slides home on a gloriously J Mascis guitar solo outro. And then there are the songs that feel so effortless and pristine—the Petty-esque heartbreaker “Word Around Town” and the acoustic ballad “Don’t See Me Now”—that it seems absurd they were buried until now.
Perhaps Songs From San Mateo County signals the end of this phase for Molina; he’s claimed the songs on his next album will cross the two-minute border, suggesting he’s entering his Under the Bushes, Under the Stars years. Tellingly, this collection concludes with “Outro,” a relaxed, tiki-torch-lit, surf-tinged instrumental that atypically evokes pre-Beatlemania rock ‘n’ roll. Whether it’s just a one-off or a sign that Molina is saying “aloha” to his past remains to be seen. But for now, Songs From San Mateo County presents the opportunity to appreciate an artist who’s accomplished a lot with limited time and space, yet only seems to be getting started.


The electro-punk duo Rainbow Arabia make their smoothest, most pop-friendly, and sophisticated statement yet.

L.A. Heartbreak

On their new full-length L.A. Heartbreak, the electro-punk duo Rainbow Arabia (married couple Tiffany and Danny Preston) has evolved into a full-fledged mainstream pop act. The tropical polyrhythms of their earliest works are sublimated into post-Moroder synth vamps, and  a newfound sense of balance and a lighter touch have clicked into compositions of unexpected sophistication. In one sense, this is a logical progression from their 2008 debut EP Basta through 2013’s FM Sushi, as the brightly colored and self-consciously “exotic” influences of North African and “other” pop musics have gradually becomes subtler and more balanced. But even in the album’s most satisfying moments, it’s impossible not to feel that there is something missing.
To pin down exactly what that missing element is, it’s necessary to untwine—or maybe re-entangle—the polar elements of Rainbow Arabia’s sound; big percussion grooves and brassy microtonal synths on the one hand (think Sublime Frequencies) and wistful, distant vocals and subtler arrangements on the other (think Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, New Order) on the other. These two ideas are not so different:  Even at their most exploratory, Rainbow Arabia have always been heirs of a sort to new wave and ’80s synthpop. Their aesthetic could be described as Berlin or Missing Persons for a generation that has swapped out MTV for YouTube vids of Vybz Kartel and kuduro.
On L.A. Heartbreak, one gets the sense that Preston & Preston are less likely to spend their time daydreaming with a store-bought fluorescent light and more likely to address their issues like grown-ups. The trippy and exotic elements are still there—just toned down and incorporated into something that feels more like everyday life. “Followed” comes on like “Just Can’t Get Enough”-era Depeche Mode before shifting into more soaring sadness. “Top Hat” takes three of it’s four minutes to morph into a slow acid house track worthy of Mr. Fingers. But the various elements feel most cohesive on the lead single “Plena.” A slow reggaeton pulse is augmented by scintillating synth-work that suggests sunlight sparkling off water, as Tiffany intones “Take me on a holiday...I am so in love with you/Tell me what you wanna do” in a voice so plaintive it’s easy to read as “I am so alone with you.” A new listener might rightly wonder if this was the new Gwen Stefani song or maybe another EDM-pop prodigy a la the Chainsmokers (if that sounds backhanded, it’s not—pop this effortless is rare and never as easy to make as it is to listen to).
Over the LP as a whole, though, this more anonymous, disaffected sound leaves the topography of Rainbow Arabia a bit flat, sometimes (as on “Modern Contemporary” and “Mixolydian”) feeling like Afrobeat without any of the urgency or joy. The duo’s songwriting has grown stronger, and their arrangements more subtle. Even the record's honest disaffection feels in some ways more authentic than their erstwhile experiments in “world” sounds. But those forays, even when they were clunky or unfortunate, also brought a sense of play and provocation that is missing here. Now that they’ve landed back on Earth, maybe next time they can bring some of their wilder, more colorful dreams back with them.


Aged rock critic Richard Meltzer once said that writing about music is much harder today than it was in the ...

Various Artists: Chains and Black Exhaust

Chains and Black Exhaust

Aged rock critic Richard Meltzer once said that writing about music is much harder today than it was in the 60s. He said that back then, there probably weren't 20 great bands in the world, so it was much easier to cover the scene comprehensively. I'd say he was reducing the issue a tad (especially in light of sets like Nuggets), but there is a kernel of wisdom in his observation. In 1967, Jimi Hendrix almost single-handedly rallied troupes from rock, pop, blues, jazz and soul on both sides of the Atlantic with his psychedelic call to arms, Are You Experienced?. In one fell swoop, he united the sounds of acts ranging from James Brown to The Beatles, and proved that young black men had as much a claim to rock's budding authenticity as any English mop tops. This could never happen again, as ironically, people like Hendrix contributed to a splintering of scenes and sounds that made common threads almost impossible to find (or wind) thereafter.
In the wake of that fertile era, rock historians penned millions of words in hopes of connecting disparate dots into a clear lineage. You know the drill: Hendrix begat Earth, Wind and Fire, Can and Led Zeppelin, who in turn begat everyone from Bad Brains to Lauryn Hill to Pearl Jam. The holes in this reductive reasoning-- all too common in the post-Creem, post-Rolling Stone world of music journalism-- becomes apparent when you realize that hey, there might have been more than twenty good bands way back when, and wow, people were coming up with all kinds of shit in their free time.
One crucial moment, almost always glossed over, is the short-lived Black Rock "scene" of the late 60s and early 70s (only occasionally in cahoots with Black Power); you'd figure that, coming immediately after Hendrix, bands like Parliament-Funkadelic, the Bar-Kays and the newly rockified Isley Brothers would seem obvious parallels, and accordingly, they're the ones always brought up in such discussions. However, bands from all over the place were shooting for the very same synthesis of American countercultural music that Hendrix did were all over, as the mysterious compilation Chains And Black Exhaust strives to document.
Without a track list, artist mentions or liner notes, the Memphix crew (a collective of DJs and funk 45 junkies spearheaded by Dante Carfagna) attempt to set the record straight on black rock, psychedelia and funk, releasing this seventeen-track comp on Jones (a sub-label of their own Memphix Records). The sound is on the exact same, embryonic tip as Funkadelic's first record (if they'd had even less of a budget). Hendrix's wah-wah makes several appearances, as does his stoned out vocal delivery, and the omnipresent direct-from-vinyl mastering gives it a vintage groove. Of course, it would have been nice to know what the hell I was listening to without resorting to major search engine detective work, but for the most part, it's a stone jam of such proportions as to render the confusion part of the experience.
The first half of a great bit captured from a radio talk show ("it's the color man, and the monthly payments, you know what I mean?") opens the record, and leads directly to Blackrock's "Yeah Yeah". Piano and guitar drone set the stage for badass kung fu stomp, courtesy of molasses-laden drums and bass, both doing their best to max out the mics. An acid-fried guitar solo elevates it into the Hendrix/Eddie Hazel stratosphere. Likewise, Iron Knowledge's "Showstopper" takes Hendrix's patented quivering fret trick (on bass, no less!) and slaps down an anti-war jam so infectious, the singers can barely stay on key during the chorus. OK, in truth some of these bands were less than polished, but the spirit is always there.
"Life Is A Gamble", performed by Preacher, Doug Anderson's "Mama, Here Comes the Preacher" and Hot Chocolate's "What's Good for the Goose" are prime slices of black rock, and would have sounded completely at home on Parliament's Osmium LP ("shooby dooby, bang bang, brotha's gotta groovy thang"), or one of the early Ohio Players records. The former tune features a break so potent a crossing of Band of Gypsies and a porno soundtrack, Westbound Records should pay them back royalties. Gran Am's "Get High" represents the raw end of the spectrum here, as the band overdub their vocalizing of the title over and over, threatening to bury the drums completely. On the other end is Curtis Knight's super-tight "The Devil Made Me Do It", which is an excellent mix of Superfly pulse and almost pop, classic rock hooks.
The lesser tracks play it closest to standard funk, such as the Kool & the Gang spunk of track 4, or the funky Getaway music of track 14-- of course, I have no idea who I just dissed, but so goes limited pressing, semi-bootleg funk comps. There's a rumor Chains and Black Exhaust will be reissued next year with recording info and track listing, but for now, Jones is your connection. It's not as if there are loads of other comps with this stuff out there, and until somebody gets off their ass and issues those early Funkadelic records in a decent mix, you need this. Shit, you need it anyway.


The debut album from the SoCal trio is a flawed artifact of ’90s alt-rock, punk, ska, and hip-hop, but remains a fascinating document of Bradley Nowell as the honey-voiced musical tourist bro.

40oz. to Freedom

Most Sublime fans have only ever known Bradley Nowell as a ghost. The frontman overdosed in a motel just two months before his band’s self-titled blockbuster 1996 album, never living to witness its impact. And so, tasked with promoting a cheery, summertime record now indelibly associated with death, Sublime’s label MCA and imprint Gasoline Alley worked some marketing magic, covering for Nowell’s absence in the band’s music videos by superimposing archival footage of him, as if to reassure viewers he was there in spirit. In one, his apparition looks down from the heavens at his beloved dog Louie, the Dalmatian that had spent Sublime’s concerts on stage curled up at his master’s feet, and smiles. Later in the same video, as the band’s surviving members run afoul of Deebo from the Friday movies on a cheap spaghetti western set, Nowell’s hologram sits on a stoop removed from the action, doing what he spent so much of his life doing: playing his guitar. He looks at peace.
It’s human nature to cling to a comforting takeaway after a tragedy. In a “Behind the Music” special years later, those closest to Nowell all framed his death the same way: After battling addiction for so long, he was prepared to die, and maybe even on some level all right with it. “It wasn’t a question of was it going to happen, it was a question of when it was going to happen,” drummer Bud Gaugh recounted. Yet Nowell’s death left a bigger void than even his loved ones and bandmates could have imagined. As Sublime’s popularity ballooned, and their eponymous final album sold by the millions, MCA rushed to capitalize on the seismic demand for a band that no longer existed, clearing the group’s vault with a series of live albums and rarity and greatest hit collections. Cover bands popped up, too, along with acts that traced the band’s template of breezy Cali reggae-punk so closely that they might as well have been cover bands—an entire cottage industry, cast from Nowell’s footprints.
All those knockoffs proved poor substitutes for the real thing. Sublime only recorded three albums during their run, and the middle one, 1994’s Robbin’ the Hood, was so haphazard and caustic that only the most devoted fan could tolerate any significant time with it (it was recorded in a crack house, and it sounded like it). That meant that all roads from Sublime’s crossover hits like “What I Got” and “Santeria” led back to their 1992 debut 40oz. to Freedom, their most enduring work and one of the most musically ravenous albums of the ’90s, a countercultural melting pot that extended its hand to skate-punks, surfers, burnouts, tape-trading jam kids, and hip-hop fanatics alike, inviting them all to gather around the same bong.
Sublime trumpeted their influences proudly, stuffing the album beyond its seams with covers of Bad Religion, Descendents, Toots and the Maytals, and the Grateful Dead, samples of Public Enemy, N.W.A., and Minutemen, and repeated salutes to KRS-One, the rapper Nowell idolized most. And, as the 75-minute record hadn’t sufficiently established the scope of their tastes, they spent its closing track shouting out to all the other acts that they just as easily could have covered if the album ran another hour or two—Butthole Surfers, Fugazi, Frank Zappa, Eek-A-Mouse, Crass, Big Drill Car and on and on and on. Even Steve Albini’s defunct noise project Rapeman got a nod.
The only album of its era that neared its big-tent ambitions is Check Your Head, which the Beastie Boys recorded around the same time in Los Angeles, a short drive from Sublime’s native Long Beach, but even that album was rooted in one primary style and one very specific notion of cool. 40oz. to Freedom’s only binding thread, on the other hand, was Nowell’s insatiable need to play a little bit of everything. The album feels like a marathon attempt to hold his own interest, cannonballing from ska to thrash to dub to campfire sing-alongs at the speed of a “Beavis and Butt-Head” channel-surfing session. Never mind that Sublime weren’t great at all of those styles, or even most of them. In their wide embrace of music, they came to stand for something greater than any single sound: a spirit of radical inclusion. The group’s forbearers, Berkeley ska legends Operation Ivy, had preached unity, making overtures beyond the punk circles they primarily played to, but it was Sublime that put those ideals into action.
40oz. was an enormously prescient record, predicting hip-hop’s influence on the late-’90s alternative sound years before a DJ became a perfectly normal thing for a rock band to have on its payroll. Mostly, though, the album resonated because it captured a lifestyle. Rejecting the smoldering angst of the grunge music that was beginning to take root on the radio, Sublime made revelry their primary muse, detailing parties, hookups, and bad decisions with such rowdy immediacy. To make the most of their modest budget, they snuck into a studio after dark to record it, and you can picture the band, their friends, and their many hangers-on crowding the room, clanking beer bottles and stubbing out cigarettes on the couch cushions. It’s no wonder why the album became a staple of so many cookouts, keggers, smoke sessions, and all-night “GoldenEye” tournaments—it was a record born of having nothing to do and nowhere to be, which made it the perfect soundtrack for a generation’s leisure time.
Yet while it’s hard to imagine a future when it won’t be blasting out of dorm rooms, time hasn’t flattered the album. A belated regional hit that primed the band for their breakthrough, “Date Rape” in particular was questionable even by its era’s standards, but today it sounds downright vile. The band sold the single as an anti-rape song, which it halfheartedly tries to be—the rapist is the villain, after all, and he gets his comeuppance—but mostly it’s a “sexual assault as entertainment” song, a titillating yarn about a predator and his prey, set to giddy, Fishbone-style horns that undercut any empathy it pretends to have for its victim. “Suggestion” this is not: Even if you can look past the noxious homophobia of the song’s parting shot about the imprisoned rapist taking it “in the behind”—poetic justice at its least poetic—ending a song denouncing date rape by cheering prison rape is unjustifiably bad.
In surprisingly callous comments to an Orlando magazine that suggest he might not have been ready for the spotlight international fame would have put on him, Nowell leaves no reason to give the song’s intentions the benefit of the doubt. “I’ve never raped anyone at least as far as I can remember,” Nowell said. “We were at a party a long time ago and we were all talking about bad date rape was. This guy was like, ‘Date rape isn’t so bad; if it wasn't for date rape I’d never get laid.’ Everyone at the party was bummed out about it, but I was cracking up and I wrote a funny song about it.” If you want to understand why so many people loathe this band, remember this anecdote, because it epitomizes what Sublime sounds like to outsiders: Dudes guffawing at a joke you find appalling.
That interview is hardly the only indication that Nowell’s offstage behavior might have fallen short of even the most basic standards that today’s listeners expect of musicians. “Pinching girlies’ asses, I was drinking recklessly,” he sings on “What Happened.” On “Right Back,” he dismisses his girlfriend as a ho and strongly suggests he slept with yours—like many white rap fans of the era, he took the genre’s influence as license to parrot its misogyny. Nowell could also play fast and loose with the cultures he appropriated. His reggae voice is broad almost to the point of insensitivity, a throaty imitation of a lascivious islander, and he mimics KRS-One’s gunshot adlib (“Bo! Bo!”) with the same overzealous glee some of his white fans would adopt years later when shouting Chappelle-ified versions of Lil Jon’s catchphrases: “What? Okay!!!” There’s a fine line between homage and caricature. Sublime’s appeal rested on never asking fans to consider it.
None of those criticisms probably would have bothered Nowell much. California’s punk scene was often proudly less PC than those in other parts of the country, and Nowell never tried to pass himself off as a saint. He sang unapologetically about robbing, drugging, and whoring. On “Wrong Way,” a hit single from their self-titled album that’s somehow even more squeamish than “Date Rape,” he sang far too vividly in the first person about sleeping with an underage prostitute (“It’s almost a true story,” bassist Eric Wilson once said). It’s remarkable, then, that listeners heard so much grace in him. Here was a guy who once used—and possibly even coined—the term “butt-housed,” yet in fan circles he came to be celebrated as almost an American Bob Marley, an emissary of peace and love who proved too pure for this world.
So how did such an uncouth horn dog, a man with so many vices and such an indelicate way with words, come to represent such an ill-fitting ideal? Chalk some of it up to his most powerful instrument: his voice, a weary croon with an inviting twinkle that implied wisdom and sensitivity that wasn’t always actually present in his lyrics. “I thought that Bradley was a black guy, because his voice is so soulful,” Gwen Stefani recalled. “And I had it all in my head exactly what he looked like, you know? And I was falling in love with him, just because [of] his voice.” On record, he certainly doesn’t sound like the shirtless bro with a tattoo of his own band’s name jetting across the massive canvas of his back on Sublime’s cover. To watch old concert footage of the band is to be suffocated by their burly, beer-gut ideal masculinity, yet listening to “Badfish” on headphones it’s difficult to imagine anything other than a gentle soul. For 40oz.’s penultimate track, he even pulls off a convincingly heartfelt cover of “Rivers of Babylon,” the Melodians’ gorgeous hymn from the Harder They Come soundtrack. That’s something Op Ivy never could have done.
And of course, death has a way of imparting mystique on fallen musicians, and the band’s posthumous music videos stopped just short of literally painting a halo over him. Watching those videos with Nowell piped in from the great beyond makes it easy to buy into his coronation. Just as the immortal image of Kurt Cobain became him in a cardigan, performing angelically against a candlelit stage on the “Unplugged” special that aired ceaselessly after his death, Nowell’s became him looking down from the heavens, watching lovingly over his dog. It’s less subtle, no doubt, yet no less effective.
For years, Gaugh and Wilson resisted exploiting their late bandmate’s legacy, a moratorium that lasted until 2009, when they joined with young Nowell soundalike Rome Ramirez in a band called Sublime With Rome, despite the furious objections of Nowell’s estate. Even setting aside questions of legality and tastefulness, the band has released two albums, and there isn’t a moment on either that feels spontaneous or surprising. Without Nowell’s acerbic personality cutting through all those peppy guitar riffs, their sound is too bright and saccharine, almost cloyingly so. Nowell, for all his faults, was the human contradiction that a band like this needed to hold any interest, which is why none of Sublime’s imitators, semi-official offshoots included, have made anywhere near the same impact. Despite the popular misreading of Nowell’s legacy, listeners didn’t just want the pleasing sounds and platitudes about love. They wanted the full sordid package: the raunch, squalor, drugs, side chicks, and dog shit. Nowell’s music didn’t resonate in spite of being problematic. It resonated because it was problematic. As a white musician at the time, Nowell had license to skirt taboos and cross cultural boundaries, his intentions rarely doubted or scrutinized, and he took advantage to an extent few of his peers ever had.
And that’s why there may be a window on the movement that Nowell started. Each year 40oz. sounds a little further past its sell-by date, its songs a little more sour and its sexual politics even less excusable. For the same reason that Mötley Crüe doesn’t make many new teenage fans these days, Sublime’s well of young fans may dry up, too; time has a way of gradually erasing music that doesn’t meet modern mores. Even many original fans who still sneak a listen while doing weekend yard work probably wouldn’t want to be seen wearing their old 40oz. T-shirt in public anymore. Yet if you talk to those same fans candidly, many will admit the same thing: It’s the most embarrassing album they’ve ever loved.


Abetted by a handful of fellow musicians from the hardcore scene, Boston’s Justin DeTore makes thick, impenetrable death metal that’s desolate and filled with tension.

Punishment in Flesh

Justin DeTore is part of a prolific group of Boston hardcore musicians updating classic metal styles, most notably as the drummer for Sumerlands and Stone Dagger and the bassist for Magic Circle. Innumerable Forms is his death-metal project, bringing the cold doom of early Finnish death metal stateside. For their debut full-length, Punishment in Flesh, DeTore assembled a formidable crew, bringing on Iron Lung’s Jensen Ward and Austin metalpunk prodigy Chris Ulsh (some of Innumerable Forms’ early shows were essentially Mammoth Grinder with DeTore on vocals) on guitars, Red Death/Genocide Pact drummer Connor Donegan, and the Rival Mob’s Doug Cho on bass.
Innumerable Forms’ demos became cult underground commodities because they essentially took a solo black-metal approach to death metal, trading one frosty, desolate sound for another. (Though it was mostly DeTore playing, it wasn’t all solo—Ward co-wrote songs for a 2016 demo and one of DeTore’s frequent collaborators, Chris Corry, produced and contributed guitar solos.) Punishment in Flesh leans heavier on the doom side of death-doom than the demos did, making it swampier yet even more unforgiving. Right off, the title track breathes in early Sentenced, strips away any decorative fringes and melodic touch, and spits back out total ugliness. DeTore has always had a vision for the thick and impenetrable, and here he has the sound and the personnel to see that out.
“Re-Contaminated,” a reworking of “Contaminated” from 2010’s Dark Worship, tacks on a doomy intro and is a touch slower than the original, yet it’s enough to put the song in another dimension. Before it was a blizzard where DeTore’s riff wall howled over everything else, where now the pummel is more distinguishable, more throbbing. Combined with Donegan’s rolling double bass drum—the drum sound is a huge leap from the demos—the new version is much beefier. It slams their Finnish sound to the concrete. Donegan’s interplay with Ulsh and Ward is key in making the slow trudges all the more agonizing; in “Firmament” there is no sweet release into speed, just hanging riffs and mid-paced torture. They have the capabilities to blast out—“Stress Starvation” and “Meaning” show the band at its most ruthless—but they know you secretly don’t want that most of the time, that the slow bits are perversely satisfying. “Joyless,” another re-recorded track, manages to sound more desolate, its ending churn arid while a disjointed solo, a guest appearance from Corry, pecks like malignant, intruding sunlight.
Convulse’s 1991 album World Without God, a bridge between death metal’s straightforward beginnings and the weirdness of fellow Finns Demilich and Demigod, still remains a principal influence on Innumerable Forms, though Punishment in Flesh also shows a debt to New York death-doom trio Winter. While less effects-driven than Stephen Flam’s solos, the record’s lead work sounds similarly driven mad by extreme temperature shifts, freaked out and angry. “Re-Contaminated” brings the ending solo up in the mix, making what should be an incomprehensible high-pitched tangle fit right in. Innumerable Forms always carried a crushing sense of hopelessness. Even with a full band and fuller production, that hasn’t changed. Winter also found a small following in the hardcore world before metal audiences took any notice; Innumerable Forms, likewise, is made up of dudes with hardcore backgrounds making vital death metal. That makes a record that offers no repentance a celebration.


The latest from the saxophonist and bandleader is a multi-genre feast of musical ideas, his most sweeping and complete statement yet.

Heaven and Earth

Kamasi Washington—a tenor saxophonist, bandleader, and composer with the profile of a low-level pop star—designed his second full-length album as a metaphysical dyad, unfolding over two halves that each run over an hour. Far and away the strongest musical statement of his career, it’s also an exercise in contrast, if not outright contradiction.
“The Earth side of this album represents the world as I see it outwardly, the world that I am a part of,” Washington explained in advance press materials. “The Heaven side of this album represents the world as I see it inwardly, the world that is a part of me. Who I am and the choices I make lie somewhere in between.” (According to Discogs, a surprise third part, The Choice, comes as a CD tucked away in the album’s packaging; it wasn’t provided to reviewers, but it’s reported to contain five tracks—almost 40 minutes of additional music.)
This is a high-flown but still more intuitive concept than the one governing The Epic, Washington’s breakout 2015 debut, which sprawled over three hours and trafficked so heavily in heroic archetype that it should have a citation on Joseph Campbell’s Wikipedia page. Heaven and Earth proposes a play of external and internal realities—a bedrock of philosophical thought often framed as mind-body dualism. True to form, Washington presents this bifurcation more spiritually, as a pivoting balance of terrestrial and celestial concerns.
There’s a deadpan self-awareness to the framing of this theme, beginning with an album cover that depicts Washington like a Byzantine icon astride the Sea of Galilee. Musically, the idea coalesces best during the final track on Earth—an adrenalized piece of business called “One of One,” with a heraldic, hard-boppish horn line set against Afro-Latin polyrhythm and a blast of choral voices and orchestral strings. Its cyclical harmonic sequence creates a sensation of endless lift. That ascension brings us to the opening of Heaven, a sparkling interstellar overture called “The Space Travelers Lullaby.” Shifting strings and voices to the foreground, all billowy movement in a major key, it’s a cinematic theme whose rippling euphoria feels both magically ethereal and strenuously earned.
Washington wants it both ways, and that’s what he wants for you, too. As a listening experience, Heaven and Earth contains the most transcendent moments of his output thus far, as well as some of the gnarliest. His version of “Fists of Fury,” the Bruce Lee movie theme, falls into the latter camp, opening the whole affair à la Curtis Mayfield, in soul-warrior mode. The vocals on the track—by Patrice Quinn, a regular member of Washington’s entourage, and Dwight Trible, an emeritus alumnus of Horace Tapscott’s Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra—gradually move further into an exhortative mode. “We will no longer ask for justice,” they each declare, one after the other, in an echoing cadence that evokes the People’s Microphone. “Instead, we will take our retribution.”
Washington has smartly sequenced the double album in a pair of dramatic arcs. And he marshals his musicians with no less careful calculation. The heavy-tread cohesion and cyclonic undertow on Heaven and Earth serve a reminder of how much time has passed since the West Coast Get Down, Washington’s Los Angeles cohort, laid the tracks that became The Epic—late in 2011. Since its blockbuster release in 2015, Washington and his band, the Next Step, have maintained a touring schedule of the sort that few jazz groups are ever able to sustain. Along the way, assorted members of the West Coast Get Down, like bassist-turned-vocalist Thundercat and keyboardist Cameron Graves, have branched out on their own, with varying degrees of success.
A handful of them stand out on Heaven and Earth. Terrace Martin makes his lone appearance count, delivering a molten, supplicatory alto saxophone solo on a bounding modal tune called “Tiffakonkae.” Brandon Coleman fashions a psychedelic synth solo on “Connections,” whose low simmer and melodic contour recall the Joe Zawinul / Miles Davis invention “In a Silent Way.” (He also does excellent vocoder work on “Vi Lua Vi Sol,” suggesting a system upgrade to Sunlight-era Herbie Hancock.) Trumpeter Dontae Winslow distinguishes himself on a handful of tracks, including a syncopated charge through Freddie Hubbard’s “Hub-Tones.”
Scan that rundown of tunes and it’s clear: Washington remains enamored of the jazz tradition even as he insists on reshaping it. The heart of the complaint against him in jazz circles is his limited range as an improviser. He has no real instinct for developing harmonic momentum in a solo, and he slips too often into pentatonic pattern-work, as if an algorithm were kicking in. On the other hand, Washington’s strengths have never been clearer. His sound is sinewy and centered, his rhythmic footing sure. And he’s a catharsis engine who also knows when to shrewdly dial it back. (Hear how he begins his solo on “Song for the Fallen,” as if delivering a confidence.) Anyway, assessing Washington by the same standard as Mark Turner or Chris Potter, or any number of other virtuoso tenors, would be something other than apples-to-apples, and missing the point. One of his core achievements on Heaven and Earth—even more than on The Epic—is to create a framework in which his ardent, expressionistic style can carry a standard into battle.
The album hits its full, glorious stride during its last several tracks. “The Psalmnist,” a taut, unassailable post-bop theme by trombonist Ryan Porter, sparks one of the sharpest Washington solos on the album, before a virtuoso battle royal between drummers Tony Austin and Ronald Bruner, Jr. The next tune, “Show Us the Way,” opens with a modal crush of piano chords that recalls “Change of the Guard,” from The Epic. It culminates, after a rafters-raising Washington solo, in a refrain by the choir: “Dear Lord,” they sing, invoking John Coltrane, “Show us the way.”
The power of that moment, which carries through the final track, “Will You Sing,” lies in a vibrational parallel to the black church, and all the momentous weight that comes with it. Washington is flagrant in aligning his music with a tradition of transcendent struggle. The feeling he’s chasing is the feeling of someone who’s been to the mountaintop and come back with an urgent story to tell.


Discovered in his teens by Warp, Edgar grows up, moves to !K7, and seems to like strip clubs (and strip-club music).

XXX

One of the great pleasures of discovering musical prodigies is the knowledge that anyone brilliant enough to create great art at a young age is usually also savvy enough to change over the course of an elongated career. Bob Dylan is the totem example, but everyone from Conor Oberst to Dizzee Rascal has made bold, stirring moves. Even the failures-- usually frequent-- are interesting and fun. Jimmy Edgar was discovered by Warp at 18 in 2001, and he's spent the last decade developing the kind of résumé you might expect from a Detroiter who was playing raves at 15. His work is dotted with hard electro, funk, hip-hop, and raunchy pop. Edgar's XXX, only his second full-length album and first for !K7, is not fun and, more importantly, it's not very interesting.
XXX sounds like strip-club music made by someone who, well, really loves strip clubs. This is not a surprise from an artist whose most famous track is "I Wanna Be Your STD". To put it another way: XXX sounds like what Lords of Acid album covers look like. XXX has attraction, sex, fucking, some afterglow, but it's uncomfortably entitled and vain. "Hot, Raw, Sex" isn't about hot, raw sex, per se, it's about what Edgar considers such an experience to be. The song's mantra: "We had/ What I call/ Hot, raw sex." What are Edgar's standards for hot, raw sex? We don't know!
Edgar has often bristled at those who refer to his music as electronic, and he might finally have a point: Though the source instruments remain analog keyboards and computers, XXX is a fairly straight pop-funk album. He's probably taking aim at Prince, and sometimes he gets there: the slow-winding groove of "Physical Motion", the pillow keys and spacey funk of "Midnite Fone Call". More often he finds Prince's weirdo offspring: David Banner's whisper-porn on "Push", the brainy thwump of Mu (minus the heavy psychosis) on "In My Color".
In interviews, Edgar is confrontational, declarative, and tactless. Describing his favorite festival moment in an interview with Resident Advisor, Edgar said, "I've got video tape of black security guards booty dancing to my set at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival a few years ago. Then it pans to a one-armed break dancer, spinning on his nub." This kind of reckless confidence-- that of a person who was declared a musical force at such a young age-- bleeds into XXX. The album feels haughty and off-putting even when its influences (frequently) and execution (less so) are on-point. We expect roadbumps with prodigies, but Edgar should be encouraged to fail more charmingly next time.


The Scottish noise-pop legends’ second album since reuniting strikes a reflective, unusually congenial tone, paying tribute to rock history and their place within it.

Glasgow Eyes

Since their landmark 1985 debut Psychocandy, the Jesus and Mary Chain thrived on the familial tension between William and Jim Reid, the brothers at the heart of the band. The friction that spurred their artistry during their heyday ultimately proved to be their undoing, culminating in a notorious onstage implosion at the House of Blues Los Angeles in September 1998. The Reids finally immortalize that incident in “jamcod,” the first single from Glasgow Eyes, an album that answers the question: What would a harmonious Jesus and Mary Chain sound like?
Glasgow Eyes is only the second album of new material the band has released since reuniting in 2007. After nearly a decade apart, the Reids mended fences so they could headline Coachella, then spent another 10 years figuring out how to move forward as a creative unit. They reemerged in 2017 with Damage and Joy, co-produced with Youth, whom the Reids hired because they believed they might need a mediator. Damage and Joy offered a spruced-up spin on the JAMC’s signature blend of rock sleaze and dreamy drones—evidence the group could still deliver new material yet suggesting they could be in danger of recycling past ideas. The Reid brothers opted to push back against looming stagnation by producing Glasgow Eyes themselves, revitalizing their rock’n’roll by focusing on synthesizers, not stompboxes.
Electronics always have lurked within the Jesus and Mary Chain’s sound, shaping the rhythms of Darklands and accentuating the ominous, saturated hues of Automatic. Glasgow Eyes flips the emphasis: synths often take center stage, leaving guitars as either punctuation or texture. The shift in direction is evident from the moment “Venal Joy” kicks off in a whirring squall of electronics underpinned by primitive sequenced drums. “Venal Joy” is insistent but not combative, demonstrating the Jesus and Mary Chain’s ability to bend old-school synths so they sound like the noise-pop that is their stock in trade.
They spend much of Glasgow Eyes pursuing retro electronics to a logical conclusion. Whether it’s the sneering “American Born” or chilled-out thrum of “Discotheque,” the group winds up playing murky new wave that walks the line between homage and satire. A few pointed exceptions arrive during the duo’s strolls through rock’s back pages. “Hey Lou Reid” is split between fuzz-toned garage and oceanic waves of strums—the two sides of the Velvet Underground combined in salute—and “The Eagles and the Beatles” is propelled by a riff that purposely nods at “I Love Rock ’n Roll,” the Arrows glam-rocker that Joan Jett & the Blackhearts turned into a standard in 1981 (not to be confused with JAMC’s own “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” which opened their 1998 album Munki).
It’s not as simple as nostalgia; the Jesus and Mary Chain have been keenly aware of the arc of rock history since their start. Yet there’s an unmistakably wistful undercurrent in these looks back, even if few songs apart from “jamcod” could be explicitly labeled as autobiography. The brooding “Chemical Animal” plays as a confession (“I fill myself with chemicals/To hide the dark shit I don’t show”); other turns of phrase suggest that former feuds are now resolved. The lyric “Brother, can you hear me calling you?” pops out on “Second of June,” whose bridge concludes with Jim Reid singing his band’s own name. Such fleeting moments of reflection intertwine with a clutch of songs draped in shimmering melancholy. The best is “Silver Strings,” a lithe slice of nocturnal new wave that illustrates the benefits of favoring synths over six strings: It floats, unencumbered by earthly notions.
Beneath its electronic veneer, Glasgow Eyes sounds curiously settled. The synthesized arrangements are something of a sleight of hand, disguising how the Jesus and Mary Chain aren’t abandoning their old obsessions; they’re still singing about longing and decadence. Ultimately, what’s different about Glasgow Eyes is not the form but the tenor. As they advance into middle age, the tension between the Reid brothers has dissipated, giving Glasgow Eyes an unusually congenial spirit.


Packing 15 producers into 50 minutes, the fun but overstuffed Future Nostalgia rework hopscotches between piano house, Baltimore club, and the kind of dance remixes that power Chelsea gay bars.

Dua Lipa / The Blessed Madonna: Club Future Nostalgia

Club Future Nostalgia

A pop diva is poorer without her remixes. Madonna’s dance remixes span Shep Pettibone’s kinetic “Express Yourself” rework to Stuart Price’s revitalizing overhaul of her discography on ’00s tours. Whitney Houston’s club versions brought extra oomph to a joyous NYC Pride performance in 1999. (“If your music’s banging in the clubs, you’re doing okay,” Houston noted.) And the hip-hop and dance remixes of Mariah Carey, pop’s queen of the remix, lower drawbridges between genres and become playgrounds for innovation.
Not all of these icons descended from the pop pantheon to party with the people. But Dua Lipa, who made True Blue for the 2020s with this year’s Future Nostalgia, is a raver. At last year’s Glastonbury festival, she wore sunglasses, a red wig, and adopted the alter-ego “Valentina Vicious” so that she could party in peace. Lipa met The Blessed Madonna that weekend, and linked up with the Kentucky-born producer earlier this year to create Club Future Nostalgia, a fun but overstuffed mix that hopscotches between piano house, Baltimore club, and the kind of dance remixes that power Chelsea gay bars like so many cheap well drinks. A stacked lineup includes Masters at Work, Mr. Fingers, Mark Ronson, Yaeji, and Moodymann, with seamless transitions from The Blessed Madonna. But heavy-handed editing can make Club Future Nostalgia feel oddly uneven.
Yaeji whittles and rebuilds “Don’t Start Now” into bouncy minimal disco, chopping her own murmured vocals into the beat like ASMR with somewhere to be. The previously unreleased “Love Is Religion,” remixed by The Blessed Madonna, sounds like a Lip Sync for Your Life song from RuPaul’s Drag Race in the best way. Mr. Fingers’ skeletal version of “Hallucinate” lifts just “I’ma love you like a fool/Breathe you in till I hallucinate” from Lipa’s original. In his edit, “fool” sounds like “fucker,” a soundtrack for any darkroom sex god to lay out their agenda to a willing partner. But the Mr. Fingers track is abbreviated—The Blessed Madonna adds a superfluous sample of Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” which takes up nearly a third of its runtime. Similarly, Jacques Lu Cont’s Balearic rework of the previously-unreleased “That Kind of Woman” is sublime, but getting only three minutes of it feels like a tease; Lu Cont, aka Stuart Price, can make every second of a seven-minute remix feel essential.
DJ drops from Lipa punctuate the record, a trick Vince Staples also used on his 2018 album FM!, which was styled as a radio show. Club Future Nostalgia feels less like London pirate radio than a show from one of BBC Radio 1’s most inquisitive DJs. That accessibility isn’t a bad thing. Jayda G’s amped-up version of “Cool” is exactly what you want to hear in a warehouse at 3 AM, football whistles and all, and Horse Meat Disco’s euphoric “Love Again” seems to be made for the moment when the sun starts to peek through a club’s shutters. But Club Future Nostalgia’s starriest moments are some of its weakest. Mark Ronson’s depressingly loungey remix of “Physical,” with a disappointing verse from Stefani, manages to make one of the year’s most vivid pop songs feel like background music. And the irresistible “Levitating” is deflated by phoned-in features from Madonna and Missy Elliott, who were more charismatic when they teamed up for a Gap commercial.
Great DJ sets are built around tension and release, but whipping through 15 producers in 50 minutes, Club Future Nostalgia struggles to build the anticipation to earn a payoff. The most dazzling exception comes at the end of the album: Moodymann’s remix of “Break My Heart” is by far the best track. Built around a bass lick, cowbells, and weird ambiance—clinking bottles, a menacing laugh—it feels terrifying and beautiful. A more left-field approach to Lipa’s music—as seen elsewhere, on Hyperdub artist Loraine James’ dark experimental rework of “Don’t Start Now,” and Erika de Casier’s neo-noir take on “Physical”—would have enriched the mix. As it is, Club Future Nostalgia is a bit like a round of exquisite corpse: fun while it lasts, but somehow less than the sum of its parts.

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The veteran singer-songwriter takes inspiration from classic country on an album full of barbed wit and insight, but the music could use more of the genre’s bite.

Joy’all

A performer who survived Toys R Us commercials, anti-drug PSAs, and the Shelley Long comedy Troop Beverly Hills, Jenny Lewis has tried to be, to quote Henry James, one of the people on whom nothing is lost. The former co-leader of Rilo Kiley has mastered the sweetly sung, acrid send-up of grifters and drifters, and the valentine to dirtbags and carpetbaggers. L.A. men, she understands, can be as gross and addictive as Red Bull and Hennessy. “This shit is crazy town,” she sings on “Psychos,” the opening track to her fifth solo album, Joy’All; the trick to Lewis is the way her remark might work as both general observation—she’s called the song “an existential take on dating in the modern age”—and a reference to the authors of “Butterfly.”
Her latest music needs that kind of vulgarity. Written as part of a Beck-organized songwriting camp in Nashville and recorded by country pro Dave Cobb, Joy’All has an amiable listlessness: It’s loveable, but I wish there was more to love. The songs rely on samey acoustic strumming. The middle stretch (“Giddy Up,” “Cherry Baby”) barely exists. The many bon mots often float like cornflakes in cold milk atop dull melodic structures (“Psychos” being the obvious example). Country music, despite stereotypes about its casualness, requires precision: Call it the real studio rock. Lewis, adept at a country-leaning aesthetic since at least Rilo Kiley’s 2002 album The Execution of Small Things, has assembled a strong band: Jess Wolfe on backing vocals, Jon Brion on sundry keyboards, and Cobb himself, among others, on guitar are standouts. But it’s as if Lewis forbade them from fussing up her material.
For Lewis, the erstwhile Hollywood scenester, country resonates as a genre that rewards the performance of feeling and foregrounds the outsider-as-insider. On her solo debut, Rabbit Fur Coat, she embraced bluegrass and the harmonizing aplomb of Parton-Ronstadt-Harris. Joy’All attempts a more conventional genre tightroping. “Marvin Gaye, Timberlake, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, John Prine, Waylon and Willie,” she sings in “Love Feel” (Justin Timberlake’s here presumably not for the way he holds a guitar). That the list includes not a single woman is fascinating, an example of the way in which certain female country-adjacent rock acts obsess over the masculine performance of sensuality and toughness—what, no Tammy, Reba, Rosanne, and Miranda? To confuse matters, she offers this affirmation in “Psychos”: “I’m a rock-and-roll disciple in a video game.”
An album composed for adults whose songs target men who act like boys, Joy’All makes no concessions to the youth market. “My forties are kicking my ass and handing them to me in a margarita glass,” she reveals on “Puppy and a Truck,” one of the songs destined to enter her canon—fingerpoppin’ folk-pop in the mode of “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” or pick-your-track from hero John Prine’s flawless mid-’70s run. Bassist Brian Allen lays down a bubblicious groove on the precisely inhabited title track, where Lewis rhymes “adore ya” and “troll ya.” Its spare white funk gives the impression that Lewis heard and liked Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters.
Still, I miss those serrated instrumental gracenotes on previous kiss-offs—say, Ryan Adams’ guitar solo in “She’s Not Me,” a masterpiece of accretive sourness (imagine what Cobb client Jason Isbell might’ve contributed to this album’s boring songs, and how he might’ve given shock treatment to the good ones). Twenty years in the biz imbues artists with resourcefulness, though, and Joy’All’s quietest song is its most chilling. “The essence of life is suffering,” Lewis sings in the mournful “Essence of Life,” but before you call bullshit she acknowledges in another verse the paradox: “The essence of life is ecstasy.” The instrumental filigrees work: Beneath her vocal track a tremoloed pedal steel line by Greg Leisz underscores the sentiment. Melding her aphoristic instincts and country’s variations on performative sadness, “Essence of Life” distills how a singer-songwriter of Lewis’ acuity can kick ass in her forties. She has songs enough, and time.


The debut solo album from Melody Prochet is a record of enchanting, psychedelic-tinged pop with just the right amount of thematic darkness. Produced by Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, Melody's Echo Chamber is one of the more satisfying LPs in recent times to bear Broadcast's influence.

Melody’s Echo Chamber: Melody's Echo Chamber

Melody's Echo Chamber

At a Tame Impala show in Paris two years ago, Melody Prochet, French pop aficionado and multi-instrumentalist for the band My Bee's Garden, became intrigued by the Aussie psych-rockers' scuzzy sonics. She struck up a conversation with the band's Kevin Parker after the show about how he achieved the band's signature, blown-out bass sound in particular, and a while later he asked My Bee's Garden to support Tame Impala on a European leg of their tour. Though her own band's sound was clean and somewhat precious, Prochet remained drawn to the Tame Impala aesthetic. So when she decided to go solo, she asked Parker to produce, and to push her out of her comfort zone a bit. "I tend to write songs with pretty chords and arpeggios, and I was kind of boring myself," she recalled. "So I asked Kevin to destroy everything."
Mission accomplished. Recorded mostly at Parker's home studio in Perth, the resulting self-titled debut from Melody's Echo Chamber is a record of psych-tinged pop with just the right amount of thematic darkness and grime around the edges. Prochet has a way with melody and a voice that places her among the top-tier graduates of the Trish Keenan and Laetitia Sadier school of dream pop, but it's Parker's signature production that helps this record transcend its forever-in-vogue 1960s pop influences. ("This record was my dream sound," Prochet said in a recent interview. "I've tried for years to get it but finally found the right hands to sculpt it.") Full of immersive textures that give off an echoey depth and prismatic riffs that tumble through space, Parker's production grants this record its own laws of gravity.
The record's best songs tease out tension between soft and hard edges-- a combination of beauty and brittleness. Excellent lead-off single "I Follow You" pairs an exquisitely sugary melody with a fuzzy, syncopated riff, while the dreamy "Crystallized" detonates in its final moments into a kraut-y electro freak-out. Beginning with a toy-soldier beat and warmly warped synth tones, "You Won't Be Missing That Part of Me" blooms into one of the record's best moments, a kiss-off song that flips the usual script and takes the perspective of the heartbreaker rather than the heartbreak ("Because I lied with all my heart, because it's time to change my life... Hold on, you'll see it won't be that hard to forget me.") Parker's production is perhaps at its most stunning on "Some Time Alone, Alone", on which Prochet's arpeggios rain down like a chandelier being hit with a sledgehammer in slow-motion.
The shards occasionally prick: "Mount Hopeless" is fittingly gloomy, and there's even a song about post-plane crash cannibalism called "Snowcapped Andes Crash". But for as odd and chilling as that song sounds on paper, it falls flat in execution, languishing on a Side B that doesn't quite have enough ideas or surprises to save from some repetitive lulls. Prochet hasn't quite figured out how to do anything interesting with the macabre that lurks somewhere in this record's sound, and it leaves you wishing she'd explored Melody's dark side a little more, à la Broadcast's creepy masterpiece Tender Buttons. Of course, Prochet's melodies can't quite fill the Broadcast-shaped void left in the wake of Keenan's untimely death, but Melody's Echo Chamber is one of the more satisfying records to bear that band's influence in recent years. For a collaboration between a songwriter and a producer who helped push her to the outer limits of her vision, Melody's Echo Chamber is an impressively immersive debut.