Serving up his customary collage of UK garage rhythms, forlorn vocals, sugary trance synths, and copious vinyl hiss, Burial is at his most emo on a new split EP.

Burial / Blackdown: Shock Power of Love EP

Shock Power of Love EP

For the first eight years of his recording career, you knew where you were with Burial, and it felt like a predictably desolate place to be. This—as the actually pretty accurate cliché went—was music for London night buses and soggy spliffs, music that buried its emotion under layers of needle hiss, with song titles like “U Hurt Me” and “Broken Home” as evidence of the sensitive soul hidden in the gloom. This perception shifted with 2013’s stunning Rival Dealer EP, which was shot through with dialogue about love and the power of self-acceptance. Stepping out from behind the curtain, Burial shared a message with the BBC’s Mary Anne Hobbs in which he called the EP’s songs “anti-bullying tunes that could maybe help someone to believe in themselves,” a shockingly unambiguous message from a producer who had always come swathed in mystery.
Shock Power of Love, a joint release with London producer (and former Pitchfork contributor) Blackdown, continues in this emotionally explicit line. Standout track “Dark Gethsemane” is a showcase for Burial the softie, a song that radiates emotional sincerity with a side order of wonder. The opening five minutes are fairly standard Burial, with a mangled yet still elegant vocal floating over a lurching UK garage beat and pointillist synth riff. The second half of the song, however, makes a radical about-face, as the UKG propulsion of the first five minutes dissolves into a kind of ambient gospel. A sonorous vocal sample tells us, “We must shock this nation/With the power of love,” over a submerged “Billie Jean” beat, handclaps, and gorgeously nebulous orchestral chords that bring to mind “Touch,” the lovelorn tearjerker that soundtracked Daft Punk’s farewell video. Consciously or not, “Dark Gethsemane”’s closing section feels like a grab for the French duo’s crown as kings of heart-tremblingly sincere electronic music.
Burial releases inevitably provoke furious online debate, and—sure enough—early reactions have been decidedly mixed, with some commentators convinced that the revered London artist has lost his touch. But it’s easy to imagine that Burial has entirely stopped giving a toss what other people think (if he ever did at all), given his other contribution to the split EP. “Space Cadet” rides a featherweight pop-trance beat, bouncing bass pulse, and the kind of circular synth riff you might find in a well-intentioned children’s cartoon, its sugary rush only partly offset by Burial’s habitual palette of vinyl crackle and soused vocal samples. The song has some beautiful moments—notably the choral rush of “Take me higher,” about halfway in—but the overall feel is too meager to really convince. The song ends with two minutes of rinky-dink dance pop that could have come straight from a second-generation Mario Bros. game.
The flimsiness of “Space Cadet” makes it an oddity in the Burial catalogue, a weakling shadow to the emotional outpouring of “Dark Gethsemane.” But at least you can see the sentimental throughline connecting the two tracks. The relationship of these songs to Blackdown’s two productions on the EP—“This Journey VIP,” a brooding take on a song originally released on Dusk and Blackdown’s 2020 album RollageLive vol 1: Nightfall, and Blackdown’s twinkling remix of Heatmap’s “Arklight”—is far less obvious.
Blackdown and Burial clearly have history—Burial remixed Blackdown’s “Crackle Blues” in 2006 and released “Temple Sleeper” on Blackdown’s Keysound label in 2015—and Blackdown’s bassy post-dubstep productions come from roughly the same place as Burial’s own work. But there’s little on these two tracks—beyond, perhaps, the enigmatic presence of muted vocal samples, which you could imagine Burial making far better use of—that suggests they simply had to be on this release. Blackdown’s two tracks are enjoyable; Burial’s, even when they stumble, are remarkable, a tribute to his expansive artistic vision over Blackdown’s rather more workaday productions.

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The 24-year-old alt-pop rapper showcases her newly refined confidence, taking a step toward the pop powerhouse she's capable of becoming.

Demidevil

The 24-year-old alt-pop rapper Ashnikko commands fantasy and chaos with ease. She dresses as an eyeball-studded character for a performance of TikTok hit “Daisy” with just as much nonchalance as she posts photos of empty dildo containers stuffed with beans on Instagram. But Ashnikko’s unselfconscious brazenness is a newer phenomenon in her young career. Her earlier releases, while still defiant and bawdy, felt constrained by uncertain line delivery and sometimes-clunky production. She told Vulture that listening to her first EP Sass Pancakes made her want to cry, saying that only recently has she started to feel “like a songwriter.” Ashnikko’s latest mixtape, Demidevil, is a showcase for her newly refined confidence, a step towards the pop powerhouse she’s capable of becoming.
Like a lot of her fellow weird pop girls (think Princess Nokia and Slayyyter, with the former featured on this album), Ashnikko enthusiastically embraces the hallmarks of 2000s radio. You can hear it in the keyboard melody in “Slumber Party,” which honks with horny Pussycat Dolls insistence, or the track “L8r Boi,” which is a staunchly anti-skater boy rewrite of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8r Boi.”
But Demidevil is by no means limited to ’00s inspiration. “Toxic” and “Daisy” both dabble in bratty trap, while the Grimes-featuring “Cry” toys with nu-metal. Some genre experiments are less successful: “L8r Boi” is boringly faithful to its source material while  the theatrical “Clitoris! The Musical” is as unsatisfyingly repetitive as the song’s clueless sexual antagonist. The lyrics on these experimental tracks are noticeably less artful, too. At one point on “Clitoris!” Ashnikko wonders “Why is my orgasm censored on the TV /While cis boys get to ejaculate freely?” A valid question, but it becomes less serious in the context of a jokey theater spoof.
Something that is thankfully consistent through all of Demidevil is Ashnikko’s humor and subversive personality. She tells untrustworthy boys “you can keep the image of my butt as a souvenir,” and admires someone else’s girlfriend for her “hentai boobies,” already having given her “cunnilingus on the couch.” In a world where “WAP” brought a tragic amount of men to the realization that they’re bad at sex, Ashnikko’s shameless odes to boobs, butts, and pussy, which she declares to be her religion on “Drunk With My Friends,” help challenge the expectations for what women can and can’t talk about. For most of music history, women pop stars have been expected to be perfect encapsulations of heterosexual sex, sultry when asked to be and angelic when not. Weird girl artists like Ashnikko crush that perfection under lucite heels, covered in your boyfriend’s blood.

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With a voice that evokes Nina Simone’s, the 24-year-old Atlanta soul singer uses her debut album to explore post-breakup intimacies of pain and desire.

To Myself

Since the days of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, rejecting domesticity has been part of the blues lady agenda. In her 1998 book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis wrote that leading blueswomen “challenged the notion that women’s ‘place’ was in the domestic sphere” by making very few allusions to marriage, domesticity, or motherhood. Instead, counter to social expectations for women then and even now, they presented themselves as independent.
Atlanta soul singer Baby Rose, whose cavernous voice evokes that of Nina Simone, references domesticity just once on her debut album, To Myself. The mention arrives early on opening track “Sold Out,” when she sings of a past lover with whom she’d considered settling down. “When we was together/I was like spouse/Right beside you/Playing house,” she sings in a velvety, bittersweet contralto, recalling the relationship before it turned “upside down.” Unlike her foremothers, Baby Rose doesn’t hesitate to admit that she once bought into the domestic fantasy. But throughout To Myself, her voice bears the emotional weight and range of the blues, exploring post-breakup intimacies of pain and desire as she works to shatter the glowing facade of her previous life.
For much of the album, Baby Rose wrestles with her polarized feelings towards her ex. On the yearning ballad “Borderline,” she dramatizes her indecisiveness about whether to go back to her man or leave him for good. Though it’s a well-worn metaphor, already used by Madonna and the Black Eyed Peas, Rose’s masterful and commanding voice paints shades of nuance, pooling and pouring out her vowels like thick molasses. Other songs encode more subtle emotional tensions: The Daniel Caesar-esque “Mortal,” which compares her ex-lover’s magnetism to a strong undertow, squares up against the vengeful blues ballad “Ragrets,” where Rose’s brooding mind can only remember him as an evil heartbreaker full of “poison.”
To Myself’s richness lies in how the intricate, multi-layered production accentuates her warm and expressive voice. The hook of “Pressure” is five words long (“Pressure/Keeps holding me back”), but like Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard, Baby Rose can extrapolate mournful meaning from just a few syllables, her voice hesitant and stumbling as she reaches the end of the phrase. A fidgety electric guitar and a drum backbeat that seems to stop and reverse every couple of bars only contribute to the feeling of uncertainty.
On the album’s centerpiece “All to Myself,” Rose is paired with just sparse piano and organ as she recalls the feeling of being alone at 3 a.m., debating whether to drunkenly call her ex. To record the song, she downed mimosas and tequila in the studio, a method-acting approach that results in a moving and raw performance suffused with moans and labored breaths. Even small noises, like her whine at the end of the word “complicated,” become little universes of desperation and sorrow.
“I had all bets in being a housewife with this guy and not even thinking about music as my first go to, even though I knew this was my purpose,” Rose told Pigeons & Planes, hinting at how the expectations of domesticity can sidetrack women’s careers. The conflict at the heart of To Myself is not just about one choosing to leave one person, but about making the decision to change your trajectory, to rewrite part of your identity. Like the blueswomen before her, Baby Rose forges her own path.


San Fran baroque-pop group takes a nice step forward on its sophomore album, thanks in part to pristine production from Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor.

Big Echo

Album titles can often sum up the albums themselves. Case in point: the Morning Benders' 2008 debut, Talking Through Tin Cans, a collection of boilerplate indie rock that borrowed more than a bit from the Shins' jangle pop. Despite a few bright spots, the record branded the San Franciscan outfit with a second-tier reputation. Add that to the fact that the Shins aren't groundbreakers themselves, and Talking Through Tin Cans begins to sound as limited as the rudimentary children's activity suggested in its title.
The title to the Benders' sophomore effort and Rough Trade debut, Big Echo, appropriately evokes their sonic shift in the past two years. The album is a homecoming of sorts, as it finds the Morning Benders correcting their PacNW indie pop identity crisis in favor of a more coastal, kaleidoscopic California haze. It also finds them embracing the cavernous experimental rock sound of Grizzly Bear, whose Chris Taylor shares a co-production credit with Benders singer/guitarist Christopher Chu.
Big Echo kicks off with "Excuses", a sunny, lilting little ditty that carries simultaneous debts to 1950s pop balladry and Sgt. Pepper's-inspired orchestral mania. The song is an easygoing and excellent introduction to the Benders' stylistic changes, and its charming melody serves as an adequate explanation as to how these guys got so many San Franciscan music notables into one room to perform the tune for videographers Yours Truly.
The trio that follow "Excuses" round out Big Echo's more accessible front-end and come closest to the Benders' previous, less complicated sound. Even then, the band finds ways to add touches of weirdness to each track. "Promises" may be just another song about an uncertain relationship, but the song's big-beat thump and tangled voices add something sticky to the bittersweet presentation. The simple shuffle of "Wet Cement" is augmented by scale-sliding background vocals, while the economical "Cold War (Nice Clean Fight)" features glockenspiel to accentuate its ramshackle charm.
Big Echo's second half is slightly slower and swampier than its first; it's also where the band's newfound Grizzly Bear influence comes through clearest, from the jagged guitars that crack open "Hand Me Downs" to the breathy, multi-part swooning of "Pleasure Sighs" and "Stitches". Taylor's studio presence is all over Big Echo, from the warped music-hall strings of "Excuses" to the hymn-like, soft-focus vocals on album closer "Sleeping In". This cavernous production gives Big Echo another titular double-meaning, lending gravitas and providing guitarists Christopher and Jonathan Chu room to stretch amidst the wooly arrangements.
Giving too much credit to Taylor's influence and direction, however, undermines the Morning Benders' stylistic transition, one any band would envy and many listeners will love. Many bands spend entire careers trying (and failing) to even nail down the one thing they're good at. The Morning Benders have already found a handful. Here's hoping they continue down the path illustrated on Big Echo's gorgeous oil-painted album cover: into the unsure seas, and away from the relative safety of stable terrain.


The eclectic comp from the Rome-based collective Crudo Volta is a solid primer for those new to gqom, Afrobass, and Ethiopiyawi Electronic.

Various Artists: Taxi Sampler 01: Rhythms & Vibes From the Spirit of Young Africa

When in Rome, the young visual collective Crudo Volta dreams of Lagos, Cotonou, and Maputo. The name Crudo Volta translates from the Italian as “a time for rawness”—something jagged and pure. Its members make high-energy, high-gloss documentary films that bridge Africa and the African diaspora. But despite its flagship medium, Crudo Volta is, at its core, all about sound.
In 2016, the group made Woza Taxi, a short movie about gqom, a nocturnal house genre birthed in Durban, South Africa. Next came Yenkyi Taxi, which followed Brendan “Hagan” Opoku-Ware, a London-based producer, through Accra, Ghana, where his family is originally from. And earlier this year, Crudo Volta debuted “Taxi Waves,” an Italian streaming series on youth music scenes in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nigeria. Now, the collective has spun off a record label that draws on its sonic archive and transnational ties.
That label, Python Syndicate, is a two-man joint, run by Mike Calandra Achode, a Beninese-Italian graphic designer and founding member of Crudo Volta, and Nan Kolè, a DJ and gqom evangelist. Their first release is Taxi Sampler 01: Rhythms & Vibes from the Spirit of Young Africa, a two-LP set featuring “the sonic and cultural landscape” of the continent’s contemporary underground, replete with a 26-page photo booklet.
The album is a musical skinny dip into a warm lagoon—which is to say, no previous experience with African club music necessary. Achode and Kolè have chosen a mix of previously unreleased tracks and tunes familiar to Afrophilic cosmopolitan DJs—by artists including Young John, Hagan, Gafacci, Sess the Problem, Ellputo, and TLC FAM. Many of the songs are fun and danceable; others hit a hypnotic groove and get stuck, looping into boredom.
Every few tracks on the LP version, there’s also a short “skit”—an interview with a music-maker—reminiscent of both ethnographic field recordings and the palate-cleansing entr’actes on rap and R&B albums. In one, Ghanaian producer Gafacci recalls his father telling him, “Hey, you have to have African elements in your songs.” (This interview appears in Yenkyi Taxi.) Another skit proceeds in an unidentified language, conveying an impression of unmediated foreignness. In their signaling of authenticity, these snippets can feel heavy-handed, but it’s nice to put a lilting voice and laugh to a name.
The strongest tracks on Taxi Sampler 01 come from two better-known artists, Rvdical the Kid and Ethiopian Records. In “Tigist,” the Addis Ababa-born Ethiopian Records opens with dueling synth swirls and a heaving drone, then builds with organic complements: palmed drums and a reedy flute. Rvdical the Kid, a DJ and producer who splits his time between the U.S. and West Africa,  blends soul and funk vocals, call-and-response shouts, and an insistent, trap-like bass in “Yama Kegule” and “Free Spirit.” Both artists work up a density in their tunes, as though they’ve swaddled the underlying beat, then peeled and unpeeled the layers, to the listener’s surprise. All this adding and subtracting moves their music along, toward peaks and troughs and suspenseful transitions. Other, lesser tunes on the album are static by comparison, building only in terms of decibels, not emotion.
It might be said that electronic music should move with the imagined velocity, mystery, and danger of a taxi, the preferred motif of Crudo Volta and Python Syndicate. On countless productions of World Music 2.0—the term for post-colonial, post-ethnographic global sounds—the taxi has symbolized movement through unfamiliar territory. For listeners new to gqom, Afrobass, and Ethiopiyawi Electronic, that’s what Taxi Sampler 01 does best.


The young Chicago producer Nick Zanca records home-schooled electronic music as Mister Lies. His buzzed-about debut full-length is an act of auditory hypnosis egged on by repetition and lush textures.

Mowgli

At a glance, there doesn't appear to be anything terribly original about Chicago's Mister Lies. Surfacing in 2012, the project followed just about every unwritten rule in the up-and-coming, home-schooled electronic producer playbook. The Hidden Neighbors EP-- a seductive, downtempo affair informed by strains of subterranean, laptop-engineered music from the UK-- was released under a cloak of anonymity. After revealing himself as Columbia College student Nick Zanca, a 7" and an "ambient gospel" collaborative EP with fellow Chicagoan Different Sleep followed, though neither proved quite as compelling as his initial effort. And finally, last summer, Zanca holed himself up in a lakeside cabin in Vermont to record his first proper full-length, Mowgli. But despite the buzzworthy pretenses surrounding his debut, Mowgli feels refreshingly untethered to anything other than Zanca's own impulsive yet careful direction. Instead of becoming encumbered by its heavy reliance on mood and atmosphere, Mowgli's patient nature makes room for some serpentine-like twists turns that often bear rich and strange fruits. Though the footing may not always be so sure, it's a record worth paying attention to thanks to it's reluctance to walk a too-familiar plank.
"My music has to do with imaginary things," Zanca told Pitchfork back in May, and while Mowgli most certainly has a well-mapped root structure (he name-checked Portishead, Burial, and "1990s trip-hop" in the same interview), it's so curious and elusive, you feel as if an Inception-style plundering of his daydreaming would be the only real way to unpack it, however subtle and simple its defining components might seem. Still, Zanca is most likely a lucid dreamer, as his knack for creating standalone sounds-- the almost uncomfortably sharp handclaps on opener "Ashore", percussive elements that sound as if they were secretly recorded in a decaying old apartment building on "Dionysian"-- makes the album feel very much of this earth. But despite not being quite impervious to gravity, Mowgli's ultimately an act of auditory hypnosis egged on by repetition and lush textures. A good number of these songs are landlocked by similar swaths of beatific fog, as familiar shapes remain a bit too blurred to really make out. But as Zanca lifts his various veils, these songs reveal themselves in unsettling, warm, or chaotic ways that feel shy, sexy, and more than a little scary, sometimes all at once. Though few records can really claim it as an asset, Mowgli invites return listens because it's so difficult to put your finger on.
Zanca's neatest trick on Mowgli is being able to emulsify opposing sounds in interesting ways, evoking a wide stretch of emotions over seemingly tiny soundscapes. Often times, it sounds like it's stuck between two different rooms, as the noise from either collides in ways that almost nauseate at first, but become harmoniously fractured as they slowly sync. "Ashore" feels like the work of a trendy, tweezer-wielding chef, plating various components just so until a huge wave of cotton-candy wrapped synth blows everything off the table. "Align" manages to juggle Four Tet-like euphoria, a burly, wormy synth line and ghostly wails and still make sense of it all. "Dionysian" is both joyful and hellish, a headrush of a track that culminates in a cacophonous rage, blowing hot all the while. But not all of Zanca's creations are so cleverly caustic-- "Ludlow", named for the Vermont town where Mowgli was born, is funky, sultry, and comfort food-y in ways that make it fully apparent why Zanca chose to record there.
For someone not yet old enough to legally drink, Zanca is ahead of the game in a lot of respects, but it doesn't mean he's impervious to the same trappings that present themselves to every young musician, especially ones who make music as insular as Mister Lies does. Too often Mowgli feels like a series of exercises, its mantra-like repetitions eventually rendering themselves somewhat directionless. Other times, things simply don't pan out at all, like "Canaan", which features a poem that came straight from freshman AP English class, or the jittery "Lupine", darting around like a sloppy game of racquetball. Over the course of a year, Zanca has proved himself to be a musician than can produce songs that are interesting and songs that are actually just plain great, and in working to find that balance on Mowgli, we can see that while it's engaging to watch him try and synthesize these two halves of his personality, it also means that Mister Lies is a project that's still in need of fine tuning. There's little question that Zanca knows where he wants to go, it's now just a question of figuring out how he wants to get there.


The Memphis garage punk band Nots' debut album, We Are Nots, offers an aggressive blend of echoing guitars, powerful drums, synthesizers, and gang vocals. They're a united front, belligerent and dizzying in their approach.

We Are Nots

For each song on Nots’ debut album, there’s a word or phrase that makes itself prominent, forcefully. Most of these are ripped from the song’s titles: "insect eyes," "decadence," "reactor," "strange rage," "static," "psychic talk show." They’re used as bludgeons, shouted by multiple voices, often lobbed with disdain or disgust. Obviously, there’s a lot of punk rock utility in catchy, abrasive, oft-repeated two-word hooks—when several people shout "black mold" in unison, you pay attention. With these kinds of choruses, they come out of the gate with undeniable power, but Nots aren’t merely offering a surface-level veneer of "creepy" or "strange." Natalie Hoffmann, Charlotte Watson, Madison Farmer, and Alexandra Eastburn are, at times, incredibly bleak. They’re letting you know that they’ve lived through some shit.
Here are some of their points of reference: a person stumbling in the dark while consumed by rage, joyless posturing, blank smiles, blood on the lawn, decay—the names, faces, stories, details, and circumstances behind their songs are unclear, veiled behind minimal poetry and symbolism. That's why every song encourages a few deep listens with the lyrics sheet in hand—there are so many subtle turns in their words, and when you look closely at their stark phrasings, it's clear they communicate quite a bit.
Regardless of where it's coming from, We Are Nots is fueled by its deep well of anger and frustration. Listen to how they yell; they're sick of being complacent, of watching people walk around with an unwarranted smug ease. Nots don't have time for that, and their brand of "weird punk," as Hoffmann summarized it during a Memphis morning TV segment, lends an ominous attack which reflects that tone. Every member of the band plays a role in adding heft and urgency to complement the lyrics. There's Farmer's persistently ominous bass, Hoffmann's swirling and echoing hellscape guitars, Watson's unrelenting bash, and perhaps the most imperative weapon in Nots' arsenal, Eastburn's ever-present synthesizer. So often, synths in punk music are an afterthought with a definitively tertiary spot behind the guitars. Here, it plays a prominent role in forming each track's overall tone.
Eastburn's presence also gives the band more freedom to go long. The Memphis band’s debut 7” arrived late last year—four muffled, lo-fi tracks that were vicious and raucous. Under their initial lineup (Hoffmann, Watson, and Laurel Ferdon), they delivered great songs. Still, they felt definitively like 7” songs—succinct, loud, and powerful, but too primitive and punchy to carry an entire album. Like so many other bands in the garage punk sphere just putting out their first single, it was unclear whether or not they could transition naturally into an "album band." They did, though—We Are Nots succeeds because Nots have evolved. With Watson moving behind the drums, they’ve got a stronger backbone. Eastburn’s synthesizers expand the band's scope, making their songs feel more fully realized and giving the band more freedom to go long. On “Reactor”, for example, Hoffmann takes her time with a few well-placed guitar stabs; she wouldn’t be able to do that without the band’s newfound synth sprawl.
The biggest obstacle they face with their first long-player is that We Are Nots is clearly set in its ways. The synthesizers, the gang vocals, their approach to choruses—it's all reasonably similar across these 27 minutes. Even Hoffmann’s vocal style, thrillingly furious in its from-the-gut delivery, doesn’t vary too much. But the structures, stories, and overall tones differ enough from song to song that this never feels like a monotone slog. They've created a surefooted, aesthetic defining opening statement.
"Don’t act like you and I would get along," sings Hoffmann on the 48-second track "Get Along" shortly before she’s joined by several voices feverishly yawping "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA" over and over again. Hoffmann might be alone in pointing the finger accusingly during the verse, but she's quickly backed by her bandmates. They're a united front, belligerent and dizzying in their approach. It's aggressive, and it sounds like fun.


On 1995's Different Class, Pulp and Jarvis Cocker were arty outsiders worming their way into the lives of ordinary folk, and they became pop in its most democratically widespread sense.

Different Class

The first time I heard Pulp’s “Common People” was at my brother’s wedding reception in the tiny English town of Tring. I had moved to America in the early ’90s and completely missed the Britpop anthem’s rise to #2 in the UK charts in June 1995. Since then, I’ve never been able to separate the sound of “Common People” from the memory tableau of those wedding revelers—all ages and levels of dancing ability, varying states of intoxication—flailing wildly as the song’s tempo accelerated from a canter to a gallop.
A wedding reception is exactly the kind of commonplace occasion or location—see also office parties, school discos, pub nights, and the sort of unhip nightclubs found in the center of provincial towns across Britain—that Pulp aimed to infiltrate in 1995. Jarvis Cocker and his group wanted to become pop in its most democratically widespread, accessible-to-all sense. Different Class and the four UK hit singles spawned off the album achieved that ambition mightily.
Amazingly Pulp had existed for seventeen years before their 1995 breakthrough, and for most of that time they'd barely qualified as a cult band. Across the ’80s, they’d released a string of oddball, mildly intriguing albums via little labels like Red Rhino, Fire, and Gift. In 1991, the gawky aspiring grandeur of “My Legendary Girlfriend” won them some fans. After a decade-plus scrabbling along in indie-land, Pulp finally got picked up by a major label, Island, who in ’93 released an anthology of their recent Gift singles titled Intro and then, two years later, the group’s proper big-league debut His ‘ N’ Hers. “Do You Remember the First Time?” glancingly brushed the UK Top 40; The Sisters EP fared slightly better, denting the charts thanks to its bouncy, bittersweet lead tune “Babies.” But Pulp were still barely hanging on to pop.
A sense of urgency—“this could be our last chance”—must surely have possessed Pulp as ’94 turned into ’95 and work started on the album that would become Different Class. Seventeen years after Cocker formed Pulp in post-punk Sheffield while still a schoolboy, the singer and his group rose to the make-or-break moment. Cocker wrote eight of the album’s 12 songs in a 48-hour burst of inspiration. Among them was “Common People,” which instantly stood out as a potential anthem.
The genius of “Common People” is the way its fist-punch chorus and frantic surge rouses unity and release even as its socially acerbic lyric speaks of division and tension. Jaunty and whimsical in tone at the start, “Common People” seems initially to be just a wry true-life anecdote: posh girl recruits fellow art student from a humble background (Jarvis) as a guide to how the other half lives. But as the pace quickens, the song escalates into an accusatory tirade, fueled by Cocker’s stinging awareness of how stacked social odds determine life outcomes. The slumming St Martin’s College sculpture student adopts the lifestyle of the less well-off. But not only will she “never get it right,” she’ll never really know the desperation that drives the live-for-now rapacity of working-class pleasure-taking: All it would take is one phone call to her father and she’ll be restored to her wealthy background. “You’ll never understand,” rails Cocker, “how it feels to live your life/With no meaning or control and with nowhere left to go/You are amazed that they exist/And they burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why.”
Different Class identifies its primary subject in its title: The social antagonisms that rankle as raw in Britain today as they did 20 years ago. Class division and regional antipathy contributed as much to the upset of Brexit—in which Pulp’s traditionally left-wing hometown Sheffield, in the formerly industrial North, surprisingly voted to leave the European Union—as xenophobia and nativism did.
In addition to pouring salt on the perennial wounds of class that mark anybody who grows up British, “Common People” had further resonance in ’95 as a skirmish in the battle of Britpop. The rivalry between Oasis and Blur was structured in terms of class and region: Northern lads celebrated as the genuine working-class article contrasted with Southerners seen as the bourgeois unreal-thing by their detractors. Damon Albarn’s Mockney-accented character studies on *Parklife—*which Cocker described as “slumming”—were a spur for the writing of “Common People.”
Pulp pointed to a third path that cut across the Oasis-vs-Blur binary. Cocker and other members of the group such as Steve Mackey and Russell Senior represented a different tradition of British proletarian pop than the Gallagher brothers: stolidly working class in background, solidly socialist in their ingrained allegiances (Senior, for instance, had picketed during the 1984 Miner’s Strike), yet arty and intellectual, in an autodidact or art school-influenced way, at odds with that background.
Those tensions—loyalty to origins versus the desire to escape their self-limiting horizons—fed into “Mis-Shapes,” the opening track on Different Class. It attempts to repeat the populist power of “Common People” but is less successful simply because it speaks for a smaller fraction of the populace. Cocker sings as spokesman for those who “learnt too much at school” and “now can’t help see” too clearly, right through the lies that every segment of society tells itself. The title “Mis-Shapes” comes from an old-fashioned word for a broken product—often a foodstuff, like a cookie—that is rejected for damage or defects, and sometimes sold at a cheaper price. “You could end up with a smack in the mouth, just for standing out,” Cocker sings, the memories still vivid of being persecuted as a weakling weirdo.
The liner notes of the CD booklet pick up this theme: “Please understand. We don’t want no trouble. We just want the right to be different. That’s all.” The tone of “Mis-Shapes,” though, is not plaintive and pleading but strident and defiant, ascending through superiority complex (“We'll use the one thing we've got more of, that's our minds”) to a triumphant fantasy of vindication and victory: “Brothers, sisters, can't you see?/The future's owned by you and me...They think they've got us beat/But revenge is going to be so sweet.”
Cocker’s ambivalence about the masses also informs “Sorted For E’s & Wizz,” which—with “Mis-Shapes” as its double A-side—became Pulp’s second UK No. 2 hit of 1995. A wistful flashback to the illegal outdoor raves of the late ’80s and early ’90s, “Sorted” sees Cocker swept up in the collective celebration yet remaining deep down a doubtful bystander. “Is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?” he muses disconsolately, “or just twenty-thousand people standing in a field?” As the Ecstasy wears off and dawn peeks grimly over the horizon, Cocker finds the sensations of unity and bonhomie to have been ersatz and ephemeral: not one of the ultra-friendly strangers he’d bonded with earlier in the night will give him a lift back to the city. Still, he can’t quite shake the lingering utopian feeling that divisions of all kinds really were magically dissolved for a few hours. In the CD single booklet, a four-word statement of perfect ambiguity spells out his sense of rave’s fugitive promise: “IT DIDN'T MEAN NOTHING.”
Class is far from the only theme bubbling away in this album, though. At least half the songs continue the love ‘n’ sex preoccupations of His ‘N’ Hers, tinged sometimes with the yearning nostalgia of earlier songs like “Babies.” The treatment on Different Class ranges from saucy (“Underwear”) to seedy (“Pencil Skirt,” the hoarsely panting confessional of a creepy lech who preys on his friend’s fiancé) to the sombre (“Live Bed Show” imagines the desolation of a bed that is not seeing any amorous action). “Something’s Changed,” conversely, is a straightforwardly romantic and gorgeously touching song about the unknown and unknowable turning points in anyone’s life: those trivial-on-the-surface decisions (to go out or stay in tonight, this pub or that club) that led to meetings and sometimes momentous transformations. Falling somewhere in between sublime and sordid, the epic “F.E.E.L.I.N.G. C.A.L.L.E.D. L.O.V.E” exalts romance as a messy interruption in business-as-usual: “it’s not convenient...it doesn’t fit my plans,” gasps Cocker, hilariously characterizing Desire as “like some small animal that only comes out at night.”
Sex and class converge in “I Spy”—a grandiose fantasy of Cocker as social saboteur whose covert (to the point of being unnoticed, perhaps existing only in his own head) campaign against the ruling classes involves literally sleeping with the enemy. “It’s not a case of woman v. man/It’s more a case of haves against haven’ts,” he offers, by way of explanation for one of his recent raids (“I’ve been sleeping with your wife for the past 16 weeks... Drinking your brandy/Messing up the bed that you chose together”). Looking back at Different Class many years later, Cocker recalled that in those days he thought “I was actually working undercover, trying to observe the world, taking notes for future reference, secretly subverting society.”
“I Spy” is probably the only song on Different Class that requires annotation, and even then, only barely. Crucial to Cocker’s democratic approach is that his lyrics are smart but accessible: He doesn’t go in for flowery or fussy wordplay, for poetically encrypted opacities posing as mystical depths. He belongs to that school of pop writing—which I find superior, by and large—where you say what you have to say as clearly and directly as possible. Not the lineage of Dylan/Costello/Stipe, in other words, but the tradition of Ray Davies, Ian Dury, the young Morrissey (as opposed to the willfully oblique later Morrissey).
Cocker’s songs on Different Class are such a rich text that you can go quite a long way into a review of the album before realizing you’ve barely mentioned how it sounds. Pulp aren’t an obviously innovative band, but on Different Class they almost never lapse into the overt retro-stylings of so many of their Britpop peers: Blur’s Kinks and new wave homages, Oasis’ flagrant Beatles-isms, Elastica’s Wire and Stranglers recycling. On Pulp’s ’90s records, there are usually a couple of examples of full-blown pastiche per album, like the Moroder-esque Eurodisco of “She’s a Lady” on His ‘N’ Hers. Here, “Disco 2000” bears an uncomfortable chorus resemblance to Laura Branigan’s “Gloria,” while “Live Bed Show” and “I Spy” hint at the Scott Walker admiration and aspiration that would blossom with We Love Life, which the venerable avant-balladeer produced.
Mostly though, it’s an original and ’90s-contemporary sound that Pulp work up on Different Class, characterized by a sort of shabby sumptuousness, a meagre maximalism. “Common People,” for instance, used all 48 studio tracks available, working in odd cheapo synth textures like the Stylophone and a last-minute overlay of acoustic guitar that, according to producer Chris Thomas, was “compressing so much, it just sunk it into the track.... glued the whole thing together. That was the whip on the horse that made it go.”
I started this review with my brother’s wedding reception and, strangely, only later remembered that Different Class’ front cover is a wedding photo. A real-life wedding too: at the request of a Pulp associate who knew the bride and groom, the happy couple and their families agreed to pose for some extra shots with life-size, black-and-white cut-out figures of the band members inveigled into the midst of the full-color scene__.__ That seems like an apt symbol of what Pulp were doing with Different Class and its hit singles: Arty outsiders worming their way into the lives of ordinary folk.
Cocker, operating solo, repeated this feat in a more surrealist prankster way the following year at the Brit Awards ceremony: he vaulted into the midst of a Michael Jackson performance, waggling his bony arse subversively and alarming some of the small children dancing onstage with his goofy moves. But in this instance Cocker represented not the freaks of the world but the regular people: it was an impulsive gesture intended to deflate the fantasy bubble-world of deluded superstars. “My actions were a form of protest at the way Michael Jackson saw himself as some Christ-like figure with the power of healing,” Cocker recalled years later. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision brought on by boredom and frustration. When someone appears onstage and wants to be Jesus, I think it’s a bit off.... I’ve always thought that when you get into a position of privilege, you should abuse it rather than toady along with what’s going on.”
After Different Class, Pulp made great—or partially great—records like 1998’s This Is Hardcore and We Love Life, the group’s 2001 swansong. But songs like “Weeds II” and “Wickerman”— inventive and majestic as they are—have, I’d wager, rarely ignited a wedding celebration or been repeat-played on a pub jukebox. Never again would Pulp command pop’s center stage—be common property—like they did in 1995.


After a decade of record label turmoil, the pop singer JoJo—of “Leave (Get Out)” fame—returns with a sincere third album, featuring guest spots from Alessia Cara, Wiz Khalifa, and Remy Ma.

Mad Love.

At 25, Joanna “JoJo” Levesque is already something of a veteran. In 2004, she became the youngest artist to hit No. 1 on the Billboard pop songs chart with “Leave (Get Out),” released when she was just 13. Its girl power ethos and catchy hook delivered by a precocious teen star aligned into a perfect pop moment. “Leave (Get Out)” was an emblem of the TRL era—and, ostensibly, the launchpad from which JoJo’s career would blast into the stratosphere.
Some of this momentum carried over to her sophomore effort, The High Road, in 2006, featuring the excellent young love anthem “Too Little Too Late.” Then, in a turn of events that even the most experienced musician would dread, a legal dispute with her label halted any of her commercial ambitions. The battle essentially held her career hostage for the better part of 10 years. Now that the smoke has cleared, JoJo’s back with a new label in her corner, a decade of gritty industry experience behind her, and her third full-length album*.*
Mad Love. provides some indication of the path JoJo might have taken if her career had rolled along uninterrupted. The EDM-leaning beats favored by today’s biggest pop stars, her contemporaries in terms of age if not necessarily longevity, are prevalent. The low, pulsating synths of bonus track “Good Thing.” build up to a drop on the chorus, and lead singles “Fuck Apologies.” and “F.A.B.” are obvious ploys for radio rotation. The former comes complete with a tame Wiz Khalifa verse, while the latter boasts an always welcome contribution from Remy Ma.
From a different artist, these songs might sound like pre-packaged attempts to jump on the same bandwagon that she decries in “F.A.B.” In JoJo’s case, they play out as sincere progressions, bolstered by her vocal talent and honest approach to storytelling (she has songwriting credits on every track). There’s enough compelling singing across Mad Love. to hold interest, even if your tolerance for dance-pop wears thin.
Rhythmically, JoJo is arguably following on a trend that she helped put in motion: she was working with Nordic hitmakers well before Stargate’s run of chart smashes. Lyrically, she is also exploring more mature themes. There are songs about sex and love to be sure (“Reckless.,” “Like This.”), but also joy and angst. On bonus “Clovers.,” she chronicles her struggles with depression: “No matter what the doctors offered me/Couldn’t shake that dark cloud off of me.” The song gives her fans, especially the ones who shed adolescence alongside her, the language to describe the fraught transition into adulthood. Perhaps the unintended advantage of being sidelined by her label was the chance it gave JoJo to bypass the common, shock-based pop starlet rebrand in favor of simply living to tell her tales on her own terms.
JoJo’s original deal was with the now defunct Blackground Records, helmed by uncle of the late Aaliyah, Barry Hankerson. The association undoubtedly, if unconsciously, pushed her sound towards R&B. It also resulted in some of her debut album’s best non-single cuts. Twelve years later, Mad Love. only reinforces the idea that JoJo could thrive in the R&B sphere; “Edibles.” is proof. As she sings, “I bring all the realness to the surface/Does a woman like that make you nervous?” over distorted synths to her are-we-aren’t-we companion, you can’t help but wish that every other track sounded something like it. The electro-pop of Mad Love. could stand to make way to a few more slow jams, which highlight her impressive range and its raspy magic—outdone only slightly by Alessia Cara on “I Can Only.,” another standout.
While JoJo sounds great on big ballads and floor-filling tracks alike, Mad Love. lacks a cohesive sound. The abrupt genre shifts are jarring at turns, but paradoxically it’s this malleability that should be key to JoJo’s continued success. Ultimately, though, Mad Love. sounds like an album that JoJo needed to make, and one that her fans were waiting for—the fans that grew up with her, went through big life changes beside her, devoured EPs and mixtapes she made despite record label obstruction, and took her back to No. 1, according to a more modern metric (the iTunes chart). On “Music.,” when she sings “every night I bet my life on you,” it’s encouraging to see that after all this time, the risk paid off.


Jamie Stewart duets with more than a dozen indie, punk, and experimental music colleagues, and what results is a surprisingly sweet meditation on friendship, with nary a try-hard shock to be found.

OH NO

It’s difficult to be a Xiu Xiu fan, mostly because it means you have to listen to so much Xiu Xiu music. Sharon Van Etten seems to acknowledge this at the beginning of OH NO, when she asks Jamie Stewart: “What were you doing there, so un-anxious to be liked?” That’s the question regarding a glorious, terrible, improbable body of work that has shades of The Velvet Underground, Suicide, and Einstürzende Neubauten but really sounds only like itself.
Though Xiu Xiu is now a duo with Angela Seo, Stewart is the lifetime member. He’s spent the last 20 years blazing an illegible path, musically and morally, between queer politics and shock-jock shtick, radical vulnerability and repugnant cruelty, good faith and bad taste. The music varies wildly in style—from punky folk and dreamy pop to experimental electronics and harsh noise, all teeming with global instruments—and quality, from the heart-filled zenith of “I Luv the Valley, OH!” to the heartless nadir of “I Luv Abortion.” For every song you’d defend with your last breath, there’s another you couldn’t defend with your first. Most perverse is when they blend into the likes of “Ale,” a gorgeous tune about telling an overweight woman playing GameCube to shut up.
It wasn’t always this way. The urge to disturb has been part of Xiu Xiu since the beginning, but there’s something elemental and pure about those early releases, which calibrated their shocks with tenderness and grace, brilliantly modulating danger and desire in mini-masterpieces like “Fabulous Muscles.” Such moments are scattered across Xiu Xiu’s later days, but the signal-to-noise ratio decidedly shifted. Shock art has to shock itself, and gradually it grows numb. The music got sprawlier, louder, more hectoring; the targets of Stewart’s disgust grew increasingly outlandish; there were chiptune experiments and free-jazz Nina Simone covers; the lyrics developed a worrisome onomatopoeia habit. At last check, Stewart was up to his old tricks on the bombastic Girl With Basket of Fruit, the title track of which contains lines like “A flock of erect dicks on bat wings pee-pees into her sleeping face.”
This is why a record as modest as OH NO, on which Stewart duets with more than a dozen indie, punk, and experimental music friends, feels disproportionately appealing. One hesitates to say he’s “grown up,” both because it’s a condescending cliché and because he’ll probably come back with an album called I Luv COVID or something. But OH NO, which is reportedly about a personal betrayal, comes out as a pretty sweet meditation on friendship, with nary a try-hard shock to be found. The collaborations clear the clotted atmosphere and perhaps have a tempering effect. You probably don’t get Sharon Van Etten in the studio by asking her to sing about clubbing baby seals over a bunch of crashing sounds.
Still, OH NO sounds more like a regular Xiu Xiu album than its track list would suggest. Apparently, singing with Stewart makes you sing like Stewart—that is to say in a kind of sinister mumble, stretching out melodies so they creep more than they stick. But given space to breathe, Stewart’s gifts as a vocal performer and sound arranger result in elegant, habitable art-pop, more along the lines of latter-day These New Puritans than GG Allin.
The darkest moments here tend to be closer to comical than harrowing. On the ambient pop charmer “I Cannot Resist,” featuring Deb Demure, the sound of a head rolling down stairs is given as “bing bong bonk-o bung.” The Greg Saunier collab, “Goodbye for Good,” is about how plants want to kill us, and features Newsom-like lists of whimsical animal names. Angus Andrew from Liars shows up to rant about Flaming Hot Cheetos and Fuego Takis on an unabashedly silly ESG pastiche called “Rumpus Room.”
More affecting is the melancholy and remorse that floats through songs with Circuit Des Yeux, Susanne Sachsse, Twin Shadow, Liz Harris of Grouper, and Chelsea Wolfe, who appears for an emphatic cover of The Cure’s “One Hundred Years.” As signs of Xiu Xiu mellowing go, could you ask for more than duets with Owen Pallett and Jonathan Meiburg from Shearwater? By not trying to shock us, Stewart actually surprises us, and OH NO makes it easier to be a Xiu Xiu fan than it’s been in years.

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Armed with breakbeats, gnarled riffs, and her most uplifting songwriting yet, the Black Dresses musician maps an arduous path toward love and security.

Rookie’s Bustle

As one half of the noise-pop duo Black Dresses, Ada Rook makes radioactive sleepover music that explores the fear, anger, and trauma spawned by a hostile world. On solo records like 2016’s Void Fantasy and 2020’s 2,020 Knives, she crafted industrial nightmares and dissociative electro-lullabies with the bite of a brutal winter night, leaning into similarly dark themes. As of late, Rook’s perspective has grown more optimistic, a change you can see even in her song titles. Where she once gave her tracks names like “Tortured Bitch” and “Dream of the Weeks When the Void Held Me and All I Could Hear was the Howling of Wind,” she now offers a more hopeful reassurance: “Ur Gonna Live.”
Culled from unreleased cuts dating back to 2019, Rookie’s Bustle is her leanest and most uplifting release. The EP’s namesake is the Japanese point-and-click adventure game Cookie’s Bustle, about a young girl who believes she’s a teddy bear and confronts challenges ranging from terrorist threats to the eradication of humanity by aliens. (Rook is also a game developer.) Rookie’s Bustle maps a similarly arduous path toward trust and comfort. Opener “920London” lays out its arc in miniature, with a concept loosely inspired by a graphic novel about goth lovers nearing the apocalypse. Jangly guitar chords spread like rays of sunlight, only to be interrupted by a gnarled riff and anguished screams. Rook sings of “clouds in my head starting to break,” but her bleak imagery—car crashes, bad dreams, bloodshot eyes—creates a cataclysmic mood. At the last moment, the desolate noise fades and Rook cries out, “And you’re still here!” It sounds like a sigh of relief.
The skies are still dreary on the robo-thrasher “Ur Gonna Live,” but at least she’s not alone: “Everytime I look at you/I feel like I’ve become somebody new,” Rook sings. The pop-punk highlight “Curse (for Devi)” is an even more touching ode to companionship, with Rook pouring her heart out to her Black Dresses bandmate Devi McCallion. “You make me feel like I’m not sick,” she whispers with a tender ache, “like nothing ever happened to me.” The sweetness and confidence of these seven tracks lend the EP a unique position within Rook’s discography. By the time we get to happy hardcore closer “A Future,” peace seems finally within reach.
The upbeat arc of the lyrics parallels the increasing buoyancy of Rook’s sonic palette. Much of her prior work sounded like a rave inside a cement mixer; Rookie’s Bustle, by comparison, is closer to a metalcore riff on the Jet Set Radio Future soundtrack. Where she once wielded clanging metallic percussion and bursts of harsh noise, she now deploys breakbeats that showcase her gift for peppy, danceable pop production. Her snarling screams now resolve into satisfying melodic hooks, as on the scratchy crunkcore of “STARLIGHT ZONE.” Even when that old, familiar darkness creeps into her music, the glimmer still remains, brighter than ever.


Following last year's fantastic Asa Breed, Michigan-based DJ/producer Matthew Dear issues this mix of minimal techno and deep house on Berlin's famed Get Physical label.

Body Language Vol. 7

To make a massive oversimplification, minimal techno in 2007 was all about Luciano's live DJ sets. The head of German label Cadenza may not have initiated the genre's trend away from minimalism and back towards deep house classicism, but he made it exciting. In the process, he practically trademarked many of the year's key tracks. Luciano switched easily from brain-frying hypnotism to body-moving funk, blurring distinctions between the two. Unfortunately, his official 2008 DJ mix, Fabric41, veers too much toward the former, restricting access to the "ultimate Luciano live experience" to those who download bootlegged live sets.
As if on cue, Michigan-based DJ/producer Matthew Dear steps up to the plate with Body Language Vol. 7, a mix for Berlin's Get Physical label that apes the Chilean DJ's minimal European techno and deep U.S. house-- a circuitous route sure to annoy purists of all stripes. Dear's the right kind of artist to jump on this trend: From the quirky micro-pop records he releases under his own name to the coldly monolithic bangers he concocts under his Audion alias, he has a knack for taking other people's blueprints to their logical conclusions.
Dear fares best when pushing to the extremes of the styles he spins here. In the minimal camp, Kalabrese's "Cityblues" is a murky cabaret number with its insistent bass pulse, Chic guitar, and erratic, live-sounding percussion, is as compelling as any of the house-noir that Kompakt's Matias Aguayo has made of late; Radio Slave's remix of Mlle Caro and Franck Garcia's "Dead Souls" counterposes eerie, fragile vocals with longform groove; DJ Koze's "Zou Zou" is the most imaginative adoption of world music this side of trumpeter Jon Hassell or Chilean minimal house producer Ricardo Villalobos. At the other end, the casual, celebratory vibe of Kid Sublime's delightfully glittery disco revival "Basement Works Vol. 1" evokes the best impromptu house party ever. And the set closes with Lorenzo's already classic 2001 anthem "Get Deep", its seductive bass punctuated with thick handclaps and yearning male vocals.
Sometimes, though, the middle ground is also the highest ground: The set's best track is Seth Troxler and Patrick Russell's "Doctor of Romance", an endlessly involving groove concealing gently writhing layers of percussion and an army of murmured vocals, sighs, and grunts. The tribal workout of Basti Grub's "Baaa Niii" is nearly as strong, with its surround sound rhythms and slurred spoken-word vocals. An entire album of tracks like these would be irresistible rather than simply great.
That Dear falls slightly short of this is less a measure of his own successes and shortcomings than those of the 2008 minimal scene. The triumph of deep house, which has replaced minimal as today's archetypal sound, has reinvigorated dance music values such as restraint, subtlety, and that most meaningless of words, "deepness." Minimal, on the other hand, placed a classicist-baiting emphasis on novelty, diversity, and melodrama. Lately, minimalism has departed from such values and lurched towards sameness, becoming a drab cliché. This year's ascendancy of rigorously reductive (but not minimal) deep house turns that pursuit of sameness into the norm, as producers craft undemonstrative, compulsive grooves.
Subtlety and restraint can be great things in dance music, and many of the best dance tracks of the year are those that get this "undemonstrative, compulsive" mix just right; the trouble is that distinguishing between the scintillating and the boring becomes a challenge when these traits dominate. There are few truly awful records, yet far too many just-decent ones, and navigating the tiny stylistic space between them is increasingly difficult. In such conditions, Dear gets it right more often than most-- a good two-thirds of Body Language Vol. 7 is genuinely compelling-- but I can't shake the feeling he won this round by a throw of the dice.


Backed by industrial noise, drum machines, and synths, the Philadelphia-based songwriter rages at systems of oppression on a bleak, troubling record of nearly unrelenting hostility.

Heterosexuality

Heterosexuality is the latest installment in Shamir’s spiky “anti-career.” After his glossy debut, Ratchet, the Las Vegas-born, Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter has issued a cavalcade of self-released, lo-fi experiments: at times brilliant, at times bizarre, but never bland. Recent records drew on hip-hop and country, but Heterosexuality nods to icons of rage like Nine Inch Nails with lyrics that capture the heavy burden of being a visibly trans person in North America.
Produced by Hollow Comet, a member of the Philadelphia indie rock band Strange Ranger, this is a record of nearly unrelenting hostility. Over industrial noise, horror-movie synths, and grating drum machines, Shamir uses his singular, stunning voice to vent at the systems oppressing him, the spectators gawking at him, and the so-called friends who’ve failed him. “I’ll keep my foot on your neck,” he growls on the gritty “Abomination,” and you don’t doubt for a second that he means it. A few moments later, in the funniest line on the album, he declares himself a “thick tankie bitch” with “a custom guillotine.” His message is clear: Join or die. Or, as he sings in “Gay Agenda,” “Free your mind, come outside/Pledge allegiance to the gay agenda.” In moments like these, Heterosexuality stands as a powerful alternative to the zero-calorie pride anthems that pepper the pop charts every June.
Elsewhere, Shamir directs his anger not at the outside world but toward himself. The 27-year-old artist has been open about his diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and many of his albums—particularly 2018’s Resolution, a meditation on racist violence—explore his experiences navigating traumatic circumstances. He has welcomed fans into his sadness, giving young queer people of color a rare space to unburden themselves in safety.
But he offers little comfort on Heterosexuality, working in a lineage of industrial music about self-harm and suicide. Some lyrics, like the chorus of “Gay Agenda,” are sung with tongue pressed firmly to cheek: “Pray as much as you can, there’s no hope for me/I will see you in hell/I will be bringing the heat.” Others are more troubling, with lyrics that allude to cutting, hanging, and drowning. “Cisgender” opens in defeat, with Shamir singing, “You wanna kill me? Well, here’s your chance!/I can barely get around now as it fucking stands.” Later in the song, when he flies toward the highest register of his voice to belt, “I’m not gonna pass for you,” his sense of defiance sounds like that of Dido on the pyre. “I’m not sure there’s a life I can lead,” he confesses on “Gay Agenda,” his remarkable voice sounding muddier, lower, less clear, before vowing on “Reproductive” to “make sure the evil ends here with me.”
To be clear, Shamir doesn’t owe anyone optimism. There must be room in queer songwriting for a broader spectrum of emotion than pride alone. That said, a sort of hopelessness flows through Heterosexuality. “Serotonin comes and goes in tiny waves,” he sings on the closing track, “Nuclear.” “But these days, it’s stalled, and I kinda like it that way.” Shamir is singing from a position of surrender, suggesting that coping with depression means ceding to it. It can make for a gutting listen.
While preparing to write this review, I’d gone for long walks through my city, headphones in. I listened to Shamir’s entire body of work, thrilling as he departed from the mainstream to hone a distinct, abrasive point of view. On one of these walks, a man twice my size flew into my periphery. He punched me. He called me a dyke.
For days afterward, I sat in my apartment and struggled to make sense of what had happened to me in broad daylight, on the street where I live, surrounded by neighbors who didn’t stop to help. Listening to Heterosexuality, I often felt as though Shamir and I were standing in the same dark place together, asking one another: Why go on? I don’t fault Shamir for asking the question. But I want us to go on, anyway, and, in the words of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Boyer, clamber out of that which resembles the grave but isn’t. Shamir finds plenty of worthy targets for his rage in Heterosexuality. Burial is their job, not ours.

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or know someone who is, we recommend these resources:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
1-800-273-TALK (8255)


Although Dodie Clark came to fame for her chatty and intimate viral videos, she proves the exception to the rule about internet stars making terrible music. Her debut studio album spotlights the sparse and self-conscious folk-pop she’s been making for nearly a decade.

Build a Problem

From Logan Paul’s Santa Claus diss track to the whoah-inducing pop of TikTok’s Addison Rae, many viral internet stars have tried to maximize their influence by creating music. This usually leads to a lot of meme trap and middling R&B, but every now and again, there’s an exception—like 25-year-old Dodie Clark, who has been uploading videos to her YouTube channel with nearly 2 million subscribers since 2011. Her debut studio album Build A Problem is an official unveiling of the sparse and self-conscious folk pop she has been posting online for nearly a decade, a career milestone for an artist who has, for the most part, been relegated to YouTube.
Although her first YouTube video is an original song called “Rain,” Clark gained subscribers not solely because of music, but because she made videos about jellybeans and bisexuality, candidly discussing her mental health while boiling pasta drunk in her kitchen. For a lot of young, struggling fans, including 19-year-old me, her videos were the ultimate salve, with their glowy, bluish lighting and Clark’s intimate mode of address. Although these videos have been unlisted and moved to a second channel, presumably in an effort to make Clark appear more serious as an artist, the vulnerability in them shines through on Build A Problem.
The music on this album is nothing if not twee, prioritizing lush vocal harmonies and shy, plucky acoustic guitar. Despite the soothing tones, Clark often finds herself swallowed by misery and bitter self-effacement in the lyrics. On “Cool Girl,” Clark wonders “How much of a tongue can I bite/until we notice blood.” On “Sorry,” Clark’ identifies herself as a monster in a small voice over stormy violins. Her emphasis on harmony, billowy vibrato, and the dutiful acoustic strumming often recalls early Ingrid Michaelson or A Fine Frenzy. Sometimes Clark departs from this candied, folk-pop sound and ventures into something closer to contemporary musical theater, coupling production melodrama with straight-shooting melodies, like on the pleasurably tense and self-serious “Before the Line.”
But some of Clark’s genre experiments are less successful. Instrumental transition tracks “?” and “.”, both feel uninformative and ungrounded. They’re the instrumental equivalents to Clark’s occasional lyrical problem, where she obscures her meaning so much that you start wondering what she’s talking about. On “Boys Like You,”  Clark tells us “there’s a name for boys like you” without ever really elaborating. The political ache of “Guiltless'' turns up hollow when the most incisive lyric in it is an opaque reference to how “a dark politician will end up alone.”
But Clark isn’t totally averse to being explicit, especially when the subject is Clark herself. She tells us plainly that she hates herself, ruefully revisits drinking until 5AM to justify desperate hook ups, and admits that, at “24, I still count everyone I kiss.” These clear, specific songs carry the same appeal of Clark’s tender and intimate old vlogs. They’re not too complicated, and the experiences they describe aren’t terribly unique, but they’re presented with the kind of surprising honesty you usually feel when reading through drunken Notes app confessions. They lay out insecurity in detail without scrutinizing or justifying it, making you want to lay yourself bare, too. Sometimes, you don’t want to think too hard. You want to put on a big sweater and complain. You want to listen to something soft and sad, look out the window and remember how embarrassing you have been. Clark knows that feeling well—her music is made for it.

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Jim O’Rourke’s 1997 album Bad Timing turns his obsessions with Americana into a tangle of deep reverence and exuberant skepticism.

Bad Timing

In the early 1990s, years before he joined Sonic Youth or partnered with Wilco or tried his hand at singing, Jim O’Rourke was a kind of prodigy in the experimental music underground. He recorded albums in his early twenties for labels like Sound of Pig, Amsterdam’s Staalplaat, and John Zorn’s Tzadik. He made music with whatever was at hand and was proficient on many instruments, and he often performed in the context of free improvisation. But O’Rourke’s first instrument was guitar, and one of his deepest musical loves was the art of arrangement—the precise placement of this note in this pocket of space, the choice of this instrument for that note. The two obsessions met in glorious fashion on his 1997 album Bad Timing.
In the 21st century, we take music built around steel-string guitar for granted. New practitioners have emerged (William Tyler, James Blackshaw, Ben Chasny), a latter-day legend has come and gone (Jack Rose, R.I.P.), and an endless series of reissues of albums by major figures stream by (hello, Bert Jansch). But 20 years ago, the notion of solo acoustic guitar as a medium for expression of album-length ideas was only just emerging from hibernation. Some of its resurgence during that period could be traced to the work of critic Byron Coley, who had written an article in SPIN in 1994, in which he’d tracked down the then-obscure John Fahey in Oregon. Fahey had barely recorded in the few years previous, and was living off the grid and on the edge of poverty, occasionally sleeping in homeless shelters. That SPIN piece, along with the Rhino compilation Return of the Repressed, which put his out-of-print music back in stores, cemented the guitarist’s status as an icon of American music. Neither he, nor his instrument, have left the conversation since.
In North America, the acoustic guitar is often associated with “folk” music of a certain mood; from 1970s singer-songwriters to the ’80s emergence of new age and then onto the rise of “unplugged” music in the ’90s, the acoustic became associated with relaxation, intimacy, quiet contemplation—a sound ostensibly more closely connected to the natural world than its electric counterpart. But Fahey’s vision for acoustic guitar was something else entirely. He was among the first to fully grasp that the instrument had uniquely expressive qualities, that its possibilities as a device for melody, harmony, and rhythm were untapped, and alternate tunings gave it further flexibility other instruments couldn’t match. In Fahey’s hands, the guitar became an orchestra in miniature, and long, multi-part pieces with the thunderous sweep of a symphony could sit alongside rustic evocations of the past. Fahey’s guitar became a tool for collapsing time and space, able to incorporate the grand sweep of music history in a flurry of strummed chords, fingerpicked melodies, and raga-like repeating rhythms.
Fahey’s mid-’90s resurgence served as a backdrop for Bad Timing, and the connection colored how it was received at the time. The Fahey connect was further underscored by O’Rourke’s earlier work in Gastr del Sol, his post-rock duo with David Grubbs (they covered Fahey on their 1996 album Upgrade & Afterlife.) But while Bad Timing has deep spiritual connections to Fahey’s work, the actual music comes from a very different place. You could almost think of Bad Timing as as a record that’s trying to be a Fahey album but keeps getting derailed and ends up going somewhere even more interesting. It was originally written to be a solo guitar record, and O’Rourke has performed versions of the pieces in that setting, but as he worked on the music, he decided he wanted to take it into another direction, one that would incorporate his obsession with carefully arranged sound.
Expanding Bad Timing allowed O’Rourke to paint on a much larger canvas. “For me both Happy Days and Bad Timing were about my myths,” O'Rourke explained to writer Mike McGonigal in a 1997 interview in the zine Music. “A big part of my head is Americana. But the Americana I know comes from listening to Van Dyke Parks, John Fahey, and Charles Ives. That doesn’t exist, and I have to face the fact that it doesn't exist. I have to address that it’s nothing but a construct.” O’Rourke has always wrestled with the “Why?” part of record-making. He’s an avid and thoughtful listener and has absorbed a mountain of music, so with each project, he considers exactly why he should be adding to the pile. Bad Timing may be an homage to some of his heroes, but he takes their collective influence and bends it into a peculiar shape, a tangle of deep reverence and exuberant skepticism. It’s a fantasy that is aware of itself as fantasy, a self-conscious evocation of an individual artist’s obsessions that also functions as a neat historical snapshot.
Parks’ lush arrangements and his gentle irony; Fahey’s vast scope; Ives’ clash of folk simplicity and avant-garde dissonance—these elements are all over Bad Timing, and minimalism is the final piece of the puzzle. Though it draws heavily from the music of other cultures, particularly India, minimalism as a compositional technique is closely identified with American icons, in particular the work of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and LaMonte Young. Glass, Reich, and Riley are best known for repetition—they build meaning through gradually shifting clusters of sound. Young’s music has alternated between repetition and carefully tuned and deeply physical drone. Two other composers, Phill Niblock and Tony Conrad, both of whom O’Rourke work with, further extended Young’s drone conceptions. For this group, held tones become a form of change; from moment to moment in a drone piece, you expect shifts and development to happen, and when they don’t, you’re constantly re-discovering where you are in the now.
Bad Timing has this mercurial quality. It flows beautifully and is easy for a newcomer to enjoy, but it’s also a series of head-fakes, regular juxtapositions that jar the music off course as it moves from one mode to the next. The opening “There’s Hell in Hello But More in Goodbye” starts off almost as a carbon-copy of Fahey in his most whimsical mode, with a sunny finger-picked melody that one could imagine a turn-of-the-century farmer whistling as he strolled across a field. But after a few bars, it drops into a single repeating pattern played on just a small handful of notes, like a needle slipping into a skipping groove, and it stays there, as a lone chord is examined, poked at, and wrung dry. Other subtle instruments fold in—organ, piano—and as “Hello” unfurls it becomes a pure drone piece, quieter and prettier but not so far from the Niblock-inspired hurdy-gurdy blast that defined O’Rourke’s previous album, Happy Days. What started as “folk” ends as a kind of raga meditation.
This kind of shell game happens throughout Bad Timing, as the individual pieces convince you they’re one thing while they’re in the process of becoming something else. “94 the Long Way” opens with a tentative, lurching fingerpicked section, hinting at possible songs behind it, but not quite committing, until finally a pattern emerges that mixes a lurching bass-string loop, repetition in the middle register, and a simple descending three-note melody that becomes the center around which the rest of the track orbits. It at first sounds too simple, like it’s barely even a melody, but O’Rourke adds cheery keyboards, gorgeous pedal steel guitar, and trombone, and it starts to feel like a John Philip Sousa march—you think of fireworks and parades and kazoos and guys in funny hats and rolling expanses of land stretching to the horizon.
The construction of the piece is impressive as new instruments are added every few bars and they all lock into place. But there’s also something joyously silly about it all, a cartoon of civic engagement. The bumptious cheeriness evokes children performing an exaggerated “whistle while you work” march, pounding forward in service of some high-minded collective ideal. The hint of camp extends further. I’ve always taken the “94” in the title to be a reference to I-94, the interstate highway that runs through Chicago. If you’re in the Midwest and you want to take a road trip, you’re almost certainly going to find yourself in I-94 at some point. O’Rourke’s song can be heard as an ode to the freeway, his acoustic Americana version of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn”—indeed, the structure of the two songs is similar, and the snaking pedal steel is evocative of the gliding guitar in the Kraftwerk tune. It’s a soundtrack for looking out the window as you roll through the farmland of Wisconsin and Minnesota.
“Americana” is an inexhaustible descriptor entirely dependent on perspective. American music, after all, is by its nature fractured, a bottomless well of influences that zig-zag around the country and then around the world. Hyper-local folk forms are “discovered” and stolen from and then sold back in a gnarled form by professionals from far away. Aaron Copland, composer of “Fanfare for the Common Man,” was a gay, cosmopolitan Jew with communist sympathies, and he created work steeped in American myths, dreaming up places where he might not be entirely comfortable (or welcome) if he were to actually visit them. O’Rourke’s musical fantasy is steeped in the past but also feels ripe with the possibility of the present moment; it’s of history but it sits outside of it.
The second side of Bad Timing is essentially a single 20-minute piece split into two sections that grows steadily stranger while playing with ideas of nostalgia and memory. O’Rourke presents ancient notions of “American music” and then toys with them. The title track opens with another playful folk guitar figure before losing itself in haze of keyboard melody. For minutes on end, the song seesaws between two slowly plucked chords as hints of accordion nudge the tune along. You keep listening for changes, and you think you might hear something shifting, but you’re also happy to get lost in the repetition, the simple twinkling beauty and building tension of the arrangement.
And then it explodes: a huge distorted power chord launches us into “Happy Trails,” the final piece. Suddenly we’re in the middle of a psychedelic rock record, and it’s like a light switch thrown on, or explosive laughter that sucks the discomfort out of a room. After the lengthy fallout from that blast, there’s another extended fingerpicked acoustic passage, and then the song is overwhelmed with a crashing marching band fanfare (a possible nod to Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 4, where a brooding string passage is interrupted by blasts of horns that sound borrowed from another piece). Adding further contrast, pedal steel guitarist Ken Champion, whose impossibly beautiful swells of sound add so much poignancy to “94 the Long Way,” returns with a downright loopy solo fit for the Country Bear Jamboree. Then the song sunsets in a golden-purple haze of muted horns, returning to uncanny beauty one final time.
This seesaw between mischievous subversion and slack-jawed beauty is the key to O’Rourke’s best music. His sense of humor is both generous and slightly dark; there’s irony in his touch, but it’s not a negating one. It’s more about being open to hearing every possibility in a given piece of music. In a 2001 interview O’Rourke was asked if Bad Timing had an element of parody. “Not a parody at all, or infatuation, it’s more like trying to reconcile what is imagined, learned, real, and imaginary.” And then he added, “Is it really that impossible to believe that something can be funny and sincere at the same time?”
Bad Timing, and O’Rourke’s solo career that followed, is a convincing argument for creation in the face of self-consciousness. The “Why?” of music-making is under-explored. Does your individual record need to exist? For O’Rourke, and especially for his solo albums on Drag City, he justifies their release by lavishing care on every detail, and embracing the music of the past in all its complexity. O’Rourke has always been very careful about how his music is packaged and presented. He only allowed it to be released digitally in the last couple of years, and the downloads on Drag City’s newly created Bandcamp pages urge the listener to “please download the best possible quality.” He’s fighting against his music being reduced, whether that means shrinking the artwork, compressing the digital files, or removing individual tracks from the context of the whole. He’s asking for a lot from the listener, but giving even more in return. Bad Timing was where so many of these ideas came together for the first time, a glorious imaginary world that becomes real every time it plays.


Prins Thomas' Paradise Goulash is a real-time, hand-mixed DJ set, and it spans 57 songs and hours of music. It's the kind of mix you might plan a dinner party around, but beware—somewhere in the middle stretch, there will be dancing on tables, and it will probably be barefoot.

Paradise Goulash

Prins Thomas' Paradise Goulash is seamless like a DJ set and wildly idiosyncratic like an independent radio broadcast. Spanning three CDs totaling nearly four hours' worth of music, it represents a colossal amount of effort:  I don't even want to think about the licensing headaches involved in putting it together, what with its 57 songs, many of them out of print, including one dating all the way back to 1968. Unlike many commercially available mix CDs, it's clear from the intermittent tempo-nudges and occasional stretches of near-chaos that this one was mixed by hand—with all the risks, and all the added hours' worth of flubbed takes, that mixing in real time and without recourse to the sync button entails.
But despite all this, Paradise Goulash never feels like work; it is an invitation to sit back and let Thomas do the driving, and it covers a lot of ground. The first mix begins with lyrical Norwegian jazz and the third mix concludes with Kurt Vile's "Baby's Arms"; along the way, we're treated to Spanish guitar, Balearic ambient, '70s Europop, French/African electronic music, dub techno, acid, deep house, Detroit techno, Swedish space rock, Italian synth pop, and a conceptual artist's cover of Arthur Russell's "This Is How We Walk on the Moon". It's the kind of mix you might plan a dinner party around, but beware—somewhere in the middle stretch, there will be dancing on tables, and it will probably be barefoot.
Thomas is known for his eclecticism, so the range isn't surprising. What is surprising is how seamlessly it flows. Even his oddest selections seem designed to seduce, and whether he's riding the mix hard—one Ricardo Villalobos track weaves in and out for nearly 20 minutes—or simply playing out songs in full, his sleight-of-hand skills are such that you never really notice the changes.
Disc one begins with jazz, detours through groovy funk rock, and then stretches out to explore all manner of sounds you might have heard Ibiza's DJ Alfredo spinning in the early '90s. A five- or six-song stretch of chilly drum machines, slow-motion acid, and world-music accents that climaxes in A Split - Second's chugging New Beat is particularly inspired; it seems to open up a kind of wormhole in time and space, collapsing multiple places and eras into a single idea. As for the tranquil denouement, Kurt Vile and that Arthur Russell cover may be notable talking points, but the most remarkable find here might be Il Guardiano del Faro's "Ma Ci Pensi, Io E Te", an Italian easy-listening song from 1980 that sounds like John Carpenter at the Ice Capades.
Those are a few of the highlights, anyway; every listener will doubtless pick up on different moments. The sheer volume of material, combined with Thomas' knack for teasing out a given tonal or rhythmic idea across long stretches begins to lend repeated listens a kind of hallucinatory air. Where am I? Didn't I just hear this? Does this stairway lead up or down? It's rare that a mix so accurately replicates the sense of disorientation that you get from a marathon stretch of clubbing, but on Paradise Goulash, the windows are blacked out, you can't find your friends, who knows what time (or day) it is, and you wouldn't have it any other way.


On his second record for Mac DeMarco’s label, the Australian singer-songwriter settles into an effortlessly smooth sound perfectly suited for date-night soundtracks.

Sweet Dreamin’

Tex Crick has a rare ability to sound wistful without any sense of pain or longing. On Sweet Dreamin’, the Australian songwriter’s second LP for Mac DeMarco’s record label, his languid vocals take on a more prominent role as he croons over pop-piano melodies and humming analog synths lines that meet him like a warm embrace. Even with his newfound bravado, he is never looking to steal the spotlight with his voice or his perspective. This is peak park-hang music, genial and accomplished without trying to get complicated.
Having played with Kirin J Callinan, Connan Mockasin, Weyes Blood, and Iggy Pop, Crick is no stranger to the ensemble approach. On Sweet Dreamin’, however, he recorded nearly every instrument by himself at his home base in Tokyo. (His sole collaborator is Miles Myjavec, who recorded the drum parts remotely from Australia.) Even as his own backing band, Crick conjures up a loose, lingering jam-session sound that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Songs are mostly under four minutes, and the fleeting moments of indulgence, like the ragtime interlude “Alley Cat” and contemplative “Drifting Off Again,” only add to the album’s casual atmosphere.
Crick’s vocal delivery, hushed yet emotive, resembles the showmanship of Boz Scaggs at a more intimate scale. He’ll have fun within the mumbled scats on “Mulberry Wine,” rhyming “take it to go” with “Picasso,” but every declaration of love sounds effortless, with nary a vocal strain. “I’ll be waiting for ya/You bring my dreams to life,” he sings to a faraway sweetheart on “All I’m Dreaming Of.” Even when his narratives imply star-crossed romance, Crick sounds more like he’s looking forward to a nice vacation. His sentiments aren’t especially original, but he imbues them with enough charm to make the optimism believable.
Though Crick’s piano is at the center of most of the album’s arrangements, the most interesting flourishes come from other instruments. It’s a small joy to hear the spurts of cowbell mixed into opener “Easy Keepers,” followed by the slinky bassline and rollicking synths of “Silly Little Things.” The richest tapestry materializes on “Barefoot Blues,” the closest Sweet Dreamin’ gets to a climax. Over a guitar lick inspired by Hawaiian lap steel music, Crick recalls a vivid affair that culminated in a serenade at a tiki bar. Appropriately, the most realized, romantic scene on the album is a memory of a live performance: “Oh, what a beautiful sound/It was heaven with two feet.”
“Barefoot Blues” also stands out for its sense of place. Absent from Sweet Dreamin’ are the ambient urban sounds that added a touch of realism to Crick’s previous album, 2021’s Live in…New York City. While the music does evoke a cozy home studio—you can practically feel the carpet under your feet—the more anonymous setting can make the album feel a little shapeless. This won’t necessarily be a detriment: No matter where you are in the world, Sweet Dreamin’ sounds perfectly content to be a tasteful, unassuming date-night backdrop.


The Ontario band arrive full-formed on a musically polished, emotionally ragged mini-album that testifies to the enduring potency of emo and pop-punk symbiosis.

Everything Nice EP

Slide a burned CD-R of Everything Nice to a brainfogged A&R rep at DreamWorks or Vagrant, and they might be convinced they signed Arm’s Length to a development deal during those fertile days of the early 2000s when pop-punk and emo solidified themselves in alt-rock rotations. The two charmingly cash-strapped videos for “Garamond” and “No Sleep” give up the game: Everything Nice is a self-released EP made by post-adolescent, suburban Canadians born between 2000-2002. In many circumstances, the dissonance between this band’s unassuming presentation and their shockingly polished collection of could-be anthems would raise suspicion. But who would try to sound like this in 2021 if they were angling to bypass a few rungs on the ladder of success?
Yet Arm’s Length are apparently right where they need to be: “Garamond” owes its buzz to emo TikTok, a platform that thrives on an encyclopedic knowledge of genre tropes and a willingness to poke fun at them. The song itself is a testament to the enduring potency of the symbiosis between emo and pop-punk, the former’s chiming, wistful guitar interplay and poetic pretensions expanding the scope of a genre whose perspective is often limited to the insides of teenage bedrooms and gym lockers. On Everything Nice, pop-punk lends propulsion and melodic immediacy, shaping the band’s more unruly impulses into something accessible. When Allen Steinberg and Jeremy Whyte hit those airtight harmonies on the swaying chorus, you know what it is: a soundtrack for wistfully scrolling through old texts and secretly wishing the whole world could just get a glimpse of how you feel.
Arm’s Length’s updates for the 2020s are minor but crucial—a couple of tricky breakdowns sourced from the New Wave of Post-Hardcore and lyrics that deal primarily in identity, familial strife, and therapeutic frameworks, leaving the romantic turmoil understated but implied. What they lack in innovation, Arm’s Length more than make up in enthusiasm, treating their formative influences with evangelical reverence. The parts during the verse where a muttered vocal gets doubled one octave higher? The off-mic yelling and low-pass filtered drums? The way the second verse shifts into double time, hitting a giddy and not entirely graceful key change at the end of “Eve (Household Name)”? They’ve studied the masters and learned that hooks can arrive other places besides the chorus, that if the drums cut out during a particularly quotable lyric, all you have to do is imagine the DJ at Emo Nite thrusting the mic towards the crowd.
Perhaps it’s the dwindling of resources or attention spans, but like many of 2021’s standout emo and hardcore releases to date, Everything Nice is here for an emotionally turbulent time but not a long time. Even if it’s technically an EP, each of its six tracks works towards establishing the structure of a genre classic: There’s the introductory track that acknowledges its role as such (“Theme Song”), the one that slows things down just a bit with guitar harmonics and mallet percussion (“Gallows Humour”), the hardcore outlier (“Safer Skin”), the one named after a woman, and the one with the parenthetical, and those last two are are actually the same one. They also pull the time-tested trick of putting the big power ballad with acoustic guitars at the sixth spot—only here, it’s also the closer.
You almost wish they’d thrown in a few filler tracks just to give Everything Nice the assumed heft of an album. Arm’s Length aren’t trying to deny their anachronisms and attachment to the CD era; the cinematic breakup of “Garamond” is captured on VHS tape and “Gallows Humour” ends with the sound of vinyl crackle that you only hear on non-vinyl recordings. The nostalgia is real and if you were alive in 2002, Everything Nice will take you there. Yet when I hear Everything Nice, I’m liable to think of 2022—a time when college freshmen might again safely pine in their dorm rooms, when friends will commiserate over beers before packing into a sweaty basement to yell the chorus of “No Sleep.” The future of Arm’s Length is bright regardless.

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Long-lost soundtrack recordings by the saxophonist’s powerhouse quartet, made shortly after 1964’s Crescent sessions, capture the band at the peak of its cohesion.

Blue World

Sometimes a thing can be hidden without really hiding. Blue World, a previously unissued cache of studio recordings by the classic John Coltrane Quartet, comes to us in this vein: For the last 55 years, a clue to its existence could clearly be heard in the soundtrack to a well-regarded French-Canadian film, which interpolated portions of three separate tracks. But only in recent years have jazz scholars connected the dots, leading to what we have here: a 37-minute album (of sorts) by one of the most compelling bands in jazz history, at an unmistakable apex of cohesion.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it may be because of the afterglow of Both Directions at Once: The Lost Album, which Impulse! released, to critical acclaim and commercial triumph just last year. The precedent of that album, and what you could call its market validation, surely had something to do with the way that Coltrane’s estate and former label have rolled out this one. But it would be foolish to shrug off Blue World as yet more product off the archival assembly line. For any admirer of Coltrane, a saxophonist-composer-bandleader who embodied so much in the 1960s—deep mystery, spiritual fervor, hurtling momentum, searching humility—it’s a windfall worth greeting with fresh astonishment, before considering a handful of questions.
So, in that spirit: Blue World offers a glimpse of the John Coltrane Quartet in a state of relaxed assurance, during the same span of time that would yield two landmarks, Crescent and A Love Supreme. Recorded at Van Gelder Studios on June 24, 1964, it’s a small assortment of songs from earlier in Coltrane’s career, refashioned by the evolving language of the band. And to a man—Coltrane on tenor saxophone, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass, Elvin Jones on drums—these musicians seem almost to luxuriate in the dark modal hum and polyrhythmic pull that had already become their trademark. They sound unburdened, as if they have no agenda to advance, and nothing to prove.
Which stands in stark contrast to director Gilles Groulx, at whose behest this music was made. Trained as a documentary filmmaker, Groulx was working on his first feature, Le chat dans le sac (The Cat in the Bag)—a metaphorically charged portrait of a young couple’s unraveling, informed both by the French new wave and Québec’s emerging separatist movement—when he had the idea to approach Coltrane for a soundtrack. Coltrane agreed, but because the project fell outside the purview of his record contract, he left the date off the usual session logs. Groulx took the master tapes back to Montréal, where they were eventually stored in a vault of the National Film Board.
Le chat dans le sac, an early touchstone for Québec cinema, uses only 10 minutes of Coltrane’s music—but in prominent places, with an obvious touch of pride. Barbara Ulrich, one of the film’s two stars (and Groulx’s romantic partner for a time), recalls in the Blue World liner notes that he had specific song requests for Coltrane. Drawn from albums in his personal collection, they represented objects in the saxophonist’s rearview. Coltrane wasn’t in the habit of revisiting previously recorded songs in the studio, but in this case, he and the band obliged.
“Naima,” Coltrane’s tenderest ballad, first appeared on Giant Steps, the 1960 album that signaled his break from Miles Davis, and the beginning of a relationship with Atlantic Records. The song remained in Coltrane’s active repertory—you’ll find it, twice, on The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings—but its quietly smoldering treatment here is notable. Les chat opens with the full first take. (A second take is no less persuasive but a touch less vulnerable.)
“Traneing In” is from an even earlier vintage: the album titled John Coltrane With the Red Garland Trio, recorded in 1957 and released, on Prestige, the following year. The version on Blue World begins with a nearly three-minute bass solo—a master class in low-end theory by Garrison, but not the sort of gesture that would have naturally suited an album track at the time. Coltrane must have embraced the idea that Groulx would pull choice excerpts from the session, taking it as a license to stretch. (The looseness in his own solo recalls a boxer’s warmup routine.)
Groulx must have also admired the 1961 Atlantic album Coltrane Jazz, because Blue World includes two reimagined pieces from its tracklist, “Like Sonny” and “Village Blues.” The former, so named because Coltrane based its melody on a phrase he associated with Sonny Rollins, appears here in one brief and noncommittal take; Coltrane’s intonation and attack are shaky, and it would seem that he decided to set this tune aside. Honestly, it’s not a keeper.
“Village Blues,” on the other hand, sounds marvelous in all three versions on Blue World. Take 2, which appears in the film, is the right selection. (The first take feels less focused rhythmically; the third maintains a lower simmer.) But these musicians could do no wrong playing the blues in this period, and the loping incantation of “Village Blues” is a near-perfect vehicle for them.
Speaking of which, the title track of Blue World appears in two excerpts toward the end of Groulx’s film. This too is a callback: The song is a barely disguised rewrite of Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “Out of This World,” which had been the opening track of the 1962 album Coltrane. Its new title is almost certainly a ploy to evade copyright and licensing obligations, given that Coltrane employs such a similar arrangement as he did before. Still, the execution reflects a band with heavier traction, a stronger sense of itself. And there are moments in Coltrane’s solo when he cycles a motif through several tonal centers, testing an idea he’d soon push to center stage on A Love Supreme.
The comparison that puts Blue World in clearer context, though, is Crescent, the title track of which had been recorded in the same room three weeks earlier. Ben Ratliff, one of Coltrane’s biographers, has observed: “Crescent does not contain the most impressive solos by any member of the John Coltrane Quartet; but in a span of six years with more cornerstone statements than most bands have listenable albums, it occupies the greatest part of that group’s center.”
This is correct. And to extend the thought, Blue World falls just off-center—not a major addition to the Coltrane canon, but certainly an addition to a major part of it. There’s no serious argument to be made for its integrity as a proper album; there’s too much redundancy for that, and no way of knowing what Coltrane would have wanted. But the strongest moments on this offhanded, unintended artifact are remarkable even by the standards of this band at this juncture, and the historical record will reflect that. Finally, the cat’s out of the bag.