On the 20th anniversary of their initial dissolution, the alt-rock OGs release an album produced by Muse-man Rich Costey and featuring TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek and Guns N' Roses' Duff McKagan, among others.

Jane’s Addiction: The Great Escape Artist

The Great Escape Artist

The year 1991 was a significant one in Jane's Addiction lore, marking both the launch of the L.A. art-rockers' Lollapalooza travelling-circus experiment and the announcement of the band's dissolution. Now, on the 20th anniversary of those events, both brands are still making headlines, despite enduring extended periods of inactivity, aborted restarts, and organizational restructuring. And it's perhaps no coincidence that both Jane's Addiction and Lollapalooza have evolved in exactly the same way: What were once unpredictable, chaotic forces have inevitably mutated into well-oiled, monolithic entities bearing little of the charm and character of their original incarnations. This circumstance is not lost on frontman/Lolla visionary Perry Farrell who, on Jane's Addiction's new album, proudly declares, "We've become a big business/ A galaxy merger!"
Even if that line is intended to be a metaphor for a blossoming romantic relationship, the fact that Farrell's singing of love in the language of commerce effectively sums up the proficient but perfunctory nature of The Great Escape Artist, Jane's Addiction's fifth official album, their second comeback record (following 2003's Strays), and the first release since the short-lived reintroduction of founding bassist Eric Avery into the fold for a 2009 tour. No doubt, their various attempts to keep Jane's alive over the past decade have taught Farrell, guitarist Dave Navarro, and drummer Stephen Perkins that replacing Avery requires more than just finding a talented bass player. In many respects, Avery defined the band's sonic identity and mystique; think of any Jane's classic, and often the first thing that pops into your head is one of those ominous, propulsive basslines. So while the middling Strays tried to plug session vet Chris Chaney into the dynamic, for The Great Escape Artist, the band makes a more concerted effort at revitalization, recruiting everyone from TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek to Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan to Morocco's Master Musicians of Joujouka-- a trifecta of collaborators who respectively play to Jane's Addiction's affinities for heady atmosphere, raunchy hard rock, and tribal-percussion jams.
At the outset, The Great Escape Artist lives up to that on-paper potential: Farrell's freak-scene re-indoctrination "Underground" and Avery-directed invective "End to the Lies" (featuring the Joujouka crew) open the album with a pair of promisingly authoritative metallic grinds that sound like they were grafted from the slow-motion mid-section of Ritual de lo Habitual's "Stop", but with Sitek's chrome-plated textures adding a post-apocalyptic ambience that greatly complements Navarro's eerie six-string squeals. But there's a palpable dip in intensity from there on in, as The Great Escape Artist gets mired in the not-quite-rock/not-quite-ballad purgatory that defines so much post-grunge alt-radio.
As slickly produced as Nothing's Shocking and Ritual de lo Habitual were, you always got the sense that Jane's Addiction were a band of four interconnected personalities contributing distinct, individual parts to the majestic whole. But even compared to the nu-metalloid sheen of Strays, The Great Escape Artist's intricate, heavily lacquered production-- courtesy of Muse-man Rich Costey-- has the effect of making Jane's Addiction sound like an anonymous assemblage of oversaturated recording tracks. More so than Avery's commanding presence, what's really missing here is Jane's Addiction's sense of playfulness, absurdity, and rhythmic verve. Beyond hard-charging closer "Words Right Out of My Mouth", powerhouse drummer Perkins is given scant opportunity to flex his percussive muscle and is instead relegated to playing the mild-mannered time-keeper on melodramatic turns like "Twisted Tales" and "Splash a Little Water on It", while Sitek's bass contributions are barely perceptible underneath the glossy sheen. And for a frontman who's always been happy to flaunt his own ridiculousness, Farrell is surprisingly humorless here, the quirky character studies and brash swagger of old replaced by straight-faced pleading and vague second-person admonishments. Sure, the line, "You were the foreskin/ I was the real head," reads as hilarious but, coming from a Jew, probably isn't meant as a term of endearment.
There is, however, one song here-- "Broken People"-- that cuts through The Great Escape Artist's sleek surface and provides a glimpse of the charismatic, affective band that Jane's once were and still could be. (Surprisingly, it's one of McKagan's three co-writes.) And, as per the standard set by "I Would For You", "Jane Says", and "Then She Did...", "Broken People" is a melancholic reverie dedicated to a tragic female protagonist, though instead calling upon his usual cast of junkies and eccentrics, Farrell updates the archetype to paint a sympathetic portrait of a sex-vid-shilling celebutante. Despite the sensationalistic subject matter, Jane's treat it with an understated elegance, thanks to Navarro's beautifully restrained guitar line, a sensitive but not mawkish vocal from Farrell, and-- rare for this album-- a concise, unfussy arrangement; even the amped-up, fist-pump treatment applied to the third verse can't sully the song's graceful sway. In a world where truly nothing is shocking, Jane's Addiction have understandably lost the will and desire to be as outrageous and confrontational as they once were. But as "Broken People" attests, the most effective way for a big business to surprise you is through a simple, humble act of charity.


Ten years ago it would have been ridiculous to use the word "formula" when talking about the music of Osaka's Boredoms. In 1999, they were riding a wave of creativity the likes of which most bands can only dream about. In the year prior they'd released both *Super Roots 7*, which on better days sounds like the final word on the visceral power of rock'n'roll repetition, and *Super Ae*, on which they revealed themselves as masters of playful trance-inducing psychedelia with spiritual underpinnings. And they were about to put out *Vision Creation Newsun*, boasting a gentler but no less immediate

Super Roots 10

Ten years ago it would have been ridiculous to use the word "formula" when talking about the music of Osaka's Boredoms. In 1999, they were riding a wave of creativity the likes of which most bands can only dream about. In the year prior they'd released both Super Roots 7, which on better days sounds like the final word on the visceral power of rock'n'roll repetition, and Super Ae, on which they revealed themselves as masters of playful trance-inducing psychedelia with spiritual underpinnings. And they were about to put out Vision Creation Newsun, boasting a gentler but no less immediate vision that seemed, especially after Yamantaka Eye's Rebore Vol. 0 re-working a bit later, to suggest that the musical possibilities in the decade to follow would be endless. All of this came after 10 previous years of painful noise, bad punk, hilarious song titles, pointless screams, and occasionally unmatched rock power. You couldn't pin this band down.
But in the decade since Vision Creation Newsun, Boredoms have interrupted long periods of quiet with absurdly grand gestures (the 77 Boadrum and 88 Boadrum events) and a couple of records that referenced or expanded upon past glories but never came close to matching them. Seadrum/House of Sun, from 2005, had two 20-minute-plus tracks that were not nearly as beautiful as the advance word made them sound, even if they managed to summon inspiring amounts of energy. (We heard talk of Eye leading his percussion-toting followers to the edge of the sea to record, conjuring images of the greatest drum-circle jams since the twilight of the Pleistocene.) And then 2007's Super Roots 9 was a 40-minute monster for drummers and pitch-shifted choir that took one thing the Boredoms did well-- gradual builds to ecstatic climaxes-- and let it play out forever. Tracks going on for far too long filled with ideas that were beaten into the ground 10 times over has always been part of the band's M.O. But when releases are so rare, they don't serve the same prankster function that they once did. Now it kind of sounds more like the Boredoms doing that one thing the Boredoms do. Again.
Which, if you happen to freaking love that one thing, isn't so terrible. A new Boredoms release is still an event, even if you no longer feel the need to rush out and tell all your friends about it. Super Roots 10 snuck up on people when it appeared for sale on a website in Japan earlier this year (by which time it was already sold out-- I'm reviewing this from downloaded mp3s). It is, with one huge exception I'll get to in a second, just the Boredoms being their post-VCN drum-happy, DayGlo-streaked, build-up-and-breakdown selves. After a short intro of bassy static, we hear a track called "Ant 10", which exists in a nine and a half-minute original mix and is then spun off into four different remixes that mostly flow one into the next. So it turns out to be essentially another 40+-minute track. The main features of the original version are layered tribal drums, an analog synth out of early-70s Tangerine Dream running scales, and Eye, sounding as joyful as ever, singing/shouting /chanting "Ah-u!" and "Hey!!!" and layering his voice in all sorts of fun ways. Toward the end there's some tape manipulation and huge cymbal-rushes, and then everything breaks down to silence, leading into "Estero 10", a remix by Japanese producer Altz.
The Altz remixes (another of his called "Mineral Dub Break" closes) and a remix by someone called DJ Finger Hat (my guess is it's Eye, which would be pseudonym number 1,328) offer an expected range of theme and variations-- drums get a bit housey, voices are extended into drones, Yoshimi's voice is added and layered to sound a little like an interlude from Einstein on the Beach, a guitar pattern is chopped into tiny pieces and sequenced. Even though it's now become so familiar and-- hate to say it-- formulaic, this stuff still has the capacity to thrill.
The huge exception to the Boredoms-by-numbers feel is the almost 11-minute mix of "Ant 10" by Lindstrøm. The Norwegian producer essentially takes his space disco approach and toughens it up considerably to meet the forward-leaning aggression of Boredoms. Heavy drums find their way to a 4/4 beat augmented by all manner of percussion fills, a Moog sounds for a moment like it's playing the intro to the title theme from Grease, a rubbery funk bassline for the ages folds in, and "Superstition"-style Clavinet starts bouncing around. There are a million things going on, but it still grooves. Long-time Pitchfork contributor Dominique Leone, who reviewed the last couple of Boredoms releases here and released material last year on Lindstrøm's Feedelity imprint, even drops by, adding some "Bow bow bow" vocals at the precise moment they're needed. Even if Lindstrøm's remix is 90% Lindstrøm's and 10% Boredoms, the change-up is hugely welcome. It's like all of a sudden Boredoms find themselves in the middle of a crazy party, where someone left the front door open and you've no idea who is going to wander in next. Time was when all Boredoms get-togethers felt that way.


The veteran band takes a victory lap on its latest record, which walks the same path as 2007's relatively polished Let's Stay Friends.

Root For Ruin

In their more than dozen years of existence, Les Savy Fav have gained a reputation as an exhilaratingly wild live act. While the band is known for working up a sweat-drenched crowd chaos, though, their career trajectory has been one of a band focused on truly honing their hard-charging craft. LSF's last full-length, 2007's Let's Stay Friends, represented the full realization of their sound, with exacting, catchy-as-hell songs that possessed the neck-snapping kinetic energy that was found in rougher form on previous records. A polished "crossover" effort, yeah, but also fun and rollicking in all the right places.
Root For Ruin, the band's fifth proper LP, re-asserts that sound rather than expanding upon or altering it. There's not many surprising moments on this record; if anything, it feels like the first Les Savy Fav album that sounds more comfortable in its own clothes than twitching to tear apart its own skin. This isn't necessarily a bad thing: LSF still excel at constructing miniature explosions of songs, even if they sound a bit tidier now.
Guitarists Seth Jabour and Andrew Reuland prove to be aces in the hole for this record, continuing to prove their worth as two of modern indie rock's smarter, more bruising axe-wielders. They layer colorful lines over each other like it's a competition, bringing the hook-laden pain on the smashing, bashing opener "Appetites" and "Lips n' Stuff". Elsewhere, they create nervewracking warning calls on "Excess Energies" that dovetail in and out of Tim Harrington's metronomic shouts. On the whole, there are still very few bands that do this arty, shitkicking stuff as well as Les Savy Fav do.
And yet Root For Ruin feels slightly sluggish, more so than any of the band's previous records. The distinct lack of new ideas plays a small part in this letdown-- "Dear Crutches"' dripping guitar line sounds a little too close to "The Sweat Descends", a standout on 2004's kickass singles collection Inches-- but mostly it's the presence of a few lukewarm cuts that make the record one of LSF's more minor efforts. "Sleepless in Silverlake" and "Let's Get Out of Here", notably, bring the album to a near-flatlining halt. The latter is a midtempo would-be rager that never takes off the ground, while the former is the life-in-Los-Angeles snoozer that you hoped Tim Harrington would never write. The slow jams aren't the only duds here, as the speed-addled "Calm Down"'s monochromatic chorus squarely locates the song on the wrong side of the "post-hardcore" tag.
Dull tempos, disengaging moments, recycled ideas-- all egregious offenses, yes. Luckily, Les Savy Fav have earned a decade's worth of goodwill to cushion a just-OK album or two landing in their discography, which makes Root For Ruin a well-deserved victory lap, if nothing else. The lone pair of surprising songs on Root For Ruin, the dissonant howler "Poltergeist" and menacing closer "Clear Spirits", serve as a gentle nudge as well that this band surely has some creative juice left in them. Let's hope they utilize it well in the future, because Les Savy Fav simply being Les Savy Fav can't retain its charm forever.


Rather than lean into the gimmick of a “bedroom” record, Cloud Nothings’ quarantine album disguises relatively amateur equipment behind clean melodies and power-pop nostalgia.

Cloud Nothings: The Black Hole Understands

The Black Hole Understands

It might not be obvious from the dense, towering compositions of his recent discography, but Dylan Baldi is something of an ascetic. The Cloud Nothings frontman’s updates during lockdown suggested he was shopping around an ambient emo record and embracing the hypnotic drone of modular synths. The only music he and Cloud Nothings drummer Jayson Gerycz released together in the past three months was a minimal “free-form jazz” improvisation that featured only a saxophone and drums. But an avant-garde side project is one thing; aiming to reproduce Cloud Nothings’ searing riffs and gnarled screams in solitude is more daunting. That might explain the relatively low-key rollout of their new record, The Black Hole Understands, recorded remotely in quarantine and primarily featuring Baldi and Gercyz. Rather than attempt to replicate the harsher sound they’ve developed since 2012’s Attack on Memory, they spit-shine limited resources until they gleam like a long-lost Creation Records release. Despite being recorded in an era of unthinkable instability, it is the most assuredly melodic Cloud Nothings has sounded in years.
Perhaps owing to the limits of his home studio setup, which by his telling consists only of GarageBand, Baldi eschews the abrasive shouts and syncopated, MacKaye-indebted barking that were his go-to on 2018’s Last Building Burning. Instead, he delicately traverses vocal triplets, overdubs bright counter-harmonies, and leaps into ELO-worthy falsettos with ease. The softer approach befits the band’s humbler sound. On “An Average World,” Baldi ends a pre-chorus bridge by resolving the harmonies introduced earlier in the verse, his voice ticking up to match his guitar. In another universe, it’s easy to imagine Cloud Nothings building momentum with layered, angular chords, Baldi capping off each line with an increasingly unhinged shout. But here they choose harmony instead of dissonance, creating tension not by pushing the limits of studio mics and faders, but through the sense of anxiety that, because everything is recorded so closely and with such light processing, any slight vocal crack could throw the song off course.
The Black Hole Understands is in many ways a revisitation of the band’s earliest days, when Cloud Nothings was Baldi recording alone in his parents’ Ohio basement. These songs share a similar pop sensibility and self-contained structure as his early recordings, bolstered by a decade’s worth of experience and Gerycz’s note-perfect percussion. There’s the simmering, quiet-loud dynamic of “The Sound of Everyone,” which arrives at a restrained crescendo as Baldi reassuringly sings “life won’t always be this way” over crisp drum fills and low bass. “A Silent Reaction” borrows the fuzzed-out sincerity of Teenage Fanclub, clean chords building to a wistful refrain delivered in Baldi’s surprisingly strong higher register. The album betrays a deep nostalgia for power pop, whether on the twinkling reverb of “Memory of Regret” or the cooing backing vocals that accent “The Mess Is Permanent.”
Despite similarly modest origins, The Black Hole Understands is more patient than the blown-out revelry of Cloud Nothings’ early bedroom recordings. Rather than lean into the gimmick of a “bedroom” record, they disguise their relatively amateur equipment behind clean melodies and reliable song structures. Thanks in large part to Gerycz’s obsessive home mixing, otherwise novel elements of the recording process—Baldi relied solely on the built-in guitar amps on GarageBand, for example—are hardly recognizable. The limits of composing songs via email manifest most clearly on the wordless “Tall Gray Structure,” where dense and stormy riffs give way to a prolonged, mostly straightforward jam session. It’s serviceable if formulaic, fading into the background like a television score. But for the most part, Black Hole stands defiantly against the decade Cloud Nothings spent working with an impressive roster of producers, honing their sound in such hallowed spaces as Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio. Absent pushback from a watchful producer, the band’s intuitive knack for melody shines through.
What could otherwise be a throwaway experiment is bolstered further by the strength of Baldi’s songwriting. While certain lines land with a wink—“This ain’t the ending I had wanted,” he sings on “Story That I Live”—his cheerily-delivered defeatism is comforting in its timelessness. “What is the purpose of anything more?” he asks with a slight shrug on “An Average World,” a question that feels directed towards quarter-life crises in general, more than the one unfolding at this particular moment. Hearing Baldi sing about comfortingly quotidian issues—emotional disconnection or frustration with life—is a source of welcome familiarity. “Ordinary people/Living out their lives,” he sings brightly on “Right on the Edge.” Backed by gleaming harmonies, Cloud Nothings make the dulled ennui of everyday life sound like an escapist fantasy.

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The São Paulo producer pushes Brazilian funk to horrorcore extremes, colliding Lil Uzi Vert and Halloween samples into a dizzying metallic symphony.

PANICO NO SUBMUNDO

Maybe the only thing higher than the bass-driven volume of baile funk is the rate at which it has evolved as a musical form. Since its origins in Brazil in the 1980s as a local mutation of electro, Miami bass, and freestyle, baile funk has grown into a global phenomenon with a dizzying spectrum of subgenres and regional variations. Mainstream Brazilian stars like Anitta have spread the sound of funk internationally through pop reinventions, while underground producers and emcees like MC Bin Laden and DJ Ramon Sucesso have found new audiences thanks to viral clips on social media. Despite the best efforts of vulturous foreigners such as Diplo and Drake, baile funk has mostly managed to resist widespread appropriation, likely because its producers so often challenge the limits of sound itself.
Some of the more cutting-edge visions of baile funk hail from São Paulo: Consider “funk paulista” or “funk ostentação” (literally ostentatious funk), which is known for its lyrical emphasis on bombastic material flexes. Also originating in São Paulo is DJ K, one of the breakout stars of Baile do Helipa, the street party that takes place in the city’s biggest favela. His new album PANICO NO SUBMUNDO—which translates to Panic in the Underworld—pushes the edges of baile funk to horrorcore extremes with a style he dubs “bruxaria,” or witchcraft.
These songs reside in the shadowy edges of the warehouse where bodies writhe into Guernica-like tableaus, finding twisted ecstasy in the unpredictable terror of a bad trip. For all the pleasures of raving and booty-shaking, there’s a sense of lawlessness to baile funk, a scene that’s been strictly policed and criminalized, largely along racial lines. Along with Bruxaria Sound, the collective of adventurous DJs and bodacious MCs he enlists as his co-conspirators, DJ K deliberately taps into the paranoid feeling that the party could go wrong and get shut down at any moment, thwarting every expectation with impish glee.
At times, PANICO NO SUBMUNDO sounds like a decade’s worth of dance music scenes crammed into a blender: The pounding beats are somewhere between South African gqom, Jersey club, European hardstyle, and the kind of distorted, sped-up “phonk” music you hear in Russian street drifting compilations. On “Isso Não é um Teste,” an alarm sound known as “tuin” signals the oncoming storm before a buzzsaw synthesizer hacks away at your eardrums. The “tuin” sound is an allusion to lança perfume, the drug of choice in funk scenes, and DJ K’s invocation of it recalls both apocalypse and hallucination. This is a relentless metallic symphony of DJ drops, chirping ringtones, menacing laughs, laser blasts, harsh bleeps, and whistles, the busy soundtrack of a chemically enhanced baile in the favelas synthesized into a single song. If the world was ending and Armageddon was imminent, the São Paulo producer would probably record the air raid sirens before locking himself in a bunker and raving for the rest of eternity.
DJ K taught himself to produce with Fruity Loops software, and his bold and cartoonish synth lines often sound like a hyper-charged blend of ringtone rap and acid house. A dirge-like violin wails on “Beat Distorce Mente,” before he blasts it into oblivion with lasers and static. Samples from popular songs whizz by at lightning speed, like on “Erva Venenos,” before your brain can even process where you recognize them from. “Montagem Eletrônica” opens with an Arabic chant that he soon chops up into a Cherrelle flip, while on “Sequência Terrorista do Heliópolis,” he fuses the Halloween theme song with a hardstyle-like thwomp. Witchy laughs and banshee wails taunt the listener throughout, as on provocative tracks like “Puta de Silicone.”
In spite of the chaos, there’s something almost startlingly minimalist about some of DJ K’s productions, which are at times little more than a drumbeat, a demented synthesizer, and chanting. The beat switches like Optimus Prime transforming from one mechanical state to another, but just as often, it grinds to a halt, leaving a voice to hang in uncanny silence. Against the intense peaks of ear-shattering sound, even a second of quiet seems like an eerily deep void of space. Every vocal is coated in reverb and echo, leaving behind blurry traces of auditory floaters for a dub-like effect of stimulating physical sensation. In one sense, baile funk MCs are very similar to classic hip-hop MCs: party conductors riding a rhythm and pushing the mixmaster to cut faster. But DJ K breaks their voices into distorted loops, turning vocalists like MC AG on “Ela Quer Pop Pirulito” into human percussion.
As a compilation, PANICO NO SUBMUNDO offers a thrilling introduction to a scene largely dominated by individual singles and SoundCloud loosies, but it doesn’t sacrifice any of its scenic specificity or middle-finger experimentality. This isn’t a Baile Funk 101 playlist curated by outsiders; it’s a transmission straight from the favelas. PANICO NO SUBMUNDO gleefully blows up any convention in its path, as DJ K engineers an audacious cyberpunk sound from the rubble that’s left behind.


On the Chicago rapper’s second album of the year, she once again displays her uncanny talent to blend the real and the absurd, the cartoon and the corporeal.

Eden

CupcakKe refers to her vagina as “Garfield” for a good 10-percent of her latest album. Over the course of the 33-minute long Eden, the rapper born Elizabeth Harris also compares her genitalia to: a keyboard, honey, a barbell, a dryer, a car parallel parking, straws, a furnace, Ring Pops, soup, a purse filled with loose change, Dial soap, and a satin cushion. She writes with a weird, wonderful specificity. In CupcakKe’s world, bodies don’t just defy social conventions; they defy physics.
This has classified the  21-year-old Chicagoan as a “raunchy” rapper—a term that never seems to be leveled at male hip-hop artists—slinging dildos on videos that get taken off YouTube for graphic content, calling her steadily growing fanbase “Slurpers.” She’s capable of more, though, and on her second album in 10 months, she’s determined to prove it. “Most people already skipped this song because it ain’t about sex and killing,” she rapped on her last album, Ephorize. The songs on this month’s Eden are still slathered in sex. The majority of the album is spent asserting her sheer competence, as she tries on different trends and flavors of modern hip-hop and still sounds uniquely, ecstatically like herself.
CupcakKe’s raps have velocity. Each track on Eden propels into the next, and her flow stays tight, whether she’s cooing or shouting. It is a masterclass in control. That’s what has always been delightful and, in its own way, empowering about CupcakKe’s work. She takes no shit when she raps about her sexuality, and for someone who’s spoken openly about her history of sexual violence and abuse, it becomes all the more radical. “That’s funny when abusers ain’t locked away/They in the crib giving more beats than Dr. Dre,” she raps on “Cereal and Water.” Moments later on the song, she spits the words, “Fucking rapists,” and it sounds like a declaration of war. CupcakKe’s music transforms the site of trauma into a place for ridiculous, fearless, uninhibited acts. Her work is a rallying cry for sexual assault survivors. That doesn’t stop it from being fun and totally insane.
CupcakKe occupies her own outrageous space in the rap world, and she easily could have stayed there. On Eden, though, she sieves herself through different strains of modern hip-hop: Latin trap (“Prenup”), a synth-pop adjacent heartbreak ballad (“Dangled”), tingling reggaeton (“Garfield”). These tracks are still uniquely CupcakKe—punctuated with moans and hi-hats, sprinkled with giggle-inducing flexes (“Bitch I’m so cold gotta rock me a thermal and sweater right under the coat,” or “Wrist ice be so creamy/So we naming this shit Edy’s”). Sometimes this feels self-conscious, a way to conspicuously show off her talent. But it’s hard to fault her for that when she’s twirling rhymes around hi-hats, or when she’s silencing critics with a line like, “What trends have you set?”
There seems to be a CupcakKe lens of looking at the world—danceable and glistening with who-knows-what, full of elaborately wrangled metaphors and puns. When she uses that lens to call out men who post pictures of her on Insta (“Post Malone can’t even post my shit”) or proclaim how great she is, it’s slick and funny. But that lens is equally effective, if a little jarring, when she employs it to examine more serious topics. On Eden, these range from an odd but earnest and sweet song about autism to stark statements about racism. Her flexibility is astounding. CupcakKe can go from a condemnation of police brutality in one minute to a line about a dick the size of Ariana Grande’s ponytail in the next. That ability to blend the real and the absurd, the cartoon and the corporeal, distinguishes CupcakKe from any other rapper. There’s a pulsing power in the center of her songs. It’s the sound of a woman in charge.


Whether the result of taking an unusually long time off between records or not, on WHY?'s fourth album, Yoni Wolf has sunk even further into himself, but not to discover some sort of deeper truth about the human condition. Mumps, etc. is an often unlistenably solipsistic, lazy album from a band that was often excellent.

Mumps, etc.

The realization that a great band has made a terrible record marks the point of pivot where you stop thinking about what's happening as a listener and turn into something like a forensics expert asking, "what happened?" The best case scenario is that an outside pathogen is to blame, a failed genre experiment, an ill-fitting producer, drugs. These are the things cult classics and critical reclamation projects are made of. The inside jobs are far more painful to endure-- records such as Travis Morrison's Travistan, Weezer's Make Believe, the Smashing Pumpkins' MACHINA/The Machines of God and the Streets' The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living that clearly couldn't have been made by anyone but their creators, but where the same qualities responsible for such individual and affecting works of art have completely turned on their owners. Mumps, etc. is of the latter variety, an often unlistenable album from WHY?, a group whose music is often excellent.
It might sound counterintuitive to claim that restraint would've worked to WHY?'s benefit here. A large part of the appeal of records like Alopecia and Eskimo Snow was that they let Yoni Wolf run rampant lyrically and emotionally, all while his band exploded the boundaries that would have kept them in either indie rock, hip-hop, or even "indie rap." No matter what Wolf was going on about-- masturbation, his bowel movements, any number of ex-girlfriends-- his extremism was tethered by relatable emotions and strong hooks. Whether it was the result of taking an unusually long time off between records or not, Wolf has sunk even further into himself, but not to discover some sort of deeper truth about the human condition. Instead, a sizable portion of Mumps, etc. turns out to be a longform rumination on what it means to be Yoni Wolf, Lead Singer of WHY?.
Doesn't matter if it's The Wall or from the perspective of a guy who admits, "I make decent cash, I'm a minor star," as Wolf does on "Sod in the Seed"; the "lot of the touring musician" album has a great track record of establishing the frightening point when an artist feels entitled to a listener's empathy despite having their most distorted sense of self. Yet it's not unthinkable for Wolf to find pathos in this scenario, since at WHY?'s level of success, "how can I keep this up?" is more a crisis of relatable age and economic concerns rather than that of a poor lil' rich boy in a gilded cage. But it's nearly impossible to find Wolf's situation interesting because I'm not sure he thinks it is either.
He repeatedly references the end of his "rap career" as something of a given and bemoans its terrible mundanity-- "I can't sleep in rental cars or airlines/ Yo, and so I keep the deck of cards for downtime." Either that, or he gets lost in impenetrable metaphor as a means of distracting from that mundanity. During the sickly mariachi lurch of "White English", Wolf engages in impressive verbal gymnastics in order to avoid saying what he actually means, and it's summed up by its diffident hook: "Lost in translation." Same for "Thirst", which introduces potentially loaded metaphors about black cowboys and discarded porn-stuffed G4 motherboards without delving far enough into their symbolism; when Wolf pleads, "He will always thirst like that/ He will thirst like that always," it fails to register. He might thirst like that, but how the hell are we supposed to know what "that" means?
But when really getting to the bottom of why Mumps, etc. often sounds like it wasn't subject to outside QC, it isn't so much about Wolf's lyrical inscrutability but rather that long stretches of the record are just really fucking hard to listen to. Musically, it's perfectly fine and a logical dovetailing of Alopecia's sharp hybrid of hip-hop and indie rock with Eskimo Snow's forays into post-rock and folk, if maybe sidling a little too close to the sort of Danger Mouse-style pop-hop it knows it can't be.
And that's because Wolf has completely lost a grip on judging his own vocals. They've always been an acquired taste for sure, and on Alopecia and Eskimo Snow, Wolf showed a canny command of his various modes of monotone, staggered rapping, heartsick crooning that packed unorthodox pop smarts. As Wolf attempts a more perfect union of those various modes, he ends up with a hybrid that somehow manages to bring all of his most grating qualities to the fore, to the point where the actual words of a line like "when I got better from the mumps, yes-- my swollen nut and neck shrunk" are the least objectionable thing about it.
Combatively nasal, all jagged edges and botched notes, Wolf makes an irreversible, disheartening slide into Borscht Belt jokes about his advancing age ("I'm in decline/ But women like be jockin' still/ 'Cause I rhyme with skill and talk so chill and youthful"), retreating hairline ("Girls used to fawn over my locks-to-kill/ Now the girls are gone and I'm on Minoxidil") or inescapable whiteness ("Rockin' soccer socks and sandals like, 'yeah, bro.'") . Technically catchy but irritating all the same, "Jonathan's Hope" and "Strawberries" are the inexplicable singles, and as Wolf sings brutal rhymes such as, "Slow pitching like a Vatican priest to be pope-- what? Dope," or, "Your mom she sits while her hair is in curlers/ Smokes weed and listens to that Garrison Keillor/ That's how I'll live when I quit my rap career," there isn't so much of a melody as a curdling effect taking place in Wolf's mouth, like he's having an allergic reaction to his own lyrics. There too are remnants of Anticon.'s willfully arrhythmic approach to hip-hop on "Jonathan's Hope" and "Paper Hearts", the latter of which might be the most unpleasant song of 2012. A noxious merger of topic, content, and delivery, Wolf cruelly describes a failed romantic encounter in flagrante: "She's cute with little titties and a sense of humor/ But to tell you the truth sir, I pity the poor fool-- her," and, "During sex I might put us in some joke positions/ But it's scary always how we end up in mission...airy like the daring men who fight to submission," aren't even the half of it. While there's no such thing as TMI in WHY? songs, it's nigh inconceivable to imagine someone listening to this for enjoyment.
At the very least, Mumps, etc. creates a new wrinkle in discussing what "career suicide" can really mean. It's usually attributed to albums so off the grid that fans will inevitably refuse to follow, yet those always strike me as a cry for help, a need to trigger a reaction. But I don't think that's the case here. Mumps, etc. does have its moments that remind you how WHY? have always been a trial by fire that demands and often rewards intense loyalty that can't be shaken easily. On the contrary, Mumps, etc. sounds like WHY? reading their own eulogy. Sure, Wolf claims, "I'll hold my own death as a card in the deck/ To be played when there are no other cards left," on the closing song, but "Exegesis" ended Alopecia making the same exact threats, so make your own "cry Wolf" joke if you must. It's just that so much of Mumps, etc. thinks of itself in the future tense, having already given up the fight. Even beyond Wolf's decidedly pessimistic take on his current occupation, most of the songs on Mumps, etc. just seem to opt out of delivering hooks when they could or should and meekly tap out before three minutes.
But to really get to the heart of Mumps, etc.'s despondence, you have to look at "Distance", paradoxically the most musically accomplished and lyrically affecting song here. The sighing strings are a bit manipulative when Wolf says, "I gotta keep my distance to withstand the silence of you missing when you're not there to listen to this nonsense," yet it's a real moment of resonance, and you're just left to wonder why such a typically candid lyricist took so long to get to the point. The structure of "Distance" would lead you to believe "men and women might yet quote his modicum of the truth/ But never will they get right close to Jonathan Avram Wolf" is the money quote, but it already happened. Because while Mumps, etc. expresses that Wolf is too in touch with his emotions to not potentially have great art left in him, it's just that I'm not sure even he believes WHY? is the best place for him to work it out anymore.


Experimental pianist Nathan Phillips flits seamlessly between wobbly electronic pop, soaring post-rock grandeur, and ambient minimalism.

Radish

Many working musicians struggle to balance service jobs and artistic pursuits. Nathan Phillips, an experimental pianist and composer from Ohio who records as Big Bend, found an unusual harmony between the two. Phillips wrote the vocal melodies for his airily gorgeous new album, Radish, by listening to the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt while mopping floors at a cafe after hours. “When customers weren’t around, Phillips tried out the lines, experimenting with singing outside familiar meters,” his Bandcamp page reads. Indeed, little of the music Phillips makes falls within the constraints of “familiar meters,” or familiar anything.
Drawn from improvised sessions with small groups of musicians, Radish flits seamlessly between wobbly electronic pop (“Long Time”), soaring post-rock grandeur (“Can’t Get Around”), and stretches of top-shelf ambient minimalism (“12'-15'”). Big Bend’s previous album, Hunched, was strictly instrumental. Here, Phillips’ bright, flowing voice (which has been compared to Sting’s) shares space with contributions from celebrated experimentalists Laraaji, on zither, and Susan Alcorn, on pedal steel. He also knows when to step away from the mic: “Four,” one of two instrumental songs, is a cosmic communion between half-stepping piano and Laraaji’s fluttering zither.
Phillips built these songs by detaching his vocals from the Arvo Pärt pieces and creating new music around them, but the resulting album is not some austere deconstructivist exercise. It is intimate, warm, emotionally inviting. It is even a family affair: Phillips’ mother, also a singer, lends her vibrato to “Swinging Low,” where operatic vocal swells make an intriguing contrast to rustling electronic pitter-patter. “Before” is a less successful experiment, allowing harsh, stuttering beats to bump up uncomfortably against Big Bend’s atmospheric proclivities.
Phillips is an inventive songwriter, and his ear for sonic and compositional detail is remarkable. Consider the way the bass enters mid-syllable in “Floating,” bringing sudden rhythmic clarity to the track’s start-stop percussive patterns, or how the whirring feedback that anchors “12'-15'” follows its own melodic logic, curiously apart from other pieces of the puzzle. “Can’t Get Around,” the clear centerpiece, is a brooding stunner that brings to mind the work of These New Puritans, Port St. Willow, or Talk Talk. The song’s climactic weight hinges on Phillips’ shifting piano chords, which unfold with the patience and grace of a Spirit of Eden outtake.
As a lyricist, Phillips is interested in aging, survival, and “spiritual phases,” as he puts it, though not overt religiosity. He repurposes a Bee Gees refrain on “Before” (“staying alive, staying alive”) and decides he’s “finally sold on the idea of getting old” in “Floating.” “Can’t Get Around” suggests a spiritual crisis and an accompanying sense of entrapment. But much of this album remains pleasantly mysterious, from the hazy cover image to the title. (The last track, “Floating,” does mention a radish, but still—why?) That’s not necessarily a gripe: Curious, open-ended, and slyly resistant to categorization, Radish is the best kind of mystery.


On their fourth collaborative album, rapper-producers Oh No and the Alchemist are dueling dragons—even when the beats could stand to bring a little more heat.

The Alchemist / Oh No / Gangrene: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

Gangrene are here to crack brains like they were blown speakers. So says Oh No near the top of his fourth collaborative album with the Alchemist, Heads I Win, Tails You Lose. The Oh No–produced highlight “Oxnard Water Torture” slides in on a bed of drums, cymbals, and haunted-house organs, a hazy backdrop he runs into the gutter. “This ain’t your Moët, this Olde English,” he says with a Joker-like snarl, his verse all harsh dissonance and razor edges. Alchemist follows up with more nimble flows and surreal writing: He’s the android with a sniper scope, hopping out the reclining Recaro seat at pinball velocity. Back together for the first time since 2015’s You Disgust Me, this dueling-stoner-dragons approach is a perfect distillation of the mud-caked shit talk the duo inaugurated with 2009’s “Acts of Violence.” Heads I Win oozes with menace when it taps into this frequency, but nearly as often, it loses some of that grime, coming off a touch too clean for its own good.
Prolific doesn’t begin to do justice to this pair’s respective catalogs—last year, they dropped nearly a dozen projects combined. As Alchemist has parlayed his indie-rap mini empire into placements on Travis Scott and Drake albums, Oh No has churned out wonky psychedelia with underground stalwarts like Elzhi and Tha God Fahim. Gangrene remains the space for them to get their hands dirty, trading sludge balls with the laidback giddiness of a true-school weed cipher. Everybody needs an outlet for low-stakes fun, and at its best, Heads I Win plays their still-developing contrasts against each other well. On “Cloud Surfing” and “Just Doing Art,” Alchemist’s fixation on surreal elegance—all Lamborghini races and smearing enemies’ blood on canvases—slots decently with Oh No’s blunt threats and metaphors (“Y’all ain’t solid, just some snakes sittin’ low-low/They will find you on the side of the wall like plate sticker logos”). They still sound like they enjoy rapping about rapping together, even when they’re worlds apart.
But when I press play on a Gangrene song, I expect not just grimy beats, but grimy beats that sound tailor-made for the duo. Several tracks on Heads I Win are missing the distinct Gangrene rawness, and it’s not a welcome change. Sometimes they’re a little too silly, like the Saturday morning orchestra sample at the center of “Dinosaur Jr.” or the chintzy interpolation of the Inspector Gadget theme song on “Watch Out.” Others sound like leftovers from non-Gangrene Alchemist projects: “The Gates of Hell” has the same kind of maudlin loop heard on his This Thing of Ours projects; “Just Doing Art” and closer “Muffler Lung” sound like they were pulled from the Bo Jackson and Haram folders, respectively. That isn’t to say these beats are bad, just that they don’t fit the project’s ethos. Stacked next to “Espionage” and “Magic Dust,” which do scratch that itch, they illustrate how Alc’s prodigious output is beginning to blend together.
Aside from “Watch Out,” Oh No largely sidesteps this problem. In front of the mic and behind the boards, the Oxnard, California, native routinely supplies Heads I Win its filthiest moments. On opener “Congratulations, You Lose,” his slinky keyboards and farting synth line inspire him to use his enemies’ beards as Swiffer mops. Here and over the skipping drumline and sour horns of “You Should Join the Army,” he sounds vicious and hungry. Even when the beats get a bit homogenous, Alchemist and Oh No’s verbal chemistry is still airtight. Hearing them flex just for fun while playing vocal double-dutch over peppy drums on “Royal Hand” is as engrossing as early career highlights like “Gutter Water” and “Flame Throwers.” It’s one of the few times on this album when the vintage Gangrene sound feels forward-thinking, too.


The Brooklyn rapper follows in the footsteps of A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and Lil Tjay, crafting sweetly melodic songs about pain and young love.

J.I the Prince of NY: Welcome to GStarr Vol. 1 EP

Welcome to GStarr Vol. 1

Justin Rivera was 14 years old when he appeared on the second season of Lifetime’s 2016 music competition series The Rap Game as J.I. the Prince of New York. The Brooklyn rapper didn’t win; his fast rapping style—easily traceable back to Eminem—was clearly dated. He continued to put out music, though he wouldn’t emerge in the city’s rap scene until he adopted the sweet-sounding melodic style New York rappers are currently using to tell street tales about pain and young love.
In New York, the pop stars who get to be the iPhone wallpapers for teenagers across the boroughs don’t sound like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber, but like A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and Lil Tjay. On “Need Me,” J.I.’s summer 2019 breakout song, he follows in the footsteps of the Bronx-born crooners—it’s a bright-but-macho love song over a sample of Mya and JAY-Z’s “Best of Me (Part 2).” By the time his December mixtape arrived, J.I. had officially become the baby-faced foil to Brooklyn’s drill movement—compared to the no-frills coldness of drill, J.I.’s easy listening melodies make him sound like he could have once been on the cover of Tiger Beat.
But J.I. desperately wants to be more than a Brooklyn rapper. “I’m tryna be global,” the 18-year-old said in a recent interview. “Global” is a vague goal, and you have to assume he’s thinking of Drake, who has conquered popular music by bouncing through trends big and small, from a Memphis dance rap track with BlocBoy JB to a dancehall rhythm with Popcaan to Brooklyn drill with Fivio Foreign to afropop with WizKid. But there’s only one Drake. Most rap albums, mixtapes, and EPs lose their soul when ripped away from their local roots.
J.I.’s new six-song EP, Welcome to GStarr Vol. 1., suffers when he’s pushed too far from his distinct New York sound. On “Spanglish,” the teenager connects with Puerto Rican rapper Myke Towers for an underwhelming reggaetón duet. It’s not a bad song, but why should we listen to half-assed trend-hopping when Ozuna or Bad Bunny are one click away?
Nevertheless, J.I. finds a groove on the EP. “Beautiful Girl” is cheesy, but charming enough to soundtrack New York teenagers falling in and out of love for the next six months, and “20K (Intro)” is a standard rapper-singer ballad. But “Love in the Club” catches the perfect balance between the crossover anthems J.I. aspires to make and the melodic New York love songs that have made him a rising local star. The track has a danceable rhythm that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Burna Boy record, yet still has the anything-can-happen-spirit of a night out in the city with the Brooklyn rapper. Because even if J.I. hasn’t realized it yet, becoming the soundtrack to New York is just as impressive as going global.

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The dance-pop quartet pays tribute to a canon of airhead classics on a fleet-footed record that prioritizes sheer pleasure and fun above all else.

Tilt

Confidence Man are fighting valiantly for the rights of bimbos and himbos everywhere. While plenty of bands beg to be taken seriously, the Melbourne-via-Brisbane four-piece makes deadpan, gleefully stupid dance music that’s unashamedly derivative and, most of the time, conceptually meaningless. Their second album, Tilt, commits so hard to meaninglessness and stupidity, in fact, that it manages to function as both good comedy and often superlative dance pop. The aim of these songs, according to vocalist Grace Stephenson, was “partnering this soft, feminine energy with also this hot, feminine energy.” The result is an album whose closest points of comparison are airhead classics like Spice World: The Movie or Paris Hilton’s Paris—a blast of raw energy so potent that it’s hard not to surrender.
Confidence Man first tried this formula on 2018’s Confident Music for Confident People, a collection of largely prosaic dance pop whose mildly fun concept—Stephenson and fellow vocalist Aidan Moore talk-singing in half-hearted American accents about being hot, being in a band, and going to cool parties—was driven into the ground several times over. The lyrics were strangely dense, as if Stephenson and Moore were looking so hard for punchlines that they ended up overcooking the joke; the production felt undercooked, recalling the thinness of early aughts electroclash and dance punk without any of the anarchic edge. Although Tilt follows roughly the same format, it’s better in every way. The main reason is that these songs don’t feel like they were tossed off in the 15 minutes before a show. Producers Sam Hales and Lewis Stephenson do an admirable job of paying homage to 1990s and 2000s dance pop: They conjure a simmering, spine-tingling tech-house build on “Woman,” pay tribute to “Groove Is in the Heart” on “What I Like,” and incorporate textures of dub, UK garage, and Balearic house in unshowy but ingratiating ways. There’s nothing here for purists, but many of these tracks scratch the same itch as Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia or Lady Gaga’s Chromatica, picking elements from the past 30-odd years of dance music history to create a sophisticated and varied synthesis.
Rather than attempt to write jokey lyrics, as they did on Confident Music, Stephenson and Moore are more content just to vibe out, with far more engaging results. The lyrics of Ace of Base-ish highlight “Push It Up,” spoken by Stephenson, typify the outlook: “I do the same thing every day around the world/I do it everywhere ’cause I’m that kind of girl.” They don’t really mean anything, but you feel hot and silly saying them, which is Confidence Man’s modus operandi. Although Stephenson takes most of the vocal duties on Tilt, Moore rarely fades into the background, probably because he takes the persona to even more loony heights than his bandmate, delivering lines like “We’re alive, we’re all animals with beautiful hair” with spine-chilling sleaze.
Tilt makes occasional allusions to the often feminist bent of classic house and disco, but these too are comically shallow: “I’m a woman of many words/But words do not define me,” Stephenson intones on “Woman.” This song, like “Angry Girl” and the enjoyably misandrist “Toy Boy,” seems to have something to say, but the rhetoric falls apart under even minor scrutiny—which feels intentional. Confidence Man find humor in reducing political sentiment to a pulp of vaguely empowering buzzwords.
As Confident Music proved, songs like these are only enjoyable when the production is up to scratch, and Tilt is not without its clunkers. The monotonous “Break It Bought It” is a house slog so desultory that not even RuPaul would touch it, and Stephenson’s endless refrain of “You break it, you bought it” begins to feel bludgeoning very quickly. These duds, however, prove just how sublime the highs are. The best song, “Holiday,” captures the ecstatic raver aesthetic of Sydney dance heroes Pnau and their 2007 hit “Embrace.” The entire appeal of Tilt is captured in these four-and-a-half minutes, prioritizing sheer pleasure and fun over all else. It’s a simple song, but it has a jolting, electric power that taps into the hedonistic feeling of all the best EDM. It confirms one thing about Confidence Man: It takes a lot of smarts to sound this dumb.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a genre-defining debut from 1981 featuring the acerbic Dan Treacy and his clever, fragile, timeless songs.

Television Personalities: …And Don’t the Kids Just Love It

...And Don’t the Kids Just Love It

For decades, the Angry Young Men shone a dingy light on British culture. Bottling working-class desperation, these playwrights and novelists originally addressed a 1950s society mired in social immobility and repressed angst. Their themes anchored the films of Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and later Mike Leigh, and found global appeal in the music of the Who. For all its rip-it-up-and-start-again bluster, punk expressed a similar disillusionment: The Sex Pistols and their ilk just gave the angry young man a spikier hairdo and held his jacket together with safety pins.
Dan Treacy, the leader and sole constant member of Television Personalities, wrote about the same frustrated youths as his parents’ generation. He littered his songs with references to film and theater, including archetypical mid-century plays like John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. He prodded borders between life, songwriting, and the culture at large, cheekily quoting both Jonathan Richman and “We Will Rock You” on an album that delves into his harrowing battle with drugs. Yet back in his teen years, class-conscious British realism was his model and lyrical inspiration. Take Television Personalities’ 1978 debut single “14th Floor,” whose narrator is trapped in a council estate tower because the lift is broken. Catchy hooks and schoolboy wit are in abundant supply—so are poverty, dysfunctional homes, and psychic pain.
Born in 1960, Treacy grew up blue collar in the increasingly posh area of Chelsea, London. His father did roadwork and his mother ran a laundrette. Through her shop, and around the hip thoroughfare of King’s Road, young Treacy met Bob Marley, Malcolm McLaren, and Jimmy Page, interning as an adolescent at Led Zeppelin’s Swan Song Records—his mom, who washed the clothes of the community’s ascendant bohemians, got him the gig. Kitchen-sink drama, swingin’ London: In his early music, Treacy flits between the two, dosing social realism with psychedelic distortion, jangly guitar, and rudimentary vocal accompaniments. Television Personalities were hardly the only punk-adjacent group taking notes from the ’60s. But they were also suspicious of the punk revolution, and with their paisley shirts and twee waistcoats, they were the rare band to wear this opinion on their sleeves.
The group’s second single, written when Treacy was still a teen, follows his speaker as he wanders around his childhood neighborhood, feeling different from everyone around him:
Walking Down King’s Road
I see so many faces,
They come from many places
They come down for the day
They walk around together
And try and look trendy
I think it’s a shame
That they all look the same
After the chorus drops—“Here they come/The part-time punks”—Treacy derides clueless conformists who buy albums at Rough Trade Records “because they heard John Peel play it.” Treacy also sent a copy of a copy of his self-pressed EP to Peel, who spun “Part Time Punks” on his popular radio show. By 1980, Television Personalities signed to Rough Trade, the label that grew out of the influential store they had disparaged. A classic countercultural gambit worked: have the guts to hate the status quo, and it might just love you back.
During January 1981, Treacy, accompanied by bassist Ed Ball and drummer Mark Sheppard, released the first Television Personalities album …And Don’t the Kids Just Love It, a feat of three-piece economy, chockablock with relentless hooks and poignant lyrics. In just 37 minutes, the record paved the way from post-punk to indie rock, hauling passé sounds from the ’60s into uncharted, lo-fi terrain. Their sound, cleverness, fragility, and frankness snowballed through music, rolling into the work of Morrissey, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Spacemen 3, Nirvana, and Pavement. Alan McGee claimed Television Personalities changed his life, leading him to start his groundbreaking label Creation Records. Other bands even began to dress like Television Personalities; a whole rock movement named itself after paisley patterns. Their first album isn’t as starry-eyed as its equally clairvoyant, stoned follow-up, 1982’s Mummy Your Not Watching Me, but the debut cheerfully prophesied a brighter path out of post-punk gloom, one attuned to feelings and human foibles. It’s Treacy’s narrative masterpiece, his most potent rock record, and the last time he cast his burgeoning personal struggles in the rosy light of youth.
…And Don’t the Kids Just Love It is shot through with the simultaneous joys of discovery and simplicity, unmistakable evidence of the kid genius behind it. Almost every track is a clinic in verse-chorus-verse tension. Treacy’s guitar lines can be brilliantly tentative; each bum note in the solo that ends “The Glittering Prizes” is like a nervous tic in an articulate monologue. Backing vocals hang idiosyncratically in front of the mix on “A Family Affair,” obscuring the rueful chorus behind heavy light. Treacy often came up with song names before writing the music and lyrics, favoring playful refrains that present as a strange jumble of reverence and mockery. Referential titles such as “Look Back in Anger” and “A Picture of Dorian Gray” feel like pretty words the grown-ups say, which the narrator wants to try out for himself. On the moving “Jackanory Stories,” Treacy pokes fun at the titular British children’s series while twisting some ordinary writing advice: “Just like life there’s a good beginning but there is no middle/So you may as well skip to the end.”
Beneath it all, desperation and rage are palpable. The Clash famously sang about using fury. Television Personalities, on the other hand, mostly just wanted to depict it. Opener “This Angry Silence” cycles through a hollering father, a drunk mother, a brother with an eating disorder, a sister who’s always at the pub (she happens to be a bartender), and finally our speaker, a “silly” poet who’s been snubbed by the girl he loves. On “A Family Affair,” Treacy surveys the horror of other peoples’ flats: “Mrs. Davies cries/The welfare have taken her children today/Jenny’s so upset/She just received the results of her test/It proved positive.” The walls subsequently crumble between songwriter and song. Turning his pen back on himself, Treacy’s lines seem anachronistically lifted from emo: “I telephoned God today/But all I got was the answering machine/Please help me.”
The LP shifts from the claustrophobia of unhappy families to the despair of living among equally miserable friends. Adulthood’s beginning is carved into the record’s grooves like graffiti on a bar top—Treacy completed …And Don’t the Kids Just Love It when he was 20, an age when home is untenable, but all the friends you might move in with are still shaky themselves. “World of Pauline Lewis” and the proto-Smiths “La Grande Illusion,” propelled by Ball’s popping bassline, are portraits of doomed, depressed young people, witnessed by a narrator whose guileless attempts at intimacy are futile. On the final track, “Look Back in Anger,” the turbulent family narrative from the disc’s beginning passes down to the next generation. Our hero looks back at a failed relationship with exasperation and regret: This cycle of disappointment, Treacy suggests, keeps rolling on in its quintessentially English way.
Throughout, the words seem to tumble out of his exultant, perhaps slightly embellished cockney accent. Punk, after all, liberated bands from needing to sing like Americans in order to hit it big. Treacy’s darker-hued opus, 1984’s The Painted Word, takes shots at Margaret Thatcher and her jingoistic Falklands War. But on his debut, Treacy’s bleak regard for the English domestic front is tempered by a kaleidoscopic nostalgia: He wants to unearth the country’s myths, embrace its pastoralism, and even curate the gems of its cultural history for a generation that was pretending to make a clean break with the recent past. “Geoffrey Ingram” might be the album’s most infectious pop tune, but it’s also a veritable sandwich cake of UK cultural references. The song is named for a character in A Taste of Honey, yet its central conceit of a flawless schoolboy “who always gets home as it starts to rain” echoes the Kinks’ 1967 classic “David Watts,” as filtered through the Jam, who covered it on their obstinately melodic, masterly 1978 collection All Mod Cons. Treacy drops postmodern breadcrumbs, leading listeners through the lineage of artists who inspired him.
A similar mischievousness motors the record’s quietest and most devastating composition, “I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives.” A decade before the song came out, its subject, Pink Floyd’s narcotics-addled first singer, notoriously disappeared from public life. Treacy knows where to find him: Cambridge. He likely heard some rumors back on King’s Road, but the point is not the story’s eerie accuracy. The young artist means to transcribe modern legend, weaving threads of psychedelia, rural English fantasy, and the innocence of fandom. A child’s voice responds to the song’s teenaged speaker, who describes Barrett’s “little house,” his “little pet dog” and “a little pet mouse.” During their visits, he and the rock star “have Sunday tea, sausages and beans.” Treacy goes on: “He was very famous once upon a time/And no one knows even if he’s alive.” The child cries: “We do!”
Addiction and depression led Treacy to struggle in his career, but he also chose to be noncommercial. A persistent sense of irreverence got him kicked off of a high-profile 1984 tour with David Gilmour; he read Syd Barrett’s home address to the crowd. His music grew prickly, atmospheric and sorrowful, and he steadily replaced his skillfully rendered characters with brazen first-person dispatches from his emotional life. Instead of duking it out in the major-label trenches, he started a couple independent labels of his own, Whaam! and later Dreamworld, a DIY business decision that would prove nearly as important to the future of indie rock as Treacy’s own compositions. The music, though, continued to be fruitful—after The Painted Word, 1990’s pop-friendly Privilege and 1992’s double album Closer to God scattered the aesthetic seeds of his early work, letting them germinate in far-flung ground.
Treacy was submerged in his habits, too. Heroin became central to his existence, and later in the ’90s he disappeared like Syd Barett, provoking similar speculation that he might be dead. He went to prison for theft several times and lived on the streets or crashed with friends for long periods. In 2011, just when Television Personalities were ramping up again, he nearly died from a blood clot, and his health issues have mounted since. According to biographer Benjamin Berton, the 62-year-old singer currently stays in a care home, where he has limited mobility, impaired vision, and some memory loss.
Making sense of such tragedy is foolish—as the angry young men showed, narratives may depict, inspire, and politically activate, but they won’t reverse life’s cruelty and ruthlessness. Yet Treacy left several generations of admirers who discovered his work’s many gifts and repackaged them for times to come, piping up like kids whenever someone asks if they know anything about that storied London group Television Personalities: “We do!”


The Polish ambient musician channels deep-seated melodic instincts on her exploratory and enchantingly enigmatic new album.

Martyna Basta: Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering

Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering

Martyna Basta was trained as a classical guitarist. On YouTube, you can find videos of the Polish musician as a preteen, tackling her repertoire with uncommon skill and an expressive sensibility unusual for a player so young. But like many musicians torn between the pursuit of excellence and desire for creative freedom, she eventually quit her studies and turned her back on the instrument. “In music school, everything had to be perfect,” she has said. “There was no room for any margin of error or any room for experimentation.” Instead, she turned to photography and field recording, learning to embrace the world as it presented itself to her.
Over the last four years the Kraków musician has released a growing body of work that pushes back against conventional modes of beauty, flipping over the block of marble to see what lies squirming underneath: quivering microtonal dissonance, arrhythmic scraping, breathy sighs and guttural whispers. While Basta has tackled a range of formats—meditative standalone tracks, filmic longform works, audio “postcards” collaging together field recordings from friends and confidants—all of them feel charged by a profound sense of unknowing. Her music exists in a stygian netherzone: It is rarely clear where her sounds come from or where a given piece is going.
Basta’s new album, Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering, employs similar moods as its predecessor, 2021’s Making Eye Contact With Solitude: The volume is hushed, the approach oblique, the candle watts practically nil. She favors bristling tritones and spiky harmonics over more consonant harmonies and timbres; when she sings, she limits herself to staccato, monosyllabic coos. Omnipresent rustling and gurgling suggest ceaseless and vaguely ominous natural processes, as though she had recorded atop a melting glacier. But she also pushes into more conventional spaces on this album, at times seeming as though she is finding her way back to melodic instincts that she forced herself to unlearn when she gave up the guitar.
That journey plays out almost in real time in the nine-minute “Podszepnik I,” the album’s second track. It opens with a lattice of moans and murmurs, touch-tone signals, insectoid scuttling, and pitch-shifted whispers. Halfway through, however, a plucked zither pattern assumes vivid focus, like wind chimes ringing out in the night, offering a scale—dissonant and strangely tuned, but a scale nonetheless—for the rest of the elements to arrange themselves around.
Even at their most melodic, these are not straightforward songs. The Los Angeles ambient musician claire rousay makes an appearance on “It Could Be as It Was Forever,” her ASMR purr run through heavy Auto-Tune; in the song’s climax, her deceptively dulcet major-key intervals give way to a bracing explosion of dissonance, squeezing the equivalent of free jazz out of pitch-correction software and glancing bow strikes. And in “Back and Forth,” where flickering constellations of zither gradually give way to a gentle guitar melody, the background swarms with whispers and grunts. The sense of intimacy is unsettling; one might read these sounds as evidence of eros, but I hear them—particularly when combined with faint splashing noises that might be rowing oars—as signs of great exertion. It’s as though Basta were moving under a heavy load, pushing forward with great determination.
That implication of strained effort makes “Podszepnik II” all the more remarkable. Here, on the album’s eight-and-a-half-minute closer and highlight, all the intimations of disturbance melt away, leaving nothing but a simple guitar figure played on the low strings. It is a repetitive melody, reaching out and then folding back in upon itself, but every so often it stretches for a higher note, as though it were trying to express an emotion that words cannot. In its inky tone, it is almost goth, but without any hint of pastiche or posing. Basta’s voice swirls around the melody in gradually thickening layers of wordless mourning, the result sounding like a lament for an unfathomable loss. In its simplicity, coming at the end of this tangled, contorted album, her song also sounds like a celebration of freedom.


Inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Birmingham techno producer puts a fresh spin on his pummeling club tracks; the album is equally suited for dancefloor abandon and spiritual searching.

Luminosity Device

Beginning in the mid 1990s, Anthony Child—as the DJ and electronic musician Surgeon—pioneered a strand of techno as brutalist as the concrete architecture of his native Birmingham, turning out hammering, remorseless rhythms that drew their power from the grease and grit of industrial music. Much of modern techno—from the Berghain sound to the noise-laced experiments of Prurient and Broken English Club—owes something to Surgeon’s influence. But Child himself remains idiosyncratic, averse to pigeonholes. A few years ago, for instance, you might have found him strafing arenas full of Lady Gaga superfans with coruscating modular electronics, joined by Gaga’s DJ Lady Starlight.
In that clip from the Lady Gaga concert, Child is sporting a Coil T-shirt; just like John Balance and Peter Christopherson’s industrial project, there’s the sense that Child isn’t interested in noise as mere provocation, but as a path to enlightenment. Over the last few years, we’ve seen him venture outside the confines of Surgeon’s turf to explore such themes by embracing new methodologies. The two-volume Electronic Recordings From Maui Jungle, released under his own name on Editions Mego, offered meditative excursions in modular synthesis, melding sweltering rainforest field recordings with the bubbling tones of a Buchla Music Easel. Meanwhile, a new duo project, the Transcendence Orchestra, employed monastic drones as a route to “exploring the effect of tone and improvisation on consciousness.” Luminosity Device feels like Child’s attempt to reconcile these extracurricular experiments in the esoteric with the corpus of Surgeon itself. The album is inspired in part by the Bardo Thodol—better known in the West as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, an ancient guide to the afterlife beloved of psychedelic explorers—and boasts track titles alluding to that ancient text’s ruminations on death and rebirth.
Despite this backstory, and despite a cover photograph where a blurry, triple-exposed Child wears the opaque gaze of a cult leader, once you get past the liquid new age of the opening “Seven Peaceful Deities,” the contents within are unmistakably Surgeon. “The Primary Clear Light” and “Earth-Sinking-Into-Water” offer up rugged, pummeling techno characterized by its pared-back simplicity and surging, runaway-train energy. Still, there is the sense that Luminosity Device has nudged Child’s sound onto a slightly different track. “The Vibratory Waves of External Unity” and “Master of All Visible Shapes” balance machine-music rigidity with an unmistakably lysergic quality—rhythms shot through with squirming undulations, burbling synths flaring and dissolving around the edges.
Luminosity Device is notable not only for its slamming dancefloor qualities: In its sequencing, it also suggests a sense of passage—from tranquil repose to dark momentum to frenzied reckoning, and finally an arrival at some kind of enlightenment. There’s a stunning moment some five minutes into “The Etheric Body” where the furious kicks suddenly fall away to reveal a lattice of pin-prick synths, and a voice describes the process of shrugging off one’s physical form and becoming spirit. That sets the scene for the climactic “The Source,” which uses mantra-like repetitions and mangled acid sounds to drill down through layers of consciousness—a sort of DIY trepanation conducted using synthesizer and drum machine.
It’s possible to listen to Luminosity Device and hear just the grit and none of the grace. But that this album feels as suited to dancefloor abandon as it does for periods of meditation or contemplation is telling; for Child, perhaps, the two aren’t so different—both offer a way of ceding control, of losing yourself in something greater.


Why Khaliq, a young upstart from St. Paul, is turning out some of the Twin Cities’ most forward-thinking rap music, and he does so by circling way back. His new seven-song EP takes the visual and musical signifiers of late-'90s and early-'00s conscious rap and injects into them welcome doses of immediacy and personal detail, and at least a half-dozen new flows.

Why Khaliq: Under the Perspective Tree EP

Under the Perspective Tree EP

The rap scene in Minneapolis and St. Paul has splintered in curious ways. From the late '90s through the end of the Bush years, the Twin Cities were known nationally for the Rhymesayers roster above all else. Atmosphere, Brother Ali, and Eyedea typified the Cities' dominant styles: self-deprecating, socially conscious, abstract. This music was sometimes cordoned off as "backpack rap," but as early as Lucy Ford it had morphed into something weirder. In any event, this aesthetic mostly trickled down to the local scenes and the promoters who curated it.
But as two of the three aforementioned acts moved into middle age (and after Eyedea tragically died in 2010), it left a stylistic vacuum that artists from all corners rushed to fill. Some of the new decade's most exciting work has been tailored for the live setting: Grrrl Party springs to mind, as does wag music, a glitchy, stuttering type of party rap that indulges all its best and weirdest impulses. The Stand4rd earned national attention with ghost-infested R&B; Mike the Martyr is bringing back Starburys from the discount bin at Foot Locker; Finding Novyon is rapping about beloved cartoon characters. And Why Khaliq, a young upstart from St. Paul, is turning out some of the Cities' most forward-thinking music, and he's doing it by circling way, way back.
Under the Perspective Tree, his new seven-song EP, takes the visual and musical signifiers of late-'90s and early-'00s conscious rap and injects into them welcome doses of immediacy and personal detail, and at least a half-dozen new flows. Start with the cover. A black man has been hanged from a tree, from which also dangles red lingerie over scattered Hennessy bottles, piles of cash, and gold chains. Slave hymnals bookend the opening song itself. But it hones in immediately: It's 3 a.m., I'm in my baby mama's mama's house. And that's what Khaliq does time and time again over the course of the record—zoom in when you expect the sweeping argument.
Producer Lelan Foley can be largely credited for how loose and improvisational Perspective Tree feels*.* The EP leans heavily on jazz piano and pavement-hard drum programming, arranged in such a way that each part of a song feels as if it shifts into the next of its own accord. On “Knew the Half,” Foley brings in the type of rolling hi-hats that are more often found in contemporary trap music, but lays them under one of the tape's warmest melodies to hypnotic effect.
Khaliq is a precise rapper and a personal, colorful writer. To stay on “Knew the Half”: he drags your focus in and out of the drum pattern, letting his syllables fall consistently but switching where he places the emphasis in each bar. Later in that song, and in a handful of others (“For You,” “Nonchalant Interlude”), Khaliq deploys a captivating singing voice, which breaks up the sound and structure of the project. Why Khaliq is the type of rapper superbly suited for his time: one who understands how to use the past to move forward. It would be a shock if the next year or so doesn't afford him a chance to latch on to the present.


The Bay Area band’s two singer-guitarists have been friends since they were teens. On a debut album shot through with grief and tenderness, that intimacy fuels an almost telepathic interplay.

Revival of a Friend

Catharsis does not always come quickly in a Sour Widows song, but when it does, it hits like a lightning strike. On early singles and EPs, musicians Maia Sinaiko and Susanna Thomson intermingled their voices and guitar melodies while dreamy soundscapes sprawled into extended vamps, holding tight to both tension and tenderness. The Bay Area band has honed its process on its debut full-length, Revival of a Friend—an album filled with patient, gracious songs that unfold with careful momentum and deep emotion.
Revival of a Friend is shaped by grief: Both Sinaiko and Thomson faced significant loss in the years since starting the band, and those experiences are embedded in their songwriting. The dynamic “I-90” pays tribute to a partner Sinaiko lost to an accidental overdose, filtering sweet, quotidian memories through the retrospective lens of sorrow. “Initiation,” too, is a song of mourning, written after the 2021 death of Thomson’s mother; its imagery is striking, combining the sacred and visceral in lyrics that sing of “Heaven spilling at the steppe/Stardust in the cup of my hand.”
Many of these songs depict a narrator reaching out for connection, grasping for something just beyond their grasp: “Fuck everything I did/To feel good for a moment,” goes the opening of “Cherish,” which eventually comes around to a pleading note: “Will you love me through this?” But beneath the desperation and severed connections lies the sound of musicians who are deeply attuned to each other. Sinaiko and Thomson are longtime friends who first met as teenagers and have written songs together ever since. You can hear their intimacy in the way they play and sing together—guitar melodies that snake and vine around each other; vocal harmonies where each voice complements the other with richness and depth. Drummer Max Edelman joined the band after Sinaiko and Thomson’s very first show as a duo, and his playing—along with bassist Timmy Stabler—ranges from delicate to thunderous, forming a deft backbone for the songs’ ebbs and flows.
Several songs shift seamlessly into instrumental interludes—like the spacey, slowcore-indebted “Revival,” which follows opener “Big Dogs,” or the gently rolling “Gold Thread,” which extends and explores musical themes introduced in “Initiation.” These blood-pressure-lowering respites make the album’s moments of breakthrough hit even harder. “Witness,” also written in the wake of Thomson’s mother’s death, has a roller coaster’s momentum: When a tight rhythm and strummed chords in the verse give way to a more elastic beat and gracefully ambling guitar lines, it feels like a fist unclenching. Later, a similar musical build erupts into full-on release; the whole band is propelled powerfully forward by the heaviness of loss, a “feeling” that “would kill you,” as Sinaiko and Thomson shout. When the song downshifts and sways into its final moments, the effect is dizzying.
The closing track, also an elegy, likewise spends its final minutes in poignant slow burn. Thomson has said the song is about learning and re-learning that, in grief, there is no one right way to feel, and there’s no way out but through. After Thomson sings the song’s final lines, the band continues to play for a few minutes more, gaining intensity then slowly receding, as if working through these changing and overwhelming emotions together, in real time.


The Asheville songwriter’s newly reissued debut divulges her restless thoughts through folksy garage-pop that’s both vulnerable and fierce.

I Love My Mom

Asheville, North Carolina singer-songwriter Indigo De Souza first picked up the guitar as a child at the suggestion of her mother, who was seeking relief for De Souza’s intense shyness. By 11, she’d begun writing original songs. For De Souza, a self-described outcast, loneliness isn’t just a go-to songwriting topic—it’s the reason she began making music in the first place, and its presence is unshakeable. In 2018, she assembled a band at a friend’s house to record I Love My Mom, a collection of the best songs she’d written over the previous few years. A new reissue from Saddle Creek re-introduces De Souza as an undeniable force, divulging her restless thoughts through folksy garage-pop. Originally intended for only a small circle of people to hear, I Love My Mom is imperfect, unabashed, and endearing.
Now in her mid-20s, De Souza explores alienation in much the same way that Phil Elverum, one of her inspirations, has explored the facets of death: How do you keep going when misery seems inevitable? I Love My Mom doesn’t attempt to find the answer, but to navigate each phase of solitude as it arrives. The album’s centerpiece, the jaunty “Take Off Ur Pants,” assesses her perceived shortcomings relative to the rest of the population: “When am I gonna go back to school like everybody else does?/When am I gonna start being cool like everybody else is?” She describes mental and emotional woes both in quotidien metaphors about dirty dishes and in dramatic, nihilistic terms: “I need to be kicked, maybe fucked, maybe told I’m in the way,” she repeats on opener “How I Get Myself Killed.” Her voice flits between breathy murmurs and emphatic wallops; at times, her vibrato resembles that of fellow Asheville resident Angel Olsen.
I Love My Mom isn’t explicitly a breakup album; its subjects are too ambiguous to fall into the “relationship” category. De Souza’s songs pinpoint the unrequited crushes, the empty hookups, the unsung situationships—seemingly minor entanglements that might not evoke the full agony of heartbreak, but when compounded, become steady omens of romantic futility. Instead of languishing there, she offers subdued reminders of love in other forms: “I don’t need anyone to love me/I love my mom more than any of you fools,” she sings on “Ghost.” The titular phrase feels like a small yet significant victory.
At times, De Souza sounds like she’s on track to reaching the closest thing to inner peace, or at least a kind of passive resignation. “I’m not the girl you thought I was, but I am close,” she sings on “Good Heart.” Moments like these are fleeting, instantly sobered by either others’ rejection or her own dissatisfaction. But weirdos, outcasts, and introverts are good at spending time alone. De Souza channels this message on “Ghost,” where her gentle deflation of a partner’s ego leads up to one of the album’s biggest kiss-offs: “I like sleeping in your bed/But honey, I’ve got my own at home.” It’s a subtle and gentle reassurance of the solitary worlds we create for ourselves.

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Three Lobed Recordings' second vinyl box set features full-length splits between Bardo Pond and Yo La Tengo, Six Organs of Admittance and William Tyler, Michael Chapman and Hiss Golden Messenger, Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn, and Thurston Moore and John Moloney and Chris Corsano, Alan Bishop, and Bill Orcutt. Despite the title, the ultimate takeaway of Parallelogram might be the tension among all these acts, not their similarities.

Parallelogram

Three Lobed Recordings operates from the brightly lit basement of a one-floor midcentury home in a quiet subdivision of modest ranches outside of Greensboro, the third largest city in North Carolina. When the label issued its first vinyl box set in conjunction with its 10th anniversary in 2011, Cory Rayborn—Three Lobed’s owner, a lawyer by day—joked of the operation’s at-home modesty by way of a sales pitch. “In this case,” he wrote of his staff, “‘we’ means one human and three feline assistants.”
Since the release of that collection, the excellent Not the Spaces You Know, but Between Them, Three Lobed has continued unabated with its curatorial quest through the weird annals of experimental American folk, drone, and rock. The pace has been methodical, with four or so albums a year, but the execution masterful. In that span, Three Lobed has served as a syndicate for some of the world’s best, relatively young solo guitarists—Chuck Johnson, William Tyler, Sir Richard Bishop, and Tom Carter. There’s been shambling, snarling folk-rock from Wooden Wand, impish permutations of folk and metal from Horseback. Three Lobed issued one of the decade’s most transfixing drone records—On Jones Beach, a bagpipe-anchored collaboration between members of the Necks and Sonic Youth—in 2012, followed by two essential collections from Bardo Pond, the free Philadelphia spirits that prompted Rayborn to launch Three Lobed in the first place. For an imprint so smitten with noisy records, Three Lobed’s actual signal-to-noise ratio remains nearly perfect.
Still, four years and all those accomplishments later, Three Lobed’s operations remain minimal, with Rayborn and his cats working away in the basement after-hours. The small scale seems by now a point of pride, a way to show that the persistent dedication of one person can help shape an entire scene. Indeed, such modesty and minimalism offer significant returns for the roster of Parallelogram, Three Lobed’s second vinyl set and a collection of 10 acts so strong it would feel like a fever dream for most any avant imprint. Bardo Pond splits a full-length with Yo La Tengo, Six Organs of Admittance one with William Tyler. Transatlantic and trans-generational kindred spirits Michael Chapman and Hiss Golden Messenger face off, while Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn back one another up on sides of their own. And for the five-record set’s white-hot point of dissonance and bedlam, Thurston Moore and John Moloney duel as the duo Caught on Tape while Chris Corsano, Alan Bishop and Bill Orcutt crash, clatter and grind as a trio. Parallelogram presents a constellation of explorers, separately ferrying the same enthusiasm and openness that have animated Three Lobed’s very catalog.
Almost every act here has experience with a much larger label. In Sonic Youth, of course, Thurston Moore made major waves by moving to a major label a quarter-century ago, while Michael Chapman issued Rainmaker on Harvest Records during the company’s first year, the same year they issued Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma. Four have deals on Matador, two on Merge, one on Drag City and so on. Some of these bands may sell more records in a week of touring than Rayborn sells of all his releases combined in a year.
But these five splits are available only in an edition of about 950 LPs. Through the label, they’re offered only as a buy-them-all bundle, though stores and the bands themselves will be able to sell individual titles. Coupled with those low numbers and a relatively high barrier to entry, Three Lobed’s low-key status and individual-driven aesthetic seem to have made each act comfortable, or free and clear to try something different out of their typical spotlight. As William Tyler, who continues his recent streak of austere wonder with his two contributions here, put it in an early interview about Parallelogram, “I pretty much say yes to anything Cory suggests. He is a number one ace dude, like a Yogi Berra-type figure in the subterranean rock scene.” Everyone on Parallelogram seems to respond to that same why-not directive.
Yo La Tengo, for instance, shows a piece of their collectively complex musical mind rarely seen in a recording studio; their “Electric Eye” is a fierce 20-minute improvisation, with stalled signals, scraping guitars, and muffled, murmured vocals fighting against a militantly loping rhythm. Its counterpart is Bardo Pond’s “Screen for a Catch (Fur Bearing Eyes)”, a sidelong beauty that seems to funnel almost every strength of their catalogue into one arcing collage. They move from bleary-eyed stoner drift to howling-guitar psychedelia, from seraphic harmonies to acoustic-slide tangents, closing with a high-and-mighty jam that fades into the middle distance. It’s like a patchwork homage to a label that exists only because they do.
And just two months after releasing the biggest album of his career, Kurt Vile pounds the piano keys through Randy Newman’s “Pretty Boy”, a song that’s a bar fight waiting to happen. You can almost picture Vile, a tumbler of brown liquor in his hand, singing it this way at a bar after a show, offering it as send-up to casual new fans who might have quaked his perpetual mellow. And when he digs into heartland country for a cover of John Prine’s gleefully apologetic “Way Back Then”, he sounds carefree, temporarily leaving behind his cool for a moment as an earnest balladeer.
Steve Gunn adds guitar to that cover, and Vile returns the favor for Gunn’s faithful and steely-eyed cover of Nico’s “60/40.” More intriguing, though, is “Spring Garden”, a 10-minute fantasy featuring Gunn, Vile and harpist Mary Lattimore on piano. In the last few years, Gunn has morphed from a guitarist issuing long-form, dexterous instrumentals through Three Lobed to a proper singer-songwriter and bandleader. But just a few months ahead of his own big Matador debut, Gunn attempts to reconcile both past and present with this extended beauty. The trio delights in seemingly infinite refractions of a riff without distracting from Gunn’s soft-focus hook.
As the title suggests, Rayborn intended these pairings to highlight interesting, perhaps overlooked similarities between sets of artists he treasures. And that approach works. Hearing Six Organs of Admittance and William Tyler on the same LP, for example, you notice how well both manage density, or the lack thereof, as a discrete aspect of dynamics. Tyler’s stunning “Southern Living” begins as a bucolic duet for acoustic guitar and sighing slide. But he slowly lets the notes hang until the space can handle no more sound, until it all blurs into a messy web he then must pull apart. Likewise, in the gorgeously distorted “Lsha”, Chasny piles layers into the mix—his ghostly vocals and rapid fretwork, broken keyboards and whirring synthesizers—until it merges into one signal. He then drifts from the din, arriving at chords so soft and pretty they sound like bedside whispers.
But the ultimate takeaway of Parallelogram might be the tension among all these acts, not their similarities. Compare the guitar elegance of Tyler or Chapman, especially on the latter’s stunning “Stockport Monday (Homage Tom Rush)”, to the six-string aggression of Moore. Here, he takes a familiar riff—in this case, the pinging theme of his “Ono Soul”—and twists, turns and tackles it in every way he can. Feedback and static, squeals and divebombs: Moore searches for new ways to destroy his own melody. Usually so solemn, Hiss Golden Messenger seems to bask in the springtime sun during a delicate, groove-heavy take on J.J. Cale’s blushing “Wish I Had Not Said That”. He adds a lightness of soul at which the original only hinted. Corsano, Bishop, and Orcutt, on the other hand, torture Jack Bruce’s soft-rock flop “Politician”, turning its creepy come-on into an off-putting, oft-hilarious fuck-you. The cumulative effect of all these lines—parallel, perpendicular, divergent—is one of sheer wonder.
There was a time not to long ago—when it became clear that most every act, no matter how large or small, could release their own records online—that people questioned what role, if any, labels might play in music’s future. Why would someone need an imprint if they could simply convince friends and fans to share a file or link? In many cases, that has come to fruition, allowing for the emergence of trends that might have been bypassed by the old, slow system. But labels aren’t just big businesses. They are, as in the case of Three Lobed, people with a long-standing dedication to a sound they want to push into the world. And their involvement in those scenes can help connect dots or create ideas, turning strange potential scenarios into five-record box sets that create new contexts for familiar acts. More than curation or tastemaking or filtering, the usual quasi-canards invoked for label survival, their real source of staying power might be their ability to invest in, understand, and help evolve a niche. For the last 15 years, that’s what Three Lobed has done. Parallelogram is a trove of evidence, fit for a label too big for a suburban basement.