Following an accident that took the life of their tour videographer, the California emo band finds new meaning in old ideas, while J. Robbins’ production nudges them toward newfound confidence.

I'm Glad It's You: Every Sun, Every Moon

Every Sun, Every Moon

Grief casts a shadow over the past. It lends new meaning to old photographs, text messages, and inside jokes, all indelibly colored by loss. On I’m Glad It’s You’s Every Sun, Every Moon, grief leads the Redlands, California band to revisit lyrics and song titles from their 2016 album The Things I Never Say. It was while touring that record, in 2017, that a van accident killed the band’s concert videographer and close friend Chris Avis. I’m Glad It’s You canceled the remainder of their tour; it would be another year before the group performed together in full and began the process of recording a new record. Every Sun, Every Moon is a lustrous document of that healing, casting the aftermath of shared pain in radiant piano and synths.
The first words sung on Every Sun, Every Moon call back to the band’s first full-length: “Another long last look from the back of the ambulance,” frontman Kelley Bader croons on “Big Sound,” echoing a memorable line (“Take a long last look”) from 2016’s “Curbside.” But where once he sounded decidedly resigned, almost sighing, here his delivery is remarkably full-throated, riding brightly over searing guitars and synths. Similarly, “The Things I Never Said” casts a regretful glance back at The Things I Never Say, the title of their debut, the song’s introspection bolstered by piano interludes and surf-pop vocal harmonies. More than just Easter eggs, these references highlight the contrasts between then and now. It’s as if, spurred by the experience of unspeakable tragedy, the only way to return is louder.
The album’s more mature palette was honed with the help of veteran producer J. Robbins. The former Jawbox frontman has spent the past three decades elevating scores of sheepish, shrugging bands to new melodic heights, leaving a legacy of adventurous, potent emo in his wake. The album is full of allusions to his highlights reel: The dense guitars that swirl around “Ordinary Pain” recall the Promise Ring’s classic Nothing Feels Good; the chiming chords on “Lost My Voice” bring to mind his work with Midwestern stalwarts Braid. Robbins’ direction suits the band, who had previously experimented with electronics on a “Redux” version of their 2016 record. Here, drawing on his experience producing similarly ambitious artists, he chooses studio techniques designed to flesh out the record’s narrative.  On “The Silver Cord,” ethereal synths complement the song’s vision of a visitation from the afterlife; on “Death Is Close,” a fluttering Mellotron sets an appropriately elegiac tone. In his diverse palette, Robbins reinforces the many moods the band traces throughout the record.
Robbins’ production also serves as a welcome, weighted counterbalance to Bader’s writing, which leans on metaphorical imagery to describe the complex mechanisms of mourning. After that early, ominous reference to an ambulance, the focus turns to the more ambiguous, amorphous project of healing. Often, Bader leans on his Christian upbringing; this comes to a head on “Lazarus,” which pits the Biblical miracle of rebirth against the permanence of death. “The second coming savior running late this time and now I think I see/What Lazarus taught me,” he sings meekly, the ache in his voice burnished by smoldering guitars. As opposed to the tinny, bare-bones production of their prior EPs, the song’s textured facade takes note from British shoegaze, couching dark, nihilistic topics within a thick, protective coating of distortion.
But where a Christian metal band, or emo peers like Reliant K, might find solace in God, Bader eschews facile resolutions. “Myths,” despite its repetitions of “hallelujah,” finds an easy savior not in prayer, but in the glacial passage of time: “Someday soon the day is going to come,” he pleads, his voice picking up as the drums kick in. It’s an ambitious song, not only for its plaintive piano arpeggios and liquid, reverb-heavy guitar, but for the careful, slanted rhythms in its verses: “My flickering flame/Dancing for rain that doesn’t pour.” The rhymes come unexpectedly, a destabilizing effect that forces a close listen and mimics the uncertainty of grief. “It’s a hallelujah/And I’m learning how to sing” might not be the typical shout-along chorus that I’m Glad It’s You expected to write when they first set out on the road three years ago. But through trauma, they’ve landed on the profoundly triumphant note that so many emo bands spend their careers angling to reach.

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On their debut album, Guillaume and Jonathan Alric make big, staid dance music tailored for main stages at music festivals where subtlety falls victim to the pursuit of big moments.

Dancehall

Guillaume and Jonathan Alric, the cousins behind French duo the Blaze, aim for big themes on Dancehall. The very first sounds you hear are piano chords so rich and full you want to wrap yourself up in them like a very expensive coat. The bass throughout is among the heaviest you’ll hear on any record this year, yet it never sounds ugly or rough. Even at its most forceful, the Blaze’s music never bangs you over the head; it’s enveloping, like a wave.
But their insistence upon capturing great passion works against them. For one thing, there’s not a lot of variation on the album: Virtually every song rolls out a boom-ticking drum machine beat and drapes it in sumptuous synths and pulsing 808 toms; their grooves rarely budge from the syncopated cadence handed down by classic piano-house anthems like “Strings of Life,” filtered through heartstring-tugging bass musicians like James Blake and SBTRKT. And you can make out the outlines of their songwriting from a mile away: First comes the pensive intro; then the drop, and a surging build until the track’s end. This is music tailored for the main stages at music festivals where subtlety falls victim to the pursuit of big moments, where only the punchiest, boomiest, most obviously emotive sounds are accommodated. Even Dancehall’s sonics evoke the sound and feel of the festival experience, with low-end that threatens to overwhelm the bass cabinets and overdriven mids that run together in a kind of ooze.
Also gloopy: the vocals. As they were on Territory, their debut EP, the Blaze’s vocals tend to sound like they’ve been pitched down by 10 or 15 percent—not enough to make them sound like Salem or DJ Screw, but just enough that they don’t quite sound natural, either. Who knows why they keep doing this. Perhaps they simply like the way it tends to thicken the sound of their voices, like a dark liqueur chilled toward the freezing point—it’s a deeply embodied sound, suggestive of throats and lumps in throats. Perhaps they’re compensating for their weaknesses as singers, in which case, not a bad idea: They can indeed be pretty pitchy. On “She,” an untreated near-falsetto recalls Robert Smith’s quavering wail, but where the Cure frontman’s yelp feels like an essential part of his band’s desperate, unhinged mien, the curdled sound of “She” just sounds cartoonish.
It doesn’t help that their attempt to capture big emotions too often verges on caricature. From “Breath”: “You’re my reason/In this wonderful life/A super weapon/For stopping the fight.” Do I need to tell you that they go on to get “sight” and “light” in there? Elsewhere, “Trust in me” is rhymed with “Set me free”; “Crazy and insane” finds its match in “Forgetting the pain.” It’s all a bit much, especially when combined with such rafter-shaking, breast-beating grooves. At the same time, it’s nothing at all: a placeholder for a sentiment with any actually meaningful resonance. Coming up with something to say would do more to rescue their vocals than the most CPU-intensive pitch-correction software.
What’s frustrating is that the Alrics have proven themselves to be talented filmmakers. With their eyes trained on young French people of color, they specialize in moody treatments of youthful passions, star-crossed lovers, communities thriving as the world breaks down. Their skill lies in sketching out a certain provocative ambiguity: What kind of couple is this? What is their history? Is this a story of love or anger? And, most importantly, what kinds of truths can be expressed without words? It’s a shame that their music doesn’t capture anything near that level of nuance. Too often, it’s a simulacrum of passion: feel-good house music as daily affirmation. Unlike the broad scope of their videos, their songs feel squashed, like an inspirational message made for Instagram’s tiny window.


Bedhead, a five-piece band from Wichita Falls, Texas, were one of the '90s bands who pushed rock into new places. They were sometimes called slowcore and sometimes post-rock and they had elements of both of those sounds. Bedhead more or less slipped out of the conversation after winding down at the end of the '90s, but this box set from Numero, which gathers everything they recorded in a deluxe remastered set, is designed to change that.

Bedhead: 1992-1998

Most of the rock subgenres we reference today were coined between the 1980s and '90s. If you were living in the English-speaking world, rap aside, music played with guitars was still more or less the main game in town during this era, so "rock" in the broadest sense had no choice but to mutate: noise-rock, post-punk, dream-pop. In lieu of entirely new tools—no computers yet—independent rock got more specific and it got weirder, splintering in any number of different directions.
Bedhead, a five-piece band from Wichita Falls, Texas, a town about a two-hour drive from Dallas, were one of the '90s bands who pushed rock into new places. They were sometimes called slowcore and sometimes post-rock and they had elements of both of those sounds. They were only around for about five years, they put out three full-lengths, a few EPs, and some singles, and, despite making music with the same guitar/bass/drum set-up everyone else was using, they had a distinctive aesthetic. Bedhead also more or less slipped out of the conversation after winding down at the end of the '90s. People who were there remember them fondly, people who were not have probably never heard of them. This box set from Numero, which gathers everything they recorded in a deluxe remastered set, is designed to change that.
Bedhead had certain parallels with Galaxie 500 that are hard to deny: Both groups put out three LPs plus a handful of other releases, both often played in slower tempos, both featured quiet/loud surges, both covered Joy Division on record convincingly, and both have the guitar at the center of their sound. But Bedhead were never "dreamy"; their music was dry and clear and grounded. Though it probably sounds very good on certain kinds of drugs, it’s not drug music. Despite the explosions of guitar and surges of grandeur, this wasn’t psychedelia; Bedhead were about the beauty of form, what happens when every note and every sound is in the right place.
When a band mixes vocals low so it’s hard to hear the words, I tend to trust that they have their reasons, and I’m less likely to spend time trying to figure out what the words mean. Which is to say I was able to get deeply into Bedhead years ago without really knowing what the lyrics were about. The vocals, sung by one of the two brothers on guitar and voice, Matt and Bubba Kadane, were delivered in kind of a half-whispered sing-speak register. At times, they were reminiscent of how Brian McMahan used his voice on Slint’s Spiderland, but Bedhead seemed less performed, more about executing a composition than inhabiting a moment. Every time you hear Bedhead vocals you imagine them coming from behind a black curtain, and in the case of this band that curtain was made up of the 22 strings—three guitars, one bass.
Returning to the albums with this set I learned that, despite how quiet the vocals could be, Bedhead songs are filled with interesting thoughts, and more to the point they seem like exactly the sort of lyrics that should be gracing this sort of music. In my head I’ve always bracketed Bedhead with Talk Talk—sonic perfectionists who aren’t afraid to be serious and studied and trust their audience to hear sincerity instead of pretension. And like that band, their lyrics are about existential questions and spiritual emptiness, about feeling like a tiny speck in an endless universe. The title of "Liferaft" actually refers to a bed, a place for sitting alone in the dark and dreaming and wondering about the nature of your own existence; "The Unpredictable Landlord" and "Unfinished" alternately get angry at God and then poke fun at him; "Bedside Table" zeroes in on a moment where the physical world meets the life of the mind. There’s something about all of these songs that is both evocative and just slightly out of reach, making you wonder if unsolved puzzles can be true.
But Bedhead were always about music first. Each instrument had its role to play. I’ll start with Trini Martinez’s drums. Where a funk band plays off the hi-hat and a heavier rock band leans on the crash, Bedhead were all about the ride cymbal, steadily marking time, never in too much of a hurry, always aware that something big is looming in the distance but certain that they’ll get there. The ride points the way through many of the best tracks here, and its linear presence reinforces that Bedhead songs never had much in the way of verses, choruses, and bridges; instead, their music was about addition and subtraction, exploring the terrain between potential maximum volume and utter silence.
Above all else, Bedhead were about composition, the way the guitar parts overlapped and braided around each other and fell away at just the right time. The earliest recordings, 7''s gathered here on an album with EPs and B-sides, found them having their sound completely mapped out from the jump. Every song on this singles/rarities set, for better or worse (and I’d argue it’s much more for the better), even the cover of Joy Division’s "Disorder", is instantly identifiable as Bedhead. They staked out the boundaries of an aesthetic, and they were not particularly wide boundaries; differences between their albums are subtle. But they explored every inch of terrain inside of them.
After those early singles they assembled for WhatFunLifeWas, their debut full-length. With a band like this, who made records of uniform quality and never deviated much from a core sound, the first record you hear by them tends to be your favorite. In my case, that is WhatFunLifeWas, which also happens to be their most intensely dynamic. Relative to the two albums that followed, WhatFunLifeWas is less about mood and precision and more about extreme shifts in volume and density. Some of the most beautiful guitar parts they ever created are here; the nature of Bedhead’s genius, and one of the serious advantages they had in having three guitarists, is that they could take several things that make guitars such a powerful instrument and make them happen simultaneously. So a track like "Powder" might have furious strumming, a soft drone, and a lead line in counterpoint all happening at once, growing and changing as it unwinds.
Beheaded, their second album, from 1996, is the hardest of the three to get a handle on. Much of the brightness and surges of joy found on the first album are gone, but the space and precision of their third, Transaction de Novo, haven’t quite arrived. The thorough (and very good) notes by Matt Gallaway describe it as their darkest record, but that feels like a question of a half a shade or so. It was recorded by Adam Wiltzie, of fellow Texans Stars of the Lid, and it’s probably their least distinctive recording on a purely sonic level, but the highlights—"Roman Candle"’s gentle jangle, the searing throb of "Withdraw"—are up there with anything the band did.
Given the kind of music they made and their aesthetic values, it was inevitable that Bedhead would work with Steve Albini. Both band and engineer agreed on how to make a great recording of a rock band: You get a decent guitar, pair it with the right amp, figure out how to play it. You put the amp and guitar in a room that gives it a certain resonance. You find the right microphone, and you put it in the place where it will give you the desired mix of direct and reflected sound. Then you set your levels and record until you get the performance you’re looking for. It’s a process based on getting the essentials right rather than figuring out the latest tricks.
The subtle differences on Transaction show how small changes in an environment of great consistency can evoke a disproportionate amount of feeling. The glockenspiel that rings so clearly in the opening is so fragile it almost hurts; they’d used the instrument before, but never with such clarity, and the tiny shift is devastating. Transition is also more judicious with its massive crescendos; there are fewer, but when they come, they hit with much greater force. The album is a tapestry of interlocking single-note parts, a celebration of the emotional possibility of guitar tone. Here they finally started to explore genre: "Extramundane" showcases the jittery Feelies influence that was always lurking beneath the surface, and they never rocked as convincingly; "Forgetting" adds some slide guitar and finally adds a country and western wrinkle. The closing "The Present" finished the album—and Bedhead’s recording career—in brilliant style, with a lyric that riffs on both gifts and moment-to-moment alienation, while the music features bowed strings, formalizing the classical undercurrent that was always there. Together, Albini and Bedhead made the band’s best record, going out on a high note.
Numero is embarking on an interesting project with boxes like this one, and the ones for Unwound and Codeine. These are American indie rock bands that have mostly been missed by people now under 30. They didn’t play the reunion tours, and they weren’t all that high profile in the first place. They were also bands that just barely touched on the early Internet, meaning they were a little too new to be canonized in, say the Spin or Trouser Press guides, but old enough that only a small percentage of the online coverage they received early on still remains. For people who loved these records then, having them back in print, in high quality sets, is welcome. They serve as a reminder of how interesting guitar music could be at this particular time and place.
As to how this Bedhead set might strike your average listener born in the 1990s, it’s harder to say. The beauty of the guitar arrangements of, say, Real Estate, sometimes reminds me of what Bedhead were up to; but even Real Estate is anomalous now, the band you go to for this sort of sound instead of being one of many. Some of that is up to how big these bands were in the first place, and some of that is up to whether or not they had any kind of sexy mystique; Bedhead had no time for or interest in anything extraneous to the music, which in itself is a marker of another era. And this is what it sounded like—serious, intense, smart, beautiful, occasionally frightening—when a band approached their work with that kind of deep focus.


The British dance pop trio Years & Years’ debut album marries thematic precision with the broad kinetics of anthemic pop songwriting, mingling self-loathing and doubt with a redemptive, near-bloody-minded push to prettiness and uplift.

Communion

Almost all forms of music seek to speak, from time to time, of love, and from time to time of sex. But pop music stands alone in its obsession with their convergence point, where they become interchangeable or indistinguishable or simply confused with one another. "Is it desire, or is it love that I’m feeling for you?" Years & Years singer Olly Alexander asks, in characteristically dramatic fashion on "Desire", and the law of pop melodrama demands that the question go unanswered. So it goes with the music: is it the easy populism of Years & Years’ honed, slick dance-pop that intoxicates, or a transmission of deeper truths? But why separate the two?
The majority of the songs on the British trio’s debut album Communion marry thematic precision with the broad kinetics of great pop songwriting, mingling self-loathing and doubt with a redemptive, near-bloody-minded push to prettiness and uplift. Only the excellent single "Shine" is as upbeat as it is up-tempo, and even then the happiness feels so hard-won it can’t help but imply its opposite. The songs carefully map the contours of gay sensuality, filtering lust through a variety of counterparts: not just shame, but vulnerability, self-awareness and annihilating self-abandon. Where Bronski Beat once crafted colossal club-pop out of tales of marginalization and abuse, Years & Years occupy a more subtle, liminal contemporary world, one of feeling isolated amidst a crowd of bodies. "I’ll do what you like if you stay the night," Olly bargains on "Real", and then later offers on the seductive slow-grind of "Take Shelter", "do what you want tonight/ It’s alright." On "Worship", he promises "I’m not gonna tell nobody ‘bout you," and finally, on the wracked, gorgeous closer "Memo", he begs, "Let me take your heart/ Love you in the dark/ No one has to see." In each case the character of the song is made small and powerless by the asymmetry of desire, which renders the stadium-chant backing vocals and sun-from-behind-clouds synth bursts more perverse and exhilarating than they have any right to be on their own.
Remove or ignore that contradiction, and Years & Years’ musical familiarity might breed contempt. You could dismiss their overblown choruses and sculpted electro-house arrangements as just the most commercial manifestation yet of a decade’s worth of also-ran bands reimagining '80s and '90s club-pop; MGMT’s "Electric Feel" strained through Disclosure’s snappy post-garage percussion and Sam Smith’s middlebrow wallowing. But Years & Years don't dilute this formula, they distill it: Communion’s biggest hit thus far, the high-gloss anthem "King", attains a kind of formal loveliness not witnessed in this genre since Madonna’s "Get Together" almost a decade ago.
Here, and on the album’s other highlights, the air of mercantile anonymity feels generous rather than cynical, the music as anxious to accommodate its imagined audience as Olly is his lovers, to be the song that made you dance all night even though you can’t remember a word of it now (i.e. to be the best song ever, as One Direction rightly observed). How else could you end up with a song like "Worship": a bright xylophone bounce for the verses, and a chorus that references gospel via diva-house via the Wanted’s "I Found You"? Appropriately, the band sounds too delirious to feel any shame.
Years & Years are weakest when seeking to project dignity, a noble bearing up in the face of life’s torments and disappointments ("Eyes Shut", "Gold", "Without"). Then, the arrangements veer towards placating grand gestures, and Olly’s "soaring" vocals threaten to become cloying. Conversely, the ballad "Memo" is perhaps the album’s pinnacle, at least in part because of its defiant specificity. Over slow piano chords and halting percussion, Olly describes in fragile falsetto his infatuation for a straight male friend ("You see yourself in another way/ I try my best but I don’t ever change"), doomed to be unrequited although perhaps not unconsummated (the repeated refrain, "I want more", works either way). Although its lip trembles with the tremulousness of its longing, at another level "Memo" is ice cold: what kind of love, it asks, would place lovers in such an impossible bind? Again, there's no answer on Communion, but you can always return to the dancefloor and try to find it again.


This self-released 3" CD-R features four tracks recorded in April 2004 as elevator music for the French Ministry of Culture building, and adds some miscellaneous material from the duo's extensive sound library.

Music for a French Elevator

Books guitarist Nick Zammuto has said that early in the band's development he was challenged by a friend to make music that couldn't possibly be used on a film soundtrack. Whether or not it was intentional, the Books have in a sense followed through on this request. By seeding their tracks with voices-- many actually drawn from obscure movies-- the Books have ensured that their music exists as a self-contained world of its own, one that doesn't easily lend itself to reinforcing an unrelated image. Their songs are their own little movies.
Even so, the Books continue to take on other sound-related projects in addition to their records. In April 2004 they recorded four short tracks to be used in conjunction with a work created for the French Ministry of Culture; the Books were charged with crafting music for the building's elevators. Giving in to repeated requests for this material, the band compiled the music on a homemade 3" CD-R, along with some miscellaneous material from their extensive sound library.
Ranging from about 30 seconds to almost 90, the four elevator pieces are, though short, prime Books material. Though lighter and quieter, "Fralite", through it's layering of guitar and cello, captures the whimsy and ache of longing of "Tokyo". The stately ballroom piano of "Egaberte", which can be heard as the soundtrack when visiting The Books website, is in a sense the quintessential elevator music, localized by the sampled voices speaking French throughout. "Liternite" is a surprisingly complete little piece, with an intro of bass, wooden fish and a singing voice pulled from a folk song building steadily to a small crescendo that fades quickly after its peak. "It's Musiiiiic!" captures the phrase from a lounge crooner and loops it.
The remaining nine tracks on this 15-minute release are mostly collages, with only hints of instrumentation added throughout. "Meditation Outtakes" plucks all occurrences of the word "meditation" from a speech and lays them end-to-end, demonstrating the way meaning changes with minute changes in inflection. "Of the Word God" uses the same technique with "god," sourcing this time from a woman preacher's sermon. You can follow the story she presents through the emphasis on this single word, beginning quietly and moving steadily toward a histrionic scream. Even though they consist mostly of voices removed from their original context and carefully edited, these odds and ends actually demonstrate rather well one of the things that makes the Books so distinctive: their ear for the musicality of the spoken word.


Whether it's a reaction against the MP3's pending usurpation of the album format or just simple coincidence,\n ...

The Streets: A Grand Don't Come for Free

A Grand Don't Come for Free

Whether it's a reaction against the MP3's pending usurpation of the album format or just simple coincidence, the concept record is enjoying a small comeback at the moment. But perhaps careful not to echo the supposed sins of bloat and misbegotten puffery that characterized the psychedelic and progressive rock eras, many of the artists responsible for the best recent concept records-- Sufjan Stevens' Greetings from Michigan, the Magnetic Fields' i, and The Fiery Furnaces' upcoming Blueberry Boat-- share a willful intimacy that borders on the quaint.
On A Grand Don't Come for Free-- the follow-up to his internationally acclaimed debut, Original Pirate Material-- Mike Skinner audaciously weaves an 11-track narrative over an often bare and inert musical backdrop, one that acts more like a film score than the foundation of a pop record. The plot is pretty bare-bones: boy loses money, boy meets girl, boy loses girl. But by focusing as much on the minutiae of life as on its grand gestures, the impact of Skinner's album-- essentially a musical update of "The Parable of the Lost Coin" peppered with Seinfeld's quotidian anxiety and, eventually, a philosophical examination of Skinner's lifestyle and personal relationships-- transcends its seemingly simple tale.
Cynics and/or detractors could sneer that Skinner's sonics are too slight and that his flow is too rigid-- particularly when compared to "other" hip-hop artists-- without being entirely off the mark: Skinner's awkward, sometimes offbeat delivery is even more charmingly/frustratingly clumsy here than it was on Original Pirate Material, and the record's beats and melodies are subservient to its story. But while those perceived weaknesses may make A Grand a non-starter for those who disliked Skinner's debut, trying to place his square peg into the round holes of either hip-hop or grime/eski seems a mistake. After all, this is a record that starts with its protagonist trying to return a DVD and ends with him chastising himself for improperly washing his jeans. In between, he spends time at an Ibiza burger stand, smokes spliffs on his girlfriend's couch, grumbles about a broken TV, sorts out his epilepsy pills, philosophizes about the nature of friendship, and grumbles about the failures of mobile technology. Clearly, Skinner is on a singular place on the pop landscape.
Echoing his ability to compensate for his own musical weaknesses, Skinner manages to turn his character's personal shortcomings into A Grand's strengths: Communication failures, both technological and human, allow Skinner to deftly examine body language and small gestures. His character's lack of prospects and disconnect with work and family highlight the importance of friendship (especially, perhaps, to young urban adults). His crippling self-doubt (at the record's start, any hiccup in his day is proof that he should just spend it in bed) and need for approval from others makes his solipsistic epiphany all the more heart-wrenching. The album's ultimate contradiction may be that while Skinner's life is seemingly driftless, his understandable attempt to tether it to another human being-- any other human being-- often causes him more harm than good.
Considering that Skinner showed such a gift for post-laddish humor on Original Pirate Material, the most surprising aspect of A Grand may be that, here, he's at his best when he's at his most sentimental. His love and/or relationship songs overflow with melancholy and the inability to express emotion at crucial moments. In short, they're pretty truthful and sometimes painfully familiar. Along with the drug haze of "Blinded by the Lights", A Grand's best moments are a pair of tracks that bookend the story's main boy/girl relationship: The first-date track "Could Well Be In" ("I looked at my watch and realized right then that for three hours we been in conversation/ Before she put her phone down, she switched to silent and we carried on chatting for more than that again") and the dissolution of that same relationship on "Dry Your Eyes", a tongue-tied, heart-in-throat ballet of non-verbal expression.
That Skinner is able to coax so much from a cliché-heavy, 50-minute examination of solipsism and self-pity is a tribute to his ability to reflect and illuminate life's detail. By stressing his paranoia and doubts ("It's hard enough to remember my opinions, never mind the reasons for them," he blubbers as he loses a domestic dispute), he deftly avoids the melodrama of today's network reality TV. Instead, his approach echoes the faux reality of The Office (which shares a non-ending ending with A Grand) and the me-first neediness of its "star" David Brent (whose final-episode self-actualization echoes Skinner's). Like The Office, Skinner's anthropological humanism typically focuses on either the mundane or disappointing-- and, let's face it, life is most often one or the other--- but he does so with such endearing intimacy and bare honesty that it's easy to give yourself over to the album's narrative on first listen and, perhaps just as importantly, to want to revisit it over and over again.


The latest album from the Atlanta metal titans finds them stuck traversing two separate paths: the straightforward wallop of Foo Fighters-style rock records, and the hard, nasty sludge of their older work. Mastodon have jettisoned the overarching concepts of old for a simpler mission: to be a hard rock band making hard rock records.

Once More 'Round the Sun

From the beginning, it was clear that Mastodon were never meant to be just another sludge band. Had they decided to get perpetually stoned and cycle through a minimal sequence of drop-A power chords, the quartet could have gone on to earn Down-level renown based on instrumental ability alone. Instead, they took the transcendent route, using their filthy guitars to conjure terrifying worlds. Remission from 2002 explored the concept of death through the prism of fire, inspiring a four-part sequence of concept albums with one of the most compelling cast of characters in rock history.
There was Leviathan’s terrifying Moby Dick, his arrival heralded by high-pressure riffs that seemed to issue forth from the Mariana trench, and the anti-hero of the earthy Blood Mountain, a direct invocation of American mythologist Joseph Campbell’s concept of “The Hero With a Thousand Faces”—and, of course, there was Crack the Skye’s Rasputin, a historical villain recast as an otherworldly sage. Ambitious as Mastodon’s concepts were, they avoided pretension by grounding their lofty thematics in crunchy, timeless riffage and a cross-pollinated sound combining Black Sabbath’s doom, Electric Wizard’s gloom, and King Crimson’s hyper-literate mad genius. And so, four guys from Atlanta quickly earned the reputations as metal’s smartest, most unstoppable band of barbarians. If anyone could cross over, they could.
So it's easy to understand why, when Mastodon’s elemental epic reached its conclusion in 2009, they were tempted to set aside the prog epics in search of a new aural identity, one that could sublimate the esoteric monoliths of old into an accessible and mature sound.  To some, the end product of that venture, 2011’s Mike Elizondo-produced The Hunter, constituted Mastodon’s jumping-the-Megalodon moment: too poppy, too giddy, and downright flimsy when compared to the steely grooves of the past. The prospect of a major metal album overseen by a superproducer like Elizondo struck many as sacrilege, but after a decade of weak-tea rock on the major labels, one couldn’t help but feel thrilled at the prospect of four storytellers re-shaping the world of popular heavy music.
Once More ‘Round the Sun, the band’s latest, tempers the mixtape approach of its predecessor. Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Alice in Chains) was tapped to produce this time, and he brings a comparatively raw sound. Troy Sanders returns with a vastly improved vocal range, one honed in the groove-driven supergroup Killer Be Killed, and Brent Hinds remains the best screamer of the group—though it’s a shame he doesn’t get more opportunities to show it off. Occasionally their tag-team approach matches Mastodon’s lofty standards, as on the title-track, which deserves special mention for that goosebump-raising chord progression in the bridge. But the thin, uninspired harmonies gets taxing by the album’s proggier second half, and on the whole, Once More ’Round the Sun is easily the band’s weakest effort to date.
For two records now, Mastodon have jettisoned the overarching concepts of old for a simpler mission: to be a hard rock band making hard rock records. Clearly, though, they’re not willing to abandon their proggy roots entirely, leaving listeners (as well as themselves) trapped between two modes: the straightforward wallop of Foo Fighters-style rock, and the hard, nasty sludge of old. They never fully commit to either extreme, resulting in a frustratingly liminal listen.
Throughout the majority of the album, those mammoth styles remain in constant collision with each other, often within the same song. Opener “Tread Lightly” sets the template: Mastodon churn out a slithering groove, segue into a good-not-great verse-chorus-verser adorned with some cool flourishes, and then launch headlong into a warped solo from guitarist Brent Hinds and some psychedelic noodling, culminating in a satisfactory raucous conclusion. Frequently, however, the band simply shrug and end with a bridge to nowhere (“Feast Your Eyes“), a lazy fade-out (“Chimes at Midnight”), or worse.
Sudden transitions are certainly not without precedent in Mastodon’s case—they’re one of the reasons why, even a decade later, Leviathan remains so memorable. But where that album used abrupt transitions to lead the listener further down the chute toward the abyss, Once More ‘Round the Sun leaves us with some undecipherable head scratchers, like the "Hey-ho/ Let’s fucking rock and roll" coda provided by Mastodon’s Atlanta punk pals the Coathangers, on the math-y “Aunt Lisa”.
Once More 'Round the Sun is also marked by an overarching aimlessness. Brent Hinds has said that the band pushed for a “stream-of-consciousness” approach on this LP, but too often, the looseness diminishes the possibility of catharsis. “Aunt Lisa” and closer “Diamond in the Witch House”, a collaboration with recurring guest Scott Kelly of Neurosis, pack plenty of momentum, but they waste it on clumsy transitions and Kelly’s directionless conclusion. Lead single "High Road" fares far better, proving the band's alt-rock worthiness in a rare show of discipline combining crunchy guitars, a belt-ready chorus, and a cheekily victorious solo.
“This time things’ll work out just fine,” sings Dailor as he pummels the kit into submission on “The Motherload”, probably the band’s vaguest rocker to date. “We won’t let you slip away.” That's not the kind of promise you’d expect from a band so previously obsessed with white whales and holy grails, but as the Georgia titans continue their slow-but-rightful ascent to the throne of mainstream heavy music—a prospect that necessitates a less caustic approach—it’s understandable they’d want to stick their heads over the fourth wall. As proud rejectors of such restrictions, metal fans are all to quick to conflate heightened accessibility with a deliberate betrayal of their extreme upbringing, and surely the quartet are aware of this.
With all that in mind, it's possible to view Once More 'Round the Sun as a vow to honor their roots, even as they set out in search of broader horizons. So far, however, Mastodon’s paradigms simply don’t mesh the way they should. Evolution takes time, and Mastodon continue to publicly work out their growing pains as they determine which traits best represent the unified sound they’ve been chasing this decade.


No matter how much effort Dollanganger injects into her morose sixth album, little on here manages to dig past the surface.

Heart Shaped Bed

Nicole Dollanganger doesn’t aim to romanticize melancholy, but her music can’t escape it. In 2012, the Canadian singer (born Nicole Bell) uploaded her first record to Tumblr and Bandcamp while recovering from a serious illness. She quickly gained a cult following for her doubly depressive and suggestive-lollipop acoustic songs, which appeared on records with campy titles like Ode to Dawn Wiener: Embarrassing Love Songs. Supposedly, Grimes heard one such song and formed Eerie Organization, a label specifically to release Dollanganger’s fifth record, 2015’s Natural Born Losers. Dollanganger remains the label’s only signee.
On Natural Born Losers, Dollanganger fancied herself a sadistic naif who hunted angels with her father’s rifle, carved a lover’s name into her leg, and suffered endlessly from an assortment of cruelties. It could be an uncomfortable listen, but its explicit depictions of female sexuality subverted the notion that vulgar desire is shameful. Delivered with breathy ennui over hushed, barren instrumentation, Dollanganger made her horrors feel inescapable; violence, she seemed to say, is inherent in romance.
There’s still plenty of guns and blood on her follow-up, Heart Shaped Bed, but Dollanganger has traded backwoods horror for a more chilled romance. She dreams of honeymooning at a seedy Poconos hotel, gives a lap dance in a“backyard full of dying flowers,” and imagines herself as a silent movie starlet. Though there’s less masochism, pleasure remains a means of reclaiming power. On the title track, she asks a lover to help “Make something gross feel romantic/Make me so no one will ever want me again.” But no matter how much effort Dollanganger injects into her morose yearnings, little on Heart Shaped Bed manages to dig past the surface.
It opens with “Uncle,” an incest fantasy inspired by a short story called “I Slept With My Uncle On My Wedding Night” by gothic horror novelist V.C. Andrews (from whom she also borrowed her stage surname). Over a spindly piano melody, Dollanganger submits to this forbidden, and honestly nauseating, romance. Though less disturbing, “Lemonade” follows a similar course. As a housewife whose husband is having an affair, Dollanganger’s narrator decides to quench her own carnal thirst. “Take you upstairs to the swan bed/Let you fuck me hard as you can,” she murmurs impassively over the arrythmia of a lobotomized drum machine. The foggy-dawn-in-the-graveyard production only enhances the sluggishness of the songs, muddling Dollanganger’s lyrics into shapeless murmurs. Even when they’re describing moments of ecstasy, the first five songs on Heart Shaped Bed can’t seem to escape their lethargy.
Side B is immediately more varied and compelling, even if the results are mixed. “Snake” overhauls the gothic monotony with a wash of whispers and static noise. She channels a sadistic bruiser on the ominous “Beautiful & Bad,” promising to punish those who cross her (“And the next time you hit, I hit back/Do you hear me, mother fucker?/Can you dig that?”) before diving into a digital abyss that sounds like a flurry of bats being drowned in a deep fryer. But then “Chapel” returns to the fantasy wedding of the first title track, and the glitchy background sparkles and booming drums prevent Dollanganger’s dreams from hitting home once again.
On Heart Shaped Bed, Dollanganger is too veiled behind the gloom to be accessible. When Heart Shaped Bed closes with “Lacrymaria Olor,” Dollanganger emits a pitch-shifted cry. Even though it is distorted beyond recognition, it is the record’s first real articulation of life. As on Natural Born Losers, Dollanganger’s apathy never wavers, whether she is embodying a self-described “crazy bitch” (“Tammy Faye”) or a devout bride (“Chapel”). Nor should it have to; disaffection can speak wonders for itself. But if the content behind the distance isn’t poignant, the message is moot.


Released through Third Man’s record club, Jack White’s 3xLP live set takes some of his knotty, obtuse songs from this year’s Boarding House Reach and lets them breathe on stage.

Jack White: Live at Third Man Records ||| Nashville & Cass Corridor

Earlier this year, Boarding House Reach became Jack White’s third solo album to reach the top of the Billboard 200. Its speedy sequel Live in Nashville ||| Live in Detroit won’t even reach the charts but that’s by design. The triple-record set belongs to an exclusive club, the Vault of Third Man Records, the label White launched in 2001. Live in Nashville ||| Live in Detroit is the 37th release in this limited-edition, subscription-only series, following the celebrated 36th installment—a splashy vinyl-only reissue of Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica—by a matter of months.
Servicing Jack White fans with live souvenirs of recent gigs is a fairly common practice for the Third Man Vault, but this particular release sequence is noteworthy. Trout Mask Replica was the first time the Vault dipped its toe into reissuing an artist outside of the Third Man empire and as it was the first vinyl repressing of a celebrated classic in nearly a decade, it brought eyes to a club that was previously the province of White diehards. And Boarding House Reach—with its 37,000 copies sold on vinyl, the largest number of any album released in 2018—underscored just how many diehards there are in the United States and, just as importantly, these figures hint at how White fans embrace the same philosophy as the rocker: They’re fighting to preserve old-fashioned ways.
Boarding House Reach notably found White battling this instinct within himself. He recorded most of the album on his lonesome, letting himself indulge in stiff funk workouts, operatic prog, and obtuse poetry. Live in Nashville ||| Live in Detroit explodes through his self-imposed confines through the simple act of transferring these experiments to stage in collaboration with a new touring band. Not all the players in the current group are new to White’s world—the rhythm section of drummer Carla Azar and bassist Dominic Davis supported him during the tour for 2012’s Blunderbuss, albeit in two different bands—but a fresh lineup energizes White, letting him squall and lurch as he fiddles with old White Stripes tunes and puzzles-out translating his recent fever dreams for an audience.
By definition, the crowds at these two concerts—one held at Third Man Records Nashville at March 16, the other a private show at Third Man Records Detroit on April 18, the day before he played the town’s “pizza arena,” Jack’s winking name for Detroit’s Little Caesar Arena—are very different than Live at Bonnaroo 2014, the last full-band live record he released. That was a set designed to thrill a festival, but the audiences here are subscribers to the Vault, ready to hear White in an intimate setting. To his credit, White decided to skimp on familiar songs—“Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” is the only White Stripes hit to appear on both sets; the much longer Nashville LP finds space for a twisted “Fell in Love With a Girl,” a full-throttle “Hello Operator” and a valedictory “Seven Nation Army”—in favor of finding out what makes his new songs tick.
Especially when heard in contrast to the leaner Stripes tunes, the new material seems ornate. But instead of wrestling the weirder new songs to the ground, White peppers his older tunes with squalls emanating from his throat and guitar. He lurches forward, trying to push himself into the future. Compared to Boarding House Reach, which wore its self-styled weirdness as a badge of honor, these modern overtures are subtle but they’re apparent, particularly as he threads his art-and-R&B inclinations with lashing guitar. While some of the songs still seem a bit ungainly—draped in its Freddie Mercury harmonies, “Over and Over and Over” always collapses underneath its own weight—his generic exercises, such as the wannabe power ballad “Connected by Love,” gain definition through live collaboration.
More than the songs themselves, this instrumental interplay is the reason to listen to these two concerts. Like Boarding House Reach itself, Live in Nashville ||| Live in Detroit already feels like a document of a transitional period for White, a time when he’s pushing and prodding, attempting to redefine his sound without losing his signature. Although it is certainly of primary interest to the devoted, it’s a shame the set is only available to subscribers because it’s a more compelling listen than the studio set and the reason why is simple: Jack White is always at his best when he wrangling with other musicians.


They're still working with an overriding concept, but this time Martin Schmidt and Drew Daniel of Matmos focus on a simple aesthetic limitation: using only synthesizers as input sources. While there's little in the way of outside text to grapple with as a result, the decision opens the door on some gorgeous sonic shifts.

Supreme Balloon

Ever since the IDM scene they emerged from in the late 1990s withered away and died, Matmos have thrived, in the process making a compelling case for themselves as electronic music's resident white coats. Beginning with 2001's A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure, the combined output of Martin Schmidt and Drew Daniel (a Pitchfork contributor) so far this decade has seen them work within the form of some pre-established conceptual constraint. A Chance to Cut saw them fashion malformed, sideways techno out of samples culled from the operating theater; 2003's The Civil War was a blissfully uncool meditation on medieval instrumentation and American folk history; and 2006's The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast, their most audacious and satisfying record, was a collection of bespoke sound and thought experiments dedicated to a cast of gay or closeted figures: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Larry Levan, Valerie Solanas, King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
It might be tempting for non-fans to imagine these conceptual parameters as being too intellectually grounded to yield much in the way of, oh, you know, fun, but fans have come to embrace them as part of the deal. That's partly because of Matmos' inherent sense of playfulness, humor, and energy-- they're just as comfortable being buffoons or instigators as they are intellectuals. But it's also because there's something strangely engaging about their transparent working process. If you know the backstory to a particular record, it's impossible to hear it and not entertain questions about how they might work within those bounds. By the simple act of listening, you become a participant.
But unlike The Rose Has Teeth, which might easily have come with an annotated bibliography of assigned supplementary reading, the underpinning idea behind Supreme Balloon revolves around a simple aesthetic limitation. This time around, Schmidt and Daniel stashed away their DAT recorders, microphones, and idle hurdy gurdys and vowed to record using only synthesizers as input sources. While there's comparatively little in the way of outside text to grapple with as a result, the decision opens the door on some gorgeous sonic shifts; spanning everything from standard-issue old-school Moogs, Arps, and Waldorfs to slightly more obscure modular antiques (indeed, if The Rose Has Teeth underlined Schmidt and Daniel's day jobs as accomplished academics, this exposes them as shameless gearsluts), Supreme Balloon is a woozily beautiful-sounding record, as crystalline, gleaming, and full-bodied as vintage Terry Riley.
That throwback spirit is underscored by the album's sequencing. Supreme Balloon comes split into two discernible sides, the former a collection of five "pop" numbers that includes the futzed-up circuitry of opener "Rainbow Flag", the punchy, almost-techno of the sprightly "Polychords", and the carbonated, 8-bit harp glissandos of "Exciter Lamp" (which features, weirdly and wonderfully, a brief passage from "O Canada"). Side two begins with the album's obvious centerpiece; clocking in at over 23 minutes long, the eponymously-titled "Supreme Balloon" is a chasm-wide, slow burning bit of analog psychedelia that conjures up very obvious comparisons to Vangelis and Tangerine Dream in their mid-70s heyday. A bubbling drone piece called "Cloudhopper" acts as the closer, and we're done.
Supreme Balloon features contributions from Keith Fullerton Whitman, Jay Lesser, and Sun Ra Arkestra's Marshall Allen, among others, while Riley himself appears on a bonus track of the iTunes version of the record. In the end, those appearances point to the album's only downside, which is the nagging sense that there's too much straight homage/pastiche and not enough of Matmos' considerable cleverness on display. Ultimately, though, it's a minor quibble; as Matmos surely know, beautiful sounds are their own kind of reward.


On this collection of classic punk covers, La Sera’s Katy Goodman and the Hush Sound’s Greta Morgan defang purposefully messy music with honeyed duets and pleasant arrangements.

Katy Goodman / Greta Morgan: Take It, It’s Yours

Take It, It’s Yours

Whenever Katy Goodman and Greta Morgan hang out, they dream big. After hiking past Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory one night, the former Vivian Girl and Hush Sound leader, respectively, stayed up for hours discussing astrophysics, science fiction, and the perils of inter-dimensional love. The next morning, Goodman and Morgan—the latter also makes atmospheric pop as Springtime Carnivore—turned that intergalactic brainstorm into 2013’s “Space Time.” It was an intense, Spectorian ode to zero-gravity heartbreak: “While our souls seemed to fit/The planets weren’t aligned,” they sang, “And so we’ll never meet in this space-time.” The song marked their formal debut as Books of Love—but with Goodman hard at work on La Sera’s dreamy Hour of the Dawn and Morgan gearing up to tour with the Hush Sound, they couldn’t stay long (or perhaps, the planets weren’t aligned).
By early 2016, another laid-back jam session ensued in Morgan’s backyard. The women were playing around with harmonies, ad-libbing over their favorite songs. Morgan tore into a Misfits cover—the crude, foreboding “Where Eagles Dare”—and Goodman followed suit, prompting a dramatic transformation. Danzig’s uniform snarl (“I ain't no goddamn son of a bitch”) had blossomed into a honeyed, if foul-mouthed, duet.
Intrigued by this contrast, Goodman and Morgan started looking at other punk songs through a pop prism: a study presented on their new collaborative punk covers album, Take It, It’s Yours. Besides the aforementioned “Where Eagles Dare,” the record includes reinterpretations of Bad Brains’ “Pay to Cum,” the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” and the Replacements’ “Bastards of Young,” among other famous tales from the gutter. Some are gussied up with marimba and vibraphone; others sound straight out of Laurel Canyon circa ’65. All of them are prime listening for a late-summer pool party, and none of them sound punk at all. Yet, by hitching unruly sentiments to pleasant arrangements, Goodman and Morgan gesture towards a wider disconnect between text and subtext. And one could argue that unity by way of disunity—a mentality of *us vs. them—*is what punk’s all about.
Across Take It, It’s Yours, the duo leave the lyrics and broader melodic outlines of its source material alone. They’re more interested in thematic reconfigurations than they are musical re-enactment: how does punk’s visceral, acerbic sentiment manifest when it’s incubated in a loungier space? As it turns out, this palette is largely owed to the project’s cinematic spirit: “We wanted these songs to fit on the soundtrack of a desert-noir mystery film,” Morgan joked in an interview, going on to cite the lauded composer Ennio Morricone as a key influence on the album’s expanded soundscapes. Tarantino should give it a look: between the twangy slide guitar leads on “Pay to Cum” and the Jam’s “In the City,” and the spaghetti-western shuffle grafted onto Gun Club’s “Sex Beat,” he would find plenty to work with.
Goodman and Morgan’s shared penchant for ’60s pop remains a cornerstone of their collaborations, manifested in dulcet point-counterpoints and bubblegum hooks. They’re covering bands that represent the opposite, but these friends have more in common with their heroes than you’d expect. After all, listening to the original versions of the Buzzcock’s “Ever Fallen in Love?” or Blondie’s “Dreaming,” with their impassioned choruses and deft chord progressions, you might never guess they arose from the underbelly. Regardless of scene or background, everyone can appreciate a spirited ode to fallin’ in love with someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with, because who hasn’t? The problem is that the duo’s version isn’t exactly spirited: a wan, lazy tango wiped clean of the Buzzcocks’ panic-stricken tempos and manic chatter. Here, Pete Shelley’s frantic lamentations (“We won’t be together much longer/Unless we realize we’re the same”) scan as glum resignations; it’s hard not to yawn as the hand-wringing sentiments drift off on the women’s soaring contraltos.
Their mission proves more successful on the opener, a haunting, slide-heavy take on Wipers’ “Over the Edge” that gracefully exposes the aching heart of the Portlandians’ war against the establishment. “Grow up and be a man,” Morgan croons, Goodman echoing in her stead, “Drop dead right where you stand.” When Greg Sage spat that screed in 1983, he was chastising society. That two women are now the ones casting out this sardonic, hyper-masculine directive only provides further testament to their clever choice to reinterpret not only this song, but similarly carnal numbers like “Where Eagles Dare” and “Sex Beat.”
Take It, It’s Yours may be one of the comfiest cover-sets in recent memory, but beneath its chilled-out façade lurks an identity crisis. On one hand, the duo’s stylistic declawing of Danzig and company offers new ways to revisit and expand upon the decades-old punk canon—in terms of sonic contrast as well as gender and generation gaps. But in taking inherently gnarled, messy songs—ostensibly composed in opposition to the status quo—cleaning them up, and having them play nice, Goodman and Morgan have relinquished the urgent energy that made them feel so impactful to begin with. Think of the record as a well-behaved, happy-hour riot: the rebellion doesn’t amount to much, but at least there’s the escape.


Rufus Wainwright's Mark Ronson-produced seventh album represents the singer's return to more formal song structure, but it also marks a break from the florid, operatic pop that defined his first five albums.

Out of the Game

Though he's had a handful of releases since 2007, Rufus Wainwright hasn't made the last five years easy on his listeners. Between two live albums (one of which was a double-length tribute to Judy Garland), a startlingly immodest and premature career retrospective (a whopping 19-disc limited-edition box set called House of Rufus), and a collection of ponderous and meandering Shakespeare-influenced piano demos (2010's studio album All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu), the casual fan might be forgiven for wondering if Wainwright had any interest in expanding on his uniquely composed and orchestrated brand of pop.
The answer is, well, sort of. While Out of the Game certainly represents Wainwright's return to more formal song structure, it marks a clean break from the florid and operatic pop that more or less defined his first five albums. Thanks in no small part to the presence of producer Mark Ronson, the bombastic orchestral pieces and the fluttering ariettas have been swapped out with an armory of peeling guitar licks and 1970s-inflected AOR grooves. Anyone with a mildly frayed birth certificate and a passing history with FM radio will get the touchpoints; Steely Dan, 10cc, Wings, ELO. If we were on a boat, you know what kind it'd be.
It's a look that Wainwright wears well, not only because he's always worked partly in the tradition of the very literate and offbeat West Coast 1970s singer-songwriter Randy Newman, but also because the relatively tighter forms of these songs prevent him from indulging in the pomp and grandiosity that often undermined his recordings. Game is certainly no less produced than any of his previous albums, but there's a lightness of touch throughout that nicely offsets its bigger moments. The sound's inherent moldiness also allows the 38-year-old Wainwright to stretch more fully into a pose he's been toying with for a decade; that of the cynical and conflicted older guy increasingly perplexed by a younger generation. Take the lead single, a statement piece that shows him proudly wearing his fusty new threads while simultaneously thumbing his nose at the hipster set: "Look at you, look at you, look at you-- suckers!" he sneers. "Does your mama know what you're doing?"
While it's a welcome update to his sound, Game isn't a straight genre exercise either. In fact, some of the album's best moments come from the songs that edge just outside of the blueprint. Boasting a pipe organ and a wormlike hook, the three minute "Bitter Tears" is an arch pop song that channels Wainwright's inner Falco; the simple "Sometimes You Need" is a surefooted ballad that rests on an acoustic guitar arpeggio before gently layering on the strings; and album closer "Candles" is a slow-burning torch song that's been re-routed through a Scottish pipe band.
When Wainwright falters, it's for familiar reasons, usually some combination of overindulging and oversharing. With its drain-circling piano arpeggios, fussy falsettos, and mildly cringeworthy lyrics ("One day you will come to Montauk/ And you will see your Dad wearing a kimono"), "Montauk" is the worst offender in this regard. Ultimately, though, it seems a bit churlish to ding someone for being uncool on a record celebrating that very fact. Even with a producer like Ronson at the helm, Wainwright will never be cool, or even popular. One thing's clear, though: He doesn't mind if you don't.


Prince's new effort, exclusive to Jay Z's Tidal service (for now), is billed as being an "experimental" effort. But the reality is something far less earth-shaking: a casual, slightly-weirder-than-usual release with one very good R&B song (that's reportedly been kicking around in his vault for a while), stranded in the album's penultimate slot.

HITNRUN Phase One

Prince's hype-man instincts defy categorization every bit as much as his vocal and instrumental talents beggar description. Though he's fallen off since the 1980s—who, in his shoes, wouldn't?—it's this artist's strange and frequent urge to over-promise that helps keep everyone harping on Sign 'O' the Times as his apogee. Yet here we are again. An album title like HITNRUN Phase One promises a fair amount, not least the possibility of a concept worth serializing. And that's before the album is announced by its creators as being "experimental" in construction. Though after stripping away the promotional language from this streaming-only platter, exclusive to Jay Z's Tidal service (for now), one finds something far less earth-shaking: a casual, slightly-weirder-than-usual release with one very good R&B song (that's reportedly been kicking around in his vault for a while), stranded in the album's penultimate slot.
To get to that very good song—at least in the manner that Prince and his young co-composer, producer, and mixer Joshua Welton intend—you'll plug through a half-hour sequence that contains a throwaway intro, a trio of putative party-starters cluttered with the confetti of modern-dancefloor production-debris, two reworked (as opposed to improved) songs from 2014's superior Art Official Age, and a tweaked version of the "Fallinlove2nite" standalone single that failed to make that prior album. (Ditching Zooey Deschanel's backing vocals doesn't much elevate that breezy tune's mild charm.)
Among the remains, "Hardrocklover" would seem to be an opportunity for one of pop's most reliably sensuous guitarists to make up ground. But the song seems strangely subdued and bored with itself. While the lyrics ("Turn my guitar up so I can make this woman scream") suggest that the inevitable appearance of guitar-heroism will be climactic, Prince's unfurling of his distorto-wail cape feels rote. The loopy-but-hard-hitting funk of "X's Face" is initially promising, though it too is thin on development. Elsewhere, the (mostly) instrumental "Mr. Nelson" riffs with a modicum of inspiration on remnants from Art Official Age standout "Clouds".
On a first listen, you might suspect that the album's opening sequence of not-disastrous (but not-terribly-memorable) EDM-influenced jams is going to be the focus of HITNRUN Phase One. Though this, too, is part of a formula: compare Prince's almost-rap flow on "Shut This Down" to that of 1992's "My Name Is Prince", and it's easy to see that the artist has a template for approaching ascendant pop trends. There are stray, tasty touches in this opening salvo—a brief electric-bass clinic in "Shut This Down", the integration of saxophone, rhythm guitar, and digitally programmed curlicues in the last minute of "Like a Mack"—but experimental this ain't. Not for the artist who wrote and recorded "Crystal Ball", anyway. (By point of comparison: Prince has also made newly available some truly chancy and obscure work from the late 1990s—like the extended paranoid-freakout "The War" and the mostly-acoustic album The Truth—on Tidal.)
Disappointments and missed opportunities aside, it's still great to have an official, Prince-sung version of "1000 X's & O's" (an old composition once intended for Rosie Gaines). When Prince sings in an environment unmolested by contemporary cliche, he gives us more than at any other point on HITNRUN Phase One—including that iconic, multi-tracked one-man choir, in addition to lyrics that, while they might not be much on the page, snap with a seductive pull when placed in his mouth ("Every drop of sweat on your brow/ Is well-earned/ So you best believe"). Even if, this time around, you can forget the familiar discographical parlor game of comparing each new Prince record to earlier triumphs—this one isn't his best album in the last twelve months, let alone years—songs and performances like that one show why it remains unwise to count him out.


Prince’s first fully actualized album is an unrelenting dance party, its kinky ambiguities blurring lines between genres and genders and pretty much everything else.

Dirty Mind

At the dawn of the 1980s, young black musicians were pretty much doomed. After disco brought forth the most racially integrated moment popular music had seen since Kennedy was shot, the ensuing backlash was fierce, and radio finally got fed up with the club scene telling it what to play. So once the airwaves declared dance music dead at the very tail end of the ’70s, African-American stars who didn’t have hits that predated disco—which was just about all of them, besides Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, and Kool & the Gang—had to either drastically change their game, face instant obsolesce, or only play to black audiences.
Prince wasn’t about to take option two or three. When he signed to Warner Bros. in 1977 , he told A&R head Lenny Waronker: “Don’t make me black.” Then the multi-instrumentalist proved his hard rock bona-fides on the guitar-shredding “I’m Yours,” from his 1978 debut For You, and “Bambi,” from 1979’s Prince, just as surely as he served notice of his disco cred with that self-titled album’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” a major pop and chart-topping R&B hit. But still, his vibe on those early wailing solos wasn’t any hipper than that of any other geek who spent his lonely teen years mastering byzantine jazz-fusion wankery.
Prince’s Dirty Mind, his first fully actualized album, changed all that in 1980—though it isn’t the thorough break from his brief past that it’s generally made out to be. It starts with the most blatant disco throb in his entire discography on the title cut, and his second-heaviest thump pounds through “Uptown,” which opens Side B. At 30 ultra-tight minutes, a length that allowed for more walloping vinyl, Prince’s sole slow-jam-deficient album is pretty much an unrelenting dance party that pointedly invited New Wavers to boogie down alongside funk bunnies and dancefloor fashionistas. It’s one of the key records that truly initiated the ’80s.
It’s all there in what’s not. Whereas Prince’s ’70s albums proclaimed his virtuosity, here he achieves much more by confining himself to the simplest, boldest strokes. Like Krautrock’s motorik beat, Prince’s opening “Dirty Mind” rhythms are just about as close a human can get to a metronome; no tom-tom fills, no accents on the high-hat, just an occasional syncopation on cheaply recorded cymbals that suggest a drum machine’s hiss. Like Chic or the Cars, Prince makes the album’s inaugural guitar so staccato it’s nearly a percussion instrument, and much of the arrangement’s tension and release is located in just how much he lets its nearly solitary chord ring out. Halfway through, “Dirty Mind” breaks down in quintessential disco fashion, but right after it builds back up, four descending key changes are offset by ascending, churchy organ: a particularly Prince-like juxtaposition that offers a peek-a-boo glimpse into the convolutions—sexual and otherwise—of his psyche. The composition denies consummation in favor of suspended anticipation.
Because so much of Dirty Mind’s instrumentation is expressed in prickly masculine terms, Prince’s vocals feel that much more free and startlingly girly. His generation grew up with falsetto soul men—Motown’s Smokey Robinson and Eddie Kendricks in the ’60s, Philly’s Stylistics and other harmony acts of the ’70s—and it can be argued that they scored with white audiences because their higher, more ecstatically female frequencies made their race and sexuality less threatening. But it can’t be underestimated how much Prince quite threateningly set off gaydar—particularly with this positively giddy album. Later on, he’d become a superstar singing in his regular range on most hits from 1999 and Purple Rain, but here he establishes his confrontational persona by ramping up the sighs and squeals. Although Wendy Melvoin and Lisa Coleman—LGBT members of Prince’s peak-era band the Revolution—pretty much nailed it when they deemed Prince a “fancy lesbian,” folks of every persuasion still argue about his sexual identity to this day.
That ambiguity is played to the hilt on the track that cemented Prince’s New Wave connection, “When You Were Mine.” The music evokes Elvis Costello’s bitter rigidity, but the lyric wanders way beyond that songwriter’s cuckold comfort zone: There’s the sharing of the clothes and the voyeuristic, nearly-bi way his post-breakup attention shifts from the gender-indeterminate object of his affection to his ex and her/his current steady guy. And, of course, the zinger: “I never was the kind to make a fuss/When he was there, sleeping in-between the two of us.” Whether it was sung by Prince or Cyndi Lauper, who memorably covered the song without changing its nouns on 1983’s She’s So Unusual, that line caught everyone’s attention. Only a new kind of person could do it justice.
Dirty Mind’s second side is unquestionably Prince’s most propulsive suite. It begins with “Uptown,” which ranks alongside Vanity 6’s Prince-penned-and-produced “Nasty Girl” among the most daring R&B radio hits of the ’80s. But its topic is even more singular—how homophobia constricts even heterosexuals. The song celebrates a boho utopia where fag-bashing, racism, misogyny, and all other trifling shit doesn’t exist: While minding his own business, a passing hottie asks him point blank, “Are you gay?” But instead of blowing his cool, Prince reasons, “She’s just a victim of society and all its games.” To school the dame, he takes her to Uptown, a real-life Minneapolis counterculture haven back in 1980 that’s subsequently been gentrified. There, she loses her uptight ways as the track’s grinding disco-funk gains momentum; the overwhelming freedom acts as an aphrodisiac, and the once-scorned weirdo gets “the best night I ever had.” Everybody’s happy.
The tempo downshifts slightly but significantly on “Head,” one of the earliest fully realized manifestations of Prince’s quintessential style. The song features another scenario perfectly archetypal of The Purple One: He meets a virgin (played with drawling deadpan glee by Coleman) on the way to her wedding, and she gives him what the song celebrates.  This results in a Bill Clinton maneuver on her gown, so she dumps her plans and marries him instead. As suggested by his thorniest, most authoritative early groove, this isn’t necessarily a wise choice; Prince vows, with not a small amount of matrimonial menace, to “love you till you’re dead.”
Right before the onslaught of AIDS, “Head” was mighty strong stuff, but even it couldn’t compare to the next track: a 93-second punkabilly ditty that abruptly cuts off right as its bridge peaks, as if caught in flagrante. “Sister” celebrates incest like the rest of the record toys with sexual identity; it’s blatantly performative, yet Prince invests so much into it that it’s impossible to definitively conclude whether he fucked his sister or is merely fucking with us. The music matches this instability; his trebly guitar chords may be fast and furious like the Ramones, but the time signature keeps flipping to trip up ears and feet.
The final kiss-off, “Partyup,” denounces President Carter’s 1980 reinstatement of draft registration. Prince’s fury is both straightforward (“How you gonna make me kill somebody I don’t even know?)” and efficiently metaphorical (“Because of their half-baked mistakes/We get ice cream, no cake”). Meanwhile, the track—in-the-pocket on the bottom but liberatingly loose on top—finds the pleasure in getting thoroughly pissed off, especially during its ’60s-worthy closing chant: “You’re gonna hafta fight your own damn war/ ’Cause we don’t wanna fight no more.”
“Partyup” earns its “revolutionary rock‘n’roll” self-proclamation even though it, like most everything else on the album, is pretty much uncut funk with louder guitars and tunes so catchy you can’t deny the pop. Yet the attitude on this homemade landmark album, which was originally intended as a demo, couldn’t be purer punk: Dirty Mind rejects labels, restrictions, and authority. That’s why, despite its many colors, the music comes across so gloriously black; why Prince’s aura is so righteously flaming; why the singing wraps its pervy purple raincoat around what’s feminine. Prince was the kind of guy who couldn’t be boxed in by anything, so Dirty Mind has him rebelling against even his relatively ordinary and modest early success.
That may have lost him a few fans. The album never went platinum in the U.S. like its predecessor or 11 of the albums that followed, and even “Uptown” narrowly missed the Hot 100. But his willful aberrance also earned him a new kind of audience, one that would also support the Clash, Grace Jones, Culture Club, Rick James, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Talking Heads, Frankie Knuckles, and all the other super freaks of ’80s rock, soul, pop, and dance music. Disco’s so-called death resurrected and radicalized Prince’s already restless definition of self. Here, he becomes everything.


The film director John Carpenter became an icon of the first synthesizer age just as he lost interest in making films. His minimal works have influenced a generation of acolytes, and earlier this year Carpenter tried his hand at a standalone album with Lost Themes. Here, remixers from Prurient and Zola Jesus to Blanck Mass tackle the master's works.

Lost Themes Remixed

As John Carpenter began to lose interest in making films, he entered into an unexpected renaissance as one of the most influential icons of the synthesizer age. Carpenter himself will tell you how accidental that status is: He only began composing and recording the scores to his films—starting with his first one, 1974’s Dark Star—in order to avoid having to pay someone else to do it. His use of electronic instruments, even his signature minimalist style—all of it sprang from budgetary concerns.
But Carpenter’s scores—specifically the ones for Halloween and *The Fog—*developed a cult following among synth geeks, and this burgeoning fan base has inspired him to try his hand at making music without a movie to compose it for. Encouraged by his musician son and his discovery of modern digital recording software, he released his first solo album, Lost Themes, earlier this year. Although the tracks are smoothed out by bland Logic plugins, it was a pretty decent evocation of his soundtrack work.
If Lost Themes provided an opportunity to reflect on Carpenter’s influence on several generations of electronic musicians, the selection of remixes by other artists tacked on as bonus tracks makes that influence explicit. Now, Sacred Bones has fleshed out the set out with a couple more tracks and Lost Themes Remixed stands as a companion volume to the original record.
Remix albums are tricky things, and the ones that fail (and most of them do) do so for the same few reasons: too many stylistically disparate remixers, too much reverence for the the source material, remixers who are clearly in it for the easy paycheck. Lost Themes Remixed avoids all three. Carpenter’s status seems to have inspired the nine remixers to bring their A game, and Sacred Bones selected committed experimentalists like Prurient, Zola Jesus, and Blanck Mass (aka Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power) who wouldn’t play too nice with Carpenter’s recordings.
Stylistically, pretty much any artist who’s going to want to remix John Carpenter is going to have a few things in common, including a pervasive gloominess and an affection for throbbing, single-note bass lines played on analog synthesizers. As a result, LTR manages to hold together as a unified stylistic statement in a way that isn’t common for remix collections.
Despite the project’s singular focus, LTR doesn’t just reflect Carpenter’s influence on contemporary musicians, but the range of artists that he’s inspired. Prurient transforms Carpenter’s New Age-leaning "Purgatory" into a harsh, icy soundscape. The Blanck Mass reworking of "Fallen" sounds like slasher-movie music from some grimy, glitched-up cyberpunk future. Zola Jesus and Dean Hurley reconfigure Lost Themes’ most classically Carpenteresque track "Night" into vocal house for vampires.
Interestingly, some of the remixers seem to be correcting Lost Themes’ deviations from Carpenter’s signature formula. In its original form, "Abyss" highlights both Carpenter’s knack for building complex arrangements out of deceptively simple parts and his weakness for really corny synth patches. Foetus mastermind J.G. Thirlwell swaps them out for the kind of assaultive analog sounds that set the tense mood of Carpenter’s early films (and which themselves were considered corny at the time). One one hand there’s something offensive about the idea of somebody trying to fix an artist’s new work by making it sound more like his old stuff. On the other hand, I have to admit I like the remix more.


The complex, referential new album from the New York-based composer responds to historical crises with sprawling orchestral pop.

Regards to the End

Midway through Regards to the End, composer Emily Wells zooms in on a hand scattering grass seed. The image is summoned with a whisper, rustling against soft piano on the lullaby “David’s Got a Problem.” “Throw a little grass out,” she sings in a hazy drawl. “Then go lie among the weeds.” The line nods to late multimedia artist David Wojnarowicz, who used to wander Manhattan’s piers planting abstract meadows in this manner. Wells cites a 1983 photo of Wojnarowicz as inspiration; he lies back in a dilapidated building carpeted with fresh green turf, peeled paint and graffiti splashed against the walls. It’s an instant metaphor: beauty extracted from waste, organic versus manmade matter, the ultimate supremacy of nature. Wells was interested in all of these themes as she wrote Regards to the End, the New York-based polymath’s latest work of textured orchestral pop.
Wells turned to Wojnarowicz’s work during a two year reflection on the AIDS crisis. She marveled at the activist community that sprouted from the tragedy. Their demand for treatment and government recognition, which often fell on deaf ears, reminded Wells of the ongoing climate emergency. Wells grappled with these colossal disasters, poring through pieces by artists and advocates like Kiki Smith, Félix González-Torres, and others. In their complex, weighty structures, the 10 songs on Regards to the End consider the despair they lived through and mimic the catharsis sown from their work.
Lead single “Love Saves the Day” signifies the alchemy of siphoning art from anguish. As she wrote it, Wells thought of David Buckel, the LGBT rights lawyer and environmental activist who self-immolated in Prospect Park four years ago. The moody classical intro hints at grief, but the song is no funeral dirge. Wells’ compact orchestra—upright bass, cello, clarinet, French horn, violin—creeps in with long, nauseous notes before she truncates their phrasing and ups the tempo. Wells shakes the piece into a rousing march; bass clarinet bounces like a Second Line tuba, and patches of synthesizer echo Wells’ vocals as if she’s singing in a tiled underpass. Unexpected details sneak in, like a peppery hi-hat and rapidly plucked violin. Surprise and precision are Wells’ greatest assets as a composer, and Regards to the End is filled with both.
A classically trained multi-instrumentalist, Wells composes in movements, and it is thrilling to trace the slopes of her songs on Regards to the End. Opener “I’m Numbers” unfurls with seasick bowed strings that dissipate in her progressively lush arrangement. She layers slight, clacking percussion, spry keys, and harsh bursts of breath. Her voice, hushed and low, examines a simple but crippling concept: “I’m numbers ’til I’m not.” The phrase suggests mortality and the cold, accountant’s view of marginalized people, who are often referred to as statistics.
Wells is an efficient lyricist. Her compositions sprawl out and swirl, invigorating the few words she offers. On “Love Saves the Day,” she laments vanishing plots of land: “All of my acres, the wet ones, the dry ones,” she sings. “They’ve all been devoured.” The image functions as a metaphor for a sick body, or a dying planet. On the relaxed “Come on Kiki,” she sums up incessant human desire effortlessly: “You don’t stop wanting/You just want differently.” The phrase is followed by velvety, rippling clarinet—an act of restraint framing Wells’ pleas for “more.”
Wells is occasionally too restrained: the latter half of Regards to the End is a sustained lull. “Arnie and Bill to the Rescue” and “The Dress Rehearsal” glide along mid-tempo to sleepy drones, Wells’ voice drenched in reverb. The songs are lovely in a safe way but suffer from sequencing more than anything else. They may have been better suited between the album’s livelier pieces, rather than stacked at the end in an elongated fadeout. Wells’ most exciting music is vibrant and dynamic, throwing the listener into unexpected hairpin turns. In the final third of “Two Dogs Tethered Inside,” Wells’ brooding synth arpeggios swell and fall as a shimmering clarinet bursts through the surface. It’s as if a rugged stone has been cracked open to reveal the sparkling angles of a geode—beauty erupting through the toughest planes.


On his latest LP, the rapper Brother Ali rekindles his long-running collaboration with Atmosphere producer Ant. They’ve crafted a purposefully uplifting sound.

Brother Ali: All the Beauty in This Whole Life

All the Beauty in This Whole Life

Over a career that has spanned almost two decades, rapper and producer Brother Ali has consistently entwined and then unbraided his personal life and his politics. His catalog has oscillated inwards and outwards accordingly. He’s never ditched social commentary, but there are certain Brother Ali records that feel like deliberate self-care. At one point on his new album, he concedes, “If I’m trying to get out here and protest/Let me first save the world from my foolishness.” Five years after the emcee turned in a record that felt like an active duty report from the front lines, he’s flipped the spotlight back on himself, thumbing through his life in intimate detail.
All the Beauty in This Whole Life finds Ali rekindling his long-running collaboration with Atmosphere producer Ant, and together they’ve crafted a purposefully uplifting sound. Throughout, Ali focuses on familiar topics: his family, his religion, his travels. Ant’s production is sparse but effective, dovetailing a few instruments at a time into basic soul and boom-bap numbers. At worst, the music sounds painted by numbers, but Ant still has plenty capacity for inventive, funky simplicity. It’s a style that fits Ali, who raps from his belly and puffs his voice up and out of his chest, stringing together sneakily sing-song couplets.
“Own Light (What Hearts Are For)” brims with direct but triumphant turns of phrase: “I know who I am, I know whose I am/On your wings I fly, in your shoes I stand,” he raps. Other songs reach for the same effect and miss the mark, like the mundane “Can’t Take That Away.” Ali’s poeticism snowballs into corniness, as he spills, “I love you and there’s nothing you can do it about it/I love you right through all your human problems.”
Other songs leverage a darker edge in sound and subject matter. For all his dramatic catharsis, Ali rarely laments his own existence, but on “Pray for Me,” he recounts his tormented childhood struggle with Albinism in depressing detail—from the trips to the salon his mother arranged to dye his hair to the specifics of the schoolyard taunts he endured. On “Dear Black Son,” he speaks directly to his son Faheem over a murmuring piano beat. It’s the latest chapter in an ongoing diary Ali has dedicated to his firstborn, providing explicit guidance as much as lovingly hoping for the best. “I can’t protect you like I want to,” he raps.
There’s an occasional return to proselytizing that can run dry. On “The Bitten Apple,” Ali preaches about the damages of pornography, and on “Before They Called You White,” he breaks down the social construct of whiteness in America. Sometimes his lucidity can feel like a lesson plan, and once his point is made, it’s hard to reason returning to the track. The opposite is true of a song like “Uncle Usi Taught Me,” in which Ali finds himself stranded in Iran after speaking at a conference, only to return home to suspicious TSA agents (“Imagine my exhausted embarrassment/Got back to America, they interrogate me like a terrorist”).
Ali is at his best when he doesn’t have all the answers, and nothing draws out the uncertainty more than his most self-reflective songs. On “Out of Here,” he sounds lost, trying to come to terms with his own life in the context of the suicides of both his father and grandfather. “Every man before me in my fam/Died by his own hand/How am I supposed to understand my own role in the plan?” he wonders. This kind of raw humanity, which is sometimes eclipsed by his political ambitions, is much welcomed on All the Beauty. “I’m a man not a brand,” he raps at one point, seemingly reminding himself as much as listeners. *All the Beauty *jolts that sentiment into perspective. It’s both sharp-tongued and warm hearted, an LP-length memoir that dabbles in political manifesto. But it comes over like an album Ali made for himself, and he sounds better off because of it.


Jumping from Sub Pop to a major-- and featuring a revamped lineup around linchpin Ben Bridwell-- Band of Horses return for album No. 3

Infinite Arms

Band of Horses' first two efforts-- 2006's grandiose, heart-on-sleeve Everything All the Time and 2007's Cease to Begin-- are practically of a piece. More of a good thing's not usually a bad thing, but even fans of Cease admitted it was a merely lateral move, one Ben Bridwell and his Band have seemingly taken great strides to correct since. Infinite Arms, their third record, took some 16 months to record and was compiled from dozens of tracks. Ryan Monroe, Tyler Ramsey, and Bill Reynolds joined the fold-- Bridwell is now the only member of the band who featured on Everything-- and each of the Horses lent a hand to the songwriting this time around. Hell, Bridwell's even going around saying stuff like "in many ways, this is the first Band of Horses record." And the result of all this new blood, a year-plus of hard work? More of the same, yet somehow much less.
It seemed clear Band of Horses knew their strengths; gigantic, unabashedly earnest choruses, flittery verse melodies, and that honeypot in Ben Bridwell's throat. They are not, and never have been, the most musically dexterous or lyrically sophisticated band around, but when they're on, a dorky-when-you-say-it line like "the world is such a wonderful place" could really hit you below the neck. But Infinite Arms rarely seems to just go for it in the way Everything All the Time and Cease to Begin did, lyrically or musically. Despite a few minor and largely unobtrusive additions to the instrumental palette, the playing feels tentative, reviving old melodies ("Laredo" is practically more "Weed Party" than "Weed Party") and putting a softer focus on the new ones. The aw-shucks naïvety and brash overstatement is dialed down; there are precious few heart-tugging, glass-in-air moments. And Bridwell pulls his formidable voice back, often mewling in a kind of Seals and Crofts-style close harmony or occasionally offering his bandmates the mic without him. Despite all the additions and subtractions, it's decidedly the work of the same band, but if Infinite Arms were, as Bridwell suggests, the first Band of Horses record, I doubt we'd be this curious about the third one.
True to form, there are some lovely moments that would've sat nicely on their previous records: The Brian Wilson-indebted highlight "Bluebeard"; the familiar yet spirited "Laredo"; the knotty melodies of lead single "Compliments" and "Dilly", which will knock around your head for a while. Infinite's got a nice, leisurely way about it, and while a few moments exhibit more flash, Phil Ek's crystalline production once again does a nice job staying out of the way. But their slowpoke anthems and sunburnt rave-ups feel so worn-in, they're growing shapeless. A few well-placed lyrical potboilers could've really spruced up the drabber numbers, but the words here mostly range from the mundane ("oh, my love, is that you on the phone?") to the goofy ("I was thinking it over by the snack machine/ I thought about you in a candy bar") to cringe-inducing nonsense (the album-ending chorus of "if Bartles & Jaymes didn't need no first names, we could live by our own laws and favor.")
Most frustrating about Infinite Arms, though, is that what it's really missing seems almost intangible; it's tough to quantify "heart," but that's not far off. Could be all the months in the studio, might be just plucking the wrong dozen from their tunes, but Infinite Arms just feels less tender, less personal, more twang-by-numbers than the last couple, despite its familiar sound and many of the same principals. There's much less of that sky-spanning, obtuseness-be-damned freedom that characterized their biggest (and, generally, best) moments in the past, and worst of all, that tug in Bridwell's throat feels muted, like even he's not really feeling it. Which is up there with Infinite Arms' most relatable sentiments.


The London quartet moves beyond the sardonic post-punk of its debut, exploring new sounds and moods while Florence Shaw reveals hitherto unheard subtleties in her famously low-key delivery.

Stumpwork

The past few years have been bad enough—but what if your tortoise also ran away? On “Gary Ashby,” a single from Dry Cleaning’s new album, Florence Shaw mourns a lost family pet while poignant guitar tramps and twirls like the animal itself trotting off. Shaw offers few details about Gary or his fateful flight; all we’re left with is a tragic image of the stumpy-legged critter trapped somewhere upside down, unable to move. It’s a goofy, sad-sweet curveball for this band, whose debut album last year was full of sardonic, barbed-wire post-punk.
Stumpwork was written immediately after New Long Leg came out, but it’s a whole different world, vibrantly expanding Dry Cleaning’s core sound. It’s post-punk but also incandescent slow rock; it’s hardcore vandalized with Dadaist-diary meditations; it’s cold and moody but also lush and friendly, alternately borderline industrial noise or dream pop. Shaw’s delivery is elastic; she’s not just talking here, but sighing, scowling, humming, even singing, although she does it in a solitary, half-aware way, as though dazed in reverie. Sometimes she steps out of the way of the instruments, as on the second half of “Conservative Hell,” an aurora skyline of foghorns, wispy guitar, and slow-motion synth ripples. If “do everything and feel nothing” was the last record’s motto, this one’s could be “do everything and feel wondrously, woozily alive.”
The jump from weary and exasperated to bright and (mildly) optimistic isn’t over the top. It’s more like someone drew back a curtain and let a thin ray of light flood the surface of Dry Cleaning’s music. The sunniest track, “Anna Calls From the Arctic,” is practically hypnagogic rock; Nick Buxton’s drums, Lewis Maynard’s bass, and Tom Dowse’s guitar fall into such gentle lockstep it’s like they’re lifting you to heaven, where you’re met by yawning horns and needling vibrations that seem to unspool for eternity. Even some of the album’s more aggressive cuts, like “Don’t Press Me,” emanate a kind of raw coziness; the video for the song has cartoon versions of the band’s faces rolling around like bouncy balls.
For all the pretty textures, there’s nothing as immediately infectious as the mirroring guitar-bass hook of “Scratchcard Lanyard,” though the soothing gallop of the title track comes close. What distinguishes Stumpwork is the way these songs are built out like landscapes, with micro-climaxes and instrumental passages that pop. There are so many mini-moments of glee: Maynard’s deviously sinewy bass opening up “Hot Penny Day,” or the drums falling away and Shaw crying out, “Is it still okay to call you my disco pickle?” The crushing “No Decent Shoes for Rain” slowly mounts tension until the last minute, when everything explodes in a rush before a shrill chord slashes it into silence. Dry Cleaning’s chief allure isn’t thrashing hooks or show-off vocal prowess, it’s the way these four London friends take cues from each other’s rhythms like they’re brainstorming riffs in real time.
The most electrifying and emotionally resonant rock made right now is often by musicians who aren’t actually steeped in the genre; they work on the fringes, conducting experiments in asphyxiating distortion and running one-person bands from their bedrooms, warping their guitars into shards of gleaming noise over convulsive digital beats. Perhaps that’s one reason Dry Cleaning’s music hits so hard: While the band is highly skilled and grounded in traditional rock scenes, Shaw’s vocals hew toward anti-rock, even though they’re shaped to the instrumental and have a conversational musicality. Their sharpness gives the band’s sound a distinctly visual quality, her voice high in the mix like a backdrop-blurred close-up of someone’s face. In a way, it reminds me of some of the most exciting rap of the last few years, which often use otherworldly vocal styles like snarling, sibilating, and whispering to make more traditional drum presets and patterns feel new again.
Dry Cleaning weren’t the first to do talk-rock, but no one else has Shaw’s enchanting simplicity. Her spoken-word delivery has often been described as stony or blank, an idea she seems to mock at least once on this record: “What I really love is to not use something to its full capacity,” she professes on the title track. There’s an abundance of silliness and emotional subtlety in her minute tone shifts and observational lyrics about everyday life. You can see it conveyed in her low-key facial movements when she performs: eyerolls, a disdainful nose scrunch, the quick flick of an eyebrow. Part of the thrill is the sheer unpredictability of her monologues, where a gaming mouse can stoke interpersonal chaos and flickers of joy suddenly shrivel into disgust: “I thought I saw a young couple clinging to a round baby, but it was a bundle of trash and food.” Even on the most disorienting song, “Liberty Log,” there’s a jolt of levity: “I will risk slow death for Chinese spring roll,” she promises, like a warrior taking a fatal oath.
So much of Dry Cleaning’s emotional pulse rests in Shaw’s words that when they’re forgettable, the music feels declawed. “Driver’s Story,” for example, is lyrically as diffuse and subdued as the slow-grooving instruments. Then again, it would be difficult to follow up New Long Leg with another vault of instantly memorable quotes about bouncy-ball filters and hot-dog daydreams without making it feel gimmicky. Shaw’s real strength lies not in her surrealism but in the way her best lines reach toward eternal truths about the small ways humans survive, like the arrival of a shoe organizer in the mail distracting her from the dysfunction of late-capitalist rot.
Deep in the final track, right before the end, Shaw offers a manifesto for living: “For a happy and exciting life… stay interested in the world around you.” Her poised tranquility makes it difficult to tell whether she’s serious or reading off a Live-Laugh-Love aphorism generator, as she adds, “Keep the curiosity of a child if you can.” These lines felt especially poetic the other night, when Dry Cleaning held an album listening party at a roller-skating rink. After a long workday, I expected to be too exhausted to really enjoy it. But I found myself grinning madly as first-time skaters careened into walls and tiny kids clung to each other for safety while Gary Ashbies and disco pickles flew overhead. Dry Cleaning is all about these glimmers: jaded torpor pierced by genuine smiles and little flashes of human oddity that make wading through all the shit that is life worth it.