By embracing the detuned bass and dope boy cool of state-of-the-art trap, Lupe Fiasco delivers his most subversive album yet.

DROGAS Light

Lupe Fiasco’s new album introduces itself with a shocking display of force: “Dopamine Lit (Intro)” is two minutes and 49 seconds of foghorn bass, fiery bars, and a half-joking, half-drunken chorus that includes a Billboard flip-off, a Lord of the Rings reference, and some self-consciously nonsensical trap grunts, for good measure. The song especially feels like a pleasant surprise attack when held against the eternally put-upon rapper’s consistently inconsistent delivery over the last few years. DROGAS Light may not surpass his auspicious debut, 2006’s Food & Liquor, but it is easily the least scattered statement he’s made in about a decade.
Not coincidentally, it is also the first album he is releasing independently after concluding his long and unhappy relationship with Atlantic Records. So rather than turning in a collection of songs that are easily sorted into column A (safer, radio-playable, label-approved) and column B (self-indulgent and somewhat superior), Lupe goes hard at a coherent sound on every single track, most pointedly on the album’s stellar first half. But coherence is not the only or most important difference here. There’s also an unexpected sonic strategy that finds Lupe unleashing a relentless assault of huge 808s, bomb-tick snares, and constantly chopped’n’popping vocal samples; he’s simultaneously trying on sounds of the moment while retaining his contrarian viewpoint on modern trap trends.
Unchained from major-label groupthink, Lupe doesn’t go completely left with a set of stiflingly dense art-raps. Instead, many of these tracks seem purpose-built to compete with Rae Sremmurd and Migos for sheer bumpability, while lyrically running laps around them. The trap-heavy production is a major asset; 808s and psychedelic ambience provide Lupe with a vehicle for his worldview, which is critical of the genre’s gangster tropes. “You seen the movie/They killed the n***ga/Why you still wanna be like Scarface?” he raps on “NGL.”
This novel collision of style and substance is a welcome switch in approach for the rapper. Lupe never quite felt comfortable in the boom-bap lineage of backpacker rap that some fans and critics have wanted him to stick to ever since “Kick Push” cast him as an unlikely torchbearer of the Native Tongues ethos back in 2006. He soon found his own mold—a mix of West Coast and Midwest gangsta rap influences with an emo/goth-pop aesthetic that never quite worked for anybody except diehard fans. Unfortunately, a few DROGAS cuts, like “Made in the USA” and “Pick Up the Phone,” still fall into that underwhelming category. The filter house outing “It’s Not Design” and dance-rocky “Wild Child” also feel like throwbacks to the days of base-covering radio singles—concessions to a label boss he’s already fired.
DROGAS’ bold new sound, however, demands to be measured, less against Lupe’s own catalog than the current field of sources he’s drawing from and bouncing off of. The best songs on the album feel kindred in spirit to some of Kanye’s The Life of Pablo but are nowhere near as original, transgressive, or transportive. Run the Jewels have combined 808s with subversive strains of anger and paranoia to stronger effect, not to mention Kendrick. And even compared with artists like 2 Chainz and Migos, Lupe’s bars lack a certain snap. That’s because he is only here to flirt and subvert—he is not really in the moment, not really about that life. Plays on drug slang provide this album with much of its imagery—“Tranquillo,” in particular, serves as sort of a key to the record’s central conceit—but overall the listener gets the sense that is Lupe still too self-conscious to truly loosen up, get lifted, and achieve the altered state that is so key to Future’s screwed soul or Kanye’s gospel-inflected high.
Ultimately, DROGAS Light reaffirms, rather than fundamentally alters, Lupe’s place in the rap pantheon. He’s always been too lyrical and heady to count out as an innovator in the game, even if his moves sometimes make you want to do just that. But here, with a newfound urgency to his sound, he proves once again that he is still the brainy smurf of rap.


Marina Diamandis’ first album since shedding her “Marina and the Diamonds” identity slides from affecting poetry to cold calculation.

Love + Fear

The fourth album by Marina Diamandis, and her first without the mantle of “Marina and the Diamonds,” arrives after four years spent battling depression and self-doubt. Her first priority in composing Love + Fear seems to have been returning to a place where music could be enjoyable, and generative, and healing; in a word, safe. Listening to the record is like slipping into a meditation exercise, with Marina as soft, soothing sloganeer: Close your eyes, and imagine you’re on a beach; just breathe, and let your worries disappear.
Marina’s devoted following, and her many LGBTQ listeners in particular, rely on her for complex, indrawn alternatives to hollow empowerment anthems. But the qualities that so endeared her to fans—her vulnerability, her appetite for risk, her unflinching handling of misogyny and mental illness—are absent here. “We don’t have the time to be introspective when there are more important things happening,” Marina recently told Fader. Without introspection, the lyrics of Love + Fear feel fully incidental to the songs swirling around them.
Safety, as an artistic priority, can shield creativity from anxiety. It can also dull an artist’s edges. Nowhere is this more evident than in Marina’s newfound dependence on “melodic math,” the Max Martin-pioneered songwriting technique that involves slotting syllables into an instrumental track, even if the resulting lyric is semi-incoherent. This can be a useful compositional tool; it can also be the reason Ariana Grande sings, “Now that I’ve become who I really are.” Though melodic math is wildly incompatible with Marina’s verbose, literary sensibility, Love + Fear is redolent of the stuff. Lyrics are occasionally nonsensical (“Stuck in fast forward, always on the rewind”) or simply sloppy (“My love is a planet revolving your heart”). The chorus of “Emotional Machine” consists of facile rhyming: “I’m a machine/An emotional bein’/Since I was a teen/Cut my feelings off clean.” When Marina covered similar territory on 2010’s “I Am Not a Robot,” she wrote: “Better to be hated/Than loved, loved, loved for what you’re not/You’re vulnerable, so vulnerable/You are not a robot.” This is a staggering slide, from affecting poetry to cold calculation. How to account for it?
It’s tempting to blame new co-writers like OzGo, a producer who’s worked extensively with Martin, for pushing Marina toward a more easily digestible pop product. But 2012’s Electra Heart also featured a battery of powerhouse collaborators, and still Marina’s distinct observations shone through. Greg Kurstin, who produced much of Electra Heart, may work with mega-stars like Adele and Ellie Goulding, but it’s hard to imagine either of them singing, “Wish I’d been a prom queen fighting for the title/Instead of being 16 and burning up a Bible/Feeling super, super, super suicidal.” Love + Fear’s gratuitous use of melodic math seems deliberate and freely chosen.
When Marina’s vocal delivery allows a glimmer of personality to shine through the genericism, the results are lovely. “Baby,” a collaboration with Clean Bandit and Luis Fonsi, stands head and shoulders above every other track, even though it already appeared on Clean Bandit’s own album last fall. On “No More Suckers,” Marina’s bratty, schoolyard-taunt delivery recalls Cher Lloyd’s excellent 2011 single “Want U Back,” elevating standard break-up fare into something witty and winking. “Too Afraid” is an aching counterpoint to anodyne lead singles “Handmade Heaven” and “Orange Trees.” When Marina sings, “I don’t know what to do/I hate this city, but I stay ’cause of you,” she grounds the earlier songs’ wide-eyed daydreaming in deeper meaning.
Elsewhere, though, Marina finds herself unable—or maybe afraid—to offer any originality. “True” is little more than a string of bland body-positivity slogans, too stale for a Dove commercial a decade ago. “Superstar” hints at substance by pairing foreboding minor-key synths with the opening lyric, “Before I met you, I pushed them all away,” then devolves into a standard, sugary love song. On “To Be Human,” Marina stretches the bridge of U2’s “Beautiful Day” to the length of a full song, and fills the space with a bizarre reference to Vladimir Lenin’s embalmed corpse. Though Marina has called “To Be Human” the album’s “most political song,” she resists making any definitive statements. When she sings, “There were riots in America/Just when things were getting better,” she doesn’t deign to place the lyric in context. Which riots? What was getting better, and for whom? By contrast, “Savages,” a standout from 2015’s Froot, offered a blazing indictment of human aggression that simultaneously demonstrated Marina’s strength as a songwriter: “I’m not afraid of God/I am afraid of man.”
In the past, whether Marina was working in a diaristic mode or a fictive one, she never caved to normality. That Marina—the lyricist who wasn’t afraid to detail the taste of toothpaste on a lover’s tongue, the vocalist who wasn’t afraid to punctuate a sentence with a feral shriek—has gone missing. The temptation of safe is undeniable, but mononyms are earned by embracing risk.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the 2005 solo LP from the Dipset rapper, who rendered his brusque New York City experience in surreally unnerving style.

Harlem: Diary of a Summer

Jim Jones doesn’t sound exactly like a human being. The way the Harlem rapper had begun, by the middle of the 2000s, to double his vocals was not quite a 1:1 recreation of the technique 2Pac used to summon a half-disembodied doom, no matter what little homages cropped on up on Jones’ tracklists. Nor was it in the same mold as No Limit artists like Master P or Young Bleed, who reimagined Pac’s fatalism as the tics of men too preoccupied to worry about technique. Both of those effects were achieved by drawing the listener’s ears to the incongruity of the takes. Jones’ increasingly claustrophobic records came to sound, instead, like the imperfect transfer of a muscular voice across rocky ethernet; only the most forceful notes survive.
Harlem: Diary of a Summer, Jones’ second album, was released in 2005 as the stranglehold he and the Diplomats had held over New York City was beginning to loosen; as New York itself was becoming decentered within hip-hop; and as the stylistic hallmarks of Dipset’s early run—deliberately chintzy soul samples, gleefully telegraphed wordplay and onomatopoeia—were being replaced, by competitors but also by the Dips themselves, with bigger, darker, and more industrial elements. Diary of a Summer runs the traditional rap blockbuster through that filter, its childhood memories turned oddly urgent, its concessions to emerging styles bent back toward post-9/11 Manhattan. Through that process Jones, the least-discussed core member of the group he co-founded, emerges as an auteur of the ordinary, his unfussy writing and uncanny vocals rendering a world just a few degrees off from the one the rest of us inhabit.
Speaking—stay with me—of 9/11: In 2001, as Jay-Z was enlisting Kanye West, Just Blaze, and Bink! to polish the soul-sample production style of The Blueprint to a high shine, Cam’ron was finalizing an agreement with his childhood friend Dame Dash that would bring him and the Diplomats to Roc-A-Fella. The quick-and-dirty approximation of “Never Change,” “Heart of the City,” and “Girls, Girls, Girls” that Cam preferred—its samples more mischievously obvious, its seams barely concealed—would help vault him and his partners to stardom. By the end of 2003, Jones, Cam, Juelz Santana et al. had not only compared themselves on record to Mohammed Atta, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban, but had become the most popular and consequential rap group in the city. The five-volume series of Diplomats mixtapes, hosted by the late DJ Kay Slay, distilled their appeal: playful but bludgeoning, cartoon villains obsessed with little language games. Cam’s third solo album, Come Home With Me, and Diplomatic Immunity, the group’s studio debut, formalized that dominance.
When the Roc-A-Fella deal was signed, Cam was already one of the planet’s best rappers, where “rapping” means bending the language into newer, vibrant, more menacing shapes than anyone had yet dared. Juelz, the deliberate and inelegant Cam imitator, was earmarked as his successor. Jones had not been a figure of serious artistic importance. In fact, when he began appearing on records, Jones was not even presented as Cam’s creative peer, but rather as a vestige of his childhood. On “Me, My Moms & Jimmy,” the Tom Tom Club-sampling lark from 1998’s Confessions of Fire, Jones follows Cam in skittering across the top of the beat, with a verse that was either written for Jones or written by him as a direct imitation of his friend. He all but stumbles through lines like, “Do you know how to scuba? I got a house in Aruba/But you keep it on low cause my spouse got a Ruger.” Jones’ turn reads as just slightly less of a novelty than the verse from Cam’s beloved mother.
Two years later, on S.D.E., Cam wielded Jones in a similar way, on the similarly sunny, Destiny’s Child-featuring “Do It Again.” But almost immediately afterward, Jones snapped out of the paint-by-numbers process and started deepening his voice, then barreling through beats with a fixity of purpose. Perhaps it was the triangulation of Cam’s finesse and Juelz’s blunting of it: On Come Home With Me’s title track, Jones follows those two with a missive about the place he grew up, where the “buses don’t run” and where Steve Francis and Queen Latifah had been mugged; where the addicts lingering in the halls and the cops surveilling them pose comparable threats; where “grandmothers is 30.” Sometimes the rhyming syllables are stacked in cascades the way Cam’s are, but on the whole the writing has turned cool and epigrammatic. Later on that same album, over Kanye’s “Dead or Alive,” the passage

I’ll hock my chain
For a block of cocaine, now it’s back to my block with cocaine
You know, re-in’ up and filling up them pots with cocaine
Then you chop it up and bottle up and top the cocaine
Gotta watch for them cops and they chains

doesn’t scan as a parlor trick, the way it would if it came from Cam—look at what I can do with a single word!—but rather as the literal, necessary diagramming of a situation.
This sinewy style doesn’t always hit. On Jones’ solo debut, 2004’s overstuffed On My Way to Church, he tries to kick it into double-time or exaggerate it to the point of near-genuflection. The album’s big commercial play has the distinct feel of an overmatched MC struggling to keep up with shifting trends. When the verses grow anonymous, there’s nothing to hang onto—especially on an album so sonically directionless, where Jones’ increasingly uncanny voice is not yet the dominant texture. Despite this, Church is frequently effective and dotted with moments, like the venomous Eazy-E homage “Certified Gangstas” or “Only One Way Up” (where he says “I contradict whatever the government says”), when Jones’ way of expressing himself is entrancingly but almost imperceptibly alien.
Harlem: Diary of a Summer goes to significant lengths to reframe Jones as someone around whom other emerging styles would orbit. He was no longer going to make songs called “Crunk Muzik” to shore up support among listeners disinterested in the finer points of Harlem politics; he was going to bare his past, his self. Its opening song is called, literally, “My Diary,” and sounds as if a child opened a music box and found Ed Koch’s New York.
That song practically sweats; Jones bursts in with a string of sparsely rendered details, the smug beat cops, the cautious senior citizens, the blocks “hot like saunas.” When Diary of a Summer is at its best, Jones and his collaborators treat neighborhood gossip like ancient myth, both for its mammoth stakes and the way it grows from generation to generation like a game of telephone. Later on “My Diary,” Jones promises to show the listener the spots where specific men and women died, and where they’ve been commemorated in murals. “Like who?” a disembodied voice—Jones, of course—asks. “Like Porter and them,” he mumbles, the rote facts (Rich Porter, b. 7/26/64, d. 1/3/90, murdered with $2,239 in his pocket) a point of assumed familiarity.
If you were to describe any component part of Harlem: Diary of a Summer, it would fail to communicate just how odd the record is. Two tracks after “My Diary,” Max B, then recently released from the prison sentence he began serving as a teenager and about to embark on one of the stranger, more rewarding creative tears in rap history, delineates 139th and 140th Streets as if they were distinctly different environments. “Harlem” is a trove of this sort of information, with cross streets punctuating nearly every bar, with men sitting on crates like La-Z-Boys, with shuttered nightclubs and cacophonous dice games and “fly jackets from Carlos at the mall.” Senses flood back unpredictably: On “Penitentiary Chances,” Jones marks a time period as having run “since chicken lo mein and rice.”
Unlike in his formative, pre-9/11 work, when his voice would bounce into the higher register usually occupied by Cam—and unlike the songs on On My Way to Church, which feature the lower tone but can’t figure out how to use it as an anchor—Jones’ voice on Diary of a Summer is totalizing. It’s able to tie together such disparate beats as Pete Rock’s shimmering Dionne Warwick sample on “G’s Up” and “We Just Ballin,” which flips Fearless Four’s “Rockin’ It” in a slightly more frenetic manner than Jay and the Hitmen had for “(Always Be My) Sunshine.” Jones’ voice actually has a lot in common with the “Rockin’ It” instrumental, in the way it leaves a slightly metallic aftertaste.
Diary of a Summer is occasionally overproduced, with the inharmonious “Penitentiary Chances” being the worst offender. But Jones flourishes in the numerous pockets of negative space. So much air flows through Develop’s ominous beat for “Ride Wit Me” that the intermittent gaps in my terrible Bluetooth connection only heightened its tension. “Ride Wit Me” is the best argument for Jones as a technical rapper and as one who understands his limitations. Excising the stilted double-time he had lapsed into on Church, Jones here leaves himself enough space to speed up then slow back down while retaining the grit and agita that makes his verses unmistakable. He complicates the patterns just enough to arrest the listener, but never to the point of distraction: The swing he adopts beginning on the line “Let’s go sightseeing” actually reemphasizes the text. This comes after an opening verse from Juelz who, at the other end of the spectrum, is at his best precisely because he works himself into a pique where each bar sounds as if it might send him careening off a cliff. That a song this razor-sharp can be made to flow naturally out of the lewd, swaggering “Honey Dip” is a testament to the unifying power of Jones’ part-robotic baritone.
When it comes to more classic strains of production, one of the signature examples of big-budget, post-G funk sampling is Chucky Thompson’s flip of the Isley Brothers’ “Between the Sheets” for the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Big Poppa.” On Big’s song, the Isleys’ classic is rich, luxurious, unhurried. But Jones’ version, “Summer Wit’ Miami,” turns it delirious. An ode to the city where he would often escape to write, record, and sit in pleather club booths, the single feels like one of the till-dawn nights Jones raps about—expensive but never classy, a wave of pleasure that makes no attempt to mask its attendant comedown. It’s indulgently shameless, and the obviousness of its source material is merely one of its audacious embellishments.
Speaking of audacious embellishments: Too few albums tuck true heat checks at the very end, sneaking their best songs in right as time expires. “Baby Girl” is the most electric thing Jones has ever recorded; he finds a bounce early and never lets it go. Elsewhere on Diary of a Summer, Jones had ironed out the kinks in his clumsier, earlier style. But here he sounds downright nimble, dancing just ahead of and then just behind the drums, pausing, sneering. It’s built around a Max chorus, but for once he’s merely the architecture—Jones has landed, at last, at the intersection of muscularity and verve.
Harlem: Diary of a Summer was released as New York began wringing its hands about the city’s role in 21st-century rap. The news that Nas was planning to call an album Hip Hop Is Dead was treated either as confirmation that the genre’s birthplace and old guard were returning to save it, or that they’d fallen painfully out of touch. Emerging subgenres, like the snap music pinging out of Atlanta, were derided as catering to cell phone providers, new stars like Young Jeezy seen as insubstantial and cynical. This was an odd time for mainstream rap in general, in part because the evaporating CD-sales economy was changing the way money flowed into artists’ recording budgets. But the uneasiness of this transition was pathologized in the five boroughs like nowhere else.
The most interesting thing New York-made rap had to offer in this period was, in fact, Max. Despite being behind bars from the beginning of 2007 on—the bulk of his catalog was recorded at breakneck pace during a roughly 18-month period of freedom—Max’s mixtapes warped 50 Cent’s pop sensibilities into something delightfully atonal and even more fatalistic. It sounded as if his material boasts, musings on death, and askance humor were all poking out of a swamp. He was both more musical and more guttural than Jones, and quickly revealed himself to be, in his way, one of the most colorful writers in rap—and a frequent, chronically underpaid ghostwriter for Jones, as Max would allege in interviews once their relationship began to deteriorate.
A little over a year after Diary of a Summer, Jones dropped his third album, Hustler’s P.O.M.E. (Product of My Environment), which features Max on seven of its 16 songs. It’s not exactly Ghost on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, but his influence looms just as large: “We Fly High,” which became the biggest hit of Jones’ career, leans so heavily on Max’s croaking style that Jones has been dogged for years by questions about its authorship. The pair fell out over the sort of arcane business details that ended up litigated ad infinitum on then-thriving rap blogs; Jones’ later singles, like 2008’s Ron Browz-produced Auto-Tune odyssey “Pop Champagne,” sound like an artist chasing the protégé.
By the end of the 2000s, Jones’ status in New York rap had somewhat receded. Artists like Max and Stack Bundles had carried his steam-engine style to divergent extremes: Where Max had made elastic the rigid frameworks of what Jones was doing, Stacks, a remarkable rapper who was murdered in 2007, coiled it around him like a snake, rapping in a booming, slightly processed voice as he wended through complicated technical passages and staccato bursts of syllables, all arranged into arch DJ Clue-era punchlines.
At the beginning of the 2010s, it briefly seemed that French Montana would be the one to keep Jones’ brand of brawny linearity in the mainstream. Instead, New York rap splintered: into the woozy, slight psychedelia of A$AP Rocky’s work with Clams Casino; into the minimalist revision of ’90s mafia rap that Roc Marciano pioneered; into the drill music ported over from Chicago and London. When stone-serious punchline rap by men approaching middle age came back into vogue, it was via Buffalo natives Conway the Machine and Benny the Butcher, whose songs sound beamed in from an alternate timeline where Dipset never existed.
Though not technically his debut, Harlem: Diary of a Summer is Jones’ version of the widescreen, cinematic introduction that rappers had been making for two decades, scanned through a thousand Xerox machines until the degradation and distortion became part of the work itself. Whether it’s “My Diary”’s conflation of the innocent and the rugged or “Harlem”’s refusal to cater to the uninitiated, Jim Jones made his one truly essential record by isolating what was at his core—what was no longer reducible.


One of the all-time great indie rock records is reissued in 2xLP form, with new liner notes and an extra disc of rare tracks.

The Dismemberment Plan: Emergency & I [Vinyl Reissue]

Emergency & I [Vinyl Reissue]

The liner notes for the reissue of the Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I come as an oral history: interviews with the band, label types, and D.C. scene staples, touching on everything from the death of singer Travis Morrison's father shortly before the album's conception to the band's oft-repeated, ill-conceived goal to cross-pollinate Radiohead and De La Soul. Among the best bits is Morrison's story of sketching the album's now-famous cover on his computer, then showing it off to skeptical friends. "People would just stare at me," he remembers. "It's a weird image. I've seen people with tattoos of it in the last few years."
To a certain segment of indie kids, many now indie adults, branding ourselves permanently with that weird sunset scene seems no stranger than an older dude's Black Flag bars or a youngster's Funeral laptop wallpaper. To many, Emergency & I, first released in 1999, is that record; breakup balm, to be sure, but also the voice in your head, the thing that seems to say as much about us as we know about ourselves. Though its influence on music at large has been difficult to chart, if we're to gauge a work's import by what it's meant to the people that come across it, Emergency & I is one of indie's key LPs. Its songs-- nervy, cacophonous, uncomfortably real-- actually mean something to people, whether they came to the record recently or have been letting it run through their lives for the last decade and change.
The history of Emergency & I isn't contained in the particulars of Eric Axelson's bass tone, or the band's brush-up with Interscope, or how much they liked Brainiac, or what was or wasn't going on in D.C. in the late 1990s. That stuff is just the prelude. Fact is, the history of Emergency & I lies with the people; people who hear too much of themselves in "The Jitters", who've vented spleen to the tune of "What Do You Want Me to Say?", who've cast off all shackles to the strains of "Back and Forth". Morrison claims not to grasp the significance of the album's title, but it's always seemed fairly obvious to me: There's the encroaching chaos of modern life-- the emergency-- and then there's you, standing outside it, yet inextricably linked. Emergency & I is a record about learning how to live with both.
Better than anyone, Morrison captures that awful, driftless, locked-up feeling you back yourself into sometimes; bored at work, unlucky in love, low on friends, lower on prospects. You're unsure where to move, be it another city or into another room, or whether either is worth the effort; that feeling, so perfectly articulated in "The City", that "something seems to happen somewhere else," yet for reasons financial and social and geographical alike, you're powerless to do anything about it. Call it self-insult to existential injury: You're so down, you start counting yourself out. That's "Spider in the Snow", in which a change of scenery still means the "same VCR, the same cats"; the same rut. That's "Memory Machine", in which eternal life seems little more than an excuse to chain-smoke. That, especially, is "The Jitters", in which our sick and sad protagonist can't bring himself to do much more than 10,000 push-ups a day.
But allowing himself to wallow or pointing fingers at everyone but himself, Morrison assesses the situation, turns over the problems in his head, sorts out what's in his control and what's out of it, and moves along. He sometimes invents elaborate metaphysical devices-- the all-access pass of "You Are Invited", the memory machine of "Memory Machine"-- to explain away what a more rational observation couldn't, but he's a strikingly realistic, austere lyricist, detailing just how dull feeling like crap can be, encouraging action even when he's not so certain he can manage it himself. He's not striving for perfection, just normalcy. That's struggle enough.
All this, Morrison delivers deftly, elastically, switching up cadence to match the mood. In 2011, an indie rock frontman copping to liking rap doesn't merit mention, but Morrison's MC-inspired delivery was and is rather novel; his voice alone is just a few notches above merely okay, yet he's never less than a commanding presence on the mic, able to pull off sharp tone-switches and jutting asides with the unusual clarity of a guy who's picked up just as much from Rakim as Ian MacKaye. Drummer Joe Easley's gifts are immediately apparent, his beefy, hyperkinetic style owing as much to dusty rock royalty as the then-contemporary drum'n'bass the band were clearly keen on. Axelson's basswork is unparalleled in both speed and tone. Jason Caddell's guitar weaves in and out of the tunes; they're a rock band, but not a guitar band per se, and Caddell's reserve is a big reason why they rarely get lumped in with the glut of D.C.'s spazzy post-hardcore contemporaries. And that woozy synth, a frequent presence throughout Emergency, beautifully echoes the weary resolve of Morrison's lyrics. Nearly as much as his voice and their explosive rhythm section, that keyboard smear is the sound of Emergency & I.
The Plan's melodic sense was unusual, borderline dissonant, and their arrangements curiously spare and well-considered. It's a busy record but never cluttered; weird but not altogether alien; lush and constantly transmogrifying. It is a perfectly realized sound-- difficult if not impossible to imitate. Not even the band itself ever quite sounded like this anywhere else. As the liners explain, at some point during the sessions, all assembled parties came to the realization that what they were working on was really something special. The reissue comes with a smattering of enjoyable singles, but even the best of those-- the barnstorming "B.O.B." rewrite "The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich"-- feels thin and frenzied next to the vibrant, remarkably self-assured Emergency & I material.
That tension between musical perfection and lyrical uncertainty is the heart of Emergency & I; here you have these incredibly exacting musicians playing this gorgeous, frantic, hyperstylized pop who then let some neurotic chart his insecurities over top. And yet the two disparate sides form an electrifying symbiosis. The music seems to alchemize around Morrison's lyrics, throbbing and melting to match the mood: "The Jitters" is the most downtrodden in tone and tempo alike, steady closer "Back and Forth" echoes a kind of acceptance with the state of things, frantic Brainiac hat-tip "Girl O'Clock" feels like the murderous sexual frustration it depicts. "8 1/2 Minutes" is positively apocalyptic, its whirring keyboards and Axelson's humongous bass runs akin to sonic blitzkrieg, and while the world ends around him, all Morrison can talk about is how beautiful it is. It's a survival strategy, the self-obsessive's way of navigating the world, a way to keep the emergency at bay. That's what Morrison seems to be positing throughout Emergency & I, urged along by its crazy rhythms: Retreat is as good as defeat. Bad as it gets, you've gotta keep moving.
I was a teenager when I first heard Emergency & I, still months from college, in a relationship I sensed then was shaky and know now was doomed. Back then, it was a constant. It deepened further for a couple years afterward, after I'd discovered all sorts of instincts I couldn't trust, after I'd found that I too can put myself on pause the way Morrison does in "The Jitters". I set it aside for a while in my mid-twenties, convinced I'd juiced the thing of all its meaning; then I lost a job and a best friend in quick succession, and I buried myself in it again, uncovering untold solace in the same old lines. Talking about these songs with others over the past few weeks, arguing over their slippery meanings, there's precious little in the way of consensus; we've all used it for breakups, for family emergencies, for nights when we're feeling low and can't quite settle on the source. But there's so much in these songs, so many situations to which they seem to hold up a mirror, what we take from them seems forever in flux. Their history, like ours, is constantly changing. One thing keeps coming up, though: Everyone I've talked to mentions that they can't imagine getting through their twenties without it. I certainly couldn't have. Bet those guys who made it feel the same way.


Working with classic hardware synths, the Russian musician makes dark, dreamlike techno infused with her ethereal vocals.

Ariadna

After the release of her arresting debut EP last year, Moscow’s Yana Kedrina (aka Kedr Livanskiy) had us guessing where she would turn next. Pairing chunky beats with delicate, shape-shifting synths and her cloudlike vocals, Kedrina summons a sense of nostalgia that permeates her lo-fi techno-pop. Kedrina has cited numerous artists that have influenced her sound, and while she channels the otherworldly IDM of Boards of Canada, the rudimentary electro of Kraftwerk, and the resplendent atmospheres of Cluster & Eno on her new album, Ariadna, she’s more in line with the current wave of idiosyncratic techno producers like Patricia and Huerco S.
There’s a whisper of reverb around almost every element on Ariadna, which glues the tracks together with a well-worn patina. Transitioning from a software-only approach to classic analog synthesizers like Roland’s SH-101 and Juno 106, Kedrina maintains the aesthetic she embraced on January Sun while using era-specific equipment better suited to the windswept air that characterizes her tracks. This shift toward hardware allowed Kedrina to feel out her music differently than before—“a flow of live interaction” that she says feels more “raw and sacred” than making music purely on the computer. On Ariadna, her synths sound sweeter than ever, though her rich ideas are sometimes tripped up by a fixation on grainy texture that can feel like a crutch rather than an artistic choice.
“Ariadna” opens the album with a brightness that remains for the ensuing nine tracks, although Kedrina’s lyrics take introspective turns that belie the vastness of her production. The tunnel-vision techno on “Za Oknom Vesna” (“Spring Outside”) plunges into weightless splendor. The lush arrangement evokes a foggy, chilly spring evening, and Kedrina sings about her isolation as the earth comes back to life: “За окном весна, не зови меня, / Я всегда одна, я гуляю одна” (“Spring is in the air/Don’t ask for me/I always roam alone”). Every song on Ariadna (save the instrumental “Sad One”) references natural phenomena, and Kedrina’s techno-infused pop suggests the intimacy of a confined space while reaching toward the ineffable, like staring through a skylight in a tiny apartment.
In the moments when Kedrina holds back, as on “Sunrise Stop” and “Love & Cigarettes,” her disaffected monotone fails to highlight her talents as a vocalist. But on the title track and the vinyl-only bonus “Sunset,” she gracefully layers her feather-light voice with driving techno, conjuring dark, dreamlike atmospheres. When she lets the drums rest, the album’s ambient turns are refreshing: Both “Mermaid” and “Sad One” feature aquatic synths that are gentle and enveloping.
When Kedrina lets loose, she makes some seriously punishing tunes. The booming electro of “ACDC” features Cleaners From Venus frontman Martin Newell reciting an 18th-century William Blake poem while a crisp breakbeat rolls across buzzing synths. “Za Oknom Vesna” is dubby warehouse fare that’s both wistful and life-affirming. Both of these tracks capture the same raw power of artists like Marie Davidson or Moscow’s Buttechno (who designed the album cover), but they are subdued by gentle currents that are more suited for headphone listening than in the club.
Across Ariadna, Kedrina deftly balances punchy beats while exploring diverse rhythms and moods. She incorporates a number of styles—snappy electro, rolling jungle, thumping techno—all anchored by her wispy voice. Kedrina sings in her native Russian, which means that for non-Russophones, her vocal scan primarily as emotional resonance and sonic texture. On her 2015 single “Sgoraet,” and elsewhere across January Sun, Kedrina’s ethereal performance hinted at her talents. On Ariadna, Kedrina proves that while her voice can comfortably rest front and center in the mix, it’s just as compelling when it hides behind tumbling beats in a gorgeous, subdued haze.


The Detroit rapper and the famed producer rejoin forces for a spare, melancholy, and psychedelic album, solidifying their partnership as one of the most rewarding team-ups in hip-hop.

Bo Jackson

The four collaborative projects Boldy James released over last year—The Price of Tea in China with producer Alchemist in February, Manger on McNichols with jazz musician Sterling Toles in July, The Versace Tape with comedian-turned-producer Jay Versace in August, and Real Bad Boldy with the music/fashion collective Real Bad Man in December—appointed different set dressings to James’ stone-faced corner-boy tales. He doesn’t recall memories of stained prison windows and being dehydrated on drug runs so much as he actively relives them, every fragment a scar on his brain. The sheer amount of stories he has, combined with his deep pool of references and relaxed voice, makes him a deceptively capable rapper, switching flows and speeds on a dime. “I let the beat tell me what to do,” he once told me during an interview with DJBooth. “I got enough game and life experiences to fill in the blanks.”
Of all the producers he’s worked with over the last two years, none have enhanced his raps more than the Alchemist. Their relationship stretches back to at least the early 2010s, but the duo reunited as Alchemist’s beats began morphing into more psychedelic patterns. Tea in China brought a widescreen flair to the double act first established on 2013’s My 1st Chemistry Set and 2019’s Boldface, with James bending his memories around the corners of Alchemist’s smokey creations. Bo Jackson, the duo’s latest collaboration, continues to match James’ descriptive paranoia against Alchemist’s ever-expanding palette.
James’ ability to switch between passive and active voice during his stories is staggering. Bo Jackson’s most explicit example is the opening song “Double Hockey Sticks,” which begins with a jump from his jewelry “cuttin’ up like I’m Mike Myers” to an isolated memory of bagging drugs in the basement like the Dungeon Family. The jumpy beat-switch midway through telegraphs a new direction without spoiling the specifics. Over Alchemist’s wailing siren and syncopated drums, James stitches together a grandmother’s advice, successful bail hearings, and laceless Dolce & Gabbana sneakers into a wavy tapestry. He doesn’t dwell on his victory over the court system, he glosses over it like a found item on a grocery list, just another footnote on the path to his next mission. The story of “Double Hockey Sticks” is fleet and nonlinear, drawing the ear with trap rhythms that keep pace with Alchemist’s equally erratic style.
This is the great trick of Boldy James and Alchemist’s union: As opposed to his more formalist boom-bap with rappers like Prodigy or Conway the Machine, Alchemist’s work with James is dynamic and kaleidoscopic. That’s not to say that the boom-bap and bare loops are gone, but James always tests their boundaries. He waltzes through the creaky piano of “E.P.M.D.,” slightly staggering his delivery in the middle of what seems like a predictable scheme. The drums on “Speed Trap” and “Flight Risk” sputter and pop in unexpected places, and James skips effortlessly across them. Bo Jackson isn’t as baroque as Alchemist’s work on Armand Hammer’s Haram, but it certainly taps into the same playful and melancholy atmosphere.
No matter what kind of sounds James rides throughout the project, his words cut through the clutter. His monotone voice amplifies the details in his writing: every lost friend, every Xanax popped to forget the unforgettable, every second taken to thank God he made it out of the life he was born into. “All this pressin’ is depressin’, the pressure is still pressin’/Against a nigga flesh, it’s beyond measure,” he says on closing track “Drug Zone.” On “Illegal Search & Seizure,” an entire friendship—from playing Double Dragon and smoking weed with a friend to dealing with the fallout of said friend snitching years later—plays out in just under two minutes. Like Vince Staples on his recent self-titled album, James’ sharp eye says more than a change in voice or a maudlin vocal sample ever could: The pain is in the details, no matter how numb they may sound. It’s gripping to the point of paralysis.
Much of the credit for Bo Jackson’s stellar mood-setting will go to Alchemist for continuing to push the boundaries of the modern hip-hop underground, and some of these beats are among his best (“Turpentine” and “Photographic Memories,” in particular, are masterclasses in sample collage). But Boldy James consistently stands ten toes next to his legendary partner. In fact, he’s only getting better. A producer with Eminem, Action Bronson, Roc Marciano, Earl Sweatshirt, billy woods, and Teejayx6 on speed-dial doesn’t just work with anybody. James has been holding his own for a decade, and Bo Jackson is more proof that the spark of their creative reunion was no fluke.

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The Lil Yachty-led rap crew’s debut mixtape has a handful of memorable moments, but its members are mostly on autopilot.

It’s Us Vol. 1

First, Lil Yachty spent a year doing so-so Michigan rapper cosplay. Then he moved on to his Tame Impala wannabe vanity project. Now, his next racket is a rap crew. That group is Concrete Boys, a five-member collective that, with Yachty as their frontman, includes the rappers Camo!, Draft Day, Karrahbooo, and Dc2trill (the latter is from Texas, and the only one of the five without any ties to Atlanta). In the last few months, the clique has formally introduced themselves with a string of pretty music videos, a viral On the Radar freestyle, and color-coordinated photo shoots. All of these efforts have led up to their debut compilation album It’s Us Vol. 1, where they seem to be presenting themselves as a modern-day version of the kind of rap crews who would have had a spread in a mid-’90s issue of The Source. That homage is loose and mostly sartorial instead of musical: On the album cover, the five are dressed in vintage Polo Sport and Tommy Hilfiger, Timberland boots, and jean shorts—outfits that make them look like they’re extras in Hulu’s Wu-Tang: An American Saga.
It’s Us Vol. 1 has much less of an identity than Concrete Boys’ fit pics. Their thing is that they’re cool, I guess. That wouldn’t be a problem if the music itself oozed cool. The album just doesn’t do that. In fact, the main appeal is that it’s an innocuous, easy-listening collection of songs—perfect to throw on in the background while you chat with your friends or pass time on your commute. Like Drake, Yachty has become an expert at dissecting and shaving the rough edges off regional and internet sounds. Here, he’s streamlined the highly collaborative, shit-talking spirit he picked up in Michigan, giving that style a neater, smoother, and more widely accessible sheen (If you’ve wished for music with the structure of Michigan rap, but with less chaos, then this is for you). For instance, the tape is heavy on punchline-based rhyming, but the bars are fairly tame and only mildly clever. And there are a decent number of beats that bring to mind the chill bounce of Detroit producer Topside’s instrumentals for Baby Smoove and Babyface Ray, except they’re not as funky (see: “Playa Walkin”). One way or another, it’s hard to get worked up about this music.
Each member of Concrete Boys has their moments. Draft Day has the most memorable voice of the crew, like he’s rapping with strep throat. It’s best in spurts, but when he pops back in on “2 Hands 2 Eyes 10 Whips/Rent Due” for a second verse after a hardened beat switch-up, his strained vocals reach Lil Wop levels, which gives the song an energy boost. Camo! is the most anonymous of the bunch—not sure what’s going on with that Jersey club flip of Pinegrove he sings over on the intro—but he can sometimes drift into a Lil Wayne-influenced zone of wisecracks. “Put my fingers inside her holes, I’m tryna bowl you,” he spits on “Hit Diff.” That’s about as funny as he gets. Dc2trill is the clique’s smooth-talker; he’s decent at it, gliding with a Curren$y-like ease on the jazzy “My Life.” Yachty is pretty much on autopilot, but he seems to have a good time when he raps with Karrahbooo. Surprisingly, her bored, deadpan flow on highlights like “Where Yo Daddy?” and “Not Da 2” has a way of making pretty simple flexes and quips stick.
It’s Us Vol. 1 mostly works as a launchpad for Karrahbooo; she’s the only one of the bunch who will leave you wanting to hear a solo mixtape. The video for their On the Radar cypher—the recording of which is included on the tape—is a solid glimpse at that potential. For four and a half minutes, the boys spit inoffensive and fine-enough verses that eventually blend together over a hypnotic, naked sax sample. It’s all build-up for the final minute, where the song really comes alive. There, Karrahbooo takes the floor, as the skittering Michigan drums kick in and her unbothered, sleepwalking flow elevates a show-offy trip down memory lane: “I was sellin’ lemonade while y’all would double dutch/I used to scam, I used to trap, I never cuddled much.” In that minute, you almost forget anything that came before her verse—aside from the fact that the guys had on nice outfits.


The Sunny Day Real Estate singer returns from a long hiatus with a crowd-funded solo album that reconciles his singer/songwriter instincts with his lavish orchestral ambitions.

Ghosts

Jeremy Enigk’s distaste for self-promotion is a relic from a time when reticence was an invaluable asset. Emo bands in the 1990s tended to be accessible and relatable, but Sunny Day Real Estate shunned press and for a time even refused to tour California; Enigk’s enigmatic nature, an extension of his otherworldly vocals, only added to the mystique that set the band apart from its peers. But while they made the record that tops basically every “Great Emo Albums” list in existence (and a subsequent one that’s more deserving), they spent most of the past decade on the sideline, about the only major act from their time that failed to capitalize on rejuvenated interest in the genre. Funded by PledgeMusic and supported with a living-room tour, Ghosts is entirely reliant upon his hustle. Not surprisingly, a common response to news of a new Jeremy Enigk album has been something like, “There’s a new Jeremy Enigk album?” But this works to Enigk’s advantage: When an indie-rock legend returns from a long hiatus with his finest album of the 21st century, it should feel like a bolt from the blue.
Keywords like “emo,” “DIY,” or even “Sunny Day Real Estate” won’t provide much guidance on Ghosts. When Enigk is left to his own devices, the sonic hallmarks of punk or hardcore have always been exchanged for the exact things they once opposed: the earnest, stately sprawl of artists like U2, Big Country, Peter Gabriel, and even Seal. This music tends to sound spiritual by default—devotion expressed not so much by quavering human vessels as by the magnificent architecture surrounding them. This was a logical trajectory, as Enigk’s vocals and religious leanings became more pronounced over time, but rarely was he bigger than the sound. Sunny Day Real Estate could’ve passed for a Tooth & Nail band on the bombastic The Rising Tide, and without that album’s counterbalance of heaving Guitar Center riffs and melodic sweep, the Fire Theft and his 2006 album World Waits were either too bloated to achieve liftoff or toppled over from their own clutter. His most recent solo album, OK Bear, appeared to be a course correction: a humble collection of zippy modern rock, as if that’s what anyone actually wanted from Jeremy Enigk.
Enigk is done trying to reconcile his orchestral ambitions with his singer/songwriter instincts; they’re now the same thing. The lavish, awe-inspiring design of Ghosts might be unexpected, given the album’s crowd-funded origins, though less so considering its eight-year gestation period, a complete lack of external pressure, and no apparent desire to acknowledge any contemporary trends. Rather than retracing familiar crescendos and dynamics, the songs on Ghosts levitate from the outset and maintain their altitude, anachronisms meant to be marveled at like zeppelins. The elements are familiar, just upscaled. Ruminative acoustic guitar figures are played on 12 strings, not six; the drum kit booms and swells like tympani; if there’s a violin in the mix, there’s probably a whole string section.
Rarely does Enigk sound like he’s fronting a power trio. The curiously cynical “Amazing Worlds” is the one instance that recalls the sad songs and waltzes of The Rising Tide, only given a luminous, stained-glass polish. But Ghosts never gives the impression that Enigk is trying to force majestic arrangements on songs that either don’t need them or can’t support them. “What else can I say but I miss you?” he sings over harp-like plucks on “Ancient Road,” which sounds like it was workshopped in cathedrals and arenas rather than on a 4-track in his bedroom; in these situations, it’s fun to imagine whether ecclesiastical emo advocate Julien Baker’s albums were inspired by Jeremy Enigk or vice versa. It’s even more fun to hear Enigk when he’s set it motion; “Sacred Fire” may hew a little close to the coffee-shop electronica of Dido and Beth Orton, but the self-explanatory “Onaroll” is a career highlight, emerging from a pulsing, muted house beat to a crescendo worthy of How It Feels to Be Something On. It’s worth considering what a vocalist with Enigk’s ecstatic capacity could accomplish collaborating with a savvy and open-minded dance producer.
Conversely, those who found tear-stained ballads like “Rain Song” and “The Ocean” to be a renunciation of SDRE’s emo roots rather than an evolution will almost certainly find Ghosts to be cloying—if titles like “Sacred Fire” suggest Enigk getting a little too precious, lyrics like “Open the secret door to your heart” and “In a game of give and take, you always take too much” aren’t here to make an argument. “Victory” sounds like exactly that, and would be a more appropriate contribution to a superhero flick than his last one. “The Long Wait Is Over” is every bit as transparent: The hi-def reverb and patient pace are proof enough that whatever we were waiting for, it was for a long-ass time, and the insistent cymbal crashes and octave leaps towards the end are the relief. While Enigk’s 21st-century albums have been criticized as overly bombastic, Ghosts proves in hindsight that they weren’t big and direct enough. Diary is his past; becoming an open book is his future.


The Providence-based Downtown Boys create fiery punk rock with a sharp political edge. Their lyrics challenge white hegemony, entitled bro culture, and more while the music offers a distinctive mix of buzzsaw guitars and saxophone.

Full Communism

If you want to know why Downtown Boys sound so angry on their debut album Full Communism, watch the music video for "Wave of History". In the clip, the Providence-based band outlines the realities of prison overcrowding, the racial divide in U.S. arrest rates, and the number of people killed by police—very real problems that, for many, are remarkably easy to ignore. Our screens offer countless alternatives to anything remotely "unpleasant" or "depressing"; even as militarized police line city streets and 24-hour news networks, they're forced to compete with a bottomless pit of interspecies friendship GIFs.
Victoria Ruiz of Downtown Boys engages with the country's broken systems and the resulting frustration fuels her lyrics. The 28-year-old worked for the Rhode Island Public Defender, aiming to combat racist and classist policing tactics. She currently works with Demand Progress, and she recently wrote an op-ed on Ferguson. Joey L DeFrancesco, 27, was her co-worker at a hotel; they attempted to start a union since the employees were, as he described it, "treated...like garbage." (DeFrancesco later quit that job with magnificent flair.) "Sometimes people ask, 'Don’t you get sad worrying about this stuff all the time?'" Ruiz said. "It upsets me because it is negative and absolves the person of the responsibility of realizing that we all have to think about these things."
Full Communism is an album-length exercise of that responsibility. Downtown Boys have two horns and plenty of aggression in their arsenal and, as they play, they force you to acknowledge the world around you. The title "Break a Few Eggs" pretty well encapsulates the nature of the project. Songs challenge white hegemony, entitled bro culture, and more with churning rock'n'roll lined with Adrienne Berry and Emmett FitzGerald's saxophones. (Between this album and that Pill EP, it's been a good year thus far for the rock sax.) DeFrancesco's guitar, Norlan Olivo's drums, and Dan Schleifer's bass lock in for a fuzzy, chugging barrage. Racism and homophobia are alluded to in shouts but the music isn't cynical; everything seems to be underpinned with the sincere desire that things actually get better. "We make, we made, we will make freedom," Ruiz sings in rapid succession on "Desde Arriba". They've talked about how they encourage a "space of collective power" at their live shows, which makes sense—Full Communism, both in message and mayhem, has the power to whip a roomful of people into a frenzy.
And that's the important bit—this music is saying some real shit, yeah, but it's doing it with a completely unhinged voice. As advocates of human rights, Downtown Boys are well-versed in the history of bland protest songs. "Political music is often cheesy or boring, so no one listens to it," DeFrancesco has said. "As much as we hate on aesthetics by themselves, they obviously matter." Matching substance with style is easier said than done—Downtown Boys could easily fall into punk's trap of loud and fast monotony. They don't, though, keeping things diverse and well-sequenced. Where the horns on "Monstro" lend a soft, beautiful counterbalance to DeFrancesco's jagged guitar, "Traders" is bookended by silence and goes full speed punk at the center.
Full Communism's songs are performed in both English and Spanish—Ruiz said the band approach music "with the intention to speak to as many people as possible." The album's last two tracks are covers—one in each language. There's "Poder Elegir" by Los Prisioneros, a song the Chilean band recorded as an effort to urge people to fight conformity and complacency during the rule of dictator Augusto Pinochet. The other: Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark". When Ruiz shouts the Boss' world-weariness, she sounds as though she's already started a fire of her own. The covers are effective—the ideal pairing of pop infectiousness and calls to action. Downtown Boys insist that nothing's going to change unless people actually get up and do something, and they've offered a soundtrack that makes positive action feel both attainable and liberating.


The first album in 22 years from seminal New York post-hardcore band Quicksand is a structurally-obsessed work where beauty and brutality coexist.

Interiors

“Behind every tough guy is a little Smiths fan,” mused Walter Schreifels, Quicksand co-founder and post-hardcore pioneer, in a recent interview. Few would consider his observation controversial in 2017. If anything, it’s obvious—meatheads need their melodies too, you know. The 48-year-old Schreifels, on the other hand, came up amid New York City’s hardcore boom in the late 1980s: a time when punk relied more heavily on radical politics and performative masculinity than sonic risk-taking, when most tough guys would be too embarrassed to admit that they’d listened to the Smiths, much less considered themselves fans.
Not that Schreifels ever fancied himself a joiner. Calling his 32-year-career a “trajectory” is like calling a lightning strike “logical.” His end-game isn’t a question of aesthetics or style, but rather melodic energy, showcased in an ever-rotating array of short-lived projects over the past three decades: Youth of Today, Gorilla Biscuits, Moondog, CIV, and Rival Schools, to name a few.
Schreifels’ biggest claim to fame remains the seminal alt-metal outfit Quicksand, who joined the aforementioned tough guy and Smiths fan in unholy (and unprecedented) matrimony during their first run from 1990 to 1999. They may not have been the first hardcore band to peddle a contoured, measured version of their genre (that honor belongs to their onetime tourmates Fugazi), but they were definitely the heaviest. And as evidenced by their open embrace of shoegaze, space rock, and pop, they were also among the most forward-thinking groups of their scene, thereby ensuring the immortality of Quicksand’s first two albums—1993’s Slip and 1995’s Manic Compression—not just as cult classics, but as shoe-ins for the post-hardcore canon.
With the arrival of Interiors, Quicksand’s third LP and the band’s first recorded output in 22 years, it seems that Schreifels’ frenetic days have mostly come to an end. That’s not to say that he and the rest of the band—bassist Sergio Vega (currently of Deftones), drummer Alan Cage, and guitarist Tom Capone—have gone soft on us. With the help of producer Will Yip (Title Fight, Tigers Jaw), the group give their rusty machinery a much-needed upgrade befitting of their pit-starting gravitas—and prone to the odd glitch in pacing.
As the title suggests, Interiors is far and wide a structurally-obsessed work. Its 12 songs comprise a hard-rock triptych separated by spacey guitar interludes. Its three-track opening salvo, a hard-rock suite that’s propelled almost entirely by Vega and Cage’s percussive push-and-pull, hews the closest to the band’s pre-established MO. The pendulous “Illuminant” is one of the year’s most explosive icebreakers; “Under the Screw” is a queasy, deadpanned noise-rocker à la the Jesus Lizard. And the jittery “Warm and Low” is an anxiety-ridden ripper tormented by snarling bass, howitzer drum fills, and foreboding bursts of guitar.
What a pity, then, to find the band more or less dozing off after their spectacular opening tantrum, drifting aimlessly in a space-rock black hole for the bulk of Interiors. In the percolating refrain on “Cosmonauts,”’ Schreifels’ wailed “Where you are’s” swirl about the surrounding abyss like emo stardust, and it’s a sweet escape. But not so on the limpid title track, an approaching meteor strike that disintegrates long before impact, or “Hyperion,” which is basically “Cosmonauts” without the anguish (and by extension, the gravitas). Quicksand give the twitchy crushers another go-round following the second interlude, but by that point, the space sickness has long since set in.
Quicksand’s grungy alchemy, however spectacular in its own right, has always existed as the means for a transcendent end—or in the case of the New Yorkers, a sort of hardcore utopia where beauty and brutality coexist, harmoniously and symbiotically. Dynamic snags aside, Interiors’ lush, layered arrangements, coupled with the stellar opening run, stand as ear-catching testament to this noble mission, and the passion inspiring it. Even after two decades apart, Schreifels and his bandmates are still a force to be reckoned with, so long as they stand terra firma—half moshers, half Morrissey, wholly unmatched.


Evocative, emo-ish lyrics and Kevin Shields-by-way-of-Thurston Moore torrents of noise once again color the work of this Scottish band.

The Twilight Sad: Forget the Night Ahead

Forget the Night Ahead

Brooder James Graham is not a great storyteller. His mission-- along with his band of post-Mogwai Scottish noisemakers-- is to evoke. When Graham repeated lines like, "the kids are on fire in the bedroom," and, "in my dreams I watch Emily dance," on the Twilight Sad's debut LP, 2007's Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, the specifics were left hauntingly up in the air. It's a tactic used by several of the singer's self-serious forebears-- from Joy Division's Ian Curtis to Interpol's Paul Banks-- but one step too far into the abstract and there's too little for listeners to hang their own shared dilemmas upon. With follow-up Forget the Night Ahead, Graham takes his cryptic musings into a pitch-black place, but he still connects enough to make all the fraught drama worthwhile-- especially when coupled with guitarist Andy MacFarlane's still-overwhelming Kevin Shields-by-way-of-Thurston Moore torrents.
Since Fourteen Autumns contained many (albeit vague) references to a severely traumatic childhood, it often sounded like a form of coded primal scream therapy. The album cover showed a cartoon mother angrily waving her masked son away; the album's companion EP, Here, It Never Snowed. Afterwards It Did, showed the masked son suffocating the same mother with a pillow. With his mommy and daddy issues sufficiently exorcised, Graham moves onto more adult worries with Forget the Night Ahead-- there's still no summer or spring in Twilight Sad World, and the days are even shorter this time around. And there's no youthful spirit to balance out the dread, either, as it's allowed to run amok throughout the album's 11 punishing tracks. To wit, the closest thing resembling a love song, the roiling "Interrupted", is topped off by Graham murmuring, "you and I will bury them all." It will not be played at weddings. Funerals, maybe.
While Graham has done many interviews over the last few years, he likes to keep mum when it comes to the meaning of his words. "I've never told anyone what my songs are about, and I don't intend to," he once said. And, in a recent Pitchfork interview, he had this to say about Forget the Night Ahead: "Things happened to me and [the album is] basically about trying to forget what happened." Such tactics are hardly enlightening, but they are smart. Because this band's tempest of meat-slap drums and fire-engine-from-hell distortion makes the mind go to disturbing places with very little provocation.
"The Room" is not a particularly detailed song title, but given the track's shadowy images of "nails in our feet" and a creepy "grandson's toy in the corner," it's pretty clear this four-walled space is not all that welcoming. "Look what you have done," says Graham on the song, without telling-- its central offense is as diabolical as you want it to be. The same fill-in-the-blank logic goes for careening stand-out "That Birthday Present", which is not about a Barnes and Noble gift certificate. Possibly alluding to an alcohol-addled friend/lover who can't help but miss their own candles burning out while going "nowhere," the track is a fireball of frustration and anger and gliding guitar corrosion. "The curtains closed again," sings Graham, offering an apropos visual to his own writing style-- listening to Forget the Night Ahead is like looking at silhouetted neighbors through a draped window; the shapes are there but it's hard to say whether someone's being murdered or preparing the family dinner.
With any sort of levity galaxies upon galaxies away, the LP's non-stop direness can read like a self-fulfilling prophecy, i.e., while it may be hard to tell each song apart, the overall effect is not easy to shake. "You'll never have some honest fun," goes Graham on "Made to Disappear", perhaps offering a bit of self-flagellation for his own sins. And there is an almost puritanical streak running through the record-- shame, ghosts, and "people downstairs" are constantly encroaching on the singer's consciousness. So is Graham really such an immaculate downer? Guitarist MacFarlane gave his front man up ever-so-slightly in a recent interview, admitting that Graham often "sits in his hotel room on the Skype and we all go out partying" while on tour. While the hopeless, unrequited pair in the middle of "Seven Years of Letters" could seemingly end up simultaneously sipping poison, in reality, they just might be bawling through a webcam. We'll never know. Luckily, the Twilight Sad deal with the real world on their own heavily shrouded terms.


After two astounding EPs last year, half of the droning duo Mountains returns with an intimate, affectionate album inspired by the birth of his child.

Ens

To paraphrase Kraftwerk, listening to Ens—the first full-length album from musical polymath and visual artist Koen Holtkamp as Beast—means contemplating the humanity of machine music. That issue is especially relevant these days at the intersection of much electronic, experimental, and modern classical music, where technology can often sink into or overload the mix. Holtkamp has operated in this space for nearly two decades, but the balance of virtues he achieved on a pair of 2017 EPs as Beast seemed to reframe the conversation entirely.
Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 retained the sweeping investigations of sonic space and tonal juxtapositions that Holtkamp has long pursued as part of the duo Mountains and in an extensive list of solo projects and collaborations. Holtkamp mapped music so broadly that meaning often dissipated into atmosphere; there’s an entire ecosystem of this kind of post-post-rock, not-really-classical, quasi-electronic music thriving in corners of Bandcamp. Yet Beast’s first seven pieces, created as soundtracks for Holtkamp’s laser projections, transcended the cliches of this environment. By abandoning string instruments and de-emphasizing his fascination with drone and dissonance, Holtkamp foregrounded a pulse as precise as the visuals it accompanied. Rhythmic lines wrapped around each other like digital ragas; though they were some of the least human sounds of Holtkamp’s career, they brimmed with deeply soulful movement and melody. The best kind of audio riddle, it was as if Steve Reich’s hand-played loops and Carl Craig’s synth arpeggios had merged.
On the surface, Ens exists in the same deeply electronic, heavily rhythmic sandbox, but human fingerprints are easy to discern here. Acoustic guitars help shape downsized compositions like “Boketto” and “Edb,” speaking to a more handmade listening experience. And for good reason: Holtkamp says Ens is a response to the birth of his child, an occasion that traditionally arouses a deeply intimate inspiration. Many of Holtkamp’s choices on Ens dovetail with the scenario of creating private music for young ears or shaping environments attuned to those needs. Closer “For Otto” invokes the wonder, exhaustion and apprehension of an old home taking on a new life not only with its title but also with its layers of treated sound, broad keyboard chords, and grey noise beneath a lightly pulsing music-box melody. The crux of loving the very domestic Ens, then, is how to engage with a project whose very inhumanity recently made it exceptional.
Depending on one’s inclination for the melodically gifted “pop” side of the classic IDM spectrum—WARPists such as Plaid and Plone, the first Morr Music releases, the Four Tet of Pause or Rounds—there is plenty to love on Ens. “Paprika Shorts” begins with a continuous synth-keyboard figure and adds a plucked acoustic string as a beat before a macro-processor sews all the rhythmic and tonal threads together into a gorgeous tapestry suited for folktronica purists. “Color Feel” folds an instrumental line that evokes both a harpsichord and a kora into a trotting piano rhapsody. Synths underpin the structure and add a futurist patina. “Color Feel” is the closest that Ens comes to democratizing propulsion for both concert hall and club.
It seems unfair that the primary drawback of Ens is a contempt bred by familiarity, especially when the inspiration for these seven pieces is so joyous. Yet there’s no doubt that where Beast’s EPs offered what felt like fresh answers to half-century-old questions about the relationship between composition and technology, Ens tables the queries, at least temporarily, for a strictly personal statement. However you approach its aesthetic beauty, that is a much less satisfying response.


On their latest EP, the band crumples up angst and complacency and offers a simple, singular diagnosis: you may feel numb, but fight.

Survive EP

Last year, as the pandemic flared in New York and pundits declared the end of the city, as wealthy residents fled in droves, Show Me the Body’s Corpus collective of artists and musicians started offering self-defense classes on Zoom. “TRAIN TODAY,” one caption beckoned urgently. They may end up the last band in New York, but they’ll go out swinging, and on their latest EP Survive, they invite listeners to do the same.
While concepts like burnout and fatigue have become ubiquitous, vocalist Julian Cashwan-Pratt can’t relate. Flipping through TV channels, he sees gory beheadings on network dramas smeared together with footage of grand-standing presidents all as one big pageant of ginned-up emotion. He can only stand a few seconds before putting his foot through the screen. Or, as he sings on “Rubberband,” over the teeth-grinding pulse of synthesizers that sound like they were peeled off the bottom of a sneaker: “It’s no longer enough to survive.”
Show Me the Body crumple up angst and its accompanying complacency and give a simple, singular diagnosis: you may feel numb, but train. As ever, every “you” in their lyrics is a coward, a scumbag, or a target of Cashwan-Pratt’s accusations. His voice is acrobatic across the EP, every spit, shriek, bellow, and burble used to mock, shake, and pull the listener out of their reverie into the living, bleeding world he inhabits.
On all three tracks, he rhymes “cry” with “die,” welding the concepts together as the EP progresses. “People on TV” starts, as the band’s songs often do, with an innocuous enough observation: “People on TV sure know how to die/Everyone at home knows how to cry,” he sings. Banjo and bass screech and creak ominously; and by the next lyric, the rage starts seeping through: “People who talk sure know how to lie.”
The EP’s title track is the culmination of this juxtaposition between death and tears. Cashwan-Pratt deadpans: “I never cry watching pigs die.” But as the sludgy bassline and shredded banjo pick up, he admits: “Cry for my people, man, I cry all the time.” He’s unable to participate in the trance of angst, the gray washout in which tragedy is directionless and accountability is just another casualty.
The music video for “Survive” is like a montage from a boxing movie or a shounen anime. Subjects do push-ups and sit-ups in kitchens that barely fit their bodies. Cashwan-Pratt, who directed the video, never instructs the actors to reflect the fury of the music on their faces; they stare, expressionless and glassy-eyed, past the viewer. The band is unendingly suspicious of farce—before mourning lost loved ones on “Rubberband,” Cashwan-Pratt stops himself, scoffing that “the words just cheapen the cost.” Instead, Show Me the Body recommits to the real and tangible: the heat of blood, of tears and concrete, and a reality worth fighting for.

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The Rochester band’s debut is a vicious and nauseating blast of classic death metal: catchy, impenetrable, and masterfully executed.

Lesions of a Different Kind

Death is their chief lyrical concern and avowed metal subgenre, but the members of Rochester, New York’s Undeath share a decidedly life-affirming outlook. “I think all of us love death metal so much,” vocalist Alexander Jones explained to Invisible Oranges, “because when it’s done well, it sits right at the intersection of pure musicianship and mindless fun.” There is a specific type of fun he is referring to: the spine-tingling thrill of campy horror movies, of screaming unintelligibly for no reason at all, of song titles like “Kicked in the Protruding Guts” and “Chained to a Reeking Rotted Body.” It is the restless, ridiculous heartbeat underlying their music.
After a few well-loved demos, Undeath’s debut album, Lesions of a Different Kind, never leans too far to either side of the death metal pendulum. It is a vicious and nauseating blast: catchy, impenetrable, and masterfully executed. What appeals about a song like “Acidic Twilight Visions” is the immediacy—a pummeling groove, a climactic solo, an honest-to-god chorus. But the closer you listen, the more you hear the virtuosity underlying their chaos, a complex web of interlocking parts that can turn on a dime from jackhammer shredding to guttural dissonance.
This old-school death metal, akin to the early work from fellow breakout revivalists like Tomb Mold and Blood Incantation, involves a purposeful lack of dynamics, indecipherable lyrics, and melodies that seem in danger of dissolving into a murky, low-end drone. The strength of the songs largely comes down to the riffs, which are remarkable throughout. Nearly every track opens with a memorable guitar part from Kyle Beam, and he guides his bandmates through an album that brings to mind plenty of the greats (Autopsy, Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse, and more are saluted in the liner notes) but coheres into a singular force.
This confidence allows Lesions of a Different Kind to stand out in the field of gory death metal worship. It also helps that the band has leveled up on the production, resulting in an album built for repeated listens. On their early demos, part of the excitement was hearing exceptional death metal rising from the fog: their killer interplay buried beneath layers of fuzz and gnarly tones at war with the songcraft. But on Lesions, Undeath give their music a visceral, lived-in clarity. Drummer Matt Browning, who also illustrated the cover art, comes through the speakers sounding particularly vicious: His manic performance in the title track plays like someone tasked with replicating the sound of aerial warfare.
If Undeath sound hyper-focused on one style, their commitment to this vision is also part of their appeal. The lyrics, mostly penned by Beam, take delight in exploring death, torture, and general disfigurement from every angle. When the Black Dahlia Murder’s Trevor Strnad accompanies Jones on the title track, their call-and-response helps the subject matter ascend toward something communal, ready to be shouted back at them. The message is plain: The human body is disgusting. Man’s capacity for evil knows no limits. The end is near and always looming closer. Undeath excel by soundtracking these thoughts through pitch-perfect metal bursting with energy. For them, death is only the beginning.

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Faces finds Mac Miller embracing a typical 2010s rapper trope: the exploratory between-album mixtape. Over an hour and a half, he advances on his last LP's heady sprawl with a palette stretching from rainy day introspection to playful wordplay exercises.

Faces

On last year’s Watching Movies with the Sound Off, Mac Miller earned an elusive measure of cachet among rap diehards by burrowing into his record collection and trying on the irreverent frenzy of Odd Future, the offbeat whimsy of MF Doom, and the gonzo electronics of the Brainfeeder squad. He ended up with the best work of his young career, a satisfying leap from the bushy-tailed, eager-to-please kid brother raps of his early work towards tighter rhymes fixated in a knottier headspace.
Mac has since worked tirelessly to prove Watching Movies’ gains were no fluke, showcasing his range on a series of off-the-cuff side projects: Delusional Thomas featured an impishly pitched-up Mac cutting loose on a half-hour mixtape of gutbucket murder raps, while Live from Space documented the plush sonics of Miller’s summer 2013 Space Migration Tour, which fleshed out Watching Movies’ spacier cuts with the help of Syd tha Kid and Matt Martians’ project the Internet. Odd Future associate Vince Staples’ Stolen Youth featured Mac in the producer’s chair unfurling hypnotic soundscapes under his Larry Fisherman pseudonym.
Mac Miller’s most ambitious post-Watching Movies project arrived in the form of a Mother’s Day mixtape called Faces, which advances on his last LP's heady sprawl with a palette stretching from rainy day introspection to playful wordplay exercises. Where Watching Movies was equally concerned with refining his writing skills and presenting a personality you wouldn’t mind sparking up a j with, this mixtape prizes frankness over curation. On cuts like opener “Inside Outside” and “Here We Go”, the latter in which Mac pridefully scans his growing empire and notes that he “did it all without a Drake feature”, the joy is infectious.
Mac gets downcast for the midsection body shot combo of “Happy Birthday”, “Wedding”, and “Funeral”, a passage that moves seamlessly from excitement to fear and uncertainty (“Do you ever reach to touch her, but there’s nothing there?/ Do you tell her that you love her, but she doesn’t care?”) into despair (“Doing drugs is just a war with boredom, but they’re sure to get me”). Faces goes where Watching Movies wouldn’t, picking over the fallout from a teen rap sensation suddenly becoming nouveau riche.
Much of the time, that means picking apart Mac’s infatuation with drugs. Hard partying bleeds into unexpected corners of the proceedings, from the debit card covered in “snowflakes” on “Friends” to the cautionary PCP comedown tale of “Angel Dust”. Miller catalogues reckless substance use like a news anchor would a traffic jam: he matter-of-factly calls himself a “drug absorbent endorphin addict” with a “drug habit like Philip Hoffman” on “What Do You Do?”, and even “Therapy”’s lightweight account of a night out with a girl contains a bout of self-medication. “Malibu” warns that “The good times can be a trap” and toys with the idea of checking into rehab before resolving to just save the remainder of the coke for another day. There's a troubling sense that Mac is tiptoeing down a well-lit path toward self-destruction and that he either feels too helpless or else too enrapt to change course , but if Faces’ good-times-are-killing-me terrors seem overbearing, they’re often offset by a sense that music is his salvation.
On the technical end, Faces is Mac Miller’s high watermark. The wordplay is limber and odd, as flows shift mid-verse and imbue otherwise nonsensical turns of phrase with jerky life. It’s enough to make unrepentantly dark lines lively. When “Polo Jeans” opens with “I give no fucks when I go nuts cause I smoke dust, overdosed on the sofa, dead/ Woke up from the coma, pulled up in a Škoda, smoked, went back to bed” you’re more likely to run it back for the deft internal rhymes than the plot point about a potential overdose.
Miller’s finally able to play ball with his esteemed rap friends, too; where he once played outfield for guys like Earl Sweatshirt and Staples, here he’s matching them bar for bar. By the time Rick Ross shows up for verse three of “Insomniak”, Mac’s already run the beat ragged. Miller’s advances as a self-taught auteur also extend to production: he crafted the majority of the beats here, and he’s arrived at an unfussed, sample-based melodicism that both harkens back to the jazzy boom bap of the 75 Ark and Fondle ‘Em Records era and stays the hell out of the way of the raps.
Faces finds Mac Miller embracing a typical 2010s rapper trope: the exploratory between-album mixtape. Its 24 tracks run nearly an hour and a half, each restlessly tinkering with his songwriting and production talents. The sprawl gives Faces a directionless feel, so it’s doubtful you’ll ever play it all in one sitting—regardless, the kid’s turning out the best work of his career, transforming adversity and discouragement into intriguing art. It might seem daunting, drug-crazed and unwieldy at the outset, but given the proper time and patience, the mixtape proves to be Mac’s most consistently honest and personal work to date. Early on “Here We Go” advises that he “ain’t little Malcolm with the baby face” anymore, and whatever memory of that goofy, affable kid remains, Faces is its slow and methodical death and dismemberment.


The art-rock auteur’s latest album is a glistening, richly detailed world that feels like a culmination of their ever-escalating talent and ambition.

Yves Tumor: Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)

Yves Tumor began their career in the low-ceilinged world of experimental noise, but from the outset, their yearning—for bigger stages, sweeping statements, limitless horizons—was palpable. “I only want to make hits,” they said with a laugh in 2017. “What else would I want to make?” Since signing to Warp, Yves Tumor has scaled upward so quickly that it sometimes seemed their own music was racing to contain their ambitions. As 2018’s darkly sensuous Safe in the Hands of Love gave way to the sex-god theatrics of 2020’s Heaven to a Tortured Mind, the only true constant was Tumor’s near-religious devotion to the possibilities of recording—for the careful placement of perfect sounds within implied space. For Tumor, headphone space is holy space, a sanctuary in which all sorts of transfigurations become possible.
With Praise a Lord Who Chews but Does Not Consume (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds), Tumor reaches an inflection point in their arms race with their own talent and ambition. They’ve got Noah Goldstein on board, a one-time Kanye engineer who worked on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, alongside Alan Moulder, one of the most celebrated architects of guitar sounds in rock history. From the sound of it, they’re pursuing an ecstatic fusion of alt-rock and R&B, seeking the mysterious nexus where Loveless meets Purple Rain. The guitars roar with jet engine propulsion, threatening to consume everything in their midst, a clear trademark of shoegaze pioneer Moulder, while Tumor’s doubled vocals ring out in an unmistakable echo of Prince. On “Operator,” Tumor even lets out the pained, wordless eros-yip—more feline than human, equally childlike and adult—that was one of Prince’s aural markers.
Countless bands have turned to Moulder over the decades, hoping some of the comet-trail dust of his famous shoegaze records would settle on their project. But only someone with an imagination as glittering and generous and expansive as Tumor’s can tap Moulder and make a record like this. Purely in sensory terms, it’s difficult to imagine many richer-sounding rock records being released this year.
Tumor treats sounds so lovingly they sometimes resemble a director framing and lighting a beloved actor, and every sound on Praise enters the mix with near-visible entrance and exit cues. The wall of guitar distortion that kicks in on “Meteora Blues” only lasts a few moments on each chorus, but it is the most exhilarating evocation of the Smashing Pumpkins guitar sound that has ever existed outside of Melon Collie or Siamese Dream. Once you hear it, you spend the rest of the song yearning for it to return. Ditto the synthesizers that well up in the last minute of “Echolalia,” so dimensional and detailed it feels as if you could reach and put your fingers through them like mist. It’s a testament to Tumor’s loving touch that none of these gestures feel empty or formal: Each one resounds with the fullness, somehow, of a life lived.
The mix on Praise a Lord is dark and viscous, with reverb so thick that every sound—the drums, the keyboards, and above all, the guitars—seems to swim through organic muck to reach your ears. In this superheated mix, all waveforms denature and melt—the gasps hit like snares, the drums feel like breath on your hand. There is a little Kevin Shields in the way Tumor manipulates sounds; the way the triggered samples detonate on late-album highlight “Purified by the Fire” recalls MBV’s “Touched.” On “Parody,” Tumor’s keening falsetto could just as easily be emitting from a synth pad or an amplifier. Within the glistening world constructed on Praise a Lord, they’re just another beautiful, alien life form streaking past our sight.
Tumor’s lyrics, when they break the surface, feel engineered to flash against your eyelids—“Stare straight into the morning star/With lips just like red flower petals,” goes an evocative line from “Meteora Blues”—more than to tell stories. “You’re still a friend of mine/We met on Chapman and Catalina,” they sing in “Lovely Sewer.” The line seems less like the beginning of a story than marooned flotsam from someone’s life, a scrap torn from a journal or the first sentence of an overheard conversation. The lyric sheet to Praise a Lord is a wishing-well of “I’s” and “we’s,” an ocean of private lives observed from celestial height. “It’s a version of myself and everyone else I’ve loved,” Tumor sings on “God Is a Circle,” providing a clue as to the source of these private lives. It feels like the most personal admission on the album.
There are stray moments across the 12 tracks where the songwriting briefly thins out, letting the tremendous atmosphere do the heavy lifting. The slower numbers, by and large, are less captivating. But everything comes together with “Ebony Eye,” the final track and the realization of all of Tumor’s ecstatic visions. The guitars advance like a battalion and Tumor’s voice replicates itself until they are a chorus of supplicants, palms turned skyward and begging for deliverance. It suggests, improbably, that there are even bigger places for Tumor yet to go.
Listen to our episode on Yves Tumor on The Pitchfork Review podcast


This collaborative album from the punk-influenced composer Rhys Chatham and Brooklyn noise-jam heroes Oneida builds on power and cosmic eruptions.

Oneida / Rhys Chatham: What’s Your Sign?

What's Your Sign?

Through most of What’s Your Sign?, the new album by veteran maximalist composer Rhys Chatham and Brooklyn DIY drone-blasters Oneida, Chatham takes only minimal steps into the spotlight. Perhaps inverting the usual super-session logic, Chatham’s guitar and trumpet blend convincingly into Oneida’s 15-year-running noisenik dynamic, while the quintet channel the power of Chatham’s work. The 35-minute LP never achieves the epic scale that both can work at—Chatham with his armies of up to 400 guitarists, Oneida via their rigorous eight-hour-straight Ocropolis performances—but each of the six tracks generates a be-here-now flash of present-tense psychedelia, hallucinations by way of overtones and volume.
Missing a monumental centerpiece, What's Your Sign? comes closest with the nine-minute “Well Tuned Guitar,” its title referencing the microtonal work of Chatham’s one-time teacher, the psychedelic minimalist La Monte Young. Building towards slashing chords—and Chatham’s big spotlight—the drama draws from the rhythmic language Chatham has been refining since 1977’s “Guitar Trio,” written after seeing the Ramones at CBGB. It’s perhaps the only place the pairing doesn’t completely click. In the hands of Oneida, while still sounding convincingly enormous, the approach also feels slightly contained, as if following a map instead of the terrain itself. Oneida’s semi-formalist mind-exploding can be heard more vividly on the disc-opening “You Get Brighter,” an exercise in forward motion driven by drummer Kid Millions, a propulsion that seems as if it could keep expanding outwards forever. Chatham’s guitar bends and freaks with the rest of the Oneida brahs, his voice adding to the song’s one-line refrain, both a signpost and conductor’s baton.
Oneida sometimes function more like a liquid light show than a traditional rock band. They most often concern themselves with a swirl of repetition, the type of music where—watching live—it’s not always possible to tell who is making what sound, perhaps not even for those playing in the band, either. Chatham and Oneida’s music feels most natural in these places, using the change of texture as a form of a movement. On a pair of drumless jams, “Bad Brains” and “The Mabinogian,” the music never stops pressing into the unknown, the driving pulse only heard in the negative space between oscillations. The music itself could be coming from any combination of the three guitarists and two keyboardists, a free improv counterpoint to the full-throttle rhythmic spectacles heard elsewhere.
The balance of What’s Your Sign? makes it feel like an Oneida album, built on power and cosmic eruptions. Besides the Positions EP (featuring a driving cover of This Heat's “S.P.Q.R.”), it’s the band’s first proper release in four years. In the interim, they’ve transformed even more fully into a live act; in 2013, a 48-minute set-opening incarnation of “You Get Brighter” did almost expand outwards forever. Besides the touch of Chatham’s compositional hand on “Well Tuned Guitar,” What's Your Sign? is another sliver of Oneida’s ever-jamming life, a place both unpredictable and consistent, where collaborators like Chatham might arrive and make themselves at home. Even tracks that start out sounding nothing like Oneida fall easily into the band’s gravity well. On “A. Phillip Randolph at Back Bay Station,” after Chatham strikes a gentle keynote with layered flute, the band quickly lifts into a group glide over a rolling snare drum sea.
Chatham’s trumpet loops finally break through and take over the four minutes of the album-closing “Civil Weather.” It’s a mode that one wouldn’t expect to find Oneida exploring, more Jon Hassell-like Fourth World bliss than kosmiche fire music, a trumpet clearing a central path down the middle of Oneida space. But in plenty of other ways—sure, why not? It’s a new place they find together, the kind of spot they might get to for a few minutes one night when the tapers didn’t make it out, and then never try again. With more than one What’s Your Sign? track fading to delighted in-studio laughter, it’s only a surprise when it ends so soon.


The Los Angeles musician’s fifth studio album is the most joyous, daring realization of her experimental tendencies yet: a sprawling, 90-minute search for meaning in a dehumanizing age.

Aviary

At the heart of Julia Holter’s pristine chamber pop there exist a felt wisdom and a profound poise. Like a deep breath on a subway car, or a private meditation amid a bustling city street, her songs exude an elegant calm, but they do not often stay still. They dramatize; they swarm. Her work frequently references and even quotes such writers as the Greek playwright Euripides, the French novelist Colette, and the poet Frank O’Hara, but never at the expense of her own composed voice. Classicism and chaos rarely glide together as easefully, or as eloquently, as in a Julia Holter song. “Try to make yourself a work of art,” she sang in bold, augmented measures on her 2011 debut, Tragedy, and there was an innate humanity in that “try.” Holter’s music ushers us along.
Holter’s new album, Aviary, is an odyssey stretching, sky-like, across 90 glorious minutes. She says the title came from a line in a book by the Lebanese-American writer Etel Adnan—“I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds”—and is meant to evoke the way memories, beautiful and horrifying, fly around in our minds, echoing the grating noise of the world. That sense of muchness makes for the purest and most daring realization of Holter’s experimental tendencies yet. In the wake of her enchanting trio of singer-songwriter LPs—2012’s Ekstasis, 2013’s Loud City Song, and 2015’s Have You in My Wilderness—this feels like gleeful anarchy. Evoking Holter’s live performances, her seriously locked-in ensemble brings an improvisatory energy to Aviary, weaving together strings, trumpet, and the fantastic drone of bagpipes. The whole album seems to vibrate.
If Holter’s preceding records were novellas, Aviary feels more like a meticulously organized compilation of mind-altering field notes in which a single page can be a world, and its depth is stunning. Songs seem to exist within other songs. Exploring the album feels like walking through a house, where each of its 15 tracks is a room, a repository for another brilliant idea: medieval polyphony, Tibetan Buddhist chanting, the poet Sappho, Dante’s Inferno, even the outer limits of new wave. Each Aviary track is an extreme and immersive sensory experience. “Chaitius” could soundtrack a ballet; “Everyday Is an Emergency” sounds trapped inside a haunted mansion. Holter is often in conversation with ancient realms, and she sings words like “bubonic,” “hysteria,” and “stunning architecture” with disarming ease. (She recently expressed an interest in “the way monks would make art.”) These eccentricities are thrilling to move between. Aviary ultimately has the effect of looking through a new friend’s bookshelf, accessing the wild particularities of their mind.
The ascending, ecstatic centerpiece “I Shall Love 2” finds an unlikely predecessor in the space-rock romanticism of Spiritualized. The galactic piano ballad “Les Jeux to You” recalls Kate Bush, and is but one Aviary song where Holter makes her lyrics—reminiscent, on the page, of a dense Gertrude Stein poem—sound like an IMAX movie. “Voce Simul,” which evokes Meredith Monk’s extended vocal technique and contains the quintessential Holter lyric, “I always find myself dead, from a 14th century,” is another. Opener “Turn the Light On” is an awe-filled microcosm of Aviary as a whole: Rejecting conventional pop structure in favor of rolling, nonlinear majesty, it flutters from one burst of euphoria to another, like cosmic jazz. (Holter sings of eating “Sierra stars.”) “Turn the Light On” feels like something breaking down on its way out of the solar system—astral, endless, but with a spirited wrongness.
A most unlikely highlight, “Everyday Is an Emergency”—not “every day” but “everyday,” hinting at the terror in the quotidian—centers the droning, atonal bagpipe playing of Tashi Wada before turning into a brutal twisted-fantasy ballad. Playfully apocalyptic, it is a soundtrack for the end times, as Holter sings, “Heaven in the Human in the Arches in the Weather in the Table in the Somber in the Clanging in the Kingdom in the Wretched […] in the Excess […] in the Burning.” The bagpipe sound, in particular, is shocking. Holter also joined Wada—as did her drummer, Corey Fogel—on a recent Frkwys album celebrating and featuring Tashi’s father, the Fluxus musician Yoshi Wada. This is a telling intergenerational connection. It’s not hard to imagine Holter drawing inspiration from the elder Wada’s 1985 bagpipe drone epic Off the Wall—a loud, almost alarming music that Wada himself said at once can conjure “a dreamlike world” and “keep [him] awake.” Holter does something similar.
Aviary’s sprawl reflects the chaos of 2018, in which linear thinking and conventional structures of any sort can feel no match for nonsensical unrest, violence, and unspeakable tragedy. Sometimes, the wisest thing anyone can do, in such a crisis, is acknowledge the complexity of being a person—and, if only for an hour and a half, search for beauty in the unresolvability of it all. “In all the human errors, there is something true,” Holter sings on “I Shall Love 2”: “What do the angels say? I shall love.” Spiraling towards the heavens, it sounds like a prayer for the human race. In the overwhelmingness of human life there is also infinite possibility. Holter, sage-like, makes that clear on Aviary.