Two years after Goblin, the Odd Future ringleader returns with an album heavy on gorgeous beats and a lyrical focus that takes aim at the band's critics and the trappings of fame.

Wolf

Odd Future ringleader Tyler, the Creator has a rap persona pitched between shock-riddled misanthropy and confessional reflection; he’s preoccupied with his own press and he uses his music as a vent for anger and frustration. His debut album, Bastard, was filled with sharp darts for rap blogs who wouldn’t post his music, while his sophomore album, Goblin, wanted desparately to prove Odd Future was worth all their sudden hype. In the two years since Goblin’s release, Earl Sweatshirt returned from Samoan exile, Frank Ocean opened up about his sexuality in a heartfelt Tumblr note and released the Grammy Award winning Channel Orange, and Tyler unveiled "Loiter Squad", an absurdist late night sketch comedy show. As a group, Odd Future embarked on a series of tours that connected them with an expanding base of teenagers and outcasts even as they drew fire from LGBT advocates, women’s groups, and a music press none too amused by the macabre content of their lyrics. A lot has changed, and now Tyler returns with Wolf.
Where Goblin felt like an attempt to shoehorn the whole of Odd Future’s nihilist aesthetic into a single album, Wolf pulls back the curtain and reveal the talented introvert behind the music. The first thing to go is the bratty punk fury of earlier material. The insurgent bravado of “Radicals”, “Sandwitches”, and “French” is scaled back, replaced by songs that flip the conventions of his songwriting inside out. The songs about women are earnest where they used to carry murder ballads’ air of ill intent. Drugs come up, but we also hear about a remorseful dealer surveying the havoc he’s caused and a man having a mercilessly terrible time while high. Wolf is still the balancing act between gruff cynicism and juvenilia that we’ve come to expect from Odd Future (especially on “Pigs”, a bleak radio play about exacting revenge on bullies), but these songs are more three-dimensional. Tyler’s more likely to aim for melody instead of menace.
Wolf as a whole also sounds gorgeous, and that even goes for the bruisers. The polyrhythmic hi-hats of the madcap posse cut “Trashwang” eventually give pause to a piano bridge, and the blustery lead single “Domo 23” gets a bump from a boisterous horn section. Foreboding numbers like “Rusty” (a lush reimagining of 1990s RZA production) and the nightmarish, tribal “Cowboy” are declawed by rich textures and melodicism. “Answer” sets Tyler’s longing for his late grandmother and absentee father to a bright guitar figure and shimmering organs. “48”’s crack epidemic reminiscence is adorned with elegant pianos, string stabs, tasteful guitar, and spoken word interludes from Nas. Tyler’s pet sounds are dark melodies hammered out on wonky synths and clattering breakbeats but here they come padded with embellishments that give Wolf a cinematic breadth. The album is pretty, but beguilingly so.
There’s something not quite right, though, and it’s not just Tyler’s gritty basso profundo cutting through every melodic flourish. Pacing is one problem. Wolf reprises the winding sprawl of Goblin, hitting its stride on a series of midtempo cuts on the front and back ends but losing steam on a midsection that places too many of its longest and slowest songs back-to-back. “PartyIsntOver/Campfire/Bimmer” marries three unrelated fragments in a manner not unlike Domo Genesis’ Rolling Papers, whose passages of short vignettes gave it an off-the-cuff feel. But the pieces here don’t hang together, and “Bimmer” is too fleeting of a payoff for the uphill trudge it takes to get there. After that, there’s the lengthy “IFHY” (“I fucking hate you,” natch.), a bit of Neptunes worship so adroit that its plinking synths and jazzy chord changes give way to a falsettoed coda from Pharrell himself. (The Stereolab-channeling“Campfire” similarly summons that band’s Laetitia Sadier for a guest vocal.) Later on, the sedate acid jazz of “Treehome95” and the closing comedown “Lone” are inexplicably split up by the shrill M.I.A. send-up “Tamale”. Wolf is full of good songs but in the wrong order.
Still, not all of the depressive sluggishness can be blamed on sequencing. Tyler makes very clear that he doesn’t enjoy the trappings of fame. The album is shot through with harsh words for critics, sheepish venue owners, puritanical parents, and groups who’ve picketed Odd Future shows. But if he’s surrounded by detractors, he only has himself to blame. He was bound to be taken for a ne’er do well by a mainstream public who first spotted him in a video eating a roach and hanging himself, to be read for a homophobe after filling his records and tweets with offensive slurs. Tyler should know that we don’t get to control the ways our words are interpreted when they leave our mouths to filter out into the universe, and we certainly don’t get to be coarse or crass without blowback. Over the length of the album, the defensive can become grating, and Wolf’s rebuttals are pointless anyhow. By now, you either like Odd Future and have figured out a mental workaround to reconcile their more troubling tendencies with their obvious talent, in which case this stuff is moot, or you don’t, and this acrimonious self-defense is ill-suited to win you over.
With Wolf, Tyler, the Creator displays a radical growth as a producer, composer and arranger, even if, as a rapper, he’s still up to some of the same antics. Still, the album contains a few of the best songs he’s ever written. “48” is a wonder, “Answer” and “Lone” delve into deeply personal matters with poise, and “Rusty” is one of the most arresting lyrical performances on the record if you can see past the self-serving chest-beating. It’s a big screen rendering of the Neptunes-meet-Stevie-Wonder-in-a-microwave quality of Tyler’s earlier works, the sound of a creative mind coming into the possession of the proper means to carry out its ideas. At its best, Wolf manages to make the inroads toward accessibility that Goblin wouldn’t and pulls it off without sacrificing too much of Tyler’s refreshing capriciousness. When the album isn’t busy telling us that we ought to like it more, it’s delivering reasons why we actually should.


On the follow-up to 2018’s astonishing Double Negative, Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk push deeper into abstraction, finding fresh angles on the themes that have animated them since the beginning.

HEY WHAT

Cast away most of what you have, and whatever’s left will mean that much more. This principle was evident in Low’s music from the beginning, when they made records out of mere whispers of guitar and percussion, and it’s still there 27 years later on HEY WHAT, their 13th album, made in large part of roaring electronic noise. The two human voices at the center are a little deeper and rounder at the edges than they used to be, but they otherwise haven’t changed much. Nor has Low’s attunement to the way the crackling particularities of any given sound, shorn of excess and beheld with close attention, can convey feeling beyond words. Once, that meant a crisp chord hanging in an empty room. Now, there’s no longer an easy external referent for the space their music occupies. HEY WHAT is more like a surge of information through a corroded terminal, or an electrical storm in the cavern between two earbuds.
It’s difficult to address HEY WHAT without first mentioning Double Negative, its predecessor. That album landed with the force of revelation in 2018, a clear career highlight for a band that’s never made a bad album. Working closely with producer BJ Burton, who returns for HEY WHAT, Low remade themselves in the image of a dying supercomputer, digitally mangling their own performances until the distortion was as central to the album’s effect as the songs themselves. It was conversant with the vanguards of electronic, pop, and hip-hop production, fields that have long since abandoned any fealty to the way sounds are supposed to behave in real-world acoustic environments. Its jagged slabs of bass reminded me, in a surprisingly direct way, of the shredded low end of Kanye’s Yeezus, or XXXTentacion’s “Look at Me!” Those records harnessed the unruliness of digital malfunction, made it palatable and even satisfying by tethering it to familiar forms; a kick-drum sound, no matter how blown out, still generally performed the expected role of a kick drum. Without undermining the compositions of co-founders Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker, Double Negative aspired toward further abstraction, allowing its ashen pixellations to shape the music on their own terms, as gestures unto themselves. It was the closest a rock album has come in recent memory to sounding completely new.
If Double Negative was a thrilling and uncertain expedition, bringing an alien landscape into focus for the first time, HEY WHAT demonstrates Low’s newfound mastery of the terrain. After a whirling free-tempo introduction, opener “White Horses” settles into a clipped staccato pulse, providing brittle accompaniment for Sparhawk and Parker’s harmonizing about the inevitable cruelty of love. By the second verse, the pulse has grown into something huge and menacing, pushing the singers more urgently than before. “Days Like These” makes a series of abrupt transitions between crystalline unaccompanied singing and voices that have been crushed nearly beyond recognition, drawing up the tension with each hard cut. “It isn’t something you can choose between,” Sparhawk and Parker sing, with the first half of the line clean and the second half distorted, a reminder that darkness and light are inseparable. This sort of precisely controlled drama distinguishes HEY WHAT from Double Negative, as if Low were creating a language in the dark on the previous album and are now using it to write a high-wire thriller.
At times, Low seem to tack back toward the tight songcraft of an album like 2005’s The Great Destroyer, directing HEY WHAT’s strange vocabulary toward the same visceral ends that they once reached with power chords and cymbal crashes. But the story isn’t so simple. HEY WHAT also maintains and deepens Double Negative’s exploration of sustained ambience, with long stretches devoted to the repetition of a single word, or the slow decay of a keyboard line. Even moments like these are not exactly unprecedented for Low, who were already including passages of quietly hypnotic instrumental churn on their debut. Low’s new idiom may have seemed like an aberration on Double Negative, but HEY WHAT’s refinements make it clear that they are still finding fresh angles on the same themes that have animated them since the beginning: using minimalism to express the entwined pairing of intimacy and loneliness, searching for meaning in the rubble after a departure too catastrophic to address by name.
Sparhawk has spoken of his desire to offer listeners tension without release in Low’s music. One route to that idea might involve continuous motion without a goal in mind, a recognition of deep and complicated truth in the old adage that the journey is more important than the destination. HEY WHAT expresses something similar with its final track, “The Price You Pay (It Must Be Wearing Off).” After 42 minutes of organized chaos, the duo finally offers the slamming catharsis of a rock backbeat, the album’s first. Everything about this moment—the swelling feedback, the heart-tugging chord changes—suggests a grand release. But as soon as it arrives, it begins to recede. The clouds gather, the harmonies cycle uneasily; the drums cut out, then back in, then out for good. “It must be wearing off,” Parker and Sparhawk sing together, and the promise of salvation at the end of the road flickers again out of view.

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After some nebulous false starts, the former hardcore band has finally found space to carve their own lane in the crowded field of ’80s-indebted groups.

In the Spirit World Now

As each new album takes them further from their powerviolence days, former hardcore outfit Ceremony recognize the pitfalls of genre pivots. On 2012’s Zoo, they toyed with garage rock; on 2015’s The L-Shaped Man, they indulged explicit Joy Division hero worship. They are also sick of hearing about how they don’t sound punk anymore and would appreciate if you could please shut up about it. (“Not reflecting on the evolution of the band is what keeps us motivated,” guitarist Anthony Anzaldo said in a press release.)
If The L-Shaped Man was Ceremony‘s first attempt to channel not only the spirit, but also the sound of their idols—the band takes their name from one of Ian Curtis’ final songs—then In the Spirit World Now is their first foray into New Order territory. The guitars remain, but new wave synthesizers take center stage. Mileage will vary depending on your affinity for post-punk and motorik-esque beats, but after some nebulous false starts, the group has finally found space to begin carving their own lane in the crowded field of ’80s-indebted groups.
Ceremony are hell-bent on not making the same record twice, and when they make good on that promise, it’s easy to forget that they were once a hardcore band. Lead single “Turn Away the Bad Thing,” with its gleaming dream-pop interlude, is a cathartic highlight with a mysterious turn from an uncredited female guest vocalist. In a different vein, “Presaging the End” finds Anzaldo flexing his adoration of Prince with a crispy funk line that would have been unfathomable four years ago. In the Spirit World Now would benefit from more of these experiments, especially in its amorphous second half.
Instead, the album is defined mostly by squiggly synthesizers. At best, they add much-needed texture, serving as a backbone for some of the catchier songs. At worst—as on the title track—they sit so high in the mix that they're a distraction. More than half of the songs here were written with synth as a lead instrument, but those arrangements don’t always translate to memorable music, and the electronics sometimes feel like an afterthought.
Nevertheless, frontman Ross Farrar sounds far more exciting behind the mic than he did on The L-Shaped Man. The Curtis imitation is gone; over the course of 32 minutes, Farrar delivers the sort of shouty double-tracking you might expect from Parquet Courts, and even sneers like Alex Turner. While his laconic verses about free will and desire can seem like free association, they’re still his most fun since fan favorite Rohnert Park. For that, he’s indebted to young alt-rock guru Will Yip, who handled production, helped to guide Farrar’s voice, and contributed some melody ideas.
Ironically, Farrar’s most captivating words aren’t sung, but rather spoken by the American poet Brooks Haxton, who oversaw the completion of Farrar’s poetry MFA at Syracuse University last year. Afterwards, Farrar asked his mentor to lend him his voice. Three dry readings of stanzas from Farrar’s poem “California Jungle Dream States End” paint a more vivid image than most of his lyrics, which can feel clipped and sometimes lose their impact as the rest of his band chug along listlessly. “Love saying, without you even less, as I felt my will jettisoned, a thing out in the street,” Hoxton intones near the end of the record.
For the first time in some time, Ceremony are mingling their shifting influences in a way that rarely feels like an attempt to rebottle the magic of their forebears. But the fact remains that most of what happens on In the Spirit World Now has been done before. Anyone can play some chromatic riffs or make synths squawk. This band knows how to break new ground, yet they sound as though they’re trying to summon songs that will miraculously slot in with their old material. It’s a balancing act that’s holding them back.

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Building on the full-band work of 2007's The Shepherd's Dog, Sam Beam's latest is in some ways even more ambitious than its predecessor.

Kiss Each Other Clean

On 2007's The Shepherd's Dog, Sam Beam reinvented Iron & Wine, building out the whisper-quiet acoustic songs he'd made his name on into a strange and mysterious soundworld, using a full band and mastering the art of multitracking his own voice. It's tempting to think that the hard work was done there-- Beam established a new approach and made a great album in the process-- but Kiss Each Other Clean, the full-band follow-up, is in some ways even more ambitious than its predecessor. He's reaching in a few new directions here, pushing himself hard as a singer, and taking risks, some of which pan out and a few of which don't.
Broadly, Beam at this point is writing by far the most assertive melodies of his career. Not the best, necessarily, but the boldest and most forcefully phrased. Even the song that most clearly ties back to The Shepherd's Dog, album centerpiece "Rabbit Will Run", has a melody that's quite different from anything he's done before. "Rabbit Will Run" is an easy highlight-- the arrangement is fantastically detailed, driven by a heavily layered rhythm track that bubbles with hypnotic thumb piano, and balanced by sections where the rhythm drops out, leaving Beam's voice hovering over a strange mix of sounds that might be a chopped-up pan flute arranged into a loop. The guitar sounds like an old-fashioned modem. It's a weirdly intoxicating mix that exemplifies the imagination Beam brings to bear on his fuller sound-- he's not just putting some drums and bass behind his guitar and voice.
Some of his bolder decisions carry mixed results. Beam brings in a horn section on "Big Burned Hand" and "Your Fake Name Is Good Enough For Me", and it works well on the latter, the album's seven-minute closer. The horns are arranged loosely, responding a bit to the Tinariwen-ish guitar phrase that opens the song and pulling it into territory somewhere near Charles Mingus' "Haitian Fight Song". The horn scrum is nicely offset by Beam's layered, tight self-harmonies on the chorus, and it's also complemented by the ragged lead guitar part. On "Big Burned Hand", though, the honking sax is used as a device to try and make the song funky, and it's not a look Beam's really figured out yet-- it lumbers along for four minutes and is the one song where Beam's risks yield no reward.
The more elemental and important change, though, is how Beam sings these songs. On "Glad Man Singing", his voice is still a soft instrument, but he's really projecting, both on the lead and the backing harmonies he layers in behind himself. On "Me and Lazarus", he reverts to the unique whisper-plus-falsetto layering technique he perfected on The Shepherd's Dog and "Woman King", and as signature sounds go, it's a good one that sounds even more distinct when he contrasts it with the other approaches. There are places on the album where the mix of rhythm and electric piano reminds me of Still Crazy After All These Years-era Paul Simon, a writer whose scope is reminiscent of what Beam is now trying to bring to his work.
Kiss Each Other Clean isn't quite on the level of The Shepherd's Dog in terms of overall unity of vision. Oddly, even with Beam's generally bolder singing, it's also not quite as immediately striking. These songs are generally not the type to grab you right away, but there's enough mystery and melody there to call you back. It's an album that takes its time seeping in, and it's ultimately worth putting in the close listening that reveals its many details and delights.


The L.A. rapper’s latest is comforting if not entirely exciting. It finds Q and host of guests in a good place with nothing to prove.

CrasH Talk

Schoolboy Q has been branded a hip-hop party animal, though now the party is less “weed and brews” and more wine and cheese. In rap, few things are feared like turning 30 years old, but Q is 32 and embracing his Saturn Return—he hits the golf course daily and deserves rap’s father of the year trophy. He is in the midst of a less extreme Snoop Dogg-like transition: once a premier voice in gangsta rap and now a West Coast uncle beloved by all generations. CrasH Talk is the L.A. rapper’s first album since 2016’s Blank Face LP, and as he’s currently in a good place with nothing to prove, it’s an upbeat entry into the music of his 30s.
The recognition-seeking hunger found throughout his earlier releases is absent on CrasH Talk, a side effect of Q becoming secure with his position in hip-hop. His main concern is making bass-heavy anthems that can trickle out of cars as they roll through the L.A. streets. Q has always sprinkled a few songs into his albums with the purpose of soundtracking a summer day party, like the fun but unessential real estate flex “Floating.” But he’s at his best when he  gets in touch with his L.A. roots and recruits the breezy melody of Ty Dolla $ign and the jackass charisma of YG (“You said I hit it raw, you lyin’/You said I ate them drawers, you lyin’”), he makes a bouncy track that should have Cali residents hitting their most refined “Bust Down” dance.
Thankfully, Q doesn’t completely abandon the reflective rhymes that showcase his unconventional ability to balance humor and pain. On “Tales,” his vivid imagery remains sharp, rejuvenated by gritty drums and menacing piano: “Before Instagram, we gram first the month/Before the gates on our block, we in the front/Before I called you my friend, we shot the ones.” And on “Black Folk,” Q lets us know that despite the fact that he’s become rap’s boozy but wise older relative, he continues to battle his inner demons.
But it’s the trust that Q’s tight-knit label TDE has in him that allows him the space to make both the songs playing from that place with the overpriced hot dogs on the beach boardwalk and coming of age street tales. That freedom also gives him the opportunity to experiment with collaborations that look like they belong on a fake tracklist. Atlanta’s own Lil Baby sounds happy to be here, upping the pace on his delivery over Cardo and Johnny Juliano’s strings. And 6LACK’s crooning fits with the jazzy piano on “Drunk,” a song made for the late night, final drops from the wine bottle hours of a dinner party. Q’s collaborative missteps surprisingly come from the features that make the most sense. On “CHopstix, ” Travis Scott sends Q a file he must’ve found on his laptop in the folder titled “Rodeo Sessions” and Kid Cudi continues to cash nostalgia checks on “Dangerous.”
CrasH Talk might not have the mean-mugging raps of Blank Face LP or the weed-infused smoker anthems of Habits & Contradictions, but it’s comforting, like diving into the fifth or sixth season of your favorite network sitcom. It’s a credit to the likability of Schoolboy Q’s persona that you just want to spend time with his stories and continue to see him get a win, or at least par the course.


Instead of a triumphant, post-prison redemption tale, T.I.'s latest is yet another introspective work. Kanye West, Drake, Eminem, and Scarface guest.

No Mercy

Originally, No Mercy was going to be called King Uncaged. Its cover was going to feature T.I., in front of a stark white background, sunk deep into a wicker throne, a lion standing by his side. King Uncaged, an album we'll now presumably never hear, was to be Tip's first after he completed almost a year in prison, finishing up a gun sentence that could've sent him away for a whole lot longer. This was supposed to be the final triumphant chapter in Tip's redemption story, and everybody loves shit like that. Instead, life intervened. A Los Angeles traffic stop led to a drug arrest and a parole violation, and now T.I. is headed right back to prison for another 11 months. So No Mercy is a confused muddle, some of the material presumably recorded before the arrest and some of it after. It's called No Mercy presumably because King Recaged wasn't catchy enough, and the album cover seems to be T.I. either wiping away a tear or punching himself in the face. Given how the album turned out, the face-punch is exactly the right gesture.
T.I. sounds best when he's in dominant form, tossing punchlines at inferior rappers from a great height. His best tracks come with a sense of inevitability; you know, from the first moment you hear them, that they're going to boom out of passing cars for months to come. "What You Know" worked like that. "Rubber Band Man" worked like that. Even "Whatever You Like" worked like that. Absolutely nothing on No Mercy works like that. Simply put, introspection does not work for T.I. At this point, he has nothing thought-provoking left to say about his gun arrest or its aftermath, and it's no fun whatsoever to hear him say "I'm only human" or "Apologies to the fans" for the millionth time. But No Mercy is his third straight album of halfassed introspection. The things that were boring or simplistic about his forced humility have only gotten worse. On No Mercy, he sounds absolutely sapped of energy. And that's rough; nobody plays the ferocious livewire better.
The last time Tip made an album like this, he was just about to head off to prison, and he scored the biggest hit of his career with the maudlin but catchy "Live Your Life". Here, he tries to repeat that success, roping in a wide and dazzling cast of collaborators to chase a commercial hit that he sounds too depleted to actually score. No Mercy, I'm almost positive, is the first album to feature contributions from both Swedish pop mastermind Max Martin and Houston rap O.G. Scarface. The assembled list of guests and contributors is just nuts: Kanye West, Eminem, Drake, Christina Aguilera, Dr. Luke, the Neptunes. But too often, this amazing assemblage of talents seems to want to make introspective Flo Rida tracks-- and, worse, they fail at it. "Big Picture" has an emaciated synth-rap track so tinny that I can barely believe DJ Toomp produced it. The-Dream has never sounded more like Chester Bennington than he does on the ill-advised crunch-rock title track. And album closer "Castle Walls" is downright insulting-- Tip wallowing in his rich-guy sorrows as a wave of gloopy Europop keyboard washes over him. "Everyone thinks I have it all, but it's so empty living behind these castle walls," Christina Aguilera sings on the hook. Yeah, that must be really tough. My sympathies, rich people.
Throughout No Mercy, Tip remains an absolutely impeccable rapper, delivering even his lamest pieces of self-help nothingness in masterful clumps of singsong cadence and slurry double-time bounce. I get the impression that he could still absolutely rip a track to shreds if he could only get himself excited about the prospect. And every so often, No Mercy crackles to life, and we hear flashes of the rap hero Tip could still be. "Amazing", for instance, finds the Neptunes taking it back to 2002, delivering the sort of chilly minimalist computer-funk that they never make anymore, and Tip just dives into those chasms of empty space with the assurance of an old pro (Pharrell gets the best punchline, though: "That dark blue shit? Y'all niggas been had/ My diamonds rainbowed like they registered for GLAAD."). And "I Can't Help It" is a blaring, menacing gangsta-rap crawl that gives Tip a chance to just attack in a way he rarely lets himself anymore. But a quick guest appearance on "Strip" highlights everything that's wrong with even the album's best moments. T.I.'s exuberant protege Young Dro careens onto the track with the sort of joyous virtuosity that T.I. used to display. Maybe he'll show it again. Not for at least another 11 months, though.


Drawn from the deep catalog of Jamaica’s legendary Studio One, every song on this new compilation is a bonafide classic, underscoring the connection between spacious rocksteady music and U.S. soul.

Various Artists: Studio One Rocksteady 2: The Soul of Young Jamaica

Rounding out the sound of Jamaica—alongside mento, ska, reggae, dancehall, and dub—rocksteady is one of the many genres born on the island. Providing the link between the swift bounce of ska and the slower throb of reggae, the reduced speed of rocksteady music means there is more space between the beats for organ flourishes, horn solos, smooth singing, and experimentation. On the new Studio One Rockstead**y compilation, every song is a bonafide classic, drawing from the deep late-’60s/early-’70s catalog of Kingston producer Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd’s legendary Studio One during the height of his powers.
In the context of street-dance, when huge stacks of speakers emit a range of rocksteady tunes, there’s usually an accompanying U.S. soul selection. The two styles work well together, and Studio One Rocksteady 2 shows just how, underlining the influence of soul music on the mid-1960s Jamaican genre. As historian Steve Barrow writes in the liner notes, “many of the tracks on this set could easily be considered as yet another regional style of American soul music.” Case in point: the mournful horn solo in Delroy Wilson’s “Riding for a Fall,” a cover of song from the Atlanta vocal group the Tams, which matches the original’s message of relationship disappointment and pushes the melancholy even more.
Many of the singers and instrumentalists on Rocksteady 2 can also claim the pedigree of the equally legendary Alpha Boys’ School: Vin Gordon on trombone during “Change Your Style,” for example, and Karl “Cannonball” Bryan fronting Cannon & the Soul Vendors on “Bad Treatment.” The collection provides early evidence of John Holt’s talents, from his “Strange Things” performance, to his vocal duties as the Paragons, to exhorting a lover over hooliganism on “Change Your Style.” Rocksteady 2 also demonstrates the enduring popularity Jamaican sounds: Alton Ellis’ “I’m Still in Love With You” remains a dancehall classic thanks to Sean Paul and Sasha’s early-’00s cover. It’s well known that Studio One instrumental rhythms (referred to as “riddims”) have been used over and over again, and many originated as rocksteady standards.
Rocksteady is a perfect music for swaying and slow dancing; it’s no wonder that folks will still couple up for tunes like Hortense and Alton Ellis’ “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” another gem here. It’s also Hortense’s pure tone that makes the collection’s opening track—a version of Chicago soul singer Billy Stewart’s “Sitting in the Park”—as pleasant an experience to listen to as, well, sitting in the park on a warm day. (Just don’t concentrate too hard on the lyrics, which describe what it’s like to be left waiting.)
Breathing a different type of life into American soul, rocksteady also opened the door to the reggae of the ’70s: the bouncy lyrics and keys of “Rub Up Push Up” point directly towards later reggae. Every February, it’s officially Reggae Month in Jamaica, with a jam-packed schedule of events emphasizing the country’s striking cultural richness. A focus on reggae requires shedding some light on rocksteady, and Studio One Rocksteady 2 is a vivid celebration.


On its third LP, the Boston post-hardcore band completes a thematic trilogy about grief, depression, and the determination to move forward in the face of loss.

Death Is Nothing to Us

An inevitable part of the grieving process is realizing that you’re not, in fact, done grieving. Have Heart frontman and hardcore lifer Pat Flynn lost his dad, a Vietnam veteran and high-school English teacher, in 2010. When witnessing his mother’s enduring grief became too heavy, Flynn worked through the secondhand struggle with Springtime and Blind, the 2018 debut album by his post-hardcore band Fiddlehead. Flynn welcomed his own child into the world shortly afterward, and he confronted the cruelty of entering fatherhood in the absence of his own dad on 2021’s Between the Richness. Now Fiddlehead’s third studio album, Death Is Nothing to Us, completes a thematic trilogy on grief, depression, and fighting to move forward.
A high-school history teacher by day and poetry disciple by night, Flynn is keenly aware of how long it takes to process life events, but he also knows better than to romanticize depression. On Death Is Nothing to Us, he comes face to face with the denial stage of grief and works to both acknowledge and overcome it. Grounded by drummer Shawn Costa and bassist Nick Hinsch’s pounding rhythm section, Flynn yells about sleeping away the pain, leaning on friends, and the desire to burn in effigy. While attending Catholic middle school, Flynn was occasionally pulled from class to serve as an altar boy at unattended day funerals, his knees digging into the stiff carpet while contemplating a life forgotten. At his most reflective, he seems to channel that experience here. Yet for all that gloom, Flynn always checks himself. On “Sullenboy,” he refuses to cede control to those “depressive Irish genes” in the name of his two toddlers. “Their day is young and their future’s wide, and I’ll die before I don’t help them rise,” he swears.
Flynn centers the album around the intersection of isolation and togetherness. On “True Hardcore (II),” he sings of the hardcore scene’s ability to unify: “Deeply depressed kids seeking art to mean more than a gathering of friends.” Both that song and “The Woes” reach their emotional peaks by inviting other artists—Angel Du$t’s Justice Tripp and 108’s Kate-08, respectively—to sing along, emphasizing both a shared feeling of loss and a community’s ability to soothe. Flynn peppers his other lyrics with lines borrowed from poets like W.B. Yeats and peers like Alex G, Infest, and the Cranberries. In its openness to outside influence, Death Is Nothing to Us reads like a thank-you note to those who helped Flynn clear away the fog of mourning.
Fiddlehead’s most emo trait has long been the way the band surges evocatively beneath Flynn’s singing. Guitarists Alex Henery and Alex Dow are deeply in tune with him this go around, utilizing the space for two guitars to duel and collaborate in equal measure. From the double-tracked slides on “The Woes” to the dense riffs of “Welcome to the Situation,” they play off one another with precision. During raucous opener “The Deathlife,” Costa fires off creative fills with a cool-headed humility that’s come to define his drumming style. Fiddlehead have never sounded more gargantuan than on “Fifteen to Infinity,” a tender love song that soars with the blissed-out tones of a shoegaze opus. Whereas the band’s previous albums opted for immediate hooks and overarching heaviness, Death Is Nothing to Us scales back. These songs are measured and warm, prioritizing nimble bass and guitar work that’s more reminiscent of Lungfish than Drug Church. Flynn himself sounds softer around the edges, too, his singing voice now just as strong as his scream.
Death never loses its power, but Flynn isn’t so fearful of it anymore. If anything, 13 years after his dad’s unexpected passing, he has learned how to accept it: confront it head on. “I feel the fear,” Flynn yells on “Sullenboy.” “So face it all and watch it, see it, feel it grow.” Fiddlehead are so in sync across the entirety of Death Is Nothing to Us that Flynn’s pain transforms from something personal into a shared catharsis felt by all. That’s especially apparent on closer “Going to Die,” a liberating anthem of defiance that crashes through joyous riffs. “I just can’t trade all the richness of life,” Flynn declares, freedom ringing in his voice. Looping, overlapping lines—“See you on the other side” and “I know I will, but I don’t wanna die”—end the song by cutting off abruptly, leaving a wall of silence. It’s Fiddlehead offering a proposal: get busy living or get busy dying. They sound relieved to know their choice.


On a new double album from his indie-pop project, Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook cycles through dozens of styles without losing sight of the primacy of the song.

GUV II

There are lots of reasons to release a double album, whether it’s to accommodate a rock opera, showcase discrete aesthetics, or spotlight the contributions of principal members. And then there’s the more prosaic rationale: You’ve simply written too many uncuttable songs. That’s the situation Ben Cook found himself in when he relocated from his Toronto hometown to Brooklyn in 2017 to devote more time to Young Guv—the solo guise he assumes when he’s not fronting hardcore scrappers No Warning or playing guitar for art-punk visionaries Fucked Up. On his own, Cook has indulged his love of pop music in all its forms, evoking both Robert Pollard’s human-jukebox acumen and Ariel Pink’s sense of mischief. These days, Cook is also mirroring their prodigious productivity: Young Guv’s most recent work was originally envisioned as a 20-song album, before Cook’s new label home, Run for Cover, convinced him to spread 17 of them over two separate releases, Use Your Illusion-style.
Last August’s GUV I shone a bright light on Cook’s power-pop skills, presenting eight songs that basked in the eternal afterglow of Chris Bell-era Big Star and all the great Teenage Fanclub tunes cast in their image. GUV II, by contrast, treats that pristine sound not as an end goal but as a springboard into a collection that’s far more adventurous. You can sense the shift about three minutes into the opening “She’s A Fantasy,” when the song’s radiant Byrdsian shimmer slowly dissolves into an extended psychedelic fadeout awash in smeared harmonies and clanging percussion, as if to provide an instant snapshot of rock ‘n’ roll’s mid-’60s shift from innocence to transgression.
From there, GUV II cycles through dramatically different styles—from sleek ‘80s dance-pop to lo-fi chillwave balladry—like an indecisive H&M shopper who’s rolled the entire sales rack into the change room. But the whiplash is diminished by the fact that Cook essentially traffics in one kind of song—the sort of doe-eyed, lovestruck laments that sound just as urgent and aching when couched in a Matthew Sweet bubble-grunge rave-up (“Try Not to Hang on So Hard”) as in an acoustic-plucked yacht-rock reverie set adrift on waves of Kaputt-ian sax (“Caught Lookin’”).
Cook’s mercurial, childlike voice can recall Gene Ween’s more winsome turns, but his flights of fancy are rarely delivered with a wink or smirk. As an artist who came of age amid the stylistic rigidity of hardcore, Cook nails the fine points of genre (see: the silken organ tones of ’70s soul-pop throwback “Can I Luv U in My Own Way,” or the liquid funk guitars of the dreamy, Toro y Moi-worthy jam “Trying to Decide”). But he also understands that genre, and the factionalized identities we build around them, are ultimately secondary to the sanctity of the song. And on GUV II, no song is more blessed than “Can I Just Call U,” a hit of Lemonheads-flavored alt-candy that peaks with a swoon-inducing surge of overlapping choruses (featuring guest vocalist Aurora Shields in the Juliana Hatfield role). Though its title is written in text-speak, “Can I Just Call U” finds Cook longing to hear his paramour’s actual voice over the phone—“The way you make the words sound, the silence in between, and the fading of a scene.” He’s hardly the first artist to bemoan a life spent “looking at a screen,” but that sort of sentiment puts the rest of the record into stark relief: like the Luddite lover pining for old-school communication in a digital world, GUV II is the sound of a pop classicist forging his own singular path in a post-everything era.


Six albums into their envious career, Blur have finally found a sound to match their name. I'm sure the ...

13

Six albums into their envious career, Blur have finally found a sound to match their name. I'm sure the name initially came from the donut- stuffed mouth of Virgin A&R; reps who feared selling a band called "Seymour" to the Teens UK. "Blur" fits the mold of the monosyllabic, schwa- voweled noun system of Brit-rock nomenclature-- Pulp, Bush, Lush, Suede. Now, after nearly a decade, Blur have grown comfortable with their image and talents. From now on, it's their mission to make ears and speakers uncomfortable. With producer William Orbit spreading gobs of digital fuzz, guitar wash, and deep- space bleeps in heavy strokes with William De Kooning- esque glee, the tracks on 13 bounce between studio walls, planets, and effects pedals until slowly unraveling and releasing with mercurian flashes and cherubic keyboard. It all... well... blurs.
The more Guitar God status fans and critics throw on Graham Coxon, the more Coxon attempts to vigorously destroy such notions with feedback, drilling, and controlled crust, which in turn just makes the fans and critics swoon even more. From the wandering melodies that twang and fall apart in "Tender" to the tongue- in- cheek metal- solo, vacuum theremin freakout, and surf- boogie ending in "Bugman," to the crescendoing strums of "1992," Coxon drops creative brain- blowers all over 13. Yet, the album sounds nothing like the band's last self- titled LP. These days, Coxon's guitars are manipulated to sound unlike guitars. Plus, layers of organs and loops balance out the intoxicating mix. But it's Orbit's UFO studio tricks make 13 a much more cohesive and consistant record than the eponymous LP.
Despite Graham Coxon's fingerprints, 13 is Damon Albarn's record from start to finish. From the opening epic, "Tender," in which Albarn delivers the line "Love's the greatest thing that we have" with a sarcastic croon after admiting that his heart screwed up his life, to the beautiful, stripped closer, "No Distance Left to Run," in which he sighs with resignation, "It's over/ You don't need to tell me/ I hope you're with someone who makes you feel safe in your sleep," Albarn opens his veins over 13's DAT tapes. Sort of. On "Swamp Song," though, he goes all Iggy Pop, grabbing the mic with sass and pose. And "B.L.U.R.E.M.I." could be a Brainiac song, the closest tune here to attaining the backlashed "Whoo-Hoo!"
Despite all the knob- twiddling and pedal- kicking, 13 contains several surprisingly subtle songs. "Trim Tramm" bobs along to quiet chords before kicking in the jets, and "Mellow Song" lets dainty moon- cocktail piano lines and hollow chimes swirl around lovely acoustic plucking. Each song is unique, yet fits perfectly into the overall hungover, psychedelic, 2001 mood. Once again, Blur has kept one step ahead of expectations (well, okay, they didn't with The Great Escape, but that was still a great record) and continued to impress. In a way, Blur is one of the last big old- school "album" bands, a band more concerned with their entire career than radio singles, more concerned with "album" than "song." The Beatles made a dozen albums in the '60s and continually progressed. The reason why is simple: when a band is really, really good, they consistently make good records. Duh.


On their studio debut, these frenzied improvisers tap the ecstasy and explosiveness of their onstage chemistry while capturing their ideas and enthusiasms in vivid, glorious detail.

Less than a minute into Brace Up!, the guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Chris Corsano call a temporary truce. The pair have been locked in a tussle for 50 seconds, with Orcutt jabbing a guitar tone like rusted but somehow sharpened steel violently into Corsano’s unrelenting cavalcade. So Orcutt stops, letting his amp whimper as Corsano dances inside the beat. Someone in the studio yells out in giddy adoration. Seconds later, they’re back at it, Orcutt turning the sparring contest into a battle of attrition by strumming the same note until they both collapse, as though slipping on a puddle of shared sweat. Those hoots and hollers and temporary feelings of sudden exhaustion are minor but telling details throughout Brace Up!, the studio debut for this long-running instrumental tandem. Only two tracks here were captured in front of a crowd, but they help make these dozen tangles—and the whole album, really—feel like one meticulous live recording, an onstage exhortation unmitigated by pre-production plans or post-production tweaks. In its ecstasy, Brace Up! feels instantaneous.
You have ample reason to assume Brace Up! is a complete live album. During the last five years, Orcutt and Corsano have released a red-hot streak of onstage documents, from ultra-limited singles and cassettes to two full-length compendiums that strung together assorted highlights into knotty wholes. And outside of this partnership, both prolific improvisers have a reputation for gripping live releases: Many of the essential memento mori of Harry Pussy, Orcutt’s band that dispatched rock’n‘roll into noisy oblivion, are captured concerts. Corsano has issued sets with saxophone maverick Evan Parker and a gripping trio alongside cellist Okkyung Lee and guitarist Bill Nace. Brace Up! takes care to preserve that first-take feeling, from the way Orcutt’s squeals and whoops suggest a crowd urging them ahead to the methodical arcs in momentum. When they finally relax, for instance, after a mid-album sequence of four explosive tracks, each lasting less than 90 seconds, it feels like they are responding to you, the listener, in real time.
But this two-day studio session in Brussels allowed them to capture their ideas in high definition, so that the intricacy and involvement of what they’re doing is unmistakable. More often than not, it is astounding. As Orcutt shouts and squeals along with his splintering quasi-riff during “Amp vs. Drum,” Corsano surrounds every guitar note with a seeming orchestra of drums. During “Clapton’s Complaint,” Orcutt seems out to prove he can outpace everyone, shredding for 36 seconds not like Clapton’s foil but instead like the anti-Yngwie. “The Secret Engine of History” is a more finessed take on Lightning Bolt’s brand of melee, the duo picking its way through dense briars rather than just mowing them down. Recalling the collaborations of Steve Gunn and John Truscinski, “Love and Open Windows” is a simmering blues meditation that constantly threatens to explode. But they always pull back, a tempestuous tease stuck on repeat. Together, Orcutt and Corsano have never sounded so vivid and motivated, propelled by an energy that feels like true collaborative joy.
Apart from the duo’s technical aplomb and contagious enthusiasm, the real wonder of Brace Up! is just how visually evocative these dozen songs can be. Close your eyes and let your mind adjust to the high-velocity interplay, as though you were stepping into the summer sun after a nap in the shade. The combined force and speed of “Bargain Sounds” conjures an image of, say, Shaquille O’Neal moving at a greyhound’s pace. During “Double Bind,” Orcutt and Corsano constantly zip past one another, the guitar inching its nose ahead only to fall behind again; it’s like watching twin sports cars race down mountainside curves, shooting across double-yellow lines to take the lead. Halting and circular, “Love and Open Windows” is the feeling of waiting for a fever to break, the pounding in your head all-consuming no matter what you do; during the last minute, it finally subsides, and both Orcutt and Corsano seem to step back with sighs of relief.
This is jarring music, no doubt, that delights in the sculpture of cacophony and the control of chaos. But that sensation of staring into the din and being able to extract something from it, of allowing it to take your mind somewhere that neither you nor this duo intended, is both an endless reward and a rarefied goal for such seemingly splenetic music. These aren’t soundtrack baubles or pastoral pleasantries, built with the intention of framing a scene or inducing an unambiguous mood. But they do it, anyway, even if the images are as fleeting as these frenetic jams.


Singles and splits documented a band’s between-albums evolution during the 1990s. These compilations, remastered and reissued, document that process for one of the era’s most innovative groups.

Stereolab: Switched On / Refried Ectoplasm / Aluminum Tunes

In the 1990s, being an indie fan required a deep familiarity with the blank tape. Much of a band’s activity took place on singles, EPs, compilations, and other formats extraneous to the long-playing studio album. For die-hard listeners, that meant compiling miscellany on cassette and sequencing it into a form that didn’t require hours crouched over a turntable, changing records every few songs—an early form of today’s playlisting.
Chief among the groups helping fuel the decade’s sales of Maxell XLIIs and TDK SA90s were Stereolab. The UK band’s first decade played out like a game of hide-and-seek across scattered black (and yellow, pink, clear, and marbled) discs: 7"s, 10"s, flexi-discs, split singles, tour-only souvenirs, oddball one-offs. Throughout the ’90s, Stereolab averaged a new album every 15 months. But as they evolved from the jangle and crunch of lo-fi indie pop to a knottier amalgam of krautrock and easy listening, much of their development happened between albums.
Keeping up with the band could require a significant cash outlay, though they made good on their Marxist ethos by intermittently compiling all that material for the masses who didn’t have $60 for a rare Nurse With Wound collaboration in its reflective silver sleeve. To revisit those anthologies—1992’s Switched On, 1995’s Refried Ectoplasm, and 1998’s Aluminum Tunes, all newly reissued through the group’s own Duophonic UHF Disks—is to retrace the development of one of the era’s most creatively dynamic bands.
Switched On is the simplest of the three. Released in the fall of 1992, five months after Stereolab’s introductory album, Peng!, it compiles Stereolab’s first three singles from 1991—Super-Electric, Stunning Debut Album, and Super 45. The band was still a tidy quartet: drummer Joe Dilworth (of th’ Faith Healers), bassist Martin Kean (formerly of the Chills), multi-instrumentalist Tim Gane, and Laetitia Sadier singing sweetly in French and English about topics plucked from a grad student’s dog-eared textbooks. The band’s sound was fuzzier than it would soon become, brimming with stompbox abuse and two-chord rave-ups; the drums and guitars of “Brittle” and “Contact” are but a stone’s throw from shoegaze. Even then, the outlines of their sound, and the roadmap to their future, were fully realized in intricate detail.
In the first three tracks here, Stereolab leap from the thrillingly linear and hard-charging “Super-Electric” to the more wistful, Farfisa-powered “Doubt” to the shuffling study in vocal counterpoint, “Au Grand Jour’.” On the eight-and-a-half minute “Contact,” they morph from a demure shimmer to the kind of airplane-roar climax that made their early concerts so exciting and deafening. And though Sadier’s dulcet voice seems to float, her lyrics—easy to miss by ear, but impossible to forget once you’ve deciphered them—are prescient. “Is it enough to show/How the nightmare works/So the people will wake up/Is it enough?” she sings during “Doubt.” The observation feels more apropos than ever now: What is doubt if not the defining quality of the post-truth political era?
In 1993, Stereolab shifted into overdrive, releasing three major works before 1994 was up. The Groop Played “Space Age Batchelor Pad Music” is a mini-LP with a dreamy mood. Their sophomore album, Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements, is heavier than its predecessor. Mars Audiac Quintet, their third, is the crown jewel of their early, motorik phase. Released 11 months after Mars, the collection Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On Volume 2) captures the run-up to that peak.
Stereolab are clearly testing the proportions of their sound, balancing the rough, the smooth, and the sly. “Harmonium”—a 1992 single by the power trio of Gane, Sadier, and Dilworth—is a grinding slab of maximalist minimalism in full Suicide mode. “Lo Boob Oscillator,” a 1993 Sub Pop single by a six-piece, marries crisp 1960s pop hooks to metronomic drumming and coruscating drones. They’re sometimes refreshingly straightforward here. On “Revox,” they pummel away, channeling their live intensity through chords that shift up and down, like the gearbox of a sports car hugging mountainous curves. “Revox” reveals the outlines of an increasingly raw sound and shows signs of growing lyrical daring, too. The sweet ba-ba-ba harmonies are actually a series of French verbs: “To pine/To quiver/To die/To moan … To suffer/To sleep/To appear/To vomit.”
But Refried Ectoplasm also documents Stereolab at their experimental best. The 14-minute “Animal or Vegetable [A Wonderful Wooden Reason...],” a collaboration with British avant-garde trickster Nurse With Wound, begins with several minutes of backmasked vocals. It veers into dirge-like psychedelic stomp before ending with an explosion of haywire musique concrète—gunfire, barnyard animals, rehearsal tapes spit out by a malfunctioning machine.
The biggest shift of Stereolab’s career came after Mars Audiac Quintet, as the band fully embraced unusual time signatures, ultra-vivid production, and the record-collector winks that distinguished 1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup and 1997’s Dots and Loops. This is the ground covered by 1998’s sprawling Aluminum Tunes, which collects music from 1994 until 1997. The 25-track set begins with the six-song Music for the Amorphous Body Center EP, created as the complement to an exhibition by the sculptor Charles Long. If amoebas could dance, they’d waltz to this burbling, squelching suite. “Iron Man,” an exotica-inspired and breakbeat-driven single from 1997, is the better indication of where they were headed. The wordless vocal samples and elastic pedal steel are kitschy and cartoonish, while the rolling drums suggest the extent to which the group was keeping an eye on what the era’s DJs were doing. There are two more explicit nods to DJ culture in the compilation’s two remixes.
Not everything here is essential, of course; an anthology sourced from 7" B-sides will, by definition, contain some filler. My personal C100 of Stereolab rarities would not include “One Note Samba / Surfboard,” their flute-laced collab with Herbie Mann. But Aluminum Tunes’ best songs, like the unexpectedly lovely “One Small Step,” rank among their best material, period. And “Speedy Car,” a 5/4 escapade with Afrobeat touches that cycles endlessly upward, offers teasing hints at paths not taken.
It’s in these mutations, so close to but so far from Stereolab’s album material, where it becomes clear why fans could be so obsessive about tracking down these rarities as they trickled out, one 7" at a time—and why, somewhere along the line, even the nice-price anthologies themselves became collectors’ items. With the band’s sneakily seductive protest music feeling more necessary than ever, now’s the perfect time for these reissues.


Fela: Vinyl Box Set 3 collects seven recently reissued Fela Kuti LPs selected by Brian Eno, one of Kuti's most eloquently spoken champions. There are really no bad Fela Kuti records, so a boxed set isn’t a bad way to absorb his music.

Fela Kuti: London Scene/Shakara/Gentleman/Afrodisiac/Zombie/Upside Down/I.T.T.

Brian Eno bought his first Fela Kuti LP in September of 1973. It was Afrodisiac, a record the Nigerian bandleader had cut in London with his group, Africa '70, the previous year. In the liner notes that accompany *Fela: Vinyl Box Set 3—*which collects seven recently reissued Kuti LPs that he selected–Eno writes that, at the time, he “didn’t really get” polyrhythmic music. He changed his mind. “I remember the first time I listened and how dazzled I was by the groove and rhythmic complexity,” he writes. “My friend Robert Wyatt called it ‘Jazz from another planet’ -and suddenly I thought I understood the point of jazz, until then an almost alien music to me.”
A few years later, in 1977, Eno played Afrodisiac for Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. Eventually he would collaborate with the band on its album Remain in Light, a record that drew heavy inspiration from African music. Amid the bonus tracks included on the Talking Heads’ Brick boxed set, there’s an unfinished outtake called “Fela’s Riff”. The introductory phrase of the track–which is really not much more than a half realized jam session–subtly mimic the ping-ponging brass figures of Kuti’s composition, “Alu Jon Jonki Jon”, the opening track on Afrodisiac. All this is to say: Brian Eno was, and is, a big Fela Kuti fan.
For a lot of people, Eno would turn out to be an important conduit to Kuti’s music, whether via his work on Remain in Light or its companion releases, The Catherine Wheel and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. And while he wasn’t Kuti’s only celebrity champion, he was among the most eloquently spoken. Over the next several decades, his support would steer countless rock bands, experimental artists, and dance producers toward Kuti. The significance of that music—now the subject of documentary films, Broadway musicals, and books—is well established. A Nigerian musician and political dissident, Kuti released dozens of records throughout the ’70s and ’80s that merged strains of jazz, funk, and African traditional music.
And with the possible exception of 1984’s Army Arrangement, there are really no bad Fela Kuti records. So, a boxed set isn’t a bad way to absorb his music. There’s not a lot of filler to wade through. The titles that Eno has picked for Vinyl Box Set 3 are drawn mostly from Kuti’s early ’70s output, including Shakara (1972), Fela’s London Scene (1972), and Gentleman (1971). Afrodisiac is included, as well as three highlights from the later part of the decade, Zombie (1976), Upside Down (1976), and I.T.T. (1980).
It’s a lot to digest. However, by lining up a number of releases–one 15-30 minute composition after another–it’s easier to get a sense of the dramatic evolution that Kuti’s music underwent throughout the decade. On the collections’ earliest works—Fela’s London Scene, Shakara—the influence of Western jazz and R&B music is clearer. In subsequent records, the key elements of Fela’s Afrobeat sound—the call-and-response vocals, the interlocking tenor and rhythm guitar parts, for instance—become more commonplace. The compositions get longer, more ambitious, and more hypnotic, and the music’s trajectory is mirrored in the LP cover art; gradually, traditional photograph-oriented designs give way to dense multi-colored illustrations. The jacket of London Scene wouldn’t seem out of place next to any number of early ’70s jazz records. I.T.T., with its grotesque caricatures and quasi-psychedelic color-palate, is from another planet entirely.
Eno’s contributions to the liner notes are thought provoking, but they’re also fairly slight—just a few hundred words of text that provide a handful of anecdotes and a touch of context. As a musician, producer, and conceptual thinker, Eno was a major presence in the music world at a moment when the ’60s vision of rock and roll was gradually slipping away as a dominant force and punk, hip-hop and disco were emerging. The set might have benefited—at least on Eno’s end—from a more substantial reflection on how Kuti’s music was perceived within the context of that time.
Though, maybe it’s obvious that there wasn’t a lot out there like it. The innovations that Kuti’s music generated are easy to take for granted now, but in the context of the mid-to-late ’70s—a decade heavy with, though not necessarily defined by, blues rock—Kuti’s band must have sounded pretty revelatory. The music is constantly moving and mutating, but is also conveys a sense of stasis. Unlike jazz, the songs aren’t shaped by chord changes or modulations, but the gradual accumulation and subtraction of melodic and rhythmic gestures. The bass might hover on a single note or riff for an entire song. The steady crack of the snare, which helps to give rock music its steady push and pull, is constantly shifted and shuffled around. “It rolls, rocks, and snaps and makes you moves,” writes Eno, speaking about drummer Tony Allen’s rhythms. “And yet it isn’t ever very regular—it’s hard to isolate the part that Tony Allen is playing because he’s constantly moving around it.”
The length of the compositions is also worth noting. One Kuti record might be made up of a single, highly repetitious sitcom-length composition. Where fusion jazz worked in similar chunks of time, it involved sprawl and spaciousness. Kuti’s music is taught and tight, even when it’s drifting past the 20-minute mark. Listening to it demands a different type of attention—one less concerned with events like verses and choruses and more attuned gradual build-ups and changes in density. It’s hard to think of anything comparable at the time, save for the rolling, burbling, and highly repetitive synthesizer compositions being made by German krautrock acts like Neu!, Kraftwerk, and Ashra (some of which were also Eno associates).
Contemporary Afrobeat ensembles seem to have largely ditched these super-extended songs, at least on record, likely because they run so completely contrary to the marketing and promotional methods of contemporary music. Certainly, this also applied in the ’70s, which required singles that could fuel radio play and, ultimately, sales. That’s definitely a fight that Fela won; eventually, the record labels just built bigger boxes to put it in.


Speedy Ortiz's four-song EP keeps runtimes tight and choruses front-and-center, pulling in some of Major Arcana's looser ends without sacrificing the fall-apart charm. The band still worship at the altar of early 90s indie—Pavement, Helium, and Archers of Loaf are their holy trinity—but frontwoman Sadie Dupuis has emerged as a distinctive voice.

Real Hair EP

"Well, it's not what you think," Sadie Dupuis sings a few seconds into "American Horror", kicking off Speedy Ortiz's new four-song EP, Real Hair. A lot of Speedy Ortiz songs seem to start this way, somewhere between a snicker and a shrug, like Dupuis just showed up late for class in snowboots and a swimcap. Throughout Real Hair, Dupuis keeps finding herself in some awfully precarious positions: sleepless on "American Horror", falling "for a bonebag" on "Oxygal", falling—or is it not falling—for a "bad news" waiter on "Shine Theory." But, whatever comes their way, on Real Hair, the increasingly confident Speedy Ortiz seem more than capable of figuring something out.
From the start, Speedy Ortiz have fared best in the margins. Their rangy, slack-happy music is prone to wandering, but they never drift so far as to leave the hook behind. Bassist Darl Ferm and drummer Mike Falcone have tightened up tighter, while Dupuis and Matt Robidoux's dualing guitars are still perched on the precipice of stringent and slipshod. And these songs are just lousy with melody; there's distortion everywhere, but the occasional dissonance of Major Arcana's given way to a heady, fuzzed-out whoosh. As a lyricist, Dupuis is every bit as fond of the inscrutable left turn as the defense-stripping full-reveal, and the distance between the two is often a couple syllables at best. And she's a chatty, candid, elastic vocalist, taking each syllable as it comes. Dupuis, Master's candidate and Malkmus stan, is a student of words: not just what they mean, but how those meanings intersect. You can skim through Real Hair, taking pleasure in its intricate guitar fuzzbombing and the curious pleasures of Dupuis' language: peep "someone who sleeps with her neck in reverse," or try and guess at how she plans to "coax the pretty waiter from his restaurant." Dig in deeper, though, and Dupuis' tangled lines slowly start to unravel.
Real Hair keeps its runtimes tight and its choruses front-and-center, pulling in some of Major Arcana's looser ends without sacrificing its fall-apart charms. Everything Speedy Ortiz do well—willful sloppiness, keep-'em-guessing lyricism, and Dupuis' sharp, knowing singing—seems turned up a couple notches on opener "American Horror". As Dupuis and Matt Robidoux pile one spiny guitar atop another, "Horror" slides from a conversational verse into a stompbox-detonating chorus. "Trust me just to my own feet," Dupuis pleads mid-explosion, "and keep me here for a whole week." You can get yourself stuck puzzling out the glue and web full of bees Dupuis sings of on "Horror", but once they punch into that chorus of "baby, you look so crazy," ambiguity's pretty much out the window. Sure enough, "Oxygal" turns up the inscrutability a few clicks. "Oxygal" is Real Hair at its most Frankensteinian, a stop-and-chop verse and woozily desperate chorus that don't seem to belong in the same tune. When it works, there's a gawky, black Chucks-and-tux elegance to Speedy Ortiz' carefully calamitous songcraft, but the jittery "Oxygal" stumbles around a bit too much to ever quite find its footing.
Over shaggy "Cut Your Hair" guitars, "Everything's Bigger" finds Dupuis connecting the dots between a lion, several sets of twins, the slipperiness of regional dialects, and a quick sojourn to the Green Mountain state. It's an odd one, for sure; these red herrings and unplanned asides give Dupuis' songs a certain spontaneity, like she's working them out in real time and keeps throwing in extra embellishments to mess with you. But Dupuis isn't just jamming a bunch of words together to fill stanzas; she's clearly trying to elucidate her points while offering something a little more interesting than a point-by-point. And, for all its misdirection, "Bigger" eventually just comes right out with it: "it's hard to keep a dialect when you keep changing where you come from," Dupuis sings, a hint of bile creeping in.
Musically, Speedy Ortiz still worship at the altar of early 90s indie: Pavement, Helium, Archers of Loaf, their holy trinity. But Dupuis has emerged as a distinctive voice: funny, sharp, ever-so-slightly neurotic, with a tendency to trail off. You've gotta take personality where you can get it in indie rock these days, but by reasserting her own peculiarities—and casting aspersions at those who'd change theirs to suit a scenario—Dupuis just makes herself seem more, well, herself, going through some shit, but certainly never cowering to it.Dupuis has called Major Arcana "kind of a breakup jam," framing Real Hair's deep-digging as being more about getting her own shit together. Spindly closer "Shine Theory" presents Dupuis with what, on paper, appears to be a perfectly acceptable suitor. Still, she passes; "I wanna want him so bad," she tells herself, "but I don't recognize the charms that he has." Though self-examination quickly turns to self-deprecation—as Dupuis puts her own charms under scrutiny—"Shine Theory" is hardly self-pitying; when it's over, you picture Dupuis shrugging, throwing her books in her bag, and leaving the "pretty waiter" to his other tables.
It's tempting to paint Speedy Ortiz as more than they are: not just a very good band on their own terms, but an antidote to the mushmouthed, low-personality murmur blanketing much of circa-2014 indie rock. Though they seem a tad too casual for savior-types, it's hard to miss the things they're doing right. Real Hair takes the gloriously sloppy, haphazardly intricate Speedy Ortiz of Major Arcana and turns it bite-size, sharpening the focus without sanding off the edges. These songs are easy to like, but they're even better when you lean in close. And Dupuis—as a singer and lyricist alike—is only getting more precise and more peculiar. She isn't especially "confessional," but she certainly puts it all out there; these songs unwind like a long, aimless phone call with an old friend, rife with in-jokes, strange segueways, and the occasional moment of clarity. And, simply from a bookkeeping standpoint, dropping an EP in the winter dead zone, some nine months after your debut LP, is about as smart a way as any to keep your name on people's lips. When that EP's as good as Real Hair? All the better.


Brooklyn band offers a skyscraping blend of the ambient and the anthemic, a record that swings for the bleachers at a time when it's fashionable to bunt.

Hospice

Who could've guessed that SNMNMNM were ahead of the curve? In 2009, you kind of need to know some C++ just to talk about bands. The trend began in dreamy California, which gave us the skuzzy-sweet Nodzzz and Wavves, and then migrated as far as Nebraska (UUVVWWZ) and Glasgow (Dananananaykroyd). Meanwhile, in serious Brooklyn, the Antlers were quietly working on a coincidental antithesis to this fad. Hospice answers silliness with solemnity, jitters with nerve. Their band name simply describes their music: a delicately branching instrument of force.
Not that the Antlers are startlingly original-- they're just swinging for the bleachers at a time when it seems fashionable to bunt, or put your forehead on the bat and spin until you get dizzy. Their widescreen sentimentality comes with an equally familiar back-story. You remember the Bon Iver beat: Sad, bearded dude emerges from self-imposed exile with batch of urgently intimate songs; recruits band; self-releases album that earns surprise web-buzz and gets picked up by venerable indie label. Well, the Antlers used to be the solo project of Peter Silberman, who wrote Hospice while emerging from a period of "social isolation." During the bedroom recording process, two guest musicians (drummer Michael Lerner and multi-instrumentalist Darby Cicci) became permanent members. They self-released Hospice in March, and Frenchkiss picked it up after web- and NPR-praise helped sell out its first pressing.
The Antlers' skyscraping blend of the ambient and the anthemic is a far cry from Bon Iver's subtle folksiness, but Silberman and Justin Vernon emerged from their traumas seeming equally scoured and eager to reconnect. Hospice is bereft of irony and cynicism, as befits a rather ghastly narrative that feels, perhaps deceptively, autobiographical. Centered around a relationship with a terminally ill child, and evocatively spun from eerie hospital scenery, snippets of conversations with doctors, terrifying dreams, and the periodic intrusions of Sylvia Plath, it becomes a broad meditation on guilt, duty, mortality, and hope in the face of hopelessness. The emotional payload, while artfully couched, is fervent and bleeding. Silberman's affecting earnestness, not to mention his sweet voice, allows him to pull off lines like, "All the while I know we're fucked/ And not getting un-fucked soon," while sounding more prayerful than cynical.
Given the bluster of the music and its fixation on death and illness (not to mention Silberman's creaky diction and fluttery falsetto), it's impossible not to be reminded of Arcade Fire's Funeral. You could even fix Hospice's precedent a bit earlier-- its starry atmosphere and bludgeoning tenderness evoke Cursive's Domestica with a pop-noise sheen. Like these groups, the Antlers plumb that elusive place where the personally specific becomes universal. They achieve this by keeping the human frailty of the singer intact while inflating his feelings to mythological proportions. You can imagine Silberman, in his isolation, growing world-sized and full; how the emotional forces he grappled with came to seem meteorological.
This sense of the boundary between self and world-at-large collapsing permeates Hospice. The lyrics cover shades of emotion from despairing persistence ("Kettering") to desperate joy (the 21st-birthday fantasia "Bear"); the music tells the same story, through quicksilver currents of tension and tranquility. "Sylvia" alternates between acute frailty and Queen-caliber bravado, guided by the sort of gnarled electronic line the Antlers love (see also the monotonous buzz whipping around the corners of chipper guitar chords on "Two"). But what’s really great is how these modulations of weight are integrated into an album-long sweep, with crescendos nested inside decrescendos, coiling surges inside lengthy unwinding passages. It's as vast and empathetic as loneliness itself, a generous framework through which Silberman can show us almost everything: The tiny figure on the horizon and his huge shadow on the mountain, the extreme weathers roiling about him at once symbolic and real.


Jack Cooper’s vision as a songwriter and bandleader comes into focus on the most cohesive album of his career: a fantasyland hybrid of elegant folk rock and understated free jazz.

Island of Noise

In another era, Island of Noise—the all-absorbing, ever-patient new album by amorphous British band Modern Nature—might have been a major-label debut. After all, the project’s mastermind, Jack Cooper, sports the sort of impressive résumé that lends itself to upward mobility, from his time in two buzzy rock bands to his more recent stint in the alluring and elliptical Ultimate Painting. Modern Nature’s first album, 2019’s How to Live, seemed poised for a breakthrough, too, with its orchestral angularity suggesting a bright new spot along the line connecting Talk Talk to Radiohead.
The initial release of Island of Noise late last year had mid-’90s major-label energy, too: Before it appeared digitally in late January, the album saw life as an intricately illustrated box set containing an alternate instrumental album dubbed Island of Silence (both LPs were pressed on recycled vinyl), with a sheet of stickers and a dense book featuring responses to its 10 tracks from the likes of popular science scribe Merlin Sheldrake and culture critic Richard King. It has the gravity of a profound statement, a major production. You can imagine J. Spaceman—for an alt-rock moment, the prince of such audacious spectacle—nodding approvingly at the ambition.
Island of Noise, though, is a testament not to old bloated budgets but to Cooper’s vision, rapidly coming into focus as the leader of a band whose lineup shifts with every project. (Ultimate Painting, he has lamented, was too easy, because he only wrote half the songs.) It is the best, most cohesive album of his career, the product of a widening topical scope and a refined instrumental approach. These pieces unfurl as a fantasyland hybrid of elegant folk rock and understated free jazz, framed by Cooper but animated by an ad hoc wrecking crew of improvisers that includes fabled circular-breathing powerhouse Evan Parker and textural, imaginative violist Alison Cotton.
As a lyricist and singer, Cooper creates a fragmented and prismatic microcosm of our own world, so that we can contemplate our crises—environmental devastation, relentless racism, caustic religion—with critical remove. Beautiful but sad, eerie but tender, Island of Noise feels like a sublime stopover between OK Computer and Kid A, or between the eccentric British folk of the early ’70s and the austere Chicago post-rock of the ’90s. Its songs are subtly overstuffed, brimming with layers of luxurious melody and imaginative variation.
Cooper was revisiting The Tempest—one of Shakespeare’s final plays and an expansive synthesis of many of his preferred themes—when he encountered a new mantra: “Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,” which he scrawled on his workshop walls. Cooper also borrowed The Tempest’s situational conceit, in which a gale casts a ship onto some unknown and distant island. What would we see about ourselves with this “new beginning” on this “holy island,” he asks above ascendant horns and strings on “Dunes,” if we had the chance? His crew survives the opening instrumental, “Tempest,” where Parker’s fluttering saxophone captures the anxiety of mortal terror while the rest of the band offers a preemptive dirge. They begin again on “some brave new morning.”
The relief is temporary. Natural disasters, unchecked development, and weaponized gods all arrive in “Performance,” the island idyll corrupted after only five minutes despite the hope that “there’s heaven in those hills.” (Cooper slyly borrows language from The Tempest here, buttressing his own images with the Bard’s while nodding to the way old problems stick around.) The island dwellers break nature and turn to religion to excuse their destruction during “Masque,” the horns howling a forlorn duet in response. Finally, on “Spell,” they murder those who dissent in an admixture of fear, ignorance, and rage. “The orchestra are tuning/Every string, every wire,” Cooper gently sings, mourning our longtime habit of cheering collective persecution, from the fatal fights of the Colosseum to the mindless faceoffs of cable news.
Recorded in London in the fall of 2020 during a brief reprieve from lockdown restrictions, Cooper’s assemblage of musicians indulges his troubled worldview without overstating it. Paired with fellow saxophonist Jeff Tobias, of modern American freak team Sunwatchers, Parker has rarely balanced beauty and edge so well in his long career. He captures nervousness, then lets it sublimate like a sunset. And the brilliant rhythm section of Jim Wallis and John Edwards swing then skitter, dance then march. They map Cooper’s moods with the precision of a stethoscope. Cooper coos when he sings about this troubled little world; the band responds with quiet aggression, scoring these catastrophes with careful restraint—a Greek chorus with the volume down.
Island of Noise can seem inscrutable at times. Cooper is a fine lyricist, capable of turning mundane things like thunderstorms and rainbows into exquisite snippets of poetry. Still, he often makes his narratives cryptic, his feelings ambiguous. I’ve listened to Island of Noise a few dozen times, and I always walk away somewhere different on the continuum between horror and hope. Is this island a new beginning or an old ending, an opportunity to right wrongs or simply repeat them?
Cooper leans into such questions during “Build,” the magnificent finale where his little improvisational orchestra renders an ellipsis with exclamation marks. “Do you see it? Do you see it?” he demands in a steady register as the band lashes out wildly, at last. But he never says what it actually is—the future or the past, the cataclysm or the salvation? That’s up to you to decide, all of Island of Noise seems to suggest—and soon.

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The pop singer-songwriter’s debut album leans on alluring and woozy R&B and hip-hop, yet the music forgoes most of the memorable hook-writing that Starrah has made her name on.

The Longest Interlude

For six years, A-list talent of every stripe has called on the enigmatic singer-songwriter Starrah for her Midas touch. The artist born Brittany Hazzard has lent her pen to many Top 10 mainstays and three No. 1 hits, including rap juggernauts and inescapable pop confections. It’s a skill Starrah attributes to her empathetic nature when collaborating with other artists: “I can pretty much put myself in that person’s shoes and write, if necessary for them, from their perspective,” she explained, which allows her to tease out a sense of vulnerability from superstars through deft genre-bridging between hip-hop, pop, and R&B.
A question that lingers after a bulletproof hit parade: What does it look like when Starrah steps into the spotlight herself? Following a brief collaborative EP with Diplo in 2017, the Delaware native provides a more definitive answer with her official debut, The Longest Interlude. The album focuses on woozy R&B and hip-hop to frame dispatches from a volatile love life, never straying too far from the downcast tone. The reflective setting suits the through-line, yet the music forgoes most of the memorable hook-writing that Starrah has made her name on.
Make no mistake, Starrah continues to be an intriguing rapper, finding pockets of rhythm that send the mind spinning. She often uses a slick patina of Auto-Tune, leaning into empty space and stretching out her vowels for emphasis. On the infatuated “Love Mania,” she adopts a melodic, feathery tone that dances against new wave guitar from Weeknd member Patrick Greenaway. The album’s upbeat track, “Love Mania,” captures vivid imagery of cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway, with Starrah’s chirping delivery easily carrying the song’s high-on-love ecstasy. Earlier, on “Made for You,” Starrah’s percussive, onomatopoeic imitation of a buzzing phone (put on vibrate so she can focus on her lover) sounds as nostalgic as the mood of the song around it.
The myriad guest stars who appear on The Longest Interlude stay mostly behind the boards. Nile Rodgers, Skrillex, Boi 1da, and more appear on production, but for all the talent on deck, the album remains mostly inert. The back half especially dips into drippy, spare balladry (“Who Decides War (More Than Words),” “8 Days a Week”) that blends together, even as Starrah pitch-shifts her voice into interesting contours. For all the conflicting emotions she digs through on the record, they become wooden when placed against barely-there backdrops.
Still, the brief songs on The Longest Interlude are just fleshed out enough to avoid seeming like demo leftovers. On one of the album’s best, “Interlude,” Starrah coasts over rolling drums and acoustic guitar to reel off wordplay about an unhealthy romantic cycle: “When I see you it’s over,” she sings, “To you it’s interlude/And we know it’s over.” You can practically hear the shrug in her voice when she trails off the end: “Same shit we always do.” With The Longest Interlude, Starrah seems patently uninterested in the same Billboard-scaling heights as her peers; she would rather ruminate in her own after-hours state of mind, following stormy thoughts wherever they lead.

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In this gripping song cycle, the vocalist-pianist M. Lamar pairs with Liturgy’s Hunter Hunt-Hendrix to explore the tradition of African-American spirituals, mixing ideas from folk, opera, and metal.

M. Lamar / Hunter Hunt-Hendrix: Funeral Doom Spiritual

Funeral Doom Spiritual

In the landmark 1963 book Blues People, a critic and poet then going by the name LeRoi Jones quoted some scholarly writing that placed the “black Christian spiritual” in a tradition of African melody. He also described how songs created by American slaves were “superficially modeled” on white hymns. Despite the mutual influences, Jones argued that “the Negro’s religious music was his original creation, and the spirituals themselves were probably the first completely native American music the slaves made.”
Drawing a line toward 20th century popular music, Jones wrote that the blues “issued directly from the shout, and, of course, the spiritual.” But his more original claim concerned the way each new form reshaped the American mainstream, in turn. According to Jones, this phenomenon demanded of black artists a consistent reinvention of performance styles, in order to avoid the marketplace “overexposure” of past innovations.
With Funeral Doom Spiritual, the male soprano M. Lamar has pulled off another one of these stylistic escapes from all the previous, expected forms. And he has done so in a way that Jones might well have appreciated: by grabbing and juxtaposing vocal-production ideas from folk lamentation, European opera, and contemporary metal. This odd mix isn’t the product of an ironic mindset. Lamar is clearly aware, and respectful, of more typical approaches to the African-American religious songbook—including those by operatic sopranos. Though he also knows that exploration is part of the spiritual tradition, too.
Alongside electronic textures composed by Liturgy frontman Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Lamar’s vocals and pianism reframe the lyrics to some well-known numbers (such as “Lay This Body Down”). And he ventures some new spirituals, as well. The hour-long song cycle is conceptually coherent and dramatically gripping—especially when Lamar’s singing moves between stark exhalations of doom and soprano lines that are full of vibrato.
The power of this shocking transition is communicated during the album’s overture, “The Demon Rising.” Early on in the track, Hunt-Hendrix’s electronic part supplies steady percussive explosions that amount to a slow beat. Lamar pounds on the low end of a Bosendorfer piano, and sing-sighs in tones of gravelly menace. Then, as Lamar moves up the keyboard, his vocals swoop up in pitch, to the top of his range.
At this point, the singer-pianist still hasn’t uttered a word. Though the work’s emotional progression has been previewed: after starting from a vantage of bleakest desolation, a more beautiful resilience comes into view. But forgetfulness is not part of the journey. Even as it anticipates some form of rebirth, Funeral Doom Spiritual holds fast to an awareness of racial injustice and physical violence.
The lyrics’ potency comes from their broad applicability, across American history. On early listens, I often wondered whether a refrain like “I carry your coffin on my back” was plucked from a vintage spiritual, or from a first-person lament related to a contemporary tragedy. The fact that the question can be asked justifies the pallor that hangs over the album, as well as the more abrasive textures in its electronic arrangement.
While the tempos and harmonies remain fairly static, the arrangements contain subtle shifts that make outsized impacts. On “They Took You From Me,” as Lamar’s voice rises to a peak of indignation (on the word “guilty”), the texture of Hunt-Hendrix’s electronics undergoes a change. What was once a drone now becomes bell-like and sparkling—akin to what might result if Oneohtrix Point Never were to interpret the music of Arvo Pärt. The sense of release, here, works as an ideal sonic accompaniment for the catharsis embedded in Lamar’s judgment, and his casting of a demon’s curse.
Funeral Doom Spiritual also exists as a work for the stage. That ritualized production recently appeared at New York’s Prototype festival, which focuses on new operas (both traditional and experimental in nature). When performed there, the piece featured a string section arranged by Hunt-Hendrix, in addition to Lamar’s singer-pianist role. I thought it was a captivating show—particularly given Lamar’s post-apocalyptic, diva costuming. Still, some of the transitions between songs were ragged. On the album, a few of Hunt-Hendrix’s string harmony ideas have been preserved, most noticeably on the electronic portion of the track “Carrying.” Overall, the studio recording’s more consistent precision makes this version of Spiritual an ideal way to encounter Lamar’s radical innovations.


Taking influence from drone, metal, and noise, the latest project from the mercurial Russian producer is a brooding collaborative album that relishes in its own bleakness.

Pavel Milyakov / Yana Pavlova: Wandering

Wandering

Over the past five years, the prolific output of Russian electronic producer Pavel Milyakov has hopscotched between genre and mood: four-on-the-floor techno, palatable indie rock, new age ambient, harsh drone, and collaborations that range from Dirty Beaches’ Alex Zhang Hungtai to avant-saxophonist Bendik Giske. Though produced with care and consideration, Milyakov’s recordings often bear the hallmarks of experimental recklessness, documenting his creative spirit with a sort of diaristic vulnerability. His music often resembles hi-fidelity sketches: expertly produced excursions deliberately left in their nascent state.
On last year’s Blue, Milyakov’s first collaboration with the Ukrainian artist and vocalist Yana Pavlova, the duo improvised a series of blissful performances with funk swagger and rhythmic propulsion. In its catchiest moments, the music inched toward something resembling indie pop. Although the pair continue a similar collaborative process on their latest album, Wandering, the results are much darker. It’s a record of harsh industrial feedback and mournful howls, one that relishes in its own bleakness. Over 10 tracks and 33 minutes, it bangs around in the shadows with hardly a glimmer of light. If Blue was Milyakov and Pavlova’s summer of love, Wandering is its unexpectedly brutal winter.
Culling inspiration from drone, black metal, dub, industrial, and noise, Wandering is fragmented and deconstructed. Its twists and turns are nearly obscured, as songs blur into one another like recurring nightmares. Feedback, pulsing static, harsh rhythms, trigger-delays, vocal chants, and crushing synths ricochet off one another in frenetic conversation. Wandering is committed to its own disquieting world, and its musicians take pleasure in restlessly tinkering within its frameworks. The monotonous atmosphere allows small inflections to cast powerful shadows: A piercing cry gives way to an impossibly sharp gated crash symbol. A flood of delayed feedback slowly rolls in like a rough tide, the silence between shallow waves bringing its own solace.
“Ramified” opens the album with delay-heavy synthetic bagpipes and cavernous, mourning vocals from Pavlova. The song moves at a crawl as warm guitar drones hum like distant thunder, a funeral procession played in reverse. Fluttering synth tones brighten the desolate palette just as the song fades into the drone doom of “Mountains & Woodlands,” where churning guitars, delayed blast beats, and chopped-up tom rolls crash like a hailstorm, recalling early Liturgy in its mechanized approach to corrosive darkness.
Several moments on the album are reimagined versions of songs that appeared in warmer, more amiable renditions on Blue. “Take a While” recasts the dance-pop standout “Strong Willed” as a harrowing drone symphony, with Pavlova chanting its memorable refrain, “Gonna take a while with it/Then you reach for it.” Here, the lyrics take on a narcotic haze, barely recognizable over crash symbols. “Denying” incorporates passages from “Blue Denial,” another toe-tapper from the previous record. But in this version, jackhammer drum fills and fuzzed-out guitars shroud the words. The stuttering feedback is unexpectedly soothing, like a doom-metal sound bath.
After the dissonance of the first half, the album begins to soften. “Rural” brightens the tone with flickering guitar notes and skittering melodies akin to Archie Shepp’s Mama Rose played through Sunn O)))’s gear. “Wandering Fugue,” a late standout, introduces bubbling bit-synth organ trills that shine through the bleakness like laser beams, supplying a brief moment of sweetness as the chirpy synths meld into Pavlova’s wordless coos. These calmer tracks offer respite from the record’s overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. With such a cohesive atmosphere, Wandering lacks some of the finesse and nuance that makes Milyakov’s more eclectic work so striking. Yet like an off-beat horror film, this haunted experiment carries its own charming aura of chaos.
Correction: A previous version of this review incorrectly identified the artist Yana Pavlova as Russian. She is Ukrainian.

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Following an EP and various singles, the sunny Brooklyn synth-pop duo's full-length debut aims for the heart and the gut.

Mixed Emotions

"Sometimes I wonder if because I make a lot of jokes here, people might think we don't take our music seriously…" Tweeted Jesse Cohen from his band Tanlines' account earlier this month, in anticipation of the Brooklyn synth-pop duo's debut full-length release, Mixed Emotions. "Simply put, neither Eric [Emm] nor I have ever taken anything in our whole lives more seriously than the work we put into this album," Cohen continued. "It couldn't possibly mean more to us. I don't think I need to be super pretentious for you to know that, but sometimes I just want to say it."
Part of the reason Cohen felt the need to clarify was likely because @Tanlines doesn't look like your typical musician's Twitter feed, focusing more on clever observational jokes rather than self-promotion. In turn, it has gained them more than a few followers who are clearly unaware that the Tanlines account belongs to a working band and not a comedian. Cohen's message contained a surprisingly heartfelt sentiment coming from a handle usually known for material like, "Just had a landline-to-landline conversation #90s." But try as he might to separate his Twitter account from his band's music, the truth is Mixed Emotions and @Tanlines have more in common with each other than Cohen would likely admit. Mixed Emotions contains some truly great tracks that work terrifically as standalone singles, as carefully composed and satisfying as a well-constructed quip, almost always augmented by a good-natured undercurrent of earnest, welcome sentimentality. And while everything in between may feel like a contextually empty @-reply or obligatory retweet, it makes for an uneven listen that still amounts to more than what that ever-present winky-sad emoticon might suggest.
Tanlines are clearly capable of writing great songs. Between a few singles and 2010's Settings EP, we were given a handful of warm, Balearic-tinged tracks with an extra dancefloor-ready boost thanks to Afro-pop and Tropicália detailing. One of the more notable standouts, "Real Life", shows up again on Mixed Emotions, and while its replay value makes its inclusion seem perfectly logical, it does reveal what some might consider to be a strike against the band. There is little denying that Tanlines' sound is, for all intents and purposes, beholden to a place and a time (see: Brooklyn, 2010). With "Real Life" fitting in so well with the rest of the new material, it's pretty clear that Mixed Emotions has been an immersive project, so much so that it uses the same building blocks on which Cohen and Emm propped up the Tanlines project a few years ago.
But being hard on Tanlines for not being progressive is a waste of time when, pretty frequently, the pair is able to use gratifying sonic details, big choruses, and large pop pleasure-center targets, all of which help manage to occasionally hit emotionally rich sweet spots. Opener and lead single "Brothers" is as good a place to start as any, with the amniotic warmth of its bass and New Order-styled synth flourishes. "Brothers" takes its name from the first studio Tanlines ever recorded in, but it also works when translated as a reflection of a friendship over the years. "I'm just the same as I ever been/ But I'm the only one who doesn't notice it," goes the chorus. A lot of Mixed Emotions contains similar thematic elements in its lyrics, full of vague, open-ended questions that seem most applicable for people verging on a mid-mid-life crisis. But because of their opaqeuness, the simplest turns of phrase-- when left open for interpretation-- give the album a sort of emotional adaptability. For such a rhythmically-oriented affair, these smears of melancholy offer necessary balance.
Mixed Emotions aims for the heart and the gut (though aside from "Real Life", not so much the hips, which is a bit disappointing), but in missing easy opportunities to connect with either lies the record's biggest problems. In the way most of these songs are structured, there's a real need for some kind of release, a way to tip things over the edge and open the songs up. You get a wonderfully redemptive feel from tracks like the gigantic, aching "Not the Same", and it's largely because there's some very tangible emotional payoff in the chorus. "All of Me" and the saccharine "Lost Somewhere" both fall victim to simply not being big enough, which is especially hard to overlook when there's evidence that these guys can pull off big. By presenting itself as being a vivid and borderline-anthemic kind of album, you can't help but feel a bit frustrated when the songs fail to make good on the promise. Exemplified by the driving "Green Grass", it means to give you a charge and push you forward, but instead creates the sensation of running in place.
Which is, in some ways, preferable to the songs that never even have a chance to get off the ground. A lot of Mixed Emotion's direct influence lies in a very specific corner of classic rock radio, plucking rather indiscriminately from the Police, Peter Gabriel, and Paul Simon. A number of acts over the past few years have been paid substantial dividends in channeling these names, but Cohen and Emm seem bent on rendering out the most honeyed details, leaving some of these tracks nauseously buoyant. Had they been a bit more inconspicuous with the references (the lovely "Abby" being a nice example), Vitamin D-enriched tracks like "Lost Somewhere" and the unnecessarily stripped-down "Yes Way" wouldn't begin to reek like so much potpourri.
Fortunately, the record's second half really picks things up, with the appealingly straightforward, new romantic-shaded rock track "Rain Delay" and the spatial new wave ballad "Nonesuch" at the close. These tracks don't hit the same highs that "Not the Same" or "Brothers" do, and that's okay. It can be easy to forget that, while you're constantly waiting for that big payoff, most of these songs are really pretty damn good. Tanlines have never had a problem with the set-up, but it's in the delivery where the occasionally falter.