On their debut album, the teen (and pre-teen) punk rockers turn adolescent angst and razor-sharp hooks into heartwarming pop-punk with ample charm.

Growing Up

Viral videos come in many forms: a lightsaber demonstration, a musical celebration of Fridays, a pig rescuing a drowning goat. In May 2021, the young punk band the Linda Lindas got their own taste of internet fame with a filmed performance of their song “Racist, Sexist Boy.” “A boy came up to me in my class and said that his dad told him to stay away from Chinese people,” the band’s drummer, Mila de la Garza, explains at the start, referencing an interaction that occurred shortly before Covid lockdowns. “After I told him that I was Chinese, he backed away from me.” Like countless women before them, the Linda Lindas reclaimed this painful experience by transforming it into a sludgy punk song. “We rebuild what you destroy!” bassist Eloise Wong shouts. The internet gobbled the clip up, with everyone from Thurston Moore to Paramore’s Hayley Williams declaring the Linda Lindas the absolute coolest.
The Linda Lindas were destined for greatness, one way or another. The Los Angeles quartet—whose members range between 11 and 17 years of age and are Asian American, Latin American, or both—began as part of a kid cover band organized by Dum Dum Girls’ Kristin Kontrol. The musicians, a mixture of sisters, cousins, and chosen family, then formed their own band. Within a year, they were opening up for Bikini Kill, who they later covered in Amy Poehler’s riot grrrl film Moxie. Shortly after the release of “Racist, Sexist Boy,” the Linda Lindas signed with the long-running punk powerhouse Epitaph. Their debut album, Growing Up, is potentially the most heartwarming record of the year.
The songs on Growing Up center on anxieties heightened by adolescence, like self-doubt, loneliness, and a lack of control. All four members—the aforementioned Wong and de la Garza alongside Lucia de la Garza (guitar) and Bela Salazar (guitar) —split songwriting duties, and each expresses her innermost thoughts with candor and precision. “If I were invisible/No one would judge me for/Wanting to be by myself,” goes one heartwrenching verse on the upbeat “Magic.” “But I’m already invisible/Enough without anybody else’s help.” But even when monstrous insecurity threatens to swallow them, the Linda Lindas anchor themselves to the hope that tomorrow will wash away the pain of today. On the Spanish-language “Cuántas Veces,” Salazar laments the agony of feeling like an outsider but lands on a place of acceptance: “I’m different/Not like everyone else,” she concludes. “And not the whole world/Will understand me.”
Beyond emotional acuity, the Linda Lindas also understand the power of a great hook. Arriving at under 30 minutes, Growing Up moves at a tight, bouncy clip, pogoing between power pop and punk, political statements and tributes to cats. The latter, “Nino,” is a post-punk sibling to the Shaggs’ “My Pal Foot Foot” that unexpectedly segues into a spacey, haunted breakdown; if you listen closely, the band say, you can catch a keyboard performance by a cat named Lil Dude. Other songs are more melodically straightforward: The anxiety spiral “Talking to Myself” channels the bubblegum stickiness of the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack while the shout-along “Oh” evokes the Go-Go’s at their punkiest moments. Of course, “Racist, Sexist Boy” makes an appearance at the end of the album and sounds as invigorating as it did in the viral video; Wong’s sludgy snarl places her in a lineage of powerhouse punk vocalists.
Growing Up is produced by the de la Garzas’ dad, Carlos de la Garza, who has worked with Paramore, Best Coast, and Bleached. This detail, along with the bandmembers’ ages, might inspire cynics to levy charges of nepotism. But to do so would deny the Linda Lindas their agency and ignore one of the album’s major themes: that through the collective action of making music together, the Linda Lindas are empowering themselves and each other. This idea comes to a head on the title track as the band acknowledge that growing up can’t be either hastened or slowed. But if they have to be on this rollercoaster, they choose to ride its highs and lows together.


The Grizzly Bear and Department of Eagles member's first solo EP is a brief, majestic song cycle.

Daniel Rossen: Silent Hour/Golden Mile EP

Silent Hour/Golden Mile EP

There is something almost topographical about Daniel Rossen's music. It has the overwhelming grandeur of something viewed from above-- perhaps from the top of a tall tree or an airplane or very possibly, if you're into that sort of thing, heaven-- but also the painstaking, labyrinthine detail of a map. His first solo EP, Silent Hour/Golden Mile, is a brief but majestic song cycle full of fingerpicked notes that babble like tributaries, echoing piano chords that cut through silence like rocks rippling the surface of a pond, and in a few cases, explosive mountains of sound that jut up out of nowhere. It occasionally sounds like George Harrison or Harry Nilsson or even, in fleeting and not unwelcome moments, the Eagles, but it also sounds personal, like one person's recollections of the music he grew up with knocked slightly askew by memory's jostling. So yes, a map, but if you had to draw it, it would end up looking like one of those on the inside cover of a fantasy novel or maybe an old edition of Robinson Crusoe: a detailed rendering of an imagined, serenely unpeopled place.
Rossen is one-fourth of Grizzly Bear and one-half of Department of Eagles. "A lot of this music comes from exiling myself," he said in a recent interview, and considering the year he had in 2009, it's understandable why the guy would need to get away from it all. After the success of Grizzly Bear's acclaimed record Veckatimest, a group that began with humble aspirations suddenly found itself catapulted onto Billboard's Top 10 and magazine covers, and vexed by sensationalist reports of intra-band conflict. The guys could weather it (they're recording Veckatimest's follow-up as we speak), but in the meantime writing and recording Silent Hour/Golden Mile was Rossen's way of keeping his fingers busy and his mind at ease during the band's downtime. It seems to have worked. "Up On High", the opener, has the bright feel of someone pushing off from the world to find the clarity that has eluded him. "In this big empty room," he exhales over a gently crescendoing chord progression, "Finally feel free."
Expansive yet graceful in its moments of restraint, Silent Hour/Golden Mile shows off Rossen's skill as an arranger. Tracks like "Golden Mile" (on which he's joined by Dr. Dog drummer Eric Slick) and "Silent Song" (which is streaked with the signal-flare wails of Scott Hirsch's lap steel) feel full and lush but never cluttered; the emotion of the songs is free to bob unobstructed to the surface. "I'll dig until I bleed/ Drink until I rot," he hollers soulfully on "Silent Song", before appealing for salvation, "Lord, I know it's wrong/ So help me out." Drowning out his pleas, "Silent Song" builds to an instrumental bridge that finds Rossen doing Rossen: imbuing architectural grandeur with gentle naturalism. "Silent Song" towers, but even in its boldest moments it trembles and rustles precariously, as if a breeze much stronger than the one blowing through could topple the whole thing.
Rossen's guitar playing has unmistakable personality. You could probably count on one hand the number of indie rock guitarists you can say this about right now, but a lot of listeners will recognize these as Daniel Rossen songs before he even opens his mouth. The style that you can hear Rossen developing from the earliest Department of Eagles recordings up through Veckitmest is a distinct, improbably fluid blend of folk, jazz, rock, and even the occasional jolt of punk attitude (one of his finest moments with Grizzly Bear, "While You Wait for the Others", hinges upon his subtly sneering distortion). And here, he busts out some of his most impressive tricks. Positioned at what feels like the exact geodetic north of the song cycle, "Return to Form"'s summit recalls Veckatimest opener "Southern Point" as it explodes into a jazzy, Beatles-esque cascade of notes that glimmer with the naturalistic sorcery of the northern lights. As with Grizzly Bear, Rossen's lyrics rarely approach the poeticism of his guitar playing, but he's able to suggest more with his unique tones and phrasing than most singers can. When words fail, Rossen's jazz hands shred.
Though Veckati-mania was replete with plenty of overzealous YouTube commenters proclaiming Brooklyn's fab four to be better than the Beatles, it doesn't feel too hyperbolic to say that Rossen is gradually, quietly earning his George Harrison stripes. Though there's nary a "Hare Krishna" in sight, Silent Hour/Golden Mile still has the candid honesty of a person grappling with faith and trying to reconcile his place in the universe. The terrific closing track, "Golden Mile", is the closest he's yet mustered to an "All Things Must Pass", and though he doesn't quite stumble upon lasting enlightenment, momentary peace will do. Rossen brings to this EP the meticulous craftsmanship we've come to expect from his work, but in Silent Hour he's created something rare: a rendering of isolation that feels sincere but never maudlin. Returning from the solitary hike of "Golden Mile", he concludes with an observation that will still ring true in a busier world: "There is bliss in this mess."


The Chicago rap scene has undergone a creative renaissance in the past few years, and Mick Jenkins is the latest auteur to emerge to the forefront. His new mixtape features improved songcraft and a tightened focus, its cohesive sound reflective of the album's titular metaphor.

The Water(s)

Chicago has undergone a creative renaissance in the past few years, one of a depth few anticipated. Compared with earlier regional moments, where local buzz propelled a handful of artists to the national stage, the Internet's clear-glass window into this world—and the increased marketing savvy of even its least-established teenagers—has made the city's multiple scenes appear saturated. This is further exaggerated by the reams of imitators the city's bigger stars—Chief Keef and Chance the Rapper—have inspired. With limited oxygen in a competitive space, a raft of rookie artists have stubbornly hoisted themselves into the air, grasping for whichever angle best fits.
With the release of The Water(S) earlier this month, 6'5" Alabama-born, Chicago-raised rapper Mick Jenkins towers above most of the city's newcomers, literally and figuratively. Like collaborators Chance the Rapper, Saba, and No Name Gypsy, he's a product of Chicago's vibrant poetry scene, and a sharp disciple of a similar lyrical tradition. Jenkins is a conscientious person, a writer drawn to literary symbolism, punctuating the poetic obliqueness of his bars with barbed truths. His debut, 2013's jazzy Trees & Truths, was loose and indistinct. The improved songcraft of The Water(S) tightens his focus, yet each track feels of a piece, its cohesive sound reflective of the album's titular metaphor.
This mixtape does bear an evident debt to Kendrick Lamar, and at times, The Water(S) feels like an album-length tribute to Kendrick's "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" and "Swimming Pools (Drank)". Although the first few songs take on amorphous shape of album tracks, Jenkins' very first verse grounds them in "The Art of Peer Pressure"-like action and movement: "It was 91st and Laney, we were six deep, steppin' up the stairs/ Black Buick with a slick creep, moving down the block, we had froze/ Felt the tension in my toes…" But Mick Jenkins' bold delivery is nothing like Lamar's introverted one. Even when Jenkins' poetical hand gets a bit too free with the pen, his verses are drawn together by the unbroken stride of his words. He stands apart thanks to a rap style that gives muscle to a moral position.
As Guru once said, it's mostly the voice: deep and sonorous, Jenkins' vocals resonate with a particularly masculine brand of authority. Where Chance the Rapper's voice affects a manic, elastic character, or Vic Mensa aims for empathic transcendence, Mick Jenkins is practical, decisive, and no-nonsense. Uninterested in high-minded frivolities, he often sounds like he's getting to the point, even when he isn't: "Everybody wanna be the back of a D-Rose" is a bit of coded language (Derrick Rose's jersey has the number one on the back), but his delivery still gives this wordplay pointed gravitas. Serious and dignified, he wears his voice like a Sunday suit.
This confident rhetorical style is underpinned by the anxiety of a person who perceives that the world has issued him a false bill of sale. Clear-eyed, he recognizes the superficiality of his peers' wealth and status obsessions and the counterfeit choices the world has presented them. For Mick Jenkins, "water" represents spiritual nourishment, clarity, purpose, qualities essential to life yet too easily ignored by the distracted. This isn't just standard young adult nonconformism—although it is that, too—but in the context of Chicago's South Side, where "Little niggas got guns now/ And they carry them to the fuckin' beat," a matter of life and death. Mick Jenkins combats this anxious frustration with aggressive confidence, willing his truth to reshape a warped reality.
The album's best songs foreground his words. The sparse, unsettling "Jazz", which twists with terse ambiguity, lets his vocals take center stage. Statik Selektah's "Black Sheep" gives the back half some sleek momentum, while the frenetic "Who Else" upends the casual atmosphere with some of Jenkins' most focused writing. But The Water(S) peaks with the climactic DJ Dahi-produced urgency of "Dehydration", where each word seems underlined for maximum dramatic impact. Closer "Jerome" with Joey Bada$$—the album's most atypical track—feels like an exuberant Lost Boyz tribute, and a welcome exultation after a record of stern intensity.
In sharp contrast with Mick Jenkins' brolic tone, the album's leisurely production is soothingly therapeutic, all smudged-graphite edges. Where his first album was jazzy in a general sense, The Water(S)' languid guitar lines and airy atmosphere bathe the music in soft-focus blues and greens, a watercolor that recalls the placid cool of '60s modal jazz. The connection between aggression and relaxation is essential: his vocals keep the chilled production dynamic, while the reassuring ambiance is immersive, sanding the rough edges on occasionally weighty material.
Heaviest of all is "Martyrs", released as a video at the end of last year. The visuals include a flashed simulacrum of Chief Keef's "Don't Like" video, but with Jenkins and each dreadlocked extra wearing a noose. The beat, like Kanye's "Blood on the Leaves", co-opts a conceptually loaded sample in Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit". His lyrics attack youthful hypocrisy and conformity, the empty pursuit of money and sex, and his peers' susceptibility to these traps. This is his truth, and a welcome counter to the blithe attitude many rap fans have carried over the last two decades of violence in the form. All the same, as Mick Jenkins grows in stature, he may experience the sensation of having people agree for the wrong reasons; that his words, as potent as they are, could easily be co-opted by those who would demonize teenagers for their own oppression—a mirrored experience of what may have gone through Keef's mind the first time he saw a crowd of white fans rap the hook to "I Don't Like". One's eyes can never be too open, but at least we can trust Mick Jenkins to tell us how he sees it.


Joining the Mivos Quartet’s strings with rapper Kool A.D. and a traditional jazz ensemble, the Oakland trumpeter crafts suite-like compositions that grapple with structural racism and state violence.

Origami Harvest

Ever since his 2014 album The Imagined Savior Is Far Easier to Paint, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire has made patient development seem exciting, whether as bandleader or playing a sideman role. He has a lot of tools at his disposal on his roundabout path to dazzlement. In solos, the nimbleness of his phrasing and his steady tone control are immediately apparent, even when the overall shape of what he’s crafting might seem hard to fathom. Then, at last, he might linger over a few select notes, putting them through a range of timbres and moods, or flash a showy shift in dynamic power, creating a sense of drama further accentuated by his having held back.
Akinmusire also clearly enjoys the idea of the ensemble as a concept. On The Imagined Savior, he added a diverse range of guest vocalists, plus a string quartet, to an instrumental core familiar to fans of post-bop jazz. His latest record pursues a similar impulse. This time, the stylistically varied group of collaborators includes the cutting-edge Mivos Quartet as his string section, while the rapper Kool A.D. is the sole guest vocalist over the opening trio of lengthy, suite-like compositions.
This grouping is extravagantly strange, even for Akinmusire. The onetime Das Racist emcee’s blunted-out free verse and screwball non sequiturs aren’t an obvious match for the contemplative style of a composer who gives his albums titles like When the Heart Emerges Glistening. Sometimes the collision doesn't pay off. As Giovanni Russonello notes, a recent sexual misconduct claim made against A.D.—and his own response—makes his continued reliance on freestyle tics like “pussies get wetter” seem ill-advised. When this phrase comes out of nowhere (as it tends to do), it’s difficult to tell if the emcee is mocking a trend in rap—or simply perpetuating it. The air of poetic abstraction on the album doesn’t clear anything up.
But elsewhere, the contrast in styles works more successfully. On the opening track “a blooming bloodfruit in a hoodie,” a strangely dry production effect on A.D.’s voice makes it sound as if recorded in another studio, and grafted on to the more natural-sounding acoustic of the string quartet and jazz combo. This is the first movement in what comes to seem like a purposeful progression. Over the 38 minutes that A.D. shares the stage with the strings, Akinmusire, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and pianist Sam Harris, there is a gradual sense of convergence among the players. By the end of that first track, the boom-bap influence on Gilmore’s playing seems sympathetic to A.D.’s sound. During the following song, “miracle and streetfight,” Akinmusire joins in this same energy, firing off a steady stream of riffs, after a powerhouse Gilmore solo.
On this track, Kool A.D.’s flow doesn’t sound as though voiced from a remove, which helps underline some of his more politically evocative lines. (“Actively looking for escape routes/Gaze at the starry sky/The moon/The tombs… of the buried ones.”) Even the re-entrance of the string quartet, at the end of the piece’s fourth minute, has the feel of alarm.
The album’s third piece, “Americana / the garden waits for you to match her wilderness,” has a slower tempo and a gentler melodic profile, with Harris occasionally incorporating G-funk slides between notes on a keyboard. Kool A.D. reprises some of his earlier freestyle fragments, but in a calmer voice, over stretches of minimalist repetition in the piano and strings, which provides a sense of closure for his stretch on the record.
Yet the rapper’s abstract influence can even be felt even when he’s no longer in the booth—particularly on the track “Free, White and 21” (a reference to a vintage cinematic catchphrase of privilege). On previous albums, Akinmusire has dedicated tracks to African-Americans killed by police. On his debut for Blue Note, he fashioned a memorial for Oscar Grant; on his follow-up, he incorporated a longer list of names in his “Rollcall for those Absent.” Here, though, the mourning takes on a more experimental quality. The names of the dead are whispered with real solemnity. But in the background, Akinmusire—credited for all the voices—bleats out higher-pitched vocalizations that sound distressed in a different way, regarding the body count.
This combination of vocal timbres makes for a more bleakly ironized memorial. Though when the American present requires a near-constant state of mourning on this topic, having recourse to multiple registers can be healthy. In these moments, Akinmusire’s decision to work with artists like Kool A.D. and the Mivos Quartet seems less like the product of a personal creative challenge than an impulse to remind us of the range of worthy ideas that unusual collaborations might yet produce.


*Brothers *is a snapshot of two young producers—Suicideyear and Outthepound—evolving quickly. They both favor languid tempos and nostalgic synth tones, and their work has a druggy, melancholic feel.

Brothers

Though he’s worked steadily since his 2013 debut album Japan, the New Orleans-based producer James Richard Prudhomme (a.k.a. Suicideyear) is still probably best known for producing “Hurt” by Yung Lean, a rapper whose work is often used as a proxy for the most grating aspects of hip-hop appropriation. Whatever you think of the controversial Swede, however, Suicideyear never deserved to inherit Lean’s criticisms. Over the course of his relatively short career, Prudhomme has worked with Atlanta rappers Rome Fortune and OG Maco and embraces hip-hop as sincerely as he does his house and techno influences. Though he's clearly still fond of Yung Lean, he told Impose in 2014 that “I wouldn’t say I’m a sad boy."
Mistaking Suicideyear’s Tumblr-friendly sound for irony was easy to do a few years ago, but today the definitions of “trap” have become so nebulous, for better or worse, that conversations about authenticity have naturally shifted. “Bad and Boujee” is, amazingly, the number one song in America and arguments about ownership now have easier targets (see: Lil Peep, perhaps saddest boy of all). Suicideyear’s 808s sound like the ones he’s heard listening to Louisiana hip-hop stations for most of his life, and the beats he crafts from them are often quite good.
Brothers is a collaboration with similarly-minded producer Outthepound, a friend who also favors languid tempos and nostalgic synth tones. Though not as high-profile a producer as Prudhomme—as of press time Outthepound has 16 tracks and 608 followers on SoundCloud—his production has already coalesced around identifiable touchstones. While Suicideyear often employs club-friendly synths in unusual contexts, Outthepound prefers presets that recall ’90s video game soundtracks. (Album art on Facebook for their song “Lust” features an avatar wielding Cloud Strife’s Buster Sword from “Final Fantasy VII.”) Other solo tracks of his, like “Conclusive,” come wreathed in dream-pop haze. The two had previously collaborated on Rome Fortune’s “Trap Lady,” a spaced-out track with screwed vocals and soothing textures that brought together both of their styles: slick, druggy, melancholic.
On Brothers, the duo’s template is spare, with bright melodies placed atop staccato snares and moody bass. These are purposefully low-impact productions: On the one hand, it’s easy to imagine that adding a warbler like Lil Uzi Vert to “All Nite” would add some direction and purpose. On the other, the instrumental beats show that Suicideyear and Outthepound are comfortable in their own world. The final two tracks are the most and least successful on the EP. “Jolly” sounds like TNGHT’s “Bugg’n” with a hint of NOLA bounce, a combination that works, but isn't original enough to be interesting on its own. “For Us,” on the flip side, swells into something more maximal and engrossing than anything on the record and hints at widescreen impulses the duo rarely indulge.
A digital release with just six tracks, Brothers is a compelling snapshot of two young producers evolving quickly. If they stay in the hip-hop world, it’ll be fascinating to see if more rappers hop onboard and how they mesh with their sound; if they follow the path suggested by “For Us,” we might see a Suicideyear x Outthepound teamup capable of headlining clubs or festivals on their own.


The Rhode Island native’s second album of noisy, downbeat techno is a cocoon ringed with razor wire—the kind of music that’s perfect for headphones and subway journeys when you’re in a foul mood.

Dies Iræ Xerox

DJ Richard’s music is as understated as his name, and that understatement extends even to the way it flits between extremes. The Rhode Island native was raised on noise and dance music, and his own productions fold in elements of both, existing in a liminal space between the two genres. From noise he gets his sullenness; from dance, his steady pulse. But there is nothing harsh or grating about the textures of his sad, coppery foghorn synths, and there is nothing particularly festive about his grooves. He didn’t invent this interzone, of course; especially in the underground, moody, downbeat techno is a busy lane. But DJ Richard navigates it far better than most. There’s a commendable depth to his forlorn atmospheres, which refuse to lapse into maudlin caricature or shift into industrial techno’s grayscale default mode.
His debut album, Grind, was about as moody as dance music gets, and probably for good reason. It was written in the space of three months, in the aftermath of having his home burgled and his computer stolen at the precise moment when he was backing up what should have been his debut album to an external hard drive. He had quit drinking, wasn’t going out much, and was beginning to contemplate leaving Berlin, where he’d been living for the past few years, and heading back home. (“That is definitely the state of mind that somehow was really conducive to music making for me,” he has said.) His new one, Dies Iræ Xerox, was created after his return to the Ocean State, but that old undercurrent of unease remains. From the very first note of the opening track, the music sounds perpetually on the verge of slipping out of tune. But this isn’t the nostalgic tape warping of Boards of Canada; it’s more like the groan of a mortally wounded beast, or a soul heaving beneath a great psychic weight.
Like its predecessor, Dies Iræ Xerox balances beat-driven tracks with drum-free synthesizer sketches whose mottled colors and blurry outlines suggest bruises. On their own, the five beatless tracks would have made for a pretty spellbinding ambient EP. “Crimson Curve” turns a gravelly, minor-key bass progression into a black-lit aquarium populated by strange, billowing shapes. “Ancestral Helm” is elegiac and becalmed. “Dissolving World” is a seven-minute investigation of two restlessly morphing chords, its emotional tenor inscrutable.
In the drum-driven tracks, the mood has darkened. You can feel the anger and defiance in the cutting sharpness of DJ Richard’s drums, the sheer force of his beats. On Grind, there were still echoes of the twinkling strain of house associated with Dial, the Hamburg label responsible for both albums. But there’s no trace of that legacy here. “Pitfall,” the album’s first drum track, is part trap beat and part bear trap, with hi-hats like rusted metal teeth. “Vanguard” advances, slow and mechanical, in rigid movements shorn of every last vestige of swing. “Tunnel Stalker” arrays bass squelches in triplets over a snapping drum groove and blackened, sizzling electronics. “In Broad Daylight” is equally stern, with brooding synths over lacerating drum programming—no mercy, no apologies, no bullshit. Simultaneously cushion and armor, this is the kind of music that’s perfect for headphones and subway journeys when you’re in a foul mood—a cocoon ringed with razor wire.
But even here, he cannily holds back. It’s not about pulling punches; DJ Richard is simply too crafty to let you see more than a flash of the blade before he draws blood. In the album’s most powerful tracks, there’s the sense of something partially obscured trying to break through—some awful presence, an indistinct background noise clawing its way into the foreground. The album’s title pairs the Latin term for “Day of Wrath” with “Xerox,” in a cryptic phrase that suggests calamity repeating itself in progressively degraded form, like Marx’s dictum about the revolving door of history as an endless cycle of tragedy and farce. The photocopier reference evokes punk zines, which feels fitting. The album doesn’t sound punk; it’s too elegant for that. But its spirit is evocative of a cut-and-paste Kinko’s missive from the 1990s, juxtaposing contrasting ideas and sources to render its own grim truth in stark black and white.


The Brooklyn-based electro-pop duo follows their 2012 EP Candy Bar Creep Show with a full-length of brooding, rhythmically strong pop songs that fall halfway between the poutiness of Lana Del Rey and the hyperactive fizz of HAIM.

Secondhand Rapture

Before MS MR had written a song, the band already knew how they would initially release their music, conceiving a Tumblr rollout strategy complex enough that Wired first reported it. The project was originally the idea of Lizzy Plapinger, co-founder of boutique NYC pop label Neon Gold, and it was consummated when she started working with producer Max Hershenow. After putting out a few singles under the guise of anonymity, they made music to fit the Tumblr plan in the form of 2012’s Candy Bar Creep Show EP. They put out one song a week, alongside “obsessively curated” images and remix stems.
In his review of Charli XCX’s debut, True Romance, Marc Hogan called for a moratorium on treating internet platforms as musical genres, and rightly so. But even as MS MR break their umbilical connection to Tumblr to release their full-length debut album, they’ve supplemented Secondhand Rapture with what they’re calling “Secondhand Captures”-- a different visual treatment for every song available online; made up of videos of eerie, wretched glamor and corruptible, all-American innocence. MS MR’s desire to give their music a visual analog is interesting, but you wonder about their ability to create a record that can be listened to on its own.
“We both get off on wild weather and write our best music when there’s something crazy happening in the air,” MS MR have said; fittingly, much of Secondhand Rapture revolves around deep, thunderous rumblings, celestial twinkling, foggy shrouds, and the sweet clarity of a pastel dawn. There are brooding, rhythmically strong pop songs that fall halfway between the poutiness of Lana Del Rey and the hyperactive fizz of HAIM. The parts where it deviates from that template, however, are baffling: most notably "Salty Sweet", which has an airy, pumping Middle Eastern-sounding riff, and “Head Is Not My Home”, which revolves around what sounds like a programmed banjo sample. They fit awkwardly amidst the rest of the record.
Plapinger has spoken about not feeling confident about her ability as a lyricist, which works for and against them. At her best, as on the wounded trip-hop-leaning “Hurricane”, she conveys the air of a girl in her mid-to-late teens feeling disillusionment for the first time, mistrustful of herself and others. Songs like “Dark Doo Wop” and “Think of You” make triumphant hooks out of single lines ("Baby, you should stick around” and “I still think of you and all the shit you put me through” respectively, and conversely), the latter in a hi-NRG springy chorus that sticks out like a showgirl in a convent among its plain verses. But elsewhere, as on the rumbling, pastel synth-swathed “Bones”, the words come over as thin and contrived.
The “secondhand” part of the title, the band say, is a reference to how many of our experiences are mediated through the internet rather than direct contact. It’s a concern shared by many of the current class; Drake is terrified of Tumblr, Savages want to smash through mediating devices to live in a present, burning now. MS MR, however, make no attempt to engage with or bristle against the idea, merely representing it. Just as their early release strategy predated the existence of the music itself, these songs play like the moodboard for an actual album, a pitch for the idea of a pop band, rather than one you’d set up a fuckyeah… Tumblr for. MS MR do have one, but it hasn’t been updated in 10 months. It’s all well and good having a pristine launch strategy, but it means nothing if you can’t follow it with something that invites genuine engagement.


The UK goddess of lite pop still sounds serene, unbothered, and preternaturally confident.

Still on My Mind

Six years after her last album, Girl Who Got Away, and 20 years after her ubiquitous debut, No Angel, Dido’s version of pop is still most distinguishable for what it lacks: drama. The London singer may be one of the UK’s best-selling artists of all time, with her keening pop mantras “Thank You” and “White Flag” still reliable soundtracks in Tescos the nation over, but her even-keel approach feels removed from the volatile acrobatics and catharsis of Adele, Amy Winehouse, Ellie Goulding, and her other peers of the past two decades. Her songs still feel like the exhalation after all the action happens; in Dido songs, the tumult has been resolved by the time she records. Her breakup ballads simmer with loss and melancholy, but no regret or indecision; sweeping love anthems have no runway left for the chase, only snug contentment and bright promises to live up to another’s faith. What her music lacks in heat, it makes up for in reliable serenity—the sense that she’s already done her emotional heavy-lifting offstage, and the song she offers is the coda, not the conduit.
It’s extremely mature, in other words—not always the sexiest bait in pop music, but a balm all its own. Dido’s fifth album, Still on My Mind, guides her even more into the path of serenity and easy listening electronics, with odes to marriage and motherhood that bask in their comforts. Her most stunning asset is still her voice—a glossy, palatial purr, fraying at the edges, nodding clearly to Enya and Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries. When she sings of “Hurricanes,” those frightening and upending sources of power, she is really asking to stand by her partner forever, so they might face them together; a delicate, late-’90s synth beat (from her brother and regular collaborator, Rollo Armstrong) offers up a few light gales, but nothing so forceful as the title could conjure.
Soon after, Dido sings her harshest and most jarring lyric: “I’ve found a way to let you go/It’s gonna rip your heart out,” she offers tranquilly, with all the malice of a kitten gif, skipping up into falsetto for a dash of whimsy. (Imagine Eminem, whose sampling of her on “Stan” made her ubiquitous, braying that same line. Marvel that they ever had a conversation, let alone shared a hit song. Let your heart swell to embrace all the gorgeous, absurd potential in this world, and then cap it with the knowledge that Dido named her son Stan.)
Elsewhere, the dance floor beckons: “Take You Home” rides a feathery disco pulse and an undercurrent of rakishness, below the elegant surface: “I can sing you a song, take you home/But I can’t seem to find my own,” Dido sings, unbothered, in a neutral middle register that doesn’t jump octaves or arpeggiate in any of the usual disco conventions. It’s notable that in a dance track, a style that would usually suggest more momentum, Dido’s singing twists in the wind; the passive house-lite backing emphasizes the lack of vocal heat. “Friends,” the other dance track and a confident brush-off to an ex, also simmers with a gentle, proto-“TRL” amiability that sounds more dated than No Angel’s winsome mixes. Plenty of career pop singers have found second lives in house and EDM tracks that amped up their voices with fresh relevance, from Kelly Rowland to Lenny Kravitz and Leona Lewis; when Still on My Mind dips into the dance realm, it suggests Dido could do the same, but she’d need more dynamic backing.
Or maybe the dance tracks don’t land simply because the club is not where Dido wants to be. In Still on My Mind’s closing track, “Have to Stay,” she sounds her most enamored; nearly a capella to open, with just a puff of echo, she sings a delicate, lovely ode to her son, promising that she’ll stick by his side, enduring all his young histrionics and troubles, and leave him only when he’s truly ready, “’cause that’s what love is, darling.” It’s the preternatural certainty Dido shows that really warms the song; on Still on My Mind, more than ever, she presents her convictions fully formed, with a confidence that can feel infectious. Of course her marriage will face storms and come out intact; of course she’ll continue to shun the ghosts of her past, and guide her son towards a bright future. Here she declares it, and so shall it be.


After a run of increasingly fussy, exhausting records, Kevin Barnes has started making direct and inviting music again. Innocence Reaches dips its toe into contemporary EDM.

Innocence Reaches

Kevin Barnes is done chasing listeners away, at least for the time being. After pruning his fan base with a run of increasingly fussy, exhausting records, lately the capricious Of Montreal frontman has been attempting to widen the tent again. 2013’s Lousy with Sylvianbriar was the band’s most inviting effort since their 2007 consensus high watermark Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer, and with its grimy ’70s rock aesthetic and openhearted account of Barnes’ divorce, 2015’s Aureate Gloom was as direct as anything he’d done in a decade. It seems that when Barnes’ personal relationships are in shambles he compensates in the studio by dialing back some of his more alienating impulses, and apparently he’s still reeling from his divorce, because even more so than the last two, the band’s 14th record Innocence Reaches craves approval.
Like most Of Montreal LPs, Innocence Reaches arrives with a hook: It’s the band’s first to dip its toe in contemporary EDM. With its springy, raved-up synths and Calvin Harris tempos, opener “Let’s Relate” teases a spectacular reinvention, while Barnes nods to shifting gender norms with a distinctly 21st century pickup line: “How do you identify?” Challenging gender binaries is nothing new for Barnes, who was prancing around stages in pantyhose back in the mid-’00s, when indie-rock was at its most heteronormative, but the pulsing production seems to invigorate him. He draws out syllables just to savor the moment. Even during his Georgie Fruit phase he rarely sounded quite this liberated.
The electronic makeover is such a flattering look for the band that it’s a shame Barnes didn’t run with it. Though contemporary sounds dot the record, especially the bottom-heavy splatter of “A Sport and a Pastime” and “Trashed Exes,” both of which play like remixes of themselves, Barnes mostly defaults to his go-to muses, Prince and David Bowie, filtering them through his usual prism of funhouse psychedelia. It’s not that any of it misses its mark. “Chaos Arpeggiating” rides a frisky, seriously hummable Ziggy Stardust riff, but we’ve heard Barnes do this kind of thing so many times before, and it sounds that much staler because it follows something we haven’t.
And after a pair of encouraging bounce-back records, Barnes has begun to fall back on some bad habits. Lousy with Sylvianbriar and Aureate Gloom were each recorded with a full band, and Gloom in particular fed on that live energy. The same band is credited on Innocence Reaches, too, but they aren’t nearly the presence here—it sure sounds like Barnes recorded most of it alone, with the same tinker-and-paste ProTools approach that made Paralytic Stalks such a slog. As outgoing as the record tries to be (and it really, really tries), it can’t shake that particular sense of claustrophobia endemic to any full-length where the singer insists on doing his own backing vocals.
That’s one lesson Barnes never learned from Prince or Bowie, both artists who, for all their leading-man charisma, understood the value of collaboration. Each assembled ace bands and made records that felt like group efforts, yet Barnes’ approach is far more rigid. His albums are very much the work and vision of one man, and so even on a relatively easygoing outing like Innocence Reaches, that insularity can grow stifling. It’s as if since Barnes can’t escape his own head, he won’t allow listeners to, either.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review misinterpreted a lyric from the song “Let’s Relate;” it has been amended.


On his latest EP, the Indiana-raised hyperpop upstart takes a step closer toward the mainstream, sharpening his style without losing the irreverence that makes up his volatile vision.

Back in Action EP

Edgar Sarratt III started this year sounding like a scared kid on the bus, unsure of what the future held for him. “I’m twiddling my thumbs, don’t know what comes next,” he sang waveringly on the opening line of  “Final Breath,” the stunning highlight off his SUMMER03 mixtape released back in March. The song’s breezy emo guitar strum, throbbing digicore bass, and heart-pounding drum sticks captured the racing thoughts of the 18-year-old hyperpop breakout; it was an outpouring of self-doubt that zoomed by at breakneck speed.
The South Carolina born, Indiana-raised Sarratt (who goes by midwxst) has become one of hyperpop’s most promising young upstarts. A charismatic vocalist and producer with the ability to fully execute his vision, midwxst has been adept at threading the needle between Juice WRLD-styled emo trap and bass-blasting maximalist pop in the 100 gecs tradition, underlining hyperpop’s indebtedness to Soundcloud rap in the process. While other ascendant hyperpop acts like Glaive have already begun to buff out their songs to the point where they don’t sound terribly different from, well, pop, midwxst has pushed his sound in new directions (even after getting picked up by a major label). On his new EP, Back in Action, he sharpens his flows and trims some of his noisier production back, while still managing to capture the volatile energy that makes him such a compelling voice.
midwxst always feels most at home on candy-colored beats that let him flex his inner nerd. Nowhere is this more obvious than on “Tic Tac Toe,” which comes complete with Super Smash Bros. sound effects and goofy lines like, “Got that yellow on me like I’m Pikachu/And that choppa be blowing like it’s a flute.” midwxst has never hidden the fact that he’s an excitable band kid who was raised on Roblox, and his best tracks course with the kind of nervous excitement you get from cracking the top 10 in Fortnite. “All Talk” ping-pongs about like Bubble Bobble marbles ricocheting off the wall, with midwxst deftly switching between his usual triplet flows and a breathless double-time bridge, even dropping a house bassline in the middle of the verse as if it were nothing. It’s such pure fun that you might not even notice the crushing doubt that seeps into midwxst’s voice halfway through the song: “Never fit in, don’t fit in the classroom; remember hiding from class in the bathroom,” he belts just a moment before singing about hopping back in the Benz for another joyride. In midwxst’s hands, his vulnerability becomes his greatest strength.
Momentum is the name of the game with midwxst, and for the first two thirds of the EP, each track slams into the next, ratcheting up the dial further and further. A long time disciple of Pi’erre Bourne (particularly for his keen sense for smooth track transitions), midwxst experiments with a few Playboi Carti-styled tracks throughout Back in Action, with some landing better than others. The vvspipes-produced “Star” and the ericdoa-featuring “Slide” tap into the same fearsome, teeth-gnashing template that Carti solidified on Whole Lotta Red, a mode that suits midwxst’s maximalist impulses well. The same can’t be said for “LA” and “Made It Back,” whose more mellow, TLOP-y synths leave midwxst out to dry, his effusive vocals limited from being as impactful as they could be.
The EP fires out the gate with plenty of  energy, but by the end you can feel the inevitable sugar crash setting in. It’s refreshing to hear midwxst firmly assert how foundational Soundcloud rap has been to the very soul and language of hyperpop, without losing the charming, open-hearted irreverence that’s made the genre such a breakthrough. On Back in Action, midwxst takes a step closer toward the mainstream, molding the current trends of hip-hop to fit his hyperactive vision. He may have started the year twiddling his thumbs, but now he sounds more confident than ever.
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In the 1980s, the legendary Bay Area composer self-released her first three albums of roving, curious synthesis. Restored and remixed by master engineer Marta Salogni, they’re collected in a new box set.

Pauline Anna Strom: Echoes, Spaces, Lines

Echoes, Spaces, Lines

“My compositions grow as if on canvas,” Pauline Anna Strom once said of her labyrinthine, incandescent music. The San Francisco-based keyboardist was speaking in 1986, when her take on New Age music was still less known, despite three albums already to her name. Trans-Millenia Consort, Plot Zero, and Spectre, released in quick succession in the first half of the ’80s, were rich with undulating, immersive soundscapes inspired by modernists like Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream as much as classical composers like Bach. “I would say my music is virtually dominated by my imagination,” the blind-since-birth musician continued, giving voice to the wellspring of her spacious compositions: a boundless, searching curiosity that touches every part of her music.
The new 4xLP or 4xCD collection Echoes, Spaces, Lines shines a comprehensive spotlight on this period of Strom’s work with reissued versions of those three early albums, plus Oceans of Tears, a previously unreleased album also recorded in the ’80s. The box set follows Angel Tears in Sunlight, the artist’s first LP in over three decades, released posthumously in 2021. Since then, the producer and mixing engineer Marta Salogni, who worked with Strom in her last years, has beautifully restored and remixed Strom’s early work from the original reels. The new compendium, which also marks the release of Strom’s first three albums on streaming, is an essential look at an undersung experimental artist who made strides in the genre ahead of many of her contemporaries.
Listening to Echoes, Spaces, Lines, Strom’s rich musical philosophy quickly comes to light. She used nature, spirituality, and legend as guideposts for her roaming music, transforming those themes into curling synthesizer curios and shadowy, abstract compositions. On her first record, 1982’s Trans-Millenia Consort, Strom was drawn to “the metals of the earth,” a poetic description of the album’s resonant, darkly enchanting glow: Highlight “Cult of Isis” opens gently with twinkling harp and eerie ambient whistles, rising and falling alongside a deep drum pattern that thumps like a heartbeat. “Energies” moves faster, building elusive, gliding ribbons of synth and a polyrhythmic beat into one of her liveliest songs. Strom’s music never shifts or peaks in a predictable manner; instead she takes her time, adding color through slight modulation or unanticipated accents, like the blips of 808 on “The Unveiling.” She created the gorgeous, subaqueous “Emerald Pool” by recording the reverberations of water in a ceramic bowl, then layering the sounds with impressionistic vocal and harp melodies. It’s one of her earliest recordings yet easily one of her most accomplished, establishing a wandering sense of play that typified her work.
For 1983’s Plot Zero, Strom adopted a psychedelic approach and embarked on a “mind trip without chemicals,” as she described the album’s tense, low-frequency vibrations. Here, her music is imbued with a hypnotic warmth that teeters on the brink of darkness. Immersive opener “Mushroom Trip” dances around a tight, tripwire melody and chiming vibrations, lodging in the brain with near-psychotropic force. The tactile approach continues on “Organized Confusion,” whose burbling, droning melodies induce a trancelike sense of hypnosis, and especially “Plot Zero,” a striking composition that opens with cinematic, windswept tones before settling into a mesmerizing, cyclical synth pattern. Plot Zero prompted pushback from some New Age purists who took issue with its drug references, but Strom never swayed. “You look at Plot Zero and the new things that are in my head—that’s not what New Age would’ve wanted,” she said in 2017. Her willingness to break from genre convention allowed new forms to take shape in her music.
Echoes, Spaces, Lines’ reissues conclude with the frostbitten Spectre, released in 1984. Inspired in part by vampire stories, the album wields a pronounced, desolate sound palette. The low, murky tones of “Spatial Spectre” drift like fog over a graveyard in a horror film. Strom even incorporates organ melodies into “Blood Thirst” and “Blood Celebrants,” reshaping the liturgical sound alongside throbbing intonations and cosmic keyboard arpeggios. Even in its darker shades, her music contains an enchanting, roving curiosity, an extension of her seemingly endless imagination.
That mindset is best captured on Oceans of Tears, the previously unreleased record that caps the physical box set. Celestial and contemplative, it’s an astonishing addition to Strom’s catalog that expands on her fascination with the natural world. The languorous “Summer Rain” allows an entrancing theremin and ambient rumbles of thunder to commingle in meditative harmony, while “Ancient Sea Ritual” follows a winding chord along a bottomless underwater path. On the standout “Domestic Peace,” a synth flute trails over quotidian noises that Strom manipulates into a fascinating, shapeshifting piece, amplifying recordings of a cooing baby and plates and cutlery placed on a table—so it would “feel like you were setting that plate down in a vast canyon,” she said. It speaks to Strom’s extraordinary ethos, using everything within her grasp to create intangible beauty. With the lovingly crafted Echoes, Spaces, Lines, Strom’s individualistic art is proven as exquisite now as it was then, speaking a language entirely out of time.


Like her debut, Sarah Beth Tomberlin’s Alex G-produced new EP finds her struggling with abandoning the Baptist church she grew up in. The five songs are so intimate they feel like secrets.

Projections EP

Sarah Beth Tomberlin wrote hushed, trembling songs about leaving behind faith while working 45 hours a week at a Verizon store and living with her parents in rural Illinois; now, she’s been on Kimmel. She quarantined with Busy Phillips. She toured with the revered indie-rock singer-songwriter Alex G, then asked him to co-produce her new project, Projections, which she recorded in his Philadelphia apartment. It’s not quite fame that Tomberlin’s reached, but Projections arrives at a point where she has more exposure than before, when the stakes are higher. This EP feels like a gift: a package of intricate, mesmerizing tracks, so intimate they sound like secrets.
Like her debut At Weddings, the EP finds Tomberlin struggling with abandoning the Baptist church she grew up in.  The most striking song from her past album showed her accepting that hurt was inevitable, that she wanted to stop fearing what she couldn’t control — “To be a woman is to be in pain,” she sang. Tomberlin is often a blunt writer, and Projections is very clear in its premise: she tries to reconcile queerness with her religious past, and to navigate relationships around a sense of impending loss. “It’s all sacrifice and violence/The history of love,” she coos on the opening track, “Hours.” “But remember when we stayed up/And took turns playing songs?”  That mix of profundity — or attempted profundity — with the sweet, banal details of new love is woven throughout the project, and varies in its effectiveness. “When you go you take the sun/And all my flowers die,” she intones awkwardly on “Sin,” redeeming the melodrama with the cutting simplicity of the next line: “So I wait by the window and write some shit and hope that you reply.”
Projections gleams when it zooms in like that, unraveling Tomberlin’s internal monologue. She overthinks through much of these songs. Every rush of an instinct must be processed; every lurch towards love, examined. “The night you asked me to hold your keys/ I felt like you wanted me to leave,” she breathes at the start of “Floor.” She watches her lover sleep as the song continues, but can’t allow herself to enjoy the private comfort of the moment: “I felt the quiet/I tried to try it,” she sings, “But my mind was always running crazy loud.” She juxtaposes every passing tenderness with the religious condemnation she’s internalized.  “I never felt ashamed in your embrace,” she sings on “Hours,” and you understand the negative space around that statement.
The production helps convey that sense that something sinister is looming, tangled in the background of every intimacy. Alex G’s hallmarks are here: the fuzz that swaddles each song, bandmate Molly Germer’s steady, loping violin. Each track is so richly textured that it blossoms beyond—or despite—Tomberlin’s stark writing. There is always a string plucked somewhere in the background, a bass wriggling under a chorus. Percussive flourishes help telegraph the triumph in the EP’s most upbeat moments—“I don’t mind sinning if it’s with you,” Tomberlin sings, and the ricochet of a drum pattern underscores the accomplishment in that statement. “Wasted”  is a soundtrack for mutely punching a fist above your head when your phone glows with a text back from a crush.
There are only five songs on the EP, one of which is a cover of the lo-fi rock band Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Maybe because of that brevity, Projections offers fewer conclusions than at At Weddings. These tracks cut off just as Tomberlin’s decided she’ll try: to show a lover that she’s stronger now, to not require affirmations of affection. “I just wanna be clean,” she moans, six times in a row at the end of “Sin,” and we don’t learn whether she’s found that through her relationships, or if she’s rejected the yearning for purity altogether. But that’s the beauty in these songs, and the growth that gives them momentum — the shards of clarity that come just with accepting love, the power that comes with naming it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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For his latest Tobacco collection, Tom Fec of Black Moth Super Rainbow compiles 24 tracks spanning 2007 to present. They testify to his proficiency as an arranger of queasy electronic psychedelia.

Ripe & Majestic

When Tom Fec, aka Tobacco, first started releasing music under the name Black Moth Super Rainbow in 2003, his approach to building songs out of analog keyboard gear stood out from his contemporaries—including acts with a similar tonal aesthetic, like Boards of Canada. By 2004, in time for the second BMSR full-length Start a People, he added a vocoder effect to his vocals that remains his signature to this day. Almost 15 years later, the queasy, semi-lo-fi, electro-psychedelic alt-hip hop style Fec invented still sounds completely unique. But he hasn’t done himself any favors with albums that sound increasingly half-baked. Even at his most epic, namely BMSR’s sprawling 2007 breakthrough Dandelion Gum, Fec tends to throw songs together without much regard for finessing the flow between tracks.
He has always maintained that BMSR and Tobacco are separate entities—BMSR is the more pop-leaning of the two—but by 2014’s Tobacco album Ultima II Massage, the line had gotten thin. On that album, it was hard to tell the difference between the more traditionally song-oriented style BMSR had evolved into, and the jagged edges that initially set Tobacco apart. Ultima II played like a hodge-podge of leftovers, so it could signal trouble that the latest Tobacco album Ripe & Majestic literally is a hodge-podge of leftovers spanning 2007 to present. It is almost completely devoid of vocals, and only two of its 24 tracks are more recent than 2015, one being an instrumental of a track he gave to rapper Beans, released as “Cemetery Wind.”
Nevertheless, Ripe & Majestic actually flows. This is the first time Fec has recaptured Dandelion Gum’s sense of journeying through a landscape filled with peaks, valleys, and strangely-colored flora. With its synth line that echoes off into the distance, “Octogram” creates a feeling of looking out towards a windswept horizon. It also has an almost identical production style as Dandelion Gum—which is no surprise, since it hails from the same year. But unlike the abrupt, whiplash-inducing stops on previous Tobacco albums, “Octogram” segues seamlessly into “Feels Like Nothing,” a tune from a different period where soft synth chords percolate in an intricate, perfectly woven call-and-response with what sounds like a fingerpicked banjo filtered through light distortion.
Shifting in style and tone ever so slightly from tune to tune, Ripe & Majestic sidesteps the punishing uniformity and sandpaper-y abrasion of last year’s proper Tobacco album, Sweatbox Dynasty. This time, in spite of the usual sophomoric song titles (“Slaughtered by the Amway Guy,” “Hick School,” “Pube Zone”) Fec doesn’t focus so much on obscuring the beauty in his music. “Wig Blows Off,” for example, skips along at a hopscotch cadence, the mood of the synths as sunny and hopeful as that childhood feeling of anticipation on a picture-perfect summer day.
There are even times when Fec finally pushes himself beyond the musical limits that so strongly define him. On “Sassy Ministries” (the aforementioned Beans instrumental), slick keyboards and simulated handclaps show that, when he wants to, Fec is capable of crafting glossy electronica without sacrificing his individuality. And though the moody noise-collage of album closer “Moss Mouth” is 10 years old, it proves how much Fec has grown. Back in 2007, he probably wouldn’t have allowed a percussive thump of static to play out against a heartbeat for four and a half minutes—not without making it painful in some way. This time, his touch is spare and patient. And strangely enough, the lack of vocals on this material highlights what a proficient and attentive arranger Fec has been for a long time now. In spite of his efforts to scuff-up them up, his synths really do sing. A most unlikely late-career coup, Ripe & Majestic lives up to its name.


The Louisiana sludge-metal giants have always professed a fondness for classic grunge; they make good on those influences on a streamlined album that’s also one of their heaviest yet.

Umbilical

Thou have always reveled in misanthropy. Onstage, the band might antagonize a disengaged audience by taunting them, or turning around and ignoring them. In lyric sheets, they paint humankind as a failed endeavor, once full of potential for good but chronically unable to pry itself from pitfalls as old as civilization itself. This outright disdain is one of the few things that Thou will cop to sharing with the Louisiana sludge-metal forebears, like Eyehategod and Crowbar, to whom they’re frequently compared.
Despite obvious similarities in geography, aggression, the lacerating use of guitar feedback, and a stylistic blend of doom metal’s murk and hardcore’s nastiness, Thou have never accepted the sludge mantle. Vocalist Bryan Funck has repeatedly suggested a closer kinship to another decades-old regional scene: Seattle grunge. Thou have amassed a staggering repertoire of grunge covers over the years, and it’s clear that their affinity goes beyond a cheeky fondness for Nirvana. Nevertheless, the band’s own abrasive, atypical, and often meandering compositions can make Funck’s determination to keep sludge at arm’s length seem a little precious. Not even the Melvins at their heaviest have ever sounded a fraction as ugly.
But on Umbilical, Thou make their grunge lineage more explicit while maintaining the intensity of their all-encompassing contempt. “Essentially, it’s a diss record,” Funck said of the album in a recent interview. “But I’m dissing Thou.” He turns the magnifying glass on himself, interrogating the anarcho-DIY ethos he’s held since adolescence against the backdrop of the compromises that Thou have made to further their careers. “Everything you’ve ever done, everything you’ve ever said, everything you’ve ever felt is a dagger on my belt,” he shrieks on “Emotional Terrorist,” before flipping his perspective: “Everything I’ve ever done, everything I’ve ever said, everything I’ve ever felt is a chain around my neck.”
It might seem like this insistent self-loathing calls for Thou’s most gnarled music yet, but instead we get the band at its most streamlined. This is their first album (excepting collaborations) with no tracks over seven minutes, and none of the brief interludes that the band is fond of. Everything is a song, and most of these songs even abide by something close to standard pop structure. Umbilical is no less heavy than any other Thou album—it might be their heaviest yet—but it no longer requires mental gymnastics to call this music grunge. Maybe it’s Alice in Chains starring in The Crow: murdered by a gang and resurrected in ghastlier form to seek vengeance. Maybe it’s Nirvana after Cobain makes a deal with the Devil, surviving the ’90s but cursed to make progressively more fucked-up albums (Umbilical is perhaps two or three iterations past In Utero).
Lead single “I Feel Nothing When You Cry” blusters in with uncharacteristically busy drumming from Tyler Coburn and thick, humid fumes rising from Andrew Gibbs’ and Matthew Thudium’s guitar amps. It sounds like 12 people queuing up “Geek U.S.A.,” all pressing play at once, and feeding the results through a wall of mangled speakers. Umbilical is a faster, hookier version of Thou, more prone to impish check this out feats—like building up to a breaking point in the middle of “I Feel Nothing When You Cry,” stopping on a dime, then shifting the groove and melody ever so slightly—than grimacing I dare you to survive this flagellation. This playfulness extends to lyrical references in unlikely places. The outwardly despondent “I Return as Chained and Bound to You” takes its closing refrain from a Mighty Boosh sketch; on “House of Ideas,” Funck slips in the central line of Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)” right before a crushing breakdown.
Where previous Thou albums gestured at alt-rock tropes with a sense of remove, Umbilical leaves more connective tissue intact. The 2018 Rhea Sylvia EP and 2020’s full-length collaboration with Emma Ruth Rundle, May Our Chambers Be Full, feel like clear predecessors, but their gothic overtones and/or devotion to slower tempos ensured different results than Umbilical’s pulse-quickening anthems. Low-slung, Cantrellian riffs like those on “The Promise” aren’t alien territory for Thou, but the fact that they’re delivered at 120 BPM alongside a hummable vocal hook is a welcome surprise.
For all of Thou’s provocation, experimentation, and obfuscation, it’s not like they’ve ever been a difficult band to enjoy. Maybe their most accurate grunge analog is Pearl Jam, whose refusal to play by the rules outlined by MTV and Ticketmaster belied their identity as one of the poppiest, most earnest bands of the genre’s first wave. Thou are a blast even when Funck is digging into esoteric philosophy over the slowest riff you’ve ever heard, but it’s refreshing to hear them get real with themselves, jogging their music out of the enthralling but insular world they’ve created over the past 15-plus years. No one is ever going to accuse Thou of selling out. They’ve put in the work; they deserve to have some fun.


For her third album, the Swedish singer and multi-instrumentalist Anna von Hausswolff made a pilgrimage to the city of Piteå, home to the Acusticum Pipe Organ. The collection transforms the instrument, regarded by many as one of the stuffiest in music, into a lusty, lustrous marvel.

The Miraculous

Growing up in Gothenburg, Sweden, the Swedish singer and multi-instrumentalist Anna von Hausswolff occasionally retreated—as so many kids do—to her own alternate dimension. Like all fanciful realms, this hallowed spot, deemed "the miraculous place", honed the young von Hausswolff’s imagination like a gym for the mind. "The border between fantasy and reality was so blurred," she recently told the Quietus. As the former monarch of the woods across the street from my elementary school, I can attest to this sensation: there’s something about self-created folklore that sharpens the spirit like no other exercise can, and one could argue that such myths lay at the heart of not just childhood, but human experience as a whole.
To craft her third full-length LP—so named for her special place—von Hausswolff made a pilgrimage to the city of Piteå, home to the Acusticum Pipe Organ. One of the largest instruments of its kind in that region, it is equipped with 9,000 pipes, built-in percussion (including vibraphone and glockenspiel), recording/looping tools, and nefarious sounds produced by submerging the pipes halfway underwater. If von Hausswolff’s wanderlust is the soul of The Miraculous, then the Acusticum is its gothic, frequently grotesque heart, its mechanical pulse tempered by the organic approach of the musician's four-piece backing band.
Consider The Miraculous’ universe a carnal Camelot, not far removed from the fucked-up mythologies of Angela Carter or George R.R. Martin. There’s no Ren-Faire tackiness, though; rather, the LP bridges high fantasy with human emotion, as the opening line of "The Hope Only of Empty Men" attests: "I think I see a knight/ I’m gonna fuck him for a while." Considering the religious contexts in which we’re used to hearing the organ, such lines seem downright heretical, and that’s exactly the point: The Miraculous transforms an instrument regarded by many as one of the stuffiest in music into a lusty, lustrous marvel.
For instance, the Swans-reminiscent highlight "Come Wander With Me / Deliverance" pits the puritanical pipes against a pair of droning guitars and an aqueous wail created through the aforementioned pipe-submerging method. It’s a battle that ends with a noise-ridden reunion, the marriage of sacred and profane. There’s darkness embedded within the songs’ dynamics as well; as Von Hausswolff lets out an ascendant wail at the start of "Evocation", the pipes swell up around her like the nightmarish offspring of a THX sound test, imbuing the musician's corporeal angst with divine strength.
There’s nothing wrong with a good glacial pace, but Von Hausswolff’s slowly unfurling arrangements, as well as her reliance on the organ as the primary rhythmic vehicle, occasionally make the record tough sledding. The album’s meandering latter half proves dull: "En Ensam Vandrare" and the title track drift along like flotsam on a lazy river, doing little to command the listener’s attention. Like most stories, The Miraculous take a few retellings for its ultimate magic—invigorating contrasts, medieval madness, and von Hausswolff’s role as foul-mouthed, fantastical raconteure—to sink in. Nevertheless, this is a dimension worth thorough investigation.


Setting doomy lyrics atop blissful melodies and wispy psychedelic production, Kevin Barnes’ latest album wields his habitual twee escapism like a shield.

UR FUN

Children born the year Of Montreal released their debut album have been breezing into American bars with their government-issued IDs for two years now. The psychedelic pop project helmed by Kevin Barnes came into its stride during the indie surge of the early aughts, when widespread twee escapism offered an out from the horrors of the news under the second Bush administration. Few darlings of that era have clung to its aesthetics as stubbornly as Barnes, who injects a surfeit of color into even his most morose undertakings. He has brewed up a storm of music over the past two decades, and while plenty of it is forgettable, hardly any is drab. Cycling through galvanizing Prince shrieks, Bowie-worshipping hooks, and feathery Beach Boys harmonies, Barnes keeps his ear trained on the most exuberant characters in pop music’s past. His latest, UR FUN, keeps the party going, even if it often sounds more like a patchwork of soft-boiled singles than an album with a cohesive narrative arc.
At their best, Of Montreal force a study in contrasts. Barnes is prone to sending doomy lyrics soaring atop blissful melodies nested in wispy psychedelic production. Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?, a peak in his abundant discography, was a breakup record disguised as a rollicking (if frantic) good time, a testament to the way that anxiety and self-doubt can jolt a grieving person out of stasis. Its joyful moments teetered on the edge of collapse, and its bouts of melancholy were buoyed by unlikely optimism. UR FUN, by contrast, tunes its antennae to romantic love in a time of overarching social precarity. Barnes still lets nervousness guide his hand, but the stakes are muddled, as is the story. In the foreground, everything’s peachy: Barnes is stably attached and eager to sing his devotion. In the background, everything threatens to go to shit, though the specifics are generally vague.
UR FUN dashes Barnes’ signature cheekiness against a backdrop of ’80s bubblegum, a format that reins in his more freewheeling tendencies. Lyrically, he reaches as ever for big concepts: “We know the universe/Must express itself as awful people, too/So we really just feel sad for you,” he chirps on “Peace to All Freaks,” seeking kernels of godliness in the trolls and fascists of the world, then dismissing them as best he can with a slight wave of pity. These clever lines rarely get space to breathe, though—UR FUN’s arrangements are so tidy, so pruned, that Barnes doesn’t give himself the opportunity to go out on many limbs.
A faithful chameleon, Barnes manages a canned Bowie impression on “Don’t Let Me Die in America,” and even strays into electroclash with “Get God’s Attention by Being an Atheist,” whose chorus (“We don’t give a fuck/We want it louder”) gestures more toward exhaustion than rebellion. Turning up the noise to drown out the horror might work well enough as a short term survival strategy, but it can’t do much more than seal its practitioners away, offer shelter at the expense of connection. UR FUN—a confection, a distraction, a collection of competent and sparkling pop songs—doesn’t open itself to the world as it stands in this moment. With his sardonic wit and sharp ear, Barnes insulates himself from the dreck rather than trudge through it. Armored, he deflects his surroundings. He blisses out until he starts to go numb.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Indiana shoegaze trio returns with a songs-first, vibes-second concept album that’s both punchy and immersive.

Cloakroom: Dissolution Wave

Listening to Cloakroom can feel like submerging yourself in an isolation tank. The riffs swallow you whole; the spectral vocals dance behind your eyelids; the sedate tempos distort your sense of time. More than any of their heavy shoegazing contemporaries, the Indiana three-piece subsists on all-consuming atmosphere, which is partially why the “doomgaze” tag, referencing the slower, thicker end of the metal spectrum, has stuck. Maintaining an intoxicating environment for an entire album is a powerful feat, but it’s also a big ask of the listener—it doesn’t lend itself to dipping a toe in and splashing around a bit.
Dissolution Wave, the follow-up to 2017’s Time Well, is a less daunting listen despite its heady themes. It is a concept album about the aftermath of a catastrophic global event that destroys all of Earth’s existing art and philosophy. This, for some reason, results in a world that runs on music—but not just any music. Something called the “Spire and Ward of Song” acts as a filter that only allows the “best material” to pass through and power Earth’s rotation. Throughout the album, vocalist/guitarist Doyle Martin sings from the perspective of an asteroid miner who spends his free time writing music, honing his craft to aid his planet’s survival. While some artists rely on A&Rs, friends, or their own ears to decide which songs are album-worthy, Cloakroom constructed a theoretical framework worthy of an Ursula K. Le Guin novel to get into a “bangers only” mentality.
No lyrics sheets or in-depth interviews, however, are necessary to hear how the structural conceit affected their work. At just 37 minutes, Dissolution Wave is Cloakroom’s shortest album by far, dwarfed by the hour-long Time Well. And while the band’s signature sound is intact, these songs arrive at their climaxes more efficiently and offer more variance in pacing, volume, and tone. The opening “Lost Meaning” sets the scene with a single snare hit and a perfectly timed squeal of distortion, and boom, we’re in the thick of the first verse. The subtle tweaks and tightenings make for a punchy album that still feels immersive.
The central braintrust of Martin and bassist Bobby Markos is joined by a new drummer, Tim Remis, whose propulsive but unshowy style recalls the jump in dynamics that stoner metal titans Sleep found with Neurosis’ Jason Roeder behind the kit. And while Cloakroom and Sleep share a penchant for exploring a single mood for extended periods of time, Cloakroom have grown increasingly interested in broadening their sound with acoustic guitars and synthesizers. On Dissolution Wave, Markos and Martin integrate those textures into the bedrock of heavy guitar and bass tones that they’ve spent 10 years honing. “Fear of Being Fixed” begins with a jagged bassline straight out of Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone, but in its heaviest moment, opts for a stately acoustic guitar to lead the charge. “Doubts,” the loveliest song Cloakroom have ever written, could pass for a decades-old country ballad were it not for the wispy keys (courtesy of Hum’s Matt Talbott) drifting by like soft-focus tumbleweeds.
The “space western” storyline of Desolation Waves inspires Cloakroom to write songs like the world depends on it: They’ve always had riffs, but they no longer seem content to ride them out until the wheels fall off. This is a songs-first, vibes-second album, although Cloakroom have spent so long perfecting their sound that it now comes second nature, no matter how concise or clear-headed the songwriting has become. Martin’s lyrics directly address this challenging balance, albeit from the perspective of an amateur musician trying to cobble together a new musical language, a process so delicate he compares it to “bottling lightning beams.” On “Doubts,” he debates the merits of tried-and-true methods versus complete artistic reinvention: “Maybe I should cherish the gift/Maybe I should smash the mirror to bits.” Settling for the middle ground, Dissolution Wave crystallizes Cloakroom’s strengths while refuting the idea that concept albums are always bloated and pretentious.

Buy: Rough Trade


On the follow-up to 2010's Hidden Lands, certifiable hippies Candy Claws maintain their wondrous perspective with a narrative about a seal-like beast and her human partner questing through the Mesozoic Era, and strengthen their dreamy songs with more definition and structure.

Candy Claws: Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time Forever

If you want to call Candy Claws a bunch of hippies, they don’t have much of a defense-- they live in Fort Collins, Col., a college town in a state that legalized recreational marijuana, and about 98% of their Twitter account is dedicated to documenting the boundless beauty of Mother Earth. On their last album, 2010's Hidden Lands, the music refracted early Animal Collective and late Mercury Rev through a reverbed cloudbank and they generated lyrics by refracting the words of Richard M. Ketchum's The Secret Life of the Forest through a translation program. Their new LP is not only granted the title Ceres & Calypso in the Deep Time, it’s also "the story of Ceres, a seal-like beast, and Calypso, her human partner, as they travel through the Mesozoic Era." Oh, and each of the band's three members plays a different character, with leader Ryan Hover as "The Deep Time." When they give a rare interview, Hover might say something like, “We just say [we're] Dream Pop because I’m a dinosaur from the Cretaceous Period dreaming I’m a human in a band in 2013.” Trippy.
But they are an actual dream-pop band on Ceres, as the most notable additions Candy Claws have made since Hidden Lands are definition and structure; while maintaining the same wondrous perspective and amorphous textures, these are more likely to be considered “songs” than soundscapes. And it turns out Candy Claws have a knack for pop construct, as “Transitional Bird (Clever Girl)” and “White Seal (Shell & Shine)” boast swelling, immediate psych rock hooks that bloom from their earthy verses, countering the unwieldiness of their titles. It allows them a proper showcase for their unusual, intuitive melodic sense-- their chord progressions are deliberate and surefooted, but each turn tends to take a step or two beyond what’s expected. It’s either the result of super-advanced knowledge of music theory or none at all; considering Candy Claws made it a point to create Hidden Lands on instruments with which they had no formal training whatsoever, it must be the latter.
Whereas Hidden Lands defied definition and either drew you in from the beginning or not at all, Candy Claws’ disparate interests are allowed to exist as individual tracks here, creating numerous re-entry points and strange innovations: spaghetti western with a 90% chance of rain, the tropical psych adventures of Os Mutantes relocated to the bedroom of a landlocked teen. Often, Ceres sounds like the first legitimately happy shoegaze record. “Birth of the Flower (Seagreen)” is something like My Bloody Valentine performing “To Here Knows When” at an island resort.
Yet the same fanciful approach to the actual, physical recording of the music doesn’t do Ceres justice. It’s an immersive listening experience, but also a claustrophobic one. There’s flow, though a curious lack of dynamics as so much of it is taken up by midrange. The layers upon layers of whispering vocals and airy synths turns Ceres into a surprisingly loud and brittle listen, a brickwall covered in gauze. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking to imagine Dave Fridmann or Ben H. Allen taking a flier on these guys and rounding out the low end, after helping Flaming Lips, MGMT, Youth Lagoon and Washed Out fuse nature-boy naivety with studio nerd fervor into something festival-ready. But on the other hand, Ceres could’ve just easily benefited from a more holistic production along the lines of Animal Collective ca. Sung Tongs, stripping away the reverb and countermelodies to let things breathe.
Ceres & Calypso is certainly one of 2013’s more unique records, which is even more impressive considering how many of its precedents and peers are some of indie rock’s more populist acts. It’s a strange situation where you wish they treated their passions more like a career-- the leap in songwriting promises an advance, but the decision to record it in the same way as the billowing, freeform Hidden Lands makes it feel like a missed opportunity. It all leads to Ceres & Calypso feeling like concrete evidence of their hippie cred, chock full of fantastic ideas and lacking just enough follow through.


Once a player with acts such as Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti, Cass McCombs, and Deerhoof, Chris Cohen's solo debut is pleasingly blurry on where and when it's supposed to feel beamed from, an effect aided by his cracked, spidery guitars, grand pianos, and Ray Davies croon.

Overgrown Path

Chris Cohen has played with a series of high-profile indie acts, including Haunted Graffiti, Cass McCombs, and Deerhoof, and Overgrown Path, his first solo album, has the unified feel of a stash of songs that he's been sitting on for years. Sunlit, pastoral, and serenely strange, it feels like something unearthed by an enterprising reissue label like Light in the Attic, rather than a brand-new record on Captured Tracks. It's a gentle listen-- the snare drum doesn't receive a lot of attention, and is tapped rather than struck when it does. The pace never ventures beyond mid tempo. But as a whole, it glows with easy comfort, and its wistfulness deepens with repeated listens.
Like his former bandleader Ariel Pink, Cohen bends the reality of his pop-culture references so that his music both begs for and resists carbon-dating. Overgrown Path is pleasingly blurry on just where and when it's supposed to feel beamed from: Does it feel like a singer-songwriter record from the 1970s? Some lost psychedelic-era curiosity? Village Green-era Kinks? A forgotten 1980s jangle-rock band? At various points, I felt certain of each. But unlike Pink, Cohen isn't out to discomfort or unsettle you: He mostly just wants to build a soothing space away from the world for a while, a place where head can breathe and his loneliness can find some room to expand. The time-warp in his music is just a way to cover his tracks.
In fact, Overgrown Path is made of only comforting sounds: cracked, spidery guitars, grand pianos, reverb haze, and Cohen's little Ray Davies croon. Cohen's voice is frail, but uncommonly beautiful, and capable of reaching into a weightless falsetto. The album's title, which suggests cozy remoteness, a time-neglected spot worth rediscovering, strongly reinforces this vibe: This is music to get lost to. Listening to its nine songs on repeat, I was strongly hit with the urge to pad around my home in socks, maybe brew some tea.
Cohen recorded nearly all the instruments parts alone in rural Vermont, and, as a musician, he has extraordinary rapport with himself. The loose Ringo-like tumble of the drum fills on "Caller No.99", its stair-step bassline, the drowsy tangle of wah-wah'ed and clean-toned guitars-- the elements fall into place so easily that it just feels like the dynamic of an expert, veteran band. The fact that it's all Cohen speaks volumes. "Monad" opens in arresting harmonic limbo, a soup of pedal-steeped piano and an uneasily questioning bassline, before easing into smoother, jazzy AM-pop territory. The transition feels like an exhalation.
As frontman to his one-man band, Cohen has a gentle, lost soul's sad-eyed presence: "Peace in life I try to find/ It eludes me another time," he sings on "Open Theme", in a croon so tender it could soothe a colicky newborn. The chorus is a lament about directionlessness that feels dredged from an old folk ballad: "I have pushed a broken wheel." Similarly, "Don't Look Today" pines for "some place you couldn't get to." Cohen crossed the country, from L.A. to Vermont, to record this music of dislocation, and Overgrown Path is darkened with small shadows that suggest a hard-won peace of mind. On "Solitude", he sings: "Sunrise, sunset/ Where I am at this moment/ Is the same as yesterday/ I travel out and the life is so different/ No shadows in the way." Cohen might have made the album for himself as a keepsake, an antidote to the rest of life's pressing noise. It works that way for us, as well.


Expansive (and sadly complete) six-disc set collects 24 four-song Peel Sessions, featuring nearly every incarnation of Mark E. Smith's legendary band.

The Fall: The Complete Peel Sessions, 1978-2004

The Complete Peel Sessions, 1978-2004

The most poignant aspect of this six-disc set is that it is now a document of the past, a finite thing that can no longer be built upon. When the Fall and their labels began work on the compilation, this was not the case-- at that time, it was a document of a living, ongoing relationship between one of Britain's greatest bands and its most legendary DJ, John Peel. But Peel passed away last year, ending a seemingly effortless decades-long run as one of the coolest people on earth, and this six-disc document of his favorite band's appearances on his show instead serves as a sort of encomium. It's at once a tribute to the brilliance of Mark E. Smith and his "always different, always the same" band, and to the dedication of a man who never stopped being a fan and never stopped loving new and challenging music.
The Fall recorded 24 four-song sessions for Peel over the course of 26 years, capturing nearly every one of the band's many configurations in all their sloppy precision, and this sprawling, amazing release makes the case that every one of them had at least something interesting to offer, including the less-appreciated Fall line-ups of the mid-to-late-90s. The case could even be made that this is the definitive look at the Fall's career to date-- even more than last year's very well-considered 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong compilation. Of course, at six discs and more than seven hours, it's not the place to start, but anyone with more than four or five Fall albums would be doing themselves a huge service picking this up.
To touch on all of the highlights, I'd have to devote a full paragraph to each individual session included on the set, so let's just say that this thing is absolutely loaded, with performances that frequently eclipse the studio versions. The 1980 version of "New Face In Hell" is thunderous and Smith's cracking, hysterical vocal is hilariously psychotic-- the band's oft-hidden sense of humor easy to spot. Smith actually laughs on "Beatle Bones 'n' Smokin' Stones", and the band's December 1994 piss-take on "Jingle Bell Rock" is a case study in sarcastic destruction.
Elsewhere, you get two 1983 sessions from the band's mighty double-drummer lineup and a generous offering from the unstoppable mid-80s lineup that produced This Nation's Saving Grace and the Wonderful & Frightening World of the Fall. The TNSG songs hit like a hammer to the head, with a borderline out-of-control take on "Spilt Victorian Child" (my favorite Fall song) and a crunching, hypnotic reinvention of "L.A." leading the way. As one might expect, the first three discs, which reach up through 1987, are the strongest and most consistent, with the last three discs veering through ever more rapid line-up shifts and wider stylistic ground.
What's shocking is the way those last three discs paint a picture of the band's late career as nearly as vital as what preceded it. Fiddler Kenny Brady brings a stronger melodic underpinning to the 1989 and 1991 recordings, without compromising the band's signature rough groove, while some of the band's more electronic 90s material comes off much rawer and crunchier in the live setting. "Immortality" in particular becomes fire-breathing, heavy death funk of a caliber the Fall only sporadically achieved in the studio during that phase of their career.
The Complete Peel Sessions, 1978-2004 is one of the most straightforward titles a Fall compilation has ever had, and the execution of the package is similarly no-nonsense: The recordings are sequenced in strict chronological order and the remastering is uniformly crisp and sharp, something that's not always the case with retrospectives of this band. It's an embarrassment of riches for the Fall's devoted cult of fans, none of whom should pass this up, and it works surprisingly well for more casual fans who've only just begun to delve into the band's bewildering back catalog.


Another in a series of jittery, post-Supergrass rockers, this young UK band released an excellent 2007 single, "The Next Untouchable", and now follows that with a Bernard Butler-produced debut album.

The Colourful Life

Bernard Butler produced the Libertines' first single, "What a Waster". Six years later, the former Suede guitarist and co-songwriter has become a producer of choice for aspiring NME pinups. Butler totally deserves his status as Britpop legend, but his recent reemergence was anything but preordained. Aside from his short-lived 2005 reunion with Brett Anderson as the Tears, Butler's post-Suede output has tended to be, at best, unexceptional. His production credits-- including the 1990s' Cookies, Sons & Daughters' This Gift, and the Veils' Runaway Found, but also Black Kids' Partie Traumatic and Duffy's Rockferry-- have been similarly scattershot.
Black Kids have a handful of good songs, all of which sound simply inept rather than charming on the album. London five-piece Cajun Dance Party are better off-- they only have one good one! And it's better suited to the sort of rollicking, punched-up production Butler gave the Libs or the 1990s. Cajun Dance Party released first single "The Next Untouchable" last year, when the group's members were all younger than 18; the song's snakelike guitar riff combines with Daniel Blumberg's pinched, impassioned cries to overcome unremarkable boy-girl lyrics ("Do you really like me?/ 'Cause 1 and 1 and 1 makes 3"). Another jittery post-Supergrass rocker, it loses less than "I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You" when Butler polishes off the appealingly rough edges.
The rest of The Colourful Life is, ahem, less colorful. Most of the blame shouldn't go to Butler, but to these not-so-ragin' non-Cajuns. There are many reasons critics tend to adore the Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner, and one is that he doesn't write songs like this album's sunny opener (and second single), "Colourful Life", which cautions, "Don't crush the bird just for fun/ Because that's not fun for everyone." Another single, "The Race", exerts a great deal of Arctics-like energy answering an age-old question: If the sun rises and no one's around, does it still rise? (Um, yes.) And Blumberg's breathy whisper-to-shout antics quickly grow old, particularly on the "Creep"-aping coda of "Buttercups" or the empty, Travis-like melodrama of "Time Falls", which fails despite mentioning a wildebeest.
Not that Butler completely evades responsibility. The sentimental strings draping "Yesterday"-style ballad "No Joanna" don't make up for its fundamental silliness and ethereal moaning that must have Jeff Buckley rolling in his (watery?) grave. Nor do they help second single "Amylase", which opens with a suspiciously Go! Team- or Black Kids-like group chant of "1, 2-- 1, 2, 3, 4!", has big bendy Oasis guitar bits, and is disappointingly nothing like "Animal Nitrate". That's from Suede, dudes.
This slight album's ninth and final track, "The Hill, the View, and the Lights", is pleasant but befuddling, with keyboardist Vicky Freund briefly turning things into a Neko Case gothic fairytale as she gets her first turn on lead vocal. Earlier, within dud "The Firework", Blumberg sings, "This is now and that was then," a cliché that means no more on The Colourful Life than it does here. One thing Cajun Dance Party's future selves have going for them, though: They aren't called Beirut.


With actorly affect and an Orbinsonesque croon, the New Zealand singer-songwriter uses the bright, artificial gloss of 1980s pop to evoke an uncanny, self-protective brand of masculinity.

My Boy

Marlon Williams’ music is debonair and elegant, performed with the countenance of an old-school crooner. But focus too hard on the timelessness of it—the rubbery, Orbisonesque tremble to his voice, the rollick and swing of his saloon-ready band—and you might miss an occasional wink or fourth-wall break: a sly acknowledgement that there’s something ridiculous, almost, about someone from Lyttelton, New Zealand, taking on the posture of a country troubadour. Williams’ actorly affect hardly diminishes the weight of his songs, though: 2018’s Make Way For Love, his second solo record, was a dark, magnificently bruised album about a fractured relationship. What better way to deal with catastrophic heartbreak than to pretend you’re just singing the classics?
On My Boy, his third record, Williams largely steps away from country, but he’s still acting. Drawing from 1970s and ’80s soft pop, he sketches out stories of damaged and dysfunctional men: two-timers trying to evade commitment, lecherous reply guys, high-functioning cocaine addicts. Much like Alex Cameron or the Weeknd, he uses the bright, artificial gloss of ’80s pop to evoke masculinity’s uncanny, self-protective qualities—the way it crystallizes weakness and vulnerability into something impermeable and cool. And, like Cameron in particular, Williams sometimes confuses gory details for satire or genuine insight.
In its weaker moments, My Boy can feel like a collection of signifiers in search of meaning. “Soft Boys Make the Grade,” the flimsiest song here, deploys the same kind of overwritten male-manipulator parody that tends to bounce around on social media. The song’s lyrics—“Coulda wrote it all down in a letter/But here I am in your DMs”—have no weight to them, nothing to offer besides the hammy, totally unsubtle subtext: It’s funny because I’m the opposite of this. The perplexing “Morning Crystals,” seemingly written from the point of view of a drug user, counters its easy ’70s lope with manic passages (“Hey hey, I’m gonna do a spin/Hey hey, I’m gonna twist and shout”) that ostensibly signal come-ups. But like “Soft Boys Make the Grade,” the track comes to a conclusion that’s seemingly bereft of interiority: “Morning crystals are all that I see/Soon it will be too late/And morning crystals will seal my fate.”
Williams is at his best when he’s being gestural, as opposed to literal. The lovely title track ambles forward, fueled by a sun-dappled Māori strum, its lyrics giving off a paternal radiance that matches the production: “He’s all to me and more/Nothing can touch my boy.” The same warmth comes through on “Easy Does It,” a love song to a faraway friend written with gentle fondness, the kind of unassuming affection rarely put in song.
These songs, in particular, sound gorgeous: The production, handled by Williams along with Tom Healy and Mark Perkins, aka Merk, feels dazed and nostalgic, a smeary mix of Pasefika pop and indie country that’s warm and incredibly detailed. My Boy is filled with almost imperceptible production choices, such as the faint, grunting exhales in the background of “Easy Does It,” that give the album a depth and humor Make Way for Love didn’t necessarily have. Even when My Boy leaves this zone, as on the anthemic, anxious “Thinking of Nina,” a song inspired by the TV show The Americans, the production feels grounded in the same universe as the rest of the record. It’s easy to be skeptical of “going ’80s” as a concept, now that nearly every indie rocker has tried it, but Williams only indulges in full-blown synth pyrotechnics when it’s warranted. Ultimately, that’s what saves My Boy: Even when his lyrics don’t land, Williams’ musical intuition is hard to beat.