Martin Gore of Depeche Mode's new solo album is an all-synthesizer affair, and in its restraint and its moodiness, it turns inward, not outward.  To listen to it feels a little like eavesdropping on someone else's thoughts.

MG

The best bits on Depeche Mode's 2013 album Delta Machine were the intros. Once the songs got underway, the band mostly just went through the motions, dutifully recreating the same arena-ready hooks and overblown saints-and-sinners metaphors they've been dealing in for decades. But for a few sweet seconds before the bombast began, there was just the zap and gurgle of Martin Gore's synthesizers.
For anyone who heard the distant promise of a far different, more interesting record in those moments, you're in luck: Gore's new solo album is an all-synthesizer affair. No guitars, no drums, no blues riffs, and, most important of all, no vocals—which means no tangled religious conceits, no BDSM analogies, no rhyming "soul" with "control." Gore has done solo records before—1989's Counterfeit EP and 2003's Counterfeit 2, both collections of synth-pop covers of songs by Nick Cave, Lou Reed, Vini Reilly, et al—and he's done instrumental electronic music in his duo VCMG, with his onetime bandmate Vince Clarke, later of Yazoo and now Erasure. But MG is something new. These are sketches rather than songs, and, unlike VCMG's visceral, sternum-punching, 10,000-watt techno throb, they're designed mostly to fade into the background.
Some tracks feature subtle beats, but for the most part this is ambient music the way Brian Eno envisioned it, as a kind of sonic wallpaper. That's no slight: the record's low stakes help make evident what it excels at, which is sound design—a careful sculpting of electricity and air. It feels less like fine art than exceptional craftsmanship, but that's OK; the world needs beautifully thrown pots as much as it needs Picassos.
A few tracks here began life as demos for Delta Machine; Gore finished MG in 2013, after the band finished touring. He recorded it in his home studio on, principally, a modular synthesizer system. Modular systems are something like the Legos of electronic music: Users build their own, custom synthesizers by patching together various devices into mazelike configurations, the functionality of which is often pretty fuzzy even to the person cabling them together. That unpredictability is important: it means that the process of wiring things together is largely inseparable from the process of composition. It is experimental in the most basic sense—Let's see what happens when we plug this into this—and that sense of curiosity is at the heart of MG. It sounds pretty much like what it is—someone alone in the studio at night, twisting knobs, feeling his way gingerly along the signal chain. In both its restraint and its moodiness, it turns inward, not outward. To listen to it feels a little like eavesdropping on someone else's thoughts.
Gore has described the album as "kind of atmospheric and filmic," and he's right; it would be easy to imagine almost anything here working as a soundtrack cue. The average track length is around three minutes, just long enough for an idea to blossom and shrivel, like a flower in time-lapse. The gnarled arpeggios and general menace of tracks like "Spiral" and "Stealth" recall Nine Inch Nails' Hesitation Marks, while elsewhere the album suggests a grittier, more minimalist answer to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' soundtrack to The Social Network. And it's impossible not to think of Tangerine Dream and Vangelis in the context of the album's most dramatic tracks. "Crowly", with its slow, stately melody, is a gleaming hovercraft of a tune, pretty clearly modeled after the Blade Runner soundtrack, and the closing track, "Blade", doesn't even try to hide its inspiration, as augmented chords dissolve into fizzy streamers.
For all the album's modest ambitions, it doesn't lack for variety. "Pinking", which opens the album, is the lone track to feature something like vocals, in the form of the gauzy choral pads familiar from New Order's Power, Corruption & Lies. It's a wisp of a thing—just two-and-a-half minutes of harpsichord-like chimes and celestial sighs. It would be easy to imagine it as the basis of a Depeche Mode song, and who knows, it might have made a great one. But it's pretty much perfect as it is. Too much music is led astray by its creators' attempts to add more; the great beauty of MG is that at a certain point while he was plugging in cables and twisting knobs, Gore simply said, "Enough," and it was.


The latest album from the Japanese shoegaze band shimmers with restless yearning, a sense of wonder kicking like a fluttering heartbeat in the chest.

Hotel Insomnia

You could characterize the sound of For Tracy Hyde as cinematic, breathless, love-at-first-sight dream pop, with a seamless melding of influences from Shibuya-kei to shoegaze to grunge. But there’s something more difficult to describe at the heart of the young Tokyo band. Azusa Suga (alias Natsubot) serves as the band’s primary songwriter, lyricist, and guitarist, and his history colors the group’s latest record, Hotel Insomnia. Suga grew up in the States, and the specter of American suburbia lingers in the background of the record like a mirage. Previous albums Ethernity, New Young City, and he(r)art shimmered with nostalgia, but the collage of ’90s influences on Hotel Insomnia feels more connected to the past than ever before.
Beyond writing for and producing a large quantity of modern Japanese shoegaze—RAY, Dots, AprilBlue, and even pop artists like Niiyama Shiori—Suga’s hitmaking process has produced a decade of dense, captivating music under For Tracy Hyde. The band has built a reputation for twee jangle pop, but Hotel Insomnia leans further toward the grunge coarseness of bands like Catherine Wheel or Chapterhouse than the gauzier Pains of Being Pure at Heart. These influences lend a heavier, more opaque sound, partly ushered in by Ride’s Mark Gardener, who mastered the album. And in between Hotel Insomnia dense, exuberant wall-of-sound are interstitial spaces and things left unspoken. The characters never intersect at the right times; “Subway Station Revelation” breathes longing across a backdrop of an overstimulating, transitory subway station, while the love interest at the center of “Lungs” is defined by her namelessness. From the thoughtful whimsy of “Natalie” to the tremendous “Lungs” and “Estuary,” Hotel Insomnia has a restless yearning, a sense of wonder kicking like a fluttering heartbeat in the chest.
For Tracy Hyde’s ambitious, always nearly hour-long albums, have a tendency toward drifting in the third act. Here, the band’s focus unspools between “Friends,” its melody sweet but jejune and formulaic, and “House of Mirrors,” with an incongruous rapping section that marks it as the album’s most bizarre experiment. The longing, spirited vocals of Eureka, who joined the group in 2015, breathe life into tracks like “Estuary,” but she often capitulates to the instrumentals, like how her delivery melts too thinly into the chorus of “The First Time (Is the Last Time).” The record’s end, however, whirls back to life; “Milkshake” and “Subway Station Revelation” are among the best tracks of For Tracy Hyde’s career and standouts in modern shoegaze.
Other For Tracy Hyde releases were gorgeous concept records, coursing through cinematic stories; the otherworldly New Young City opens with a retro movie company jingle, and he(r)art’s cover is formatted like an enticing movie poster. After a decade of these narratives, however, Natsubot has grown tired of the band’s usual modus operandi, instead deciding to “create a playlist rather than a story” with Hotel Insomnia. But there’s no less effort put into For Tracy Hyde’s magic: Each song resides in its own world, individual and distinct both in image and sound. In Natsubot’s search for a world that no longer exists, these tracks race through hotel-hallway liminality—in mirrors, or the almost warm space someone once was. Its sound is dreamlike, but Hotel Insomnia feels clear and vivid.


Modern Baseball's Holy Ghost asks for difficult things out of its audience—space, patience and acceptance—but demonstrates them as a band with an undeniable sonic ambition and social conscience.

Holy Ghost

Modern Baseball became a popular band writing songs about Facebook and Instagram and emulating the selective communication of those social media platforms: revealing personal minutiae without ever having to be vulnerable. Throughout 2012’s Sports and 2014's You’re Gonna Miss It All, Jake Ewald and Brendan Lukens sang mostly about girls, social insecurity, and punk rock hypocrisy—nothing that the average person in their audience hadn’t experienced themselves.
Since then, Modern Baseball have unexpectedly evolved into an *important band. After canceling an Australian tour last fall, Lukens went to rehab and was diagnosed with manic depression, alcoholism, marijuana addiction, and cutting behavior, all of which was unsparingly detailed in their Tripping in the Dark *mini-doc. Every Modern Baseball interview in the time since has doubled as advocacy for destigmatizing mental illness and encouraging the seeking of medical treatment. They’re not alone: Along with Sorority Noise, the Word Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, the Hotelier and basically any leader of emo’s 4th-wave, Modern Baseball demonstrate an undeniable sonic ambition and social conscience in a genre still reduced to a “Sad as Fuck” T-shirt. Their extracurricular candor is a necessary complement to Holy Ghost, which asks for difficult things out of its audience—space, patience and acceptance.
In the past, MoBo’s appeal often lied in how they looked like guys who came to their shows straight from a Drexel lecture hall, singing about things that happened to them just that day. On Holy Ghost, Ewald and Lukens admit that even a wholly unpretentious, image-free band like Modern Baseball might have to put on an act sometimes just to make it to the next gig. “The glare from our stupid, spineless words just whining, every fucking day/what do I really want to say?,” Ewald spews on “Note to Self,” one of the many road-weary tracks here.  Throughout Holy Ghost, Lukens and Ewald mostly want to say “I miss you,” “I love you,” or, “I’m sorry.” But with their friends, family and Philly often hundreds of miles away, Modern Baseball either internalize or end up directing their anxieties at each other.
There was a point where it was unclear whether Modern Baseball would make it to Holy Ghost,* and the tension is audaciously presented in a Speakerboxxx/The Love Below-style split condensed into less than a half hour. Ewald is given the first six tracks, while the remaining five are Lukens’. Even up to last year’s excellent MOBO Presents: The Perfect Cast EP featuring Modern Baseball, *new listeners could be forgiven thinking the band only had one singer. At this point, Ewald and Lukens seem like total inverses of each other.
*Holy Ghost *will inevitably take on a new life as its lyrics become status updates. All the zingers will be Ewald’s, but since his hooks are as densely worded and occasionally unwieldy as his verses, the shoutalongs come from Lukens. Ewald’s side builds towards “Everyday” and “Hiding,” the most compositionally complex and ornately arranged Modern Baseball songs to date. Lukens, meanwhile, claims he wrote all of his lyrics in the last three days of recording. His songs are urgent, frenzied and compact, with titles that read like inside jokes used as placeholders (“Breathing in Stereo,” “Coding These To Lukens," “Apple Cider, I Don’t Mind”).
The format serves each writer as an individual. While the shift towards tempered indie rock often robs *Holy Ghost *of the instant gratification of early MoBo, there isn’t a single clunker lyric that was wedged in for the sake of cleverness. Taken together, *Holy Ghost *feels inevitably unbalanced. Modern Baseball probably didn’t have much of a choice; shuffled in any way, it just becomes nonsensically disjointed.
The sequencing makes more sense upon hearing the closing “Just Another Face,” whose chorus alone more than makes up for any denied catharsis. Based on The Perfect Cast and their live Killers covers, an album full of this kind of bombastic arena-emo would be certainly welcome. It consolidates every improvement over You’re Gonna Miss It All: Ewald’s compositional ambition and patience, Lukens’ newly theatrical high range and for both, a desire to recognize the bittersweet way in which the relationship between them and their audience has changed.
The self-pity of the verses are simply and petulantly worded to recall MoBo’s earlier phase and Lukens’ real rock bottom (“I’m a waste of time and space,” “entering a well-known phase, I scream ‘get lost, I hate everything’”). A number of people might be the voice talking to Lukens during the unabashedly uplifting chorus. Perhaps it’s his family, or Cam Boucher, the Sorority Noise frontman Lukens credits with pushing him to seek help. Maybe it’s a girlfriend, as the title references a lyric from the first song Lukens ever wrote ("How Do I Tell a Girl I Want to Kiss Her," naturally). It could be the other members of Modern Baseball, who Lukens claims “saved my life.” Earlier on "Note to Self," Ewald hoped to build “something that cannot leave the ground/unless we lift it up together,” and Holy Ghost makes good on that desire: Every performance of "Just Another Face" will end with Modern Baseball and their audience yelling at each other, “I’ll be with you the whole way.”


The Malian singer/songwriter returns with another album produced by John Parish. The music is an intimate and minimalistic mix of Mandingue and Western pop/rock influences, and Devendra Banhart guests.

Né So

“Né So” means “home” in Bambara, Mali’s primary lingua franca. The album, Rokia Traoré’s sixth in a career spanning almost two decades, hangs loosely around that same theme. The concept of home has long been fluid for the Malian singer/songwriter, who grew up traveling the world with her diplomat father and who today splits her time between Bamako, Brussels, and Marseille. Before that, not long after the Mali conflict erupted in 2012, she relocated temporarily to Paris but continued to grapple with personal difficulties that had pushed her to consider quitting music. As a result, on Né So, home encompasses the personal and the political, from refuge and nostalgia, to love and freedom.
Né So opens with a benediction. On “Tu voles” (“You fly”), Rokia Traoré sings in French, “You fly/ From every hurt/ You release yourself/ And you swim through the air/ You fly…” Her raspy, quavering voice floats untethered over a spritely reggae guitar and lilting blues figures. By all accounts, she’s trying to sing you, and herself, to a freer place, where, “Body and soul are aligned” and “You glimpse your ideal.”
Working with producer/musician John Parish (PJ Harvey, Tracy Chapman, Eels), who also produced her last album Beautiful Africa, Rokia keeps Né So intimate and minimalistic. Her music is, as ever, mainly a mix of Mandingue and Western pop/rock influences. But this time around, she sounds tired, even as she doubles down on giving moral lessons throughout. On “Ile,” Rokia sings in Bambara over lithe Afrobeat guitars and a drum kit imitating calebasse rhythms: “You there/ Why inflict on others what would be woe for yourself?/ I don’t like violence.” And on “Kolokani,” she sings a soft lullaby reminiscing about her hometown of the same name while paying her respects: “Those who stayed at the source give meaning to our past.”
Most of the textural differences from song to song on Né So are slight, so they tend to bleed into one another. “Kenia” is the most dynamic track on the record vocally, as Rokia switches her airier singing style in for a more strident Wassoulou-esque sound à la Oumou Sangaré or Fatoumata Diawara. The guitars buoying her alternate between Tuareg and American blues. But Traoré herself has pulled this off before to similarly charismatic effect, so while it’s a perfectly good song, it remains unremarkable outside the context of the album. It’s telling, actually, that the one standout track here is a cover. In Traoré’s rendition of “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday, a solitary bass lumbers beneath a guitar line that bends and wavers like heat over asphalt. Her voice aches and shudders, giving way in the end to a ngoni solo that hovers in the middle distance, like a ghostly reminder of ancestors past.
This is the album’s turning point; the remaining two tracks are less songs than they are speeches set to music. On the title track, Rokia says (in French), “In 2014 another five million five hundred thousand people fled their homes/ Forced to seek refuge in towns and countries far from home.” It’s an important message, to be sure. But the track comes perilously close to feeling like the soundtrack to a TV fundraiser special, of the kind where important people appear on screen reciting statistics and platitudes about the human condition over melodramatic background music.
It doesn’t help that label-mate Devendra Banhart joins in to represent the voice of the displaced, delivering lines like, “Where to place my dreams/ Where to hold a heart opened to joy/ Opened to hope.” It only gets worse on the album’s closer, “Se Dan,” which sits somewhere between TED Talk, overwrought spoken word poem, and a lecture from your mom (who loves you but is concerned and wants you to learn some respect). On it, Rokia is joined once more by Devendra to pontificate, this time in English, about how we all have, “One world/ One destiny/ One aim/ One thing to never forget: respect." The sentiment is heartfelt but it verges on the trite, which can be said of the album as a whole.


By resisting the bluster of past efforts, the Montreal band emerges with its most cohesive album yet, the first that never gets lost in its own dark gravity.

The Witness

Suuns are almost maddeningly consistent. Over a decade-plus career firmly wedged between the “experimental” and “indie” sections of your local record shop, the band’s instantly identifiable brand of vampiric electro-rock has unraveled like a scroll, revealing new dimensions in an expanding universe of existential dread. Held together by singer Ben Shemie’s ghost-in-the-machine croon, the Montreal trio (formerly quartet) doesn’t so much innovate with each new release as restlessly explore the same familiar, walled-off territory.
Their last full-length, Felt, showed hairline cracks forming in that dam. Purging some of their obsession with grim avant-pop provocation, they brought a generousness of spirit that gave the album a warm sense of psychedelic intimacy. Even as they lashed out with abrasive, rushing energy on tracks like “Look No Further,” the tempered, even honeyed nostalgia of centerpiece ballad “Make It Real” suggested the cooling passions of a band making peace with uncertainty.

But growth is messy, and the grainy rumblings of 2020’s FICTION EP flashed like a warning sign that the band was ready, if not eager, to reopen the portal and relapse into the haze. So it’s a welcome surprise that on The Witness, Suuns are in full communion with a calmer approach to anxiety. Their latest is fundamentally chilled out, plunging the band into frigid landscapes that they softly crawl over with post-rock-like delicacy recalling fellow Canadians Badge Époque Ensemble. Sprawling and beat heavy, the album’s drift is a perfect staging ground for Shemie’s sentimental explorations of the sicknesses inherent in embodied life. Like a spirit forced into corporeal form, Shemie painstakingly unpacks his alienation, and with the band tightly reined in around gentle electronic lullabies, he’s never sounded better. By resisting the bluster of past efforts, Suuns emerge with their most cohesive album yet, the first that never gets lost in its own dark gravity.
The instrumental palette of The Witness reflects the (relative) ease with which they’ve mellowed. On “Timebender,” synthesizers that once hissed and groaned now curl gently around your ear, trading fours with sampled birdcalls. Guitars that once rushed with nervous aggression quietly trickle into the mix; when the dreamy chords that close out “Witness Protection” finally arrive, they slowly drift into focus from far out in the stereo field, like sunlight tapping at a window. There’s a newfound fixation with lowering themselves into a groove rather than trying to tear themselves out of it. It’s hard to imagine a band like Suuns improvising like a jazz trio, but the way their ideas expand and contract over the six minute micro-odyssey “The Trilogy,” it sounds like an unrehearsed nocturnal jam session.

These changes reflect back onto Shemie, who paradoxically has never sounded more like a frontperson than he does here. His voice presides over everything, so much so that when he slips into the background to allow Erik Hove’s saxophone space to riff on the romantic meditations of album highlight “Clarity,” you feel the absence acutely, craving his inhuman warmth. Shemie’s lyrics usually telegraph his own disgust from a comfortable distance, but the band’s steady pacing has relaxed him into confessional confidence, an acknowledgment of how long he’s put up a steely facade. “I don’t want to wear this mask/To conceal/The way I feel,” he moans on “Third Stream,” before defeatedly admitting that he’s finally “seen too much” as the track spins off into the night. When his tender whine fades in on the penultimate track, “Go to My Head,” crying out for “no more tears,” it’s as if he’s speaking to you from across a shared pillow, peering into your eyes at the end of a long night of the soul. Embracing the sweetness pulls out a different side of Shemie, one you wonder if even he knew he had in him.

The swarm of cicadas that opens the record reappears to close out the album, trapping these tender emotions in a locked groove. As the album spins back upon itself, Suuns seem almost to revel in the consistency of mood and texture that they’ve achieved on this record. The Witness unlocks a parallel universe for the band, and though Suuns are still sculpting monoliths to paranoia, to hear them chipping away with such steady hands is a welcome treat.

Buy: Rough Trade
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For someone whose musical sensibilities were largely shaped by the minimalism of hip-hop, it's hard for me to even ...

I Phantom

For someone whose musical sensibilities were largely shaped by the minimalism of hip-hop, it's hard for me to even say the words "concept album" without wincing and imagining the elves and druids of prog-rock past. The only thing less palatable than a concept album is an annotated concept album that explicitly states each song's plot and theme. So when I cracked open the new Lif and discovered the aforementioned attributes in brazen attendance, it was difficult to fight back the urge to toss it into the trash bin. However, after giving I Phantom a few spins, I must say that Lif has managed to transcend the gimmicks and wankery that generally mar this kind of grand opus, and emerge with his strongest offering yet.
Lif's success can largely be attributed to his focus on themes that other, more timid emcees wouldn't even touch; the album tackles the dehumanizing dysfunction of capitalism and its dramatic effect upon a b-boy everyman, including a dissection of commerce's influence upon art, family and spirituality. The phantom of the title is the individual personality/soul that has been drowned in a flood of media-fueled consumerism, empty labor, and abandoned relationships. Explaining his themes in a recent interview with SOHH, Lif commented, "Our identity is essentially wiped out in many ways. Under the code of professionalism, you do not bring your slang or culture into a place of business... there's a code of conduct which wipes out any flare that we have as individuals."
The plot of I Phantom has four acts: an initial dream state where Lif is killed and resurrected; a second act where Lif awakens and struggles with poverty and social alienation; a third where Lif achieves financial success only to find it emotionally and spiritually bankrupt; and a final, surreal postscript where he and his friends lyrically navigate the apocalypse. As you can imagine, this sure as fuck ain't Nellyville. In fact, the album's thematic and narrative scope has more in common with Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections than it does with a hip-hop album.
In the first two songs, Lif cops a gun from Cannibal Ox's Vast Aire and is killed while robbing a store. "Return of the B-Boy", the album's third track, finds Lif resurrected as a hip-hop messiah. "Return of the B-Boy" is a nearly eight-minute epic that is the most lyrically and musically accomplished track Def Jux has ever released. Beneath a noisy mosaic of turntable scratches, squealing effects and bass-heavy beats, El-P drops Guru rapping, "Hip-hop, Im'a bring it back, hip-hop..." Then, as the noise reaches a crescendo, the beat drops and the track transforms into a fast and funky boom bap revival, replete with James Brown grunts and an '89-style fast rap.
On "Mic Check," Lif declares, "How the fuck did you figure you could interfere with a music so potent?" "Mortal Kombat" style, Lif steps up and destroys the Pharisees, Uncle Toms, and Jiggas who've transformed hip-hop from a culturally relevant lifeforce to an aural billboard for excess and self-destruction. In a particularly vivid confrontation with a subpar emcee, Lif raps, "I step to him slow and look deep in his eye/ Say the prison is within 'cuz he's living a lie."
The song ends suddenly, and a ringing alarm carries over to provide a segue to the next song where Lif awakens to find himself preparing to go to the "slave quarters" where he toils for a "trifling hourly wage of $6.50." In the spiritually arid atmosphere of "Live from the Plantation", Lif is confronted with the working man's irony: "Life is a gift to be enjoyed every second.../ Yet I find myself looking at the clock, hoping for the day to fly by." Once again, the song shifts in the middle and we're treated to a beatbox breakdown that sounds like Doug E Fresh remixed by Autechre. The juxtaposition between the b-boy heroism of "Return of the B-Boy" and the everyday struggle of "Live From the Plantation" reveals that the tensions provided by the crippling minutiae of real life are just as dramatic and compelling as any superhero theatrics.
After failing at work on "Live from the Plantation", and being socially spurned due to his economic condition in "Status", Lif turns his eyes to the cash prize in "Success" and becomes a professional slave who's "forced to give [his] life away while [he's] earning a living." Putting forth the professional's mantra, Lif raps, "Smile, don't be too proud, too wild/ You can suffer, but just don't be too loud." Fellow Def Jukie Aesop Rock guests on the track, returning to many of the same themes he dealt with on last year's Labor Days. In a stinging chorus, Aesop raps, "Daddy had a name tag that said 'busy working'/ Mommy had a milk carton that said 'missing person'/ John had a new baseball glove, but nobody to learn with/ The oil left the water and the water kept searching."
Over the course of the next two songs, our narrator sees his family dissolve due to his workaholism. After divorcing his first wife, the narrator remarries and focuses on having the perfect (read: fictional) family and ignores his first, unsuccessful family. The subsequent pressure to succeed causes his daughter from the second marriage to commit suicide. On "The Now", Lif flips the script and raps from the perspective of the abandoned child from the first marriage. It's a creative and revelatory point of view that showcases Lif's incredible narrative skills.
Unfortunately, Lif abandons the concrete details of his narrative on "Iron Helix" and answers the question as to "how we got here, meaning how did we [get to] this point in human existence where these types of social ills are common." For the next song, "Earthcrusher", Lif provides "a visual for the nuclear holocaust." Um... Druids, anyone?
Still, Lif's point has been made, and the last tracks' interesting, yet misguided forays into ponderous sci-fi don't ruin Lif's masterpiece. On his previous EPs, Emergency Rations and Enter the Collosus, Lif showed a lot of potential. I Phantom is the big payoff, the album that we knew Lif had in him. While there are those who accuse Lif of being unpatriotic and overly didactic, a searing social critique in this time of unchecked nationalism and media disinformation is not only refreshing, but absolutely necessary. Whether out of fear, complacency or self-absorption, there have been far too few voices of dissent to emerge from the world of independent music. That Lif is willing to be the odd man out-- especially in a time when publicly questioning the actions of our administration is considered rote, despite the fact that we need it now more than ever-- is exemplary. 'Nuff respect due.


The revered and ridiculed DIY legend makes a brisk power-pop record about loving what you do but hating the toll it takes.

Juiceboxxx: It’s Easy to Feel Like a Nobody When You’re Living in The City

To his converts, Juiceboxxx is a DIY legend, celebrated for the intensely physical shows he’s been performing since the early ’00s, when he was a 14-year-old getting dropped off at gigs from the Milwaukee suburbs by his parents. One journalist was so moved by Juice’s devotion to his craft he penned an entire book about him. In other corners of the internet, though, Juiceboxxx is more infamous for a disastrous TV news performance that’s forever branded him in Google searches as “the worst rapper ever.” Bloggers ripped him mercilessly, and within weeks comedians Chelsea Handler and Chris Hardwick were dunking on him, too (“Yo, Pewaukee in the house!” Hardwick quipped on @midnight).
Six years later, that fail footage is no less painful to watch, although in a certain light Juiceboxxx’s performance is also strangely inspiring. After offering the anchors a complimentary can of Thunder Zone, the energy drink he was hocking at the time, he doesn’t just bomb. He bombs with gusto, committing fully to his affable party-starter routine even as he wrestles with a sadistic sound mix and the sinking realization that an act that slays in a basement full of sweaty fans doesn’t translate to an empty stage of a news broadcast.
That down-with-the-ship attitude has defined everything he’s recorded since—if public humiliation on that scale doesn’t shake your dedication, then maybe nothing can. These days Juiceboxxx no longer tours the country on a Greyhound with an iPod as his DJ, though. He’s traded it for a two-piece backing band, which conjured the guitar-drenched rap early Beastie Boys on his 2017 effort Freaked Out American Loser. His new It’s Easy To Feel Like a Nobody When You’re Living in The City goes one step further, ditching hip-hop almost entirely but keeping the guitars.
Recorded with Wavves/Jay Reatard bassist Stephen Pope, it’s a brisk power-pop record about loving what you do but hating the toll it takes. “Have I wasted all my life in the basement?” Juiceboxxx wonders on the lifer’s lament “In The Basement,” a typically revved-up number featuring some unmistakable synths from The Rentals’ Matt Sharp. It’s Juiceboxxx’s catchiest song yet, though the album gives it some competition. Pitched somewhere between Sum 41 and the Ramones, opener “Coinstar Song” is all fist pumps, while “Running So Deep,” with its crunchy riff and giddy cowbell claps, plays like a mall-punk homage to ’80s John Mellencamp.
These songs find Juiceboxxx down and out, surviving on frozen pizzas and the adulation of an audience that isn’t growing any bigger.
And while he mostly plays his defeats for entertainment, his lyrics make enough references to mental health to imply that it’s not only his career at stake. It’s Easy to Feel Like a Nobody walks a fine line, taking Juiceboxxx’s quandaries seriously without disrupting the stay-true-to-yourself positivity that’s always been the heart of his act. Even the title track, despite its bummer sentiment, plays out as uplifting Lou Reed-style testimonial about the rejuvenating power of rock ‘n’ roll.
Throughout the album Juiceboxxx ponders trading it all in for something closer resembling a normal life, but always just as quickly rules out the option. “Kids Are Looking” speaks most directly to the heart of his decision to keep at it, an obligation to pay forward the feeling of belonging he found at punk shows as a teenager. “It’s like a call that’s telling us we’re not alone,” he sings. A touring artist’s life might not be glamorous, It’s Easy to Feel Like a Nobody argues, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t noble.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Elephant Micah is Joseph O’Connell, a singer-songwriter whose songs betray his day job as an Indiana folklorist. He’s been experimenting with Americana for 14 years now, and his new album, featuring vocals from Will Oldham, strips away all but guitar, voice, a pump organ, and some rumbling drums.

Where in Our Woods

Elephant Micah is Joseph O’Connell, a 33-year-old singer-songwriter whose songs betray his day job as an Indiana folklorist. Take "Slow Time Vultures", the 7-1/2-minute centerpiece of his Western Vinyl debut Where in Our Woods, which describes the time O’Connell’s childhood home in Pekin, Indiana, attracted a giant flock of vultures. The song anthropomorphizes the birds, who use the barn roof as a soapbox to lament Indiana’s conforming to Daylight Savings Time. (Prior to 2006, most of the state disregarded DST, and locals often referred to its singular zone as "slow time.")
The vultures question and criticize fast-paced progress ("We can’t afford to go forward any more"), and O’Connell sanctifies their words in a sparse, patient arrangement. It takes about 20 seconds for him to sing the first six words—"Vultures on our old barn roof"—and he spends much of the song hypnotically plucking the low E of a nylon-stringed guitar that permeates the album, becoming its signature instrument. The effect is stark and haunting and entirely vulture friendly.
O’Connell has been experimenting with Midwestern Americana for 14 years now, but most of the 11 Elephant Micah releases prior to Where in Our Woods were primitively recorded and distributed on tiny labels or self-released on CD-Rs. Elephant Micah isn’t exactly a secret (you can find most of the releases for pay-what-you-want prices on Bandcamp), but O’Connell has remained on the margins more than friends like M.C. Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger (the two covered each other’s songs for a 7'' release a few years ago). All that, plus the folklorist thing, has contributed to Elephant Micah’s outsider/not-of-this-time rep. You get the feeling O’Connell doesn’t get worked up about iTunes updates or the appropriate context for leggings.
If 2012’s Louder Than Thou refined the Elephant Micah sound, Where in Our Woods continues the distillation until, after stripping away all but guitar, voice, a pump organ, and some rumbling drums (courtesy of O’Connell’s brother Matthew), the minimalism becomes the album’s calling card (think Bonnie "Prince" Billy’s unadorned but crisply rendered Master and Everyone). The album isn’t so decorous that it doesn’t take chances, though. It’s a risk, in fact, to present O’Connell’s voice so nakedly, since it’s neither a showstopper nor terribly eccentric. He doesn’t whisper, doesn’t yell. It’s smooth, almost to a fault, but the clarity of his tenor fits the pace and spareness of these eight songs. And just when you start yearning for something more, the bonnie prince himself, Will Oldham—an obvious inspiration here—shows up to add some harmonies.
Often, folk singers are either storytellers or read-into-it-what-you-want poets, but some of this generation’s best (Oldham, Jason Molina) fall somewhere in the middle. Elephant Micah stands firmly in that middle ground, not shying away from small details nor lofty, ambiguous ideas. Without some background explanation, it would be impossible to know that "Demise of the Bible Birds" refers to an Indiana man who trained birds to perform Christian-themed tricks. Or that O’Connell ripped the three stories in the gorgeous "Albino Animals"—hunters killing an albino deer, athletes capsizing on a boat, and meth cooks avoiding prosecution for a trailer fire—from the headlines of his hometown newspaper. O’Connell, though, gives us all the details we need to ponder ignorance and the unknowability of life while falling under the spell of a bewitching, repeating guitar line that somehow communicates both the tragedy and mercy in the stories.
The songs on Where in Our Woods were all written in 2006 and 2007, and while the Elephant Micah albums of that period have an experimental, homespun charm to them, O’Connell was wise to set these songs aside until he found the right setting for them, even if that didn’t become clear for several years. As the slow time vultures sing, "Ours are the spoils and the things that we can find on our own time." Maybe those birds are onto something.


A former jazz prodigy emerges with a clever and heartfelt indie rock debut that pays winking tribute to adolescence in all its agonies and small glories.

Trophy

If you were a tightly wound perfectionist who spent her formative years shuttling from award ceremony to award ceremony, conducting life as if it were graded by rubric, then you probably stumbled into adulthood craving freedom. The former jazz prodigy Kate Davis graduated from high school a Presidential Scholar in the Arts, scored a full-ride to the Manhattan School of Music, and performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. But she wasn’t satisfied, sneaking in time to experiment with more emotionally liberating indie rock. Now 28 years old, Davis has resurfaced with the clever and heartfelt debut, Trophy.
Trophy is a winking salute to adolescence, that chaotic period when your body is illogically proportioned and you’re not sure who you’re supposed to be. This turbulence has been fertile ground for sharp, empathetic indie rock for approximately forever. Davis has a good ear for it: she co-wrote Sharon Van Etten’s howling masterpiece “Seventeen,” and her own work basks in that wide-eyed nostalgia, radiating a sincerity that feels almost anachronistic in these bitter, irony-poisoned years. Unlike the pouty adolescents now seen on television, Davis’ teenagers aren’t sarcastic, lewd, or indifferent. A nervous boy spots a girl he likes at a party in “Dirty Teenager,” a droll Courtney Barnett-like track that finds poignancy in Miller Lites and scattered trash. Davis, cutting through swirling electric guitar and drums, sings “I just want to be your friend” so sweetly and earnestly that it‘s devastating.
Everything about Davis screams early 2010s — both the kindly, sincere messaging and the Pandora-approved singer-songwriter flavor of her music. Davis’s songs often start languorously, wading into gentle, lapping folk before plunging into noisier grunge-rock. She has a pleasant, lilting voice to listen to while resting your head against a window. But these slow-moving repetitions—a few plucked strings, a murmured confession—leave you hungry for grittier self-scrutiny. Romantic metaphors of open heart surgery and stars aligning can come off saccharine, as do melodramatic declarations to a lover to “meet me in the morning, indigo skyline twilight.”
The stakes often come into focus halfway through, paving the way for urgent, earnest questioning. After much toothless meandering on “Burning Accidents,” Davis growls at the thought of “wanting more”; the guitars swerve into a drone, and tender hopes of reconciliation splinter into visceral anguish at breaking apart. On “Did You Love Somebody,” Davis’ voice leaps and thins as she repeats the question. You can imagine someone avoiding her gaze, a little unnerved by the directness.
The emotional centerpiece of Trophy is “Daisy,” a wrenching song Davis wrote following the death of her father. Launching with the same guitar chug as Liz Phair’s “Fuck and Run,” it charmingly captures the aimlessness and dread of growing up. Davis lists off virtues she doesn’t have: “Neither am I good nor pure, neither am I wise.” When she repeats “I keep fucking up,” she reminds us that we’re all little kids with lipstick smeared on our faces, masquerading as grown-ups.


Oregon metal band's latest record is their hugest, most artful collection to date.

Ashes Against the Grain

I lived in Portland, Ore., for six months in 1997: It didn't stop raining, until, eventually, the rain just turned into snow. Coffee shop regulars told me it was an especially bad winter for the Pacific Northwest, but even amid the sleet breezes, I made plenty of treks to Mt. Tabor. When the weather was good, I jumped fences to pick fruit. If you were lucky enough to find a car, you could make a quick jump to the coast. Of all the cities I've temporarily called home, Portland coexisted best with the land it was built upon: Trees didn't feel like decorative afterthoughts.
Named for the fragrant, incense-burnt Agarwood, dark-metal quartet Agalloch are the perfect Portland band. Beginning as an idea in Montana sometime in late 1995/early 1996, founding members John Haughm and Jason Walton relocated to Oregon in 1996, where they met guitarist Don Anderson. Currently a quintet with drummer, Chris Greene, Agalloch's functioned as a proper group since releasing the 1997 demo, From Which of this Oak. The band's third album, Ashes Against the Grain, the first full-length since 2002's The Mantle and sundry EPs, is their hugest, most artful collection to date. It features an endless amount of hooks-- songs appear to be going out to sea when things pause and change direction, ushering in another lap. If you think this stuff's boring, you aren't listening.
Ten-minute opener "Limbs" floats Godspeed striations atop an Isis crunch. Gaining momentum, the swirl eventually moves toward an acoustic interlude, which offers a breath-catcher before the next spiral of echoing water-logged guitar and distorted drums. Floodgates open, close again, reopen. Lyrically, the "limbs" of the title refer to both human arms/legs ("Hacked, severed and forgotten") and branches/roots: "Earth to flesh, flesh to wood, cast these limbs into the water." Time gets cast, "Whispering from tree to tree/ Through every lonely bough it sings."
Speaking of words, Agalloch might lose a few less hardy souls when vocalist John Haughm enters the mix: Instead of Slint speak/sing, buried shoegazer wails, or the by now acceptable doomy Ocean scowl, Haughm's gruff, slick, snarled black metal-style voice seethes above the sound. Once he clears his throat, everything else becomes a backdrop to his dry-rot laryngitis: "The texture of the soul is a liquid/ That casts a vermillion flood/ From a wound carved as an oath/ It fills the river bank, a sanguine fog." (Unless you have a degree in black metal, good luck getting that without a lyric sheet.)
But then, to my ears at least, where groups like Godspeed and Mogwai function merely as background music to my daily occurrences, Agalloch consistently engages and overrides. Some name-check arboreal, less urban Swans-- especially when Jarboe stopped by the garden-- but Michael Gira was never about riffs like this. Comparisons to Opeth can and will also be penned. They work to some degree, but Agalloch add a shoegaze element to their intricate compositions: Unlike Ghost Reveries, the pieces don't feel as stitched together, and songs are long only if you pay attention to the display on your stereo. Keep your eyes closed and the anthemic "Limbs" could be divided into four pieces of occasionally proggy, neo-folk doom.
Same with "Falling Snow", which locates a catchy 1990s alterna-wavelength, as sludge guitars nestle behind psychedelic licks. The expressive, poppy notes make for a wonderful contrast between Haughm's cackled naturalistic lyrics: "Red birds escape from my wounds and return as falling snow/ To sweep the landscape/ A wind haunted; wings without bodies."
Yup, the first two tracks require fist pumping, but Agalloch are much more than dog-and-pony rockers. "This White Mountain on Which You Will Die", a minute-and-a-half of sleepy, somber ambience, is a swath of Gregorian chant minus the chanting. A quintessential embodiment of that 1997 Oregon chill, the 10-plus minute "Fire Above, Ice Below" places watery guitar over acoustic strums. As it grows, the whispery vocals contrast with the more mannered folk-metal sound. The end of "Fire Above, Ice Below" sinks and recedes, blending into the AM static-ocean of the next track, "Not Unlike the Waves". It builds from that midst to major guitar-chug riffs, balancing a heaviness and a fragile sort of beauty. Like the forms made when a stone's dropped in a pond, the layers keep coming. For instance, acoustic interludes often signal things are about to grow exponentially magisterial: Multi-track vocal drone; a Malefic-mixed dry rot howl (lyrically, "the midnight wolves who watch over the dawn" makes perfect sense); submerged double bass drum. It's a Medieval doom madrigal built on a sea bed fault-line.
As if none of this was huge enough, the album closes with the grandiose three-part "Our Fortress Is Burning". The crux? Overall ambient submersion. The opening section moves from piano to strumming-n-drumming against falling stars and fuzz bath; a drum roll links it to the second part, and the track ends where Agalloch often does-- in melancholic triumph. The finale, subtitled "The Grain", is the one time the record lags a tad: It's pretty, but it lacks the propulsivity of what came before it. Agalloch squeeze enough "epic" into each "endless horizon of ice" that appending a self-consciously three-part finale could be taken as superfluous.
I've used the word "metal" a few times, but don't let that scare you off. I'd offer more qualifiers and nifty neologisms, but that seems equally tired. No matter what you call it, Ashes finds Agalloch burning down the forest, replanting it, watching shit re-grow. In the process of that intense musical exploration they've become an intriguing band, regardless of genre designation.


Like most good DFA full-lengths, this album has post-disco dance-pop aesthetics intersecting and merging in ways that transcend cheap retro.

The Future Will Come

If you wanted to hear an askew semi-counterpoint to Hercules and Love Affair's longing, unrequited "Blind" last year, all you had to do was jump back a couple of weeks and one DFA catalogue number. The Juan MacLean's "Happy House" might have been comparatively overlooked in the wake of their labelmates' widespread critical success, but it's hard not to hear it as the weight on the other side of the scale. It jumps a decade or so past H&LA's Larry Levan-minded disco into a style alluded to in the song's double-meaning title, Nancy Whang's voice dripping with a cool, almost aloof exuberance that seemed content to ride along with that pulse-raising piano. It figures that its biggest refrain and most memorable line hints at an arch sort of romanticism: "you are so... excellent." Yet "Happy House" is a stylistic fluke in a discography that got rolling with the jagged yet warm electro-house of the 2002 single "By the Time I Get to Venus" and aimed upwards with 2005's Less Than Human. With more than a year to build on the goodwill accumulated by a potential career-changer, the Juan MacLean have already gone in a completely different direction on their new album.
The Future Will Come does at least aim to join "Happy House" in its lean towards pop-music structure, even if it gets there through an era-spanning synth-pop pastiche rather than the euphoria of late-80s (and early 00s revival) house. That shouldn't be too out-of-nowhere, especially if you've already been primed by "The Simple Life", which followed "Happy House" in single form late last summer and points towards the Human League-gone-disco sound John MacLean hinted at during interviews in the run-up to this album. But that song, a gradually-building, subtly-mutating piece of Moroder-meets-Yaz(oo) that spans over eight and a half minutes in opening the album, is a red herring in its own way. That's because with the exception of the 10-minute "Tonight", which blends dubby T.K. Disco rhythm with Derrick May bass in the service of a song filled with strangely mournful-sounding anticipation, every track on The Future Will Come that hasn't already appeared as a single last year is a relatively short and succinct piece of work; think a bunch of radio edits instead of the 12" mixes.
The good news is that brevity keeps some of these tracks from getting stretched thin: The rubbery bongo-driven percussion and mutating, unraveling synths in the title track sound like they reach peak powers just before the song ends a few seconds shy of the five-minute mark, the midtempo electro-funk of "Accusations" fits in enough ebb-and-flow atmosphere to explore its Balearic-tweaking turf thoroughly, and cuts like "A New Bot" and "The Station" bypass gradual-build club dynamics entirely to focus on straightforward post-new-wave hookiness, whether it's frenetically anxious or brooding respectively. Yet a couple of other songs feel rudely truncated before they can build to the bigger, arm-waving moments that seem just over the horizon. The seething acid-house of "No Time", which sounds like the Human League's "Being Boiled" on heavy stimulants, ends too quickly, but it stings particularly hard when the 81-meets-89 rave-pop of "One Day" simply drops off a cliff after just more than four minutes when it sounds like it should go on for another six. Like most quality DFA full-lengths, this album has post-disco dance-pop aesthetics intersecting and merging in ways that transcend cheap retro; too much of it leaves you wondering if it could've gone even further with a bit more breathing room.
Still, what could another four minutes here and there really do about the dour mood? That's the other gag The Future Will Come springs on the unsuspecting listener hoping for an hour's worth of "Happy House" giddiness, with Whang and MacLean sniping at each other in character like the Oakey/Sulley dynamic in "Don't You Want Me" pushed to a barely repressed loathing. It makes sense, since their vocals are incompatible with each other in the most basic respect. Whang is all coquettish detachment and reserved emotion, singing as though she just happens to be pretty good at expressing these feelings (but, y'know, not showing off or anything), while MacLean stretches his flat voice into attempted overenunciations and hiccupy quirkiness that are beyond the ability of his ideally-monotone voice.
As they sing with clashing voices about how hard it is to get along with anyone, this is ebullient, frequently exciting music that trades on the concept of love as irritating farce. The first verse on "The Simple Life" opens with the Whang-sung couplet "Promises you gave but never kept/ Apologies to save for last regrets"; "One Day" sees both singers trading embittered breakup barbs with the promise that "I'll tell you what you wanna hear if you try" the closest it gets to reconciliation; "No Time" drains all the empathy out of post-one-night stand ennui and brings out the casual cruelty in the typically-innocuous pop-lyric standby "shut your mouth." It's all a bit exhausting, but it does lead to a knockout bit of sequencing: from the sourly regretful back-and-forth relationship burden complaints of "The Station" to the sparse, false-ending-filled, self-pitying solo-piano dirge of "Human Disaster"-- and then, to finish the album, "Happy House" in its complete 12-and-a-half minutes of ecstasy. That single hardly represents how the rest of the album turned out sounding, but you couldn't pick a better flash of light at the end of the tunnel.


Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was one of the most generous records of the 90s. Smashing Pumpkins took it upon themselves to make a record that only teenagers could love and for many it was the only one they needed. This mega-deluxe box set pads the original with an additional 64 tracks.

The Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

Billy Corgan hasn't done a very good job speaking on his own behalf over the past decade, so let me feed him a line from the Greek philosopher Pittacus that would make a much better case for his legacy: "The measure of a man is what he does with power." In 1995, nearly every other band at Smashing Pumpkins' level was in some way turning its back on its audience: Pearl Jam had started their principled retreat from the spotlight; U2 and R.E.M. were deep within their stagiest, most ironic phases and making their least satisfying music to date; Rivers Cuomo was well on his way towards making Pinkerton; Metallica discovered nail polish; and, of course, Kurt Cobain gave up on life itself. On a much smaller level, even Corgan's eternal rival Steve Malkmus had just released Wowee Zowee, a record whose sloppy sprawl was taken by Rolling Stone as proof that "Pavement are simply afraid to succeed."
Given this mid-decade valley, it's understandable that the 2xCD Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness would be sneered at as self-indulgent. The Smashing Pumpkins hadn't made their appearance at Hullabalooza yet, so many were unaware the band had a sense of humor*.* Still, their reputation was played for laughs. But Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness turned out to be one of the most generous records of the decade. During a time when rock heroes were hard to come by, Smashing Pumpkins took it upon themselves to make a record that only teenagers could love and for many it was the only one they needed.
I suppose it's worth mentioning I was 15 when Mellon Collie came out and I would've told you at the time it was my favorite album ever made. Finally, I thought, here was our White Album, Physical Graffiti, or The Wall, but we could watch its legend being constructed in real time without all the received wisdom. It's true, a double album reeks of 70s-style excess that tries to edify its creators. It was meant as Smashing Pumpkins' monument to itself. But in the case of Mellon Collie, it was the only format that could contain the songwriting streak Corgan was going through at the time. Anything shorter would've done his fans a disservice.
This is not an exaggeration. Cull the 14 best tracks from the concurrently recorded The Aeroplane Flies High singles collection and you either have the fourth best Smashing Pumpkins album (behind the perpetually underrated Adore, ahead of Pisces Iscariot) or a strong third disc that would've made Mellon Collie the greatest triple-LP ever made. What becomes more obvious with time is that Mellon Collie, unlike its most common comparison The Wall, has no conceptual framework. There is no plot, almost no filler, and the organization of its two discs is iffy at best: The second song on the seemingly chronological first disc Dawn to Dusk is "Tonight, Tonight", while disc two, Twilight to Starlight, contains all of the ugliest metal songs. So Mellon Collie is a Smashing Pumpkins record that just so happens to be 28 songs in length, stunning in both its stylistic range and overall excellence.
This is perhaps the only Smashing Pumpkins record where they acted like an actual band rather than Corgan and his resentful charges. It's hard to pinpoint where the influence of James Iha or D'Arcy came into play (not so with the phenomenal drumming of Jimmy Chamberlin), but with the oversight of producers Flood and Alan Moulder, Mellon Collie was developed through protracted jam sessions and personal interplay. Siamese Dream, for all of its symphonic grandeur, was a fairly standard rock album and a solitary one-- nearly all of the guitar and bass parts were rumored to have been performed by Corgan himself. Meanwhile, Mellon Collie indulges in styles more associated with hermetic artists-- ornate chamber-pop ("Cupid De Locke"), mumbly acoustic confessionals ("Stumbleine"), and synthesized nocturnes (mostly everything after "X.Y.U."). And it does so while feeling like the work of four people in a room.
Mellon Collie's remarkable breadth is the best indication of Corgan's ability to let loose. You could pick five songs at random and still end up with a diverse batch of singles that would make a case for Smashing Pumpkins being the most stylistically malleable multi-platinum act of the 90s. Maybe it wouldn't sell as many copies, but picture an alternate universe where heavy rotation met the joyous, mechanized grind of "Love", "In the Arms of Sleep"'s unabashed antiquated romanticism, the Prince-like electro-ballad "Beautiful", "Muzzle"'s stadium-status affirmations, or the throttling metal of "Bodies".
The ubiquity of the five songs that did become singles overshadows just how idiosyncratic and distinct they were in the scope of 1995. Has there been anything like "Tonight, Tonight" since? Orchestral strings typically signify weepy balladry or compositional pretension in rock music, not wonderful, lovestruck propulsion. While "Tonight, Tonight" is now inseparable from its Le Voyage dans la lune-inspired video, that the music existed without its guidance only stresses the Pumpkins' sonic creativity. "Thirty-Three" was the final and least heralded of the singles-- where on alt-rock radio was there room for a slowpoke, time-signature shifting country song with phased slide guitars and shuffling drum machines?
"Zero" and "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" are the ones that riled up the older folks and, yes, the lyrics are pissy and juvenile and fairly embarrassing. That said, they're far more interesting from a sonic perspective than they're often given credit for. They're the songs where Flood's digitized production fits better than the saturated, analog warmth Butch Vig lent to Siamese Dream. They're basically new wave performed as pop-metal.
And of course, there's "1979", the one everybody can agree on. On a record that reveled in 70s prog and pomp without being restricted to it, it sounds futuristic. And while just as youth-obsessed as everything else here, it's one of the few times where high school sounds like something that can be remembered fondly. Corgan loves to stress how it was the last song to make the record, and while its chorus does have an effortless charge embodying the "urgency of now," it's the only Mellon Collie song that functions best as nostalgia. That reading is no doubt abetted by another fantastic video, but while "1979" is an unimpeachable song, the rush to praise it as an outlier does its surroundings a tremendous disservice. While Mellon Collie is the realization of all Billy Corgan's ambitions, most of the criticisms surround the lyrics for not being as personal as those on the tortured Siamese Dream. It's this way by design.
The terms "sad machines" and "teen machines" are interchangeably used during "Here Is No Why", a pep talk to the outwardly sullen mopes who Corgan urges to break free of either and ascend like its heroic guitar solo. "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" is notorious for its chorus, but teen angst doesn't fight fair; you need some seriously heavy ammo to resist it. The mudslide of distortion that ushers in its bridge leads towards two minutes of the most viscerally exciting music that Smashing Pumpkins produced. Then immediately after, the mournful "To Forgive" devastates with a personal detail that gives Corgan credibility in all of this: "And I remember my birthdays/ Empty party afternoons." This is the kind of youthful, inexplicable emotional whiplash that can result in an immolating hatebomb called "Fuck You (An Ode to No One)" being followed by a giddy proclamation that "love solves everything." It's clearly not a mature way of dealing with life, but that's only a problem if you somehow believe Mellon Collie isn't meant as rock 'n' roll fantasy. When Corgan declares "I know that I was meant for this world" during "Muzzle", it's your happy ending.
So, yes, most people who have developed a meaningful relationship with Mellon Collie did so in their youth. The question is whether you can get anything new from this in 2012. As with all of the Smashing Pumpkins reissues, Mellon Collie is giving: the Deluxe boxed set justifies its sticker shock by containing "re-imagined cover art, velvet-lined disc holder and decoupage kit for creating your own scenes from the Mellon Collie Universe," which is everything you'd imagine and thensome. There are an extra 64 tracks and only a few of them appeared on The Aeroplane Flies High, though most of these inclusions are demos or alternate takes, the sort of thing that should only be listened to multiple times by people who are being paid to do so, i.e., music critics and Flood.
But there is a way of hearing the same album differently as you refract it through your own experiences. "Thru the Eyes of Ruby" is rumored to have contained 70 guitar tracks; it's a wedding vow punctuated by Corgan snarling "youth is wasted on the young." This isn't meant to negate the intent of the 90 minutes that preceded it, it's a reminder of how Mellon Collie can communicate different things to someone who's 30 as opposed to 15. Revisiting it can feel like leafing through a high school yearbook-- not necessarily your own, just somebody's. And there's solace in how, for all of the navel-gazing that went on, the ridiculousness of it all somehow escapes you. What you wore, how you spoke, what you felt not so much seeming normal as just the way it is. You look at each person, thinking that they might hope to achieve the self-actualization promised by "Muzzle", to lose themselves in another person in the manner described by "Beautiful" or "In the Arms of Sleep", or to embrace their own awkwardness as a rallying cry like "We Only Come Out at Night". Those events were all right around the corner, as they are for just about anybody growing up, but when you're locked up in your room listening to Mellon Collie for hours on end, they seem as distant and fantastical as the album cover. When Corgan sings "believe in me" during "Tonight, Tonight", you don't have much of a choice if you want to escape.
I'd like to say "they don't make 'em like this anymore," which is true if you want to talk about rock bands who make double-LPs that sell 10 million copies thanks in part to lavish videos that air constantly on MTV. They do make 'em like this, in spirit, albeit very rarely-- 2012 appears to be just as hostile as 1995 was towards embracing the life-altering possibilities of classic rock or pursuing actual populism. It's no wonder Corgan is so agitated about the state of rock music these days, since his critics won. But every now again, there will be something like M83's Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming and Japandroids' Celebration Rock-- that get there in their own way and express what the Pumpkins did on "Tonight, Tonight", that "the impossible is possible tonight," as in right now. They have little to do with Mellon Collie except that they sacrifice being cool to show a deep respect for the way teenagers interact with music. When the world is a vampire, you don't want history lessons or a list of influences, you want fucking magic. You don't want lifestyle music, you don't want Our Band Could Be Your Life. You want music that you can live inside. Damn right Smashing Pumpkins shot for the moon on Mellon Collie, but only because they wanted to give you the sun and the stars.


The enchanting singer enlists ANOHNI, David Byrne, Brandi Carlile, and more for an interesting collection of covers ranging from traditional folk songs, to Neil Young tunes, to children’s lullabies.

Folkocracy

The folk tradition looms large over the work of Rufus Wainwright. Approaching the craft as a white gay Canadian man for whom the canon of his own folkie dad was there to be overcome, Wainwright lavishes the cover material he recorded for Folkocracy with the appetite of a weary traveler sniffing a bounteous feast. This is an artist who set Shakespeare’s sonnets to music and belted “Over the Rainbow” at Carnegie Hall: He ain’t afraid of shit. Like his stylistic and artistic compass Bryan Ferry, Wainwright can inhabit the cobwebby artifact “Oh Shenandoah”: He’s a habitual tourist with an appetite, growling in a foreign country’s terrain.
And, I must point out, he has never sung better on record, wresting control from a vibrato too often besotted with its own purring, like a cat stroking itself. Even on his self-titled 1998 debut, an album that elbowed me into coming out a few weeks after my first listen, his dolorous way with a syllable occasionally smothered its chansons. He had more fun on 2001’s sprightlier Poses, one of the period’s few documents about a gay urban life where too many cigarettes, cocktails, and muzzy mornings don’t quash his insistence on more cigs, cocktails, and mornings, or on improving the songcraft that particularized his experiences.
Toughened by decades’ worth of incident in Wainwright’s life—from vices to kids—Folkocracy queers these ancient prayers and subterranean croaks without Wainwright or the band, assembled by co-producer Mitchell Froom, fussing them into inertness. Folkocracy is a fun listen. Froom, known for treating keyboards like bazookas, keeps things spare, not parched: He knows his client requested condo-sized voices like ANOHNI, Chaka Khan, and Brandi Carlile. For once the advance PR is correct: the album sounds like a party to which the birthday boy invited his favorite people. For precedents consider Neil Young’s Americana, where he plugged the likes of “Oh Susannah” into the blown, bleary amps of Crazy Horse.
These projects are worthless if they don’t surprise, so, happily, Folkocracy offers several. Andrew Bird plays a violin line as old as Tennessee mud and harmonizes with Chris Stills on “Harvest,” the best Young cover since Lee Ann Womack’s poised “Out on the Weekend” almost a decade ago. The Chaka Khan who impressed with versions of  “All of Me” and other standards long ago contributes a vocal to “Cotton Eyed Joe,” whose finger-brushed delicacy suggests the lyrics remain a mystery she longs to solve. John Legend has never sung with less ham-on-rye than on “Heading for Home.” A performer who sounds least human when conventionally crooning, David Byrne invests Moondog’s “High on a Rocky Ledge” with a tremulous intensity; I imagine him pledging his troth to his lover instead of shoving her off the cliff.
The above-the-title star holds up his end. For his next project he should write original kid songs like “Hush Little Baby,” joined here by siblings Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright Roche on the mic. As if inspired by the gently fierce Hawaiian protest rhetoric of “Kaulana Nā Pua,” he includes his own lamentation. The highest compliment to offer “Going to a Town” is that it belongs in this company. Val McCullum strums basic guitar chords over which Wainwright and ANOHNI mourn the promises their fellow citizens persist in breaking. “I’m so tired of you, America,” Wainwright sighs, but in a sigh inflected with the expectation that he’ll hope again—just like the rest of us will break the promise again.
The concentration and breath control he demonstrates on “Going to a Town” are triumphs. It’s not like he couldn’t ever sing: he’s got “I Don’t Know What It Is” and “Foolish Love” in his catalog. But a newly jazzed Wainwright has learned from the company he keeps. Folkocracy is as generous as a utopia.


Steeped in ’80s revivalism, the New York dance-rockers’ eighth album is a hazy tapestry of half-remembered sounds and shopworn tropes.

Lobes

We Are Scientists were never the center of the zeitgeist. The California band arrived in New York City just as the post-millennial party was winding down; they released their debut album in 2005, by which point it was apparent that the Strokes hadn’t changed the world after all. But where their peers fell by the wayside, guitarist/vocalist Keith Murray and bassist Chris Cain persevered, doubling down on melody while embracing humor, if not outright silliness, taking pains not to be confused with Weezer.
It was a blueprint that could sustain a career, generating such tuneful records as TV en Francais, the 2014 album where they unveiled their neo-power-pop formula: Underneath the spiky rhythms and shards of guitar, the band was guided by hooks. They clung tight to their blueprint, finding variations on familiar themes all the way through Huffy, a 2021 album propelled by post-pandemic urgency; they seemed intent on rushing through their songs, giddy that they were getting back to the grind.
Ostensibly, Lobes is the album where We Are Scientists dive into strange waters, a record where the pent-up energy that fueled Huffy drives the group into new territory. Keith Murray explained to DIY Mag that where Huffy was a “’‘guitar-rock’-focused record,” Lobes swings the pendulum to “electronic, synth-based dance-rock songs.” It’s a difference without distinction, partially because We Are Scientists have always traded in dance rock. “Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt” and “The Great Escape,” a pair of singles from their debut, neatly fit into the fashionable dance-punk revival at the time, and they’re not all that far from the stylized thrum of Lobes. It’s just that the emphasis has been flipped; synthesizers lead the charge, with guitars functioning as coloring and texture.
The thick layers of keyboards and pulsating drum machines conjure ghosts of new wave, all performed by a group almost old enough to have experienced it firsthand. Curiously, nothing on Lobes feels born of personal experience. Rather, it’s a hazy tapestry of half-remembered sounds and shopworn tropes, all absorbed secondhand through persistent exercises in nostalgia, whether retro radio revivals, vintage MTV broadcasts, video games, or other bands who got around to resuscitating the sounds of the 1980s first.
Many of the building blocks on Lobes feel purposefully familiar. With its glistening synths, “Turn It Up" echoes New Order; “Settled Accounts” is driven by a chicken-scratch guitar that tips its hat to Nile Rodgers; and “Less From You” throbs to a disco beat straight out of the glitter-ball glory days. While the insistent rhythms help give the album a retro-futuristic pulse, even on such ballads as “Lucky Just to Be Here,” Lobes is essentially mood music. Neither the frenetic melodies nor Keith Murray’s flat affect—on “Settled Accounts,” he’s a dead ringer for Julian Casablancas—can pierce the production’s gleaming, neon veneer. Pastiche is the entire point of Lobes. Maybe its period recreations provide some surface pleasures, but it’s not enough to erase the suspicion that We Are Scientists have turned into indie-rock journeymen, content to dabble in sounds and styles that have just fallen out of fashion.


Gqom (pronounced Gome) is a blistering variant of South African house which finds its roots in the coastal city of Durban. Like lots of the home-brewed genres of music in South Africa and beyond, a treasure trove of tracks is easily available on the Internet. The 15 tracks that compose Sounds of Durban Vol. 1 successfully capture the very essence of gqom: the rough-and-tumble vibe, the impressionistic and asymmetrical kickdrums, the hypnotic chanting, and the music's brash youthfulness.

Various Artists: The Sound of Durban Vol. 1

The Sound of Durban Vol. 1

The Rome-based DJ/producer Nan Kolè discovered gqom late one night last January when he saw a friend tagged in a link with the mysterious hashtag: #Gqom. Luckily he clicked on the link and committed to a deep dive, staying up 'til the next morning downloading hundreds of songs. Gqom (pronounced Gome) is a blistering variant of South African house which finds its roots in the coastal city of Durban, and like lots of the home-brewed genres of music in South Africa and beyond, a treasure trove of tracks was easily available on the Internet. The plentiful and vibrant community on the free file-hosting site Data File Host, the dozens of Facebook groups (IGqomu, Gqomu Music, Gqom Nation to name a few), invite-only WhatsApp group chats, and most importantly KasiMP3—South Africa's answer to Bandcamp and Soundcloud—can make a newcomer feel like he's uncovered an embarrassment of riches.
But good luck cataloging any of it, let alone compiling a "best of" when so many tracks are titled with cellphone numbers/BBM pins, and available mostly in low bitrate formats. Kolè met Lerato Phiri through mutual friends in Rome, and she moved back to South Africa to find and meet with young producers in Durban, convincing them to contribute to a compilation. A year later they've co-founded the record label Gqom Oh! and have released their first full-length release, The Sound of Durban Vol. 1.
If there is an origin story for gqom it all begins on the Internet, probably on the Pirate Bay or a similarly clandestine digital backdoor. Emo Kid, an artist featured on Sounds of Durban, said that he he thinks the style "was invented when some unknown guy from elokishini, the ghetto, got hold of production software and began experimenting and making something he could dance to, and gqom was born." Gqom comes from a Zulu word meaning drum or hit, and in the local slang it's an onomatopoeia that mimics the abrupt sound of a rock hitting a tile floor. The sound of gqom is one literally of rupture and force, or as Kode9 has said, "like being suspended over the gravitational field of a black hole, and lovin' it." The entire aesthetic of gqom is steeped in a swashbuckling DIY attitude. Nothing about these productions feels slick or highly processed. The music proudly shows its seams by remaining highly tactile, off the cuff, and very confrontational. Back-breaking tracks like "Zulu War" and "Gunz & Soulz" make this quite evident.
What Kolè found so attractive about gqom in the first place was that it felt like a perfect artistic expression for the political, economic, and urban contradictions so apparent in Durban and South Africa as a whole. It is among the most Westernized and developed countries on the continent, but the living conditions for the predominately black communities in the townships of South Africa remain dismal. Gqom is still being produced in townships and suburbs, marginal communities by and large where access to Internet, gear, and everything young musicians need is still a struggle. And for the most part gqom artists and gqom music is not played on local radio, nor has it reached any significant popularity outside of Durban, which is often seen as secondary in the music scene to the larger and more visible Johannesburg. While it might seem specious that someone who has never been to Durban become the spokesperson for the genre, Kolè's intentions feel heartfelt and earnest. He's said the artists (whose ages range from 15 to 22) call him "Malumz" which means "uncle" because he's too old to be a "bro."
Phiri and Kolè want gqom to have the same connection to Durban that juke and footwork has to Chicago, and by helping bring the genre international recognition they hope to route investment toward better access to technology and greater cultural infrastructure in Durban, which should continue fostering artistic production. They aren't the only group trying to make gqom a big deal on international dance floors. Kode9 included gqom tracks in a Resident Advisor mix last year, and the London-based label Goon Club Allstars released an EP by the group Rudeboyz last summer. That same summer, up-and-coming grime rapper Stormzy traveled to South Africa to learn about gqom. According to Johannesburg music journalist, Lloyd Gedye, you can even hear strains of gqom's signature stylings in Jamie xx's "Gosh," which he might have heard in the now-popular gqom nights that are popping up in South London. Even with all the hype attached, it still feels like we're learning more about gqom, and Phiri and Kolè's project is the largest and most thoughtful survey of the genre available to western audiences to date.
The 15 tracks that compose Sounds of Durban Vol. 1 successfully capture the very essence of gqom: the rough-and-tumble vibe, the impressionistic and asymmetrical kickdrums, the hypnotic chanting, and the music's brash youthfulness. Originally referred to as "Broken Beat" in the community, gqom is a pushback against spiritual predecessors like Kwaito, where melody and other harmonic qualities are dissolved away and only the hard beat of a song remains.
Much of the music on the album can feel amorphous and shapeless because it's difficult to identify and differentiate artist from artist as songs bleed into the next. In that way, it's more a well-wrought mix than an album. The album pleasantly bludgeons you with what makes gqom different from other kinds of house music: it's raw, it's tougher, angrier. It presents a case for a minimal version of house which is never restrained—the music is always exuberant and riotous. This also means the album can easily move from relentless to tiring, because as a whole it lacks pacing, and it is instead a trial by fire.
Although that is not to say that artists don't stand out. Dominowe's "Africa's Cry," the album's second track, sets the bar impossibly high. Cruel Boyz's "Umeqo Emagqomini (Dub Mix)" was the lead single for the record, and it might be the album's best song. It feels like the strongest argument for gqom being the heartbeat of club music in Durban, with its addictive combination of polyrhythmic claves and vigorous, almost painterly, use of kickdrums.
Some of these songs might feel like prototypes for who these artists might become. But it's also the first major salvo in a genre that will only get more dazzling and compelling. Ultimately, Sound of Durban is the story of a talented group of friends as much as it is a sampler into a new and fast-moving genre of dance music. All the things that are carefree and rebellious about being young find a way to be showcased in these songs. And if there is any resolution that can feel doable in this new year, it's to rep this group of young people in Durban as hard as possible when you decide to hijack the speakers at the party you find yourself at tonight.


On his debut, this Swedish artist submerges psych-rock instrumentals into one low, bubbling groove.

Eastern Flowers

Last year, the Swedish artist Sven Wunder quietly released his debut album Doğu Çiçekleri on a freshly minted label called Piano Piano. Intentionally mysterious, the project was crafted to resemble an obscure ‘60s or ‘70s library record, the kind of purposefully anonymous mood music used by TV shows and movie houses to cheaply soundtrack their productions. In a vacuum, most library records are campy and awkward, but a select few feel like mystical accidents, cross-genre laboratory experiments that yield bizarre new life forms. Sven Wunder has successfully aimed Doğu Çiçekleri in this direction, and so it feels less helpful to describe the music as jazz or funk than to back away and simply call it heavy.
The most memorable and reliable lead voice is a saz, a shimmering, sure-footed metallic sound that helps cast Eastern Flowers in a Mediterranean folk hue. Whoever is playing it is shredding, and helps give the album its restrained funk. The album clearly wants to transport you somewhere, but Wunder is refreshingly unclear about where that might be, and Eastern Flowers is never too on-the-nose about evoking rare-groove nostalgia: “Daisy” opens with some surf-rock spy-theme cliches before a saz overpowers the guitar and snowballs into  glitchy organ stabs and beeps. That surf-rock tone pops up as the pecking bass effect on “Red Rose” alongside a wah-wah that sounds like a laser. These are dramatic production choices, but Wunder submerges them into one long, lazy, bubbling groove.
Things get much weirder: “Hyacinth” coaxes a polka-like trot out of a Seinfeld-theme bassline and douses it in spaghetti-western toppings. “Lotus” and “Lily” are brooding psych-folk jams, apropos of nothing else on the record. But no matter how outré the sounds get, the intensity of Wunder’s productions sneaks up on you. Many grooves dig in so deeply they seem to form a drone, an intoxicating effect that sinks in slowly over the course of the album. Snap out of it and step away, and the whole album seems to buzz in the same vibration, like a single plucked string. It’s a testament to Wunder’s vision that he’s created something so self-contained out of such wild ingredients.


The British electro pop artist sings of love, loneliness, and solo partying across an album built in and made for this very moment.

how i’m feeling now

How I’m Feeling Now, the album Charli XCX conceived and created entirely at home in quarantine in Los Angeles over the past six weeks, is instantly familiar to a lot of us at the moment. “I’m so bored/Wake up late, eat some cereal/Try my best to be physical/Lose myself in a TV show/Staring out to oblivion/All my friend are invisible,” she deadpans on “Anthems,” a song workshopped during a recent session on Instagram Live, the celebrity platform du jour. “Sometimes I feel OK/Some days I’m so frightened.” Say it louder for the people stuck in a depression nap.
Launching a creative endeavor in public feels somewhat incomprehensible right now, when conditions for creating art are so uniquely discouraging. Charli began with a mid-March Twitter note, pondering questions that have become increasingly pressing as the music business scrambles to adapt to pandemic culture: When might it be safe to tour? Who will pay for artists’ work until then? Charli, a self-identified workaholic, forged ahead: She performed at the Minecraft music festival organized by 100 gecs and hosts a weekly video conference with appearances by famous friends.
For those who’ve kept up with Charli’s unusually transparent creative process via interviews, livestreams, and screenshots, part of the joy of the new album is simply seeing how her song sketches and Notes app lyrics turned out. Those just tuning in may have missed the stress of a self-imposed May 15 deadline (she only just made it), and how quarantining with her boyfriend strengthened a previously strained long-distance relationship. How I’m Feeling Now is simultaneously a hopeless cry and a celebration of love recorded steps away from its object, with songs like “forever,” “claws,” “7 years,” and “i finally understand” devoted to sincere, immediate romance and pleasure.
Though How I’m Feeling Now doesn’t have the same reflective gloss or celebrity guest list of 2019’s Charli, its sound is true to the sugary bounce of the club pop she’s explored since the Vroom Vroom EP in 2016 (A. G. Cook, Bon Iver collaborator BJ Burton, and 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady all receive co-production credits). While life shuts down, this music bursts out. Busy synthetic arrangements snake their way around Charli’s vocals, unmistakable even after they’ve been repeatedly pitch-shifted and filtered. “Claws” sounds like it’s being assembled in a canning factory, ascending a euphoric EDM build to a gaggle of dissonant, bionic vocal vibrations.
Opener “Pink Diamond,” a standard-issue Charli banger, makes only passing mention of pandemic life (“In real life could the club even handle us?”). But though Charli might role-play as a party-time pop android, the most enjoyable parts of How I’m Feeling Now come from a vulnerable person in conspicuous glitter armor. “I’ve been reeling for 12 days/When I start to see fear it gets real bad,” goes the tender-voiced first verse of “detonate,” a dispatch from the anxious early weeks of lockdown, when the days were still few enough to count. Even the simplistic premise of “party 4 u” takes on new meaning under the circumstances: “I only threw this party for you/For you, for you, for you.” Hey, it’s not like anybody else can come.
The sentiments read simply, but with the collective fear and uncertainty of pandemic still surrounding us, their meaning feels profound. As Pitchfork contributor Shaad D’Souza wrote last week, Charli’s music is not the pop of the future, but a pure expression of the present. By design, How I’m Feeling Now is so current that it’s hard to imagine its message resonating the same way when life begins to feel normal once again. It’s a cultural artifact from the ultimate liminal space, between the old, pre-pandemic world and an uncertain new landscape—why should it live anywhere else? Right now, even “forever” comes with a bittersweet caveat: “I will always love you/I love you forever/I know in the future/We won’t see each other.”
But Charli makes a lot of sense here, and she deserves credit as our most fully online pop star. She’s the ideal choice for a festival in Minecraft, where glitchy, pitched-up vocals and the occasional free-association nonsense lyric seem to extend naturally from the game’s surreal, hyperactive world. More than just an autobiographical document or a manifestation of Charli’s impressive work ethic, How I’m Feeling Now is her answer to questions about the viability of music in a crisis. It works better than anyone could have anticipated.


Remastered and reissued editions document Dan Bejar's early period, when he grew into the unique, beloved songwriter he is today.

Destroyer: City of Daughters / Thief / Streethawk: A Seduction

"Find something difficult to do and do it," says Destroyer's Dan Bejar a few tracks into Streethawk: A Seduction. Which is more or less the story of Bejar's early albums, now reissued-- City of Daughters, Thief, and Streethawk. In a few years, the tentative bedroom auteur grew into one of indie rock's most distinctive voices, and these three records laid the groundwork for his career. The extravagant glam-pop that would become Bejar's trademark is hinted at, whittled down, and then perfected over the course of these albums. Every record since Streethawk has felt like either an extension of its successes or an outright rejection of its excesses.
City of Daughters found Bejar playing with others for the first time, but it's still plenty homespun; its songs are rough around the edges and not always sure what to do with themselves. Most of these tracks are simple and occasionally quite direct, but with less drama and fewer of the flashes of brilliance Bejar's often built songs from and around. Still finding his voice as a singer, Bejar alternates between sounding meek and going in just a tad harder than the songs seem to deserve. The wordiness that would become something of a trademark is in full effect, but he was only just starting to get the sloganeering thing down; unlike much of what came later, not every line is worthy of examination.
His work with the band, too, results in some fairly perfunctory arrangements; in hindsight, it's easy to see where a big crescendo might have gone had they had the means to pull one off at the time. The bouncy synth-pop breakdown in "The Space Race" is the first real evidence of his penchant for throwing a lot of unexpected elements into a song and making them stick. But the most successful tune here is one of its most bare; "You Were So Cruel" describes some manner of abuse, and while the specifics aren't crystal clear, Bejar's delivery is devastating. A good writer can explain themselves in any number of words; a great writer needs only a couple. With a few dozen words, the song drags you through about as many emotions. It's possibly his first masterpiece, though more would follow.
Thief, originally issued in mono, benefits the most from remastering. It's Bejar's first stab at matching his grandiose, idiosyncratic vision to a showier sound, and it's never sounded better. It's also the first Destroyer LP to feature a full band on every track, and it displays a far better understanding of how its moving parts should fit together than the more fleshed-out numbers on Daughters. It's more patient, more deliberate, and much more confident; the singing improves vastly, and the songs cease feeling like vehicles for spitting out lyrics.
All the hallmarks of Destroyer as we know them now are here: Rousing instrumental passages, lots of la-da-da's, effusive underlining of key phrases. But the sense of drama-- that teetering-on-the-brink feeling that marks his best stuff-- only occasionally rears its head; he still seemed to be getting comfortable having other people around, and there are times when the band seems to be playing him, rather than the other way around. As much as Destroyer is about excess, Thief sometimes bites off more than Bejar could chew at that point, and the duller bits obscure the moments of graceful abandon.
But then there's Streethawk, a record of practically nothing but graceful abandon. Each line seems immaculately crafted, every note falling into perfect order, every word sung with the proper bite and bile. This is what Bejar was building to, why he became a songwriter in the first place, and he reaches quite a precipice. Songs move effortlessly between bits of received wisdom, the drama is amped up to almost unthinkable levels, and these tunes feel like a long series of exclamation points. The guy got really good really fast, and he knew it-- his wit is sharp, his observations are keen, and his gaze is withering.
Bejar's pop songcraft gets a real shot in the arm here; instead of burying his best lines in verses, he builds his rave-ups around them, and the songs feel like a series of unlikely peaks that, in less able hands, would topple in seconds. You could study this music at academy; you can also pump a fist to it. It can at first feel overwhelming or overstuffed, but the salty poetry and barrage of hooks eventually starts to make its own kind of sense; beyond brimming over with ideas, if it's got a flaw, it's that it wasn't issued with a glossary. This is the payoff for years of head-down dedication to craft-- all these monstrous choruses and anthems-to-be; all those difficult years of working and reworking to make himself a better songwriter until, finally, he was one of the best we've got. He still is.


The singer and producer’s dazzling new EP is a subtle gesture about grace and interiority and the illusion of effortlessness, the same attributes that mark Chris as a true star.

Christine and the Queens: La vita nuova EP

La Vita Nuova EP

Chris is gentle and tough, masculine and feminine, subtle and direct, a pop singer with high-art ambitions. La vita nuova, a five-song EP and its accompanying short film, is about the psychic effort required to maintain the balance. On the cover, Chris appears pensive, part Ziggy Stardust, part Degas portrait. She calls it a project about vulnerability, though it’s also about grace and interiority and the illusion of effortlessness, the same attributes that mark her as a true star.
If you’re looking for the party, you’re in the wrong place: Shorter and sadder than 2018’s Chris, La vita nuova has fewer big synth swoops and slower tempos. Produced by Chris alongside debut album collaborator Ash Workman, its cool, aquatic surface ripples with subtle vocal manipulations and whispery background samples. “People, I’ve been sad” is an open apology to a world its author can’t bear to face, like a note from the friend who misses you but still won’t return your calls. “You know the feeling,” Chris offers, opening a door within herself to reveal a mirror.
Her imagistic writing remains spare as ever, making a game of revealing concealed emotion by rendering it in multiple languages. Last year was the year of “Gone,” Chris and Charli XCX’s duet about sadness and sexual tension; the Caroline Polachek duet “La vita nuova” is a worthy successor. Their verses in Italian are a mutual affirmation of passion, but the chorus, in English, mourns the partner who won’t dare to show their love. “Heartbreakers,” Chris cries, “I never take their answer for sure.”
Throughout, she seems like someone who’s just emerged from a breakup, still sorting through the raw emotion. “Do you think there’s only one thing to do/To write a song about you?” she asks on “Mountains,” a wistful sketch of a lapsed connection. Other times her stance is not so clear-cut: Perhaps the selfish, possessive lover she addresses in “Je disparais dans tes bras” is not a lover, but the flattening gaze of fame—not merely the pain of unrequited love, but of the impossibility of being her full self in the eyes of others.
Most spectacular is the accompanying short film, a five-song music-video narrative set in Paris’ sumptuous Palais Garnier opera house. Directed by Colin Solal Cardo, the story is a supernatural drama of a performer’s life, following Chris through a rooftop dance solo and a group rehearsal to a climactic vampire ball that pairs her with Polachek for a lusty duet. Chris appears in virginal white and then in shiny black pleather, a heavily symbolic heroine uniting the sacred and profane.
It is astounding to watch Chris’ particular vision play out in this location—a genre iconoclast defining her own scene in a lavish 19th-century Parisian theater. It recalls a story from her youth that she relayed to The Guardian a few years ago, how once, at drama school where only boys were permitted to direct plays, she defied the administration by staging her own. With its Thriller-esque flash and tomato-red fake blood, the film La vita nuova looks like a kind of theater-kid fever dream. But that’s what theater is for: The emotions that feel too unruly, too ambiguous, to survive in the real world. They need space, just as dancers do, and Chris’ could fill the house.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Maroon 5’s seventh album sets out to experiment beyond their comfort zone. It sounds like a band trying desperately to appeal to as many markets as possible.

Jordi

The most you can hope for from Maroon 5 is oblivion. The band hummed and strummed their way into perpetual background music, cooing sanded-down soft rock in every Starbucks, Adam Levine’s signature whine pleading for love and rain and Sunday mornings. It was anaesthesia. Levine became a bland, steady presence in pop culture, preaching banalities and judging TV singing competitions. In the nearly 20 years since the band debuted with Songs About Jane, they’ve clawed at pop trends—EDM-inspired beats, strategic collaborations with rappers—occasionally finding a hook so sugary, a drum pattern so blunting, that you surrendered to the rush of it. You don’t turn to Maroon 5 for their baggy, overcommitted metaphors or their sappy ballads. You listen so you can submerge.
The band’s seventh record comes up short. They continue to fumble for relevancy with mismatched features and plastic-sounding pop, but these tracks are more scattered and chaotic than on past albums. Jordi’s title is a tribute to Maroon 5’s late manager, who died suddenly in 2017, and there are pockets of mourning on the record. “Doo doo doo doo doo, memories bring back you,” Levine hums over a cloying guitar line on “Memories.” Maroon 5’s take on love has always been doused in cliché; their response to tragedy is equally pallid. When the band released “Nobody’s Love” as a single in July 2020, Levine wrote on Instagram that he made the song with “the whole world in mind,” urging essential workers and social justice activists to remember the “potent power of love” as they listened to him croon. “Ain’t nobody want to live in this world today,” he proclaims on “One Light,” an Afrobeats-lite collaboration with pop songwriter Bantu. Elsewhere, there’s a jarring posthumous Nipsey Hussle verse on a remix of “Memories” and an uncharacteristically anodyne appearance from the late rapper Juice WRLD, on a track otherwise devoted to Levine begging a love interest to talk to him.
This is not about a band experimenting beyond their comfort zone; it is the sound of a band trying desperately to appeal to as many markets as possible. blackbear delivers an almost identical flow to the chorus of his hit “hot girl bummer” on “Echo,” and Levine tries on the rapper’s trap drums and fluorescent production. He’s his own guest feature on the streaming-service bonus track “Lifestyle,” which is actually a Jason Derulo song. “Can’t get your lipstick off my col-la-laaaaa,” he babbles. “You do that thing that keep me calling ya.” The band attempts a sweeping, theatrical ballad on “Convince Me Otherwise,” Levine and H.E.R. trading verses about a lovers’ argument, but the song caves in under the weight of self-seriousness. Jordi bounces between smeary electropop haze, wobbles of tropical house, a forgettable Stevie Nicks appearance. It’s too cluttered to sink into, too limp for catharsis.
The album credits a whopping 47 writers, and there is a vague comfort in how precisely these songs are formulated, hooks and synths and predictable rhymes snapping into place. But if past Maroon 5 songs addressed convincing-enough emotions (misery, longing, horniness), Jordi has few discernible narratives. Levine goes from wondering how he can “save my mama” to deeming a love interest his “starlight and moonshine and burning sun.” “I’m not holding on, I’m just depressed that you’re gone,” he lilts on “Beautiful Mistakes,” by far the most palatable track. It’s a simple admission, dissolving into chants of “na na na” and clean, frictionless chords. The song builds to a Megan Thee Stallion feature, but like the band’s past collaborations with the biggest female star of the moment—the Cardi B-featuring “Girls Like You,” the SZA duet “What Lovers Do”—it feels flimsy and transactional, an excuse to briefly join Megan’s orbit. This, too, is part of Maroon 5’s time-tested strategy: offering a reprieve from Levine’s internal monologue, then fading back into it. The band’s grief flares up through the pop formulas in discordant flickers—“Live young, die fast,” Levine breathes on “Remedy.” Making an album to address the darker sides of life is an honorable intention; it also means making a Maroon 5 album, sleek and glib and synthetic.

Buy: Rough Trade
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