Ten years on from the minor psych-rock renaissance that birthed them, the Swedish quartet have proved surprisingly durable, even influential*. Allas Sak* finds the band fully re-engaged in the sound that they have staked out over the past decade—performing music that’s still as beautiful, optimistic, strange, and singular as ever.

Allas Sak

In 2004, when Dungen released their third and still-greatest LP, Ta Det Lungt, the Swedish quartet was just one good act amid a minor psych-rock renaissance. At the time, a number of bands were finding inspiration in progressive rock from the '60s and '70s and pushing those sounds toward fuzzier and more frantic extremes. This was also the year that Santa Cruz's Comets on Fire released their well-loved record, Blue Cathedral, and around the same time that Dead Meadow, Pearls and Brass, and Boris were putting out some of their best music.
Ten years later, a lot of these groups have split up, moved on, or faded from view, but Dungen have proven surprisingly durable, even a bit influential. It’s hard to listen to Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker and Lonerism without hearing some parallels to the Swedish band, particularly in the sense of rhythm and the doubled upper-register vocal melodies.
Allas Sak is Dungen’s first release in five years and seventh album overall. Not too much has changed since their last record, 2010’s Skit I Allt. Like that album, Allas Sak is split almost evenly between Swedish-language pop songs and instrumentals. And like all preceding Dungen records, it sounds awesome. Led by singer, multi-instrumentalist, and engineer Gustav Ejstes, the band is able to perfectly dial in the organic tones of vintage '60s pop, even when working with computer-based recording software.
While Dungen have never quite bested Ta Det Lungt in terms of pop uplift and songwriting, the band have also never made a truly bad record. Rather, they have remained remarkably consistent, so much so that by the time 4 came out in 2008, audiences had probably started to take them for granted—one more record, one more Keith Moon-style drum fill, one more expertly-fuzzed guitar solo. But after half a decade off, Allas Sak provides some great evidence for why Dungen have endured while so many of their peers have trailed off.
Though Ejstes initially wrote all of the songs and even performed most of the band’s music, over the years Dungen have gradually become a group effort, with a dedicated band including guitarist Reine Fiske and drummer Johan Holmegard, and bassist Mattias Gustavsson. As a result, they’ve gotten progressively jammier from album to album. But while Dungen’s music has its share of sprawling moments, it’s seldom aimless. Even in their most improvisational passages, the band’s songs move with intention—one solo or spaced-out interlude setting up the next climax or scene shift.
Of the record’s instrumentals, only the guitar-driven freak-out "En Dag På Sjön" sounds like it was clipped from a spontaneous jam session, while the rest are deliberate and composed. On "Franks Kaktus", Ejstes performs the lead melody on a flute, trading riffs with the guitar and guiding the band in and out of a bongo-laden groove. As smooth as the music is, though, it doesn’t come off as arch or ironic. Indeed, you can hear evidence of Ejstes earnestly vibing out every time his notes go slightly sharp—the wind equivalent of a bent guitar note or scrunchy face. On "Flickor Och Pojkar", a delicate Rhodes piano melody is gradually augmented with string and acoustic guitar flourishes that sweep across the stereo field. The music recalls the work of film composer Ennio Morricone in its attention to arrangement and sonic detail.
This obsession over small moments and gestures is important to the Swedish band’s music. A lot of psychedelic rock is focused on the big-picture freak-out—the zonked experimental and spontaneous moment where the music becomes combustible and uncontrollable. And while Dungen are capable of producing those moments, the band have always set their primary focus on hooks, both in a rhythmic and melodic sense. Just about any four bars of a Dungen song could be sampled and looped as the foundation for something else.
And though the group’s music appropriates sounds and production styles from the past, it’s hard to think of a particular act from the '60 or '70s that Ejstes is consciously emulating. Rather, Dungen use retro-minded instrumentation and recording techniques to convey fairly modern musical ideas, removed from the established sounds of classic rock and psych. The rhythm section, in particular, takes a strong influence from the feel and pulse of hip-hop. In this, they’re a little like Stereolab, another band that drew heavily from vintage experimental music, but who would never be mistaken for revivalists.
It's true that over the years Dungen have not changed very much. The band has remained in a more or less fixed position, while styles, temperaments, and audiences around them shifted. Ejstes has been right to stick to his guns, though. Today’s Dungen record might sound a lot like yesterday’s Dungen record, but yesterday’s Dungen record was good. And while the execution has at times wavered over the years*,* Allas Sak finds the band fully re-engaged in the sound that it has staked out over the past decade—performing music that’s still as beautiful, optimistic, strange, and singular as ever.


This meeting of punk and jazz heavyweights sidesteps contemporary trends; instead we’re treated to four players finding common ground as they slip between genres.

The Messthetics / James Brandon Lewis: The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis

The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis

As far as meetings between punk elder statesmen and avant-jazz explorers go, the Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis is an intuitive one. Drummer Brendan Canty and bassist Joe Lally, as the rhythm section of Fugazi, had a wide appetite for grooves from outside of hardcore’s pummeling standard vocabulary, whether the half-time sway of reggae or the piston-pumping backbeat of funk. And Lewis, though deeply rooted in jazz tradition, is similarly willing to stray from genre orthodoxy in search of a sound that suits him: The saxophonist’s modern-classic 2016 LP No Filter, full of distorted electric bass and throaty horn lines, has the gleefully pugilistic energy of an all-ages basement show. Lally and Canty formed the Messthetics as an instrumental trio in 2018, filling out the lineup with Anthony Pirog, a left-field jazz guitarist who’s equally adept with sidewinding melody and searing noise, and has worked often with Lewis, including on No Filter. After Lewis sat in with them on a couple of live dates, it must have felt only natural to invite him into the fold for an album.
The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, which the four men composed collaboratively, sits comfortably apart from any prevailing trends in 2020s jazz: no new-agey ambient soundscapes, cerebral free improvisation, nor incense-and-hand-bells spiritual-jazz revivalism. Its sensibility has a whiff of downtown New York in the freewheeling 1980s and early ’90s, when John Zorn was playing grindcore in Naked City and Sonny Sharrock shared a bassist with Henry Rollins. As in that era of cross-pollination, the players meet each other confidently and generously on their own terms. The punks don’t sound eager to prove their jazz bona fides, and the jazzers don’t seem to view punk with any condescension toward its rudimentary building blocks. Each one brings his particular skill set, and the others figure out how to work with it. The results can be astonishing, as in the climactic final section of “Three Sisters,” when Lewis and Pirog play intertwining solos and the Fugazi guys churn beneath them, each player urging the others toward ever higher flights of intensity and invention.
There are also moments that sound more or less like Fugazi with a free-jazz saxophonist instead of a singer. Though they may lack the grand scale of a composition like “Three Sisters,” they ground the album in a sense of boisterous good fun. “Emergence” should be particularly easy for fans of Canty and Lally’s old band to love, with the Messthetics making breakneck switches between “Waiting Room”-style syncopation and pogo-ing power chords, and Lewis blowing like hell on top. Even in his more overtly jazzy work, the saxophonist tends to favor relatively static harmonies over the elaborate chord changes of bebop, an approach that proves a good fit for the lean-and-mean compositional sensibility of a couple of guys schooled on hardcore. With the rest of the band providing such a solid and stripped-down framework, Lewis is free to embellish the melody of “Emergence” in whatever direction he chooses: first straight and declarative, then with increasingly frenetic dissonance as the song goes on.
On a high-profile collaboration like this one, the players could have easily just vamped on a few different grooves with the tape running and called it a day. They’re good enough that even no-stakes jamming would have yielded some compelling moments, and they have enough collective clout that people would have listened either way. To their great credit, they didn’t skimp on actually composing. From the sideways funk riffs of “That Thang” to the bluesy refrain of “Railroad Tracks Home,” each tune is robust enough to stick with you, all providing meaningful context and structure for the improvised journeys they frame. The most ambitious of them is “Boatly,” which spends its first half as a sultry ballad and its second as a soaring post-rock anthem. If a group without this quartet’s easy chemistry and clear mutual respect attempted such a drastic change, it might come out hokey or unpleasantly abrupt: the clear point at which one member’s ideas fade to the background and another’s take over. But as the Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis shift into their finale—Canty stops caressing the drums and begins to pound, Lewis brings his sax from a purr to a scream—you get the sense that these four would only reach this particular conclusion together.


We wanted a The Wrestler-style comeback that derived power from its protagonist's fall; instead, this LP has a lonely, defensive Kirk Van Houten vibe.

Crime Pays

Our current financial difficulties haven't stopped the incessant need to find trends in anything, and the result has been dozens of publications proclaiming the fashionability of frugality. This has worked out extremely well for not only people who were cheap before it somehow became cool, but unexpectedly, for many rappers who have either passed their commercial peak or never really experienced one in the first place. No longer cowed by unrealistic expectations, either self-imposed or label-imposed, guys like Scarface, Styles P, Beanie Sigel, Freeway, Slim Thug, and Jim Jones are putting out highly enjoyable, no-frills records with low overhead, proving all along that some rappers just need a decent beat and everyone else to stay out of their way.
Crime Pays all but confirms that Cam'ron is not one of those rappers. Over the past half-year or so, leaks like "I Hate My Job" and "Get It in Ohio" suggested a possibility of a The *Wrestler-*style comeback narrative that derived power from admitting how far its protagonist had fallen. Instead, Crime Pays has a lonely, defensive, and vaguely desperate Kirk Van Houten vibe-- more noticeable than a lack of breakout bangers or guest spots (though you gotta wonder how 40 Cal was the biggest name to clear his schedule for the first Cam'ron record in three years) is a palpable and inexcusable lack of excitement and spark. Killa could stand to borrow a feeling.
Seems like any time Cam isn't able to shout out the names of every inaugural member of DipSet, he retreats into the sort of insular (not to be confused with impulsive or impenetrable-- that would be more interesting) bad habits he's picked up since Purple Haze became arguably the last definitive document of popular New York rap. Earlier in the decade, beats from Just Blaze, Kanye, and Heatmakerz provided exquisite and posh soundtracks that added extra shine to Cam's theater of the absurd. But whether it's a reduced budget or his increased need to show allegiance to the Sun Belt states, Cam outsources most of Crime Pays to Araabmuzik and Skitzo. They contribute mixtape-quality music that goes heavy on repetitive Psycho strings and incessantly ticking 16th-note hi-hats but ultimately has about as much low end as a Junior Senior record.
And not that I'd expect the guy who penned lines like "take it in your ass-- how 'bout 30 grams?" and the entirety of "Stop Calling" to give the most positive spin on gender relations, but even after all the poisonous misogyny we've heard Cam deal in up to this point, "You Know What's Up" and "Cookies & Apple Juice" are so mirthlessly repulsive that "Bottom of the Pussy" somehow becomes, like, the fifth-most offensive song on Crime Pays. At least Cam seems amused with himself on that track, which also explains how the comic high point of Crime Pays is a two-minute skit wherein Cam'ron threatens to shit in a woman's car-- it's a veritable Easter Egg for people who remember his second verse on "Dead Muthafuckas".
Of course, when Cam disappears headlong up his own assonance (no ho-millz, as he helpfully instructs throughout) it's still incredibly entertaining. Even within the tightest rhyme stricture, his gamesmanship in spooling vowel sounds fascinates. Cam'ron's one of those kind of guys where you could read his lyrics on paper and know exactly how it sounds. If only his lyrics and cadence weren't saddled with such shabby beats-- even as they contain some of the least imaginative lines on Crime Pays, the relative levity of kiddie beats like "Never Ever", "Silky (No Homo)", and "Whoo Hoo" feels welcome.
And then there's "Hate My Job". Killa's relationship with reality is so dysfunctional that his most "normal" songs tend to be his weirdest, especially when he tries to make an honest connection: the maybe-sincere love letter "Daydreamin'", "I.B.S." (that's irritable bowel syndrome). It's hard to say what could have inspired this unusually human and empathetic moment-- "Ay yo, I hate my boss/ Dude think he know it all/ And I know I know it all/ But I follow protocol." It's typical Cam smirk, and really the last bit of self-respect he can dredge up before a host of travails break him down, from everyday nuisances ("That's why I light the sour before I hit the office/ Being here eight hours sure get you nauseous") to the very real hopelessness befalling someone with a checkered past ("You're working on my future/ Why you calling out my history?").
As bizarre as it initially seems for a rapper like Cam'ron to go in character as a working stiff, it's not unprecedented-- in fact, the soundtrack for Office Space had two such instances, from Canibus and Kool Keith. The latter's shadow paradoxically hangs heavy over Crime Pays-- shortly after Dr. Octagonecologyst broke him with the indie set*,* Keith was also making intermittently enjoyable records centered around NBA namedrops, poop jokes, and the fine distinction between "alien" and "alienating." It's a slippery slope Cam would be well-advised to study, since on four separate "Fuck Cam" skits, a bunch of crotchety haters talk shit about his lemonhead earrings, floor-length minks, and his pink and purple pioneering. In their minds, Cam's done nothing worth really mentioning since 2005, and Crime Pays often makes you wonder if they've got a point.


On its second album, the Asheville five-piece goes big and loud, scaling up its shoegaze-indebted sound while frontwoman Karly Hartzman buries an undercurrent of anxiety beneath the clutter.

Twin Plagues

Wednesday frontwoman Karly Hartzman has a crowded head. “I’m honestly trying to forget and move on, rather than hold onto these memories. I’m writing about them to let them go,” she once professed. Hartzman wades through these lingering impressions at a slacker’s pace in the band’s sophomore album, turning heads with each extraordinary afterimage: a burned-down Dairy Queen, an acid-induced window escape that results in a broken foot, the warm breath a lover leaves on the bathroom mirror. On Twin Plagues, the Asheville five-piece goes big and loud, breathing second life into the things (and a dog) that refuse to die, curling secondhand wisps of sound over and under the living world with remarkable, unexpected beauty.
Hartzman covers a lot of ground, splitting her time between brash, head-banging lines about the Beach Boys and reverb-drenched moments of intimacy: “At night a stone/Alone/Faking Sleep/I won’t fool you,” she sings in “One More Last One,” a classic shoegaze cut that could have been pulled straight out of Loveless. In Hartzman’s universe, even the most callous of objects come alive. The wall cares so much as to wince, while the floor’s proximity to her lover makes Hartzman jealous. Meanwhile, Jake Lenderman’s animated guitar meets this world head on: A breathing, kicking creature, it squalls all over and piles up heaps of feedback.
Fuzzy, distorted riffs are a constant presence on Twin Plagues, layering atop one another two, three times over. Hartzman elbows through the chaos a little like Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan did on Habit. But while the latter revels in cathartic emotional displays, Hartzman’s own feelings are more delicately tucked away. An undercurrent of anxiety runs beneath the clutter. Recurring reminders of a real-life car crash follow the record like its shadow. And as pointed as her writing is, Hartzman frequently shrinks into generality when she writes in the first person. Names turn into pronouns; objects lose their outlines: “Couldn’t laugh at it yet/Wasn’t far away from it yet,” or “There’s something moving over me/I want to remember everything.” That loss of specificity, rather than dampen the strength of her songwriting, injects another dimension into it—there’s a sense that we are catching Hartzman right after the moment of impact, transfixed in a state of shock or paralysis, whether that’s in the aftermath of trauma or a heartbreak in which “the pain was kinda wonderful cause it was so complete.” That pain, the devastating, ineffable immediacy of it, is perhaps the most striking aspect of the album.
Twin Plagues can feel relentless, almost interminable. After all, this is a record haunted by its own becoming. Hartzman’s vocals are often submerged underneath the noise completely, crushed by its weight. Occasionally, she breaks through the surface in slower ballads like “How Can You Live if You Can’t Love How Can You if You Do,” where a folksy twang adds welcomed variation. One might charge, perhaps, that those moments are too few. In “Three Sisters,” things start to get lost within the folds of a dense blanket of sound. But the issues on Twin Plagues are minor. Like Amanda, in “Gary’s,” who was “screaming something at her boyfriend that we could not make out,” Wednesday leave behind something—something we’ll remember even without all the details.

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This essential six-CD set captures Otis and his blazing ten-piece band at a vital time in soul music, where a young showman was trying to cross over to the white rock'n'rollers on the Sunset Strip.

Otis Redding: Live at the Whiskey A Go Go: The Complete Recordings

“We’re hoping that this be one of the greatest albums that ever come out.”
Otis Redding says these words just before launching into “Respect” on April 8, 1966, wrapping up the first of seven sets he’d play over the course of three days at Los Angeles’ Whisky A Go Go. A few songs earlier, he first informed the crowd that they were recording the concert with plans of releasing it as an album, playing the newly-written “Good to Me” for the second time in nine songs simply because it was the single and they needed to get it right. For his ’66 stint at the Whisky A Go Go, he was backed by his road band, the Otis Redding Revue—a ten-piece group similar to the bands who supported him whenever he toured the south. This is the residency that is captured in its entirety on Stax’s six-disc box Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings.
Redding’s residency was a deliberate attempt on the part of the singer and his management to move him out of the Chitlin Circuit and into the mainstream. The idea wasn’t to have Otis record pop music, but rather bring his act straight to the rock audience. So they set up shop right on the Sunset Strip, home to such hip rock‘n’rollers as the Byrds, Love, the Turtles and the Doors, figuring there was no better place to introduce Redding to a white audience.
Otis managed that crossover but not at the Whisky. It happened later at the Monterey International Pop Festival in ’67—backed then by Stax/Volt house band Booker T. & the M.G.’s—because he benefitted from the festival setting. In the open air, excitement spreads like fire. Indoors there is a different dynamic, particularly if it’s a crowd confronted with something they’ve never seen before, which was certainly the case of the Los Angelinos that headed to the Whisky to see Otis Redding that April weekend in 1966.
Once Otis hit the stage on April 8, the applause was polite but not enthusiastic. He had to work to win that crowd, which he does by the end of the set, by which point they’re cheering “Respect.” At that point, Redding wasn’t unknown, particularly in R&B quarters—he had three Billboard R&B Top 10s, with a fourth soon to follow—but such gutbucket soul shows simply weren’t played in mainstream rock venues like the Whisky A Go Go.
That alone made the three nights at the Whisky a step forward from Redding, who was hungry to become a star on his own terms. But the concerts alone weren’t the main thing: These shows were designed to be the primary source for an album, one that could capture the raw power of Redding on wax and hopefully bring in a wider audience. Throughout the seven full sets captured on Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings—a box that doubles Stax’s 2010 set Live on the Sunset Strip, which contains about half of the sets from that April ’66 stint—Redding reminds the audience they’re cutting a record and, in a way, the sets are structured as recording sessions. Over the course of the seven shows, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is played no fewer than *ten *times, a sure sign that Redding wanted to be sure he nailed this song for the album. A few other songs appear nearly that often (“I Can’t Turn You Loose,” “Good to Me”) but he also made sure to play almost every song he and his Revue knew, throwing in covers of James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” and the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” along the way—anything that could snag new listeners.
Once Volt/Atco heard the tapes, they decided the performances were too raw to release. Not only was fidelity poor, but the band sometimes seemed ragged, veering out of tune and maybe not locking in on a groove. Stax/Volt founder Jim Stewart decided to shelve the record for reason, bringing out a version of it ’68 called In Person at the Whisky A Go Go only after Otis had died and the market demanded more Otis. The Whisky A Go Go tapes served that very purpose over the years, popping up on vinyl in 1982 as Recorded Live and almost a decade later on CD as Good to Me: Live at the Whisky A Go Go, Vol. 2, with some tracks popping up as bonus tracks on a 2008 deluxe edition of 1965’s Otis Blue. The double-disc Live on the Sunset Strip seeming like the last word in 2010.
Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings, however, trumps them all. It simultaneously emphasizes the consistency of Redding and his Revue along with their quirks. Listening to the sets back to back, it’s hard to hear where the band allegedly strays off path: Whatever flaws that may exist in a given track tend to melt away in the context of a full set. There’s an electricity to the performances even when they bring the tempo down for the slow-burners, and a great thing about this box is that there’s plenty of space for the band to play.
On the 1968 LP, the longest number topped out just over five minutes but here performances routinely clock in between six and eight minutes, giving the band room to vamp while Otis works the crowd. It’s not only invigorating, but it suggests how Redding’s southern soul was tied to James Brown’s nascent funk. Listen to how he closes out Saturday’s first set with a marathon eight-minute “Satisfaction” then picks up the next set with the same song, stretching this version out to nine minutes via interlocking horn solos—it’s nearly 17 minutes of white-hot down-home vamping that is earthier than Brown and the J.B.’s but undoubtedly comes from the same source.
Nevertheless, the greatest thing Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings offers is so much vital live soul from an era where the sound was in its prime but was rarely recorded. Perhaps Booker T & the M.G.’s were a tighter outfit than the Otis Redding Revue, but the rawness heard on Live at the Whisky A Go Go: the Complete Recordings has its own singular virtues, particularly because so little of these southern soul acts were recorded in the ’60s. That alone would make this a worthy historical document but, better still, it remains exceptional because it captured a moment when a premiere showman worked his hardest to win over new fans. Decades later, these 1966 concerts at the Whisky A Go Go still possess the power to convert skeptics so seems that Otis Redding did indeed get his wish: He made one of the greatest albums that ever came out.


Drawing singles from his forthcoming album, DJ Shadow's latest flirts with trendy, forward-thinking sounds in bass music without jumping into the thick of it.

I Gotta Rokk EP

DJ Shadow has been skirting predictability for a good long while. The Outsider might have been a critical and fanbase fiasco, but at least it proved he was trying to engage with the greater hip-hop world and make something that didn't fit the precedent of Endtroducing.... (And we got a pretty damn good E-40 track out of it.) Shadow could be excused for testing his limits, for reacting to the sounds currently reverberating through the instrumental hip-hop arena he helped build. And it's tempting to speculate what his next move might be. He could be ricocheting off recent psychedelic L.A. bass music, or trying to see how his beat-building/breakdown technique could spar against UK funky rhythms, or maybe just stripping things back to the point of minimalism. The fact that he's calling his upcoming album The Less You Know, the Better says something about his M.O., at least.
Then again, the I Gotta Rokk EP contains a few singles drawn from that album, and they suggest a new direction more along the lines of what people expected from him 10 years ago. Any of the three original tracks on this EP would've fit well stylistically as follow-ups to the prog-skewing aspirations of The Private Press, representing a gradual evolution from his sample-virtuoso approach. As they stand in 2011, these songs are a bit of a mixed bag, flirting with sounds that could qualify as trendy or forward-thinking in bass music without jumping into the thick of it.
It's not so much the scattershot styles that register as strange; if there's anywhere hard rock, psych-folk, and electro-glitch all share a root context, it's in the scrapyard assemblage of an ecclectic cratedigger like Shadow. It's more of a structural disconnect, where it's possible to hear what he's reaching for but harder to grasp just how he plans to get there. The title track lurches around in a stoner-rock plod, as a creeping armada of metal guitars eventually bleeds through its slow build to a manic false-ending. The hesher trappings are novel enough, but its drums are uniquely Shadow's: clipped yet heavy-sounding snares, hi-hats, and claps that sound culled from a dozen long-buried sources, but which coalesce into a dense vortex of percussion.
The other two originals debuted last year as a digital single, and if they're both distinctly Shadow, they also prove how nebulous that descriptor really is. "I've Been Trying" leans toward the same vaguely soulful psych-folk that informed "Six Days" and "This Time (I'm Gonna Try It My Way)", but it sounds less like an actual sample-based construction than a song with overdubs-- it's one of those cuts that might feel more alive if the seams were less concealed. "Def Surrounds Us" is the more intriguing proposition, Shadow loosely toying with dubstep in a somewhat self-aware mode. The Southern-bounce digital snare rolls and hornet-sting synthesizers approach Benga's more jittery moments, but only until the song takes a left turn into glitchy drum'n'bass. It may be the most manic thing he's done since the similarly structured "Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain", and it's proof positive that he can still do exhilarating, spectacular things with drum breaks.
Out of three additional remixes, the one that pulls it off the best ironically has the weakest source material: Various' take on "I've Been Trying" scatters that track's weedy vocals into lonely dub echoes, bringing out the same sense of isolation with a completely different mood. The other two-- Irn Mnky's Pendulum-style "Swagger Mix" of "I Gotta Rokk" and Rockwell's twitchy, overstuffed remix of "Def Surrounds Us"-- show just how tacky contemporary drum'n'bass bombast can be, weirdly managing to use all the prominent elements of their originals to create remixes that miss all the things that make Shadow's tracks slice instead of bludgeon. At least the first three tracks prove that Shadow himself still knows how that approach works.


This collaborative album between Ghostface Killah and D-Block's Sheek Louch features spots from Raekwon, Method Man, Jadakiss, Styles P, Masta Killa, GZA, and Erykah Badu, among others. Everyone sounds engaged and happy to be in the room.

Wu-Block

You don't tune into a D-Block and Ghostface Killah collaborative project expecting surprises, so here's the good news: There are absolutely none on Wu-Block. Neither Ghost nor the LOX have switched up their style in over a decade, which makes listening to Wu-Block feel a little like watching a late-period Woody Allen film; before anyone opens their mouth, you already know exactly how everyone will sound, what they will talk about, what the surroundings will look like. If you're drawn to Wu-Block, it's probably at least in part for the way it promises, for 50 minutes or so, to shut the door on surprises.
Luckily, it's coming out, as all Ghostface-related projects do, right before the holiday season, a moment when we're all a little fonder of hoary old institutions and a little more susceptible to nostalgia. Ghost and D-Block are mascots of an unchanging NYC, as reliable as a  beloved slice joint. But there's a blurry line where "reliable" fades into "stagnant," and mileage will vary for rap fans where Wu-Block falls. (Me, I still can't quite shake the memory that one of these guys, Ghost, was one of the most constantly surprising to ever do it.)
The tone is established from the opening seconds: The first song is called “Crack Spot Stories". It opens with the sound of Raekwon, Jadakiss, Ghost, and Sheek arguing over who has the remote, and the production is a faded soul loop. Sheek Louch nails the project's slightly-too-comfy vibe in one line: "Fiends at the door, I'm too lazy to let 'em in/ Turkey sandwich, barbecue chips, ESPN." Ghost is "chillin' in his robe," while Raekwon is sitting with his "leg back, examining choices." The scene is less crack-spot than man-cave, a bunch of grouchy old guys cracking each other up with the door closed to the outside world.
All of them sound great, though, and it's nice to hear them settle comfortably into their roles as older heads. Ghost is still finding vivid notes within his coke-sniffing kingpin fantasy persona, which is more than a decade old. "If I sneeze, the left side of my nose might rip," he yelps on "Comin For Ya Head". In that same verse, he gives us some home potency remedies ("You eat seal meat, dick stay up for a fuckin' week") and takes us to "a brutal rap battle in Zaire." On "Take Notice", he says "I do hood yoga/ I pull muscles counting money, need a new shoulder," and in a club-scene verse on "Pull Tha Cars Out", he shows off his still-sharp flair for imagery: "A baby ghost appeared from the blunt smoke/ It lingered through her hair and set into her clothes."
Neither Sheek Louch nor Styles P ever had golden ages like Ghost's to live up to: They've been endearing knuckleheads pretty much since Day One, and they're as enjoyable, more or less, as always. Sheek Louch's "winded touch-football participant" flow tends to make his dumb jokes hit harder than they should (see "My chain lower than your GPA," from "Take Notice"),  but they make his unintentionally funny lines even funnier: "My bars is prenatal!" he yells on "Comin For Ya Head". Styles P has always flowed like steel shavings (one of the most quotable lines of his career is still "I don't give a fuck who you are/ So fuck who you are"), and his best line here is when he sneers  the line "probably in the crib getting high watching Fargo" with a fierceness all out of proportion to the act of watching the movie Fargo.
There are other familiar faces, too: Cappadonna, yelling about a girl with a "thunder butt" on "Pour Tha  Martini"; GZA working out an over-labored "life-as-car" metaphor on "Drivin Round", a song that also features a lightly crooning Erykah Badu. Raekwon sounds amazing, always, but his cadences and slang have budged so little over the years that everything he says has started to sound the same, giving his lines a "pull-string Raekwon" feel: "Sit back, laughin' with a stack and a clapper." See? You know exactly how that sounds.
But again, that familiarity is the point of Wu-Block. Everyone on the album sounds engaged and happy to be in the room. There are a handful of goofy skits, and a lot of hilarious cross-chatter in the album's margins: after  the song "All in Together" ends, they stick around to make fun of people who wear fake jewelry. On "Take Notice", Ghost yells about the cold he has, acting grumpy and pulling the covers around him in the booth. "He's tellin' me to throw onions and garlic in my socks-- I ain’t with all that! Hand me some TheraFlu, some NyQuil or something." Small joys, but real ones that give Wu-Block a rap Statler-and-Waldorf feel. The conversation has long since passed these guys by, so they're having their own. You can visit whenever you like, but close the door on your way out.


Five years after their party-starting YoYoYoYoYo, Spank Rock returns with an album executive produced by Boys Noize with guests including Santigold; it's not nearly as much fun as it wants to be.

Spank Rock: Everything Is Boring & Everyone Is a Fucking Liar

Remember when everyone was having panic-attack cred-spasms over skinny-jeans rap? Thinkpieces about indie appropriation, flame wars about "real hip-hop," stock insults hefted toward Billyburg trusties-- good times, right? Well, not every pioneer goes unrewarded. Five years after the Diplo-sanctioned fuck-bass shtick of Spank Rock's YoYoYoYoYo set critics' brows furrowing, there's a lucrative boom in party music that turns the once-communal dancefloor/club experience into overblown swag-level competitions between Red Bull-addled alpha males. And if you push hyperactive pussy-popping anthems to enough well-meaning lefty skeptics who are otherwise hesitant to buy into strip-club chic, eventually that noise will ricochet its way toward the mainstream. Anything that skeevy to the point of being problematic has to have real transgressive pop cred, right?
So waiting a good half-decade between the debut and the follow-up shouldn't matter too much. Not with an updated production sound and some choice gigs sharing bills with Ke$ha and LMFAO to back the sophomore effort. The beats on this new album signal a shift in emphasis from Spank Rock as self-contained Hollertronix-satellite rapper/producer group to Spank Rock as MC showcase, with YoYoYoYoYo's sonic architect XXXChange taking a backseat to a new palette heavy on German electro-scuzz specialist Boys Noize. It all bumps distractingly enough, sure. The opening salvo of "Ta Da" builds off a decent swath of plink-thump minimalism that serves as a little early snap-music nostalgia, and the Santigold-boosted "Car Song" pulls off a good mixture of jittery, late-nite, uptempo, indie dance-punk bombast. Even the token sop to indie-punk, the Death Set collaboration "Energy", has a neat interpolation of the break from Can's "Vitamin C" underpinning its bursts of freakout rock. The worst you can say about the production is that it can be sort of anonymous-- there's a song called "#1 Hit", and I bet you know what it sounds like without listening-- but it's nominally the sort of stuff an engaging presence on the mic can overcome.
Which brings us to the problem of Spank Rock himself. After originally carrying himself like a smartassed joker on the debut, he now comes across as someone more ambivalently unserious. Everything Is Boring & Everyone Is a Fucking Liar is the title, and maybe the easiest joke on the whole album: the cynical veneer on a loosely bundled collection of bass-rap tics that are delivered from a vantage point you can't quite see. There's no point in trying to sneak bass music through under cover of irony these days, but the edge that sparked Spank Rock's best moments back in the day either isn't there or flails around without direction. His rhymes are occasionally vaguely political, sometimes intentionally disingenuous, but never confident enough to tell you just where he stands. Somewhere between the rote, my-dick-rules bragging ("Hot Potato"; "Nasty"; "Race Riot on the Dance Floor") and the even more rote, I'm-so-fucked-up material (this is a dude who requests coke in place of salt on the rim of his margarita in "Cool Shit"), it's easy to hear that title's disillusioned cynicism in the spaces where the actual persona should be. YoYoYoYoYo at least tried to let some of the sketchier meat-market catcalls off the hook because they were funny; here it's just a bunch of boilerplate sex raps that seem a little too possessive to be fun.
Trying to engage the pop market with something there's already a surplus of is tricky enough when you're outsized enough to justify it. For Spank Rock, it just gets exhausting. He's a stylistic free-agent with a flow that drifts between Baltimore club, Southern bass, post-Guetta house-rap, and the occasional halfway-inspired Prince pastiche ("Baby"). But if his enthusiasm for genre-hopping gives him carte blanche to work his hyperactive, higher-register yawp into some interesting shapes, it does so at the expense of attention-getting things to say. And if lines stick out, it's usually because they're kind of tone-deaf-- "now I wanna go west (like Kanye?)/ I was thinkin' more Cornel" (wow, someone just heard his first Das Racist track). But his flow is either too rushed or too buried in the mix to jump out. What you're left with half the time for a lyrical identity is a hook, and the thing about hooks is that they work best if you can shout along without either feeling like an asshole or hoping everyone catches your scare quotes. If you can pull that off with lines like "shake it 'til my dick turns racist" ("Race Riot") or "I can make you famous/ He can buy you bottles but I can buy you Billboard" ("#1 Hit"), congratulations on overcoming the crippling burden of self-awareness.


The acerbic, self-deprecating magic of the show barely translates to its soundtrack. Taken on their own, most of the original music is decent comedy rap, which is to say, imminently disposable.

Various Artists: The Rick and Morty Soundtrack

The Rick and Morty Soundtrack

Let’s get this out of the way: “Rick & Morty” is about 20% too far up its own ass but it’s still very funny. And a big part of why its funny comes from its musical moments. The marquee Adult Swim cartoon, which aired its third season last year, has evolved from a Back to the Future parody about ball-licking into a gross, existential science fiction comedy that deftly integrates music into its episodes: a teenaged Rick using an acoustic guitar to express his literal decay, an alien’s schmaltzy ballad wondering why we can’t all just, like, get along, man, and an original school special rap about how the flu is bad. So “Rick & Morty” definitely has enough music to fill out the The Rick & Morty Soundtrack—but is it really worth listening to on its own?
Part of the magic of “Rick & Morty” is the way the show’s animation exists to add credibility to what is, essentially, the controlled rambling of co-creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, exemplified by the series’ “Interdimensional Cable” episodes, in which Roiland essentially ad libs alien television shows only for the animators to try to decide what to put behind them. Most of the music on The Rick & Morty Soundtrack has heavily improvised lyrics in this vein: Harmon made up the lyrics to “The Flu Hatin’ Rap” and “Alien Jazz Rap,” while most of Rick’s lyrics are ad-libbed by Roiland, as in the series’ musical episode “Get Schwifty,” where the Earth is conscripted into a life-or-death intergalactic singing competition.
That episode, written around some goofy beats made by series composer Ryan Elder and improvised by Roiland, is very funny, and “Get Schwifty,” in particular, is a highlight of the soundtrack. (“Get Schwifty” was on two Pazz & Jop ballots as one of the best singles of 2015.) When “Rick & Morty” is firing on all cylinders, it’s a sort of delirious, highly produced drunk riffing that manages to induce giggling fits even though you haven’t thought about the show in months. Then there’s the rest of it. Though there are a few moments where this degree of intentional sloppiness works on the soundtrack (in particular, the extended version of “The Flu Hatin’ Rap”), for the most part audio-only doesn’t work as a medium for “Rick & Morty”.
Taken on their own, most of the original music is decent comedy rap, which is to say, imminently disposable except to the people for whom comedy rap is an absolutely fundamental, Ten Commandments-level genre. And though the original score is fun enough, like the deliriously over-the-top theme song riffing on the “Doctor Who”music, most of it doesn’t work divorced from the episodes themselves. Tracks like “Jerry’s Rick,” a lilting sad guitar riff, wouldn’t be out of place on a treacly hospital drama—even though it’s used on the show to create humor. Does that make these songs effective parody, or out of place songs on a record that includes a track called “Terryfold”?
Like the show itself, a decent chunk of the music of “Rick & Morty” is incredibly catchy, if slightly irritating. Mostly, these are cheesy parodies of genres designed to infect your ears like “The Rick Dance,” an ’80s rap takeoff featuring a beat drop from Slow Mobius, or “Goodbye Moonmen,” a chintzy David Bowie parody sung by Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement. Some tracks are previously existing songs that acquired an almost meme-level quality from their placement in the show, like Blonde Redhead’s “For the Damaged Coda” or Mazzy Star’s “Looking on Down from the Bridge.” (Unfortunately, ”X Gon Give It To Ya” didn’t make the cut.)
It feels telling that the most effective “Rick & Morty” songs are loud and goofy, working in equally loud and goofy genres. (One thing that doesn’t work in this context: clipping.’s “Stab Him in the Throat,” which is definitely a clipping. song with vocal samples of a screeching character named Mr. Poopybutthole.) Much of “Rick & Morty”—the show, not the broader hologram of  “Rick & Morty” as a cultural phenomenon—feels like solving a giant jigsaw puzzle of genres that aren’t supposed to fit together, and making them work largely through sheer force of will. While many of the individual songs are minor triumphs of this process, The Rick & Morty Soundtrack isn’t one of them.


On his debut, this young Glasgow post-dubstep producer seems to understand that the surest route to dance music immortality is to reach both the dabblers and the hardcore by marrying innovation with hooks.

Glass Swords

Twenty years ago, Warp released Frequencies, the debut album by LFO, a duo who'd come up in the North England rave scene and scored an unexpected UK chart hit with their bold and brutal eponymous bleep techno single. This year, Warp releases Glass Swords, the debut album by Rustie, a young Glasgow producer who's come up in the protean post-dubstep scene and has yet to rough up the mainstream. (Give him time, though, especially if he catches the ear of a diva.) Most of the vinyl-only singles by LFO's revolutionary contemporaries are now sadly forgotten. In another 20 years, there's a good chance that most of the singles by Rustie's boundary-pushing peers will likewise be gathering metaphorical dust in the deep recesses of some iPod. But LFO's music has survived, and I have a feeling Rustie's will too. Because Rustie knows, like LFO knew, that the surest route to dance music immortality is to reach both the dabblers and the hardcore, marrying underground innovation with as many of electronic music's biggest ideas and best hooks as you can cram in.
Frequencies kicked off with LFO literally asking, "What is house?" The duo's answer was the album itself. For LFO, house was everything that had already come along, from wistful Kraftwerk to future-shock electro to beatific Detroit techno. They then edited it all into short and vibrant jolts, without watering things down a bit. Glass Swords takes the same tack, to brilliant and sometimes bewildering effect. The heavy wobble of dubstep is the frame that holds everything together, but thankfully Rustie's no purist. The title track is a dreamy and disorienting merger of metal guitar and IDM ambiance, bombastic and beatless, that owes as much to a portentous Metallica intro as old-school shoegaze swirl as Daft Punk's kitschy take on progressive rock. And like the new wave of take-rave-back-to-the-kids producers, Rustie is also fearless about rehabilitating and reinventing the genre's cheesiest and most pleasurable moments, the stuff dubstep's more glower-prone producers wouldn't even claim as being part of the genre's DNA. On the so-giddy-it-feels-unstable "Crystal Echo", you might mistake Rustie for a happy hardcore producer brought out of retirement to remix Rihanna, all squeaky, sped-up voices and hammering drums, twinkling melodies running smack into dubstep's bass whomp. Glass Swords might just as well have opened with Rustie asking, "What is dubstep?" His answer is the same as LFO's was for house: Everything, but as shiny and delirious and speaker-rattling as you can make it.
But Rustie is operating in a world where radio producers have already plundered dubstep for fresh sounds, and as if knowing he's now competing as much with Billboard hit-makers, his tracks have the maximalist zeal of Max Martin bubblegum. Even his most traditionally "dubstep" tunes won't sit still or do what they're supposed to, maniacally morphing plastic basslines and synth riffs with the sharpness of the album's titular crystal weaponry. "Surph" has the genre's requisite big bass drops, but Rustie also throws in pop-rave pianos, trance keyboards, and snippets of sugary R&B, because he can, because he's showing off, because it's fun, because he's never interested in just turning out another scene-pleasing exercise. He shares the make-it-immediate urge of Deadmau5 and his ilk but has no time for their simplicity or brutality. One of the best things about Glass Swords is that, for all of its pop-goes-clubbing bluster, it's also as psychedelic, where the devil's in the zillion little details zigzagging across the tracks-- as you'd expect from a Warp album-- whether we're talking their classic-era IDM records or more recent signings like Flying Lotus. "Cry Flames" has more of metal's brute force in its gnarled groove, but the real shiver-inducing moment comes when Rustie begins weaving a fragile, almost Satie-like piano melody into the bass snarl.
All that said, there's not a lot here that will redefine your ideas of what dubstep or electronic music in general can do. For all of Rustie's skill as a sculptor of very 21st-century beats, Glass Swords can feel just as much like a "greatest bits" collage. A lot of déjà vu elements are worked onto the framework of a current club trend, little hints of everything from Art of Noise to U-Ziq to the S.O.S. Band to old RPG soundtracks colliding with dubstep's bass pressure. But compared to the sterile sound of most retro-collage electronic albums, it's also an undeniable and up-to-the-minute rush. And in a couple of decades, when you're looking for an instant hit of what electronic pop felt like in 2011, you'll be able to throw on Glass Swords and get a dose of that feeling in its purest form.


The New Orleans singer’s lush, sultry soul-pop goes down almost too easy.

Candydrip

Lucky Daye takes a decidedly old-school approach to contemporary soul and R&B. The artist born David Brown cut his teeth as a songwriter for artists like Ella Mai and Mary J. Blige before releasing “Roll Some Mo,” a smoky breakout that foregrounded the New Orleans native’s weightless falsetto. Daye’s lush soul-pop and sultry lyrics about modern relationships don’t break new ground, but they don’t need to—his music is refreshingly crisp, built for breezy afternoons and sweltering late nights. Daye’s 2019 debut, Painted, netted him four Grammy nominations, placing him among the current class of artists (H.E.R., Anderson .Paak, Giveon) reinvigorating classic R&B for a new era.
Daye’s second LP, Candydrip, expands the scope of his laidback sound only slightly. As on Painted, the new record’s tasteful instrumentation is handled by powerhouse executive producer D’Mile, who furnishes the album with gently plucked acoustic guitar and cinematic strings alongside textural pitch-shifted vocals and rhythmic backbeats. They’re elegant and manicured backdrops for Daye’s musings on love, whether unabashedly horny on slow-burning standout “Deserve” or dissecting a toxic affair on the balmy, Musiq Soulchild-sampling “Over.” Daye’s fluttering voice makes even the most libidinous line sound like an impassioned plea for connection, giving the album’s best moments a sense of raw vulnerability.
Daye chooses collaborators who match his smooth temperament—on last year’s velvety Table for Two EP, he recruited a fleet of up-and-coming women in R&B (Ari Lennox, Joyce Wrice, Yebba) to complement him. Candydrip branches out toward rap and lo-fi soul; Daye vamps alongside Smino over tinkling keys on the forgettable “God Body,” but makes out better on the bossa nova-infused “NWA,” where he teams up with Lil Durk. When Daye links with experimental soul duo Chiiild for the deep cut “Compassion,” their falsettos dance around each other with a soothingly mellow rapport. “Sometimes I know I get dramatic, yeah/But it’s automatic,” Daye sings, a bleeding-heart admission that sounds altogether angelic.
Candydrip’s easygoing sensibility and glossy production are both a feature and a fault; the blandly lovesick lyrics and funky guitar strut of “Feels Like” wouldn’t be out of place in line at CVS. But Daye often finds a surprising sweet spot, like when he lifts a melody from the pre-chorus to Usher’s “U Don’t Have to Call” on early highlight “Guess,” stretching it out into a warbling undercurrent beneath one of his most indelible hooks. The homage to Usher is fitting—Daye is working in the same lineage, emphasizing the strength of his voice to create effortless soul-pop that goes down easy.


If the mesmerizing motorik hum of the War on Drugs' earlier records gave leader Adam Granduciel an outlet to escape his problems, Lost in the Dream is where he pulls a U to survey the emotional wreckage. The result is the band's most lustrous, intricately detailed, and beautifully rendered record to date.

Lost in the Dream

The War on Drugs’ 2011 album Slave Ambient saw perpetual unease as a Zen state: bandleader Adam Granduciel’s ruminations on restlessness read like a veritable prescription for Xanax, but the psychedelia-smeared country-rock enveloping his words was all, like, “No worries, dude.” The War on Drugs’ third album, however, presents no easy remedy for his inner turmoil. If the mesmerizing motorik hum of Slave Ambient gave Granduciel an outlet to escape his problems, Lost in the Dream is where he pulls a U to survey the emotional wreckage. While his former War on Drugs compadre Kurt Vile is forever Waking on a Pretty Daze, Granduciel has been sleepless through some ugly nights.
As detailed in a recent Grantland feature, Lost In the Dream was the product of a grueling, year-long recording process. Though Granduciel involved his touring band more so than any previous War on Drugs record, his perfectionist tendencies still held sway, resulting in endless cycles of recording, revising, and scrapping. And such self-doubt wasn’t helped by the fact that Granduciel was recovering from the flame-out of a long-term relationship, the ashes of which are scattered all over his lyric sheet here. But the obsessiveness and insecurity pay off massively on Lost in the Dream—this is the War on Drugs’ most lustrous, intricately detailed, and beautifully rendered record to date. In essence, the War on Drugs have evolved as a band on an album-to-album basis in precisely the same fashion as so many of their songs: what at first seemed like a fairly straightforward, traditionalist roots-rock exercise has very gradually, very subtly blossomed into something wondrous and profound.
Lost in the Dream continues down the Slave Ambient route of bridging polar-opposite strains of 1980s rock—namely, the tremulous haze of late-era Spacemen 3 and the sort of flyover-state Americana anthems used to sell pick-up trucks. But even in the album’s opening seconds, the new album asserts itself as a more urgent affair—overtop the blurry, break-of-dawn guitar ripples of “Under the Pressure”, a stuttering drum machine sounds off like an alarm clock coaxing you out of bed and prodding you out the door. And if the steady-pulsed melody that emerges initially positions “Under the Pressure” as the most placid song about anxiety ever, by the third chorus run—at which point it’s amassed a swirl of dueling guitar solos, starburst synths, and brown-note saxophone swells—you feel the full weight of this nine-minute track bearing down on your chest.
This tension is inescapable. Whether it’s the hair-raising, Autobahn-blazing charge of “An Ocean In Between the Waves” or the Positively South Street sway of “Eyes of the Wind”, Granduciel’s litany of worries are laid bare here, free of any textural interference or obfuscation. And the comparatively direct lyrics mirror the new approach to incorporating some of Granduciel’s more unfashionable influences. As ever, totemic figures like Dylan and Springsteen cast a long shadow over the War on Drugs’ terrain, but Granduciel is the sort of classic-rock purist who wore out the grooves of those artists’ most canonical albums so long ago that he now finds fresher inspiration in their less lauded 80s discography.
Period sounds abound: “Red Eyes” is what would happen if Springteen’s simmering “I’m on Fire” was actually set aflame; “Burning” finds its fuse in the buoyant keyboard riff to Rod Stewart’s 1981 new-wave novelty “Young Turks”; the melancholic mid-album meditation “Disappearing” sounds like the synth-powered rhythm track of Tears for Fears’ “Pale Shelter” on a codeine drip. And the preponderance of glistening piano chords on this record suggests Granduciel is not one to touch his dial whenever Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” pops up on his local oldies station.
But if Lost in the Dream is unapologetic in its dad-rock reverence, it’s dad-rock for people who are too fucked up and broken to even think of having kids. (As he sings on “The Ocean In Between the Waves”: “I’m in my finest hour/ Can I be more than just a fool?”) In sharp contrast to, say, recent efforts to liberate Dylan’s 80s output from its dated production, Granduciel’s songs are left to fidget and squirm within the claustrophobic sonic confines and synthetic sheen. In his hands, these echoes of the past ultimately emphasize the uncertainty of his future, those shiny surfaces representing the good life that seems forever out of reach.
And besides, on Lost in the Dream, the most crucial details are found in its structural mutations. The album is loaded with songs whose greatness is revealed slowly, where the simplest, most understated chord change can blow a track wide open and elevate it from simply pretty to absolutely devastating. Note the shift that occurs two minutes and 50 seconds into “Suffering”, where the pent-up despondency heard in Granduciel’s state-of-his-union address (“Why we here when we’re both gonna fake it?”) is unleashed in a crying jag of drizzling piano chords and gently weeping White Album-like guitar slides. Or in the midst of the album’s epic break-up-ballad finale, “In Reverse”, you realize that all of the angst and ache that went into the song, and the album’s creation as a whole, is just building to the moment of release provided by the big, shoulder rub of an acoustic-guitar riff that appears out of nowhere at the 5:13 mark. They’re the sort of perfect little touches that effectively translate Granduciel’s private hurt into communal catharsis—and reify Lost in the Dream as an immaculately assembled portrait of a man falling apart.


Kieren Hebden has been letting loose on stage, but he keeps it restrained on his smartly sequenced album that deftly incorporates virtually every style of music that he’s made over the years.

Three

Some performers start playing it safe when the stages get bigger. Not Kieran Hebden—better known as Four Tet—the heady, tasteful, crate-digging producer who has taken his new arena-sized crowds as an opportunity to confound, delight, and troll. Behind the decks, there’s no move that’s taboo, no track that’s off-limits. A decade ago, that meant raising eyebrows by going back-to-back in the booth with Skrillex, Now that he and Sonny Moore have become an Odd Throuple with Fred again.., the BFFs’ B2B2Bs are Hebden’s opportunity to further subvert whatever you might have thought Four Tet is supposed to sound like. At Madison Square Garden, he dropped a mischievous minimal-house edit of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” that he’d cobbled together for his daughter. At Coachella, he used the intro to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as the setup to an absurdist punchline: Hol!’s “Country Riddim,” a dubstep anthem featuring a cartoonishly garish drop. (Hebden loves that song: At the trio’s surprise Times Square gig in February 2023, he unleashed the tune again—and then spun it back to the top of the drop, just to savor its ridiculousness.)
But however unpredictable Hebden might be on stage, on record he’s as reliable as they come. Three is his 12th solo album, give or take—the proliferation of live recordings, early-works anthologies, shadowy side projects, and experimental longform excursions complicates the count—and it embodies everything that has come to define Four Tet over the years. There are shuffling UK garage rhythms and moonlit pools of ambient, heavy-lidded head-nodders and floor-filling rave-ups, hand-carved breakbeats and harps, harps, and more harps.
A few years back, I found Four Tet’s consistency on his albums frustrating; I longed for him to switch things up, throw the occasional wrench in the works. I wondered, with 2020’s Sixteen Oceans, if he was getting boxed in by his formula. But on Three, the familiarity is welcome. The record is less experimental than 2020’s Parallel, which collected the 2-stepping club tracks and atmospheric experiments of his alias ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ. But the trim, eight-track album is smartly sequenced and nicely varied, taking in virtually every style of music that Hebden’s made over the years—house, downbeat, hip-hop, and more, all given the customary Four Tet slant. Most importantly, he sounds energized, as though all that mischief-making behind the decks had taught him new twists in old tricks.
The album drops us directly into classic Four Tet territory with “Loved,” a wistful tune whose slowly rocking breakbeat and sun-seeking tendrils of synth call back to Rounds’ juxtaposition of muscular drums and watercolor keys. Crisply delineated shakers and hi-hats, along with a sizzling hint of vinyl crackle, flesh out a perpetually evolving beat in which no two bars are alike. A hissing loop runs out of sync with the groove, adding an almost imperceptible hint of instability; out of nowhere, little burrs of white noise swell into thunderclaps. Yet for all this activity, the track is never overstuffed, and it’s remarkably efficient: Before it even hits the 3:30 mark, the song has said its piece, and winds down across a gentle ambient outro.
While tempos vary widely, most of Three maintains a similarly ruminative mood. In the elegiac “Gliding Through Everything,” a beatless swirl of bells and chimes gradually gives way to clouds of overdriven ambience; “Storm Crystals” lays out a meandering synth melody over a slow-motion breakbeat and wraps it in a halo of dubbed-out harp. Only with track four, “Daydream Repeat,” does Hebden finally lock into dancefloor mode, anchoring a flyaway harp melody with a rugged, house-inspired rhythm. But even here, the vibe remains as dreamy as the beat is physical. Only one other track so much as flirts with the dancefloor: “31 Bloom,” which revisits the minimal-techno investigations of 2008’s Ringer. A heads-down roller arraying cottony chords over a beat that sounds like two small stones being clacked together, it’s the album’s most emotionally ambivalent track—a welcome counterbalance to the occasional moment (on “So Blue,” say) where things get misty-eyed.
It’s the details that make Three really sing. “Daydream Repeat” opens with great, dissonant sheets of phased and distorted guitar that sound like something off the Cure’s Pornography—hardly the first reference point that typically comes to mind on a Four Tet record. Guitar is all over the album, in fact, and it makes for some of the record’s best moments—like “Skater,” which imagines an alternate universe where DJ Shadow remixed the Cocteau Twins. The rosy ambient glow that opens “So Blue” is suddenly broken by a single tone, slightly too loud, shorn of reverb and weirdly skewed to the right; it reminds me of a boss I once had who would sneak a hidden phrase into the final paragraph of a 2000-word email, just to make sure you were paying attention.
There’s much more here than meets the ear: interruptions you never see coming, intimations of sounds in the depths of the mix you can’t quite make out. That’s what separates Three from the merely chill; it takes a master craftsperson’s skill to create music that scans so simply on the surface but then opens up to reveal hidden rooms within hidden rooms—just like it takes a seasoned selector to drop “Country Riddim” and get away with it. In tone and mood, Three is the opposite of Hebden’s stadium setlists. But within the carefully thought-out parameters of what makes a Four Tet record, he’s finding new, quieter ways to surprise.


GoGo Penguin's latest album comes on the heels of a revival of sorts for jazz music, when artists like Kendrick Lamar, David Bowie, Flying Lotus and Kamasi Washington fused the genre with their own blends of rap, rock, electronica and soul. Man Made Object, the band's third album, resides in similar space; many of its 10 tracks started as electronic compositions, created on Logic and Ableton by the group’s percussionist.

Man Made Object

In his 1982 film, Koyaanisqatsi, director Godfrey Reggio sought to explain the relationship between human beings, nature and technology. He presented a gorgeous collage of scenic landscapes and rolling clouds, set against an equally riveting score. The movie said everything it needed without any spoken dialogue, which can be nearly impossible in cinema and music.
Jazz trio GoGo Penguin rescored the film in a one-off event this past fall, which makes total sense the more you assess the band’s art. Drummer Rob Turner, bassist Nick Blacka and pianist Chris Illingworth fuse classical and electronic elements while keeping with jazz’s improvised nature. Much like Koyaanisqatsi, GoGo Penguin’s music is full of subtle shifts that allow its composers to shine equally. For Man Made Object, the band’s third album, many of its 10 tracks started as electronic compositions, created on Logic and Ableton by the group’s percussionist.
GoGo Penguin opts for an energized sound on Man Made Object, conjuring pastoral imagery while loosely exploring scientific concepts. Between its title and multifaceted sonic approach, the LP seems directly influenced by Koyaanisqatsi, bringing to mind the same sorts of aerial views we see during the movie’s 86 minutes. The album comes on the heels of a revival of sorts for jazz music, where artists like Kendrick Lamar, David Bowie, Flying Lotus and Kamasi Washington fused the genre with their own blends of rap, rock, electronica and soul. The success of their respective LPs brought jazz back into mainstream view and made it more accessible for younger listeners.
Man Made Object resides in similar space. Much like the band’s first two albums—Fanfares and v2.0, the latter of which was shortlisted for a Mercury Prize Album of the Year—the band’s new album takes hold right away and sustains an upbeat groove. Even in its quieter moments, like those on “GBFISYSIH” and “Initiate,” they carry a reflective vibe without losing momentum. GoGo Penguin creates jazz in the same vein as Robert Glasper: It’s a piano-driven blend with all the traditional aspects you’d expect from the genre while still scanning as something refreshingly vibrant and contemporary. Theirs is a percussive strain of frenetic drum breaks and rock-infused instrumentals, like on “Smarra,” where a fluttering bass line takes center stage, ramping up the rhythm until it burns to a smoldering heap. It’s the best moment of an album filled with unique creative twists.
Yet despite these details, Man Made Object is largely devoid of standout, calling-card tracks. “Smarra” and “Protest” hit hardest at first glance, but the other tracks take longer to build up, one leading to the next for a unified listening experience. Man Made Object is tailor-made for laid-back enjoyment, to be consumed at a moderate volume without much fuss. It marks a nice step forward for a group that lives comfortably beyond artistic restraints.


On his supposed debut album, the hyper-prolific Rochester rapper upgrades his fidelity and sharpens his focus.

Till I’m Dead

Few artists have maximized the direct-to-consumer possibilities of YouTube like RXK Nephew. Where other artists are bound by contractual obligations and release schedules, the Rochester, New York rapper took an accelerationist approach, delivering an erratic stream of loosies to a devoted cult following. Recently he’s slowed his once-overwhelming workrate—relatively speaking. Till I’m Dead is his first full-length project since November 2022, while his flood of YouTube uploads is now more of a trickle. Even as he’s started to acknowledge the game a little more, Nephew manages to swerve industry expectations—his music is still confusingly spread across multiple Spotify profiles with slight differences in spelling, as if to throw off any fair-weather fans.
Despite Nephew’s mammoth catalog, Till I’m Dead is presented as his official debut album. If it’s not his actual debut, it at least introduces a new version of the ever-mutating Nephew. Alongside his conspiratorial bars and non-stop flow, a general indifference to conventional standards of mixing and mastering has long been a defining feature of Nephew’s work. On Till I’m Dead, he finally acquiesces to industry audio conventions. And while past releases have included beats from multiple producers, Till I’m Dead is produced entirely by Rx Brainstorm. Nephew is approaching his work with greater focus: It’s the first album he’s recorded entirely sober, a formative shift for an artist whose work has always felt deeply intertwined with drugs, in both lyrical content and overall atmosphere.
Any concern that these developments might impede Nephew’s distinctive stream-of-consciousness flow quickly proves unfounded—greater intentionality has merely brought the pixelated edges of his work into sharper resolution. Till I’m Dead is an hour of unrestrained and overlapping bars sans features, showcasing Nephew’s singular fusion of galaxy-brain absurdity and unexpected vulnerability. The pressure to conform is a stress that Nephew acknowledges lyrically—“Hey Neph, you should do a hook,” he says in a mocking tone on “1000MPH”—but he still refuses to give in.
Nephew’s love affair with dance music is hardly new, but Till I’m Dead proves it’s more than just flirtation. Rx Brainstorm weaves effortlessly from footwork on the opening track to LTJ Bukem-like astral jungle on “Frames” to smooth tropical house on “Critical.” Even when the mood is more relaxed, the music glides through multiple styles: The watery synthesizers on “Do It For You” have a slight indie pop flavor, and “On My Mind” sounds like trance music by way of vaporwave.
On his most uptempo tracks, Nephew transforms into an MC in the classic sense, an enthusiastic party conductor commanding the audience to groove. The air horns and trap drums that open “I’m High” recall Datpiff-era rap, but the beat switches to Baltimore club as Nephew unleashes his manic Slitherman persona, suggesting a demented version of early ’90s hip-house jock jams. Cartoonish alter egos like Slitherman and Too Tuff Tony, who Nephew embodies through affected voices, are a core part of his mythology and a locus to his work. A compelling parallel emerges in his constant references to professional wrestling; like the greatest pro wrestlers, Nephew treads a thin line between persona and personality. The contrast between his whimsical side and the increasing poignance of his writing makes the expression of sincere emotion land harder. Though Nephew is still negotiating a compromise between his own sensibility and more commercial considerations, Till I’m Dead is the closest he’s come yet to threading the two.


Muse are back, with an LP of all-caps, no half-stepping ART-ROCK that closes with a three-part epic so shameless about its size it's billed as a "Symphony."

The Resistance

As with so many 21st-century mainstream (or quasi-mainstream) rock albums unafraid to stuff 10 tons of quasi-operatic melodrama into 60 or so minutes, The Resistance will be easily dismissed by those into the Grizzly Bear/Dirty Projectors brand of orchestrated art-rock. You know, where the album has a pleasing ramshackle feel under the surface-level skillfulness, the sense that the vocal acrobatics or tricky instrumental interplay could suddenly veer into uncomfortable, mock amateurish expressionism.
By contrast, you never get the sense that Muse are anything less than in total control of their "difficult" music at all times. Throughout The Resistance, frontman Matt Bellamy is ready and willing to foreground his chops, be it tickling the ivories, hopping octaves, or tossing out increasingly tasteful solos. If the The Resistance is "about" anything, aside from the conceptual malarkey encoded in the lyrics, it's about mastery, ego-security, etc. It's the kind of all-caps, no half-stepping ART-ROCK that closes with a three-part mini-epic so shameless about its own classic rock bigness that it's billed as a "Symphony", complete with "Overture". Jumped ship yet?
For the wary or outright dismissive, however, The Resistance is also a very smartly sequenced album. it opens with the most "pop" sequence of the band's career, a three-song sequence aping the stadium-grade synth-rock of Depeche Mode at their crossover height. It then segues into a middle section of hard (but not too hard) rock, nodding in the direction of grottier bands like Queens of the Stone Age or System of a Down without stripping away the sparkle. Only then does The Resistance shift into the sort of fist-pumping, kitchen-sink prog you were probably expecting. It's canny: Leading the uncommitted down a drum machine paved path of catchy 1980s revivalism and straight into the path of an army of kids straddling the gap between entry-level classical and "Headbanger's Ball".
And "army" is right: Unity in the face of faceless post-industrial society grinding down beautiful stuff like love and friendship is perhaps Muse's great theme. Bellamy is constantly tossing out mass-shout-along-ready lyrics like "we will be victorious" and "they won't stop breaking us down." Songs get titles like "Uprising" and (natch) "Resistance". Things break down easily into a "we" (rarely does an "I" creep into Bellamy's songwriting) and a "they." Your age-old, rock-standard good (we, the fans) vs. evil (them, the nebulous straight government-corporate nexus) set-up, got it?
But unlike the creepy mass-rally overtones that so bugged early rock critics about music designed to pack civic centers-- or thrilled them when it was punk leading in the kids in revolt-- you get the sense that Bellamy's lyrics are an outgrowth of wanting to make his music as big and inclusive as possible, rather than any inchoate political impulses. No doubt Bellamy fancies himself some sort of social crusader, but his mush-headed vagueness (like Bono and Chris Martin and just about any Brit frontman operating on this scale) is designed to inspire warm fuzzy feelings of togetherness and resistance rather than offer any ten-point plan to overthrow the emotionally fascist modern world.
So let's take the warm fuzzy bigness of the music at face value. It's understandable if the Buckley mannerisms and Mercury multi-tracking on "The United States of Eurasia" aren't your cup of tea. You may cringe at the Pavlov-approved crescendos that surge through "Guiding Light", the sort of thing where you imagine a ProTools preset producers have nicknamed "10,000 People Holding up Bics They Bought Especially for the Concert." And then there's "Exogenesis", the aforementioned "Symphony" in three parts. Now a Daydream Nation style knowing "trilogy" this is not. There's massed strings. There's half-time chest-beating theatrics ready for flashpots and Vegas set design. If it's not quite Keith Emerson's territory-- or Celine Dion's, for that matter-- it's a similarly grandiose ballpark where the fans wear slightly different clothes.
But still: I'm a punk at heart, suspicious about the meeting of rock band and orchestra after all these years, and even I have to admit there's something cornily beautiful about "Exogenesis", like Radiohead with no fear of pushing things until the motor bursts into flames. Judged on its own terms-- out of control scale, genre-smashing ambition, musical and vocal virtuosity-- The Resistance is a success. It's just the kind of success where you have to appreciate a guy who builds his own guitars daring himself to make the next song even more rapturously overstuffed and classically cathartic. It's an album you can embrace or get the fuck out of its way. There's really no in between. It's high-test pop-prog hokum, better suited to mashing buttons to kill wizards or gorging on a stack of four-color batshittery than working on your thesis or darning your socks.
Video games or comics are probably a closer comparison than most of the music Pitchfork covers, actually. There's a prevailing idea that there's something spiritually and emotionally dangerous about grown men and women spending most of their alone-time immersed in improbable fantasies where interpersonal relationships and the traumas of the real world can be dispatched/ignored via magical powers. But do you want to wallow in grey impotence in the face of quotidian bullshit every damn minute of the day? Escape, whether via Matt Bellamy or the Immortal Iron Fist or the fine folks at Nintendo, shouldn't be a dirty word, at least when used sparingly.


The Chicago band moves past its early twang into raucous alt-pop on an album that captures childhood confusions and adult yearning.

Printer’s Devil

On their earliest releases Ratboys tagged their sound “post-country,” but you really had to squint to hear the country. The twang on their 2017 album GN was more implied than explicit, and the music cozily straddled the line between woozy guitar pop and homespun folk. The whole album seemed to exist in a blissful state of in-between.
GN was a gem, the kind of album that’s hard to replicate, and on their follow-up Printer’s Devil, Ratboys don’t even really try. Years of sharing stages with punkier bands like PUP and Dowsing has thickened and toughened their sound, as has the solidification of a full-time rhythm section after years of touring with rotating drummers. Printer’s Devil is Ratboys’ first album as a four-piece, and there’s no mistaking the difference.
That riff-forward makeover brings them closer to the alt-pop of bands like Charly Bliss and Speedy Ortiz. On the surface that’s a step toward anonymity—not a lot of bands shared GN’s tender, ephemeral reimagining of Americana, while plenty share Printer’s Devil’s debt to the Veruca Salt lane of ’90s alternative. But it rips convincingly: The classic rock-spiked “Look To” is pure speaker candy, the kind of unabashed windows-down moment that GN’s muted production didn’t allow, while the guitars on “Anj” sizzle like early Paramore.
Even when working with less-novel sounds, singer Julia Steiner has individuality to spare, both as a vocalist and a songwriter. She’s not a howler. Instead she works her frayed voice like a pair of kitchen shears, doing her damage not through broad swipes but well-placed snips. Her warmth and whimsy seeps through even Printer’s Devil’s grungiest songs. Like Doug Martsch, Jenny Lewis, and David Byrne before her, she captures how childhood confusions linger into adulthood. And like those songwriters, her cleverness never masks her vulnerability. On “I Go Out at Night,” one of the record’s rare softer numbers, she pictures herself in “a job uninstalling ’90s payphones,” a wry image but also a wistful metaphor for growing up.
Ratboys demoed the album in Steiner’s empty childhood home just after it had been sold, which she’s said was as emotionally taxing as you’d expect. That experience may account for the extra ache in these songs. Steiner fills Printer’s Devil with half-remembered snapshots of adolescence—sprints down hills in the summertime, a ride on an airplane simulator at the mall—juxtaposed with images of overgrown grass, vacated lots and other innocuous signifiers of the passage of time that carry weight only in the rare moments we pause to consider them. The effect is comforting and sobering all at once, like revisiting your elementary school’s playground as an adult. The swings are still there; you can sit on them, even. But whatever you’re hoping to reclaim is long gone.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Swedish punks Makthaverskan embody a reaction to what they considered to be a conformist, “happy and cute” indie scene in Gothenberg. Their new album is an interior and personal record of constricted scope, one of unhinged beauty that can be wrested from longing and anger.

II

There’s a tendency in American culture to use foreign punk bands to gain insight to another nation’s political and emotional tenor, and that’s just not gonna work with Sweden’s Makthaverskan. Though a reaction to what they considered to be a conformist, “happy and cute” indie scene in Gothenburg, II is an interior and personal record of constricted scope, occurring entirely within Maja Milner: in her blood, in her head, in her body, in her room. Beyond that, who knows what else is going on in the world—but that’s the whole point of II, a record of unhinged beauty that can be wrested from longing and anger. At times it feels threatening enough to render all other concerns inconsequential.
The cramped confines of II are indicative of its attitude, a desire to get the fuck away from somewhere, whether it’s a torturous relationship, a mental straightjacket, or a shitty mood. For the most part, Makthaverskan flit through decades of genre variations (dream-pop, melodic post-punk, and so on) that are typically lumped into “bedsit music”. However, its punk ethos and intensity make it all feel like a crying fit so physically severe that you’re actually sore afterwards.
Makthaverskan try to soar with makeshift wings on II, and more often than not, the results are charming rather than awkward. Glistening guitar leads occasionally stumble upon a bum note, drums get lost in swirl of reverb if they let up the intensity. Regardless, it’s rare to hear a singer who can flat-out project like Milner__—the leaps of faith she takes before hitting the skyscraping notes that punctuate the daring introductory duo of “Antabus” and “Asleep” are captivating to the point where sometimes it seems like she’s only utilizing a small fraction of her powers. But as with the rest of her band, Milner is less compelling on songs that require a bit more finesse;__ when “Drömland” drops the 100,000,000th “Be My Baby” drum intro and “Something More” runs through facile midtempo, mid-career Cure, it comes off as strangely sheepish. Consequently, there are points where Milner’s voices gets a bit too piercing amidst the unbalanced mix__—__it’s the effect of cleaning your ear with a Q-Tip and going in a little too far.
But then again, II takes on the form of what happens to people who’ve gone a little too far putting themselves out there—the “never again” visceral reaction one has after getting screwed by their vulnerability. (It's worth noting that “Antabus” is named after a drug which elicits a violent reaction in alcoholics when they relapse.) While little of II’s vitriol is lost in translation, there is no English equivalent for the band name: “The woman with the power” is as close as we can get.
And yet, Milner’s lyrics can be categorized into three stages of trying to recapture that power rather than owning it: "Don’t go", "Please come back", and "Fuck you, leave". At times, the latter is literally what it comes down to__:__ there’s no real chorus to “Antabus”, just a refrain of “I don’t know what to say/ So fuck you!/ Fuck you!” Fittingly, “No Mercy” is even more direct__,__ as Milner yells, “Fuck you for fucking me when I was 17...You never loved me/You wanted to own me." The fine and crucial semantic distinctions of “fuck” apparently cross the language barrier and throughout II, there isn’t much romantic love, just the romanticization of young lust and teen angst. Those are part of the same continuum, though and when II taps into its eternal power, the cries from Milner’s bedroom nothing short of universal.


One of the more common criticisms of Jamaica's music from those who don't typically listen to it is ...

Pressure

One of the more common criticisms of Jamaica's music from those who don't typically listen to it is that it's monolithic. That it all. Sounds. The. Same. I can't remotely agree with the sentiment, but those who have this idea in their head don't often care to reconcile with the possibility that they may be mistaken. There's no such problem on Pressure, as The Bug skulks around the dancehall underground working with a variety of sounds and vocalists. He takes a distinctly outsider's view to the genre and scene, blending it with elements of his own dubby ambient work and other white-boy dancehall crossovers-- German Basic Channel-esque minimalism, hard-edged beats, and ruff-in-the-jungle ragga.
Calling The Bug a Jamaican artist is, naturally, a fallacy in the first place. It's one of many pseudonyms for Kevin Martin, who also worked in Sonic Boom's space-rock collective EAR and who, with Justin K. Broadrick, creates ambient techno as Techno Animal and hip-hop as Ice, among other projects. Despite his restless genre-hopping, Martin has enjoyed his greatest successes working with elements of dub sounds and processes, most notably his first album as The Bug (1997's Tapping the Conversation-- yes, named for the Coppola film) and his work as the curator of the landmark Macro Dub Infection compilations.
On Pressure, Martin's exploration of the wildly creative and vital sounds of contemporary dancehall works best when he's at his most abrasive and least distant from its Jamaican progenitors. Tracks with ragamuffin hip-hop pioneer Daddy Freddy ("Run the Place Red" and "Politicians and Pedophiles"), longtime Martin collaborator Toastie Tailor ("Beats, Bass, Bombs, and Weapons"), and the Rootsman and He-Man ("Killer") are the record's highlights, gruff and tumbling shards of sound system greatness.
When straying further from dancehall's frenetic, digital snap/crackle/pop, The Bug is less successful. Providing variety-- but with less interesting results-- are a handful of collaborations with London poet Roger Robinson, who offers spoken-word sentiments over sly ambient waves and rolling basslines, and former Rhythm & Sound mate Paul St. Hilare, who chips in with some Horace Andy-like falsettos.
Pressure is another blow to what I thought was an irreversible dislike of Tigerbeat6 Records and the juvenile, prankster-like approach to music that seemed to be the only feather in its creative cap. Then, after years of churning out sonic sludge-- often slathered over the works of far more creative artists-- dj/Rupture came along and had me at hello. Pressure (released on Rephlex in the UK) is another winner from the label. The more kinetic and abrasive the record gets the more it appeals to me, but its melange of elastic bass, distorted beats, and spacious pools of electronic dub offers a bit of something for everyone.


The garage rock auteur’s latest is a mid-career standout full of gunky riffs and tender love.

Three Bells

The video for Ty Segall’s recent single, “Eggman,” is just a static shot of Segall, sitting at a table, eating hard-boiled eggs for four minutes straight. Around the time Segall scarfs down his eighth egg, he starts showing visible signs of fatigue, a shift reflected in the music: What starts out sounding like a pissed-off John Lennon ad-libbing a sequel to “I Am the Walrus” with Plastic Ono Band devolves into a queasy, uncomfortable dirge that feels like a blocked digestive system. By the time the song disintegrates into a murky pool of distortion, you’ll never want to eat another egg again. But Segall and wife/co-director Denée’s “Eggman” video is more than just a high-concept visualization. It’s also a spot-on advertisement for Segall’s own approach to classic-rock revisionism: He takes something that’s supposed to be a source of comfort and makes it seem kinda disgusting. And with his 15th studio album, Three Bells, he delivers some of his most immaculately constructed grotesquerie to date.
While no two Ty Segall albums are totally alike, his first decade’s worth of records at least felt like they were positioned along the same psych/punk spectrum. But since dropping his definitive double-album statement, Freedom’s Goblin, in 2018, Segall has entered an exploratory phase not unlike Neil Young’s notorious 1980s period, approaching each record as a premeditated genre exercise to further dismantle his long-standing reputation as the impulsive garage rocker who can bash out three albums before breakfast. There was the anti-guitar exotica of First Taste, the synth-shocked treatments of Harmonizer, the no-frills folk of “Hello, Hi”—all illuminating additions to his multifaceted discography, but also insular, low-stakes affairs from an artist who didn’t seem all that interested in capitalizing on the momentum that Freedom’s Goblin generated. With Three Bells, however, Segall once again gives himself license to embrace randomness and surrender to sprawl. More than a status update on Segall’s ever-changing whims, it’s an ambitious, uncanny, joyously unpredictable album that invites you to get lost within its house-of-mirrors design.
Three Bells’ vitality is all the more remarkable considering how easy it is to mistake it for the sort of temperate album a once-unruly rocker inevitably makes as they approach middle age. This is a record that relies on acoustic guitar as much as electric. There’s another song about his dog that’s way more chill than the last one. And when he’s not singing about life at home, he’s dropping copious references to bells and vibrations and mirrors and metaphysics, suggesting the Ty Segall of 2024 is more likely found in an occult bookshop than a basement dive. But Segall avoids slipping into the dad-rock zone because he’s still a mischievous punk at heart. He’s not pretending to be the Beatles in ’68 or Led Zeppelin in ’70—he’s imagining the music they’d make today if they were California surfer bums and skate rats just like him: “I Hear” is Bowie’s “Fashion” on a DIY budget, its disco-club bounce replaced by a grimy acoustic groove and the Frippian guitar squeals pushed into the red; “Wait” starts off on Side 1 on The White Album and ends up on Side 2 of Master of Reality.
But Three Bells isn’t just a cruise through Segall’s record collection. The album opens with two multi-sectional prog-folk epics—“The Bell” and “Void”—that apply the battle plan of his madcap 2017 medley “Warm Hands (Freedom Returned)” to more mystical realms, dialing up the delirium with each new melodic fragment and sudden tempo shift. This is rock’n’roll as an M.C. Escher painting—a balance of innovative engineering and disorienting up-is-down logic. But for all their twists and turns, “The Bell” and “Void” clearly lay out the thematic terrain that Segall explores throughout Three Bells: the eternal tension between seeking inner peace while buckling under external pressures. On the rustic power-pop reverie “My Room,” he admits: “Out there, I’m too dizzy/I’d rather be inside my room,” but as the song’s electric-guitar hooks get sharper, nastier, and more intrusive, he seems to acknowledge the impossibility of fully tuning out.
Segall’s prescription for sanity is to draw strength from the ones he loves: his pets, yes, but most notably his wife. On Three Bells, the Lennon influence is as much matrimonial as musical: While Denée has turned up in Segall’s work before (including in their robo-punk project the C.I.A.), with this record, she becomes the muse and creative co-conspirator who’s completely enmeshed in his art, and the agent provocateur pushing it to new degrees of raw carnality. As singer and lyricist, she delivers her idea of a love song with “Move,” a brash proto-metal boogie in which she reveals the couple’s secret to stress relief: “When we are sideways/I disconnect the phone/It’s different in the morning/When we’re alone.”
By contrast, Segall addresses his better half with pure reverence. “To You” begins as a portrait of touring-induced homesickness colored by manic folk-punk strums and ping-ponging synths, but when he declares, “I’m coming back to you,” the song melts into a swooning, faux-symphonic serenade. And toward the end of this long, labyrinthine album, Segall offers up Three Bells’ climactic set piece, “Denée,” whose title constitutes its lone lyric. But while it initially sounds as though Segall is laying down an ad-hoc placeholder vocal, he keeps repeating her name until it blossoms into a devotional mantra, which bursts open into an extended cosmic-jazz jam that’s unlike anything else in his bottomless canon. It may not be an outwardly sentimental “Oh Yoko!”-style serenade, but “Denée” is no less direct a paean to the transcendental power of a love that leaves you at a loss for words.