Identity can be a tricky quality to evaluate. Often, it's hard to tell who is the actual "owner" of ...

The Present Lover

Identity can be a tricky quality to evaluate. Often, it's hard to tell who is the actual "owner" of the qualities in question. Example: if a jazz drummer with an interest in abstract, improvisational electronic music suddenly starts turning out smooth vocal house records then perhaps there's an expectation that he would be criticized. Is this an expectation of the audience? Of the artist to play down his own work? Of the "critics"? Maybe there's a question of the artist's intent or sincerity. Maybe the identifiable relationship the record has with all of the players in question supercedes the need to find links to the tried and true critical vices. Finland's Luomo is that artist who would be the focus of an identity crisis.
Luomo (aka Vladislav Delay) offers very few easy answers. Having taken an interest in jazz (particularly the sprawling eccentricity of Miles Davis) from a very early age, he began his musical career attempting to make a go as a jazz drummer. Though still in his teens, he soon realized he wasn't going to make his real statement (or a living) in jazz, and gravitated to electronics. His first recordings retain the adventurous, improvised spirit of jazz, but come out like rather dry, experimental ambient. If he was well on the way to becoming a full-fledged IDM technician, it would be another one who would de-emphasize the 'D' quotient.
All the stranger, then, that he should make a startlingly adept transition to house on 2001's Vocalcity (his first release under the Luomo moniker). Stranger still that it was received with open arms from most anyone in the vicinity. Vocalcity's strange brew of clicks, cuts and ultra-suave female cooing was an impressive accomplishment for someone admittedly unfamiliar with the genre. What's more, it was the mark of someone apparently oblivious to what he was "supposed" to be doing, and the result is warm, (com)passionate music.
The Present Lover continues the experiment, and in general improves on it. Luomo, in typically modest fashion, speaks of the "panic" he went through recording the vocals on Vocalcity, having never featured any on previous releases. It's a safe bet he isn't panicking now, as the singing here (both female and male) is as smooth as it comes. However, it's also reminiscent of thousands of faceless lounge and downtempo compilations featuring "soulful divas" and androgynous emoting-- and if that's a problem for you (you know who you are), The Present Lover might come on a tad strong. Still, it fits the cosmopolitan, deeply European tracks to a tee. Even if you've never set foot in a club, the lengthy, passive strains of tunes like "Could Be Like This" or the title track work just as well as pure trance (not the dance kind, er, though you could dance to it).
From the beginning of the album, things don't unfold as they should. "Visitor" is a lush, beatless piece of pop impressionism. If I didn't know better, I'd say Luomo was doing a pretty good job of presenting the over-reported sound of Scandinavia, what with its glacial momentum and tendency to replace all the rough edges with icy consonance. The low-key chorus of female vocals proclaims, "I doubt you wanna make me burn," and it is clearly more of a plea than a prediction.
Throughout The Present Lover, passiveness and submission seem like attributes rather than easy targets. Likewise, on "Cold Lately", the female narrator (longtime Vladislav Delay collaborator AGF) inquires "what makes you so cold at home?" over near-glitch slow-jam and deep, percolating bass as if the mere fact that she cared to ask would make everything better. As the tune progresses, her vocal is overrun by a series of computer-generated cuts and pops, but it hardly loses its vulnerability (and notice that oozing synth cluster in the background never went away).
Several tracks are clearly suited for club play, and would probably work wonders for your party as it approaches its final hour. "Talk in Danger" plays up its midtempo, hi-hat intensive groove while AGF continually reassures you that she isn't trying to disappoint you, and goes on a lengthy tangent about how "talking in danger" helps her find her ability to trust. This kind of freeform narrative doesn't seem like it would work in any music related to pop, but Luomo's perpetually engaging track makes it seem perfectly natural. The title track features male vocals (likely provided by Delay himself), and a punchier beat. Where it aligns itself more closely to straight-ahead house via repetitive hooks and bouncy four-on-the-floor, it also manages to slip in non-sequiturs like the bizarre, slinky synth solo about three minutes in.
"Shelter" furthers the energetic feel, but again lapses into strangely formless structure as the vocal floats in and out of the mix, sometimes not seeming a part of the song at all. The by-now familiar female chorus offers something like a hook, but Delay's background in improvisation colors The Present Lover in unexpected ways. There are no resounding resolutions or triumphant cymbal swells here. There are no recapitulations of a verse or concessions to an obvious form. Just like a modern free music ensemble, Luomo makes his mark via an impact delivered over time and through the interaction (albeit self-imposed) and modification of the sounds at his disposal.
There is a decent chance you'll glide right past this record if you've often found yourself at odds with house music. I certainly wasn't terribly enamored of the stuff coming into The Present Lover. But this is an easy album to recommend, largely due to it having an impact far beyond the dancefloor. Sometimes it just doesn't pay to hang onto old biases, and for now, I'm perfectly willing to leave this on repeat if you are.


With spacious live takes and poetic lyricism, the North Carolina songwriter’s second album brings order to the chaos of the day. Step inside Eno Axis and things immediately fall into place.

Eno Axis

Back in March, when the world screeched to a monstrous halt, H.C. McEntire was already sitting still. The alt-Americana artist had decided to head back to her home state of North Carolina a few months earlier, after spending the better part of the last two years as a touring backup singer for Angel Olsen. To reorient herself, McEntire settled into a farmhouse on the wooded edge of the Eno River in Durham and started doing what most folks do each day: the laundry. The daily tasks of rural life and McEntire’s meaningful devotion to them define Eno Axis, the sophisticated yet relaxed follow-up to 2018’s all-consuming Lionheart.
Step inside Eno Axis and things immediately fall into place. On album opener “Hands for the Harvest,” a simple suggestion—“Early rise, start the fire, till the rows, pass the tithes”—hung across a sweet gospel waltz sets the pace. All that needs to get done today are the dishes, the song suggests. The stakes remain comfortingly low throughout Eno Axis. Stress only creeps in through the album’s weaker tracks. Thematically, “One Eye Open” is an outlier. Though the subject of white supremacy remains as upsettingly relevant as ever, its placement here is jarring. The song would’ve been better suited for Lionheart, where McEntire reckoned with her own history growing up as a closeted tomboy among a Southern Baptist family in a small town at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
In addition to being a songwriter, McEntire is a skilled poet, and the poet’s devotion to both meaning and clarity comes through in many of these songs. You don’t have to wrestle with lines like “closer than a shadow cast,” because you know what it means. Her clever and clear wordplay recalls the style of another great queer poet, Mary Oliver. “She will leave like she appeared, eager-winged hummingbird,” sings McEntire on “River’s Jaw.” “I know someone who kisses the way a flower opens, but more rapidly,” writes Mary Oliver in “I Know Someone.”
The peaceful assurances that Eno Axis offers come in part from McEntire’s selective deployment of imagery and metaphor. A love that lasts “longer than a good night’s rest,” and is as “certain as the horse’s stare,” is a very nice thing to think about. But pretty verses alone could not soothe a sore the way this album does. McEntire’s musicianship works equally hard and just as effectively. She challenged herself to write in open tunings, giving a song like the gorgeous instrumental interlude “Sunday Morning” space to roam within itself, individual instruments gently bouncing off one another like the giant balloons at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. A recording process that prioritized live takes and involved few overdubs also contributes to the album’s spontaneous and spacious atmosphere. The gentle, rolling drumbeat on “Footman’s Coat” and the rich, warm tones that McEntire and band member Luke Norton evoke from their instruments create a full sound that avoids the cloying style of Nashville country.
Restricted by a more confined, less spontaneous structure, the songs of Eno Axis would surely lose their healing powers. Their simplicity gives them strength and McEntire’s unfussy treatment makes for music that doesn’t distract from chaos but teaches us instead how to move through it.     Eno Axis is both a wonderful album and a handy instruction manual for our times: Follow the simple suggestions tucked within McEntire’s songs and you may just feel your weariness begin to lift like morning mist burning off a river.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Stricken by a disease that left her unable to sing, the British songwriter recruits a cast of guest vocalists for a set of songs that toy with assumptions about authorship and interpretation.

Proxy Music

Linda Thompson is best known as a singer and interpreter of someone else’s songs. A specific someone else: Richard Thompson, her ex-husband, with whom she made a few of the greatest British folk-rock albums ever as a duo in the 1970s and early ’80s, lending dignified poise to his tales of suffering and strife. Linda made one album after they broke up, then began struggling with a condition called spasmodic dysphonia, which causes involuntary contractions of the larynx that can make it difficult to sing or speak. She focused on family life and released no new music until the early 2000s, when treatment with Botox relaxed her vocal cords enough for her to make a careful comeback. The three albums she’s released since then are remarkable not only for the renewed power of her voice, but also for her emergence as a songwriter, a craft she honed when it seemed like she might never sing again.
Thompson’s dysphonia has since worsened. Proxy Music, as its title cheekily suggests, is a collection of songs she wrote for other people to sing, inverting the composer-performer dynamic of her best-known work. With a few exceptions, the music, largely co-written with her and Richard’s son Teddy Thompson, could fit onto any of those classic ’70s records, with stately acoustic instrumentation and melodies that wind patiently without flashy pop hooks. Her sensibility as a lyricist is informed by the folk tradition, and she writes often about the sort of heartbreak and regret that also characterized her songs with Richard.
But she’s also funny—sharper and daffier than she ever got to be as her ex’s melancholy mouthpiece. In “Or Nothing at All,” a piano ballad about unrequited affection performed tenderly by Martha Wainwright, Thompson describes true love’s deliverance not in terms of high passion, but absurd clinical precision: “A hundred men in their white coats/Would check you with their stethoscopes/And hand you straight to me.” “Shores of America,” sung by Dori Freeman from the perspective of a pioneer woman leaving a lousy partner behind in the old world, contains a zinger so good it’s hard to believe no one’s gotten to it before: “And if it’s true/That only the good die young/Lucky old you/’Cause you’ll be around until kingdom come.”
Perhaps inspired by the unusual rotating-singer format or her years spent inflecting someone else’s words and melodies with her own personality, Thompson is playful and probing with notions of authorship and authenticity of voice that many other songwriters take for granted. She is especially attuned to the gradations of difference in perspective between a song’s writer, its singer, and the constructed character of its narrator. Proxy Music opens with “The Solitary Traveler,” an emotionally complex waltz whose lyrics, about a “wicked” woman who has lost her voice and the love of her child’s father, seem drawn from Thompson’s biography. But they also gesture in the direction of a folk-song stock role she was occasionally asked to play earlier in her career: the fallen woman, undone by her own bad choices, an object of both pity and scorn. By the end of the song, Thompson has turned this misogynistic archetype on its head. “I’m alone now, you’d think I’d be sad,” sings Kami Thompson, Linda and Richard’s daughter, brassy and assured. “No voice, no son, no man to be had/You’re wrong as can be boys, I’m solvent and free boys/All my troubles are gone.”
“John Grant,” delivered by former Czars frontman John Grant, has a narrator whose heart has been stolen by a man named John Grant. It is both a Being John Malkovich-style metafictional hall of mirrors and a sweet portrait of the mutual quirks that develop in long relationships. “A moment on the lips/A lifetime on the hips” is how Thompson recounts the couple’s shared love of sweets. Later, we learn that they’re tree-huggers, an identity they take literally. “It chafes the arms a bit,” Grant sings with a sort of auditory suppressed smile, “And we don’t know if they’re into it.” He also contributes some pleasantly noodly electronic keyboard lines, sounding a bit like Jerry Garcia when he used MIDI to turn his guitar into a synth in the late ’80s and ’90s. It’s a strange incursion on an album otherwise committed to rustic instrumental textures, but a welcome one, heightening the uncanny aspect of the song’s premise.
Proxy Music’s other experiments with relatively contemporary accents aren’t always as successful. The reverb-enhanced stomps, shouts, and claps of “That’s the Way the Polka Goes” serve to make its asymmetrical rhythm seem much more generic than it actually is, bringing an otherwise fine song dangerously close to Lumineers territory. “Three Shaky Ships” also has too much reverb, its cathedral-sized echoes and Rachel Unthank’s quietly portentous delivery evoking another mid-2010s musical cliche: It sounds like one of those spooky covers of famous pop songs you used to hear all the time in trailers for blockbuster movies.
The album’s stunning closer is “Those Damn Roches,” a tribute to the titular singing sisters and various other famous musical clans, with lead vocals from Teddy Thompson. The delicate arcs of lead guitar sound a lot like Richard’s own, which may not be coincidental. The guitarist is Zak Hobbs, Richard and Linda’s grandson, son of their eldest daughter, Muna. Richard himself, who has contributed in various ways to all but one of Linda’s post-comeback albums, sings backup. (He also plays guitar on “I Used to Be So Pretty” and co-wrote “Three Shaky Ships.”) Inevitably, the subject turns to their own family in the final verse. “Faraway Thompsons tug at my heart/Can’t get along ’cept when we’re apart,” Teddy sings. “Is it life, or is it art?/One and the same.”
Life and art have long been entwined with unusual intensity for Thompson. Shoot Out the Lights, her final album as a duo with Richard, was filled with songs about bitterly dissolving relationships, many of them apparently written while things were still happy between them, and released just as their real-life breakup was bringing their collaboration to an end. Proxy Music entwines them again. Turning Linda’s absence as a singer into a flickering subject of the music, rather than just an unfortunate circumstance of its creation, it is a strange and sometimes brilliant album—one that only Linda Thompson could have made, whether or not you can hear her singing.


DFA vets Shit Robot return, and make their case as the label's long-underrated house band. Featuring guest spots from Alex Taylor, Nancy Whang, and the Juan Maclean.

What Follows

This past weekend was Electric Daisy Carnival, a yearly festival for neon-clad EDM ravers that takes place in NYC, among other cities. While perusing the throngs of revelers from the safe distance of EDC's sponsored Snapchat feed, I was struck by the gigantic array of DJs spinning to vast seas of people, each act with their own specific, trademark gimmick. Swedish duo Dada Life throw huge inflatable bananas into the crowd. There's an artist named Marshmello who wears a giant white light-up square over his face. It seemed like elaborate costuming and props were almost a prerequisite, and while hordes of teens dance their worries away, watching them made me long for the old-school showmanship of rave and acid house—no less gimmicky, surely, but grittier, more sardonic, weirder. The last time I saw Irish house and techno producer Marcus Lambkin, aka Shit Robot, perform, he too plugged in a crazy-looking LED helmet when he hit the stage, but it felt like a throwback to house's underground days, and not a ploy for more Instagram likes. He also proceeded to spin his homegrown brand of techno well into the night, striving to create that perfect, lost-in-abandon dancefloor moment—which he achieved, several times.
Shit Robot's third album, What Follows, also tries to recreate that experience, and while it's not always on the mark, it manages to deliver an enjoyable hour-long headtrip.  As on his previous LPs, Shit Robot makes impeccable use of his label mates: Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip, Nancy Whang of LCD, Museum of Love, and the Juan Maclean all lend their talents, and their camaraderie with Lambkin is evident. On opener “In Love,” Taylor's lilting vocals come in and out of the mix, soaked in piercing 808 synths and stuttering bass sequencers, while Lambkin's production sets the tone for the record: one, big giant swell from start to finish.
The lead single on What Follows is “Lose Control”, cowritten with Nancy Whang and Juan Maclean, where Whang speak-sings a icy directive: “I can't fight this feeling/Lose control.” The song makes good use of Shit Robot's dash of humor, the place where his appreciation of '80s and '90s rave culture comes through the most. It's a theme further explored in “Is There No End,” a rambling five minutes of shuffling techno where a spoken-word vocal describes a man's stream-of-consciousness journey to the club, only to get kicked out at the party's peak. It's like an exact counter to the surly doorman in Kick Like A Mule's 1992 acid house classic “The Bouncer,” but recast as the druggy clubber trying his best to follow the music to its peak.
That peak, the climax forever chased by ravers everywhere, never really comes to fruition on What Follows, with a majority of the album blending into one never-ending rise that doesn't quite launch itself over the edge. It's certainly purposeful, but nonetheless it lacks for something meatier, for the sonic equivalent of a huge green robot face lighting up the sweaty night. With DFA intricately woven into his DNA and a near lifetime of ironclad production skills, Shit Robot will no doubt continue honing his sound, inching ever closer to that perfect, life-changing beat.


The pioneering second album from the avant-pop artist is a darkly nuanced look at identity and technology, where personal disasters occur at the same scale as the actual apocalypse.

Glitch Princess

One so-called Coachella Key NFT gives you and a guest access to the festival for one weekend a year, along with any and all virtual productions, forever. It’s a venture in line with artists’ recent investment in virtual reality as a result of the pandemic and companies’ efforts to stake their claim in the prospective riches of the metaverse. Each Coachella token sold for over $40,000, twisting the idea of an event pass intertwined with the holder’s life, death, and the in-between of virtual existence into techno-capitalist grotesquerie. Less interested in remedying the problems of the world we live in, we’re squeezing every drop of its resources to build a new one with the same failing structures, where we can escape to attend a concert in Fortnite or Minecraft while it withers.
In this sense, yeule is a kind of escape artist. The music of the Singapore-raised artist born Nat Ćmiel addresses how the promising idea of digital life can be just as stifling as real life. On their 2019 debut, Serotonin II, their songs billowed out of synth lines that droned like faraway planes, their beauty so complete that you could miss the terror of their own mind creeping in. Like Enya or Grimes circa Visions, yeule tested the power of a disembodied voice to both spook and seduce, singing alongside interludes that sounded like a hovering UFO or wind sweeping over nothingness. Every now and then the same beat resurfaced to remind you of their capability as a pop artist as opposed to just the creator of whispery and ambient digicore experiments. Its hypnotic, steady pulse distracted you from the fact that they sang about wanting to die.
That overactive death drive persists on yeule’s second album, Glitch Princess, elevating relationship troubles into Shakespearean psycho-dramas backed by soundscapes massive enough to contain them. Layers of limping synths compete with pitched-up vocals that evoke a time that sounds like a technological cataclysm. They’ve mastered the language of self-erasure they practiced on Serotonin II, where bits of narrative implied “micro-deaths,” like a screen shutting off or spending a few hours anesthetized on drugs. Annihilation is a more desperate and unambiguous goal now: yeule details a physical desire to “burn out” of their body on “Eyes,” imagines themself hit by a train on “Friendly Machine,” and throughout the record considers being totally subsumed into someone else. They project their pain onto the vastness of cyberspace as if seeking advice from an oracle and listen back to the static of its reply, hopeful it can illuminate why life is so hard to live.
Despite all their references to wanting to be gone from the world, yeule the person is very present on Glitch Princess. The title of the opening track erases the line between their stage name, taken from the Final Fantasy video game series, and their given name: “My Name is Nat Ćmiel.” With their voice wavering like an A.I. attempting speech, they state their age (22) and a list of things they like: “I like pretty textures in sound, I like the way some music makes me feel, I like making up my own worlds.” A slow synthetic melody plays behind their words, hesitant and twinkling, as if to soundtrack a character that’s just coming to life. But even after presenting their most essential traits, yeule shows that merely knowing your own name is not necessarily enough to tether you to reality.
Press materials for Glitch Princess describe yeule as a cyborg. Though that idea isn’t explicit in the lyrics, it’s present in the way they fashion themself as if they’re not fully autonomous, as if their identity is the responsibility of some external creator. “Always want but never need/I don’t have an identity I can feed,” they sing on “Friendly Machine.” To begin to understand what’s going on inside their mind, yeule treats their existence as something veritably strange. They rhyme “amphetamine,” a stimulant, with “amitriptyline,” an antidepressant, curious about the ways we can manipulate our bodies though we’ll never be able to fully control them. Modern medicine is full of “couplings between organism and machine” wrote Donna Haraway in her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” a challenge for feminism to move away from the rigidity of identity politics. That sense of otherness is central to Yeule’s conception of cyborg-hood; it provides them access to their most core sense of humanity.
On “Bites on My Neck” they sing: “I had to walk into the fire to know how to feel,” simultaneously invoking a resurrection through pain and the flame-licked birth of Frankenstein’s monster. By holding themself at a remove from the rest of humanity, yeule seems to explore basic experiences as if for the first time. “Electric” considers the touch of another as a rapturous event. The song cracks open with an inhuman wail that recalls the esoteric birdsong on Björk’s Utopia—a hook whose strangeness magnifies the song’s wide-eyed, pleading admission that “you’re the only one who knows me.” It’s the voice of a being whose suffering and salvation feel beyond their control—a perspective at odds with other musical cyborgs, like Holly Herndon or Charli XCX, whose art addresses the ways that technology can expand notions of empathy, community, and pleasure.
They give themself a short reprieve from despair on “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty,” an emo-leaning acoustic confession that arrives like a solar flare at the album’s midpoint. The song opens in media res: “Currently,” they sing in a sharp coo, “the sullen look on your face tells me you see something in me more pure than this dirty.” The strumming guitar keeps pace with yeule’s tumbling stream of lyrics, as if slowing down might extinguish this rare good feeling. Their words are tinged with hope but are still no rebuke to the self-hatred that saturates the record; the moment they step away from the person they’re singing to, yeule returns to their own “tainted flesh.”
Personal disaster occurs at the same scale as actual apocalypse on Glitch Princess. Where yeule once favored synthetic harp swells and breathy vocal harmonies, there’s now industrial booms, throbbing audio feedback, and synths like thousands of bottle rockets whistling off into the sky at once. The enormity of the sounds make mundane actions—bleeding, eating, having sex—feel precipitous. yeule sings about leaving their “real” body, suggesting there’s somewhere else for consciousness to go. Maybe there will be soon, and we’ll indeed have to re-learn those essential behaviors as if from the beginning. For all their pessimism, yeule offers one consolation: When contemplating the body’s destruction, needs that might have otherwise been hidden can unselfconsciously emerge, like to be seen or known or loved completely.

Buy: Rough Trade
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review incorrectly referred to yeule’s place of residence. The reference has been removed.


Few producers have made the recent transition from underground bass music enigma to pop-adjacent craftsman as seamlessly and effectively as Brooklyn's Kingdom. On his new Vertical XL EP, he's closer than ever to perfectly balancing the two things in his music that've always stood out: heavy pulses and airy spaces.

Vertical XL EP

Few producers have made the recent transition from underground bass music enigma to pop-adjacent craftsman as seamlessly and effectively as Kingdom. It shouldn't be much of a surprise, even if 2010's bracingly pounding That Mystic EP and its fun-through-overload atmosphere provided a strong first impression. His 2011 EP Dreama proved as much: here's a man who could use all that stomping bass of his to boost up some genuinely romantic-sounding R&B crossover that didn't just drop in nods to “Like a Prayer” ironically. He didn't lose force or energy in the process-- he just turned up the contrast and opened the blinds. Now he's closer than ever to perfectly balancing the two things in his music that've always stood out: heavy pulses and airy spaces.
Vertical XL is even more soulful and warm than his Dreama material, the kind of beats that would work wonders under a Chance the Rapper verse or a Katy B performance. Not to fantasy-book collaborators or anything, but it really does fit the moment, and leadoff cut “Bank Head” rises to the occasion. Its appearance as an instrumental on Night Slugs Allstars Volume 2 was a red herring: there were plenty of icily glowing synthpop homages to carry it, but it feels more like a complete piece now that the final version adds vocals that complement its tense austerity. Singer Kelela, an Angeleno with an upcoming mixtape on Kingdom's Night Slugs sister label Fade to Mind, pulls off a name-making performance as the initially delicate, increasingly impassioned voice that draws out, complements, and then drastically expands on the longing frustration of the track.
Maybe it's the strong impression that “Bank Head” makes, but from there on out the rest of the EP's alt-pop, hip-hop and R&B tendencies jump to the forefront. The pull between deep percussive bass and the beats he doesn't drop continue to give his work a simultaneously heavy and aerodynamic sparseness, a groove too clean to be chaotic but too forceful to really be minimal. And that approach-- intricacy in the service of simplicity-- is a good environment for his hookier tendencies to emerge. Even when things get moody, they don't need a lot of coaxing to get danceable: the chain-clanking, plinking-water darkness that sets off “Corpse” is overwhelmed by machine-gun kicks and synths that toe the line between foreboding and intimate, and the minor-chord moan of “Viper Lash” has enough hopped-up percussive interplay piercing the surface to make it more thrilling than gloomy.
When it's at its most explicitly future-pop stylized, the music takes on some of Kingdom's best tendencies. The sparse, heavy-foot loping “OG Master” isn't exactly a good-mood pool-party soundtrack on its own, but the speaker-rattling resemblance to some of the more iconoclastic space-rap beats to emerge from grime-savvy Southern and West Coast underground producers works in its favor. And even through all the characteristically dense drum programming and intense forward motion, the heart of “Viper XL” is a juxtaposition of synthpop and old-school house that lets him construct some of his most euphoric melodies yet. Kingdom's still a relatively low-profile entity-- for now, at least-- but he does what pop musicians should do: build, reinterpret, transform, and revel in the possibilities of a long lineage of dance music. That he does so with only one vocal track makes it clear that his own voice is just getting stronger.


After producing for Joey Purp and Vic Mensa and singing on Chance the Rapper’s “All Night,” Chicago’s Kevin Rhomberg steps up with his breezy debut album. It crystallizes his peculiar pop appeal.

Paradise

Until recently, Kevin Rhomberg was a relatively behind-the-scenes force on the Chicago indie hip-hop scene. As Knox Fortune, Rhomberg has produced for Joey Purp, Vic Mensa, and Towkio, but it wasn’t until last year with an outright feature on Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book that his name began to hold enough weight to crack a headline. Now that he’s just released his debut, Paradise, a round of high-profile interviewers have been forcing the rotely burning question: “What was it like to work with Chance the Rapper?” they all ask.
Rhomberg’s voice on “All Night”—that happy, jukey Chance the Rapper dance track he featured on and won a Grammy for in 2016—was peculiar enough to immediately wonder, “Who is this guy?” And Paradise crystallizes his peculiar pop appeal. The album squirms from indie rock to synth pop and back. Without recognizing his name, a lot of new fans wrongly assumed Rhomberg’s gender from the pitch of his voice. It’s not just the almost-alto range of his singing that lends Rhomberg a slightly bizarre quality; the thin plainness of his timbre can make him sound downright boyish. There’s no gravity to his voice to anchor a song, and so no matter the style, Paradise seems to constantly buzz around in a summery daze.
Despite his previous production and Chicago affiliations, Paradise is anything but rap. Instead, the album dances around a core of quaint, shimmering synth-pop and indie rock, stances that present Rhomberg as a playful and unbothered lead. Standout single “Lil Thing” is the best consolidation of his charm. An earworm with a blurry mix, it’s subtly funky, but like the rest of the record, it never bogs down in technical austerity. That the lyrics are so cooly quippy extends the effect. On the stuttering “Help Myself” a slinky bassline misdirects from the dainty guitar riff that peeks over the top of the mix. “I think she wants it, but doesn’t know how to say it/She squeeze my hand in the car when I slam on the breaks,” Rhomberg sings, letting that familiar moment of tense inertia explain a new couple’s burgeoning intimacy. He conjures up little scenes like this throughout Paradise without coddling them in context. If you’ve ever driven a car with a loved one in the passenger seat, you know exactly what he means.
On “24 Hours,” a jumpy R&B pop track that sounds like a recycled Robin Thicke reference, Rhomberg feigns some pop star arrogance before disarming it away. “Accentuate my ego, yeah I’m the man,” he sings, trying to convince himself as much as his lover. Later he admits, “I’m a man to my mother, but afraid of the dark.” It’s not the only lyric on Paradise that might elicit an “aww.”
“I Don’t Wanna Talk About It” is the closest thing to Rhomberg leaning into the mic, and it sounds like he’s jumping around a garage trying out a psych-rock rendition with his friends. “Keep You Close” seems like the most forward crossover attempt. It’s a happy banger with a hint of edge and radio-friendly production: a theme-song worthy piano riff plods over a snappy drum break. “I need you to love me when I won’t/The one thing I’ll stress the most is/I’ll keep you close,” Rhomberg sings, turning his self-doubt into a love story.
All of this seems to come easily to Rhomberg. Never do you get the sense that he’s trying too hard or stretching his limits. Of course, there’s a potential downside to that light-footedness, and it’s fair to wonder what he might sound like as an aggressive auteur. But that Rhomberg doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously is his greatest asset. Much bigger pop stars strain to sound so passionately breezy. Even when he’s not trying anything new, Rhomberg just sounds like himself.


The Kyoto punk quartet unleashes a tornado of defiance at the prospect of romance, monotonous office work, and people who feel entitled to women’s time.

Itekoma Hits

Kyoto, Japan-based punk quartet Otoboke Beaver make anti-love songs with no time for sadness or longing. Instead, they are fueled by a rage so ferocious it’s thrilling to behold, like watching an exhausted athlete dig deep to overtake the frontrunner in the final 200 meters. The band’s latest release, Itekoma Hits, is an album of unwavering “no”s shrieked over gnarly guitar riffs and frantic drums, a tornado of defiance at the prospect of romance, monotonous office work, and people who feel entitled to women’s time. Hurtling through 14 songs in 27 minutes, it burns like a sore throat and blazes like a brittle tree doused in kerosene.
The album’s songs are less narratives than slivers of raw fury directed at hyper-specific situations. The title of one demands, “Introduce Me to Your Family,” while the 18-second closer simply asks, “What time did you say you’d come back today?! Mean.” Otoboke Beaver’s lyrics make heavy use of repetition, sometimes reiterating a line four or five times in a row. Nowhere is this more pointed than on “I’m Tired of Your Repeating Story,” where the repetitious form and frenetic guitar evoke the mind-scrambling agitation of listening to someone launch into an anecdote for the umpteenth time: “Bored receptionist like a corpse/My ears are bleeding/My ears are bleeding.” Similarly, “6 Day Work Week Is a Pain” employs repetition to simulate the tedium of an unfulfilling desk job, ending on a series of facetious “thank you”s followed by a snarled, “Fuck you!”
As a band, Otoboke Beaver work together seamlessly, building tension with lead vocalist Accorinrin’s winding solos and releasing it in teeth-gnashing group vocals. Album opener “datsu.hikage no onna” begins with Accorinrin’s croons of “I hate you” as she laments being a “woman in the shadows.” When the rest of the band joins in, the sentiment is unified and powerful, as if bolstered by an army of women who have all felt this way. These more melodic vocals, though rarer and rougher around the edges, are expertly deployed. On highlight “Bad Luck,” lyrics sung in rounds depict the blossoming of new love with cynical suspense, knowing nothing can stay sweet for long.
Itekoma Hits’ most vivid imagery centers around food and eating. On “S’il vous plait,” “pork bits” is slang for male genitalia. Elsewhere, a wife’s home-cooked meal becomes a symbol of unattainable love and respect in the eyes of her husband’s scorned mistress. And on “Binge Eating Binge Drinking Bulimia,” Otoboke Beaver sing about an emotional reaction to unrequited love that balances frustration and shock value, toeing the line between bold and messy. In the rare moments when the band loses focus, their brazen energy can slip into overwhelming commotion. At times, the spontaneity that defines their songs feels like it isn’t building to any final revelation.
Still, their music evokes a deep sense of joy. Otoboke Beaver have said that they are not feminists, telling The Japan Times last year, “We don’t try to sing about women’s rights or women’s issues in our music, we’ve never talked about it.” But intention is not always the same as impact; even if their music is not explicitly feminist, there is power in hearing a group of four Asian women say exactly what they want. Listening to these songs, it is simply assumed that we have the confidence, security, freedom, and poise to confront those who have wronged us, to turn down love and sex that doesn’t fully satisfy us, and to demand better. In Otoboke Beaver’s world, loneliness is holy and anger is a beautiful, terrifying spectacle.


Near the end of his life, Jimi Hendrix recorded two concerts in Hawaii for an ill-fated film. A new reissue reveals him elevating above an earthly debacle to offer a glimpse of transcendence.

The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Live in Maui

Live in Maui

In early spring of 1970, Jimi Hendrix’s manager Michael Jefferey convinced Warner Bros. executives to dump $1 million into his client’s name. Half of it went to finish Hendrix’s state-of-the-art Electric Lady Studios. And half went to Jefferey himself, intended to kickstart his new career as a film producer with Hendrix providing the soundtrack. That half-million was thrown into the money pit that was Rainbow Bridge, a piece of hippie drivel by Warhol acolyte Chuck Wein that glommed onto surfing and tai chi, casting a bunch of amateurs and Hawaiian locals.
As the film production spun out of control, Jefferey pitched an overburdened Hendrix on Hawaii:  two weeks of relaxation and two shows tacked onto the end of his Cry of Love Tour. It would be a ”vibratory color sound experiment,” as Wein spun it, with the audience segmented by astrological sign. Hendrix wanted no part of the debacle, but nevertheless found himself on a stage hastily erected near the Haleakalā volcano on a ranch in Olinda. It made for a stunning tableaux, but gale-force winds left the band struggling to stand upright, much less hear themselves onstage. It would also be Hendrix’s penultimate concert in the United States. Six weeks later, he was dead.
While the two concerts were filmed and recorded for Rainbow Bridge, the finished product, so dependent on his presence, only featured a baffling 17 minutes of footage of Hendrix, and the album of the same name featured none of the audio. Thanks to those winds, drummer Mitch Mitchell had to re-record all of his parts in the studio. Live in Maui presents both concerts for the first time, along with an accompanying documentary. For a posthumous discography that has seen numerous recordings from that final tour officially reissued (Berkeley, Atlanta, Isle of Wight), Live in Maui has Hendrix performing the near-miracle of elevating above an earthly debacle to offer a glimpse of transcendence.
That last tour—and Maui in particular—captures the myriad forces pulling at the guitar god during what Robert Christgau called “the excited, spiritual, bummed-out sprawl of his final year.” A headlining rock act constantly dealing with slapdash festival sound while also trying to build a studio to his exacting standards and finish a new album, Hendrix was pushing towards weaving in more Black musical strands while bogged down by his primarily white audiences’ expectations. They wanted “Purple Haze,” “Fire,” and “Foxy Lady” for the thousandth time, while Hendrix was seeking beyond those increasingly threadbare numbers towards something funky, if not yet fully formed. The band reflected that divide, a hybrid Experience of longtime English drummer Mitchell and Hendrix’s fellow Chitlin’ Circuit survivor and Band of Gypsys bassist Billy Cox. Together, the trio were working through those not-yet-settled new songs in real time. Incandescent blues numbers and hurried run-throughs of the hits sit alongside very loose jams that stumble about, shuffle, nearly dissolve, and then suddenly shoot skyward.
The first set boasts slightly better clarity, the second set coming across more muffled. But the wider canvas of these two sets offers him a freedom he didn’t always have on that tour. Rather than frontload the hits, the trio gets to take their time, folding in a dozen new songs that had yet to appear on any album. Maybe that extended time in Maui eased Hendrix’s mind. So the set opens with “Hey Baby (New Rising Sun),” rather than close with it, as they often had on previous dates. What might have been the title track of the next Jimi Hendrix record blooms with a gorgeous, iridescent guitar tone like a sentient waterfall.
Effortless guitar heroics abound, from the chopped “Sunshine of Your Love” chords sprinkled into “Fire” to the “Star Spangled Banner” quote teased in the last moments of “Purple Haze.” When it seems like the rarely performed “Villanova Junction” is about to dissolve into silence, it pivots into a storming take on “Ezy Rider.” Even on the big hits duly rendered here, Hendrix at some point in each song hits a frequency akin to a serotonin release, reminding you why his music is equivocated to the euphoric highs of drugs or sex. Or just go near the two-minute mark of Maui’s version of “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” when his guitar seems to be shooting down from a mile above the stage. “I kept thinking a spaceship was landing,” remembers one film cast member in the documentary, and it doesn’t sound like stoner hyperbole.
The seeds of Afrofuturism reside in this  gravity-defying tone, yet Jimi was equally profound and transcendent burning through a slow blues. “Red House” appears here in a peculiarly short but still potent version. But it’s Hendrix’s lashing of “Hear My Train A-Comin’” that staggers: sorrowful, unbowed, and pissed, his guitar obliterating all in its path.
Blame the messiness of his estate in the wake of his tragic death, or confounding number of posthumous compilations and concert recordings, but is there an icon of the boomer era who has been needlessly diminished like Hendrix in the 21st century? “Jimi Hendrix looms large among those lapses in our collective consciousness,” cultural critic Greg Tate writes. “His absence from a general celebration of African American heroes is both absurd and symptomatic of a more widespread problem: cultural and political amnesia...Hendrix [remains] one of the most misunderstood and misapprehended.”
A Black genius plying a once wholly Black music before a now peculiarly white world of rock (the footage of a crowd composed primarily of blissed-out blond flower children before the man himself appears seems even more absurd in the present), Hendrix paved the way for every subsequent and successful Black visionary to follow in his wake—think Stevie, George, Marvin, Prince. Live in Maui sees the man pushing beyond the boundaries of rock towards something new and untenable. Maybe it was right to call it “a vibratory color sound experiment.”

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The Canadian country singer immerses himself in a bygone era on this spacious and dynamic full-band set.

Little Songs

Across his recent albums, Colter Wall has turned the vistas of his native Saskatchewan into old-timey slideshows full of hardscrabble folk heroes roaming the land, weary cowboys trading campfire tales, and couples two-steppin’ across the worn, wooden floors of an old barn. While the imagery has been consistent, the soundtrack has evolved. After working with producer Dave Cobb on 2018’s stark Songs of the Plains, Wall self-produced his follow-up, 2020’s Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs, and incorporated his longtime touring band to capture a more bountiful sound. With his fourth album, Little Songs, he further saturates the picture with a focus on original fare that feels less like homage and more like habitation.
The sense of confidence can be credited to Wall’s creative partnership with bandmate Patrick Lyons, who co-produced Little Songs. They no longer simply nod to the past and its looming figures—Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb, George Jones, and of course, Johnny Cash—but immerse themselves in the era completely. Compared to contemporaries like Charley Crockett, Wall doesn’t seem interested in modernizing his music or playing with form. “Well I don’t care what’s cool or where it’s at,” he sings on “Honky Tonk Nighthawk.” The fiddle-heavy arrangement evokes the warm press of an audience swirling in tandem, and it sits alongside a blustering cover of Canadian singer-songwriter Ian Tyson’s “The Coyote & the Cowboy,” where Wall’s sings in a gruff growl that thickens the song’s wit like a roux.
Listening to Little Songs can feel like dropping a coin into the local nickelodeon and watching the past flicker to life, and much of that movement comes from Wall’s band. Their radiant performances flesh out the record long after Wall’s voice, all wood-grained weft and warble, has quieted. You can hear their magic in the sashaying, doubled electric guitar solo on “Honky Tonk Nighthawk” and in Lyons’ twinkling pedal steel lacing around “Prairie Evening/Sagebrush Waltz” like the most delicately stitched trim. When Wall’s narrator spies a woman “shaming the glow of the moon” at a local dance on “Prairie Evening,” the song blossoms into a summery waltz, the bass harmonica and fiddle rippling against one another.
Given the space to play, there are times when the band overshadows Wall’s lyrics. The disjointed “Standing Here” details a moment of pause that leads to a few meandering reflections: about the country, about people these days, about the music industry. But Wall falls short of larger poignancy, and the band fills that gap with a lively do-si-do jam. He fares better in “Corralling the Blues,” as close to a confessional as he has dared. In a land where “the sky seems to end 50 feet up,” as author James Welch writes in Winter in the Blood, the blues don’t seem to hang heavy the way they do in more harried locales. Yet, Wall divulges over brooding acoustic guitar that he’s battled an affliction since “before I was grown.” A ruminative harmonica from Jake Groves flutters and suggests a daydream yearning for a mind less weighted.
When faced with the vast emptiness of prairie life, work can keep an agitated mind busy for only so long; it takes something bigger to beat the blues. With its pacing title track, Little Songs offers a sentimental theory for one possible remedy. “You won’t get much on mountain time/Except older and a thicker hide,” Wall sings with a wink. “You got to fill the big empty/With little songs.” He delivers these lines like a seasoned storyteller, reminding himself of the timeless feelings that drive us to keep the music playing, whether it’s old or new.


On his latest set of releases, the new age composer Laraaji delivers divine works full of drifting ambience. He offers sage advice and highlights the transformative power of ancient gong tones.

Sun Gong / Bring on the Sun

Laraaji has spent the past 40 years trying to ease the world’s stress. He creates soothing ambient music, and across several releases, Laraaji’s done his best to make you forget he’s even there. For his splendid new pair of releases, Sun Gong and Bring on the Sun, the new age musician and foremost purveyor of laughter meditation compiles another reflective set, full of the drifting ambience and life affirmations you’d expect from Laraaji.
The musician is probably best known for his 1980 album Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, which was produced by preeminent ambient composer Brian Eno (who discovered Laraaji playing in Washington Square Park and asked him to record an album as part of Eno’s famed “ambient” album series). Much like Laraaji’s previous work, Sun Gong and Bring on the Sun entice a deep state of rest. The idea for Sun Gong, Laraaji said recently, was to construct an immersive listen that highlights the transformative power of ancient gong tones. For centuries, the gong has been used as a calming device in yoga and meditational therapy. In holistic medicine, it helps resolve emotional and physical dissonance, bringing the body and spirit to one accord. When coupled with light music, gong meditation has also been known to heal physical ailments.
Sun Gong consists of two extended compositions, “Sun Gong No. 1” and “Sun Gong No. 2.” It is a monotonous drone of wafting cymbals, chimes, and penetrating bass—a mix of dark acoustic and electronic sounds that slowly become brighter. The music’s subdued hum brings to mind Eno as well as contemporary artists like Tim Hecker and Oneohtrix Point Never, except the mood feels divine in an almost undefinable way. It’s minimalistic and trance-like, made for headphone listening and intimate spaces, but in no way does it fade into the background.
Laraaji filters his instrument through various electronic effects, crafting massive waves of metallic sound. Near the eight-minute mark of “Sun Gong No. 1,” the musician pares down his main device, allowing the synths to breathe. Around the 12-minute mark, a celestial chant comes into play, giving a ghostly resonance to the piece. A similar chant arises near the end of “Sun Gong No. 2,” a far more radiant work that transitions Sun Gong to the complimentary Bring on the Sun.
Dubbed a “magical mixtape,” Laraaji brings a broader array of compositions to the eccentric Bring on the Sun. Where Sun Gong is dark and improvised, Bring on the Sun is made of weightless hypnotic loops (one is called “Laraajazzi”) and contemplative vocal tracks with standard song structures. If Sun Gong aims to relax its listeners, Bring on the Sun finds Laraaji connecting with them in more direct ways. On “Reborn in Virginia,” for instance, Laraaji openly recounts his upbringing “in the backwoods” using a bouncy blend of harp, tabla, and tambura. On the folk-influenced “Change,” he offers sage advice through a weathered baritone. “If you can boogie with life,” Laraaji asserts, “then you can boogie with change.”
In a world of mounting pressure, Sun Gong and Bring on the Sun are a collective, not-so-subtle nudge to turn down for a bit, continuing the same message Laraaji has touted for years. Yet in the current political and social climate, it seems the musician’s art is more relevant than ever. At this year’s Moogfest, for instance, Laraaji performed an overnight “sleep concert” that featured eight hours of faint echoes, zither, and light bells, all tailored to help participants fade into slumber. That makes Laraaji’s reemergence all the more fascinating: with stadium-sized pop dominating the electronic lexicon, the 73-year-old has come back into view by taking his same, exact opposite approach. Once the party is over, you need to get some rest.


On their first new album in six years, the folk troubadours balance out-of-time balladry with a mature sensibility that’s attuned to melancholy and mortality in the present.

The Decemberists: As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again

As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again

Once a figure of ridicule and derision, the nerd defined the first decades of the 21st century even more than the hipster or the bro. This seemed like a promising development, before it soured into misogynistic gaming culture and The Big Bang Theory. The Decemberists, named after an obscure Russian revolution (which they winkingly misspelled), represented a more benevolent side of geekdom: They were smart, of course, but also very passionate about arcana. They fussed over prog-folk epics, sea shanties, and Shirley Collins the way other nerds nitpicked D&D campaigns or Star Wars canon. We knew the terrain of frontman Colin Meloy’s inner emotional life not through confessional lyrics but through his obsessions.
The Decemberists weren’t rock nerds, though, which may be why actual rock nerds dismissed them in their heyday. Instead, they were theater nerds—a wildly intense phylum of geek. Meloy wrote songs like playlets, constantly implying a proscenium, and the band performed them like a troupe of thespians, occasionally even reenacting Tolkien battles onstage. There was an element of playacting in every song, which made them seem like the nerdiest band around (even Barenaked Ladies’ theme songs never went that deep). That dramaturgical proclivity festooned quote marks around certain songs (“The Mariner’s Revenge Song”) and even entire albums (The Hazards of Love), but their music always seemed to spring from a benign fixation with the historic and the folkloric.
With their ninth studio album, the Decemberists have done something that few 21st-century nerds even consider: They’ve matured in their relationship with their obsessions. They’ve grown up. Not a lot, but enough. The archaic syntax of the title As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again suggests a “return to form” or at the very least a career retrospective. But the album is nothing quite so lofty: The Decemberists are dressing up in yesteryear’s costumery—the character-driven songs of Picaresque, the jangle rock of The King Is Dead, the shaky political engagement of I’ll Be Your Girl—but there are no quote marks around these songs. It’s more a personal reckoning with their own past: a rummage sale of dusty enthusiasms.
So there’s an unexpected melancholy to these new story-songs, a poignancy that wouldn’t have been possible 15 or 20 years ago. Meloy understands we obsess differently in our dotage, with a new sense of impermanence and a more acute understanding of mortality. He has sung about death many times before, but it sounds a little more immediate on opener “Burial Ground.” There’s an easy charm in Meloy’s gashlycrumb wit and in the band’s ability to combine various influences so that the familiar—’60s folk melodies and pop arrangements—sounds slightly unplaceable. Is it more Beach Boys outtake or more pre-Days of Future Passed Moody Blues? “Burial Ground” operates not unlike Fairport Convention’s “Come All Ye”: It’s an invocation, an invitation to the graveyard, and the Decemberists know we’re all headed in that direction anyway.
That’s how they start the album, and every song that follows—from the “Hell”-acious “Oh No!” to the bittersweet love song “All I Want Is You”—ponders the inevitable end of every story. The long white veil in “Long White Veil” hides not a bride’s face but a corpse’s frozen countenance (gesturing toward the Lefty Frizzell hit “The Long Black Veil”), and “Don’t Go to the Woods” is nothing but dread and caution: a preamble to “The Black Maria,” the dark heart of this album. That title might refer to arcane slang for a paddy wagon, or it might be the Beasts Pirates in One Piece, but Meloy is writing his own canon here. Death is a walking shadow, never glimpsed by the living but known by its heavy footfalls in the hallway. “Turn out your lantern light, set your affairs to right,” Meloy sings over a strummed acoustic guitar and a lone funereal horn. “The Black Maria comes for us all.”
As fanciful as these songs can be, the Decemberists can’t help but ground them in the very real, very horrifying present. That’s never been their strongest subject, but they at least try to meet our current moment with the capitalist allegory of “The Reapers” and even “William Fitzwilliam” (which is haunted by the ghost of John Prine’s “Paradise”). The angriest song here, “America Made Me,” might be twice as powerful if it was half as clever, but there is something to be said for soundtracking dissent with jaunty piano and party horns. It’s a tack they’ve been deploying since “16 Military Wives,” although here the sentiment is more potent in its outrage and disgust.
As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again ends as you might expect: with a nearly 20-minute epic called “Joan in the Garden.” Its winding length and multi-part structure gesture toward The Tain and its spawn The Hazards of Love, but it might align more closely with “I Was Meant for the Stage,” their creative exegesis from Her Majesty. It’s a song about what the Decemberists do and why they do it, a meditation on art as a weapon against death—but, in this case, not their own. Joan is literally in the garden, deep in the soil, but Meloy can resurrect her with words: “Make her 10 miles tall, make her arms cleave mountains… write a line, erase a line.” After a five-minute folk passage and a five-minute prog section, the Decemberists give over nearly 10 minutes more to ambient noises, stray rhythms, plunked strings, errant synths. It sounds like they’re striking the set and clearing the stage—a softer kind of death—and it’s weirdly moving. They might have stopped there rather than append a dramatic coda, but they never could resist a big finish. As it ever was.


The singer’s first full concert in 22 years was a joyous surprise, a moment of wonder. Led by Brandi Carlile, the live recording of the star-studded fête crowds Joni out.

Joni Mitchell at Newport

Joni Mitchell’s unannounced set at the Newport Folk Festival late last July was pure social media manna. Just minutes after the most sophisticated singer-songwriter ever associated with “folk-rock” returned to the stage for her first full show in nearly a quarter-century, shaky videos and sunlit photos flooded sleepy Sunday timelines. There was Mitchell, 78, on a stage again, bejeweled and beaming, as if laughing at life’s absurd odds. It felt impossible not to consume every clip, the sacrament of some new miracle.
After surviving childhood polio, devastating post-polio syndrome in the ’90s, and a 2015 brain aneurysm, Mitchell had learned to sing and play some guitar again through a series of loose living-room hootenannies in her Southern California home. Her younger friends dubbed them “Joni Jams.” And now, with a dozen or so of those apostles, she had brought that party to a blazing but joyous Sunday afternoon in seaside Rhode Island. Her appearance was our world’s truly rarest commodity—a complete surprise, thrilling and affirming because it so long seemed impossible.
For all that day’s rapture and wonder, Mitchell’s unexpected appearance never really seemed the setting for a proper live album. (And she has made two, both staggering.) Consider how high passions were onstage, after all, with the acolytes—Brandi Carlile, Blake Mills, Lucius, Allison Russell, Marcus Mumford, and so on—there to assist in Mitchell’s resurrection as her sprawling, spirited band. On most of the songs, the kids took the lead, Mitchell supplying backup for her own songs; on occasion, she took charge, while they offered awestruck accompaniment. You can hear, appreciate, and even admire their ecstasy during At Newport, the hour-long edit of Mitchell’s day in the sun. It’s audible in the onstage squeals after she sings the second half of “A Case of You” or when Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith stammers “That’s my hero right there” like some smitten schoolboy after he leads “Amelia.”
Such unrestrained fervor, though, makes for an album so frustrating that it actually complicates that memory’s innocent delight. Mitchell’s voice is gorgeous and rich throughout, a piece of high-pile cotton velvet warmed in the daylight. She renders “Both Sides Now” with the wisdom of survival, the “up and down” having still somehow delivered her here. But too often, her patient approach is swallowed by the tide of well-intentioned boosters, associates who make Mitchell feel like little more than an honorary guest at her own party.
Carlile’s role in helping Mitchell return to stage cannot be overstated. During a single decade, she went from a stylistic disciple to the advocate who covered Blue in full to one of the few true believers who held out hope Mitchell might still make music. Mitchell, in turn, used the star-studded and ultimately empowering private Joni Jams that Carlile facilitated as a Jacob’s ladder, unsteadily climbing toward an updated version of her singular voice. “Just watch… Joni’s back,” Mills remembered Carlile telling him after Mitchell sang several songs during a Joni Jam in September 2021. “[Brandi] recognized that moment,” Mills later said in a Mojo interview, “and she could see the future.”
But onstage in Newport, Carlile—to borrow a coveted Mitchell barb—“made some value judgments in a self-important voice,” having checked any ostensible self-awareness backstage. That much even seemed clear simply from early images of the day, where Carlile matched Mitchell, seating herself on an ostentatious Victorian throne and singing into a gilded microphone. (This happened again this June, at a second public Joni Jam.) It is the sort of undeserved equivalence that, even before hearing a note, at least made me wonder how Carlile, who can be a wonderfully boisterous singer, would work with Mitchell, not just around her.
Now on tape, Carlile’s approach to the songs borders on suffocation. At best, she offers serviceable readings of standards, over-singing “Carey” and “Shine” with church-camp gusto and letting Mitchell get in a harmony edgewise. At her worst, though, she distracts from and even drowns out Mitchell, with a maddening insistence on having a say during every track. Her Mariah-lite melisma at the end of “A Case of You,” her unnecessary edict to “Kick ass, Joni Mitchell” before an astounding instrumental of “Just Like a Train,” her incessant humming and whispered phrases during the back half of an otherwise sublime “Both Sides Now”: Carlile is constantly reminding the audience that she’s here, that she’s partially responsible for this. She is such an insistent and pandering presence throughout these songs that, when Mitchell begins Gershwin’s “Summertime” like she’s slinking through some smoky jazz lounge, you half-expect the sidekick to answer “Bradley’s on the microphone with Ras M.G.” (Later, Carlile settles for “Tell ’em what time it is, Joni.”)
This overzealousness pervades the entire performance. The motley troupe’s righteous energy during opener “Big Yellow Taxi” or the choral finale of “The Circle Game” never truly wanes, even during the relatively quiet tunes. Goldsmith, for instance, does an admirable job fronting “Amelia” and “Come in From the Cold,” a perspicacious 1991 single that’s thankfully been salvaged here. His tone is plain and kind, as if offering Mitchell an open invitation to meet near the middle. She accepts it haltingly on “Amelia” but then readily on “Come in From the Cold,” their voices interweaving with an uncertainty tailor-made for the song’s senses of self-discovery and doubt. It is one of At Newport’s few examples of clear vulnerability and risk.
As with Celisse Henderson’s bold interpretation of “Help Me,” even that moment is soon overrun with other voices and instruments, Carlile’s army of Lucius, Mumford, and the like coming down to clutter the clearing. The results subsume the eccentricity, elegance, and innovation of Mitchell’s work, applying a kind of conventional Disney gloss that is the most elementary musical takeaway of the entire Laurel Canyon scene. At Newport is like a selfie snapped from some overwhelming vista, where the faces of the subjects accidentally crowd out the actual sight they’re there to behold. That subsequent Joni Jam this June corrected some of these issues, but here, on tape, they glare and grate.
At Newport does get one thing exactly right, a sometimes-neglected aspect of Mitchell’s career: her humor or, more exactly, her laughter. Even as she has mapped the darkest recesses of our hearts, Mitchell wrote with wit so incisive it was frequently overlooked or even ignored by those who saw her as only lachrymose. But on stage, she’s always been engaged and disarming, constantly ready with a howl or a bon mot. Just listen to the way she cracks during Miles of Aisles when a fan yells “Joni, you have more class than Mick Jagger, Richard Nixon, or Gomer Pyle combined.” Without a word, she obviates every aloof image.
Her laughter is the first thing you hear after the chords of “Big Yellow Taxi” are strummed, the last sound of “Summertime,” and the ellipsis she lets hang following “The Circle Game,” one of the sharpest songs about aging and the perfect exit here. That deep, assuring laugh feels like a better testament to her continued vitality than the album itself. “So fun,” she says when it’s all over. It is one of the very few bits of At Newport that gets better the more times you hear it, the more times you try to relive this surprise.


Help me out here, people. It's time we all put our minds together and came up\n\ with a ...

To Everybody

Help me out here, people. It's time we all put our minds together and came up with a new name for the genre known as "post-rock." Now, genre labels are never very descriptive, and usually serve merely as a crutch for writers and a denial target for musicians ("We're not emo!" a thousand bespectacled bands cry). But they do serve some purpose as a sort of critical shorthand-- I tell you a band is new-wave synth-pop, and your brain instantly dials up an approximate framework for the music at hand.
Post-rock is an especially faulty term, however, since it says almost nothing about a band's sound, other than it being somehow "after rock." It's sort of like describing an especially tasty dinner as being post-lunch. What else can we call it then? One could go back to the genre's obvious roots in King Crimson-style complexity and call it neo-prog, or something more futuristic, like prog-o-tron. If it's important to tip a hat to the music's German origins, Ameri-Kraut might catch on. Or we could all just tell it like it is and label it pretentious-core. I'm open to suggestions.
All this semantics-wrassling is provoked by 90 Day Men, an act that many would most likely lump into post-rock or math-rock circles. On To Everybody, their second album, the St. Louis quartet may possibly be addressing this problem of classification by naming a track, "We Blame Chicago," indicting the geographic center of post-rock with charges of beating the genre into clichédom. That's just a wild guess, and only the 90 Day Men know the real story behind the title, but To Everybody comes across as just such a challenge to the scene.
The first three minutes of the opening track, "I've Got Designs on You," led me to think that the album had little in store, with Dianogah's melodic bass, Don Caballero's gymnastic drumming and an irritating pinched whine for vocals. However, after eight minutes of bobsled run twists and turns (sorry, too much Olympics), I was hooked. What happened? Well, the addition of Brian Case's textured guitars and more restrained counterpoint vocals didn't hurt. But the real kicker is Andy Lansangan's piano, which slowly enters the fray before taking control and allowing the composition to achieve liftoff.
Piano, you say? Big frickin' deal, you say. I'm gonna go see what else Pitchfork reviewed today, you say. Shut up and sit down, I say. While the piano might not be the most advanced of instruments, Lansangan uses it to great effect on To Everybody, adding much-needed warmth and melody to 90 Day Men's sound. Where the band's previous effort, 1999's (It (Is) It) Critical Band, occasionally sank into the sludge of an overly busy rhythm section, Lansangan's inventive playing has the band in a much more balanced state instrumentally.
No one song showcases their new strengths like the aforementioned "We Blame Chicago," a piano and wah-wah-driven piece that swoops and darts through two tuneful movements, disintegrates into noise, then returns triumphantly to the original theme. 90 Day Men function like a musical assembly line, with each member playing simple phrases that add up to a cohesive and complex whole. While many bands that take this approach sound overly choreographed and rigid, Lansangan's jazzy style keeps things loose, giving off at least the appearance of improvisational energy.
"St. Theresa in Ecstasy" and "A National Car Crash" follow a stretched out version of the same blueprint, slowly assembling an intricate pyramid of sound before destroying it all like an angry toddler, only to rebuild it even higher. While the former says less than it probably should over its near nine-minute length, the latter closes the album with a fiery display of tension-release dynamics.
If 90 Day Men have a weakpoint, it's in their vocals, which are predominantly used as just another color of yarn to knit into their musical scarf. That most singing gets buried in the mix is perhaps a wise decision, as only the brief, aerobic "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life" reaches minimum singalong-ability. When the vocals are too prominently displayed they distract from the music beneath, or at worst, are wincingly melodramatic ("Alligator," where the band's prog side gets the best of them).
90 Day Men are also smart enough to know that listeners can only handle so much of their dense, sinister sound in one sitting, and keep the album at a lean, mean forty-minute length. And despite a few missteps, To Everybody indicates that the 90 Day Men are a band to watch in the Ameri-Kraut arena, using familiar ingredients but to greater effect. It may even end up being one of the better prog-o-tron releases of 2002. What do you think, are they catching on?


Before they were Black Mountain, Stephen McBean and crew recorded this LP, which mines similar sounds and themes.

Pink Mountaintops

Let's wax reverse chronological: Pink Mountaintops' self-titled debut was issued last year, but the album has been drawing increasingly more attention since the January release of the self-titled debut from the band's evil vinyl-schooled twin, Black Mountain. Besides sharing personnel, the albums have a lot in common. With Vancouver polymath Stephen McBean at the helm, both are notable not merely for their rootsy rock influences, but the specificity of their stylistic appropriations. In a field where bands often consolidate entire decades to achieve a generic "retro" sound, McBean's geological formations hew away at something smaller and more ornately detailed.
Clearly, this is the way to go. Why settle for a mass-produced replica when you can have the hand-stitched real thing? Of course, no CD comes caked in John Bonham's dried sweat, but then, bands don't stand a chance of becoming deities themselves unless they hone in, internalize their forebears' achievements and conceive something new(ish) from the recycled matter. When it's done well, retro isn't biting; it's a novel and economical use of widely available ingredients.
Perhaps Pink Mountaintops haven't been as warmly received as their more ominous-sounding counterparts because their influences are more abstract and toyed-with. On "Modern Music", Black Mountain came right out said it-- they "can't stand all your modern music"-- and proceeded to ride Ozzy's headless bat all up in our grill. Here, McBean and his associates are more reserved. "Bad Boogie Ballin'" surpasses the composite weirdness of Black Mountain in its first four bars alone: A grimly metallic beat teams with a gas-huffing accordion to provide a backdrop for McBean's swarthy blues-trimmed vocal. The song seethes with tension, awaiting the melody that never shows up.
"Rock 'n' Roll Fantasy" is creepy and hollow. Soft solo guitar and meditative female back-up hums nuzzle up to the Doors as McBean delivers a harrowing vocal, revealing his most sexually-frustrated dream-wishes: "I came all over myself/ Wish I came all over your blouse." "I [fuck] Mountains", despite its titular filthiness, is actually the album's smoothest cut, letting nothing disrupt the flow of its hand drums and wafting-smoke guitars.
In general, Pink Mountaintops' music is more provocative when it isn't noisy. Among the louder numbers, only the chipper, almost Kinks-y "Sweet '69", which finds McBean's head buried deep in the feathered glory of his Summer of Love fantasies, truly succeeds. Elsewhere, "Tourist In Your Town" and "Atmosphere" take the Velvet Underground's band-of-gypsies plod into the sunset a little too far, failing to achieve the aimed-for catharsis of "Heroin". It's a flawed ending to a promising debut, but I wouldn't call it a letdown: Pink Mountaintops still aren't your dad's rock anachronism, because chances are they know the terrain better than the old man himself.


The San Antonio musician’s longform ambient compositions honor the timeworn strategy of soundtracking imaginary films, but their cinematic expanses have the raw immediacy of status updates.

claire rousay: everything perfect is already here

everything perfect is already here

There’s something in the air each time new work by San Antonio-based composer claire rousay arrives, something like “the feeling of the idea of silk scarves in the air” in Robert Ashley’s uncanny opera Private Parts: thoughtful, self-referential, beautiful, supplemental. Lately, it happens all the time, as her Bandcamp offers dozens of releases from just the past few years. She tries on various styles, including in-joke odes to mall punk and hyperpop, but the best of them show off her extraordinary ability to coax, and craft, multitudes from minute gestures. Her sounds—which might resemble scratches on a drumhead, soft plunks of piano, room-tone-tinged murmurs in a room different from the one you are in now, or the flick of a lighter—are straight out of experimental music’s central casting. Yet they come together in what feel like unique sample packs. Her arrangements, which tend toward the side-long, honor the old ambient strategy of serving as soundtracks for imaginary films, but their cinematic expanses have the immediacy of status updates.
rousay calls her latest everything perfect is already here, and what’s here, along with her usual ear-ticklers, are some offerings from collaborators that hint at composition. A voice begins: Um, um, I think, uh um, my um…, the words stumbling like the symphony Le Tigre made of women swallowing their own tongues, and also like a conductor tapping her baton. There are strings: Allies Alex Cunningham and Mari Maurice open their violins while Theodore Cale Schafer tickles the ivories. Deep in the mix, someone mentions “sadness and melancholy” as the performers buttress rousay’s itchy percussion with scraps of melody. Marilu Donovan plucks a harp. The mood is a cat lazing in a sunbeam, or the revelation that surviving trauma is a matter of staying present. About eight minutes in, big puffs of new age-y chords hover above something ticking. Calm comes in time.
The title track falls deeper into the kind of spell that a few people can cast in concert. rousay and company embark on a drone with facets that gradually reveal themselves. Here comes a bow against steel, then the depth of a machine humming to itself. Still, though, rustles and color from someone else fill the corners of the mix, as if whatever is happening among the players isn’t it. There’s always something or someone left outside. A bit of digital-ish noise pops by, striking in its beauty. The pleasure of the glitch. It’s generous, and accompanied by a rustling and cracking that, to me, sounded like notebook paper crumpling into balls for the trashcan, sort of funny. Then everything drops out and there’s just a recorder capturing an empty room. The void is deafening. Someone says, faintly, “I will always fight for and laugh with and care for and have them care for you. It’s really reassuring and lovely to have that person.” There’s a temper tantrum of banging on things, wind on a mic head. Someone laughs and says, but this can’t be right, “Whitney Houston.” Drones and wheezy rattling return.
Perhaps what sets rousay apart from the hundreds of field-recordings-and-drone workers out there is the mystery of her organization. Her tracks might be improvised or labored upon. They feel both sui generis and tossed off. You can hear her hand, and it makes you wonder, and in that way her recordings are empathy machines. They warm and flatter as they fill the air around you, silk scarves just out of reach.


A new reissue resurfaces the music of a cult-favorite songwriter from 1980s Baltimore who drew on ambient and British pop influences.

Few Traces

The name Mark Renner has been on the lips of the Baltimore fringes for decades. In the early 2000s, I heard whispers of a lone wolf artist from the county who made music like Ultravox and Cocteau Twins circulating through at least one Charm City house party. Awareness of his existence was a sort of cred calling card that distinguished a true Baltimore deep head from the flocks of fashionable Maryland Institute College of Art students and surly punk-scene townies in Charles Village, Mount Royal, Remington, Hampden and other enclaves of alternative culture.
It was a fertile environment for a legend of this kind. Interpol’s neo-post-punk sound had reignited interest in Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine and lesser-known bands from the crannies of British indie. Kids were rabid for shimmering guitars and driving drum machines. The savviest among them had a cassette rip of Renner’s 1986 full-length debut, All Walks of This Life, an album whose a-side of Harold Budd-esque instrumental meditations led into a b-side of glittering pop.
After purchasing a sealed copy of the LP from a record dealer at a Philadelphia flea market a few years back, RVNG Intl. label head Matt Werth understood what the Baltimore deep heads already knew: Renner’s music deserves to be mentioned alongside those 1980s UK tastemakers, and it almost certainly would have had a more visible profile had their fans gotten hold of the album in its day. Instead, Renner became a UPS driver and a humanitarian worker, traveling to Ethiopia with his church to help locals struggling with AIDS in the early 2000s. All the while, he continued to make music and art on the side. And now Werth and crew have assembled this collection of nine tracks from All Walks of This Life, along with a handful of rarities, in hopes of bringing Renner’s music to a wider public.
A committed and prolific visual artist, Renner explains in the album notes (written by Pitchfork contributor Brandon Soderberg) that he doesn’t really consider himself a musician. “My approach to recording has often been as a painter—only with sound instead of color,” he says. It’s a very Eno-type declarative. This ethos reveals itself most clearly in the instrumental pieces that comprise the bulk of this reissue, some from the 1986 LP and others culled from even lesser-known works. This mood music brings to mind acts like Cluster, whose deceptively complex arrangements, like Renner’s, permeate one’s consciousness fluidly. Renner says that these recordings were often meant as companion pieces to his paintings, and it’s unfortunate that this package doesn’t include renderings of those visual works for comparison.
That said, his unforgettable pop songwriting is the highlight of this reissue. “Half a Heart,” a jangly standout from All Walks of This Life, could have been a hit. Indeed, it was inspired by a friend who’d go on to tread in such waters. How Renner became penpals with Stuart Adamson of the Skids and Big Country in the early Eighties isn’t explained, but after about a year and a half of correspondence, he traveled to Scotland, met up with Adamson, and cut a series of demos in a London studio with his guidance, “Half a Heart” among them. Other vocal tracks, like “Saints and Sages,” “The Wild House,” and “More or Less,” also showcase Renner’s hushed baritone and poet’s lyrical sensibility. He’s musical and thoughtful, exemplary of the era and yet unique. These vocal compositions are where Renner really shines, and it’s a shame there aren’t even more of them.
Taken as a collection of songs, Few Traces is a mostly great comp showcasing an outsider’s celestial pairing of ambient and British pop influences. Only a few tracks from the ’90s, like “A Fountain in the Cloister” and “James Cowie (The Portrait Group),” stand as outliers to an otherwise fluid sequence. But as a reissue package, the lack of visual context and outside perspectives in the narrative leave something to be desired. What could Baltimore studio technician John Grant, who engineered most of Renner’s original albums, have said of the work? Or Ed Meyers, Renner’s bandmate in his early groups Boys in the River and the Favorite Game? Or Renner’s brother, whose copies of Hermann Hesse’s writing had a profound effect on the young artist? Forget music: How about a gallerist who believed in Renner’s visual artwork?
The label has provided a caveat for this release: “Few Traces collects Mark Renner’s early music but strives not to simplify or reframe it.” The aim of presenting Renner’s work in a straightforward manner is admirable, but the omission of essential context leaves the listener wanting. Despite this shortcoming, the good news is that his music now has an opportunity to transcend the limited reach of the Baltimore fringe-culture cognoscenti, through this release and via a forthcoming documentary by Baltimore resident Maia Stern. The warmth of such renewed possibility is often the sweet spot of reissue culture, what makes the hard work worth it. Three decades later, Renner’s humble dedication to his art is certainly deserving of our attention.


A new reissue of the Stockholm multi-instrumentalist’s 2020 album highlights his knack for making a studio sound like a lightly psychedelic, breezy early-evening DJ set.

Fastingen-92

It seems fitting that some listeners will first encounter Fastingen-92 as a reissue, even if only three years after its original release. Each track on this album from Stockholm multi-instrumentalist and studio wiz Daniel Ögren has the air of a record collector’s prized find, rescued from obscurity and turned into a cult favorite. After a limited-run release in 2020, it received a wider audience this year via the long-running UK label Mr Bongo, whose catalog is filled with reissues of the sort of crate-digger classics of global dance music that Ögren’s work clearly channels.
Though Ögren played, recorded, and mixed nearly everything on these primarily instrumental pieces himself, together they feel like a breezy early-evening DJ set, traversing styles, eras, and continents from one selection to the next: a dembow rhythm that could have been lifted from a dancehall record, a live drummer expertly emulating the sampled breakbeats of ‘90s rap, percussion loops that hiss and wheeze like the early drum machines Sly Stone used to use. Atop these funky rhythms, Ögren arranges all manner of guitars, synths, and keyboards, most of them sweetened with vintage-sounding echo effects—psychedelic, but in the sense of a microdose to go along with your orange wine or mezcal negroni: a gentle heightening of buzzy sensation, not a disorienting head trip. The grooves are too buoyant, the melodies too insistent, for anyone to stray too far into the portals of their mind. You could dance to it, but it’s probably best suited for the moments just before full-on revelry breaks out, when people start to wiggle on their bar stools as they lean forward to order the next round.
Though Ögren’s apparent influences are far-flung, the music on Fastingen-92 is also rooted in his particular Stockholm milieu. The way he combines dreamy psych-pop textures with hip-hop-inflected drums, and emphasizes midrangey analog warmth rather than the booming lows and tactile highs of digital-era pop, suggests an affinity for Dungen. (By extension, that means Fastingen-92 sometimes also recalls the heavily Dungen-indebted early records of Tame Impala.) And like his sometime collaborator Sven Wunder, Ögren seems to have a fondness for library music: records created in the mid-20th century for the express purpose of licensing to movies, advertisements, and the like, whose composers-for-hire were often more adventurous in soundtracking these scenes not-yet-imagined than the job strictly required.
The best tracks on Festingen -92 occupy a similarly rich middle ground between specific detail and evocative elision, giving you just enough to invent your own settings for them. “Picasso,” with its romantic acoustic guitar melody and clattering percussion, suggests tropical humidity and ferns parting to reveal a tableau you can’t quite glimpse in full. “Maj (For Tintin)” has the relentless pulse of a rave anthem, but without any low-end heft; its vaporous sonics give the feeling of a bustling nightlife scene viewed from the clouds far above it. Though Ögren takes elements from existing styles, the sonic locales he dreams up are only loosely rooted in real-world geography: the main thing is that they’re very far away from wherever you are right now.
Like those library music composers, Ögren is capable of rising above the call of duty. Though Fastingen-92 could get by well enough on groove and tasteful atmosphere alone, it also has hooks that will stick with you long after the party winds down. A couple of them are almost too familiar: one melodic tidbit from the joyous “Hjälmarsfjorden” might as well have been flown in directly from Shuggie Otis’s psych-soul totem “Strawberry Letter 23.” The verses of “Idag,” the album’s lone vocal-led pop song, sound uncannily like a stylish Swedish-language trip-hop remix of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne.” Intentional or not, these flickers of recognition don’t take away from the experience of Fastingen-92. If anything, they heighten the sense of a skillful DJ controlling the decks, mixing a few bars of a crowd-pleaser in with the deep cuts.
But Ögren’s vibe-centric approach to composition does have its limits. His focus on sustaining a single mood for the length of a given track leaves little room for surprise. Most toggle back and forth between two or three sections repeatedly; with rare exceptions, if you’ve heard the first minute and a half or so, you know how the rest will go. That’s not a knock, exactly: sitting alone at home and feeling the emotional tug of some unexpected chord change isn’t really what this music is for.
DJs and sampling producers are attracted to library records and other dusty obscurities for a reason. They have a certain blankness for the listener, whether baked intentionally into music for soundtracking visuals, or arising like a phantasm in recordings now far removed from the social and cultural contexts in which they were created. And within that blankness lies the possibility for all sorts of new resonances that the original musicians could never have foreseen. Like the old records that inspired it, the tracks of Fastingen-92 might find new life through recontextualization. In other words, they would sound great in someone else’s DJ set.


The latest from Copenhagen’s Loke Rahbek—a collaboration with multimedia artist Frederik Valentin—is a set of wistful sketches for synthesizer and piano that gracefully sway.

Loke Rahbek / Frederik Valentin: Buy Corals Online

Buy Corals Online

Posh Isolation got its start as an outlet for power electronics, industrial, and post-punk; it was born of provocation. But lately the Danish label’s output is just as likely to reflect a softer, gentler sensibility. Take label cofounder Loke Rahbek: For years, his work in the duo Damien Dubrovnik was dedicated to the most caustic, eviscerating strains of noise. Their synths had the reek of burning plastic; extreme distortion disfigured their vocals like blisters on burned skin. But their sound has opened up. Parts of the band’s 2017 album Great Many Arrows recall Tim Hecker’s pastel reveries, while Rahbek’s Croatian Amor project has evolved from what he once termed “bubblegum industrial” into a velvety variant of pop-ambient. Buy Corals Online, a collaboration with the Copenhagen multimedia artist Frederik Valentin, is among the most unreservedly lyrical and elegiac music to come from Rahbek yet: a set of wistful sketches for synthesizer and piano that sway as gracefully as kelp beds in a turquoise sea.
Valentin, like Rahbek, seems to have mellowed over the years. Recently he’s been involved with the Posh Isolation project Kyo, a duo with Lust for Youth’s Hannes Norrvide; their most recent album, 2017’s I Musik, is an uneasy swirl of synths and found sounds that’s as elegant as a still life. But Valentin’s past is spottier. In the 2000s, he played with grunge-inspired dirtbags Hard Rock Power Spray, whose repertoire included songs like “Ride on Me,” “We Belong in Bed,” and “Much More Music for You to Be Fucking on Drugs To”; then came the more polished Vomit Supreme and the druggy space-rock project Complicated Universal Cum. If you think that name is tasteless, wait ‘til you get a load of his video for “Everything Is Drugs Pt. One,” which turns out to be not the only time he thought that wearing a swastika was a good idea; to follow Valentin’s artistic evolution is to slip uncomfortably down a rabbit hole of druggy, post-ironic nihilism.
Buy Corals Online, on the other hand, is a thing of striking, immediate beauty. Across eight tracks and 32 minutes, it explores plangent synthesizer pads and sentimental piano interwoven with lean arpeggios and thickets of Reichian minimalism. “Garden Tattoo,” the album’s shortest track, is a pulsing steel-drum fugue, while “A Woman Without” touches upon Debussy and Sonic Youth’s “Providence” before dissolving into harmonica-soaked ambient blues.
The mood is foggily absent-minded, like a lover lost in thought. “You Come With” opens with quiet, meandering organ notes; after a couple of minutes, a pulsing arpeggio lends a sense of direction before muted sheets of noise rise up from the mix and all the song’s layers seem to bunch up, like fabric tangled in a sewing machine. In “A Million Coloured Fish,” keyboard clusters shiver in place, as though huddling together for warmth; a strange clattering noise might be someone walking around a hardwood-floored apartment, banging into the furniture. Balanced between song and ambient sketch, the album proposes an unusual hybrid, one that feels as though it could pull apart at any moment: composed enough not to seem too haphazard, yet abstract enough to tip into full sentimentalism.
Buy Corals Online is supposedly inspired by “the floating world,” a decadent aesthetic from Japan’s Edo period, though the press release’s Wikipedia-cribbed description might suggest that the theme doesn’t run much deeper than the music’s aquatic qualities. More telling might be that title. It’s the kind of phrase you might come across in a piece of email spam or a block of internet chum. Its flat, quotidian ring masks levels of unease (not the least of which is an uncomfortable reminder that the world’s reefs are dying); it offers a tantalizing glimpse of the ocean, only to land face-first right back in the distancing and deadening properties of the internet. You come seeking seaside solitude, but you wind up staring at a screen. As with everything the Posh Isolation crew does, even their melancholy is complicated.


The latest project from the alt-rap Misery Club member showcases his dynamic voice and features a grip of collaborators from Clams Casino to Alice Glass that often overshadow Zubin’s personality.

Heavy Down Pour EP

Zubin doesn’t really sound like anyone else in the emo-tinged world of alternative rap. For listeners, there are often two options: whiny songs emphasized by whiny voices, or songs about being down in the dumps that sound gravelly and guttural. Instead, this North Philadelphia native dwells in a high, thin range of wilting malaise. Zubin’s voice is uncommonly pretty and clear, and his vibrato is his unmistakable signature: quivering and unnerving, like a terrified puppy.
Perhaps, at 29, Zubin has a different frame of nostalgia than his younger vocalist peers, who are mostly reworking pop-punk and post-hardcore sounds they weren’t so lucky to live through the first time. Six years ago, he began his career in the dancey soft-pop trio Worshyper, playing keys and producing but never singing lead. He was making bloopy mashups of Disclosure and Destiny’s Child when he was discovered by the production collective Working on Dying, who invited him to start singing on their dark rap songs. It’s different, but his trajectory is part what makes his presence so vital: In a scene that can now feel homogeneous, or, worse, redundant, Zubin adds much-needed complexity — maybe even a feeling of hope.
Heavy Down Pour is a testament to his draw. Comparable to iLoveMakonnen’s self-titled 2014 EP—which elevated the idiosyncratic rapper’s status for the simple existence of songs with Metro Boomin and Sonny Digital—Zubin’s latest project attracts an elite cast of collaborators. The enigmatic producer Suicideyear, emo-rap forebear Clams Casino, and current leading light Nedarb Nagrom all contribute beats. There are five guest vocalists across six songs, including a particularly inspired appearance by Alice Glass, alongside Gothboiclique members Wicca Phase Springs Eternal and Fish Narc. Zubin is clearly a favorite among people who worked with Lil Peep, even though—or perhaps partly because—they sound nothing alike.
In both emotion and pitch, Zubin has an unfortunately narrow range, a weakness that’s exaggerated here. The constellation of collaborators gives Heavy Down Pour special weight, but sometimes its leader can feel like a guest on his own project. Earlier this year, Zubin and Nedarb released a superior and mostly feature-less EP called Misery, which gave him far more space to stretch his legs, shaping and reshaping his uneasiness until the hooks sounded like pop songs. Here, the most impactful and ambitious tracks, “Sinking” and “Dark Alley,” both feature two guests. These are high-level posse cuts, but it’s none of the singers' best work: While their different voices are made more distinct, they’re also reduced to archetypes
Where Zubin shines is how he conveys his feeling. Heavy Down Pour is an unrelenting breakup album. On “Sidelines,” self-produced over simple guitar, his voice is layered and interlocking, with a soft melody and texture almost evoking early Bon Iver. Other producers push him closer to his limits. “Stay Down” pits Zubin against a monstrous synth that might have knocked him flat, yet he conveys fragility while somehow sounding ten feet tall. It’s a bit artificial, with AutoTune honing his notes and dialing up the shakiness in his voice. But Zubin is a melodramatic singer: it’s only fitting that over-the-top lines like “I tried to look on the bright side and my eyes started bleeding” are rendered even more superhuman. You don’t need to shout when your whispers can turn into earthquakes.