It's the return of the... Ah, wait, no way, you're kidding: Eminem's relapse is just an update of his shock tactics? It still beats most of Encore.

Relapse

You might think calling Eminem "divisive" in 2009 would give him too much credit. After all, nearly every piece of promotion that's led up to the release of Relapse has caused the internet to stop whatever it was doing and form a unified chorus exclaiming how washed up it made the guy look. But did you know that after "We Made You" hit the airwaves, major networks ran segments on whether Eminem's "controversial" new video went too far? Let's think big picture here: In some corners of the indie community, people quibble about whether Wavves are overhyped, even though 99% of America have absolutely no fucking clue who they are. Eminem is divisive the way BIG people are. Like A-Rod. Or George W. Bush.
Relapse makes it abundantly clear where the line gets drawn in 2009. It's appropriate that the title character from "Stan" has become web argot for "obsessive fanboy," because Eminem drives both Stan and stan alike crazy in the same exact way-- by completely ignoring them until it's too late to make amends. Star Trek isn't the only franchise reboot expected to do big numbers this summer-- instead of the 13-year-old who got into The Slim Shady LP and found that underground shit he did with Scam, Relapse is for that guy's little brother who's 13-years old right now, and Eminem is fully committed to upping the ante for today's desensitized sensibilities. Do a double-take when he rapped "I just found out my mom does more dope than I do"? This time, you get to untangle the knotty word thickets of "My Mom", wherein young Marshall gets bullied and tricked by you-know-who into an addiction to prescription pills. Recoil when he threatened to push a fat girl off the high dive in swim class? He's now murdering his cousin in a tub and drinking the bathwater. Cringe at Eminem advocating roofies at a kegger? Get ready for the term "felching" to enter the public consciousness as Eminem gets anally raped by his stepfather in a tool shed. Got all that? Congrats, you're now four songs into Relapse.
It's smart for Em to revert to the shock tactics of his glory days-- Encore was a Chinese Democracy/HIStory-style catastrophe of self-exile with no real exit strategy. Though saddled with a terribly awkward rhythm that Eminem thankfully ignores, "Underground" finds him laying waste to a murderer's row of horror movie franchises with focused, devilish glee. If Relapse were Eminem in Michael Myers mode, it would be fantastic, but instead he's gone Mike Myers or even Robin Williams, subjecting us to "wacky" accents and a delusional sense that he still has a grip on what's edgy.
Favoring a voice more staccato and pinched than ever, Eminem jacks off to Hannah Montana, hunts Lindsay Lohan for sport, sings about Valium in Auto-Tune, clowns Jessica Simpson, and raps a verse in character as Christopher Reeve. Much like The Love Guru, it's so painfully unfunny that you can't even bother to act offended. And then there's "Bagpipes From Baghdad". As with much of the record, you have to get past your initial inclination to absolutely not give a shit about a deader than dead topic, but when Eminem spits poison at Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon, he comes off as so annoying and misguided that you end up taking Mimi's side. On "If I Had", Em rapped that he was "tired of hearing people say they're tired of hearing me rap about drugs." He begins "My Mom" by rapping "I know people are tired of hearing about my mom," before rattling off one of the record's many choruses that are catchy in the way all grating but effective hooks are-- "my mom loved Valium and lots of drugs."
As for the singles, well, they're still here, but fortunately lacking any visual component. As easy as it is to ride Eminem for such sub-Jackie Harvey cultural mockups, it's possible to argue in his defense that instantly dated references have been part of the package since day one (Spice Girls, Tom Green, etc.). Truth is, the tracks where Eminem turns on himself usually end up carrying the water, and it's no different on Relapse: "Deja Vu" explains in exhaustive, darkly comedic detail how he managed to disappear in a cocktail of nearly every available intoxicant for the past Olympiad before summarizing, "See, me and you, we almost had the same outcome, Heath." Immediately after, it feels like Relapse hits something of a stride with "Beautiful", the "what do I think of success? It sucks" rant, succeeding despite clichés both metaphorical (if you're doing "woe is me," pick "tears of a clown" or "walk in my shoes," not both) and musical.
It's been easy to rag on the musical aspect of Eminem's recent output, and the mere fact he's working with Dr. Dre is seen as cause for celebration (the entirety of "Old Time's Sake" is great). But ever since "In Da Club" (and probably because of it), Dre has treated production like a test run for his very expensive headphones, concerning himself with only the most inert, stainless steel sounds. But you don't have to be an audiophile to find fault with the music here-- just a person who has a passing familiarity with Dre's post-2001 output. Relapse can be an intermittently thrilling sonic experience until you realize everything sounds like a variation of "What's the Difference", "If I Can't", or even fucking "30 Something". Granted, Eminem can overpower any beat by sheer force of will, but would it hurt for it to at least sound fun?
Which is really the reason I can't truly dig Relapse, even with all the temptation to do so: When Eminem's on ("Underground", "Must Be the Ganja")-- and he is more often than he's been since 2002-- he can put you in an awfully forgiving mood. Sure, the singles end up being the worst tracks, and it's chocked with filler and has almost no sense of sequencing, but that's the case with all of his albums. Eminem's always been able to manipulate not only his alter egos but his public persona, but here it feels more forced than ever-- as though, as The Onion once quipped about a past-his-peak Marilyn Manson, Em's going door to door trying to shock people. Sure, it's great to have the guy back, if only due to the fact that if we get to ignore him for the next four years. But it'll be on our terms, not his.


The enfant terrible of the pop-rock revival wades deeper into the genre, coming back with even less than before.

Mainstream Sellout

It’s been four years since A$AP Ferg declared Lil Uzi Vert “the new Blink-182,” and three since Blink ditched their guitars for synths. But the one-time rapper Machine Gun Kelly, who won “Favorite Rock Artist” at last year’s American Music Awards, sees himself as a savior of pop-punk in its traditional sense: “It needed a face again,” he told Spin. If 2020’s Tickets to My Downfall was a love letter to his mall-punk predecessors, mainstream sellout is a bitter kiss-off, too busy defending himself against the genre’s gatekeepers to bother with the hooks and heartbreak that made his previous effort so surprisingly slick.
Machine Gun Kelly, born Colson Baker, is wading into a far more crowded pool than the one he left in 2020. He tapped Travis Barker to produce Downfall before the Blink-182 drummer became a professional studded-belt whisperer, adding a jagged edge to music from disaffected Hype House e-boys. Situated among his fellow Barker-ians, most of whom were in short pants when Blink first broke up in 2005, it’s understandable why the 31-year-old might feel a sense of ownership over the Zoomer-led Hot Topic revival. Barker joins MGK again on mainstream sellout, but this time, their pairing feels less inspired and more paranoid. These songs feel cut-and-pasted together from a grab bag of adolescent clichés and recycled three-chord solos; the eyeliner and lip ring seem even more like a costume when Baker opens the record with an impassioned “Why is it so hard to live?”
MGK and Barker aren’t exactly known for subtlety, but their latest collaboration is painfully prosaic to the point of meaninglessness. mainstream sellout never bothers to show you how twisted and broken Machine Gun Kelly is when it could just tell you: “I’m damaged,” he whines on “5150.” “make up sex,” featuring blackbear, is somehow more hollow than their collaboration on Tickets to My Downfall, mixing crass sexual references with such lyrics as, “I love chaos/I love toxic/I love wreckage/I love falling.” MGK leans into the worst tendencies of his Victory Records influences, blaming his rampant narcissism and misogyny on his exes and his vices.
Sure, there are suggestions of deeper traumas—late fathers, broken homes, forbidden love—but most of the album is cartoonishly rendered via graveyard walks and vague references to mental illness. “born with horns” and “god save me” feel thin to the point of approaching parody, like “Emo Kid” without a shred of irony. “emo girl,” a duet with fellow pop-punk revivalist Willow Smith, feels both too serious to laugh at itself and too absurd to take seriously. It does little to transcend its tropes and despite Smith’s admirably yelpy delivery, it still lands like a TikTok-ready meme. And while Baker’s vocal tics—“ums” and “yeahs” thrown in for emphasis—are catchy in spite of themselves, as a guitarist, he can barely bother with an original melody. “maybe” includes the requisite “Misery Business” interpolation and a metalcore verse from Bring Me the Horizon’s Oli Sykes for good measure. The distorted riff on “papercuts” sounds suspiciously like Green Day, but perhaps without the draw of controversy, Machine Gun Kelly didn’t feel the need to give them the same credit.
When he’s not threatening self-harm or screaming “fuck your feelings,” Machine Gun Kelly uses mainstream sellout to settle scores: “I hear too many interviews/From these artists in the news/Speaking on my name,” he roars on “WW4,” a followup to his previous record’s breakup anthem “WW3.” If Tickets to My Downfall was built from the restless pitch of the American Pie soundtracks, this record is closer to emo’s brooding, fame-obsessed LiveJournal era. Almost two decades since Panic! At the Disco sang, “Well we’re just a wet dream for the webzine,” and Fall Out Boy declared, “This ain’t a scene, it’s a goddamn arms race,” MGK is retreading long-dormant Myspace subculture wars without the wit or self-awareness to pull it off. Somehow, even the last-picked-in-gym-class losers of The Academy Is… seemed menacing when they told haters to “take a long walk off of the shortest pier”; the best MGK can do is count his toes (he’s got all 10!) and threaten to “stomp the shit out of you.”
When MGK drops the battle for authenticity, he’s still good for a patented mix of partying and pouting. He loosens his white-knuckled grip on his six-string eventually, and his hip-hop past and pop-punk pivot go down easy in a post-Juice WRLD landscape. Baker’s millionaire misery feels like a natural fit on “die in california,” singing about hating his house in the Hills while Gunna warns about “demons on my shoulder.” When the light hits just right, Machine Gun Kelly feels like the inevitable figurehead of “bop-punk”: drum machines and drop-D tunings bonded by shared desperation.
Machine Gun Kelly recently told Billboard he feels like “the kid who was just outcasted from birth.” That chip on his shoulder has only grown with each new album, first as a white rapper beefing with Eminem fighting to prove he had bars, and now as a reinvented rockstar spinning his struggles into power chords. mainstream sellout is too concerned with trying to prove Machine Gun Kelly can be a guitar god to contend with his complicated feelings or innovate on his basic formula in any meaningful way. Tickets to My Downfall was memorable for the way it treated pop-punk like a natural palette for his emotions, but this too often feels like a concept album about rock, a stodgy record that’s too busy using “real instruments” to do anything interesting with them. But then again—what’s more emo than a God complex?


RTJ3 is essentially the Run the Jewels manifesto, an outpouring of rage and defiance that never loses sight of the objectives: rallying the troops, holding all accountable, and toppling oppression.

Run the Jewels 3

On 2006’s “That’s Life,” Killer Mike boasted “You’d be hard-pressed to find another rapper smart as me,” opening up about Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson, poverty, respectability politics, and civil rights, before taking on both Bush Administrations (“George Bush don’t like blacks … and his daddy CIA had flooded the hood with rock”). A few months later, El-P was waging war with the same enemy in the 9/11 conspiracy theory thriller “Run the Numbers,” concluding that “it always comes back to a Bush.” The two songs sounded very little alike, but the music (and the rappers) shared a similar fire and presence: confident, conspiratorial, no-holds-barred, and razor-sharp. Neither were likely to be deemed “political” rappers then, but both were already dissenters and nonconformists; independent artists signed to themselves, free thinkers shooting off at the mouth.
Nearly a decade after airing out the Bush family, the duo, as Run the Jewels, have found a creative renaissance. The group’s latest self-titled album, Run the Jewels 3, is a well timed, finely tuned rap epic that confronts the ruling class (here addressed as “the masters”) with deadly precision; it’s rap as resistance.With a demagogue waiting in the wings to assume the presidency, their particular Molotov mix of explosive shit-talking and unfiltered insubordination feels vital.
Their interplay is instinctual this time around; the songs move and shuffle with its MCs intuitively trading bars, filling the gaps in each others’ phrases, and feeding off each others’ energies, using their booming voices to cut through the startling noises of a future dystopia. “Poor folk love us the rich hate our faces/We talk too loud, won't remain in our places,” El-P raps on “Everybody Stay Calm.” They’re both observers who refuse to sugarcoat. “I just try my best, man, to say something about the shit I see,” Killer Mike told The New Republic in 2015. “Because I don’t want to go crazy. I don’t want to be walking around angry and feeling rage.” To that end, RTJ3 isn’t a response or reaction, it’s a preemptive strike, laying the groundwork for the battleground ahead.
Their methods remain consistent, but the stakes have been raised over the years. RTJ1 was a fun experiment; RTJ2 was a classicist statement, and now RTJ3 is a reckoning. Many of these songs have more urgency than before; If RTJ2 was the music of protest, then this is the music of revolt. In that way, RTJ3 is essentially the Run the Jewels manifesto, an outpouring of rage and defiance that is never overcome by the moment and never loses sight of the objectives: rallying the troops, holding everyone accountable (from lawmakers, to other rappers, to Don Lemon and themselves), and toppling oppression wherever it may reign (on “Thieves! (Screamed the Ghost),” El-P raps, “Fear’s been law for so long rage feels like therapy”). “Thursday in the Danger Room” peers into the duo's personal turmoil and their shared history, and on “2100” Killer Mike lays out their President-Trump survival strategy: “You defeat the devil when you hold onto hope.”
The key to RTJ3 is closer “A Report to the Shareholders,” which is plainspoken about the duo’s message and intent: “Maybe that’s why me and Mike get along / Not from the same part of town, but we both hear the same sound coming / And it sounds like war.” Seconds later, Killer Mike goes full Malcolm X: “Choose the lesser of the evil people, and the devil still gon’ win / It could all be over tomorrow, kill our masters and start again.” This is the ire of a group that’s tired of saying I told you so.
This is by far the best produced record of their trilogy, with beats that find new and interesting ways to wreak havoc. “Call Ticketron” turns automated ticketing technology into a beacon for alien transmissions. On “Hey Kids (Bumaye)” crackling static and thumping bass crater open to reveal whirring, wobbling tones and ghostly whispers, and Danny Brown slots in an exceptional guest verse. On “Panther Like a Panther (Miracle Mix),” furnished by the shouts of Miami rap goddess Trina, rounded blips mimic the patter of hand drums before bursting into a wave of buzzing, distorted noise that slowly dissipates back into nothing. They’re still clearly having fun doing this and it’s still fun to listen to them work.
It isn’t quite as punchy as RTJ2, which was brutish in its tactics, with nonstop bangs and thrills, but RTJ3 is a triumph in its own right that somehow celebrates the success of a seemingly unlikely friendship and mourns the collapse of a nation all at once. “Thieves! (Screamed the Ghost),” a song about riots as a response to violence as opposed to a means to create it, samples an iconic Martin Luther King, Jr. quote from the 1967 speech “The Other America”: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” In keeping with that idea, RTJ3 is a soundtrack for the riots to come.


The angriest, most aggressive record in the Beatles catalogue, For Sale finds them reaching back to their Hamburg club days in both attitude and sound.

Beatles For Sale

The Beatles faced the same pressures every teen sensation has since-- fatigue, frustration, being bounced into recording substandard material. "It isn't a pot-boiling quick-sale any-old-thing-will-do-for-Christmas mixture," claimed Derek Taylor on the Beatles For Sale sleeve. This pre-emptive strike looks more than a little defensive, especially when the cover versions are back in force, and one of them is the notorious and oft-detested "Mr. Moonlight".
The workrate expected of early-1960s pop stars is one of the hardest things for modern listeners to get their heads around. We're used to bands making a record, touring in support, searching for inspiration, trying out new ideas, maybe two years later making another. Because our experience of the early Beatles is structured around their albums, we tend to think of them as doing something similar, except at a much more rapid pace. As Ian Macdonald's superb Revolution in the Head makes clear, this wasn't true: albums, singles, EPs, tours tumbled over one another with hardly a break-- a firehose of almost continuous activity.
There were two reasons for this workload. Firstly the music industry simply hadn't worked out yet how to extend a record's shelf life-- singles weren't taken from albums after all. Secondly the lifespan of acts wasn't expected to be long, so it made sense to get the most work possible out of them. The famous hotch-potch of their early American catalogue was one result. The Beatles themselves were changing how the business worked, but Beatles For Sale, of all the British records, bears the stamp of these business realities. It's a mess.
But it's a really good mess. Taylor's sleevenotes are also interesting because they go out of the way to reassure listeners that everything they're hearing can be reproduced live. Studio experimentation was becoming more important to the band and producer George Martin, but clearly someone viewed it with a little nervousness. You can understand why: The Lennon-McCartney originals on Beatles For Sale are often full of curious arrangements, drones, jagged transitions, and lashings of aggression. Blame pot, or the inspiration of Bob Dylan, or just the pressure-cooker environment the group was in, but the record hits a seam of angry creativity.
This is particularly true of Lennon's amazing first three songs. "No Reply" shatters itself with waves of jealous rage, taking the menace that had flecked Beatles music and bringing it up in the mix: his dangerously quiet "that's a lie" is the most chilling moment in their catalogue. "I'm a Loser" turns that anger inward with just as much brutality. And "Baby's in Black" curdles a nursery rhyme, transforms the group's crisp pop sound into an off-kilter clang, and uses John and Paul McCartney's double vocal to thicken the soupy sound even further. This run of tracks marries the direct attack of their earliest material and the boundary-pushing of their later albums, and stands with the best of both.
Even so it's a relief when "Rock and Roll Music" breaks the tension, especially when you notice that the band are playing their best rock'n'roll since "Twist and Shout". Perhaps the workrate had pushed them back into the Hamburg hot zone, but the uptempo covers on Beatles For Sale are fiercely good-- as ragged, loud and immediate as the songs needed to be. Even "Mr. Moonlight" fits the aggressive mood, the ugliness of its organ solo surely deliberate.
McCartney's songs on Beatles For Sale are more thoughtful than moody, though on his splendid "Every Little Thing"-- given melodramatic thrust by Shangri-Las-style piano and bass drum-- he's distinctly melancholy, his "yes, I know I'm a lucky guy" sounding like an attempt to convince himself of that. But Lennon's anger and the band's rediscovery of rock'n'roll mean For Sale's reputation as the group's meanest album is deserved, even if it has "Eight Days a Week" as its breezy centerpiece. The lumpiest and least welcoming of their early records, it's also one of the most rewarding.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


Since forming over three decades ago, the UK shoegaze band’s fifth album is the first to shoulder the weight of those years. The music is wispier, more skeletal, attuned to and aware of fading glories.

everything is alive

Slowdive were a band built for eternal youth: They were teenagers, only 15 when they met and started rehearsing, not yet 20 when they found themselves signing with the legendary Creation Records, suddenly label mates with bands like My Bloody Valentine and Teenage Fanclub. They were riding the crest of a scene predicated on the intensity of adolescent feelings, and like all adolescent feelings, it ended, decisively and dramatically: When the press turned on shoegaze in favor of Britpop, the turn was as decisive as getting dumped senior year by your first love. Their “last” album, 1995’s experimental and loop-based Pygmalion, was dubbed—admiringly—as “career suicide.”
It takes an extraordinary tenderness toward the resonance of teenage feelings to return to a band like this, after 22 years away—after marriage, children, and divorce, greying hair. But tenderness has always been one of Slowdive’s key virtues. Maybe owing to the fact that Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead were childhood friends since age 5, their music always glowed with a familial affection that was hard to quantify or point to: When they played together, or when their whispering voices swirled together, it always felt like the continuation of a private conversation between two former kids.
In 2023, Slowdive are, improbably, the closest thing the strange and ephemeral shoegaze scene has to “survivors”—a band that can still play its catalog to festival audiences decades later, whose new songs occasion cheers instead of drink-line evacuations. Their self-titled 2017 comeback felt exultant: with its thick, overdriven guitars and bolder, cleanly etched pop choruses, it might be the loudest record in Slowdive’s catalog, an invigorated blast from old friends who have fallen joyfully back into each other’s company again.
On everything is alive, those two former kids look up, startled and amused to discover the wrinkles on each other’s faces. It’s the first record where you can hear, and feel, the weight of those previous years, and the shadows of the losses that etch the contours of a life entering its 50s. The music is wispier, more skeletal—a gust of distortion from 2017’s “Sugar For the Pill” would blow it all away. Ironically, it’s the closest they’ve come since reforming to recreating the sound of 1993’s glimmering, jewel-like Souvlaki, but it’s been darkened and complicated by age and perspective. This isn’t summer music; this is sunset music, attuned to and aware of fading glories.
Part of that haunted feeling emerges from the vocals—on “skin in the game” and “andalucia plays,” Halstead’s voice sounds slightly harrowed, closer to Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan than to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid. That character alone, like the appearance of crow’s feet on a handsome leading actor’s face, imparts an appealingly rueful, seen-it-all cast to the music. There is a lot of shared life bound up in the Slowdive project now, after all. Since the group began sessions in April 2020—and then quickly abandoned them for six months as the world shut down—Goswell’s mother and drummer Simon Scott’s father died. Slowdive lyrics are largely imagistic, not narrative, but it doesn’t take much interpretation to pick up mournful signs flashing past in Halstead’s words: “Time runs on once more/Another ghost is born/I feel like change will come/When the night rolls in,” he sings on album opener “shanty.”
Halstead initially conceived of everything is alive as a minimal techno record, closer in spirit to Pygmalion. Although they gradually drifted back into all-band territory, something of the minimal coldness persists in the record’s bones. The first sound you hear is the blurp of a modular synth, which oscillates for a good minute before the first cloud of guitar colors the song’s edges. The perfectly named “chained to a cloud” lays out a loop, layers a few elements, and then lets a single lyric circle in the arrangement like one red sock in the dryer. At eight tracks, three of them mostly instrumental, the length feels purposeful and personal, like these songs are sketches from a journal Halstead and Goswell left open.
Even the love songs feel lonelier, the landscape more unforgiving. A good Slowdive song has always felt like two lovers huddling together for warmth. But on everything is alive, the forces conspiring against the star-crossed lovers feel more menacing and specific. “Remember the first winter/The dark heart of everything/And the dog just laid down/You’ll cry for all of us,” Halstead murmurs on “andalucia plays.” The implication of a dead dog: Surely, this is a first for shoegaze, a genre predicated on recreating the terrifying teenaged conviction that all your strongest feelings would last forever. But this is what it means to be a survivor, even within music built on ephemerality: The longer you live, the further your central drama falls away from the frame, and the more attuned you become to the shifts happening at the corners, the markers of erosion. Everything is alive, yes, but only for a moment or two.


Curated by Mark Ronson, the pop-heavy soundtrack to the blockbuster doll movie shrivels outside of the magical world of Barbieland.

Barbie the Album

Barbie, the fluorescent new blockbuster helmed by Greta Gerwig, is a sometimes-arch summertime romp about the perfect doll and its not-so-perfect reputation. But the film doesn’t need an introduction: You’ve already seen the brand activations, even fired off your own “Barbieheimer” tweets. At its core, Barbie is a piece of marketing that is being aggressively marketed, and it's succeeding wildly while anticipating its own critique. The movie features a knowing scene in which a real-world tween lambasts Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) for “the glorification of rampant consumerism” while, at the same time, it pumps demand for plastic dollhouses and direct-to-landfill Barbie garb. It casts Mattel’s doltish male executives as antagonists while funding those guys’ next vacation home in Sicily. But Barbie is for the girls, apparently, and the girls are powerless to a little treat.
So who better to oversee the film’s soundtrack than Mark Ronson—a wily nostalgist always trying to squeeze extra life out of the classics, so attuned to the emotional power of women he recruited a suite of them to vocalize the anguish of his own divorce? The 47-year-old industry veteran cultivates a chic, diverse roster—including artists whose identities weren’t fully represented by Mattel until around 2016, when in response to declining sales, the brand started thinking more actively beyond leggy white women with big tits. The soundtrack features mainstream pop stars like Dua Lipa and Lizzo, global phenoms like reggaeton singer Karol G and K-pop girl group Fifty Fifty—and why the hell not—Tame Impala. Mattel may have sued Aqua in 1997 for besmirching Barbie’s reputation, dirtying her into a sex object, but now Ice Spice is rapping over “Barbie Girl” about getting her man “bricked”—and she’s doing so alongside the original Black Barbie, on a ready-made hit that debuted in the Top 10.
What makes Barbie allegedly subversive is how it self-consciously ridicules the blinkered feminism of its eponymous icon and Mattel’s own girlboss marketing. And so you have songs like Lizzo’s “Pink,” which, even with congas, horns, and jubilant backing vocals, scans as a more insipid iteration of her usual you-go-girl jams: “What you wearing? Dress or suit? Either way that power looks so good on you,” she coos, ostensibly satirizing an affirmation culture that blindly validates women’s choices. It doesn’t matter that Barbie will simultaneously critique liberal politics while ending with dolls getting freed from patriarchal brainwashing upon hearing rousing proclamations about how “it’s literally impossible to be a woman.” The movie’s self-awareness is a great trick: The shallowness and frivolity of any generic selection can be justified as winkingly on-theme. Fifty Fifty’s “Barbie Dreams” is a pop jingle as cloyingly bright as Barbie and Ken’s Impala inline skates. Ava Max’s “Choose Your Fighter” is a light-up Eurodance banger that’s just her 2020 single “Kings and Queens” with different plastic accessories.
Barbie is just the beginning of Mattel’s efforts to repackage old I.P. into new media enterprises and dominate pop culture in the process; among the dozens of projects in the works is an “A24-type” Barney movie for dread-filled millennials and a live-action Polly Pocket vehicle directed by Lena Dunham. The film has ignited complaints about indie directors selling out—and finds its most natural collaborator in a pop auteur whose last album cycle wryly proclaimed the joys of selling out. On the relative highlight “Speed Drive,” Charli XCX threads the needle between film’s nostalgia industrial complex and music’s, not only cribbing the ping-ponging synths from “Cobrastyle” and the cheer-squad chants of “Hey Mickey” but recycling her typical themes—being cute, driving fast—and glib, signifier-heavy writing style. “I’m a classic, real deep, Voltaire,” she teases. It’s not her best song, but it’s more clever than the rest of Barbie’s selections; at the very least, Charli delivers on a good time.
Barbie is best when it pursues fun, dumb spectacle, chiefly in scenes with the himbo extraordinaire, Ken (Ryan Gosling). Sick of being an afterthought, he enters the real world and gets pilled on men’s rights, converting Barbie’s Dream Houses into beer-stocked “Casa Mojo Dojo Houses” and looking like dirtbag Macklemore in a fat fur coat. Upon this transformation, we hear Sam Smith’s “Man I Am,” a hammy disco anthem with growled verses from the perspective of a beefcake with slicked hair. “I’m the groove catcha, hottest thing, six pack and tight G-string,” a deep voice utters in the song, before clearing up any misconceptions: “No I’m not gay bro, but I’ve been on that lay low.” The farce escalates as the definitely-not-gay Ken launches into a power ballad about the anguish of being second place: “I’m just Ken/Anywhere else I’d be a 10,” he wails like a boy band member, before pivoting to rock opera bombast in which background singers intone, “Feels so real, my Kenergy.”
True to form, the other Kens on the soundtrack contribute nothing—doze through Dominic Fike’s noodly, acoustic “Hey Blondie,” which exists halfway between “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” and “Hey Soul Sister,” and the Kid Laroi’s howling emo-trap ballad “Forever & Again.” But the girls often can’t prove they’re worthy of main character status either, as in the case of Gayle’s scratchy power-pop tantrum “butterflies,” Billie Eilish’s lachrymose piano ballad “What Was I Made For,” and Karol G’s beachtime reggaeton joint “Watati.” There are a few cute selections, like PinkPantheress’ “Angel,” a 2000s rom-com track with cartoon dog barks and ribbons of Irish fiddle. And Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night” is a serviceable Future Nostalgia retread that’s partially redeemed by its inclusion in an exuberant dance sequence, a suggestion that all of these songs would sound better under the magical thinking of Barbie Land. But this is the real world, and in the real world, these throwaway products should largely be left on the shelf.


Andrew Bird follows March's poppy, elegant Break It Yourself with Hands of Glory, a set of rustic songs recorded during loose sessions at his western Illinois barn. Bird and his band cover country tunes, strip down their own originals, and explore weighty Biblical themes.

Hands of Glory

Andrew Bird's music is in part defined by the way he marries the traditions of the fiddle and violin-- two very different styles played on the same instrument. If March's Break It Yourself was his violin album, full of careful pop-leaning arrangements, then Hands of Glory is its fiddle complement. It's a set of rustic songs born of his old-timey live sets as well as the loose sessions at his barn in western Illinois, on the banks of the Mississippi River. Bird and his band cover country tunes, strip down their own originals, and explore such weighty Biblical issues as death and resurrection, sin and salvation, creation and Armageddon.
Hands of Glory possesses an almost academic quality, as though Bird and his cohorts were presenting a musical essay about endtimes imagery in country music. The album begins with "Three White Horses", which, thanks to Bird's bowing, sounds like it's coming from an old acetate. That song is followed by a cover of the Handsome Family's "When That Helicopter Comes", an oddball gospel that deploys Alan Hampton's bouncy bass and Bird's otherworldly bow as a soundtrack to separatist paranoia: "There'll be power in the blood, when the helicopters come." Bird switches theologies for "Orpheo", an austere reimagining of the spry "Orpheo Looks Back" from Break It Yourself, which thrives on the empty spaces between the strums and plucks, such that his gentle falsetto at the end has a beseeching effect. Only "Railroad Bill", with its aw-shucks lyrics hoots and hollers, sounds out of place.
Nevertheless, Bird thrives in this setting, which permits greater emphasis on his stoic vocals and curious playing. He intuits Townes Van Zandt's "If I Needed You" as a kind of secular hymn, directed to an ambivalent God rather than to a departed lover. His vocal cadence and mournful Appalachian airs evoke not so much a spiritual crisis but its resolution-- a place of relative peace after so much soul searching. Those same qualities bolster the inventive storytelling on "Spirograph", originally by the Minneapolis band Alpha Consumer. It's neither old nor country, but Bird treats it with the same care he might bring to a dusty ballad.
Thematically and perhaps musically, closer "Beyond the Valley of the Three White Horses" is intended to evoke some sort of afterlife. It's a lovely set of loops-- long bows, staccato plucks, airy strumming, and ominous ambience-- that draw equally from fiddle styles as well as violin styles, making it the most intriguing use of Bird's instrument on the EP. It's also the longest song on the album, unraveling gradually while never quite settling on one specific mood or theme. Instead, Bird constantly alters the shape of the composition, introduces new ideas, and lets them morph and mutate with each repetition. This technique is not necessarily new for Bird, but "Beyond" is a moment of subdued rapture, and, like the most bracing passages on Hands of Glory, it's one that arises from the way in which Bird's instrument inventively fuses these two disparate styles.


Merrill Garbus' music as tUnE-yArDs has always been playful but extremely confident. Her third album, Nikki Nack, is more reserved than 2011's w h o k i l l; when Garbus calms down here, she does it with the grace and certainty of an archer drawing back her bow—less a concession than a show of power.

Nikki Nack

Merrill Garbus started recording music as tUnE-yArDs while working as a babysitter on Martha's Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts. Funny things happen to solitary people in quiet places. You talk to yourself. You expand to fit the space. You realize "you" might be more than one person. Midway through her 2009 debut, BiRd-BrAiNs, Garbus tells a deadbeat lover she no longer needs him because she can always get pregnant with birds, which comes as terrific news. Her backup singers—a bevy of voices that seem to have fluttered out of a 1930s dish-soap ad—agree, which makes sense because they are also Merrill Garbus.
Her music has always been playful but extremely confident. The product of a liberal liberal-arts education, she has worked as a puppeteer and is often photographed wearing facepaint. At the height of the Occupy movement, she lead audiences from the theater into the street, guerrilla-style, and her music embodies an activist's urgency, filled with sounds that elbow their way to the front in order to be heard. She's an introvert's nightmare, and all she wants is for you to open your heart and sing.
Her third album, Nikki Nack, is more reserved than 2011's w h o k i l l, which isn't saying much. There are still songs that sound like playgrounds full of street kids ricocheting off each other like bumper cars. There are still nursery rhymes about body dysmorphia and white liberal guilt set to what sounds like Coke-bottle percussion from the undiscovered country. But there are also songs like "Time of Dark" and "Look Around", where Garbus seems to have made a conscious choice to slow down, and in slowing down, lets us see the muscle in her stride. tUnE-yArDs now sound less like buskers outside the neighborhood co-op than some blues-jazz combo from the near-future, severed from the traditions of the music but still somehow in touch with its spirit. (Two of the songs here were produced by Malay, who also worked on Frank Ocean's Channel Orange, and whatever Garbus lacks in marketing appeal to the alt-R&B crowd she makes up for by actually having a powerful voice.)
Subtlety has never been at play for Garbus, who tends to tackle her subject matter like a child after a robotic mole at a carnival game. "I come from the land of slaves/ Let's go Redskins, let's go Braves!" she wails on "Real Thing". Her world is made up of broad irony and clashing patterns—one whose conflicts are obvious but painfully irresolvable. Earlier, on "Water Fountain", there's this vignette: "I saved up all my pennies and I gave them to this special guy/ When he had enough of them he bought himself a cherry pie/ He gave me a dollar, a blood-soaked dollar/ I cannot get the spot out but it's okay, it still works at the store." The imagery is violent but the delivery is sweet—then, you remember the cherry pie, red as blood. The most startling moment on w h o k i l l was when Garbus  fantasized about making love to a cop who arrested her brother, then confesses how liberated she feels by violence as the band breaks into an ecstatic calypso.
Nate Brenner reprises his w h o k i l l role here as a bassist, synth player, and co-writer, and the album also features contributions from Roomful of Teeth, a Grammy-winning vocal group who, like Garbus, enjoy doing things with their voices that most people would not classify as singing. But even as Garbus opens up tUnE-yArDs to other collaborators, her albums still appear to be the work of a solitary kid in a basement, jerry-rigging her own fun with the help of imaginary friends. It is private music, splattered outward.
Like Dirty Projectors and St. Vincent, Garbus is an artist who lives with weird but flirts with normal. Gone is the chipper ukulele of w h o k i l l and BiRd-BrAiNs; Nikki Nack signifies maturity while still allowing room for Garbus to do zany things like scat-sing "One two three o'clock/ Four o'clock, walk and walk and talk and talk and walk and talk and then/ Five, six, seven—seven—seven—heaven—heaven—take me again" for 90 seconds straight on full tilt. In moments when Garbus does calm down, she does it with the grace and certainty of an archer drawing back her bow—less a concession than a show of power.


SremmLife 2, the follow-up to the turbocharged rap duo's joyous debut SremmLife, is stranger, artsier, and flat-out ballsier than its predecessor.

SremmLife 2

In 2014, Mississippi rap duo Rae Sremmurd became hugely popular off the strength of oddball party anthems like “No Flex Zone” and “No Type.” The following year’s full-length SremmLife made good on those joyous pop-rap instincts; carried by the outlandish, even cartoonish voices of of brothers Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi, they made joyous inclusive rap that produced enough energy to power a city block. Their music was fun, infectious, whimsical, and a potent (if momentary) remedy for agoraphobia.
And yet some rap fans cried “foul,” dismissed them as empty-calories frat-rap, a mix of LMFAO’s party rock cut with Ying Yang Twins crunk and packaged in the youthful exuberance of Kris Kross. When Complex named SremmLife its third-best album of 2015, former Hot 97 program director and current Beats 1 DJ Ebro Darden launched an all-out assault on the duo, saying that the selection couldn’t be valid. He accused the brothers of not writing their own raps and capped his comments with another diminishing jab: “It was a fabricated thing we all liked.” Two of the most electric new voices in rap were suddenly being reduced to the rap equivalent of Milli Vanilli. Mike WiLL Made-It, the super producer who helped mastermind the duo’s success (and the alleged ghostwriter), addressed the allegations on Twitter as only he can: “See the Problem is niggas be stuck in these old ass boxes they scared to jump out of…”
Jumping out of the box is exactly what SremmLife 2 does. Whether by design, by accident, or simply out of necessity, SremmLife 2 deconstructs the party-rap formula the duo perfected on their debut, zigging and zagging from Drake-esque rap-sung half-ballads (“Now That I Know”) to Mustard’s “ratchet music” (“Set the Roof,” with a Lil Jon-feature nod to crunk) to sugary bubblegum rap (“Just Like Us”), all while maintaining the  spirit at the core of SremmLife. The album’s default setting is synthpop, retrofitted with Mike WiLL’s disorienting array of bells, whistles, tones, and clattering drum kits. Its most ambitious outings, like the back-to-back combo of metallic stargazers “Look Alive” and “Black Beatles,” push their talents to new heights by redefining what the duo can and will do. The songs hook into each other at the ends, creating seamless album-friendly transitions.
The weirdest and wildest moments on SremmLife 2 are its lifeblood. The album is stranger, artsier, and flat-out ballsier than its predecessor, especially considering the stakes (SremmLife produced five platinum singles; this is a follow-up that doesn’t seem to care much about that.) It’s a less dance-friendly alternative driven by the yelps and whines of its two stars. Slim Jxmmi tears through the hook and verse on “Start a Party” like a man possessed, moving at a ferocious pace that makes his voice crack. On “Swang,” which strobes in a fluorescent neon glow, Swae Lee floats in and out of a wispy falsetto. The most challenging song is “Take It or Leave It,” with Swae Lee going full crooner, belting out a pitchy-but-charming melody. When Swae jumps too far out of pocket, Jxmmi is there with the answer, settling things with even-keeled verses.
Swae Lee, in particular, is venturing into Young Thug territory: His arsenal of yips, squeals, and whistling falsettos has grown exponentially, and he’s willing to try just about anything now, which results in some strangely liberating artistic choices. But it’s Slim Jxmmi who really grows here. Many past Rae Sremmurd songs were exhibitions for Swae’s vocal acrobatics (“No Type,” in particular), with Jxmmi playing springboard, but Jxmmi is showing greater range and rapping with much more force. He even puts together some of the most quotable bars: “A young nigga so superb/I’m Kool Herc on the herb” on “Real Chill;” on “Over Here,” “Charlie Sheen is my clone/Can they fuck with us? No/Red carpets my home/VIP my throne.” Together they’ve become one of rap’s most exciting tag-teams, and it appears that the brothers are getting the last laugh on those ghostwriting allegations.
Rae Sremmurd were born of the “Crank Dat” and “ringtone rap” eras, where hooks and dances powered entire careers. That era of rap was often considered disposable, too. (Nas made a whole album about it.) But acts like Soulja Boy and Travis Porter have proven durable, and they’ve had a discernable influence on the Brown brothers, not just in their sound but their swagger: the sense of being unbothered, unburdened, and invincible that comes with being super-young, rich, and black. It’s that same sense of liberation that fuels the boldest decisions on this album. SremmLife 2 collects all of the quirks in the margins of its predecessor and develops them; more than anything else, SremmLife 2 is the ultimate middle finger to grouches who think this brand of rap can’t be complex.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit an album that changed ambient music forever.

Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works Volume II

Selected Ambient Works Volume II

The facts were thin on the ground. Richard D. James was from Cornwall, yes—a geographical outsider in the context of early-1990s UK rave, a kind of coastal cowpoke. He’d been at college for an engineering degree, one he never finished, and was known to pick at the innards of his analog synths. He collected aliases like another young man might sneakers, trotting each one out when the occasion called for it, never letting any of them get too worn: Polygon Window, Caustic Window, Power-Pill, the Dice Man, GAK, Blue Calx, Q-Chastic, AFX, plus his clear favorite, Aphex Twin.
James claimed to sleep just two hours a night; claimed, too, that he could control his dreams, even wrote much of his music in his sleep. He is said to have gotten the jackhammering sounds for “Quoth” from a day job digging tunnels. Did he really drive a decommissioned tank? And as for the bit about being named after his dead brother, you kind of didn’t even want to know. Some people swore he’d cried in interviews, talking about his perished namesake sibling; others were sure it was part of the long con.
Try as you might, you couldn’t quite separate fact from fantasy, or figure out where the truth ended and the fib began. James thrived on ambiguity, possessing a gaslighting nature, David Toop wrote in his 1996 book Ocean of Sound, that “indicates either a serious person who has never been taken seriously or a practical joker who has been taken seriously for way too long.”
I don’t think James ever made anything up maliciously; I think he just liked to talk, to amuse himself, to keep himself from getting bored in the endless parade of interviews a rising star gets subjected to. It’s no wonder an ornery young artist, a prodigy, really, might tell a gullible journalist that, by his 20th birthday, he’d completed 1000 songs, enough to fill 100 albums. No matter how tall the tales grew around this Cornish Paul Bunyan, none of them ever came close to eclipsing the music itself.
James emerged in 1991, at 20 years old, just as UK producers were scrambling to keep up with the newfound domestic demand for electronic dance music. The sound was born in Chicago and Detroit in the mid-1980s and imported to the UK in 1987 when a handful of London DJs stumbled upon acid, the musical style—along with ecstasy, the chemical compound—while on holiday in Ibiza. Their horizons instantly broadened, they connived to bring the stuff back home, and wham: a canary-yellow smiley face landed upon fair Albion like a pallet of rations air-dropped by a benevolent conqueror. Within a few short months, trend-happy (and MDMA-happy) England was consumed with the fever for all things house and techno, but it soon became clear that America simply wasn’t producing enough of the stuff to keep up with British ravers’ ravenous appetites.
Local production went into overdrive, and few native sons or daughters (it was mostly sons) were more determined than James to put their shoulders to the wheel. He’d been making electronic music since he was a young teen, but for years, his output went no further than the cassettes full of demos—not even demos, really, since he had no intention of actually releasing any of it—that he dubbed for friends, who drove around Cornwall unwittingly blasting future classics from their Ford Fiestas.
Finally, though, one of those friends connected James with an Exeter record shop called Mighty Force, which inaugurated its in-house label with James’ debut 12"—Aphex Twin’s Analogue Bubblebath EP—in 1991. The floodgates opened. The following year, he’d release two albums—Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, his full-length debut, and Polygon Window’s Surfing on Sine Waves—along with half a dozen EPs that, with their zigzagging rhythms and eerie, metallic timbres, quickly established James as one of UK techno’s foremost innovators.
In addition to techno, ambient music—more than that, really, the idea of ambient music—was in the air in the early 1990s, even if nobody could quite agree on what the term was supposed to mean. Brian Eno had popularized the concept with 1978’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports, positing the idea of a functional sound product, like Muzak but more tasteful, that might be used to “tint” the air. By the late 1980s,  it had shifted from Eno’s genre-agnostic ideal to a concept closely aligned with rave culture’s futurist (and hedonist) ethos.
Ambient’s bubble-world atmospheres were well suited to the cybernetic and psychotropic lifestyles then in vogue. As a comedown soundtrack, ambient provided a gentle landing pad for psychonauts returning from the trips of the night before; as a mind-expanding spiritual elixir, it went along with oxygen bars, smart drinks, and other trappings of the dial-up counterculture in the final decade of the 20th century. And, like those AOL free-trial CD-ROMs spilling from mailboxes across the land, it was everywhere.
The KLF’s 1990 album Chill Out and the Orb’s 1991 album The Orb’s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld gave pre-millennial ambient its amoebic form. Both were long, largely seamless journeys whose ebb and flow mimicked the fluid path of a psychedelic trip—swirling collages conjoining bucolic synths, pedal steel, classical strings, dub and acid-house rhythms, the occasional thunderclap or train whistle, and barnyard animals.
By 1993 the ethereal style was unstoppable. Virgin Records launched a compilation series, A Brief History of Ambient, by declaring it “the summer of ambient” in a full-page magazine ad. The independent label Caroline countered with its own franchise, Excursions in Ambience. The burgeoning style made it into the pages of the New York Times in a 1994 article by Simon Reynolds that noted, “Ambient has become a booming album-based genre, appealing both to burned-out ravers and to people who never really cared for dance music in the first place.” Even Moby got in on the act with his 1993 album Ambient—a collection of sedate yet still rhythm-driven techno that, by today’s standards, doesn’t sound terribly ambient at all.
The same could be said for much of Aphex Twin’s debut album, Selected Ambient Works 85-92. It’s true that, even at its most intense, SAW 85-92 was gentler than his abrasive, reputation-making early singles like “Digeridoo” or “Dodeccaheedron.” But the pumping breakbeats and drum machines of tracks like “Xtal” and “Pulsewidth” were light-years from the interesting if ignorable air fresheners that Eno had originally proposed. Only the beatless “I” suggested anything like the tone-poetic purity of ambient at its most ephemeral. But with 1994’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, James made a clean break—with his own prior catalog, and with virtually everything else that was being trafficked in the genre.
Then, as now, the first thing you become aware of with Selected Ambient Works Volume II is its purity, its starkness, its emptiness. There have been quieter records, more minimal records, more difficult records. But few have done so much with so little; few have shown less interest in being any more forthcoming than they are, in meeting the listener anywhere near halfway, in making the slightest attempt at articulating their own ambiguous emotional terrain. SAW II can be warm and it can be chilly; it can be sentimental and it can be forbidding, but it would be hard to call it expressive, exactly. A little like those samples of Mars’ terrain thought to contain evidence of amino acids but which turned out to be merely tainted with the sweat of some careless lab tech who didn’t pull his gloves on tight enough, Aphex Twin’s creation frequently seems only accidentally contaminated by human emotion. Whatever you feel when listening to it—well, that’s on you.
The album opens with a subtle tension: soft synth pads, the most basic, three-chord progression imaginable, cycling uneventfully round and round, while a breathy syllable—a voice, or something remarkably like one—bobs overhead, like a loosed balloon rapidly fading from view. Lilting harp accents turn to steel drums and back. The voice is detuned by just a few nearly imperceptible cents; the delay lags almost unnoticeably behind the beat. It’s a child’s lullaby turned queasy, a music box with a whiff of attic mold.
That tension—between disturbing and reassuring, trouble and calm, mutation and stasis—is the album’s defining characteristic. Across its 23 (or 24, 25, or 26, depending upon the format and edition) mostly untitled tracks, the balance tends to tip from one extreme to the other, like someone nervously shifting body weight from foot to foot. Some tracks, like #3 (known by fans as “Rhubarb”) are soft and consonant, welcoming as a well-kept lawn; others, like #4 (“Hankie”), with its bowed metal and whale-song laments, are deeply unsettling. The lilting chimes of #7 (“Curtains”) suggest a fairground populated only by tumbleweeds; the slow-motion grind and whirr of #22 (“Spots”) might be a chopped-and-screwed edit of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. #23 (“Tassels”), recorded on an EMS Synthi, one of the first synths the young artist ever bought, might come closest to James’ description of the album, in an interview with David Toop, as being like “standing in a power station on acid”: “Power stations are wicked. If you just stand in the middle of a really massive one … you get a really weird presence and you’ve got the hum. You just feel electricity around you. That’s totally dream-like for me.”
The four tracks that open CD2 (both the US and UK editions; tracks #13-16 of the digital release) make for a particularly compelling stretch. “Blue Calx”—the only song to bear an official title, it originally appeared on the 1992 compilation The Philosophy of Sound and Machine, credited to Blue Calx—is surprisingly pretty, placid, dreamlike. #14 (“Parallel Stripes”) delicately balances the album’s most tactile tones—I imagine metal shavings dancing across a magnetic field—with a meandering hint of melody. The shuddering, clanging “#15 (“Shiny Metal Rods”) is a tumultuous counterbalance to the album’s gentlest passages, the closest James comes here to the jagged techno of his earlier singles. And #16 (“Grey Stripe”) is pure filtered white noise; it might be the dying breath of a distant star.
Whatever anyone thought they knew about James, back in 1994, must have dissipated as soon as they finished listening to this album. Where was the ginger enfant terrible with the barbed tongue? Where were the antic flights of fancy? These freezer-hum fantasias were the opposite of James’ class-clown personality; they were radically introverted, defiantly private, almost shockingly serene. For once, he appeared as if with a finger to his lips, head cocked, inviting us to stand beside him in his imaginary power station and revel wordlessly in the vibrations.
The title did not help elucidate the album’s mysteries. Much like its predecessor, it borrowed the language of the classical canon—“works” rather than “tracks” or “songs”—and the music’s austerity only heightened the irony. Were these barely-there miniatures, these etudes for electrical outlet and tuning fork, meant to be taken as high art? Although the album title suggested an anthology, these pieces could hardly stand on their own: Pull them apart and most would seem lightweight or insubstantial, each one a passing experiment or sketchlike work in progress. But, like the notes of a chord, they drew meaning from their proximity to one another.
Then there was the matter of that “Selected”: What pool had these two dozen-odd tracks been selected from? Were there indeed more of them? (It seems entirely possible there were: The New York Times reported that the album’s triple-LP, double-CD final form had been “reluctantly cut down from quintuple length”—leaving open the tantalizing possibility that there are at least two more LPs’ worth of SAW II-era material that has yet to see the light of day.)
The album’s secrets were only amplified by its packaging, beginning with a cover that rendered Aphex Twin’s glyph-like logo as a relic from some strange future-past, like alien markings discovered on some weathered desert pyramid. Where the KLF and the Orb’s strains of chill-out had clung to both a stoner’s giggly sense of humor and wide-eyed appraisal of the cosmos, SAW II  had no interest in freaky chakras or zen mindstates or any kind of reference whatsoever. It was so committed to its own hermetic world that it shunned even titles. The album’s cryptic cover art, designed by James’ friend Paul Nicholson, referred to each track only by abstract photographs of pure texture, with color-coded pie charts mapping out the tracks’ respective run times. (The titles that fans today frequently use to refer to the album’s untitled tracks grew out of discussions in places like Hyperreal’s IDM listserv. As Marc Weidenbaum details in his 33 1/3 book on the album, those titles were eventually collated by Greg Eden, an IDM list member and eventual Warp Records employee. Though unofficial, they have taken on the weight of historical fact: If you rip the CDs into your computer, the Gracenote database will automatically tag the tracks according to the fan-sourced titles.) Sitting down with the LP or CD insert could feel like strapping into an alien spacecraft and trying to decipher a flight manual written entirely in pictograms and graphic code. “I don’t really like words in music,” James told Select magazine in 1995. “It’s too restricting… I don’t like words in general because they mean something. Whereas electronic stuff—because it’s so abstract and doesn’t have any meaning… you can interpret it in so many ways.”
SAW II was not initially greeted as an epochal event. In The Wire, it was reviewed alongside Future Sound of London’s Lifeforms and a techno compilation called Usability Now, the music barely touched upon, and it failed to make the magazine’s top 50 of 1994. The following year, SPIN favorably compared Aphex Twin’s 1995 record I Care Because You Do to the “largely drumless synth moans” of the “oddly hailed” SAW II, which “went on for longer than the Use Your Illusion albums combined.” Even Simon Reynolds, one of Aphex Twin’s staunchest early supporters, doubted that listeners might extract the same “use value” out of SAW II, in its “dearth of sheer loveliness,” that the more fetching SAW 85-92 provided.
The fan response detailed in Weidenbaum’s book, in online spaces like the Hyperreal IDM list and the WATMM forums, helped buttress the album’s totemic reputation. Like any quasi-religious text, SAW II has proven uniquely susceptible to sustained exegesis. But the album’s essential mysteries extend far beyond any Da Vinci Code-like attempts to decipher them, even as pieces of the puzzle have begun to fall into place.
Two years go, Paul Nicholson, who designed the sleeve, shared the notebooks in which he jotted down all the calculations that went into the album’s pie charts. Those blurry, abstract images were revealed to be objects from the apartment he and James shared at the time—radiators, “bits of metal”—photographed by James’ then-girlfriend; the logo on the cover turned out to have been done by James himself, carving up an old leather suitcase with a razor and compass. And when Warp launched Aphex Twin’s online store in 2017, James—who has turned out to be surprisingly unguarded in recent years—weighed in with a few choice details. “Blue Calx” was the last track he ever recorded in the bedroom studio in his parents’ house; the indistinct voices of #22 turn out to be a murderer’s taped confession, provided to James by a friend who used to mop floors at the local police precinct. In the world of Aphex arcana, those kinds of revelations can be momentous, discourse-shifting events. But the effect of this newfound knowledge was not like learning how a magician does his tricks. None of these factoids has diminished the album’s fundamental and enduring strangeness.
Despite the occasional ambient track over the years, James has never followed up with a Selected Ambient Works Volume III—even though, as Marc Weidenbaum points out, multiple pieces from Aphex Twin’s 2015 SoundCloud dump approximated the metallic drones of SAW II. In fact, immediately after releasing the album, he abruptly shifted course, tacking into the convoluted drill’n’bass rhythms and general tomfoolery of ...I Care Because You Do and the Richard D. James Album. The aspects of James’ character that SAW II had briefly laid bare—beatific calm, transcendent focus, a wordless sort of vulnerability—were quickly papered over with madcap jags like “Milkman” and “Come to Daddy.” For a long spell, in interviews, his answers got shorter while the tales got taller.
For a fan of the album, it’s easy to wish that James might return to its charged air, its field of pure electricity. But it may be that he mapped every square inch of this otherworldly zone in those two-dozen-odd tracks (give or take all the material that may have gotten left on the cutting-room floor). That possibility is part of the album’s power, too: That it’s a world unto itself, self-contained and self-sufficient.
“Music in the future will almost certainly hybridise hybrids to such an extent that the idea of a traceable source will become an anachronism,” wrote David Toop in Ocean of Sound, ambient music’s most definitive text. He was right. In that sense, SAW was out of step with its pre-millennial peers. While other landmark ambient records of the day hurtled toward the networked future, SAW II was radical in its purism, its refusal to admit anything beyond these slim, quivering frequencies. It’s so rudimental that it verges upon the primeval: music for the latent cave dweller in all of us.
We tend to think that culture today moves faster than it used to. We point to the rapid-fire emergence and collapse of a given musical trend as proof of an accelerated timeline. Yet in the early 1990s, culture was moving just as swiftly: “In a year, ambient has degenerated into little more than shoegazing with a beat,” wrote Reynolds in Melody Maker’s review of SAW II. There was a palpable, self-conscious awareness of watching the genre evolve in real time. Criticism recognized it; marketing recognized it. Just think of that Virgin ad proclaiming 1993 “the summer of ambient.” Critics, listeners, and musicians didn’t always agree on what “ambient” or “intelligent techno” or any other nascent term might mean, but they recognized a common goal in trying to figure it out before the music changed shape, wriggled free of any attempt to define it. Wordlessly, instantly, Selected Ambient Works Volume II marked a freeze-frame moment. It captured the essence of ambient, and in that act of capturing it, changed it, irrevocably.


Two reissues from the Manchester veterans track the progress of their post-punk/disco fusions into the 1990s and 2000s—an uneven path, but their freewheeling energy still charms.

A Certain Ratio: Change the Station / Mind Made Up

Change the Station / Mind Made Up

“My heart was just an open sore/Which you picked at ’til it was raw/It bled away my existence/Shriveled under your insistence.” Who writes lyrics like these? Nihilist poets, emo singers, hyperliterate teenagers, sure—but a disco group? Dance music has often addressed themes of alienation, pain, and loss, but rarely has a band been both as enticingly funky and harrowingly bleak as Manchester’s A Certain Ratio. In their first decade, ACR made some of the most seminal yet underrated post-punk, avant-pop, and tweaked funk of an era filled with hybrid explorations. Early tracks like “Knife Slits Water” and “Do the Du” ruthlessly deconstructed the pleasures of the flesh while simultaneously urging listeners to succumb to them. Part of the fun remains in trying to decide if ACR were, at heart, party boys who couldn’t get out of their heads or overburdened cultural theorists looking for an escape hatch. As they moved into the 1980s, this binary juxtaposition would fall away in favor of a more expansive approach to dance music: brainy, jazzy, adventurous, yet keenly aware of exhilarating developments in the Top 40.
The group had intimate ties to their hometown’s “Madchester” scene, a community of musicians and DJs clustered around Factory Records and its legendary nightclub, the Haçienda. Alongside fellow Mancunians New Order and the Happy Mondays as well as Leeds’ Gang of Four and Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire, ACR were a historic example of the spontaneous groupthink Brian Eno dubbed “scenius.” These artists exemplified the rushing development from punk’s snotty three-chord “fuck you”s into the nuanced, multifaceted expressions that defined underground music in the ’80s.
By 1996, the dance music revolution that ACR & co. once anticipated had come to fruition beyond anyone’s expectations. House, techno, ambient, downtempo, jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, IDM, and their various subgenres (not to mention hip-hop) had exploded across the globe. During their late-1970s/early-’80s peak, ACR’s output was neck and neck with historic releases like Kraftwerk’s Computer World, the Upsetters’ Blackboard Jungle Vol. 1, and Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” But now the funky futurism of the ’80s sounded quaint compared to the blink-and-you-missed it developments in Berlin, London, Detroit, and New York. Change the Station was the band’s first effort in five years—an eternity for dance music at that time. In the meantime, artists as game-changing as Björk, Aphex Twin, Goldie, Underground Resistance, and Basic Channel had all brazenly recalibrated dance music’s DNA.
It would be unfair to expect ACR to have kept up with the hectic pace of this next generation, but revisiting Change the Station today, it feels like the group was flagging. The album goes full Balearic, with lots of smooth downtempo breakbeats, soulful vocals, and unhurried saxophone. Soul II Soul’s 1989 smash “Back to Life (However Do You Want Me)” is a loose template, itself a commercial success story for the kind of multikulti, house-adjacent pop that ACR had been exploring 10 years prior. What Change the Station lacks is the sense of hyper-intelligent, nervy dissonance that brought depth to earlier albums. Even at their grooviest, ACR maintained an edge—the fun never came entirely free. The band who once asked “Who sold that knife to me?” here blandly implore you to “listen to the sound.” Ok, we’re listening. Now what?
The sound of the album is in fact one of its central flaws. ACR’s songs often functioned more as energy fields than as clear narratives—sonic mobiles rather than roller-coaster rides. This practice was aided by tweaked timbres and attention to texture and effects. The production values on Change the Station are wholly professional, yet they lack strong personality. It feels like a mock-up for the record it should have been, its elements stock stand-ins for more riveting performances that never arrive. It’s unfortunate, because the core concept might have worked. The late 1990s were rife with jazzy, laid-back electronic music of all sorts, from A Tribe Called Quest to Massive Attack. But Change the Station’s session-musician sheen keeps these tracks at arm’s length. Play it in the background of your sushi restaurant all you want; it’s hard to imagine another scenario where it would thrive.
After Change the Station, ACR retreated once again. It would be another 12 years before they regrouped to record 2008’s Mind Made Up in loose sessions guided by a spirit of openness. Compared with Change the Station, the later album embraces the band’s rock roots, shifting perspective from ecstasy-tinged inclusiveness to aloof, knowing narrations of modern ennui. The tasty RHCP-esque lick that opens “Way to Escape” suggests a slow-mo strut down the avenue, past junkies, businessmen, hustlers, crooks, and their victims. Mind Made Up feels rooted in a rotting metropolis, each expression of hope balanced by something dour. But this isn’t protest music—ACR are level-headed observers, thriving and surviving amid the chaos of modernity, smart enough to comment but powerless to change. “Just try stay funky/Just try to be cool,” sings Denise Johnson on “Rialto 2006,” nearly buried by waves of horns, guitar squall, and echo. Good advice.
Overall, Mind Made Up is an improvement on its predecessor. The group allows itself to experiment and stretch out, and that alone gives the album a spark. It suffers from some of the dad-friendly blandness of Change the Station, particularly when the band attempts a driving groove, but their freewheeling energy is not without its charms. “Teri” is an awkward but affecting ballad built around a simple piano figure, while “Starlight” tries to manage a bit of the throwback disco that Hercules and Love Affair had recently reinvigorated.
Both albums close with tracks that are notably stronger than anything on their respective LPs. Change the Station wraps with “Groove (E),” a beatless reprise of opener “Listen to the Sound.” By clearing out the arrangement, the song shifts gears from overeager to sensual. It’s not a masterpiece, but it has a smoky, penetrating vibe. Meanwhile, Mind Made Up finishes with the tumultuous “Very Busy Man.” Roiling and formless, it feels like a jam bashed out at the end of a long, frustrating day in the studio. Bass accents are cribbed from Miles Davis’ On the Corner, while the drums splinter into rolling waves of energy.
Deep into their career, ACR’s strengths lay in the extreme ends of their personal spectrum: “Groove (E)” draws you in with a whisper while “Very Busy Man” lunges. One wonders the albums would have looked like if these last tracks had been the jumping-off point for a new direction. Neither Change the Station nor Mind Made Up could be expected to accomplish what their first records had done; few artists surf the zeitgeist so gracefully even once, and for most a second shot is unheard of. In these moments, though, it’s good to hear traces of that fevered energy—the razor’s edge of pleasure and pain that once made ACR one of the most vital bands of their time.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Seal’s 1991 debut, a luxurious album that grew out of the UK rave scene and took his inimitable voice to the world.

Seal

In London’s Trafalgar Square, thousands of young people gathered to fight for their right to rave. Brightly colored tracksuits and baggy denim rippled in waves, as far as the eye could see. Demonstrators at this 1990 Freedom to Party Rally were protesting legislation aimed at kneecapping the acid-house bacchanals that had recently revolutionized UK youth culture. The stakes were high: “IF YOU DONT STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHTS THERE WON’T BE ANY MORE ‘SUMMER OF LOVE’, THERE WONT EVEN BE ANY MORE RAVES,” warned an all-caps flyer for the event, apostrophes breathlessly optional.
Despite the cold January rain, the mood was jovial. There were boomboxes, a bullhorn, a beach ball. Pirate station Obsession FM broadcasted live from the event. People danced in empty fountains and clambered atop the bronze lions sternly guarding Nelson’s Column. Later that night, revelers would break into a warehouse in the village of Radlett, near the M25 orbital—the motorway that had funneled so many convoys full of party people into the English countryside over the previous year—and there, despite skirmishes with police, the party would run until 9 the following morning.
Weaving through the London crowd were two young men who had nipped down to soak up the vibe. One of them was Adam Tinley, 22, better known as Adamski. Already deep in the rave scene, he had scored a minor hit with the previous year’s squelchy “N-R-G” and even appeared on the BBC’s Top of the Pops—the first instrumental act to play the show in a decade, by his reckoning. The other was Sealhenry Samuel, known simply as Seal, nearly five years Tinley’s senior but a relative newcomer to the swiftly evolving rave movement. The two had come to the protest to feed off its energy before heading back to Adamski’s studio, a 20-minute walk away, where they were laying down Seal’s vocals over Adamski’s beats. There, hunched over a Roland 909 drum machine, feeding floppy disks into an Ensoniq SQ-80 synthesizer, they channeled the energy of the moment into a song about freedom.
They made for a curious duo. Adamski, bearing a “fragile, little-boy-lost demeanor,” was a studio tinkerer and technophile who had played in Diskord Datkord, a Dadaist electro-pop group known for chaotic multimedia spectacles—a dog was sometimes involved—that often ended in nudity. Seal, on the other hand, was imposingly tall, with jagged scars on his cheeks and bits of tinsel woven into his dreadlocks, partial to musicians like Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, and, his favorite, Joni Mitchell. Seal had recently returned from a year-long stint in Asia; while the UK’s day-one ravers were necking their first pills in muddy fields, he’d been playing in funk and blues bands in Japan and Thailand. Upon his return to the UK, a friend, determined to show Seal what he’d been missing, had taken him to the Santa Pod Raceway for Sunrise 5000, an 8,000-strong rave where Adamski was holding court in an airplane hangar. The sound and the spectacle hit Seal with the force of an epiphany. (“I don’t think I really knew myself before then,” he would later admit.)
Seal had already been singing and writing songs for a number of years, multi-tracking instrumental parts into a Portastudio with just his voice. Now, he immersed himself in the rave scene, singing along to the DJ at the top of his voice while crowds swirled around him. Somewhere in the rush of ’89–there are multiple, contradictory versions of the tale, which isn’t surprising, given the blurry circumstances—Seal handed his demo to Adamski’s MC and flatmate, Daddy Chester, and the two soon met. On New Year’s Eve, “in a haze on the dancefloor,” as Seal remembers it, they decided to work together.
One month later, back at Adamski’s studio and buzzing off the energy of the Freedom to Party rally, Seal selected an instrumental to sing over: a pounding, grinding staple of Adamski’s live sets that the producer had originally banged out in 15 minutes. It had the working title “The Killer” because Adamski thought the stabbing synths sounded like the soundtrack to a murder scene. But Seal’s presence—the powdery texture of his voice—softened the song. Empathy and optimism coursed through rave’s honeymoon phase, as new sounds and new chemicals promised a radiant pathway out of the grimness of Thatcher’s Britain. But Seal’s bluesy, searching entreaties had a pleading, bittersweet quality at odds with the day’s giddy tumult: “Solitary brother/Is there still a part of you that wants to live?/Solitary sister/Is there still a part of you that wants to give?” The song’s couplets were sometimes awkward, twisting platitudes into nonsense phrases that, from today’s perspective, resemble the output of an AI trained on ’80s power ballads (“Jaded hearts/Heal with time/Shoot that love/So we can stop the bleeding”). But even their clumsiness couldn’t drag down the song’s tender uplift, especially once Seal broke into his heavenly falsetto.
Since 1988, there had been no shortage of dance anthems in the charts—not just feel-good house tracks from acts like Inner City and Soul II Soul, but also headier, more esoteric cuts like 808 State’s blissed-out “Pacific State” and Humanoid’s paranoid “Stakker Humanoid.” But despite its ravey hallmarks—pistoning piano chords, flickering trance synths, and white-hot 909 snares—“Killer” sounded like nothing else at the time. Within six months, it would go to No. 1 on the UK charts and remain there for four weeks, an inviting and inclusive bridge from the underground to the airwaves. And though Seal’s name didn’t even appear on the cover, the song would serve as his launch pad. Just 50 weeks after “Killer” went to No. 1, he released his 1991 self-titled debut and ascended into the upper stratosphere of pop stardom.
Early press accounts painted Seal as a larger-than-life character, a sort of British Paul Bunyan—“a vast, almost monumental figure,” wrote one outlet. “Hands on hips like a fashion model, staring out with an Ancient Egyptian arrogance from behind his dreadlocks, he seemed to look down upon the world from a great height.” In one article he stood 6’1”; in another, 6’4”; still another pegged him at six and a half feet tall. He was said to have inherited his name from a Nigerian patriarch; sometimes, there was Brazilian heritage in the mix, except when there wasn’t. There were hints at a rough background—the mother who gave him up and then reclaimed him, the father who beat him; the squatted flat, the job flyering for sex workers. He’d studied architecture and electrical engineering, yet ended up cutting leather for a fashion designer on King’s Road—hence, perhaps, his own predilection for tailored suits and glistening animal hides.
Rumors swirled about Seal’s scars—they were the result of a bar fight, a wolf bite, ritual scarification gone wrong. He told one interviewer they simply appeared overnight, “at a time when I was dreaming a lot. Perhaps it was a cosmic thing,” he mused. (It later came out that they were a side effect of lupus.) He dated supermodels and played tennis with Andre Agassi and Boris Becker, his new neighbors in the Hollywood Hills. When he was laid low by pneumonia, it was double pneumonia. When he totaled his Range Rover, nearly careening over the cliff of a canyon, he climbed out the shattered sunroof and walked away unscathed. A SKI magazine profile tracked down the avid snowboarder in Whistler, where he bombed backcountry runs by day, and then, back in his cabin, serenaded the locals on acoustic guitar by the light of his fireplace. He rhapsodized about the pleasures of heliboarding, which suited him: Here was a person who, despite his colossal physical attributes, barely seemed to touch the ground.
But in contrast to these magisterial qualities, on his debut album, Seal is an ambiguous, mercurial entity—not so much a singer as a pure source of heat and light. For all the marvels of his voice, the music surrounding him is just as opulent; his singing is just one thread in a vast tapestry of crushed velvet, raw silk, and spun gold. (To paraphrase Project Runway host Heidi Klum, who was married to Seal from 2005 until 2012, it sounds expensive.) Seal is almost ridiculously luxurious: a mahogany wardrobe of strummed acoustic guitar, liquid fretless bass, jazz piano, glossy disco guitars, and gleaming Fairlight orchestral stabs. It is only tenuously connected to the dance music that launched Seal’s career, albeit held together by some of the most sumptuous synthesizer pads electricity is capable of generating. At the edges, tiny slivers of musique concrète—a peal of thunder, a bit of movie dialogue from a TV set tuned low at the other end of the room—seem to hint at the world outside, yet they have the paradoxical effect of cocooning us even deeper inside the album’s folds.
The credits boast a remarkable array of talent stretching back through funk, soul, and hip-hop, among them bassist Doug Wimbish (of Living Colour, Tackhead, the Sugarhill Gang Band), drummer Keith LeBlanc (Tackhead, Little Axe, the Sugarhill Gang Band), percussionist Paulinho da Costa (a session player with credits on Thriller and Purple Rain), drummer John Robinson (Off the Wall), and keyboardist Guy Sigsworth, who wrote and produced for Madonna, Britney Spears, and Björk. Wendy & Lisa, of Prince & the Revolution fame, sat in on “Whirlpool.” At the center of this gauzy web was chief dreamweaver Trevor Horn, who had signed Seal to his ZTT label after “Killer” topped the charts.
In the 1980s, Horn had emerged as one of the most innovative producers in pop music, putting his maverick instincts and vertiginous high tech in the service of artists like ABC, Yes, Grace Jones, and Pet Shop Boys. Horn often gravitated toward big personalities, provocative themes, and camp aesthetics; his work with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Art of Noise might be seen as a kind of spiritual precursor of PC Music and hyperpop. By the late ’80s, Horn was wading dangerously deep into shlock: Consider Simple Minds’ overstuffed 1989 album Street Fighting Years, or Rod Stewart’s schmaltzy cover of Tom Waits’ “Downtown Train” the same year. In Seal, however, Horn found an opportunity to pursue his most atmospheric interests, extending the lush, HD sound-sculpting of Propaganda’s A Secret Wish and Art of Noise’s “Moments in Love” into ambient pop cross-cut with new age and jazz fusion. Where Adamski’s “Killer” had been a hit in Ibiza’s clubs (he and Seal had performed live at Amnesia’s 1989 closing party, in fact), the largely un-clubby Seal represented the full sweep of the idiosyncratic style known as Balearic beat—a sunset-soundtracking strain of chillout that sheltered everything from 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love” to Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” beneath its shady umbrella.
Though Seal had already written some of the album’s songs on guitar, in Horn’s hands, the material became far more ornate. “The Beginning,” the album’s most straightforward club-centric cut, opens the record on a deceptive note; its rushing snares and snub-nosed FM bass don’t sound too far off from what New Order did on the Ibiza-influenced Technique, just the year before. But Horn manages a more multidimensional sense of space; light-years stretch between the string pads, funk guitars, and layered percussion. New sounds and new variations appear around every corner; two-thirds of the way through, he throws in a completely superfluous eight-bar key change just because he can. From the first moment we hear Seal arcing upward across the stereo field, it’s clear that Horn knew exactly how precious this particular instrument was: As extravagant as the song gets, he never crowds out his singer.
After the uptempo “The Beginning,” the music mellows. Many of the album’s best moments are its most chilled. “Deep Water” begins by pairing a gentle electronic bossa-nova beat with acoustic guitar and slide guitar, like a country-soul reimagining of Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks; halfway through, there’s a false ending, and a swirl of backmasked guitars gives way to a crisp proto-trip-hop beat. (Soul II Soul producer Nellee Hooper, of pre-Massive Attack collective the Wild Bunch, consummated the trip-hop connection that year with his own slow-motion remix of Seal’s “Future Love Paradise.”) “Wild” begins with an errant, overdriven guitar chord before practically melting into a pool of iridescent keys and electric bass. The song’s changes make a breathtaking showcase for Seal’s harmonic facilities. Even “Crazy,” the album’s biggest single, is exquisitely laid back, weaving trance synths, wakka-wakka guitar, and a new jack swing-influenced beat into a billowing backdrop for Seal at his bluesiest. The restraint is no mean feat, given that the song was inspired by nothing less than the falling of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square massacre, two years before.
Unfortunately, Seal’s lyrical gifts were not necessarily up to such grandiose themes. The chorus of “Crazy”—“We’re never gonna survive unless/We get a little crazy”—was meant to capture the yearning for freedom that triggered the world-historical events of 1989, yet it’s essentially “YOLO” stretched out over 17 syllables. Seal’s frequent paeans to freedom were never exactly “Redemption Song,” and sometimes they could be asinine, even offensive. (From “Crazy”: “Crazy yellow people walking through my head/One of them’s got a gun, to shoot the other one/And yet together they were friends at school.”) Even at their most affecting, Seal’s lyrics often don’t stand up under close inspection. “Show me the way to solve your problems and I’ll be there,” he pleads on “Show Me”—an empathetic sentiment, perhaps, but hardly the most proactive.
Seal seemed aware of his limitations as a songwriter, opting not to print lyrics on the album’s sleeve. Occasionally, he could hit upon a truly stellar hook, of course. The chorus of “The Beginning” (“Music takes you round and round and round and round and rou-ound/Hold on to the love”) doesn’t look like much on paper, but the way he delivers it is thrilling: working away at each repeated syllable like a carpenter lovingly sanding down a beveled edge. Many of the record’s most successful songs are those where Seal simply lets the sound of the words take the lead: the snake-like twists of “Wild laces with diamonds in your hair/When you smile you make my world resolve, and you take over”; the plaintive assonance of “Jade, a shade of pain and then we die.”
In interviews, Seal professed his admiration for Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser’s evocatively nonsensical writing; he might have done well to take her lead and wander further into the realm of indecipherability. He has said that “Whirlpool” was the album’s most personal song for him, an attempt to come to terms with the spiral of self-doubt that followed the success of “Crazy,” yet he expresses more in its wordless introduction than in any of the song’s tortured metaphors. Cooing his way through the opening cadenza, he sounds like he’s pulling spirits out of the air, wrangling stray emotions with every blue note.
In general, Seal could stand to be more ambitious, more idiosyncratic, flat-out weirder. Moments like the interstitial passage at the midway point of “Deep Water” hint at paths the record could have taken, the ambient remix album that exists in an alternate universe. Seal and Horn come close on the closing “Violet,” a melancholy ballad that posits Seal as a kind of surrealist Balearic torch singer. There have been times, locked in its swirl of synth pads, fretless bass, and jazz piano, that I’ve been tempted to declare it the most beautiful piece of music I’ve ever heard. Behind its sentimentality and its simplicity lurks an incredible vastness, one made all the more compelling by the bits of movie dialog woven almost inaudibly into the mix. (From the 1987 film The Sicilian: “Why should they come? I was supposed to die back there, but I didn’t!”) The mind reels at what he might have done had he gone further down that path. Instead, in 1994, we got “Kiss From a Rose,” the first step on his reinvention as the adult-contemporary star that he is today.
I don’t know what “Violet” is about; the writing is too vague, too convoluted, to scan in any meaningful way, though Seal manages some lovely images—a “violet unicorn”; a request to “take my tears and wash the sunrise”—along the way. But that hardly matters. Seal may have idolized literary writers like Dylan and Mitchell, but you don’t come to Seal for poetry; you come for that voice and the way it navigates Horn’s productions, like a bird surfing springtime’s swirling air currents. Much the same way that “Killer” fed off the energy of the Freedom to Party rally, Seal drew sustenance from the spirit of that volatile era: It is idealistic, unfocused, and beautiful in its innocence. When I listen to the album, I imagine Seal caught up in the maelstrom of Sunrise 5000, light glinting off the metal tips of his dreads as he towers over fellow dancers’ heads, singing along to techno at the top of his lungs. Whatever the words were, they were lost the moment they melted into the air—he was just one more element in a vast, multi-sensory explosion of color and texture, a voice giving voice to something beautiful.

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The Australian musician Alex Cameron paints quick, affecting character sketches of losers and creeps, bolstered by elementary synth programming and Cameron’s confident, warm baritone.

Jumping the Shark

Upon leaving electronic outfit Seekae to embark on a solo career, Australian musician Alex Cameron started committing to his stage character by applying latex wrinkles, scars, and pockmarks to his face before each public performance or appearance. These can be seen pretty clearly on the album cover of his debut solo album Jumping the Shark. Though the record is seeing official release this month, the photo was taken back in 2014, when the album was originally given away for free on Cameron’s charming “Remember Geocities, guys ;-))) ???” website. Cameron’s goal was to look the part of the sketchy, down-and-out lounge singer he played in his songs.
However, now that Cameron is on the road, he’s announced that he’s no longer wearing the wrinkles. The decision is a good one: By removing the mask, he renders the character of Alex Cameron even stranger, as there’s now one less layer between the audience and the man giving ridiculous interviews like this, making it feel less of an act and more of an open question: Is this who this guy really is?
Wrinkles or not, what might actually make people care about Alex Cameron is the fact that he’s a great storyteller, one who uses simple song forms to couch vivid messages. Seven of Jumping the Shark’s brief eight tracks are in the first person, and each one depicts a cast of losers and creeps whose unifying thread is “the sort of desperate nature of trying to avoid failure.” Though his characters are caricatures of the downtrodden—e.g., “the drunkest, ugliest girl at the bar;” broken men who’ve moved back in with their parents—Cameron has crafted these characters so convincingly it’s easy to imagine he’s being honest when he says he drew some from his own life.
Cameron’s sketches wouldn’t hit home quite as deeply without his effortless compositions, which perfectly complement his scuzzy, blue-light tales of woe. Driven by elementary synth programming and Cameron’s confident, warm baritone, the music suggests a Nick Cave-meets-second-album-Suicide aesthetic. But unlike Alan Vega’s airy, effect-masked vocals, which included a lot of reverb, gasps and yawps—making them frequently more atmospheric than not—Cameron places his voice audibly front and center, emphasizing his narrative gift. Both “Happy Ending” and recent single “The Comeback” follow this template to great effect, sharing the miseries of freshly jobless men trying to convince themselves that they know how to move on. The latter in particular, with its sunny melody underneath a story of TV host who won’t let go of the past, feels especially devastating—the juxtaposition of warm sounds and bleak words creates a bizarre sense of false comfort that channels the denial of the narrator perfectly.
A few tracks vary this formula to even greater success. On “Real Bad Lookin’,” Cameron provides a circus-carousel oom-pah accompaniment but breaks the song open with a heavily-treated guitar solo in the mold of Robert Fripp. “Mongrel” the only song without first-person narration, conjures the playfulness of White Williams, embracing the poetic freedom that comes from abandoning the perspective of a sad cretin; the poetic closing line “Death is the pulse in your eye on your very last breath” registers as perhaps the most remarkable lyric on the record.
As could be expected for a Vegas-style showman, Cameron saves an elegiac note for last, wrapping up the record with the austere “Take Care of Business,” which meditates slowly for the song’s first few minutes on a simple repeated keyboard and drum program before an organ synth bursts in with climax as Cameron’s reverb-heavy vocals begin chanting the chorus: “I ain’t half the man I wanted to be/You gotta take care of business.” The accompanying video for this single depicts the still-wrinkled Cameron contorted on stage under a harsh blue light (an idea repeated again on the video for “The Comeback”)—making overt the subconscious David Lynch connection.
At only eight songs and thirty-two minutes, Jumping the Shark makes the most of its quick run time to sell you on the idea that Cameron’s “I’ve been cut so I know how to bleed” tales carry the charm and gravitas of authenticity; the fact that he is making it harder to see the difference between himself and his characters only cements this impression. More importantly, the melding of these stories with Cameron’s efficient, minimal compositions create the type of songs that penetrate deeply and linger in your consciousness long after you’ve stopped listening to them.