Transforming their past solemnity into swaggering confidence, the Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter and rapper returns with an EP of thunderous club music.

Crossover EP

CROSSOVER is warehouse music; it sounds like the lights are off, or maybe strobing. On previous EPs—2020’s ROSETTA and 2019’s acclaimed Nūr—Sudanese American artist Dua Saleh fleshed out a genre-defying niche that alternated gospel-influenced vocals and languid, poetic rapping over stark synths. Their goal for CROSSOVER was different: “to make music people could dance to.” Saleh’s gift for flow translates into a hypnotic mélange of club anthems with a hallucinogenic delivery. With collaborators including rapper and singer Duckwrth and Bajan American horrorcore rapper Haleek Maul, CROSSOVER introduces a bubblier, more upbeat sound. But even when working with certified pop producers like STINT (NAO, Gallant) and Kyle Shearer (Tove Lo, Melanie Martinez), Saleh maintains the tenacity and sarcasm that has become inextricable from their resonant drawl.
Saleh’s background as a poet shines through on CROSSOVER, where grandiose musings on identity and rebirth (“I can see the future in the fire and the fodder”) hold their own alongside swaggering declarations of sexual prowess. Saleh’s disarming, somnolent tone intensifies each statement until it boils over; even the silliest repeated quips, like “I got them buzzing like a bee,” lodge themselves into the brain. The solemnity of their previous work is transformed into a blustering self-confidence that serves as CROSSOVER’s foundation, even as the EP runs the gamut from austere, house-influenced beats to twinkling electro-R&B.
Incorporating Afrobeats and hip-hop into what Saleh calls “trans-interdimensional pop,” the EP’s first half establishes a thumping, bass-driven club sound grounded in their earlier, rap-oriented work. Boosted by harsh, industrial beats, “fitt” has the hardest entrance in Saleh’s catalog as their boasts about newfound international fame echo over clanging drums: “Boom, Mumbai, wanna feel my grit/People in the Bronx wanna take a trip.” And while Amaarae’s whispery, pixie-like feature provides a refreshing contrast to the brusqueness of Saleh’s chorus, her fluttering vocal belies her confidence: “Every time I do it, shawty pop for me/Feeling like a n**** won the lottery.” On “tic tic,” the EP’s hands-down, arms-up standout, Saleh and Haleek Maul spar in Spanish, Arabic, and patois over a beat that falls somewhere between reggae and grime. Building off the haunted dancefloor energy of “fitt,” “tic tic” is Saleh at their most captivating, carrying an undeniable menace with each bouncing step.
“trash snacks” steers the record towards a glossier, more frenetic plane. Cranking up the distortion on Saleh’s vocals and piling on soapy, glitching synths over reverberating bass, it’s a saccharine anthem that kisses the speakers before blowing them out entirely. The song’s brattiness is a much-welcomed foil to CROSSOVER’s overall thundering swagger, but when Saleh spits, “Don’t you call me baby ’bout your little fucking snacks,” in a baby voice modulated to PC Music-level heights, the venom is instantly recognizable.
Although the closing “fav flav” falls superficially in line with the shiny electropop of “trash snacks,” it’s the EP’s weakest point. While Duckwrth’s suave vocals flow like honey, his unmemorable feature and the song’s relatively tame production are a poor fit; lines like “Hot like Megan’s frame” and “Cartier frames, no shade” match the lighthearted tone yet fall flat, even when Saleh sings along. Saleh thrives when they take risks, so the daring experimentalism of “trash snacks” is where they seem most at home. Synthesizing the macabre and the dainty into sublime club music, their new vision is ambitious and riveting.

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The South East London singer’s latest EP is a glittering portal into the future that offers up brief glimpses into a glamorously dirty life.

ALIAS EP

In the remarkably unsexy year of 2020, you wouldn’t expect an artist to evoke the glowing grime of a club so exactly, but Shygirl manages to do it with her latest EP, ALIAS. Similar to 2018’s Cruel Practice, ALIAS finds Shygirl spitting vulgarities like they’re her typical weekend plans, aided by oily bass lines from producers like longtime collaborator Sega Bodega. This time, though, Shygirl’s voice carries a bit more over the muck; the production is bolder and more focused, like throwing a sharpened knife at a wall rather than a smattering of darts.
In general, this EP is about fucking. Shygirl playfully contemplates her parents’ failures in her upbringing as she wonders if you “like what you see,” offers her freakiness “on the bed/on the floor,” and name-drops “your daddy,” who’s calling her on the phone right now. It all might come across as gaudy if it wasn’t so fun. Shygirl’s delivery has a dark-horse quality to it; her voice is buttery soft, but she handles lyrics with venomous precision, knowing when to bite and when to soften.
“Bawdy” is a good example of this skill—Shygirl begins with sharp commands—“grind it right/arch back/hand to thigh”—then practically sighs through the chorus, telling you to “come and get it” while a bursting synth line that sounds like a much hotter “Party Up (Up in Here)” loops. She tends to favor murmuring bass and glimmering synth lines, reminiscent of Amnesia Scanner or the bubblegum bass of Slayyyter.
But Shygirl’s music skews darker, heavier, and oozes a very specific kind of sexuality, the kind that usually gets scared out of women by seventh-grade health classes and angry men on the internet. It’s self-indulgent, and it revolves around Shygirl—her body, how nasty she is, what she wants you to do—not any particular lover, and least of all, romance. She offers up brief glimpses into a glamorously dirty life, detailing nights spent “arse up, titty out” and riding in a “fast car/past all the city lights.” There’s an understated line in “Slime,” a song that lives up to its name, slippery with a taunting trap loop running through it, that encapsulates the way that Shygirl so perfectly evokes party culture.
The 808 bass speeds up, preparing the listener for the moment it drops, and as soon as it does, Shygirl says matter-of-factly from her gut, “She came to fuck.” The line nearly made me laugh the first time I heard it, it’s so blunt yet so vague. We are never given any information as to who “she” is other than the suggestion that she’s “a baddie,” but with Shygirl’s delivery and the track’s grumbling, slithering production, you can’t help but feel like you know exactly what she means. She’s talking about your first night out after a breakup, or when you got dressed up to find a suitable enough ex-frat bro at your local bar, or when you’re in the middle of a sweaty room, you’re dancing with all your friends, and you think you’ll never feel sad again.
“She came to fuck” energy defies gender or context—it’s the concept of having a single goal and the gall to believe that you’ll either achieve it or be completely unfazed if you don’t. It contains the driving forces behind a good party: shamelessness and debauchery. In a year of no touching, these euphoric party moments feel far away, but Shygirl’s endearing hedonism brings that sweaty room a bit closer. ALIAS is a glittering light, a portal into the future and everything you might do.

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The wonderfully anarchic British post-punk outfit tries out a little of everything on their promising debut EP.

Town Centre

On their signature single “Houseplants,” Squid chronicle the struggle to find decent lodgings on the cheap in London. Rather than grumble along with the rest of us, they dismantled their gear and drove a few hours south to Brighton, where core duo Ollie Judge and Louis Borlase rented an apartment by the sea. Ditching the capital wasn’t necessarily an act of industry subversion, but it stems from the same irreverence that animates their anarchic music. For one thing, they have no frontperson: Lead singer Judge is also the drummer, so if anything he’s a rearperson. As with contemporaries black midi, their frenzied live shows emanate from the drum kit. Guitarists and bassists, typically the phallic standard-bearers, are swallowed up like detritus into a whirlpool, then soundtrack their fight to survive.
“Houseplants” doesn’t appear on this Dan Carey-produced debut EP, but plenty rivals its antic spirit. On “The Cleaner,” a jittery seven-minute duet between Judge and Borlase, an indignant shop cleaner yelps about coworkers who “don’t even know my name” before clocking off to orchestrate his own glory on the dancefloor. “Match Bet,” at first a hurtling indie rock tune, plateaus and re-emerges in a motorik dreamscape, via the portal of a 32-bar cornet solo.
Judge, who is 25 and usually yelling, jerks between bewilderment and martial discipline, defying anything resembling a speaking cadence. His “Match Bet” narrator faces a perilous choice: to cut the “red wire” or the “blue wire” when, “well, they all look the same to me.” The politically disillusioned are an object not of mockery, but of primal empathy. Comparisons between Judge and the barking Brits of early postpunk are there to make—some will find the likeness jarring—but Judge’s rhetorical tone lands closer to David Byrne and his mania of the mundane. (“This is my beautiful house/But I can’t afford to live in it,” he trills on “Houseplants.”) The vocals vamp and contort until circumstances too often presented as normal—encroaching social alienation, preposterous living costs—suddenly appear insane, and we wonder who wouldn’t bounce off the walls in despair.
When it isn’t on the offensive, Town Centre waltzes from Tortoise-shelled post-rock (“Savage”) into oddities like “Rodeo,” a morass of Neu! ambience, shuddering cello, and elliptical spoken-word. Being unselfconscious mostly suits them: Once an audacious young band starts to sound like a little of everything, they’ll eventually go full circle, sound like nothing else. Squid are getting there, avoiding genre constrictions they’d later have to wiggle from underneath. More than the map to a promising destination, Town Centre sounds like a declaration of limitlessness.


Daniel Lopatin’s latest release is less a conceptual follow-up to last month’s Age Of than a gift to hardcore fans who relish even his odds and ends.

The Station EP

Until recently, every full-length release from Daniel Lopatin’s Oneohtrix Point Never project possessed a single distinct and unified vision, from commercial-sampling chillwave to thunderous, mutated EDM. But June’s Age Of marked a break from that tradition, even as its conceptual sprawl surpassed that of the phases that came before it. An eclectic record that spanned hermetic electro-folk, doomy sampledelia, and the eerie loveliness of Boards of Canada, Age Of also found Lopatin rifling through his own back catalog for inspiration: If you listened closely, you could hear echoes of the pointillist early-electronic music on R Plus Seven, Garden of Delete’s neon headbanger fare, and the noisy, refracted new age of Rifts. The album didn’t represent a new aesthetic for Lopatin as much as a recontextualization of his previous work within a more pop-oriented vernacular.
Less than two months later, Lopatin has followed up that statement with a stand-alone release of Age Of’s brooding, “Schism”-meets-R&B cut “The Station,” accompanied by three previously unreleased songs. One track, “Trance 1,” dates back further than Age Of; it first surfaced in edited form on 2017’s A Message From Earth, an audiovisual tribute to NASA’s Golden Record Project. Rather than pushing his latest album’s relatively streamlined approach even further, The Station is an EP for hardcore fans who relish digging through Lopatin’s odds and ends. Its 14 minutes of previously unreleased material don’t bear any significant resemblance to the vocal-led title track, and the record makes no discernible overarching statement.
But if you’ve become fascinated with Lopatin’s unique approach to electronic music over the last decade, The Station provides some intriguing material to chew on regardless. “Trance 1” is its highlight, four minutes of zithering synth clouds and gaping drone that perfectly realize the song’s space-is-the-place intentions, while “Monody” pairs Age Of’s occasional forays into medieval harpsichord with a nasty-sounding breakbeat that opens up to reveal Lopatin’s approximation of a proper rave track. The glassy “Blow by Blow” is the collection’s weakest cut, a five-and-a-half minute suite of processed chord-shredding, water-droplet percussion, blasts of static noise, and synthetic euphoria that drifts between moods without quite cohering.
And then there’s “The Station.” Originally written for Usher, its straightforward pop sound makes it a humorously incongruous introduction to the EP’s more abstract material. Still, it makes plenty of sense as a single: It’s one of just a few Age Of cuts that feature Lopatin on lead vocals, for the first time in OPN’s existence, and it uses his singing in a fascinating way. His processed voice slithers in and out of a hypnotic bassline before the music spins out into a state of entropy, with synth lines crashing in and out of the mix as noisy squeals erupt like a DDOS attack on the song's mainframe.
“It’s an open invitation/To try to find the bottom of a bottomless hole,” Lopatin sings, early in “The Station.” Divorced from the themes of modernity-in-collapse that permeate Age Of, the lyric could be interpreted as a summary of Lopatin’s own ongoing mission to find new ways of deconstructing pop music, leaving only warped afterimages in his wake (see also: the title of Age Of’s closing track, “Last Known Image of a Song”). Much of the thrill in following his career over the last decade has come from watching where that protean vision takes OPN from album to album. By now, it’s clear that guessing what lies ahead for Lopatin based on any given release is futile. If The Station fails to offer any clues about his next move, at least we can presume that opacity is intentional.


The second album from the viral star is crowded with histrionic vocals, tired emotions, and petty grievances, leaving little room to actually enjoy his music.

The Fall of Hobo Johnson

To Hobo Johnson, Earth’s imminent demise won’t be because of climate change or nuclear war. Instead, the apocalypse will arrive the next time a girl he likes doesn’t text him back. Hobo Johnson is the product of a section of a pop culture fandom whose life was changed by a Kid Cudi lyric, went to Warped Tour once, started shopping at Zumiez, and learned about love from 500 Days of Summer. The 24-year-old’s music is a genre-bending mash of spoken-word pop and Lin-Manuel Miranda-style raps, backed by a versatile band called the Lovemakers that play punk, folk, and jazz with the same sexless energy as the group of dads that played your local church fundraiser. But the core of Hobo Johnson’s music is his emotional honesty and an occasional ability to detail his battles with crippling insecurities. This would be relatable and maybe even affecting if his material wasn’t all sourced from jealousy and disappointment at the women that continue to pass up on the good guys like him.
Last year, the California-raised Hobo Johnson entered NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest with a live backyard video for a song titled “Peach Scone.” His entry went viral on social media garnering millions of plays in less than a week, but the response to the video was polarizing. A few people reasonably called out his insincere approach to rap. “My name is Hobo Johnson, I’m a rapper/I’m actually not a rapper, I like to say musician,” he raps, while implying falsely that his use of live instruments distances himself from the genre. But the majority of the reactions to Hobo Johnson—born Frank Lopes Jr.—was warm. He was positioned as a hopeless romantic, despite “Peach Scone” being a possessive story about his falling in love with a girl who has a boyfriend only because she was the first person to show him any attention. The track features his teary-eyed emotion and his brand of quirky comedy. He became the latest love of moody teenagers desperate to find music that reciprocated their temperamental and lonely online aesthetic.
The Fall of Hobo Johnson is his first album since his viral moment, and it stays true to “Peach Scone”’s unstated goal of making music for guys who are angry that a person they’ve never spoken to doesn’t love them back. Fame hasn’t changed Hobo Johnson’s view on relationships. At all. “Fear the girl who he really thinks is a different species, she’ll rip your heart out,” he says on “Mover Awayer,” justifying her decision to ghost him. His songwriting is mostly composed of ramblings that could double as overly deep black-screen background Instagram stories: “She makes my Mondays feel like Fridays,” and, “Every single guy she’s ever loved to me sounds really fucking dumb.”
If you haven’t noticed, Hobo Johnson doesn’t take rejection well. On the surface he does—he fills his ex-crushes’ inboxes with shallow compliments and warm wishes. “I really hope that you find happiness,” he says in the opening line of “Happiness.” Though that’s before he spends the remaining three minutes spiraling, placing the guilt on her for not sharing those feelings through pill-popping and drinking himself to near-death. These emotions don’t connect or make you think of similar times from your own past. Instead, you just feel sorry for him.
Aside from his never-ending heartbreak, the other major theme on The Fall of Hobo Johnson is death. It often comes across melodramatic, especially on the cliche and unimaginative “Moonlight,” which features him in the afterlife: “And if I go to hell I will think of you, I will think of you and everything will be OK,” he says moodily. “Sorry, My Dear” is similarly heavy-handed and made unlistenable by scratchy voice-alteration and production that is like if Bon Iver retired the weed for Juul pods.
What Hobo Johnson does have going for him is that there’s no artist within the reach of the mainstream consciousness that sounds like him. He laughs, screams, and cries like an open-mic slam poet. But the last thing the music world needs is more “I don’t understand girls” rap that feels it’s above the genre. His goals are mundane: On “I Want a Dog,” he talks about his life goal to be married with a wife, a dog, a house on a hill, and a kid that plays guitar. His approach to relationships would make him the villain of every reality television dating show and the Lovemakers are probably set to be the first band replaced by artificial intelligence. Now Hobo Johnson is left to wait for the next viral moment that keeps his world spinning.

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The debut from the young hip-hop duo is an antidote to mainstream South Korean rap and pop—personal, anti-capitalist screeds over experimental trap and techno hybrids.

Language

Hip-hop in South Korea has made it over to the mainstream, partly due to the massively popular music competition show “Show Me the Money,” which is like is like “X-Factor” with more hypebeasts in bucket hats. As the reality TV program has gained popularity, major Korean record labels have become more willing to invest in burgeoning rap stars instead of the typical idol or group. XXX’s Kim Ximya, who raps on top of production by the duo’s other half FRNK, has suggested that the commercialism of Korean rap has killed the authenticity of the genre, as it increasingly mirrors the formulaic nature of K-pop. “For most of the Korean rapper population, I feel they did not write about what they actually felt or what they were actually doing,” Kim said in an interview with Billboard. “They were making music they thought people would like to hear.”
On their debut album Language, XXX present themselves as the alternative to the sanitized, hyper-glossy rap music typically pumped out by the billion-dollar Korean music industry. If BTS are measured and subtle about their politics, XXX cuss in two different languages to get the point across. Kim launches invectives against the corporate K-pop machine, money-thirsty rappers, and oppressive standards of “success” (as defined by capitalism). He’s at his best when he’s absolutely seething with rage—a refreshing mode of delivery that doesn’t appear often in K-pop’s biggest hits.
“Y'all wanna know what the fuck hip-hop is?” Kim spits with vitriol on “S_it,” before he answers his own question: “Such luxury does not exist in Korea.” And although Kim’s intermittent English lyrics are sometimes clunky, they help non-Korean speakers get a sense of the themes he’s tackling here. It works best in “Sujak,” when he starts off by rapping in English: “Strip club/Casket/Body in that basket.” Kim charges the song with nihilistic energy before switching over to Korean to elaborate on living in a soul-sucking society that values money over people. It seems almost utilitarian, like how other K-pop stars add in random English interjections in order to appeal to as many international listeners as possible. But his bilingualism is more impressive in the moments when the shift is seamless and the two languages flow together, like when he rhymes Korean words with English ones and vice versa.
While Language repeatedly takes aim at the overwhelmingly high pressures of the Korean music industry, Kim’s rage never becomes monotone or boring. His frustrations are nuanced, as he portrays his internal conflict of wanting to succeed within the system that he’s actively trying to fight. On “Ugly,” Kim admits that he ascribes his self-worth to his success as an artist. “This ranking system and poverty is fucking my mentality/In the end, my music doesn’t reach the charts,” he raps. And on “What You Want,” he illustrates how easy it is to find himself slipping back into the capitalistic ethos. His train of thought begins to unravel: “Art is human/Human is greed/Ergo greed is money.” He snaps himself out of the cycle and starts over, until he inevitably finds himself talking about money yet again.
Since they’ve gained attention globally, Korean rappers have been accused of biting off their American counterparts and even “mocking” black culture. But XXX seek out their own identity by opting for dark, intense production that would fit in more at a warehouse rave than an upscale club, bolstering their anti-establishment attitude. On Language, FRNK veers towards Arca’s Stretch 2-era twisted experimental trap and leans into the bombast of Hudson Mohawke and Lunice’s TNGHT bangers. In a standout moment at the end of “S_it,” a fascinating breakdown chops up the sound of knives unsheathing with ominous plucks from the gayageum, a traditional Korean string instrument. Instead of lifting sounds from another scene, XXX take cues from their own culture and mash them up with weirder found sounds, proving that Korean rap can innovate, not just replicate.
XXX have lamented the fact that they’ve started to gain more recognition in America than in Korea. (Kim said: “I really wanted to break the system first back home.”) But they’ve carved out a space on the internet instead of on TV or venues in their native country, where the music industry might not want to champion two iconoclasts who don’t fit the status quo. Their exile from mainstream Korean rap and pop, of course, is why Language is such a thrill to listen to.


Matt Cutler, known for the lysergic downbeat and serotonin-flushed rave throwbacks he creates as Lone, released his first widely available album, Lemurian, seven years ago. The label that put it out has gone dark, but the collection has now been remastered, given striking new cover art, and, crucially, released on vinyl for the first time.

Lemurian

It's only been seven years since Matt Cutler released Lemurian, his first widely available album as Lone, so it might seem early for a reissue—but there are practical issues to consider. Dealmaker, the UK hip-hop label behind the original release, went dark after 2010. Cutler has since become known for his singular fusion of lysergic downbeat and serotonin-flushed rave throwbacks; it makes sense that fans would want to hear what came before his subsequent albums—Ecstasy & Friends, Emerald Fantasy Tracks, Galaxy Garden, and Reality Testing—established him a kind of King Midas in Mickey Mouse gloves. To sweeten the deal, Lemurian has been remastered, given striking new cover art (a big improvement on the original, which evoked Britpop cutout-bin CDs from the '90s), and, crucially, released on vinyl for the first time.
It's easy to imagine that Lemurian was always destined for reissue treatment, if only because it was such a nostalgic undertaking from the get-go. The longing for a lost musical utopia is woven into its very fibers. Lone's debut outing, 2007's Everything Is Changing Colour CDR, was already an attempt to recreate the sound and style that Boards of Canada pioneered a decade prior, from the blurry family photo on the cover to track titles that hinted at synaesthesia, numerology, and other cornerstones of the Scottish duo's aesthetic. The music, meanwhile, brimmed with pitch-bent synths, woozy easy-listening samples, and shuffling hip-hop beats. But it was with Lemurian that Lone really immersed himself in his idols' tape-warping acid bath.
The titles might have come straight from a Boards of Canada name generator—"Phthalo Blue", "Green Sea Pageant", "Maya Codex", "Lens Flare Lagoon"—and the music follows suit. If Everything Is Changing Colour represented Cutler's desire to sound like his heroes ("I heard Boards of Canada on John Peel when I was 12, and that was it," he told the Nottingham Post in 2008), then Lemurian found him mustering the chops to do so convincingly—and compellingly. Their hallmarks become his hallmarks: his synths are fat and rich and full, brilliant as a kaleidoscope full of diamonds. His chord changes evoke a wistful, nonspecific yearning, and the omnipresent wow and flutter lends an extra layer of temporal dislocation. Matching the distressed VHS-tape timbres, there are scraps of found footage running through "Interview at Honolulu"; the soft-focus "Girl" samples the trailer from a racy European flick from the '70s. And he's no stranger to a beautiful place out in the country: waves lap in "Under Two Palms", a river runs through "Orange Tree", and birds chirp in "Lens Flare Lagoon". Beyond those literal references to nature, the whole thing feels sun-drenched and wind-kissed. He's fond of chords that rise up and away, forever drawing your attention above the shining horizon; his Doppler-effected de-tunings feel like sound that's been carried on the breeze from three counties over.
Even the album's sequencing takes after Music Has the Right to Children and Geogaddi: in between the more fully fleshed-out songs, brief sketches suggest wide vistas before dissolving into thin air. "Buried Coral Banks" is as watery and mysterious as its title; "Green Sea Pageant", just a loop of too-bright keyboards and a scrap of voice, feels like a late-night public-access transmission spun into a locked groove. Like his heroes, Cutler has a thing for low-budget cable-TV aesthetics, and his digging game is strong: "Phthalo Blue" loops an easy-listening interlude from Bob Ross' The Joy of Painting and turns it into a woozy folktronic miniature that sounds almost like a Bibio tune.
But Lemurian, to its credit, is more than just the sum of its inspirations. His approach to rhythm is looser than Boards of Canada's, for one thing. Cutler has cited Madlib as his other key influence, and it's easy to hear how Madlib and Dilla's slack, elegantly ramshackle timekeeping animate Cutler's own rumpled sense of swing. Where Boards of Canada's beats are often crisply mechanical, his slow-burning grooves crackle like the cherry at the end of a cone-shaped spliff; they shuffle along, shoulders hunched, hands stuffed in pockets, as though they were trying to go unnoticed. Sometimes lumpy, sometimes fluid, his beats feel unusually organic, as misused as that term can be—almost as though they grew themselves, like a burl, or a fungus. Lone's later albums would incorporate the cadences of Detroit techno and breakbeat rave, but Lemurian's intense focus on the expressive possibilities of hip-hop rhythms and looped chords lends to its success as a sustained mood piece, front-to-back. It's as though he heard a kernel of something in his favorite records and, not hearing enough of it there, figured out a way to extend it to fill an entire album. That we're still going back to it seven years later, after he moved on to four albums that are far more diverse, and maybe even more ambitious, is a testament to its success. If you're interested in immersing yourself in a phthalo-blue haze, there's no better place than this.


On their seventh studio album, the UK rave veterans help themselves liberally to sounds and ideas from their back catalog while punching up the production to ultra-modern standards.

No Tourists

It’s tempting to call the Prodigy the Rolling Stones of rave. Both bands formed in the unfashionable home counties around London. Both took Black American music, sugared it up, and flogged it back to the States. And both stopped innovating 15 years into their careers, in favor of repackaging classic sounds into stadium-friendly bundles. That makes No Tourists, the Prodigy’s seventh studio album, their Steel Wheels or Voodoo Lounge: a permissible indulgence that’s most satisfying when it reminds you of their earlier work. Prodigy leader Liam Howlett almost admitted to this nostalgic tinge when he explained in the run-up to the release that No Tourists “draws on the best elements of the band.”
He wasn’t kidding. Listening to No Tourists sometimes feels like a game of sonic whack-a-mole as you try to work out where, in the Prodigy’s long career, you’ve heard that sound before. There’s a lengthy YouTube thread under the video for “Light Up the Sky” that tries to trace elements of the song back through the Prodigy catalogue, calling on “Breathe,” “Their Law,” “Voodoo People,” and “The Day Is My Enemy” in the process, while “We Live Forever” sees Howlett sample Ultramagnetic MC’s for at least the fourth time in the Prodigy’s history.
Even when specific noises are more original, a comforting air of familiarity hangs over the album. Since rejuvenating their sound with an injection of Pendulum’s metallic drum ‘n’ bass rush on 2004’s Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, the Prodigy have been in happy stasis, immune to the musical world outside them. And so it proves here: the lopsided “Amen” break on “Resonate” is the only sign of the band trying anything different and even that doesn’t last much longer than the song’s first two minutes. Elsewhere, the Prodigy spew up their usual mixture of elephantine drum sounds, snarling vocals, and heavy-metal synth riffs, wrapped up in the kind of rave production rush that feels like a garish fairground ride on a cold November night.
For all that, Howlett has denied that the new album is retro, and you can kind of see his point. The production is so incredibly well crafted—loud and compressed like an aural battering ram—that it leaves the band’s older rave records sounding weedy in comparison. But if No Tourists is effective—those Eastern European festivals will be shook—they’re also having fun with it. The Prodigy have long been distinguished by their sugar-rush hooks, and No Tourists has some of their strongest, from the nagging vocal sample on “Need Some1” to the turbo synth line on “Timebomb Zone.”
Yet this fun might have ended up somewhat more profound if the Prodigy had pushed the boat out farther. In the past some of the band’s more captivating moments have come when they welcomed unexpected guests (Martina Topley-Bird on 2015’s “The Day Is My Enemy,” Dave Grohl on 2009’s “Run With the Wolves”) but the invitees on No Tourists are too close for comfort. Industrial hip-hop group Ho99o9 don’t lend anything to "Fight Fire With Fire” that The Prodigy themselves couldn’t have cooked up, while English singer-songwriter Barns Courtney merely waters down Keith Flint’s growl—itself a diluted version of John Lydon’s—on “Give Me a Signal.”
Ultimately, No Tourists is the sound of a once-inflammatory band happily lodged in its comfort zone, where virtuoso water treading meets industrial-strength customer satisfaction. It’s rave as family entertainment: good, wholesome fun with just a whiff of cartoon danger, the contented din of a bunch of punks who grew up, got rich, and—like Mick Jagger before them—realized that maybe you can get some satisfaction when your bank balance demands it.


The Queens, New York-based outfit Psalm Zero explore the fertile territory between metal and new wave on their sophomore album.

Stranger to Violence

The members of the Queens, New York-based outfit Psalm Zero have impressive underground pedigrees: Frontman Charlie Looker is an alum of Extra Life, Zs, and Dirty Projectors, and former co-frontman Andrew Hock, formerly of Castevet (and no longer with Psalm Zero: While he’s on this record, he was dismissed in February after allegations of unwanted sexual contact), is steeped in jazz improv. But on their sophomore album Stranger to Violence, their musical adventurousness starts to work against them. On opening track “Stranger to Violence,” and second track “Pay Tomorrow,” the pair combines guitar riffs straight out of the industrial metal playbook with unconvincing synths that could have been lifted right out of the wan pomp of Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” Van Halen’s 5150-era forays into keyboard fluff, or countless other forgettable c-grade hard rock songs from that same period. Clearly, Looker and Hock were looking to infuse their music with melody, a noble pursuit, but they went out of their way to flirt with a cheese factor that doesn’t serve the music.
On paper, Stranger to Violence offers a new route through the fertile valley between metal and new wave. Looker’s voice and phrasing, for example, recalls Morrissey, Joey Ramone, and Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman all at once. Looker’s vocal tone immediately splashes fresh context—and sensitivity—onto Hock’s coldly mechanical guitarwork, which follows in the footsteps of Godflesh, Prong, and Voivod at their most dissonant. But Looker and Hock don’t initially extract the full potential from these contrasts. Crude, tinny electronic drumbeats barely do more than function as demo-grade placeholders and don’t come anywhere close to the personality or menace that Godflesh were able to convey with far more limited drum-programming methods at their disposal.
Once you get past the first two songs, though, the album’s contrasts get richer, even if they don’t necessarily deliver on their promise. Looker’s voice may possess the timbre of the aforementioned vocal icons, but he is unable to move through his phrases with their flexibility. That said, his reflective, humane lyrics about mass-scale problems like imperialistic Western dominance (“Real Rain”) and global economic collapse (“Pay Tomorrow”) mesh well with his more personal outlooks on addiction (“Oblivion’s Eye”) and Jewish identity (“Not Guilty”). And as the album progresses, the pop touches undercut the seriousness of those lyrics with additional layers, rather than hollow them out as they do on the first two songs. Either way, hearing synth figures that recall the giddy celebration of ‘80s radio makes you do a double-take, a mismatch of moods that Looker intended to play up.
Likewise, Hock’s wiry guitar tone offers a change of pace from the predictably leaden guitars that have become de rigeur in contemporary heavy music. As a lifelong fan of Depeche Mode going all the way back to the first cassette he ever bought, it’s easy to see where Looker got his affinity for spartan arrangements. And as Stranger to Violence grows more compelling and its sonic quirks sound more natural on the ear, Looker and Hock’s facility with chord changes becomes more apparent, as does the inventiveness of some of their choices.
The meditative chant that opens “Real Rain,” for example, falls right into place beside Godflesh/Fudge Tunnel-style growling, and Looker sounds perfectly natural alternating between both approaches. “Not Guilty” starts out, typically enough, with a strobing tremolo guitar throb until a horn hook lifts the song from convention and sends it halfway to the renegade jazz mentality of Steely Dan. And by closing the album with the one-two punch of “White Psyche” and “Oblivion’s Eye,” Psalm Zero prove they’re perfectly capable of rewarding listeners with a dramatic payoff that they manage to sustain for a total of 15 minutes.
But Hock’s guitar riff on the verse of “Stolen by Night” highlights this album’s central issue: it takes a moment to notice how Helmet’s Page Hamilton could have written it, and that’s because it lacks Hamilton’s inimitable grit and flair. In fact, Helmet, Killing Joke, Katatonia, and the rest of Psalm Zero’s progenitors all possessed that intangible “it” factor that continue make their work instantly recognizable to this day. Even recent output by those bands oozes with character that this album, for all its efforts, simply can’t match. As a quirky bastard offspring of industrial, metal, and new wave, Stranger to Violence anchors itself in a decidedly modern brand of stress. But it’s hard to listen to it without being drawn back to the times when Psalm Zero’s influences made their own hybrids with far greater authority.


These influential but under-documented L.A. punks finally get a proper release, and the five demos here reveal an adventurous band pushing the boundaries of punk orthodoxy.

Screamers: Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977

Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977

Outside of crude bootlegs of sub-demo quality and grainy videos, the Screamers have existed mainly in wistful anecdotes conveyed by California punk royalty like Jello Biafra, Exene Cervenka, and Pat Smear, who claim the band’s outsized influence and lament their lack of proper documentation. Despite never recording an official album or single, Superior Viaduct has unearthed the closest approximation of such with Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977, a collection of five demo tracks recorded at the band’s outset.
For the uninitiated, the opener, “Magazine Love,” may initially sound incomplete, like the guitar track is missing from the mix. But all the hallmarks of the burgeoning L.A. punk sound are there. Drummer K.K. Barrett bounces, hitting the snare on the one and the three, a beat similar to the one on Fear’s “I Love Livin’ in the City.” Singer Tomata du Plenty blithely snarls about mainstream publications like Family Circle and Tiger Beat. A throbbing pulse of synthesized bass propels the song forward. But, by design, the Screamers completely eschewed that ubiquitous talisman of first-wave punk: the extremely loud electric guitar. Unconventional as it was, the Screamers looked and sounded punk anyway, and in 1977, before hardcore hegemony, that was enough.
Performing for most of their history as a quartet—toward the end, the Screamers augmented their live shows with two violinists and a female vocalist—the band swapped out guitar and bass for dual keyboards. Tommy Gear, who co-wrote most of the band’s songs with du Plenty, played an ARP Odyssey synthesizer, and David Brown mutated the sound of his Fender Rhodes by channeling it through a Big Muff distortion pedal. The Screamers were, to their dismay, contemporaneously compared to Kraftwerk, and “Punish or Be Damned” is probably the reason. Clocking in at five minutes in length—an eon in punk time, especially adjusted for inflation—the synths pave the way, swirling in ascending spirals as du Plenty adopts a staid monotone over a mostly electronic drumbeat. It’s not quite krautrock, but it makes sense that the punks at L.A.’s famous punk club the Masque watching a rail-thin du Plenty deliver his lines under meticulously styled German expressionist lighting thought so.
The twin keyboardists that defined the band’s sound had clearly designated roles, which are easiest to discern on songs like “Anything.” Gear starts with a repetitive high single note on what sounds like an organ. A few seconds in, Brown’s skronking keyboard descends like an alien ship onto the song. When the drums kick in, that extra-terrestrial noise essentially becomes the distorted bassline, and Gear’s note—still the same—acts as the lead. That sonic duality is echoed in Gear’s delivery of the song’s message, a combination of societal rage and personal desire that permeates much of the band’s output. “I get so sick of the fashion and the fascism/Makes me crazy, wanna try a little smash-ism!” Gear screams in his idiosyncratic rasp during the verse. But then he seems to stare down the listener, quietly sing-speaking: “You wanna have fun, you want a reaction/I wanna have you, I want a sex action.”
Much of Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977—and indeed band’s catalogue—deals with sex and sexuality. There’s the suggestion of smutty reading materials in the title of “Magazine Love” and the description of du Plenty’s peers on “Peer Pressure”: “Some of them are straight, and some of them are queers.” On “Mater Dolores,” du Plenty breaks into a staccato yelp to convey an existential crisis for the Virgin Mary, stifled by piety and “with no one to charm her.” He combines the sacred and the profane with one lonely image, lamenting that there are “no angels in the boudoir.” Gear and du Plenty first performed together as part of an all-drag trio following du Plenty’s early days in Seatlle’s late-’60s gay theatre underground. Their flamboyant stage presence and du Plenty’s life as an out gay punk didn’t appear to alienate the 1977 Los Angeles scene.
In September 1978, early punk documentarian Joe Rees filmed the Screamers performing at San Francisco’s Mabuhay Gardens for his studio, Target Video. One of the only other existing documents of the Screamers, it shows an audience that largely seems to worship the group. Once, a snotty punk shouts “You suck!” during a break in one song, but another voice screams, “We love you, Tomata!” and the throng of spiky-haired, mostly male kids scream along and pass du Plenty beers when he asks. Perhaps the Screamers stacked the deck for the professionally filmed set, loading the crowd with its most ardent Bay Area fans, but most evidence points to total acceptance of wherever the band wanted to take them. Before punk begat hardcore, a largely homogenized and dogmatic genre—1981 seems to be the turning point, which is coincidentally the year the Screamers split—the punks could fuck around and be as weird as they wanted. Screamers Demo Hollywood 1977 finally bottles up that singularity.

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A deluxe reissue of Minnie Riperton’s best album—fusing funk, reggae, folk, soul—includes bonus tracks and new liner notes, which elaborate on the process of recording this classic with Stevie Wonder.

Perfect Angel

In 1972, Minnie Riperton was semi-retired from the music business. She was in her mid-20s, married with a young child and another on the way, and wanted an easygoing life away from the industry. So Riperton, her husband Richard Rudolph, and their son Marc moved to Gainesville, Fla., where Richard worked as a weekend disc jockey for WGVL-FM and Riperton quietly wrote songs. For her, the 1960s were littered with short-lived creative endeavors and others that weren’t successful. In 1961, the Chicago native joined a local girl group called the Gems; elsewhere, she sang backup for the Dells and Etta James while working full-time as a receptionist in the office of Chess Records. After releasing a single, “Lonely Girl,” under the pseudonym Andrea Davis, Riperton joined the Rotary Connection, a psychedelic soul band that achieved moderate commercial success before dissolving in the late ’60s. In 1971, Riperton released her solo debut album, Come to My Garden, a gorgeous yet downtempo blend of jazz and orchestral soul that also flew under the radar.
Steve Slutzah, then a college rep for Epic Records, found Riperton in Gainesville a year into her sabbatical. He’d been looking for her ever since the Rotary Connection broke up, and he received word that she was there. In Florida, Riperton’s husband played Slutzah a four-song demo that he and Riperton had recorded during a previous stint in Los Angeles. Slutzah loved what he heard so much that he took the demo back to Epic’s A&R rep Don Ellis in New York, who eventually flew south to meet Rudolph and Riperton personally—and sign them. “Don flew out, sat on the floor with us on these big pillows as I played guitar and Minnie sang,” Rudolph said in a 2001 interview. “Next thing we knew, we were flying back to L.A. to make a record.”
That record became Perfect Angel, Riperton’s second and best album, which has now been remastered and reissued as a double disc with 11 bonus tracks, including two alternate versions of smash hit “Lovin’ You.” This isn’t the first time Perfect Angel has been reissued: Capitol Records re-released it following Riperton’s untimely death from breast cancer in 1979, when she was 31. But the new reissue includes a 24-page packet of rare photos and extended liner notes by Rudolph that break down Perfect Angel’s full backstory and elaborate on what it was like working in the studio with an icon, Stevie Wonder.
Riperton wanted Wonder to produce Perfect Angel, though he was then in the midst of his legendary run of albums, including 1972’s Talking Book and 1973’s Innervisions. Riperton and Wonder had met once before, in 1971, at a black expo in Chicago. They exchanged pleasantries, and Wonder insisted he’d always wanted to work with the singer. Epic didn’t believe Wonder would get on board for Perfect Angel. But an agent got Wonder on the phone, and Riperton found herself at his studio that very day, singing background on “It Ain’t No Use” and “Creepin’,” which would appear on his 1974 album, Fulfillingness’ First Finale. Still, Motown didn’t want Wonder to produce a record for Riperton, who they considered an upstart. So to circumvent Motown, Rudolph and Wonder created a joint company called Scorbu Productions, and Wonder co-produced Perfect Angel with Rudolph under an alias, “El Toro Negro.”
On paper, a Riperton-Wonder collab made complete sense. They both sang of trees and flowers, comparing Earth’s grand beauty to the spiritual power of love. To them, love was the ultimate healer; petals, water, and the sun were divine gifts from which humanity could summon long-lasting peace. They were both hippies at heart. Perfect Angel would be Riperton’s brightest moment.
With Wonder’s backing band, Wonderlove, at the helm, the album felt bold and robust. Compared with Come to My Garden’s jazz arrangements and operatic elegance, Angel combined a lush blend of funk, reggae, folk, and soul. Riperton sounded more assertive than ever on opener “Reasons,” a strong mission statement with a brazen rock sound. It showed right away that Riperton had grown, that she was a budding star coming into her own. The first of three planned singles, “Reasons” saw marginal success on the radio, as did subsequent singles “Take a Little Trip” and “Seeing You This Way.” But they showed a different side of Riperton, as did the steamy “Every Time He Comes Around.” Never before had the vocalist been so sensuous in her music.
Other standouts included “The Edge of a Dream”—which, according to Rudolph, was partially inspired by the civil rights activism of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.—and “Perfect Angel,” which was written by Wonder. Then there was “Lovin’ You,” a sweet, acoustic lullaby that Riperton delivers wistfully. It became the album’s biggest single and Riperton’s most recognized song ever. Listening to it today, “Lovin’ You” still feels remarkably affectionate, and offers the best example of her famed five-and-a-half-octave vocal range; when you think of Riperton, you remember that voice, a dynamic, heart-rendering instrument that imparts love, caring, and tender romanticism in equal measure. Of the alternate versions on Perfect Angel’s deluxe edition, the band rendition—with Wonder on Rhodes, Ollie Brown on drums, and Reggie McBride on bass—gives “Lovin’ You” a completely different sound, full of rolling basslines and floating keys steeped in Brazilian jazz.
The second disc of this reissue offers a nice glimpse into how Perfect Angel was compiled, complete with studio chatter and extended jam sessions that make this great album even greater. We hear Riperton and Wonder tinker with the pace of “Seeing You This Way,” and Wonder’s sheer delight as the extended mix of “Perfect Angel” fades to a close. While these details could be considered small in the grander scheme of the recording, they speak directly to the joy that was captured on this LP. They offer peeks under the hood, showing us that the musicians not only created a masterful record but also had fun doing it together.
Also on the second disc, album closer “Our Lives” is stretched beyond the nine-minute mark, carried by a layered funk groove and Wonder’s signature harmonica. The song feels moving and sad when reexamined now. Here, Riperton looked ahead to old age, when she and Rudolph could celebrate each other and the growth of their children. “Side by side, in the sun,” she sang, “we will build the world we’re after.” Near the end of the second verse, as Riperton reached the top of her range, she let out a soft “I love you,” that—when coupled with Wonder’s chilling chords—feels especially haunting. “During our time in Florida, Minnie and I were together all the time,” Rudolph writes in the new liner notes. “We were consumed with each other. We used our feelings as jumping off points to write songs like this one.”
Riperton died long before her vision of the future could materialize. Though she’d release three more albums before her passing, Perfect Angel caught lightning in a bottle, and presented Riperton at her creative apex. Riperton set a precedent for artists like Erykah Badu and Moses Sumney, whose respective strains of soul and folk draw a direct line to her free-spirited ethos. You hear the legend’s hushed tranquility on new songs like Sumney’s “Doomed” and throughout the ’70s-inspired funk-soul hybrid of Badu’s 2000 album, Mama’s Gun. Samples of Riperton’s music can be heard across many rap songs, from A Tribe Called Quest and Black Star to J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar. Her iconic stature was cemented on Perfect Angel—43 years on, it has become a record for the ages. In what would’ve been her 70th year of life, Riperton continues to fill the world with magic.


Janelle Monáe's second album is looser and more physical than her 2010 debut ArchAndroid. Together with her tight-knit Wondaland collaborators (and with guest spots from Prince, Erykah Badu, Miguel, and Solange), she supervises and synthesizes a parade of golden era touchstones into a showstopping display of force and talent.

The Electric Lady

Janelle Monáe opens her second album the same way she did her 2010 debut: with a sumptuously recorded studio orchestra tossing off flourishes with abandon. When the smoke clears, the first full song features a guest vocal from...Prince. Monáe is not the kind of entertainer who takes prisoners; she operates at the locus of generosity where "generous" shades subtly into "aggressive." The song is called "Givin Em What They Love", but the feeling is a little more "take you home and make you like it."
The facts of Monáe's emergence have occasionally made it difficult to embrace her music: She arrived so thoroughly anointed by so many key figures in the entertainment industry that it has sometimes felt pointless to try and touch her. At the heart of her ornate, impressive music, a hint of chilliness kept us at arm's-length; she was a conqueror, undoubtedly, but maybe she glossed over the whole "winning the hearts of the people" thing.
With The E**lectric Lady, she finds a way to give us more of herself. Together with her tight-knit Wondaland collaborators-- Kellindo Parker, a magnificent guitarist who singlehandedly gooses several songs into transcendence; her college friends Nate “Rocket” Wonder and Chuck Lightning, and Roman GianArthur-- Monáe supervises and synthesizes a parade of golden touchstones (Sly, Stevie, Marvin) into a show-stopping display of force and talent. And at the heart of it, she embeds some of the most personal pain she's allowed to leak into her music.
Many of her lyrics here telegraph a desire to break away, to "find a way to freak out," as she puts it on "Dance Apocalyptic", which is the closest the album comes to an immediate calling card like "Tightrope". The album is overall looser and more physical than its predecessor, more concerned with dancing, sex, love, and abandon. "I wanna scream and dream and throw a love parade," she sings, in a creamy mid-register, on the moonlit Miguel duet "Primetime". The song rides a cerebral whine into an "I Only Have Eyes For You" glide, with a "Purple Rain" solo cascading over the top like an MGM waterfall.
The emotional core of the album, and its unique loneliness, derives from how Monáe both fails and succeeds to connect. She wants to scream and dream, she's found a way to freak out. The most pleading passages on Electric Lady-- gorgeously tender soul ballads like "It's Code" and "Can't Live Without Your Love"-- feature some of her most emotionally bare, strikingly abject singing. But for all of the sex-positive, queer-friendly utopianism of her music (one between-song skit advertises a "bouncing electro booty contest"; on the title track, she pictures "all the birds and the bees dancing with the freaks in the trees"; and on the Erykah Badu-featuring "Q.U.E.E.N.", she asks playfully, "Is it weird to like the way she wears her tights?"), her music has always been about the the exhilaration coming from the sensation of total control.
Attention to detail is nothing new for the admittedly obsessive Monáe, but man, there are some knockout details here: the rusty poking bedspring of a guitar that powers "Q.U.E.E.N."; the percussion loops on "Electric Lady"; the manic clean-toned jazz guitar skittering behind the vocal breakdown on "Ghetto Woman". The strings carry some of the most heart-tugging melodies, and the most beautiful moments come when songs melt from an amped-up funk groove into a glimmering, soul-revue orchestra, like "We Were Rock and Roll", "Give Em What You Love", and "Q.U.E.E.N". Gorgeous soul ballads like "Can't Live Without Your Love" are built on the kind of rich, finely managed melodies and jazzy modulations that haven't been the sound of the radio since the late 70s.
Taken as a whole, The E**lectric Lady is a convincing argument for the virtues of micromanagement, but some of the most powerful, tender moments come from acknowledging  limits. On "Sally Ride," she admits defeat, of sorts, declaring she's "packing my spacesuit, and I'm taking my shit up to the moon." On "Victory," Monáe offers, "I'll just keep singing until the pain goes," and there's something humbly stoic in her voice. She's not singing to exorcise pain, which will hang around until it's good and ready to go, she's just passing the time until it does doing the thing she does best.


The Louisiana rapper's follow-up to the excellent The Luca Brasi Story finds him world-weary in all the spots where he was starry-eyed and reflective. While the pop hooks are played down, Gates' knack for detailed, despairing storytelling cogently picks up the slack.

Stranger Than Fiction

Louisiana rapper Kevin Gates’ The Luca Brasi Story matched the brutality of coke rap to earnest sentimentality and melodicism with such a finesse that it obscured the record's essential weirdness. Songs outlining the perils of trafficking narcotics were heard next to those inspired by romance novelist Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook and the Twilight series. In street rap, a fixation on romance is often seen as a mark against the artist’s perceived toughness, as if the one gives the lie to the other. But the weathered rasp of Gates' voice lent a measure of grit to the love songs even as it made the deterministic criminality elsewhere in the tape feel lived-in. He's has since inked a deal with Atlantic Records (who summarily squished the 22-song tape into a digital EP) and released the low-stakes digital album Stranger Than Fiction. Where The Luca Brasi Story’s itinerant sprawl and plentiful guest appearances played like a game of show and prove, Stranger Than Fiction whittles things down to a series of pithy two- to three-minute nuggets that lurch toward resolution, often finding it within a verse or two.
The accomplished tunefulness of Luca Brasi highlights “Paper Chasers” and “Neon Lights” is pushed to the margins here. Save for the hooky despondency of late-album gem “Don’t Know What to Call It”, Stranger Than Fiction’s Kevin Gates is world-weary in all the spots where he was starry-eyed and reflective the last time around. Whether the tense shift in his songwriting is a conscious attempt to put some distance between himself and his trap house hook-men contemporaries or a function of him stockpiling melodies for a future mainstream push, his knack for detailed, despairing storytelling cogently picks up the slack.
Stranger Than Fiction draws much of its gravitas from Gates’ own colorful back story: he cuts through the airy synths and open spaces of “4:30AM” with a travelogue of betrayal for which he’s as much a culprit as a victim, and on “4 Legs and a Biscuit”, a viewing of the gangster flick King of New York trips off a broadside about the constant strain of legal woes. “Tiger” elaborates on the period when he quit dealing drugs to pursue a career in rap, only to fall prey to a series of janky promoters and label executives whose shifty machinations made him the vic instead of the villain. Stranger Than Fiction is a litany of near-misses with police and armed foes interspersed with emotionally guarded examinations of the trust issues they leave as collateral damage. But where Gates has pulled back from the emotional heft that made Luca Brasi such a compelling character composite, he’s poured his energy into the mechanics of rhyming with such fervor that what’s being said in these songs is often trumped for intrigue by the way he says it.
While Gates’ stories suggest a battle-damaged cynic, his restless wordplay gives voice to the excitable language nerd beneath the gruff exterior. “Die About It” effortlessly switches up cadences mid-flow, shifting from a laconic swing to a sparse, staccato yelp and back. On “Careful”, he goofily adopts three different Southern accents in two verses, only one of which is his own. “MYB” reduces his voice to a guttural whisper, rendering the song’s callous dress-down of a lesser criminal all the more diabolical in the process. Gates sells all of these experiments with the same verve, and the album scarcely misses a mark until Wiz Khalifa hits the buzzerbeater on the album closing remix of Gates’ 2012 single “Satellites” with a wastepaper-basket-deep verse delivered in a bratty yawp grossly ill-suited to the rest of the song.
The success of Stranger Than Fiction is as much a result of keen lyricism and inventive vocal tricks as good editing. Its 14 tracks are over and done in just a little more than 40 minutes. The brevity and the relatively monochromatic production, a glut of foreboding minor key trap beats, collude to force the spotlight on Gates’ versatile rapping. From the achy old gunshot wound that flares up after Gates gets stabbed and the glass of Sprite that’s purple instead of pink because he overdid it on the promethazine on “4:30AM” to the Popeyes dinner that lends the title to “4 Legs and a Biscuit” to the punch in the face that doesn’t hurt on “MYB” and the succession cars he laments not being able to drive on “Don’t Know What to Call It”, the record's uncompromising hard luck street narratives are dispensed with a preternaturally sharp eye for detail that dabs Gates’ economic writing with a shock of much-needed color.


Inspired by waltz time, heartbreak, and ambient Americana, Jason Lytle returns with his characteristic mix of humor and tragedy.

Blu Wav

Jason Lytle has always written in the folk tradition. Even in his early songs as Grandaddy, the Californian tended towards fictionalized narratives, aphoristically making sense of technological apprehension like a Pete Seeger or Judy Collins for the turn of the millennium. Rather than lament the uniform “little boxes” of post-war suburbia, Lytle channeled the alienation born from even smaller boxes—computer monitors, cubicles—into evergreen ennui. By casting his emotions onto our surroundings, both organic and non, Lytle rendered them universal in their profound specificity: “Grieve like a freeway tree,” he sang on the 2017’s Last Place, capturing a sadness so uniquely American and yet so instantly legible. On Blu Wav, Grandaddy’s first album in seven years, Lytle leans into bittersweet Americana twang, a natural fit for his fatally flawed, cautiously optimistic cast of characters.
Inspiration for the shift toward country arrived when Lytle heard singer Patti Page’s 1950 hit “Tennessee Waltz” on his car radio. Struck by both the song’s time signature—he felt that he already naturally wrote in a waltz’s 3/4 or 6/8—and its gentle, winsome strings, he set out to make an album in a similar style. He captured his aesthetic vision in the titular phrase, a portmanteau of bluegrass and new wave—and since it wouldn’t be a proper Grandaddy title without at least one double meaning, “wav” also refers to the lossless audio format.
In part, Blu Wav recalls what some writers have dubbed “cosmic country” (or if you want to sound really smug, “bootgaze”), wherein acts such as SUSS and Luke Schneider combine traditional folk instruments like lap steel guitar with modular synthesizers and drum machines. With the addition of Max Hart’s pedal steel, Blu Wav sounds as expansive as the open road: “Cabin in My Mind” layers flurries of arpeggiated synths and soft guitar atop Hart’s winding melodies, a warm invitation to Lytle’s imagined oasis. On “Long as I’m Not the One,” Hart’s pedal steel and a few well-placed bass plucks imagine Grandaddy as the Emo Morricone, singing about loneliness over swelling synths that conjure an endless Western expanse. His instrumentals—“Let’s Put This Pinto on the Moon” and “Yeehaw AI in the Year 2025”—take a far more impressionistic approach, recalling David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy ambient work with Brian Eno. Between gurgling machine bleeps, sounds from Lytle’s home recording setup bleed into the mix—coyote howls, wind batting the walls—forming a cinematic combination of quotidian life with the alien sounds of synthesis. It isn’t quite familiar, but it’s not exactly frightening either: Blu Wav lives in the eerie in-between.
“I wish the happier, more upbeat [songs] just flowed out of me easier,” Lytle said in a recent interview. But in a departure from his previous records, here he at least sounds sanguine, even if his characters are in dire straits. The gentler sound of Blu Wav underscores lyrics that are typically Grandaddy in their mix of humor and tragedy: There’s the office flirtation gone wrong on “Watercooler,” where he can’t bring himself to call a coworker and tell her their relationship won’t work. The album also deals, opaquely, with Lytle’s divorce: In perhaps its most devastating refrain, he sees a former flame with a new lover and assesses the damage: “You’re going to be fine, and I’m going to hell.” But Grandaddy’s most memorable songs often leave the realm of his personal life completely, and on “Jukebox App,” he invents a personal purgatory: A heartbroken boy sits in the parking lot of the diner where his ex and her new beau are eating, furiously programming the restaurant's jukebox app to play “our song” on repeat. It’s a hilariously contemporary punishment, but his protagonist’s demented agony long predates TouchTunes.
When Lytle heard “Tennessee Waltz,” a song about a lover leaving you for one of your friends, he saw it as “simple and sweet.” That same contrast—gentle guitars and soft piano beneath lyrics about abandonment—grounds this album. Blu Wav has a calmness and ease, even as Lytle sings about feeling miserable. The guiding rhythm of the waltz suits the record’s strange, contained world, which seems to move one step back for every two steps forward. Lytle, a former amateur skater, has recently taken up long distance cycling, and Blu Wav also echoes the sport’s balance of tranquility and steady momentum. You might say he’s finally heeded his own advice, turning off his computer and heading to the cabin in his mind.


The Australian electro-pop veterans return with a climate-change album both as chilled as an upscale boutique and as politically engaged as your Instagram feed.

Freeze, Melt

Cut Copy have been at it for almost 20 years, which seems impossible. They seem to exist outside of time, perhaps because they’ve been looking back from the start—immediately appealing and with a toothsome competence, but more about articulating taste than defining a singular point of view.
Maybe bandleader Dan Whitford felt stale after 2017’s slick bummer, Haiku from Zero. Maybe the anxiety of influence had settled into ennui. For whatever reason, Whitford left his native Australia and decamped to Copenhagen, endured Scandinavia’s dark winters of the soul, and obsessed about climate change before returning to Melbourne to get the band together again. The result is an album as chilled as an upscale boutique in a heatwave and as politically engaged as your Instagram feed, which is to say very and not quite as much as it thinks.
Lead single “Love Is All We Share” is sumptuous, with an icy choir hovering at eye level and little squiggles signifying the alienation that arrived with the dial-up modem, leaving us more connected and more isolated than ever. “Dead to the world,” he sings, as beautiful chunks of harmony float by like floes in a rising sea, “can you feel it in your fingers?/Love is all we share.”  There’s more numbness than sentiment. If this “we” is us in Australia, or Denmark, or the United States—or, sadly, so much of the rest of the world—love is not all we share; rage and terror are at least two more things. Anyway, in “A Perfect Day,” Whitford is “running out of love” but does have very well recorded percussion echoing like bad thoughts, and glistening synths that can fill up an otherwise empty room. “What a perfect day,” he sings, “to be alone.”
Words barely make it into “Stop Horizon,” a twinkler of plucked guitars and pitter-pat keyboards, as if the Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” blew in some light showers. Later, a track called “Rain” arrives, and whether it signifies tears, a biblical cleanse, the flooding doom on our horizons, or a pitiless drought which will allow the West to burn unabated, it puddles beautifully. It’s basically an onomatopoeia, but the meaning washes away. Lyricless “In Transit” moves the album to a close, with little stuttering ticks of time running out for us all and a rather lovely sing-song melody that murmurs, Oh well.
“Running in the Grass” has a bit more bite, with a sharp swiping blade of a noise that could give your eardrum a papercut. It severs the chorus (“You cut me down to the bone”) from the verses. If crowds ever gather again, it will please them. As will “Like Breaking Glass” which is mixed, like the rest of the album, by the Knife and Fever Ray collaborator Christoffer Berg. It softens those Swedes’ silent shouts into slightly hushed sighs. And opener “Cold Water” is wistful and effective, a soggier take on Portishead’s “The Rip,” soaring upward in hopes of a festival to survey. Would that it find might one.
Festival culture, with its massive expenditures of energy and waste creation, is (was?) hell on the climate. Touring, too, not to mention the transubstantiation of fossil fuel into beautiful vinyl. If it’s hypocritical for Cut Copy to swap the joys of neon and dancing and kissing for a political agenda diametrically opposed to their own work, well, hypocrisy is the price of existence. The trick is to acknowledge reality without aestheticizing peril. The cover of Freeze, Melt nods to the conceptual artist John Baldessari, whose death at the start of 2020 might have warned us of the waves of bullshit to come. Its own concept is unimpeachable: Climate change does suck. Ice is a memory. Mostly, though, Freeze, Melt just feels like a nice warm bath.


Samantha Urbani’s debut is alt-pop with style and nuance. She coats her sound with some retro ’80s accessories, but her real emotions remain grounded in the present.

Policies of Power EP

Samantha Urbani has been exploring the boundaries of pop music since her days as a founder and frontwoman of the Bushwick group Friends. The collective—who channeled ESG and Stacey Q.—was a Brooklyn DIY staple and one among a coterie of producers and performers finding blog acclaim for pushing pop outside of its overly-manufactured confines (see: Charli XCX’s “Nuclear Seasons,” MNDR’s “Fade to Black”). Like other subcultures before it, alt-pop was a direct response to 2010s Top 40 despondency. The artists creating some of the hookiest songs of the year weren’t necessarily trying to navigate the indie world, but rather trying to make glossy, catchy music whose substance and heart were in plain view.
“The current, tragic state of pop music doesn’t mean that people should forget about great pop artists of the past or write off the genre’s future,” Urbani said in 2012. “Look at somebody like Prince, for example; he was such a genius who was in control of all aspects of his music, and he still made complex yet commercially palatable music with a statement behind it.” Five years later, Urbani has readied her debut, a five-track collection called Policies of Power. If her goal is simply to have control over music and create sonic and lyrical depth while still being primed for radio, then she ticked all of those boxes easily with her EP.
Featuring two songs released in 2015 (“1 2 3 4” and “U Know I Know”), Power is a product of patience. In 2016, she launched her own record label URU (as in “you are you”) where she first reissued overlooked British synth-pop duo Rexy’s 1981 album Running Out of Time. The reissue was released in tandem with a covers series for which she enlisted people like Ariel Pink and Zoë Kravitz, among others, to perform alongside her. Her own music stayed on the back-burner.
Even though one of her oldies, “1 2 3 4,” is the most euphoric point on the album, the new songs are deft and nuanced—synths make way for sax on “Time Time Time” (supplied by Sade’s co-writer and “Smooth Operator” saxophonist Stuart Matthewman) and ’80s hair metal shredding goes bubblegum on “Hints & Implications.” The vibe can feel more suited to a decades-old, forgotten teen comedy, but because Urbani’s lyrics avoid platitudes, it scans as something more grounded and mature. “No more invitations/I got the hint that you don’t want them,” she sings on the hook. “Without the same information/We’re living in two separate dimension/So break it to me.” It isn’t as detailed as the failed romance narratives some like Kelela displays so baldly, but it is far more personal than the vague missives pop so often provides.
“Go Deeper” pulls out the same shattered poetry: “I had an attitude/And you can't, can't, can't stand that/I hear you, respect your solitude/But was it poetry when you told me you would be right back?” Some listeners will suspect that lines like these are about her former paramour Dev Hynes, but those coming to the EP for indie gossip are here for the wrong reason. Urbani’s big draw is her contrast, the elation that glows behind the sadness revealing more and more layers of her sound and personality.
Policies of Power may only suffer because it does have so much style. Urbani is often compared to Madonna because of her ’80s throwbacks caked in contemporary gloss. But unlike some mainstream pop music that is incubated in songwriting camps with each piece fabricated until it is blemish-free, Urbani’s music comes almost entirely from herself. Considering the time it took for her to reveal who she is and the art she wants to make, it was worth the wait.


Experimental guitarist and ex-Harry Pussy member Bill Orcutt’s A History of Every One comprises cover versions of old songs, some dating back to the 1800s. He doesn't view these standards as patterns to trace, but as collections of moments that inspire him toward new ones.

A History of Every One

Bill Orcutt’s guitar playing is all about possibilities. As he unfurls impulsive runs and quick turns, each move opens a web of new paths he could travel. As a result, when I listen to his albums I end up thinking as much about what could happen as what is happening. But then Orcutt’s plucks and strums are usually so quick and idea-filled, it sometimes feels like everything that could happen actually is happening.
Given this boundless approach to improvised playing, A History of Every One—an album comprised solely of cover versions—is risky. By limiting himself to others’ songs, Orcutt could sound handcuffed, beholden to preset parameters rather than following his muse wherever it wants to take him. Further complicating matters, he’s chosen tunes that are all over 50 years old (some even go back to the 1800s). Many, especially ubiquitous ones like “White Christmas” and “When You Wish Upon a Star”, are so culturally ingrained, any attempt to transform them could be like trying to reshape the Grand Canyon.
Fortunately, Orcutt views these songs not as patterns to trace but collections of moments that can inspire him toward new ones. That's not really a surprise—he previously used the raw ideas in his head as points from which to launch, so here he takes concepts well-worn by others and does the same. But that doesn’t make it any less of a bold move, because it’s still rare to hear covers that don’t mimic originals or simply replace one style with another.
Orcutt has found another way. He truly explores these songs, eager to hurtle down any tangent that each phrase, hook, or melody could lead to. From a single note he’ll burst into a looped figure or angled run, then dart back to the original figure to find more uncharted avenues to trample. His restless style makes each piece sound three-dimensional, as shards of songs pass each other in a storm of string activity. It makes for exhilarating, sometimes exhausting listening. But it also makes for music that, though it hints at structure, never sounds predictable and rarely settles.
It also makes for pretty varied music considering it’s just one man and six strings—or actually four, assuming Orcutt’s still playing his vintage Kay acoustic guitar. A few tracks fly by, like a blistering take on “Zip a Dee Doo Dah” (from the 1946 Disney movie Song of the South) and a nearly-epileptic version of the 1915 union anthem “Solidarity Forever”. But others mix fast runs, sharp stops, and gradual stretches. Orcutt’s rapid-fire sounds are a wonder, but it’s even more impressive when he cuts them with pauses or slows them into moments of reflection. This turns the 1925 song “Spanish is the Loving Tongue” into a kind of serrated elegy, and the Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Bring Me My Shotgun” into a seamless mesh of fire and ice. He even turns a Harvard fight song into a spirited mantra of pointed plucks and urgent moans.
Those moans are stronger than ever on A History of Every One. I’m not sure if Orcutt “sings” (which for him means wordless humming, howling, and wheezing) more than on previous full-lengths, but it sure feels like it. As the album progresses, his voice becomes increasingly prominent, leading the songs rather than reacting to them. By the time he gets to a swaying approximation of “Ballad of Davy Crockett”, you can almost hear him crooning the melody like he’s teaching it to his guitar. Perhaps Orcutt felt more singing would help capture spirit of these originals, most of which center on lyrics. But just as likely, he needed to deploy all his weapons to find new ideas in songs played so much their potential might already be exhausted.
A History of Every One shows that’s far from the case. It also represents a turn in Orcutt’s approach. These songs seem to have inspired a more contemplative mode. It may be paradoxical to call music this active “contemplative,” but even when he’s got the pedal to the floor, you can hear Orcutt thinking these songs through—rolling them over in his mind while pouring them out from his fingers. This culminates in perhaps the simplest thing he’s ever recorded, an album-closing cover of Stephen Foster’s “Massa’s in the Cold Cold Ground”. Sparse and moving, it shows Orcutt can do as much with restraint as he can with speed—opening up yet another path he can pursue.


Still trying to capture the lightning of his star-making debut, the Compton rapper’s latest is an attempted return to form that plays it far too safe.

Feed tha Streets III

Roddy Ricch is stuck in limbo. Fueled by a bevy of hooks, the 24-year-old Compton artist’s 2019 debut, Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial, propelled him to a stratosphere of rap superstardom not seen since 50 Cent’s mammoth debut. The record was slightly personal but mostly familiar, showcasing the infectious melodies of the era’s mainstream rap, proof that the sound of mid-2010s Atlanta had spread across state lines. On his 2021 follow-up, LIVE LIFE FAST, he struggled to recapture that lightning in a bottle. Instead of continuing to add his unique spin to a sound that was being regurgitated everywhere, he faded into the background. Feed Tha Streets III, his latest project, is supposed to be a return to form, but it suffers from the anxiety of trying to conform to fan expectations and subdues his best traits.
The game plan: Strip away the glitz and glamor of his prior studio album and retreat to the bare-bones approach of his mixtapes. It’s a good idea in theory, but the problem with Roddy’s music lately isn’t that he’s trying to accomplish too much—it’s that the melodies and beats have become so anonymous that if you’re not paying attention, you’ll forget whose song you’re listening to. “Blue Cheese” is a dry impression of a pumped-up Young Thug song—down to the woo hoos—that falls flat without any identifiable eccentricities to get stuck in your head. The repetitive ad-libs on “Twin” (“Across the street from my hotel”) only get more tiresome as he keeps going. Has Roddy been hit with a neuralyzer? At the peak of his powers, he had a knack for stringing together lines with ease, turning simple concepts into full-blown hits with slight vocal twitches and emotive singing. On Feed Tha Streets III, he seems to have forgotten how.
When Roddy raises the energy, it’s a reminder of how electric his voice can be. Single “Aston Martin Truck” is buoyed by pitch and tempo variations that keep things interesting the whole ride. When he wails “My mama said she see the demons on me/So I gotta stay outta her way” on “Get Swept,” his frank delivery stands out, even if it doesn’t lead anywhere. These jumps in intensity are the shots of espresso the album needs. But they aren’t enough. Maybe a Mustard feature could have broken up the formulaic production choices: If the hi-hats or acoustic guitar on “Favor for a Favor” had an inkling more imagination to meld with the croons, the song could morph from fine to good.
When Roddy finds a topic that doesn’t feel like just a backdrop to a celebratory Instagram post, he can express a sense of urgency, like when he lays out how he wants his son’s childhood to be different from his own on closer “Letter to My Son.” Looking inward and getting personal isn’t the only way to move forward, but he’ll need some semblance of depth to separate his music from all the other rappers jockeying for the top spot on Apple Music’s Rap Life playlist. At least LIVE LIFE FAST made a few efforts to diversify his sound. On Feed Tha Streets III, Roddy sounds so worried about stumbling that he ends up moving at a snail’s pace.


The duo’s second collaborative album is an enveloping matrix of sounds both familiar and unfamiliar—a form of ambient music that refuses to recede into the background.

Félicia Atkinson / Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: Limpid as the Solitudes

Limpid as the Solitudes

For Félicia Atkinson, sound is pretty much sentient. She calls it a “live presence” that “can get inside people, get in and out as it pleases.” Her music works under a central assumption: We merely share the world with all the sonic phenomena swirling all around us. It’s this reverence for the spiritual side of sound, as well as its omnipresence, that has made the French experimental musician’s catalog so fascinating. She deploys a bevy of tools and techniques—voice, assorted synths, field recordings, and numerous passages of unknown origin—to achieve uncanny effects. Her songs can generate strange, psychoacoustic sensations; the buzz and static of her compositions can in ring your ears like insects trapped in your skull.
The New York ambient musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has similar proclivities, using a tsunami of guitar dissonance and echo to create formidable and emotional noise recordings. Limpid as the Solitudes is the pair’s second collaborative album, and it is a brain-teasing exercise in sonic manipulation. Combining animal groans, rumbling weather fronts, and busy urban landscapes with surreal synths and lulling drone, the project is the perfect middle ground for Cantu-Ledesma’s sculptural approach and Atkinson’s fantastical mindset.
The four compositions on Limpid as the Solitudes reveal few clues as to how they were made. There’s a sort of alchemy at work in the way the two create a pool of noise and echo in which sounds bob like buoys in a wine-dark sea. On the opener, “And the Flowers Have Time for Me,” they introduce countless little details across a nearly six-minute span, creating a fully realized world to inhabit: what might be a crowd jostling in public transit, the pulse of an EKG machine, naked flesh rubbing up against coarse fabric, doors opening and closing, water pouring from a carafe, birds chirping, storms cloud gathering on a sunny day. Undergirding it all is the simultaneously calming and queasy rumble of synthesizers and the hiss of what might be tape delay.
The effect that this slow accumulation of so many familiar and unfamiliar sounds creates is disorienting. The music’s easy flow  invites relaxation, but its many subtle shifts make it hard to drift away, and the way they force dozens of contrasting textures together can be quietly jarring. This is especially true of “Her Eyelids Say,” which sounds like two extremely different songs playing in parallel. On one side, there’s what feels like an alien abduction, with tractor beams buzzing overhead; crawling, creeping, buzzing bodies moving all around; and fluids dripping into a receptacle. On the other side is a patient progression of piano notes that might be the rehearsal for a recital.
What makes Limpid as the Solitudes such an excellent ambient release isn’t just the rigor of its formal experimentation. Like William Basinski, these two know how to make a song that spills and mixes into the listener’s own environment. The album’s centerpiece, the 18-minute “All Night I Carpenter,” is a wide, rich, and open space that folds nearly all of the record’s previous sounds into a warm whirlpool of hum. Whatever else is happening around you at the time gets sucked into the mix: A hissing heater or a honking horn might be confused for a purposeful gesture. That randomness, that possibility of a song changing with every listen, multiplies Limpid as the Solitudes’ many rewards.


This fiery live recording, the first to feature Wire's most recent stage lineup, focuses on the elegantly textured 2011 collection Red Barked Tree.

Wire: The Black Session: Paris, 10 May 2011

The Black Session: Paris, 10 May 2011

Thirty-five years into their start-and-stop career, Wire are not short on live albums. This is the 15th they've released since 2004 through their own Pinkflag imprint, covering all three incarnations of the band: the brittle, brainy punks who hurtled artward from 1976 to 1980, the poppy, brainy "beat-combo" that branched out toward both alternative radio tunes and monomaniacal hammer-drone from 1985 to 1992, and the tough, brainy old guys who reconvened in 2000 and have been bearing down hard ever since. But the only really significant live Wire discs are the out-of-print Document and Eyewitness-- a bootleg-quality set centered on an abrasive 1980 gig that featured almost entirely new material-- and 1989's It's Beginning to and Back Again, which was so heavily reworked in the studio that it's barely a live album at all.
That shortlist hasn't changed with the new addition to the pile. The formal distinction of The Black Session is that it's the first recording to feature Wire's most recent stage lineup. (For those who haven't been following closely, founding guitarist Bruce Gilbert left in the mid-2000s; Margaret Fielder McGinnis of Laika replaced him on tour for a few years, and, since 2010, Matt Simms has augmented the remaining trio of original members on tour.)
The days when Wire would turn up for gigs with a set of material the audience had never heard before, or save the throwbacks for the encore, are behind them. At this gig, they run through the better part of 2011's Red Barked Tree, basically ignore everything else from the past 24 years except for 2002's hardcore-velocity "Comet", and toss in a couple of old favorites. It's particularly unsettling to hear "Map Ref. 41ºN 93ºW", one of their most precisely constructed studio singles, in a sloppy garage-band rendition-- metronomic drummer Robert Grey struggles to keep the tempo steady, and singer/guitarist Colin Newman sounds uncomfortably exposed when nobody joins him for harmonies on the chorus. The final encore is one that rejoined their repertoire in 2000 and stayed there: "Pink Flag", with its original two-chord structure replaced by a single blaring E chord at which they hammer for seven minutes or so until it disintegrates into end-of-show chaos.
For Wirephiles, the value of The Black Session is the live treatments of the Red Barked Tree tracks. As elegantly textured as that album was, it also sounded reserved and unconvinced in places, and tried to pass off some old Wire ideas as new ones. These versions have more fire and bite to them, even on slow numbers like "Down to This" and "Adapt", and the band has rearranged "Clay" to not sound quite so much like a faint carbon copy of 1978's "I Am the Fly". There's no getting over the resemblance of "Moreover" to Wire's 1979 single "A Question of Degree", but it's mostly an excuse for them to stomp hard, and for Simms and Newman to contrast a tightly wound little riff with a high-pressure spray of noise.
In the context of Wire's catalog, this is just another document of incremental change, and not even the best live recording they've made lately (that would be their gorgeous Daytrotter session from 2008). Still, if this were the only Wire record in existence-- a debut album by a new quartet, three of them in their late 50s, captured live on French radio-- it'd be bracingly new even in 2012, an original take on punk minimalism, guitar sound, singing technique, tunefulness vs. dissonance, and so on. "My God! They're so gifted!" Newman yells in "Two People in a Room", and as usual he could be referring to himself and his collaborators.


The Berlin tech-house duo’s debut album purports to expand its palette, but an impressive list of collaborators can’t keep the music from lapsing into middle-of-the-road anonymity.

Dream House

It’s hard to remember, but the oft-overlapping genres known as tech house and minimal were once bastions of experimental dance music. As the 1990s bled into the first decade of the new millennium, producers like Richie Hawtin, Akufen, Cassy, and Levon Vincent explored a lean, groundbreaking hybrid of techno’s futurism and house’s funk. Sturdy, endless grooves bolstered druggy detours, glitchy hiccups, and startling ambiguity. Breakout star Ricardo Villalobos matched DJ celebrity with a recorded output of tunneling vortexes, hour-plus-long remixes of folk melodies, and feverish mirages. He was recognized for his efforts with a cover story in The Wire, his name next to Whitehouse and Laurie Anderson.
But as the aughts drew on, a sense of futility crept into the party. The music’s immaculate strangeness began to seem fussy and irrelevant as dubstep, grime, and rawer strains of techno came to the fore. It was at this crossroads that Innervisions, the label run by Berlin’s Dixon and  Âme, stepped in. Their output cleaned away the freaky debris of minimal, bolstered the production to soundsystem-rattling perfection, and coated everything in a warm, welcoming glaze. Their signature has been one of the most influential in modern dance music: Resident Advisor’s readers repeatedly voted Dixon as the No. 1 DJ of the year, and EDM’s flirtation with four-on-the-floor piggybacks directly on the smooth, crowd-pleasing drops Innervisions perfected. If the label remains a template for dance music’s current mainstream, the duo Âme arguably embody one of the most distilled iterations of that formula. Now, 14 years since their first release, they are releasing Dream House, their debut album.
Âme made a name for themselves with tracks like “Rej” and “Balladine”: monstrously effective dancefloor bombs that built shamelessly towards huge moments but were tinged with just enough melancholy to keep things tasteful. Dream House, however, is billed as an expansion of their voice. Moving away from the club, the record draws an eye-grabbing list of collaborators, including Matthew Herbert, Cluster founder Roedelius, German art-punk veteran Gudrun Gut, and Planningtorock, and attempts 11 mood pieces, genre workouts, and studio experiments. Like all their work, Dream House sounds expensive and carefully constructed. It’s also punishingly square.
The record suffers from a false binary which remains endemic in dance music: the questionable idea that fun, energetic work should be saved for 12”s while albums are reserved for Serious Artistic Statements. The press release for Dream House explains that it’s “an evocative home listening journey,” as if no one ever listened to energetic music at home. It’s an absurd proposition—imagine Metallica crafting Kill ‘Em All or Yoko Ono prepping Plastic Ono Band deciding to tone it down for “home listening.”
Of course, Âme aren’t obligated to rev their motors if they aren’t in the mood, but Dream House is so bereft of substance that you sense the duo backed into these tracks via mood boards and career strategization rather than genuine inspiration. There’s not a wrong note on the entire album, yet nothing leaps out at you either. It’s a polite wave of empty gestures and aesthetic nods, neither demanding to be heard nor allowing you to be overwhelmed.
The duo draws from Can’s humid wiggle, EBM’s primitive futurism, Pet Shop Boys’ studio perfection, Tangerine Dream’s layered arpeggiations, and "Miami Vice"’s steely soundtrack. These influences could suggest an arty cruise through the 1980s, but Âme’s years of big-room gigs don’t fall away so easily. Everything winds up tech-housed in the end. Sometimes it’s harmless, as on the perfectly lovely chillwave instrumental “Futuro Antico,” but elsewhere things get rough. Herbert, the loungey dark prince of minimal, layers his vocals on “The Line”: “Still just sitting around,” he croons over a melodramatic builder that could pass for the Chainsmokers on a Peter Gabriel binge; “it would be a curious thing if I felt the fury was real.” This from the guy who once sampled a pig being killed to raise “complex questions about our relationship to these often-maligned and misunderstood creatures.” Meanwhile, “No War” loops its title with insulting banality, as if Âme were blithely proposing world peace over oat milk cappuccinos.
Mostly though, Dream House is simply anonymous to the point of invisibility. Heard in a clothing shop or a commercial, you wouldn’t notice a thing, but that’s just the rub. The duo spent three years on this album, and in that time scrubbed it clean of almost any identifying marks or glimpses of spontaneity. In the group’s bio, they describe their music as “strumming at your heartstrings.” This isn’t a good thing. If Âme wanted to make a truly serious artistic statement, they could have risked looking ugly, weird, or uncool. Instead, Dream House forsakes even the grandiose manipulations of their EPs for a placid, empty surface. It looks good on paper. It will sound nice while you cook dinner. Then you’ll forget you ever heard it.