Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit Laurie Anderson’s grand theatrical treatise, an avant-garde piece comprised of sound sculpture and rock music, gender and social studies, philosophy and linguistics.

United States Live

On January 25, 1983, Reagan delivered a rousing State of the Union to a country reeling from a recession. He bid for inspiration. “As surely as America’s pioneer spirit made us the industrial giant of the 20th century,” he said, “the same pioneer spirit today is opening up on another vast front of opportunity, the frontier of high technology.” He had, he said, “a vision not only of what the world around us is today, but what we as a free people can make it be tomorrow.” Six weeks later, in the premiere of his blockbuster “Evil Empire Speech,” he told an audience of the newly-ascendant Christian Right, “Any objective observer must hold a positive view of American history.” It was, he said, “a history that has been the story of hopes fulfilled and dreams made into reality.” Much of the country loved his shiny hair and avuncular brand of authoritarianism. They believed what he said.
In-between these two speeches, on February 7th, 1983, the performance artist Laurie Anderson had an opening night of a new show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She spiked her hair with Vaseline and pulled on a suit like she was ready for business. The overall effect was somewhere between Albert Einstein and Grace Jones. She gathered her trusty violin—various states of violins, really, some with neon inside them and others strung with prerecorded cassette tape the bow could activate—and a vocoder and other mechanical wonders, many made by her own hands. She had thousands of slides and videos and a crew to run them. A small band of fixtures of the Downtown scene, including the Love of Life Orchestra’s Peter Gordon and David Van Tieghem, was ready to accompany her. An audience primed by recent theatrical epics like Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach sat ready to be wowed. They believed in her. In the darkened auditorium, Anderson took the stage. She pointed to a map of America projected behind her. She asked: “Can you tell me where I am?” Then she turned to a mic plugged into a Harmonizer that dragged her voice way down into what she named her “voice of authority.” Her male voice said: “Do you want to go home?”
And so began Laurie Anderson’s own state of the union. The record of this eight-hour, two-night show—1984’s four-and-a-half-hour box set, United States Live—is a gesamtkunstwerk, a bold federation of hobbyist tinkering and scientific wizardry, sound sculpture and rock music, gender and social studies, philosophy and linguistics. With performance chops equal to the Gipper’s, Anderson untangled Reagan’s knot of tech and hope and power and wove together an alternative form of patriotism, one that centers disorientation and finds authenticity in imagination. Along the way, she created an American masterpiece.
“I grew up in the Bible Belt and spent a lot of my childhood listening to these stories, at Bible school,” Anderson once said. “Adults who mainly just did the most mundane things imaginable (mowing their lawns, throwing potluck parties). They all believed in these wild stories. And they would sit around and discuss them in the most matter-of-fact way.” Born in 1947 in the suburbs of Chicago, she angled for attention as one of eight kids and wore red blazers to talk about life in America on a European tour with Talented Teen USA. She studied biology for a year at Mills College, then ran away to New York to study art at Barnard College and then Columbia University. She taught for a while, often fabulating art history, and made work of her own: 1973’s Institutional Dream Series, in which she’d fall asleep in night courts and library bathrooms and then document the effect of public places on her dreams. For the following year’s Duets on Ice, she strapped on skates embedded into a block of ice and played along with her “self-playing violin” which held a speaker inside it, until the ice was a puddle.
She found success in the minimalist and conceptual art circles downtown, rubbing elbows with Philip Glass and Arthur Russell, and toured the country. But in the late 1970s, even the highest-profile performance art was still a low-paying gig. In the American artistic tradition, she decamped to Europe. “I was basically an expat,” she recently said. “[There were] more opportunities to work, particularly in Germany and Italy. Those were the places we went, and we’d be sitting around after a concert, usually in an art gallery…and people would go: How could you live in a country like the United States? How do you manage?”
One answer was to get famous. The NYC indie label 110 Records used an NEA grant to press up 5,000 7"s of a track Anderson had made with her friend and collaborator Roma Baran, in which she sang into a vocoder a song about the future. “O Superman” is a doo-wop-inspired robo-bummer, its peppy harmonizing more nuclear winter than the Beach Boys’ endless summer. With lyrics like, “So hold me Mom, in your long arms/Your petrochemical arms/Your military arms/Your electronic arms,” the track was a perfect foil of Reagan’s Father Knows Best strongman schtick.
To Anderson’s surprise, it became a hit, eventually making it to No. 2 on the UK charts after play by John Peel, and would go on to be sampled or covered by everyone from El-P to Booka Shade to Moses Sumney. On its strength, Warner Bros. offered her an eight-record deal. Venues offered stages. Anderson returned to New York and dug through the work she’d amassed over the previous decade. A few pieces, including “O Superman,” appeared on her first solo album, 1982’s Big Science. Hundreds more had circulated within her performances for years. The borders of United States Live were broad enough to welcome in all of them. How could she live in America? “It turned out to be an eight-hour answer,” she later laughed.
United States Live is operatic in scale but most of its 78 songs are three minutes or less. In some of them, Anderson shows off a bit of tech she’s fabricated: for “Small Voice,” a violin recorded onto a cassette is modulated via a speaker tucked inside her mouth. In “Reverb,” she turns her skull into a drum, amped by a microphone strung across a pair of Joe Cool sunglasses. As with much of the album, Anderson’s sight gags are missing, but the sounds stand on their own. She’s in charge, both carnival barker and star of the freak show. She’s Reagan promising ingenuity will save us, but she’s also Cassandra: In “New York Social Life,” she portrays a series of alienated hipsters with only their answering machines as shoulders to cry on. “Closed Circuits”, a love song to oil, stretches out and stays a little longer as the Voice of Authority longs for “long black streams of that dark electric light” pumping from the ground. The track ends with a brag and a threat: “We can change the dark into the light,” he purrs, “and vice versa.” The apocalypse is never far away, and it is manmade. In the terrifying “Finnish Farmers,” she recounts a confusion between grain and missile silos in a clipped, bureaucratic voice above a nauseating clatter worthy of Throbbing Gristle. And a harrowing, 11+ minute version of “O Superman” slowly melts down into wintry flute and birdsong.
Anderson keeps things moving, as if doomsday was just a bad dream in a road-trip hotel room. In hushed but confident tones, she offers travel stories with a postcard’s economy: going to France and wondering if the babies judge her fluency; going to China and watching another artist mistakenly tell locals that Americans regularly commute to Heaven. But she can’t outrun fate. In “The Language of the Future,” the Voice of Authority gets on a plane that almost crashes and meets a teenager who speaks in “a kind of high-tech lingo” he barely understands. It’s the “language of the on-again/off-again/future,” he realizes, “and it is digital.” In a moment that feels like, among other things, hope, the girl doesn’t even notice that he doesn’t understand.
United States Live charts this uncertain digital future with analog tools. Even the sole digital instrument, the Synclavier Sampler Ann DeMarinis uses to chop Anderson’s voice into soft pads of percussion, is used rather like a hand drum. Vocal samples ripple across “Blue Lagoon” as if the radioactive waves of “O Superman” have been washed clean by cool seas; an opera singer offers human reflections of them while Anderson and her band build a bed to dream in. Big Science highlight “Born, Never Asked” is an amniotic ooze of synth and strings that seems to ricochet off hand claps; live, it’s a freak-out so groovy you can understand why Spiritualized covered it over a decade later.
Even her most traditional pop songs follow strange rules. “Language Is a Virus from Outer Space,” for example, begins with a chance observation—“I saw this guy on the train, and he seemed to have gotten stuck in one of those abstract trances”—which swells into alienation: “I wanted you…and I was looking for you…but I couldn’t find you.” Paranoia strikes: “Are you talking to me,” someone asks her, “…or are you just practicing for one of those performances of yours?” She escapes into pure sound, her band rising and falling through drum rolls and sax squalls at a clip that feels out-of-sync but stays in the pocket. It’s difficult music that’s easy on the ears. Throughout, Anderson’s razor-sharp editing keeps the solos from overstaying their welcome. It also affords jokes about a Stonehenge made of wood called Woodhenge grins instead of groans.
United States Live peaks with a definitive version of “Big Science.” Arriving like a stranger into town with a song in her heart and a clippity-clop beat, Anderson sketches what she sees. Like Reagan, she’s a virtuoso with her voice, telling wild stories in matter-of-fact ways. She sees a society and its reflection. “And they all say: Hallelujah. Yodelayheehoo.” The thrill of technology. The thrall of faith. And the frontier spirit, civilizer and colonizer. For Anderson, America is awe-inspiring. It prompts wonder and dread in equal measure—which, perhaps, is the only equality to be found. Reagan’s awe was a weapon; for Anderson, it’s fuel.
You can hear the awe ignite BAM in 1983. You can hear it powering the kind of techno genderfuck that Prince harnessed in his Camille phase and which traveled over the waters to Fever Ray and SOPHIE and Planningtorock. You can hear it in Anderson’s resolve to simply, wryly, speak her mind, a practice revived today by Cassandra Jenkins and Dry Cleaning. You can hear it in the ambivalent epics of Owen Pallett and the sci-fi self-mythologizing of Janelle Monáe. Anderson’s American awe is world-building, an atlas and instruction manual, a book of fables and a songbook of new American standards. It’s a saga that begins with the patriarchy asking a female artist if she wants to go home and ends with her saying that she already knows the way. It’s an album almost five hours long that leaves you wanting more. And it offers an answer to how to live in America: feel the awe. And with it, make something of use.

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On the Philly-via-Allentown band's fourth LP, Pissed Jeans trust in the power of honesty in Matt Korvette's lyrics while dropping the musical defense mechanisms that may once have kept listeners at a distance. It's headbanging music that allows you to nod feverishly in agreement.

Honeys

If you're into Pissed Jeans' music because you relate to it, well, Matt Korvette is sorry it's come to this. Call it Commiseration Rock: Over the past decade, the Philly-via-Allentown band has occupied a very specific niche, making violent, shout-along sludge punk about situations that find men at their wimpiest and most impotent. In Pissed Jeans' songs, men (typically Korvette himself) go bald, can no longer shop happily at Whole Foods, take solace in ice cream, are beleaguered at work, and baffled by women.
Those are very real concerns that nonetheless foster a dangerous perspective from which to create art: It's basically responsible for the rash of deplorable "manxiety" sitcoms, which take the defensive and view any deviance from a false ideal of "father knows best" society as a threat to God's natural order. Typically, you'd say there's a "delicate balance" to be struck with this kind of stuff. On Honeys, Pissed Jeans' fourth and best album, they wisely make no such distinction, trusting the power of honesty in Korvette's lyrics while dropping the musical defense mechanisms that kept listeners at a distance-- it's headbanging music that allows you to nod feverishly in agreement.
So, no more seven-minute dirges about car troubles, no spoken word odes to scrapbooking. That's not to say Pissed Jeans have gone soft on us. You'll get your fill of terror by the second track, as "Chain Worker" is three minutes of free-time, squalling feedback surrounding Korvette's screams about a tortured office drone drinking until he cries blood. Otherwise, it's 10 songs (and a brief interlude) that take after the delirious opener "Bathroom Laughter" in concision and purpose. Nearly everything could pass for "the single"-- edge-of-sanity tantrums that make for great singalongs because the chorus is either an exasperated yell or just the song title. Without sacrificing visceral force, Pissed Jeans allow themselves enough versatility to keep Honeys intense and interesting throughout, fashioning a loser's history of alt.rock that honors some of the most abrasive bands to get a deal post-Nevermind; the cruel swing of Jawbox ("You're Different (In Person)"), the Melvins' mammoth plod ("Male Gaze"), Nirvana themselves going very ape ("Vain in Costume"), and of course, plenty of the Jesus Lizard's warped machismo.
The spirit of the music alone positions them as top-flight  AmRep revivalists, though the relatively clean production makes them sound a little less faithful than labelmates METZ. But this is a necessary decision, as Korvette is a frontman who is trying to communicate with the listener, not just be a part of the abrasive din. Honeys is the most concentrated and consistent display of what Korvette does best. He's reliably quotable largely because his deadpan literalism allows him to be funny without aspiring to cleverness, and lets the ridiculousness of his actions and those of others speak for themselves: a chemically processed, preservative-laden frozen meal calls itself "Healthy Choice," a stick figure family decal on a car proudly boasts one's humility, the friendly "ding" accompanying an incoming email reveals the death of a coworker, a lazy boyfriend who thinks his girl should appreciate the effort it takes for him to say "let's do it."
In the past, it was easy enough to applaud Pissed Jeans simply for being so overtly topical in a genre that rarely has much to say-- to think, "Oh, a doom metal song about getting a massage, good one." While it's clear what each song is specifically about on Honeys, whether that's online dating or cat allergies, they're all essentially dealing with the same thing in a larger sense; the guilt of recognizing the frivolity of your problems and the compounded guilt of recognizing how powerless you are over these stupid things.
"Cafeteria Food" is closest to the perfect Pissed Jeans song in terms of aligning those two threads. The hollowed-out thud of the kick drum and guitar mirrors how, on the wrong day, a walk down the hallway at work can feel like a death march. It contains the album's best one-liners; upon finding out a shithead project manager has died, Korvette feels "like I've won the Super Bowl," "like Jesus Christ, our savior," and in a line inspired by guitarist Brad Fry's viewing of Maury, "like I'm not the father." If it were just an *Office Space-*style revenge fantasy, I doubt it would hold up to many listens. There's something more devious at play; notice that Korvette doesn't screw his enemy's wife on his desk, he doesn't take a baseball bat to his fax machine, he doesn't tell him and his fantasy team to fuck off. This is a subtler, dark humor-- here's a guy whose hatred has rendered him so feeble, he's resorted to the futility of begging for divine intervention, resigned to the fact that he'll probably have to make small talk with the same guy in the lunchroom today, tomorrow, and the day after that: "Go ahead, you can use the microwave/ It's an excellent kitchen tool."
Honeys hits hard and it also stings as it fully explores how lives are driven by fear and the sad little power plays we make to clutch any bit of control. The last two songs are on seemingly different planes: On "Health Plan", Korvette refuses to take shit or (any helpful medical advice) from doctors, and later disappears into his DVD collection on "Teenage Adult". But they're both unflinching looks at how people frame their willingness to endanger their wellbeing as principles rather than serious denial. This is even more pronounced on the "relationship" songs; far from an Al Bundy homage, the laughs of "Romanticize Me" are uncomfortably triggered by the acknowledged, pathetic co-dependency where one person refuses to change, the other refuses to leave, and you sit at dinner with the couple wondering how they ever found each other attractive. "You're Different (In Person)" is similar in that it doesn't deconstruct social media so much as let it speak for its own devolutionary power; from the excitement of setting up that perfect profile to the realization that the internet allows shut-ins an even higher level of deceit, manipulation, and stunted emotions than "real life." When Korvette yells, "I thought this was meant to be fun!" he outlines the sad truth that most people aren't different in person.
The cartoonish brutality of the music is fun as hell, and since Korvette is most often mocking himself during Honeys, it doesn't come off as hectoring. This is extremely important on "Male Gaze". Most often, songs by men decrying misogyny try to speak on behalf of all men (or all women, really), and turn into condescension. It might help that "Male Gaze" takes the most caricatured, simian path musically, but Korvette simply acknowledges the unintended consequences of his actions ("It's when a smile becomes a stare/ And it starts to burn") and apologizes. He doesn't ask for or assume forgiveness, he doesn't place himself on a pedestal and he doesn't indict his entire gender so you might think more highly of him. Korvette artlessly mutters, "I know I'm no angel/ But I'm trying to kill it," admitting to progress in a way that's more powerful than feigning perfection.
Pissed Jeans can often be mistaken for a misanthropic band, especially since Hope for Men and King of Jeans came equipped with enough self-sabotage to keep their underdog status intact. But when I call it "Commiseration Rock", it's because Honeys focuses on dealing with other people to an extent that's extremely rare. Not "how to deal with people"-- Honeys is thankfully not a treatise, not a moral code, not a series of op-ed pieces trying to convert you to Korvette's point of view, and it acknowledges that the zero-sum games of "fuck the man" punk idealism don't work for most people who have real jobs and bills. It's just a kickass rock record that presents Korvette in a way most of us can relate to, a guy trying to blow off steam after another exhausting, barely successful attempt to not be an asshole one day at a time.


The former hyperpop star’s new album is refreshingly warm and musical, characterized by an unvarnished left-field funkiness lacking in her online contemporaries.

quinn

quinn must have whiplash. She’s spent her short career madly oscillating between extremes—only a few months into the pandemic lockdown, she mushroomed from having a few thousand fans to being crowned hyperpop’s forever-queen. But after that sudden assault of unwanted expectations, she disappeared and deleted her old music on SoundCloud. Then, equally abruptly, she returned with a debut album, swiftly followed by a mixtape she said was made during the worst period of her life. Through it all, she’s remained holed up in her bedroom, creating at least nine projects across her many pseudonyms in the last two years.
It’s easy to forget she’s only 17—a high schooler. But after all that tumult, quinn may have finally broken free. “I’m in a new place/I’m in a new light/I’m where I’ve always wanted to be,” she sings on “pdwnth” from her new album quinn, her voice curling when she says “be” like honeysuckle bending toward the sun. She’s never sounded more serene. Gliding over soft bass guitar and electric piano, she sings blithely about being faded and dehydrated, about being the shit and knowing it: “Who is she?/Bitch, I’m me/The first prodigy you ever seen, seventeen.”
quinn is her least hyperactive and glossy project to date. It arrives at a peculiar moment, when the internet music scene she came from feels increasingly overrun with lookalikes deploying the same ultra-shiny synths, same Main Character song structures, same windswept emo mewls. Against that context of done-to-death hyperpop, quinn is refreshingly warm and musical, full of little confessions and self-reflections that don’t monopolize your attention. Instead of pop hooks or electronic explosions, there’s bright guitar and tight yet relaxed drums. It has an unvarnished left-field funkiness that’s hard to pinpoint, similar to but not quite like Toro y Moi’s dissipated grooves, Slauson Malone’s sound-mosaics, or Dean Blunt’s genre-flummoxing anarch-art. It almost feels outside of time, with ’70s echoes—jazz-fusion, a lumbering funk rhythm, soulful singing—rubbing against chopped-up sound shards and processed vocals.
quinn produced, wrote, and arranged everything here, an impulse clearly aligned with her desire to be beholden to no vision except her own. To that point, her releases don’t bend to coherent shapes; they feel more like a dramatic disgorging from a peripatetic teen too curious to keep it all in. Recall how her debut, drive-by lullabies, skittered between twee pop and ambient, glitch-rap and facemelting bass. Or peep this year’s i’m going insane, an unrestrained torrent of draft-dump aural adventures from serrated rap to spoken-word SoundCloud poems to ultra-dreamy sample flips. quinn has the same thrillingly unscripted energy as before but this time it’s more focused, like flipbooking through someone’s brain. Smooth rapping and rhythm loops crash into noise; an almost tear-eliciting apology to a friend dissolves into a baleful bass rampage where quinn talks about invading an unnamed man’s house and stealing his identity, without proffering any explanation or context for any of those actions.
This album is slightly tighter than her debut—16 songs in just 32 minutes—which makes it feel dizzying and disjointed at times, especially during the middle, when the creepypasta-core bass mystery “i see you” spirals into radiantly quaint indie and then a vaporous void of synth. “food 4 thot” is maybe the tape’s weirdest. It microwaves a sample of a man rambling about the fifth dimension over a synth that evokes an anthropomorphic trumpet slumped on a bench, blowing morosely into the dusk, its plaintive wails buried under the scuffle of evening traffic. The wide sweep of textures on display mirrors the breadth of emotions—there are moments of frustration, elation, and affection, although most prevalent is earnest self-confidence. “warm and fuzzy” spotlights quinn as she ponders why she doesn’t feel comfortable showing her music to others, which is common in internet music scenes, where artists often trade files on Discord. Reaching the conclusion that “all you can really do is know yourself,” quinn decides to have fun and not “give a fuck if it’s ass.” The song ends with a silly, sweet detuned synth—the sounds agree with her.
Listening to quinn, I can’t help but contrast its more self-assured tone with some of the artist’s earliest music, dominated as it was by brutal throbs of cold loneliness. It was a feeling many of us experienced during the early pandemic. Yet maybe because of quinn’s lack of an adult’s emotion-guarding filter, the melancholy felt so much more visceral in her young voice: “It must be nice to have something to live for," she cried plainly on “mbn,” one of her first hits, a touching song about having no friend group and feeling left out. “I just want something to live and strive for.”
Fast forward two and a half years, and it feels almost like she’s answering her past self on quinn when she hurls commanding lines like, “I’m exclusive, motherfucker” and “You ain’t never, in your life, heard some shit like this.” She’s still working through anxieties like impostor syndrome and sharpening her sound, further removing herself from the rapidly homogenizing center of hyperpop. But now there’s a sense of earned optimism, of a better future to be had. quinn has a plan, she promises us on the luxurious, top-down-breezy highlight “please don’t waste my time.” The road ahead is newly smooth; all the whiplash that came with her twisty rise is fading in the rearview.


On singer-songwriter Zachary Cale's fourth album, Blue Rider, you're forcefully reminded that acoustic solo music is only as simple as you make it. It's a misty, gorgeous collection, offering a space that feels wonderful to roam around in.

Blue Rider

The first thing beckoning you towards Blue Rider is its atmosphere—spacious, cool, distant. Zachary Cale's mesmerizing finger-picking, drawing on open-string drone and country blues tunings, wanders restlessly around a clean, well-lit place of a mix, synths humming like 3am refrigerators and chiming guitars confusing your sense of middle distance. It is a misty, gorgeous record, a space that feels wonderful to roam around in.
The second is the delicacy and exquisite loneliness of Cale's guitar playing. He has said in interviews that he'd rather not be aligned with folk music—"To me, folk music is something sacred, something that people today don’t have any business singing," he told the blog Underneath This in March—but the virtues of his playing are folk virtues, especially the ability to serve as his own rhythm section. Every one of Blue Rider's songs  appears to feature at least three guitarists simultaneously; it's all Cale, working live. You are forcefully reminded, listening the counter-layers of something like "Hold Fast" or "Wayward Son", that acoustic solo music is only as simple as you make it.
At the center of the crystalline tangle sits Cale, a singer-songwriter who's been hiding in plain sight for awhile*—Blue Rider* is his fourth album. He's less quizzically arch than Destroyer, less cryptically moody than Cass McCombs. But there is a similar inscrutable poetry in his music, and the impassive Blue Rider is his most beguiling collection. He has some of Bejar's vocal timbre and some of McCombs's tilted-dog's-head relationship to language: The way that McCombs asked, teasingly, "What does it mean to be a man?" repeatedly on "Big Wheel" is the way that Cale sings lines like "Lover, for you my heart beats strong." He speaks them haltingly, as if he is testing the words in his mouth as much as he is puzzling over their meanings.
Cale sings these lines through a half-closed mouth, his consonants blurring into the soft curves of the sound, which means that a wry line like "Well, the past is still the past, he can visit anytime/ Nothing's really changed except a few road signs" ("Hold Fast") might initially slide past you unnoticed. But Cale's imagery flashes sharp and dreamlike across his songs once you tune to it—"Shadows walk across a jagged sky," he sings on "Hangman's Letters", a dark, alarming image. On "Noise Of Welcome", he muses "What does it mean to die in my dreams?" It's a question with a day-tripper's ring to it, but Cale has built the perfect environment for languorous thoughts like this. Blue Rider is short—eight songs, 35 minutes—but it slows everything down around it while's playing, coaxing half-formed feelings out of their corners and giving them space to exist.


Working with cello, digital processing, and field recordings, the New York composer creates a gripping ode to the dynamism of nature and the beauty of transformation.

Forest Scenes

On stage, experimental cellist MIZU handles her instrument more like a dance partner than a hunk of curved wood. She stands, knees slightly bent, twirling and swaying her cello by the neck, occasionally stretching out her foot to set off an effects pedal. “It’s almost like a ballet,” MIZU told New Sounds host John Schaefer last year, suggesting that her expressive maneuvering of the cello, and her ability to undulate alongside it, might be stifled if she sat and played in a more conventional manner. The classically trained musician can’t help but tweak tradition: While studying at Juilliard, MIZU was more intrigued by modernist composers Elliot Carter and Milton Babbitt than wigged titans like Mozart and Bach. She ultimately grew frustrated “playing the same Beethoven sonata that 1,000 other cellists across the world play with equal facility,” as she recalled to Schaefer.
Meeting guitarist and composer Rachika Nayar in Brooklyn’s queer party scene cracked open new possibilities for MIZU after college. Nayar taught her how to warp her instrument with electronics. On her 2023 debut, Distant Intervals, MIZU tracked cello phrases in her closet before layering, looping, and manipulating them digitally. On her new LP Forest Scenes, MIZU inverts the technique, composing high, shining arches of cello around digital dissonance and field recordings that capture the chatter and roar of the woods. Teeming with texture—whispered phrases, dry foliage, dial-up distortion—the gripping 37-minute instrumental is an ode to transformation. Frequently gorgeous, at times unsettling, Forest Scenes is constantly in flux.
MIZU was initiating a process of gender transition while writing Forest Scenes, and elements of growth and change are ingrained within her pieces. On the slithering “Pavane,” tremulous strands of cello twist together like vines in a time-lapse video, while a convention of birds confabs in the trees. Though distinct, these elements seem to sprout from the same ecosystem, and each additional detail enriches the landscape, be it belching bowed strings, plucked melodies, or staccato breath darting around the perimeter.
On Distant Intervals, MIZU ornamented her neoclassical playing with electronic flourishes. But the jungle racket and harsh digital passages of Forest Scenes—which were recorded before MIZU even picked up a bow—are structurally and thematically vital to each song. On “Pump,” crisp twigs and leaves snap underfoot before yielding to MIZU’s insistent, almost nagging loops of cello. As the piece crescendos and tapers, the forest footsteps reemerge, their crunching turned to sloshing, as if entering a shallow brook. This slight detail suggests an entire journey.
MIZU’s range as a composer, producer, and player feels far more developed on her second album. She can make her strings bellow like a bass clarinet (“Rinse”) or tremble in a high-pitched vibrato (“Flutter”). Her handling of software feels more fearless as well; on “Enter,” she dispatches eerie snippets of croaking, sizzling, and spurts of percussion before introducing any melody. Commissioning drum samples from New York composer Concrete Husband, MIZU has also crafted her most jarring piece yet: “prphtbrd” sounds like tech breakdown incarnate. Picture an arcade full of malfunctioning Atari kiosks. MIZU’s placement of “prphtbrd” just before the poignant 11-minute closer “Realms of Possibility” might be a comment on the constant threat of collapse—and the beauty of resurrection.


The fullest solo album yet from the Big Thief guitarist is an earnest ode to getting lost.

Haunted Mountain

“Cyclades” is the sort of song Buck Meek could spend the rest of his life writing. A rollicking country-rock rambler, it opens with a verse about Meek’s father crashing a motorcycle into an elk and ends with his parents magically surviving a head-on collision with a truck. There’s no connection between those stories, aside from being unbelievable—something even Meek mentions: “They said, ‘You made that all up’/When I retold their story recently.” The chorus provides no commentary other than, “There’s too many stories to remember.” Meek isn’t throwing up his hands in frustration, but expressing a sense of wonder at how many experiences make up a life. It’s easy to imagine him adding new stories and new verses to “Cyclades” as he gets older and gathers more experiences.
Meek, who is better known as the guitarist for Big Thief than as a solo artist, specializes in a philosophical strain of songwriting, one that is still personal but not necessarily confessional. His songs aren’t merely vessels for stories, but prompts for reminiscences, tools to stir up the dust in the darker corners of his mind. Haunted Mountain, his third solo album, is full of songs about getting lost and finding yourself, about the pleasure of disorientation and the new perspective reorientation can bring. He gets lost in memories, in daydreams. He gets lost on a mountain, in the eyes and kisses of a lover. Meek sings the title track like he’s lost his way and is happier for it: “Now that I live here on this haunted mountain/I know I’m never coming down.” He co-wrote the song with fellow Texan Jolie Holland, who was inspired by Mount Shasta in northern California, but really that haunted mountain could be anywhere in “this green land.”
Meek’s guitar is always closely attuned to vocals, whether his own or Adrianne Lenker’s. He rarely calls attention to himself, but he values texture and complementary rhythms over big riffs or lightning licks. In the past his songs have rambled, mostly foregoing verse-chorus-verse in favor of stream-of-consciousness. Perhaps due to Holland’s contributions, Haunted Mountain is his fullest and most structured album. He and his band amble through these songs with… well, not more purpose or focus, which are anathema to getting lost. But listen to the coda of “Didn’t Know You Then,” which stretches out before losing its way. There’s a joy in the aimlessness of that ending, in not knowing where the music is taking them.
Meek has described Haunted Mountain as a collection of love songs, about half of which he wrote about his relationship with the person who became his wife. He can be insightful in this mode, as on “Secret Side,” when he realizes he must let her grieve rather than comfort her. In its direct expression of a hard truth, the song sounds indebted to Big Thief’s recent tourmate, Lucinda Williams. Elsewhere, his sentiments are sweet yet overly scripted, which makes it hard to get truly lost in the music. “Paradise” sounds like it’s based on a bad pickup line: “Tell me about living in the afterlife,” he sings, because he sees “heaven in your eyes.” On “Didn’t Know You Then,” Meek maps out their relationship in kisses: “Our first kiss felt like home/With tears in our eyes/And now, one thousand kisses later/Each one feels like the first time.” It’s dreamy and romantic, but it doesn’t sound like an actual lived experience or even an unbelievable story. It sounds like something you’d hear in a love song.


For the last decade, Glenn Jones has taken a craftsperson's approach to the guitar and the banjo, issuing a sterling but rarely surprising string of records that find him telling stories and sharing vulnerabilities sans bells or whistles, his voice or his band. Fleeting, his latest, feels familiar, comfortable, welcome.

Fleeting

The network of exceptional solo acoustic guitarists that emerged during the last decade has proven to be a restless bunch. In recent years, William Tyler went full electric, even recruiting a full backing band. Steve Gunn has morphed into an accomplished singer-songwriter, now fronting an outfit that resides in the borderlands of cosmic country and psychedelic rock. Cian Nugent sings these days, as does James Blackshaw. Six Organs of Admittance turned toward folk-rock and, more recently, savagely electric systems music. This pattern isn't surprising or without precedent, of course—Fahey, Bull, Basho, and Kottke never sat still with six unamplified strings, either.
Not so with the guitarist, scholar, and erstwhile bandleader Glenn Jones: For the last decade, Jones, several decades older than the lot that's emerged in the new millennium, has taken a craftsperson's approach to the guitar and the banjo, issuing a sterling but rarely surprising string of records that find him telling stories and sharing vulnerabilities sans bells or whistles, his voice or his band. It's as though he cycled through enough zany ideas during his time in the wild group Cul de Sac for a lifetime. He is now the six-string analogue of The New Yankee Workshop's Norm Abram, more obsessed with making work that will last than work that will momentarily stun.
Every two or three years since his solo debut in 2004, Jones has issued another set of quiet reflections that, taken together, suggest stacks of letters mailed from an old friend—thoughts on what has hurt him and what has given him hope, where he's been and what he's learned. On 2013's My Garden State, written while he cared for his aging and ailing mother at home, listeners shared in his sweet sadness; on the new Fleeting, dedicated to his late mother, he reflects on her life and death, the wonder of a newborn baby, and shifts in the season and scenery. It all feels familiar, comfortable, welcome.
If technique is your thing, Fleeting, like all Jones records, is a master class. His tunings are counterintuitive and mesmerizing; his use of partial capos and muted strings is novel and intriguing. But to Jones' great credit, those only feel like tools for telling stories. “Mother's Day” is a bittersweet ode to memories and mortality. When Jones lets the high strings sparkle, he seems to smile at some fond recollection; elsewhere, he digs deep into low, moody chords, as if sighing at the fact that those moments are stuck forever in the past. The album's finale, “June to Soon, October All Over,” is brilliantly composed, with the harmonies between the strings shimmering like late-afternoon sunlight on a lake and the slowly building structure suggesting a slowly opening flower. Jones slides smoothly down the guitar's neck and picks every nuance from every chord, but this feels more like a confession than a demonstration.
Indeed, every song on Fleeting carries its own emotional resonance. Written for an infant, the banjo miniatures “Cléo Awake” and “Cléo Asleep” are tender lullabies, with friendly, staccato phrases that seem to mimic a child's guileless laughter. Taken together, they barely break the three-minute mark, but the brevity feels like an ellipsis, an affirmation of the child's infinite possibilities. The slow, staggering “In Durance Vile” is Jones at his most irascible. He nods toward the blues as he slides between half-muted chords, and he slinks in cycles of notes that seem suspended in the doldrums. For four minutes, Jones' quiet despair becomes your own, his worry your worry. Then, the banjo of “Cléo Awake” trickles in, and everything is right with and bright in the world again.
All told, Fleeting isn't as distinct or as instant as its predecessors, particularly Jones' 2011 masterpiece, The Wanting. But as Jones' collection builds, making astonishing albums seems to be less and less the point. Instead, Jones is chronicling the stories of his life and sharing them in an honest, open way, as if he's invited you to pull up a chair for a conversation by the fire. You get to know him not as a technician but as a person, perfectly content to get better at expressing himself with five or six strangely tuned strings.


Inspired by a love of fantasy and cartoons, the rapper’s debut full-length is simultaneously playful and sincere, confident and anxious.

Live on Ice

Animation offers the freedom to escape the self, to explore one’s contours from the outside. Last year, across three EPs—tobi lou and the Moon, tobi lou and the Loop, and tobi lou and the Juice—the Chicago-raised, LA-based rapper tobi lou strove to inhabit an animated universe. Each release featured a cartoon version of lou on its cover. He wrote songs inspired by the fantasy series Adventure Time and Sailor Moon. Even the glittery plastic stars lou often wears at the corners of his eyes seem like remnants of a cartoon alter-ego transferred into the real world.
On his debut album Live on Ice, lou’s suspended reality manifests in songs about feeling caught in the middle: between youth and maturity, playfulness and sincerity, confidence and anxiety. He works from a toolkit of synthetic, ringing tones whose constancy counters the album’s unwieldy length. But across 21 tracks tinged with the diaristic influence of SoundCloud rap, his wavering sometimes devolves into ambivalence. When the occasional string swell or slow guitar strum emerges, the combination suggests pause music, the kind a video game avatar idles to while the player is away.
But the ambient instrumentation can work when paired with lou’s stream-of-consciousness flows. On “I Was Sad Last Night I’m OK Now,” he repeats the titular lyric and asks: “You ever been so hungry you just lay down?/You ain’t even eat, you just went to sleep, just so you could dream about some takeout?” Times may be lean now, but lou’s twinkling synths and conversational delivery are a simple lesson in feeling better tomorrow. There are several such moments when he allows listeners to see past the fantasy and into his real world. On “That Old Nu-Nu,” he confides, “I’m told that my mother hates rappers,” before addressing his mother directly: “Mama, I hope this isn’t too rapper-ish.” It’s a playful moment with an aura of real significance: He just wants to make his mom proud.
Most of the time, though, lou sounds far more unsure of his abilities. On opener “100 Degrees,” he wonders: “I don’t know if it’s really me talking or if it’s just a ventriloquist.” Later, on “Berlin/Westside,” he promises, “I’m still me, just rearranged.” In spite of his self-awareness, Live on Ice frequently lingers on the wrong side of the line between tongue-in-cheek and cheesy. “Humpty Dumpty” aims for OutKast’s quirky panache and lands on bad egg puns; “Like My Mom” strikes an uncomfortable balance between adoring and overzealous. Narrating a romantic rejection, lou sings: “She tried to call me ugly, but she just sounded dumb/’Cause goddamn, I look good like my mom.” The album is weakest when he fails to laugh at himself.
“Orange Reprise” splits the difference between sincerity and corniness. When the track begins, lou is struggling to ward off sadness, rapping about feeling “insubstantial” and changed for the worse (“Why’d I stop rockin’ flannels?”). Framed as a tribute to Frank Ocean’s genre-defying power, “Orange Reprise” has grand aspirations. But then comes a slide whistle solo, and an outro that sounds like a Wii theme music version of “Pure Imagination,” from the Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory soundtrack. When tobi lou manages to make the two styles coalesce, they complement each other well. When he can’t, the fantasy seems out of reach.


The TDE rapper’s sixth album is a daring feat that finds the sweet spot between comfort and anguish. It’s the rawest and most adventurous music of his career.

Blue Lips

Schoolboy Q spends “Cooties,” the eighth track on his sixth studio album, Blue Lips, marveling at the dimensions of the box he’s put himself in. “I know the feeling of being trapped from all the things that you built,” he yelps before ping-ponging between the spoils and troubles of the last 13 years. He’s working through trauma while dealing with haters; relishing the “house on the hill” where his daughters play soccer and he puffs ganja in the vestibule, but also worrying about school shootings and memories of betrayal. These are the nightmares of the outside world for Black folks folding into the creature comforts afforded by his rap stardom, and the paranoia and pride fight for space in the staggered elegance of Q’s delivery over scuzzy bass and drum slaps. As a whole, Blue Lips viciously prods at this sweet spot between comfort and anguish.
If 2019’s CrasH Talk was the kickback where Q leisurely took stock of his position in life, then Blue Lips is a thumping raucous night out with the homies chased with a shot of existential dread. The album’s title refers to the phenomenon of being shocked into speechlessness, and over a decade into his journey, he remains shocked at all the fans, accolades, and prestige he’s racked up. But instead of the occasionally maudlin poolside reflection of CrasH Talk, Blue Lips fully embraces the dissonance of pairing the morose with the manic. Q sounds like he needs to get all his ideas out in case he won’t have the chance to do it again. Every side of the California rapper—the former Hoover Street Crip, the iced-out spitter, the horny golf-playing father of two—is given room to stretch and ruminate and stomp his way across the rawest and most adventurous music of his career.
More than any other Top Dawg Entertainment artist, Q has thrived on hairpin musical turns. 2014’s Oxymoron and 2016’s Blank Face LP, in particular, are constantly molting, revealing a delicate ear for sequencing that brings variety while helping the experience stick to the ribs. He may not reach the conceptual heights of a Kendrick, but he doesn’t need to. He’s supremely gifted at balancing party jams and grizzled storytelling tracks with cinematic flair. Blue Lips keeps that structure while being bolder and weirder. Songs like the Rico Nasty-featuring “Pop” end abruptly and smash cut into the next without warning; songs that have smoother mass-appeal tendencies grind up against unvarnished soul loops and trippy drum ’n bass freakouts. The slinking “Movie” is ceded entirely to LA rapper AzChike, who turns it into a creaking Cali street rap funhouse. Intro track “Funny Guy,” with its trilling flutes and technicolor guitars and choir, sounds more like an Avalanches B-side than anything a disciple of Kurupt or Suga Free might touch, yet here Q is, crooning about money bags, sex, and kicking rowdy fans out of venues. There’s a bracing, madcap quality to Blue Lips, proof that he still knows how to surprise listeners by folding off-kilter influences into head-nodders and rocket fuel.
Q spends the album shooting out sparks on the sides of the rails without ever letting the train tip over. Centerpiece “oHio” has its own three-act structure that flirts with the epic scale of prog. A grainy funk beat wafts in for the first third, as Q hints at near-death experiences before cutting to flexes about his AmEx and getting head in Paris. Just as quickly, he’s slinging jokes (“Nigga, your bitch got a negative ass!”) on a fast-paced synth beat that skirts into lounge-jazz territory where he and Freddie Gibbs trade barbs about the pitfalls of fame and marriage over a piano and saxophone waltz. All of this happens in the span of five minutes. The rush of styles, tones, and themes would overwhelm a lesser artist and render the whole song a broken, soupy mess. But Q holds court, grinning his way through the peaks and valleys.
The sheer amount of modes Q is capable of switching between remains astounding. But Blue Lips never feels gaudy or overly concerned with elegance. None of it sounds made for the golf course or for soirées at the beach house. These are aggressive, revealing, and occasionally messy songs about the intersection of success and the underlying hurt from a sordid past it’s often used to conceal. For every kick-in-the-door anthem like the cop-blasting “Pig Feet,” or the giddy look-at-me-now-ness of “Foux,” Q will spend a track like “Germany ‘86”—named for where and when he was born—reminiscing on his father abandoning his family and the street life he inherited as a result.
Ever the blunt lyricist, Q’s writing has become more curt across the board, making every flex about jewelry land with as much impact as probes into his self-confidence. A song like “Blueslides” is a microcosm of Q’s writing at its most economical, bending light wordplay about depression and desperation around wilting piano and trumpets. Its second verse features several bars chastizing listeners for turning their backs on Kanye West, crudely chalking up his last half-decade of controversy to a growing indifference toward mental health advocacy. Though it’s an oversimplification of many complicated issues (and plenty of ignorance and bigotry), the hurt behind the admission is real. In context, the bars highlight one of the album’s, and Q’s, greatest concerns: the struggles of having everything in the world and still not being able to outrun your problems.
Near the beginning of “Movie,” there’s a brief vocal sample taken from Ralph Bakshi’s 1975 cult classic Coonskin, and that film’s imperfect candy-colored bacchanalia might be the closest analogue for Blue Lips’s brand of chaos. Bakshi’s goal was to bring the pains, pleasures, and racism of 1970s inner cities to life in lurid detail. While Q’s ambitions aren’t that lofty, the album’s frenetic pacing and writing fit the mold all the same. A world’s worth of regret and fun is squeezed into just under an hour, and aside from a few hiccups—Devin Malik’s opening verse on the otherwise exhilarating “Back n Love” is a particularly harsh speed bump—hardly a second is wasted. It doesn’t just push Q past the crossroads he was at pre-pandemic, it reaffirms him as one of mainstream rap’s most engaging and daring stylists. Few MCs, on his label or elsewhere, are capable of firing in so many different directions and hitting this many targets at once without sounding out of their depth, but Q corrals the ups and downs of his lavish lifestyle into a deliriously entertaining joyride.


Widowspeak take bits and pieces of rock, folk, and country history to make a pop Americana sound that feels antique. Whereas their first two records were dark and haunted, All Yours is all lightly shaken maracas, dreamy acoustic melodies, and getting so stoned the world feels like velvet.

All Yours

Widowspeak unabashedly and openly take bits and pieces of rock, folk, and country history to make a pop Americana sound that feels antique. The band’s last full-length, Almanac, showcased a lively, psychedelic strain of '70s rock'n'roll, and their following EP, The Swamps, was a bluesy, banjo-plucked ode to the Southeast. But Widowspeak's third record, All Yours, seems to strip away the group's hyper-referential past sound to something more sparse. All Yours is committed to a sunbaked, blissed-out pop rock sensibility that is noticeably lighter than their previous work. There’s no big concept here or specific inspiration behind it other than making something that sounds pretty and easy to listen to. And where there first two records were dark and haunted, filled with Morricone-style guitars, All Yours is all lightly shaken maracas, dreamy acoustic melodies, and getting so stoned the world feels like velvet.
Which isn’t to say this record is all feel-good music to string daisy chains together. Singer Molly Hamilton has said that for All Yours the band wanted to focus for the first time more on "writing songs about what we’re thinking," and you can hear that in the lyrics. From blaming the stars on "Cosmically Aligned", to being too young on "Girls", to not being able to read the lines in a palm well enough to know on "My Baby’s Gonna Carry On", the band runs vaguely through all the reasons why love can go to the wayside. The rollicking "Dead Love (So Still)" is a Fleetwood Mac wannabe, its jangly guitar almost masking the record’s most devastating inquiry. "Dead love, you’re so still," Hamilton sings. "Are you just sleeping in?"
There’s a sort of rolling movement to every track on All Yours, partly owed to Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas’ steady and unfussy guitar work but mostly to their songwriting, which lays heavy on fleeing scenes. It's a road trip album, less for the heartbroken crowd and more for the heartbreakers (and every runaway and hitchhiker ditching a promise.) "You know that I’m always worried that I can never pay my debt," Earl Thomas sings for the first time on "Borrowed World". "Always feel like I’m running and they haven’t caught me yet."
Though it’s clear the band is refining their songwriting and getting more personal in the process, the record feels wilted instrumentally compared to their previous releases. All Yours has its gorgeous moments, but when you hear the band’s older tracks like Almanac’s "The Dark Age" or The Swamps' "Smoke and Mirrors", you have to wonder where that fiery spark went. Seems like Widowspeak is ghosting from something more than just an unpaid debt or an old flame, and it might be a step backward instead of forward for the duo.


On his latest album, the singer-songwriter documents the tumultuous months of late spring and early summer 2020, occupying a sweet spot at the intersection of folk, punk, country, and Americana.

Alive in the Hot Zone

Every artist unlucky enough to release an album in 2020 has faced an unenviable choice about whether or not to address a certain elephant in the room, whether or not they consider themselves to be a “political” outfit. They can either try to ignore the horrors of the current administration and chance coming off as out-of-touch or ignorant, or choose to tackle the Trump era head-on, and risk feeling dated after the next geopolitical shift (remember all those Rock Against Bush compilations? Me neither, and I was their target audience). For heartland folk-punk singer-songwriter Austin Lucas, though, it was never even a question. He even went a step further by choosing to document a specific section of a specific year—namely, the late spring and early summer months of 2020, when the initial burst of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter uprising spurred by the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor captivated the nation.
It was a move that felt entirely in character for Lucas, whose sound occupies a sweet spot at the intersection of folk, punk, country, and Americana. The Bloomington, Indiana-born artist has long sported a “This machine kills zombies” sticker on his guitar in a clear reference to Woody Guthrie’s warning to fascists, and is open about his own anti-fascist politics, as well as his background in the DIY punk scene. The punk delegation has historically tended to excel at this particular task ever since the Reagan era ushered in a generation of vital hardcore (Anti-Flag’s rollicking, venomous 20/20 Vision is an excellent contemporary example), and Lucas released an anti-fascist anthem of his own with “Already Dead,” the first single off his new album, Alive in the Hot Zone.
It has a poppy, anthemic feel that belies its sobering lyrical content. In just over three minutes, Lucas storyboards out the frustrating trajectory of slowly losing a loved one to the lure of fascist rhetoric, opening with the weary entreaty “Let’s talk, though we have nothing to say.” There are shades of Bruce Springsteen’s hangdog working-class malaise (as well as his stadium-filling sensibilities) tucked amidst the peppy chords, and Lucas nails the exasperated futility of a familiar conversation that was never going to go anywhere anyway.
“Already Dead” is one of ten songs that offer direct commentary from the troubadour’s perch in Mainz, Germany (where he unexpectedly found himself weathering the pandemic after a trip abroad turned into an extended lockdown). While most of the album keeps to an even keel, the dystopian “American Pyre” comes barreling in with a woozy surf-rock vibe, and the twangy, nostalgic “Shaking” was made for playing in a busted-up van on a trip through big sky country. In other tracks, he slows it down, as on “The Truth Is Supposed to Hurt,” a poignant slice of Rust Belt gothic Americana, or the sweet, lonesome dirge of  “Anyone.” Lucas’ voice reaches unexpected heights on the delicate album closer “Holy Sparrow,” showcasing the upper reaches of an elastic vocal range that serves him well throughout but shines extra bright when he pushes it outside of his grittier comfort zone. (There must be something special about sparrows, because country icon Dolly Parton has been known to exhibit the same tendency).
Though it was made in the midst of a deadly pandemic while its creator was stranded far from home and worrying about the fascist creep at home, Alive in the Hot Zone is more than just a diary of the plague year. It’s an emotional plea for empathy from someone who’s weathered more than a few runs of bad luck and heartbreak himself, as well as a call for political action. Lucas has been in this particular game for over two decades, and has used that time wisely in honing his sound and carving out a unique niche. Americana, punk, and folk all attract their fair share of misfits, but there’s no one quite like him.

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A new reissue shines a light on the Nigerian session player, who brought his Afro-rock heat and slick funk to British experiments with West African music in the ’70s.

Son of Africa

Musician Remi Kabaka, a Ghanaian-born Nigerian, first landed in London in the early 1960s, flourishing in the expat community’s Soho club scene and performing at joints like Club Afrique, where African bands rubbed shoulders with London’s writers, artists, and record collectors. Kabaka’s reputation as a percussionist and keyboard player brought him into hip circles; by the summer of 1969, he was flanking the Rolling Stones at Hyde Park for a elongated performance of “Sympathy for the Devil,” with an estimated crowd of as many as half a million.
At the time, veterans of Britain’s ’60s abduction of American blues and rock‘n’roll were seeking something new, something raw, which they found in West African sounds like Kabaka’s. He accepted session work with Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker’s Air Force, and Paul McCartney and Wings on the song “Bluebird” (Kabaka recorded his part in London, despite McCartney’s sojourn to Lagos to create most of Band on the Run). It was all enough to convince Island Records—perhaps seeking a fresh international voice to emulate the success it had with Bob Marley—to invest in a Kabaka solo record. As things turned out, Son of Africa, released in 1976, struggled to infiltrate a Britain infatuated with reggae and dub. But newly reissued by BBE, it remains a killer blend of Afro-rock, funk, psych, and soul, one that showcases this noted session man was ready to step out and lead a band.
For the recording, Kabaka called upon friends like Winwood; the Wailers’ Junior Kerr on guitar; bassist Jerome Rimson, who would go on to work with Van Morrison; and future Can collaborator Rebop Kwaku Baah on congas, among others. Yet from its first track, Son of Africa leaves no doubt about who the title refers to (though it possibly twins as an allusion to a prominent British abolitionist group of the 18th century). The song that bears Kabaka’s name is steeped in the sound of 1970s Nigeria, with chants of “Kabaka” and “kachunga,” which means creative and happy, punctuated by dynamic horns and funky guitars. “Wake up, do it, the new Afrobeat,” Kabaka sings ardently, his drumming crisp and propulsive. “Wake up, shake it, the funky, funky beat.” When things are this fun, lyrics are often best kept simple.
Son of Africa features the polished production values that many Afro-rock records recorded in the UK had at the time. Even popular West African artists like the Funkees and Joni Haastrup were entering British studios during this period and coming out with something a little more slick—a little more palatable for Western ears, perhaps—than some of the raw, fiery recordings they’d forged in their homeland. “Aqueba Masaaba” has disco-era guitars, pristine keys, and a rubbery bass. This sleeker style might not be how Lagos loyalists prefer things, but it’s impossible to deny that Kabaka’s funk workouts generate significant heat. Just feel the pop and snap of “Meteorite,” a sophisticated, high-end funk jam with brass solos, natty drum rolls, and cool harmonies.
The album is enamored with the angel-dusted sounds of ’70s American psych-funk too, tripping the strobe light fantastic on tunes like “Sure Thing.” The spirits of Bootsy Collins and Sly Stone circle the carefree, cosmic slop of “Future of a 1000 Years,” and it’s easy to picture Kabaka going into the booth to record the vocals to “New Reggae Funk” after listening to Curtis Mayfield’s There’s No Place Like America Today on repeat.
Son of Africa, of course, didn’t make Kabaka famous. He released a couple more solo albums under the name Aderemi Kabaka and continued to rack up sessions and touring credits with the likes of Paul Simon. These days, his London-based son, Remi Kabaka Jr., who provided the voice of Russel Hobbs in Gorillaz, also carries on his name and legacy. And now, this reissue has arrived to ensure his father’s position as an early innovator in blending Anglo-American and West African sounds is set in stone.


Amid the humble Florida rapper’s croons and raps about life and pain, there’s a unique voice that’s starting to emerge.

Blessed, I Guess

Lil Poppa probably wouldn’t mind if he didn’t get any more popular. From his music, you can tell that the Jacksonville rapper isn’t too interested in photo-ops with Johnny Dang or shopping sprees at Neiman Marcus. Those are just distractions. Mainly, you’re left with images of Poppa sitting alone in his room, fanning away smoke while praying that he can make his grandmother proud and hoping that the pain goes away. The glossy, fast-paced lifestyle of a rap superstar isn’t very appealing to Poppa. Rapping is more of a passion that became a job—there’s no doubt that he loves it, but at the same time, it’s what he has to do to make sure that his siblings and cousins get everything they want.
Over the 41-minute runtime of Blessed, I Guess, Poppa’s constantly second-guessing himself and asking: Am I doing enough? There’s no amount of drugs, money, or sex that can bring back his lost ones, but that doesn’t stop him from trying to ease his hurt. Poppa buries himself in work to make others happy; personal happiness feels all too distant for him. It’s only when his little brother tells him to “stop being humble” he realizes that with how much he’s spent on his siblings, he could’ve treated himself to something too.
Of the various schools “pain song”—NBA Youngboy’s blunt revenge letters, Rod Wave’s bluesy tales of struggle, and Rylo Rodriguez/NoCap’s punchline-heavy poetry—Poppa’s style most closely resembles Polo G’s clear-headed, meditative storytelling. It’s best on display with the twangy guitar of “It’s Alright Again” and somber “Chosen One, Pt. 2,” where every line might as well be followed with a dejected shrug. “My dawg hit my phone and said he losing hope/I say just stick to the plan, he say he losing focus/I be feeling the same way, like, will they ever notice,” he laments. It’s a style that incidentally courts rap traditionalists because of its emphasis on pensive songwriting and straightforward structures.
Admittedly, Poppa isn’t a fan of sitting down and writing out songs, which would make those same traditionalists suck their teeth. He prefers to record in short bursts as lines come to him, which gives his music a flip switch that allows it to go from a slow-rolled measure of talking straight into a head-turning outburst like “Mask On.” “When you write stuff, the whole song is liable to have the same flow,” he explained in an interview last year. “When you punching stuff in, freestyling, you got a chance to play with it… Be creative with it.”
The greatest successes on Blessed, I Guess come when Poppa sets up a hidden camera to find new angles. For a brief moment as the album reaches its climax, he’s no longer “Lil Poppa,” he’s “Ms. Barbara Grandson” and he’s narrating his own biography, flickering between backstabbing friends and the comforting ringtone he’s had since his childhood. The album’s wheels start to spin occasionally: Nearly every song is built on short loops of moody keys trying to become the backbone of a hit. But when those keys are combined with more interesting elements, like the soaring guitar solo of “Boys to Men,” it gives Poppa the chance to stretch his legs and show he can be explosive without losing any of the depth of his slower songs.
When he pushes out the words “I’m blessed,” on the title track, it sounds like he’s struggling to hold his chin up before sighing, “I guess.” It’s said with the enthusiasm of someone who just spent five minutes trying to blow a balloon up before watching it deflate and fly away in the wind. Poppa never finds the answer to his question: Am I doing enough?; He’s aware that no one can help him navigate the nuances of loss, envy, and responsibility, but he never turns hopeless, even when life’s discouraging.

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On her debut solo album under her own name, the Screaming Females frontperson reintroduces herself, placing the focus on her remarkable singing voice.

Peace Meter

Over the past 15 years, Marissa Paternoster has made a name for herself as the driving force behind New Jersey rock band Screaming Females and, occasionally, under the solo moniker Noun. The 35-year-old musician is as nimble as she is reckless when wielding her faithful G&L guitar, and her playing has ranged from heralded classic-rock riffs to the type of punk-indebted shredding that elicits blisters. This unbridled talent, however, isn’t the focus of Peace Meter. On her debut solo album under her own name, Paternoster bolsters the other core instrument that’s often left in the shadows: her voice.
When faced with a canceled tour at the start of the pandemic, Paternoster holed up in her grandmother’s house by herself and sent the skeleton of a song to Thou guitarist Andy Gibbs in hopes of fleshing out new ideas. That digital swap morphed into a regular long-distance collaboration and, over the span of several months, included two other musicians: Snakeskin’s Shanna Polley on backup vocals and Lung’s Kate Wakefield on cello. For much of her career, Paternoster’s trademark has been a guttural trill that verges on a warning sign, like a rattlesnake’s hiss before pouncing on its prey, that fits in whiplash punk songs and jittery pop-punk tracks alike. On Peace Meter, however, she softens her voice and the force at which she sings. Long vibratos billow and puff up, and the more she elongates them, the softer they become.
Album opener “White Dove” introduces this evolution in a little over four minutes. While a steady kick drum pounds in the distance, Paternoster sings about a white dove’s feathers soaking in blood and lets the vowels wobble as they leave her mouth. With each repetition of the refrain, she rounds out the edges of her vibrato until it becomes a soothing, meditative loop. Elsewhere, she uses minimalist 1980s synth pop as the groundwork for wistful vocal harmonies about a fractured relationship (“I Lost You”) and draws out her choir-like melody with riffs that descend like molasses (“Sore”). While there are flashes of her usual rock-adjacent songwriting, like on the snappy indie-rock single “Black Hole,” Paternoster often opts to replace her guitar solos with mellow vocal coos.
If Peace Meter at large serves as a reintroduction, then “Balance Beam” plays like Paternoster’s breathtaking entry into the gala ballroom. Subdued and elegant, the stripped-down ballad layers fingerpicked acoustic guitar with haunting cello and delicate vocal harmonies. Her vocal delivery recalls Grouper, and her pitch is lush and soft while bright enough to cut through the foggy drone. The song positions her voice as a meditative instrument, more suited for echoing through posh theaters than riling up fans in sweat-drenched venues. It’s the surprising pillar of a collection defined by its beautiful vocal performances and relaxed pace. The emotional effect rings just as loud as her heavier work, and it proves that Paternoster is far more than her six strings.

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200 Million Thousand

Whatever you like to call the Black Lips' particular branch of guitar rock-- garage, revival, their own "flower punk" tag-- it's an easier sell whenever the band in question is painted the fastest, craziest, or most depraved in the land. But it's long past time we put the band's reputation and ridiculous press aside and look at them for who they are; they're neither buffoons nor savants, and they deserve to be judged on their music, which was plenty maniacal without taking any outside factors into consideration. Now on the verge of a potential breakthrough-- maybe because of it, who knows-- on 200 Million Thousand, Black Lips sidestep expectations and make a record less approachable than its predecessor.
Indeed, the cleaner sound and summery pop of Good Bad Not Evil has been ditched here for a psychedelic haze. From opening track "Take My Heart" onward, vocals are more obscured by echo, guitars play queasy, atonal leads, and the rhythm section pokes and ambles around the beat. Some tracks are subtly weird-- like the simmering breakdown of "Drugs", where the band's voices get not so much quieter as they do smaller-- and there's more full-on psychedelia on"Big Black Baby Jesus of Today", a Southern swamp shuffle drenched in toothache-inducing guitar bends and unhinged vocals. Closer "I Saw God" takes an already near-inscrutable ode to a minor drug epiphany and manipulates it with tape-masking and censoring "bleep" noises, before its full-band climax goes off less like a tidal wave of sound and more like someone falling over a drum riser. If there's beauty in imperfections, some of these songs are shrines.
No one's going to mistake this record for anyone but Black Lips, but they are stretching out as band here, pulling back their own tics in favor of things like style and tone. Vocal duties are spread more democratically among the band, and more styles are dabbled with, though they haven't moved the needle too far on the college radio dial. There's faux-innocent greaser-pop like "Drugs", some Byrdsian jangle added to the sobriety pledge of "Starting Over" ("while I'm still lucid... my wounds won't stop oozing"), and "Trapped in a Basement", a weirdly theatrical number that combines country twang with woozy keyboard tones.  But before you say there are no surprises on the record, there's also a rap song: "The Drop I Hold" is a definite departure, though maybe not one as drastic as it first seems. The scratchy orchestral loop underneath that would be more appropriate for an early Wu-tang record, but Cole Alexander rap-sings its lyrics, sings its hook, wails like a ghost in the background in the same way they hit the high notes in "Trapped in a Basement", and even imitates a turntable scratch with childlike exuberance. It's as if he's singing along to a favorite song that existed already.
You could say the same about many of this band's best songs, and that's no criticism. They're obvious about their influences, but thankfully never fussy or precious about them. The results still hold something palpably reckless and earnest, refracting tradition through their own filthy lens. Black Lips haven't lost their lack for songcraft-- "Short Fuse" is so sleekly and effortlessly catchy that any disparate sound they graft onto it (paisley 60s pop, hammy piano hammering, an ancient B-movie whoosh) sticks by force of inertia. But whether or not Black Lips have changed their M.O. much, 200 Million Thousand is less consistent than any of their previous albums, with more winding paths than real peaks.


Building atop a wobbly foundation of post-punk totems, the Glaswegian sextet make complicated songs sound fun.

Carnage Hall

Of all the ways to say something is fucked, “kaputt” might be the cheeriest and most playful. There’s an almost cartoonish quality to the word, conjuring images of blown gaskets and billowing smoke. Yet it’s a silly-sounding word that cuts straight to the heart of capitalism’s great folly: It’s a system whose survival depends on selling you useless, instantly obsolete junk over and over again. So it’s fitting that, on their debut album, the Glaswegian sextet who call themselves Kaputt proffer a style of post-punk that is both highly combustible and patently absurd.
Carnage Hall is built atop a wobbly foundation of familiar post-punk totems: the wiry energy of early B-52’s, the bass-string-snapping rhythmic contortions of Minutemen, the melody-resistant rants and cheerleader chants of Brix-era Fall, and the sort of saxy violence that coursed through feisty freaks from X-Ray Spex to Love Is All. But in sharp contrast to your typical Mark E. Smith-modeled sing-spieler, Kaputt lead singer Cal Donnelly isn’t especially cranky—his elastic voice sounds both permanently gobsmacked and full of bravado, like someone who’s gotten clocked in a bar fight and, amazed to be still standing, marvels at the imaginary stars swirling around them. The first words we hear him sing on album opener “Rats” are, “It’s so much/Darker now,” but while a sudden breakdown at the 28-second mark braces you for a hit of chaotic skronk, the track instantly reanimates itself as an upbeat, brass-powered thrust that invites you to dance your worries away.
As “Rats” illustrates, Kaputt excel at making complicated songs sound fun. Even Carnage Hall’s most tightly wound rave-ups, like the D. Boon-worthy “Very Satisfied” and the call-and-response sprint “Parsonage Square,” pack surprise structural shifts and outta-nowhere hooks, with percussionist Emma Smith’s restless clatter providing the destabilizing counterpoint to bassist Tobias Carmichael and drummer Rikki Will’s vacuum-sealed rhythms. Donnelly’s wordplay cuts through the clamor with lyrics that are as bleakly satirical as they are brutally efficient. On “Feed My Son,” he takes on patriarchy and gluttony in a single couplet, singing, “I need to feed my son/Need him to grow big, big and strong,” before adding an ominous twist: “I need to eat to my son, he’s grown to twice the size of a normal one!”
Donnelly’s innate theatricality is most effective on Carnage Hall’s more manic tracks, where he can pinball off of guitarist Simone Wilson and saxophonist Chrissy Barnacle’s punk-rock pep-rally harmonies. His unwavering bug-eyed intensity feels out of place when the band eases off the accelerator for slow-burn struts like “Hi! I’m the Wasp” or more light-hearted fare like “You Are Buried With My Nose.” But the band successfully ventures beyond the typical dance-punk parameters on Carnage Hall’s two-part centerpiece, “Drinking Problems Continue.” It is, in many senses, the album’s most despairing song, an unflinching portrait of escape from industrial-town misery via alcoholism. (“Metal smell roll off hill, burn my nostrils further,” Connelly sings, before sardonically adding, “I love this place like no other.”) But it’s also the album’s most joyous moment, with a boisterous Afropop groove that gives way to an ecstatic group chorus—a readymade self-help anthem for when all your hopes and dreams go kaputt.


On their first self-produced record and first in 24 years without drummer Janet Weiss, Sleater-Kinney find pleasant comfort and not much else with down-the-middle rock tunes.

Path of Wellness

A shift began in 2019 with The Center Won’t Hold, the closest Sleater-Kinney has ever come to making a pop album. Produced by Annie Clark, the record was a scattered and confusing anomaly. It bounded awkwardly between new wave and art-pop, sounding at times more like Sleater-Kinney covering a handful of St. Vincent songs. Shortly before its release, drummer Janet Weiss left the band; founding members Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker toured the album without her. The power of Sleater-Kinney was, for the first time in their 27-year career, slightly dimmed.
Path of Wellness is the first Sleater-Kinney record without Weiss since 1996, and their first self-produced record ever. It is a course correction, a tricky and frustrating rock record full of well-executed and arranged songs. It’s pleasant enough to listen to with a friend, heavy enough to put on after an argument. But it’s missing something. In the band’s attempt to swing the pendulum back, they’ve lost their spark and urgency, the very stuff that makes Sleater-Kinney one of the most impactful rock bands of all time.
The album sounds best when Tucker and Brownstein allow themselves to let loose, be funny, and have fun. The scorching “Tomorrow’s Grave” has a sublime guitar solo as well as some characteristically witchy lyrics about being “the drought,” and “the barren land,” à la Dig Me Out’s “Jenny.” On the moody “Method,” Brownstein sings like she’s looking out the window at the rain as bluesy guitars unfurl around her. “Worry With You” captures the cheeky overconfidence of having three beers and then hopping on your bike. These songs aren’t exactly outliers, but they are some of the only ones that feel playful, where Brownstein and Tucker seem to be directly engaging with you.
Path of Wellness has the same aura as almost all previous Sleater-Kinney records. It’s tight as hell; Tucker’s wailing mezzo-soprano is as brutal and uncompromising as ever. The lyrics can be a bit corny and overdone, but this should come as no surprise to anyone who has heard “God Is a Number” or “The Ballad of a Ladyman.” The problem here is more of a spiritual one. Earlier Sleater-Kinney albums took the feminized undertaking of “shut up and smile” and turned it on its ear. A record like 1997’s Dig Me Out explored being present with your anger as a woman in a world where men constantly expect you to be submissive and sweet. It was also about heartbreak: about breaking up with your girlfriend and then having her sing backup vocals on the song you wrote about her. In 1999, The Hot Rock compared love to being riddled with tumors, turning the malaise that comes with realizing you’re growing up into intensely beautiful, brooding music. The best song on 2005’s The Woods is literally about jumping off a bridge; it leaves you feeling like someone ran a steamroller over your chest.
On the Path of Wellness, there is very little of that visceral way of exploring pain. Relatedly, there is also a complete lack of irony that is so crucial to the band’s ethos. A track like “Complex Female Characters” is so self-serious and humorless that it’s almost cloying. “You’re too much of a woman now/You’re not enough of a woman now,” sings Brownstein. The song’s feminism feels surface level, a critique of gender stereotypes in art plucked from an op-ed column in a campus newspaper. It strives to get close to the biting feminist and anticapitalist critique of “Modern Girl,” but it’s missing the shit-eating grin you envision Brownstein wearing when she sang about a donut with the hole of the entire world. Instead, it leaves you feeling weirdly empty.
As producers, Tucker and Brownstein are minimalists, which works for a band whose best songs are often the least cluttered. Path of Wellness is chilled out, almost effortless. It’s not such a bad thing to feel like you don’t have to work hard for what you’re listening to—but Sleater-Kinney used to put you in a headlock and hold you there. Their songs can make you feel crazy, give you whiplash, make you clench your jaw, kick a brick wall, eat a pill off the ground and then spit it up in someone’s face. There is none of that bleary-eyed rage on Path of Wellness. Moreover, very little happens at all. This music doesn’t prompt the kind of introspection that leads to personal breakthroughs; it doesn’t leave the world feeling more vivid, more exhilarating than it did before. Sleater-Kinney has made heart-stopping, philosophically challenging rock music. Path of Wellness takes a more pacifist stance, content to let life happen around it.

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Nashville institution Chris Stapleton followed his 2015 breakthrough with two new albums this year. They showcase his omnivorous approach to country music in all its dignified melancholy.

Chris Stapleton: From a Room: Volume 1 / Volume 2

From a Room: Volume 1 / Volume 2

Chris Stapleton toiled for nearly 15 years to become an overnight sensation. After moving to Nashville in the early 2000s, he played in a bluegrass band and co-founded a Southern rock group whose only claim to fame was opening for Zac Brown, all while writing songs for artists like Luke Bryan, Darius Rucker, Blake Shelton, and Lee Ann Womack, among others. He tried his hand at a solo career, releasing a single in 2013 that went nowhere. In 2015, with a new breed of singer-songwriters challenging Nashville’s most ingrained conventions, Stapleton finally released a full album under his own name, Traveller. Revealing a vivid and economical songwriter as well as a soulful and sensitive singer, the album enjoyed only modest sales right up until the night of the Country Music Awards, when he performed with Justin Timberlake and took home the award for Album of the Year, beating out more established acts like Jason Aldean and Little Big Town. He woke up the next morning to a No. 1 album.
In Nashville, a place where traditionalists are treated as the avant-garde, Stapleton quickly eclipsed many of the artists who had previously sung his songs. His success, however, isn’t based on how he envisions the future of country music, but rather how he uses the past. His sentiments and characters are familiar, occasionally giving way to generalities but usually bringing the dignified melancholy of old-school country right up to the present. Musically, he understands that “country” is an inclusive label, one that uses the bristly twang of 1970s outlaw as its foundation but also covers the excitable R&B from Memphis and the Shoals as well as the blues-based Southern rock of the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Two years after Traveller turned him into a Nashville institution, From a Room Volume 1 sounded like a non-follow-up when it came out in May: a way to release new music without having to make a big statement or one-up his debut. The tracklist was short, nine songs clocking in at just over 30 minutes. The packaging was minimal, a cardboard sleeve for the CD and a retro insert for the LP. The nondescript title carried a concealed pun, as all the songs were recorded in Room A at the historic RCA Studio in Nashville. Lending that indefinite article even more weight was the fact that the studio had been threatened with demolition while Stapleton was recording Traveller there. Someone thought condos would be a better use of that real estate.
Vol. 1 works as a tribute to that studio, but Stapleton is as interested in personal history as he is in music history. He resurrected songs he’d written years before, some of which had been hits for other people, some of which had been overlooked completely. It sounded more like a minor reclamation project or an abbreviated career retrospective than an actual album, but with the release of From A Room Volume 2, the first collection comes more sharply into focus. Together, they reveal the full scope of his abilities, not only monetizing his vast catalog (he’s written approximately 1,000 songs) but filling in his biography for the uninitiated.
As a songwriter, Stapleton rarely strays from country’s evergreen topics: breaking hearts, breaking the law, breaking the bank. But he tackles them with a graceful economy of language and fine gradients of emotion. Take “Either Way,” off Vol. 1, originally recorded by Lee Ann Womack on her 2008 album Call Me Crazy. Stapleton, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, describes the romantic inertia between lovers who only talk “when the monthly bills are due.” He sings quietly on the verses, as though lost in thought, but his voice rises to a near-shout on the chorus: “We can just go on like this/Say the word, we’ll call it quits.” There’s not a happy ending. In fact, there’s not an ending at all. The last verse makes clear that nothing will change between them.
Stapleton works well with resignation and regret, to the extent that even his raucous weed anthem “Them Stems,” off Vol. 1, offers a chicken/egg conundrum: Is the narrator’s life a shambles because he smokes too much pot, or does he smoke too much pot because his life’s a shambles? The people inhabiting these verses tend to live at the extremes, although the songs fare best when those extremes are familiar and relatable. The doomed inmate on Vol. 1 closer “Death Row” is less a character than an archetype, making it a peculiarly inconsequential contribution to country’s prison song genre. And the multiple generations of farmers on Vol. 2’s “Scarecrow in the Garden” are far less compelling and distinct than the pragmatic alcoholics on “Nobody’s Lonely Tonight,” a Vol. 2 standout. “What’s love but just some illusion we believe,” Stapleton sings, his tone both disgusted and resigned. “What’s love but just some confusion we don’t need.”
He doesn’t mean it, of course. Vol. 2 leavens its heavier moments with songs that celebrate the simple joys of love and marriage and family, without lapsing into sentimentality. “Millionaire,” a cover of a song by fellow writer Kevin Welch, is about how love is worth more than money. “A Simple Song,” penned by Stapleton’s father-in-law, lists off a family’s escalating woes, which include bad health, poverty, and unemployment, until Stapleton admits, “But I love my life/Man, it’s something to see/It’s the kids and the dogs and you and me.” The idea of finding happiness in the face of hardship is not new in country music, and that’s the whole point. What has made him so successful is how Stapleton invests these ideas with gravity and gratitude.


A product of their city's thriving DIY punk and hardcore scenes, the Tampa, Fla. band features members of Neon Blud, Cult Ritual, and the Dry County. Their ambitious second album is an outsized, emotionally rich pop record that practically begs for your attention.

Children of Desire

It's not surprising that digging up concrete information on Tampa, Fla.'s Merchandise is a little harder than it should be. As a product of the city's thriving DIY punk and hardcore scene, the three-piece (anchored by multi-instrumentalists David Vassalotti and Carson Cox, who also contributes vocals, along with Patrick Brady on bass) is used to flying under the radar, contributing to other Tampa-based outfits like Neon Blud, Cult Ritual, and the Dry County, respectively. But with Children of Desire, Merchandise's second proper LP to date, lying low no longer seems like much of an option: Though most assuredly not a punk record, Children of Desire is anything but understated; instead, it's an outsized, emotionally rich pop album that practically begs for your attention. "I still participate in punk and hardcore but for traditional reasons," Cox told music blog Yellow Green Red in October. "My roots are strong and have kept me playing whenever I really hated playing shows because of pointless social gossip or whatever. I'm taking the chance that there are people like me outside of punk by playing whatever I like. Genres are not for us."
Merchandise's conflicted feelings about genre are understandable: One of the most interesting things about Children of Desire is, despite being crafted from familiar parts, how damn hard it is to peg. A cursory blog search will tell you that Merchandise play an amalgamation of post-punk or shoegaze or noise pop or pretty much any confluence of notable indie offshoots that gained momentum during the 1980s, and while you certainly wouldn't be faulted for making similar connections, something about such broad distinctions doesn't do the band justice. Trying to figure out where Children of Desire fits is not only a fruitless endeavor, it marginalizes the ambition that acts as the record's most visible engine.
On their 2010 debut, (Strange Songs) In the Dark, things were a bit easier to sort. Working as a miserablist pop album shrouded in corroded production, it's a record that tries to filter the fog of strife and regret that pepper so many songs about love and youth. But for the players that make up Merchandise, these ideas were rendered in ways that were uncommonly restrained. "Learn how to sleep without any company," Cox dourly croons on "What Was Left Behind", "Oh, you're still a young man." Though the approach still feels-- at least from a production standpoint-- punk-influenced, there's no denying that something more romantically resonant was bubbling underneath. On Children of Desire, a great deal of that suspected brightness has broken through the surface, revealing a borderline anthemic sound that's a leap and a revelation. The hot, swirling guitar feedback that overwhelmed (Strange Songs) In the Dark is no longer front-and-center; here, it's a natural by-product of the wide-eyed magic Merchandise have begun to conjure.
"The music started, I realized it was all a lie/ The guitars were running out/ Last year's punk," sings Cox, sounding newly unencumbered on the telling "Become What You Are", a staggering piece of music and one of two songs on Children of Desire that push the 10-minute mark. It's almost proportioned for an arena, glowing and aching in nearly equal measure. Noisy, decadent, and richly characterized by titanic passes of stinging guitar, it sounds both urgent and somehow elegantly dazed. It's the kind of song you don't want to end (it almost doesn't), briefly breaking down from either exhaustion or bliss (or both) only to ratchet itself back up with a tornado-like intensity that ends up spinning the entire thing right off its own axis. The same kind of energy is more concisely registered on "Time", the murderous first single that subscribes to an almost Tears For Fears-like bigness, cut with an undercurrent of Smiths-ian longing, all drenched in swaths of sugar-spun reverb. Thanks to its pop-friendly structure, you wouldn't be hard-pressed to conjure up a dozen other equally flattering reference points, but Children of Desire ultimately succeeds thanks to its ability to still sound singular.
One of the smartest moves Merchandise make on Children of Desire is bringing Cox's vocals to the forefront. There's a delicateness in his voice that, by all accounts, should be crushed whole under the weight of how gigantic these songs can be, but there's also a sturdiness in his baritone that brings a surprising but necessary balance. Cox's phrasing makes it clear that Morrissey has had some sort of an influence on his approach here, like on the driving, industrial-bent cut "In Nightmare Room", which he manages to make sound more like "I Know It's Over" than whatever Jesus and Mary Chain track you're trying to put your finger on. The fact that he doesn't actually sound much of anything like Morrissey is also an important insight, as Merchandise are able channel influences with some sort of vague kineticism rather than flat-out ape them at nearly ever turn, avoiding the easy missteps that a less intuitive band would make pretty quickly otherwise.
There's little denying that Children of Desire is an ambitious effort. Take "Satellite", which sounds as if it's practically lifting "The Suburbs" wholesale and repurposing it as a barroom piano ballad. But watch it then blossom into a radiating, communally drunken waltz. Things like that shouldn't work, but when they do, Children of Desire's risk-taking reads as crucial, not foolhardy. So it's a bit of a downer that the closing, 11-minute "Roser Park" doesn't quite live up to some of the same high-wire tricks that preceded it. You can't help but feel a bit of the air go out of the room, though it's hard not to be a little greedy after being so consistently thrilled. "Roser Park"-- with its beatific organs and mechanically sharp rhythm section-- would be a gem on most any other like-minded LP. Here, it's merely a reminder that, for Merchandise, the bright lights are most definitely on.