The legendary document of grunge celebrates its 25th anniversary with a reissue dominated by Chris Cornell, revealing just how much he contributed to the film’s blend of Seattle reality and fiction.

Various Artists: Singles: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack-Deluxe Edition

Andrew Wood died of a heroin overdose in March of 1990, rending his tight-knit Seattle music community. As often happens in creatively fueled local scenes, community members rallied and turned their grief into art. Wood’s roommate Chris Cornell recruited Wood’s erstwhile Mother Love Bone bandmates Jeff Ament and Stone Gossard to record some songs he’d been working on. With guitarist Mike McCready, Soundgarden drummer Matt Cameron, and recently relocated San Diego native Eddie Vedder, they called themselves Temple of the Dog, after one of Wood’s lyrics. Their eponymous album, released in April 1991, sold modestly thanks to Soundgarden’s profile—they were signed to A&M, in rotation on 120 Minutes, and toured with Guns N’ Roses.
On the night of Wood’s funeral, many of his friends and collaborators gathered at Mother Love Bone manager Kelly Curtis’ house, including director Cameron Crowe and his wife, Heart guitarist and Seattle native Nancy Wilson. Crowe had moved to Seattle several years earlier and fell in with the area’s incestuous network of rock bands, labels, college radio stations, and venues. Then 32 years old, he was already an ex-Rolling Stone features writer and accomplished screenwriter working on a new script for a romantic comedy that used Seattle’s burgeoning rock scene as its backdrop. On the night of Wood’s memorial, something clicked. “It was the first real feeling of what it was like to have a hometown—everybody pulling together for some people they really loved,” he told an interviewer in 2001. “It made me want to do Singles as a love letter to the community that I was really moved by.”
If Temple of the Dog were a spiritual origin of “grunge”—the name associated with the mainstreaming of Seattle-area indie rock and the culture it briefly spawned—then Singles (the film and soundtrack), was its commercial coming-out party. More than a year after duetting on “Hunger Strike,” Vedder and Cornell were merged into Matt Dillon’s Cliff Poncier character. Cornell appeared in the film as himself, fronting Soundgarden playing “Birth Ritual” in a club scene and, in the film’s most Wayne’s World moment, standing in stoned silence while Poncier blew out the windows of his girlfriend’s car with too much speaker wattage. While they were recording what would become Pearl Jam’s debut album Ten, Vedder, Ament, and Gossard actually had lines in the film, playing Poncier’s backing band in Citizen Dick. In one of the few Singles scenes about band life, Vedder and Ament mumble through an alt-weekly pan of the band’s LP to protect Poncier’s feelings. Crowe cuts to a close-up of the review, which paints Poncier’s music as “pompous, dick-swinging swill” that comes from being a big fish in a small pond. If he moved to a bigger, more established city like Minneapolis, the review snarked, he’d be a nobody.
The Seattle that Singles was shot in during 1991 was a very different city than the one it was a year later when the film was released. Like Temple of the Dog, Singles was the product of a bonafide music scene that was starting to make mainstream impact (bands signing to majors, journalists sniffing around to write trend pieces on Sub Pop), but it was released into an absolute hype storm. Effectively, by late 1992, both could enjoy the rare distinction of pre-emptively canonizing a musical movement. They were “grunge” before grunge was even Grunge. At the very moment it achieved mass popularity, grunge not only had breakout stars and a fashion style guide (flannel, long underwear beneath shorts, stocking caps) but its own scene supergroup and a feature film in theaters.
Grunge “broke” thanks to Nirvana, an absent presence in the film and its soundtrack. In a Rolling Stone diary entry dated January 24, 1992, a couple weeks after “Smells Like Teen Spirit” peaked at No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100—the same day Nevermind became the No. 1 album in the country—Crowe noted that Warner Brothers, the studio that had been sitting on Singles for months, was now suggesting a new title for the film: “Come As You Are.” By April 1992, Singles the film still didn’t have a release date, but Epic was pushing to release its soundtrack to ride the ascendant grunge wave. By mid-year, A&M was aggressively re-promoting Temple of the Dog to radio and MTV, and Epic released the Singles soundtrack two weeks before Soundgarden and Pearl Jam played the main stage at Lollapalooza. It is impossible to underestimate how much that summer and fall were suffused with grunge. Soundgarden was big (Badmotorfinger peaked at No. 39), but Pearl Jam became massive—Ten was a slow-building success, that peaked at No. 2 on Billboard in late August, a couple weeks before Temple of the Dog entered the top ten as well. In September and October, when Singles was in theaters at the same time that “Hunger Strike,” “Outshined,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and “Alive” were omnipresent on MTV and modern rock radio, grunge felt like a small version of disco in the Saturday Night Fever moment: a mass-media cultural phenomenon and style sensibility that had as many haters as acolytes. By December 1992, SPIN was calling Seattle “to the rock’n’roll world what Bethlehem was to Christianity.”
Where Singles the movie was a romantic comedy with Seattle rock as its backdrop, its soundtrack, for anyone outside of the Pacific Northwest or the college radio universe, was a revelation. The 25th-anniversary reissue of the compilation revisits and further contextualizes this moment, with a bonus disc of demos, live versions, and other film ephemera never before issued on CD or vinyl. At the time, SPIN called the Singles soundtrack, “as close as possible to the ultimate Seattle music anthology…without sounding like a masturbatory Sub Pop collection.” Amid the hippest bands of the insurgent grunge moment and Mother Love Bone’s epic “Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns” (which also appeared briefly in Crowe’s 1989 film Say Anything), Crowe was careful to include Seattle rock royalty (via a Hendrix deep-cut and a deeply faithful cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Battle of Evermore” by Heart (as the Lovemongers), and hire Minneapolitan Paul Westerberg for the score and two prominent songs (his first two solo recordings, to boot). Through the Singles soundtrack, Crowe expertly situated grunge within the ’60s and ’70s classic rock pantheon while, through Westerberg, not testing the rom-com demographic by putting TAD or Screaming Trees on the trailer. It’s not a perfect fit: though Westerberg’s DNA as the leader of the Replacements winds through grunge, the chipper, raspy power-pop of “Dyslexic Heart” sits oddly aside Soundgarden and Alice in Chains on the soundtrack.
About that contrast: Crowe was deeply connected to Seattle’s scene, but despite casting several of its key participants in the film, he had no pretensions about its death-fixated, deeply ironic, drop-D metal-punk indie rock scene serving as anything more than a backdrop for his du jour romp: Linda, a “U-dub” grad student in environmental policy; Steve, a civil engineer whose dream is to revolutionize the city’s urban transport with a latte-serving high-speed train; Janet, a naïve, love-seeking (and Fountainhead-reading?!) barista played by Bridget Fonda. Apart from catching bands in clubs and the Citizen Dick narrative, grunge is as much a lifestyle backdrop for Singles as the city’s booming coffee market. Consider “State of Love and Trust,” which along with “Breath,” represent the earliest (and best) Pearl Jam music (and provide evidence of how immediately the band congealed). The song appears early in the film as the background soundtrack to the moment when lovestruck Linda realizes she’d been duped by the Spanish man to whom she’d given her garage door opener. She drags her friend outside and has a good cry, in front of a graffitied wall reading “LOVE BONE.”
The broader context of Singles shows how Crowe, like the bands on his soundtrack, was coming into his own. The movie hit theaters a few months after the debut of MTV’s Real World in May 1992, and predicted Friends, which launched on NBC in September 1994. Consider Friends through Singles: a cast of attractive late 20-somethings, all of whom (except Linda) live in the same apartment complex, date each other and…hang out at a coffee shop (Java Stop) when they should be working, with a popular soundtrack featuring…Paul Westerberg. An underrated aspect of Singles, even apart from freezing pre-grunge Seattle in celluloid, was Crowe zeroing in on an emergent audience demographic—late-20s/early-30s single white people—that television would capitalize on in the next several years, broadening the ambit of sitcoms past the workplace and family to the extended networks of young urban professionals.
Singles the film was successful, but the soundtrack was a minor phenomenon, cracking the Billboard Top 10 and eventually going double-platinum. Its success was enough to launch the career of one band: Screaming Trees. “They kept postponing the release of our album,” Screaming Trees drummer Barrett Martin remembered of the band’s commercial breakthrough Sweet Oblivion, “because the Singles soundtrack was getting all the attention.” Scene veterans from sleepy Ellensburg who’d signed to Epic in 1990, the Trees were filed under “heavy metal” and marketed as a hair band until grunge. Their anthemic single “Nearly Lost You,” powered by Mark Lanegan’s raspy baritone and a radio-friendly iteration of the band’s psychedelic power-sludge, made the soundtrack’s penultimate slot as a last-minute addition. Oblivion was finally released that September 8, and thanks to Singles it sold upwards of 300,000 copies, easily the band’s biggest seller.
As a commercial genre, grunge paved a lane through which bands like Screaming Trees could chase the rock mainstream. As a word, grunge was a perfect phonetic suggestion of how the music sounded and the musicians looked. The Trees were big, gruff guys—the kind of dudes who, per Mark Yarm’s essential grunge oral history Everybody Loves Our Town, got in a brawl with 10 club security guys in New Jersey the night before their national television debut on Letterman. They played “Nearly Lost You” with Lanegan sporting a shiner, after which Letterman admitted, “I’ll be honest with ya—I was kinda scared.”
The origin of “grunge”—which, though derided, is still as on-the-money as “punk” as a single-word encapsulation of music and attitude—is the stuff of legend. Sub Pop co-founders Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt had great ears for music and an even better knack for self-effacing promotion, and were obsessed with gaining credibility in the UK, which, in the label’s view, meant playing up the music’s blue-collar roots, occasionally to the cartoonish level of guitar-wielding loggers and lumberjacks (which Kurt Cobain hated). The word “grunge,” legend has it, was most prominently deployed by Melody Maker’s Everett True in a Sub Pop band review, though in Yarm’s book, Poneman claims True cribbed it from Pavitt’s description of Green River’s Dry as a Bone in Sub Pop’s mail-order catalog: “ultra-loose GRUNGE that destroyed the morals of a generation.”
The mass media didn’t care about its provenance because grunge just worked. It allowed industry types to market music (and release films like Singles), and made the perfect peg for journalistic trend pieces, which often failed to sniff out the subcultural irony that defined so much of the Seattle scene. Most legendary in this respect is the sidebar to the New York Times’ “Grunge—A Success Story,” published two months after Singles’ theatrical debut, in which Sub Pop receptionist Megan Jasper created a one-woman hoax when prompted for a grunge “lexicon,” offering made-up slang like “swingin’ on the flippity-flop,” “lamestain” and “bloated, big bag of bloatation” which were reprinted verbatim in the paper of record (Jasper later fessed up in Doug Pray’s essential 1996 documentary Hype!).
Singles the movie doesn’t even remotely trade in this level of irony—that’s the opposite of Crowe’s thing—though the soundtrack’s incorporation of Mudhoney’s “Overblown” at least offers a sincere critique from the guy who many consider the linchpin of the entire scene (the soundtrack’s deluxe version includes a demo version). Opening with ur-grunge singer Mark Arm’s studio chatter, “Okay, grunge masters, he we go,” “Overblown” sounds like a mangled version of the Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat,” as Arm deadpans, “Everybody loves us/Everybody loves our town/That’s why I’m thinking lately/The time for leaving is now.”
In a particularly great anecdote from Our Town, Truly guitarist Robert Roth recalls watching Nirvana debut “Teen Spirit” live at Seattle’s OK Hotel while “across the street, there was a private thing where they were filming Alice in Chains for Singles.” Notwithstanding the synchronicity of an actual historical moment in rock lore coinciding with Crowe’s simulacrum of another moment, these shows help to understand just how different the bands lumped in under “grunge” were. Alice in Chains played unrelentingly dark, metal-influenced sludge-rock, though the harmonized vocals of guitarist/songwriter/hesher Jerry Cantrell and the vampiric Layne Staley set them apart from their contemporaries. Their 1990 single “Man in the Box” was the early breakthrough of Seattle rock, bridging the Headbanger’s Ball and Buzz Bin crowds.
Alice in Chains appear twice in Singles, playing Facelift track “It Ain’t Like That” and “Would?” which kicked off the soundtrack. Though the compilation’s two non-Ten Pearl Jam songs made it commercially valuable, “Would?” is unquestionably its best song. Penned by Cantrell as an ode to Andrew Wood, “Would?” is more generally about making bold choices, ignoring doubters, and accepting whatever consequences might come. If any song of 1991-2 could be called pure, uncut “grunge,” this is it: starting with a menacingly low bass rumble that blooms into a slithering goth-metal groove, featuring the tense interplay between Staley’s acidic snarl and Cantrell’s placid vocal, the lyrics drenched with the kind of looming dread pioneered by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. The song’s odd structure lends it a further disorienting effect, like a slasher movie cutting to black at the exact second the protagonist opens the door to the dark basement. The key change signals a reprieve, but there’s no resolution; just when the song veers to a new path in the final bridge, it drops off suddenly, leaving Staley screaming a question that’s equally alluring and terrifying: “If I would, could you?!” while everything just collapses under its own weight. “Would?” concluding with a musical bridge-to-nowhere is as good an encapsulation of grunge’s performative nihilism as anything Arm, Vedder, or Cobain could summon.
“Would?” remains the best song on Singles, but the 25th-anniversary reissue of the soundtrack is dominated by Soundgarden, especially Chris Cornell, revealing just how much he contributed to the film’s blend of Seattle reality and cinematic fiction. It was Cornell who suggested Crowe include “Drown” on the soundtrack, an eight-minute epic from Chicago’s Smashing Pumpkins, who were still a year away from Siamese Dream. While Citizen Dick re-recorded Mudhoney’s epochal Sub Pop single as “Touch Me I’m Dick,” it was Cornell who actually wrote the songs for Poncier’s “solo album,” prompted by song titles jokingly devised by Ament.
Crowe loved the songs, especially the acoustic track “Seasons,” which recalled Zeppelin III and Pink Floyd circa Meddle and perfectly bridged the soundtrack’s past and present iterations of Seattle rock. Another song from what became the Poncier EP was “Spoon Man,” an ode to a quirky local street musician that appeared briefly in Singles and would be fleshed out into the lead single from Soundgarden’s magisterial 1994 LP Superunknown. The Singles reissue bonus disc contains Cornell’s original Poncier tape (along with some incidental music he composed for the film that went unused), including the stark “Nowhere But You” and the lilting, psychedelic “Flutter Girl,” both of which would reappear in more exquisitely produced form on the 1999 CD single for Cornell’s solo single debut “Can’t Change Me.” While Euphoria Morning marked a dramatic public shift for Cornell-the-solo-artist after more than a decade as Soundgarden’s howling frontman, these tracks reveal that he’d long had a quieter, more pensive side.
Cornell’s May 17th suicide after a Detroit Soundgarden concert came as a shock to rock fans and the Seattle community to which he meant so much, and, less importantly, provided a morbid coincidence for the 25th-anniversary reissue of the Singles soundtrack to which he contributed so much. As happens with rock star deaths, Cornell’s triggered countless appreciations of his significant contributions to 1990s hard rock, for which he was perhaps the single most prominent link to its 1970s and ’80s predecessors. It was also a reminder that of the five rock frontmen to emerge from that moment in rock history—Cornell, Cobain, Staley, Vedder, and Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott Weiland—only Vedder and Pearl Jam remain (they were feted in 2011 with a career-spanning documentary directed by Crowe himself). This is the thing about grunge: apart from its commercial success and validation of mass media hype, grunge-as-music was most often a very dark thing, populated by iconoclastic young men negotiating personal authenticity with unavoidable fixations on death, sickness, and pain. That many of those men sang passionately about the same things that led to their premature deaths is in the end, the legacy of that moment.
By definition, by stressing authenticity within the bounds of mainstream commerce, rock music has to die and be periodically resurrected. What made grunge—rock’s final mainstream “rebirth”—so potent and problematic was how it intertwined artistic tensions (selling out vs. staying true, community vs. commerce) with the musicians’ own deep-seated personal anxieties, fears, and sicknesses. That’s what made it feel real, what allowed for individuals to identify with it, and ultimately, what made it so commercially valuable. The music was often great, but more importantly, it was cast as the organic cultural product of a single city in the corner of a country, that, for many, marked an organic “victory” after years of post-punk indie rock bands slogging it out on college radio and vanning it between small clubs. For locals, on the other hand, grunge was an absolute hype nightmare that had little to do with music or community and everything to do with vulture-like industry encroachment and outsider social positioning.
Singles is often seen as a sui generis rock-historical document because of its ostensible realism. Crowe’s love letter to his adopted hometown—shot on site and cast with actual locals—was composed in the moments before Seattle became a synecdoche for rock’s latest rebirth, and was rush-released to coincide with a moment that it, in turn, further fueled. Twenty-five years later, when local scenes are inextricable from their immediate online hype and a churn of thinkpieces mourn rock’s latest “death,” Singles feels less like Hollywood realism and more like the conjured ghost of a dead moment. As in the early 1990s, so it is today: rock lies in wait, ready for its resurrection through some authentic commercial séance. Maybe Cornell knew best, growling on the Singles soundtrack: “The snake retreats/Admits defeat/And waits for the birth ritual.”


The latest record from Glenn Donaldson chronicles the ups-and-downs of music industry lifers, searching for pockets of transcendence amid ennui.

The Reds, Pinks & Purples: The Town That Cursed Your Name

The Town That Cursed Your Name

Much of indie pop’s appeal stems from ephemeral pleasures. Some of the genre’s most formative practitioners were short-lived bands who pressed a few records, quietly dissolved, and watched as their influence spread across generations. Glenn Donaldson, on the other hand, has managed to rework this cycle of death and rebirth into an institution of his own. The San Francisco songwriter’s back catalog, which spans nearly three decades, is a vast family tree of pseudonyms and collaborations. Each new project slightly tweaks his ramshackle formula to extract hidden influences, whether he’s exploring gothic aesthetics as Horrid Red or weaving psychedelic folk tapestries in the Skygreen Leopards.
Since debuting in 2018, the Reds, Pinks & Purples has blossomed into Donaldson’s flagship project. Under this alias, he has released seven full-lengths of barebones, college-rock songs, interlinked with a visual shorthand of suburbanite artwork that allows fans a chance to stroll through his pastel-toned neighborhood. The lyrics take new precedence, stemming from the sort of unguarded internal monologues that take hold while taking a long walk or doing the dishes: fleeting thoughts that expand into a web of memories and self-examination. His records simply pick up where the last left off, like a series of Moleskines filled end to end. On his latest album, The Town That Cursed Your Name, Donaldson is preoccupied with industry ups-and-downs, crafting second-person sketches of bands on their last legs, casualties of scene politics, and owners of failed record labels.
Though the Reds, Pinks & Purples casts Donaldson as a lovable sad sack in the vein of Another Sunny Day frontman Harvey Williams or the Field Mice’s Bobby Wratten, his writing embodies the adolescent angst of Sarah Records from a more seasoned perspective. He maintains the foggy tufts of reverb and sing-song melodies of his predecessors, but his lyrics trade unrequited crushes for more practical pining. On “Life in the Void,” he struggles with feelings of futility, counting his blessings with a knockout dose of cynicism. “Just over minimum wage,” he sings. “I guess you’re lucky just to be employed/I guess you’re lucky it’s not worse.” Bleak as his outlook may be, there’s an undercurrent of optimism: verses shifting into choruses as gleaming leads peek through a canopy of feedback. “You don’t want to live like that, you don’t want to work that hard,” Donaldson adds during the coda, a reminder that living for art ultimately outweighs the adversity.
On “Mistakes (Too Many to Name),” Donaldson translates moping into celebration, juxtaposing a self-deprecating refrain with four-on-the-floor tambourine and snares and victorious, pealing guitars. “I made every mistake you could make,” he sings, and it sounds like a rallying cry until he interrupts the thought with a shock of dreamlike imagery: “Breaking down in the open fields of flowers that we found.” It’s a strange detour, but it reiterates the thesis of his solo project: Donaldson searches for pockets of transcendence within ennui. Occasionally, he leans too far into impressionism. “Burning Sunflowers” is a collage of imagery—summer skies, sun on skin, oddly attractive scraps of litter—that can’t coalesce without a larger narrative to guide them. Instead, the song feels as blurry as its instrumentation, its beauty too self-evident. Donaldson’s best work hides allure within a bigger picture, like a jangle-pop egg hunt.
The Town That Cursed Your Name is bookended with odes to bands that never made it. Opener “Too Late for an Early Grave” is classic Donaldson, a strummy mid-tempo tune that puts a frontman’s small bit of renown into sobering perspective. “Never climbed the charts, destroyed the stage,” he sighs, pitting these dreams against scenes of clocking in on sick days and grinding to pay the bills. It’s the most pessimistic entry on the record, but it sets the stage for Donaldson’s cast of nameless underdogs to rail against the drudgery of the work week.  “Break Up the Band,” the final track, brings the narrative full circle, this time profiling the last days of a group, demoralized by microscopic streaming payouts and internal conflict. Most importantly, it’s a major stylistic pivot—a pop-kid pastiche of the Beatles’ “Good Night” that sidelines guitar for a winkingly melodramatic backdrop of piano and strings. The sound is unusually theatrical for a project so concerned with subtlety, but it pays off. In the world of The Town That Cursed Your Name, the tedium of dead-end work pales in comparison to the death of an artistic endeavor.


The experimental New York duo morph into a crack ensemble on their wide-ranging new double album, blurring genres and record-store categories.

I Was Real

Guitarist Che Chen briefly worked at New York’s beloved Other Music in the mid-’00s, and his subsequent duo with percussionist Rick Brown, 75 Dollar Bill, bears the stamp of the shop’s aesthetic. Their early music did a lot with a little—Chen’s guitar amp strapped to his back, Brown pounding out beats on a wooden box. They recalled Tinariwen and Group Doueh, as well as obscure favorites like Otha Turner and Henry Flynt, artists the store championed. Naturally, the band’s 2015 debut LP was released on the Other Music imprint, and when the venerated store closed for good in 2016, 75 Dollar Bill was part of the farewell parade.
On their new double album, 75  Dollar Bill expand from spartan duo to crack ensemble, with upwards of ten players. Equally attuned to raw world music and psych rock, country blues and drone, jazz and early New York minimalism, they push into a new terrain that blurs the distinctions and record-store categories. “Every Last Coffee or Tea” revisits a number from their very first cassette, amplifying the shifting 3-on-2 groove with viola, upright bass, and rhythm guitar. On “Tetuzi Akiyama,” Chen’s descending fuzz-guitar lick is closely shadowed by the fat, wide frequencies of Cheryl Kingan's baritone sax.
The title track, the longest in 75 Dollar Bill’s discography, spends half of its near-17 minutes carefully building up and the other half dying down. Karen Waltuch’s slow-bowed viola recalls John Cale’s drone work in the Velvet Underground, while Chen lazily circles around a few notes. Almost imperceptibly, the band draws everything back down, allowing the ambient noise of your environment—a buzzing AC unit, distant traffic, whatever—to expand into the growing silence.
Sprinkled throughout the album are a number of “WZN” tracks (a contraction of “wezin,” which in Mauritania and Northwest Africa denote the kind of dance songs played at weddings). On these, 75 Dollar Bill strip back to their earliest sound. “WZN #4” spotlights a heavily phased guitar and a riff like a turning screw, while “WZN #3” carefully overlays additional needling guitar lines. Such pieces may have their roots in Africa, but as each piece unspools, you might find yourself wondering about the band’s placeless sound. 75 Dollar Bill slyly nudges you beyond the familiar, so that—no matter your record-nerd knowledge—you’ll wind up someplace new.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Neil Young turns 60 in November. In the last year he's survived an aneurysm and a greatest hits album ...

Prairie Wind

Neil Young turns 60 in November. In the last year he's survived an aneurysm and a greatest hits album. So why hasn't the man started to sound old? Sure, his voice quavers on some of the high notes on his ambitious new album, Prairie Wind, but he sounds remarkably preserved, showing the same age and wear he's shown for years: That voice-- alternately gentle and strident, tender and outraged-- has held up surprisingly well, gaining gritty authority with age. His few cracks and wrinkles just reinforce the sense of wistful nostalgia that suffuses Prairie Wind as well as almost all his other folk-rock albums since Harvest Moon, if not since Harvest.
Young has made this sort of no-surprises reliability a virtue. He long ago set the templates for his music, and while he's known for his itchy restlessness, late in his career he doesn't stray from that comfortable sound. The scope of his albums grows immodestly-- his previous, Greendale, was even accompanied by a film-- but his music, whether time-capsule folk like Prairie Wind or ragged-glory rock, remains the same size, exhibiting his confidence that a small voice can address enormous issues on a personal level. That constancy can be consoling, despite the themes of loss that haunts his songs.
There's something proudly old-fashioned about Prairie Wind, specifically in its simple visions of America, as in the title track's central image of a farmer's wife hanging laundry in the backyard. Even the title itself hopes for the possibility of more American frontiers, a new home on the range instead of a McMansion in the 'burbs. In other words, Young's concerns are deeply buried in the past, in a vision of history that seems simpler than the present. To his credit, he isn't another 1960s boomer insisting that everything was better back then, man-- his music hasn't changed that dramatically. There are a few moments of fuzzy nostalgia, as on "He Was the King", which takes liberties with Elvis's legendary exploits. But does anybody need to be reminded of Elvis's popularity when the same old songs are repackaged every holiday season? Or is that Young's point?
Still, Prairie Wind is best when Young indulges personal reminiscences, as on "Far From Home", which starts with a fond memory: "When I was a growing boy rockin' on my daddy's knee/ Daddy took an old guitar and sang 'Bury me on the lone prairie.'" Young's dad appears again on the title track, and a less earthly father appears on "When God Made Me". "This Old Guitar" reminisces over his long career, and on the album opener, "The Painter", he nods to old friends who are either long gone or still hanging around for another album. Several of the musicians on Prairie Wind have played with Young many times before, including keyboard player Spooner Oldham, guitarist Ben Keith, bassist Rick Rosas, and Emmylou Harris. For such a seasoned band, though, they sound maybe a little too familiar: They tend to let the songs drag out, clocking in at five, six, or even seven minutes (the tiring title track) when three would work just fine.
Intermingled with these private memories are larger concerns about Bush-era America, across which a cold prairie wind apparently blows. Yet Young's music is so rooted in the past, specifically the spirit of the 60s, that his stabs at contemporary relevance sound awkward and even curmudgeonly, as on "No Wonder" when he refers to "America the Beautiful" as "that song from 9/11" and quotes Chris Rock. Prairie Wind tries to gauge the present via the past, but there's a profound disconnect. But maybe Young is aware of it: "I try to tell the people," he sings on the title track, "But they never hear a word I say/ They say there's nothin' out there but wheat field anyway." He sounds pretty frustrated, but Prairie Wind mostly is frustrating.


The Philadelphia/Baltimore duo recorded their 2021 debut remotely from their respective bedrooms, but the album—newly reissued by Carpark—captures the spirit of folk-pop at its most intimate.

Mind Palace Music

With Bandcamp as their roadmap to discovery and YouTube as their confessional, artists like Soccer Mommy, Clairo, and Jay Som represent a new breed of bedroom-pop musician: introverts who sing confessional lyrics into their Macbooks while turning hazy guitar melodies into earworms. And at first, @, the duo of Philadelphia guitarist Victoria Rose and Baltimore musician Stone Filipczak, appear to fall into that camp as well. As artists destined to collaborate but separated by 100 miles of highway, they swapped song ideas over iMessage before deciding to join forces—virtually, of course—to record a joint album from their respective bedrooms. But in sound, their music has an old-school feel rooted in acoustic guitar and rich vocal harmonies, sounding a little like ’70s-inspired teens hung up on the Mamas & the Papas. Originally released in 2021 and now reissued by Carpark, @’s debut full-length, Mind Palace Music, offers a tidy half hour of raw folk-pop straight from the heart.
The most striking quality of @’s music is also the most human one: their voices. The imperfectness of their singing is akin to Animal Collective’s exuberant tone on Sung Tongs, or the pristine vocal harmonies of girl groups like the Chordettes or the Ronettes if somebody slid them a glass of scotch to take the edge off. Filipczak enunciates each word and sings with a slight, high-pitched lilt that, in flashes, recalls John Lennon, giving a song like “Major Blue Empty” the uncanny air of a Beatles demo. Rose counterbalances with a warm, pure timbre, and the urgency of her delivery resembles emotions bubbling up. Compared to her solo work as Brittle Brian, particularly last year’s Biodiesel, she sounds unburdened as she draws out notes in “Star Game” or “My Garden.” The duo’s vocal harmonies are at once full bodied and delicate, off-key and in tune, merry and forlorn. On the opening “Parapet,” Rose and Filipczak’s evocative vocal harmonies are paired with fluttering piano in a way that perfectly captures the visceral feel of relentless longing.
At a time when most bedroom pop feels tethered to the online world, @ are making music that cuts the ethernet cable, no matter what their alias and origins might suggest. Each instrument on Mind Palace Music sounds well loved from years of jamming, lending the album an intimacy akin to the quiet sounds of a friend performing a song just for you: the buzz of a string vibrating against a fret, the hum of a microphone turning on, the tingle on the back of your neck when two voices intertwine. That human touch is audible in the spritely acoustic guitar and soft thumps of bongos on “Letters,” or the even-keeled flute in “First Journal.” Though the influence of cult favorite Vashti Bunyan is audible on the album’s best single, “Friendship Is Frequency,” the rustic tone of the duo’s guitar and Irish low whistle adds a personable, left-field signature of their own.
Mind Palace Music is an example of what happens when you take a poignant songwriter who’s careful about her chord progressions and introduce a fellow songwriter who knows the magic of no-frills arrangements. By the time Rose and Filipczak add more instruments into the mix, @ bloom into a kind of backyard folk-pop fit for Elephant 6. The album’s longest track, “Camera Phone,” begins quietly before evolving into a spontaneous flash of prog-rock complete with MIDI erhu. “My Garden” follows a similar trajectory, but this time Rose’s vocal cadence plays with meter to fake the dizzying effect of a shifting time signature. Even the driving percussion in standout “Cut From Toxic Cloth” can’t derail the intimate charm of @’s pop tendencies. “I don’t want intensity, no/Just a way to warmth and amity,” sings Rose. That’s exactly what the band finds on its humble debut.


Across six tracks channeling vintage freestyle, electro, UK garage, Baltimore club, and more, the Manchester producer pays tribute to dance music at its most joyful.

All Hours EP

For anyone who has ever slouched out of a nightclub in the inhospitable hours of the new day, wondering what on earth they were thinking, Manchester producer Anz’ All Hours offers ample justification that it was all worthwhile. Her debut EP for London independent powerhouse Ninja Tune pays jubilant homage to clubbing and club music with enough genuine joy that it’s enough to make you want to do it all over again, no matter the ringing ears and pounding headache.
Anz is fully qualified to tackle this Herculean task of rejuvenation. Not only is she from Manchester—arguably the cradle of the UK’s dance culture—but Anz has also proved herself to be the perfect bridge between dance music’s past, present, and future, a producer (much like India Jordan) who understands dance history without being in thrall to it, capable of producing both turbo hardcore throwbacks (like “Rave Casual”) and dazzling experiments in rhythm (2020’s “Gary Mission”).
The nightlife concept behind All Hours is explicit but not overbearing. Anz calls the EP “dance music for people who are up all hours,” and the record’s opening and closing tracks—“Decisions (AM Intro)” and “Quest Select (AM Outro)”—reflect their positioning in the theoretical small hours. The EP’s six songs surge and relax as the record traces the course of 24 hours in clubland, building from the contemplative welcome of “Decisions (AM Intro)” to the brutalist rave frenzy of “Last Before Lights,” and finally mellowing off into the nervous energy of “Quest Select,” a song that suggests tired, twitching feet and brain waves hovering between retreat and attack.
Within this loose framework Anz offers a freewheeling—and very entertaining—callback to the club styles of the last four decades. The giddy “You Could Be,” featuring George Riley, takes the listener back to the early days of Madonna’s career, when she was riding high on the New York electro-funk style of Jellybean Benitez; “Real Enough to Feel Good” nods to G-funk, UK garage, and Baltimore club, while “Inna Circle'' splits the difference by introducing Mantronix-style electro to Baltimore breakbeats. “Last Before Lights,” meanwhile, is a tribute to pretty much everything, throwing Beltram hoover sounds, staccato trance riffs, a chest-bursting bassline, and rousing Italo pianos at a track intended to capture that last, glorious surge of energy before the club lights come on.
While this genre pick ’n’ mix is not exactly standard practice for electronic producers, All Hours is notably less experimental than Anz’ 2020 EP for Hessle Audio, Loos In Twos (NRG). With the possible exception of “Real Enough to Feel Good,” the music on All Hours walks with a straight back and winning smile quite different from that EP’s wobbly strut. The production is bright and welcoming, like an unexpectedly friendly pat-down from security.
More importantly, All Hours brings to the forefront a melodic tendency that Anz has only hinted at in her previous work. The piano intro to “Decisions (AM Intro)” teases the kind of ambiguous emotional journey you might expect of a particularly winsome movie soundtrack, while “You Could Be” is simply a wonderful pop song, shining with romantic sass. The way that the EP’s six songs flow into each other, with sonic elements artfully bridging the divide between tracks, evokes a well-crafted DJ set. The twisting synth riff that connects “Decisions (AM Intro)” and “You Could Be” brings a smile to my face every time, a perfect sleight of hand that never seems to tire.
Like the very best nights out, this EP is simultaneously fleeting and impactful, a brief moment of joy that promises to resonate for years. All Hours feels like an effortless step up to the major leagues for a producer who can find magic in the murkiest nightclub corner.

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Running influences from classic jungle, reggae, and R&B through pop music’s pithy filter, the Manchester producer is extending UK hardcore’s legacy to a new generation.

Forbidden Feelingz

Let’s get the inevitable PinkPantheress comparisons out the way first. Both Nia Archives and PinkPantheress like a breakbeat. They’re both relatively young, and open in their admiration of mid-’90s UK dance music. PinkPantheress calls her style “new nostalgic,” Nia Archives goes with “future classic.” They both sing. They’re both women operating in dance-music spaces that have historically been sausage fests. And they’re both fueling a renaissance of the UK’s dance-music canon among curious, TikTok-enabled generations—which is why the comparisons are so tempting to make. But comparisons being inevitable doesn’t make them useful.
While PinkPantheress plumbs turn-of-the-millennium jungle and garage for curios and loops (and is open about her own freshness to it), Nia Archives is a studious devotee of the jungle scene. The Leeds native left home at 16 and came up playing basements and squat parties around drum’n’bass-loving Manchester, and she’s since been taken under the wing of the elders at foundational jungle imprint V Recordings as part of the EQ50 initiative, which aims to redress the scene’s historic gender imbalance. Her songs, along with diaristic lyrics about parties and problems, are stuffed with nods to junglist culture and its roots in big bass scoops. Her voice is indebted to the jazzy licks of Erykah Badu and Nina Simone, while she lifts a soulful lilt and lyrics from the sunnier sides of reggae music—all ingredients picked up, she’s said, from her West Indian upbringing. And then she pulls it all through pop music’s two-and-a-half-minute mangle, with mesmerizing results.
There’s a fine line between being devoted and sounding derivative, but Nia Archives traverses the divide with easy elegance. The title track—a standout among highlights on this fast-paced six-tracker—samples vintage TV for its punctuation (a neat setup from Columbo’s titular detective) and deploys the gnarly Reese bass that served as a bridge between jungle and its drum’n’bass fork in the mid-’90s. On “18 and Over” you get an instantly familiar reggae hook in the intro (Cocoa Tea’s “Young Lover”) and a sampled call to arms (“Give me a motherfucking breakbeat!”) that’s littered everywhere from Hardsequencer’s 1993 acid slammer “Some Motherfucking Breakbeat” to the gabber headrush of Hardliner’s “Motherfucking Breakbeat” from the same year, all the way up to 2020’s far more serene “Brand E” by John Frusciante. So far so familiar, perhaps. But then Nia Archives starts singing, and her voice spins, captivating, like a smoke ring. “Gud Gudbyez” will have you reaching in vain to the back of your brain to figure out where you’ve heard the trippy hook before. (Don’t worry, you haven’t.) She toasts like a soundsystem MC: churning loose words and cute phrases over and back, catching a second of delay here, lingering on a wispy vowel there, stepping over bouldering basslines and precision-tracked breaks. And everything fits just so.
Unlike those soundsystem MCs, Nia Archives can give the sense that she’s singing as much for herself as to her listeners. On opener “Ode 2 Maya Angelou,” she swaps her own voice in and out for the late poet-activist’s, drip-feeding lines from a recital of Angelou’s most famous work, “Still I Rise,” like a morning affirmation. “Luv Like,” with its thumbed bass and picked guitar recalling Roni Size’s “Brown Paper Bag,” appears, for all intents, as an adolescent love song—“To think that you could ever love someone like me,” she coos—before throwaways like “I’m far from perfection” reveal its meditation on the turmoil of dysmorphia. “Thank god I found a good in a goodbye,” she simmers on “Gud Gudbyez.” Extroversion turns inward. Comedown thoughts are soundtracked by music from the night before.
Nia Archives is clearly cognizant of the lineage she’s writing into, and she likes to show her work. But she’s never showing off. There’s nothing self-indulgent here: The half-time breakdown on “18 and Over” lasts just long enough (which is 10 seconds); “Forbidden Feelingz” bangs itself out just as it gets going, as if shy at its own wild performance. As the years roll round, every established scene finds claimants for a new generation at its porch. With songs like these—laser-sharp, as intimate and comforting as they are fresh and rollicking—Nia Archives won’t need to kick the door in.


The Flint-raised, Houston-based rapper is known for his outrageous punchlines, but the engine of his raps is the personality-filled flow and the piano-driven Michigan beat.

Bfb Da Packman : Fat Niggas Need Love Too

Fat Niggas Need Love Too

Bfb Da Packman is not a comedian who raps; he’s a rapper who happens to crack a shitload of dick jokes. His breakout song and video, “Free Joe Exotic,” is one of the best and funniest singles to come out of the red-hot Michigan rap scene in the past couple of years. Every line is absolutely nuts: His thoughts on protection (“I’ll jump off a bridge ’fore I put my dick in plastic”), mid-sex musings (“She said she can feel it in her stomach, stop capping/Ol’ lyin’ ass bitch, my dick ain’t that big”), and self-deprecating digs (“I nut super quick and I be weighin’ down the mattress”). In the video, he rolls around on the ground and humps cars while wearing swim trunks, glasses that make him look like Bubble Bass from Spongebob, and a bright orange sweatshirt that reads “STILL HIV POSITIVE.” Guest Sada Baby, one of the most animated rappers in the Midwest, looks like the straight man.
Yet Packman’s debut album, Fat Niggas Need Love Too, isn’t consumed by the gimmick. The Flint-raised rapper, who now lives in Houston, can really spit: He tries to make a good Michigan rap song first and the jokes follow naturally. On “Wendy Williams,” Packman isn’t laugh-out-loud funny—except for maybe when he exclaims, “I got goals of eating Domino’s off Tika Sumpter’s ass”—but the engine of his raps is the personality-filled flow and the piano-driven Michigan beat.
The best Packman songs combine the spirit of a true Michigan street rap single with one-liners so dark and weird that the only reasonable reaction is to laugh and think, Why would anyone say that? “If Lizzo sold her coochie juice, ah, I wanna buy a swiggle,” raps Packman on “Bob and Weave,” followed by the sound of a drink being poured. On “Federal,” he lies, “Family full of hoes, even my granny got an OnlyFans,” a claim ridiculous enough to pierce the underwhelming guitar-based beat. On “Weekend at Solomon’s,” he attempts to boast, “Bougie nigga, just to beat my meat, bitch I get Jergens,” and later, “Man, I had a fat mama, how dare you niggas blame me.” He’s never afraid to clown himself—or his mom or his grandmother or his kids—and it makes his music so much fun.
If there are puns that don’t work for Packman, it’s the STD ones. Even if based in some truth, lines like, “When it comes to STDs, woo, I’m the mascot,” feel needlessly edgy in a way that his humor usually avoids. But the less enjoyable parts of Fat Niggas Need Love Too more often come from his guests: Wiz Khalifa is an awkward fit on the thudding instrumental of “Fun Time,” Coi Leray is fine but forgettable on “Ocean Prime,” and the Sada Baby reunion on “Big Bertha” is dissapointing, mostly because Sada continues to operate on autopilot like he has for much of the year.
The weirdest feature of all is Benny the Butcher on “Frenchmen,” where Packman raps about plugs on a brooding piano beat that sounds like it should be track 17 on a random Griselda mixtape. It’s a miracle that it isn’t a disaster and even moreso that Benny seems to embrace the ridiculousness of it all: “I hit Packman and said, ‘You nice, yeah, I’ll give you that’/Plus you gettin’ rich, can’t believe you ain’t fuck Lizzo yet.” But that’s Packman for you. He’s such a contagious personality that he can make even the most self-serious rapper of the most self-serious rap crew have some fun.

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The Malian producer employs ngoni and other regional sounds in hip-hop-inspired fusions that, at their best, suggest a West African beat tape.

Falaw

Luka Productions crafts music that fuses global hip-hop styles with folktronica vibes. The brainchild of Mali’s Luka Guindo, a producer and vocalist who records in his home studio in the capital city of Bamako, the project is at its most potent when it mines a similar sonic tract to the productions Timbaland and the Neptunes served up for Missy Elliott, Clipse, and NORE around the turn of the last century—only with the sinewy sitar and synth riffs switched out for lines of ngoni, a West African string instrument. But when the 27-year-old Guindo moves on from the loop-based foundation of the album’s most infectious tracks and wanders into more musically expansive territory, the extra layers of instrumentation wind up skewering the appealing punch of his beats.
Falaw, whose title translates to Orphans, opens strongly: The introductory title track features lilting ngoni cushioning Guindo’s fleet yet tender vocals, which he recites in his native Bambara tongue in a sing-song flow. (Lyric translations are included with the album.) The run of tracks that follows contains the album’s gems. The raucous “Bbni” bubbles with dancehall-influenced rhythms and moody flashes of melody. “Foret” is even more addictive, with Guindo demonstrating his own brand of loop science by chopping up an acoustic ngoni like he’s working with an unearthed sample source. The sparse structure of the song is its charm: Vocals appear only briefly, in a call and response fashion, and when it locks into its repetitive mid-section, the track brings to mind a funky and absorbing West African beat tape.
Frustratingly, every time Guindo builds up a degree of cohesive momentum with pockets of songs like these, he can’t resist throwing in an oddly sequenced moment that derails the experience. This happens first with “Indienfoli,” whose four-to-the-floor rhythm and disco stylings come across as clunky rather than upbeat. This unfortunate dampening of the vibe repeats: The hypnotic “Djessou” pulls you in, but the grander, more fleshed-out “Sitanba” breaks the spell, sounding like an errant jazz-funk outing; the playful back-and-forth male and female vocals of “Damonson,” which features the endearingly sweet but husky voice of Rokia Kane, are swamped by closing cut “Dogonodoon,” which threatens to blast off into Detroit techno territory.
The core of Falaw ably showcases Guindo’s talent at hooking up ear-catching loops and channeling the traditional sounds of his region through a hip-hop lens, but he too often seems to become impatient or distracted; he muddles the mix by adding too much instead of letting his songs settle. Much like the tradition of crate-digging that inspired the album, Falaw shines brightest when Guindo narrows his focus on the magic of the groove.


The starkly beautiful seventh album from the venerable singer-songwriter reveals more of her aged wisdom through winding narratives rich with humor and despair.

Song for Our Daughter

There is a song on Laura Marling’s new album which bottles despair and keeps it airtight, like a storm cloud in a glass dome. “Fortune” is the kind of musical moment that can make you freeze in the deli aisle, rooted to the spot by Marling’s voice. It’s a spare lament about an unnamed woman who hopes to escape her unhappy life yet is powerless to make that change. The burden of sorrow is passed down from mother to child until, finally, the “unbearable pain” is absorbed by Marling herself, whose inspiration for the song was her mother’s never-used “running away fund.” Picture-perfect appearances, she seems to say, can hide a well of sadness deeper than we can imagine.
On her Grammy-nominated 2017 album Semper Femina, Marling used Classical-era imagery to add mythos to women-focused stories, but Song for Our Daughter, her seventh album, is guided by its own kind of far-reaching lore. Marling does away with her previous record’s occasional blues-rock grit and peels her sound back to its gleaming bones: pristine acoustic guitar, textural hums, a metronome click. She doesn’t need much else to frame her quartz pendant of a voice, which can reach Alpine altitudes as well recall a troubadour singing through chewing tobacco. Marling has described Song for Our Daughter as a rumination on modern femininity, and her tendency to leave lyrical narratives open and unfinished adds an evocative elasticity to her new music. You may find yourself wanting to fill in the spaces as if playing a particularly soul-searching kind of Mad Libs.
Marling—an avid reader who once visited her local book store several times a week—sketches her new heroines with a literary bent. The subject of the rousing album opener, “Alexandra,” is partially inspired by a Leonard Cohen song, an enigmatic woman who finds ”diamonds in the drain” and collects them with abandon. The metaphor implies the jewels are simple men that fall under Alexandra’s spell. “If she loved you like a woman,” Marling sings with a withering tone, “Did you feel like a man?” At other times, Marling is downright funny, rolling her eyes at the champagne socialism of the recently woke. “Girl, please,” she sings drily. “Don’t bullshit me.” Still, Marling has not quite forgotten her genteel upbringing in Berkshire, UK. “I won’t write a woman with a man on my mind,” she sings on the album, before worrying, “Hope that doesn’t sound too unkind.”
At other times, Marling sounds delightfully carefree. She sings the upbeat, folk-rock tune “Strange Girl” with a swaggering tone and a full band, calling to mind a group of journeymen busking with a bashed-up guitar case open at their feet. At one point in the song, a laugh creeps into her voice, as if she’d caught the eye of a mugging band member mid-sentence. And while “Held Down” describes the cruelty of abandonment over trundling bass guitar, Marling sounds about as stressed as a flower child singing to the moon, her vocals bathed in psychedelic coos. As much as she sings of unrest, Marling's tone suggests a serene clairvoyance for the future, as if she has an 8-ball telling her everything will be okay. She’s even able to bring an optimistic outlook to the starkly beautiful break-up song “The End of the Affair,” a co-write with Blake Mills. “I love you goodbye,” she sings, her voice rising to a falsetto before putting a decisive cap on the relationship. “Now let me live my life.”
Song for Our Daughter brims with peaceful reflections that, even though Marling herself is just grazing her 30s, could seem like the work of an artist in their twilight years. “I’ve lived my life in fits and spurts,” she sings at one point on the album; “Bruises all end up benign,” she offers elsewhere. She thinks about passing on that perspective to an imagined daughter in the elegant, bucolic title track, describing misogynist “bullshit” and predatory creeps. “You’ll cut your way through it somehow,” she sings with relief, a tone that suggests lessons learned the hard way. Marling caps the song by broadening its perspective further still, invoking the writers of “words that will outlive the dead.” It’s a class to which Marling also belongs.


For the Liverpool mainstays' fifth album, they've removed the cinder block that Velocifero applied to the gas pedal, opting for a floatier, airy feel that often sounds as if its creators' feet are barely touching the ground.

Gravity the Seducer

Seduction can be an evil art, and Ladytron are certainly capable of resisting it. The Liverpool mainstay's fifth album is titled Gravity the Seducer, but Newton's discovery clearly struggles to seal the deal throughout. During their dozen-year career, the band's refused to outright repeat themselves-- 2002's Light & Magic was a glossier, more robust update on the toy-store analog work of the previous year's debut, 604, while 2008's underrated, overstuffed Velocifero added a menacing stare and at-times mismatched experimentation to the void-creating shoegaze synths of 2005's game-changing The Witching Hour. For Gravity the Seducer, they've taken off the cinder block that Velocifero applied to the gas pedal, opting for a floatier, airy feel that often sounds as if its creators' feet are barely touching the ground. Hired gun Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails) returns to lend an extra hand, but his touch is less heavily felt than on Velocifero, where, more often than not, throttling industrial rhythms prevailed.
Change is good, right? Well, here's the rub: Ladytron aren't quite content to let go of the since-perfected Witching Hour sound that won them attention beyond the Cobrasnake crowd, so the push-and-pull between their new-look sound and the blank-eyed electrogaze of the past creates an unfortunate tension. "Ace of Hz" and "Mirage" are boilerplate, late-aughts Ladytron, right down to the charging synth melodies and vague political-naturalistic lyricism, and the former's shoulders-shrugged ordinariness is driven home when its melody is redone on the instrumental LP closer "Aces High". Earlier on the album, another sorta-instrumental rears its head in the form of "Ritual", a limp faux-rocker that, if nothing else, makes for an easy "Roxy Elevator Music" joke.
Unsurprisingly, the weightless pomp of Gravity the Seducer's fresher material is more impressive. Opener "White Elephant" is a sneaky-good song with a swaying melody that belongs in the Great Ladytron Songs canon, while the drum machine-kissed ballad "Ambulances" bucks the band's trend for blush-worthy, Tolkien-esque lyricism in favor of a worrying plea in the name of lost love. Still, even when Ladytron attempt to fully escape the past, it haunts them: the melodic structure of album highlight "90 Degrees", in all its glistening beauty, can't help but recall Witching Hour closer "All the Way...", a song that's of the band's most directly affecting works to date and certainly more substantial than the majority of what's here.
So Gravity the Seducer is a transitional album bearing the growing pains and separation anxiety that we usually associate with bands that are in between periods of true inspiration. It's not a bad record, but it is an upsettingly uneven one, especially considering the flashes of greatness that Ladytron are still capable of. I'm tempted to give them the benefit of the doubt, though, based on their longevity alone. In his review of last year's greatest hits collection, Best of 00-10, ex-Pitchfork editor Scott Plagenhoef made an excellent case for why Ladytron demand more than a light dismissal-- and, let's face it, considering the flash-in-the-pan electroclash "movement" that first gave them recognition, it's a pleasant shock that they've stuck around this long and still manage to evolve. "Points for showing up" usually carries negative connotations, so how about we give Ladytron "points for surviving." After all, simply sticking around without growing totally stale is a feat that's not easily pulled off these days.


The experimental rapper remains an impish writer and an athletic vocalist on his latest album, one that lays bare the sprawling collage in his fiery, fascinating brain.

All My Heroes Are Cornballs

From the DC Universe to the internet writ large, JPEGMAFIA’s heroes span genres and mediums. The producer and rapper’s pantheon is expansive and colorful, a bustling splash page of influences and pop culture totems. While JPEG has never downplayed the prominent roles that anime, video games, and wrestling play in his music, the adrenalized politics of his past projects sometimes obscured that scope. Listening to a song like “I Just Killed a Cop Now I’m Horny,” for instance, the morose Ai Aso sample always felt overshadowed by the flamboyant title and JPEG’s anti-cop lyrics. All My Heroes Are Cornballs adjusts that imbalance by laying bare the sprawling collage in his brain and showcasing how seamlessly it all fits together. The record feels like a public access show on an interdimensional cable channel: unhinged and trippy, but still deeply earnest.
All My Heroes is a significant departure from his earlier work. But for as dense as it sounds, there’s a quiet accessibility to how JPEG performs and structures these songs. He adopts gendered terms like thot, slut, and girl, leaning into Peggy, his feminine nickname, and stages a few songs from the perspective of a woman. It’s unclear what they might signify about his own identity, but they further the idea that his fearlessness is his superpower. As a producer, he builds his hyper-syncretic songs around concord rather than contrast. The distorted guitar riff on “Rap Grow Old and Die x No Child Left Behind” acts as a springboard for the vocals and other instruments, converting all the friction into motion. The crackle of a recorded fire on “DOTS FREESTYLE REMIX” fills the spaces between JPEG’s boasts and the cutesy synth tune. He’s adept at making disparate sounds and images cohere without sacrificing texture or invoking an exaggerated sense of audacity. In a year full of nods to diaspora and lineage, his productions are a reminder that even randomness can be personal.
Sounds and sequences that would have been codas or flourishes in his past music are allowed to fully blossom, even in passing. “Kenan Vs. Kel” shuffles through keyboard melodies before settling on a riff that morphs into a dusty beat. Then, halfway through, a crunchy power chord shows up and is stretched like sheet metal as it’s hammered with percussion. JPEG raps on both parts, and as busy as that sounds, the shifts are effortless, like swiping between smartphone apps. “Grimy Waifu,” a gun ode with a gorgeous downtempo backbeat, folds in flute spirals and acoustic guitar riffs as JPEG sings in AutoTune of his weapon’s commitment to him. It’s as ridiculous as it is dazzling.
Amid all the chaos, his rapping remains his greatest tool. JPEG is an impish writer and an athletic vocalist. He can slither in and out of rhythms and hopscotch through the densest arrangements without losing momentum. Here, he raps in compact spurts, volleys, and streams, his words slurred, stretched, and compressed as he channels his heroes and roasts his enemies. His references are personal and evocative. “BBW” is named after the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson (JPEG claims to be his black counterpart). On “Post Verified Lifestyle,” he likens himself to DOOM, Beanie Sigel, the Beatles, and 98 Degrees. The first half of “Rap Grow Old and Die x No Child Left Behind” uses Bobby Brown and Michael Jackson to skewer music industry whitewashing in the chorus, and ends its second verse with a shout out to Tom Hardy’s Bane.
What’s striking about all these name drops is their constant sense of dimension. JPEG threatening to turn former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon into Steve Hawking on “PRONE!” is incredibly brash and aggro and ableist, yes, but it’s also a sincere expression of rage against a propagator of white nationalism. Similarly, JPEG’s reference to The Dark Knight Rises alludes to the album’s title while conveying his genuine belief in armed revolt against cops. As nerdy and gushing as this album is, it’s no less unabashed about JPEG’s political stances. He may want to be your girl (“Thot Tactics”), but he’s still blasting the alt-right (“Beta Male Strategies”) and incensed by police brutality (“PTSD”). There’s no hierarchy to his touchstones or his tactics; his idols coexist with his ideals.
Given the record’s wild song titles and manic energy, it’s tempting to attribute that equivalency to the internet, but JPEG’s fluency feels more tied to his life experiences than his web history. He’s lived across the world and country as an airman, artist, and black man (“I been everywhere around the world and nobody likes niggas,” he once observed). He grew up listening to reggae singer Michael Prophet (“Free the Frail”) and has recorded sincere covers of Carly Rae Jepsen and now TLC (a dissonant cut of “No Scrubs” appears as “BasicBitchTearGas”). “Don’t rely on the strength of my image,” he sings on “Free the Frail.” It feels like a public warning as well as a personal mantra.
In balancing the stridence of his politics with the aesthetic overload of his many influences, All My Heroes reintroduces JPEGMAFIA as an imagineer as well as a provocateur. He remains a hellraiser, but also comes across as bubbly and inventive, technicolor and cyberpunk—real anime supervillain shit. In a scattered .txt file titled “thoughts” included with his previous album Veteran, he wrote, “U can never make a type beat for me I’m to [sic] varied.” Back then, the statement rang true mostly for his boisterous, glitchy beat-making. All My Heroes shows that it applies to his full skill set. Get this man a shield.


On their debut album, the Los Angeles hardcore band explodes out of the basement show without abandoning its energy and essence.

Life Under the Gun

Militarie Gun originally started as a solo side project for Ian Shelton, the drummer and vocalist for the Seattle powerviolence group Regional Justice Center. Across three early EPs, it felt as if Shelton was stuck in a state of perpetual metamorphosis. It was tough-guy-sounding punk songs injected with brief sections of jangly acoustic guitar or gentle harmonics, at times sounding like several insoluble ideas trying to be whisked together.
But increasingly, he had his sights on inverting the formula in pushing pop to the forefront. He got a band together—including guitarist Nick Cogan from Drug Church and drummer Vince Nguyen from Modern Color—that finally does just that on Militarie Gun's debut full-length. Life Under the Gun explodes out of the basement show without abandoning its energy and essence. The noise of their earlier EPs has become rich and lush, their rhythm section tight and crisp. It’s the first time Shelton’s voice is allowed to completely seep through—cracked, damaged, and sweetly heartbreaking.
The epiphany appears to date back to the band’s collaboration with James Goodson’s project Dazy last spring on the song “Pressure Cooker.” It’s an airy pop gem that deftly balances a Stone Roses-style rhythm section, grungy guitar licks, and an anthemic earworm of a chorus punctuated by Shelton’s signature “ooh ooh” grunt. He still wields a primal growl when necessary, but he is even more effective when his voice has some melody to it. Goodson is all over Life Under the Gun as a background singer, subtly lifting Shelton up, whispering in his ear that it’s sometimes OK to smash the off button on the Big Muff pedal.
The evolution is most easily heard in “Big Disappointment,” re-recorded for the full-length after first appearing on the EP All Roads Lead to the Gun II. It charts a similar course: a mid-tempo, chug-filled rock song that employs a bass drum stutter to hammer home Shelton’s frustrations—“Addicted to rage/Can’t get out of the way”—with a brief, spacey interlude before raging to a close. The repeated closing line, “And it stains,” sounds punctuated with a question mark on the EP. Here, Shelton confidently tosses on a couple exclamation points for emphasis, his last word encompassing a second, lower note instead of being shouted flatly. Even the “burned, beaten, bludgeoned brain” that Shelton describes in his staccato yelp glows vividly in the mind’s eye.
There are moments when Life Under the Gun feels a bit too simple for its own good, as if the pendulum swung back too far. Whereas most of the record employs shimmery, dense melodies, “Seizure of Assets,” a lament about the narrator’s car being repossessed, sounds a little stripped for parts. Luckily, detours like this are rather brief and are vastly overshadowed by something like “My Friends Are Having a Hard Time,” the album’s centerpiece, and thesis for the new big beefy Militarie Gun. “I can’t do anything/For anyone, not me” Shelton sings in the chorus alongside Goodson. The song tumbles toward, the harmonies expand, the time signature gets weird, the guitars and bass volley riffs back and forth. Goodson returns to the chorus and Shelton plows forward, singing “I wish I could help,” his fatalism at an all-time high. It’s heart-rending, arresting, a sound and feel that Militarie Gun can finally call their own.


Matthew Cooper's second solo piano record in 15 years glows with a childlike wonder underscored by mature regret.

Pianoworks

In 2004, Matthew Cooper released his second Eluvium album, An Accidental Memory in the Case of Death. The electronic ambient of his debut ceded the stage to unaccompanied piano, a choice that marked him as an artist who understood the true nature of the instrument. The piano is memory incarnate, an instrument made for remembering true things, which you can’t do without forgetting false ones—one track was called “Nepenthe,” a mythic elixir of amnesia. Since then, he’s tacked between electronic drone, quasi-chamber music, ambient pop, post-rock, and points outlying. But the piano has remained a stabilizing presence, holding up some of Cooper’s most memorable tracks, like the Philip Glass pastiche “Prelude for Time Feelers”. Pianoworks is his second solo piano record, and, considered alongside its 15-year-old predecessor, it reflects how he’s changed and how he hasn’t, as any mirror worth its magic should.
Most obvious is Cooper’s growth as a player and a recording artist. An Accidental Memory sounds like someone sunk an old upright in the Pacific Ocean for a while, then hauled it up and stuck a microphone in it. Cooper’s unadorned etudes are as winsome and lulling as a baby’s mobile, which accounts for their classical-gateway-drug charm. But Pianoworks is clearly a more professional recording, with a broad, pearly sound, softly curved instead of flat and shrill. The compositions are consummate Eluvium, but the signature childlike wonder is underscored with mature regret and intellect. It is as if a musician once governed by stark emotions can now feel one thing while thinking another, in the middle of life, tugged by the immediacy of youth from one end and the mysteries of mortality from the other.
Cooper has been tinkering with this record for years, and happily, it sounds like he spent much of that time paring it down. There’s no grandstanding in his playing, nothing inessential, nothing hidden in the fixed but flexible figures. Not every track earns its spareness: “Transfiguration One” feels static. But usually, Cooper’s tunes find the edge where memory blends into dream and linger there, their opening intervals stirring echoes of near-recognition (the first four notes of “Paper Autumnalia” nearly quote “Silent Night”) that isn’t broken when they take their own course.
Eluvium is defined by instant legibility, and at worst, it can feel effective but easy, confected from the surface froth of 19th-century impressionism, 20th-century minimalism, and modern indie classical. You could say Cooper’s virtue and vice are the same: simplicity. But I’m not sure we’d have it any other way, and Pianoworks, retaining the virtue while dispersing the vice, hints that the farther he gets from the almost-remembered paradise he seeks, the richer his music is going to become.


The first full-length project from the Bronx’s Sie7etr3 collective showcases its leader’s elastic flows and artful delivery over minimal but effective beats.

De Chamaquito Siempre Cabezu

Every rap crew needs a cocky ringleader, and Chucky73 gleefully stepped up to the challenge for Sie7etr3. Over two years, the Bronx label and collective has flourished thanks to its Uptown twist on New York drill. The crew racked up YouTube views and Instagram followers, dropped loosies and EPs; meanwhile, Chucky charmed us with his unflappable flow and toothy smile, emerging as the group’s cherub-cheeked playboy. It’s fitting that the first full-length project from Sie7etr3, the just-released De Chamaquito Siempre Cabezu, comes from the collective’s loveable lothario.
On his debut album, the New York rapper confronts some familiar challenges for newly crowned regional rap royalty: the pressure to expand an already buzzy profile and reach new fans without abandoning the beloved local style that made him blow up in the first place. Luckily, Chucky mostly avoids that fate. Rather than trend-hopping and watering himself down, he chooses organic collaborations in the broader Latin trap landscape, flaunting his elastic, agile flows and artful delivery over minimal but effective beats.
The crew’s penchant for simple, sturdy productions shepherd the album, as does their fondness for onomatopoeic, four-letter track titles. Robust horns on “Fiti (lili part3)” and “Chassy” recall the maximalism that made Dipset New York legends. On “Zili,” Chucky rides the lurching bass and skittish violin hook, dropping playful but hard-edged bars in short, pummeling bursts. Sparse production accumulated in the low end is an ideal setting for Chucky’s songs of triumph; his polysyllabic bars feel muscular, making his presence known with straight-talking tigueraje. Sie7etr3 member Fetti031 and Puerto Rican lyricist Myke Towers also lend vocals to “Zili”; Towers drops a breathless verse that serves as a reprieve from the more melodic fare he typically showcases on mainstream pop-reggaetón records.
Throughout the album, Chucky sets the tone for his guests, many of whom are Latin trap or reggaetón artists. Guests like Chilean trapero Pablo Chill-E, Dominican emcee El Pollito Trapper, and reggaetón legend Ñengo Flow are compelled to get on Chucky’s level and actually rap—or admit embarrassing failure, like Jon Z’s sophomoric attempt at a drill flow on “Tutu,” a track that otherwise sounds like an homage to Pop Smoke. It’s a shrewd choice; Chucky invites his guests into his world while reminding them that the bland reggaetón- and trap-lite that currently dominates the Latin pop charts just won’t do here.
Tracks like “Dominicana” show off Sie7etr3’s irresistibility; the addictive, clanging beat demands some ass-shaking in the mirror, preferably with a Henny colada in hand. Chucky drops a handful of deadpan, laugh-out-loud couplets that capture the goofiness he’s beloved for, and though the Mr. Freire production almost too closely resembles the synthetic horns and bells on Sie7etr3 EP’s “Brazilera” and “Colombiana,” the track still harnesses the jocular sensibility that makes the Bronx crew stand out from their peers in other boroughs. It’s a reminder of how they’ve resuscitated the Latin trap scene and embraced a sense of vivacity in the otherwise ominous New York drill movement.
De Chamaquito Siempre Cabezu has its valleys. Chucky has faced criticism for repetitive flows, which he dismisses with cheeky wordplay on “Palos”; changing up his style would be like telling El Alfa to abandon dembow, or asking notoriously incendiary radio host Alofoke to cut the drama, he says. His laid-back flows are a central part of his magnetism and something he’s not willing to sacrifice so easily. But he does harbor some writing crutches, and when Chucky crafts punchy lyrics, he tends to fall back on them. “Wigi’”s chorus includes a line about packing a 40 in Dora the Explorer’s backpack, but it’s repeated so many times the joke deflates when the song comes to a close. Those seeking respite from all the flexing and sex talk might tap in to “Rosario” or “Desahogo,” but these trap baladas suffer from trite lyrics about the come-up and clichéd voicemail samples from Chucky’s mom.
Yet even Chucky’s most uncomplicated songs are made interesting, either through minimal, potent productions or sticky Dominican palabreo–a language of survival that revels in improvisation and orality, always refusing the colonial imposition of proper Spanish. Dominican Spanish has long been dismissed as low-class or too culturally specific; today, white, non-Caribbean Latin American artists frequently don accents or pepper their songs with island slang, cashing in on the cultural and racial currency of Afro-Caribbean speech and performance. Chucky doesn’t have to posture as something he’s not; the songs on De Chamaquito Siempre Cabezu announce his arrival with fearless opacity, and he couldn’t care less whether you understand. He may have traded his low-budget videos for flashy hotels and high-profile collabs with Rich the Kid and Fivio Foreign, but De Chamaquito Siempre Cabezu suggests he’s set on remaining the movement’s irreverent, self-assured torchbearer.

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This four-song EP came about when Radiolab asked the self-sufficient Hudson, NY, duo to cover New Order's "Blue Monday" for a compilation, which led Buke and Gase into trying to write a song a day for a week.

Function Falls

It makes perfect sense that Hudson, NY's Buke and Gase chose Wired to host a stream of their new EP, Function Falls, even though as gase-ist Aron Sanchez explained to the tech magazine, "Nothing [on it] was created in the computer." I visited the band's studio in the Red Hook neighborhood last spring, and it was the closest I'd come to a physics lab since leaving school; a basement full of what Sanchez termed "cannibalized" instruments, shedding or absorbing new components on their path to becoming something else entirely. As Joshua Love explained in his review of their debut full-length, 2010's Riposte (made under a different spelling of their name), their inventing new instruments arose from necessity; finding one that would accommodate Arone Dyer's carpal tunnel syndrome, and making two people sound like a full band. Buke and Gase solved musical problems using Sanchez' background in making mad instruments for the Blue Man Group and Dyer's experience building bikes. With such a bold self-sufficient streak, it's not surprising to know that their last single, May's "Hiccup", was released in "sympathy" with the Occupy movement.
Solution found, on this new EP (there's a full-length to follow early next year), Sanchez and Dyer set about executing control experiments, working within limitations that unexpectedly prove both fruitful and poignant for a band whose previous raison d'être had been making maximalism from within minimalist confines. Function Falls came about when Radiolab asked the band to cover New Order's "Blue Monday" for a compilation, which led Sanchez and Dyer into trying to write a song a day for a week. Their cover of the dance staple sounds as though it predates the original-- made in the bracing, clanking austerity of the industrial age rather than the burgeoning glamor of the early 1980s-- and the classic's insistent synthesizer line proves the perfect mettle for Sanchez's gase (a guitar strung with bass strings). Those steady, tugged bass parts underpin the other three songs here, a far cry from the bungeeing bottom-end bounce that defined Riposte and 2008's mini album, +/-. Instead, Function Falls stands on the lip of the bridge, deciding whether to jump.
Where Buke and Gase's early releases were bristling and joyous-- doesn't "[waking] up in a bundle of orgasm" sound like fun?-- it's much harder to parse the emotion here. The band have described how the words to the opening song, "Misshaping Introduction", were improvised, "resulting in a slight lyrical disintegration," and true to form, the only part that's easy to pick out without a lyric sheet is "Don't clear the air/ Better to love first." The song's steady mechanical clank and the way Dyer sings in a downcast, quieter tone, all former yelps expunged, give the impression that the whole thing could go off at any second; it reminds me of the danger present in Annie Clark's work, particularly when she's playing dead in a visual. You stoop over, duped into concern, and bam!, she's got you by the throat.
"Fussrate" puts out a little more easily, starting with a familiar monochrome tug-- they share a similar palette to Shellac, and it's no surprise that Bob Weston has mastered their forthcoming full-length. Then one bastardized instrument or other poses as a Moog, making for an elegant segue into a regimented orchestral cacophony halfway between the most in excelsis parts of a Rhys Chatham composition and Battles circa Mirrored.
Despite all this control, there's a danger present in the kind of industrial mechanical sound that Buke and Gase mine-- the tambourine in "Tending the Talk" sounds as if fashioned from a wreath of shivs, the effect on the guitar lending it a dull glitter, like a jagged piece of quartz lagged in dust. It's the brightest song on the record, but Dyer sings at her slowest and most soulful, repeating, "this heart ain't too hard to guarantee," as half statement, half plea for understanding. She reaches a depth and insidiousness in her vocal that more than makes good on the band's excellent Fugazi covers for the Our Band Could Be Your Life concert that took place in New York earlier this year. Even though it was the starting point for the record, their cover of "Blue Monday" sits at the EP's end, where Dyer's processed, neutered cries of "How should I feel?" seem to act as a kind of emotional release for the questioning tone and linguistic disintegration that came before.
On each of their releases to date, Buke and Gase have never been anything less than absolutely thrilling-- even if some of those thrills were a bit more firecracker-on-your-chair than others-- and it speaks volumes that, whether they're going for maximalist madness or something more contained, both tacks still pack the same exhilarating punch. In their case, letting function dictate form hasn't limited any of their expression; rather, it's just shown off another side of their considerable arsenal. It's rare to find a band that triumphs in aggression, emotion, and innovation. Their controlled experiments have elicited a rare alchemy.


*Coconut Oil, *Lizzo's first release under Atlantic, is her ode to body positivity, self-love and the trials of getting to the point where you believe you deserve it.

Coconut Oil

Lizzo is having a good year. The ink is dry on her deal with a major label, one of her songs got the silver screen treatment and she’s gracing the airwaves too, as a host of Wonderland—MTV’s new live music program. She found time in between all of this to finish Coconut Oil, a six-track EP that marks her official debut for Nice Life Recording Company, an Atlantic Records imprint.
This busy stretch for the Detroit native coincided with an intense period of reckoning for the world at large. Every week brought renewed potential for despair, as images of war, humanitarian crises and police brutality were plastered across our TV, computer and phone screens in stunning high definition. Faced with this seemingly relentless stream of horrible news, and short of going off the grid completely to avoid it, taking time to look after your physical and mental wellbeing is a matter of survival. Coconut Oil is Lizzo’s ode to body positivity, self-love and the trials of getting to the point where you believe you deserve it.
The perception of coconut oil as a cure for all of life’s problems has achieved legendary, and therefore meme-able, status. It’s now hailed as a balm to alleviate everything from the pain of heartbreak to the pressure of student debt. As an integral part of many skin and Afro haircare rituals, it has come to represent something very important for black women in particular, who rally around its power to heal from the outside in. From acknowledging this in the EP’s title down to making songs that speak directly to the lived experience of this demographic, Lizzo is both channeling and fuelling the zeitgeist under which black women’s oft-ignored specificities are being celebrated in popular culture.
In some circles the substance that inspired the EP’s name is used with an almost religious fervor. Lizzo honors this sentiment by taking us to church on the title track, crooning “I thought I needed to run and find somebody to love, but all I needed was some coconut oil” against a backdrop of organs. It’s a light-hearted retelling of the journey from youthful insecurity (“I remember back, back in school, when I wasn’t cool”) through to hard-earned confidence, with a nod to the experiences and people that helped shape her along the way – especially her mother. Saved for last in the play order, “Coconut Oil” the most reserved and lyrically modest effort on what’s otherwise a very spirited collection. Over the five songs leading up to it, she pushes to the upper reaches of her vocal range, quite literally belting out her own praises with no hint of shyness.
The twinkly opening keys of “Scuse Me” give you just enough time to prepare for the impossibly long bass drops and frantic drum sequences to follow, over which she explains just how much she’s feeling herself. Her pre-chorus line “Feeling like a stripper when I’m looking in the mirror, I be slapping on that ass getting thicker and thicker” plays out like a 2016 rewrite of “Oops (Oh My)” turned up to 11.
Two promotional singles from earlier this year found a home on Coconut Oil. “Good As Hell,” featured in the latest installment of the Barbershop series, is brassy encouragement for anyone who is worn out from giving more than they get in a relationship. “Phone” is pure MPC and bassline magic, on which the existential dread of losing both your cellular device (“Where the hell my phone?”) and your friends at the club is somehow turned into a danceable moment.
Weaving in and out of sung and rap verses on all but one song, it’s clear that Lizzo feels at ease in both of those spaces. Still, the EP as a whole doesn’t reach its sweet spot melodically. The mambo-inspired horns on opener “Worship,” give way to a chorus that drifts into show tune territory, leading into two very different syncopated dance rhythms before getting to “Deep.” If neither “Phone” nor “Good As Hell” brought you to this EP, “Deep” would likely be quick to standout as a club-ready dance tune with its soukous-inflected guitar riffs. There is nothing wrong with these elements individually, but it’s hard to know which thread to follow when they’re all packed into a running time of under twenty minutes.
Lizzo’s career and sound have already been through many transformations: from rocker, to electro-soul crooner, to rapper and singer by way of on-air talent. Perhaps Coconut Oil works best when considered as a statement of intent—an inventory of all the things she’s good at, and a testing ground for how best to blend them in the future.


Josianne Boivin’s full-length debut gestures toward space opera, but her lonely disco and lo-fi aesthetic are better suited for sleepy introspection about your place on Earth.

Voyage to Mars

Josianne Boivin—the woman behind MUNYA—isn’t particularly alien. A Canadian with a background in opera and a Parisian instinct for delicate production, Boivin is the image of a musical cool girl: gifted in aesthetics (she draws most of her album covers), bittersweet in her lyrics, elegant in her floaty synths. The most unearthly thing about her is probably her fascination with Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, a theme her debut full-length, Voyage to Mars, tucks between its chiffon layers like an odd, precious egg.
This reference hangs around like an ugly cousin, but it’s impossible to ignore completely. It’s in the title, a rose for Musk’s purported mission to bring humanity to Mars. It’s in many of the songs, which cover sci-fi-adjacent territory like aliens, moons, and Boca Chica, Texas, where the SpaceX launch site is located. Regardless of your interest in these topics, it’s not exactly a great time to be a French Canadian musician with Musk tendencies. Thankfully, Voyage to Mars avoids the Twitter antics and the billionaire propagandizing in favor of the simple admission that, hey, space is pretty cool.
As sugary soft pop, Boivin’s songs make convincing invitations to roll your shoulders back and take a dip. “Cocoa Beach” cycles through melodic guitars and basslines with the soft, lazy glitter of snow. Boivin’s voice, mellow and good for telling a fairytale, swishes through watery riffs on an understated cover of the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Tonight, Tonight.” The orange-peeled guitar of “Voyage” calls back to 2010s indie pop-rock (think Two Door Cinema Club), but encased in a cloud of drowsy, SoundCloud-esque reverb, it doesn’t sound so dated. Boivin’s lonely disco, lo-fi aesthetic, and Quebecois intonation make a perfect backdrop for sleepy introspection about the planet and your place on it.
But despite the prominent space motif, Voyage to Mars is mostly content to explore the weirdness of our current existence, working through typically earthly concerns like listlessness, boredom, and romantic dissatisfaction. Boivin constructs swirling vocal layers, wrestling herself with teary ahs on the breathless “Pour Toi” and the lovesick “Captain Ron,” where she sounds like she’s sleepwalking as she begs a lost love to “show me the light so I can find my way.” On “Perfect Day,” a banal observation feels restless: “Two by two/How do we make it through?” she asks, urging you to reconsider the basics of human companionship against a curl of custardy guitars.
This sort of emotional quandary can’t be resolved by imaginary trips to the moon or rendezvous with aliens, though it doesn’t seem like Boivin is particularly interested in finding solutions to ennui. The songs are too vague, too gossamer to accomplish that. Instead she throws her displeasure on the table—Here it is, the human condition—to make room for more imaginings. As Boivin dreams for Mars, channeling constant disappointment into momentary entertainment, you might start to think of everything you hold onto when you’re dissatisfied, too.

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Remember the future? How futuristic it was going to be? Cripes, yo, it's 2002-- weren't we supposed to ...

Light & Magic

Remember the future? How futuristic it was going to be? Cripes, yo, it's 2002-- weren't we supposed to have brainphones and hover-beers by now? Weren't we supposed to be able to seduce our relatives and combat Biff by time-traveling in Deloreans fueled by sewage? Wasn't the government supposed to be teleporting the homeless to Haiti while they sleep? Where are my in-foot skates?
Ladytron certainly remembers the future, and they've grasped that it will be symbiotically reliant on the technological dreamwaves of the past-- namely old synth textures. As major playaz in the key-heavy, retro-progressive Genre That Hath Too Many Names, these four Brits knew that stakes was high for their sophomore slab. Anyone expecting the warm organs of 604 will be stung by this disc's stark, arch tones; the band's no longer sittin' on the dock of the analog bay. The distant, bloodless Light & Magic is club-fodder for some Kubrickian half- or post-human future in which android scum mimic the moves of the mammals they were built to replace.
Those who dismiss Ladytron releases as "More Songs About Fashion and Dreck" get subjected to the circular logic of the Ladytron fanatics who insist that anyone who doesn't get it simply doesn't get it. Despite Ladytron's popularity (congrats on the car commercial, gang, that industry really needed more stylized fetish-marketing!), these satin-jacket-and-secret-handshakes fans act as if the group is still their hidden prize. They also claim that Ladytron are the arbiters of some savvy cultural criticism. Call me thick, but I don't hear it-- and I promise I'm listening for it, as one of the few eager listeners aware that at the peak of boredom perch those who act bored by cult-crit. But where is the sly commentary in songs such as "Blue Jeans", "Cracked LCD", and "Black Plastic", which are about blue jeans, cracked LCDs, and black plastic? And how, on other tracks, can these dashing primpers bemoan the tyranny of fashion? That's like self-arresting inmates, or anti-potassium bananas, or...
So you're all, "Let's 'Tron again/ Like we did last summer," only to realize that camp is never as good the second time around. And of course, Ladytron's camp is fussily campy. "Turn It On" might be daft, but it's a classic guilty pleasure, reeking of roller-rink digi-breeziness and reminiscent of certain Mantronix/Salt-N-Pepa/Herbie Hancock unmentionables. In fact, more than a couple of these tracks evoke a strange, reverbed collaboration between Yaz and Sir-Mix-A-Lot. Ladytron fans with CDR's full of "Playgirl" remixes had better recalibrate their ometer-ometers to withstand the shock; we're a long way from their cover of Human League's "Open Your Heart". I draw the kitsch line at "Flicking Your Switch", though-- any sophistos laboring to trace Ladytron's roots to aggro-dance greats will hopefully acknowledge that this thin riff summons only, er, (cough) Technotronic.
If you're insecure about how these frozen jams polarize your mind, ask people in proximity to you for their reactions: someone whose opinion I value, who is usually tolerant of my stereo worship, demanded that I stop Light & Magic, citing the repetition and the buried vox as key irritants. A pretentious idiot told me that the album was "post-millennial", whatever the ass that's supposed to mean in the year 2002. (Man, that was a post-millennial "Everybody Loves Raymond" last night.) The non-idiot had a point: this album repeats itself exponentially. I know the songs go nowhere on purpose; that's part of the robo-statement, etc. But I promise you'll want out of this antiseptic defertilization ward unless you're planning a stasis-themed party at the old warehouse out on Cellphone Tower Ave.
Mixed signals abound and obtain and endure: the album is by turns ominous and playful; for every passage that feels like ghosts haunting the intercoms at an abandoned airport, there are stretches like "Seventeen", which, be warned, is the only thing in the world catchier than Quincy Jones' "Sanford and Son" theme. I won't even type its chorus for fear of its voodoo. For every blatant genre flirtation, you get an ice-pop turn like the bouncily experimental "Re:agents", which lays claim to a killer flute loop and even dares to meander during its breakdown. The disc's vocals approximate Kim Deal's at welcome intervals, and some Faint-ish noise-blasts emerge, betraying the sheepish control booth.
Don't judge this beast by its look-at-me packaging, which reads like one of those salon samplers you "read" while waiting for your haircut at 3:15 while your stylist and her 3:00 commiserate about their junkie boyfriends. Ladytron has succeeded at programming a record so distant that you'll wonder just what comprises the wind beneath their wires.


The UK producer now best known for contributing to Yeezus returns with an EP that finds his music sounding bigger in every way. This is essentially big-stage EDM, with colossal surges of bass and thick, serrated synth lines.

Waterfall EP

In late 2011, a handful of instrumental tracks under the account name Evian Christ showed up on YouTube. A random, anonymous person putting music online is something that happens thousands of times a day, but Evian Christ’s productions got around, quickly, on the strength of “Who is this?” raves from publications like Dummy and a number of blogs. Returning to them more than two years later, these early tracks, especially the startling and forceful “Fuck It None of Y’all Don’t Rap”, hinted at serious potential, even if they didn’t quite congeal into a distinctive voice. But one important person heard something in them: Kanye West used some of Evian Christ’s music to construct “I’m in It” from Yeezus, and suddenly, the kid who posted beats to YouTube had a hand in one of the most sonically adventurous records of the year.
Shortly after that initial burst of interest, Evian Christ (real name: Joshua Leary) signed to Tri Angle, who assembled his early tracks onto an EP. The label was the logical home for his music in part because his path was similar to that of Tri Angle’s Clams Casino. But while Clams Casino sent his tracks to rappers and only later presented himself as an instrumental auteur, Evian Christ, despite the contribution to Yeezus, has been perceived more as producer of standalone electronic tracks. The Waterfall EP, his first release of new music constructed while people actually know who he is, finds him straddling the worlds of the functional collaborative production and discrete statement.
What’s most striking about Waterfall, hearing it next to those earliest tracks, is how much bigger his music has become. The early tracks eventually collected on the Kings and Them were nimble and spacious, touching on genres like two-step that allow for tricky stop-start programming. From Waterfall’s opening “Salt Carousel” forward, it’s clear that Leary is trying to rattle all the way back to the cheap seats. The is essentially big-stage EDM, with colossal surges of bass and thick, serrated synth lines evocative of the maximalism of TNGHT and Hudson Mohawke. It’s the type of music that makes most sense at massive volume, with builds and drops whose meaning becomes clear only when the sound is completely overwhelming. And in terms of sound design and construction, Waterfall has much to admire. The music is bursting with color and the surges are palpable, and you can almost see the legions of head-banging festival-goers whenever tracks hit a big peak.
The problem is that the four tracks here have a total of about three ideas. Three well executed ideas, no doubt, but it’s still not enough to make the record feel like a complete experience. Once you’ve heard one track—and each is in its own way a banger—you’ve heard all four. So when experienced outside of the massive soundsystem and communal experience of a live event, Waterfall comes over as something closer to a beat tape—when listening to it, I even find myself unconsciously inserting the ghost of a Danny Brown verse, something to transform the Grade-A sonics into a track with an arc and some tension, a piece of music with a few surprises or twists. Impressive as it can be in small doses, Waterfall as a whole plows ahead like a WWI-era tank, heavy and lumbering and powerful but pretty much limited to a single direction.