The latest work from the Norwegian jazz pianist and composer draws inspiration from classical music and folk songs, but the focus remains on the trio’s delicate and muted interplay.

Opening

Since Tord Gustavsen’s debut on ECM almost two decades ago, his songs have offered panoramic, highly-detailed images of his home country Norway. The pianist’s compositions are informed by Norwegian folk melodies and performed in unrushed tempos with an extremely delicate touch; the mood often veers toward ambient by way of jazz, occasionally recalling the vast space and looming melodies of impressionist composer Erik Satie. Adding to the atmosphere is his drummer Jarle Vespestad, who has worked with Gustavsen since his debut and whose soft brushwork and shimmering cymbals evoke the morning after snow.
Gustavsen’s latest album, Opening, brings newcomer bassist Steinar Raknes into the fold, replacing the trio’s previous bassist Sigurd Hole. Raknes performs as if he’s played with these musicians for much longer, providing ample counterpoint while establishing his own voice within the trio. He even takes the lead on the mournful “Helensburgh Tango,” switching from the upright to a bowed bass. The 12 songs on Opening draw on sources ranging from Swedish folk music to Norwegian classical, which the trio approach with a delicate interplay. The musical conversation between Gustavsen and Raknes on centerpiece “Stream” is breathtaking, the improvisation from both musicians rich in melody and poured like dual streams of water, alternatingly merging and branching off. Meanwhile, Vespestad sticks to the background with a muted pulse, adding momentum without distracting.
Elsewhere, Gustavsen reimagines 20th century classical music using modern instruments in “Fløytelåt,” a piece by Norwegian composer Gveirr Tveitt. Had the trio performed the song straight, it would’ve been haunting and slow, well within Gustavsen’s wheelhouse. Instead, he transforms it into a surprising highlight, playing the central melody on an electronic instrument whose haunting tone resembles a muted theremin. The texture conjures an eeriness that the trio would not have been able to reproduce on acoustic instruments, and the spectral atmosphere allows Gustavsen some of the album’s most impressive improvisation.
Gustavsen has always had an omnivorous approach to music, interpolating traditional folk melodies and hymns while incorporating different textures and sounds on each release. Whether through the clamorous fusion of “Ritual” or in the mid-tempo groove of “Shepherd Song,” he seems excited by exploring new possibilities within the confines of the trio. Despite these left turns, however, the focus of Opening remains the playing from Gustavsen and the rich accompaniment from his fellow musicians, creating an atmosphere perfect for a walk by a cabin at dawn, with the sun peeking in through the trees.


At the top of their fifth decade, the Lips rekindle their past romance with Neil Young’s piano ballads, the Beatles’ psychedelic guitar tones, and Bowie’s stargazing anthems on a deeply personal album.

American Head

Thirty years ago this month, the Flaming Lips released their first game-changing album: 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance. After spending the ‘80s trying to figure out if they wanted to be a prog Replacements or a punk Floyd, the Lips outfitted Priest with an interstellar noise-pop sound that nonetheless retained a distinctly Oklahoman flavor, complete with fairground noises, field recordings of crickets, and strange songs about Jesus. In a Priest Driven Ambulance was also the first installment in what would become a Lips tradition: releasing pace-setting albums at each turn of the decade. Nine years later, their orchestral opus The Soft Bulletin ushered in the band’s imperial phase, while 2009’s Embryonic portended an extended period of wild, anti-pop experimentation. The band’s first album of the 2020s likewise marks another significant change in course; in this case, however, it feels less like the start of a new journey than a homecoming.
In sharp contrast to the Lips’ recent adventures in fairytale fantasias, American Head finds its inspiration in an arcane piece of Oklahoma musical lore. After revisiting the Tom Petty documentary Runnin’ Down A Dream following the rock legend’s 2017 death, Lips ringleader Wayne Coyne became fixated with the story of Petty’s pre-Heartbreakers band, Mudcrutch, with whom Petty spent time in Tulsa in the early-’70s en route to L.A. From that anecdote, Coyne and multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd envisioned American Head as a work of speculative fiction, reimagining the Lips as the sort of drugged-out local Oklahoman rock band that might’ve hung out and jammed with a pre-fame Petty while he was passing through town.
As it turns out, that mythical ‘70s scenario is really just a roundabout way of getting the Lips back to where they were in the ‘90s. American Head retains some of the symphonic sweep of the Soft Bulletin era and the freaky futurism of their post-Embryonic state, but, at its core, we find the band rekindling their past romance with Neil Young’s piano ballads, the Beatles’ psychedelic guitar tones, and Bowie’s stargazing anthems. Likewise, Coyne approaches his favorite topics—love, drugs, and death—from a less existential, more personal vantage, grounding his narratives in more naturalistic settings. Instead of tunes about killer robots and unicorns with purple eyes, we get songs about people working in slaughterhouses and slinging coke on the side to get by, fond teenage memories of taking quaaludes and frightening recollections of trying LSD, and dramatizations of actual traumatic incidents from Coyne’s early years.
In the 2005 band documentary The Fearless Freaks, we see old home-movie footage of Coyne and his brothers enjoying a typical ’70s all-American adolescence, playing pick-up football with the local longhairs, before a darker narrative emerges—specifically of the drug habit that would land his brother Tommy in and out of prison. American Head feels like it was born from this moment of innocence lost. Though not a narrative concept album per se, each song feels like a vignette from some tragic sequel to Dazed and Confused, where carefree teenage kicks have given way to the unforgiving realities of young adulthood. (And while it’s not an explicitly autobiographical work, tellingly, one of its doomed characters is also named Tommy.)
“What went wrong?/Now all your friends are gone,” Coyne sings on the album’s majestically melancholy opener, “Will You Return/When You Come Down,” and as American Head plays out, that absence takes many forms. On the equally crestfallen “Flowers of Neptune 6,” his old acid-eating pals are getting shipped off to war or thrown in jail; on the moving orchestral centerpiece “Mother I’ve Taken LSD,” his youthful naivete turns to sorrow as he sings of an addict friend taken off to a psych ward and another on life support after a motorcycle crash. But as the album’s title suggests, these sorts of crises are endemic to the American psyche and perpetuate themselves for generations. While these songs may be loosely based on incidents in Coyne’s past, they speak soundly to the country’s current condition, where working-class teens are still often forced to choose between the army, addiction, prison, or death. “Now, I see the sadness in the world,” Coyne sings on the latter track as the strings come in, “I’m sorry I didn’t see it before.” It’s a line that hits especially hard in 2020, when much of the world is both pining to go back to the way things were pre-COVID while having their eyes pried open to the social ills and inequalities that have been festering all along.
But American Head handles this heavy subject matter with a light touch, framing its stories in a magic-realist sunset atmosphere that lends even its gravest songs an earthbound charm. The barnyard sound effects and countrified breakdown of “You n Me Sellin’ Weed”—a folksy ode to young dealers in love—nod to the group’s more playful mid-’90s catalog, as do the dixie-glam guitar slides throughout the record that summon the spirit of the group’s former string-bender Ronald Jones. And for added authentic southern flavor, three tracks feature vocals from Kacey Musgraves, the latest pop star to get roped into the Lips’ supersonic circus. However, in contrast to their previous match-ups with Kesha and Miley, Musgraves serves more as a textural enhancement to the album’s fading-summer milieu, lending her dreamy wordless sighs to the instrumental “Watching the Lightbugs Glow” like someone familiar with the sight, and floating in the background of its companion track “Flowers of Neptune 6” as if beaming in harmonies from the afterlife. Even on their proper duet “God and the Policeman,” she isn’t so much seizing the spotlight from Coyne as playing the angel on his shoulder in a moment of crisis.
American Head hits its emotional peak with the plaintive ballad “Mother Please Don’t Be Sad,” a fictionalized account of Coyne’s real-life experience getting robbed at gunpoint while working at a Long John Silver’s back in the ‘80s; here, he imagines himself getting fatally shot and bidding his mom adieu with “Bohemian Rhapsody”-worthy gravitas, before the song’s hypnotic psych-jazz sequel “When We Die When We’re High” thrusts him toward the white light. But American Head arrives at a calming full-circle conclusion with “My Religion Is You,” which provides a handy yardstick for just how much the Lips have changed in the past 30 years—and how much they haven’t.
On In a Priest Driven Ambulance, the Lips capped off a set of sacreligious psychedelia with a ramshackle yet earnest cover of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”—an early indication of Coyne’s future role as alt-rock’s leading motivational speaker. “My Religion Is You” is an infinitely more elegant performance, yet Coyne’s affinity for simple, optimistic sentiment remains. On the surface, it’s a song of devotion expressed in the language of heretics—”I don’t need no religion,” Coyne sings, “all I need is you.” But, coming at the end of a record that’s largely about grappling with loss and change, “My Religion Is You” is an open invitation for you to hold onto whatever it is—whether it’s Jesus, Buddha, or, in Coyne’s case, family—that can help make this scary world feel a little more wonderful.

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*"Hence the album's titled 1+3+1-- it's a reference to how it was made. He sent us stuff, then we did stuff, then he added the final touches. He did a little bit more editing and production and mixed and mastered it in Berlin."
\--Triosk drummer Laurence Pike to Jasmine Critteneden, December 2003,* Jazzgroove

Call it The Postal Service II. Triosk is an otherwise unknown Australian jazz trio that liken their compositional approach to the loops and "clever layering of sound" of electronic music. Pike's "he" is Berliner Jan Jelinek, of course, easily one of the most consistent and multi-capable electronic

1+3+1

"Hence the album's titled 1+3+1-- it's a reference to how it was made. He sent us stuff, then we did stuff, then he added the final touches. He did a little bit more editing and production and mixed and mastered it in Berlin."
--Triosk drummer Laurence Pike to Jasmine Critteneden, December 2003, Jazzgroove
Call it The Postal Service II. Triosk is an otherwise unknown Australian jazz trio that liken their compositional approach to the loops and "clever layering of sound" of electronic music. Pike's "he" is Berliner Jan Jelinek, of course, easily one of the most consistent and multi-capable electronic artists around today, and whose Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records Pike once heard on late-night radio and now credits as one of the trio's primary influences. In fact, in the past, Jelinek samples constituted Triosk's primary sound source: live and on record, the trio play controlled improvised sets atop a collection of loops that emanate from a nearby mini-disc; as the loops change, the trio reacts accordingly.
And indeed, 1+3+1 sounds like a jazz trio not playing alongside Jelinek's material, but atop it. At most times, Triosk overpowers Jelinek's original loops to the point of near-obliteration. Which is somewhat ironic, I guess: On projects such as Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records, Jelinek nominally works with the vinyl physicalities and actual sounds of jazz records, though no one would ever know that jazz was the source material for his clicks and hazy dub atmospherics.
While it's important to an extent to meet the record on its own terms (i.e. Triosk is not simply attempting organic covers of Jelinek tracks, but are using the loops essentially as jumping-off points for their own compositions), Jelinek devotees, of which I am one, may be somewhat disappointed by the great absence of audible Jelinek presence. His minimalism is a compositional one, certainly, and Triosk masters this aspect of Jelinek. That said, Jelinek is not a loop composer in the vein of Philip Jeck or Ekkehard Ehlers; the sounds Jelinek uses are themselves minimal, and the extent to which he can maintain a curious degree of the listener's interest despite this sonic temperament bears witness to his high-horsery. 1+3+1 is not minimalist jazz; it is loop-based jazz, influenced and produced by a minimalist composer, and then given to a jazz trio with post-rock tendencies.
Of course, with post-rock tendencies comes the very real possibility of tedium via unmodified repetitions, and Triosk falls into this rut often. The agility of Jelinek's builds and collapses becomes apparent in contrast, as Triosk gets caught in a loop and always seems to stay in it a minute or so too long before making their next alteration. Opening track "Mis-Leader", while benefiting slightly from the post-Triosk Jelinek production miasma, suffers from this languor, and to a lesser extent "On the Lake" does as well. The deliberate and hazy "Munmorah", which superficially sounds the most similar to Jelinek's ambient output, lacks the degree of Jelinek's subtle modifications.
That said, there are three tracks on 1+3+1 where Triosk and Jelinek meet equally, and we finally understand the vast potential for their alliance. "Track 2" is essentially relentless free jazz run through whatever there is of a Jelinek glitch machine. Jelinek slices up Triosk's passionate outbursts, repackages and resequences them across the pan and in and out of a beautifully dusty mix, and in short, there is never a dull moment, a testament equally to Triosk's chops and to Jelinek's fanciful post-production. "Theme from Trioskinek" bears effectively less Jelinek influence, but seems to represent what the trio intended to come of the other tracks, quickly and seamlessly moving from one loop to the next, never staying on one for too long. "Vibes-Pulse" is all build, finding its beginnings in an audible Jelinek sequence, and then focusing on a fantastically reverbed vibraphone loop until Jelinek's stormy cloud reaches supersaturation and dissipates. It's a shame Jelinek didn't have more to do with this record; 1+3+1's best moments-- when Triosk's wider dynamic and range of possible sound meets Jelinek's agility and degree of subtlety-- are the ones that most clearly betray his influence.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore 1974’s black funk dreamscape from Miles Davis.

Get Up With It

One autumn in New York, in 1972, the most famous jazz musician in the world tried to take a right turn at 60 mph off the West Side Highway and totaled his Lamborghini Miura. A bystander found Miles Davis with both legs broken, covered in blood and cocaine. Even after the crash, Miles had a bleeding ulcer, a bad hip, nodes in his larynx, and a heart attack while on tour in Brazil. He spat blood onstage, his legs in so much pain he had to work his wah-wah and volume pedals with his hands, and offstage, he self-medicated with Scotch and milk, Bloody Marys, Percodan, and more cocaine. “Everything started to blur after that car accident,” Miles later wrote.
His trajectory up to that point was a blur of a different hue. From teen sideman to Charlie Parker’s bebop revolution to a solo career that’s better compared to Pablo Picasso than other jazz musicians, Miles instigated entire paradigm shifts in music. Or, as he hissed to a matron at a White House dinner in the 1980s: “I’ve changed music five or six times.” Most narratives point to iconic albums like Birth of the Cool, Relaxin’ With the Miles Davis Quintet, Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, Miles Smiles and Bitches Brew, but his 1974 album Get Up With It hangs like an ominous storm cloud over them all, the one that fans of his other works might hesitate to name, his last studio album before he fell mute for the rest of the decade. Like Orpheus grieving in the underworld or Marlow going up the river, Miles went to a place that forever altered his DNA. When he finally returned to the studio, he never sounded the same.
Starting with Bitches Brew in 1970, Miles proceeded to drop eight double albums as well as audacious efforts like A Tribute to Jack Johnson and On the Corner, each one deploying a strategy that undercut his audiences’ expectations. With Get Up With It, Miles began the most defiant shift of his storied career, dropping a totemic yet untidy leviathan that rebuffed jazz fans and critics alike. Each song careens between extremes, as Miles presages everything still to come: ambient, no wave, world beat, jungle, new jack swing, post-rock, even hinting at the future sound of R&B and chart-topping pop. For many modern fans, it’s his heaviest era, but Miles himself offers little insight into his mindset of that period, the music barely mentioned in his 1989 book Miles: The Autobiography. Instead, he writes: “I was spiritually tired of all the bullshit…I felt artistically drained, tired… And the more I stayed away, the deeper I sank into another dark world.”
The sessions that comprise Get Up span four years and include a roster that reflects Miles and the transitory nature of his ever-molting priorities: Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Billy Cobham, Al Foster, Airto, John McLaughlin, Reggie Lucas, Pete Cosey, James Mtume, David Liebman, and many more appear. Behind them sat producer and editor Teo Macero, who shepherded hours of sessions and chaos into something majestic. The stabilizing force, however, was teen bassist Michael Henderson, lifted from Stevie Wonder’s band and dropped in to anchor each iteration of Miles’ groups for the next seven years. Deemed too simplistic a player by the jazz cognoscenti, Henderson’s funk vamps function like simple machines, wedging between the beats to pry open more space, each cycling riff tightening like a screw.
By this point in the ’70s, Miles was moving away from jazz fusion’s popularity to something more primal and sanguinary. His band grew more Afrocentric, and thanks in no small part to his wife of one year Betty Davis (née Mabry), Miles started listening to Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, and Sly and the Family Stone. But he also had an ear tuned to Aretha Franklin, Ann Peebles and—in one of his inimitable turns of phrase—told DownBeat magazine, “If Al Green had one tit, I’d marry that motherfucker.”
Still, beneath all that, another sound was stirring, one that hearkened back to his East St. Louis childhood. Early in his autobiography, Miles talks about “That roadhouse music, or what some call honky-tonk…that shit that they play in black ’bucket of blood’ clubs…the fights that were likely to jump off in those clubs.” Moving towards the downbeat of funk also meant moving to that ur-throb pulsing beneath it like a pulmonary vein. “I was trying to play the music I grew up on now, that roadhouse, honky-tonk, funky thing that people used to dance to on Friday and Saturday nights,” he wrote of his impetus for much of the ’70s. “It has to get down inside your body, up into your blood before you can do it correctly.” So Miles got Hancock, Jarrett, and McLaughlin to submit to the jerky strut of “Honky Tonk” and hopped on “Red China Blues,” a bit of Sonny Williamson-meets big band boilerplate that serve as the album’s obvious outliers.
During these sessions, Miles began to seek an emphasis on rhythm above all else. “Miles left post-bop modernism for the funk because he was bored fiddling with quantum mechanics and just wanted to play the blues again,” Greg Tate posited in his essay “The Electric Miles.” For the remainder of the ’70s, Miles was one of reduction as well as negation. For all of its two-hour runtime, Get Up barely features his trumpet, a trend already reflected in his live shows of the time. After decades of the finest pianists in jazz serving as his sidemen, Miles himself moved to the electric organ.
Miles’ organ playing didn’t have the nuance, shade, and heights of his trumpet, but with the electric organ, vast new chasms opened up to him: seismic drones, durative noise blasts, a sense of deep space and foreboding void that the trumpet otherwise punctures. Dark arts arose from his keys, as Sly Stone’s bassist of the time recalled during one coke-fueled night: “[Miles] got on Sly’s organ and started to voice these nine-note, ethereal crazy chords. Sly…came out yelling, ’Who in the fuck is doing that on my organ? Miles, get your motherfucking ass out…Don’t ever play that voodoo shit here.’”
Rather than run the voodoo down, now Miles could conjure it all by himself. How else to get that vertiginous, heart-strangling fear and magnificent malefic-ness of “Rated X”? Full of dread and a speedball of drums, conga, and tabla, it’s a track that plays with the ideas of no wave, post-punk, and techno at its most brusque. But Macero’s editing style (dropping out the rhythm section entirely and letting the keys levitate in mid-air) also anticipates the modern horror movie aesthetic, the flickering cuts akin to the terror of an approaching tornado, bloody machete, or unmoored jet turbine. For the better part of “Maiysha,” Davis’ keys act as breezy as any other jazz organ trio (think Groove Holmes or Big John Patton), though ten minutes in, lead guitarist Pete Cosey enters and the two hit a tone kin to electrocuting a tomcat.
In Cosey, Miles found a sparring partner unlike any other. There had been the likes of Parker, Coltrane, Shorter, even McLaughlin in the past, but only Cosey could range wider and push Miles deeper, from country blues to Muddy Waters, microtonal tunings to Hendrix at his most atonal. Cosey was an imposing force with his thick shades, towering afro, and an array of pedals and synthesizers that melted futuristic noise and old ghosts together that made him demiurge to metalheads, noiseniks and punks alike. Hearing Cosey and Miles trade solos on the furious “Mtume” is like relishing the bloody spray of each landed blow in a heavyweight fight. Miles veered in tone from lines chopped like a coke rail to higher than a chemtrail. To Cosey, the music warranted such extremes. “That music was about life,” he said in one interview. “It dealt with cleansing. It dealt with rising and falling. It was extremely cerebral, but it was earthy at the same time.”
Get Up With It’s crushing emotional gravity comes from two 32-minute pieces that are unlike anything else in Miles’ catalog, much less the history of jazz, ranging from despair to rage, pride to anguish, ecstasy to abject sadness. There’s the frenzy of “Calypso Frelimo,” which takes its name from the Mozambique political party seeking independence from Portuguese colonial rule. It sounds like a riot in the middle of a block party. Miles layers his wah-wah horn and electric organ into an ebullient Caribbean theme as Henderson holds down the low-end with Mtume and drummer Al Foster. Densely polyrhythmic yet melodically slick, with incandescent solos from Miles, Cosey and tenor saxophonist Dave Liebman race through the din. They never break away from the matrices that band lays down, they illuminate every hectic angle of it.
For a certain generation, the triplet bass figure that Henderson drops ten minutes in feels instantly familiar. It brings up images of your childhood living room as well as a subterranean realm, so closely does it resemble Koji Kondo’s theme for the underworld levels of “Super Mario Bros.” Tate calls the work a “dub fugue,” centering on that cavernous bass throb and a telling juxtaposition of Caribbean elements and European ones that reflects back on the title itself. The massive piece suggests a Pangaea that connects the Caribbean rhythms of reggae and calypso to African-American jazz and back to Africa herself.
And then there’s the elegy of “He Loved Him Madly.” Recorded a month after the passing of Duke Ellington, its title taken from a Christmas card greeting Duke sent to Miles the year before. It both summons the ghost of Duke’s “jungle style” big bands and anticipates the forsaken pall of dark ambient. Assembled from five separate takes, Macero wove the seemingly aimless recordings into a magnum opus, one that Brian Eno later hailed as “revolutionary,” finding in its half-hour descent “the ‘spacious’ quality I was after” for his own future ambient work.
It’s a eulogy to Duke that seems to emanate from across the River Styx. Mtume’s congas flutter like bats across the stereo field, Cosey spins out cobwebs on guitar, with Macero’s spacing suggestive of a gaping void in the center of the piece. Miles looms around C-minor on organ, and when his muted trumpet finally sounds at the midway point, he channels longtime Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams, seeming both close as a whisper and a distant wail. Erotic and ethereal at once, a second solo comes as the band starts to quicken, only to have it all turn phantasmagoric by song’s end.
Less than a year after Get Up With It’s release, Miles plunged deeper into “another dark world,” one where no sound escaped for the next seven years. Lurid stories abound about his reclusive, sordid, filthy lifestyle holed up in his Upper West Side brownstone during those years, as well as numerous run-ins with the law and fears of his imminent demise in the press. He had burned a bridge, one that had led him to the brink of madness. “You can’t know how terrifying it is to be in the middle of all of that, it’s endless sound,” he confessed to one interviewer at the time. “Music is a curse.”
During that same span, his Get Up With It bandmates also stepped away from that endless sound, instead infiltrating the realms of R&B and pop, scoring frothy hits ranging from “You Are My Starship” to “Never Knew Love Like This Before.” Guitarist Reggie Lucas worked with a new singer named Madonna, writing “Borderline” and producing her debut album. And together with percussionist Mtume, they formed the funk band Mtume, responsible for that ode to gumilingus, “Juicy Fruit.”
The demented, paranoid, self-imposed exile of Miles Davis was a tragedy, a genius turned into a man as shell-shocked as any Vietnam War veteran. When he returned to the studio in 1981 with the turgid and slick The Man With the Horn and his subsequent ’80s work, Miles sounded like a doppelgänger of his former self. He and his band had willingly gone to the darkest places of the soul during Get Up With It and—as he notoriously did to his audiences at his peak—now he willingly turned his back on it. Dipping into elevator music takes on “Time After Time” and “Human Nature,” Miles also continued to play the blues, but a more bloodless version of them. Much like Sly Stone before him, Miles ventured into the heart of darkness with Get Up With It and wrestled with the devil for his gun. But in coming out on the other side of this music, Miles and his band were irrevocably transformed. Or as he would realize near the end of his life: “You don’t change music, music changes you.”


The saxophonist’s soundtrack to the unsettling horror movie feeds off his darkest impulses as a composer, amplifying and mirroring the trauma and fear on the screen.

Colin Stetson: Hereditary (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Even before Nicolas Roeg was losing his demons with Mick Jagger and helping David Bowie come back down to earth, left-of-center filmmakers were already reaching out to left-of-center musicians to assist in bringing their strange stories come to life. Today, when word of a Cave or a Reznor or a Greenwood handling the score for some of Hollywood’s most lauded directors comes as no surprise, that kind of news still helps encourage a new class of forward-thinking movie-makers to gravitate toward the fringes of pop music for inspiration. In a little over a year, nü-electronic iconoclast Oneohtrix Point Never scored a gritty, heartbreaking crime drama; Portishead member and Beak> head honcho Geoff Barrow helped the cult-favorite-in-the-making Annihilation shimmer in uncomfortable ways. And of course, the examples don’t stop there.
The most recent and arguably most affecting member of these contemporary avant-garde composers is multi-instrumentalist Colin Stetson, best known for his work with Arcade Fire and the astounding circular breathing technique he applies to bass saxophone. Though it isn’t his first time recording for the screen, Stetson’s score for Hereditary—the much fawned-over debut horror flick from Ari Aster—has audiences holding their breath in fright. Where Stetson’s solo albums use dread and paranoia to undercut his careful attention to post-rock’s sense of limitless possibility, Hereditary feeds off of his darkest impulses.
At its core, Hereditary is a film about grief and the ways a family deals with grief, no matter how toxic or irrational. When Annie (played raw, unhinged and undoubtedly soon-to-be-award-winning by Toni Collette) finds herself un-mourning the death of her frigid, seemingly unremarkable mother sets off a deeply upsetting chain of events, Stetson coolly plays the background. His music rarely jumps or shrieks; it seeps. Reedy wheezes morph into grave moans, keys click and scratch like nails being chewed down to blood, layered clarinets imitate tuned-down strings being run backwards through a rusty pasta roller.
Still, approaching Hereditary on its own terms makes for some tricky navigation. It is functional music, purposely beholden to a larger piece of art. In that sense, it succeeds almost flawlessly—just watch as deformed arpeggios worm their way into the brain of Alex Wolff’s tragically dumbfounded Peter after a terrible car accident. Better is Stetson and Aster’s willingness to let wide-open trenches of silence do much of the heavy lifting throughout the film, only to slowly suck you back down into a dank well of insular terror after the collective exhale has begun. In these rare moments of calm, Stetson’s cautiously beautiful, fairytale-like asides begin to read more and more sinister.
There will be debates over the movie’s payoff (or lack thereof), but it is that scene where we finally hear his cascading saxophone, which is a cathartic payoff in itself. It is the emotional climax that mirrors the film’s charred, disquieting images, and reanimates its very real sense of emotional paralyzation. Much like the film itself, Stetson’s music succeeds because it plays off our basest fears. It’s no real revelation that there’s something in our human nature that longs to know what’s lurking in the shadows. Less ingrained is a willingness to indulge in art the conjures relentless despair, no matter how fathomless. No matter: embrace the suffering; take the plunge.


On this poignant covers album, Steve Earle inhabits his late son’s songs of love and loss as a means of moving through pain.

J.T.

Just three months after Justin Townes Earle’s death, his father, Steve Earle, announced he was releasing a covers album of his son’s songs. The timeline seemed sudden: From the outside, inhabiting Justin’s songs of loneliness and loss appeared to be an act of emotional masochism. But everyone grieves in their own way, and for Steve those sessions were simply part of his own process, a means of communion and moving through pain. It “wasn’t cathartic as much as it was therapeutic,” he told the New York Times. “I made the record because I needed to.”
JT is not an autopsy, but many of these songs address Justin’s struggle with addiction by necessity: He wrote often about his own demons, such that any cross-section of his catalog will expose dark struggles. “Lord I’m going uptown, to the Harlem River to drown,” goes one of his best and most beloved songs; both father and son sing the lyric with a calm determination that seems to grow with every block north they walk. Drawing mostly from early in Justin’s career—half of these ten covers are from his first two releases—Steve doesn’t attempt any of the songs about him or Justin’s mother, who split not long after he was born. That’s just as well, since that might distract from the craft of the songs and the immediacy of the performances.
Not every song hints at Justin’s fate. Some just have a good story to tell, like “Lone Pine Hill” and “They Killed John Henry,” which reveal a songwriter with an abiding interest in American history and a keen empathy for the people who lived it. Other tunes have a different perspective on country’s favorite subjects: love gone bad, immense loneliness, an abiding desire for human connection. Steve settles into “Far Away in Another Town” like it’s a Texas Hill Country classic, bringing the same gravity and reverence you might hear someone apply to an old Hank Williams tune, and he musters a bluesy dread on “Turn My Lights Out.” (Its refrain, “I know it’s gonna be alright, when I turn out my lights,” is one of Justin’s pithiest and most devastating lyrics.) Only “The Saint of Lost Causes” doesn’t work: its brimstone sermonizing sounds like another songwriter altogether, and is weirdly out of place on this record.
JT plays like an album of first takes. It’s multifaceted in its messiness: a leather hide wrapped around a tender heart. That loose quality plays up the differences between father and son. Justin was a songwriter with a concise sense of melody, a singer with an eloquent approach to phrasing, and a guitar player with a style that gracefully combined traditional folk and rural blues picking. By contrast, Steve has a voice like a gravel driveway, a punk’s steely bravado, and what appears to be an abiding belief that a song’s imperfections are what make it so relatable. To hear Steve sing Justin’s songs is to hear him erase many of those differences and emphasize their similarities: their brutal candor, their emotional rawness, but most of all their shared belief that a sturdy song was the perfect weapon to beat back their darkest demons. “I don’t know where I’m headed, and I don’t care,” Steve sings on one of his son’s earliest songs, “I Don’t Care,” and it sounds like a sentiment that would alarm any father.
JT ends with the set’s only original from Steve, a short remembrance called “Last Words.” It’s the only time he specifically addresses his son’s death, the only time he acknowledges the very real loss that motivated this album. Using their final phone call as a framing device—which means their last words to each other were “I love you” and “I love you, too”—Steve ponders the pain his son felt and wonders what he might have done to ease it in any way. “I don’t know why you hurt so bad,” he sings. “Just know you did, it makes me sad.” The melody is simple and fleet, conveying immense confusion and hurt just beneath the words. It recalls one of Steve’s best compositions, “Goodbye,” but it also brings to mind several of Justin’s songs, as though the father has learned from his son. It’s a fitting farewell on this album, showing the world both the man and the talent we lost.

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Teneil Throssell’s full-length debut is break-neck techno that tries to transcend the club without turning its back on it.

Baby, We’re Ascending

There’s rarely a dull moment in HAAi’s high-octane techno because Teneil Throssell is a master of the quick cut. Sometimes she attacks her music with surgical precision, carving out breathtaking pockets of silence before slamming the beat back. At others, she works with a field medic’s intensity, slashing diagonally across mangled breakbeats, then suturing the wound with an overdriven blast of bass. But for all its frequent change-ups, HAAi’s music never suffers from a short attention span. Channeling the hypnotic, tunnel-vision effects of classic Underworld, vintage drum’n’bass, and the early-’00s output of labels like Border Community and Kompakt, it’s a sound as heady as it is physical. Throssell works like a film editor, piecing together stray threads into a form that is cinematic in scope; her cuts always contribute to an overarching sense of continuity.
Born in Australia and based in London, HAAi has been developing her brand of peak-time drama on singles and EPs over the past five years, but her debut album is her most ambitious attempt yet to spin the energy of the rave into something bigger, something that transcends the club without turning its back on it. Pocked with interruptions, trap doors, and fractals, the maze-like shape that it assumes over the course of its hour-long running time replicates the labyrinthine dimensions of an unfamiliar nightclub—its corridors and cul-de-sacs and darkrooms, its moments of exhilaration interlaced with descents into doubt or panic.
Throssell cut her teeth making bangers, and Baby, We’re Ascending hardly lacks for moments of intensity. The very first track is a kitchen blender overflowing with liquefied bits of industrial-strength techno. “Pigeon Barron,” which follows, evokes fellow Mute affiliate Daniel Avery’s dystopian euphoria in concussive drums and vertiginous synth glissandi. And “Purple Jelly Disc” is a white-knuckled rollercoaster that leads from a cavernous techno dungeon to a sunrise beach rave.
But the prevailing mood is ambivalent, the atmospheres frequently murky. The epic “Biggest Mood Ever” uses the voice of Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor to wonderfully contrasting effect, distorted breakbeats tearing through pastel dream pop like shrapnel through a field of daisies. “I’ve Been Thinking a Lot Lately” drapes pitched-down breaks in gloomy piano reminiscent of the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds, an enveloping fusion that recalls an all too short-lived strain of depressive drum’n’bass that emerged toward the end of the 1990s. And “FM,” a highlight, covers a sullen techno rhythm in Burialesque grit and fog; with a mixdown that tilts dangerously toward the bassy end of the spectrum, it’s boomy yet weirdly distant, like a heaving dancefloor heard through warehouse walls.
More than any individual standout tracks, what’s most compelling is the album’s journey. Beginning with the sound of a tape being slotted into a cassette deck, Baby, We’re Ascending unrolls like a unified suite, and the interstitials—like “Louder Always Better,” a minute-long stretch of elastic sound design followed by 40 seconds of punishing techno—are often as gripping as the anthems. The way individual songs morph makes them often feel like passages snipped out of a DJ mix. There’s a knowing sense of humor to these twists and turns, too: “This concludes Side 1,” intones a robotic voice at the album’s midpoint.
Vocals play a prominent role in roughly half of the album’s songs, and while they sometimes work—UK trans activist Kai-Isaiah Jamal’s spoken-word poetry cuts powerfully through the moody “Human Sound”—they sometimes feel like Throssell is straining slightly for gravitas, pasting emotion on top of tracks that communicate plenty of it on their own. On “Bodies of Water,” her voice doesn’t quite gel with the woozy synths surrounding her; she’s more convincing on the title track, a Jon Hopkins collaboration that replicates the heart-in-mouth feel of raving at its most ecstatic. She’s good on the closing “Tardigrade,” too: The lyrics don’t necessarily scan very meaningfully, but the sound of her voice adds a Beach House-like airiness to the song, which balances gauzy dream pop with Yeezus-grade industrial drums. That mix of opposites is textbook HAAi, and so is the twist that follows: In the song’s final seconds, a gentle fade-out gives way to a three-second burst of drums that’s completely unconnected from anything that has come before, and ends as abruptly as it appeared. In this most cinematic of records, it seems only fitting that Throssell should leave us with a cliffhanger.


Sharing members with Swedish psych-rock monsters Dungen, the Amazing have a similar reverence for the music of the past. But their mix of folk and psych has more going for it than just retro pastiche.

Gentle Stream

The Amazing opened their self-titled debut album with an inspired reworking of a song from Fleetwood Mac's little-known post-Peter Green, pre-Buckingham/Nicks period. Named for 1968-72 Mac singer-guitarist Danny Kirwan, "The Kirwan Song" set a precedent for playing spot-the-references that the Swedish band's history-bursting blend of pastoral-England-meets-Laurel-Canyon psych-pop and folk-rock only invites further. Throw in a lineup that includes members of Swedish-language psych-rock monsters Dungen, and you could be forgiven for wondering if liking this stuff requires Talmudic knowledge of, say, the 80s Paisley Underground movement.
It doesn't. Happily, the Amazing's music is less reverent of its post-gold-rush past than might be obvious at first blush. Both on 2009's The Amazing and 2010's equally impressive Wait for the Light to Come mini-album, the band's impressionistically melancholy songwriting and gracefully unspooling instrumentals push toward the sort of poetic textural subtleties associated with post-rock or shoegaze. Simply put, it sounds pretty in headphones-- even if you can't quite make out all that frontman Christoff Gunrup is singing. He does use English, at least, though often here it's the feeling, the overall construction, that matters more.
Reine Fisk, who plays a mean lead guitar in Dungen as well as this band, has said all of the Amazing's records so far are roughly similar in mood, and he isn't kidding. Second proper LP Gentle Stream, out late last year overseas and due for a stateside release this fall on Partisan, by and large sticks to the Amazing's previous tendency to glide between winsome acoustic ballads and brawnier rockers, stretching out with easy-riding guitar solos and thoughtful, Mellotron-touched arrangements. References are still tough to avoid, whether it's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere-era Neil Young and Crazy Horse on the organ-glazed title track, Nick Drake on the yearning flute- and sax-framed "Flashlight", or Simon and Garfunkel circa "Dangling Conversations" on bastards-rueing "The Fog". But as pleasantly jangly video selection "Gone" and harmony-bursting European-edition finale "When the Colours Change" best exemplify, this album is far richer than retro pastiche.
Gunrup's dewy vocals carry melodies that refuse to dissipate over multiple listens, and the drumming, in particular, makes these songs stand out, with a jazzy, rambling, naturalistic quality, punchy in just the right places. The descending Led Zeppelin riffage of "Dogs" might go on a little too long, and the mostly vocal-based, sub-two-minute "Assumptions" is the only real change-up. But when Gunrup sings, on the languidly shuffling American bonus track "Ghosts", of ways to "drive off the ghosts," he shouldn't be worried. Like other bands such as the Clientele, the Kings of Convenience, and Tame Impala, the Amazing have exorcized their turn-of-the-70s spooks by embracing the evanescent. A fine follow-up, Gentle Stream captures its namesake in soft, skilled hands.


On their fourth record, Dominick Palermo leads his dream-pop shoegaze band in a claustrophobic album about his upbringing, and how his music career has brought hope and horror in equal measure.

The Great Dismal

Domenic Palermo formed Nothing to save himself; four albums in, it seems clear nothing can. The Philadelphia/New York frontman is locked in a perpetual battle with his own self-mythology. Palermo often embraces his abrasive reputation, reclaiming his two-year stint in prison by naming an album after jailhouse jargon and openly discussing his drug and alcohol use in interviews. But as the march of album cycles charged forward, the punk-turned-shoegazer more often expressed exhaustion with facile interpretations of his tortured narrative, the way performing one’s own trauma night after night can lead to complete detachment. Yet, with blind faith, he continues to return to the dark well of his subconscious, turning over the “lingering black cloud” that’s remained past their first three records’ hazy catharsis. The Great Dismal, their fourth record, is an existential commentary on Nothing’s career—a reflection on Palermo’s hometown, his upbringing, and how his music career has brought hope and horror in equal measure.
Beneath the poetic remove of Nothing’s lyrics, there’s a leering sense of realism. For those voyeuristically drawn in by the ghosts of Palermo’s violent past, songs like 2018’s “Blue Line Baby” shaded in its darker colors with concrete details, names, locations. There are specifics on The Great Dismal, too, but they largely draw from a more recent past—the disorientation of endless touring, of finding a bar in Shibuya, Tokyo that feels like home. But those challenges, understandably, feel a bit removed. The band instead finds more success when Palermo waxes philosophical: “Existence hurts existence,” he sings over the album’s shiniest riffs on “Famine Asylum.” It’s an aptly dreary take on Sartre—allegedly the first lines Palermo wrote for the album—and it stands in as a thesis statement for the record. There’s a resilience buried in that declaration, too, as if the act of living is itself a victory over death: “It’s a marvel that my shell has kept its shape,” he sings coyly on “Catch a Fade.” After multiple close calls with oblivion, Palermo finds something like awe in the quotidian drudgery of existence.
Nothing has toed the line between the sharp melodies of their hardcore roots and more delicate swirls of dream-pop and shoegaze, pivoting between the two as their collaborators see fit. On 2018’s Dance on the Blacktop, they took their cues from the sludge savant John Agnello, layering dense guitars and nestling Palermo’s inner lyrical torment within quiet-loud dynamics. For The Great Dismal, they’ve returned to emo stalwart Will Yip, who produced their glassy and gorgeous 2016 record Tired Of Tomorrow. And while Yip’s presence is evident in the record’s spacious compositions—the echoing snap of the drums on “Bernie Sanders,” the ambient cloud of reverb that lingers over “Blue Mecca”—it’s a more hesitant, claustrophobic record than their previous collaboration. Where Tired of Tomorrow began with a fury of cymbal crashes, opener “A Fabricated Life” casts a dense fog over the record from the outset, driven by a single guitar and Palermo’s whispered vocals, percussion never entering the equation. It’s a symbolic gesture, one that reinforces that Nothing is, at the end of the day, Palermo’s voice alone.
As if to drive Palermo’s singular vision home, The Great Dismal sees the biggest lineup change of any Nothing record since the band’s inception. Founding bassist Nick Bassett, of Whirr and Deafheaven, as well as founding vocalist and guitarist Brandon Setta, have both departed the band. In their place, Jesus Piece’s Aaron Heard and Cloakroom’s Doyle Martin step in to fill their respective voids. It’s a subtle but marked shift, lending the dulled weight of Martin’s opiated vocal harmonies to “Catch a Fade” and “Blue Mecca.” And despite Palermo’s recent relocation to New York, Philadelphia makes itself known on the album, with Alex G adding his lilting vocal affectation to “April Ha Ha.” It’s a markedly gentler sound from Nothing, an anesthetized grunge that mirrors their relentless gloom. It’s a logical progression for the band, but it’s hard not to miss their duality, their moments of ragged hardcore intensity; the crisper edges of “Ask the Rusk”’s opening riff are a welcome shot of adrenaline.
Though Nothing is cut from the somnambulant swirls of UK groups like the Smiths and Cocteau Twins, they’ve distilled their critiques into a distinctly American frustration. The Great Dismal takes its name from a giant swamp along the southeastern American coast, what Palermo refers to as a “brilliant natural trap” where only the murkiest survive. The album features one sample, a manic ode to shopping taken from a mall infomercial, and its eerie enthusiasm speaks to the capitalistic hedonism Nothing seems unable to escape. Nothing has established their voice by transforming that anxiety into languid, slanted harmonies. The Great Dismal takes stock of their career, finding vaporous beauty in shrugging off their inner demons.

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Ostensibly a side project to Will Wiesenfeld’s Baths, Geotic comes into its own on an album that treats background listening as a springboard into a world of color and texture.

Traversa

Will Wiesenfeld’s swish ambient alter ego, Geotic, makes it to album number 10 (or nine, or 11, depending on how you count some of his early, digital-only output) with Traversa, which should at least graduate Geotic from side project to side project emeritus. The Los Angeles musician is best known under the name Baths, though Wiesenfeld’s shape-shifting electronic signature glistens across both projects. With Traversa, he douses every second in sudsy synth and glimmer.
Wiesenfeld has described the difference between Baths and Geotic as the difference between active and passive listening. At times, Geotic even glorifies and exalts the passive. Traversa hovers at the edge of the background, always ready to distract. Filled with skittering violins, pliable piano runs, and cart-wheeling rhythms, it is Geotic’s most bounding, attention-seeking work.
If last year’s Abysma seemed tailored for domestic enjoyment, then Traversa might be better suited for a sojourn in hilly terrain. The album is invigorating and repetitive in the way that walking is invigorating and repetitive. From the first sly beats of “Knapsack,” Wiesenfeld has made songs that scamper and recede with animal-like curiosity, maybe like the “quiet tree frogs” the song mentions, delightfully. As with the tree-frog hum—where the endless reiteration of their noise creates one flush fog of sound—Traversa gets its productive energy from blending and repetition. Emily Call’s violin and Wiesenfeld’s synth pads are both stretched to start to sound like one another. On “Maglev” (named for the train system that uses magnetic levitation based on a system of repelling), the violin achieves a state of suspension in bending back and forth.
Whether as Baths or Geotic, Wiesenfeld often focuses his songs on an emotional center. His chord progressions can pluck out the most sunken types of melancholy (see “Beaming Husband” from 2010’s Mend). But Traversa’s flickering movements suggest escapism: at the surface, moving quickly. The tangy bassline of “Swiss Bicycle” propels in forward motion as if careening past alpine lakes, wildly content. The album doesn’t stay giddy the whole time, but even the letdowns are gentle. On “Aerostat,” a pillowy kick drum comforts a piano that’s fixated and mournful, though still suspiciously lovely. The song doesn’t seem to be able to stay with the plaintive melody without trying to heal it.
Traversa’s leisure-outing quality comes through in the plush production. The song titles evoke a roving, European mountain vacation—and mirroring a vacation, the album seems cherished but not labored over. What if some grist was applied to these songs? If some of these pieces had worked through their progressions a little further, would the effect take us somewhere more transportive? If there was more elbow grease and some steel wool, would it be even shinier? Traversa wants to please, which isn’t the same as wanting to satisfy.
But a shadow lurks beneath Traversa’s fantasy of endless vacation. “Terraformer” might be a song about colonizing space or it might gesture at the unknowability of a romantic interest, but it does have a palpable twinge of doubt. When Traversa lets some suspicion slip through, it contours the slick, polished façade. It’s a welcome new depth.


Mike Mills feature film includes the work of Elliott Smith and the Polyphonic Spree.

Thumbsucker OST

As summer turns to fall in the cinematic season, it has become traditional for studios to wheel out indie coming-of-age films. Since we've been around this block before, we know to expect certain things from the soundtracks of these films, be they focused on teenage crisis, quarter-life crisis, mid-life crisis, or some combination of these infinite crises. Any compiler knows that a delicate mix of childlike whimsy and bittersweet melancholy is a must, not to mention a dusted-off, neglected oldie that summarizes the film's themes, and maybe a few covers, for good measure.
Thumbsucker is clearly aware of these requirements, and given director Mike Mills' illustrious career in music video production, his rolodex should have been more than up to the challenge of filling out the OST. He started by courting Elliott Smith, who was originally pegged to provide all of the film's music. Smith's erratic work rate delayed the proceedings, and his death halted them, forcing Mills to draft in the Polyphonic Spree, perhaps thinking he could at least save the money it would've cost to hire an orchestra.
To their credit, Tim DeLaughter's robed crew are adept at the whimsy part of the recipe stated above, as anyone who's heard their relentlessly optimistic brand of sun-cult music can attest. Though the format doesn't allow the Spree to indulge their usual slow-build dynamics, the band nevertheless finds the space to use all of their many parts, handing most of the vocals to their choir and letting the strings, horns, etc. flit around the borders. But with rarely more than a minute or so to unfurl, the songs lack heft, sounding a little like jingles for correspondence art schools and new-age massage centers.
However, as far as the Spree doing the melancholy part: Eh, not so much. Attempts at gravitas sound overly forced and unnatural for the band, with DeLaughter putting on his best Ben Gibbard impression for "Sourness Makes It Right" and the choral smiles being poorly hidden on "Wait and See". Fortunately, Mills was able to salvage three demo-ish songs done by Smith, tremulous takes on Big Star's "Thirteen", Cat Stevens' "Trouble", and his own "Let's Get Lost". "Thirteen" is clearly the best of these, reverently remade as it is, Smith adding another sedimental layer of sadness to undercut Alex Chilton's already-longing adolescent reminiscences. But as accompaniment to a movie about a troubled teenager and his relationships, it's not the most subtle of soundtracking gestures. Lack of subtlety is something that plagues the entire score, not surprising given the rainbow sledgehammer tactics of the Polyphonic Spree.
In the end, this lack of grace is what keeps Thumbsucker's OST from joining the ranks of excellent indie soundtracks alongside The Virgin Suicides, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and anything Mark Mothersbaugh has done for Wes Anderson. The Polyphonic Spree, despite attempts to pare down their sound and numbers when appropriate, can't help but be too intrusive for cinematic usage, inserting themselves into scenes like that episode from "Scrubs", rather than providing constructive background color.


Featuring production by M. Ward and boasting songwriting credits from Nick Cave, Neko Case, Justin Vernon, and others, Mavis Staples' Livin' on a High Note is a happy record. Its beneficent energy is refreshing after the cloistered prayer of last year’s Your Good Fortune and two thoughtful Jeff Tweedy-produced records.

Livin' on a High Note

From her first performances as a teenager in the 1950s through her era-defining hits in the 1970s and even up to her Grammy-winning comeback albums with Jeff Tweedy, Mavis Staples has created some of the most joyous music ever. For her latest solo effort, however, she wanted something even more exuberant, even more celebratory—something in the vein of Pharrell Williams’ "Happy." "When I heard it, wow, it just lifted me up," she told the Guardian recently. "I told my songwriters I wanted songs just like that, that would make people smile, also because I’ve been making people cry for so long."
Certainly Livin’ on a High Note sounds like a happy album. Featuring production by M. Ward and boasting songwriting credits from Nick Cave, Neko Case, Justin Vernon and others, its burst of beneficent energy is refreshing after the cloistered prayer of last year’s Your Good Fortune and two thoughtful Tweedy records. The tempos on here percolate amiably, with flashes of horns and bold basslines supplied by members of her longtime backing band. Ward doesn’t have much facility for groove, so the celebration often sounds muted and controlled—more studio than church. But he knows to keep things airy and light and to give Mavis’ voice some space to move around.
"I’ve been making people cry for so long" isn't entirely true. But the statement does hint at her own place in the complicated history of civil rights in an era defined by dignity and social progress as well as by systemic prejudice and even outright hatred. She has shared stages with MLK and Southern jail cells with her father and siblings. Livin’ on a High Note nods to that history, especially on the opening track, "Take Us Back," penned for her by Benjamin Booker. As her back-up singers encourage her along ("Mavis, take us back! Mavis, take us back!"), she reminisces sweetly about her early days as a teenager on the gospel circuit: "Chicago wasn’t always easy, but love made the Windy City breezy."
From other artists such a sentiment might sound too pat or prescribed, but Staples’ voice infuses it with affection and joy. "They don’t call me Bubbles for nothing," she declares. Seventy years into her singing career, her voice has lost none of its ecstatic expressiveness and only a bit of its technical agility. She can still swing low into a baritone range, and she can still soar into a churchly higher register. But really it’s the way she shapes her words that makes these songs so distinctive: The way she fawns over a word like "darling" makes you want to wrap the syllables around you like a warm blanket.
It might seem like an odd time for an upbeat message, but Livin’ on a High Note is as well timed as her 2008 live album, Hope at the Hideout, released just a week before Obama was elected the country’s first African American president. Eight years later, we’re deep into a confounding election cycle that has already defined itself by blatant concession to voters’ basest prejudices. At the same time, some of our best artists—D’Angelo, Kendrick, and Beyoncé—are making race and class dominant subjects in pop music, with songs like "Alright" and "Formation" prompting heated discussions about black identity and police brutality.
High Note complements rather than contradicts those bleaker depictions of 21st century America and casually argues for Staples’ legacy as an agitgospel singer. Would we have Beyoncé singing, "I like my Negro nose and my Jackson 5 nostrils" in 2016 without the Staples singing, "I like the things about me that I once despised," at Wattstax in '72? In that regard, the most crucial song on here is also the shortest: "What do we do with all of this history now?" Staples asks on "History Now," penned by Neko Case. Bearing all this weight can’t be easy for anyone, but with that divine voice of hers, in fact, Staples seems uniquely suited for it. And Livin’ on a High Note suggests she may even be happy to have that responsibility, if only because it reminds her that happy doesn’t have to mean complacent.


If Montreal indie rockers Braids' debut Native Speaker drew its power from being the proverbial tip of the iceberg, Flourish // Perish is the iceberg itself, impressive and monolithic. It’s an interesting and daring turn for Braids, retaining the complicated, prog-like arrangements of their past while working within the textures of IDM and minimal techno.

Flourish//Perish

Musical restraint is often confused with abstinence-- the idea is that artists are constantly warring with a natural compulsion towards adding that extra vocal overdub or drum solo or two-minute coda and should be rewarded for “winning.” Montreal's Braids made restraint feel a lot less theoretical on their 2011 debut Native Speaker and the results were often fascinating. The songs averaged about seven minutes and made no secret about the influence of Animal Collective at their most hormonally charged. But they weren’t defined by indulgence so much as a Hulk-like instability. "Lammicken" had a single, telling lyric-- "I can't stop it." When Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s soft-spoken surrealism exploded into carnal caterwauling and the band’s intricate interplay gave way to washes of free-form noise, you sensed that Braids had to work their asses off just to keep themselves in check, and were doing it for our good and theirs as well. Braids appear to have their impulses under control two years later, and if Native Speaker drew its power from being the proverbial tip of the iceberg, Flourish // Perish is the iceberg itself, impressive and monolithic, cold and impenetrable.
Perhaps it’s not all that surprising, as Montreal has seen a chill come over it since entering 2013 as indie's hottest city-- Majical Cloudz’s Impersonator achieved a glacial, barren beauty, something like sunlight on the Antarctic, while Doldrums disappeared into his laptop with static-laden, cracked pop. Grimes did somewhat likewise, retreating from music and relating her experiences with incisive and invective Tumblr posts. Then there’s Preston, the first in the scene to receive widespread attention; the humid romance of 2010’s Blooming Summer was a distant memory for her side project Blue Hawaii, as Untogether was filled with disaffected, click-and-whir electro laments that could be taken as a commentary on an artistic community that’s grown apart from each other.
On first exposure, it can feel like Flourish // Perish is an extension of Untogether rather than a complement. Pared down to a trio after losing founding member Kate Lee, Braids all but ditched their guitars and got deep into programming and sequencers. As such, Feels has been exchanged for mind music-- the mechanistic Flourish is heavy on turn of the century Warp (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher) and Warp-influenced crossover acts, i.e., Björk ca. Vespertine and Radiohead. Hermetic and kinetic, the band’s production bears the mark of “intelligent dance music”, not because it’s smarter than other electronic forms (as if that could be quantified) but due to its mirroring of cerebral function. The songs here are built from short, synaptic and repetitive firing, tiny loops, short glitches, silvery hooks that corkscrew into your memory.
It’s an interesting and daring turn for Braids, retaining the complicated, prog-like arrangements of their past while working within the textures of IDM and minimal techno. The spaciousness and clarity of Flourish does make it an easy record to return to; while challenging, it’s not a difficult listen. This is crucial, as the underlying rhythm beds rarely give Braids much melodic structure and put the focus on Preston’s lyrics, which are simultaneously more poetic and yet less evocative than her past work.
On Native Speaker, Preston functioned like an anthropologist in the wild, experiencing the strange rhythms and rituals of those around her, journaling the frightening results without judgment. There’s a scientific method to Flourish, where she’s inquisitive, probing and more concerned with challenging her own findings within clinical surroundings.  Examples of self-examination and self-recrimination abound on Flourish-- Preston’s ego is a bed too comfortable to leave, her head a lake in which to drown. Yet, she maintains critical distance and for that reason, Braids are a lot tougher to read here. On the whispery morning-after ballad “Girl”, a lover serves as a mirror for the narrator’s inadequacies rather than comfort: “Every day I wake/ To sunlight on his face/ He is so care free/ Why can I not be.”  On “Hossak”, Preston acknowledges “a boy knocking outside my window with a slice of pizza” with the eerie absenteeism of someone describing a UFO sighting.
The extraterrestrial quality cuts both ways. Flourish is a purposefully alien and repetitive album, and at the outset, it works-- the fractious, percussive rhythms of "Victoria" and "December'' are hypnotic, as is the overlay of high, diaphonous cooing atop Preston's spoken word during "Freund". But in the second half, the iterance becomes tedious; footholds are few amidst the long stretches of vast electronic tundra and the Perish side B can feel like a sheer drop towards revelatory closer “In Kind".
In a way, it makes you want to try and listen to Flourish // Perish in reverse-- “In Kind” feels like a continuation of Native Speaker, with the same kind of cresting dynamics and the one time where Preston lets off a scream, a satisfying, feral shriek that almost compensates for its lack thereof prior. And there’s also its introductory lyric, “I must have saw a girl/ Who looked a lot like myself ... knowing all the answers/ And it is a problem.” And if that’s the problem of this intriguing but insular album, the solution is found on “Victoria”-- “My father always said/ To get out of my head/ Maybe he meant to see what's next to me.” That’s the first line on Flourish // Perish, and the one that Braids could be wise to heed going forward.


A quiet resolve underlies the folk singer’s mesmeric Sub Pop debut, which is her sunniest and most intrepid.

August

August marks a series of milestones for Shannon Lay. It’s her debut for the Sub Pop label, and her first solo album recorded with fellow Angeleno Ty Segall. Its release arrives in tandem with the two-year anniversary of Lay quitting her day job, a coveted turning point not every musician reaches, and one she’s immortalized in the album’s title. Outside of making gorgeous folk music, Lay also plays in the punk quartet Feels and in Segall’s Freedom Band, and the ease between her and Segall is palpable.
Lay demonstrates the comfort and command that only comes from finding your people. The album has a telepathic quality to it, like Sandy Denny working with Richard Thompson and John Wood on The North Star Grassman and the Raven, or Elliott Smith mind-melding with Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock for Either/Or. Lay’s lyrics find depth and meaning in everyday moments: “Gone with the day again/I’ve seen so much and there’s more yet,” she sings on opener “Death Up Close,” an album highlight that features garage-pop musician Mikal Cronin blowing rays of light through a saxophone. “I love it/I love you,” Lay concludes, a plain confession whose boldness mirrors the confidence in her full-throated delivery.
The arrangements seem to bloom directly out of her voice, mirroring her mental state. “Nowhere soon/Soon we’ll get to nowhere/And we’ll talk to no one/And not meet them,” she intones on “Nowhere,” and the loping percussion echoes her romantic aimlessness. “I can decide my own way/I can decide which way to go,” she declares on the title track, over a nervous repeated pattern on electric guitar and locomotive drumming.
The album’s most tender moments are heard when Lay honors her idols. “November” considers Nick Drake’s serene and unparalleled voice: “Molly did you feel the sting/Of November songs gone quiet,” Lay wonders, imagining the devastation felt by Molly Drake when her son passed away. “I think of him often/I wonder if he’s listening/I wonder if a voice so quiet could ever really die,” she muses. Her take on “Something On Your Mind” transports the tune from Karen Dalton’s lonely backroads to a sun-drenched front porch, her fingerpicking folding into a barrage of percussion. The cover is a brave and well-meaning gesture, if not an entirely necessary one: Lay’s obvious love of Dalton is heard more subtly and perhaps more successfully through the album’s earthen textures. The fiddle on “August” and “Sea Came to Shore” is straight out of “Katie Cruel.”
At any rate, Lay is able to cover Dalton without losing her own voice. Her vision is clear-eyed, poetic, and for all the ways she channels the greats—Dalton and Drake, yes, but also Vashti Bunyan and current-day figures like Jessica Pratt and Adrianne Lenker—she also chisels her own name in the canon, painting a pastoral Los Angeles where the blazing concrete and wondrous shores and discarded sofas and blooming canyons form a peculiar everyday worth interrogating.

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The earliest music of Calgary's Kiesa Rae Ellestad leaned toward folk, and then she hooked up with producer and current collaborator Rami Samir Afuni, who has written and arranged for the likes of LMFAO and Miley Cyrus. The duo's debut is largely made up of attempts to recreate the success of their pop hit, “Hideaway”.

Sound of a Woman

Disclosure’s Settle wasn’t just the best debut LP of 2013, it was also the best dance-pop crossover record from last year; with no dominant trend in the sub-genre cropping up this year, the Lawrence brothers have dominated 2014 by proxy, too. Their rising success can be found in industry-shepherded superstar collaborations and dance veteran co-signs; they were also responsible for putting the most boring new pop star of the year on the map. All of which has lead to the music industry’s typically craven search to find something, anything comparable when it comes to satiating the fuzzy-boots crowd’s sudden micro-thirst for vocal-driven house. It’s why UK producer Duke Dumont’s ebullient, bursting “I Got U” could be found on U.S. pop radio earlier this summer, and it also explains why the market has been flooded with knockoffs supposedly meant to catch some of Disclosure’s heat. If you thought the glut of post-dubstep singer/songwriter types or tortured alt-R&B auteurs proved tiring, the 4/4 onslaught that mainstream pop is about to undergo could prove even worse.
Recently, the market’s been hit with two new artists in the Disclosure mold: first, there was Gorgon City’s competent, ultimately ineffective debut LP Sirens, and now we have the debut album from Calgary's Kiesa Rae Ellestad, Sound of a Woman. Kiesza's earliest music leaned toward folk, and then she hooked up with producer and current collaborator Rami Samir Afuni, who has written and arranged for the likes of LMFAO and Miley Cyrus. In 2012, Kiesza and Afuni released the single “Oops”, a pop trifle about unprotected sex that mixed bright, MOR synth-pop with the requisite wub-wub elements that marked big-tent dance music at the time; at the top of this year, they hit the pop bullseye forcefully with “Hideaway”, a throaty blast that sounded like the duo’s attempt to remake Robin S.’ “Show Me Love” for the millennial crowd.
A minor U.S. hit that went platinum in four European countries, “Hideaway” was a stroke of low-level pop mimicry genius, and Kiesza and Afuni are clearly aware of its winning formula: Sound of a Woman, a record that proves as generic and bland as the catch-all title that adorns it, is largely made up of attempts to recreate that song’s success, right down to replicating its basic structure. Sometimes, this works: the effervescent “No Enemiesz” finds Kiesza shouting over squiggles and a hollow, pounding beat before hitting a chorus that utilizes her oversinging tendencies effectively, while “Giant in My Heart” blooms into a satisfying 4/4 pulse that carries superficial charms similar to off-brand cereal.
Elsewhere, though, Sound of a Woman fails to spark, as its homogenous textures blend together to rob this music of the personality and emotion it has when done right. Kiesza and Afuni treat house music with all the studiousness of someone reading a textbook, as evidenced by her sorta-viral, sacrilegiously po-faced cover of Haddaway’s “What Is Love”. On one level, they’ve committed cultural thievery of the laziest kind, right down to European dance culture’s obsession with dusty, pre-2000s hip-hop (the shiftless “Losin’ My Mind” and “Bad Thing”, with respective features by American rappers Mick Jenkins and Joey Bada$$). Kiesza and Afuni come across as guests at a dinner party who couldn’t be bothered to bring anything and expect their presence to do the work for them.
So Sound of a Woman’s most memorable moments are when the duo deviate from their established norm: “So Deep” is a brooding, bleeping slow jam that, midway through, breaks into a moderately appealing 2step rhythm, while "Piano” soothes and swerves with the druggy melancholy of certain strains of R&B, building to a pleading, drum-assisted chorus that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Jessie Ware’s 2012 debut Devotion. They’re capable, pretty songs, and like the rest of Sound of a Woman, they don’t give any clues as to who Kiesza is.


The Norwegian metal band Kvelertak find the unlikely meeting spot between black metal blast beats and the anthemic power of Van Halen and Judas Priest.

Nattesferd

Before Metallica basically turned metal into a speed-racing contest, older acts like Accept, Raven, and Metal Church had already embraced fast tempos while keeping one foot planted in what we once called metal but now look back on as traditional hard rock. Sonically speaking, these bands formed a kind of connective tissue between the poofy-haired stuff and the more aggressive styles that arose in part to purge the genre of its focus on backstage hedonism. If they referenced the rock'n' roll lifestyle, though, they tended to do so with a tough-guy attitude, as if partying, sex, and cars weren't the ultimate endgame but the reward for sticking to one's guns and making METAL an all-caps priority for life.
When you hear the modern-day Norwegian sextet Kvelertak ("stranglehold"), it's obvious that they're aiming for the same middle lane as their proto-thrash predecessors. But Kvelertak also embrace the let-the-good-times-roll side of metal as well. (For the record, the band describes itself first and foremost as "rock and roll.") And even though frontman Erlend Hjelvik sings entirely in Norwegian, Kvelertak's third album Nattesferd is so thoroughly crammed with fist-pumping hooks it's easy to get the impression that he's singing about heading out to the highway the whole time. He isn't, but on the first song alone the band manages to marry blast beats to the anthemic power of Van Halen, Dokken, and Judas Priest.
Nattesferd actually covers a lot more ground than Kvelertak's '80s ancestors did, but elements that might otherwise oppose one another blend into the experience seamlessly. Kvelertak's fellow revivalists (the Hellacopters, Bonded By Blood, The Sword, and pretty much any Sabbath-mimicking fuzz-rock band) can be so adamant about faithful replication that listening to them can feel suffocating. By contrast, the overwhelming feeling that comes across with Nattesferd is one of freedom to explore. "Svartmesse," for example, begins with a reverbed, single-string choka-choka-choka guitar line that's initially reminiscent of the Lick It Up-era KISS tune "Exciter" until the song veers into a quintessential New Wave Of British Heavy Metal-style verse. It's hard to imagine such a move in anyone else's hands not falling into either complete camp or embarrassing over-earnestness. In this case, it's fun without making you laugh at—or even *with—*the band.
The same is true of the production. Both Kvelertak's 2010 self-titled debut and 2013's sophomore album Meir benefited from the touch of Converge guitarist/producer Kurt Ballou, who, no surprise, captured the scratchy edges of the band's sound. This time, Kvelertak chose to produce themselves along with engineer Nick Terry (The Libertines, Turbonegro, Robyn Hitchcock). By contrast, Nattesferd hearkens back to a more vintage rock feel. Still, Terry and the band opt for a crisp, vibrant ambience rather than the boxed-in reverbs that were typical of the early '80s.
The CD booklet includes lyrics, which of course won't be of much use for non-Norwegian speakers. But the text for each song is preceded by a cryptic thumbnail summary. Listeners shouldn't expect to get a feel for what the songs are actually about with introductions like "Odin hangs himself from Yggdrasil for nine days so he can uncover the secrets of the world," "A future of despair awaits us. Resistance is futile," and "A traveler ventures into the strange black night with hopes of finding himself a new home." (The album title means "night traveler.") Alas, Google Translate won't help you determine that either, but with Nattesferd Kvelertak exploit an opportunity to create a sense of mystery. More importantly, they back it up with a group of songs that's virtually filler-free and loses little steam towards the end. Even if Kvelertak didn't mean to re-cast the Norse deity Odin as a Camaro-driving rebel burning rubber down the road, Nattesferd makes it exceedingly easy—and enjoyable—to picture him as one.


The hip-hop legends return for their first album in 12 years and turn a comeback story into more of a claim to their legacy.

and the Anonymous Nobody...

De La Soul have been positioned as everything from young hippie weirdos to aging, jaded scolds in the face of their more hardcore contemporaries. But the truth is that they’re just smart, grounded wiseasses whose eccentricities alternately hid or let slip their everyman status. If the clean-cut white yuppie who came in for U2 and came out with De La Soul was positioned semi-ironically at their start, their current position as elder statesmen of rap comes from their crossover eclecticism fine-tuned into a true-to-self versatility. They began showcasing a post-genre adventurousness in the ’80s, opened doors for alt-rap’s next wave in the ’90s, and spent the first half of the ’00s getting Damon Albarn, Chaka Khan, and Carl Thomas to share iPod space. Then they vanished.
Calling De La Soul’s hiatus a disappearance isn’t that much of an exaggeration: In their absence, the new record industry streaming model turned their history of innovative sampling and cultural interpolation against them, and the clearance and rights issues that locked them out of digital distribution posited them as one of the most important, and possibly the last, true holdouts of the CD era. But they had to keep their name out there somehow and found a way around the record business unable to maintain their legacy by funding their music through Kickstarter, just like regular folks (albeit more than $600,000 above most regular folks’ goals). They’ve also come to a phase in their career where an artistic existential crisis is scraping up against the getting-old anxiety that the rest of their Gen X peers are making a big public deal about. And working through that on record might be their most down-to-earth move yet.
*and the Anonymous Nobody... *is their first album since 2004’s The Grind Date, which featured a still-prolific MF DOOM, a still-peaking Ghostface, and a still-living J Dilla. This one features an equally notable and telling guest list: there’s David Byrne organizing an art-neurosis summit on “Snoopies,” there’s Damon Albarn turning “Feel Good Inc.” inside out on “Here in After,” there’s Snoop Dogg (“Pain”) and 2 Chainz (“Whoodeeni”) and Roc Marciano (“Property of Spitkicker.com”) mastering their own cool, dad-jokey versions of Over-35 rap to go along with De La’s version. Their dozen-year absence and the fact that Pos and Dave and Maseo are all going to hit 50 before the decade is out looms over all that, and it turns a comeback story into more of a claim to their legacy.
It’d be easier to shake off that feeling if there was more of a kick to this record. If your impression of “old man rap” is short on energy and long on reflection, this album won’t change that. At times, *Anonymous Nobody *feels more like a matter of necessity than enthusiasm, even if the work put into it proves it’s not. When it sounds tired and bummerish, it’s more in keeping with the hazy enervation of contemporary Drake-casualty rap than the proto-backpacker energy of their old joints. And while their casual, collected deadpan was always key to their delivery, Dave and Posdnous aren’t so much rusty as they are restrained in their down moments, all heavy eyelids and middle-distance stares. The flow’s still there—Pos remains way underrated in terms of disjointed, unpredictable rhyme schemes, and Dave still has a way of injecting that characteristic “huh, how about that” understated sharpness into his words—but the energy’s more stoic than ever.
Which makes sense, given the thread of tribulation and frustration that cuts through Anonymous Nobody, likely their bleakest record thematically since Stakes Is High. All the relationships they bring up seem to have been doomed long ago. “Drawn” and “Memory of... (US)” is all about trying to persist through faded love, depicted damningly as a metaphor for music-biz struggle. When they’re telling ass-chaser tales like “Trainwreck” or Dave’s verse in “Whoodeeni,” it’s all so tenuous that they have to bring in a 67-year-old man character in for an interstitial skit to remind them they need to get less reckless about hookups. If that sometimes lends itself to dated tropes—a “morally pure but naive young girl comes to the big city and gets corrupted” rap like “Greyhounds” sounds bad coming from a bunch of middle-aged dudes, even if one of those dudes is Usher—that's a side effect of dealing with accumulated experience.
There’s still no questioning De La’s greatness with observational abstraction. “Royalty Capes” isn’t just a juxtaposition of opulent-kingdom metaphors and gimme-what’s-mine industry beef, it’s the best type of convoluted wordplay: “I choke the blood out of felt tips/Heavyweights up to the front if the belt fits/The wealth is like ivory toothpicks/One out of each tusk/And must gets bust for each and every hiccup.” And “Pain” runs through its weary streak with been-there resilience, as if to say that if this shit’s a constant, it might as well be your inspiration.
There’s unexpected power in that weariness sometimes, but at low points, the big sinking weight of this record is their laconic flow and beats rarely make a case for themselves. At least when they had to tread water back in the day, they had a danceable electric piano hook to do it over. The live-band production and original musical composition is a good juke around any worries about sample rights, but too often the Rhythm Roots Allstars either keep it a little too tasteful (“Greyhounds” aims for the Miguel/Frank school of sumptuous future-soul and lands in a mattress commercial) or swing at pitches in the dirt (the arena rock of “Lord Intended,” featuring the Darkness’ Justin Hawkins, is easily the most inexplicable thing De La’s ever done). Pete Rock and Estelle just manage to bring that glow to “Memory of… (US),” but when it takes one of the greatest producers ever and an actual Crystal Gem to make a cut sound alive, it’s easy to wish the rest of the album had more to work with.
Fortunately, the tasteful outnumbers the ridiculous throughout the record, and if you don’t expect tectonic shifts in the way live-band hip-hop beats sound, the cumulative effect is at least thoroughly pleasant. And sometimes thoroughly pleasant plus heavy bass is just what you need. And when the energy level spikes on the late-album P-Funk homage “Nosed Up,” it’s live enough to distract you from wishing there was more of it. It’s all kind of what a skeptic might expect from hip-hop’s most enduring outsiders coming to terms with finally being outside the youthful drive that helped break them in the first place. Middle-aged rap has rarely sounded more grown, with all the mixed-blessing perspective that comes with it. *Anonymous Nobody *is kind of a downer, but sometimes that’s what you need, especially when the optimism’s just below that melancholy surface. If De La can find their place again after being gone so long, those clouds have got to break eventually.


These wildly unpredictable art-rockers infuse the murky experimentation of their last two albums with the raw two- and three-chord rigor of punk, 1960s garage, and early 70s hard rock.

Liars

When Liars released Drum's Not Dead last year, they convinced naysayers that their turn towards dank improvisation on 2004's critically reviled They Were Wrong, So We Drowned was part of some masterplan: It was seemingly the perfect refinement of Drowned's experiments in noise and rhythm. A year later, they've taken another hard-left turn. With the band's expectation-defying back story, the surface way to read the new Liars is that it's the murky, art-damaged sound of their last few albums with the rock reattached. Here, the raw two- and three-chord rigor of punk, 1960s garage (and even pop), and early 70s hard rock reasserts itself over the haunted sound of Drum's Not Dead's tricky, Kraut-ish polyrhythms.
Much of Liars is rhythmically simplistic-- even brutish-- giving it an unexpected caveman thrill after the more cerebral Drum. In some ways, it hearkens back to the beefy punk-funk of the band's earliest material, where they bulked up the skinny-legged skronk of the Gang of Four and James Chance on a meat-and-potatoes diet. But in other ways this heft feels totally new-- classic rock moves melted into a noisy reduction. "Clear Island" and "Plaster Casts of Everything" both throb to the kind of riffs and howling keyboards that go right for the American rock fan's lizard brain.
In essence, Liars is scorched-blacktop biker music played through the art-rock filter of a band that's spent the last few years steeped in the bleak sounds of German new wave and early industrial. The riffs may be shackled to just a few notes, or restrained to a shrieking drone, but these are undeniably songs about the Power of the Guitar, not songs colored by atmospheric flecks of fuzz and feedback. The rhythm section's Mo Tuckerish momentum moves with the muscle mass of ZZ Top and the artless abandon of an upstart punk band. Liars have always been mesmerizing on stage-- even if that's often meant Angus Andrew flailing around in a soiled dress as much as the musicianship-- but Liars is the first time in a long time that live intensity has really come through on CD.
Of course, this being a Liars record, unpredictability is a foregone conclusion, and the band's turn to heavy metal thunder only makes up a fraction of the album's songs. Elsewhere the group shows a flair for grotty pop pastiche that must have previously been buried under all that jagged percussion. "Freak Out" is such a dead ringer for the Spector-spooked feedback-pop of the Jesus and Mary Chain-- right down to winkingly dumb "rock'n'roll" song title-- that it's impossible to ignore and likewise no accident on the band's part. "Pure Unevil" is shoegaze/dream pop if it had been concocted in a damp nuclear bunker rather than a paisley hippie crash pad. The song reverberates with a sickly but seductive metallic echo, with the drums and Andrew's voice coming from the opposite ends of a mile-long sewer pipe and the lonesome guitar zigzagging off the slimy walls between them.
The inspiration behind "Pure Unevil" is less obvious than the outright homage of "Freak Out", but both offer newly tweaked takes on 80s British rock that are echoed in "Houseclouds", where the baggy funk rhythm and creaky organ sound like what might have resulted had the Happy Mondays set sail for Bowie's Berlin rather than the ill-fated Barbados trip that produced Yes, Please. It's these laconic, menacing, and almost pretty moments that leaven Liars, adding skewed hooks to a band more infamous (rightly or wrongly) for willful noise and studio jamming. The murk (dub by way of stoner rock) remains constant throughout and moments of past inscrutability occasionally stop the record dead in its tracks. ("Leather Prowler" and "The Dumb in the Rain" go for that same kind of ethereal menace as "Pure Unevil" and get to the level of practice space dicking around.) But if Liars flowed smoothly, instead of stopping occasionally to worry at its scabs or piss all over the couch, it wouldn't be a Liars album.
Instead, hairy warts and all, the album is another script-flipping overhaul from a band that too often gets forgotten when folks start toting up 21st century rock's front line. Inevitably some will claim the album is a concession designed to appease those who ditched the band when the band ditched the rock. But if it doesn't quite confound like They Were Wrong or thrill like Drum's Not Dead, Liars still finds the band ignoring whatever you thought you wanted or needed from them, and doing what they damn well please. Just don't expect the next one to sound anything like it.


Australian psych rockers Pond share members with Tame Impala, as well as a penchant for arena-sized 1970s rock. Their new album mixes bright synths, campy detours, and grim lyrics.

The Weather

Because of the success that one-time Pond drummer Kevin Parker has had with his solo vehicle Tame Impala, it’s easy to mistake Pond for a spinoff act—especially since Pond’s music wasn’t released outside of Australia until their fourth album, Beard, Wives, Denim, in 2012. Parker has functioned as in-house mixing engineer since Pond’s 2009 debut Psychedelic Mango, while two of Pond’s three core members—Nick Allbrook and Jay Watson—have in turn served as touring members of Tame Impala.
The two bands share a penchant for grand, arena-sized music that carries the torch for 1970s classic rock. But where Parker is sedate onstage, Pond combine feral enthusiasm with goofy recklessness, their baroque suites draped in punkish basement-show charm. (Think Queen dressed up as the Replacements or vice-versa.) Pond also keeps threatening to release a record that rivals rock’s all-time classics—creatively if not commercially speaking—and their seventh album, The Weather, is a tantalizing attempt.
The Weather opens with a cloudy arpeggiated synth pattern that introduces leadoff track “30,000 Megatons”—an early signpost that points in the keyboard-heavy blue-eyed soul direction Parker pursued on 2015’s Currents. Halfway through the song, filtered robotic vocals tease that Pond is about to follow in the same footsteps, which proves to be especially true for the album’s first half. On numbers like “Sweep Me Off My Feet” and “Paint Me Silver”—both love songs drenched in falsetto and synths—it’s almost hard to tell the two albums apart.
Pond dips into parody on “Colder Than Ice,” with its cliché “c-c-c-cold as ice” chorus and a keyboard bass groove evoking Frankie Goes to Hollywood and countless other 1980s acts who made cheesy videos filled with artificial smoke. Ditto for “All I Want for Xmas (Is a Tascam 388),” which apes the iconic chorus of Bob Geldof and Midge Ure’s 1984 all-star famine-relief song “Do They Know It’s Christmas.” Such campy detours are hardly surprising given that Pond’s work has mostly been about as serious as a spitball fight between junior high students just released from detention.
But The Weather is pervaded by a newfound sense of grimness. On “30,000 Megatons,” Allbrook sounds weary and disgusted with humanity, as he basically calls for someone to push the button and end it all, singing “I look out at the mirror/Look out at the world/30,000 megatons is just what we deserve.” On “Edge of the World, Pt 1,” he croons “We’re all just a waste of good meat/In a godless world” in a stagey falsetto.
Even the syrupy-sweet “Sweep Me Off My Feet” belies the sense of defeat at its core. When The Weather descends into vaudevillian strangeness during its second half, the contrast between words and music becomes especially fertile, as the band stays true to its zany spirit while showing that there's more going on below the surface. Throughout, Parker wisely employs his ear for fine-tuning while playing-up some of the band’s inherent roughness, like when the drums distort towards the end of “Edge of the World, Pt 1.” And on “A/B” (a remake of the band’s own “Elvis’ Flaming Star”), Pond establishes a missing link between Joe Jackson and early Funkadelic via a spazzy punk tempo that feels like it might derail at any second.
The Weather actually does derail—several times, in fact—but nothing can obscure its soaring moments. Rock bands have historically ended albums with songs that build gradually to gigantic climaxes—what Pond multi-instrumentalist Jay Watson once called “cosmic bollocks.” The Weather contains no less than four songs like that and even starts with one, as if Pond had epic moments to spare. For all its disjointedness, the album never wanders more than a few inches away from the sublime. It’s a document of a band knocking loudly on the door of greatness.


Where 2013’s cautious Defend Yourself attempted a belated recovery from a disappointing major-label debut, the indie-rock icons’ latest sounds like the work of a band refreshingly free of baggage.

Act Surprised

Arriving a good 14 years after its predecessor, Sebadoh’s Defend Yourself, in 2013, was less a comeback than an act of closure, like one of those standalone reunion specials that follow the demise of a beloved long-running TV series. Where much of the indie-rock icons’ celebrated 1990s catalog invited us to eavesdrop on Lou Barlow’s roller-coaster romance with his main muse (girlfriend-turned-wife Kathleen Billus), his contributions to Defend Yourself updated their relationship status one last time with a striking degree of finality. “Someone else has found her way into my soul,” he sang at the top of album opener “I Will”: “Things have changed, no longer need to be with you.” Even if you were a casual listener with little knowledge of Barlow’s personal life, the line still stung, because it also summed up the average Sebadoh fan’s relationship with the band at the end of the ’90s.
The trio’s 1999 major-label debut, The Sebadoh, didn’t just fail to expand its audience, it was a dealbreaker for many longtime fans in an era when making an elaborately produced crossover record was enough to get even the most acclaimed indie-rock band cancelled. While Defend Yourself saw Barlow singing once again with the sort of characteristic candor that inspires tribute songs from veteran emo bands, musically it felt a little shell-shocked, as if memories of The Sebadoh’s Icarian leap inspired a reactionary retreat into a mid-tempo ’90s-indie comfort zone. But on their first album in six years, Sebadoh sound like a band free of baggage, whether personal or professional. Now they just have our raging shit-show of a world to worry about.
Act Surprised assumes the familiar form of Sebadoh’s mid-’90s Sub Pop classics, with Barlow and his habitual foil Jason Loewenstein evenly splitting the songwriting, while accommodating a lone wild-card contribution from the drummer (currently Bob D’Amico, formerly of the Fiery Furnaces). Instead of merely contrasting the tunefully heartfelt Barlow with the more erratic, irascible Loewenstein, the new album finds them mining common topical terrain—namely, the emotional toll of perpetually wading in a sea of misinformation—through their respective personalities.
As they take stock of a polarized culture, Sebadoh are unafraid to wade into gray areas. The deceptively chiming “Medicate” is Barlow’s contribution to the growing dialogue surrounding mental health, but it’s more than just an admission of addiction—when he sings, “Oh, I miss it when the sorrow tempts me again,” he’s questioning whether it’s actually better to feel pain than being drugged into feeling nothing at all. Loewenstein, meanwhile, uses the twitchy “Phantom” and twangy “Raging River” to parrot the sort of paranoia endemic to conspiracy-theorist culture. But he’s not just making a turkey shoot of easy targets—as an admitted enthusiast of UFO cover-ups on the early internet, he’s imagining the kind of tinfoil-hatted wingnut he could’ve turned into had he continued to slip deeper down the dark-web rabbit hole.
To channel our fraught current condition, Sebadoh eagerly reclaim their license to confuse by emphasizing a quality that was far less perceptible on Defend Yourself: their inherent volatility. Though often hailed as lo-fi folk heroes who taught indie rockers how to get in touch with their feelings, Sebadoh were also weirdo hardcore kids raised on Minutemen and Meat Puppets, and those eccentric influences are given more room to run wild here. Barlow’s “Celebrate the Void” may begin as a sluggish anthem of indecision, but it abruptly shifts gears into an exhilarating motorik free fall, while Loewenstein’s “Follow the Breath” finds a common language between needling math-punk guitars and arena-toppling Keith Moon drum rolls.
That sort of inspired energy proves tough to sustain over Act Surprised’s 45-minute run, particularly when the album veers into more temperate 1980s college-rock territory (“Vacation,” “Act Surprised”). But the album’s stellar closing trifecta—comprising the winsome power-pop of “Belief,” the adrenalized, Feelies-esque duet “Leap Year,” and the equally odd and elegiac “Reykjavik”—confirms Act Surprised’s status as the strongest Sebadoh release since 1996’s Harmacy. In a recent podcast interview, Barlow quipped that, extended hiatuses notwithstanding, Sebadoh “will never break up,” and on “Sunshine,” he spells out his recipe for endurance: “I need sunshine/To ignore/I need a room with heavy curtains, double lock up on the door.” With the way the world is heading, the future promises plenty more reason to curl up in the dark.