The soundtrack to Wes Anderson’s new stop-motion film, built around Alexandre Desplat’s instrumental score, embodies the movie’s spirit of cherishing rather than fearing difference.

Various Artists: Isle of Dogs (Original Soundtrack)

Isle of Dogs (Original Soundtrack)

“He’s extremely specific,” composer Alexandre Desplat explained in an interview several years ago about his working relationship with Wes Anderson. “Every single shot, every single line, every single camera move, and every single moment of music is precisely designed by Wes.” This will come as no surprise to followers of Anderson’s work. Indeed, a thorough, painstaking, sometimes fussy attention to detail has always been the defining feature of the director’s craft—the widely imitated, much-parodied hallmark of his unmistakable style. One can be certain that Anderson carefully oversaw the composition of Desplat’s score for his new film, Isle of Dogs. How could it be otherwise? Sound, for him, is not extraneous or incidental. It’s an integral component of his artistic vision.
Isle of Dogs concerns the efforts of a plucky 12-year-old boy, Atari (Koyu Rankin), to retrieve his beloved “short-haired Oceanic speckle-eared sport hound,” Spots (Liev Schreiber), from an offshore island dump outside the fictional near-future Japanese metropolis of Megasaki City, whose despotic mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura) has banished canines from city grounds after an outbreak of infectious snout fever. In short, it’s a classic Anderson romp. A marvel of intricate stop-motion animation, the film astonishes with every frame: each tuft of fur and thread of fabric, each morsel of food and scrap of garbage, looks handcrafted, color-coordinated, and meticulously arranged. A miniature bento box prepared with patience is so richly detailed it seems edible. A kidney transplant performed in full looks so real you can hardly help but squirm.
Anderson may be a brazen aesthete, but he isn’t superficial. And so while Isle of Dogs is about the rousing exploits of man’s best friend, it’s also about companionship, fraternity, and such old-fashioned virtues as working together to overcome adversity and practicing empathy in times of bitter strife. The music reflects these themes. Desplat’s score, in its synthesis of contrasting styles, embodies the film’s spirit of teamwork, of cherishing rather than fearing difference. The eastern instrumentation appropriate to the setting—the taiko drumming arrangements by Kaoru Watanabe that bookend the film in particular—is complemented by Desplat’s own sensibility, which is rooted in the Hollywood tradition. But what derives expressly from Japan has not been co-opted irresponsibly. Desplat pays homage with earnest fascination and respect.
This is not so much Japanese music, to put it another way, as a westerner’s idea of Japanese music. Desplat’s score draws on the conventions and cliches of a broadly exported popular culture, creating something that will ring true to American ears raised on anime, Studio Ghibli, and old Akira Kurosawa movies caught on TV. This is in keeping with the film’s somewhat controversial conception of Japan—not as an authentic country, but a fantasyland devised by an admiring outsider. In the Anderson diorama, the most sensible tribute to Kurosawa is the appearance of music from both Seven Samurai (“Kanbei & Katsushiro—Kikuchiyo’s Mambo”) and the more obscure but equally superb Drunken Angel (“Kosame No Oka”). And when all else fails, he can always cue more taiko drumming. The instrument runs through the picture like a kind of shorthand.
Conspicuous contrasts abound. Most notable, perhaps, is the interpolation of Prokofiev’s decidedly un-Japanese orchestral suite Lieutenant Kijé, which seems to have been used only to emphasize the wilful incongruity: Anderson wants to make clear that he’s not interested in consistency or verisimilitude. At times, the orchestra seems to veer suddenly from a Japanese motif to a blatantly American flourish, and sometimes back again. Those saxophones and clarinets tend to flair up with the jazzy verve of one of Henry Mancini’s scores for Blake Edwards, as on the irrepressibly buoyant “Second Crash-Landing + Bath House + Beach Attack” (an accurate title that encapsulates well the energy of the movie). The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s sweet, understated “I Won’t Hurt You,” meanwhile, returns Anderson squarely to his wheelhouse of pleasant mixtape-ready deep cuts from post-war American rock bands.
“Technique can only go a small way toward explaining the effect of a film as intricate and vivid as this,” the critic Dave Kehr wrote of Rushmore in the late 1990s, “with its simultaneous sobriety and eccentricity, its love of grand gestures and its respect for the tiniest fluctuations of emotions, its underlying sadness and great, bursting hopefulness.” This, Kehr felt, was “the stuff of poetry,” and Anderson’s poetic streak has only become more pronounced since then. Isle of Dogs is a film and a soundtrack of grand gestures and tiny fluctuations, of sadness and hope. It affects the mournful quality of Japanese theatre, then zips into the mid-century L.A. exuberance of giddy brass and woodwinds and drums. What’s most evident throughout is the warmth and thoughtfulness behind it all.


Wax Idols' intensely personal new album unspools like a clever synthesis of new wave and late-'80s post-punk without sounding like a pastiche of either. At a relatively brief nine tracks, it's a perfectly paced blast of dark pop that deftly reflects frontwoman Hether Fortune’s growing prowess as a songwriter.

American Tragic

As the frontperson and creative force behind Wax Idols, Hether Fortune has cultivated an aesthetic of icy cool—punk rock bravura shrouded in multiple layers of gothy frost. The last Wax Idols record—2013’s sophomore effort Discipline + Desire—was an exercise in sustained tension informed, at least in part, by her training as a professional dominatrix. As a result, the record played like an extended tease—tantalizing the listener with heavily eyelinered pop stylings but still keeping things at a cool remove, always stopping just shy of delivering the kind of massive hook that could have potentially knocked everyone out of their collective creepers.
In contrast, American Tragic is a much more empathetic affair, fully stocked with songs that bear the trappings of gloomy post-punk and the appropriate gray shades of goth, but wraps them around words that articulate real human feelings. While previous Wax Idols tracks sometimes felt like excuses to show off an aesthetic, Tragic manages to unpack a number of complicated ideas, particularly about how much our personal identities are defined by our relationships. And while it would be easy to attach a personal narrative to songs like "Goodbye Baby" and "Lonely You" (based on the fact that Fortune reportedly went through an ugly divorce prior to making this record), the album strives to be much more than a classic breakup record. In the end, it’s a record about getting over.
The album opens with "A Violent Transgression"—a bit of reverby melodrama in which Fortune sets the tone for the record by singing "This is an absolute negativity/ A sudden, irrevocable plunge" before ultimately concluding that "Desire/ It’s violent." The violence of wanting—both wanting in and ultimately desperately wanting out of a relationship—lies at the heart of American Tragic. The most compelling tracks are those that deal with the queasy malaise of missing something you know is ultimately bad for you. On the glorious "Lonely You"—a bit of Anglophilic guitar pop that sounds like some long-lost "120 Minutes"-worthy single that never was—Fortune pauses to pine for a lover that is better left in the dust. "It was a sorry gilded cage/ That bound our hearts together," she laments, "Now I just want to push the weight of you away forever." Elsewhere, on "Goodbye Baby" the notion of a collapsing romance is both devastating and empowering: "I’m not wasting time/ I’m taking my heart back/ I’m taking what’s mine."
If Fortune sounds newly empowered here it’s for good reason. American Tragic is, in every way, a very personal missive. She wrote and recorded everything herself (except the drums, played by Rachel Travers) and the collection unspools like a clever synthesis of dark new wave and late-'80s post-punk without ever sounding too much like an obvious pastiche of either. "At Any Moment" approaches Sky Ferreira levels of mainstream pop accessibility, while "Deborah" gives a twist on the classic doomed heroine ode ("Had you pegged for a gay boy but you were just a playboy") and wraps it up in Cure-like guitar lines and a sprinkling of drum machine handclaps. On the other hand, "Severely Yours", with its references to sexual power dynamics and submission ("You can be the Marquis tonight"), is a little too on the nose for someone who has already mined this kind of territory so thoroughly in the past (and there should be a moratorium on non-ironic references to crucifixion and martyrdom for any kind of goth-approved record that isn’t actually Pretty Hate Machine).
Mostly though, Tragic avoids living up to its namesake by sidestepping cliché and never overstaying its welcome. At a relatively brief nine tracks, the record is a perfectly paced blast of dark pop that deftly reflects Fortune’s growing prowess as a songwriter—here offering everything from slow burn dirges on romantic grief to perfectly executed synth jams about emotional freedom. As a result, it’s not a surprise that she increasingly draws comparisons to women like Chrissie Hynde and Siouxsie Sioux—powerful forces who knew how to strike a perfect balance between authority and vulnerability. By opening up and shedding some of her icy veneer on American Tragic, Fortune places herself in very good company.


Composer and producer Anna Meredith's wild music blends synthesizers and acoustic instruments. She makes it feel as if you're strapped in her spaceship's sidecar as she goes rampaging around the universe.

Varmints

On her debut single "Nautilus," Anna Meredith sounded drunk on power and spoiling for a fight. The 2012 cut was the acclaimed Scottish composer's first mainstream release after nearly two decades in the classical world, where her adventurous work often met with sedentary audiences who were polite at best, and openly contemptuous at worst. The track's imperious brass fanfares, artillery-fire percussion, and earth-quaking bass seemed designed to pummel and intimidate listeners. The song was so monstrous in scale that the EP it helmed, Black Prince Fury, and 2013's follow-up Jet Black Raider, trembled a bit in its wake, like going from a Jeff Koons or Louise Bourgeois sculpture to a roomful of sketches.
The track won Meredith the response she was after, but her prospective debut album kept getting put on the back-burner in favor of paid commissions. Almost four years later, Varmints also opens with "Nautilus," and actually lives up to its huge opening gambit. Meredith's electronic work has often drawn from the soundtracks and sci-fi iconography of classic arcade games, and her EPs often stuck within their characteristic limited polyphony. Here, blending synthesizers with acoustic instrumentation, she makes those 8-bit quests and battles feel completely visceral and real, as if you're strapped in her spaceship's sidecar as she goes rampaging around the universe.
Although Meredith wanted to escape the concert hall's stuffier conventions, Varmints still exploits every inch of these rooms' dynamic range, from womping bass and juddering low-end to piercing, starry heights. (It's important to point out that she's not abandoning her day job as a composer.) Her trademark as an arranger is intensely detailed maximalism, but with a keen sense of pop phrasing that keeps things limber, like Max Tundra before her, or Battles circa Mirrored. Matching "Nautilus" for pure muscle is "R-Type," a mass of screaming arpeggios that evokes the do-or-die auto-fire moments of a classic intergalactic shoot'em-up's final level. "The Vapours" is equally bonkers, and sounds like a roomful of overheated machines on the precipice of exploding, while "Shill" thrashes like a herd of angry bull elephants romping in a lake.
Meredith knows the pleasure that can come from pushing a little bit too hard, and the record's few low-key, borderline-ambient instrumentals ("Honeyed Words," the lovely closer "Blackfriars") serve as welcome respites from the madness. Meredith is equally capable of subtler assaults, which she wages with miraculous and exhilarating builds: "Scrimshaw" starts out sounding melancholy and graceful eventually bursts into an unrelenting cosmic endorphin rush. On "Last Rose," Her plaintive, piercing vocals intensify the song's sense of loss. Her crescendos don't always lead to a drop, but she makes you feel the hunger in every one.
All of these skills feel like they could serve as key ingredients of great pop songs, and, wouldn't you know it, Meredith can write those, too. The three here seem to deal with the various stages of a break-up: "Taken" feels like "R-Type"'s more muted sibling, driven not by brute force but Meredith and collaborator Jack Ross' confident  "yeah-eh-eh-eh-eh" chorus and a skittish bass line. With different production, "Something Helpful" could be a massive rave-up; as it is, Meredith strips out most of the low end and spins it into a sweet and unguarded ultimatum. "Dowager" starts as a spinster's lament, its queered vocals and crystalline guitars aligning it with Wild Beasts circa Smother, but eventually finds strength in the idea of a widower who "plays by herself."
Meredith's diverse array of classical commissions has included making music inspired by MRI scanners, performing body percussion pieces at the BBC Proms, and conducting five disparate ensembles connected by satellite hook-up. Perhaps fairly, she worried about becoming the "novelty movement girl," but then, those were all works written for commissions. Her first wholly indepedent project reveals her to be one of the most innovative minds in modern British music: She wears her obvious theoretical grounding lightly and never lets it obstruct her ecstatic quest for new ideas and deranged stimuli. And Varmints is a knockout, the kind that makes you see cartoon stars.


The Flaming Lips’ prog-inspired alter-ego act the Electric Würms promotes redoubtable multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd to bandleader and reduces Wayne Coyne to background noisemaker. The Würms' six-song LP could easily be considered the (slightly) sunnier follow-up to the blood-red-skied electro-psych of 2013’s The Terror.

Electric Würms: Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk

Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk

Flaming Lips fandom in the 21st-century requires agreeing to the terms of this transaction: in exchange for receiving a non-stop stream of new, consistently adventurous music from your favorite band, you have to put up with Wayne Coyne’s Instagram skeeziness, and all the #freaks hashtags, exclamation-point abuse, and Miley Cyrus tongue-wagging selfies that go with it. Seems like a fair enough trade-off, but even those fans who are most tolerant of Wayne’s social-media madcappery had to be thinking “really, dude?” last spring when some especially ill-advised photos led to accusations of racism, and the extremely acrimonious ousting of long-time Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock (the fallout from which continues to spread).
In light of this, the debut of the Lips’ prog-inspired alter-ego act the Electric Würms couldn’t have come at a better time. By promoting redoubtable multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd to bandleader and reducing Coyne to background noisemaker (with Nashville psych-rock outfit Linear Downfall playing the role of an absent Michael Ivins), the new project effectively doubles as a form of damage control, redirecting our attention back to the ongoing evolution of what has been a remarkably productive and intriguingly unpredictable phase for the band. Even that Teutonic album title—which apparently translates as “music that’s hard to twerk to”—offers the guarantee of a Miley-free zone.
Given that Drozd has long been the de facto musical director of the Flaming Lips, the Würms unsurprisingly stick to the post-Embryonic playbook, to the point where the new band name is practically immaterial, and Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk could just as easily be the (slightly) sunnier follow-up to the blood-red-skied electro-psych of 2013’s The Terror. And when you consider how much Coyne’s voice was fused into the textural mist on that album, Drozd’s soft, childlike coo doesn’t have much opportunity to distinguish itself amid the shock-treatment synths, radio-static guitar fuzz, and stellar-drift drums. Oddly, for an album that cheekily presents itself as a long-lost ’70s prog cut-out bin artifact, Musik, die Schwer zu Twerk’s most notable characteristic may be its 29-minute brevity, offering a tasting-menu sampler of the various modes the Lips have been exploring for the past five years. It’s almost as if the Lips have formed a cover-band-medley version of themselves.
So in lieu of prog’s multi-sectional intricacy, each of the six tracks here lock into discrete themes, from the mirage-like space-age bachelor-pad smear of “Futuristic Hallucination” to the Live-Evil-era Miles (by way of Yoko Ono’s Fly) psych-funk shriek of “Transform!!!” However, these four-minute spurts are too free-ranging to establish a melodic logic, yet too steady in execution to achieve maximal freak-out potential; with its creeping rhythm, quavering vocal, and steampiped-synth exhaust, “The Bat” is very much sonically of a piece with The Terror, but feels insubstantial outside a similarly elaborate context.
Ironically, focus arrives in the form of a cover of Yes’ hyrda-headed dinosaur-rock colossus “Heart of the Sunrise,” which simply lops off Vincent Gallo’s favorite build-up and the arpeggiated closing act and condenses it into a pure and simple four-minute star-gazing ballad, with Drozd doing an eerily spot-on Jon Anderson. (That said, the attempt at writing a modern-day Yes song—“I Could Only See Clouds”—is less satisfying, with a placid central melody that never fully adheres to the intrusive Howe/Squire-worthy contorto-riff.) But it’s not surprising that the Würms find their greatest success the further they venture from the Lips mothership and the longer they stay the course. With the Neu! hypno-rock pulse of “Living,” the band turn in both their headiest jam and most dramatic song, with Drozd’s ghostly voice sounding like a final transmission to mission control before he and Coyne thrust themselves into the coldest, darkest reaches of outer space—or, at the very least, somewhere with no smartphone reception.


Ganna Bryzhata’s ethereal, shape-shifting electroacoustic experiments feel equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy.

Eye of Delirious

Some artists require a certain measure of distance to thrive. That’s the case for Ukraine’s Ganna Bryzhata, aka Bryozone. She’s best known as the bassist of Chillera, a trio of dub aficionados who developed a gently psychedelic style of space rock in their adopted hometown of Odesa, a port city on the Black Sea. The three once considered moving to Kyiv but ultimately decided that life in the capital wasn’t for them: “It’s great to come for a while, to feel the active movement, but it sucks up the energy,” they told an interviewer in 2019. “You need to be more self-organized to live there. We are still not able to bring this chaos to order.” You can hear that refusal to adapt to the rhythms of the big city in their instrumentals, in which Afrobeat basslines and surf licks churn as blithely as the tide, unconcerned with anything beyond maintaining the breezy vibe.
A similar sense of willful isolation characterizes Bryozone. Bryzhata’s solo music is a world away from Chillera’s, trading their warm blues riffs and wah-wah twang for ethereal loops and icy, atonal drones. But both projects share a timeless quality. Chillera’s records sound like they’ve spent decades gathering mold in some beachside community thrift store; Bryozone’s output might conceivably have been rescued from the flooded basement of a mid-century tape-music studio. Perhaps even more than Chillera, Bryozone is bubble music, promising an insular journey into inner space.
Bryozone’s music has changed considerably since her first two EPs, 2013’s ACID FROG DAY and Ifrit. Where those records remained tethered to familiar strains of lo-fi techno and ambient dub, Eye of Delirious, her debut LP, leaves such recognizable terrain in the rear-view mirror. Across 10 varied tracks, Bryzhata explores a series of mysterious, shape-shifting visions that feel conjured out of thin air—not so much the products of silicon and circuits as the phantasmal afterimages of lysergic dreams.
The sea’s rhythms hold sway over the opening tracks. “Smoothly Flow” channels tidal rhythms into a swirl of watery synths and foghorn drones—loops upon loops upon loops, submerged in a thick, grainy paste of tape hiss. It’s eerie and emotionally blank, equally conducive to beatific calm and deep melancholy. “Sub Nautica” pairs a plodding 4/4 pulse and muted dub bass with rolling waves of synth; the influence of dub—a music of ocean currents and cultural exchange—speaks, perhaps, to Odesa’s historic identity as a mercantile city. “Ghost Tribe” and “Liminal Tribe” spin hand percussion through eerie tape effects, turning pitter-pat rhythms into insect chirps and alien soundscapes; they evoke the work of Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and Muscut label head Nikolaienko, who similarly have reexamined vintage ethnographic phonography through an experimental electroacoustic lens.
Some of these tracks aren’t “songs” at all—more like tricks of the light captured on foggy deadstock film. “Sequence One” arrays dissonant chirps and chimes into slippery arpeggios, somewhere between a circus carousel and a flickering asphalt mirage; “Glowing Sirens” and “Ambiency,” imbued with the otherworldly timbres of Sarah Davachi’s Vergers, suggest Aeolian harps, or long metal wires strung across a cavernous tunnel. The closing suite ventures furthest into the penumbra. The title track recalls the haunting expanses of Seefeel at their bleakest; “Fateful Torment” and “Ground Floor” are full of clomping footsteps and ominous electrical buzz, steeped in the doleful, otherworldly frequencies of mid-century explorers like Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Pauline Oliveros, and Else Marie Pade. These are the most difficult pieces on Eye of Delirious, but they might also be the most rewarding. Bryzhata’s coldly keening frequencies luxuriate in their desolate surroundings, making ghostly tendrils of feedback feel sumptuous. Resolute in their isolation, they offer an alluring glimpse of oblivion, a hand-delivered invitation to disappear.


A tribute to their hometown of Los Angeles, this covers album spans genre and style, showcasing Los Lobos’ versatility, taste, and strength as a rock’n’roll band.

Native Sons

Consider Native Sons an autobiography told through other people’s words. Los Lobos designed this covers album as a tribute to their hometown of Los Angeles, selecting songs they believed would represent the soul of the city, taking pains to incorporate the different sounds and cultures that lie within its urban sprawl. Sticking largely to music written and recorded prior to the band’s formation in 1973, Los Lobos dodge nostalgia by side-stepping recognizable tunes in favor of ones that showcase their versatility and taste, elements that have distinguished the band throughout their long career.
Cover songs always loomed large in the history of Los Lobos. In their earliest days, they made their bones playing weddings and parties, building muscles they’d flex when they made the leap to Hollywood punk clubs in the early 1980s. Aligning with the rootsier side of punk, they signed with the indie label Slash—home to X and the Blasters; in the liner notes to Native Sons, saxophonist/keyboardist Steve Berlin says the latter band was “not just inspirational, but aspirational”—and earned a nationwide cult upon the 1984 release of their major-label debut, How Will The Wolf Survive. When director Luis Valdez brought the story of pioneering Chicano rocker Richie Valens to the big screen with La Bamba, Los Lobos were the natural choice to perform Valens’ songs on the soundtrack.
“La Bamba,” a Mexican folk song turned rock’n’roll raver by Valens, gave Los Lobos a No. 1 hit when their version accompanied the film’s theatrical release in the summer of 1987. A fluke in the grand scheme of things, the song gave Los Lobos mainstream recognition, which they built into a viable career, keeping them on the road for decades. As they closed out the 2010s, this touring schedule made it difficult to find time to write a new record, so they decided to cut a covers album. When the pandemic forced them off the road, they took the time to create a cohesive collection, canvassing friends and colleagues for song suggestions and adding a sweet new original to the mix.
Native Sons deliberately casts a wide net, bringing in songs from different genres and different corners of Los Angeles. It opens with “Love Special Delivery,” a 1966 track  by the Chicano rock & roll band Thee Midniters. Many other Mexican artists are saluted, from the hopping “Los Chucos Suaves” by Lalo Guerrero—the guitarist widely acknowledged as “the Father of Chicano Music”—and Willie Bobo’s romantic “Dichoso,” to “Where Lovers Go,” a dreamy end-of-the-night instrumental by the Jaguars that closes the album on a wistful note. “Farmer John” is also associated with Mexican rockers the Premiers—they brought it to No. 19 in 1964; it would later be included on the classic 1972 compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968—but Los Lobos revive the frenzied tempo of the original version by Don & Dewey. It is one of several R&B tunes that give Native Sons a walloping dance beat.
Between the margins of Chicano rock and R&B, music that conveys the pulse of Los Angeles to many of its residents, lay rock groups who embodied a a different kind of Southern California sound. Apart from splicing “Bluebird” and “For What It’s Worth” into a Buffalo Springfield medley, Los Lobos stay faithful to these original arrangements, which doesn’t mean they’re replicating records. They’re relying on their collective strengths as a rock’n’roll band, sounding less ornate than the Beach Boys on “Sail, On Sailor” and leaner than Jackson Browne on “Jamaica Say You Will,” even if they retain his honeyed harmonies. The same keep-it-simple aesthetic also means they take “Flat Top Joint” at a faster clip than the Blasters and explore jazzy detours during a long vamp on War’s “The World Is a Ghetto.” Even when they’re playing songs from other artists, Los Lobos sound like no other band.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On Mezzanine, Massive Attack tried to escape trip-hop. They nearly tore themselves apart and made its defining document instead.

Mezzanine

“Trip-hop” eventually became a ’90s punchline, a music-press shorthand for “overhyped hotel lounge music.” But today, the much-maligned subgenre almost feels like a secret precedent. Listen to any of the canonical Bristol-scene albums of the mid-late ’90s, when the genre was starting to chafe against its boundaries, and you’d think the claustrophobic, anxious 21st century started a few years ahead of schedule. Looked at from the right angle, trip-hop is part of an unbroken chain that runs from the abrasion of ’80s post-punk to the ruminative pop-R&B-dance fusion of the moment.
The best of it has aged far more gracefully (and forcefully) than anything recorded in the waning days of the record industry’s pre-filesharing monomania has any right to. Tricky rebelled against being attached at the hip to a scene he was already looking to shed and decamped for Jamaica to record a more aggressive, bristling-energy mutation of his style in ’96; the name Pre-Millennium Tension is the only obvious thing that tells you it’s two decades old rather than two weeks. And Portishead’s ’97 self-titled saw the stress-fractured voice of Beth Gibbons envisioning romance as codependent, mutually assured destruction while Geoff Barrow sunk into his RZA-noir beats like The Conversation’s Gene Hackman ruminating over his surveillance tapes. This was raw-nerved music, too single-minded and intense to carry an obvious timestamp.
But Massive Attack were the origin point of the trip-hop movement they and their peers were striving to escape the orbit of, and they nearly tore themselves to shreds in the process. Instead— or maybe as a result—they laid down their going-nova genre's definitive paranoia statement with Mezzanine. The band's third album (not counting the Mad Professor-remixed No Protection) completes the last in a sort of de facto Bristol trilogy, where Tricky’s youthful iconoclasm and Portishead’s deep-focus emotional intensity set the scene for Massive Attack’s sense of near-suffocating dread. The album corroded their tendencies to make big-wheel hymnals of interconnected lives where hope and despair trade precedent—on Mezzanine, it’s alienation all the way down. There’s no safety from harm here, nothing you’ve got to be thankful for, nobody to take the force of the blow: what Mezzanine provides instead is a succession of parties and relationships and panopticons where the walls won’t stop closing in.
The lyrics establish this atmosphere all on their own. Sex, in “Inertia Creeps,” is reduced to a meeting of “two undernourished egos, four rotating hips,” the focus of a failing relationship that's left its participants too numbed with their own routine dishonesty to break it off. The voice singing it—Massive Attack's cornerstone co-writer/producer Robert “3D” Del Naja—is raspy from exhaustion. “Dissolved Girl” reiterates this theme from the perspective of guest vocalist Sarah Jay Hawley (“Passion’s overrated anyway”). On “Risingson,” Grant “Daddy G” Marshall nails the boredom and anxiety of being stuck somewhere you can’t stand with someone you’re starting to feel the same way about (“Why you want to take me to this party and breathe/I’m dying to leave/Every time we grind you know we severed lines”).
But Mezzanine’s defining moments come from guest vocalists who were famous long before Massive Attack even released their first album. Horace Andy was already a legend in reggae circles, but his collaborations with Massive Attack gave him a wider crossover exposure, and all three of his appearances on Mezzanine are homages or nods to songs he'd charted with in his early-’70s come-up. “Angel” is a loose rewrite of his 1973 single “You Are My Angel,” but it’s a fakeout after the first verse—originally a vision of beauty (“Come from way above/To bring me love”), transformed into an Old Testament avenger: “On the dark side/Neutralize every man in sight.” The parenthetically titled, album-closing reprise of “(Exchange)” is a ghostly invocation of Andy’s “See a Man’s Face” cleverly disguised as a comedown track. And then there’s “Man Next Door,” the John Holt standard that Andy had previously recorded as “Quiet Place”—on Mezzanine, it sounds less like an overheard argument from the next apartment over and more like a close-quarters reckoning with violence heard through thin walls ready to break. It’s Andy at his emotionally nuanced and evocative best.
The other outside vocalist was even more of a coup: Liz Fraser, the singer and songwriter of Cocteau Twins, lends her virtuoso soprano to three songs that feel like exorcisms of the personal strife accompanying her band’s breakup. Her voice serves as an ethereal counterpoint to speaker-rattling production around it. “Black Milk” contains the album’s most spiritually unnerving words (“Eat me/In the space/Within my heart/Love you for God/Love you for the Mother”), even as her lead and the elegiac beat make for some of its most beautiful sounds. She provides the wistful counterpoint to the night-shift alienation of “Group Four.” And then there's “Teardrop,” her finest moment on the album. Legend has it the song was briefly considered for Madonna; Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles sent the demo to her, but was overruled by Daddy G and 3D, who both wanted Fraser. Democracy thankfully worked this time around, as Fraser’s performance—recorded in part on the day she discovered that Jeff Buckley, who she’d had an estranged working relationship and friendship with, had drowned in Memphis’ Wolf River—was a heart-rending performance that gave Massive Attack their first (and so far only) UK Top 10 hit.
Originally set for a late ’97 release, Mezzanine got pushed back four months because Del Naja refused to stop reworking the tracks, tearing them apart and rebuilding them until they’re so polished they gleam. It sure sounds like the product of bloody-knuckled labor, all that empty-space reverb and melted-together multitrack vocals and oppressive low-end. (The first sound you hear on the album, that lead-jointed bassline on “Angel,” is to subwoofers what “Planet Earth” is to high-def television.) But it also groans with the burden of creative conflict, a working process that created rifts between Del Naja and Vowles, who left shortly after Mezzanine dropped following nearly 15 years of collaboration.
Mezzanine began the band’s relationship with producer Neil Davidge, who’d known Vowles dating back to the early ’90s and met the rest of the band after the completion of Protection. He picked a chaotic time to jump in, but Davidge and 3D forged a creative bond working through that pressure. Mezzanine was a document of unity, not fragmentation. Despite their rifts, they were a post-genre outfit, one that couldn’t separate dub from punk from hip-hop from R&B because the basslines all worked together and because classifications are for toe tags. All their acknowledged samples—including the joy-buzzer synths from Ultravox’s “Rockwrok” (“Inertia Creeps”), the opulent ache of Isaac Hayes’ celestial-soul take on “Our Day Will Come” (“Exchange”), Robert Smith’s nervous “tick tick tick” from the Cure’s “10:15 Saturday Night,” and the most concrete-crumbling throwdown of the Led Zep “Levee” break ever deployed (the latter two on “Man Next Door”)—were sourced from 1968 and 1978, well-traveled crate-digging territory. But what they build from that is its own beast.
Their working method never got any faster. The four-year gap between Protection and Mezzanine became a five-year gap until 2003’s 100th Window, then another seven years between that record and 2010’s Heligoland, plus another seven years and counting with no full-lengths to show for it. Not that they've been slacking: we've gotten a multimedia film/music collaboration with Adam Curtis, the respectable but underrated Ritual Spirit EP, and Del Naja’s notoriously rumored side gig as Banksy. (Hey, 3D does have a background in graffiti art.) But the ordeal of both recording and touring Mezzanine took its own toll. A late ’98 interview with Del Naja saw him optimistic about its reputation-shedding style: “I always said it was for the greater good of the fucking project because if this album was a bit different from the last two, the next one would be even freer to be whatever it wants to be.” But fatigue and restlessness rarely make for a productive mixture, and that same spark of tension which carried Mezzanine over the threshold proved unsustainable, not just for Massive Attack’s creativity but their continued existence.
Still, it’s hard not to feel the album’s legacy resonating elsewhere—and not just in “Teardrop” becoming the cue for millions of TV viewers to brace themselves for Hugh Laurie’s cranky-genius-doctor schtick. Graft its tense feelings of nervy isolation and late-night melancholy onto two-step, and you’re partway to the blueprint for Plastician and Burial. You can hear flashes of that mournful romantic alienation in James Blake, the graceful, bass-riddled emotional abrasion in FKA twigs, the all-absorbing post-genre rock/soul ambitions in Young Fathers or Algiers. Mezzanine stands as an album built around echoes of the ’70s, wrestled through the immediacy of its creators' tumultuous late ’90s, and fearless enough that it still sounds like it belongs in whatever timeframe you're playing it.


Born in the Echoes continues the creative resurgence ignited by the Chemical Brothers' brilliant last full-length, 2010’s Further. In contrast to that album's loved-up euphoria, Echoes is a grab bag: Festival fillers and club bangers rub up against wondrously bizarre studio experiments and some of the best pure pop songs Rowlands and Simons have ever made.

The Chemical Brothers: Born in the Echoes

Born in the Echoes

"The future? I’ll see you there!" These words come in the middle of the latest album from London dance music survivors the Chemical Brothers. It could be a sly nod to their influence on this decade’s global electronic boom. Back in the mid-1990s, acts like the Chems, Fatboy Slim, and the Prodigy were primed to vanquish guitar rock once and for all while ushering in a squelching age of rave. It didn’t work out that way and, soon enough, Limp Bizkit were dragging their knuckles all the way to the top of the charts. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons’ radical mix of acid house, hip-hop, and shaggy psych was deemed just another pop fad. But now, with EDM festivals drawing millions of fans around the world and spiritual big beat descendants like Diplo and Hudson Mohawke helping to shape the Hot 100, it’s clear that the Chemical Brothers were both ambassadors and soothsayers. And they’re still around. They deserve to gloat.
Then again, the line could also suggest something more sinister. It’s taken from a spoken-word performance by iconoclastic 76-year-old Canadian poet bill bissett, whose idea of "the future" involves scentless flowers, two-headed babies, and other marks of a hellish apocalypse; for every hit of ecstatic futurism, they seem to be saying, there is an equal and opposite dose of reality. Meanwhile, the music of "I’ll See You There" finds Rowlands and Simons once again tripping out on the past, as howled backmasking and frenzied drums criss-cross in an effort to once again capture the headiness of their own psychedelic pop ur-text, the Beatles’ "Tomorrow Never Knows". All of which leads us to the eternal present—the now—which happens to be a place that suits the Chemical Brothers quite well.
Born in the Echoes is the pair’s eighth album and it continues the creative resurgence ignited by their brilliant last full-length, 2010’s Further, which served as something of a career reset following a decade of flagging potency. But whereas that album was marked by extended dancefloor workouts, seamless DJ-style transitions, and an overall feeling of loved-up euphoria, Echoes is more of a grab bag: Enormous festival fillers and hard-nosed club bangers rub up against wondrously bizarre studio experiments and some of the best pure pop songs Rowlands and Simons have ever made.
Like fellow '90s innovators Daft Punk, the Chems have managed to last more than 20 years in part because they are smart enough to prioritize mindless immediacy. The two upper middle class boys bonded while studying history at Manchester University at the height of the city’s ecstasy heyday; they would read Chaucer’s bawdy Canterbury Tales and then head over to The Haçienda and flail about with 1,000 of their new best friends. They quoted British novelist Evelyn Waugh on an early EP title and then sampled roughneck New York rapper Keith Murray on their ageless classic Dig Your Own Hole. Simons recently returned to the world of academia (and will miss this year’s Chemical Brothers tour dates because of it), while Rowlands recently summed up the duo’s objectives thusly: "We're just really into making funny sounds and putting them into some kind of order that makes sense … Not every song has to be the meaning of life."
So on Echoes we get Q-Tip spouting motivational pizza box rhymes over rubberband basslines on future sports montage soundtrack "Go" followed by St. Vincent staring into the suicidal void of a performer’s high on "Under Neon Lights", which peaks with a guitar (or is it a synth?) solo that searingly recalls "Bulls on Parade". We get the viscous funk of "Taste of Honey"—replete with buzzing bee cameo—next to the taut title track, which features a coolly distant vocal from Cate Le Bon and sounds like a worthy tribute to the late, great psych auteurs Broadcast. Then Beck shows up at the end to help Rowlands and Simons create the finest New Order song in ages. "Wide Open" makes the inevitability of losing it—life, love, inspiration—sound terribly triumphant, and just as the track hits its climax, Beck wisely gets out of the way, making room for undulating waveforms that bristle and burst with all-too-human imperfections.
Talking to Spin about his Big Beat contemporaries in 1999, Ed Simons suggested, "There’s surely going to come a time when those kind of tricks—all the drops and builds and rhythm changes—aren’t going to trigger the same responses in people." Of course, the same could be said of today’s insta-nuke dance tracks, the ones that try to cheat death by just running away from it really fast and really hard. And, to be fair, the Chemical Brothers have deployed plenty of drops and builds and rhythm changes across the last two decades. But Rowlands and Simons’ version of the future isn’t one of narrow-minded annihilation; there are levels to it, along with paths that connect everything from the Fab Four to "Funky Drummer" to Phuture. Part of a fast-moving culture always looking for the next high, the Chemical Brothers remain steadfast—eyeing the past and future while living in the here and now.


The band whose Ayrton Senna EP helped define last summer's bright, beachy sound gains momentum with a beautifully surging, shimmering trance-pop LP.

Subiza

Delorean helped define the bright, beachside vibe of last summer's indie landscape, but they also deserve to be placed in a broader context. On their new album, Subiza, the Spanish four-piece deploys the build-and-burst tempos of 90s house and techno music, and they do so explicitly, never shying away from arms-in-the-air piano bridges or incandescent raves. This music is proudly informed by the resiliency and vigor of classic club music, and its title (named after the Basque town in which the album was recorded) recalls the famously nightclub-centric Ibiza and the Balearic dance music that originated there.
Delorean's musical growth isn't far removed from the evolution of Primal Scream. Like Delorean, Primal Scream were a dance-rock band with more traditional, rock-leaning origins (Delorean formed as a no-frills indie group) who ended up embracing druggy dance subculture. Over time, Screamadelica became a part of the 1990s pop firmament to the point where it no longer sounds like a blending of much of anything. Depending on which ways the trend-winds blow, observers may one day question why Subiza was ever labeled as anything more than uptempo indie rock.
The band definitely has that pedigree, crafting four- and five-minute verse/chorus pop songs. Singer/bassist Ekhi Lopetegi has a slightly pinched, accented delivery that lends intrigue and emotional resonance to lines like "Would you ever make yourself this decision I've made?" (from "Grow"). Sonically, Delorean borrow from chilled trance and piano-heavy Italian house, but like any music fan in 2010, their interests are varied. The pitch-shifted chipmunk vocals that orbit "Real Love" are drawn from hip-hop; the warped female voice that echoes "Maybe" during the refrain of "Grow" is lifted from dubstep. There's more than a little Merriweather Post Pavilion in the whirring rave of "Infinite Desert". The band even runs a club-heavy blog, and when they're not playing live, their massive DJ sets feature faintly familiar house tracks that hit a perfect nostalgic nerve.
Delorean's 2009 EP, Ayrton Senna, was recorded in-studio, but for Subiza, the band made a conscious move toward electronic production, laying down dozens of tracks and building the rhythms on sequencers and drum machines. The overall sound remains similar to Ayrton Senna's totemic dance-pop, but Subiza feels tighter and more congealed. What the songs lose in clarity (ratchet those vocal levels down a bit, guys), they gain in cohesion: Subiza is uncommonly bound by tempo and mood. While hardly modest, Delorean have toned down their anthems, so that much of Subiza feels like a very tiny, very personal rave.
Subiza sounds like a simple and straightforward record. It's bright and quick and full of easy sentiment. Its songs bleed in and out of one another effortlessly, but it's also surprisingly varied. It contains few obvious singles, yet its winning moments-- those piano breakdowns, the "Get up/ Get up/ Get up" bridge of "Stay Close", and the resplendent chorus of "Warmer Places"-- pile up and leave you dizzy. Synth-pop, Balearic disco, indie house: Call it what you want. Delorean just make beautiful, modern pop music.


Ex-members of Arcade Fire and the Unicorns team for a record that's closer to the latter's skewed art pop than the former's stadium anthems.

Clues

Back in 2003, Alden Penner was a member of the Unicorns, one of the first bands to draw serious attention to Montreal's thriving indie rock scene. At the same time, Brendan Reed was the drummer of Arcade Fire, and performed on that band's debut EP. Just a year later, Arcade Fire exploded in popularity just after Reed's departure, and the Unicorns imploded and disbanded before ever recording a second album. Though Penner and Reed have been active in the time since, Clues' self-titled debut marks both artists' return to the spotlight since their crucial early efforts in building Montreal's well-deserved reputation as one of the best arts scenes in North America.
Given that Penner is the primary songwriter in Clues, it should come as no surprise that the band's music bears a stronger resemblance to the skewed art pop of the Unicorns than the heart-pounding stadium anthems of Arcade Fire. Penner's guitar style remains hyperactive and colorful, but his songwriting has become more ambitious, adapting his former band's sense of faux-mystical whimsy to arrangements implying danger and adventure, resulting in music that often sounds as if it were intended to be the soundtrack of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The songs that most closely match this description are easily the most rewarding. The riffs in "Cave Mouth" swing and slash like an enormous battle ax; "Remember Severed Head" and "Approach the Throne" marry grandiose melodic themes and urgent, adrenaline-pumping rhythms. In these tracks, Clues hit upon a magical combination of Chavez's razor sharp chord progressions, the quasi-Medieval melodic sensibility of late-period Helium, and the oddball drama of the Danielson Famile.
The band is less successful in its quieter moments. Though about half of the album rocks outs with a twitchy, childlike enthusiasm, the remainder is deliberately static and lethargic. They are particularly fond of sequencing lulls before their most aggressive moments, as with the long, repetitive quasi-folk number that gradually builds to the manic burst of energy at the start of "Cave Mouth", or the tense ambience that carries through the opener "Haarp" until it erupts into a punk-rock payoff in its final minute. On a conceptual level, this is fine, and they are more than capable of evoking a spooky atmosphere, but these slower passages are simply not as pleasurable and well-realized as their frenetic rockers. These cuts also highlight the band's flaws. Just as Clues exaggerate dynamic shifts in their more rocking compositions, they also push their stillness to unfortunate extremes, resulting in seemingly interminable tracks that overwork threadbare melodic themes. Penner's thin voice is not flattered by the slowness either, as it nudges him to sing in an often-annoying nasal whine that sounds a bit like someone doing a mean-spirited impression of Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donahue.
Aside from these problems, Clues is a very assured debut with a fully formed aesthetic that exploits the strengths of its players while pushing them beyond their established comfort zones. With any luck, Penner will be able to stick with this project for a second album-- there may be some excellent tracks on this record, but it mostly hints at better things to come down the line.


These reissued electronic works by the ’70s Moog pioneer marry the fantastical and the everyday, the whimsical and the occult.

Mort Garson / Lucifer / Ataraxia: Didn’t You Hear? // Lucifer: Black Mass // Ataraxia: The Unexplained // Music From Patch Cord Productions

On July 20, 1969, Mort Garson began his 45th year on Earth hunkered around a television set with family and friends. It was, after all, the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but for Garson, the moment held special significance. Having been asked by CBS to compose a six-and-a-half-minute piece to accompany their coverage of the moonwalk, he spent his birthday soundtracking magnificent desolation. “The only sounds that go along with space travel are electronic ones,” Garson opined on the eve of the event, watched by 600 million people globally. “I used a big, symphonic sound for the blastoff and a pretty melody for the moon.”
Garson, who composed until his death in 2008, hadn’t always specialized in scoring feats of human endeavor. A classically trained Juilliard School graduate, the Canadian composer’s bread and butter was turning out jingles, TV themes, and the occasional hit like Ruby & the Romantics’ “Our Day Will Come.” Encountering the then-new Moog synthesizer—and its inventor Bob Moog—at a convention in early 1967 flipped the script entirely. A smitten Garson forked out $15,000 for one of the first models ever made and turned his Laurel Canyon home studio into his personal mission control center.
Reflecting on the state of electronic music at the time, musician and author Thom Holmes said, “No one really knew what direction to go in. The Moog did not come with an operator’s manual, literally.” As the ’60s fell out of view, and with no handbook to rip up, Garson could only be impeded by a lack of imagination. Luckily, he was a futurist invested in the radical potential of electronic sound. His modular explorations—fine-tuned on the cozy pocket symphonies of his 1976 opus Mother’s Earth Plantasia—conjured up a synthetic sphere where far-out filters and raw electricity went light-years beyond any lunar surface. “He was really fascinated by the newness and what this machine could do and how it sparked his creativity,” his daughter Day Darmet recalled. “I think it woke him up from a world of commercialism.”
Originally only available at screenings in Seattle, Garson’s soundtrack to 1970 oddity Didn’t You Hear? doubled as one of the first all-electronic film scores. Without context, vocalist Tom Muncrief's histrionics on the title track are jarring. But they are just a blip. “Death Talk and Jeep Approach” and “Sail! Sail!”—which foreshadows the corroded synth doom of Iggy Pop’s “Mass Production”—more than make amends. On the former, Garson summons an eerie tundra of panned whooshes and pitch-shifted bells the likes of which would have made the BBC Radiophonic Workshop proud. On a gentler note, the cutesy arpeggios of “Walk to the Other Side of the Island” is a hint of wholesome themes to come.
Owing in part to the box-office success of movies like Rosemary’s Baby and Witchfinder General, the occult crept into pop-culture consciousness in the late ’60s. Majors like Capitol and Warner Bros. capitalized by releasing schlocky, spoken-word LPs like Witchcraft – Magic: An Adventure in Demonology. By 1971, Garson offered up some credibility. Marketed as a feature-length interpretation of esoteric phenomena, Black Mass saw him adopt the moniker Lucifer for an experiment in supernatural electronics. Titles like “ESP” and “Witch Trial” leave nothing to the imagination, but, like peaks “Solomon’s Ring” and “Exorcism,” they furnish the mind’s eye with imagined visuals, pairing rich melodies with white-noise bursts and contorted clangs.
Though listeners are assured Black Mass “takes its subject matter seriously,” there’s a classic Garsonian comfort to the screwy spirit underpinning it all. It’s a niche Garson resumed when he became a tour guide to the paranormal for a second time in 1975. His sole release under the name Ataraxia, The Unexplained (Electronic Musical Impressions of the Occult) is a trove of dark ambience (“Sorcerer”) and a nostalgia bath of bubbling basslines (“I Ching”). Influence-wise, it’s a textbook case of give and take: The unearthly, new-age skulk of “Deja Vu” is essentially “Tubular Bells” 2.0. Opener “Tarot,” meanwhile, has the kind of driving 32nd-note pulse that John Carpenter would wield on his Halloween theme three years later.
But the crowning glory is the first-time issue of Music From Patch Cord Productions. Raiding the archives, it spans subtly alternate takes of Plantasia tracks (a thrilling, extra-syncopated “Ode to an African Violet”) and hallucinatory sci-fi tunes like “Son of Blob Theme.” The album’s stylistic outliers are also their best. The disco funk of “Dragonfly,” which plays like a dreamworld duet between Pac-Man composer Toshio Kai and Yellow Magic Orchestra, exists whole planes apart from “Cathedral of Pleasure.” A paean to physical empowerment, the latter calls to mind Jenny Hval musing over Pino Donaggio’s wistful main title from Carrie.
Looking back, it’s obvious Mort Garson was a jack of many trades and a master of one. At the dials and keys of his beloved Moog modular, his marriage of the fantastical with the everyday eluded comparison. Whether for outer space, or the quiet domesticity of home, he zoomed out to places unseen, or honed in on the familiar, bringing it to levels unconsidered. And just like he did on that momentous day back in 1969, Garson, Lucifer—whatever you want to call him—still guides his listener to not simply see the future, but look beyond it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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After rocketing into the stratosphere with his first album and struggling with second album syndrome, Australian producer Flume scales back with a lithe, quirky, understated EP.

Skin Companion EP I

The stakes were high for Harley Edward Streten. In 2012, the Sydney, Australia-based producer, who records as Flume, released his self-titled album as EDM was reaching peak cultural saturation. Flume’s beat-oriented sound—experimental enough for comparisons to L.A.’s Brainfeeder scene, pop enough to best One Direction in the charts—was so quick to catch fire that even Streten seemed shocked by his ascendency. “There was a lot of hype,” he told Complex recently. “It exploded in Australia first and then the rest of the world was coming on board and it was quite a process.”
This was only one year after his first live show, and Flume—then 21—had a legitimate hit album and the attention of music’s biggest names. Over the next 36 months he would remix Lorde, Disclosure, Sam Smith, and Arcade Fire. So, when it came time for him to drop Skin, the burden was heavy to prove he was more than just the flavor of the moment. “I struggled with the pressure of having the successful record after the first record,” he said. “Second album syndrome. I’m living proof; it’s very real.”
Streten’s way of dealing with astronomical expectations, as it turned out, were equally large ambitions: if Flume was a beat maker flirting with pop, Skin was a pop record with an experimental sense of rhythm. The sixteen-track album was stacked with legacy giants and alt-pop darlings, among them: Beck, Raekwon, Vince Staples, Little Dragon, AlunaGeorge, MNDR, and Vic Mensa. Some songs, like “Tiny Cities,” were successes. (Beck recast as a future-pop Beach Boy was an unexpected win.) More often, however, the features roster seemed a cagey distraction to Flume’s more left-field impulses.
Skin Companion 1, is billed as the first EP, presumably in a series, that will feature music recorded from the same sessions that produced Skin. But while that album emerged from a sous-vide of industry hype, its companion isn’t nearly as overdone. Of the EP’s four tracks, only one, “Trust,” features a guest vocalist—the Preatures’ Isabella Manfredi—and she’s here because she makes sense for the song, not to generate buzz. (The Preatures, like Flume, are New South Wales natives.) The result is a glitchy and glossy R&B-inflected tune, somewhere between CHVRCHES and Natasha Kmeto, with all the punch of Skin standout single, “Never Be Like You.”
The remainder of the album features more airy successes, similar to the shorter cuts on Skin. “V” rattles and clatters for under three minutes, blending organic percussion, disembodied vocals, and elastic synths; the sound is surreal and meditative, like playing pick-up-sticks in a zen garden might be. The EP’s most straightforward track, “Heater,” is restrained compared to the Glastonbury-ready productions on Skin. It could work as a festival experience—there’s a mellow mid-section drop—but the compressed synths invite enthusiastic head nods, not dancing. The EP closes with “Quirk.” Etherial and unstructured, a soulful vocal sample drifts atop percussion that never quite reaches Arca-levels of avant-garde. Flume's album art, which looks like weaponized, net-art ikebana, does an accurate job of capturing a sound that is as biological as it is mechanical.
Had something like Skin Companion 1 came out before the release of Flume’s sophomore effort, fans would probably be questioning Streten’s muscle: these are subtle productions, more Gold Panda than SBTRKT. But now that we’ve seen Flume’s version of laser-focused hit making, it’s nice to him in a painterly, if insubstantial mode. After holding his breath for four years, it was time for Flume to exhale.


The all-drum band Rattle's self-titled record has an admirable sense of freedom and unwillingness to mimic the tropes of conventional songwriting.

Rattle

Is there a harder sell than the all-drum band? It’s one thing to see a purely percussive group live and get swept up in their visual dynamic and the room’s collective energy, but listening on record demands a certain level of dedication—a need to reset your internal pulse, maybe—or just plain masochism. Undeterred by the hard sell, Nottingham’s Katharine Eira Brown and Theresa Wrigley took a break from their respective regular bands Kogumaza and Fists to unite under the onomatopoeic banner Rattle in 2011, galvanized by the demand for imagination inherent in such a project.
That doesn’t mean Wrigley and Brown are big on showmanship. Their sound is sparse, exposing and exploiting the specific qualities of each drum in their kit, building up clean and agitated patterns from skittish rim taps, roiling toms, and the snare’s metallic tang. The ghostly notes that bleed from their reverberations become the starting points for their vocal melodies, as they chant fragmented lyrics that could be about an impending catastrophe and the subsequent new world order—the call to leave your homes on “Trainer (Get You)” (maybe named in tribute to Shellac drummer Todd?), their ominous observations that something’s “Starting,” the electromagnetic event of “Thunder,” and the sparsely sketched portrait of a world leader who wants to “ruin it and rule in a ruin.”
Rattle doesn’t really offer any such threat to the status quo. Too many of its songs lack any sense of dynamic, shuffling around stop-start beats and wordless vocalizing that drags once you’ve realized it’s going nowhere. The duo are yet to come up with any particular spell—lacking, say, the violence of fellow Brits Shit and Shine, or the transcendent quality of Steve Reich's percussion compositions. They've also left some gaping open goals: “Starting” never actually gets off the blocks, and the clipped intonation of “Dulling” is… just that.
But there are some inventive moments here. Often, Wrigley and Brown coo in the colorful looping pattern made famous by Dirty Projectors, stumbling over themselves as the excitement mounts. The addition of cabasa and vibraslap gives “Stringer Bell” a strangely danceable groove, and “True Picture” brings to mind Autolux’s Carla Azar marching to tUnE-yArDs’ beat. The duo’s sense of freedom and unwillingness to mimic the tropes of conventional songwriting are to be admired, even if they’re not necessarily traits that will convince anyone but ardent early-Reich fans that drumming records are worthy of a place on their shelf.


Twin brothers Taiwo and Kehinde Hassan, aka production duo Christian Rich, have crafted beats for everyone from Vince Staples to Earl Sweatshirt to Lil' Kim. Their debut album, a loosely conceptual record with a sci-fi theme, is a good illustration of their understated talent.

FW14

Twin brothers Taiwo and Kehinde Hassan, aka production duo Christian Rich, placed their first beat on Lil' Kim's 2003 album, La Bella Mafia. Seven years later, mentor Pharrell Williams appeared on The Decadence, a nimble set of club bangers designed to introduce Christian Rich to a bigger audience. Along the way, they've crafted beats for Childish Gambino on Because the Internet’s "Crawl", and for J. Cole, on Born Sinner’s "Sparks Will Fly"; in 2013, Christian Rich landed four tracks on Earl Sweatshirt’s breakout Doris, and most recently, the duo composed "Señorita", the menacing lead single from Vince Staples’ exceptional Summertime '06. On the surface, their production work hasn't been particularly groundbreaking, and their debut album, FW14, doesn’t make an immediate impact. But midway through the record, near the end of the JMSN-featured "Fast Life", a bright flurry of drums move FW14 from mostly contemporary fare to an international sound closer to their Nigerian roots. It's another subtle shift for a group that's built a strong career on understated creative turns.
The album is loosely conceptual, with references to traveling through space and time and a premise derived from sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, and director Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film, Interstellar. Musically, FW14 brings to mind The Love Below, the André 3000-led second disc of OutKast's award-winning LP. The pace and influences are similar, and both albums take their time reaching their destination. It drifts comfortably through the cosmos, and a song like "FACE" benefits from a wafting ambience.
The album thrives on a technical prowess that grows more refined over its length. FW14 features several collaborators whose names might be more recognizable than the group's, even if they've spent several years crafting hits for Top 40 radio talent. But on FW14, and working with Vince Staples and singers Jack Davey and Niia, the group chops their vocals and re-filters them through the arrangements, keeping the producers at the forefront.
The music centers on glossy EDM grooves while mixing in jazz, global dance, and '70s funk. Thematically, FW14 feels like a romantic jaunt through the universe, following the ups and downs of a couple with common relationship struggles. Through songs like "Real Love"—a nostalgic R&B number featuring vocalist Angela McCluskey—and the GoldLink-assisted "Compromise", there’s a prevailing intimacy in the album’s second half. The aforementioned "FACE" delves into unconditional commitment: "Let’s go half in life," goes a line from the track. "I don’t need so many things to myself." FW14 has a gentle touch that grows more intoxicating with each listen, an album that moves calmly without much commotion, gradually taking shape.


Collected on a new anthology, the two albums from the supple-voiced ’70s singer-songwriter mine the internal turmoil of coming of age.

Laurie Styvers: Gemini Girl: The Complete Hush Recordings

For half a century, Spilt Milk was remembered as a footnote: a lost Laurel Canyon-adjacent curio, a promising start by a vanished songwriter, or most commonly, a victim of critical overkill. At December’s end, 1971, the critic Robert Christgau—writing in the same early iteration of his “Consumer Guide” reviews column in which he rewarded Hunky Dory an “A-”—harpooned the dozen-song debut of Laurie Styvers, a 20-year-old University of Colorado student who had stumbled into a major-label deal while a teenager living in London. “Normally, I ignore records as rightfully obscure as this one,” he wrote, squaring up to an album that had been out on Warner Brothers for a month. He called Styvers trite, “pretty-poo,” and fashionably troubled, then hoped she choked on her own money. “Oh shut up, Laurie,” he concluded. Of the hundreds of records Christgau reviewed by that rubric across two decades, Spilt Milk was one of just 15 to earn his “E” admonition: “proof,” as he put it, “that there is no God.”
But in his rush to year-end judgment and jokes, Christgau missed a sharp and idiosyncratic snapshot of how it feels to try growing up, especially when everyone else (sneering older critics included) tells you that you’re doing it wrong. Escaping to the country to take drugs and cavort, grappling with dawning traces of mental illness, navigating real love within a presiding ethos of free love: These are the multitudes of Styvers and her Spilt Milk, a piano-driven wonderland that invoked the buoyant pop side of Laurel Canyon vogue to frame a complicated internal portrait.
After a 50-year absence, Spilt Milk and its more settled but only slightly less striking follow-up, 1973’s The Colorado Kid, have been lovingly restored as a single generous set that alternately suggests the opulence of recent Weyes Blood and the precision of vintage Aimee Mann. What’s more, rigorous liner notes by producer Alec Palao portray Styvers, who died in 1998 after a long battle with hepatitis, as a fascinating person, not just Christgau’s punching bag or someone Stephen Malkmus liked to put on mixtapes, as he did in a 2006 Rough Guide. “What I’ve been through all these years has made me who I am,” a 21-year-old Styvers sings during one of her second album’s little stunners. Now, at last, we know a bit about who she actually was.
When Styvers, then Laurette Stivers, was still a teenager, her family left Texas for Swinging London, where she fell fast not only for the era’s extravagant fashion but also its interweaving folk and rock scenes. A student at the private American School, she entertained new chums with songs, fell in with the local cast of Hair when it opened there to royal adulation in 1968, and soon answered an advertisement to join Justine, the band of two schoolmates. Their fascinating, self-titled 1970 LP is a flower wheel of acid-folk idioms (and, these days, a collector’s item), its cataracts of harmonies and twisting riffs twirling in the open space between the then-recent debuts of Led Zeppelin and Pentangle. In Justine, she was but one of five singers.
Feather-haired industry lacky Hugh Murphy produced Justine and purportedly recognized the makings of a star (and, unsurprisingly, a sporadic romantic partner) in Styvers. After several members of Justine, Styvers included, were busted for drugs, she returned to Colorado, where she’d vacationed as a kid, and wrote songs of idyllic escape and long-distance longing. When she briefly split from school for London, those endearingly plaintive tunes became the core of her Murphy-produced debut, Spilt Milk.
Styvers was a veteran pianist, most often accompanying her athletic voice, which could track from a whimper to a roar in a single breath, with insistent keys that steadily billowed. But she doesn’t play piano once on her debut, yielding instead to arranger and multi-instrumentalist Tom Parker. The decision is, at least, sadly fitting for an album defined by its constant search for a sense of self. During the sashaying “You Keep Coming Home in the Mornings” and the slowly soaring “All I Ever Had,” Styvers tries to resolve her role among assorted lovers, attempting to parse trysts from commitments. She tries to dissuade herself from mercurial emotions at large during “Leo Loves You,” a hymn of failed rationalization for anyone who’s ever worried they feel too much. And during the brooding “Gemini Girl,” she acknowledges her privilege—the pretty white woman from a family working in oil, raised in London with vacations to the Rocky Mountains—as a way of hedging her relatively minor romantic complaints.
More compelling, though, are Styvers’ solitary protest songs, anthems not only against social expectations as a young woman from a middle-class family but against civil society at large. “Open Your Window” and “Eat Your Cornflakes” wrestle with the reality of a woman’s domestic work. “Instead of playing housewife, you should be playing concert grands,” she sings, as Parker—apparently altogether unaware of irony—dashes out a brief, flashy solo in response. Then there are Styvers’ back-to-the-land stunners. “Pigeons” is her Randy Newman-like number about despising the city, while “Imagine That the Lights Have Gone Out” wants to check out of capitalism through a mix of downers, Ram Dass spirituality, and silence.
Such gentle strains of resistance coalesce on opener “Beat the Reaper,” the tune Malkmus liked to recommend. Telling an effortlessly charming tale about a stoned weekend in the woods with friends, dogs, and lots of MDA, Styvers maintains a childlike glow as she coos about partying until dawn, “smoking or drinking or playing guitars.” It all sounds so pleasantly Dionysian, a rager somehow as gentle as a lazy river. You’ll probably want to join Styvers and her friends at the rented countryside house they indeed called Beat the Reaper, to drop out of whatever rat race to which you are hidebound and lounge, quietly, amid their orgiastic excess.
During a triptych of alternate versions and demos appended to Spilt Milk for this reissue, Styvers at last plays the piano on some of these songs. She is less exacting than Parker, but there’s modest charm to her touch, a sense that these sentiments needn’t be browbeaten. When Styvers is in charge of telling her own story, you can get closer to it, feel that it’s hers. How might Spilt Milk have taken shape had Styvers and not a series of hired men been behind the keyboard and mixing board, had she taken charge of these sessions like the audacious Judee Sill, a California contemporary who also made two early albums for a big label and then vanished?
Styvers did manage to commandeer the piano for much of her second and final album, The Colorado Kid, ceding the seat to Parker only three times. And there’s only one co-write with Murphy. This burgeoning resolve creeps into every element of these 11 songs, like a vine that’s finally found what it needs to sprout and spread. If Spilt Milk was Styvers sorting through the damage and delight of her past, on The Colorado Kid, she was digging into the present while cautiously turning toward her future, saying plainly what she might want and need there—particularly, a dependable partner invested in an equal emotional give-and-take.
The insistent and bewitching “Take Me Into Your Arms Again” is a plea for permanent forgiveness, as she works to cut ties with her libertine history. “White Flowers”—Styvers’ incredible parable of blooming after the fire, beginning meekly and exploding into a massive chorus—is a parallel devotional. She turns away from “the bodies of men you don’t even know about.” Later, she even makes demands for herself: “Come stay with me for a few weeks,” she sings, her voice cool and assured in this new role of authority. “I’ll get you to mean what I want you to mean.”
The arrangements, too, are newly daring. Howling saxophones flirt with dissonance toward the end of “There’s Still Time (Follow Your Heart),” a brief break from Styvers’ spirited repartee with an electrifying quartet of background singers. She invokes samba on “You Can Fly Me to the Moon” and drifts into shadowy psychedelia during “Gather the Grain,” a hymn for independence inside a close relationship. “You be you, and I’ll be me,” she sings, as if nodding to Murphy, loosening his grip. “We’ll gather the grain as we reap.” Chrysalis issued The Colorado Kid in Europe, but Warner Brothers never bothered to release it stateside. Perhaps they assumed that Carole King’s Tapestry, which Styvers had absorbed while writing, made it redundant, flattening the experience of piano-playing women to one. The month of The Colorado Kid’s release, King played for 100,000 people in Central Park; it’s hard to imagine that Styvers’ music couldn’t have found some fans within that throng.
In the reissue world, the temptations to aggrandize tragedy and rewrite history loom large. Does what’s been newly salvaged stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the songs we already know, the singers we already cherish? For Styvers and Gemini Girl, the answer is no. She was a fan and acolyte of King and Joni Mitchell, but her own records, however interesting and winning, lacked the singular vision of those influences. She wrote at least a half-dozen stellar songs that have now been retrieved from history’s dustbin, but they were very much part of her era’s singer-songwriter tide. Spilt Milk deserved better than “rightfully obscure,” but, as reissues often reiterate, such is the music industry’s churn-and-burn cycle.
By most reports, especially those of Gemini Girl’s liner notes, Styvers took it in stride. She did not spend the next quarter-century pining for what might have been; she settled in Texas, rescued animals, and cared for dogs with her dad. “We’re gonna find a cabin/And throw the rest away,” she sang at the end of “Heavenly Band.” At least, it seems, she found some version of that.


Phonte and Nicolay continue in the vein of Leave It All Behind, crafting musically and emotionally sophisticated R&B.

Authenticity

The narratives surrounding the Foreign Exchange's albums often overshadowed the conversation around the music itself. On their debut, Connected, it was that rapper Phonte and producer Nicolay constructed their tracks through back-and-forth Internet correspondence, having never met by the time their album was released. With their follow-up, Leave It All Behind, it was that the group had committed a total about-face, Phonte having traded rapping for singing. In both cases, the results of such improbable experiments were astonishing. But unlike Connected, which seemed to lose steam with time, Leave It All Behind had a different trajectory. That album grew only richer and more impressive as the years passed, revealing itself to be a remarkably complex, mature R&B record.
Now there's a third Foreign Exchange album, Authenticity-- but this time, there's no gimmick. What's more, it is about as far from "cool" or "edgy" as any music can be: It's an adult contemporary record that is actually musically and emotionally sophisticated in the vein of Van Morrison, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, and Everything But the Girl. If there's anything yoking these artists to one another, it's adulthood-- not just in the aural placidity but also a lyrical fixation on the politics of relationships. As with Leave It All Behind, this topical concern is very much intact. But musically, this is a much more refined album. Leave It All Behind insinuated a break-up-- if not one that's already happened, then one that's just on the horizon; Authenticity is undoubtedly the aftermath.
Nicolay has successfully synthesized the polished, straightforward constructs of Connected with the labyrinthine soul arrangements of Leave It All Behind. The music on Authenticity may initially sound remedial and elemental, even saccharine, but further listens reveal new intricacies. What kept pulling me back in was the album's final track, the somehow elliptical and conclusive "This City Ain't the Same Without You". Over a trickling keyboard pattern and a breezy guitar strum, Phonte and guest YahZarah echo the song's title into the ether with a lingering hook. It urged me to keep revisiting the album, and each time around, another song would stand out, until I soon began to admire all of them. But as with all albums possessing this level of depth and detail, that's how this kind of thing works. At a brisk 40 minutes, Authenticity reaffirms that sense of accomplishment, cementing the Foreign Exchange as one of the artists at the forefront of contemporary R&B's avant-garde.


Burna Boy’s fifth album takes in the view from the top, fusing his adventurous pan-African pop with memories of 1990s hip-hop, advice from Virgil Abloh, and a little victory-lap stunting.

I Told Them...

“I told them I’m a genius” is succinct and grand as an opening salvo, and Burna Boy is nothing if not grand. This is the lyric that introduces I Told Them…, the Nigerian superstar’s fifth album, and a callback to a comment he made in June, when he performed for 60,000 people at London Stadium, becoming the first African solo artist to sell out a venue of its size in the UK. The line implies either a savvy album tease or quick work recording the subsequent song, but it also positions him as both giant and underdog: an artist who simply had to succeed in order to prove he could. “I told them I’m the realest… for some reason they didn’t believe it, so here we are,” he purrs over a glissade of guitar and congas, with satisfied nonchalance.
Burna Boy has increasingly little to prove: The peripatetic musician has released a slate of juggernaut hits that have made him Afrobeats’ biggest global star, and has spent 2023 selling out stadiums across the world. Each of his moves registers a massive ripple; weeks before I Told Them dropped, “City Boys” became a viral TikTok challenge. The “Big 7” video, which partly documents Burna Boy’s introduction to New York pizza via Brooklyn rap icon Busta Rhymes, had 10 million YouTube views in less than a month. Belying the faux-exasperation of his station, I Told Them’s chill acceptance of his global footprint translates to an even broader musical slate as he blends—and links—his influences: Caribbean dancehall, UK drill, U.S. hip-hop, Ghanaian hiplife, Nigerian highlife, Afro-Cuban percussion, and, yes, Afrobeats. Through this process, he steps further into Afro-fusion, the pan-African genre he’s claimed for his music. His undeniable voice—low and warm, raspy and pooling with intensity—is the unifying force. That, and some well-placed tenor saxophone that conjures a rare Cheval-Blanc by candlelight, signals his desire to push forward beyond the imaginary borders he’s traversed.
I Told Them is enough of a swerve that Burna Boy thought it prudent to create I Told Them magazine, an intriguing and well-put-together document that shades in the backdrop of his Afro-fusion project. (Its tagline: “The magazine for Afro-fusion music, life jewels, and big vibes.”) In his editor’s letter, he writes that now felt like “the right time to reflect and make a progress check of sorts on things ‘I told them’ from the last decade.” But it’s also clear that, as he strays further from Afrobeats as a sound (and after his own criticism that Afrobeats “mostly” lacks substance), he wanted to reassure fans that he’s still grounded in his roots—to “explain the process,” in his words—showcasing Nigerian chefs, fashion designers, and entrepreneurs. The message arrives most explicitly in an intersecting history of juju, highlife, and hip-hop in Lagos written by Benson Idonije, the veteran Nigerian music critic (and Burna Boy’s grandfather).
Contextualizing I Told Them, the album, is a valid project as Burna Boy further explores the ’90s U.S. hip-hop he grew up loving, preemptively hedging skepticism even as he infuses the songs with Wu-Tang Clan members, boom-bap beats, and a Brandy sample (on the ebulliently 1998-sounding “Sittin on Top of the World,” which also features 21 Savage delivering his best Mason Betha flow). Released from the wallpapery niceness that sometimes characterized 2022’s Love, Damini, Burna Boy explores the spoils of his talent and renown, weaving triumphantly through wealth, women, weed, and, on the J Hus-sampling “City Boys,” creatively rhyming “ice cream” with “disgusting.” Throughout his victory lap, he experiments with form to winning effect. On standout “Giza,” Burna and young Nigerian powerhouse Seyi Vibez craft an international mobster movie over a beat that smolders like amapiano turned inside out, and on the sax-reggae joint “Tested, Approved & Trusted,” a man has never pleaded more sincerely for a woman to “jump upon my body like animal” mid-wine.
There is a sense of self-reflection, too, after a “Virgil” interlude that captures the late designer Virgil Abloh philosophizing extremely Virgilly about how Burna Boy can further connect with the masses. “Big 7,” which pours some out for Virgil and posthumous collaborator Sidhu Moose Wala, the Indian rapper who was murdered in 2022, makes being “wavy since morning” sound like the most beautiful thing in the world—despite its lyrics warning everyone away because he simply can’t talk to them in his altered state. Moments like this, including the easy minimalism of “On Form” and the self-reflective, Kwabs-sampling “Cheat on Me,” featuring the London rapper Dave, are emblematic of Burna Boy’s growth, reflecting his hope to translate “the temperature of the times” into his music, as he says in a conversation with RZA in I Told Them magazine.
Still, he has a notorious, if occasional, inability to stay out of his own way. On “Thanks,” he falls into the superstar’s trap of taking criticism as a knockdown attempt, coming after some Naija fans for a perceived lack of support and allowing J. Cole to devolve into an eyerolly, self-referential bromide against PC culture. It’s misguided, particularly on an otherwise fascinating track that chops his vocals into a flanged and skittering mini-cyclone of guitar and beats. An underdog needs a powerful opponent, but creating one when the world says he’s winning is beneath Burna Boy’s talent, particularly after a reverent interlude, “12 Jewels,” in which the longtime Five Percenter RZA enumerates the life tenets toward which a man should aspire. Fortunately Burna Boy is dextrous enough to evade his own traps, and that emotional range is a huge part of his appeal—that he can believably move from lashing out to roadman fuckery to spiritual deliverance, as on the acoustic-guitar devotional “If I’m Lying.” “Every day, I just dey give thanks for life,” he sings. “Know how to move ’cause I know how to sacrifice.” Burna Boy has more than established himself; I Told Them is an adventurous promise that he won’t become complacent.


The beloved Scottish indie rock band reissues their 1993 sophomore album, a fan favorite, one that exemplifies the band’s communal songwriting and their indelible romanticism and pop instincts.

I’ve Seen Everything

Is there any indie rock band more lovable than the Trashcan Sinatras? There are of course bands that are beloved by more people, and bands who have been loved for longer. But the community that formed around this bookish, hermetic Scottish group seems to transcend the standard relationship between fans and their favorite rock band, especially one whose brushes with the mainstream were so infrequent. The Trashcans’ still-perfect debut single in 1990 was called “Obscurity Knocks,” a fitting title for a band whose legacy would be carried, not to mention funded, directly by their own audience, long before the advent of Patreon and Bandcamp.
In the beginning, most critics discussed the Trashcans in the context of “the new Smiths,” and while their jangle-pop melodies and punny, sometimes melancholy lyrics do share a resemblance, the comparison was more to suggest this band could serve a similar purpose in your life: quote their lyrics like dialogue from a favorite film; sing along when you are at your lowest; devote yourself to scouring record shops for every import single and B-side; listen to their work and feel like it is purely your own—with no interference from the outside world.
The Trashcans’ second album, 1993’s I’ve Seen Everything, is generally the fan-favorite, and this new reissue, embellished with six excellent outtakes and a hardcover book titled The Perfect Reminder, is an ideal gateway. This is a specific type of album: If you are the kind of person who argues Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk over Rumours, or Neil Young’s Ditch Trilogy over After the Gold Rush, you will find the slapdash energy of these 14 songs to be instantly appealing. What you hear in these recordings is not the sound of lightning in a bottle but rather the wild, thrashing energy of a band trying to catch it, which makes those perfect moments when they do—the wordless chorus of “Earlies,” the trumpet-accompanied refrain of the title track—sound even more thrilling.
To follow their debut—1990’s Cake, 10 expertly crafted songs in under 40 minutes—the Trashcans established a new process that would span the rest of their career. Working at their in-house studio Shabby Road, they took their time, slowly amassing material among several primary songwriters within the group. There’s the de facto frontman, Frank Reader, whose expressive voice is one of the band’s defining features: It can be smooth and melodic, occasionally showing the bond with his sister, the folk singer Eddi Reader. Or it can carry the rough edge of Paul Westerberg, giving a sense that he might sound prettier on a day when he wasn’t so broken up about things.
The other members—guitarists John Douglas, with a deeper, trembling delivery, and Paul Livingston, who contributed some of the finest songs on this album, plus bassist David Hughes and drummer Stephen Douglas—are equally essential, and they speak to another element of the band’s charm: They work best as a team, elevating one another to places they could not access alone. (Fittingly, Ray Shulman, of the 1970s prog rock band Gentle Giant, produced these quietly complex pop songs). Often, their dynamic brings into focus the spark of creation itself. Power-poppy highlights like “Easy Read” and “Bloodrush” are introduced with decoy hooks that feel transplanted from other, equally catchy songs; the uncharacteristically grungy “Killing the Cabinet” and “One at a Time” end with chaotic, jamming codas, letting out the demons before moving onto more polished material.
Despite the experimentation, these songs are built to lodge themselves in your head, and every individual part—the bassline in “I’m Immortal,” the vocal harmonies in “The Hairy Years”—feels designed to get the crowd singing along with them. And once you do, you might notice that the lyrics, sung mostly by Reader in a thick Scottish accent, are just as thoughtful as the melodies. They love wordplay—“rehearsing” followed by “reversing the hearse”—but even more, they love playing with expectations. The heroic-sounding, minor-key “Hayfever,” an obvious single, seems to promise a star-crossed romance, and yet, Reader can’t seem to get past the introduction. “Hello, I’m Harry” go the opening lines, as well as the chorus, placing the opening scene on loop before speeding through the action: “The rest,” he concludes, “is chemistry.”
Is it any wonder a band like this—so subtle, so self-aware—never took off? The years after I’ve Seen Everything are a bleak but familiar story in indie rock. The follow-up tanks, their label gets acquired by a major. The band gets dropped, falls off the radar. And while this would be the end of the story for most groups, it’s around this point that the Trashcans really get going and the community pitches in: Since their comeback with 2004’s Weightlifting, they have shared a symbiotic relationship with their fans, thanking supporters by name in the liner notes and rewarding them with a steady stream of live albums and demos collections.
In the liner notes for one of those demos collections, Livingston notes that “Easy Read,” the opening track on I’ve Seen Everything, was inspired by the time a bouncer wouldn’t let him into the club, so he came up with a lie about needing his keys from a friend inside. Somehow, it worked. It’s a small victory he translated into one of the band’s most triumphant songs: a sweeping string section, an ascending chorus, and a lyric that seems to capture the hazy romance of their own music: “Over the moon and under the influence,” Reader sings as the band rises to a climax. Upon the album’s release in 1993, Livingston looked toward the future. “I think we’re always going to be doing this,” he predicted in the original press statement. “Even if everybody started hating us and our record company chucked us off, we’d still write songs and make records for ourselves.” After all, anybody can lie their way into the club for a night. Starting your own takes guts.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This 2015 live set at the Brooklyn all-ages venue captures Conor Oberst’s reunited punk band digging into its scrappy, DIY roots.

Live at Shea Stadium

Desaparecidos make scathingly political music, yet their most popular song is also their most positive song. In fact, says Conor Oberst while introducing “Mañana” toward the end of Desaparecidos’ new (but technically quite old) album, Live at Shea Stadium, “It’s the only positive song we’ve ever written.” “Mañana” is also the one song of theirs that could be accused of not aging particularly well. The recent 20th anniversary reissue of Read Music / Speak Spanish reanimated Oberst’s hellish visions of escalating gentrification and drone warfare, so what of the wonderfully idealistic and naive anthem that allowed for the possibility that things might actually get better? It’s worth noting that onstage in June 2015, Oberst does not dedicate “Mañana” to the recent protests against police brutality in Baltimore and Ferguson. He gives thanks to their “kindred spirits” in So So Glos, the scrappy and mostly apolitical Brooklyn punks that established the all-ages venue Shea Stadium and welcomed Desaparecidos into their orbit. This salutation makes for the most telling moment of Live at Shea Stadium—this is not a quasi-celebrity band doing an underplay but one that earnestly wants to give a DIY space in Brooklyn equal billing.
From the moment Oberst allowed himself to get roasted on his own album, he’s wrestled with the impostor syndrome that comes with his method-acting approach to art. Freewheelin’ truth teller, yeoman troubadour, inscrutable mystic—these were all pretty easy to square with his public persona. But being Desaparecidos’ frontman has always been the most difficult for him to pull off, even if there’s no doubting the sincerity of the hard-left ideology that animates most of their music. “Man and Wife, the Latter (Damaged Goods)” and “Greater Omaha” have accumulated no nuance since 2002, nor has “When the President Talks to God,” the 2005 Bright Eyes song most lyrically similar to Desaparecidos—but they’re as blunt as they needed to be, particularly at a time when Oberst was one of the few major indie acts willing to face blowback for opposing America’s post-9/11 jingoism. He gave a shout out to the Socialist Review on an otherwise drugged-out synth-pop album in 2005 and capped off a “Bright Eyes return to form” press cycle by interviewing with Jacobin Magazine.
Yet the mere fact of Being Conor Oberst in 2002 allowed Desaparecidos to mostly bypass dues-paying, “get-in-the-van” punk bona fides. They were able to complete one full tour for Read Music / Speak Spanish before the obligations of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Statistics and so forth resulted in their quiet disintegration. The Shea Stadium show documented here served as the release party for Payola and one of the few live dates Desaparecidos would honor in 2015, when the bulk were canceled as Oberst recovered from a battery of ailments. So from the moment they rip into “The Left Is Right,” Live at Shea Stadium fishes for the one compliment that short-lived, erratic punk bands hope to hear about themselves—you really had to be there.
Though Payola was in many ways the work of a tighter, more confident band, it lacked the urgency of its frantically composed predecessor, sounding like an album cobbled together over several years rather than a week—which it was. Throughout a well-balanced setlist, the beer-muscled energy of Live at Shea Stadium brings its source materials closer together in spirit; “The Left Is Right” and “Underground Man” are held together by a centrifugal force missing from their studio versions as well as, really, Oberst’s entire recorded output in the preceding 13 years. Aside from “Anonymous,” they jettison most of the time-stamped, topical, and theoretical material that made Payola feel somewhat quaint in 2015, when protests and police clashed in the streets as a literal matter of life or death. The looser approach also benefits Read Music, as “$$$$” stretches out to six minutes and imagines an alternate future where Desaparecidos got further into Sonic Youth rather than T.S.O.L. Conversely, any song that requires multiple pedals or a slower tempo or a solo falls apart immediately; one’s allegiance to the source material will ultimately determine whether “City on the Hill” sounds charming, or like a demo banged out by a band that, hungover the day after a gig, looks like what Oberst once called “hammered dog shit.”
It’s unlikely that anyone minded on that night—the crowd wasn’t a pack of revolutionaries in waiting, but a packed house of friends, VIPs, and well-wishers on a scorching June night in Brooklyn. Surely, some felt empowered by the fact that Oberst spat exponentially more venom at Joe Arpaio, the Pentagon, and the American healthcare system than he ever did at himself. Many more likely just pointed their beer towards the stage and tried to hoist up the wildly off-key whoas in “City on the Hill.” Live at Shea Stadium almost certainly isn’t meant to stoke anticipation for LP3 or reappraise the political valence of “The Underground Man” in the Joe Biden presidency. Instead, it’s a rare opportunity to avoid evaluating Desaparecidos’ political prescience and instead see them as they’d wanted to be seen: a scrappy punk band among many in 2015.
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