When attempting to encapsulate the essence of Paris in a word, Evelyn Waugh endearingly deemed the city "bogus." In his ...

Talkie Walkie

When attempting to encapsulate the essence of Paris in a word, Evelyn Waugh endearingly deemed the city "bogus." In his travelogue, Labels, he wrote, "It seems to me this scrap of jargon, in every gradation of meaning... gives a very adequate expression of the essence of modern Paris." Thanks mostly to San Dimas High School, in the seventy sum years since Waugh's trip, the term-- and bogus journeys, in general-- has evolved into a firm negative. Waugh, however, enjoyed Parisians' ability to dismiss nostalgia in art and revel in the present without regard to the future, past, or public reception. In so few words, the French don't give a fuck.
Because of this, American audiences continually underestimate French music, assuming our rigid filters of "authentic" or "ironic" apply. Admittedly, the cultural barrier is difficult to overcome: Daft Punk's masked robot disco, Gainsbourg's reggae, and Phoenix's flying-V Steely Dan tribute seem cute and studied when compared to the supposed bleeding-on-wax of our idolized Kurts and Jimis. As such, investing emotionally in "Sexy Boy" was akin to a Cubs fan buying playoff tickets. Air's revered debut hit cosmetic commercials within weeks of its release and goes great with a dry Chardonnay. 10,000 Hz Legend opened with synthetic voices proclaiming, "We are electronic performers," before 10cc choruses toyingly queried, "How does it make you feel?"
Which makes the overwhelming beauty and longing of Talkie Walkie that much more stunning. No longer are Air's sincerities lost in translation. The album title (no, they're not being cute, that's just how they say it in French) knowingly acknowledges this fact. Like the communication devices, Talkie Walkie sounds intimate, yet distant and distorted. Hope Sandoval nailed "Cherry Blossom Girl" on a demo, yet in forgoing guest vocalists for the first time, Air unerringly personalize their songwriting. Stomping piano and opiated gospel handclaps march "Venus" in a brutal funereal pace through keyboards that break like dead, pale winter sunlight and falling ice. Tolling bells and crickets take the song into twilight. Somehow it's numbingly romantic. Atonal music boxes, Plutonian pings, and digital fugues create a Side One that evokes purgatorial drifting, running out of oxygen, and passing into the light after a Space Walk disaster.
The second half with the propulsive "Surfin' on a Rocket", whistling "Alpha Beta Gaga", banjo-laced "Biological", and the Japanese imperial garden suite, "Alone in Kyoto", reconstitute Brian Wilson's surfing symphonies through Bowie and Eno's Berlin flipsides. Nigel Godrich, rather than supplying his default clean, shimmering production that can homogenize artists such as Beck, Travis, and The Divine Comedy, betters some of his Radiohead A-game here. The album's chilling resonance is due in part to Godrich's anagogical recording of minimal instrumentation and digitally etiolated detail.
Being the good Parisians of Waugh's estimation, Air load Talkie Walkie with images of moonbase love and alien encounters that neither mocks the comically misjudged visions of yellowed science fiction, nor longs for some utopian future. Air creates the alternate now, an environment that begs escapism without denying humanity. Talkie Walkie may mollify Air's overt Frenchness, but should in no way be deemed a sudden opening of the soul. In their insular way, Air have always been soul. They've simply grown more cosmopolitan, and not just in their solubility with vodka, Cointreau and cranberry.


With her latest album, the singer cements herself as one of R&B’s most relatable storytellers, with an ear for melodrama that becomes monotonous. The best moments capture her soulfulness alongside her fury.

Still Over It

Summer Walker’s music has the emotional intensity of a Real Housewives reunion. Her songs are as shady as they are chaotic—and irresistibly entertaining. Yet beneath the drama are layers of vulnerability. Walker’s 2019 debut Over It positioned the 25-year-old singer as a star in the moody landscape of contemporary trap R&B. With her follow-up, Still Over It, she cements herself as one of the genre’s most relatable storytellers, with a keen ear for melodrama that eventually starts to become monotonous.
Still Over It charts a journey through a messy and complicated breakup. Walker wants you to know she’s singing about her ex-boyfriend and the father of her child, noted Atlanta producer London on da Track. London not only contributes production to half of the album; he’s also the subject of Walker’s lyrical anguish. Her sadness and insecurities aren’t theoretical, and her songwriting is most powerful when she’s descriptive about the depths of that agony: “How could you make me spend my whole fucking pregnancy alone?”
Walker and London aren’t the album’s only contributors, nor the only characters in its story. Opening track “Bitter” is a hazy stream of consciousness where Walker presumably addresses her social-media spats with the mothers of London’s other children (“So why you puttin’ on for The Shade Room and Insta?” she questions). The track ends with a voicemail from Cardi B, who advises Walker to “put that drama in your music.” Lead single “Ex for a Reason”—featuring City Girls’ JT and co-produced by Sean Garrett—shines with a sleek hook and bubbly production reminiscent of Garrett’s early-2000s hits. On the pop-infused “No Love,” Walker and SZA regret defending a man who isn’t worth it: “Tried to act like I wasn’t good enough in your eyes/Funny now that you callin’, that you ringin’ my line,” Walker sings.
The turbulent narrative feels true-to-life, but as the album stretches toward 20 tracks, Walker struggles to find new angles that are equally as compelling. On the Neptunes-produced “Dat Right There,” she re-emphasizes her sexual prowess and brags about stealing other women’s boyfriends, a boast that feels a little sour coming after so much heartbreak. And on the closing “Ciara’s Prayer,” the titular singer leads us in an earnest appeal to Jesus to send her a deserving partner: “I pray the next man in my life will be my husband/I pray he loves me, leads me, guides me,” she recites. It’s an appropriate closer for a breakup album but an awfully old-fashioned plea.
The best moments on Still Over It capture Walker’s soulfulness alongside her fury. Hers and Ari Lennox’s bluesy vocals pair with an alluring sax solo on “Unloyal,” one of the strongest R&B singles of the year. Another standout, “Screwin,” is a slow groove about toxic intimacy featuring Omarion, and “4th Baby Mama” shows just how searing Walker’s songwriting can get: “I wanna start with your mama, she should’ve whooped your ass,” she sneers, modulating her voice to deliver an unsparing critique. Walker understands her strengths as a storyteller, and on Still Over It, she’s at her most commanding when she sings for herself while evoking the pain of other women who’ve been hurt.

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On her solo debut following the death of her Them Are Us Too partner, Kennedy Ashlyn navigates grief by sorting through echoes of 4AD’s essential early days and haunted goth textures.

Unreality

Cash Askew was one of the 36 people killed in the catastrophic 2016 fire at Oakland’s Ghost Ship. The 22-year-old guitarist was half of the duo Them Are Us Too, alongside singer Kennedy Ashlyn. A year earlier, Them Are Us Too released their debut, Remain, showcasing an impressive sense of the moody, shimmering texture of 1980s goth and dream pop. Earlier this year, Dais issued Amends, a collection of Them Are Us Too’s final recordings that Kennedy described as “a collaborative effort between TAUT and some of Cash’s dearest friends and family, culminating in a final ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye.’” Listening to those six songs was bittersweet: They were more robust and rhythmic than their predecessors, though the promising new direction only made their sense of finality more tragic.
But two years after what Ashlyn called “the worst thing to happen in my life,” she has moved ahead alone with SRSQ (pronounced “seer-skew”). For her, the title of the project’s debut, Unreality, “speaks to trying to process what a surreal world feels like in the wake of such a reality.” During “The Martyr,” she sings of dream worlds and hell’s depths in a fluttering, high register over uneasy synths and a beat reminiscent of early Beach House. Grief creeps into the frame: “I’m sickened by the terrible reminder.”
If Them Are Us Too were headed toward more forceful, straightforward songs at the end, Ashlyn takes SRSQ in the opposite direction. This is anti-gravity music, emptiness surrounding synth beds and brittle drum machines; save for the perpetual build of “Permission,” Unreality conjures a foggy ambience through which Ashlyn’s high-wire exhortations weave. It all evokes the essential early days of 4AD—specifically, Cocteau Twins and goth-minded kin of their time—and the long-running Pacific Northwest label Projekt, which still specializes in this type of ethereal darkwave.
The way Unreality plunders the past is, at times, remarkable. The galloping chorus of “Cherish,” in particular, possesses an uncanny resemblance to the vocal cadence of Cocteau’s Elizabeth Fraser. But Ashlyn imbues such influences with a personal touch. As she slides into the wordless chorus of “The Martyr,” her voice wavers, creating a texture so intricate you want to reach out and feel it; on “No Reason,” she layers incantatory spoken-word over synth detritus and her own high-register vocal acrobatics. Music like this is often described as “otherworldly,” but there’s a lovely human imperfection to the way Ashlyn sings.
Despite the move forward, an undercurrent of grief and longing runs through Unreality. “Are you hearing my songs?” she asks over the pounding rhythm of “Mixed Tide.” During the perpetually shifting “Only One,” Ashlyn admits, “It crushes me every day/I’m just barely holding on.” But even as Ashlyn processes the trauma on tape, the new beginnings represented by Unreality offer a measure of hope in the honoring of memory. Near the end of the skyscraping “Procession,” Ashlyn looks for peace amid the dulling pain and offers up a veritable mission statement for this document of loss and struggle: “It’s an impossible hurt/But you’ll never, ever leave my heart.”


The Brooklyn quartet Primitive Weapons blend the all-out assault of hardcore with dexterity and melody, striking a balance of brains, brawn, and heart.

The Future of Death

Primitive Weapons wouldn't sound out of place sharing a stage with just about any heavy band you can think of from the last 25 years. It takes a great deal of dexterity to blend the all-out, histrionic abrasion of Converge and straight-ahead melodics of Warrior Soul, but The Future of Death, Primitive Weapons' sophomore album, takes listeners to the equator between those two poles. This is not entirely surprising given that the Brooklyn quartet's members spent their formative years—as both listeners and musicians—knocking around a New York/New Jersey/Long Island scene that ran the gamut from melodic hardcore like Quicksand, Glassjaw, and Vision of Disorder on one end and heavy-as-shit extremity like Human Remains and The Dillinger Escape Plan on the other. The band's collective resume, in fact, includes not one but two Quicksand spinoff acts (World's Fastest Car and Instruction) as well as groups like Mind Over Matter, Gay for Johnny Depp, and a slew of others. Today, all four members have ownership stakes in Brooklyn bars and restaurants, most notably the renowned metal venue Saint Vitus, a hot destination for touring acts.
Perhaps it's this ear to both the local and global pulse that gives The Future of Death a fluidity that's bound to speak to disparate breeds of fans. Dean Baltulonis' recording doesn't hurt either. Where producer Alex Newport emphasized Primitive Weapons' raw brutality on their self-titled EP, Baltulonis (Sick of It All, The Hold Steady) follows guitarist Arty Shepherd's lead in carving out more space for atmosphere and dynamics after the departure of second guitarist Justin Scurti. Together, Shepherd, bassist Eric Odness and drummer Chris Enriquez alternate between doomish menace (the descending, cobra-like riff that drives album opener "Ashes or Paradise"), straight-ahead pummeling ("Night Eyes"), pressure-cooked brooding ("Whistle Past the Graveyard"), and herky-jerky odd-metered grooves (the verses of "Old Miami," where it feels like the ground is shifting under your feet and you can't quite locate the downbeat to steady your footing).
On "Panopticon Blues," a critique on the loss of privacy in the digital age and perhaps the album's most varied tune, a hi hat/rolling tom tom pattern veers towards a hulking strain of new wave or even disco. About a third of the way through, however, the song launches into a standard mosh breakdown only to then, in another twist, vaporize, leaving room for Shepherd's repeating chant of "We're watched / We're trapped / We're never alone" as his spooky background vocals haunt the empty shell that's left of the song by its conclusion. Vocalist David Castillo favors a more traditional death metal bark in the other band he fronts, White Widows Pact. But in Primitive Weapons, he channels his lyrical focus into a broader human scope and, as a result, comes across as less irate, a person who prefers to express what bothers him in the form of abstract poetry. "What I'm asking for is so much more / than another pound of flesh for a song," Castillo sings on "Whistle Past the Graveyard." The Future of Death's balance between brain, brawn, and heart is so perfectly calibrated that the audience gets more than the usual pound of flesh as well.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misidentified the producer of 2012's The Shadow Gallery. It is Dean Baltulonis.


With a title invoking alarm bells, this ambitious collection of the New York composer’s work is turbulent and disorienting, suggesting cycles of crisis and change.

TOCSIN

Patrick Higgins composes with a scholar’s historical perspective and a punk’s sense of abandon. While many avant-garde musicians strive for originality by incorporating elements from outside Western tradition—or scrapping tradition altogether—Higgins melds the elegance of baroque chamber music, the colorful dissonance of Krystof Penderecki and Edgard Varèse, and the unrestrained discord of contemporary noise music, bending stylistic tropes from each era towards a central aesthetic meeting point. One of his most fascinating releases, Early Music, is a collaboration with violinist Josh Modney in which the duo fuses Renaissance forms with digital processing and the serrated edge of electric guitar. There are moments on Bachanalia, his album of radical reinterpretations for guitar from across Bach’s oeuvre, where the addition of delay and other electronic effects contorts the well-worn compositions into something resembling 20th century minimalism. Higgins’ influences are canonical, but he approaches them with as much skepticism as reverence.
Bach again provides the jumping-off point for TOCSIN, Higgins’ most ambitious and wide-reaching collection of original compositions. The album contains three distinct multi-movement pieces, but it begins with an arrangement of Contrapunctus XIV, an unfinished fugue written at the end of Bach’s life, performed by Mivos Quartet. The piece ends abruptly in the middle of a phrase, alluding to the alternate meaning of “fugue”: a sudden dissociation or break in the normative perception of reality. In the album’s liner notes Higgins asserts that his own compositions take that bruised silence and use it as a mandate to explore “the question of death, the task of ritual, and the crisis of representation in our contemporary world.” The album’s title, meanwhile, invokes the act of ringing an alarm bell, although the urgency it suggests is dampened slightly by the quartet’s somewhat leaden performance of this fragmentary opening piece. As a conceptual hinge, however, Higgins’ framing of the piece is inspired.
Higgins’ own compositions are turbulent and insistent. “SQ3,” performed again (and more persuasively) by Mivos Quartet, is filled with uncomfortable stillnesses and bursts of agitated frenzy emerging from that initial crack of silence galvanized by Bach’s death. The suite is divided into four movements, each retaining the same eerie atmosphere but varying in structure and tumult. Higgins pushes the players to cacophonic extremes only to pull them back into a shadowy quiet, the strings groaning to life like a ferocious animal struggling to overcome the effects of a sedative. In the second movement, dissonant, droning crescendos dissolve into fits of pizzicato that then crumple back into silence. It is only with the piece’s final movement, allusively titled “Fugue (Burial),” that Higgins turns to more structured notions of harmonic and melodic development; even then the framework dissolves in the piece’s final minutes, returning to powerful thuds of clustered tones and screeching wails.
“Tocsin,” the album’s double-movement centerpiece for two cellos and piano, benefits from the spotlight on prodigious pianist Vicky Chow, whose exactitude and expressive instincts transform what might otherwise be obtuse into a riveting thrill ride. Her instrument is prepared with objects that transform specific keys into gamelan-like plinks, which come into play in the quietest and most chaotic moments, adding a surrealist bent. Higgins is a technically virtuosic guitarist, and his propensity for disorienting complexity shines in moments when the instruments coalesce into pulsing patterns of indeterminate beats that dance about wildly before collapsing in on themselves. Compared to “SQ3,” the chaos in “Tocsin” feels controlled. Rather than diminish its impact, that precision offers a more approachable entry into the clamorous world that Higgins has built.
Higgins composed and premiered these pieces in 2015 and 2016—a period when, in the U.S., an old way of being was snapped in half, and a new period of turmoil was intensifying. The music on TOCSIN, charged with brutality and unease, feels like an acknowledgement of the cycles of crisis and change confronting us in the new decade. Alarm bells ring and ring and ring, over and over, but there is force in Higgins’ portrayal of both moments of rupture and the determination to continue on.

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Sasami Ashworth’s second solo album cleaves together two distinctively 1990s sound worlds as it asks: Can a song ever make it all the way to another person?

Squeeze

SASAMI’s second album ends with a song that plays almost like a fable. A singer hears an astonishing melody in her head. She writes it down so that, later, she can sing it to her love. When she does, what comes out is “not a love song—just a beautiful, beautiful sound.” What rang rich and full in her imagination falls limply in the air between her and the object of her devotion. Meaning peels away, leaving only pleasure that evaporates on the wind.
Can a song ever make it all the way to another person? This question concludes Squeeze, and in doing so winds back through the album as a whole. SASAMI—the mononymic project of Sasami Ashworth, a former member of Cherry Glazerr and now a Los Angeles-based solo artist whose debut album came out in 2019—agitates her work toward the belief that music can get there, that it has to. “Do you like me? Do you notice me?” she speaks against a snaking, fuzzed bassline on “Need It to Work.” “Meet me in the dark,” she murmurs, her voice muffled and menacingly downpitched, against “Say It”’s industrial seethe. All across Squeeze, characters grasp at each other while questioning if their hands will reach far enough to meet. Their doubt adrenalizes their belief, serrates its edges, makes it tender.
In staging these scenes of clasping and dispersal, Ashworth melds two distinctively ’90s sound worlds. Squeeze holds Korn, Disturbed, and System of a Down in one hand; Sheryl Crow, Faith Hill, and Shania Twain in the other. Opener “Skin a Rat” bares blood-ringed teeth with its gnashing percussion, howled group vocals, and acidic guitar lines. Country-pop standout “Tried to Understand” frames those same teeth in a magazine-perfect smile. Like the recently reunited experimental metal group Faith No More, Ashworth delights in using genre as material rather than protocol. When I use the terms “nu-metal” or “country-pop” to describe what she does, I don’t use them to point to scripts that she’s followed. I mean that she’s hurled each loose grouping against the wall and watched their respective innards drip down until their colors start to blend.
When they blend, it’s awfully fun. The sunny-but-severe “Make It Right” pairs a delectably beachy guitar tone with a drumbeat that constantly spins off from the main pattern, progressively expanding the scope of the sound field. “The Greatest” works as both a delicate breakup ballad, a safe haven for nursing wounds, and an altar on which to swear bloody revenge against whoever broke your heart—a duality reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s most charged moments. The Daniel Johnston cover “Sorry Entertainer” electrifies and fleshes out an originally spare recording, surfacing the bitterness and exhaustion of a song about digging demons out of your head with the point of your lyric-writing pencil.
Squeeze toggles between a wide-open open sky and a cramped basement ceiling, threading the same desire through both scenes. Below ground, the body mingles with other bodies, rendered indistinct in the crush of a mosh pit. Above, in a daze, the body bleeds into its environment, similarly losing its specificity. Music is a way you can lose yourself. And once that’s lost, the distance between the source of a song and its receiver isn’t so stark. They were never really different to begin with.


The prolific New York rapper-producer’s latest album is self-assured and clear-eyed, ushering in an ambitious new era for the hometown hero.

Burning Desire

A little over halfway through MIKE’s new album, Burning Desire, a recent moment of joy in the New York rapper’s life takes center stage. During an interlude that begins on the title track, TAKA, MIKE’s friend and IFE Radio partner, recalls a fond memory from this summer’s Young World festival. The event, curated by MIKE, strived to connect disparate parts of rap’s underground. That day in July, a storm threatened to cut the show short, forcing organizers to pause the celebration as they waited out gray clouds. Eventually, the music resumed, and the first song played was the title track of the then-unannounced album. The moment, small and inconsequential, could’ve passed without second thought. But as TAKA’s words bleed into “They Don’t Stop in the Rain,” it instead feels like a testament to the serendipitous connections MIKE has forged. The New York rapper’s music can make small blessings feel transformative and cathartic—incidental details turned into canon events.
Three months later, Burning Desire arrives, a clear-eyed record that builds on those musings about fate and happenstance. MIKE isn’t a volume shooter, but with his Wiki and the Alchemist collab Faith Is a Rock released just three weeks ago, Burning Desire makes the case that he could be. For most of the album, MIKE raps with the same hot-blooded urgency of December’s Beware of the Monkey. This time, however, he gives himself room to just bar out. When 10k labelmate Niontay and D.C. rapper El Cousteau join him on “Mussel Beach,” MIKE eases into a slippery flow to match their energy. Outside of rare side quests like Popstar Benny’s delirious “ATL Freestyle,” MIKE has seldom sounded this loose.
Burning Desire moves between chest-puffing bombast and MIKE’s characteristic rumination, sometimes within the same breath. While angst and grief remain recurring subjects, here he chooses to honor loved ones instead of framing past hardships as insurmountable. MIKE’s tone has moved in this dynamic and self-assured direction since 2021’s Disco!. The confidence in his voice is palpable across Burning Desire, especially on “Sixteens,” where he sounds like he climbed to the top of the Rocky steps moments before hitting record.
Under his producer alias dj blackpower, MIKE handles all but two of the album’s 24 tracks. (GAWD produced “African Sex Freak Fantasy,” while Laron is behind “Snake Charm.”) The beats range from misty loops that evoke the sentimentality of Count Bass D’s Dwight Spitz (“What U Say U Are,” “Let’s Have a Ball”) to cataclysmic landscapes (“plz don’t cut my wings,” “should be!”). Burning Desire illustrates MIKE’s evolution as a beatmaker, each song a tweezer-perfected terrarium of manipulated vocal samples, chunky loops, and rattling drums; the pockets of air MIKE finds within them make room for some of his most dexterous rapping yet. Take “Zap!”, where he bobs and weaves between brass stabs, or “African Sex Freak Fantasy,” where his words ricochet off walls of distorted bass like a rubber handball. The Liv.e and Venna-assisted “U think Maybe?” marks the first time that MIKE has incorporated live instrumentation in his production discography. After two minutes of wistful call-and-response, the London saxophonist’s somber performance and Liv.e’s aching voice melt into tranquil harmony.
As a prolific artist whose albums pull from a pool of familiar collaborators, MIKE’s music can sometimes feel insular, culled from an isolationist universe with little external influence. Burning Desire doesn’t quite crack his world open with shocking surprise twists—Earl Sweatshirt returns, while Crumb’s Lila Ramani and the mysterious London singer mark william lewis make for refreshing guests. But it does point toward potential expansion.
Earlier this year, MIKE told me that he and his manager planned to operate his career like a “mom-and-pop store,” aiming to stretch opportunities as far as possible while staying small. Even with sponsorships from Supreme, events like Young World demonstrate at least one form of commitment to that plan by prioritizing accessibility, intimacy, and community over self-gain. According to an Okayplayer interview, MIKE passed on a headline show and instead used the fees from SummerStage, the organization that funded Young World, to pay artists on his own self-curated lineup. Burning Desire feels similar: an adventure that preserves the homegrown spirit of MIKE’s music while taking a half-step toward something even more ambitious. “Thebe showed me Alc money/Still be hella proud ’bout all the shit I did without money,” he asserts on “Ho-Rizin.” On Burning Desire, MIKE proves he’s still discovering ways to sustain that pride.
Correction: A previous version of this review implied that Pepsi was also a sponsor of Young World. It is not.


Working under the auspices of another vague, dystopian narrative, the UK band slaps a shiny new label on the grafted remains of better songs and calls it the ninth Muse album.

Will of the People

Generally speaking, Muse operate in three modes: “The government is trying to control me, but I won’t let them, because I love freedom”; “I am so horny that my gonads have leapt into my throat and started knocking against my larynx like a fleshy Newton’s cradle”; and “Alas!!!!!” They tend to do their best work in the libidinal register—think of the adrenal floods of “Hysteria” and “Bliss,” Chris Wolstenholme’s frenzied fingerwork, the twinned squeals of Matt Bellamy’s guitar and throat—but there are gems in all three. The UK band’s ninth album, Will of the People, samples unevenly from these readymade buckets. Bellamy has billed the LP as another concept album about a man sick of the dystopia in which he finds himself mired, so you might expect Will of the People to tilt heavily toward “the government.” Not so. In its bulk and at its core, this is an “alas” album: an assembly of songs that look out at the world, throw up their hands, and go sulking back to their room.
Will of the People starts out strongly in narrative mode. The title track calls for a populist revolution: Crowd vocals ring out against AC/DC guitar chords and a Gary Glitter stomp-whap, both compressed within an inch of their life, as Bellamy snarls at the big bad that he and his army are about to take down. On lead single “Compliance,” Bellamy switches roles from oppressed to oppressor, sounding out the words that might be uttered by a narcotic omnipotence, a cult of power that promises to blunt all suffering for the price of mindless obedience. Here, Muse lapse back into the neon hues of 2018’s retrofuturist outing Simulation Theory, setting palm-muted chords against snaking funk bass lines, shearing synth leads, and vocoder huffs copied and pasted from the Weeknd’s “Starboy.” So far, so good: Protagonist and antagonist square off atop a few mismatched, Xeroxed set pieces. By the time we arrive at the Queen homage “Liberation,” another song written from the perspective of the People and their Will, we almost have a story.
And then the concept deflates. From the lachrymose piano ballad “Ghosts (How Can I Move On)” (which at least gives us a glimpse into a parallel universe where Coldplay has a technically proficient singer) to the flimsy, pseudo-thrash embarrassments “Kill or Be Killed” and “Won’t Stand Down,” Muse drift into songs that sound, vaguely, about a relationship in tatters. In theory, it’s meaty enough subject matter, but a rock opera it does not make. Through the grief and anger of a fresh split, the band doubles down on the album’s arbitrary collage of musical styles; each song is a mosaic of references so far-flung and so thinly considered that Will of the People starts to feel like that scene in the new Space Jam where every character from every property is somehow there on the screen, cheering for basketball—a pop cultural slurry whipped up into a dizzying whirlpool.
Muse pilfer from themselves and everyone else, cramming their horde into a tightly produced display case. “You Make Me Feel Like It’s Halloween” hits its seasonal nail squarely on the head with a mockery of Vincent Price’s “Thriller” epilogue. “Won’t Stand Down” spits up the subwoofer wubs of Imagine Dragons’ cultural pollutant “Radioactive” and AWOLNATION’s actually pretty decent single “Sail” and Muse’s own “Supermassive Black Hole,” too. On “Verona,” where Bellamy at least remembers that songs sound better when they have a vocal melody, a trebly loop from the Edge’s discard pile jangles at half speed. “Euphoria” (there are only so many synonyms for “bliss”) inexplicably defiles Giorgio Moroder’s gorgeous loop from Donna Summer’s eternal disco hit “I Feel Love” right before it reiterates the pre-chorus to “Time Is Running Out” and then, inexplicably, launches into an early 2000s California pop-punk refrain that’s comically at odds with Bellamy’s unflappable vocal gravitas. At the end of this mess, closer “We Are Fucking Fucked” almost directly repurposes the climactic rev-up of “Knights of Cydonia,” only without any of the delightful melodramatic heights to pitch us into freefall.
All of these moments lurch through time without any thought of build or denouement—no tension, no release, no narrative. Muse parade their influences while giving us all comical winks: Remember this? And this? And how about this? When Bellamy rattles off a list of apocalyptic buzzwords on “We Are Fucking Fucked” (“STOCKPILE!” he shrieks in Roger Taylor falsetto), the rot in the pit burbles to the fore. If musicians with all the means in the world are happy to slap a shiny new label on the grafted remains of better songs and call it the ninth Muse album, what investment could they have in anything?  Why dig deep for the hard questions of the world, its politics, its future when you could look around and declare the whole thing game over? Why trouble yourself with the distinctions between genuine collectivism and despotic mind control—between what you really want and what you’re conditioned to want—if this shallow flailing guarantees streams all the same? I felt compelled to call this album a Frankenstein’s Monster, stitched together as it is from so many dead appendages. Then I remembered: The monster wanted to live.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a bucolic cult classic from 1983, one that taps into a centuries-old tradition of pastoralism in British culture.

Virginia Astley: From Gardens Where We Feel Secure

From Gardens Where We Feel Secure

The mid-’80s were a peculiar time for alternative music in the UK. Around 1983, the surging momentum of the post-punk era dissipated into a confused clutter of trends and revivals. People who’d begun their musical journey in roughly the same spot—the Sex Pistols, the Clash—were now making sounds unrelated to each other and a long distance from their starting point.
Even though it came out on the archetypal post-punk independent label Rough Trade, few records could have been further from the filth and fury of 1977 than the pastoral ambient music of Virginia Astley’s 1983 album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure. She had been a punk fellow traveler as a teenager in the late ’70s, going to rowdy gigs and playing in pubs herself as keyboardist in the new wave group Victims of Pleasure. By training and temperament, though, Astley did not fit the standard profile of a post-punk musician. That movement teemed with art-school students who approached music-making conceptually. Astley attended music college and arrived on the scene armed with craft and technique. She drew inspiration not from political theory but poetry and literature.
Still, as her post-punk contemporaries expanded their sound, Astley found her services in demand. She did the string arrangements on Siouxsie and the Banshees’ tempestuous single “Fireworks.” After working on an album track by the Scottish new wave band Skids, she collaborated with singer Richard Jobson on The Ballad of Etiquette, an album of poetry and spoken word set to music. Astley also formed a romantic and creative partnership with Skids bassist Russell Webb, with whom she would co-produce From Gardens Where We Feel Secure.
Before starting her solo career, Astley briefly belonged to Ravishing Beauties, an all-female trio of classically trained musicians whose tiny clutch of recordings includes a poignant setting of “Futility” by First World War poet Wilfred Owen. The allusion to early 20th-century English literature, along with the genteel quaintness of the expression “ravishing beauties”—imagine it uttered in debonair Downton Abbey tones—set the stage for Astley’s first recordings: not so much a case of “like punk never happened” as “like rock never happened”.
Judging by her speaking voice, which can be heard on a 1983 interview for Greenwich Sound Radio, Astley was not particularly posh. But her singing tones are as demure and pure as the choir soloist at an all-girls boarding school. Even her name seemed to hail from another time, evoking (via Virginia Woolf) the Bloomsbury Group, or perhaps a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel (his Brideshead Revisited, adapted for TV in 1981, had plunged half the nation into nostalgia for a lost aristocratic England). There’s even a phonetic echo of Laura Ashley, the popular clothing designer whose floral patterns and natural fabrics harked back to the country-house world of the 19th century. Astley herself favored Fair Isle sweaters and flowing, loose-fit garments. Appearing on the cover of NME in autumn 1983, clasping a bunch of wildflowers and with a scarf masking her face, Astley looked like a cross between a botanist and a bandit.
Although no one else on the UK indie scene at that time made a record as beguilingly bucolic as Gardens, Astley had company in other ways. She fit into a mini-phenomenon I call “wide-brimmed hat music.” Astley sported one herself on the cover of her 1986 album Hope in a Darkened Heart. In the mid-’80s, the independent charts and music papers were full of hat-wearing groups like the Woodentops and Martin Stephenson and the Daintees. The headgear had nothing to with dashingly masculine hats like those worn by the Clash. These were more like the hat a pale English girl would wear to ward off freckles while being punted along the lazy rivers of Oxford or Cambridge.
Seven years on from punk, the British rock scene’s obsession with street credibility suddenly evaporated. For the first time since Kevin Ayers in the early ’70s, a spate of UK performers no longer hid their well-spoken accents by adopting a downwardly mobile drone. Sonically, too, there was a kind of rebellion against rebellion, with artists like Everything But the Girl, Vic Godard, Weekend, and the Style Council embracing light music and middle-of-the-road sounds: Cole Porter, Astrud Gilberto, French chansonniers. In an echo of the proggy early ’70s, another moment when rock grew comfortable with being middle-class, non-rock instruments like strings and woodwinds became chic accoutrements. Kate St. John, formerly one of Ravishing Beauties, played oboe and cor anglais in the Dream Academy, whose trans-Atlantic smash “Life in a Northern Town” became the wide-brimmed moment’s mainstream breakthrough.
Astley’s 1982 debut EP Love’s a Lonely Place to Be includes songs with lyrics, but there is a foretaste of Gardens’ almost completely instrumental direction in the form of “It’s Too Hot to Sleep” and “A Summer Long Since Passed,” both of which would reappear on the album. The EP’s title track’s chirruping vocal riff uncannily anticipates Enya’s “Orinoco Flow”; the inspiration probably came from Laurie Anderson’s voice-pulse on “O Superman” or the fluttery “systems music” of composer Michael Nyman. Both were among the artists that Astley played on the 1983 radio show, which took place while Gardens was still a work-in-progress. She also mentioned Brian Eno as an admired ancestor. Astley’s account of what she’s trying to do with the album is very close to Eno’s definition of ambient as music that must be as ignorable as it is interesting: “Whoever’s listening could lie down and put it on, and not really listen to it that much,” Astley suggested during the radio chat. “Just have it on in the background.”
Featuring nature sounds recorded in and around the village of Moulsford-on-Thames, From Gardens Where We Feel Secure taps into a centuries-old tradition of rhapsodic pastoralism in British culture. Both the countryside and the household garden figure as places where Nature’s wild beauty is domesticated and made into a safe space for dream and play, reverie and revelry. Increasingly it was the ever-expanding city that came to seem like dangerous wilderness, a place whose depravity and deprivation bred both vice and radicalism. Illness and unrest alike could be inoculated, urban planners hoped, by the creation of public parks. Inspired by similar social anxieties, the garden city movement of the early 20th century created new towns that incorporated large areas of greenery, while another social initiative provided allotments of land for nominal rental fees so that ordinary townsfolk could grow their own produce and recover their inner peasant.
Gardens recreates a single summer day from dawn to dusk: The first side of the original vinyl covers the morning, while the second is dedicated to the afternoon. “I was just trying to capture that feeling you get on one of the first really hot days of summer,” Astley told NME later in 1983. “The timeless feel of the beginning of summer.” “With My Eyes Wide Open I’m Dreaming” starts with the bright dawn chatter of birdsong, gradually interlacing piano, flute, and acoustic guitar. Although there are no drums, the track is more melodically sprightly than what we tend to consider “ambient” these days. But the repetitiousness of the patterns and the absence of gaps between tracks create a feeling of suspension from time.
Like a cinematic dissolve, the elegiac title “A Summer Long Since Past” establishes the idyll faraway in time, associating it with childhood or even the pre-industrial past. Astley’s wordless “la-la-la” vocal is mixed further back than on the EP version: It seems to reach your ear across distance, like a girl singing happily to herself while walking down the road on the other side of your garden wall. A descending piano figure gently cascades in a haze of sustain-pedal. On the title track, church bells peal in a continuous loop, suggesting that these are not chimes marking the hours of an ordinary day but an exceptional cause for communal rejoicing: a Royal Wedding, the coming of peace at the close of World War II.
The back cover of the 2003 CD reissue of Gardens features a photograph of a thatched cottage and a small, fair-haired girl who looks like Astley and which most likely stems from a brief period in her otherwise suburban childhood when she lived in the countryside. Like the hauntology of Boards of Canada and the Ghost Box label, Astley’s music taps into that zone where idyllic personal memory bleeds into collective nostalgia: mythic notions of England as Arcadia.
The atmosphere of a halcyon long-lost summer intensifies on the “Afternoon” side of the album. The rusty squeak of a gate between fields forms an irritable loop through “Out on the Lawn I Lie in Bed,” contrasting tartly with pretty xylophone chimes and piano trills in the higher octaves like rippling water rushing over rocks. “Too Bright for Peacocks” is an intriguing title, leaving you to wonder whether it’s the birds’ plumage that’s so radiant in the mid-afternoon sun it makes you squint, or if it’s the peacocks themselves who need shades. Staccato piano thrumming like rays pounding on your back, the track captures that heat-baked peak of the day when a wide-brimmed hat would really come in handy.
Despite the largely acoustic palette, subtle touches of studio trickery surface every so often, most notably on “When the Fields Were on Fire,” where a high-pitched drone on loan from Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy for Lilith wavers throughout the track. Living up to the title, the piece conjures that golden hour when a certain slant of dying sunshine sets the wheatfields eerily aglow. Nominally identified as “afternoon,” “It’s Too Hot to Sleep” really belongs to the night, as the tu-whit tu-whoo of a tawny owl signals. The title flashes me back to the English ’80s—when air conditioning was virtually unknown in the UK—but the piece itself doesn’t evoke restless limbs tangled in a single sweat-soaked sheet but rather blissful drowsiness.
In June 1983, as Astley finished work on Gardens, Margaret Thatcher won reelection: a historic landslide buoyed by the jingoistic swagger that followed the nation’s victory in the Falklands War, and an electoral triumph achieved despite the mass unemployment and social discord caused by her conservative economic policies. Nine months later, Thatcher went to war again, not with foes overseas but with the “enemy within”—striking miners, the toughest and most defiant organization within what remained of Britain’s industrial proletariat. During Thatcher’s rule, the country’s alternative musicians hurled out protest songs: Crass’ “How Does It Feel? (to Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead)?,”  Robert Wyatt’s oblique and melancholy “Shipbuilding,” Test Dept’s collaboration with a Welsh miners’ choir.
It would be a stretch to describe Astley’s album as a response to or even a commentary on its times. But the summertime idyll so lovingly recreated is shadowed by the political crises of the early ’80s, not least because the notion of England as a green and pleasant land is entangled with the nostalgic conservatism of the Thatcher era. Both the album title and “Out on the Lawn I Lie in Bed” come from W.H. Auden’s 1933 poem “A Summer Night,” a mystical vision of companionship and erotic tenderness set in a country garden in the Malvern Hills. But shadows of the coming conflict in Europe pass across Auden’s poem, as well as a sense of the privilege that supports such comfortable seclusion: “Nor ask what doubtful act allows/Our freedom in this English house/Our picnics in the sun.” It’s not a huge leap to connect that guilty awareness with the imperial flashback of summer 1982, when Great Britain flexed its naval might in the South Atlantic. Could it be that the album’s overt subject, pastoral peace, carries a pacifist subtext?
Support for such a reading comes from the EP that preceded Gardens, 1982’s A Bao A Qu, run through with themes of untimely mortality and anti-war sentiment. There are borrowings from the German poet Friedrich Rückert’s Kindertotenlieder (poems inspired by the death of children), W. B. Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” and Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Consider also the Ravishing Beauties’ interpretation of Wilfred Owen’s bitter poem about slain young soldiers, with its references to “the kind old sun” and “fatuous sunbeams.” While the British people basked in an unexpected burst of hot weather in early June 1982, their young men were slaughtering and being slaughtered at Bluff Cove on East Falkland.
From Gardens Where We Feel Secure came out just over a year later, via an imprint through Rough Trade especially established for its release. The sub-label’s name, Happy Valley, is probably a reference to Samuel Johnson’s novel Rasselas, which contains an ambivalent portrait of a rustic idyll. It’s music that lends a fragrant tint to the home atmosphere, defusing stress as it infuses the living space. Particularly in these restricted times, Gardens works as a surrogate for a day trip to the country. But just like in Astley’s ’80s, the haven it recreates remains surrounded on all sides by turmoil and trouble.

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On their shaggy, wild-eyed seventh album, the Austin rockers sound like a band rejuvenated—or, at least, a band that remembers what people liked about its music in the first place.

Performance

If you haven’t checked in with Austin rockers White Denim in the past five or so years, here’s a refresher: After gaining blog buzz for their gnarly, unpredictable tunes in the late 2000s, they joined artists like Santigold and Mos Def on Downtown Records for their fifth album, 2011’s D. Under estimable producers including Ethan Johns and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, their sound mellowed, taking on a more sanded-down, straightforward feel. As the buzz (and the broader influence of blogs over the music industry) faded, band members Josh Block and Austin Jenkins peeled off to write for, record with, and back up Fort Worth rock-soul throwback Leon Bridges.
It wasn’t such a dramatic transition for Block and Jenkins, considering that White Denim had spent most of the current decade leaning into the soulful aspects of their sound, growing smoother and, in turn, less distinctive than they had been during their noisy early years. So it’s a bit of a surprise that Performance, the band’s seventh album overall and first for new label City Slang, is so shaggy and wild eyed.
Recorded in White Denim’s new Radio Milk space in downtown Austin, with founding members James Petralli and Steve Terebecki manning the production booth, Performance sounds like a band rejuvenated—or at least a band that remembers what people liked about its music in the first place. The album kicks open the door with a run of cuts that play fast and loose with rhythm and melody, featuring miniature breakdowns and guitar-riff emissions so thick they might violate EPA standards. There’s a sense that White Denim are having fun here, from the proggy synth arpeggios that shiver through the center of “Moves On” to the drum patter and tricky bass licks of “Backseat Driver.” And such playfulness allows the band to flex its capable musicianship. (It’s practically a given that these songs will sound very good live.)
The colorful abundance of Performance is reminiscent of another guys-rocking-in-a-room album from earlier this year: Chicago psych bros Post Animal’s When I Think of You in a Castle, which fused skill and melody to similarly potent effect. But while Post Animal aren’t shy about venturing into heady territory, Performance finds White Denim sticking comfortably within the confines of more familiar classic rock sounds. The closest they get to entering a trippier realm is in the closing minutes of the sprawling “Fine Slime,” when a jammy, grimy groove starts to fade out, replaced by some errant noise. But then the grit returns at full blast. You can hear hints of the Beatles (don’t laugh) on the album, as well as blues-pop titans and fellow classic rock disciples the Black Keys, who leave an indelible imprint on opener “Magazin.”
It’s unlikely that fans of either band would be too bothered by the imitation, which says something about the kind of listener who typically seeks out music like White Denim’s. Their grinning, good-natured rock doesn’t place much value on originality, but that doesn’t matter much to fans who can’t get enough of good old-fashioned rock’n’roll. Compared with what’s considered cool in both indie and mainstream music circa 2018, White Denim possess all the cultural capital of an ironing board—and I don’t really mean that as an insult. Instead of reinventing the wheel, they’re offering an intermittently thrilling ride in the ancient jalopy it’s attached to. Whether you end up jumping on board with Performance will depend on the extent of your own predilection for “real music” nostalgia, but those who do find themselves in the passenger seat are likely to have a pretty fun time.


Mica Levi’s band, formerly known as Micachu and the Shapes, embraces imperfection, evoking late-’80s indie pop in whimsical ideas, unsteady rhythms, and meticulous detailing.

Shades

Some artists make being in a band sound like absolutely the worst thing in the world, but not Good Sad Happy Bad (the new name for a rejiggered Micachu and the Shapes), who make you want to dive, headfirst and blinking, into their grottily inviting world of avant-retro pop. Shades may be the fifth album for Mica Levi and co., but it has the enticing naivety of a debut—a result, perhaps, of structural changes within the band, as keyboardist Raisa Khan moves to lead vocals and CJ Calderwood comes in on saxophone, recorder, and electronics.
The key to this youthful buoyancy is a certain embrace of imperfection. Micachu and the Shapes were never exactly the slickest of acts, but Shades is a particularly unselfconscious record, wobbly and wonderful, home to the kind of eccentric ideas, unsteady rhythms, and touches of discordance that more anxious musicians lop off in Pro Tools. “Believe It,” all misshapen ideas and sprightly urgency, could be the first demo of a promising young band before they become embarrassed by their weird edges. It starts with loose cymbal hits, sloppy guitar riffs, and disjointed saxophone skronk before cutting into a melody that sounds—in the very best way—like it was knocked up in 10 minutes on a battered acoustic guitar. The band stumbles through the song like four debutants furtively eyeing each other for chord changes.
This scruffy musical charm, mixed with Khan’s rather prim vocals, lends Shades the air of late-’80s/early-’90s guitar music, sitting somewhere between the jangling indie pop of the C86 bands, early shoegaze, and grunge, as seen through the winsome eyes of Graham Coxon’s noisier solo albums. It’s yet another new look for a band that has explored everything from chopped and screwed symphonics to lo-fi hip-hop beats since debuting in 2009, and they wear it extremely well. The continental guitar shelves of “Reaching” are kissing cousins to the somnambulant psychedelia that Kevin Shields and his sleep-crazed crew dreamed up on Isn’t Anything, while “Honey” has the same deliciously polite suggestion of the Velvet Underground that pre-internet favorites like the Darling Buds and the Shop Assistants used to press up on flexi-disc.
If Shades was just an indie knockoff it would be fun, untaxing, and ultimately unnecessary—a well-written, retro-fitted guilty pleasure for dreaming of better times. Dig into Shades’ apparent spontaneity, however, and a world of detail emerges. “Blessed” dresses its sweetly insouciant melody in a patchwork quilt of disjointed vocal clips, aquatic effects, and ghostly electronic whoosh, while “Taking” sets a grunge guitar line against a twinkling starscape. Best of all is opener “Do It,” whose detuned chords sparkle against tiny, half-submerged melodies played out on what sounds like synth, flute, and recorder. It helps that Levi is an excellent guitarist, capable of wringing transcendent riffs, dinosaur drones, and detuned sludge out of the instrument; Calderwood’s Fun House saxophone rasp brilliantly offsets Levi’s unpredictable playing.
The result is a kind of precise imprecision, as if the band had captured the abandon of their early recordings and then pored over the detail with manic industriousness—tweaking rather than polishing, the better to accentuate the unevenness. Shades is lightning captured in a meticulously painted bottle, and a hell of a good time, to boot.

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Ron Morelli is chiefly known as boss of the techno imprint L.I.E.S., but A Gathering Together is his fourth release for Hospital Productions, the label run by Prurient/Vatican Shadow man Dominick Fernow. In Fernow, you sense Morelli has found a true bedfellow, one who shares his aesthetic of misanthropy, gutter eroticism, and sonic abrasion.

A Gathering Together

The phenomenon of noise dudes turning their hands to techno has become a familiar one, but to date there hasn’t been so much in the way of return traffic, and probably little wonder: club music presents access to a world of international travel, plentiful drugs, and beautiful strangers; while the noise life offers lightly attended shows in cold basements and all the Xeroxed fanzines about serial killers you can eat. In short, you have to want it, or more accurately, feel it—and Ron Morelli both wants it, and feels it. Morelli is chiefly known as boss of the New York-born, Paris-based techno imprint L.I.E.S., but A Gathering Together is his fourth release for Hospital Productions, the label run by Prurient/Vatican Shadow man Dominick Fernow. In Fernow, you sense Morelli has found a true bedfellow, one who shares his aesthetic of misanthropy, gutter eroticism, and sonic abrasion.
L.I.E.S.’ take on techno is brackish and lo-fi, and Morelli’s 2013 debut for Hospital, Spit, conformed to type: in broad terms, this was a club record, albeit one with torn clothing and dried blood under its fingernails. A Gathering Together is something more uncategorizable and disassembled. There are occasional hallmarks of dance music—a whoosh of sub-bass here, a vandalized vocal line there—but there will be, as Bill Callahan might have it, no dancing. Rhythms recall mechanical or industrial processes, pitched too fast or too slow for physical interaction. "Desert Ocean" is a hobbled march of throbbing generator tones and bold horn-like blasts that sound like a tanker lost in thick fog. The sounds of "New Dialect" bring to mind a needle puncturing metal, underwater scrapes, and the hiss of compressed gas. "Voices Rise" takes a brief vocal sample and suspends it in limbo with a variety of tics, scratches, and twists, while the miasmic drone of "Cross Waters" sounds like A Guy Called Gerald’s "Voodoo Ray", on fire, being lowered into tar.
This oppositional quality leads you to reflect on Morelli’s personal philosophy. "People are terrible and always have been," he told FACT in an interview two years ago, while the accompanying text for A Gathering Together describes the title track as being born from "rapid-paced dead-end urban environments that force people together." Perhaps the record’s most vivid, evocative cut, it begins with a disorienting field recording, before we hear what sounds like massed ranks of hands taking up percussion instruments and proceeding to beat out increasingly furious polyrhythms. The message seems plain enough—humanity can be horrifying—but there’s a paradoxical quality to its sense of barely corralled frenzy. If there is fear and disgust here, there is also elation and fascination, too—a recognition of life, even if it feels not so much empathetic as anthropological.
Is A Gathering Together a noise record, or not? The mechanistic looping and layering of "The Story of Those Gone" suggests Morelli might be familiar with the output of demented industrial recluses such as Maurizio Bianchi or Atrax Morgue. Equally, however, he might not, these being the sort of sounds you might discover given solitude and the right—that is, wrong—mental state. To Morelli’s credit, Gathering feels detailed and textured where it needs to, its shifting layers crisp and detached rather than blitzed into mulch. But Morelli’s negative energy, when robbed of an unrelenting bass drum, can drift toward monotony.
The idea that techno is more developed, or evolved, than noise is, of course, a false dichotomy. But take Dominick Fernow: his path from Prurient to Vatican Shadow has felt like a progression, opening up his compositional practice in a way that’s informed his many other projects to date. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Morelli, as he drifts from the dance floor, is taking a reverse path, somehow. Consequently, A Gathering Together is a bold move that falls short of being a landmark. But as an illustration of where Morelli might angle his music and label next—not to mention his readiness to confuse, confound, or destroy in order to explore more personal themes or private fancies—it still illuminates.


On his meditative collaboration with the ambient guitarist Noveller and jazz trumpeter Leron Thomas, Iggy Pop turns inward.

Free

Years ago, the world tacitly accepted there was a line separating Jim Osterberg and his feral creation Iggy Pop. Osterberg devised the street-walking cheetah persona of Iggy Pop as a way to tap into his primal urges, but the idea that he was playing a role only came into focus when he managed to survive to tell tales about his hedonism. At this point, decades after his image softened enough so he could score a Top 40 hit and sell travel tickets on TV, the split personality is so accepted it nearly seems like a cliché: Whether he’s on or off stage, he plays the part that’s expected.
Free finds Iggy Pop embracing the notion that he’s playing Iggy Pop. In its liner notes, Iggy admits “this is an album in which other artists speak for me, but I lend my voice,” and that he consented to this peculiar situation because he felt “drained” at the conclusion of the cycle for Post Pop Depression, his 2016 collaboration with Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme. A clever fusion of the gnarled fuzz of the Stooges and the arch artiness of Pop’s ’70s Berlin collaborations with David Bowie, Post Pop Depression sounded like an Iggy Pop album was supposed to sound like. It was, to use a phrase Pop coined himself, “a rock album with popular punks,” the snide explanation he gave for his record company rejecting his Francophile 2012 album Après.
Free belongs to the same lineage as Après and Préliminaires, the 2009 album where Iggy returned to his jazzy arthouse inspirations. It’s such a departure from Post Pop Depression that it nearly feels like a repudiation, yet that isn’t quite true. It’s merely another iteration of the divide between Iggy Pop and Jim Osterberg: Homme brought out the rocker, while Free allows Osterberg to turn inward and meditate.
It’s a guided meditation, directed by Leron Thomas, a jazz trumpeter from Houston, and Noveller, the stage name of the Brooklyn-based musician Sarah Lipstate, who specializes in “guitarscapes.” Neither Thomas nor Noveller are particularly well-known. Pop happened upon them both as he was searching for music to play on his regular BBC Radio show and within their music, he recognized a moody elasticity that suits his flights of introspection. Hiring the pair to tap into this dusky, brooding vibe, Pop gave them a pair of poems to act as a lodestar for their compositions—Lou Reed’s “We Are the People,” Dylan Thomas’ middle-school prerequisite “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”—and then sat back, collaborating on occasion but otherwise performing songs handed to him.
Thomas and Noveller both make a conscious decision to appeal to the parts of Pop that lie above the waist, writing songs that address matters of the head, heart, and soul. The closest Free gets to the carnal is “Dirty Sanchez,” a Thomas-written screed against online sexuality that Pop had to be persuaded to record. It’s odd to think that the author of “Cock in My Pocket” and “I Wanna Be Your Dog” balked at the line “Just because I like big tits/Doesn’t mean I like big dicks,” but the song isn’t meant to be kinky or titillating; it’s tired, enervated by the onslaught of cheap online sex and, in that sense, it fits the rest of Free, which is filled with songs where the narrator yearns to be anywhere other than where he is at the moment.
That yearning isn’t especially urgent, however. Free runs a mere 34 minutes but it meanders, lingering in shimmering twilight vistas, luxuriating in reverb and gaining a bit of momentum when the bass line of “James Bond” nods at spy movies. Every element, whether electronic rhythms or swells of keyboard or stabs of a trumpet, is used as texture, letting Iggy savor the words he recites and croons. Often, the lyrics are as skeletal and suggestive as the music, lending Free a certain spectral quality; the album threatens to come into focus but resolutely resists to offer anything more concrete than whispers and suggestions.
The haziness of Free has its share of frustrations—as alluring as the pensive soundscapes are, it’s hard not to wish they were occasionally more sculpted—but there’s something curiously human and appealing about its ungainly nature. Once again, Iggy Pop is standing outside of the zeitgeist, separating himself from the digital clamor and processed noise that constitutes popular culture at the twilight of the 2010s. Age certainly plays a factor in Pop’s current cultural isolation. Now in his early 70s, Iggy can’t be bothered with the clatter that constitutes hipness, yet he’s not ready to settle down. He’s restless but in a subdued fashion, happy to play the part of Iggy Pop not because he lacks energy or imagination, but because this subjugation allows him the freedom he craves.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On Forest Swords’ 2010 EP Dagger Paths, the web of dub, psych, dance, and drone spun by UK producer Matthew Barnes felt instantly singular. Engravings is the perfect sequel, cementing his knack for creating complex effects with elementary methods. Every song here is boldly sensual, and each note has a distinct emotional hue.

Engravings

On Forest Swords’ 2010 EP Dagger Paths, the web of dub, psych, dance, and drone spun by UK producer Matthew Barnes felt instantly singular. So singular, in fact, that the task of creating a worthy follow-up must have seemed daunting, which I assumed was why it took him a while. It turns out there were other reasons-- for one, he suffered from hearing problems that made his new work sound different with each listen, and forced him to consider ending Forest Swords. But also, in keeping with his music’s slow-growing vibe, he was wary of rushing things. As he admitted in a February interview, “I’m glad I took a step back…I’ve seen so many bands who strike while the iron’s hot and then burn out.”
Barnes’ judgment proved sound, as did his ears, at least in their ability to assess his work. Created at his own pace in his own home in North West England, Engravings is the perfect sequel to Dagger Paths. Barnes steadfastly retains his sturdy loops, simple beats, and evocative guitar lines, refusing to overhaul his potent formula just to dodge accusations that he’s repeating himself. But he also gradually inserts new sounds into that equation, fitting them snugly into his songs’ accumulating layers. The result is both familiar and fresh, cementing Barnes’ knack for creating complex effects with elementary methods.
Engravings also confirms his ability to conjure more than just a chilly, faded-memory vibe. Dagger Paths did that too, but it was easy to get lost in its burned-out echo and miss other ideas and moods that Barnes explored along the way. Here, those diverse facets of his music are unavoidable. Every song is boldly sensual, and each note has a distinct emotional hue. Mixing that intensity with dream-like atmospheres lands Engravings in a unique emotional space, one Barnes accurately describes as a “balance between really intense euphoria and this almost bleakness.”
Trying to balance those opposites could produce disjointed, even jarring art. But one of the biggest strengths of Forest Swords’ music is its fluidity. Although Barnes adds and subtracts loops and beats without hiding the seams, he persistently maintains a DJ-like flow. As a result, following the curving path of his melodies feels more like riding a wave than cutting through choppy waters. So even a track as spliced together as “Onward”-- which opens with a stuttering clang, grafts on glittering guitar, then drifts into strings and a pounding beat-- feels completely logical, as if this is the only way time could march on.
Barnes’ strong sense of flow lets him add new twists to his sound without forcing them in. Often they emerge sneakily, like the radio-static transmissions in “Ljoss”, the New Age piano on “Gathering”, the horn-section accents in “An Hour”, or the near-militaristic beat of ecstatic closer “Friend, You Will Never Learn”. In other places, these additions are clearer, but they’re always well-suited to their environment, as if Barnes had no other choice but to include them in his mix.
That’s especially true of the increased amount of singing on Engravings. The majority of it comes from Barnes’ own voice, which he sampled and then edited down to a nearly molecular level. This digital abstraction of the music’s most human element gives Engravings subliminal warmth, as if the ghosts of long-dead lyrics are watching over the songs. At times, vocals even become the focus: “Gathering” is nothing but overlapped singing for its first half, and the inclusion of Brighton-based vocalist Anneka on “Anneka’s Battle” adds vivid soul to Barnes’ brand of negative-space R&B.
Barnes inviting a guest onto a Forest Swords song is a bit surprising. His one-man music is usually a personal affair: you can practically hear him thinking through the songs as they unfold, and all the reverb and atmosphere make them feel like internal monologues. But compared to Dagger Paths, there’s more acknowledgement of the external world on Engravings. Barnes incorporates field recordings and refers to his locale in song titles; he also mixed the entire album on his laptop while sitting outside. Opening his process up a bit to include his environment perhaps explains how music this skeletal can sound like it has so much blood coursing through it.
It also explains how the one-man world of Forest Swords can feel so universal. Unrestricted by words or verse-chorus structures, Barnes’ songs reflect the way life can feel like an endless loop, growing and building without ever losing its cyclical nature. Maybe that’s why, even though Forest Swords’ sound skirts an array of genres, it doesn’t belong to any single one. Barnes’ work is less concerned with trends or scenes than experiences and memories that everyone has had, regardless of what music they’ve listened to before. On that count, Engravings is a broad success.


The follow-up to 2019’s This Is How You Smile is mellower and breezier than its predecessor; it feels less like a tour of Roberto Carlos Lange’s psyche than an afternoon barbecue in his backyard.

Far In

For Roberto Carlos Lange, 2019 seemed to be the type of year that any songwriter hopes one day to see. After over 10 years of crafting introspective and alluringly amorphous songs as Helado Negro, among other projects, Lange pulled it all together, tied it up, and delivered a masterpiece. This Is How You Smile assembled notes of just about every sound Lange had dabbled in before, but not in the lazy way; every texture was carefully, tightly bound to a Teflon core statement of identity, self-affirmation, and the right to be many things. Nostalgic gazes into childhood portraits, Latin folk turned inside out, sparkly tinsel monsters, suboceanic synth wubs: It was all there, it was all him, and it was all that a listener roots for an artist to achieve. “Brown just glows,” he memorably sang in the first minute, a lyric that landed with way more weight than should be possible from a voice so light, and Lange only radiated more from there.
But then there are the years where self-actualization is secondary to simply remaining alive and well, and these times found Lange shortly after releasing This Is How You Smile. A long tour behind the album broke him down—just in time for a pandemic, his 40th birthday, and a move to North Carolina after a decade and a half in Brooklyn. On his new double album, Far In, he doesn’t sound quite so concerned with the artistic “step forward” as with healthier steps. His priority today seems to be, to quote his first words on Far In, “Wake up tomorrow.”
If This Is How You Smile was the complete house tour of Lange’s psyche, Far In is more like an afternoon barbeque in the backyard. It doesn’t tell as complex of a story, but you’re more than happy to hang out in the sun for a while and enjoy his company. The aesthetics are much more even: steady, mellow, comforting. Lange may not have felt as carefree as he sounds on these 15 chilled-out tracks, but they seem like signposts, like a target state of mind more than a revealing self-portrait.
Lange has always had a delicate touch, but the general breeziness here is different. The prominent drumming of Jason Trammell has a lot to do with that: He’s a consistent presence, always drawing attention but never loud, manipulating his hi-hat and muted snare to keep it interesting. With the help of Trammell and a clutch of guest drummers, Lange shows that even his disco-inflected songs can still be tactile and rewarding in headphones—albeit some more than others. “Outside the Outside” is the best example, a silent-rave shuffle that quietly pulls you in; it sounds like it’s coming up through the floorboards, a song that you’ll only hear if you crouch low. “Gemini and Leo,” meanwhile, dials it up to near-anthem size and loses some of that magnetic intimacy that Lange does so well, like a stick of watermelon gum that blasts flavor for a few minutes then goes bland.
Far In still has its fair share of range, but there are fewer songs that feel like he's flipping parts around, or opening up a hidden door. The moments with a lighter pulse (like the fingerpicked “Wind Conversations,” which perfectly evokes lying in shady grass) or almost none at all (“Aguas Frías,” a beautifully accentuated drone on thornier themes of fragile memory and lost love) are more ripe to crack open and explore than the dance tracks, which offer little in the way of mystery, and even stick out at times. Ultimately, that makes Far In feel a little less ambitious than the past few Helado Negro albums (despite its beefy 68-minute runtime and stacked roster of collaborators, including Kacy Hill and William Tyler) if still the right move for Lange at this moment. From Solar Power to Sky Blue Sky, there’s plenty of precedent for the lower-key, sun-worshipping album that immediately follows an artist’s most personal effort, the one that nearly crushed them and was widely hailed as a masterpiece.
Last year, Lange and his partner, visual artist Kristi Sword, released Kite Symphony, Four Variations: a rhythm-less, instrumental album—a companion to a site-specific series of Mylar sculptures—about the skies over Marfa, Texas. The influence of that project is palpable on Far In. To me, this album has a closer resemblance to a kite in the air. It dances, it’s colorful and detailed, and it feels light enough to be swept up off the ground by a gentle gust of wind. It can also be an oddly satisfying and centering thing: On days when your stresses and anxieties consume you, block out the world and just fixate on a kite for a little while, and you might find your footing again. This is Lange’s reminder to himself, and anyone listening, on Far In. If you’re lucky enough to have the power to do so, lighten up—it won’t kill you. It’s far more likely to save you.
Correction: This article originally credited Jason Trammell with drumming on “Hometown Dream,” “Agosto,” and “Telescope.” Drums on those tracks were performed by Marco Buccelli, John Herndon, and Savannah Harris, respectively.

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Arizona’s Gatecreeper stand out not by aping one particular style of death metal, but by acting as a polyglot of various classic bands. Sonoran Depravation is their unwavering debut LP.

Sonoran Depravation

Other states may bear more significance for metal, but Arizona is not without its history. Soulfly’s Max Cavalera, best known for his time in Brazilian thrash pioneers Sepultura, calls Phoenix his home. Jason Newsted got his start in the neighboring Flotsam and Jetsam before Metallica called upon him to replace Cliff Burton. And the Metal God himself, Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, was even the publisher of a Phoenix entertainment paper, Where It’s Hot Weekly. As far as current bands go, there aren’t many, which makes Arizona death metal group Gatecreeper all the more special. After an affirming debut demo tape in 2014 and a series of splits, they’ve finally extended their reach on their first full-length, Sonoran Depravation.
Gatecreeper stand out not by aping one particular style of death metal, but by acting as a polyglot of various classic bands. Their demo was prime Swedish worship, and considering the slew of hardcore bands that were drawing from Entombed’s buzzsaw sound—Nails and Trap Them chief among them—an American version of the pure thing was long overdue. Depravation still carries that influence; most records that Kurt Ballou has a hand in do. (Ballou, metal producer and guitarist of Converge, mixed Depravation.)
They also show a devotion to Florida legends Obituary’s ethos of keeping things as uncomplicated as possible. In the late ’80s, Obituary stripped the gothic trappings of Celtic Frost’s mid-paced stomp and brought it to its barest essence, and in Depravation’s groovier sections, that tradition lives on. Sometimes, Obituary is directly referenced, like in the main riff of “Lost Forever,” or the turn to death-doom in “Patriarchal Grip.” In the latter, Gatecreeper slow the tempos to put as much weight on the riffs as possible. It sounds like they could give out at any moment in the Arizona heat; when the pressure’s on, that’s when they’re at their heaviest. “Grip” is an experiment in applying Asphyx’s thick riffing to their interpretation of Entombed’s guitar tone, and what a fusion it is.
When Gatecreeper crank up the speed on “Desperation,” the Obituary ethos becomes more spiritual than direct. This is a track that cannot be bogged down by excessive soloing or a sudden drone dirge. It’s an aerodynamic boulder—bulky riffs blessed with a nimble lightness. Even in the album’s rare flourishes, like “Flamethrower,” bearing their most Swedish lead work, Gatecreeper always bring it back to the direct, crushing riff. “Slave,” from their demo, ended with a doomy riff that could have gone on forever, and the album is rife with similarly hypnotic moments. That’s another layer of “Lost”’s appeal, and “Sterilized” ends with a chunky, palm-muted, NYHC-esque breakdown that Suffocation would be proud of. Just when Gatecreeper are on the verge on riding a riff too long, their inner John Tardy kicks in. Nothing goes to waste. Depravation eschews technicality not to cover up for a lack of adventurousness or ability, but to affirm the band’s real talent: getting the most out of every riff.
Depravation arrives not long after another of Gatecreeper’s key influences, Bolt Thrower, announced their breakup. These retirements will become more common over time; even touring machines like Cannibal Corpse and Deicide won’t go on forever. Younger bands, like Gatecreeper, must keep death metal alive with their own stamps. Sure, the classics will (hopefully) always be in print and on services somehow, but Depravation is necessary because it shows that there is still life even in the most rudimentary of the genre’s characteristics. Simplicity works when it’s durable, and Depravation is unwavering.


Following the tour for 2011's White Wilderness, John Vanderslice quit his former label, Dead Oceans, to take full control with his next releases, funded via Kickstarter: the original Dagger Beach, an experimental, confessional set, and a quasi-covers record of Bowie's Diamond Dogs.

John Vanderslice: Dagger Beach / Plays Diamond Dogs

Dagger Beach / Plays Diamond Dogs

As the story goes, John Vanderslice returned home to San Francisco after a lengthy tour supporting 2011’s White Wilderness only for his wife of six years to swiftly announce that she’d be leaving him. He went out into the woods of Northern California and hiked around by himself, all the while pretty much losing his mind. He decided he needed to Do Weird Stuff again musically, which-- with all due respect to his last few albums-- involved getting back to what made him great in the first place, besides the enduring, secretly genius storyteller thing. So he quit his former label, Dead Oceans, because he wanted full control in his endeavor to put himself back together with Dagger Beach, and to write a love letter to his idol with a reinterpretation of David Bowie’s 1974 Orwellian concept album, Diamond Dogs. (Vanderslice funded the project with a Kickstarter campaign that made three times his total funding goal.)
Many of Vanderslice’s most effective songs are clearly fictional, but he commits to them fully. On Dagger Beach, the songs are more clearly personal-- detailing the dissolution of his marriage-- and he executes them with the same specific eye: “In the last known photograph/ Of you and me sprawled on the grass/ You looked off frame/ You were through with this stupid play” (“North Coast Rep”). Unsurprisingly, these songs taste pretty bitter going down, even when they're pretty acoustic numbers like “Song for Dana Lok” and “How the West Was Won”, whose opening riff treads in Fogerty lawsuit territory. “Harlequin Press” is the big exception to this personal vibe, and its clever punchline about a writer who sacrifices personal truth for what the audience wants is a classic of Vanderslice’s fictional storytelling method.
Vanderslice has abandoned the polish of White Wilderness here, though that album’s crucial backing band, Magik*Magik Orchestra, provide woodwind, string, and brass arrangements. Highlight “Song for David Berman”-- an ode to the Silver Jews leader-- leans on strings, inciting a sense of growing eeriness set against a sparse acoustic guitar. It’s one of the only instances on the record where Vanderslice convincingly conveys his pain musically rather than lyrically. It's not a problem of polish vs. lo-fi, but a series of songs rendered so angular that the overall effect feels aimless, an effect that gets old on Dagger Beach. The lack of structure makes these songs feel experimental, but not sufficiently to commit to being out there in a remarkable way.
As far as experimentation goes, Diamond Dogs is a stronger bet. Rather than merely covering the album (which he performed live in full last year), Vanderslice takes the hits and turns them on their heads, changing lyrics, even titles. “Juvenile Success” (that's “Rebel Rebel”) is a twinkly, soft-spoken affair that feels more like a Belle and Sebastian single than anything Bowie did in his most shamelessly glam moment; the line, “Hot tramp, I love you so” has never sounded so polite. “Would You Possibly Rock and Roll With Me?” (a.k.a. “Rock‘N’Roll With Me”) sounds like a church organist messing around following Sunday services, long after the congregation has filed out. While songs like “We Are the Dead” amplify their original greatness by ramping up the noise, by and large, it’s all sonic effect without much of the attitude and soul that actually drew people to these songs, and the curiosity factor wanes quickly.
For a longtime professional musician who woke up one morning and called off his record deal, Dagger Beach is not as experimental as you'd expect. The Bowie redux, however, is a different story. It seems as though the mere act of bringing new life to one of Bowie’s lesser-canonized albums brought joy to Vanderslice in his difficult days. Even if it's not required listening, if that new lease reflects back on him, it will have been worth it.


It's been a long time since I've wanted to hear an album every day, let alone more than ...

White Blood Cells

It's been a long time since I've wanted to hear an album every day, let alone more than once a day. Sure, to make these review deadlines, I often have to listen to a record daily, but in so many cases, it's a chore. That's not a problem with White Blood Cells. In fact, the problem now is finding time for the next album to review; all I want to do is listen to the White Stripes. I've got it taped for my walkman in the classic cassette format-- it fits easily onto Side A of my 90-minute Maxell. I keep wasting precious battery power fast-forwarding through Side B so I can get back to White Blood Cells.
I love the rock and roll. There's always someone new coming along, taking that heavily rooted sound-- the music of the Gods-- and making the old beast sing anew. It's Christ and Prometheus, eternally dying and rising again. Jack and Meg White summon the Holy Spirit and channel it through 16 perfectly concise songs of longing, with dirty, distorted electric guitar cranked to maximum amplification, crashing, bruised drums, and little else. They don't innovate rock; they embody it. And whatever past form of the genre White Blood Cells invokes has been given a makeover and set loose to strut the lower east side's back alleys in its new clothes. Red and white clothes. (The Stripes could stand to vary the color schemes of their album covers.)
There's no denying that the White Stripes fall within the confines of the garage rock band. Their music is simple, stripped down and it howls the blues. But despite its simplicity, there's something here that goes so much deeper. Jack White's mangled guitar screams like a rabid catfight, its strings massacred to the point of snapping. Meg White's kit is bashed with such force you'd imagine her as some kind of incredible hulk, though in photos, she appears the prototypical indie girl-- waifish, with pigtails and a nasty smirk. Yet she whips all of her 98 pounds into a tornadic fury like E. Honda's hundred-hand slap.
Occasionally, Jack tosses an organ into the mix, or bangs on a piano like the Stones' Ian Stewart. But for the most part, White Blood Cells is instrumentally sparse, with only a guitar and drums. The last time I recall such a dense sound being wrung from rock's bare essentials was on Liz Phair's similarly Stones-inspired Exile in Guyville, though this record explores much raunchier sonic textures; rather than Phair's restrained but biting wit, Jack White opts to lay it all on the line, the unfiltered cynicism of an intelligent mind sent blaring through 1000 Hz of raw aggression.
White Blood Cells surges with classic rock's grittier moments, stomping around like the MC5 and, on the instrumental "Aluminum," Sabbath. The guitar echoes the second half of Neil Young's Rust Never Sleeps. But Jack's vocals are pure indie rock-- bratty and unashamedly so-- and in his upper register, his voice yowls and cracks with pissed adolescence.
Virtually all of these songs address a distanced lover. Sometimes he's coming home to see her; other times she's done him some permanent wrong. The lyrics are succinct and direct, and poetic like an aged bluesman. On "Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground," he sings: "If you can hear a piano fall, you can hear me coming down the hall/ If I could just hear your pretty voice, I don't think I'd need to see at all." He concludes the song with, "Any man with a microphone can tell you what he loves the most/ And you know why you love at all if you're thinking of the Holy Ghost."
On the country hootenanny "Hotel Yorba," the Stripes reflect the grit of early Railroad Jerk-- a glee-filled boogie with Jack's voice breaking and whooping, almost on the verge of a yodel. "Fell in Love with a Girl" is frenzied and rollicking (the album's best), complete with Yardbirds-type "ahhaa's" and a joi de vivre tempered by the admission that trouble is sure to follow: "My left brain knows that all love is fleeting."
Indeed, many of the songs admit that the love is lost. On "The Union Forever," Jack White mourns, "It can't be love/ Because there is no love." The song is a riff on Citizen Kane, including a strange breakdown with sampled dialogue from the film. Here, the White Stripes are the most experimental they get, which is to say "not very," though the song reminds me of the ragged power of Royal Trux without the pointless artiness. Certainly, it would be nice to hear the White Stripes take this music in a new direction, but this band is all about the songs, and the songs are good enough to stand alone, sans-flashy effects and tape editing.
"The Same Boy You've Always Known" is another high point. For a ballad, it rocks harder than most bands' hard-rockers, yet it wrenches in its emotional impact. Jack White repeats certain key lines, straining his voice to impart meaning and feeling. Again, the state of the relationship in question is uncertain. The song ends uncommitted and terribly sad with, "If there's anything good about me/ I'm the only one who knows." How many bands have failed with entire albums of moroseness to only express the alienation of those two lines?
The closest thing to a dud on this record is "We're Going to Be Friends," a gentle, nostalgic ditty of innocent love and childhood. It's a little too pleasant, lacking any of the fear and confusion of those pre-double-digit years, but its softness gives the record's midpoint some time to inhale before another six exhalations of fire.
Finally, at the close of the album, Jack sits alone at the piano for "This Protector." Though its message is vague, there are implications of religion and loss: "You thought you heard a sound/ There's no one else around/ 300 people out in West Virginia/ Have no idea of all these thoughts that lie within you/ But now... now... now, now, now, NOW!" Now what? It's the floating resonance of the moment, the intensity of the feeling, that gives these words meaning.
White Blood Cells doesn't veer far from the formula of past White Stripes records; all are tense, sparse and jagged. But it's here that they've finally come into their own, where Jack and Meg White finally seem not only comfortable with the path they've chosen, but practiced, precise and able to convey the deepest sentiment in a single bound. It's hard to know at this point in the game where they'll head from here, but what matters is right now. And right now, I want to listen to this album again.


The debut album from the Pulp frontman’s new band uses a novel approach to recording that aims for the wild abandon of live music but only occasionally reaches it.

Beyond the Pale

Beyond the Pale was never meant to exist. In 2017, Jarvis Cocker assembled a six-piece band that would only perform live, without releasing albums, and gave them a slightly confusing name: JARV IS… It took the intervention of Geoff Barrow to nudge the former Pulp frontman into making this record, which the band assembled by adding studio overdubs to live tapes they’d been recording for personal use. They call it an “alive album,” rather than a live one.
It’s a contrived and aspirational description for an album that aims for the wild abandon of live music but only occasionally reaches it. Beyond The Pale isn’t dead, certainly. But it’s moribund at times, like a post-festival straggler in need of three square meals and a vitamin shot rather than a rampaging rock god. It’s a shame because the idea of JARV IS… as a living transgression of the line between recorded and live music is interesting, and there are enough moments of lively inspiration to suggest what Beyond The Pale could have been, if it weren't weighted down with overlong songs and flat production.
Beyond the Pale’s songs tackle brilliantly un-rock’n’roll subjects, from evolution to the cabin fever of an aging raver, and lines like “God damn this claustrophobia/‘Cause I should be disrobing ya” show Cocker has not lost the wit that made him an unlikely Britpop icon. "Children of the Echo” has a rousing and unusual chorus that stands up to Cocker’s strongest melodies, and the verse of “House Music All Night Long” nails the classically British art of polite desperation.
Cocker’s excellent band combines atypical influences in intriguing new shapes, led by Emma Smith’s supple violin attack. Album highlight “Sometimes I Am Pharaoh”, whose basic track was recorded live in a cavern in middle England, is a sublimely freaky mixture of taut Roxy Music sophistication and frazzled tribal grunge, while “Swanky Modes” offers a rueful combination of dubwise bass and jazzy piano. Their approach is a bit like Pulp’s in their later years, albeit a version of that Pulp had lost something of their musical discipline and sharp edges.
The flab that buries Beyond the Pale’s highlights may be a result of the album’s half-live conceit. Several of the songs feature long spoken-word breakdowns, which are effective on stage, where Cocker can work his magnetic presence, but feel empty on record, undoing the bite of the better songs and exposing the faults of the weaker ones. “Children of the Echo” is a six-and-a-half-minute epic that has said it all in four, and “Am I Missing Something?” drags like a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Beyond the Pale contains plenty of sharp songwriting, but despite the intrigue of its premise, it may have benefitted from a more thorough commitment to making a proper album. The hybrid stage/studio setup captures the sprawl of a live gig without the excitement and possibility, and the sheen of a studio recording without the cohesion and refinement.

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On the third album in his series based on loops of early 20th-century, mostly Yiddish records, the guitarist and archivist incorporates more instrumentation and more space.

Landwerk No. 3

In the early 20th century, labels like Columbia and Victor courted the millions of European immigrants who had recently arrived on American shores, including many Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jews. Seeking new markets for both records and record players, these labels made hundreds of recordings of cantors, klezmer bands, and denizens of New York’s Yiddish Theater District. A century later, many of these records can be found in legendary musicologist Alan Lomax’s archive, curated by the Kentucky-based guitarist Nathan Salsburg. Landwerk No. 3 is the third in Salsburg’s series of haunting, dirgelike, glacially paced albums on which he plays along with loops of Yiddish records. It’s a hauntological project with a specifically Jewish-American angle, allowing Salsburg to open a dialogue with a bygone fountain of Yiddishkeit.
All of the samples on Landwerk No. 3 are sourced from Jewish artists who performed and recorded in New York City in the first half of the 20th century. Yet listeners coming in without any context would be forgiven for placing the action a few thousand miles west in Monument Valley or the Mojave Desert. Salsburg’s guitar, which he used to explore American folk and blues forms on earlier albums, is weighted with the same reverb and sadness that country musicians, Spaghetti Western soundtrack maestros, and latter-day Americana abstractionists like North Americans and SUSS have used to suggest the sun-baked sprawl of the American West. Salsburg made a point not to use blues records for the project, but the sounds he makes and the scales he plays on his guitar nonetheless nudge Landwerk No. 3 toward the genre.
Landwerk No. 3 incorporates more instrumentation than previous installments while also letting the samples breathe more. Salsburg achieves this balance with runtimes that flirt with or surpass the 10-minute mark. With six tracks in over an hour, Landwerk No. 3 is nearly as long as both of its predecessors combined, and much of the extra time is spent simply letting the vinyl crackle and the samples loop. On “IX,” a sample of cantor Meyer Kanewsky amounts to little more than a faint, ghostly swell, and at first it sounds almost like Salsburg simply duetting with static. 18-minute closer “XIV” keeps his guitar on the bench for much of its runtime, opening with a faint percussive sample from Yiddish theater pioneer Abe Ellstein’s “Mazel Tov” and a doleful chord progression played on an organ. “XII” is based on a spooky piano sample from Jacob Silbert, another star of New York’s Yiddish theater, and Salsburg correctly trusts that the sample is interesting enough to benefit only from the occasional guitar filigree.
In addition to Jewish music and Salsburg’s mainline in American roots music, Landwerk No. 3 is also inspired by Leyland Kirby’s The Caretaker project, in which the decay of vinyl records stands in for the decline of human cognitive functions. In order to make music that sounded beamed in from the distant past, Kirby and contemporaries such as Christian Marclay, Janek Schaefer, and the late Philip Jeck obscured the borders between what was being sampled and what was being overdubbed. On Landwerk No. 3, those distinctions are much more explicit, with the pristine polish of the guitars and pianos emphasizing the temporal distance from the muddy vinyl loops. Because of this contrast, the process is inextricable from the music, and Landwerk No. 3 never quite transcends the image of a man playing along to his records. The best experimental turntablism can make the listener feel as if a ghost has entered the room. Listening to Landwerk is like eavesdropping on somebody else’s séance, but luckily, these spirits have a lot to tell us.