Ditherer

With its emphasis on slacker attitude and anything-goes energy over ambition and technical polish, indie rock is the consummate entry-level genre. It's the musical equivalent of a pick-up-and-play Wii game compared to, say, techno's steeply learning-curved Xbox 360 shooter. As such, musicians who began their careers as catch-all indie rockers before narrowing their focus to more technically and conceptually challenging genres are a dime a dozen.
Fog's Andrew Broder is much rarer: His trajectory inverts the familiar one. Fog's first two LPs were released on Ninja Tune, but they were steeped in the Anticon aesthetic (fittingly, Doseone brought Fog to Ninja Tune's attention)-- an obscure haze of post-Prince-Paul sample wizardry ballasted with baubles of melody and avant-hop guest stars, generously laced with rhythmic decomposition and seething negative space. The delicate Ether Teeth gave us Fog at its most challenging and rewarding-- it was an uncompromising attempt to build music that towered, teetered, but didn't move.
For listeners bored by artful stasis, the relatively straightforward electro-pop of 2005's 10th Avenue Freakout (which featured discernible structures and more of Broder's vocals than ever before) must've seemed like a step in the right direction. But for those who admired the imperfect yet promising Ether Teeth, it was the first step in a regression that culminates in the unabashed indie-rock of Ditherer. There's nothing wrong with the urge to try on more traditional garb, but while Broder is an adequate frontman, it's not his best look, and Ditherer makes the previously outré musician sound mundane. He's in the habit of mercilessly stretching his syllables over the tricked-out riffs, which is a good cheat to make awkward lines fit into consistent structures, but quickly becomes monotonous. And in this context, his ridiculous lyrics have more in common with the dopey pretensions of Primus than Bob Pollard's absurdist Zen.
For Ditherer, Broder coalesced Fog into a rock trio featuring himself on guitar and vocals, Mark Erickson on bass, and Tim Glenn on drums. As if making up for lost time, the album finds Fog stitching together a hodgepodge of rock styles into a quilt of clashing colors. "We Will Have Vanished" is ponderous, enervating stoner rock. "Inflatable Ape Pt. 3" is indebted to Pavement, with its stabby guitars and nervous drums. The roots-rock-gone-wild of "I Have Been Wronged" tangles up a percolating guitar figure with forlorn hound-dog vocals, zippy prog trills, and a lounge-y breakdown. "Hallelujah Daddy" is off-kilter Southern rock, and the spacious, eerie "What Gives?" (which features Microphones' Phil Elvrum on backing vocals) reminds us that it's hard to understate how crucial Thom Yorke's otherworldly voice is to Radiohead's success.
Broder is better at details than broad strokes, and Ditherer contains some excellent ones; they're just buried in the piecemeal and decidedly indelicate songwriting. "Hallelujah Daddy", which features a guest appearance from Why?, comes to life in its gospel-rock middle section. The dubby title track (dubby is good for Broder; it plays into his strengths) profits greatly from Dosh's sprightly electro embellishments and Andrew Bird's weepy violin, while "What's Up Freaks?" offers a welcome respite from Broder's voice with a guest spot by Low's Mimi Parker and Alan Sparhawk. It's easy to admire the careful studio touches that pop up in almost every song-- the helium-deflating breakdown of "We Will Have Vanished", the telegraphic percussive blips and vocal strobes of "You Did What You Thought", and the bending sheet-metal on post-rock epic "On the Gallows". But it's hard to enjoy them without bogging down in been-there, done-that songwriting.


Scandinavian house and disco producer Mr. Tophat recruits his superstar compatriot Robyn for a three-song EP.

Trust Me EP

In the world of Scandinavian electronic music, Stockholm’s Mr. Tophat is swimming upstream. Instead of icy electro-pop or intricate IDM, Tophat offers massive, 10-minute-plus underground disco and house tracks through his Junk Yard Connections and Karlovak labels. These epic re-edits reference everything from Moroder to Larry Levan, passing through ’80s boogie and ’90s rave. His most recent release, titled Trust Me, is his most audacious yet—not only because of its intriguing balance of experimental textures and pure momentum, but because he has recruited superstar compatriot Robyn to provide vocals.
Believe it or not, Robyn's last solo release, Body Talk, came out in 2010 (coincidentally, the same year Mr. Tophat released his first record), which is several decades in pop time. Entire careers have come and gone in the time that fans have awaited a proper follow-up to “Call Your Girlfriend.” It’s a mark of his producer's ear that on Trust Me, Mr. Tophat seems aware of exactly how much Robyn is enough; her unmistakable voice envelops the songs without overcoming them, and Tophat expertly weaves her vocals in and out of the mix like one of many instruments in his arsenal.
Their partnership feels playfully equal, Robyn’s phrasing even improvisational at some points. On the opening title track, when she sings “We can make love/Don’t think twice/You can trust me,” she sounds like a mischievous siren luring a drunken sailor under the waves—even more so when moments later, she erupts in primal yelps and squeals. It’s this versatile exuberance, refusing to take itself too seriously yet the product of quiet perfectionism, that makes Robyn such a compelling pop star.
Even away from the sweaty haze of an actual club, Trust Me keeps your attention. Club music heard in headphones sometimes falls victim to druggy repetition, but these tracks are so layered and dense that new elements keep bobbing to the surface after multiple listens. The 15-minute closer “Disco Dovato” begins with loose percussion, lagging almost behind the beat (courtesy of drummer Per Lindvall, a former member of ABBA and another nod to Swedish pop royalty), until a typical disco guitar riff slowly filters in—but then distorted, looped samples begin slowly encroaching, along with Robyn’s cheeky vocal take. By the time the beat drops and the hi-hats kick in, well past the song’s midpoint, you half-expect the thing to fall apart under its own weight. But it never does. Mr. Tophat has a gift for this kind of balancing act, and on Trust Me, he manages to share the spotlight with one of his country’s famous pop stars.


With Frozen Niagara Falls, Dominick Fernow has taken strengths from his entire oeuvre to reach deeper into himself and produce what may be his best record yet, one that brings all the fulfillment of noise and transcends them all the same.

Frozen Niagara Falls

Prurient, the main guise of Dominick Fernow, peels back the grislier aspects of the human condition within the boundaries of noise music. He doesn't just talk about desire and hate and pushing oneself in his music, he soaks those very feelings into his works. Within his massive discography, littered with limited-release tapes that can be frustrating to any would-be collector, are his "statement" records, which often introduce new elements that advance his artistic growth. Among these are 2006's Pleasure Ground, where his talents for rhythm really started to bloom, 2011's Bermuda Drain, his blackened new wave masterpiece*,* and 2013's Through The Window, where he nearly ditched noise for unknown-hours techno. Frozen Niagara Falls, Fernow's latest double album, is definitely one of his "statement records," and it brings back much of the harsh noise that faded away from his more recent works, but it's neither a "return to form" nor a retreat into his early career. With Niagara, he's taken strengths from his entire oeuvre to reach deeper into himself and produce what may be his best record yet, one that brings all the fulfillment of noise and transcends them all the same.
Fernow's moved back to New York from L.A., where he was briefly a member of Cold Cave, and Niagara cements that return. There's none of the techno of Window or any traces of his European adventures following his side project Vatican Shadow's frequent touring there, and only some of Bermuda's bizzaro synth-pop. There are no remaining traces of Fernow the underground playboy posting swanky selfies on OkCupid; on Niagara, he is once again the man standing shirtless outside in the New York winter. The closest to anything resembling Bermuda is "Every Relationship Earthrise", which would make for excellent darkwave if the hiccuping beat would hold still.
Fernow takes the tools most noise artists use as ends themselves and uses them to further narratives and enrich the compositions. Take "Traditional Snowfall", which starts off as a murder-romance fantasy—"I want to rip out your lower back/ And suck the air out of your lungs/ And wrap my hands around your neck/ And collapse your throat/ And squish your thorax/ And kiss you"—but turns into a rumination on the ambiguity so prevalent in modern love: "Friends are everywhere but I'm always leaving/ Dismantling us with rumors." (Maybe some of the club weariness of Window stuck around after all.) Fernow takes that confusion and buries it in the hisses and frantic electronics, so that it bleeds through every element of the track. Huge blasts of static and contact mic chaos come back into the fore, a passionate and turbulent dance between beauty and ugliness. To work with contrasts like that, on that deep a composition, is a rarity in noise.
It may seem weird that Prurient would have "hits" or "fan favorites," but they do exist. Fernow designed Niagara to be sprawling and cohesive, and there are multiple competing candidates for new ones here, across the spectrum. The first would probably be "Dragonflies to Sew You Up", with percussion that resemble Godflesh's drum machine becoming sentient and suffering a panic attack. Beneath the barrage, blue synthesizers and pianos chime, barely surviving the mortar-fire of the percussion. In the lyrics, Fernow flips the script on how lust is portrayed in noise—it's far from the simplistic objectification that comes too often with big, burly loud music. There's a conflicted pain when he screams, "IN AUGUST/ YOU'RE OVERDRESSED/ PLYWOOD BROKEN/ UP ON IMPACT." A line like "I promise I will only fuck prostitutes" may seem comical on paper, but add in the context of Fernow's vocal performance, and it's clear he takes no pleasure from yelling such a thing.
Fernow's synths sound both lusher and icier than they did on Drain, thanks to producer Arthur Rizk, known for his work on Power Trip's Manifest Decimation, Inquisition's Obscure Verses for the Multiverse, and other notable recent metal and hardcore records. Fernow has pushed the limits of what lo-fi can do—Pleasure in particular is a testament to the beauty of buried synths—but with his grander ambitions, he needed a bigger sound, and Rizk's contributions are so invaluable he may as well be Prurient's second member. Niagara is Prurient's most developed record, not just for its length, but the attention to detail that Rizk provides.
Fernow's original intent for Niagara was to source all of the material acoustically, with no electronics at all. That would have been radical, even for him. Still, upon first listen, it is jarring to hear acoustic guitars, provided by Rizk and Fernow, in the beginning of "Greenpoint", Niagara's peak New York song. From there, it descends into throbs of darkness, but that's only part of the point of the song. While "Greenpoint" is about someone Fernow knew, when I read the lyrics my mind went to Oliver Sacks' New Yorker essay on monologist Spalding Gray's descent into irreversible depression that led to his suicide in 2004. Gray's thoughts of suicide always centered around drowning and his mother, whose own suicide figured heavily into his work, and it's eerie that "The East River isn't romantic anymore you know/ That's where the suicides go/ Or maybe that's what you want in the end/ To be mixed together and reunited with your mother" are almost as if they were about him. It's specific yet flexible, adding another layer of complexity as only Fernow can.
Like "Greenpoint", closer "Christ Among the Broken Glass" shows a side of Prurient that is sometimes overlooked: poignancy. It's also the closest thing to Fernow's original vision for Niagara, which makes it an even more appropriate ending. The sound of fire combines with the guitars, evoking a séance more than a campfire. Like "I Understand You", the closing track from JK Flesh and Prurient's Worship Is the Cleansing of the Imagination where fragile glimmers of serenity are eaten without mercy by squalling feedback, "Christ" reveals itself slowly. Niagara was recorded "in the spirit of homelessness," and Fernow's lyrics in "Christ" capture how winter brutalizes the homeless and how self-sacrifice can make one appear messianic, especially when that figure is among the afflicted themselves. The man, "Jesus of cities," becomes both more noble and more destitute with every verse—"Cobbling together syllables/ Over a frostbitten tongue/ Trying to remember the prayers"—though this isn't about pity, but about reality. Fernow's hushed vocals don't even come in until close to the end of the song, and they make his silent stalker tone on Window sound pronounced in comparison. Who knew that one of the least noisy Prurient songs would strike the deepest?
A double noise album is a lot to take in, and Prurient's never been about accessibility. He's also not about acceptable signifiers; he's bigger than noise. He offers an endless, probing self-exploration that simply isn't found in noise, metal, hardcore, power electronics, whatever harsh music you can think of. In that regard, Niagara is a landmark not just in Prurient's discography, but within extreme music. His few utterances in "Falling Mask" sum up the experience of the album, and of his body of work: "What we do/ We invite pain/ It's ok to be hungry/ Hunger is normal/ I'll meet you there." He knows Prurient isn't for everybody, and that's part of the appeal, but if you're not going to invite growth and reveal yourself, why bother?


This 2xCD cordons off the rockers from the acoustic tracks; Dave Grohl calls it his band's Physical Graffiti, and here he's at his most pensive, purposefully distanced from his all-American prankster persona.

In Your Honor

Having publicly declared In Your Honor, the Foo Fighters' fifth full-length since their start in 1995, the Physical Graffiti of the band's oeuvre-- hence, the Foos' definitive artistic statement-- frontman Dave Grohl understands the sudden need for gravity. Now he sings with his eyes closed-- earnest and calm, face pressed to the microphone, hair plastered to his forehead: the two-disc In Your Honor is Grohl at his most pensive, purposefully distanced from his all-American prankster persona, attempting to build a legacy that extends beyond the shadows of Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, past well-publicized star-turns in other people's bands. In Your Honor is Dave Grohl claiming ground.
Sadly, the record suffers from that largeness-- reportedly recorded in a warehouse, its double disc conceit (one half is hard rock, the other acoustic) is heavy handed, the segregation too deliberate. Grohl's "metal" voice periodically strains, like he's concentrating too hard on forefronting his emotional intensity; likewise, the softer tracks can sound stifled, like their proprietor is holding something back, curbing his urges for the sake of classification.
Disc One features loads of thundering guitars and manic drum breakdowns, classic Foo structures (brash verse, anthemic chorus) and aggressively contemplative lyrics. Single "Best of You" muses furiously about the frailty of the human heart, asking clunky questions ("Were you born to resist, or be abused?/ Is someone getting the best of you?"), Grohl's chest-screams barely seeping through his bandmates' soupy guitars. The song fades out where it should climax, bleeding into "DOA", a twisty, death-obsessed cut ("It's a shame we have to disappear/ No one's getting out of here/ Alive") with docile vocals (that almost sound as if they were snatched from another song.) Meanwhile, the 70s rock-infused "Resolve", a dynamic call for tenacity, is memorable-- but still weirdly reminiscent of nearly every Foo Fighters single ever shot to radio.
The big problem is that the Foo Fighters are telling the exact same story, over and over: heavy guitars, Grohl's bitter, self-directed hollers, loud drums, catchy choruses. At their best, the Foo Fighters are muscular and unrelenting, pushing in all the right spots-- but Disc One still confirms an undeniable stasis. Ten years have passed, and the band isn't evolving: This is where In Your Honor's big curveball-- the acoustic second disc-- attempts to make up for all the retreads.
It succeeds, to an extent. The bossanova-tinged "Virginia Moon" (which features guest vocals from Starbucks' own Norah Jones) proffers brushed cymbals, flamenco guitar, and tinkling piano bits-- it sounds more like a classic Norah Jones track than anything the Foos have ever recorded, but the band's sudden break in character is also intriguing: With its jazzy, coffee-table lyrics ("Sweetest invitation/ Breaking the day in two/ Feeling like I do/ Virginia moon, I wait for you tonight"), "Virginia Moon" allows Grohl to croon gently into the night sky, singing lullabies to an army of dudes driving home from their girlfriend's houses in their Honda Accords. Barely breaking a whisper, Jones and Grohl's respective vocals blend effortlessly; surprisingly, it's Jones who adds a bit of grit to the track, her grainy murmurs sneaking texture into Grohl's squeaky-clean pipes.
The docile "Miracle" features a cameo by Led Zeppelin's own John Paul Jones, although its gentle piano and sweet acoustic strums aren't terribly suggestive of sharp Zep bluster. "Cold Day in the Sun" sees drummer Taylor Hawkins assuming lead vocals, steering the Foo Fighters dangerously close to adult contemporary mush; "Friend of a Friend", a Nirvana-era Grohl original (supposedly written about his former bandmates) is eerily quiet, just strums and voice, Grohl's vocals controlled and determined, pushing his way through. That unwavering restraint provides one of the most emotionally honest moments on In Your Honor-- listen close, and you can almost hear Grohl's face going white.
In Your Honor, like most Foo Fighters records, is sterile and controlled; there is never any threat of dissolution. While Grohl's musicianship and charisma are certainly a credit to any project he participates in, he still lacks the volatility typically inherent to life-shaking art. Nirvana felt wobbly, fragile, and fleeting, Queens of the Stone Age pound deranged, Probot are full-on bananas: The Foo Fighters are strong, neat, and clean. So we wonder: Can a steady, hard-working everydude from northern Virginia make transcendent art? Sure. Does Dave Grohl? Sometimes.


The Dominican bachata king follows his chart-topping Golden with a celebration of the genre's rich history, lifting up his forebears and revealing his musical DNA.

Utopía

“Dominicano soy
De mis raíces yo no voy a olvidarme
Soy bachatero y lo llevo en la sangre”
Thus begins Utopía, the new album from Dominican-American bachata king Romeo Santos. The album’s intro reimagines the classic Fernando Villalona merengue cut, and paints a clear picture of what you’re about to get into: “I am Dominican/I’m not going to forget my roots/I am a bachatero/It’s in my blood.” The album it introduces is a veritable syllabus for the distinctly Dominican genre of bachata, a record full of collaborations between its biggest star of the present and the legends from its past.
Santos didn’t need to do this. On his last LP, Golden, he pushed bachata’s boundaries through collaborations with reggaetoneros like Nicky Jam, Daddy Yankee and Ozuna and urban radio mainstays Ne-Yo and Swizz Beatz. The result cracked the Top 10 on the Billboard 200 and dominated the Latin and Tropical charts, proving that the market for Spanish-language music was big enough to render the old crossover paradigm irrelevant. He is a massive, ground-shifting star—the Beyoncé of bachata. For his fourth LP, he could have done anything; that he chose to celebrate bachata’s rich history and lift up his forebears is nothing short of remarkable.
This undercurrent of humility runs through Utopía. Santos is inarguably the biggest star in bachata, but to get there he had to stand on the shoulders of others. Here, he gives all of them their due. The album features all four members of Santos’ group Aventura—in their prime, they were derisively been referred to as bachata’s N*SYNC, but their popularity helped raise the genre’s profile. There are appearances by the OGs Santos grew up listening to in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, legends like Antony "El Mayimbe" Santos. El Mayimbe is the godfather of bachata, credited with helping take it from the campo to the capital, bringing the music of the working class to the mainstream—in the Dominican Republic, at least. On “Bellas,” Santos’ collaboration with El Mayimbe, Santos takes a back seat to his elder on his own record. Santos’ generosity isn’t just symbolic: “Canalla,” his collaboration with El Chaval de la Bachata, is the bachata veteran’s first new song on the chart in more than a decade.
Of course, this is still Romeo’s album. While he shares the spotlight with other artists, the album is still filtered through his perspective. Each collaboration on Utopía is with an artist he grew up listening to, so you won’t find Prince Royce or any of his contemporaries here. This serves the album well—rather than try to squeeze the entire history of the genre into one 12-track LP, he instead explores his own musical DNA. The results are often stunning.
Each track is molded to match his collaborators. On the Raulín Rodriguez track “La Demanda,” his lyrics slyly reference some of Rodriguez’s best-loved hits. And while the Aventura reunion will garner most of the headlines, the most important collaboration on the album is arguably the reunion of Monchy y Alexandra, the male-female duo that broke up in 2008. Alexandra is the only woman on the record, and her contribution stands out for not only for its rarity but its heat and sensuality. It’s hard to understate the impact of a prominent female voice on a big bachata record—women are almost always the subject of these lamentations, but their perspectives are rarely heard.
Utopía’s sonic palette is somewhat traditional, with the requisite requinto lead guitar, segunda electric rhythm guitar, bass guitar, bongos, maracas and guiras. But he still lets his guitarist flex a bit, as on the blistering solo in the middle of “ileso.” If you think the songs sound the same—a common, if lazy, criticism of bachata—you’re not listening closely.
Lyrically, Utopía consists of lovesick anthems oozing with drama. The aesthetic is on full display on opening song “Canalla”: “Hoy voy a morir de un amargue / Y la asesina eres tú / Este masoquismo es rentable / Aunque me afecta la salud” he sings, or “Today I will die of bitterness /You’re the murderer /The masochism is profitable /But it affects my health.” Extra, for sure, pero soy Dominicano. “Maldito sentimiento,” Santos and Zacarias Ferreira sing on “Me Quedo,” lamenting their “damned feelings” like Drake drowning in his tears in VIP. How you feel about all of this depends on your tolerance for melodrama. But it’s inherently of bachata, and therefore, Dominican.
Santos is such an outsized star within his genre that his gravitational pull is strong enough to shape bachata with each new album. If Golden drew English-language stars into his orbit, getting them to cross over into Spanish language music (as opposed to the more common inverse) and introducing bachata’s profile to their audiences, Utopía is re-shaping the fabric of bachata spacetime, shining light on living legends and reuniting defunct-but-influential acts from its recent history. It’s a monumentally generous act, evidence of humility and star power that makes Romeo one of the most beloved Dominicans on the planet.


After two records of quiet, lonely, piano-only music, Spencer Krug returns to the guitars, bleeping synths, and pounding rhythms of his best-loved work.

My Best Human Face

After releasing two consecutive records of quiet, lonely piano-only music (2013’s Julia with Blue Jeans On and the 2014 City Wrecker EP), the Spencer Krug of guitars, of bleepy synthesizers and occasionally pounding rhythms is back. Earlier this year, his first famous act Wolf Parade announced that the band was reuniting, first with a secret show and then by dropping their first recording of new music in five years. And now he’s followed that development with the release of his latest effort under the Moonface name, the fully electrified My Best Human Face.
Considering that his last two records relied entirely on piano, Krug’s lyrics and his wearied moan—a nicely distinctive voice to be sure, but one with limited range and an ability to grate on overexposure—they turned out to be surprisingly strong, particularly the full-length Julia. Despite the limited instrumentation, on each he made great use of both depth-adding vocal overdubs and ruminative, carefully considered piano accompaniments showing not a rock musician playing songs but a trained pianist uncovering notes.
With My Best Human Face, however, Krug has returned to traditional keyboard-driven rock, and in offering a new electric version of the previous EP’s title-track ode to Montreal “City Wrecker,” he implicitly asks his listeners to assess the results. The original “City Wrecker” was emotional centerpiece of that release; looking back on Krug’s time spent in Montreal and his somewhat anguished decision to leave, it worked quite well in the cold and stark context of piano and voice. However, with Krug’s decision to repeat the track here he does himself a bit of a disservice, as his chosen ornamentation for it in a Twin Shadow-y imaginary-'80s slow burn removes some of the heft of the song and makes you speculate on the seriousness of its sentimentality in the first place.
Elsewhere, the rock contrivances work better. Lead single “Risto’s Riff” charges out of the gate with a pounding four-on-the-floor rhythm and sinewy guitar that carry Arcade Fire-style urgency. It's so immediate that you are compelled to shout along with the chorus even as you realize it hinges on the half-hilarious, half-ridiculous rallying cry “At least I'm not a photographer!” On “Ugly Flower Pretty Vase,” he marries a tight drum-and-bass rhythm to snappy, minimal Britt Daniel guitar. And “Them Call Themselves Old Punks” nails the cresting payoff that “City Wrecker” strived for.
Unfortunately, the brief seven-song album neither starts nor ends well, bookended by two dirges. Opener “The Nightclub Artiste” feels like a textbook example of when Krug takes too much time on a slow song going nowhere, putting too much emphasis on a voice that just isn’t dynamic enough. Plodding closer “The Queen of Both Darkness and Light” is even worse, sounding like exit music that plays over credits while an audience exits a theatre. The fact that it clocks in at a baffling seven minutes—the longest song on the record—makes it seem like Krug must be hearing something the rest of us are not.
Then there are Krug's way with lyrics, which can be as divisive as his voice. There’s no question he puts painstaking effort into telling stories rather than singing songs, but there are times when is choices are so off-putting it's hard not to do a double-take.  Take the aforementioned “At least I'm not a photographer” in “Risto’s Riff,” or the equally awkward “There’s nothing punk about that” refrain in “Them Call Themselves Old Punks.”  Both moments don't feel witty or unorthodox as they do just awkward, like chunky square pegs jammed into the round holes of standard rock songwriting.
When Krug sticks to his strengths—off-the-beaten-path keyboard-driven rock n’ roll, with taut, wiry tunes that match his voice and wry wit—he generally succeeds. But his tendency to slow it down and draw it out leads him to take risks that often don’t pay off. He hit a decent payday on Julia with Blue Jeans On, but already that formula delivered diminished returns on its successor City Wrecker EP. And here now on his electric return, even less so.


The Smashing Pumpkins' fourth album is the latest to get the lavish reissue treatment, with five discs of bonus material. With Adore, Billy Corgan made an album nearly as diverse, sprawling, and confounding as Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which was the exact opposite of what he set out to do.

Adore

Here we have the little, lovesick album where the caged rat sings and alienates Smashing Pumpkins fans by the millions—you know, the one that’s 73 minutes long and whose first single begins with the lyric, “It’s you that I adore/ You’ll always be my whore.” The one that’s called "underrated" so often that, by definition, it can’t actually be true. It’s also the one that should be held in highest regard by indie musicians—it features a highly stylized gothic cover, lacks anything resembling an Almighty Riff, features drum programming from a guy from Nitzer Ebb, and shares a producer with Exile in Guyville. And yet, Billy Corgan made an album nearly as diverse, sprawling, confounding and compelling as the diamond-selling, massively influential prog-pop masterwork Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness—which was the exact opposite of what he set out to do with Adore.
The tortuous dualities that inspired Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie—most notably, grandiose ego and bottomless self-loathing—were clearly encoded in their titles, but these qualities are harder to spot here. The title would be read for its amorous overtones and an allusion to Prince’s own intimate, lovesick record, when it’s actually a homophone for “a door”—as in, a way out. So the main tension here is between the album Corgan was compelled to make and the one he felt Smashing Pumpkins were compelled to make.
Billy Corgan is Smashing Pumpkins—it’s hard to remember the last time anyone had illusions otherwise—but the two are not synonymous. The even-numbered Pumpkins LPs in the project's discography tend to be autobiographical, and opener “To Sheila” is Corgan talking directly to the listener as someone who just experienced the loss of his mother, his marriage, and his “musical soul mate” after firing drummer Jimmy Chamberlin. During the Mellon Collie tour, keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin died of a heroin overdose in a hotel room with the drummer; from most accounts, due to his struggles with addiction, it could’ve just as easily have been Chamberlin. There have been Smashing Pumpkins songs like this one before—spare and acoustic, Corgan’s unmistakable soft-palate vocals high in the mix, proving he could actually write poetic lyrics rather than diary simulacra. “To Sheila” is a salvo in its own way, albeit one whose tone isn’t sustained throughout Adore.
Somewhere deep within the five bonus discs of material is a live version of “For Sheila” where the banjo is inaudible amidst orgiastic crowd noise that negates the opening lyric,“Twilight fades on blistered Avalon.” And it’s there you sense that Corgan may have had that Dark Knight feeling where he wanted to streamline his operation, but not by that much. He empathized with Batman while recording “The End is the Beginning is the End” for that franchise’s very own MACHINA/The Machines of God (Batman & Robin), and why not—we’re talking about a guy driven by childhood trauma and lifelong grudges, with no real superpowers outside of his alter ego and available weaponry. Corgan always took his fans into consideration, and that crowd noise may have talked him out of his Nebraska; how could he go there when Smashing Pumpkins were his sole means of smiting enemies both real and imagined?
But 1998 was a strange and unstable time for alt-rock superheroes—as hard as it is to picture in 2014, the record industry literally had more money than they knew what to do with, but the big names of years past were finding themselves crowded out by rap-metal, post-Disney pop, and hip-hop. That much hasn’t changed, and on the other side—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—a critic-instigated push for electronic musicians as the new rock stars forced actual rock stars to pay lip service to the obsolescence of guitars (more so than* OK Computer did*). And that’s how you got, amongst many others, Nine Inch Nails’ baroque, Debussy-quoting double-album The Fragile, Marilyn Manson going glam, Chris Cornell and Scott Weiland making neo-psychedelic solo records, and the closest analog to Adore, R.E.M.’s Up, which is also way too long, missing their original drummer, and has a rightfully loathed electro-rock single.
This is how we likely ended up with “Ava Adore”, the closest thing to a “rock” song that still honored Corgan’s ambitions—there are discernible chords, a braying chorus, and a guitar solo (albeit one that only lasts four bars). But “Ava Adore” didn’t build on the promise of “The End is the Beginning is the End” or “Eye”; rubbing elbows with Bon Harris must’ve convinced Billy Corgan that he got a little closer to Trent Reznor vibe-wise, though most people who related to Smashing Pumpkins don’t do “menacing” or “sexy”. Corgan doesn’t either—the song never gets as bad as its first lyric, but the video is the least sexy “sexy” alt-rock clip next to “Lakini’s Juice”. It somehow holds up less than the unearthed “Puff Daddy Remix”, which unsurprisingly sounds like the two never once spent time in the same room. (I mean, Corgan couldn’t handle the egos of James Iha and D’arcy, imagine how we would've gotten on with post-No Way OutPuffy.) Nevertheless, the remix sounds like it could’ve fit next to that “Kashmir” reboot on the Godzilla soundtrack and while I’m not sure if that means it’s any good, it does mean it achieved exactly what it set out to do.
Adore’s commercial fate may have been sealed anyway—perhaps it was a sign of the times that a band whose last record sold 10 million debuted at #2 right behind MP Da Last Don, which could be considered Master P’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. But “Ava Adore” was a bad stumble at a time when the Pumpkins could ill afford one, and while the luminous follow-up “Perfect” was a logical extension of “1979”, the Pumpkins overplayed their hand—the video is literally a sequel, albeit with John Mellencamp’s bald drummer and Corgan wearing a cowboy hat. It was a negation of a bold rebrand that flopped and rather than a correction that set Adore right, it felt needy, if not somewhat desperate—this tendency got worse, never better, as Smashing Pumpkins proceeded.
However, “Perfect” is how most people who love the record choose to remember Adore, working within the polarity established by its opening duo and revealing that Corgan had his next move already figured out two years prior. The aforementioned door had already been blown open by “1979”, as Smashing Pumpkins learned to use guitar without being reliant on it—a pristine acoustic demo recording of “Perfect” shows how it could’ve fit on any Smashing Pumpkins record or even Zwan’s. On Adore, guitars are distorted, but not with distortion, instead given blushing effects that complement the more subtle emotional palette. Ornate chamber ballads were relegated to the "experimental" final quarter of Mellon Collie, whereas hearbtreaking sob stories “Once Upon a Time” and “Crestfallen” have come to define Adore's character. Moreover, “1979” (and really, everything after “X.Y.U.”) unintentionally prepared Corgan for life without Jimmy Chamberlin—compare “Perfect”’s stone-skipping pace or the lush, sultry “Appels & Oranjes” and “Daphne Descends” to Chamberlin’s pummeling heavy metal funk on MACHINA’s “Raindrops and Sunshowers”.
With a light touch and a heavy heart, Corgan expands his range and alchemical abilities beyond classic and symphonic rock of the 1970s; trip-hop’s hermeticism is infiltrated by a sunlit chorus on “Pug”, while 8-bit percussion gives way to a silvery Fleetwood Mac pop ballad (“The Tale of Dusty and Pistol Pete”) that now appears to be 15 years ahead of its time.Even the requisite eight-minute guitar epic isn’t really a guitar epic—“For Martha” is a tender tribute to his mother that builds from a simple piano line to an even simpler guitar solo bearing a similar tone to the one Corgan’s father lent to The Aeroplane Flies High cut “The Last Song”. Centerpiece “Tear” finds room for minimalist electro-pop, clattering Zep-sized drums, and J.G. Ballard’s Crash, foreshadowing M83’s Before the Dawn Heals Us, a record from one of the Smashing Pumpkins’ most outspoken and famous fans.
Of course, none of the above changes the simple fact that Adore is 73 minutes long—reissuing it with five bonus discs, which includes a version recorded in mono, certainly doesn't either. It’s been in regular rotation for me over the past 15 years and when I listened to Adore in its entirety for the purposes of this piece, it dawned on me how long it’s been since I had done that. I’m hesitant to call songs like “Annie-Dog” and “Blank Page” “filler” even though they’re rough, indistinct sketches filled with insular lyrics. They’re almost certainly meaningful songs to somebody. But they both arrive as comedowns on a record that certainly didn’t lack for them. It’s where Corgan wins out over Smashing Pumpkins, a show of generosity when concision would have made for a stronger record.
The duality of Adore is best demonstrated in an oft-quoted line from a 1998 MTV interview: “I’m not talking to teenagers anymore.” It can be seen as a cynical, preemptive strike in retrospect, Corgan realizing Adore wasn’t going to achieve the widespread commercial success of Mellon Collieand shifting the blame. But this is a guy who so convincingly sang the words, “Time makes you bolder/ Even children get older/ And I’m getting older too” as if they were his own. There was likely a recognition that Smashing Pumpkins fans who’ve been there since the beginning were becoming adults now, and yeah, I graduated from high school two weeks after Adore dropped, though I’m sure I truly believed that having my emotional tumult soundtrack by Smashing Pumpkins entitled me to feeling like an old soul.
Either way, Corgan once belted “I’m all by myself/ As I’ve always felt”, and previous Pumpkins records offered empathy towards fellow isolators in their preferred quarantine, whether it was in the clouds (Gish), your past (Siamese Dream), or your room (Mellon Collie). Without being overt about it, as much as this record was meant to provide “a door” for Smashing Pumpkins’ music, it was an emotional portal as well, to perhaps get outside yourself to risk loving something or someone. And that can be scary—Mellon Collie spoke to hyperbolic and yet safe associations developed in one’s teen years, offering, “Love solves everything” and “Love is suicide.” Love is a lot of things on the feedback-stained long walk home of “Shame”—it’s good, it’s kind, it’s drunk, it’s blind. But Corgan gives his first piece of grown man talk about how it always ends—“You’re gonna walk alone/ You're gonna see this through/ Don't let them get to you." Delivered in a warm register but a discomforting tone, it reveals the other unifying theme of Adore: moving on in the face of loss, of friends, of family, and of the Smashing Pumpkins.


Blur frontman Damon Albarn's last 15 years have included film soundtracks, operas, and collaborative projects including Gorillaz and The Good, the Bad, & the Queen. Everyday Robots is his first proper song-based solo album.

Everyday Robots

Blur singer Damon Albarn has had 20 years of practice perfecting a certain kind of song. It’s a sad song but comfortable in its sadness, the kind of song that might make might you stop in a crowded bar and remember that even beautiful things come to an end. It is grand, but rumpled and a little isolated, too. It has quieter places to be. For someone who has performed in front of a crowd of 200,000 people, Damon Albarn never seems to be far from his next nap.
Blur has been on and off hiatus since 2003. Since then, Albarn has made 12 albums, including four with the downturned pop collage project Gorillaz, who came on like an afterthought and ended up selling millions of records anyway. He has co-written two film soundtracks and two operas. He has collaborated with folk musicians in Mali and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and with the rigorously buttoned-up English composer Michael Nyman. He has also partnered in a label called Honest Jon’s that specializes in curiosities like London is the Place for Me, a four-volume set of Calypso, jazz, and highlife. He is your dog-eared friend who never seems to be doing much and yet gets more done than anyone.
All the Albarns appear on Everyday Robots. It is sleepy music, with the looseness of reggae and the bittersweet grace of gospel and soul. It connects the globetrotting Albarn to the fashionably moody one who sang Blur songs like "Badhead" and "This Is a Low" and "Tender", without Blur’s reluctant grandeur. Most of its songs are anchored by drum-machine heartbeats down low and plinking acoustic sounds up top, with a big warm hole in the middle. (Robots was produced by both Albarn and XL Recordings owner Richard Russell, who Albarn has previously worked with on Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here and Bobby Womack's The Bravest Man in the Universe, albums with a similarly old-soul quality.)
Albarn is famous whether he cares about fame or not, but has tended to set his own name to the side. Robots is actually the first time an album has been credited to Damon Albarn and Damon Albarn alone. There he is on the cover, sitting in the middle of an indefinite gray space, hanging his head and smirking at some private joke, the boy who refuses to look at the camera even when it’s time for his close up.
Robots relishes in alienation, and specifically in the way technology facilitates it. Cultural concerns like this are important but can feel pedantic when turned into art. Parts of Robots—the lyrics of “Lonely Press Play” and the title track, for example—are obvious statements made in obvious ways, right-on but one-dimensional, melancholy rendered melancholically.
More interesting is when Albarn manages to graze the side of his subject matter in a way that knocks it into place. Robots starts with a sample from the British comedian Lord Buckley talking about the explorer Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca: “They didn’t know where they was goin’ but they knew where they was wasn’t it.” Removed from its literal context the line becomes a comment about society writ large. “Mr. Tembo”, a sweet, upbeat song Albarn originally sang for a baby elephant he met in Tanzania, keeps returning to the refrain, “It’s where he is now but it wasn’t what he planned”—a reminder that unfortunate circumstances are less important than how you deal with them. The album’s best songs, “Photographs (You Are Taking Now)” and “You and Me”, mention Albarn’s hot-button topics but set them to the side, frames about other kinds of stories more than the stories themselves.
Albarn has often been compared to English writers like Ray Davies but has always seemed more like Paul Simon, a heavy-hearted and moody person who nevertheless manages to bring a room together. A lot of pressure rests on an album like this but it would seem out of character for him to rise to it. Robots is decidedly lowercase music, more a piece of his puzzle than a picture on its own.


On her seventh album, Taylor Swift is a little wiser and a lot more in love. Though uneven, Lover is a bright, fun album with great emotional honesty.

Lover

The theme of Taylor Swift’s Lover is right there in the title. These 18 songs are odes to the things she loves most and knows best: her boyfriend and her mom, the West Village and the West End, and, always and forever on a Taylor Swift album, being in love. It’s an exuberant celebration of the challenges of maintaining a relationship through seasons and across continents, of telling the truth and saying sorry. Swift has always mined her personal life for opaque fables of love and retribution; she memorializes a romance’s fleeting details, wraps them in bows, and ferries them to an audience eager to receive her gifts. She writes about a life that’s strengthened, not broken, by heartbreak. Lover is the suggestion that the right person, the right song, might lift heartbreak from your life, too. The concept is, as she claims early on, both “overdramatic and true.”
Lover nods to 2017’s Reputation, but, in spirit, it’s the sequel to the synth-pop glitter of 1989. Produced mostly with ubiquitous pop whisperer Jack Antonoff, it’s full of low-lying synthesizer pulses and reverbed beats that can feel more like scaffolding than full songs. Sometimes it attempts to honor Swift’s entire artistic journey at once: The waltzing “Lover,” full of fiddle and fairytale weddings, harks back to the Old Taylor; “I Think He Knows” is a thumping electro-pop shout-out to Nashville’s Music Row. She uses the word “shade” twice, up from once on Reputation. She’s 29, but she still writes metaphors about prom dresses and homecoming queens. It’s bright and fun and occasionally cloying.
Lover’s emotional peaks and valleys are higher and deeper than reputation, where romance played out under a long shadow of doubt. Opener “I Forgot That You Existed” is a hopscotch rhythm set to a rhyme like you’d leave in your nemesis’ yearbook if you were really being honest—which is to say, it doesn’t sound like she forgot for one second. It comes off as throat-clearing, but it opens a stretch of drama-free delights, like the magnetic pink glow of “Cruel Summer” (“I don’t want to keep secrets just to keep you!”) and the crystal-ball clarity of “The Archer,” with its elegant, Chromatics-esque synthesizer build and self-aware regret: “I cut off my nose just to spite my face/And I hate my reflection for years and years.” The exception is undercooked gender-equality anthem “The Man,” a song that hilariously, unironically points to Leonardo DiCaprio’s playboy image as the height of masculine privilege, and proves that other people shouldn’t write Kesha songs.
Is it the prickly cotton-candy production or the lyrical detail or the vocal echo or just the event album–ness of it all that keeps Lover in the foreground, song after song? With the possible exception of the steel drums on music-box oddball “It’s Nice to Have a Friend,” the album never claims any new ground; some of its best moments are unavoidably familiar. Rihanna or Robyn might intend their new music to sound entirely fresh; Swift, our most conventional pop star, builds atop what has worked already. And with Antonoff behind so much of the sound of pop music in the latter half of the decade, the bold, ’80s-inspired style isn’t inherently more interesting or varied than any other. “I Think He Knows” sounds like Carly Rae Jepsen; “The Archer” sounds like Lorde’s “Supercut”; “Miss Americana & the Heartbreak Prince,” actually a Joel Little joint, sounds like Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die.
Swift and her collaborators try some real doozies: Pop-punk marriage proposal “Paper Rings” has a key change borrowed from the Shangri-Las and more than a little acoustic guitar in the mix. It’s cute, and then exhausting. The perky, England-themed “London Boy” begins sweetly—“I saw the dimples first and then I heard the accent”—but devolves into a parade of rugby and high tea and “I fancy you”s, a love song as predictable as one of Mary-Kate and Ashley’s direct-to-video European adventures. She samples Idris Elba joking about taking James Corden on a scooter ride, apropos of nothing except that he says “London.” I can only imagine what it sounds like to a Brit.
“London Boy” is relentlessly upbeat, but the next mood swing will knock you sideways: It’s “Soon You’ll Get Better,” a heartrending ballad about Swift’s mother’s ongoing cancer battle, with background harmonies by the Dixie Chicks. Three minutes later, her tender testimony of new faith is outshined by the terrific “False God,” a moody sophistipop meditation on transatlantic romance where worship (“Religion’s in your lips… the altar is my hips”) sounds more like a metaphor for… oral sex? On a Taylor Swift album? Am I losing my mind? Then “You Need to Calm Down” crashes in to remind us that she also considers making nice with Katy Perry to be a form of activism.
Because Swift is better when she’s learning than when she’s trying to teach us a lesson, Lover’s garish lead singles contribute to the strain. I’ve thought about “Me!” every day for four months; it still sounds like a musical number taken out of context, just unearned celebratory fanfare without plot or character development, so dead-eyed it’s spooky. But she’s better when she gives herself real space to think, as on “Cornelia Street,” a lovely, understated tribute to memory and nostalgia with the power to make one rarefied block of Manhattan feel universal.
Like Red or Speak Now, Lover is a sprawling scrapbook of invisible personal bookmarks, an escapist fantasy about a real-life celebrity boyfriend, a shrewd self-mythology disguised as a benevolent offering. It’s probably five bad songs away from being better than 1989. It’s also a little wiser and more emotionally honest. “I once believed love would be black and white… I once believed love would be burning red/But it’s golden,” she sings on dreamy pastel closer “Daylight,” replacing the fiery passion of Red with a gentler, more mature understanding of true love as a good idea you don’t want to stop having. Heartbreak can strengthen you; love sustains you. If only all of Lover had the same heart.


Bill Fay’s 2012 LP Life Is People, his first proper record in more than 40 years, felt like a spectacle. Who Is the Sender? finds Fay coming down from that high, frustrated by humanity and praying that some force bigger than a singer behind a piano will someday intervene.

Who Is the Sender?

Of course Life Is People, Bill Fay’s 2012 LP, felt like a spectacle: It was his first proper record in more than 40 years. At the start of the '70s, the Englishman released two imaginative, mystifying folk-rock albums that were critically lauded but commercially stillborn. After low sales prompted his label dismissal, Fay decided not to press the issue. He retired to private life, started a family and recorded new tunes only for his own fulfillment.
Still, his reputation steadily spread among singer-songwriter literati, and those early albums became collector’s items. Reissues followed, along with a plea from the young American producer Joshua Henry: Make another record with me. On the resulting 12 songs, choirs emboldened Fay’s humble mantras about self-fulfillment, miniature orchestras afforded his modest folk songs symphonic splendor, and Jeff Tweedy traded verses and shared choruses with one of his idols. Fay seemed like a singer who’d returned to reclaim the due he’d missed for an entire generation. Life Is People was his triumph over time.
But the new and muted Who Is the Sender? finds Fay coming down from that high. He expresses frustration and consternation with the world, its wars and persecutions, and prays that some force bigger than a singer behind a piano will someday repair it all. Fay sighs as much as he sings here. The once-soaring strings turn doleful, and harmonies that felt like life-affirming proclamations just three years ago now seem like cries for survival. The album’s only celebrity guest, Spiritualized leader J. Spaceman, is relegated to near-anonymous background harmonies. Fay’s transition suggests a radically time-collapsed echo of Bob Dylan’s career between the early '80s and the late '90s, as he moved from religious exaltation to end-times anxiety.
"What on earth is happening? What have we done?" Fay mutters over a somber piano stomp during "Underneath the Sun". The song is an observation in two parts: Fay first finds wonder in the nature around him, where trees climb skyward and squirrels scavenge for their refuse. When his gaze turns to people, though, he sees only the threat of bullets and bombs and the suspicion that society will ruin everything around it. That same resentment creeps into "War Machine", a smoldering excoriation of humanity’s animal instinct to kill by funding an army it doesn’t question. And the beautiful ballad "The Freedom to Read" tells the tale of the court-ordered immolation of a 16th-century Protestant labeled a heretic for translating the Bible into English. It’s as if, three years after promising universal redemption on "The Healing Day" or exploring the magic of miracles on "Cosmic Concerto", Fay has accepted that his songs have yet to make the world any less bitter or more benevolent.
But Who Is the Sender? runs deeper than blind kvetching: Fay’s Christianity, and his cautious optimism in its power, uplifts him. The gently rising "Order of the Day" treats the Book of Revelation like a balm. The banjo-backed "Bring It on Lord" is a prayer for peace and healing. Perhaps all this sounds off-putting and naïve, but on Who Is the Sender?, Fay emerges as the rare religious songwriter who talks about his God without imploring the audience to make it their God, too. His beliefs seem too personal for him to proselytize on their behalf, too wrapped up in his survival for him to justify them. On "Something Else Ahead", he even confesses that his doubts about religion have never really vanished but that maintaining his faith is his tool of perseverance. "Let’s just hope there’s something else ahead," he sings sweetly above circling strings, "that a life on Earth don’t just end."
That sentiment resonates with the resurrection of Fay’s interrupted career. Who Is the Sender? effectively doubles his recorded output and moves him from the category of a curiosity who returned after a four-decade absence to make a third great album to someone perhaps capable of doing so in perpetuity. But Fay seems to have few regrets about the way things went, a question he addresses during the opener "The Geese Are Flying Westward". He follows the avian migration and wonders if he should have ventured far from home, too, if he would have been happier had he pursued his musical aspirations. But he concludes he’s grateful for the seasons and years he’s witnessed at home, the place that’s made the perspective of his late-life albums so very poignant.


The Philadelphia rapper’s first project out of prison is a quick and powerful Meek sampler: the bustling street anthem, the croon-assisted sex jam, the tortured flashback.

Legends of the Summer EP

For 171 days, from November 2017 to April 2018, Meek Mill was detained at Pennsylvania’s Graterford Correctional Facility because the NYPD saw an Instagram video of the Philly rapper doing wheelies through Manhattan on a dirt bike. The probation violation stemmed from 2007 charges for drug dealing and weapons possession that have forced Meek to spend nearly all of his adult life under the eye of law enforcement. Meek would be the first to admit he isn’t blameless in his situation, but every mistake he made in his 20s—from failing to report his travel plans to getting in a fight at a St. Louis airport—was compounded by trying to survive in the streets at 19. He’s 30 now.
This dirt bike infraction, seen by many as a miscarriage of justice, rallied many to his cause. He was visited in prison by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and the Reverend Al Sharpton. Allies popped up from all corners to voice their support: from his Roc Nation boss JAY-Z and frenemy turned rival Drake to Olympic athletes and the governor of Pennsylvania. At this year’s Super Bowl, the Philadelphia Eagles took the field to Meek’s “Dreams and Nightmares” intro—they won the game. With public support behind him, his two-to-four-year sentence was overturned by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, after a series of appeals. On his first day out, he attended a Philadelphia 76ers playoff game. Most of these extravagances have only been afforded Meek because he’s a prosperous celebrity rapper. He has become an inadvertent and unlikely paragon for criminal justice reform, specifically in sentencing and police conduct, and yet he is still an outlier: It’s hard to imagine that Meek Mill would be free today if he wasn’t Meek Mill.
But true freedom is the right to be autonomous, the ability to live without oversight. “I don’t feel free. I ain’t feel free since I caught this case at the age of 19,” he told NBC’s Lester Holt in a “Dateline” special in April. It’s a sentiment echoed by “Millidelphia,” from his first post-prison release, Legends of the Summer: “They was screaming ‘Free Meek!’/Now Meek free, judge tryna hold me,” he raps exasperatedly about being denied a new trial for the 2007 conviction keeping him on probation. There’s an anxiety carried in these songs—as with the best Meek songs—like he doesn’t know how much time he has left on the outside. This new four-song EP plays like a Meek sampler: the bustling street anthem, the croon-assisted sex jam, the tortured flashback. And while there are plenty of face-offs with judges, it finds him largely celebrating a life out of the box in search of freedom, if not exoneration.
For 2017’s Wins and Losses, Meek Mill redrew the lines for victory and defeat after his ill-fated battle with Drake, explaining that being outmaneuvered by a rap rival means little in the face of time served. That appraisal seems prescient now. The complete 180 from more mercurial fans who went from writing him off to demanding his release means he has more goodwill behind him now than ever. He capitalizes by returning to the same punchy tactics that have made him a great rapper for nearly a decade. “Who came and tripled his worth? Meek/Who shall inherit the Earth? Meek,” he shouts on the “Millidelphia.” Reuniting with longtime collaborator Jahlil Beats (the man behind hits like “Ima Boss,” “Amen,” and “Burn”) on “1am,” he luxuriates in life on the late-night circuits: V.I.P. for all the P.Y.T.s/Puffy up in the session, we doing B.I.G.s/I’m notorious just for sportin’ these Givenchys.” These aren’t quite his most engrossing or impactful songs, but they are among his most energizing.
He has never quite foregrounded his experiences with prison culture the way he does with Miguel on “Stay Woke.” The song is topical, but it’s also a soul-bearing chronicle of a life spent in the revolving door of the justice system, an introspective look that uses the turmoil of his own experience as a lens through which to consider systematic imbalances. “It’s amazin’ this environment we was raised in/On them papers, one mistake and I’m gettin’ caged in,” he raps. “You gotta feel me, feel like the system tryna kill me/Got arrested and the charges F1 for popping wheelies, stay woke.”
For all the EP’s chest-thumping, hate-me-now confidence, “Stay Woke” is Legends of the Summer’s beating heart. It is one of Meek’s best songs, well-written and well-rapped, performed as if in search of solace. With great aplomb and self-consciousness, he relives his waking nightmare with clear-eyes, takes stock of the young rappers making the same mistakes he did, takes on a racist judiciary, and asks more of his community. “How can I pledge allegiance to the flag/When they killin’ all our sons, all our dads?” he asks, before weighing the role the streets play in perpetuating this disparity: “I come from a place when you kill your own brother you can brag/Like he got bodies, but that’s a fad, no, that’s a fact.” Meek’s now a powerful symbol for the many ways our broken government over-penalizes those it disenfranchises. Even when faced with these insurmountable odds, the Philly rapper refuses to be defeated, delivering his verdict: “That’s impossible ’cause I’m unstoppable.” His conviction feels freeing.


On his debut album, the Atlanta rapper/singer makes his strongest case yet that he is one of the foremost sources of rap that's as peculiar as it is pop. He also miraculously shows that it's still possible for Auto-Tune to be an interesting artistic tool.

Pluto

Rap has its eccentrics, and it has its pop stars, but as the genre has been pushed further and further out of the mainstream, it seems to have little room for artists that split the difference. Never has the phenomenon been more clear than on Nicki Minaj's Roman Reloaded, one of the most anticipated albums of the year from the genre's premier eccentric, but one that has such a clear delineation between out-there rap and bloodless pop conformity that it might as well ask you for your passport halfway through. Atlanta rapper/singer Future, a Dungeon Family blood relative who'd be as at home on "The Voice" as Cee-Lo, has made it his aim to bridge that gap, and with Pluto, his debut album, he makes his strongest case yet that he is one of the foremost sources of rap that's as peculiar as it is pop.
Future's lineage is easy to follow, and the forebears of Pluto are pop stars that are (or were) divisive weirdos. His music pulls heavily from Lil Wayne's syrup-soaked ballads, T-Pain's robotic rapping turned singing, and Akon's illusions of stadium grandeur, but Pluto is far more familiar than it is formulaic. Future's ability to orbit those influences instead of cynically mining them means that his debut is much more an extension of those artists' groundwork than it is a monument built using their blueprints. Where T-Pain gave up rapping for singing or Wayne ping-ponged from one to the other (sometimes within the same song), Future turns the art of singing and rapping at the same time into a science. He also miraculously shows that it's still possible for Auto-Tune to be an interesting artistic tool.
It's the latter that is Future's calling card, and it's what his singularity more or less hinges on. Before it was hijacked by T-Pain, Auto-Tune was initially used to paper over deficiencies in a singer's performance, but on Pluto, Future finds a multitude of ways for the software to accentuate and color emotion. On "Tony Montana", his breakout solo hit that is the album's most threatening-- though also its goofiest-- cut, he cuts the buzz of Auto-Tune by rapping with a slight hoarseness in his voice, and it allows the song to be as weary and paranoid as it is chilling. Then there are tracks like "Truth Gonna Hurt You" and "Neva End", a break up song and love song respectively where Future lets his voice crack and deteriorate. The former is a lament that Future sings with a hint of cheeriness, but the treatment of his voice imbues the song with an unmistakable heartsickness. On the latter he reinforces the strength of a relationship in the face of turmoil, and his raspy singing is the perfect punctuation, making it seem like he recorded the song immediately after an hour-long screaming match. His voice is never perfect, but that's explicitly the point.
This push-pull between computerized precision and soul-baring imperfection has been explored before by other artists. So has Future's use of Auto-Tune as a license to affect street-true hardness while still writing an album that would be plied by "American Idol" contestants in an alternate universe where Atlanta swag rap was the biggest music in the country. But arguably no one has explored those contradictions so thoroughly and seamlessly across an entire album, at least since 808s & Heartbreak. It shouldn't necessarily come as a surprise either, as Future is a much smarter artist than his music would indicate at first blush. Take "You Deserve It", a song about himself that he sings to himself that hilariously comes directly after the stunner about his dream girl ("Turn on the Lights"), or "Long Live the Pimp", a Pimp C tribute that eschews the sounds of Texas in favor of being an especially banging Future song.
The result is what may end up being the most singular rap album to hit Billboard in 2012. Future may soon flame out, but his current status as rap royalty is one of the best things in recent memory to happen to a genre that has almost wholly succumbed to sucking the singularity out of its nascent pop stars. Pluto is Future's album and no one else's, and though it will sound instantly recognizable, his personality, voice, and skewed take on pop-rap make it instantly different. No Stargate beats necessary.


This shadowy UK outfit brings the ominous, hazy electro-dub and never gives too much away.

One Nation

Hype Williams are, ostensibly, a London-based duo comprised of one Inga Copeland and one Roy Blunt. Except Inga's name might be Karen Glass, and Roy Blunt may actually be Roy Nnawuchi. It's possible neither exists; some have suggested Hype Williams may in fact be a much larger collective, while others have offered the name Denna Frances Glass as a potential culprit. When they perform live, they don elaborate masks, and are notoriously-- albeit understandably-- interview-averse. The vinyl version of One Nation, their latest, is a white record, tucked into a plain white sleeve in a glossy white cover. Even their name, Hype Williams, seems less an SEO-piggybacking attempt at easy nostalgia points than a pun on the very idea of "hype." There's an intentional blankness and an almost post-punky spirit of deconstruction to Hype Williams' image that does well by their stark music, a spacious, hazy, hip-hop-influenced electronic dub.
As you'd imagine, Hype Williams don't exactly provide credits for One Nation, but they do take the time to shout out a couple of special guests: MDMA and blueberry kush. Despite a certain stoney splay, there's a weird solemnity to One Nation that belies the presence of these mood enhancers, an unsettling ominousness even in its floatier moments. Snatches of smeary g-funk, synth-pop, and monster-movie soundtracks sneak into the mix, but One Nation is sparse throughout, with most tracks consisting of little more than a beat and a bit of queasy synth. There are few vocals, fewer hooks; it's not quite ambient enough to slip completely into the background, but nothing's quite fleshed enough to demand full attention, and you're better off losing yourself in the drift of One Nation in total than attempting to settle on a highlight. In their rare interviews, Hype Williams have done what they can to distance themselves from this kind of half-there hypnagogy, and their aloofness sets them apart from much of the bedroom-borne haze of late. Melodies don't just waft, they meander, beats shuffle into unlikely grooves, and any hints of prettiness are suffused with a looming dread.
But there's an intentionality to every gesture on One Nation. Even when the melodies threaten to lose their shape, they seem to bend just so, and the notes they're not playing seem every bit as important as the few they do. The negative space envelops like a fog; whoever's making this music has a producer's ear and editor's spirit, excising all unnecessary details while embellishing what little's left. At its best, One Nation sounds like a beat tape left to crackle for a decade in somebody's garage, a kind of post-Chronic spin on one of those far-out late 70s dub-inflected collaborative krautrock LPs. But other times it feels like a series of conceptual curios that seems to think holding the listener at arm's length might even be too close.


The second solo album from former Grandaddy frontman Jason Lytle begins much like his first, with a veiled statement about the state of his career, and ends with the kind of mock-epic album closer he does so well. But in between, Dept. contains frequently bracing explorations of the unexpected.

Dept. of Disappearance

Jason Lytle's second solo album begins much like his first solo album, with a veiled statement about the state of his career. On the title track of 2009's Yours Truly, the Commuter, he claims he was left for dead: "I could give two shits about what they said/ I may be limping, but I'm coming home." At the time it sounded like he was still bristling over the breakup of Grandaddy, the Modesto-based band that soundtracked Lytle's weird tales of space miners and lovelorn robots. The lines were vague enough, however, that you could appreciate the renewed sense of mission without getting caught up in any potential intraband politics. On "Department of Disappearance", which likewise opens and sets the tone for an album of the same name, Lytle explains, "I'll crawl into the mountains, I'll fall into obscurity/ A phantom on the landscape, a memory of what used to be." Is this an ultimatum of some sort? And is the titular institution really a secret society of veteran musicians from the 1990s, still tooling around years after their breakthrough albums and playing to dwindling audiences of aging fans? If Yours Truly announced Lytle's return, Department of Disappearance sounds like a musician embracing obscurity as perhaps the natural outcome of a career whose chief subject has been emotional, mechanical, and ecological entropy.
There's nothing worse than an artist waxing bitter about his career, and to his credit Lytle doesn't sound self-pitying or entitled to more than his current lot. But Department of Disappearance does sound strangely complacent and monochromatic, offering no twists on the technorganic aesthetic he's been plying since Grandaddy were still a bedroom act. The album toggles between the mountains of Europe and the badlands of the American West, as Lytle indulges a bit of emotional mountaineering on "Last Problem of the Alps" and "Matterhorn". Geographically, this is new terrain for him, but musically Lytle is walking in his own footprints. He's climbed similar hills before, both with Grandaddy and as a solo artist. Once again he fashions widescreen panoramas out of instruments seemingly ill suited for the job: chintzy synths evoking Bierstadt landscapes, grotty guitars tracing the country's inexorable westward progress, saccharine strings coloring in complex feelings.
This is, of course, Lytle's thing. And it's a good thing. He's done what few artists possess the vision or the tools to accomplish: He has devised a new combination of styles and instruments into a sound that is immediately recognizable as Lytleputian, and perhaps more impressively he has fashioned a unique perspective from which to write about himself and the world-- specifically America in all its mythic strangeness. Last year's reissue of Grandaddy's second album, The Sophtware Slump, reminded us how vibrant and weird that voice could be, and Department of Disappearance has the distinct disadvantage of following up that release, which provides an unflattering point of comparison for familiar, almost boilerplate songs like "Somewhere There's a Someone" and "Hangtown". If once he imagined a new world defined by millennial fears and technological detritus, on "Willow Wand Willow Wand" and "Get Up and Go" the naivety sounds forced, the sense of whimsy merely workmanlike.
For every valley, however, there is a peak. "Young Saints" sets an uneasy tone with its creeping vocal melody, disembodied drums, and dark intimations of mortality: "Your ex-girlfriends, lost pets, and dead friends," he sings in his trademark deadpan. "No, they won't be hanging out with you again. You are gone!" It's intense and disquieting, yet it's the one song where Lytle sounds most present, with no character, robotic or otherwise, to absorb or soften those fears of absence. Similarly bleak, "Your Final Setting Sun"-- which was, according to Lytle, inspired by Cormac McCarthy-- recounts a killer's final taunts to a dying man: "I know you loved your life, but say goodbye, this is your final setting sun." Has Lytle ever sounded so cold-blooded? So musically malevolent or so emotionally hardened? As the drums barely keep pace with the frantic keyboard themes, his vocals take on a menacing quality that we've never heard from him before and that quite frankly I didn't dream he could muster: It's a bracing moment and completely unexpected, both the album's biggest risk and its biggest reward.
Then Department veers into the valedictory closer "Gimme Click Gimme Grid", and we're back on sadly familiar ground. This is exactly the type of mock-epic album closer that Lytle does almost too well. Think "So You'll Aim Toward the Sky" off Sophtware Slump or "The Final Push to the Sum" off Sumday. But it sounds absolutely anticlimactic sequenced after "Your Final Setting Sun", which suggests a much more inventive and exciting artist than we get throughout most of the album. That song says more about Lytle's career than any veiled lyric could: If he can't push himself in new directions, he'll be stuck at his desk job, pushing paper for the Department of Disappearance forever.


This Montreal-based band touches on shoegaze and other 1990s signifiers but manages to craft a melodic squall all its own.

Ghost Blonde

No Joy was a band founded on the concept of distance. Starting out as a collaboration spanning almost the entire length of North America (co-principal Jasmine White-Glutz briefly took up residence in Los Angeles, while Laura Lloyd remained in Montreal), the duo sent tracks back and forth, and Mexican Summer eventually picked them up after hearing two songs on their MySpace page. Before long, White-Glutz moved back home, the band was praised by the always-enthusiastic Bethany Cosentino (whose tweet referred to No Joy as, "the best band ever"), expanded to a quartet, and recorded their debut album, all in less than a year after forming. Whoever says that long-distance relationships never work out should take Ghost Blonde for a spin.
Distance is an ideal that seeps into the pores of every guitar strum and snare hit on the record. Lloyd and White-Glutz's airy vocals are pushed low into the mix, to the point where their voices resemble conversation from a foggy, half-remembered dream. The guitars, loud enough to obliterate everything within 50 yards, create a balmy atmosphere where lacerating riffs and blurry strumming shares face time with ear-piercing feedback. And this noise becomes just as much of a compositional tool as the actual notes summoned from their six-strings.
Filing Ghost Blonde as shoegaze would be reductive, as the reference base is deeper than most of today's bands who work in that template. Lush, My Bloody Valentine, the Breeders, Sonic Youth, and even traces of Hole can be picked up from No Joy's sometimes-melancholy, sometimes-violent sounds. And while the list of references draws heavily from the 90s, the band displays a very uncommon sense of originality. "You Girls Smoke Cigarettes?" is a bass-driven tune with an addictive slurry chant during the verses and a chorus that explodes with harmony, followed by a destructive climax, breakdown, and bridge, all in just a little over two minutes. "Still" is an 80 MPH push featuring ethereal vocals not even trying to rise above the careening, bleating guitars that ping-pong all over the track. "Indigo Child" and "Pacific Pride" temper the righteous noise of the aforementioned songs. The former is a glacial stride into sadder territory offset by the low rumbling of noise that eventually reaches a crescendo by the end of the track, and the latter tests the band's sense of dynamics and succeeds wildly.
"Distance" can be a pejorative term, as if the fact that certain things can't be held at a close range can feel defeating. But while Ghost Blonde can feel like it's keeping the listener at arm's length, further listens reveal a record full of vibrancy, the kind in which you soon find yourself fully immersed.


On their first project in 17 years, the voices and the wordplay of Styles P, Jadakiss, and Sheek Louch have aged not one bit since 2000, for better and for worse.

Filthy America… It’s Beautiful

There were innumerable cameos at the Bad Boy Family Reunion Tour, but as is often the case with nostalgia packages, “the inexorable march of time” stole the show. Shyne lip-synced “Bad Boyz” in exile from Belize. Lil’ Kim was as magnetic as ever, but tragically so, going blank during large portions of her past hits. While DMX and Ruff Ryders’ constant shirtlessness and bloody-knuckled Casio beats were a corrective to hip-hop’s sample-happy Shiny Suit era, with enough distance, they could all be lumped together as “late ’90s NYC rap.” And most bizarre of all were the once-estranged Lox screaming “if you glad that L-O-X is Ruff Ryders now!” during “Wild Out,” their first single after a nasty, public and possibly violent extrication from Bad Boy—referred to as “Rape'n U Records” on the subsequent We Are the Streets.
Now signed to Roc Nation, the Lox are once again close to the locus of money, power and respect, affiliated with their third megastar-owned hip-hop conglomerate in as many albums. Their bizarre career is probably their biggest asset at this point and they have a hell of a story to tell. Filthy America...It’s Beautiful has little interest in telling it.
No longer subject to the commercial expectations of their late-90s heyday, they should be able to talk directly to an audience for whom the first Lox album in nearly 17 years is “highly anticipated.” There’s enough time-stamped gossip in “What Else You Need to Know” to reward people who remember the narcissism of small differences fueling the D-Block and State Property beef and, yes, Sheek Louch utters the magic words “bring New York back.” More importantly, the voices and the wordplay of Styles P, Jadakiss, and Sheek have aged not one bit since 2000—no mean feat if you’ve tried to talk yourself into a recent Wu-Tang or DipSet project, or hell, just skip to Prodigy sounding like a wax figure of himself on “Hard Life.”
Even within the narrow narrative structure on “What Else You Need to Know,” the chemistry between the trio is still a marvel. Jadakiss’ rasp remains one of hip-hop’s most indelible vocal instruments, a blank-faced menace even during the vast majority of Filthy America when he isn’t saying much of anything. Styles P’s wearied nihilism has naturally gotten more potent with age and as for Sheek...well, the bullish enthusiasm he shows for even his clumsiest rhymes is actually endearing at this point, providing an emotional immediacy to balance out his more reserved partners. He even knows he’s the third wheel—in fact, that’s exactly what he talks about on “What Else You Need to Know,” admitting he thought the “All About the Benjamins” beat was wack (they never had much of an ear for beats), weathering constructive criticism and chalking up his obvious exclusion from “Jenny from the Block” and “John Blaze” to knowing his role. You’d be hard pressed to find another example of a hardcore rapper taking an L with such dignity.
All of this material would make for a fascinating interview on Hot 97, though it’s preceded by just that, the interminable “Stupid Questions” proving that the Lox are still the most tone deaf skit-makers in rap history. But because it’s a Lox track on a proper studio album, “What Else You Need to Know” is a reminder of the skill set separating great rappers from great songwriters. Like much of Filthy America, it’s saddled with an awkward hook and the kind of stainless steel, geographically non-specific, vaguely “futuristic” synth beats you typically hear from once commercially-viable rappers on the album after they’re no longer privy to A-list producers. Granted, Dame Grease and Pete Rock might be permanent A-listers to some, but their presence is only felt after reading the credits. And then there’s DJ Premier on the ironically titled “Move Forward.” If hearing Styles bitch about “mumbling rappers/DJs with the aux cord” still makes you want to pull irresponsible ATV tricks in celebration, it’ll be a pleasure to hear any Premo beat in 2016 because you know exactly what you’re getting. At the same time, you have to wonder what that’s worth when Premo’s 2016 output has been split between territorial flame-keepers like Royce 5'9 and remixes of Desiigner and Twenty One Pilots.
The Lox are spared similar indignities here—Fetty Wap and Gucci Mane could churn out tracks like “The Agreement” and “Secure the Bag” ten times over in the span of a month and their appearances show the Lox have an interest in contemporary rappers without chasing contemporary trends. But maligned as they were for playing dress-up with both Bad Boy and Ruff Ryders—too grimy for the former, too conventional for the avant-Tunnel Banger phase of the latter—their commercial ambitions were the solution, not the problem. The Lox’s most beloved songs—“Money, Power and Respect,” “Wild Out,” “We Gonna Make It,” “Good Times”— provided state-of-the-art beats, ready-made hooks, and most importantly, direction for a group whose artistic zenith is probably a collection of radio freestyles.
Otherwise, despite no longer being required to stuff a $17.99 compact disc to capacity, the Lox still have a way of making at least half of Filthy America feel like filler. They’re far more interesting characters than they let on: Styles P wrote a novel on his Blackberry and also opened a juice bar with Jadakiss. Surely the ins and outs of franchising would make for more interesting material than the “concept tracks” or production choices here, all of which seem designed to recall 1999 —“Hard Life” is Dame Grease blatantly Xeroxing “It’s Mine”; “Move Forward” is “Recognize Pt. II,” while “The Family,” “The Omen,” and the courtroom procedural “Filthy America” have precedents that can be easily identified by even casual rap consumers from the late ‘90s.
But while both Styles and Jadakiss are capable of coming up with a scene-stealing guest verse or two every year—see: Schoolboy Q’s “Groovy Tony/Eddie Kane,” the “Ooouuu” remix—they know damn well that’s what keeps their career going at this point and they know better than to waste their best material here. The Lox have never lived up to their potential and they certainly aren’t going to start now.


After last year's hit "Video Games" and the endless remixes, leaks, think-pieces, and controversy that followed, it's finally here: the major-label debut from Lana Del Rey.

Born to Die

What happens to a dream fulfilled? More specifically, an American dream fulfilled, rags turning to riches with the snap of a manicured finger, kissing James Dean in Gatsby's swimming pool, getting played on the radio. This is a central question animating Lana Del Rey's Born to Die. Our heroine has all the love, diamonds, and Diet Mountain Dew she could ask for, yet still sings, "I wish I was dead," sounding utterly incapable of joy. To paraphrase Liz Phair, if you get everything you wish for and you're still unhappy, then you know that the problem is you.
Given the waves of hype and backlash over the last six months, it can be easy to forget that we're here, first and foremost, because of a song. "Video Games" struck a nerve not just because it was an introduction to Del Rey's captivating voice but because it seemed to suggest something as-yet-unarticulated about the way we live today. Whatever her intention, as a metaphor about disconnect and detachment from our own desires, "Video Games" felt frank, pointed, and true, and it had a chord progression and melody to match. The ultimate disappointment of Born to Die, then, is how out of touch it feels not just with the world around it, but with the simple business of human emotion.
The singer born Elizabeth "Lizzy" Grant may have made her mark with a grainy homemade video that brought to mind other grainy homemade videos in the indie sphere, but the slick sound and sentiment of "Radio", Born to Die's most straightforward statement of purpose ("Baby love me 'cause I'm playing on the radio/ How do you like me now?"), places it firmly within the realm of big-budget chart pop. Born to Die was produced by Emile Haynie, whose credits include Eminem, Lil Wayne, and Kid Cudi, and the album's impressively lush atmosphere might be the one thing that will unite its detractors and apologists.
The album's recurring themes ooze out of every note: sex, drugs, and glitter hover in the yawning atmosphere around Del Rey's breathy vocals. There are strings and trip-hop beats and bits of 1950s twang, and the melodies, assembled with assistance from hired-gun songwriters like Mike Daly (Plain White Ts, Whiskeytown) and Rick Nowels (Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven Is a Place on Earth") are built to stick. But for an album that aims for fickle radio listeners, many of its pop signifiers feel stale and ill-fitting. On "Million Dollar Man", Del Rey drawls like a highly medicated Fiona Apple, and "Diet Mountain Dew" and "Off to the Races" aim for chatty, sparkling opulence, this singer doesn't have the personality to bring it off.
The album's point of view-- if you could call it that-- feels awkward and out of date. Whether you take a line like "Money is the reason we exist/ Everybody knows that it's a fact/ Kiss kiss" with a 10-carat grain of salt is up to you, but even as a jab at the chihuahua-in-Paris-Hilton's-handbag lifestyle, it feels limp and pointless (unlike, say, Lily Allen's mock-vapid but slyly observant 2008 single "The Fear"). Still, the dollar signs in its eyes aren't an inherent strike against Born to Die: Even in the wake of an international debt crisis and the Occupy movement, it was hard not to fall for Watch the Throne. But that's because Jay and Kanye made escapist fantasy sound so fun. Del Rey's gem-encrusted dreamworld, meanwhile, relies on clichés ("God you're so handsome/ Take me to the Hamptons") rather than specific evocations. It's a fantasy world that makes you long for reality.
And speaking of fantasy: The conversation surrounding Lana Del Rey has underscored some seriously depressing truths about sexism in music. She was subjected to the kind of intense scrutiny-- about her backstory and especially her appearance-- that's generally reserved for women only. But the sexual politics of Born to Die are troubling too: You'd be hard pressed to find any song on which Del Rey reveals an interiority or figures herself as anything more complex than an ice-cream-cone-licking object of male desire (a line in "Blue Jeans", "I will love you till the end of time/ I would wait a million years," sums up about 65% of the album's lyrical content). Even when Del Rey offers something that could be read as a critique ("This is what makes us girls/ We don't stick together 'cause we put our love first"), she asks that we make no effort to change, escape, or transcend the way things are ("Don't cry about it/ Don't cry about it.") In terms of its America-sized grandeur and its fixation with the emptiness of dreams, Born to Die attempts to serve as Del Rey's own beautiful, dark, twisted fantasy, but there's no spark and nothing at stake.
The critic Ellen Willis once wrote of Bette Midler: "Blatant artifice can, in the right circumstances, be poignantly honest, and she expresses the tension between image and inner self that all of us-- but especially women-- experience." But Born to Die never allows tension or complexity into the mix, and its take on female sexuality ends up feeling thoroughly tame. For all of its coos about love and devotion, it's the album equivalent of a faked orgasm-- a collection of torch songs with no fire.


After a debut littered with yearning club jams, hits penned for pop stars, and a romance with the singer Ciara, Future has come to be understood as one of his generation’s premier romantics. His new mixtape, produced in full by Atlanta trap legend Zaytoven, finds him speaking to a specific personal turmoil without worrying about whether it’ll be relatable or even likable.

Beast Mode

After a debut album littered with yearning club jams like "Turn on the Lights" and "Neva End", warm hits penned for pop stars, and a whirlwind romance with singer Ciara that produced a few pretty duets and an adorably well-dressed baby, Future has come to be understood, perhaps prematurely, as one of his generation’s premier romantics. His story was always more complex than that, though, as we came to understand over six months in 2014, when our rap Romeo went from "Girl when I’m with you, feel like a champion" to "Girl you know you like a pistol, you a throw away." Things soured for Future and Cici somewhere between the April release of Honest and Halloween’s Metro Boomin produced Monster, and the callous nature of his writing post-breakup has given the lie to the Nicholas Sparks perception that’s clouded his major label career.
On Beast Mode, produced in full by Atlanta trap maestro Zaytoven, Future retreats further into the flashy player lifestyle presented on pre-album mixtape highlights Dirty Sprite and True Story. He’s colder than he’s been since 2012’s Astronaut Status’ "My Ho 2" on cuts like "Lay Up" and "Peacoat", bragging on the former about passing a hook-up off "like a lay up" and glibly remarking that he "spent a check on that pussy" on the latter. At first it seems like a continuation of the aggy sexual and emotional revenge tactics of Monster (see: "My Savages"’ "You think I’m sitting up depressed?/ I’m somewhere counting up me a check," "Throw Away"’s "I was fucking on a slut and I was thinking about you") but the deeper you delve into Beast Mode, the more it comes off as the vice grip headache and hangover to Monster’s seedy rager.
At the outset Beast Mode is somewhat mechanical, Future locking into whirring synth arrangements and churning out three-minute nuggets of dopeboy grit. Opener "Ooooh", Juvenile tribute "Aintchu", and closer "Forever Eva" coolly channel the inherent catchiness of mixtape Future, the half cast off, half accomplished greatness he exuded before he began to write more keenly for mass consumption. But when Zay tosses out something darker he gets it back in kind. You can hear Zaytoven catch Future in the chest at the top of "No Basic" as the track billows in and he ad libs, "You gotta feel the pain of a kid in the ghetto, the heart of the ghetto" before laying out a list of hard hits he took in getting to the money ("Took all the pain and I ran with it.../ I took a few losses and ran with it"). On "Just Like Bruddas", he’s suspended in a daze of Percocet, Xanax, and promethazine self-medication amid a bad press cycle of his own design as his producer dances around a gutting, intricate piano line underfoot.
Future and Zaytoven have collaborated quite a bit in the past but it’s apparent that Zay is bringing something different to the table this time and that it’s bringing something else of Future. Zay’s best works (Gucci Mane’s "Bricks" and Usher’s "Papers", to name just two) are wonky collisions of trap drums and church organs armed with a fleet musicality that the bullish simplicity of the Lex Lugers and the druggy atmospherics of the Mike WiLLs have often lacked. Recent Zaytoven productions have eased off a measure of the emotionalism of his playing, though, resulting in still great, still quirky winners like Migos’ "Versace" and Shy Glizzy’s "Catch a Body" with hooks that grip but don’t much pull. Beast Mode feels heavier, particularly in the stretch from "No Basic" to "Where I Came From", a succession of dour compositions rendered quietly devastating by Zay’s soulful riffing around the central themes and by Future’s matching reflective malaise. Their deepening chemistry is Beast Mode’s boon.
Jutting outside his hitmaking responsibilities has allowed Future to make music that speaks to a very specific personal turmoil without worrying about whether it’ll be relatable or even likable. The feed-the-charts-feed-the-streets formula of Honest worked as well as it possibly could’ve last year, but lately, Future’s feeding himself, taking inventory of his journey, and learning how to navigate a very public rough patch. The casual sex doesn’t seem fun, the recreational pharmaceutical use feels ominous, and there’s a distinctly mournful air to the proceedings. Though he’ll only tacitly admit as much, our player entrepreneur is hurt, and Beast Mode’s heavy-hearted sounds assist him in sorting through it just as Monster’s menace helped him turn spite to fuel.


Damon McMahon's Locust release recalls other claustrophobic, inner-space travelers like Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, and Skip Spence.

DIA

The fact that Damon McMahon (aka Amen Dunes) recorded DIA while holed up in a Catskills cabin is so fitting it feels like a myth. The album's claustrophobic, voice-in-head tone immediately evokes inner-space travelers like Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, and Skip Spence. And McMahon's simple songs, fuzzy guitar, and buzzing vocals all sound like the product of some solitary brain, sitting in some isolated cabin, buried deep inside some dark forest.
It's telling, though, that after he made DIA, McMahon moved to Beijing: as the album progresses, it reveals a musical vision reaching beyond the boundaries of a lonely woods. Early on, his stylistic umbrella expands to let in a Suicide/Spacemen 3 loop, the eerie howls of early Royal Trux, and the post-Barrett folk of Robyn Hitchcock. But his farthest-flung and strongest reference point proves to be the underground sounds of 1980s New Zealand. As McMahon's tunes sharpen and deepen, he becomes like an American cousin to Kiwi songsmiths Alastair Galbraith, Chris Knox, and brothers Graeme and Peter Jefferies.
The key to how McMahon can evoke those greats and still bring some of himself to the mix is his voice. On the surface his singing sounds raw and monotone, pitched in a droning hum and distorted at the edges. But listen closely and you can hear subtle changes that give DIA a surprising diversity. On "White Lace", his singing rises sharply, pulling his guitar along with it. He alternates tough moans and eerie falsettos in the Barrett-ish "Castles", and ghosts of Knox and Galbraith emerge via his openly earnest croons in "No Shot". By album's end, McMahon's meditative hums are practically all that's left, like shells on a beaten shore glistening in the sunset.
"Glisten" is a relative term here-- overall, DIA is still a rather constricted album, with a tonal range that's pretty narrow despite how much McMahon mines from it. But the record does hold indications of how wide his sound could become, particularly the perfectly-crafted bit of psych-folk called "Two Thousand Islands" that pops up near album's end. Here, his modest voice melds beautifully into some clucking, Velvet Underground-ish guitar. That alone is enough to make you look forward to what McMahon comes up with next, perched above a temple in Beijing rather than tucked away in a Northeastern woodland.


After years of searching, Ariana Grande has found her true voice. Sweetener is an exemplary pop album, radiating with low-key joy and newfound love.

Sweetener

Ariana Grande’s journey from child star to “human cupcake” to heir apparent to the diva throne has been centered around discovering the song that defines her. Though her soprano is instantly recognizable—floating from sultry melismas to whistle singing, elocution be damned—locating her in the hits has been difficult at times. Her last two albums, 2014’s My Everything and 2016’s Dangerous Woman, were solid but musically scattershot, filled with trendy guests and weighed down by her bad-girl alter-ego. For Grande to ascend to the next creative level, she’d need more than just the range.
Sweetener, Grande’s first album since the 2017 bombing at her Manchester concert, feels more honest and distinct than any of her past work. Perhaps because tragedy has a way of revealing our true selves, the 25-year-old star finally allows herself to just take things as they come. She doesn’t force the heart-wrenching emotion of it all into tearful ballads and message-heavy anthems, but instead lets the low-key joy of the title track radiate across the album. The best parts of Sweetener have her looking for hope and stumbling upon the glow of new love. By the time you reach the interlude about her comedian fiancé Pete Davidson called “Pete Davidson,” where the word “happy” is repeated 22 times in just over a minute, whatever cynical snapshot of their quickie engagement that may have formed between That Lollipop Photo and reports of Big Dick Energy has fallen away. Let the yung diva love in peace.
Grande co-wrote more songs than usual (10 out of 15) and formed a clear bond with Pharrell Williams, who serves as a songwriter and producer across Sweetener’s stronger half. His funk-lite idiosyncrasies set a bright tone and help elevate the record’s more conventional song structures. Grande and Williams leave themselves plenty of room to play around with texture in clever ways, particularly when it comes to layered vocals and skittering percussion. Set to little more than panting, tongue clicks, and keyboard orbs, “R.E.M” finds novel ways for Grande to expand her vocal repertoire. Singing in a stream of consciousness style about the man in her dreams, she flows in and out of R&B crooning, doo-wop vocal runs, gospel harmonizing, cheeky sing-talking, and a surprisingly precise rap flow (“’Scuse me, um? I love you/I know that’s not the way to start a conversation, trouble”). She doesn’t even need a money note to stamp her mark.
The non-Pharrell tracks come courtesy of past Grande collaborators like Max Martin, Ilya, and TB Hits, and largely tap into the ongoing trap influence on the Top 40. Not one of them is outright filler, but an ode to a toxic ex like “Everytime” is markedly less original—the kind of bad-decision-making set to ominous thumping that’s all over the charts. Grande’s got her own new rules, though: She tweaks the daydreaming of Imogen Heap into the throbbing EDM twinkle of “Goodnight N Go” and turns the melancholy of Drake into a meditation on anxiety with “Breathin.” Neither is a direct extension of her work with Williams, but both feel like natural fits on an album all about finding the light.
Grande may have delivered more of a full-album vibe than a bangers-filled juggernaut, but there is at least one career-defining moment here—the song she has been looking for, wrapped in an unassuming package. Sweetener ends with “Get Well Soon,” the sort of freeform, self-help soul ballad you’d maybe expect to round out a Beyoncé opus. Anyone who knows how gracefully Grande handled the horrific events at her Manchester show last year will recognize an equally graceful response to her own emotional aftermath in this song. Channeling all the conflicting voices in her head, Grande sings striking downbeat counter-melodies of “girl what’s wrong witchu come back down.” She soothes herself with her own luscious harmonies, urges fans to take care of one another, and modestly assures that anyone can work their way to the top. Like much of Sweetener, the song is musically sparse but encompasses a kaleidoscope of vocal tones. It is here, four albums in, that the true multitudes of her voice, and by extension herself, blossom.