The new LP from Brooklyn’s Aye Nako introduces the songwriting of guitarist/singer Jade Payne. It presents two equal voices with their own takes on the queer black American experience.

Silver Haze

Aye Nako has always been direct about the subjects of their music: “sad punk songs about being queer, trans, and black.” It’s listed right there on their Facebook page. You don’t need to know that to rock out to their fuzzy take on emo, but these words are their existence. When you’re black, queer, and trans, a forceful statement of identity is itself a political act.
Identity has been the focus of much of Aye Nako’s recorded output. And while their earliest compositions stayed mostly within the sonic boundaries of ’90s pop-punk, their growth and maturation has been inspiring. Their 2015 The Blackest Eye EP served up complex and poetic examinations of abuse, exclusion, and the multifaceted stigma of blackness. But from the first track of their new LP Silver Haze, it’s clear they’re not the same band. “We’re Different Now” is a tape collage of guitarist and singer Mars Dixon as a kid playing with a friend, augmented by a sparse drum-and-guitar backing track. As the last line echoes “We’re different now/Different now/Different now…” it hints that those changes are more than skin deep.
Aye Nako’s story is one of transition, including Dixon’s own. But even as testosterone treatments changed his singing—and subsequently, his approach to writing on guitar—Dixon was also welcoming another voice into the mix in guitarist Jade Payne. Payne wasn’t on Aye Nako’s debut LP, 2013’s Unleash Yourself, and while her guitar and background vocals added a new dynamic to the sound of The Blackest Eye, the songs were still Dixon’s. Silver Haze, then, represents a new era for the young Brooklynites—one with two equal voices. It’s an assertion backed up by the cover image, of the two songwriters sitting side-by-side, bonded by shared experience, each with their own take on the queer black American identity.
Payne’s songs are often just as sad, but they are occasionally imbued with righteous indignation—“When you’ve said your empty amens/Shed the skin of a dead sentiment,” she sings on “Arrow Island”—that complements Dixon’s resignation. Payne has also spent some time of late moonlighting on guitar for Sadie Dupuis’ Sad13 project; the influence of Dupuis’ other band, Speedy Ortiz, is particularly prominent in Payne’s songs on Silver Haze, from the vocal inflections to the guitar tone.
Dixon has developed a stronger grasp on dynamic vocal range, confidently moving from whispers to whines to wails, incorporating more complex chord structures. Aye Nako still sound like a band that grew up obsessed with Superchunk, but now their output has less in common with Drive-Thru’s catalog than it does, say, Jade Tree’s. Payne, who works as a sound engineer at Brooklyn’s Silent Barn collective, recorded their last EP, but for Silver Haze the band worked with Joe Rogers at Room 17. His influence is especially felt on lead single “Particle Mace,” a pop song washed in fuzz with vocal tracks that shine through the noise.
The lyrics on Silver Haze maintain a relative obliqueness, which makes these intensely personal portraits relatable to anyone who has ever been on the outside looking in, or struggled with bodily self-reflection. If you’ve seen a Maybelline ad, you might guess that “Maybe She’s Bored With It” was about makeup—but the line “Caffeinated dreams/At the dawn of another work week/That’s the routine” cuts to the heart of the working class experience, drawn from Dixon’s time working in a makeup factory. His deadpan drawl of “Getting lost in the industrial noise” feels earned, an emotional resonance impossible to fake. Because as much as they may have matured, Silver Haze still feels like the best of Aye Nako—songs that clawed their way out of their writers, thoughts and ideas that would have eaten them alive if they didn’t get out.


On their fourth LP Earth, the Chicago sludge crew enlist Hum’s Matt Talbot and Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou. Where other heavy bands would rather barrel down the cliffside first and ask questions later, Sweet Cobra regard the speedometer with a careful, cumulative eye, with occasionally poppy results.

Earth

Sweet Cobra have spent the past decade, plus change, doing two things: pumping out noise, and pissing off genre purists. Steeped in Illinois' mid-'90s alternative rock boom—Local H, the Jesus Lizard, et al.—the trio gave off a grungy first impression, only to dash it by incorporating out-of-town touches: a hint of New York hardcore, a tinge of post-hardcore á la Unwound, and on their most recent outing (2010’s Mercy), some splashes of Savannah sludge.
On their fourth LP Earth, the Chicago crew push their sound even futher, aided by Hum’s Matt Talbot and Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou on co-production duties. Cuts like "Old Haunts" and "Complaints" pack enough firepower to compete with peers like Torche and Doomriders; but where the aforementioned bands would rather barrel down the cliffside first and ask questions later, Sweet Cobra regard the speedometer with a careful, cumulative eye, with occasionally poppy results: "Repo" sounds like a Snow Patrol song on steroids.
One of the most underrated tools in Sweet Cobra’s arsenal is their sharpened sense of restraint: a necessary, and yet frequently overlooked, step in building a proper sludge assault. "Future Ghosts" guides a soft-spoken melody down a gurgling, muddied undertow of a bassline. The anxious post-punk of "Sunburned Sons" provides a master class in momentum, and the album’s warm, six-minute closer "Walls" feels concise and organic.
Earth isn’t perfect, and Sweet Cobra’s charisma and compositional prowess don’t except them from the occasional flat note. Without a clear dynamic arc, "He Tall He", the album’s puffed-up ode to self-loathing and being "[sent] down the river with... shit ideas," stumbles and buckles under its exaggerated weight. Meanwhile, lead vocalist Botchy Vasquez’s supple tenor lacks the substance to make glammier, radio-ready cuts like "Flight Risk" and "Stiff Fits" really shine. Despite his bad habit of tacking on unnecessary sharp notes to the end of his phrases, the guy's one of the most underrated vocalists in his niche, eschewing the throaty styles of Torche’s Steve Brooks or Baroness’ John Dyer Baizley for a headier approach that, in turn, makes the music feel less stifling. A little breathing room goes a long way, and in an atypical move for swampy albums of its ilk, Earth succeeds because it doesn’t attempt to downright bury the listener—it’s a slow, sweet smothering.


The third solo album from Thom Yorke is the first one that feels complete without his band behind him. It floats through the uneasy space between societal turmoil and internal monologue.

ANIMA

Earlier this month, a strange advertisement for ANIMA Technologies appeared inside London’s Tube. The company purported to have built something called a “Dream Camera,” a device capable of capturing the world of the unconscious: “Just call or text the number and we’ll get your dreams back,” the copy promised. But curious callers were treated to a cryptic voice message, a jumble of stilted legalese read in a thin, unctuous voice, that apparently rendered the Dream Camera’s promise moot: something about a cease and desist from the High Court, an admission of “serious and flagrant unlawful activities.”
There were only ever two things this ad could be: Some exhausting promo for the worst  “Black Mirror” episode yet or an oblique tease of Thom Yorke’s third solo album, ANIMA. Dreams and a healthy distrust of a techno-dystopia have long been pillars of Radiohead and Yorke’s songwriting. The wires of the brain and the wires of the world are forever being crossed: Fake plastic trees, paranoid androids, mobiles chirping, low-flying panic attacks. So of course the man who has sung about the narcotized rhythms of urban life would want to snap commuters out of their reveries with a once-in-a-lifetime promise. Dreams, nightmares, and sleepwalking haunt the songs of ANIMA, Yorke’s most ambitious and assured solo album yet. It is the darkest and tenderest music he has released outside of Radiohead, floating uneasily through the space between societal turmoil and internal monologue.
ANIMA is the product of what Yorke has described as an extended period of anxiety, and it sounds like it, full of wraithlike frequencies and fibrillating pulses. That’s not a huge surprise: Yorke’s solo material has always sounded anxious, sometimes to its detriment. Where The Eraser, his solo debut, largely succeeded in channeling the decade’s post-millennium tension into compellingly moody electronic abstractions, 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes too often felt claustrophobic, morose, enervated. In contrast, ANIMA’s tone throughout is meaty, full-blooded, often a little menacing. Yorke’s melancholy has grown teeth.
Yorke has long been a fan of left-of-center dance music; remixes commissioned for The Eraser and The King of Limbs constituted a who’s who of the European club vanguard. But this is the first of his own productions where it feels like he and longtime production partner Nigel Godrich really get it, where their beatmaking strides beyond contemporary fashion. The influence of James Holden and his Border Community label, an avant-techno touchstone, is all over ANIMA’s burly bass synths and jabbing pulses. Syncopated, spring-loaded grooves are reminiscent of Four Tet and Floating Points; the blippy “Not the News” channels Zomby and Actress. Yet for all the music’s heavy electronic bent, it isn’t obviously mapped to a rhythmic grid: It slips and slides all over the place, wheezy synths surging in waves, feeling restless and hungry. Yorke treats climaxes with a boxer’s strategy—feinting, falling back, changing the angle of his attack.
Critics have sometimes complained—understandably, if not always correctly—that Yorke’s solo work has felt incomplete. As frontman and linchpin of one of the world’s most dynamic rock bands, Yorke has had to work doubly hard to convince listeners that his late nights in front of a laptop are equally worthy of their attention. But ANIMA proves how much he and Godrich are capable of on their own. His bandmates’ influence colored The Eraser; on the more unmoored Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, their absence loomed large. But here he and Godrich have perfected a sound of their own, one that doesn’t take Radiohead’s achievements as its primary unit of measurement.
Track after track, Yorke proves the importance of stripping back. It’s remarkable how much he can make out of so little: The best songs here get by on the strength of just one or two synthesizer patches, a handful of electronic drum sounds—mostly just scraped white noise, plus the occasional booming kick drum—and his voice, processed and layered as often as is needed. “Impossible Knots” rides a propulsive electric bassline that lands somewhere between Afrobeat and Fugazi; the closing “Runwayaway” makes trance-like use of Tuareg-inspired desert blues guitar. There’s not much else. Every element practically dares you to so much as ask for any further accompaniment.
There are a few outright topical songs—“The Axe” (“Goddamned machinery, why don’t you speak to me?/One day I am gonna take an axe to you”) will resonate with anyone who suspects technological progress is moving in the wrong direction—but for the most part, Yorke’s lyrics remain imagistic, non-specific, as intractable as eye floaters. Fragmentary lines play out like pages ripped from a journal on the nightstand. Sometimes he seems to be muttering to himself; elsewhere his voice is chopped into a jumble of words dangled teasingly near the outer limits of meaning. “Twist” ends with an incantation that might be straight from a horror film: “A boy on a bike who is running away/An empty car in the woods, the motor left running.” We’re whipped back into the hypnopompic logic of Yorke’s tangled thoughts, the fogged film of ANIMA’s Dream Camera.
A short film by Paul Thomas Anderson for Netflix accompanies the album, sequencing “Not the News,” “Traffic,” and “Dawn Chorus” into a single audiovisual suite. Its opening shots—a subway car full of commuters in drab colors, their exaggerated movements a herky-jerky pantomime of restless slumber—explicitly link back to those ANIMA Technologies subway ads, playfully smudging the edges of the album’s world and our own. Exquisitely choreographed by Damien Jalet, the film takes the form of a dream sequence, following Yorke as he follows a woman (played by his partner, Dajana Roncione) along a labyrinthine subterranean course.
Both the album and the film hinge upon “Dawn Chorus,” one of the simplest, most beautiful songs in Yorke’s catalog. It is a reverential song about loss, nostalgia, and regret; a farewell to the departed and a celebration of second chances. Over patient synthesizer harmonies, Yorke mulls over ghosts of a past life, shadows of what might have been: “If you could do it all again,” he muses, each line trailing off into non sequitur, each stanza a stack of stray puzzle pieces. At the song’s apex, the synthesizers pause and crescendo softly, modulating as Yorke sings, his voice hushed:

In the middle of the vortex
The wind picked up
Shook up the soot
From the chimney pot
Into spiral patterns
Of you my love

If there’s a more perfect image of absence than these ashes dancing in midair, I don’t know it. Anderson’s film ends with Yorke awakening on the train, his face bathed in the light of daybreak as “Dawn Chorus” winds down. A moment before, he and Roncione have been locked in an intimate embrace, but as he opens his eyes, it is clear that he is alone. The song’s title has been a part of Radiohead lore for years now; only they know what other forms it might have taken, other meanings it might have accrued. But here, on a song starkly unadorned, Yorke expands his already vast catalog with a perfect, unforgettable song, an elegy for the dreams that cannot be retrieved.

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Erykah Badu’s curated tour of the Afrobeat giant’s sprawling discography showcases the headier aspects of the legendary bandleader’s work, even as it grapples head-on with his life’s contradictions.

Fela Kuti Box Set #4

Fela Kuti’s oeuvre is so uniquely suited to the vinyl box set that, had the format not already existed, his music might very well have forced us to invent it. In an earlier era, when “serious” listening automatically implied a focus on either jazz or Western classical, the state of vinyl technology constrained runtime to two short-ish compositions—a poor substitute for a night at the opera or a bebop quintet playing in a smoke-filled lounge. The album was invented when this shortcoming was addressed by binding multiple discs together into a book-like form—hence “album”—compiled around an organizing theme. Only later did microgroove technology allow these thematic sets to fit on one LP, or “long-player.”
In the 1970s Fela took all that extra runtime and slurped it right up with what you might call macro-grooves. His seemingly endless songs pushed willfully against the limits of the vinyl format, forcing open enough room for the sprawling, polyrhythmic, polyamorous Afrobeat machine that was his band Afrika ’70 to assemble itself bit by bit, just as it did onstage. Accordingly, Fela long-players usually comprised only two songs, or even one song split in two. The approach gives a unique shape to the body of work he left us upon his passing in 1997. If anything makes Fela’s work “difficult,” it’s not the lack of entry points; it’s the length and depth of the passages they lead to. On such passages, it’s nice to have a guide, someone who’s traveled the road and can point out guideposts within his prolific discography.
For those lucky enough to see him perform during his lifetime, Fela himself was that guide. Each serpentine groove (even longer outside the studio, his now-famous concert in Detroit covering just four songs in its two and a half hours) was tamed by his ease in the roles of shaman, emcee, and raconteur as well as singer and bandleader: talking and joking with his audience, cussing the corrupt politicians and systems that were his constant nemesis. With the release of Knitting Factory and Partisan Records’ Fela Kuti Box Set #4, Erykah Badu ably takes on all of these roles, picking up the torch carried by Questlove, Brian Eno, and sometime Fela collaborator Ginger Baker on past editions.
Badu proves to be a sure-footed guide. On one hand this is not surprising at all, given that the artist sometimes known as Badoula Oblongata seems to excel in almost every medium in which she tries her hand. She has also performed live with Fela’s eldest son, Femi, at the revamped Shrine venue in Lagos and collaborated with his pioneering drummer Tony Allen within the Damon Albarn-led supergroup Rocket Juice & the Moon (experiences recounted in her liner notes for the new release). But it’s safe to say that most of her fans would consider those tangents to her career, and of the four curators named, Badu is perhaps least recognized as a Fela expert.
This, it turns out, might be a very good thing, as it frees Badu to chart a more eclectic course through the Knitting Factory’s Afro-funk archive. The seven pieces she has collected here comprise neither an all-time “essentials” list nor represent any particular side of Fela. Instead they follow certain threads across all phases of his evolution to create a playlist that is personalized, highly listenable, and in places revelatory, even to longtime fans.
Badu’s choose-your-own-Fela adventure leans heavily on the discs from the classic Afrika ’70 lineup that included Allen’s frenetic, virtuoso drumwork—particularly those that broadcast Fela’s fondness for a James Brown groove. (Most of the recordings are paired in their original A/B sides.) The rhythm guitar work that establishes the key of “Yellow Fever” and “No Agreement” is practically slick with chicken grease. But Badu also explores lesser-known avenues, following those threads right up into his mostly overlooked 1992 release Underground System.
This makes for winding, hypnotic listening, drawing out specific facets that would be lost in any other shuffle of the Fela deck. There is, for instance, a preponderance of great Fela solos on keys and squonky saxophone, side trips that are by turns noodly and whimsical or plonky and dissonant (see the extended Phantom of the Opera organ freakout that occurs roughly 11 minutes into “Army Arrangement Pt. 2”). This is less because great solos are absent elsewhere in his work than because Badu’s ear seems to have settled on tracks with particularly raw mixdowns, emphasizing the head-music dynamic of Fela’s playing over the grooves more conventionally suited to the dancefloor.
There are still plenty of the big brass arrangements and fast, shekere-anchored marches that have inspired DJs to seek out Fela’s music again and again in the last few decades. But far more often Badu has honed in on a particular strain of Afrobeat rhythm which marries the endlessly repetitive with the off-kilter (“No Agreement,” “Pansa Pansa”) in way that can be compared to almost nothing else outside of the krautrock mind-jams of Can. An overall loose and lo-fi feel pervades the selections, amplified by the inclusion of songs which were actually recorded live, whether abroad (“V.I.P.”) or in Fela’s Lagos stronghold, the Kalakuta Republic (“Johnny Just Drop”)—a quality which, amazingly, prevents the three-odd hours of music from ever dragging its feet or overwhelming.
In fact, the juxtaposition of tracks tends to enliven even the familiar ones (“Yellow Fever” b/w “Na Poi ’75” is the only disc which repeats from the previous three box sets, but inevitably one or two selections will already be on the shelves of ardent Fela fans). The listener is more likely to note the way a Rhodes keyboard’s overmodulated and fuzzy tone cracks through the mix with the force of an electric guitar, while elsewhere Fela drums on the keys in a way that recalls melodic percussion of John Cage’s prepared piano—or how his sax plays in a register so fat and low over the worryingly fast beat of “J.J.D.” that it could be easily be mistaken for a tuba.
There is another, more cerebral, reason to love viewing Fela through Badu’s mirror shades, and that is the way in which her mind—as expressed in the box set’s extensive liner notes—reinvigorates and recontextualize his politics as powerfully as her ear does the music. An unavoidable paradox of Fela’s appeal lies in the way his resolutely Afrocentric challenge to colonialism and political corruption—which at times extended to risking beatings, imprisonment, and even death while standing toe-to-toe with Nigeria’s military dictatorship—was undercut by a trenchant chauvinism. This tension is subtly but powerfully present in the music of Box Set #4. On “V.I.P.” the live Berlin performance is augmented by audible challenges from women in the audience who attended specifically to protest Fela’s retrograde vision for The African Woman. But “Coffin for Heads of State” pays tribute to his martyred mother—thrown from a window during an Army raid on Fela’s compound, resulting in fatal injuries—by recording the moment when Fela invited yet another beating by marching up to the quarters of outgoing President General Obasanjo and laying a coffin in front of his residence, shaming the man he held personally responsible for his mother’s death.
Badu never shies away from addressing these contradictions head-on. While there are places where her liner notes feel a bit like homework that has been reluctantly, if creatively, phoned in (“My brain is tired of writing… I think I have some sort of disorder. This is only the fourth one… and I feel like I am being punished. What kind of mind sits up and writes all day? On a timer?”), overall they add volumes by sharing the ways in which Fela’s rebellious spirit fit into her own life, contradictions and all.
In the notes accompanying “J.J.D.,” a diatribe against Nigerians who adopt a superior attitude after returning from abroad, she finds a counterintuitive point of entry into her own reception when, after her freshman year at Grambling State, she returned to Dallas in the mode of a self-appointed “religious dogmatic fact checker, pork intake monitor and sentence structure correctional officer.” Elsewhere she provides a refreshingly non-didactic take on the pairing of “Yellow Fever” and “Na Poi ’75,” songs which address the dangers of skin bleaching and sexual repression, respectively. Letting Afrobeat historian Chris May provide the more encyclopedic context for each track, Badu explores her personal connection to Fela’s themes in terms so stream-of-consciousness insightful they could almost be Funkadelic lyrics: “For an African to escape the cruels of inferiority complexes due to Colonialism unharmed, is like sucking on a big, thick juicy mango without its nectar slowly dripping down your wrist. You just can’t do it without getting physically sticky or psychologically penetrated.”
Ultimately, Badu’s reimagining of Fela succeeds better than any of the previous box sets by making his music feel both very much alive and very much her own. Her curation pulls together a sonically and thematically coherent experience that comes close to being the macro-album these album-length macro-grooves seem to demand.


Beth Ditto and co.-- already stars in the UK-- now take on the U.S. with their Rick Rubin-produced major-label debut.

Music For Men

Thank heavens for Beth Ditto. In a world of manufactured, auto-tuned pop stars and wispy-voiced indie-chanteuse pinups it's nice to see an honest-to-god female rock star who is provocative, strong, and sexy with the muscular vocal chops to match. Since the release of 2005's Standing in the Way of Control, Ditto has become a superstar in the UK, hobnobbing with Karl Lagerfeld and Kate Moss and proudly splashing her naked body across the covers of British magazines. But at home in America, the Oregon-by-way-of-Arkansas singer is still a niche artist. That is supposed to change with Music For Men, her band's first studio album for Columbia. It represents Gossip's major-label coming out party, an achievement shepherded by bearded superproducer Rick Rubin.
The result is a good Gossip album, one that could soundtrack sweaty summer dance parties, but it also isn't drastically different from their last one. They may now have major-label money and famous friends, but their bluesy-voiced dance-punk remains unchanged-- a fact that is especially surprising given the waning popularity of that genre over the last four years. Ditto may be the "personality" of the band, its loud-mouthed, outrageously attired public face, but the power of its sound is anchored by Hannah Blilie's thundering, precise drumming and Brace Paine's choppy, Chic riffs. And on Music For Men these "sidemen" are in rare form with drums so taut they sound almost mechanical and pulsing, staccato basslines that call to mind Stevie Nicks' "Edge of Seventeen" (as on "Heavy Cross") and the "Knight Rider" theme song (as on "Vertical Rhythm"). But fret not, Ditto-worshippers; the arrangements are meticulous but spare, leaving plenty of sonic space for her vocal pyrotechnics. In fact, it is her florid, soulful voice that gives these crisply percussive tracks their melodic kick.
With a lean three-person lineup and a crack rhythm section, Gossip have never really been driven by their melodies. They built their reputation on unforgiving rhythmic relentlessness and Ditto's raw, limber warble instead of on singalong anthems or hooky choruses. But there are moments on Music For Men that represent some of the most memorably melodic of their career. In many cases, that's because Ditto has interpolated snippets of classic hits into her throttling garage-disco tunes. "Love Long Distance", for instance, quotes "I Heard It Through the Grapevine"'s "not much longer would you be my baby" line, and "Men in Love", this album's answer to the last record's gay-rights anthem of a title track, features a "Chain of Fools"-like "shame, shame, shame" refrain. It makes sense that Ditto would be influenced by such soul classics, given the vintage bent of her wail, but the band also pays homage to their disco and hard-rock influences on "2012", a standout track that flips Kiss' "I Was Made For Lovin' You" into a handclap-studded disco-punk anthem that instead announces, "My heart may never beat again, baby/ Have you got the best of me?"
Though longtime fans of the band may worry that they have left their DIY-punk-scene roots behind for Paris Fashion Week and pictures on Perez Hilton, Music For Men should assuage their fears-- not because it's not a glamorous or glitzy collection (it is), but because it sounds so much like its predecessor. Being caught between the mainstream and the underground may have changed the band's visibility, but it hasn't changed their music much. That is both a relief and little bit of a disappointment. As a musical statement of intent to the throngs of the newly interested, Music For Men shows a clear picture of who Gossip want to be-- a New Millennial Madonna for whom Danceteria never closes. But for those who have been following Gossip's career, waiting with bated breath to see how the band will evolve, this new record may feel a little too much like they are still Standing in the Way of Control.


Featuring dual saxophones, synthesizers, voice, and drums, the new group led by Montreal composer John Hollenbeck analyzes pop songcraft through a jazz lens.

Letters to George

John Hollenbeck likes to blur the distinctions between the knotty virtuosity of jazz and the broad appeal of pop. Formed in the 1990s, his best-known project, the Claudia Quintet, emulates certain tenets of rock bands—the ensemble’s lineup has remained the same since its inception—and draws from the more accessible side of chamber jazz, eschewing harsh textures while indulging rhythmic weirdness. More recently, his Songs I Like a Lot / Songs We Like a Lot / Songs You Like a Lot trilogy placed hits like “Wichita Lineman” and “How Deep Is Your Love” under the microscope of big-band music, stretching pop songs out into sprawling 10-minute epics.
Though it still aims for that same populist appeal, Hollenbeck’s new quartet GEORGE marks an eccentric departure from his previous work: Its debut album is a whimsical effort largely guided by the diverse tastes of its members. Rounded out by multi-instrumentalists Anna Webber (saxophone/flute), Aurora Nealand (saxophone/voice), and Chiquitamagic (keyboards/voice), the band formed and practiced remotely during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the four players would not meet in person for the first time until January 2022, when they assembled to record Letters to George. They seem to have embraced the strange set of circumstances that led to this initial session, emerging with a scrambled grab bag of tracks united in their disarray.
Bogotá-via-Toronto musician Chiquitamagic’s background is steeped in synthesizers and drum machines, and her club-tinged sensibility steers GEORGE into its most inspired territory, challenging her collaborators to fit their improvisation with her electronic aesthetic. On opening track “Earthworker,” her squelching bass synth lurches in step with Hollenbeck’s jerky percussion, setting up a hypnotic juxtaposition against velvety microtonal keys. This looped chord progression creeps along in small increments, rolling out a level plane for Webber and Nealand to build upon. Dual saxophones engage in warm, intimate conversation, and wordless vocals enter the mix, briefly matching a wayfaring keyboard melody note for note in the tune’s final stretch. “Earthworker” sets a high standard for what follows, tapping into each member’s full arsenal of experience and skills while maintaining a smooth exchange of ideas. Though their arrangements may seem perplexing, GEORGE’s music is quite listenable, emphasizing harmonic interplay and quirky energy.
On “Can You Imagine This,” initially composed to test the viability of the band’s remote practice sessions, their obvious chemistry yields Letters to George’s most emotionally dynamic showing. Chiquitamagic’s odd chord voicings take a commanding role once again, creating a subtle sense of unease. Webber and Nealand have even more room to improvise here, concocting chromatic phrases that sound intriguingly tangy, but not quite sour. Like the aforementioned “Earthworker,” the song peaks near the end with an almost artificial vocal performance. This time, as Webber switches from saxophone to flute, Nealand chirps and stutters like a buffering video, weaving in and out of alignment with the woodwind. The band teeters on the edge of collapse, each improviser prodding at the edges of a sustained chord until Webber and Nealand stick their landings in unaccompanied tandem. It’s not the smoothest ride, but it’s never boring.
GEORGE’s two cracks at cover songs don’t work as well as the adaptations on Songs I Like a Lot. Their rendition of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” struggles to gel around fractured drum fills and 808 pulses. A sparse backdrop of hushed saxophone and the occasional wash of digital strings create a sense of foreboding, but nothing emerges from the shadowy corners of the group improvisation. Their ambient reconstruction of Cyril Tawney’s sea shanty “Grey Funnel Line” is quite pretty, though, buoyed by impressionistic playing that results in some of Letters to George’s most melodic moments.
Compared to the intricately composed, sometimes symphonic works Hollenbeck is best known for, GEORGE’s debut is an exercise in leaving things up to fate. The performances are impulsive and fun, augmented by sounds more associated with dance music and alt-pop than free jazz. The ideas don’t always coalesce cleanly, but when the band nails down its unique blend of vintage funk and futuristic electronica on tracks like “Washington Carver” and “Iceman,” GEORGE’s energy is as infectious as a perfect pop tune.


On their first new album since 2015, the onetime Brooklyn indie darlings turn definitively toward dad rock.

The Big Mess

When they were young, Tanlines made a couple EPs and an album that, at the time and still today, sum up a specific place and time. In their case, it was Brooklyn in 2012; but it was also the sound of at least half a dozen middle-class urban enclaves around the world, where, for a brief moment, straight white dudes got it up and started dancing. Tanlines did it with rare efficiency. It was good fun, which is harder than it sounds, and they made it sound easy.
And then time passed, which, if you’re lucky, it tends to do. Their next album sounded like more of the same, only less. They flailed a bit, soundtracking Lena Dunham’s therapy session and covering “If You’re Happy and You Know It.” They seemed to give it up.
This winter, they returned with “Outer Banks,” a song about failing to launch that itself fails to ascend, stuck in a mid-tempo shuffle that, despite a glittering bridge, isn’t likely to get anyone onto a dancefloor. Tanlines’ youthful glow has gone gray. This is mid-life crisis music. Lead songwriter and singer Eric Emm made some announcements: He’d moved to Connecticut during the hiatus and continued to make music in his basement. Longtime bandmate Jesse Cohen had stayed in the city, hosting musicians like Perfume Genius and Waxahatchee on his No Effects podcast, and finally reunited with Emm to record what became The Big Mess.
Another single followed “Outer Banks,” less catchy and more of a character study. But who’s the dude playing blues-y guitar licks in “Burns Effect” and why are we paying attention to him? “I get surreal sometimes,” he croons, without evidence. “It cuts like a knife.” Men making fun of self-important men (a timeless pastime) doesn’t happen enough anymore, but it’s not happening enough in “Burns Effect,” either. The target is blurry and the satire is as flaccid as the groove.
Emm had said that he wrote The Big Mess while thinking about “introspective masculinity.” Those hoping for, say, Lindsey Buckingham’s unnerving odes to creeps will find some of his clinquant guitar tones but little of his brutal psychology. Bruce Springsteen’s manly nostalgia-as-humblebrag is another touchstone, particularly the golden-hour dustups of his Tunnel of Love period. But mostly, these songs don’t interrogate their subjects. They empathize without explanation. “New Reality” chugs along amiably: “I just can’t disguise what I feel inside,” Emm declares. “I’m just trying to be me.” What’s stopping him? The narrator of “Arm’s Length Away” complains about the sensory overload of modern life, with its “electric motor cars” and “limited this and that,” then throws it all away for the pleasures of small-town life. “I got there and I looked around,” he sings. With admirable nerve, he takes on indie rock’s masterpiece of alienation, asking himself, “How did I get here?” A tambourine rattles, some echoes carefully bounce around the stereo field. “Well,” he says, finally, “I don’t mind at all.”
As an album, The Big Mess isn’t really declarative, or sizable, or wrecked. It aims for something complicated and settles for complacency: a working definition of modern masculinity. If Tanlines once sounded effortless, now little sounds like it’s worth the effort. The title track features rumbling drums by John McEntire of Tortoise and the Sea and Cake, who knows how to plumb the depths of surfaces that seem initially placid; longtime National collaborator Peter Katis conjures some melodrama at the mixing desk. The song swells, fades. Emm keeps saying there was a big mess but doesn’t say what it was.
The album’s best track shakes off the vague nostalgia. “Clouds” floats soft melodies atop a tale of characters who are convincing in their specificity. Like an upstate pair of Dorian Grays, they live with a portrait that could tell them who they are—could make them strip, could make them fuck, could even maybe make them dance. Emm doesn’t confirm if any of this actually happens, but here ambiguity is a sexy possibility. There’s a great percussive detail that sounds like two corduroy’d thighs rubbing together. Guitar and synth licks melt like ice. Finally some drama: The couple “rise out of the clouds/shaking in the sun,” caught up in natural forces larger than themselves. In a brief moment, Tanlines rediscover their inner glow.


This set of ramshackle folk songs did as much to create the slacker ethos as Beck's more well-known 1994 release, Mellow Gold. It's also almost as good.

One Foot in the Grave

The year "Loser" charted at #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 (1994, probably hoisted up by cassingle-crazy prepubescents like me), Beck actually released three full-length albums: the canonical Mellow Gold; the messy, skit-heavy Stereopathetic Soul Manure; and One Foot in the Grave, a set of ramshackle folk songs about, roughly, the apocalypse.
He was 24. He was cute. He was smart, funny, and tender. Like a lot of great songwriters-- or writers, period-- he was as critical of his surroundings as he was enamored of them. He was also an entertainer, and it helped (from a marketing perspective) that his lines describing just how nigh the end is-- "Forces of evil in a bozo nightmare/ Ban all the music with a phony gas chamber"-- doubled as the kind of kooky shit that casual, young radio listeners are powerless against. In the year of Kurt Cobain's suicide and the popular awakening of bands as indescribably bad as the Stone Temple Pilots, Beck wasn't just our "consolation prize" (as Spin's 20 Years of Alternative Music later called him)-- he was our escape hatch.
One Foot in the Grave, out of print between 2005 and last week's merciful deluxe reissue, is a good companion to Mellow Gold, if not as essential on its own. Originally recorded for Olympia, Wash.'s stringently indie K Records (which spent the 80s tearing down the received image of the punk rockers and replacing it with research librarians and men who love embroidering), One Foot is Beck striking his most lo-effort, DIY pose-- one that fit not only into K's roster, but into an indie-music world where foot shufflers like Palace, Smog, and Pavement were getting traction. But it's also his personal take on Americana-- opener "He's a Mighty Good Leader" is a Skip James cover; the slide-guitar blues of "Fourteen Rivers Fourteen Floods" just sounds like one; and the folksy stasis of "Sleeping Bag" has more in common with Leonard Cohen than anything happening in the indie world. This is Beck, rustic. The guitars are not entirely in tune. His voice, removed from the matrix of samples and syncopations, sounds nasal and naïve.
But his worldview-- really, what made him something much bigger than a novelty act-- is beautifully articulated. While Beck's commonly cited forebears are the Beastie Boys and Bob Dylan, his real lineage was from sculptors like Robert Rauschenberg or Claes Oldenburg: guys who turned the unusable spillover of mass production-- "trash," to the trash collector-- into art. If Warhol's soup cans had a crisp, almost optimistic feel, Oldenburg's hamburger was a downer-- an unappetizing convenience that will, eventually, kill us. And One Foot in the Grave is the moment after we surrender to it: Tract homes and strip malls, a Midwest that the Hold Steady hadn't yet romanticized, the edges of Los Angeles County that money didn't whitewash-- all crushed, half-empty, a mess. It's just the trash and the couch and me and you.
What's seductive about this particular doomsday scenario-- i.e., what's not depressing or urgent, or even meaningful-- is that Beck sounds relaxed. (If nobody advanced the idea in 1994, when the word was inescapable, I submit that being a slacker-- if being a slacker means "not caring about what's going on around me"-- is a form of peace, self-preservation, or maybe even enlightenment.) Every other song on One Foot juxtaposes a world burning down (or burned out) with sitting on one's ass. I could quote forever in support, but because this isn't a book report, I'll offer one line, my favorite, from "I've Seen the Land Beyond": "There's no telling who'll be dead/ When the pale horse is turning red/ And the tongues will burn in vain/ And everything will feel the same."
About half these jeremiads double as love songs, a form Beck didn't revisit in earnest again until 2002's Sea Change. While SC was unimaginatively billed as his "mature" album, I'm not sure that he was actually any more mature in 2002 than he was in 1994. True, the obvious "relationship" songs here-- "Asshole" (as in "She'll do anything to make you feel like an") and "Girl Dreams" (as in the ones that "never come true")-- lean on familiar (if funny) self-deprecation. But songs like "Painted Eyelids", "It's All in Your Mind", and "Teenage Wastebasket" (the latter two among the album's 16 bonus tracks) are careful, adoring, and sympathetic. ("Teenage Wastebasket", of which we get two versions, plays like a dull slap in Neutral Milk Hotel's face: "She is a teenage wastebasket/ Paddling up the river in a casket/ Trying to experience everything at least once/ Her life is a commercial for being fucked up.")
I'm not sure that remastering an album that was already lo-fi has done much good, and I'm not sure that the bonus material here is a revelation as much as, well, just a nice bonus. The best outtake, "It's All in Your Mind", was actually rerecorded for Sea Change, and it's obvious why the rest of the songs didn't make the final round. What is good is that One Foot ended up back in print. Mellow Gold eclipsed it (and Stereopathetic) entirely. In a sense, that's fine-- Mellow Gold was the best of the three. But I remember eagerly buying all three at once, and realizing later that what saved Beck from being a novelty artist was not only life after "Loser", but the life he'd already made around it.


David Berman’s first new music in over a decade is a marvelous collection of heartbreak, grief, and bitterness. His careful writing has never sounded so exacting or direct.

Purple Mountains

In 2009, David Berman quit music because he’s not a careerist; because he feared that he might start sucking; because, as he posited in an essay called “My Father, My Attack Dog,” his work as a songwriter could never offset the damage done to the world by his notorious corporate lobbyist father, Richard Berman, known as “Dr. Evil.” When HBO approached him during the hiatus to participate in a docuseries about his father Berman backed out, fearing it would end up being a sympathetic Tony Soprano–style portrait. But of all the reasons David Berman has given for abandoning his recording project, Silver Jews, the most pressing one was also the simplest: He wanted more time to read.
And so, Berman spent his forties at home in Nashville, surrounded by books—an experience that he recently described as being “kind of my childhood dream.” It’s an easy image to conjure for anybody acquainted with his body of work, an insular, quotable universe that spans six great-to-extraordinary studio albums, a collection of poetry, a book of cartoons, a documentary, a few EPs, and a compilation. Through it all, Berman maintained the role of the quiet outsider, someone proudly allergic to trends and devoted with scholarly intensity to things uncommon even in the individualist community of lo-fi indie rock: religion, country music, sobriety, an insistence on attributing deep significance to every word he sang and each interview he granted.
On 2008’s Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, the final Silver Jews album, Berman pared down his MFA-backed control of language for simple, allegorical writing. Throughout the record, his mood seemed light, as he sang words of love and perseverance, accompanied by his wife Cassie, the bassist and vocalist of his always-changing band (which has included, at various points, Stephen Malkmus, Bob Nastanovich, Will Oldham, and William Tyler).
Having kicked a nearly fatal drug addiction and devoted himself to Judaism, Berman seemed to be in a good place back then. And while he’s always been one for fabrication—he has given several contradicting explanations for the “Silver Jews” band name through the years—he’s never been one for pure obfuscation. It was easy to believe him when he said he was done with music for good. There were a few appearances following his early retirement; you can find YouTube videos of him, clean-cut and suave, at a poetry reading and a Harmony Korine screening. But there was also a lot of quiet. You never really imagined a Silver Jews comeback, even after rumors started spilling about band practices and new songs with titles like “Wacky Package Eyes.” “No I don’t really want to die,” he sang a long time ago. “I only want to die in your eyes.” And so he did.
The way Berman tells it, he picked up a guitar again after his mother’s death. “I think it was like meditation, but it was also like a massage,” he said of that familiar exercise, the wooden body vibrating against his chest. His strumming eventually spiraled into “I Loved Being My Mother’s Son,” a gentle highlight from his new comeback album under the name Purple Mountains. Lyrically bereaved but musically at peace, it sets the tone for the record as a whole. These are plainspoken songs of heartbreak, grief, and bitterness. One ballad, “Nights That Won’t Happen,” can be heard as a pros-and-cons list of just being alive. Backed by members of the Brooklyn psych-folk band Woods, however, Berman’s writing has never sounded so exacting or direct. These songs offer a solid introduction to all the beautiful contradictions that have always made his work so comforting and complex—a rare feat for a comeback album.
As warm and immediate as the record sounds—heartland harmonica, cantina horns, and pedal steel all guide his words—Berman’s lyrics reveal all the reading that has inspired him. The singalong chorus of “Margaritas at the Mall” alludes to a philosophical text on the capitalist origins of purgatory; a line about treating the world as a “roadside inn” in “Nights That Won’t Happen” echoes a teaching by the second-century Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus. And the jaunty “Storyline Fever” continues his tradition of whimsical penultimate tracks by considering the span of life as a long narrative with an infinite number of possible outcomes—it reads a lot like an anxiety attack but sounds a little like the Kinks. That Berman has scrounged a college syllabus’ worth of texts for their most human uses is a testament to the enduring, tragic empathy of his writing. Few writers are so willing to submit to their lowest depths to make you feel less alone.
While Purple Mountains is remarkable for affirming what we missed in Berman’s songwriting, it’s equally affecting for what it’s missing. He alludes to crises of faith in both “That’s Just the Way I Feel” and “Margaritas at the Mall,” a song that finds him at his wit’s end looking for answers from “such a subtle God.” His separation from Cassie after two decades of marriage casts a heavy shadow through nearly every song, a thematic and musical absence that gives the album an unsettling starkness. His voice has never been strong, but there’s a new helplessness to his delivery. “The end of all wanting is all I’ve been wanting,” he sings weakly in the opening track. “If no one’s fond of fuckin’ me, maybe no one’s fuckin’ fond of me,” he grumbles in the last. These are the kinds of characters he once observed with self-aware distance; nowadays, he just sounds spent.
The subject matter of Purple Mountains is grim, but he’s still David Berman, and he can still dazzle with the sheer beauty of his writing or wink at the camera to lighten the mood when necessary. Back when he first gained prominence in the ’90s, he was called a slacker, suggesting his unpolished delivery was either an affect or an ethos. Over time, he insisted just the opposite—that it was the striving that was important; that even if you couldn’t hold a note, it was worth showing the effort; that a song was something you spend a lifetime learning to sing right.


The Brooklyn singer-songwriter’s second solo album brings the haze of a previous life into focus, making a methodical survey of the vagaries of memory.

Good Guess

Good Guess, the second album of original songs from Brooklyn singer-songwriter Winston C.W., surveys the varied topography of human memory, finding hills and valleys in territory that feels both familiar and foreign. A song might arrive through rose-tinted glass, or as a self-critical reflection that casts the past in a single hue. But whatever the initial observation, it paves the way for more nuanced understanding, shedding light on previously overlooked intricacies of relationships both platonic and romantic—though, by the time all’s been said and sung, even these conclusions feel debatable.
This even-handed analysis is old hat for Cook-Wilson, who, as the frontman of New York sophisti-pop quartet Office Culture, detailed the highs and lows of city living on 2019’s A Life of Crime, an album full of characters finding joy and disappointment in equal measure in bars and backrooms. (Full disclosure: Cook-Wilson is also an occasional contributor to Pitchfork.) Good Guess localizes the drama, applying Cook-Wilson’s hyper-analytical introspection to the mind’s eye. With the hindsight that comes from months spent indoors, the haze of a previous life comes into focus, enabling more impartial evaluation of a time not so long ago that already feels distant.
Even with a clearer understanding of the past, doubt lies just beyond the frame. Uncertainty arrives in lockstep with each vignette, affecting every turn of phrase and chord progression. It oozes into the record’s central monologue, making for songwriting that’s rarely authoritative and keenly aware of its limitations, yet doing its best to describe things as they were. As Cook-Wilson sings on “Safety,” “That guilt will find you, no matter where you summer/No matter how long you hang your head.”
Offset by Cook-Wilson’s procession of muted piano chords, Carmen Rothwell’s bowed upright bass and Ryan Beckley’s hazy electric guitar heighten the miasmic, self-effacing verses of “Safety” and “Broken Drum.” Gradually, however, the players shift towards harmonic unison, and tense, dissonant performances eventually congeal into moments of warm melody. Simultaneously, Cook-Wilson’s songwriting becomes grounded and cogent, emerging from dazed ruminations with new wisdom on personal failings, whether it’s an awareness of life’s repetitive nature (“Broken Drum”) or an acknowledgment of how deeply the present is beholden to the past (“Safety”).
Beyond serving as backdrop for Good Guess’ ambiguous narration, this instrumentation propels the record’s most self-assured moments forward. The introductory instrumental of opener “Cakewalk” provides a sense of motion, its recollections of time spent with an ex-flame transitioning to a metaphor-laden exposition on the entire relationship as a meandering solo piano gives way to the full ensemble. Likewise, on “Birds,” the album’s most lighthearted tune, Cook-Wilson employs melodic vamps evocative of Randy Newman to playfully rib himself for his own past self-aggrandizing attitudes. It’s a spark of joy on an album that is otherwise serious and methodical in its approach to memory.
Experimental segues are abundant on Good Guess, but they sometimes feel isolated and nebulous. The instrumental “Swing Time” and its disparate, untethered instruments come off as indulgent, softening the momentum built over the record’s first four tracks. The winding lyricism and about-face turns from harmony towards a dirge-like procession on “No Regrets” are similarly contrarian, breaking from the album’s characteristic warm interplay. But in line with the record’s penchant for exploration, these suites are short-lived, as fleeting as the memories they soundtrack.
There’s no Rosebud in sight by the time Cook-Wilson arrives at the album’s titular conclusion, no final ruling as the mental evidence begins to pile up. “I look at your picture, squint ’til it bends/The eaves start rustling and I’m numb again,” he croons, encased by rumbling pianos and dissonant electric guitar, his vocals sounding spent as the album reaches its max volume before quickly fading to an outro of dampened pianos, quiet as it began. Nonetheless, it offers some closure; while the past remains unknowable, Good Guess illuminates the recesses of the psyche. There’s no real truth to be found back there, either—but eventually, you’ll have to turn around and come out.

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Sensuous, funny, and smartly produced, the London artist’s full-length debut transforms dusky electronic beats and trending pop sounds into a singular celebration of sexual agency.

Nymph

Midway through “Shlut,” a sultry entry from Shygirl’s full-length debut, the singer poses a simple question over skittering trap beats: “Is it so bad to just like to be touched?” Sexuality, especially female sexuality, is often seen as frivolous, fleeting, and tempestuous, something that by nature can’t be defined or qualified. Across Nymph, in both the content of the songs and the eclectic nature of their instrumentation, the artist born Blane Muise challenges that notion by giving full breadth to her fantasies and desires. What does it mean to be “bad”? What does it mean to want? With futuristic neo-club anthems like “Freak,” “Nasty,” and “Gush,” Shygirl has long worn her sexuality on her sleeve. On Nymph, her siren song lures us deeper into the forest, past the dank dancefloors of her early discography and toward somewhere brighter and more introspective.
To achieve this feat, she assembled a coterie of co-writers and co-producers, including longtime collaborator Sega Bodega, Mura Masa, Arca, and underground pop denizens Danny L Harle, BloodPop, and Vegyn. Each is known for a unique sound, but from track to track, they never clash. To her immense credit, Shygirl maintains the thread throughout, her barely-there falsetto and never-faltering bravado keeping everything laser-focused. On “Shlut,” she, BloodPop, and Bodega distill aspects of classic Y2K pop, like Darkchild-esque plucked acoustic guitars and a staticky looping sample, and mesh them seamlessly with the hip-hop and electronic influences you’d expect from a Shygirl track. The sound transcends nostaglia, evoking the low-rise jeans, belly tees, and brazen sex appeal of the early 2000s without resorting to mimicry.
Elsewhere on Nymph, Shygirl and her cohorts achieve the opposite effect—taking a very contemporary sound and reverse-engineering it so that it resembles the genre from which it evolved. While Shygirl has never been a hyperpop artist, her creative development has coincided with the genre’s rise. It’s an easy first reference for “Firefly,” where she, Fade to Mind producer Kingdom, and Bodega marry a bouncy, glitchy synth melody with a wispy electro beat and downpitched vocals. But instead of summoning an (increasingly stale, if we’re being honest) hyperpop sound, a satisfying UK garage track bubbles forth. Shygirl’s understanding of how these musical elements interact and inform one another feels alchemical.
That’s not to say Nymph is all heady production values and technical minutiae; it’s also a showcase for Shygirl’s whimsical and carnal humor. Call me juvenile, but I have yet to get through the intro to “Coochie (a bedtime story)” without a hearty chuckle: “Hello?” Shygirl breathes down the phone, “Is there anyone there? It’s the coochie calling.” She sounds like the grime Betty Boop. Even that image gets subverted, though, because as the song kicks in, we realize it’s not Shygirl’s coochie that is doing the calling; rather, she’s on the receiving end of the request. “Anytime that coochie calls/I’ll be on my way,” she sings, once again using her sexuality to underline the point that she has the agency to fuck, or be fucked, by whomever she pleases.
Like “Coochie,” every track on Nymph reveals some new aspect of Shygirl’s persona, musicality, or, most often, both. “Poison” is as much four-on-the-floor club fare as it is ’90s Europop fantasia. “Nike” is a tongue-in-cheek minimal dance track built around a flickering melody that sounds like a Nokia ringtone from 2005. Even when the pace slows in the final third, Nymph remains everything you’d want from a debut album: a definitive collection of songs that builds upon what already makes the artist remarkable. The only thing that doesn’t quite fit is Shygirl’s chosen pseudonym; coy, maybe, sly, definitely, but Shygirl? There’s nothing reserved, nothing toned-down about this record. Though she seldom sings above her speaking register, it’s the proverbial strength of Shygirl’s voice that gives Nymph its undeniable power.


This compilation of rarities shows the beloved emo band growing into their status as a generational voice.

The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Assorted Works

Assorted Works

The emo revival was largely a humble, underground phenomenon when The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die got started in 2009, but everything about them—their name, what seemed like a dozen people on stage trying to keep six-minute songs called “Eyjafjallajokull Dance” from collapsing on themselves—was too audacious and absurd to be ignored. It was clear they’d either be a generational voice or they might implode after one album, if they even get to that point. Maybe both. Even before their seismic proper debut Whenever, If Ever, TWIABP owed this reputation to the daunting and diffuse array of splits, singles, EPs and alternates that are collected for Assorted Works—a compilation that functions as a capstone for a bygone version of TWIABP, an entire scene, and an entire decade.
Scour r/emo, Midwest Emoposting or any other similarly minded community, and “Best Of” mixes of this material likely already exist, the band’s shadow history distilled into an unofficial TWIABP LP4. So Assorted Works might not actually be meant for the hardcore TWIABP fan—it’s a work of convenience rather than curation, 20 tracks in semi-chronological order over the span of nearly 80 minutes. And really, it’s far more fun to explore these songs in their original contexts, where TWIABP’s evolution can be traced from a confounding curiosity to a band that stuck around long enough to be a formative influence.
The first four tracks are taken from Are Here to Help You, a split with New Hampshire’s sorely underappreciated Deer Leap. “Beverly Wyatt,” which shows them beginning to refine and weaponize their burst-and-bloom dynamics, is also a treasured artifact from a crucial period: a few months before the release of Whenever, If Ever. On its original 4-way split, “Beverly Wyatt” served as the binding agent between the dour indie-pop of Tigers Jaw, the misanthropy of Self Defense Family, and metalcore innovators Code Orange, who were about five years away from realizing their full potential as WWE entrance music.
Though TWIABP already felt unruly and grandiose, they were still clearly a product of their local emo scene—probably the only reason they weren’t immediately hailed as maximalist indie rock standard-bearers like Arcade Fire or Broken Social Scene. Most of the notable bands of that time had an off-key yelper and an off-key hardcore guy on the mic. TWIABP had both: Tom Diaz and a guy named “Shitty Greg,” who’s credited with inventing the term “twinkle daddy,” which could refer to the two dominant modes of guitar in early TWIABP—the ringing, exploratory harmonies of American Football or the stardust trails of Explosions in the Sky.
It took time for TWIABP to make sense of everything, but from Are Here to Help You, it already was clear what they were about. Diaz was the singer for a band that conscientiously lacked a frontperson, writing almost entirely in plural pronouns about building community, reinforcing the meta, world-building quality of the band. The first half of Assorted Works introduced melodic motifs and homespun images (cars parked on the lawn, climbing trees) that would be revisited on their later albums, while “Mega Steve” is the first in a trilogy of TWIABP songs honoring drummer Steven Buttery, the only person to appear on all 20 tracks. Fuss with the sequencing of Assorted Works’ first half and there’s an alternate vision for Whenever, If Ever that similarly juggles propulsive pop-punk (“Be Neon With Me”), scratchy folk (“To the Janitor, to the King”) and their preeminent mode, which conflated emo’s anxious energy with post-rock’s grandeur. As is, they justify the hype that turned Whenever, If Ever into the emo revival’s first phenomenon—anticipation was so fervent that the label had to move it up due to leaks, and it even managed to scratch the outer edges of the Billboard 200.
Oddly enough, Whenever, If Ever is the source for the one true rarity on Assorted Works. “Gig Life” is the most plainspoken song Diaz wrote for the band, a vivid account of going from college town to college town, sustained by Sheetz and mewithoutYou albums. The take here, sourced from a lathe-cut single, cuts off before reaching the orchestral crescendo of the Whenever, If Ever version, and its incompleteness is even more poignant as his last vocal feature on Assorted Works—Diaz left the band prior to the release of Whenever, If Ever and died at the age of 32 in 2018.
Diaz’s role was absorbed by David Bello, whose vocals were similar enough on Whenever, if Ever that the two were easy to confuse. But Diaz never had a chance to guide something like “Fat Heaven,” the morose, feedback-scarred track that immediately follows “Gig Life,” and leads into the most antagonistic work of TWIABP’s catalog. “A Note From the Author February 1st to the Author January 1st” introduces the borderline-parodic spoken-word readings of Chris Zizzamia, whose presence lent an intriguing, unstable element to the band’s live shows. It’s followed by “We Carry Knives,” six minutes of harsh noise that appeared on tour-only single The Distance. In retrospect, those one-offs are the sound of TWIABP testing their outer limits before their transcendent sophomore album Harmlessness, a work so fantastically realized that it inevitably siphons some magic off of what surrounds it. The Assorted Works cut from this period are almost uniformly strong and occasionally sublime—the murderous double-kick drum outro of “Katamari Duquette” is a highlight, as is “Smoke & Felt,” featuring call-and-response vocals between Bello and Katie Dvorak.
Assorted Works cuts off on “Body Without Organs,” a song that didn’t quite mesh with the generous spirituality of Harmlessness and was released as an ACLU benefit in November 2016. There’s nothing here made by the lineup responsible for 2017’s Always Foreign, nor have TWIABP produced any new music in the time since—a significant decline in momentum two years after an album that was primed to be a breakthrough. Always Foreign featured TWIABP’s catchiest songs and also their most relevant, as Bello drew on his experience as a person of color for timely invective against rising anti-immigration rhetoric, proving TWIABP was not a band bound by their utopian idealism.
There has been a lot of turmoil in the band’s lineup since then. The only remaining original member is Buttery; “Shitty Greg” left for good in 2015 and is now a booking agent for a lot of bands you’ve probably seen if you liked TWIABP. The remaining members of TWIABP are working on their next album with “probably the strongest core we have yet,” and maybe it will just as strong as everything else they’ve released. But they look downright normal now, promoting a collection that remembers when they could’ve been anything in the world.

Buy: Rough Trade
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If a soundtrack to a troubled movie that features half Sia songs and half Scott Walker compositions sounds at the very least interesting, rest assured, it is not.

Vox Lux OST

“That’s what I love about pop music. I don’t want people to think too hard. I just want them to feel good.” That sentiment is uttered early on in Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux by the film’s protagonist, Celeste, a school-shooting survivor whose moment in the national spotlight turns into a decades-long ascent to pop stardom. It’s an old cliché about pop’s role in society that demands some ideological sharpening, but Corbet’s second feature doesn’t possess half the amount of focus required to develop the well-worn idea into something more insightful and holistic.
As young Celeste (Raffey Cassidy) survives an unbelievable tragedy that’s become all-too-believable while her older self (Natalie Portman) is trapped in a cycle of self-loathing and trauma, Vox Lux attempts to tilt at a few thematic windmills—the American culture of violence, how said culture intersects with pop iconography, the pressure we place on public figures to behave in a way that reflects our own assumed system of belief—without fully committing to any one beat. As a meditation about the daily horror of mass shootings in America and the accidental stardom that can accompany becoming the face of tragedy, it’s purely anachronistic; the assertion that Celeste’s elegiac post-shooting song “Wrapped Up” could go viral in the early 2000s anticipates the normalcy of regular violence and instant fame in a way that betrays the pre-viral time period. As target practice for the target-rich machinations of pop music itself, Vox Lux feels as forced as Portman’s Staten Island accent.
Amid these grasps for meaning, the clearest aspect of Vox Lux becomes its general disregard for the music itself. Written and produced by Sia and ubiquitous pop guy Greg Kurstin (Adele, Halsey), most of the ten Cassidy-and-Portman-performed songs the duo composed for the film are jammed into subpar concert footage that closes out the film’s last 20 minutes. For viewers looking to engage more fully with the music, there’s the soundtrack itself, which tacks on 10 instrumental score cues composed by legendary avant-garde figure Scott Walker (who also handled scoring on Corbet’s previous feature, the fascist-focused 2015 The Childhood of a Leader). Divorced from the screen, the Vox Lux soundtrack literally represents a split release between two of the pop machine’s most capable tinkerers and one of the most offbeat musicians of the last 40 years—a prospect as enticing as it is wholly representative of the film’s own thoughtless framework.
Sadly, neither of the soundtrack’s halves provide much to sink one’s teeth into. Walker’s scoring gets the job done in the truest sense, to the point where much of his music feels incidental when removed from the images it accompanies; his “Opening Credits” theme stands out the most here, with piping, eerie vocals and unsettling ambience only matched by the horrifying, hollowed-out center of “Terrorist.” Otherwise, Walker’s orchestral compositions—which provide a solid, melodramatic foil to Corbet’s onscreen pretension—largely lose their effectiveness in a home-listening environment, a fans-only experience far removed from the obtuse high art of his solo material and collaborations with Sunn O))).
If Walker’s contributions simply fade into the scenery, then Sia and Kurstin’s work represents the opposite. Her days as lead vocalist for British chillout group Zero 7 aside, Sia’s never really been much for subtlety; listening to her strongest and most effective singles can provide the emotional uplift of hang-gliding to the top of a mountain with fireworks timed to explode the moment you reach the peak. She makes big-sounding music with Kurstin frequently at her side, but through writing songs for Celeste’s fictional oeuvre, their sweeping approach takes the form of an obnoxious blare.
“I’m a private girl/ In a public world,” Portman sings competently on “Private Girl” through thickets of vocal processing that are practically tactile in their over-application; the sentiment lands with a dull thud of obviousness that suffocates the music as well as the film it’s attached to. Sure, pop music retains an effectiveness when not asking too much of its listeners—but Vox Lux and its insipid attempts at creating a fictional pop world functions as a cautionary tale in the face of such a banal truism: Treating your audience as if they’re stupid tends to reflect poorly on everyone except the audience themselves.


Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid have traveled far in the six years since their debut ...

Stars of the Lid: The Tired Sounds of...

The Tired Sounds of...

Brian McBride and Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid have traveled far in the six years since their debut, 1995's Music for Nitrous Oxide. But. They. Continue. To. Move. Very. Slowly. That promising first record combined crude guitar feedback with some snippets of religious radio programming that the band captured in their home state of Texas. It was all likely laid down on a four-track in some living room arranged around a double-barreled bong. Music for Nitrous Oxide was a noble and affecting work of home recording, showing that the DIY aesthetic could be incorporated into experimental drone music just as easily as guitar-based pop.
But The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid finds these guys fully harnessing the power of the studio, with striking results. Strings and horns are all over this record, and the richer palate gives the drones added weight and depth. In 1989, new music pioneer Pauline Oliveros recorded an amazing album called Deep Listening inside a 2,000,000-gallon steel tank, and the feel of The Tired Sounds is similar. Like the Oliveros record, the listener is meant to focus attention on the subtle build and decay inside these layered drones. Slight breaks in harmony between a violin and a shard of guitar feedback carry serious emotional weight. The half-second decay of a breathless French horn resonates like a perfect chord change. Silence becomes another instrument.
The Tired Sounds is an exceptionally long album-- two CDs or three LPs-- with six multi-part suites over the course of about two hours. If this were the latest collection of 2Pac rarities, we'd be talking serious sonic overkill, but music that evolves this slowly needs plenty of time to stretch out. Hence, nothing about this lengthy album feels at all bloated or extraneous.
The first three-part piece bears the jaunty title "Requiem for Dying Mothers," and the music itself is fitting. Thick cello harmonies weave between guitar drones that have a bright, almost Celtic quality. Changes are paid out slowly over the course of close to seven minutes, until the track opens up in its second part, introducing periods of silence and deep, foreboding bass pedals. Eventually, the band's penchant for field recording rears its head, as the 20-minute "Requiem" transforms into a gothic piece, with spare piano and unnamable radio transmissions.
"Austin Texas Mental Hospital" keeps the party going over the next 20 minutes, as guitar feedback and a larger orchestra modulate between two chords, rocking back and forth slowly like a self-stimming resident of the facility that gives the piece its name. The second part of the track reminds me of the Peter Gabriel soundtrack to Birdy, with hints of mechanical breathing interspersed with throbbing bass tones and a hanging drone in the middle register.
The second disc has a relatively lighter tone, with more space around the instruments, more keyboards, and less guitar feedback. "Mullholland" seems like it could be an audition tape for the forthcoming David Lynch film of a similar name, glowing with menace like a freshly waxed, cherry-red vanity ride. "Piano Aquieu," though, is the real find on this disc-- a minimal piece for treated keyboards, piano and organ, with a yearning melody and a half-hearted promise of redemption.
The strings return in force on "Fac 21," joining in a thick, Youngian drone. The piano-based "Ballad of Distances" recalls Labradford as heard through the ventilation shaft at Alcatraz, and the three-part "A Lovesong (For Cubs)" incorporates horns and cellos for a more conventional, but no less affecting sound.
With each record, Stars of the Lid seem to assess what tools are at their disposal and then set about seeing how they can maximize the result. Their continued explorations into more varied instrumentation and richer sonics are a smashing success. Still, in their crowded field, it's hard to say exactly what makes Stars of the Lid so special. It comes to mind that their relentless commitment to subtlety sets them apart, as does their masterful hand with tone. Throughout The Tired Sounds, dissonance is doled out in small portions, perfectly coloring the sculpted fields of sound.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the political soul of Curtis Mayfield’s 1972 album Super Fly.

Super Fly

The success of an album like Super Fly goes against all conventional wisdom. Nothing this raw, this ghetto, this funky, soulful, and political is supposed to sell five million copies. At least, to my understanding, nothing before the dawn of hip-hop, and even then you had to sacrifice some of those elements for commercial success. That’s what all the “conscious” rappers were telling me around the time I discovered Curtis Mayfield’s album some 15 years ago. It was around the time when George W. Bush was trying to convince the country that there were definitely WMDs in Iraq and even if there weren’t, he was still justified in leading us into another war with no information, no goals, and no end in sight. And yet the only protest music to really penetrate the charts was Green Day’s (decent) “American Idiot” and Jadakiss’ (less decent) “Why.”
The worst political music sounds like political music. It tends to be didactic, sure, but that’s an understandable and almost forgivable sin; it is difficult to condense any meaningful and convincing political message into the space of a few verses and a chorus. But when political music is truly awful—here, think of something like John Lennon’s “Imagine”—it is because the artist has made the same mistake as the politician: they have treated the message as more important than the people it is being delivered to. The best political music doesn’t necessarily announce itself as political because it is concerned first and foremost with the people for whom the politics matter the most.
That’s Super Fly. As Mayfield’s third studio album as a solo artist, Super Fly perfectly encapsulates the post-Civil Rights/early Black Power feel of black America struggling to survive the social and political consequences of the nation’s conservative backlash. This is the backdrop of all of the so-called blaxploitation era of film in the early ’70s, though Super Fly (directed by Gordon Parks Jr.) is the most explicit. The 1972 film follows Youngblood Priest, disillusioned by the drug trade that brought him riches beyond his imagination, as he seeks to set up one final score before leaving the game for good. The soundtrack became the most cohesive and poignant of Mayfield’s albums because it unfolds around this story of the dispossessed, forgotten strivers. The film’s star, the classically trained Ron O’Neal, said in an interview: “Super Fly is about people who don’t believe in the American Dream at all.”
As such, Mayfield opens the album with “Little Child Runnin’ Wild,” a song that was in the works before he got the Super Fly assignment, which balances both the frenetic pace and precarious circumstances of ghetto life. The string section is ominous, while the horns feel like a further warning of the dangers Mayfield describes in the lyrics. But when he wails:

Didn’t have to be here
You didn’t have to love for me
While I was just a nothin’ child
Why couldn’t they just let me be

You can feel the pain coursing through his falsetto as it gives way to resigned, desperate moan on the last “let me be.” You cry for the nameless, faceless child who runs with no escape.
Then, when the percussion kicks in on “Pusherman,” you’re ready to groove. The drums are brought to the fore, giving us a percussive melody foreign to pop music but which hit the definition of funky. It would have been easy to let the tune carry on to the dancefloor with some lighter lyrics, but Mayfield didn’t let listeners off the hook, dropping us into the life of this “man of odd circumstance/A victim of ghetto demands.” He enjoys all the spoils you expect to come from a life of dealing drugs: money, sex, clothes, cars, envy. But Mayfield’s chorus provides us with an important insight into who and what is embodied in the “Pusherman”:

I’m your mama, I’m your daddy
I’m that nigga in the alley
I’m your doctor, when in need
Want some coke, have some weed
You know me, I’m your friend
Your main boy, thick and thin
I’m your pusherman

It’s not simply that the pusherman becomes this singular figure that replaces every important relationship in the addict’s life, but rather that the pusherman could be any one of these people. Black America faced an uncertain world in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the election of President Richard Nixon. Politicians were promising to restore “law and order” after years of urban rebellions frightened white folks who had long fled to the suburbs. Steady divestment from black communities, along with increasing levels of violent policing, right at the moment where black people were supposedly free to enjoy the rights of American citizenship, put black neighborhoods at economic depression levels. The drug trade offered the best sense of escape. No one, as Mayfield pointed out, was exempt from the temptation. He had intimate knowledge of this world. Mayfield was a son of Chicago, having been raised in the notorious Cabrini-Green housing projects. The lyrics were as much his personal reflection on ghetto life as they were based on the characters of the film.
The soundtrack’s biggest hit, “Freddie’s Dead,” is the tragic tale of one of the film’s characters, Fat Freddie, an addict that Youngblood Priest exploits in his plot to make his last big score. Mayfield employs the wah-wah guitar to place some funk underneath the mournful orchestra while warning us against Freddie’s life choices. The most interesting lyrical couplet, though, is: “We can deal with rockets and dreams/But reality, what does it mean.” It’s reminiscent of Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon,” lamenting the ability of mankind to explore the stars but not provide for people suffering right here on earth. The album and Mayfield’s politics were aligned in being concerned, above all else, about how we care for one another.
The back half of the soundtrack includes the sensual “Give Me Your Love” which accompanies the film’s iconic bathtub scene where Youngblood Priest and his lover, Georgia, make love in the bubbles. The scene itself is maybe not as smooth as the music, but at the time, seeing black bodies be sensual and sexual with one another was so rare in film that it had to feel more revolutionary than Parks Jr.’s camera made it look. Still, the machismo and misogyny of the film can’t be overlooked, as so much of the blaxploitation era leaned on sexist tropes to carry their narratives, turning the women of their films into ancillary characters who only bolstered the male protagonist’s claim to manhood and vitality. “Give Me Your Love” isn’t so much a love song as a command song. It manages not to veer too far into the territory of aggression, maintaining a romantic assertiveness, but the line is bit blurry.
The cheesiest of the album’s nine tracks is “No Thing on Me (Cocaine Song)” which feels thrown in to satisfy Mayfield’s desire to ensure that he didn’t glorify drug use, as the film tended to do. But even with his overly cautious, hall-monitor lyrics (“You don’t have to be no junkie”), he never leaves the groove behind, opting this time for something a bit more triumphant and celebratory. He closes it out with “Superfly,” a clear attempt at mimicking the boisterous superhero anthem that Isaac Hayes provided for Shaft the year before. Hayes’ song may be the single most popular track of the blaxploitation genre, but that has as much to do with its being peppered with easily parodied, overtly ’70s slang as it does with the quality of the song (it helped Hayes become the first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Original Song). “Superfly” aspires to be as big, musically, as “Theme from Shaft,” but it doesn’t sacrifice on the thematic continuity. This is still about hustling, surviving, poverty, blackness, and pain. It is, as Mayfield’s highest falsetto intones at the end of the song, about “Tryin’ ta get over.”
Super Fly inspired imitations in the blaxploitation soundtrack genre, such as Bobby Womack’s Across 110th Street, James Brown’s Black Caesar, and Willie Hutch’s The Mack (not bad imitations, but imitations nonetheless) that didn’t quite capture the tension, despair, and astute political analysis that make Super Fly stand out. Mayfield created the perfect film soundtrack; certainly the best of the blaxploitation genre, and perhaps, outside of Prince’s Purple Rain, the best of any soundtrack written and produced by a single artist.
And while he sang sweetly on record, Mayfield had entanglements with the real women in his life that were much more harsh. According to the Curtis Mayfield biography, Traveling Soul, co-written by his son Todd Mayfield and Travis Atria, around the time of Super Fly’s success, Curtis was abusive toward the woman he lived with, identified only as Toni, and referred as his “spiritual wife.” Todd writes: “On vacation in Nassau in October [1972], right around Super Fly’s ascendance to the top of the pops, he and Toni got into a late-night argument as [his daughters] Tracy, Sharon, and I slept in another room. When the commotion startled me awake, I walked out to find policemen hulking in the doorway and Toni with a black eye. Dad never did these things in front of us, but we’d see the aftermath.”
There is a tendency to celebrate male artist in such an uncomplicated way that obscures, and even rationalizes, some truly abhorrent behavior. This is especially true when it comes to violence against women committed by musicians we celebrate for their political contributions. We have to be willing to complicate the legacies of the men responsible for these acts. Entangled within Mayfield’s life is Super Fly, the ghetto, funky, soulful, political album that was disseminated across America. Maybe the conscious rappers of my youth were right. If Super Fly needed to accomplish all of that to become popular, it’s the exception that proves the rule. It was a moment of fortune.


Few post-punk outfits deliver their most accomplished album 36 years after putting out a debut single. Yet the story of Philadelphia’s Notekillers has rarely been a typical one.

Songs and Jams Vol. 1

Few post-punk outfits deliver their most accomplished album 36 years after putting out a debut single. Yet the story of the Philadelphia’s Notekillers has rarely been a typical one. After an initial five-year run in the late 1970s and early ’80s, members of this instrumental trio shelved their jagged no-wave arrangements and called it quits. Guitarist David First moved to New York and launched a career in the city’s Downtown new-classical scene. And while this short-lived band didn’t make most of the histories of the American underground (understandably), it did turn out to have some big fans in Sonic Youth.
Once Thurston Moore let on that he, Kim Gordon, and Lee Ranaldo had all been influenced by Notekillers’ only single—and after Moore’s Ecstatic Peace! imprint released a 2004 collection of vintage recordings—the band resumed work and put out a solid reunion set.
It was a feel-good underground rock story. (Resolved: only cranks dislike seeing relatively unknown artists get a bit of overdue recognition.) But it was also possible to survey the band’s embryonic provocations and post-hiatus polish and sense a potential yet to be fulfilled. The early tracks have undeniable energy—that single made an impression on Sonic Youth’s three singer-songwriters for a reason—though the originally unissued material from that era could be thin on development. And while the songs on 2010’s We’re Here to Help showed greater complexity, several of the compositions worked hard at touching on everything the group could do: a strategy that, when repeated, paradoxically gave the full album a uniform air.
Songs and Jams Vol. 1 may bear a casual title, but it’s the most conceptually varied release of this band’s strange career. Side A provides a stretch of distinct, catchy no-wave—as well as production sonics that have been smartly updated with just the right amount of electronic overdubbing. (And for the first time, a Notekillers song even features a guest vocalist.) Side B is devoted to a pair of exploratory, improv-dominated noise-rock opuses (long a feature of Notekillers’ live gigs, but not a side of the group previously documented in a studio). Over the album’s 38 minutes, there isn’t a lick that isn’t memorable, or that seems out of place.
And for all that refinement, it still snarls with invention. Opening track “Foster” begins with quick pivots between two riffs—as a hurtling, ascending line in the guitar and bass switches off frequently with a more melodic passage. Just when this back and forth threatens to become predictable, First overdubs a woozy, whammy-bar solo while the rhythm section locks onto a single-chord grind. First’s alternate career as a composer of avant-classical music is hinted at in “Ants,” courtesy of an ululating drone that joins the power trio in the early going (and which points toward the song’s anxious, climactic alarm). And the introduction of percussive, minimalist bell patterns, at the close of the majestic “Crash,” is another compositional surprise that works.
The band is joined by another veteran of New York’s post-punk scene on the anthem “Missilebones.” Singer Shelley Hirsch has, like First, worked in New York’s alt-classical venues—using her extended-technique vocal skills in performance-art operas as well as in improvisatory rock contexts. In addition to her own albums, she’s been featured as a guest on a variety of recordings issued by John Zorn’s Tzadik label. But her appearance on this Notekillers track is one of her best guest features.
Her vibrato seems impossibly wide, at times, though it’s always clearly under her control. You can hear the training, even when she’s pushing a line into desperate squeals and strangled yodels. The edge of her performance also seems to let the members of Notekillers relax into one of the sunniest pop choruses of their catalog—during which Hirsch provides some conventional background harmony. I’d listen to a full album of songs from this collaboration.
The two longer tracks—“Ring Mod 2” and “Trem 7”—are what the band calls “free-rock jams.” And while this music is often noisier than the band’s focused no-wave compositions, this sequence of music manages to feel like a respite, too. The patience with which both improvisations play out has a calming effect, even when the overall sound is in the red.
Creating a meditative peace through complex microtonal movement is a goal of some classical work by First, so it’s not a surprise that this thrashing music could have a similarly blissed out quality. Though credit is also due to the entire band: in these closing tracks, both bassist Stephen Bilenky and drummer Barry Halkin show a vibrant range of performance possibilities that don’t fit easily inside band’s shorter, more urgent songs. Since it advances the avant-rock forms these musicians helped invent, this Notekillers album is more than a victory lap. It’s a thing to cherish. Bring on Volume 2.


A breakdown that led BADBADNOTGOOD keyboardist Matty Tavares to move in with his parents also resulted in this breezy, psychedelic soft-rock album recorded with sought-after sample maker Frank Dukes.

Déjàvu

Matty Tavares got burned out. The keyboardist’s band, Toronto jazz combo BADBADNOTGOOD, had achieved a remarkable degree of success collaborating with A-list rappers like Ghostface, Tyler, the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt, and Kendrick Lamar. That increased profile led to touring—which, for Tavares, soon led to anxiety and depression. He became frustrated with the band, experienced what he has called a “mental breakdown,” and moved in with his parents. While living with them, Tavares returned to making the psychedelic soft rock that he’d dabbled in since he was 16 years old, working with a close friend, producer and ubiquitous sample source Frank Dukes.
It was a therapeutic period for Tavares, who has since rejoined BBNG, but also a productive one. The result is Déjàvu, a breezy, pleasant nine-song record whose parkland harmonies and AM-radio fuzziness recall the gentle, mid-period work of Woods and Ariel Pink. Its music is simple, soothing, and often lovely, betraying little of the friction that generally accompanies a period of self-examination like the one Tavares underwent. But the lyrics are so nakedly vulnerable that they can feel, paradoxically, as if they’re not revealing much at all. Often, instead of stories or scenarios, Tavares presents emotions so undistilled that they can be easier to ignore than to engage with.
As a member of BBNG, the keyboardist contributes to a group that has long since set genre orthodoxy aside. The band gained a following by covering hip-hop instrumentals and tends to shift its tone from record to record. Tavares’ versatility has been key to this evolution: Compare his anxious contributions to 2014’s IIIwith the triumphant tenor of his chords on the title track of 2016’s IV, and you’ll have a sense of how his talents help BBNG to change colors as needed. He comes across as a hugely supportive musician, so maybe it’s no wonder that he needed a break from the demanding intimacy of the group.
On Déjàvu, his generosity manifests in the music’s consistent richness. “Clear” is laden with falsetto harmonies and soft, humming keys—yet another green world shot through with sunlight. Opening track “Embarrassed” is chillwave redux, its cushiony bass and synths transporting the listener directly back to the summer of 2009. The lyrics also convey Tavares’ real-life generosity, albeit in a less compelling way, as he describes how his aversion to conflict keeps him from confronting others: “I’m embarrassed to know you at all,” he sings. “That’s why I keep the conversations small.” The disparity between the comforting tone of the music and the needling disquiet of the words makes it tempting to tune out the latter. A similar emotion suffuses “I’ll Gladly Place Myself Below You,” as Tavares describes the self-loathing that compels us to put others’ needs before our own. Although it doesn’t read as self-pitying, the song stops at acknowledging the feeling’s existence rather than examining what caused it.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the record is its lack of memorable melodies, given Tavares’ and Dukes’ respective pedigrees. There are exceptions: “How Can He Be” is an uptempo pop track with a jaunty bass anchor and Beatles-esque harmonies on the chorus, while “Nothing, Yet” is a Tame Impala-style jam that has the catchiest verses of any song on the album. But even those cuts fail to distinguish themselves beyond the visceral pleasure of the music. On “Nothing, Yet,” Tavares doesn’t seem to have worked out exactly what to do with the chorus, which makes the song’s highlights play like wasted opportunities—they’re beautiful bridges to mild disappointment.
The most damning indictment of the songwriting on Déjàvu is also the record’s most impressive offering: its closer, the title track. Although it’s an instrumental, the eight-and-a-half-minute piece has a narrative arc that the rest of the album largely lacks. With its poise, its knowing shifts in momentum, and its comfort with the longer format, it sounds a lot like BADBADNOTGOOD—and, in that sense, it makes a neat coda to Tavares’s crisis. The transition from jazz to pop may not entirely suit him, but in releasing Déjàvu, he has shared some very pretty music and made public a private project that helped him work through deeply personal issues. Most importantly, the album documents the process that led him back to the role in which he seems most at home.


The appeal of DuFlocka Rant 2 can be compared to certain strains of extreme metal, where the gratification comes from surrendering to the onslaught. If Waka Flocka Flame has lowered the standards for writing in the rap world, he's also introduced a new level of catharsis.

DuFlocka Rant 2

Here’s a fun challenge: Cue up DuFlocka Rant 2 through headphones at a reasonable volume and while listening to it try to accomplish anything that requires even a modicum of concentration. Read a magazine article. Write a blog post. Shop for cat food. The average person will find even simple tasks like these considerably more difficult than usual, if not flat-out impossible. Waka Flocka Flame is the most attention-starved character in hip-hop, and he’s not satisfied with simply grabbing your attention; he needs to dominate it, to the exclusion of everything else. Waka Flocka Flame does not want you multitasking while he’s on.
Hence the throat-shredding scream-raps (sometimes layered two or three deep) suspended in a matrix of frame-rattling bass, flickering hi-hats, and anxiety-inducing one-bar synth loops that form the foundation of Flocka’s aesthetic. Each track on DuFlocka Rant 2 fills every available nook and cranny of the audible spectrum with noise and chaos. Trying to ignore it in any way is hopeless.
This kind of insistence upon your attention is normally a turnoff, but Flocka makes a compelling case for letting him dominate your senses. The pleasure that I take in listening to DuFlocka Rant 2 is less like what I get from the usual mixtape and more like why I love certain strains of extreme metal, where the gratification comes from surrendering to the onslaught, and letting yourself be obliterated as it passes over you and through you.
On DR2’s spoken word intro Flocka boasts, among other things, that when he dropped Flockaveli back in 2010 that “hip-hop changed,” and it’s hard to argue with him. That album not only made him a star, but also made teen production wizard Lex Luger one as well, and helped solidify the modern trap sound’s stranglehold on mainstream hip-hop. It also, as many of his critics complained, dealt a considerable blow to the notion of that good rappers need to be good writers, which had already been weakened by a generation of Southern rappers who were less interested in competing with Northerners lyrically than economically. Flocka’s admission early on that he rapped primarily for the checks and not because he considered himself an artist sent up howls from hip-hop’s more serious corners.
But if Waka Flocka Flame has lowered the standards for writing in the rap world-- and the wave of poetry-averse Flockaveli fans that make up the Chicago drill scene, for instance, suggests that he has-- he’s made up for it by introducing a level of catharsis that it had rarely achieved before. Records like DR2 aren’t just distractions, they’re sonic power washers blasting out whatever psychic residue you have gunking up the corners of your brain. If you’re in the market for a moment of mental ablation you might want to try the larynx-ruining primal scream that Flocka emits in the middle of “Hood Rich”.
The qualities of its screaming chaos aside, does DuFlocka Rant 2 offer up anything that you can’t find on the original DuFlocka Rant or any of his other mixtapes? Sure. “Can’t Do Golds” has one of the most straightforward pop hooks that he’s delivered yet. “Tax Money” has an intriguing instrumental track (produced by Purps on the Beat) based around low orchestral horns that suggests that more rap producers should be ripping off the score to Inception. And overall there’s just more of a tightness, a strong feeling that the manic combustibility of his first few records is now being concentrated and refined into a weapons-grade explosiveness, and that whenever Flockaveli 2 drops it’s going to leave a crater on the rap landscape.