After a scooter accident almost killed him, William Bensussen returns with a more nuanced album, full of spiritual revelations and electro-psych affirmations.

Instrumentalepathy

William Bensussen should be dead right now after he flipped his scooter back in 2013. But anyone who still goes by the name “the Gaslamp Killer,” a DJ name he earned in his teenage years by alienating San Diego party bros with his dark psych hip-hop sets back in the day isn’t going to compromise that easy—not for death or anyone else.
The Gaslamp Killer’s feral enthusiasm and morbid sense of style have run through his work from visuals to sonics, a beat-scene Black Sabbath in a Los Angeles otherwise driven by next-gen Pharoah Sanders acolytes. He still fits—he always has—but firsthand brushes with mortality have a way of shifting even the most detached cynic’s perspective. And GLK is no detached cynic. *Instrumentalepathy, then, is what happens when a man known for his intensity steps back from the brink, still reeling from the haze of painkillers and the sounds of family voices he thought he’d never hear again. And while his work hasn’t been 100% unrelenting doom-sludge from the get-go—even 2012’s flag-planting debut Breakthrough *shook hips as often as it chilled spines—there’s a hard-fought liveliness to this record that reconfigures his familiar tics and collaborative ideas into something more affirmational.
The beginnings of the album as it exists now started taking shape while GLK was still in the hospital. Opening cut “Pathetic Dreams” features his mother’s voice stating “I love you,” an echo of the first sound he heard when he woke up from surgery. From the meditative stretches through its more characteristically hectic, live-drummed acid-funk assault, it feels like the struggle and strengthening of a recovery process both depicted through and helped along by his music.
There are two cuts on *Instrumentalepathy *that came to be while Bensussen was still housebound, zonked on pain pills after years of sobriety, trying to recapture the feeling of making music that might be a substitute for narcotics. Fittingly enough, they’re the closest *Instrumentalepathy *has to a clear continuation from the sounds on the pre-accident Breakthrough: “Haleva,” like the earlier “Nissim,” is a Turkish funk nod to Bensussen’s lineage named after one of his great-grandparents and featuring instrumentation from guitarist Amir Yaghmai, and the penultimate “Shred You to Bits” is a growling beast of a track that would fit in cleanly on Breakthrough’s doom-breaks latter half. But even with the commonalities—including return appearances by Yaghmai, Gonjasufi, and co-arrangers like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Mophono—there’s a different, more nuanced aim here.
It’s a trip to hear “Residual Tingles” unfurl from its subwoofer-rattling Incredible Bongo Band loop and become newly graceful and cosmic. When it builds from a floating sequence of organ chords into an orchestral flourish, it’s a clear sign that GLK’s is as comfortable with meditative beauty as he’s been with abrasive heaviness. He’s also having fun turning his ear to more playful takes on the weird: the hissing-grease glitch of Mophono team-up “The Butcher” is like a ’70s Moog novelty record tasered into joint-dislocating bass music, and the Malcolm Catto-propelled “Gammalaser Kill” lopes beneath rusty analog whistling that sounds like a run-down robot aviary. Most impressive of all is “In the Dark (Part Two),” a “digital bonus” that winds up feeling like the definitive closer the album can’t live without. Catto’s Heliocentrics reconvene with GLK for a nearly twelve-minute slow-burn crest of orchestral psych that’s the closest anyone out of Low End Theory has come to classic Spiritualized.
And that’s what happens when you’re as infectiously outgoing and enthusiastic as Bensussen is: He gathers friends, then he gathers ideas. In late 2013, less than five months after his accident, he put together an all-star lineup of musicians to record as “The Gaslamp Killer Experience.” He made his beat-scene-cornerstone status into an ensemble effort and the 2015 release of the concert as Live in Los Angeles revealed how strongly his material could carry over from DIY-studio beats to full-fledged live-band arrangements. So as much as he’s still rooted in that one man/one MPC/10,000 records ethos, he’s flourished as an artist who knows he’s part of something even bigger. He uses that knowledge to help unlock the kind of revelations that come from realizing you’ve got another chance at renewing who you are as an artist. *Instrumentalepathy *is where we learn what GLK realized once he started recovering from his accident, and his work on this earth isn’t even close to over.


The Bristol duo championed by Portishead's Geoff Barrow indulge in sample-heavy pop that seems pulled from a UK pirate-radio broadcast from 1973.

Ugly Side of Love

"I know what I want/ I want off this roundabout!" Given Malachai's apparent fondness for turn-of-the-1970s British music-- Badfinger, schmaltzy AM-radio pop, or the grainy reggae imported by England's Jamaican immigrant class-- this lyric from the masked Bristol duo's debut could very well just be a colloquial reference to traffic congestion on UK motorways. But the manic, cut-and-paste aesthetic that members Gee Ealey and Scott Hendy exhibit on Ugly Side of Love also suggests that the lyric could be a rejection of the (re)cyclical nature of rock, what with the 80s post-punk resurrection that informed so much indie over the past decade now yielding to 90s alt-rock revivalism, like clockwork. For a band like Malachai, who are more interested in toying with unfashionable pop arcana than conforming to hipster-baiting trends, it's hard to tell what's more wearisome: the prevalence of genre-centric nostalgia, or the fact that it recurs at such predictable intervals.
Now, Malachai-- previously Malakai, before a namesake California rapper claimed legal dibs on the "k"-- are hardly ones to present themselves as futurists; Ugly Side of Love seems deliberately designed to evoke the dusty-grooved ambience and freewheeling feel of a UK pirate-radio broadcast from 1973. But unlike so many Britpop bands who tried to recapture the spirit of a bygone era by writing and performing songs that sound like their favorite albums, Ealey and Hendy simply take the posturing out of the equation altogether and just sample them wholesale. Ugly Side of Love is thus a rock album pieced together by crate-diggers, one that's eager to undercut notions of authenticity to emphasize its own pastiche quality with obvious samples and abrupt edits.
Surprisingly, the liners list only two sample sources, one of them 70s-era UK crooner Daniel Boone's "Sad and Lonely Lady" being repurposed on the boogie-rock stomper "Snowflake". But there's clearly so much more where that came from: "How Long" loops the Guess Who's 1970 single "Hand Me Down World" into a piece of hand-me-down rock that deviously cuts its sample off mid-guitar-lick; "Shitkicker" revs up on a riff reminiscent of Heart's Camaro classic "Barracuda" before sling-shooting back on a cavalcade of incessant handclaps, Gee's double-tracked harmonies and, of course, more cowbell; the reggafied rumble "Warriors" not only name-checks the 1979 gang flick, it uses the film's climactic, bottle-plinking "come and out play" taunt as its hook. But Ugly Side of Love is more than just the sum of Malachai's dollar-bin finds. In Gee, they boast an elastic vocalist who perfectly embodies band's mischievous approach, yielding performances that are by turns sinister (the mutant acid-rocker "Blackbird") and heart-on-sleeve sweet (the bubblegum-soul serenade "Another Sun"). Ironically, it's his least affected performance that feels the most forced, with the clap-along campfire jam "Moonsurfin'" coming off like a commercial jingle ("Now it's here/ Grab a beer!") pitched at trustafarians.
Considering Malachai's Bristol roots and flair for sample-based recontextualization, it's no surprise that the duo has found a champion/mentor in Portishead's Geoff Barrow, who first issued the album last year on his Invada imprint and served as its "executive producer." Indeed, the sole Barrow co-write, "Only For You", carries heavy, cannabis-infused whiffs of Portishead's film-noir funk. But Malachai are actually most reminiscent of Clinic, another shadowy outfit who debuted on Domino some 10 years ago. The latter tapped more canonical cult-rock sources like the Velvet Underground and Sparks, but exhibited a similar adeptness at processing and repackaging disparate reference points into seemingly familiar yet freakishly alien two-minute pop songs. And if, like Clinic, Malachai are too respectful of their retro sources to fully veer off the rock'n'roll roundabout, Ugly Side of Love nonetheless revisits a moment in British pop history through a series of surprising U-turns and thrillingly illegal lane changes.


The Mael brothers are riding high. Their 26th album strikes the ideal Sparksian balance of madcap melody, labyrinthine arrangement, and stinging social satire.

The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte

Most underdog rock documentaries paint a doleful portrait of neglected geniuses who have been cruelly denied their due. Director Edgar Wright’s 2021 love letter to Sparks, The Sparks Brothers, doesn’t exactly make that case: The copious clips of brothers Ron and Russell Mael performing on Top of the Pops in the ’70s and joshing with Dick Clark on American Bandstand in the ’80s indicate this band hasn’t exactly been wallowing in obscurity. What Wright’s film argues is that Sparks simply aren’t popular enough. But thanks to The Sparks Brothers’ Netflix-abetted dissemination, and the Maels’ subsequent César Award win for scoring Leos Carax’s maniacal musical Annette, the brothers are currently enjoying an unprecedented degree of mainstream attention for a couple of septuagenarians on their 26th album—complete with a Cate Blanchett co-sign and prime Yellowjackets placement. This summer, the brothers will headline the Hollywood Bowl, the same venue where they saw the Fab Four at the height of Beatlemania. Fifty years after these American Anglophiles first became cause célèbres in the UK, Sparks are an international institution—and with The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte, they meet their moment head-on and thoroughly whomp that sucker. The album marks the Maels’ return to Island (incubator of their earliest ’70s hits) after 47 years, but the move doesn’t so much signal a return to their glam glory days as reaffirm Sparks’ surging currency.
Sparks are rightfully praised as savvy shapeshifters, but the past decade has been one of relative aesthetic consistency. After a half-century of bounding between rock theatricality, electro-disco austerity, and classical frippery, recent releases like Hippopotamus and A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip have synthesized the Maels’ interests into sleek hybrid models, presenting a vision of pop music that belongs equally to Old Hollywood and outer space. The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte stays the course but exudes even more vitality and verve, striking the ideal Sparksian balance of madcap melody, labyrinthine arrangement, and stinging social satire. What Kimono My House was to their glitter-rock phase and No. 1 in Heaven was to their synth-pop period, The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte is to this late-career era of holistic stability: While it may not aspire to the same game-changing sense of surprise as those ecstatic classics, it nonetheless represents a new high-water mark for 21st-century Sparks.
As titles go, The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte would make for a perfectly wistful Belle and Sebastian record, but Sparks present that melancholy café scene as a five-alarm fire. On the opening title track, buzzing synthesizer and panic-attack beats direct our attention to a weeping woman who’s experiencing not so much a midlife crisis as a middle-class crisis: the appearance of having it all but feeling empty inside. As the pressure mounts, “The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte” transforms into an electro-shocked “Eleanor Rigby,” its dejected protagonist serving as an avatar: “So many people are crying in their latte,” Russell repeats, providing a bumper-sticker slogan for a record that suggests the true meaning of life is to brace yourself for its endless disappointments.
But no other band articulates existential dread with such playful panache and joyous absurdity. The self-explanatory sentiments of “Nothing Is as Good as They Say It Is” are packaged into feel-good power-pop sung from the perspective of a newborn baby who gets an eyeful of life outside the womb and opts to crawl back in. And on “The Mona Lisa’s Packing, Leaving Late Tonight,” even da Vinci’s eternal model of calm contentment is anxious to step out of the frame and run for the hills. “She might seem dispassionate, but that’s not true/She feels much the same as everyone, me and you,” Russell observes as he rides a synth-speckled stomp into an alternate universe where Sparks enlisted Giorgio Moroder to produce Indiscreet.
Through Sparks’ looking glass, history becomes fantasy, politics become pantomime, and dictators become DJs. Over the goose-stepping ’90s piano-house accents of “We Go Dancing,” Russell sketches a delirious caricature of authoritarianism by assuming the voice of a Kim Jong Un zealot who claims his fair leader is far more skilled behind the decks than Skrillex and “maybe Diplo.” And on “Veronica Lake,” the brothers revive the movie star of the 1940s with electronics from the 2040s, reframing her strange-but-true story of sacrificing her signature hairstyle for the war effort as a white-knuckled do-or-die mission worthy of an espionage thriller. But if The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte reaffirms Sparks’ status as rock’s most reliable fabulists, the album’s grand finale brings forth an uncharacteristic introspection. In their 1994 UK hit single, Russell asked, “When do I get to sing ‘My Way’?” and “Gee, That Was Fun” is as close as he’ll probably get: a plaintive, curtain-closing ballad that catalogs his regrets. And he’s had a few. (For starters: “Should have spent less time watching sports/Should have improved my quick retorts.”) It’s the sort of song that sounds like a deathbed reflection, or perhaps a requiem for Sparks themselves. But most likely, it’s the album’s most elaborate prank: a cunning send-up of the meditations on mortality that serious artists are expected to write once they reach their 70s—a joke for which Sparks’ ongoing renaissance provides its own self-evident punchline.


AraabMuzik’s long-awaited sophomore LP Dream World is packed with more sonic diversity than his beloved debut, Electronic Dream. This works both for and against him.

Dream World

It’s easy to forget that AraabMuzik has successfully been making beats for close to a decade. The Providence producer's widespread allure arrived near 2010 when pop music fell head-first into the EDM scene. His 2011 debut LP Electronic Dream capitalized heavily off that trend, with woozy dreamscapes that ultimately trickled into the humble rap beginnings from which he came (primarily Cam’ron and his Dipset dynasty).
It would be remiss to say AraabMuzik (born Abraham Orellana) invented the subgenre cloud rap, but he provided a sturdier framework for it, while producers like Clams Casino and Harry Fraud unlocked a bevy of samples often ignored by Araab in exchange for his rapid-fire MPC flexing. Videos circulated of him flapping his arms over the device like a Hindu deity, solidifying his dexterity as both a hip-hop producer and a catchy electronic one. A flood of mixtapes and EPs arrived in the sizable gap between Electronic Dream and Dream World, yet AraabMuzik’s place in beat-making feels uncertain right now.
They say to tailor your resume for every different job that you want, so going by that theory, Dream World would land AraabMuzik in any career field. The experience is there, but the project breathes an unspoken awareness that his signature sound is no longer just his. Clams and Fraud have popularized that atmospheric aesthetic, but other producers have taken to wedging random electronic blips into their work in an effort ride the trap house movement. So what we’re left with on Dream World is a solid project that flies in multiple directions.
Thankfully, the dreamier cuts are there—and arguably the best parts of the album. Opener “Adonis” blends Araab’s MPC proficiency against choir chants and electronic key tones, reflecting a cult-meets-church vibe. “Mind Trip” and “Faded” bring it back to the Electronic Dream era, pairing the producer’s knack for ethereal voice samples with his hip-hop bassline foundation. A collaboration with producer !llmind proves successful, as “Dream” highlights the vocals of newcomer Vchaney on a track that travels along the same vein as a Tinashe or Jhene Aiko joint.
Araab even traipses smoothly into house territory on “Chasing Pirates,” while his collaboration with Dvnk Sinatrv (“Waiting For”) is near perfect minus the Zedd-ish build-up synths—the same crime is committed on “Stadium House.” A few tracks are begging for any one of the rappers in AraabMuzik’s rolodex, from the subtle boom-bappery of “Train Wreck” to “Left Side,” which recalls Scott Storch's stint with the Roots on keys. But on the flip side, there are other tracks where the vocal features seem extraneous. “50 Box Of Swishers” could have done without Kobe, despite his “I came to get fucked up” crooning over a hard hip-hop beat like he’s Tony Sunshine during the Terror Squad reign. Speaking of throwbacks that don't really work, Araab inexplicably revisits dubstep with “Try Me” and “A.M.”, where the genre's signature “womp womps” are literally just that.
It’s understandable to approach Dream World with demands for the mind-fuck AraabMuzik delivered on his debut. But for a producer who's now sailing along a flooded production market, his only buoy here is to try anything once. He could become David Guetta after this; he could also become DJ Mustard. But honestly, we just want AraabMuzik back. At this point, that’s the real dream.


Jenny Lewis' third solo album is defined and motivated by a sense of personal nostalgia, as these songs sift through Lewis’ past to find some key to her present. It’s not anchored in one particular scene, but plays as broadly California, with sly nods to the Byrds in the guitars, the Go-Go’s in the vocals, and Randy Newman in the wry humor.

The Voyager

In the 1930s the writer Gertrude Stein traveled to the Bay Area, where she visited her hometown of Oakland. When she arrived, she discovered that her childhood home had been razed and in its place erected new, anonymous buildings. It was a different and less inviting place, one that did not match up to her memory. In her journals, which were published as Everybody’s Autobiography in 1937, she wrote about the experience and concluded about Oakland, “there is no there there.” Jenny Lewis examines a similarly thwarted nostalgia on her third solo album, The Voyager, and on the opening track “Head Underwater”, she sings, “I never thought I would ever be here/ Looking out on my life as if there was no there there.” It’s a pretty devastating admission of disconnection with oneself, as though the Jenny Lewis of today had no means of identifying with any of the Jenny Lewises of the past.
Not that you would immediately sense such alienation in “Head Underwater”. The beats thump with a laidback bustle, the synths shimmer as if submerged in a pool, the Watson Twins harmonize perfectly in the background, and Lewis’ vocals swoop sharply and assertively, with a slight ascending vocal arc that conveys optimism rather than its opposite. After the first verse, however, a dark, post-punk guitar theme emerges, more East than West Coast, casting a darker spell. The song strikes a particularly Californian balance of sun and sadness, and this glossy rumination is Lewis’ true milieu: If her trio of solo albums all sound different, they emanate from the same perspective. It’s been four  years since she released that Jenny and Johnny album and six since she released her last solo album; even though the new album falters a bit, it’s nice to see the world from that point of view again.
The Voyager is defined and motivated by a sense of personal nostalgia, as these songs sift through Lewis’ past to find some key to her present. There are passing references to the L.A. Riots and 9/11, which act as clearly identifiable landmarks in in her (and many people's) life. There are musings on her past selves, such as the “furious and restless” teenager in “Late Bloomer” or the woman chasing an ex on “She’s Not Me”. If this is Lewis’ most adult album—which is arguable, as the self-possession she conveys plays as a kind of maturity—then it’s primarily because she’s more adult now, with more experiences and more past selves. These songs wonder not only about how she got where she is, but also where that is exactly. She still sings about cheating on her boyfriend on “Slippery Slopes”, but justifies the discretion by claiming it makes her feel closer to him while she’s on tour: “If for just one second it helps us to remember that we like each other the most.”
The album title and its NASA allusion may refer to the rocket-fueled momentum with which “every boy and girl” flies through life, as Lewis muses on the title track. But the word also applies to her approach to making music. Especially as a solo artist apart from Rilo Kiley, she has moved from one style to the next, trying on genres and traditions like an actress visiting the wardrobe department. It was rhinestones and Nudie suits for her debut, Rabbit Fur Coat, which plumbed the Golden State’s country and country-rock history. She explored psych-pop on her 2008 follow-up Acid Tongue.
By contrast, The Voyager is not quite so easily summed up. It’s not anchored in one particular scene, but plays as broadly California, with sly nods to the Byrds in the guitars, the Go-Go’s in the vocals, and Randy Newman in the wry humor. On the other hand, the album is produced to sound produced—that is, to remind you that it is the product of a studio, and in particular, the studios of Beck and Ryan Adams. Such an approach lapses occasionally into tedious self-referentiality and even more tedious self-regard, especially on “Aloha & the Three Johns”, about rock stars on vacation. The song plays like an episode of some low-rent game show where the contestants can’t even appreciate the luxury of their surroundings. Of course, the characters aren’t meant to be sympathetic, but they’re not especially relatable either.
Most of the time, however, Lewis is her usual smart, funny self—a singer whose default setting is wry skepticism and a songwriter with a gift for the telling detail and the blunt confession. On the Beck-produced single “Just One of the Guys”, she all but stops the song to underscore a moment of dire self-assessment. As the tempo slow and the instruments all fall away, shit gets real: “There’s only one difference between you and me/ When I look at myself, all I can see/ I’m just another lady without a baby.” Those lines nod to the expectations women of a certain age face not only from others but from themselves, yet Lewis manages to personalize it. Her delivery adds another layer of self-awareness and perhaps something darker, like resignation or regret. It’s a complicated sentiment nestled into a breezy pop tune, which is Lewis’ specialty. That precarious balance means there’s more than enough there there.


With a new rhythm section, the notorious black metal experimentalists deliver their most aggressive and radical album yet.

H.A.Q.Q.

Liturgy tend to sort listeners into cynics and disciples. The first camp views the group as posers overthinking intentionally atavistic music—de facto trolls, making headlines for diatribes about their music’s transcendental intentions and its philosophical underpinnings. For the second camp, Liturgy are unapologetic radicals, channeling the basic spirit and sounds of black metal into experimental upheaval.
H.A.Q.Q., Liturgy’s fourth album, confirms what must have been right all along: The truth exists somewhere in the middle. Liturgy offer bait for the haters right there on the cover, with the philosophical framework of founder Hunter Hunt-Hendrix—divided, for your convenience, into four categories, like Axiology and Cosmogony—serving as the album’s stark artwork. And Greg Fox, the hyper-precise drummer that even the naysayers respected, is gone. On the other hand, nothing else sounds quite like these nine volatile tracks, where electronic interference interrupts full-metal sprints and where hoarse screams and mutated strings bleed into one. Yes, H.A.Q.Q. cements Liturgy’s try-hard reputation. But it’s kind of thrilling to hear any band try this hard.
For Hunt-Hendrix, Liturgy were always a way to explore his ideas about existence, which could make for an uncomfortable band power balance. Indeed, tensions over their dynamic led to a hiatus after 2011’s high-water mark Aesthethica. Only Hunt-Hendrix and guitarist Bernard Gann remain for H.A.Q.Q, with Fox replaced by ringer Leo Didkovsky and bassist Tyler Dusenbury swapped out for the versatile Tia Vincent-Clark. If you never checked the credits, you may never notice the difference: The rhythm section still flips between sprint and silence with light-switch precision, and the blast beats (yes, Hunt-Hendrix still calls them “burst beats”) continue to expand and contract, like lungs in the middle of a marathon.
But for Hunt-Hendrix and Gann, the lineup change feels like a permission slip to pursue a more aggressive and demanding version of Liturgy. Those stilted rap verses of The Ark Work notwithstanding, Liturgy have never bulldozed so many disparate sounds into the same claustrophobic space. During “HAJJ,” a lugubrious choir competes, at once, with tentacular harp lines, curdled screams, and guitar lines that prick like pins or slash like rusted razors. “God of Love”—perhaps the quintessential Liturgy track—buttresses wild expanses of black metal with a little choir of glockenspiel and vibraphone. They form intricate shapes within the din, creating a disorienting sense of infinite scale.
There’s never very much quarter during H.A.Q.Q., either. Liturgy’s interludes long doubled as the ellipses between connected thoughts, a brief shelter before the next wave hit. But here, these instrumentals are perhaps the most uneasy pieces. “Exaco I,” for instance, recalls the crisscrossing density of composer Conlon Nancarrow—who wrote pieces so tangled he composed them for the player piano—but as pounded out by Cecil Taylor. (Gann’s father, Kyle, is a Nancarrow scholar.) The chiming bells and disembodied operatic vocals of “Exaco II” feel like a moonlit stroll through an ancient graveyard. The album fades away with three minutes of miasmic solo guitar, the distortion strangling each note into one last gasp. It’s the ringing left in your ears after the music is over.
Parts of H.A.Q.Q. feel inchoate. And you’ll likely tire of Hunt-Hendrix’s new habit of splicing glitches inside these songs, a device meant to ratchet up tension that mostly produces tedium. But watch Hunt-Hendrix talk about his philosophy, his eyes darting uneasily in bed as he tries to define these ideas. Then listen to these songs, primal and often ecstatic expressions of something bigger than himself. If his ideas are a work in progress, the purpose of Liturgy is to test them, a process bound to include a little failure.


The soundtrack to an imaginary theme park where people reconnect with nature and spirituality, the Beijing producer’s album combines traditional Chinese references with wild electronic experimentation.

Birdy Island

There’s a reason rural escapism in China has risen over the past several years. Millions are drawn to lifestyle vloggers like Li Ziqi and Dianxi Xiaoge, who portray idyllic countryside lives spent creating everything from food to clothing from scratch. There’s even a small but notable group of young people called fanxiang qingnian, who, in a departure from China’s mass rural-to-urban migration of the past four decades, have opted to return to farm life. Of course, Chinese nationalism and the state’s push to promote Chinese culture do play a role, but the fact remains that China’s rapid economic growth, not unlike that of its American counterpart, has left its people wanting something more.
On Birdy Island, producer Howie Lee takes this desire and projects it into the future, applying it to the question of what follows society’s collapse under capitalism. The artist imagines a scenario that is by turns dystopic and hopeful, in which a Chinese investment company has decided to fund a theme park aimed at reconnecting people with nature and spirituality. The park is located on a floating island (the album’s namesake), where birds and ancestral spirits commingle. Lee, as a character in this musical metafiction, has been hired to score its soundtrack.
In reality, the Beijing producer, née Li Huadi, began piecing together Birdy Island in late 2018, between multiple albums, EPs, and single releases. Since 2011, when he co-founded Do Hits as a club night, and later an independent label, Lee has pushed the bounds of what Chinese electronic music can be. Like much of his work, Birdy Island concerns itself with the social and economic questions of contemporary life in China, while looking to the (admittedly bleak) future. At once fine-grained and expansive, Lee’s work combines traditional Chinese music and historical references with wild electronic experimentation. But where past releases (2020’s 7 Weapon Series, 2019’s Tian Di Bu Ren, 2018’s Natural Disaster) were more abrasive, tongue in cheek, and club-influenced, Birdy Island admits more daylight, often conveyed through washes of ambient sound, even as it continues to cast long shadows.
Like many works of science fiction, Birdy Island blurs the line between the natural, supernatural, and man-made. The result feels something like a mash-up of a Daoist landscape painting and Coney Island, situated on Ghibli’s Laputa. There, during the day, feathered life forms announce themselves via digital blips and whoops. At night, bits of industrial debris rattle down alleyways, as if suggesting the presence of unseen forces. On opening track “Time to the Sun,” a tottering medley of machine parts, synthetic owl hoots, and tama-like drum licks gathers in the glow of dawn. An otherworldly voice (belonging to artist and frequent collaborator Yehaiyahan) emerges, singing in Mandarin, “Push open the door of aspiration/Hide the chaos of yesterday [...] It is time/To face the sun.” Here, as throughout the album, the human voice serves as a touchstone to both earthly and spiritual worlds. “Wave, Wave, Wave,” for example, follows a jaunty synth-based accordion melody over unstable percussive terrain before resolving into a choral arrangement reminiscent of Daoist temple chanting.
Yet while the park attempts to manufacture an experience that provides respite from capitalist destruction, it is also inherently tied to those very forces. As a result, it is impossible to shake a creeping sense of discord. In multiple instances, variations of a lopsided jack-in-the-box motif appear, including one played on what sounds like the dissonant left side of a guzheng (“The Door of Aspiration”). In “Island Birdy,” the trills of a yangqin (Chinese hammered dulcimer) needle over washes of ambient synth as a low, pulsing synth foreshadows the ominous dagu war drumming to come. At other times, Lee taps into easily identifiable sonic tropes, such as “Caribbean” cruise music or video-game soundtracks, to evoke alternate realities (“Feather Signifier”). These constantly shifting settings trigger a sense of disorientation that reflects the strangeness of his elaborate sonic fictions.
Despite all of this, the album is not exactly nihilistic. In the end, Birdy Island proposes a kind of hopeful syncretism, reaching back into traditional Chinese spiritual practices and finding a place for them within the destructive wake of neoliberal economics. It is also a documentation of both the beauty and the corruption of a culture that is sometimes romanticized, frequently villainized, but always human.

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With layered guitars, drifting arrangements, and gently ambiguous songwriting, Kayla Cohen and her band invoke dream worlds and trance states.

Imitation of War

Some people play the guitar like they want to caress it; some play like they want to destroy it. Kayla Cohen, who has been recording under the moniker Itasca for around a decade, handles the guitar like she is feeling her way through a lucid dream, cutting through the fog with bright, exploratory lines. Imitation of War, her first release in more than four years, makes the searching motion of her playing its motivating principle. The result is an album conversant in a certain language of post-punk, dual-guitar rock—that of, say, Television or Pavement—but whose animating spirit lies somewhere else entirely. Over a suite of patient songs that don’t so much stretch out as tunnel inward, Cohen and her band render richly textured guitar-rock dreamscapes that nonetheless feel grounded and immediate.
Cohen’s songs can sound loose and jammy on a first listen. The delicate strummed figure that kicks off opener “Milk” quickly refracts into pinwheeling dual leads—both played by Cohen, uncannily evoking a live performance—before the band settles into a groove, anchored by Evan Backer’s sensitive bass playing and Daniel Swire’s crisp drums (Evan Burrows plays drums on two other tracks). Cosmic doodles of electric guitar wind their way around the spare, fingerpicked “Under Gates of Cobalt Blue.” But after a few listens, you start to feel the contours of a deeper sculptural form undergirding the music. Progressions postpone resolution; lyrics loop back on themselves like truncated villanelles. Cohen heavily favors suspended chord voicings that hover in a zone of harmonic ambiguity. Despite all the dreaminess, the sounds are warm and clear; there is very little reverb or other production shortcuts to transcendence—just a light coating of quavering chorus effect on the guitars. It is as if all the restless motion is happening on the surface of the music, and beneath it there is a vast, taut stillness.
“Stillness” is the first word Cohen sings on Imitation of War, and it returns throughout in various guises. In the title track, she inhabits the perspective of a painter struggling to capture a flash of sublimity; she imagines herself as “a saint there on the chapel font”—which is to say, frozen, carved into a hard surface, potentially martyred. Even this grim form of inertia would offer reprieve, perhaps, from the shapeless turmoil the songs’ protagonists seem to face. They set out on quests: Some “set sail on the maelstrom” and travel the road to El Dorado, while others try for more metaphysical feats, like reaching out to touch a moment and threading tears through a needle’s eye. These songs are dream worlds where such things are possible. Cohen has explained in interviews that she wrote Imitation of War under the influence of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst and mystic, theorist of dreams and archetypes. From him, she took the idea that a song can be an “alternate reality” accessible through a “trance state.”
The goal here is not to reach the grail, but simply to prolong the reverie. “I knew the road to my El Dorado,” Cohen sings, just barely above a whisper, on “El Dorado,” the album’s glittering standout track. “But I was caught looking at the weeds.” She sings it wistfully, but such a detour might not be an entirely bad thing. Imitation of War gives form to the impulse to let one’s attention slacken and drift, to get waylaid along the hero’s journey and let it dilate into something weirder and maybe truer.


For his fourth solo album, the southern California rocker retreated to a cabin and wrote songs full of doubt and existential anxiety.

Seeker

To overcome an uncharacteristic bout of writer’s block, Mikal Cronin took the took the time-honored sequester-yourself-in-a-cabin approach and emerged with the songs on Seeker, his fourth solo album. A longtime collaborator with other Southern California acts, he enlisted members of the Ty Segall Freedom Band, and despite that group’s penchant for raucousness, out came a mild, confounding blend of twangy power pop, like reaching for half and half and guzzling skim. Cronin’s wistful vocals land on lofty themes—death, rebirth, cleansing fire—but the sound itself is a shrug, a noncommittal exploration of big ideas that never quite reaches an exclamation point, let alone a big impact.
“I feel it all,” Cronin insists on the track of the same name, and yet, over the plinks of piano keys, one might ask impatiently, “What? What do you feel?!” For an album supposedly full of introspection, Seeker remains frustratingly vague. On the song “Fire,” which (as he tells it) gave the record its direction, he sings “red embers float above the front yard.” It’s an image that ought to carry some apocalyptic menace, but his delivery suggests falling leaves instead.
Cronin’s music has always been ingratiating, but that quality works against his material here, which yearns for something deeper or darker. There are clear limits to the affability that makes some of his previous singles so winsome. “Show Me” starts by teasing some serpentine Tom Petty power chords, and Cronin has a cocksure delivery, but the simmer is cooled by a tepid chorus. The song, like many on Seeker, feels like an almost-anthem, a half-decent rock song a few jolts and surprises away from becoming a good one.
“Caravan” is another example of this “almost, not quite” feeling. The chugging distorted guitars snarl at us and a saxophone honks, raising faint hopes of some Stooges-style mayhem, but the bar-band chug stays contentedly mid-tempo. Lacking a hook, many of these songs feel unsure of what exactly they’re meant to be—a ballad a la Big Star’s “September Gurls” (particularly “Lost a Year”)? Garage rock?
On closer “On the Shelf,” he sits down with just an acoustic guitar and reconnects to some of the warmth and immediacy of his best work. He’s always had a good ear for affecting closers, and the song could be straight from the back half of Big Star’s #1. “We’ll fall in love and fuck the nonsense; it’s not for us,” he sings, charmingly. It’s the only real cri de coeur on the album, the only time he seems to stare us directly in the eyes.

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On his first album in six years, the Vermont-based musician continues to flesh out lush, melancholy house music with amateur vocals sourced from the internet.

Mercury

James Hinton is an excavator. Over the past decade-plus he’s spent making music as the Range, he’s trawled through the unattended corners of YouTube, Instagram, and Periscope in search of vocals, most of them largely ignored by platform algorithms and the larger listening public alike. As of 2022, that strategy has grown less unusual, especially as the rise of TikTok has sent pretty much every A&R rep with a pulse scrambling online to find the next viral talent. Hinton, however, takes a more nuanced approach, having developed a specific set of search parameters to maximize his chances of striking internet gold. He’s not looking for hit songs; he’s looking for unpolished gems, fragments of speech and emotionally resonant turns of phrase that he can transform into pieces of electronic pop perfection.
Hinton’s technique has remained fairly consistent; his latest full-length, Mercury, largely relies upon the same methodologies as his 2013 breakthrough LP, Nonfiction, and its 2016 follow-up, Potential. As such, the new album represents something more like a refresh of his sound, rather than a full-blown reinvention. Its 11 tracks allude to various strains of dance music (’90s rave and classic grime most prominently) but largely steer clear of the actual dancefloor, basking instead in moments of gauzy melancholy and wistful reflection. Elements of soul, hip-hop, and R&B all factor into the mix as well, but at his core, Hinton is a pop artist, and a meticulous one at that. (Given his attention to detail, it might not be surprising to learn that he studied theoretical physics at Brown University and has admitted to being the kind of guy who does math problems for fun in his spare time.)
His methods are remarkably effective. From the rave-lite R&B of LP opener “Bicameral”—a song that makes the Bicep catalog sound like the work of hardened street toughs—to the twinkling gospel flight of “Cantor,” the album is bursting with bright colors and the stickiest of sing-along melodies. Mercury is notably warmer than its predecessors, and even as it glides between compact bits of woozy UK rap (“Urethane”), gloriously shambling soul (“Ricercar”), and tinkling garage laments (“Not for Me”), there’s an obvious universality to Hinton’s work. Referring to something as “Spotify-core” wouldn’t normally be a compliment, but every song on Mercury seems perfectly suited for today’s streaming culture, in which listeners expect big feelings (and even bigger hooks) in taut pop packages. There’s no fat or excess in a track like “1995,” even as it somehow squeezes plaintive piano, MPC boom-bap, a My Bloody Valentine sample, and the soulfully longing croon of vocalist Toiya Etheridge into less than four minutes.
For all his songwriting prowess, there is something extractive about Hinton’s process. Many of the voices on the album are by Black singers, and are being used by Hinton (a white guy currently living in Vermont) to further his craft. His use of Black voices as an expressive tool—a practice that producers have leaned on for decades, often without asking permission—may not be intentional or even conscious, but it underscores troubling power dynamics within not just the music industry, but society at large. To Hinton’s credit, he’s worked to make sure that the artists he’s sampled for the new album not only grant him permission, but also receive a songwriting credit, along with a share of the publishing—just as he did with Potential. That model may not be perfect, but it’s at least a step in the right direction; it’s also a kind of acknowledgement on Hinton’s part that there are things that he can’t do, and though he relies on strangers on the internet to fully realize his musical vision, he’s willing to compensate them for work that they’d initially put out into the world for free.
Hinton’s YouTube mining habits, and subsequent songwriting, feel distinctly contemporary. In a time when memes—themselves an elaborate form of (often uncredited) cultural recycling—have become a valid form of nuanced expression, why wouldn’t musicians source anything and everything at their disposal in an effort to most effectively communicate their emotions? Creation is increasingly defined by recontextualization, and when everyone is constantly being bombarded with content, perceptions of authenticity often become uncoupled from scrutiny of artists’ individual processes. Hinton’s own voice doesn’t show up on his latest LP, but it doesn’t have to. His songs tug at heartstrings all the same, and in a cultural landscape where “Does this make you feel something?” is now the predominant question, Mercury is sure to prompt a resounding yes.


A new compilation recaps the career of the Belgian synth-pop trio, whose futuristic kitsch stretched from the Eurovision Song Contest to the roots of Detroit techno.

This Is Telex

When Belgian musicians Dan Lacksman and Marc Moulin first joined forces as Telex in the late 1970s, the goal, Lacksman said last year, “was to do something not serious,” like taking a well-known French song and make it as slow as possible. It was Moulin who suggested couching their hijinks in synth pop’s minimalism.
Lacksman already had ample experience making slight and silly music with modular synthesizers. Recording with his EMS VCS 3 as the Electronic System, he scored a European hit with “Coconut,” a jaunty, bleep-heavy novelty in the mode of Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn.” With the royalties from that single, Lacksman bought a Moog module—Moulin already had his own MiniMoog—that became the central instrument on a series of albums that further blurred the lines between bubblegum pop and disco.
With vocalist Michel Moers in the mix, Lacksman and Moulin developed a sound that was both futuristic and slightly tacky—like dancing to “Autobahn” while sipping a frothy drink in a seaside disco. The six albums that the trio released were knowingly goofy yet thoughtfully composed, much like the work of Sparks, with whom Telex would collaborate. Along the way, the group managed to make a modest splash on the charts, represent Belgium in the 1980 Eurovision Song Contest, and, as promised, slow Plastic Bertrand’s “Ça plane pour moi” to a sultry crawl.
That song is unfortunately absent from This Is Telex, but the compilation does provide a delightful overview of the trio’s work. Spanning three decades, the kitschy covers and playful originals collected here may not be as instantly recognizable as those of the synth-pop groups that emerged alongside them. But Telex’s bubbly energy and club-ready rhythms were just as influential to the first wave of techno and house DJs and producers. (The Detroit group A Number of Names were supposedly inspired by Telex’s “Moskow Diskow” when they recorded the 1981 single “Sharevari,” considered one of Detroit techno’s first tracks; in 1998, Carl Craig would remix Telex’s hit.)
This Is Telex runs in chronological order, and the sequencing demonstrates how Telex stayed true to their whimsical M.O. even as they brought new instruments into their arsenal. With two tracks culled from the group’s 1979 debut, Looking for Saint Tropez, the trio speed up the Trans-Europe Express on “Moskow Diskow” and put a synthesized spin on “Twist à Saint-Tropez,” a yé-yé single originally recorded in 1962 by French band Les Chats Sauvages. On selections from their final album, How Do You Dance?—released in 2006, after an 18-year absence—Telex are still up to their old tricks, turning Sparks’ “The Number One Song in Heaven” into a throbbing lament and rock standard “La Bamba” into a robotic trudge.
Telex’s most fascinating material arrived between those bookending albums. Encouraged by their label to enter the 1980 Eurovision Song Contest, the trio wrote “Euro-Vision,” a part tribute/part send-up of the annual competition. The lyrics poke gently at the ephemeral quality of most Eurovision songs, while the music is the sort of jaunty earworm that tends to perform well in the contest. Telex hoped that with their song and their adorably stiff performance, they would place last. But thanks to a surprise vote from Portugal, Belgium finished 17th out of 19 nations.
The group’s most impressive effort was their 1981 album Sex, which they recorded with Ron and Russel Mael of Sparks. The two bands were introduced by mutual acquaintance Lio, a Belgian pop singer and model, and quickly set about collaborating. The two tracks from Sex are a perfect wedding of the Maels’ arch, detailed lyrics (“Medium toast/Time to blow nose/Extraordinaire,” Mors sings with flat affect on “Drama Drama”) and Telex’s spare, bouncy production. Lacksman would later return the favor by helping engineer Sparks’ 1983 album In Outer Space at his Synsound Studios in Brussels.
This Is Telex does a good job of presenting the less-than-serious intentions of the trio, but the curation could be stronger. Placing undue emphasis on the group’s covers, the tracklisting skips over solid fare like the Art of Noise-esque “Peanuts” or “A/B,” their chirpy ode to listening to the flipside of singles. More than some of the original material included here, those songs show how Lacksman and Moulin evolved as composers as they added samplers and sequencers into the mix. But even with those oversights, this compilation makes a fine introduction to Telex’s quirky spirit and breezy sound.

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In a recording from Berlin’s Atonal festival captured on camera mics in the crowd, the Danish electronic musician melds the sanctity of live music with the profanity of eavesdropping on strangers.

Ephemeral Camera Feed

It is a warm August night in Berlin in 2018. Inside a former power plant located by the River Spree, people stand between towering columns under red lights that color a dense fog. With varying degrees of attention they listen to a performance by the Copenhagen-based artist Astrid Sonne, a progressive composer who melds synthesizers with classical instrumentation to craft complex compositions. She is debuting a new piece titled Ephemera. Meanwhile, two camera operators are filming Sonne’s performance from different perspectives, one static and one handheld. Four years later, the footage will yield an unusual document of the night.
Using the audio from those video recordings, Sonne composed Ephemeral Camera Feed, an EP that captures the spatiotemporal nature of live music. Rather than editing a clean line-in recording of the performance, Sonne uses camera mics, in essence capturing vibrations passing through air from different vantage points. The music is situated within the venue with all its incidental ambience, coughs and chatter from the crowd turned unintelligible by the hall’s reverberance. In doing so, Sonne highlights how venues act as vessels for moving air. The space becomes a container for not only its inhabitants but also the waveforms she produces.
The performance took place at Atonal festival at Kraftwerk Berlin, an industrial venue originally constructed as a power plant in the 1960s to provide energy to residents of East Berlin. The event space inhabits the plant’s 100-meter turbine, whose awe-inspiring proportions offer anything but a neutral listening experience. Ephemeral Camera Feed uses the shifting dynamics within that space to create a visceral, somatic experience for the audience. Sonne had previously released raw audio of the camera footage, and although this edited EP sounds cleaner, it’s still spacious.
On “Ephemeral I,” hopeful strings float over hisses of fog and idle chatter. Attendees are heard clearing their throats, whispering, and laughing. It’s hard to hear what they’re saying, but certain sharp consonants cut percussively through the music. I almost want to shush them, but then I’d be weirder than the weird guy on the subway who laughs loudly while listening to podcasts. Also I’d lose my place in this space, a simulation of being surrounded by strangers all facing the same way. It allows me to imagine what couldn’t be captured in audio: the lights, the air, the floor, the rumble. Sometimes the sounds can mimic the physical, with synths piercing the venue like light through fog. Recorded electronic music often exists in a void: Sound waves generated by machines encased in steel and plastic are sent to our ears through digital means. On Ephemeral Camera Feed, the physical space is as important as the music itself.
“Ephemeral III” begins with synth stabs that act like ellipses, punctuating the stillness to create tension before an onslaught of arpeggiated plucks urgently fills the venue with reverberance. By now nobody is talking; the room is too preoccupied with bracing itself against the intensity of Sonne’s music. Listening to the track on the train to work, I dream about being pummeled by waveforms at the venue: my head smacked into a dizzying haze, my chest vibrating as my heartbeat rises, my feet trembling as I try to hold my body up. The synths phase hypnotically and the track culminates in a dense flurry of overlapping arpeggios that flood the venue.
The music on Ephemeral Camera Feed moves from ear to ear, entering and exiting from different directions, detailing the architecture of the room. A growling bass synth mimics a vibrating floor on “Ephemeral II,” which is emphasized when someone drops what sounds like a lighter. Ominous sirens wander the hall on “Ephemeral IV,” howling and echoing against walls. The crowd converses under the electrocardiogram-like beeps that open “Ephemeral V” before the synth lines expand and start maneuvering through conversations. Sonne melds the sanctity of experiencing live music with the profanity of eavesdropping on strangers. Ephemeral Camera Feed carries the weight, length, and height of the space and all that it contains. The cliche is to say music has a way of transporting you to another world, but with these pieces, I feel less at peace and more jealous about the fact that I wasn’t there. Fortunately, thanks to Sonne’s unusual document, I almost feel like I was.


Singing and rapping in Korean and English, the Los Angeles-based electronic producer takes tentative steps toward reinventing herself as a songwriter.

Before I Die

In the past three years,박혜진 Park Hye Jin has moved from Seoul to Melbourne to London to Los Angeles. Before I Die, her first full-length, which she made entirely during the pandemic, excavates the feelings of isolation and vulnerability triggered by those transitions: the injustice of feeling wronged, the ache of familial longing, the loss of her sense of self. Where 2018’s breakthrough EP If U Want It and 2020’s How Can I EP focused on dreamy house production with forays into experimental club, juke, and techno, Before I Die expands into trap, industrial techno, and downtempo alongside her typical atmospheric house productions. She also incorporates more storytelling into her lyrics this time, using Korean to illuminate specific incidents and English to convey her feelings in broad strokes. At its best, the album explores the contours of an emotional journey in space and time. Occasionally, though, scattered moods and unfocused songwriting blunt the record’s impact.
Hye Jin frequently explores the way that loneliness can open up into emptiness. A soft haze hangs over much of her production, as if suggesting the fluidity between her conscious and subconscious. On the wistful “Let’s Sing Let’s Dance,” her husky vocals—“I sing on sad days,” goes the Korean-language refrain—drift over lounge-y piano chords and a mellow four-on-the-floor thump. On “I Need You,” twinkling piano lines and skittering hi-hats suggest the feeling of being kept awake by restless thoughts: “I’m up all night again,” she sings, in Korean. “It seems only the moonlight knows where you are.” On the title track, her longing takes on an almost aquatic quality as a blurry, marimba-like synth motif buoys her plaintive English-language vocals: “I miss my mom/I miss my dad/I miss my sister/I miss my brother.”
Before I Die is full of references to days and nights and the patterns that repeat within them. “Good Morning Good Night,” for example, is a sort of numbed-out recitation of quotidian gestures. From within a reverb-heavy echo chamber reminiscent of a Grouper song, Hye Jin drawls, “Good morning, good night/It’s already evening/How was your day?/Hope you had a good day.” Her tone feels intentionally inert, a way of pointing up the meaningless repetition of going through the motions. By contrast, on her dancier tracks, she shakes herself out of these doldrums into a different space-time continuum altogether: that of the club. On the housey “Where Are You Think,” a metronome-like tick cuts through a crunchy, bass-heavy beat as Hye Jin hypnotically repeats the titular phrase. Meanwhile, the industrial techno track “Hey, Hey, Hey,” utilizes repetition as a means of suspending time, which is, after all, what good club music does.
But there are times when Hye Jin’s repetitive, minimalist production becomes static, almost generic, particularly on trap tracks “Sunday ASAP” and “Whatchu Doin Later.” Elsewhere, the lyrics themselves grate. “Never Give Up” is built around the heavily repeated refrain, “When they treat me just like bullshit.” “Can I Get Your Number” opens with a simple two-track loop vaguely reminiscent of the wobbly bass and finger snaps of a Bay Area hip-hop track, which ought to give the artist plenty of space to flex. Instead, Hye Jin loops her voice into an unconvincing imitation of a ghetto-house track: “We can fuck I wanna fuck.” On “Sex With ME (DEFG),” which can be read as a sequel to IF U WANT IT’s “ABC,” she raps, switching between English and Korean, “Don’t be shy, say it’s OK, just leave it up to you, say I’m your dad.” Perhaps pent-up pandemic horniness is partly to blame, but on both occasions, her entreaties sound forced and awkward.
And yet, listening to the rest of the album, it’s easy to see how this attempt at a hard, brash exterior likely has to do with self-protection. Hye Jin has, after all, been screwed over by scammers (“Never Give Up”), doubted by those around her (“i jus wanna be happy”), and uprooted not only from loved ones (“Before I Die”) but also from herself. On the album’s most personal song, “Where Did I Go?,” the artist looks to fill her loneliness not with sexual, romantic, or even familial intimacy, but rather with connection to herself. Against a gauzy curtain of jazz piano chords, Hye Jin reminisces about an image of cotton candy, now lost, that she used to draw as a child. “Where’d it go?” she repeats, as if finding it would allow her to unlock some essential part of herself. Yet try as she might, she can’t. Her longing curls around itself, as if circling a drain, before disappearing once again into shadow.

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A collaboration between English extreme-metal quartet Dragged Into Sunlight and Dutch noise musician Mories, N.V. is both a supergroup-like meeting of the minds and an empty exercise in envelope pushing for its own sake.

Dragged Into Sunlight / Gnaw Their Tongues: N.V.

N.V.

"That's when my rape fantasies first started, when I was in college," explains the late serial killer Michael Ross, who is centrally featured on the aptly titled "Visceral Repulsion", perhaps the most jarring example of the pointless and even malicious shock that characterizes N.V*.* A collaboration between English extreme-metal quartet Dragged Into Sunlight and Dutch noise musician Maurice "Mories" de Jong, who releases music under several monikers and has put out upwards of 30 records as Gnaw Their Tongues, N.V. ("negative volume") is littered with samples of true-crime confessions from the likes of Ross.
As if his presence weren't unpleasant enough, the sample delves into the various techniques Ross used to murder his victims. Presumably, the team of artists who made N.V. would argue that real-life horror is fair game for evoking a reaction(namely: disgust) with art. In fact, judging from two recent interviews, it seems likely that Dragged Into Sunlight even managed to disturb themselves with this record, and that de Jong draws from headline-news violence in his work because it genuinely frightens him. Not to mention that the sound clips are lifted from TV documentaries that sensationalize these acts while purporting to condemn them.
Still, the inclusion of these samples is flat-out despicable and speaks volumes about how decades of desensitization have blurred not only the lines of good taste but of common decency as well. If N.V. is any indication, actual murder has become indistinguishable from any other image we passively ingest from the safe, numb remove of our computer monitors. Once artists adopt "extremity" as the cowardly affectation that it is, they leave themselves little choice but to keep pushing the envelope. The musicians on N.V. would probably insist that they went this far precisely because they wanted to make the audience feel something. But to indulge them in a rewardless thought-loop by debating their intentions is to allow them to manipulate you and waste your time.
It's a shame, because N.V.'s lurid first-person homicide monologues overshadow its wealth of sonic character. Both of these acts are defined by their (arguably unparalleled) ability to create atmosphere, which makes their yin-yang pairing a natural fit that, on paper, overflows with possibilities. Judging from their respective bodies of work, there's no doubt that Dragged Into Sunlight and Gnaw Their Tongues could have rendered tunes like "Visceral Repulsion" scary—and taken the audience into a truly murderous, sexually depraved headspace—through other, more imaginative means. Pig Destroyer frontman-lyricist J.R. Hayes, for example, scares the daylights out of you and dives even further into the same thematic terrain but manages to get there without trampling on anyone's grave.
Billed as a joint effort, N.V. actually bears the stamp of two other significant contributors, Godflesh/Jesu founder Justin Broadrick and Corrupt Moral Altar drummer-producer Tom Dring. Having produced the first two DIS albums, Dring once again had a hand in shaping the sounds throughout the making of N.V., while Broadrick stepped in as co-producer and sonic overseer later, during the mixing stages. By that point, the initial collaboration had yielded three hours' worth of raw material spanning five years' worth of on-again, off-again back and forth with DIS and de Jong working out of their respective homebases in England and the Netherlands.
Stretched as it was over time, distance, and multiple perspectives, N.V. sounds surprisingly focused and, musically speaking, rather non-indulgent (perhaps because Broadrick, Dring, DIS, and de Jong boiled the final product down to a 32-minute runtime). Broadrick's input is somewhat difficult to discern, but de Jong's touch saturates this music. Even in the spots where Dragged Into Sunlight blasts away and it seems like there's no room to cram in any more sonic information, de Jong is there, hovering like a toxic, mind-altering haze that burns your eyes, chokes your throat, and soaks into your skin -- sensations that are not without their appeal.
Dragged Into Sunlight had already created a sense of psych-ward hysteria with the black-grind hybrid they established as far back as 2008's Terminal Aggressor, and their ability to use raw ingredients like cymbal wash, inhuman-sounding vocal shrieks, reverbs, and delays gave their music a queasy hall-of-mirrors feel that set the band apart from other likeminded peers. On N.V*.*, they turn to Mories as a kind of set designer who fleshes out and brings spacial and tactile dimension to the Liverpool quartet's caustic exorcisms.
Naturally, as an almost supergroup-like meeting of the minds between three highly production-conscious acts, N.V. is crammed with details that don't initially reveal themselves. But even if de Jong and Dragged Into Sunlight grasp the scale of the tragedies they've chosen to rub the audience's nose in, the fact is they're contributing to trivializing the victims in these cases. Will listeners respond to N.V. the way we might once have tittered at the gross-out slasher fantasies on early Cannibal Corpse records, or will they recognize the distinction?
At this stage in the game, metal bands should consider it their creative if not human responsibility to view these well-worn subjects through new lenses. Being "more extreme" for its own sake is not only lame but creatively and ethically bankrupt. That said, there is undeniably an art to N.V.'s execution. Together, its participants combine layers of abrasion that can be rewarding if you can, well, get past the visceral repulsion.


Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross strike a tone similar to their soundtrack work, alternating between hope and dread in sprawling ambient meditations released in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts V: Together / Ghosts VI: Locusts

Ghosts V: Together / Ghosts VI: Locusts

It was right and proper of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor to name his expansive, four-volume 2008 suite of instrumental work Ghosts; in the Dickensian sense, they foretold his future. Consisting more of sketches than songs—only six of the albums’ 36 tracks run over four minutes, often just barely—Ghosts presaged Reznor and his collaborator Atticus Ross’ work as soundtrack composers, a sideline that would soon compete with Nine Inch Nails as the pair’s creative outlet of choice. The music that resulted from this transition to instrumental recordings netted the pair an Oscar and often surpassed the quality of the films and television series it was written to accompany.
The fifth and sixth volumes of Ghosts (subtitled Together and Locusts respectively) return to the atmospheric terrain now familiar from Reznor and Ross’ soundtrack work: buzzy ambience, simple melodic hooks, an emotional palette that vacillates between peace and dread. But rather than soundtracking an on-screen drama, they arise from the very real COVID-19 pandemic and its society-wide remedy, social distancing. The musicians say that the current crisis was the reason they completed the two records in the first place, “as a means of staying somewhat sane.” As such, Ghosts V-VI—released for free less than two months after the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency—are very likely the first major albums to have been inspired by the coronavirus crisis.
These two Ghosts volumes feel much more concrete and ambitious than the original quartet. Each has its own clear-cut identity, too: Volume five (Together) has a more hopeful sound, while volume six (Locusts) is where the dread creeps in. And while the 2008 iteration’s songs were short as a rule, many of the tracks here are uncharacteristically sprawling. This isn’t about getting ideas down on tape and shooting them into the world—this is about identifying an emotional angle and working it as long and as hard as possible.
Maybe it’s because the tone better matches the animating spirit of the project, or maybe it’s simply because the pair have better ideas in a major key at the moment, but Ghosts V: Together is solidly the stronger of the two. Opening track “Letting Go While Holding On” begins with a woozy, eardrum-tickling buzz, adding a five-note melody and layered, synthesized vocals until it feels almost like a choral composition. It’s followed by “Together,” which employs the same basic structure to even stronger effect.
The album’s subsequent tracks each introduce a novel element or two into that basic template. “Out in the Open” begins with a sort of faux string section, lending it a filmic feel; “Apart” brings in a flute midway through; “Your Touch” adds science-fictional bleeps, sweeps, and creeps. Throughout, there’s a vibe of quiet optimism. By the time the closing track, “Still Right Here,” rolls around, you’re so used to ambient uplift that when a full-fledged rhythm erupts around the 4:30 mark, it’s as bracing as cold water in the face.
Ghosts VI: Locusts is Together’s opposite number. It’s anxious and anxiety-inducing, very much of a piece with Reznor and Ross’ Watchmen score; indeed, from its clockwork motif on down, the opening “The Cursed Clock” feels like an unused excerpt from that world of paranoid superheroes. To their credit, the composers introduce a slew of novel elements here—horns in “Around Every Corner” and “The Worriment Waltz,” a huge “The Perfect Drug”-style drum breakdown in “Run Like Hell,” the sound of some massive thing inhaling and exhaling in “Just Breathe,” a susurrus of sampled vocals in “Turn This Off Please,” a cyclical heartbeat in closing track “Almost Dawn.” Yet without Together’s relatively rousing melodic template and pacing to propel it, Locusts often feels like its titular swarm, devouring itself for 80-plus minutes until there’s not much left by the end.
Ghosts V-VI speak to their moment in just the way Reznor and Ross intended. Trapped in homes and apartments with only ourselves for company, we can all use music that feels as alternately hopeful and despairing as we do—and consuming it in two-and-a-half-hour chunks is not nearly the tall task it might have been a month ago. With these albums in your ear, you can soar and/or jitter at your leisure.


Sample-happy electronic producer Jim-E Stack steps out with his debut full-length, which folds in influences like Baltimore club, electro, R&B, and dancehall.

Tell Me I Belong

Brooklyn-based Jim-E Stack grew up in a pre-gentrified San Francisco, surrounded by a variety of different cultures and sounds; after an early stint as a drummer, he started making beats in high school, and though he was turned on to house music in his late teens, you can still hear echoes of all the styles he’s loved on his debut full length, Tell Me I Belong.
Much of Stack’s reputation comes from his live sets, and his feel for mood and transitions on the first half of the album justifies his reputation as a club DJ. Tell Me I Belong has a narrative ambition not often present on electronic LPs, and Stack takes plenty of time patiently building energy for the album’s early climax, “Reassuring”. Leading up to that track, the listener is taken on a slow climb through the mid-tempo Baltimore club-influenced “Run” and “Below”'s saccharine electro. “Reassuring” is the reward at the top of the mountain, a deep house jam with a screwed-up vocal sample, plaintive R&B keys, and a dancehall shuffle. The track that follows, “Everything to Say”, is the perfect denouement, and if Tell Me I Belong were an EP consisting of these five tracks, it would be hard to find anything wrong with it.
But the second half of the album is a lesser echo of the first, up to and including its vocal-looping climax, “Without”, which, at best, stands as a mere duplicate of “Reassuring”'s charms. Other counterpoints are similarly weak: the blocky stabs at house and B-more club on “Out of Mind” feel random when compared to the precision of “Run”, and the working man's samples-n-synths package on the one-minute, “Ease Up”, while an amusing diversion, could use a little extra weight.
When the second half of Tell Me I Belong finally deviates from the established blueprint, Stack comes through with “Wake”. It’s a full-fledged, album-ending anthem that manages to combine the emotional heights of “Reassuring” and “Without” with the sure-handed patience that marks the album’s superb sequencing. Skip to any two random points within the track, and there’s a chance that they’ll make absolutely no sense in relation to one another. But in real time, these disparate moments are smoothed out by Stack’s ability to shift gears with the speed and serenity of a Formula One driver. "Wake" is a reminder of Stack's talent as a storyteller; shame, then, that the narrative of Tell Me I Belong doubles back on itself  halfway through the tale.


The ambient, five-track mini-LP from the French producer further accentuates the wide-eyed rapture of her early work.

One Life

One of the highlights of Mono No Aware, an ambient compilation released in 2017 by the Berlin experimental label PAN, was “Held,” a beguiling track by a relatively obscure French producer named Malibu. The song moved through four distinct movements in just six minutes; its careful juxtaposition of elements—filmic synthesized strings, ASMR-grade whispers, an eerily Auto-Tuned lullaby—was reminiscent of an immaculately arranged terrarium. But despite the promise contained in that verdant miniature world, for anyone wanting more from Malibu, pickings were slim.
There was a vaporous abstraction on the Astral Plane label’s Psychotropia compilation, from 2015, and a milky ambient sketch, “i can see hills,” that Malibu had self-released on Bandcamp at the beginning of 2017. (Bizarrely, the cover art was a screenshot of the logo of Bedrock Records, John Digweed’s famously emotive progressive-house label, suggesting that for all the seeming seriousness of Malibu’s music, she did not lack for a cryptic sense of irony.) A year after Mono No Aware, she returned to Bandcamp with an Auto-Tuned cover of José González’s “Crosses.” But aside from a few early, exploratory pieces on SoundCloud, that was pretty much it.
One listener eager for more was the ambient composer Julianna Barwick, who discovered the French producer’s music in the background of an Instagram video. “I let the video cycle seemingly endlessly as I thought, this is maybe the most beautiful music I have ever heard,” Barwick writes. “Once I found out who the maker was I scoured the internet for whatever I could get my hands on. It ended up being a treasure hunt—finding bits of her voice and textures hidden in mixes, compilations, and radio shows.” Barwick, a guest curator of Joyful Noise Recordings’ White Label series, the label’s platform for “undiscovered or underappreciated bands,” tapped Malibu for a record.
Malibu’s early music took prettiness—which conventional critical wisdom typically has deemed inferior to more “serious” attributes, like complexity or nuance—and raised it to the level of the sublime. One Life is no exception. If anything, the five-track mini-LP further accentuates the wide-eyed rapture of her early work. Its primary materials are lush strings, endless reverb, and the suggestion of vastness that the pairing of the two implies. It is unabashedly atmospheric, right down to the sounds of rolling surf that accompany two songs (a tribute, perhaps, to Malibu’s oceanographer father).
It’s not hard to hear the ways that Malibu is inspired by film music; any of these songs could work wonders as soundtrack cues. The yearning cycles of the opening “Nana (Like a Star Made for Me)” are reminiscent of Ennio Morricone’s score for The Mission, but melody here is generally secondary to mood. She favors long, held tones that arc wistfully toward the horizon; at most, we get a rising, three-note figure like the one at the heart of “Lost at Sea”—less a song than a clothesline from which to hang the airiest of emotions.
Malibu’s formless melancholy shares something in common with Grouper, but where Grouper is lo-fi, Malibu is hi-def. I could be wrong, but her washes of strings typically sound synthesized or sampled, in any case ersatz—they’re a little too smooth to be the sound of a real orchestra. But this quality adds to their nostalgic air; in their too-perfect surfaces, they echo those films that didn’t have the budget for a full orchestral score, and instead made do with synths and software. This isn’t vaporware, but it faintly resembles that genre’s obsolete-media sheen. Another point of comparison is Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project, though where he typically swirled his symphonic samples into murky gloom, Malibu’s music gleams.
One Life’s simplicity can be deceiving. A little like a quartz crystal, what at first looks like a radiant, unblemished surface turns richly contoured when viewed up close. The interplay of contrasting textures is most vivid in the forlorn “Lost at Sea,” one of several tracks to feature the British cellist and songwriter Oliver Coates. For several minutes, the widescreen sweep of piano and strings swells and recedes, tiptoeing right up to the edge of maudlin. Then, faintly, the resiny scrape of Coates’ bow rises in the mix, sawing rapidly away, as though cutting against the grain. The overwhelming consonance turns microtonal; around it all wordless voices hover, diffuse as a sunrise mist. It might just be, as it was for Barwick, the most beautiful music you’ve ever heard. The gorgeousness of it is almost overwhelming. But squint a little, and a world of microscopic detail flashes into focus.


Not quite a reinvention, the Goldfrapp singer’s solo debut sets her against sleek synth disco that she mostly complements rather than commands.

The Love Invention

Beyond the Juicy Couture rhinestones and TMZ flashbulbs of 2000s tabloid culture lay another, cheekier way of keeping up appearances: high glam. Arty flamboyance strutted through the aughts pop industrial complex, offering up outré, high-fashion freakiness as an antidote to twisted celebrity ego and meat-and-potatoes Abercrombie & Fitch sexuality. Consider: Róisín Murphy in a greasy spoon, serving up Margiela couture with a side of fascinator. Kylie Minogue storming the runway with overdrawn pink eyebrows, a gaggle of alien queens in tow. A young Lady Gaga, lightning bolt affixed to cheek, musing about self-declared fame just as she was poised to realize it.
Consider Alison Goldfrapp! With her luxurious mane and penetrating cat-eye stare, the British singer adopted more glam-rock swagger than almost anyone in her cohort. Together with bandmate Will Gregory in the duo Goldfrapp, she pitted her honey-and-venom voice against moody trip-hop, silvery folktronica, and floor-stomping stadium pop, putting on and casting off identities with aplomb. After coming down from the late-career high of 2017’s Silver Eye, a record that featured the band at their dark-sided best, the singer felt the need for a new possibility. Following stints driving across America and holed up in East London, she put her partnership with Gregory on ice to collaborate with producers Richard X and James Greenwood (aka Ghost Culture) on The Love Invention, her debut solo record and first in a 25-year career.
If there’s a unique quality that distinguishes this Alison from the frontwoman of Goldfrapp, it’s not particularly obvious. The Love Invention introduces “Alison Goldfrapp, house diva,” a pivot she doesn’t totally sell. For one, it’s not that radical of a departure and musically invites comparisons to other, better moments across her back catalog (and nothing on this record comes close to touching “Ride a White Horse” or “Alive”). Goldfrapp is also staking her claim in a pitilessly crowded field and the album she’s presented is neither eclectic enough to stand out nor danceable enough to hold its own against the likes of Jessie Ware’s disco purism or Beyoncé’s megawatt starpower.
It takes an incredibly flexible performer to span the range of genres and identities that Goldfrapp has tackled, but on The Love Invention she is frequently too accommodating, more often complementing Richard X and Greenwood’s production rather than commanding it. Over the throbbing, Moroder-inflected beat of the title track, she alternates between a sultry purr and a vocoder that dissolves the edges of her voice into a barely audible murmur. That track at least benefits from a breakneck, diamond-studded pulse; the same cannot be said of “The Beat Divine” or “Digging Deeper Now,” which roil in place interminably beneath layers of breathy vocals.
Like Bowie or Bolan, Goldfrapp is equally capable of turning out a gorgeous character study as she is of elevating so-stupid-it’s genius lyrics with sheer energy and charisma. It’s a shame that on The Love Invention she too often plays things straight. The slinky, ice-melting beat of “So Hard So Hot” loses steam with time-keeping monosyllable verses, while tracks like “Fever” and “Digging Deeper Now” feel punishingly functional with canned rave-ups and generically euphoric lyrics. In a New York Times profile, Goldfrapp mentioned that the title track was partly inspired by the regimen of hormone replacement therapy she underwent for menopause, which would be a fabulous and far-out conceit if it were played up with more audacity. On The Love Invention it simply remains a glamorous suggestion.
The record’s best moments are its quietest. The lush, twinkling ambience of “Hotel” and “In Electric Blue” are reminiscent of Carly Rae Jepsen and exist thematically, as Jepsen’s work does, at the threshold between longing and consummation, when the possibility of true connection feels most dazzlingly real. But these are dress rehearsals for “SLoFLo,” the album’s final and best track. For three minutes Goldfrapp holds a swirling mass of indescribable feelings in gorgeous suspense with little more than her voice and some gentle synth washes. It is airy and abstract, a trick of light and shadow more impressive than the album’s more labored vamping. Alison Goldfrapp can conjure magic on her own.


Two decades in, the gifted West Coast producer/rapper is making some of the most inventive music of his career.

The Book of David

For more than 20 years, DJ Quik has been the secret ingredient in the broth. Whether you know it or not, the gifted West Coast producer/rapper has worked on dozens of L.A. gangsta rap classics you've drunkenly screamed along to, often without even a liner-note credit to show for his efforts. Pop music's grumbling cast of neglected innovators is long, but Quik doesn't quite fit with that crowd: He's released platinum and gold records, as well as helped craft them for Tupac, Snoop, and Dre. Instead, he's stuck in that weird purgatory between Unknown Legend and Not-Quite-Star. It's a situation that could bog you down if you let it. But if you decide, one day, that you simply do not care anymore, something amazing can happen: You realize you can do whatever the hell you want.
This realization has been dawning in real time in DJ Quik's music recently. On BlaQKout, his 2009 collaboration with fellow West Coast warrior Kurupt, he experimented with stylistic detours from electro to dub, letting his free-associative musical imagination run wild. On the surface, The Book of David feels more straightforward. A rich stew of warm disco, grown-and-sexy R&B, and classic g-funk, it sounds engineered to waft out over barbecues. But it's also riddled with idiosyncrasies: songs that dissolve into deep-dub fade-outs, vocal samples that pop up in unexpected places, astonishing statements of raw heartbreak and anger. It's as weird as it is crowd-pleasing, and it underlines what BlaQKout suggested: Unencumbered by commercial expectations, Quik is making some of the most inventive music of his career.
Quik has always been quirkier than his gangsta-rap peers-- underneath the monstrous knock of his drums, he's snuck in all manner of odd little details. On The Book of David, though, he's a full-blown mad scientist of trunk-rattle. "Fire and Brimstone", the album's opening track, lurches out of the gate with a stumbling drum pattern. It's a pulverizing track that could transform a passing Jeep into a noise-disturbance complaint, but it's also a sprawling grid of counter-rhythms oddly similar to the rhythmic map of Radiohead's "Bloom". (Seriously.) "Poppin'", meanwhile, feels like a random collection of unrelated sounds accidentally colliding to form a perfectly coherent groove.
If any of this sounds wonky or cerebral, don't worry-- The Book of David is a pleasure-first listening experience, and Quik deploys each of his tricks with a showman's flair. "Hydromatic" loops an intoxicating vocal sample around some bone-jarring piano stabs and New Orleans brass-band blurts, and that's before the head-spinning syncopated hand-claps glide in. "Killer Dope" rolls in on a regal fanfare of French horn pads and jazz-inflected pianos. On that song, Quik brags about his ability to simultaneously rhyme and play his piano live; it's a telling boast, revealing the old-school funk producer Quik is in his heart. On The Book of David, you feel his keen musical intelligence-- and his humble pride in his talent-- presiding.
Most rapper/producers struggle to be as memorable on the mic as they are in the booth, but not Quik. On BlaQKout, he effortlessly lapped frowning technical lyricist Kurupt, and given a sprawling 70-minute album to hold down, he makes for durably fascinating company. His word choices-- meticulous and hilarious-- land somewhere left of your expectations, making him the most vivid presence on each song he's on. "I got wordplay acumen/ And I've had it since you was in grade school watchin' the janitor vacuumin'," he informs us on "Babylon". When he doles out insults, it's with a sense of school-teacherly calm (he's "a dignitary, you're a lowly beggar," he says on "Fire and Brimstone"), and even when Quik summons true venom, his voice never rises above the level of casual conversation.
Most of that venom on The Book of David is directed, as it has been for most of his career, at an intimate place: his own family. "Ghetto Rendezvous" ("I hate you so much it just shows/ I hate you more than Michael hated Joe") is directed to his own sister, whom he almost did 10 years in prison for pulling a gun on when she allegedly tried to kidnap his children. It's a horrific story, the kind of dirty laundry some rappers would air as a perverse badge of honor (see: Game, The). But Quik has no interest in battering us with his personal pain; he just wants to tell us about it. So he slips it in easily among the boasts, the jokes, and the party jams. In that way, David mimics the texture of real life-- jokes and confessions, partying and pain, all mixed up together.
The Book of David emanates this decidedly zen confidence and ease at every level. Quik has a lifetime's worth of career relationships and unlimited lines of credibility to draw on, but he shows zero interest in crowding his tracks with guest-verse favors called in from his more famous friends to wiggle closer to the mainstream. The features on David-- relative no-names like Jon B., BlaKKazz K. K., local legends like Suga Free, over-the-hill West Coast rappers like Ice Cube and Kurupt-- are his compatriots, people he's worked with for years, and they slot into his overall work exactly as he sees fit. When you've exerted the kind of unacknowledged influence on your art form that Quik has, bitterness can take hold easily. But Quik has chosen a wiser route: He's created a tiny island on which he is king.


The strength of Marina Diamandis’ work, historically, has been her lack of subtlety and her playful Technicolor self-presentation. And yet on Froot, her focus is inward. Here, she ditches the mega-star collaborators and writes not only by herself, but about herself.

Froot

"She is a Polish girl in America!" Marina Diamandis sang in 2010 on "Hollywood", a song from her debut album The Family Jewels. She went on, "Oh my god, you look just like Shakira, no, no, you’re Catherine Zeta— actually, my name’s Marina!" In one verse, she mimicks the voices of those grouping her with other crossover celebrity women who scan simultaneously as "White" and "Other" to American audiences and answering them, at once. It was a smooth performance, demonstrating her place within American’s white spatial imaginary (Diamandis is Greek and Welsh)— a dream-like double consciousness acknowledged with nary a nod or a wink.
It is within the space of disacknowledgement that Diamandis created the character Electra for her 2012 followup Electra Heart, an album produced and co-written with American hit makers like Diplo, Dr. Luke, and StarGate. Electra was a "cold, ruthless character who wasn’t vulnerable" she told The Daily Mail—a personification of the American Dream. On her third album, Froot, she ditches the mega-star collaborators and writes not only by herself, but about herself.
The strength of Diamandis’ work, historically, has been her lack of subtlety, her playful Technicolor self-presentation. And yet on Froot, her focus is inward and free of peacocking. The hushed, bare-bones opener "Happy", built on a piano-ballad core, is a meditation on inner contentedness that seeks self-realization over companionship. "From the concrete to the coast, I was looking for a holy ghost," she sings. On Froot, she's found God, and pop music, within herself. She is an artist who knows who she is, and Froot luxuriates in the confidence that we do, too, relaxing in the space and power that Diamandis has claimed.
Part of her art has always been to pack the emotional punch of confession while denying over-the-head admission, an approach with a political tinge—"the impersonal is political," in her case. Her flamboyance and theatrics have served to both deflect and detach—some songs on Electra Heart and The Family Jewels alluded to an eating disorder without explicitly saying so, while other songs feature second-person lyrics—an implied "I." Sharing—thoughts, emotions, information (where you live, what your plans are, take your pick)—is always a risky act for women, opening them up to potential violence, and this is the violence Marina explores. In "Savages", Marina sings, "I’m not afraid of God, I’m afraid of Man." "Underneath it all, we’re just savages hidden behind shirts, ties and marriages," she posits. "Solitaire", which opens with the lyric, "Don’t wanna talk anymore, I’m obsessed with silence," doesn’t land quite as well as its antithesis, the final track "Immortal", does. "Immortal" is about a deep longing to "reserve a space" in history, to be remembered by others.
Almost every song on Froot plays with memory and sensory imagery—"Gold"; "Blue"; "Forget"; "Froot"—thematically, lyrically or otherwise. But it’s the tucked-in songs—in the "Weeds", so to speak—where Marina shines colorfully: "Happy", "I’m a Ruin" and "Can’t Pin Me Down" are stand-out tracks, speaking most directly to the album’s core. They’re also the most sonically interesting songs. The bare piano accompaniment of "Happy" makes it a somber and sweet track. Her production is more understated than the lush, orgasmic pulse of Electra Heart, making Froot a more elastic and dynamic work, with Everestian highs and darker depths. In "I'm a Ruin" the drums carry the song, thumping into climax and ecstasy.  The other percussion-heavy tracks, like "Can’t Pin Me Down", give the album power and drive. Others, like "Gold", go at the tempo of a slow soul clap, taking you to a quiet church.
There’s cognitive dissonance between Diamandis' flamboyant posturing and her subtlety. She performs feeling. She no longer hides behind shaky, furtive archetypes and characters as she did on Electra Heart, an album created explicitly for American consumers—she’s untangled herself and trusts us to understand a record that is internal, and rich in nuance. Froot traces her career arc: with The Family Jewels she is mistaken (by record companies) for a "foreign cross-over success" like Shakira, and with Electra Heart she tries on this identity and finds that it doesn’t actually fit her. With Froot she’s refuting the myth that female artists are forever the first, the only, that they can only exist if they fit within the shape of whatever cultural precedent exists for them. Mind the bold corrective: "Actually, my name's Marina!" As if we could forget, now.


The Brooklyn duo Tanlines recorded their second album in a church with Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor, and Highlights sounds like a legitimate pop record.

Highlights

After Random Access Memories, The 20/20 Experience, and Reflektor, we were tired of protracted album release stunts. Now we have Surprise-Album Fatigue. Granted, Tanlines don’t answer to as big of an audience as Justin Timberlake or Beyoncé. But they deserve an immense amount of credit for constructing a rollout for Highlights that likely could’ve gone on for another two years without complaint. The Brooklyn duo’s second LP was teased with a Netflix-aping website, and "premiered" with a fake "conference call", which featured some "Sound Advice" from "SNL"'s Vanessa Bayer. Eric Emm and Jesse Cohen’s charming social media presence had long established that they’re "one of us" and they’re the change we want to see in Music Nerd Twitter: clever, but not snarky, self-aware but not overly self-conscious, willing to poke fun at the inherent silliness of PR, album cycles, and branding without framing the whole affair as meaningless. Now, very little of this innovation or irreverence or ingenuity carries over to Highlights, but the goodwill Tanlines have generated isn’t all for naught. It just allows one to see the divergence between the rollout and the record as an unfortunate coincidence rather than a cynical cover-up.
There is a kernel of truth behind the Tanlines-as-TV joke: think of them as the offbeat comedy that got picked up after accumulating a fanbase while muscling through an erratic first season. For the second go-round, reinvention would be unwise or impossible, so the goal is to capitalize on the quirky chemistry of its leads and modify it to establish replicable consistency. Or, to make it ready for syndication; Tanlines are much more effective as a singles act than as the subject of an immersive binge listen.
The duo are a study in compatibility rather than contrast, each favoring brassy, spotless tones, Emm’s vocals sounding as much a synthesized version of a real instrument as the actual synthesizers. While male vocalists in this realm typically rely on a bass register to convey sage wisdom, sex appeal, or a sinister aura, for Emm it’s a means of foregrounding Tanlines’ everydude appeal. It works in conjunction with the often maddening mundanity of Highlights lyrics: "I fall to pieces when you’re away," he sings on the opener, the implication being that this meltdown will be short-lived and she’ll definitely be back, probably sometime after the holiday weekend. They’re modest songs for modest moments, occupying the space between the hookup and the breakup, of getting hired and getting fired, that manageable lovesickness, regret, and anxiety that underlie just about every URL and IRL interaction.
But the essence of Tanlines lies in the contrast created by the simplicity of their songwriting and the luxury of the sound design. Imagine a child winning a contest where his Construx design is turned into an actual skyscraper; that's Highlights. There isn’t much distance from what could’ve started out as FruityLoops demos or factory presets—Cohen’s arrangements still don’t provide much texture or polyphony. But the post-production is crucial all the same, allowing Highlights to sound like a legitimate pop record rather than shareware.
This time out, they recorded in a church with Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor rather than in Miami with Jimmy Douglass (Foreigner, Timbaland)—it’s the reverse of what you’d expect from a band trying to update their sound from 2012 to 2015. But Tanlines aren’t really about staying on trend anyways. Since they work with a limited number of tools, it’s often difficult to distinguish one Highlights song from the next, or even remember them 10 minutes after they've ended. However, when it’s a Tanlines song, you definitely know it’s them. It’s an impressive accomplishment for an act that once appeared destined to be a footnote from Brooklyn Indie Rock 2010, a couple of scene mainstays who got more out of tropical keyboard presets than any New Yorker since Swizz Beatz.
That said, Highlights hightails down the same escape routes that have been overbooked since the turn of the decade: Balearic, Drive, Caribbean rhythms, New Romantic synth-pop. As with Mixed Emotions, there’s the opener that doesn't oversell its anthemic ambitions ("Pieces"), the New Wave cruiser ("Slipping Away"), the one with an acoustic guitar ("Invisible Ways"). The most notable update in their software results in a track that still could’ve fit on their proper 2012 debut: "Two Thousand Miles" is Tanlines’ EDM moment, though the strobing synths and triplet beats are strangely muffled, meant more for an apartment party with noise restrictions rather than the festival tents where the duo have become a frequent and effective crowd pleaser.
Tanlines have proven more than capable of hosting a celebration, and they can attract a surprisingly massive flock of hands-in-the-air party people as well. That shouldn’t change, as Highlights is more consistent than its predecessor, which was propped up by a few tentpole singles. But Tanlines could also be the center of the affair, particularly when Emm fearlessly leaned into big pop hooks during "All of Me" and "Real Life". Those moments are sorely lacking on Highlights, which becomes defined by its deceiving sort of consistency: maintaining a baseline pleasantry that makes the title into the only unintentional punchline of the whole campaign.


The Toronto singer's debut EP arrives fully formed, a short mix of quiet storm R&B and dark pop for doomed lovers.

CDW EP

Charlotte Day Wilson was the satin surface in the “smooth-ass R&B” Toronto quartet The Wayo. Her low voice draped around their suave arrangements just like Sade’s around her group of smooth operators. A smoldering guest spot on BADBADNOTGOOD’s recent ’70s jukebox number “In Your Eyes” made her credentials as a warden of the old school all the more official. But her debut solo EP, the mainly self-produced CDW, shoots ahead a couple decades to a more polished, contemporary adult sound. With Sade still a touchpoint—as well as Maxwell’s stylish neo-soul and some pre-“Heartbreaker” Mariah Carey sprinkled in too—Wilson’s quiet storm whirls with similar magic.
Only, the opener “On Your Own” is a bit of a red herring. The short, freeform piece is a soundscape built on futuristic keys and Vangelis-esque ambience. Words are hard to make out, but the atmospherics spark as Wilson’s voice emerges on the horizon. It’s not until the blurry ballad “Work” where you hear how well her woozy production and voice work together. Her musings are vague, and her thoughts are scattered, as she quietly sings, “It’s going to take a little time but with you by my side/I won’t let go ‘til I’ve got what’s mine.” The familiar feelings of relationship anxiety come through clear as a crystal tumbler.
With a chorus that soars, “Find You” is the nearest thing CDW has to a brash pop number that stays inside Wilson’s dapper parameters. The EP’s high point, though, might be “Where Do You Go.” Produced by rising star River Tiber—the only person other than Wilson invited to jump behind the boards—the horns and basement club jazz underpin a feeling of loneliness and isolation as the singer ponders the whereabouts of her missing-in-action lover: “Where did you go today?/It could have been anywhere.” Her voice doesn’t just sound great on the ear; it carries a huge emotional weight.
The one thing missing is friction. A longer release would have benefitted from one or two more muscular productions, or some stylistic shifts to keep you guessing. But even without some extra force pressing down, these six tracks show Wilson has already mastered her strengths. The smooth-as-hell Canadian’s got the voice and a lot more besides. CDW funnels timeless sounds through her own distinct filter, making songs for doomed lovers sitting alone in a dimly lit living room over a bottomless bottle of cheap bourbon.