Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore follows his band's return to tunefulness, Rather Ripped, with his first formal LP since 1995's Psychic Hearts. Here he takes up an interesting challenge: What can a guy like Moore do with the bare and noiseless architecture of an acoustic guitar and a verse-chorus-verse set-up?

Thurston Moore: Trees Outside the Academy

Trees Outside the Academy

In 2006, the release of Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped brought a lot of the band's ex-fans-- people who'd either gotten over them with the help of 2000's NYC Ghosts & Flowers, or just thought they'd finally aged out-- back to the fold. The more tuneful record was different from anything they'd done this decade, re-establishing the direct line many of us had to the Sonic Youth of our teenage years. At the Pitchfork Music Festival this summer, Sonic Youth played a well-received Daydream Nation, but a bunch of people I talked to after their set thought the group sounded even better during the encore, when they tore through a handful of newer songs.
As a separate entity from Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore's reputation as a basement icon precedes him. Where it was once surprising to find him at Connecticut noise shows, Brooklyn No Fun fests, and Western Massachusetts DIY open mic nights, his recent role as mentor to (and collaborator with) young rock dynamos has since made his presence in the underground a constant. Given these feedback showdowns-- not to mention the solo work of his distant past-- it came as a mild shock when his Ecstatic Peace label recently announced that not only was there a new Thurston Moore solo album in the works (his first formal LP since 1995's Psychic Hearts), but that it would also feature actual songs.
Trees Outside the Academy is, in fact, a song-based album-- and they're good songs, too. Rather Ripped had whistle-clean guitar lines and minimal melodies-- the noise had lifted to reveal Sonic Youth still picking out sharp hooks, with songcraft as sparkling as ever. Those pop songs were a good place for them to return to for inspiration-- they gave the band a form (rather than void) to play around with-- and Trees takes up a similar challenge: What can a guy like Thurston Moore do with the bare, noiseless architecture of an acoustic guitar and verse-chorus-verse structures?
Try "Honest James", a chiming, slippery duet with Charalambides' Christina Carter that holds back on vocals until two minutes in, giving that delayed entrance an immediate kick. Or "Fri/End", an archetypal spoken-sung Moore track that begins with cranky feedback, then something more upbeat and jaunty before settling into a melancholy Sonic Youth groove. Add experimental folk artist Samara Lubelski's violin punctuation, which augments every song here, and Steve Shelley's solid drumming, and you begin to understand how much this guy can do with relatively little-- especially after growing accustomed to hearing him work for so long with so much more.
Those listening for Sonic Youth demos might be surprised to hear how much more there is to Moore's songwriting when it's comparatively unadorned. What would be burners in his band's hands are instead spare and introspective: "The Shape Is in a Trance" is weary; "Wonderful Witches + Language Meanies" begins emphatically and then strips down, a kind of reverse-momentum rock song. And then, just to prove he can do it, "Never Light" is a guileless twilight-type ballad about "beat-up copies of old satellites, messages beaming."
Spare hints of Moore's more revved up ways show up here and there on Trees, but with the same relaxed and dusty cast: "American Coffin"'s out-of-tune piano, "Free Noise Among Friends"' homemade analog noise, and "Thurston@13", a self-explanatory archival tape that begins like this: "What you are about to hear is me taking off the cap of a Lysol spray disinfectant can...[pop]...there. What you are about to hear is me spraying Lysol spraying disinfectant around...the room...I am in...[spray sound]... there."
It's no coincidence that Moore chooses to end Trees on this note. That his 13-year-old self was a huge theatrical weirdo won't surprise anyone, nor will the fact that the track ends with a young Thurston saying, "What you have heard is me wasting time again, asking myself deep inside, why the fuck I am doing this?" Of course, he's already answered this question, and he knows he has. What he's hinting at is a different question: How many different ways will he do it before he's done?


Homogenic embraced all of Björk’s most provocative contradictions. The main theme is the wish to rush headlong into a life lived to the fullest—an unbridled yearning for the sublime.

Homogenic

Robed in silver satin, luminous against iridescent grey, Björk stares out as us from the cover of Homogenic. Filigreed flowers crawl across the background like frost crystals, mimicking the embroidery on her gown. The Alexander McQueen-designed garment looks vaguely Japanese, with a kimono-like sash; her elongated neck is wrapped in rings reminiscent of those worn by tribes in Burma and South Africa, while her pursed, painted lips smack of Pierrot. Behind narrowed lids, her eyes glaze like camera lenses. The longer you stare into those enormous black pupils, the more adrift you begin to feel. Beneath two tombstone-shaped slabs of hair, she appraises us coldly, her expression unreadable. She might as well be made of wax—or marble.
After the dewy naturalism of Debut’s sepia-toned portrait and the bullet-train rush of Post’s blurry postcard from the edge, McQueen and Nick Knight’s Homogenic cover showed Björk in a way viewers had never seen her before: at once ancient and futuristic, elegant and severe, part warrior queen and part cyborg—a picture of near-perfect symmetry rendered in colors of ice and obsidian and blood. The album followed suit. Trading the playful eclecticism of Debut and Post for distorted, hardscrabble electronic drums and warm, melancholy strings, it showcased a newly focused side of the musician while embracing all of her most provocative contradictions.
By 1997, when she released Homogenic, Björk had been a familiar face to pop fans for a decade. The Icelandic singer and composer had first appeared on many listeners’ radars in 1987, when the Sugarcubes’ surprise hit “Birthday” made actual stars out of a quintet whose entire raison d'être had been to lampoon pop. (Her countrymen, meanwhile, had been listening to her since 1977, when she recorded her debut album—a collection of covers translated into Icelandic along with a few original songs, including an instrumental written by Björk herself— at the tender age of 11.)
After a few whirlwind years with the band, she struck out on her own with 1993’s Debut, enlisting Nellee Hooper of Soul II Soul and Massive Attack to co-produce the album. It was a clean break, trading the Sugarcubes’ jangly alt-rock for the electronic sounds then coming out of the UK: house beats and basslines, trip-hop atmospheres, and the rippling textures of experimental techno, which she fleshed out with orchestral strings, big-band jazz, and a smattering of world music. Surprising even her record label, which scrambled to manufacture enough records to keep up with demand, it went all the way to No. 3 on the UK albums chart. On this side of the pond, some listeners were less thrilled with her new, electronic direction: Rolling Stone carped that Hooper had “sabotaged a
 ferociously iconoclastic talent with a phalanx of cheap electronic gimmickry,” adding, “Björk’s singular skills cry out for genuine band chemistry, and instead she gets Hooper’s Euro art-school schlock.”
Björk paid no heed to critics (including fellow Sugarcube Þór Eldon, now also her ex-husband) who were dismissive of her burgeoning interest in electronic music. Moving from Iceland to London, she threw herself into UK dance music, soaking up its club culture and collaborating with 808 State’s Graham Massey, Tricky, Howie B, and Talvin Singh, among others. She may have come to electronic music as an outsider, but she had good instincts: For remixes, she avoided the usual suspects in favor of some of the most adventurous artists on the scene: the Black Dog, Andrew Weatherall’s Sabres of Paradise, the junglist Dillinja, even Mika Vainio, aka Ø, of Finland’s scorched-earth analog noiseniks Pan Sonic. Today, the material gathered on her early remix collections—1996’s Telegram and also the lesser-known, cleverly (if not at all succinctly) titled The Best Mixes From the Album Debut for All the People Who Don't Buy White-Labels—holds up far better than the vast majority of remixes from that era, keenly balancing the songs’ essences with a restless experimental spirit.
Part of that is because Björk never saw remixes as a simple marketing gimmick: Her youthful study of classical music had taught her to think of remixes as a contemporary iteration of the longstanding concept of theme-and-variations. “When I think of that word remix, it’s recycled, like trash,” she told Rolling Stone. “But for me, the word remix means ‘alternative version.’ It is just another word… for a variation. It’s like Bach—his symphonies were not completely written out so every time he played them, they would be different.”
Björk’s unconventional instincts and her keen understanding of the hidden links between classical and experimental electronic music—she had interviewed Stockhausen the year before, in fact—guided her on Homogenic, as strange and uncompromising an album as pop music has produced. From the album’s opening bars, it’s clear that she’s on to something new. Björk’s approach to electronic music had never been conventional, but it had generally been tuneful, and her beats tended to keep one foot tapping in time to house music’s reassuring thump. Not so “Hunter,” which bobs atop fluttering, fibrillating kicks and snares, its reversed accordion glistening like an oil slick. Aphex Twin had toured as Björk’s opener after Post, and you can hear his rhythmic influence across the album: in the filtered breakbeats of “Jóga,” “Bachelorette,” and “5 Years”; the resonant zaps of “All Neon Like”; and the buzzing, headlong stomp of “Pluto.” (The engineer Markus Dravs assisted in the beat-making, as did LFO’s Mark Bell, who co-produced much of the album.) Throughout, drums crunch and sizzle, throwing up little clouds of dust with every impact. And with the exception of the relatively frictionless skip of “Alarm Call,” her beats are far more kinetic than most programmed rhythms, twitching and flexing like fistfuls of cellophane curling open.
After the stylistic zigzags of her first two albums, Björk was determined to create something more focused. “This is more like one flavor,” she told SPIN of the album. “Me in one state of mind. One period of obsessions. That’s why I called it Homogenic.” The working title, in fact, was Homogenous. The Icelandic String Octet, performing Eumir Deodato’s arrangements along with string parts she had written herself, was the glue that held it all together. The result is a strange, captivating mix of impulses, with seesawing drones exploding into lush, neo-classical passages. You can hear the influence of the Estonian minimalist Arvo Pärt, whom Björk had interviewed for the BBC the year before, on the slow, elegiac string harmonies of “Unravel”; conversely, the cut-up harp and strings of “All Is Full of Love” faintly mimic the burbling pulses of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. “Even though my arrangements are quite experimental, I’m very conservative when it comes to song structure,” she told SPIN. “So it’s this beautiful relationship between complete discipline and complete freedom."
Many artists have attempted to fuse dance music’s rhythms with classical instrumentation; recently, between events like Haçienda Classical (a pops take on the hallowed Manchester dance-music institution) and Pete Tong and the Heritage Orchestra’s Ibiza Classics, the concept seems resurgent. But endeavors like those, and even Jeff Mills’ more highbrow attempts at orchestral techno, nearly always fail; it turns out that DIY electronic dance music and classical orchestras, a format that has barely evolved in over 100 years, are largely incompatible. Björk succeeded where so many others have failed by weaving the two inextricably together into an undulating fabric as flexible and as durable as Kevlar, processing the strings until it’s impossible to tell where the silicon ends and the catgut begins. You can hear the influence she exerted upon a young Alejandro Ghersi, aka Arca, who would go on to collaborate with her on 2015’s Vulnicura; his own music’s viscous textures and mutating forms would be unthinkable without the example set by Homogenic.
Blanketing the album’s electronic elements like a heavy layer of snow, Homogenic’s strings give the album a somewhat monochrome palette; it’s a dense listen, and in songs like “Jóga” and “Bachelorette” there’s not a lot of breathing room. But those rolling, subtly shaded contours periodically give way to jagged crags and extreme contrasts. This was not accidental: The album was meant as a kind of sound-portrait of her native Iceland. Björk envisioned beats “like rough volcanoes with soft moss growing all over it,” recalls Markus Dravs, whose percussive sketches formed the rhythmic foundation for her songwriting. “I wanted Homogenic to reflect where I’m from, what I’m about,” Björk told MTV. “Imagine if there was Icelandic techno! Iceland is one of the youngest countries geographically—it’s still in the making, so the sounds would be still in the making.”
Many of Björk’s collaborators over the years have discussed her tendency to describe music in unusually synaesthetic terms: Despite her intensive formal schooling in music—she began studying music at five, and was introduced to the work of modernist composers like Messiaen and Cage while still very young—her studio vocabulary, when she’s trying to get a point across, leans toward terms like “more angular” or “pink and fluffy.” So it’s hardly surprising that she would take formal inspiration from Iceland’s steaming geysers, igneous formations, and other geological features that lend themselves especially well to the visceral textures and rhythms of late-’90s electronica.
But there were also more personal reasons for her shift of focus. After years in London, she had become homesick for the land of her birth. She had traded a country with a population of fewer than 265,000 people for a city of some six million; not only that, she had been through hell and back in the years leading up to the album’s creation. A string of relationships with high-profile artists—the photographer Stephane Sednaoui, Tricky, jungle producer Goldie—had all fizzled. A physical altercation with a journalist outside Bangkok’s international airport had landed her in tabloids all around the world. And in September, 1996, a 21-year-old Miami pest control worker named Ricardo Lopez, furious about her relationship with Goldie—unbeknownst to him, they had actually broken up just days before—assembled a sulfuric acid bomb in a hollowed-out book and mailed it to Björk’s management before locking himself in his apartment, putting a loaded revolver in his mouth, and pulling the trigger, all in front of a video camera while Björk’s “I Remember You” played in the background. Police managed to intercept the device with no further casualties, but Björk was left shaken—concerned for her ability to protect those closest to her, including her son, and conflicted about her own openness with her fans. Returning to Iceland for the Christmas holidays, as she did every year, she fell under the island’s sway. Inspired by the country’s landscape, she became determined to make music that expressed a geological essence that was as raw as her own nerves.
You don’t need to know any of these details to connect with Homogenic, however; its emotional impact far transcends the biographical footnotes of its making. Lyrically, the record picks up themes she had already explored on her previous two albums—loneliness; sexual desire; desperate, even defiant love; the feeling of being a fish out of water—but her writing is more vivid than ever before. “I’m a fountain of blood/In the shape of a girl,” she bellows in “Bachelorette,” and later, “I’m a path of cinders/Burning under your feet.” The song is a kind of epic saga, and Björk has explained that it forms the third part of a loose trilogy with “Human Behaviour” and “Isobel”—a sort of Bildungsroman about Björk’s own adventures in the wider world.
Many lyrics take place as internal monologues grappling with her own contradictions. “How Scandinavian of me!” she yelps on “Hunter,” a desperate ode to self-empowerment, chiding herself for having believed she could “organize freedom.” (To Icelandic people, she later explained, Swedes and Danes are hopelessly regimented.) The distorted, minor-key “5 Years” is lovelorn and angry—for anyone who has ever been stuck in a dysfunctional relationship, is there a more relatable lyric than “You can’t handle love”?—while “Immature” channels broken-heartedness into a kind of empowering self-reprimand (“How could I be so immature/To think he could replace/The missing elements in me?/How extremely lazy of me!”). Despite the self-flagellation, it’s a quiet, tender song, with a beat carved out of a sigh; its twinkling arpeggios sound like a dry run for Vespertine.
When love turns up on this album, it is almost always something that is over or absent—a missed signal, a sailed ship. But she makes real poetry out of these small, bitter tragedies, and she occasionally even finds hope in them. In the soft, delicate “Unravel,” she sings of her heart unraveling like a ball of yarn while her lover is away. The Devil promptly steals it: “He’ll never return it/So when you come back/We’ll have to make new love,” she sings, in a strangely affecting conceit about the fickleness and resilience of love.
But the main theme running through the album is the wish to rush headlong into a life lived to the fullest—an unbridled yearning for the sublime. “State of emergency/Is where I want to be” she sings on “Jóga,” a song dedicated to her close friend and tour masseuse, in which churning breakbeats and slowly bowed strings mediate between lava flows and Björk’s own musculature—a kind of Rosetta Stone linking geology and the heart. “Alarm Call,” the closest thing on the album to a club hit (the Alan Braxe and Ben Diamond remix, in fact, is a storming breakbeat house anthem) shouts down doubt with the indomitable line, “You can’t say no to hope/Can’t say no to happiness,” as Björk professes her desire to climb a mountain “with a radio and good batteries” and “Free the human race/ From suffering.”
If you’re looking for catharsis, you won’t find better than the album’s final, three-song stretch: Following “Alarm Call” comes the incensed “Pluto”: “Excuse me/But I just have to/Explode/Explode this body off me,” she sings, launching into an ascending procession of wordless howls as buzzing synthesizers flash like emergency beacons. Finally, the quiet after the storm: The soft, beatless “All Is Full of Love,” a downy bed of harp and processed strings. The title is self-explanatory, the lyrics wide-eyed, nearly liturgical. It is a song about ecstasy, about oneness, about infinite possibility—and about letting go.
Björk’s voice is, without question, the life force of this music. You can hear her finding a new confidence on “Unravel”: The edge of her voice is as jagged as the lid of a tin can, her held tones as slick as black ice. A diligent student could try to transcribe her vocals the way jazz obsessives used to notate Charlie Parker’s solos, and you’d still come up short; the physical heft and malleability of her voice outstrips language.
Videos had long been an important part of Björk’s work, but they became especially crucial in building out the world of Homogenic. Compared to the sprawling list of collaborators on her first two records, she had pared down to a skeleton crew for this album; working with an array of different directors, though, allowed her to amplify her creative vision.
Chris Cunningham used “All Is Full of Love” as the springboard for a tender, and erotic, look at robot love. Michel Gondry turned “Bachelorette” into a meta-narrative about Björk’s own conflicted relationship with fame—an epic saga turned into a set of Russian nesting dolls. Another Gondry video, for “Jóga,” used CGI to force apart tectonic plates and reveal the earth’s glowing mantle below. At the end of the video, Björk stands on a rock promontory, prying open a hole in her chest—a pre-echo of the vulvic opening she will wear on the cover of Vulnicura—to reveal the Icelandic landscape dwelling inside her. In Paul White’s video for “Hunter,” a shaven-headed Björk sprouts strange, digital appendages, eventually turning into an armored polar bear, as she flutters her lids and wildly contorts her expression—a vision of human emotion as liquid mercury. Her use of different versions of her songs for several of these videos also contributed to the idea that the work was larger than any one recording—that these songs were boundless.
Björk’s initial idea for Homogenic was to be an unusual experiment in stereo panning. She imagined using just strings and beats and voice—strings in the left channel, beats in the right channel, and the voice in the middle.
It’s kind of a genius idea: an interactive, self-remixable album, a sort of one-disc Zaireeka, that goes to the heart of the dichotomies that have always made Björk—theorist and dreamer, daughter of a hippie activist and a union electrician—such a dynamic character. And while it’s easy to see why the concept never came to fruition—there’s no way such a gimmick could have yielded an album as richly layered as Homogenic turned out to be—it turns out to have been a prescient idea: the direct antecedent to Vulnicura Strings, which excised the drums and electronic elements of Vulnicura and focused on voice and strings alone.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see the way that Homogenic paves the way for later career triumphs like Vespertine and Vulnicura: In its formal audacity and sustained emotional intensity, it represents a phase shift from Debut and Post, fine though they were. Björk’s personality has seen her seesaw between extremes throughout her catalog, and after the shadowy intensity of Homogenic, Vespertine would end up a softer, gentler record. (Björk has said that she envisions “All Is Full of Love” as “the first song on Vespertine.”) Created in the glow of her nascent relationship with Matthew Barney, it is the domestic album, the comfort album, the beach-house-weekend album. But Homogenic is the one that complicated the picture of Björk, that threw aside big-time sensuality in favor of more volatile forces, revealed a glimpse of her deepest self for the first time.


Pavo Pavo's debut LP sounds like a dispatch from what people in the mid-20th century thought the future would be like: jetpacks, Mars landings and dehydrated Thanksgiving dinners.

Pavo Pavo: Young Narrator in the Breakers

Young Narrator in the Breakers

The last track on Pavo Pavo's debut album, Young Narrator in the Breakers, is called “2020, We'll Have Nothing Going On,” which seems strikingly ominous now given the state of current American politics. However, the Brooklyn-based five-piece consider themselves optimists—a fact mirrored in their music and their aesthetic. The album's artwork features two women holding hands, walking into a metallic horizon like a 1950s advertisement, and this type of imagery informs the album. Young Narrator in the Breakers sounds like a ’70s soft-rock dispatch from what people in the mid-20th century thought the future would be like: jetpacks, Mars landings, and dehydrated Thanksgiving dinners. Their music embraces space-age retro-futurism, but with some gentle touches from the last 10 years of indie rock (Fleet Foxes' angelic harmonies; Grizzly Bear's urban folk; Arcade Fire's wide-eyed chamber pop) to keep them from being stuck in nostalgic pastiche.
All five members of Pavo Pavo are classically trained musicians as well as songwriters—and instead of seeming like disparate entities all vying for your attention, each person contributes just enough in their respective area that every drum fill, handclap and keyboard stab falls perfectly into place. “Time is a hole in my waterbed,” sings vocalist/keyboardist Eliza Bagg in her soothing soprano on the album opener “Ran Ran Run,” exactly the sort of softly loopy line that gives Pavo Pavo their off-beat color. As the chorus kicks in, the song shifts gears from downtempo to upbeat, jaunty pop, illustrating the band's knack for unconventional arrangements, another factor that keeps their somewhat typical setup from falling into conventionality.
It seems that 2016 had brought on a miniature, unexpected ’70s soft-rock revival (think the Lemon Twigs' mellow glam or Drugdealer's woozy folk). Down to their soft focus press photos in color-coordinated turtlenecks, this is a style Pavo Pavo make no qualms about embracing, and “Wiserway,” another highlight, is the closest they get to realizing it. Supported by off-kilter synthesizers that plod along like the theme to a forgotten after-school special, vocalist/guitarist Oliver Hill's voice, somewhere between a confession and plea, coasts effortlessly across his bandmates' three-part harmonies. Pavo Pavo may have formed in Brooklyn, but everything about this song conjures up images of Laurel Canyon, midnight beach bonfires and lazy coastal car rides.
The album is not without the occasional misstep: The title track interlude is a one-minute-long burst of space rock that aches to be given a full song treatment. But more often than not, Pavo Pavo redress those imperfections within a matter of seconds—“No Mind,” an uptempo number that at times sounds like Mark Mothersbaugh fronting the Flaming Lips, glues the second half of the album together, and “John (a Little Time)” makes the best use of Bagg's haunting vocals in a whisper of a ballad, like a lovelorn alien reaching out from the farthest reaches of the galaxy. By the time you do finally reach the closing sigh of “2020, We'll Have Nothing Going On,” the song's driving, mid-era Beach Boys wish to “Take me to the country/Seriously, Christine” does begin to feel like a promise of a better tomorrow, building a rocket to the future with childlike wonder. Whatever the actual year 2020 will hold, for now, Pavo Pavo's escapism feels cozy, uplifting, and wholly appropriate.


An album about and of solitude may not seem like an appealing listen, but Doe Paoro comes through the other side strong and clear. Recorded at Bon Iver's April Base studio, she soaks up the sound inherent in that space, while more than capably carving one of her own.

After

It was bound to happen. As more and more bands in the extended Bon Iver family have made use of Justin Vernon’s April Base studio in the tiny village of Fall Creek, Wis., the location and the sensibilities of the musicians who overlap on these releases (and sleep there in bunk beds while recording) have begun to create a distinct sound. April Base seems like a place you’d find locally made art on the walls, Bruce Hornsby on the turntable, and half-eaten bags of trail mix on the counters. In the same way Matthew E. White's Spacebomb house band stamps its records with vintage-horn-section grandiosity, April Base recordings tend to have a liquid, woodsy aura like the one Vernon debuted on Bon Iver in 2011.
Enter Doe Paoro, who turned heads with her smoky, soulful voice on 2012 debut Slow to Love, which she wrote on a Vernon-esque cabin retreat outside Syracuse, N.Y. Though she didn’t know Vernon, when it came time to record a new batch of songs, she reached out to him, and he ended up producing her single "The Wind" and also introduced her to the production team of S. Carey and BJ Burton, who has produced, engineered, or mixed several others in the extended family (Carey, Volcano Choir, Colin Stetson, Megafaun). Burton, who also produced Low’s recent Ones and Sixes in Wisconsin, wisely realized it wouldn’t make sense to give Low the heavy duty cycle of April Base’s sonic wash, which can be dialed up (Repave) or down (Range of Light). For After, Doe Paoro gets the full-on Wilson Phillips-in-the-woods treatment. It fits her just right.
A lot of the conversation surrounding Paoro (real name Sonia Kreitzer) has focused on her time in Tibet and her study of Lhamo, an ancient form of Tibetan folk opera. But rather than a direct influence on her sound, Lhamo seems to represent one of the many ways Doe experiments with form. On After, she’s not tied to a specific song structure or genre just as she’s not easily described by one type of vocal tradition. Vintage and modern R&B, soul, Fiona Apple, and '80s synth-pop all commingle.
When Paoro originally released "Traveling", it was a minimalist performance video with just Paoro on vocals and Guy Blakeslee of the Entrance Band on guitar, but on After, the guitar is subbed for coughing woodwinds, muted synths, and processed keys. "Silence can be so loud, it’s abrasive," she sings, countering any preconceived, romantic notion of isolation. Holing up in a cabin can block out the din of humanity, but that withdrawal can also amplify your own thoughts, making them louder than you ever imagined. "I wanted solitude and that’s what I got/ Now I’m a living island with only one thought: Maybe I was wrong," she sings as organ and the April Base horn section swell and those "In the Air Tonight" drums kick in.
Either version of "Traveling" is a winner, and that malleability makes Doe Paoro something special. While there’s a familiarity to the production of Carey and Burton, the backdrops they create for Paoro are experimental and filled with surprises. Drums disappear as quickly as they appear. Pulsing bass drives "Nostalgia", while the patiently paced "Outlines" finds Paoro alone with a piano, pausing between bluesy phrases and relishing her chance to take center stage as a damaged but defiant torch singer.
As much as the producers and collection of studio musicians imprint After, their influence wouldn’t allow just any songwriter to shine. Paoro, alongside co-writers like Peter Morén and Adam Rhodes, uses the album to reckon with loss and all of its implications, especially as it relates to time—knowing that you’re knee-deep in the aftermath, but not yet on the precipice of something else. The future is a bunch of white space, neither something to get excited about nor dread. So what do you do with the present? Well, for one, you don’t dwell on the past. "Nostalgia is killing us," Paoro sings. And on "Hypotheticals", she realizes questions like "What’s fair?" aren’t even worth answering. "I won’t indulge in hypotheticals," she spits out in a blast, turning something that could be a tossed-off sound bite from an Aaron Sorkin drama into a charged, anthemic refusal to let someone else change her story. Making peace with something as painful as loss is a messy task. After is a confident, beautiful, clear-eyed testament to that mess.


On his latest album, the former Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman takes an imagistic, detail-driven look at the dark corners of America.

Empty Country II

A song by Joseph D’Agostino can spin in a dozen different directions. Take “Erlking,” an early standout from his second album as Empty Country. Named after a murderous elf from European folklore, it opens with a sobering thought about the victims of Sandy Hook: “Those 20 kids should be visiting colleges.” From there, D’Agostino alludes to Calvinists sailing across the Atlantic on wooden ships, glimpses terror in a “dented metal restroom mirror,” and sarcastically imitates dudes who brush away their buddies’ assault allegations: “Forget who he molests/He’s a hell of a guy.” Locating a linear narrative is difficult, but both the song and the album that surrounds it casts a shadow of doom, best summed up by one lyric: “We’re well and truly fucked, my dear.”
D’Agostino, the former Cymbals Eat Guitars frontman, started Empty Country after his arty, emo-inflected band broke up in 2017. His second album under the moniker continues the bleak imagining of America of his 2020 debut. Accompanied by one-time CEG drummer Charlotte Anne Dole and her twin brother Patrick on bass, D’Agostino tells tales of lost innocence, societal decline, and rampant violence, venturing further into the corroded recesses of this country’s past and present. Empty Country II is the purest distillation of his songwriting yet, and it could be packaged with a map: He name-checks everything from Tennessee’s Cumberland Caverns to New York City’s dreaded Port Authority Bus Terminal to the Glen Road Silver Bridge in Southwestern Connecticut. Often, the locations are the only solid ground D’Agostino offers. His tales are fictionalized, unreliably narrated, and interwoven across centuries.
“Bootsie,” which veers between claustrophobic verses and anthemic choruses, tells of a young girl who takes a Greyhound from West Virginia to the “Biblically filthy” New York of the early ‘80s, finding community (but also chemical dependency) within the disco era’s drag queen culture. Closing epic “Cool S”—named after that Cool S—is sung from the perspective of a teenage murderer who is now living out his days behind bars. “FLA” traces trauma across decades in its namesake state, spiritually linked by hurricanes in 1935 and 1992. While Empty Country II can feel like a short story collection whose thematic connections become more apparent with every page turn—and indeed, D’Agostino did write a companion short story to lead single “Pearl”—ECII is more masterful as an album than a lyric booklet, invoking the depressive blues of Neil Young’s Ditch Trilogy and the sweeping, scraggly landscapes of Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West.
Whether accompanied by little more than a piano on “FLA” or guiding full-band climaxes with his falsetto on “Pearl,” D’Agostino’s adenoidal voice cuts against the grain of the music, ensuring that we hear every word. The prickly compositions stray from Empty Country’s folk and country overtones. Even on the jazzy David Berman tribute “David,” knotty solos and seedy atmospherics lurk in the background. Seek out the most uplifting lyric and you’re left with D’Agostino reflecting on Berman’s suicide: “I’m scared to die/But I’m not scared of death.” This is a dark, disheartening listen. And yet, Empty Country’s detail-driven writing shows there’s strength to be found in dredging all this up, that there’s beauty in the margins.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review misstated the location of the Glen Road Silver Bridge.


Expanded to a trio, Scott Herren's S&S moves to Stones Throw, thickens his music's mix, and revels in the sounds from the melting pot of 1970s Brazil.

La Llama

What does it mean to say that you are a Scott Herren fan? In over a decade of painterly sonic experiment, bouncing from name to name, style to style, he has fashioned such a colorful body of work that even the artist himself warns against drawing connections and comparisons. Because he doesn't want to diminish his collaborators' roles, he approaches each project-- there are no "side projects" to him-- on its own terms and asks listeners to follow suit. This year alone, Herren's mark can be found on three new records: one under his high-tech Prefuse 73 moniker, another that pairs him up with Zach Hill, and, here, a return to his kindler, gentler early work as Savath y Savalas. A partnership with Eva Puyuelo Muns since 2004, the outfit has recently welcomed beat-sculptor Roberto Carlos Lange, the son of Ecuadorean immigrants, into the fold.
And the result is La Llama. Expanded to a trio, S&S have changed in ways you might not expect. Of course, there is a thickening of the mix, but it owes more to the group's new methods than to the adding of a third voice or instrument. Swirls of psychedelic haze, and not only the crisp folk heard on Apropa't (2004), lend La Llama its grainy-footage aura, a sort of blissful density that fogs up each track. While part of that creamier texture is rooted in South American acid-folk-- more on that later-- another part comes from the ragtag recording. Warmly hued, dust-flecked, intimate, it isn't hard to believe the trio put this record together in a downtown apartment. The opener, which seems to cut and paste strips of the everyday ambiance seeping into his window, hints at the warm DIY production to follow. Tinny collisions of sound, the stalled construction projects around the Bowery may serve as metaphors, depending on your mood, for the faceplanting of high finance or simply for the relentless self-fashioning of Scott Herren. Certainly its collage-like quality reflects the melting pots that, over the years, he has labored to embody in musical form, from the Iberian diaspora's origin point, to the African enclaves of northern Brazil, back to his room in the immigrant mecca of New York.
Not only is this the group's first non-studio effort, but it also serves as its debut on Stones Throw. With their yen for leftfield tunes that fall within, or just beyond, the bounds of hip hop, the label that has housed both upstarts like Koushik and stalwarts like J Dilla makes a neat fit for the soulful adventurousness of Savath y Savalas. In fact, it seemed to be a match made in crate-digger heaven. The general manager at Stones Throw, the NPR funk archeologist Egon, shares Herren's love for the scene in Recife, Brazil in the mid-1970s. For many, that may not ring a bell. Luckily, reissues-- most by the vital Time-Lag Records-- have helped to reassemble a crude picture of this cauldron of psychedelia, with three records standing out as the towering documents of the subculture that gathered around Lula Cortes. There is the summery acousticism of Flaviola E O Bando Do Sol's self-titled record, the overdriven hymn to the four elements, Paêbiru, and Satwa's suite of starlit protest ragas. But apart from the ubiquitous guitar-- strummed and picked here, sliced and diced there-- the outsize personality of Recife is tough to spot. Herren has explicitly said that the region exerts a "direct and indirect influence," just one ingredient among many, but as the record beats on, one wishes that Brazilian muscle, verve, and eccentricity left a bigger mark on La Llama's mostly safe and Starbucks-ready aesthetic.
Instead of a jolt of funky Brazilian mysticism, what we witness in the record is a simpler and surprisingly fluid evolution: a handful of strands from Herren's past work woven together. Not every strand was worth his effort, though. For one, the shift in Apropa't, the sophomore effort that hipped devotees to Muns' feather-light delivery, continues here with the chanteuse's return to the fore. But her contributions add little color to the songs, as her airy monotone tends to stick to a mechanical, lullaby delivery, revealing her razor-thin range on "Barceloneta" and amid the sleepy strums of "Pavo Real". On the other hand, that record's often soothing blend of Catalan folk and Chicago post-rock lives on, far more vividly, in the billowing "Me Voy" and the brooding guitars of "No Despierta".
Though La Llama never plants itself on a bed of breakbeats, at its best, it does revisit the hopscotch editing of Herren's Prefuse 73 work. It is an attitude toward composing that also guided his essentially instrumental Savath debut as well as 2004's Mañana. And this persistence of the adventurous, anxious side of Herren (arrayed against his rustically downtempo Apropa't/Golden Pollen side) seems to coincide with the arrival of Roberto Carlos Lange, a musician who cut his teeth in the late-night peñas of Miami before crafting backcloths to gallery installations, and whose avant-garde spirit can be felt on the best tracks. From the flutter and fuzz of "Carajillo", the Verocai-via-Varese frenzy of "Una Cura", or the spooky animalism of "Pajaros en Cadaques", one thing is clear. A good deal more Lange and a good deal less Muns would have brought out the best in Scott Herren.


An 80-minute epic blending screamo, jazz, prog rock, IDM, and more, the latest from producer Angel Marcloid offers some of her most focused and welcoming material amid the chaos.

Eternal Home

Fire-Toolz’s work has always felt designed for life indoors. Listening to Chicago producer Angel Marcloid’s psychedelic splatters of new age, prog metal, vaporwave, and digital noise captures the distinct feeling of growing up online, with the entire history of recorded music just a keyboard click away. As with similarly minded artists like Galen Tipton and 100 gecs, Marcloid depicts the internet as a place where leaping between genres is as easy as switching tabs, the line between “good” and “bad” taste is all but meaningless, and you can let your personal soundtrack get as weird as you want from the safety of your headphones. The internet often acts as an incubator for our hyper-specific tastes to develop unfettered, a place for personal expression to take on wild new forms as we find our own niche communities that accept us. Marcloid’s music incorporates that boundless freedom and unleashes it like a modern take on an epic, confessional GeoCities blog post, full of typos and spinning unicorn clipart.
The fantastical world-building of prog rock has always figured in Marcloid’s personal mythos, and bands like Rush and Dream Theater act as a guiding light for the Fire-Toolz project with their arcane sci-fi lore, highly technical compositions, and shamelessly excessive approach to songwriting. On Eternal Home, Marcloid offers her own take on the prog-rock epic: an 80-minute purging of ideas that melds screamo, smooth jazz, and IDM as if they were always meant to be together. This long-form project is a dense proposition from an artist whose music was already overwhelming to begin with, and parsing through the album requires dedication. However amid the chaos lies some of Marcloid’s most focused, welcoming material yet.
Although following the themes of Eternal Home will require a lyric sheet to comprehend Marcloid’s distorted shrieks, a close listen reveals the album to be a  search for self-fulfillment and purpose, narrated from the isolated confines of the house. From the first moments of opener “≈ In The Pinewaves ≈,” chintzy synth chords clash in all directions as Marcloid muses about mundane tasks like doing the dishes, shouting pissed off affirmations like, “I’m owed strength now” and “I’m not paying for a mantra.” In Marcloid’s hands, being a stay-at-home stoner is a journey of self-discovery. “Lellow< “Birbs<” contrasts suburban imagery of neighborhood puppies and “macho sports dad-isms” with a gradually intensifying blastbeat, culminating in a simple, spoken-word declaration: “It’s always a nice day when we can be nice together.” It feels absurd, and yet Marcloid has a way of making these words sound completely earnest, like a kid screaming for peace from the cruelty of the playground.
One new development on Eternal Home is Marcloid’s use of clean vocals as opposed to her usual black metal howls, with the best moments finding ways to make the two styles work together. "Thick_flowy_glowy_sparkly_stingy_pain.mpeg'' opens with an absolutely decimating shriek before launching into an unholy nu-metal blast of Deftones by way of Cocteau Twins, layering glistening harmonies over pounding guitar riffs. “Where on EARTH Is My Sacchidānanda?” is even more accessible (at least by Fire-Toolz’s standards), leading a triumphant shoegaze charge as Marcloid sings and screams about having “sampled everything there is to learn” in her quest to find bliss. It feels like an anthem for the Fire-Toolz project as a whole, the melodic vocals making her trademark growls feel all the more powerful.
Moments like these manage to fold Marcloid’s far-reaching ambition into surprisingly sharp songwriting, but it’s hard for the more wandering material to sound quite as exciting in comparison. For every stunner like “I Am a Cloud,” an uncanny valley acoustic power ballad recalling  Oneohtrix Point Never’s work post-Garden of Delete, there are oceans of head-scrambling glitch collages that end up coming across like sonic vomit. It’s fun to get lost in the delirium of it all, but the album works best on a choose-your-own-adventure basis, dipping from one batch of tracks to the next like switching between Discord channels.
In the spirit of prog rock, Eternal Home is as ambitious and cerebral as it is self-indulgent; but unpacking these strange, messy depths has always felt like the whole point of Marcloid’s music. All of her searching yields some dazzling results—the thrashing blackgaze climax of “Odd Cat Sanctuary,” the lo-fi emo serenade “To Make Home, Be Home,” the playful MIDI sound that rolls through “Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window.” As the album winds down with “To Make Whole, Be Whole,” Marcloid confronts the ways that happiness can alway seems out of reach, running off a checklist of taxes to pay, medical work to be done, and distant places to eventually settle down. For Marcloid, home is an ever-changing state. As uncomfortable as it may be, there’s beauty in the way Fire-Toolz embraces this turbulent state of flux as the real destination.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their lusty new album, the L.A. singer and songwriter leapfrogs across trap-inflected R&B, countryfied ballads, and bassy pop confections.

Crash

On Kehlani’s last album, 2022’s blue water road, the L.A.-based singer-songwriter dove into the comforts of love via airy guitar pop. It was a slight adjustment to their formula following albums rife with heated R&B and moody atmosphere, a new wrinkle reflecting a maturing sensitivity to tales of love lost and won. On Crash, Kehlani’s fourth studio album, they turn once again, this time toward a grab bag of genres that reflect the dizzying ups and downs of desire and self-examination. While it often sounds like Kehlani is trying on a series of flashy outfits to see which one fits best, it’s still exhilarating when Crash dials up their signature swagger.
For Kehlani, the titular crash symbolizes a sudden, brief spike of emotion. The album evokes that intensity through freewheeling music that roves between styles, occasionally within the same song: buoyant dancehall, trap-inflected R&B, and country-tinged ballads are just a few of the flavors Kehlani whips up. Halfway through opener “GrooveTheory,” they switch from girl-group croons to stomping come-ons with the click of a radio dial. “Let’s make a movie/Then come and show me the sequel,” they purr, offering an easy inroad to Crash’s frisky point of view. On the similarly slow-burning “Sucia,” Kehlani gets an assist from Jill Scott, who shows up in sultry spoken-word mode, and Puerto Rican rapper Young Miko, who slides on the song’s beat with slinky ease. It’s a moody highlight that depicts Kehlani in the depths of lust: “I don’t want Miami, I want Medellín/Take you from the party to the trampoline,” they urge.
That focus on desire courses throughout most of Crash, lending its best songs a flirty levity. On “What I Want,” Kehlani threads a chip-tuned Christina Aguilera sample with trap hi-hats and thundering bass, giving it a darkened glower that ratchets up the bravado. It’s one of the stronger, more deliberate sample choices on Crash, fresher than much of the nostalgia bait that runs rampant in contemporary pop and R&B. “After Hours” achieves a similar flex, rewiring the riddim popularized by Nina Sky’s classic “Move Ya Body” into a breezy plea for a longer night with a lover; it’s a featherlight, upbeat reinterpretation that doubles as an expert showcase for Kehlani’s vocals, which across Crash sound more syrupy and relaxed than ever.
When Crash slows down, the results are more mixed. On the pared-back ballad “Better Not,” Kehlani reaches for a country-tuned wistfulness that treads too close to faceless folk-rock. “Vegas,” with its keening, ’80s-nodding guitar solos, suffers a similar fate and simultaneously falls into cliched songwriting (“What happens here stays here”) that winds up sounding like a marketing campaign. It’s emblematic of some of Crash’s less imaginative songs, like the “crying in the club” motif that runs through the chorus of the dancehall-tinged, Omah Lay-featuring “Tears.” The lyrics can feel like an afterthought, even when Kehlani’s sheer charisma and honey-smooth delivery makes them go down easy.
Kehlani recovers on “Deep,” a highlight that unfurls a spread of bass-heavy psych-rock to take stock of their tumultuous life story. Featuring background vocals from family including their daughter, the song recalls Rihanna’s cathartic, conflicted ANTI, with a careening chorus that rides on Kehlani’s trilling, emotive delivery and heavy, skull-rattling beats. Tracing an arc from sleeping on a concrete floor to present-day success, it’s the kind of sharp, introspective work that colors Kehlani’s best music: a welcome counter to some of Crash’s excesses.


After a tumultuous few years, the TDE rapper gets personal and sounds reinvigorated, but his worst tendencies as a rapper consistently hold him back.

Herbert

Note: This article contains references to suicide.
On “The Book of Soul,” the penultimate song from Ab-Soul’s 2012 breakout album Control System, his life flashes before his eyes. What starts as an abridged telling of his childhood battle with the rare skin disease Stevens-Johnson syndrome gives way to a recollection of his relationship with singer Alori Joh, who died by suicide months before the album’s release. The song corralled Soul’s fascination with religion, conspiracy theories, and traditionalist wordplay into a bracingly personal story that’s more unsettling a decade later—if only because of how prescient it turned out to be.
In 2016, Do What Thou Wilt. marked a turning point in the life and music of Herbert Stevens IV: drug addiction and a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories figured heavily into his songs, isolated him from his family and, during the creation of his latest album, Herbert, led to a suicide attempt of his own last year. Though the video for single “Do Better” features an alleged reenactment of that attempt, Soul says the song—and most of the album—was written beforehand. Herbert is framed as his most personal project, the one most reflective of his government name in its title. And while he sounds reinvigorated, his worst tendencies as a rapper consistently hold him back.
During the peak of Top Dawg Entertainment’s popularity in the first half of the 2010s, Soul was known for breaking down complex spiritual, political, and historical ideas into smoothly rapped, if occasionally overwrought, forms. His best songs painted him as more than just Ras Kass with access to BearShare: He was inquisitive and sly, funneling historical texts and philosophies into jokes and bouts of self-discovery. Herbert is Soul’s first album devoid of the encyclopedic deep-dives that have been a hallmark of his work for the last decade. When he locks in on specific moments, like examining his public image on opening track “Message in a Bottle” or reminiscing about friends who kept him away from street life on “Hollandaise,” his elastic flows and storytelling bring the corners of his block and his mind to life. On “Do Better,” he grapples with survivor’s guilt while interpolating lyrics by his late friend Mac Miller; and on the title track, he describes the sickness breaking his body down (“Eye doc said I need new corneas/I’d rather need those than a coroner”) while confiding in the family he has left. These flashes of his personal life are nothing short of harrowing.
But Soul’s penchant for forced wordplay and over-commitment to Real Hip-Hop spoils the mood. He may have left the amateur philosopher schtick behind, but this is a man who grew up idolizing battle rappers like Canibus, and old habits die hard. The funniest and most shocking bars walk the line between the realest shit you’ve ever heard and quips from a book of dad jokes, and several of Herbert’s songs lean dangerously toward the latter. There are at least one or two clunkers on nearly every song, lines meant to be clever that, in reality, wouldn’t cut it in an episode of Epic Rap Battles of History. Some are word games that yield boring prizes (“Knew I might be on BET/Now I think I might be E.T.”); some are bouts of dated braggadocio (“You very venereal, I’ma set you men straight”); some are nonsensical (“Would a honey stay when the money goes?/I dunno, ask Winnie the Pooh”) or just straight up corny (“Just keeping it a buck, I’m on one, George Washington.”) Soul’s love for hip-hop is evident in his delivery and his academic commitment to interpolations of Grandmaster Flash and Lauryn Hill songs, but these tryhard raps—and the “what happened to hip-hop?” screed that opens “Moonshooter”—detract from both the serious and fun songs across Herbert.
That’s a shame because Soul is working with the lushest beats of his career. Production on earlier projects took a darker bent, but the beats on Herbert skew bleach-white with brighter sounds and clearer perspective. The jazzy boom-bap of “Message in a Bottle” blends well with the peppy production on songs like “FOMF,” and Soul is game for all of it: He sounds as comfortable dipping through the grooves of Jacob Rochester and Beach Noise’s gleaming boom-bap on “Bucket” as he is over the synthetic rush of DJ Dahi’s “Church on the Move.” Awkward sex raps aside, Soul’s performance on “Go Off” is fluid and exciting, his voice booming like it never has before. He’s branching out and taking chances, but he sounds especially proud stomping his way through DJ Premier’s triumphant horns and scratches on the closing-track-as-mission-statement “Gotta Rap.” Throwaway songs (“The Wild Side,” “Positive Vibes Only”) and the imbalance between quality and silly bars disrupt the tone and effect of what would otherwise be a well-sequenced album.
It’s undeniably a good thing that Ab-Soul is feeling better these days. Herbert is proof of his progress: his voice sounds fuller, his vocal runs sharper, his love for the craft rejuvenated. He opens up the book of his life story, but this isn’t some 180-degree shift in personality. For all the deeper soul-searching, vestiges of the man who once rapped “lemme put my mouth where you potty, boo” still surface frequently enough to shatter the reality he’s trying to convey. Maybe that’s the ultimate takeaway from Herbert—for better and for worse, this shit is in his blood.
If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or know someone who is, call 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or visit the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.


Remember Teenage Fanclub's *Bandwagonesque*? In 1991, it was *Spin*'s album of the year, besting Nirvana's *Nevermind*, a release that would later be hailed by the same publication as the greatest LP of the 90s. Such contradictions are a testament to the cerebral oddity that, even though stories are told forward, they're formed backward-- events, or works of art, that occur at a certain time can take on greater importance when subsequent events lend them meaning. The then-present may have deemed *Bandwagonesque* just as compelling as *Nevermind*, but the future rendered Nirvana's record far more important.

This bothersome epistemological fact has led

Brian Eno / Harold Budd: Discreet Music / Ambient 1: Music for Airports / Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror / Ambient 4: On Land

Remember Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque? In 1991, it was Spin's album of the year, besting Nirvana's Nevermind, a release that would later be hailed by the same publication as the greatest LP of the 90s. Such contradictions are a testament to the cerebral oddity that, even though stories are told forward, they're formed backward-- events, or works of art, that occur at a certain time can take on greater importance when subsequent events lend them meaning. The then-present may have deemed Bandwagonesque just as compelling as Nevermind, but the future rendered Nirvana's record far more important.
This bothersome epistemological fact has led the world of academic art in the 20th century-- ever concerned with securing historical posterity-- to adopt a curious mindset. Artists have had to learn to speak a language of continuous self-analysis, regarding themselves in historical and present contexts so as to constantly reaffirm and even force their relevance within such stories. In modern art, it's been widely complained, the justification of a piece can be more important than its content. The artist learns a craft, but also a thought process that demonstrates a constant awareness of his or her continuity with the past, importance in the present, and meaning for the future-- every artist is equal parts analyst, critic, and salesperson.
Brian Eno has gradually been placed-- and has placed himself-- at the beginning of a growing number of stories regarding contemporary music; needless to say, the man went to art school. His historical-analytical mindset has angered some when it's led him to make sweeping claims such as, "I invented ambient music." Of course, much music has both ideologically and aesthetically predated Eno's (an issue explored in Mark Pendergast's The Ambient Century). The sense in which Eno invented ambient music is that he was able to identify its parts and impact, and thus hone a thesis stated through his Ambient 1-4 series. He took a loose collection of artistic impressions that were somehow related and defined their connection and import, creating-- as John Dewey's Art as Experience would've called it-- a unified, qualitative aesthetic experience. He "discovered" ambient music in the same way that most countries have been "discovered"-- when a Westerner finds it, names it, and gives it borders. His works are breathtaking, but the polemics that accompany them are of equal parts accomplishment and influence.
Eno's ambient ideal was formed in 1975 during months of lying in a hospital bed recovering from a car accident, forced to listen to too-quiet 18th century harp music that his body cast prevented him from turning up. This alerted him to the way that recorded sound can effectively merge with the environment in which it's played, appealing to "many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular." He aimed to create a cocoon for thought and reflection through a music that could be used with utilitarian purpose. He has described the process as a painter taking the human figure out of a landscape. In music, this figure took the form of his own voice, a cohesive melody, and other evidence of human intervention-- by eliminating these, he created a sense of space where there was once an object.
Brian Eno's affinity with composer John Cage is strong, in both their shared conception of environment as music and use of chance operations to illustrate this effect. The difference is that John Cage saw even musical basics like tonality and harmony-- the things that lend music emotional content-- as subject to his own theoretical rigidity, making some of his work ultimately uninviting to an average listener. But Eno's ambient works subvert themselves to the standards of musical beauty even in the farthest absence of humanity. Thus, in the same way that the most nihilistic of literary resolutions can somehow offer transcendence of meaning if the writing is beautiful, the ambient albums embody a duality of emotional distance and deep affection within that detachment.
As in a dream, such music has the power to make one nostalgic for places either never visited or nonexistent. And to many modern listeners, the melancholic nostalgia in these works has become twofold; it's both inherent in the music itself, and in the now-datedness of the recording style, which evokes a world of 1970s and 80s synthesizer music. One thinks of, for example, the soundtracks to grainy science-fiction movies such as Vangelis' score to Blade Runner, or that of Dune (the theme of which Eno contributed). Eno's sound appeals today to the ideal worlds both of abstract perfection and to the media of our own younger lives.
The most direct outgrowth of Eno's epiphanal experience was the Discreet Music, released in the same year as his accident; indeed, he recommended that it be played over hospital speakers to create an environment soothing to patients (it has, in fact, become a popular piece for expecting mothers). The 30-minute title track is one of the most pure realizations of Eno's original vision, a gentle immersion in slow, warm waves of sound. It's intended to be played at low volumes "even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility." The piece is an analog version of several theories that Eno would explore fully through computer software in the 90s. It's based in a sort of musical systems theory-- self-organizing works in a free-roaming environment of musical parameters predetermined by the composer. Thus, the actual execution of the music requires "little to no intervention" on the musician's part. Such systems create pieces that could go on forever, static in terms of musical movement yet never repeating exactly. In this case, Eno hooked his synth up to a tape delay system that allowed two melodic lines to linger and evolve with minimal input on his behalf. The result remains one of the greatest single ambient pieces that Eno has produced.
The album also includes three smaller works, variations upon Johann Pachelbel's "The Canon in D Major" derived by applying chance procedures to the original score and performed by a group of musicians conducted by Gavin Bryars-- composer of the beautiful The Sinking of the Titanic. If the piece "Discreet Music" is an aural statement of what ambient sounds like, then these are the term's ideological distillations. By building swirling drones upon a staple of the classical repertoire, Eno representationally strips music of its functionality-- the classic tension and resolution of one chord moving toward the next. Pachelbel's "Canon", in its circle-of-fifths progression, is a textbook piece of functional harmony; Eno's deconstruction, conversely, makes any expectation of musical movement impossible. Thus, though not the most enveloping or appealing of Eno's works, these variations gently force the listener to switch fundamental modes of hearing.
Eno's first official statement of larger intent came three years later with Ambient 1: Music for Airports. The dispassionate title reflects the smooth, sterile, modernist surfaces that the music evokes. Eno picked a building similar to a hospital, the location of ambient music's conception. Both hospitals and airports are centered on mechanized rituals that are simultaneously in the service of, and often numb to, basic human needs. Eno thus aimed to make a music that would "get rid of people's nervousness." The music comes in four sparse sections-- some of them solo piano, some synthesized voices and other tones, all altered through subtle tape manipulation. In long, disintegrating notes that echo the work of Morton Feldman, Music for Airports gives the listener nothing to hold onto, remaining as transitory as its location.
In describing this album, Eno said, "One of the things music can do is change your sense of time so you don't really mind if things slip away or alter in some way." In Music for Airports' meeting of place and sound, Eno realizes music's capacity to unify contrasting conceptions of time. The imagery of airports implies constant movement-- passengers rushing to catch a flight, planes taking off, lines of people and conveyor belts moving forward. Yet Eno's work is composed of placid, sustained tones that connote stillness. This contrast evokes both the inherent transcendent suspension in speed and the sense of "rushing forward" within a warm drone, and it's why many have likened the emotional content of Eno's work to the barrage of sixteenth notes found in minimalist pieces. Though opposite in rhythmic conceits, both seem to warp one's sense of movement through space.
Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror (1980) is Eno's collaboration with pianist Harold Budd, a late bloomer of a musician who became a master of playing his instrument at barely audible volumes. In the Grand Unified Story of Music, it's definitely the ambient album that most directly leads to much of the Windham Hill label's output-- a connection Eno would care to forget, as he's complained that new age mimics his aesthetic universe while divesting it of deeper meaning. Budd's placid, Satie-like melodies on reverbed piano are backed by hushed tones from Eno. The Plateaux matches Eno's other ambient albums in its moments of deep beauty, though it does little to mute the human presence. One gets the feeling that Harold Budd was after something slightly different from Eno, as his playing seems a bit busy under the concept at hand. Still, left on in the background, Plateaux is a light-filled album that accomplishes the goal of transforming its environment. It can turn any room into a place of fragile reverence, and it can offer poignancy to the most mundane of actions.
Ambient 4: On Land (1982) has been cited by both Eno and many fans as his best work. It's a complete realization of several artistic aims, and of all his albums it remains the most distinctive-- there are hardly any successful imitators of its unique universe. As Discreet Music foretold the manner by which Eno would realize self-contained musical environments, On Land presages the sound of several musical elements acting independently, coinciding only by chance yet remaining cohesive. The tracks of On Land, all fairly unchanging environments in this way, seem to similarly extend infinitely past the boundaries of their beginnings and ends.
Eno has talked of finding his inspiration for On Land in Ghana, when he used a microphone and headphones to hear the conflated sounds of his surrounding radius. "The effect of this simple technological system was to cluster all the disparate sounds into one aural frame; they became music." (For a demonstration of this effect, just walk around outside with a microphone amplified into a pair of headphones: It really is striking to hear the world flattened into two dimensions upon one's ears.) The result was an attempt to make dense "worlds" of sound using the same sense of disparate yet spatially connected elements. The album is both more varied than his other ambient works and more foreboding. The atmospheres in many of On Land's pieces are so dense as to leave one staring down a chasm of sound, with no visible bottom apparent. Eno used several nonmusical objects and field recordings to contribute to On Land's thick aural web, the album being a testament to Eno's use of the studio as an instrument. On Land intensifies the most subtle and indescribable of emotions, and it stands at the forefront of the transformative possibilities inherent in non-rhythmic, non-melodic music.
Brian Eno's ambient works received criticism similar to minimalist music of the time. About Steve Reich, a critic once sniped that listening to his pieces was like watching waves roll upon the shore-- pretty but meaningless. About Eno, guitarist Lydia Lunch once complained that all ambient did was "flow and weave," that its emotional ambiguity was oppressive and vapid. Both criticisms assumed a certain way of perceiving sound to be the only valid conceits under which to compose. But as time progresses, we find more and more artists influenced by Eno's expansion of sonic possibility, rendering earlier criticisms inherently moot. Some may find Eno's constant analysis aggrandizing, but it's that very mode of thought that allowed him to identify "ambient" as a coherent idea in the first place. He both verbalized and demonstrated a concept that perfectly fit its time and place, and that has visibly shifted the landscape of musical thought. For that, Eno gets to join the ranks of those who have accomplished such sea changes throughout history-- a shift in thought we often attribute to "genius."


Playing spacey techno sounds off breakbeats and inventive percussion, the Australian producer’s debut album has a psychedelic undercurrent that’s more Burning Man than Berghain.

Modern Bliss

Outside of Australia, most people don’t know what a bush doof is, but they’re essential to understanding Roza Terenzi’s music. For a teenager growing up in Perth, a place often described as the most isolated city in the world, clubbing wasn’t a particularly attractive option, but bush doofs—that’s Aussie slang for outdoor parties in remote or rural areas—offered the chance to take a proper plunge into the trippy depths of electronic music.
Terenzi recently located to Berlin after spending a few years in Melbourne, but Modern Bliss, her debut album, is rife with what sound like subconscious echoes of the nights she spent dancing in the wilds of Western Australia. (Some of those echoes might also be linked to her father, a percussionist who’s been part of an electronic dub project called Beatworld since the late 1990s.) Words like “sci-fi” and “extra-terrestrial” are often used to describe Terenzi’s production—and lines can absolutely be drawn between her work and the spacey sounds of vintage Detroit techno and electro, as well as the Motor City-inspired output of Dutch outposts like Clone and Crème Organization—but Modern Bliss also has a hippieish, psychedelic undercurrent that’s more Burning Man than Berghain.
This vibe is most evident on “Modern Bliss,” which pairs a self-actualization mantra (“Exactly where I need to be/My thoughts create reality”) from Barcelona’s Ivy Barkakati with a floaty techno-trance framework reminiscent of Paul van Dyk’s 1996 anthem “Words.” Back then, ponderous self-empowerment monologues were a staple of trance and progressive house, and there’s something familiar and comforting about the track’s warm pads and subtle synth wiggles. “Total Eclipse” is another throwback, its blunted breakbeats and twirling acid lines forming a perfect soundtrack for blithely zoning out in the chillout room. The shambling, sun-soaked “Spiral” is an even headier trip, yet it’s “Jungle in the City” that provides the album’s most blissful moment. A cosmic chugger that cleverly nods to Terenzi’s father (it shares a title with the first Beatworld album), the song’s astral melodies glide atop gently tumbling tropical drum sounds.
Warm and fuzzy flourishes aside, inventive percussion is at the heart of Terenzi’s appeal. A skilled shapeshifter, she’s flirted with a variety of styles and tempos across her previous releases, but her forays into electro and breakbeat have become a calling card. Those crooked rhythms play a role in Modern Bliss as well, albeit a less prominent one. With its robotic beats and thick, rolling bassline, “Yo-Yo” is one of the album’s sturdiest cuts, with bright melodic stabs that tip the song into euphoria. Album closer “My Reality Cheque Bounced”—a playful collaboration with Planet Euphorique founder DJ Zozi (aka D. Tiffany)—isn’t a straight-up breakbeat track, but its snappy, stop-and-start drum pattern and rubbery bounce make it one of the LP’s most obvious party tunes.
Straight lines are in short supply on Modern Bliss, but “That Track (Rewired Mix)” is one of the few instances in which Terenzi adheres to dance music’s standard four-on-the-floor grid. With its squiggly melody and sassy vocal refrain, the thumping house tune jettisons the rave nostalgia, opting instead for something closer to the perky sounds of classic Chicago labels like Dance Mania. It’s one of the album’s most streamlined productions, but it’s also one of its most effective. Moreover, it’s proof that even when she deviates from what’s expected, Terenzi can still be devastatingly effective. The heart of Modern Bliss may reside in the bush doof, but its creator is capable of thriving just about anywhere.


An essential new vinyl box set collects all of the trailblazing Olympia band’s records. It is a monument to the spartan trio’s music and their seismic influence on the indie rock that followed in their wake.

We Are Beat Happening

In 1979, a 17-year-old music nerd named Calvin Johnson made a revelatory discovery. “I know the secret: rock‘n’roll is a teenage sport, meant to be played by teenagers of all ages—they could be 15, 25, or 35,” he wrote in a letter to the punk magazine New York Rocker. “It all boils down to whether they’ve got the love in their hearts, that beautiful teenage spirit.” As a preternaturally music-savvy high schooler in Olympia, Washington, Johnson had a show on KAOS-FM, a community radio station hosted by Evergreen State College which had a strict rule that at least 80% of all records played on-air must be independent. He filled his slot with bands that prioritized idiosyncratic passion over technical ability such as Young Marble Giants, the Raincoats, and the Slits. In 1980, Johnson enrolled at Evergreen, a small public liberal arts school with no majors or grades that attracted the kind of inquisitive minds who created and collaborated nonstop.
Johnson’s upstairs neighbor during his freshman year at Evergreen was Heather Lewis, an aspiring artist from affluent Westchester County in New York. Lewis—who had never played in a band before—accepted an offer to play drums in a group called the Supreme Cool Beings in the summer of 1982. Inspired by fellow Evergreen student Bruce Pavitt’s Subterranean Pop fanzine and cassette imprint, Johnson had founded a home record label called K (Johnson has said that K stands for knowledge, but also that it’s “unclear why the name is K”). The Supreme Cool Beings’ 1982 Survival of the Coolest cassette—recorded live on Johnson’s KAOS show—was K’s first release. The following year, Lewis and Johnson started playing together and after a few lineup changes, Johnson invited recent Olympia transplant Bret Lunsford—who had never played guitar before—to join the band that would be renamed Beat Happening.
The punk and underground music Johnson discovered as a teenager was driven by independence, egalitarianism, and an urge to destroy life’s rulebook. Beat Happening stripped away these philosophies until only the most elemental parts remained. They used yogurt containers for a drum kit, a thrift store guitar with no amp, and rebuffed the bass entirely. At live shows, they frequently switched instruments, if they had them at all. “Our attitude was if people don’t let us borrow drums then we can go grab a garbage can or a cardboard box and that will do,” Lunsford says in Micahel Azerrad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life. While punk was presumably loud, fast, and aggressive, Beat Happening, with their instrumental amateurism, unintimidating appearance, and unabashedly sentimental lyrics, were provocative by simply existing. It was an unintentional sort of defiance. “We just didn’t have a choice,” Johnson said years later. “We made music that we made—and that’s just the way it is. We were always working to the edge of our abilities.” Beat Happening was music at its purest.
We Are Beat Happening, a new vinyl box set that collects all of the bands’ records in one place for the first time since 2002, is a crucial step in recognizing the trio’s seismic influence. Though Beat Happening are frequently written off as cloyingly twee (which, to be clear, should not be an insult), in truth, the band created a crucial link between the minimalist experimentations of post-punk and Riot Grrrls’ demystification of perfection. By disrupting the status quo concept that music must be polished, practiced, and public, Beat Happening helped crack open a world for new voices.
In 1985, Beat Happening released their self-titled debut, a declaration of their undefined, instinctive, and fearless nature. As Johnson sings on “Youth,” one of the group’s earliest recorded songs, “When you’re young you can afford to be bold.” Drifting between barely-there lo-fi ballads and ’60s jangle-pop ditties, Beat Happening is unconsciously rule-free. The band’s name, which originated from an Evergreen student film called Beatnik Happening, could not have been more appropriate: In Beat Happening songs, a rhythm organically materializes. Vocal responsibilities bounce between Johnson’s booming, buffoonishly sexy baritone—which more than makes up for the lack of an actual bass—and Lewis’ unaffected candor, which propels the band’s more hook-driven songs. As she implores listeners to “open up your eyes and speak your mind” on the opening song “Foggy Eyes,” Lewis crashes through walls of hesitancy with every word.
The record’s bright yellow cover with a stick-figure cat riding a rocketship indicates that the music inside is childish. And sure, there’s plenty of wide-eyed whimsy throughout Beat Happening: the beachside dance party and picnic hosted by Mr. Fish in “Down At the Sea”; the singsongy “Fourteen” where Johnson struggles to speak while he and his crush feed a pet rabbit some cabbage; the tambourine-driven “Our Secret” where forbidden lovers express their undying devotion over cups of tea. The charming activities outlined in the band’s music were reflective of their lives in Olympia. They had slumber parties, made Super 8 films, and lived simply.
In many ways, Beat Happening was three twentysomethings performing the affectations of innocence. But for all their pseudo-naivete, the band’s music can be strangely sexual, like a teenager caught between the mysteries of adulthood and the comforts of childhood. The nearly a capella “In Love With You Thing” begins with Johnson lamenting an unrequited romance and kicking himself over his bashfulness. Suddenly his creaky wooden voice softens and he admits a hankering to touch a woman’s “parted lips” and “swinging little hips.” On the barebones “Look Around,” Johnson stares down a girl before deciding to “come between her thighs.” The most overtly sexual moment arrives on “Christmas,” a bumpy little track which appeared on a 1996 expanded edition of Beat Happening. It starts with a deadpan admission: “I had sex on Christmas/I had sex three times today/Three different women taught me how to be bored/In their own separate sweet little ways.” These moments of carnal desire stand in stark contrast with the record’s prevailing sense of polite swooning. While Bruce Springsteen was on the radio likening his desire to being set aflame, Beat Happening preferred small and private pleasures of all sorts.
Beat Happening’s debut was initially just a drop in the ocean, adored mostly by their small but supportive community in Olympia. But through Johnson’s connections in the fanzine world, the record eventually caught the ear of Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis, who would release Beat Happening in Europe in 1986. While this led to a swell of positive foreign press, the re-release also exposed the band to like-minded indie-pop contemporaries like the Pastels, Talulah Gosh, and the Vaselines.
Three years later, they made their darker and more abrasive second album, Jamboree. It opens with Johnson spellbound by a woman whose heart is “black as tar” to the point of single-minded delusion. His almost-frightening obsession marks a drastic change from Beat Happening’s debut, where Johnson was more likely to accept rejection with his tail between his legs than pursue romance so doggedly. On the caustic closer “The This Many Boyfriends Club,” he implores a young woman to ditch the dudes who fawn over her; he’s indignant that they think of her as an object rather than a person in her own right.
But for all its grit and angst, Jamboree is still driven by an underdog’s romanticism. The record’s most beloved track, the lethargic, wistful “Indian Summer,” clings to the promise of forever in the face of looming heartache. “Breakfast in cemetery/Boy tasting wild cherry/Touch girl, apple blossom/Just a boy playing possum,” Johnson murmurs, letting the delicate romance of each image melt in his mouth. Though Lewis’ vocal role here is more understated than on Beat Happening, her scrappiness leads to one of the record’s highlights. “In Between” is a charged blast of three-chord pop and it offers one of the most profound, utterances in Beat Happening’s catalogue: “And I remember when my parents met/It was years before my birth/And I can see them years from now/Their ghosts fly above the earth.”
While Jamboree was delayed by time off and physical distance between the bandmates, Beat Happening went on to release a steady stream of records for the next four years. Their third, 1989’s Black Candy, is undeniably the band’s spookiest and most sexually-charged album. While things begin pleasantly enough with the chipper Johnson-Lewis duet “Other Side,” their dreams of running away to a cozy shack and living off “bread crusts and lemon rind” are quickly extinguished by the ominous title track. “Jackhammer, can’t stand her/Can’t live unless I have her/Sin dribbling down my chin,” Johnson darkly intones. “Pajama Party in a Haunted Hive” is not the innocent bumblebee sleepover the title suggests. Over Lunsford’s spiky guitar, Johnson unleashes a horrifying Kama Sutra of insect innuendo: “Yellowjacket buzz let’s honey do/I’ll lie down on top of you/Gonna split this womb in two.” Even its most warm-hearted track, “Cast a Shadow,” is sullied by a dark specter of a lover who can only be seen in dreams.
Following the release of Black Candy, Beat Happening headed out on tour with punk heroes Fugazi; Johnson had befriended the band’s founder Ian MacKaye years before in Washington D.C. and the two artists regarded each other as contemporaries who shared ethics about DIY culture, independent labels, and affordable, all-ages shows. Beat Happening’s rejection of macho aggression as a core tenet of punk was bewildering and infuriating to some Fugazi fans, who wanted to crash into each other in the pit, not watch an awkward crooner squiggle his hips, rub his tummy, and sway like a drunk puppet. But the backing of Beat Happening by scene authorities like MacKaye signaled that punk is not a sound or a style, but a spirit of rebellion against norms of all sorts.
In 1991, Beat Happening released their fourth record, Dreamy, with Sub Pop, who were riding high off the grunge explosion. After the B-movie pulp spookiness of Jamboree and Black Candy, Dreamy returns to the vulnerability of the trio’s debut. But after six years playing together, Beat Happening’s technical ability had de facto improved in almost every way. Paired with Steve Fisk’s polished production, Dreamy is Beat Happening’s most cohesive record and their best-kept secret. Opener “Me Untamed” confronts a similar drunk in love sentiment as Jamboree opener “Bewitched” but this time Johnson chooses smoldering earnestness instead of force. “Who’s gonna love me the way that I am,” he solemnly asks on the gentle “I’ve Lost You.” Lewis’ songs are equally introspective and tender, especially “Left Behind” in which she summarizes romantic differences with serene precision: “You want more things, I got my own way.” Dreamy’s easygoing harmony confirms that Beat Happening’s creative puzzle pieces had found their proper places.
Several months after the release of Dreamy, Johnson and his K Records partner Candice Pedersen organized the International Pop Underground Convention, a six-day gathering in Olympia that celebrated self-invention and underground music. While the convention featured a hodgepodge of activities from performances by Beat Happening and Bikini Kill to screenings of Planet of the Apes, its most influential offering was Love Rock Revolution Girl Style Now, aka “Girl Night.” This opening night showcase featured Heavens to Besty, Tobi Vail, Bratmobile, a pre-Tiger Trap Rose Melberg, and more. While women like Vail, Lois Maffeo, and Kathleen Hanna were already mighty voices in the Olympia underground, “Girl Night” galvanized a younger generation and the burgeoning Riot Grrrl revolution transformed Beat Happening and K’s DIY ethos into a worldwide call to arms.
Though they continued to write songs about the mysteries of love and death, Beat Happening’s fifth and final record, 1992’s You Turn Me On, feels removed from their ramshackle beginnings. Produced by Fisk and Young Marble Giants’ Stuart Moxham, the trio wander into dream-pop territory and idle in the drowsy glow of someone just awakened from an afternoon nap (one track is literally called “Sleepy Head”). The nearly-seven minute opener “Tiger Trap” is a slow-burning opus in the vein of Galaxie 500. “Godsend” burrows into a lush daze with Lewis’ multi-tracked murmur repeating “It’s just the things you do/You make it true/You’re a godsend” over and over across nine-and-a-half minutes. Perhaps Beat Happening fans who only listen to their 1985 debut assume that the trio never surpassed their unsophisticated beginnings, but You Turn Me On proves that by their end, the band evolved into something far more refined than anyone would have expected.
Technically, Beat Happening never broke up. They simply went separate ways and focused on other projects. Johnson continued building K into a beloved indie mainstay and released music under the monikers Dub Narcotic Sound, the Halo Benders, and his own name. Lewis continued to pursue visual art; her minimalist sketches appear on a majority of Beat Happening’s album covers and her naturalistic paintings of rabbits adorn the We Are Beat Happening packaging. For a decade Lunsford owned the beloved Anacortes record shop The Business and encouraged a new generation of artists, including Phil Elverum, to create art and community through whatever means were available. In 2003 they released Music to Climb the Apple Tree By, a collection of b-sides and rarities recorded between 1984 and 2000, but since 1992, Beat Happening’s music has been left to quietly inspire.
Over the past two decades, Beat Happening helped provide a blueprint for countless musicians looking to pave their own path. Kurt Cobain, who listed Jamboree as one of his favorite records of all time, got a K tattoo as a reminder “to stay a child.” Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker were individually blown away by the band’s simple set up and felt empowered to start a two-guitar-one-drum band. As Bandcamp became a tool for anyone looking to share their bedroom musical doodles, there was an outburst of young musicians inspired by Beat Happening. The most prominent of these modest yet singular voices Frankie Cosmos, who has said that listening to Beat Happening helped catalyze her to begin writing music. “Beat Happening will never get old,” she told Pitchfork in 2015. “It’s similar to Frank O’Hara—you can hear the voice so strong in the writing.” The teenage spirit Calvin Johnson once unearthed springs eternal.

Buy: Rough Trade
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After circulating underground for five years, the rapper’s new project recaptures the magic of his late 2010s glory.

Project T-Pain

In July of 2018, 03 Greedo reported to a Texas prison to begin serving a 20-year sentence related to drug and firearm charges incurred during a 2016 traffic stop. The Watts, California rapper had always been prolific: From the start of 2016 through the beginning of his sentence, he released seven LPs, three of which clocked in around 90 minutes, while two more ran two hours apiece. But in the weeks leading up to his incarceration, he recorded at an even more astonishing pace, summoning collaborators from around Los Angeles to various studios at all hours of the day and night.
Many of the songs written during this period have since been released, usually on projects helmed by a single producer. These records occasionally recall Greedo at his elastic best, folding and stretching into ridiculous shapes to accommodate the disparate sounds he loves to synthesize: bounce from Baton Rouge and New Orleans, warbled singing from Atlanta, scuttling claps from his city’s own strip clubs. Still, they all rest on a shelf below his pre-prison material, perhaps because it often feels like there are too many people in the room. Though he has turned in scorched-earth guest verses on other rappers’ songs, Greedo’s music is strongest when it hermetically seals you inside his psyche—when each interpolation or irrupting confession feels unmediated, unedited, and raw. Of all the music he’s released since he began serving his sentence, Project T-Pain comes closest to recapturing the sorcery of his 2016-18 run.
Created during that period—and circulated subterraneously as a .zip file for more than five years now—the finally released album also pairs him with a single producer, this time LA’s Dnyc3. But whether it’s due to the more considered sequencing, more wrenching writing, or a less idiosyncratic collaborator (for better or worse, it is impossible to hear a Mustard beat and think of anyone else), the comparatively brief set feels like it flows directly from one man’s hyperactive brain.
On the second song from 2017’s Purple Summer 03: Purple Hearted Soldier, Greedo noted his trips in and out of lockup with a sly joke. “I might freestyle this whole album,” he teases, “‘cause I hate the pen.” But Project T-Pain opens with a much starker vision of the incarceration he faced at the time he wrote it. “You ever rode inside a bucket van?” he asks on the sweeping “Stronger,” where he invites the listener to imagine being “shackled from your hands and your feet.” A few bars later—before Dnyc3’s drums have even kicked in—Greedo laments experiencing homelessness before finding success, only to realize that he won’t beat the case in front of him. It’s the sort of bloodletting that would usually be reserved for an album’s end; by slotting it at the very front, the stakes of every encounter with an enemy or squad car that follows feel impossibly high.
It can be a thrill to witness Greedo’s unbridled energy as a rapper. On “Going Back,” he melts into a cascading flow—his third cadence in a single verse—that at first seems to break free from Dnyc3’s beat, only to be revealed as the anticipation of a thumping drum change. The album’s title is an advertising gambit; Greedo has always rapped and sung in nearly equal measure, and few beats here approximate the high-gloss playfulness of peak T-Pain. But the two artists do share a baseline unpredictability: On “Project Nigga,” which marries the turn-of-the-century Cash Money sound to the less quantized mutation of it that dominated LA during the Trump years, Greedo spends much of the song buried deep in the pocket only to emerge with a tossed-off coda. In it, he notes that his role model is not someone from his own life, but rather “Boosie—and [he] never met the nigga.”
The accents Dnyc3 adds to this school of production are subtle but delightfully eccentric: It sounds like there’s a chirping cricket trapped within the defiantly synthetic beat for “She Got It.” Greedo responds by couching his most overtly pop ideas inside songs too plaintive or violent for radio or by burying them at a track’s end.
The signature song on Project T-Pain—and one of the best distillations of the artist’s mission in Greedo’s entire catalog—is “Jordan Downs,” an urgent riff on Juvenile’s “Ha.” Greedo is one of the only rappers from the past quarter-century expressive enough to convincingly sell the original’s taunting-question structure; he has populated the Watts of his imagination with sufficient detail to stand alongside Juve’s Magnolia Projects. True to form, Greedo finds a way to pivot the song into a reflection on the hollow left by gang violence. “You ain’t no OG just ‘cause you 25/You ain’t no killer,” he raps. “You just still alive.”
It can be difficult to revisit Los Angeles hip-hop from this era without feeling a tinge of sorrow. Despite a handful of artists’ persistence, the exhilarating wave from the late 2010s has ebbed, ending too soon as a result of murder and imprisonment. But Greedo’s finest work exists somehow outside of time: He mines the past for component parts he can warp until they’re unrecognizable—until they sound, oddly, like the future.


Karen O leads an all-star team (including members of YYYs, Liars, and Deerhunter) on the OST for Spike Jonze's film version of the Maurice Sendak classic.

Karen O and the Kids: Where the Wild Things Are OST

Where the Wild Things Are OST

Sure, you could look at Karen O's name on the soundtrack to the film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are and chalk it up to a convenient byproduct of her close relationship with the film's director, Spike Jonze. But really, there's no one better qualified for the job of translating Maurice Sendak's bedtime-story classic into song. Like Wild Things' young protagonist Max, Karen understands the power of imagination in transforming your mundane surroundings into something spectacular; witness the former Oberlin College student trying to make her way as a folksinger in Unitard, before refashioning herself into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' beer-spitting, mascara-smeared mouthpiece. Unlike most lead singers with a reputation for physically extreme performances, Karen O's onstage behavior is never really subjected to psychoanalytic interpretation, nor should it be: That giddy, childlike smile she routinely flashes lets us in on the make-believe fantasy of it all, reminding us once again that rock'n'roll is really just the grown-up version of building a fort or playing with dolls.
So for Karen O, Where the Wild Things Are isn't just a soundtrack gig; it's a vessel through which she can again redraft her surroundings. This time, she plays the head mistress of a freak-folk dream-team (christened the Kids) that includes fellow Yeah Yeah Yeahs Nick Zinner, Brian Chase, and Imaad Wasif; Deerhunter's Bradford Cox; Aaron Hemphill of Liars; and Dean Fertita and Jack Lawrence of the Dead Weather. Strangely, the Wild Things trailer that's been burning up YouTube for the past month features not a note of music from this soundtrack album, instead luring us into the movie's magic animal kingdom through the choral grandeur of Arcade Fire's "Wake Up". But that track provides a cue for what Karen O and her Kids are aiming for here: a balance of the folky and fantastical, with immediate, all-together-now hooks designed for maximal campfire communalism.
Children's music, in other words-- though, barring the forced simplicity of lead single "All Is Love" (presented in a simple sing-along and a more dramatic, Funeral-ready form), it's music that's direct and participatory enough to engage the kids without aggressively pandering to them; it won't be hard to get your young'un to shout along to the gleeful, wordless hollers on "Rumpus", but the forceful stomps on which they're delivered serves to remind us that, for all their cheek-pinching cuteness, kids can be nasty, destructive little buggers. While the song titles reference the movie's events and characters, the lyrics rarely do; strip away the requisite film-dialogue snippets, and this set could've been a bonus acoustic companion disc packaged with It's Blitz!. In a sense, this soundtrack serves a similar function for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as the "MTV Unplugged" series did for grunge acts in the mid-90s-- an opportunity to strip down, but also get more elaborate and pile on the vibes, woodwinds, and other acoustic textures.
However, while the spell-it-out chant "Capsize" and the dust-up jam "Animal" tap into the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' feral energy, they ultimately feel like alternate, restrained versions of songs that would sound more effective and natural in amplified form. And, inevitably, there are a handful of incidental acoustic instrumentals that probably sound better when paired with Jonze's widescreen imagery. But the Wild Things soundtrack boasts enough illuminating, atypical turns from Karen O that make it worth experiencing independent of its source. The languorous lullaby "Hideaway" may be the least kid-friendly song here-- both in its strung-out, hazy-headed performance and my-baby's-gone subject matter-- but is a marvel nonetheless, a come-down sequel to "Maps" that the broken-hearted can comfort themselves with after the tears have dried. And it's no discredit to Karen's efforts to say that the soundtrack's most affecting moment is its lone cover-- for a film concerned with the complicated, conflicted relationship between childish whimsy and the real world, there's no better representative than Daniel Johnston, whose beautifully bruised ballad "Worried Shoes" is given a lovely, touching treatment by Karen. Like Johnston, Karen O has used music to access a fantasy world more exciting than the everyday one. The former's eccentricities put him in a mental hospital; the latter's got her on magazine covers. But the appearance of "Worried Shoes" on this soundtrack underscores the fact that, while our wildest fantasies are uniquely personal, the insecurities that inspire them are universal.