Aly Spaltro was a teenager when she wrote much of her 2013 Lady Lamb the Beekeeper debut, a collection that found her whipping folk tropes into rock rambunctiousness. On her second album, she hits one of the unexpected truths of your twenties: that embracing your repressed childlike instincts is one of the more adult things you can do.

After

Aly Spaltro isn't a teenager anymore, but she was when she wrote much of her Lady Lamb the Beekeeper debut, 2013's Ripely Pine. That album didn't sound like the emergence of a college-aged songwriter so much as it played like an experiment from someone who had already gotten good at putting music together. Full of nerves and breath and blood, Ripely Pine whipped folk tropes into rock'n'roll rambunctiousness, giving her plenty of space to sound precocious. On her second album, After, Spaltro hits one of the unexpected truths of your twenties: that embracing your repressed childlike instincts is one of the more adult things you can do.
Ripely Pine struck out big, with elegant metaphors rooted in the natural world. After's track list includes a song called "Milk Duds", suggesting that Lady Lamb's tone has shifted from Ripely's seven-minute ballad "You Are the Apple". "We fell asleep on a box of Milk Duds," she sings on the new song. "They melted into the clubhouse cushions/ I never loved another person/ More than I loved you when I woke that morning." That sticky mess doesn't make the prettiest image in the traditional sense, but Spaltro's probably the first songwriter to find a symbol of her love in a pile of chocolate and caramel and polyester. She's getting braver.
After is heartsick to its core—the title seems to eulogize a love affair in a single word—but it's much rowdier than its lyrics alone would imply. On opener "Vena Cava", Spaltro looks at her sleeping partner and sees the fiery death of their relationship as though it's already happening in slow motion all around her. "I can feel how the seams of your ribs will separate from the seams of my ribs," she sings. "I know already how much TV will fail to comfort me in your absence." She switches from two ribcages unraveling to a melancholic Netflix binge in one line. And the song's a jam to boot.
Her lyrical muscle lets Lady Lamb oscillate between the visceral and the mundane without so much as a knowing lilt in her voice. Both modes come easily to her, and the tension between them is fertile. There's a parallel tension in the music, too: The strongest songs on After verge on acoustic despondency only to break into a big, crunchy chorus. You can always weep out the pain, but sometimes it's so much more fun to mosh it off.
There are plenty of startling moments full of guts and gristle in Lady Lamb's dense lyrics, and then there are the moments when she wanders. The fingerpicked "Sunday Shoes" stretches out between the shoegaze-inflected "Heretic" and "Spat Out Spit", injecting a weird bubble of space into the album's flow. The rousing coda on "Penny Licks" almost feels like an Arcade Fire climax, even though it only arrives in the seventh song. Like Ripely Pine, After clocks in at a solid hour—and it's an hour you'll feel, because while After boasts a stacked lineup of well-crafted songs, it's a choppy ride to make it through them all.


This unlikely electronic trio—featuring the Chili Peppers’ John Frusciante, Venetian Snares’ Aaron Funk, and noise musician Chris McDonald—cherry-picks from 11 years of dazzlingly complex improvisations.

SDM-LA8-441-114-211

The debut EP from Speed Dealer Moms came out 11 years ago. The unlikely trio of John Frusciante, Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist and late-blooming rave maven; Aaron Funk, who makes furiously virtuosic breakcore as Venetian Snares; and Chris McDonald, a comparatively little-known musician specializing in scorched-earth electronic noise, has been working together steadily since then. When their schedules permit, they gather to test the limits of various analog synths and drum machines, pushing their vintage equipment to extremes of velocity and intricacy that would stupefy any reasonable human collaborator. On SDM-LA8-441-114-211, their long-gestating second release, they’ve got 22 minutes of music to show for these years of experiments, apparently culled from a much larger archive. The brevity isn’t a problem. Each of the three tracks is so dense with musical information that it’s difficult to imagine processing even one more after the EP shudders to a close.
The first Speed Dealer Moms EP was one of Frusciante’s earliest forays into purely electronic music; if it was tempting to see him as a dilettante back then, time has proven that characterization unfair. He’s racked up multiple albums of fleet acid house and techno with his Trickfinger alias since SDM first appeared, and he released a reverent but rewarding collection of breakbeats and synth stabs under his own name last year. (If anything, it’s his recent return to the RHCP fold that now seems faintly puzzling.) Funk’s career path has always been as jittery as the rhythms of his own drum tracks; after the sweeping cinematics of his 2018 collaboration with Daniel Lanois, a return to the mayhem of the Moms makes as much sense as any other possible move. Given the restlessness of both men, and the low profile of McDonald, whose Skm-Etr project has an online footprint consisting of a few YouTube links and a handful of ultra-DIY releases cataloged on Discogs, it’s pretty much impossible to make an educated guess about who’s doing what at any given point during SDM-LA8-441-114-211. You get the sense that they like it that way.
For such a slap-happy and technologically inclined trio, Speed Dealer Moms have an old-fashioned, almost jazzy devotion to capturing the spontaneity of live performance. They program their synths, plan out a loose structure for a given track, and start jamming; what you hear on the record is what came out of the machinery that day, without edits or overdubs. Even their track titles resemble notes from some lost Blue Note session: the date, the take number, maybe the location. So it’s apparently just a coincidence that “April One 4” reads like a tribute to one of the best-known Aphex Twin compositions, though Richard D. James turns out to be a pretty good reference point for the way the music sounds. Not the placid solo piano of “Avril 14th,” but the organized clatter of his mid-’90s Hangable Auto Bulb era, when the glowing analog synths of his early work collided with the computer-assisted percussive freakouts of his later albums.
Speed Dealer Moms’ ability to generate the same sort of complexity in real time, without clicking and dragging clips around on a laptop screen, is impressive, even if they can’t always match James’ corresponding gift for clear and simple melody. The various elements of “April One 4” clearly have some rhythmic relationship with one another, but for most of the track’s duration, you’d have a hard time figuring out what it is. A handclap pattern nearly syncs up with a bubbly arpeggio, then races off in the other direction; some obscure subdivision of the beat takes over for a few moments and starts to supplant the main pulse. It feels a bit like peaking hard on a cocktail of stimulants and psychedelics: Everything is moment by moment, with little opportunity to process one sensory overload before the next one takes over. When it all coheres into a loping four-on-the-floor pattern for the track’s final minute and a half, it’s more surprising than any of the hyperactive feints that came before. I’m torn between admiration for the trio’s uncompromising approach and a wish that they’d ease off the intensity a little more often, let the music breathe like it does here.
“LA August 1,” the 11-minute opener, is the EP’s most satisfying track, and perhaps its most accessible, despite the imposing runtime. Without close attention, it might whir by as an undifferentiated mass of beeps and stutters, but focused listening reveals an elegant compositional arc, with a handful of themes arriving in various combinations over a stately repeated bass line. If you’ll permit a tortured comparison, it reminds me of an IDM update on Pachelbel’s famous Canon in D—processional music for acid-fried ravers. “April Two 11,” the closer, isn’t so friendly. The trio abandons the anchor of the kick drum, leaving only intersecting buzzsaws of cymbal and snare, with occasional globs of synth bass filling in the gaps. The “dance” part of the IDM equation has become purely notional at this point, if it wasn’t already. By the end, the Moms have just about left rhythm behind altogether, in favor of screaming feedback and bellowing drone. It’s as if the machines, brought to the breaking point and beyond, have finally given up.

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The latest archival set collects demos and live recordings from the pivotal years between the stark solo songs of For the Roses, her full-band masterpiece Court & Spark, and the impressionistic jazz-pop of The Hissing of Summer Lawns.

We hear a drummer counting off and then a half-sentence from his bandleader, Joni Mitchell, who in April 1972, was embarking on the first official recording sessions for For the Roses. One year earlier, she’d released Blue, the album that solidified her place, at the age of 27, as one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived. After that came a period of reflection and retreat from the music industry and its hometown of Los Angeles, both of which she’d begun to view with suspicion. She moved to a stone cabin in rural British Columbia, listened to the arbutus trees rustling at her window, entertained the occasional deranged fan who managed to find her there, and wrote songs about whatever came to her.
Many of these new songs were about an artist’s relationship to her own work; to the audiences who receive and justify it; and to the middlemen who both facilitate and corrupt this exchange. The sojourn to the country had been artistically fruitful, but Mitchell, whose questioning mind was at its sharpest when it took its own motives up for examination, eventually started to wonder why she was there. The house had been “conceived out of paranoia,” she told an audience later. She’d hoped to escape the corruption of the city: “Suddenly everything that was good and virtuous seemed very important to me. Well, that’s alright, but it leaves very little room for humanness, you know?” In late 1971, she returned to L.A. and started recording.
“Give me that again,” it sounds like she’s saying on the tape as the drummer counts off a full-band rehearsal of “See You Sometime” on a new box set, Joni Mitchell: Archives, Vol. 3: The Asylum Years (1972-1975). One benefit of life among the humans: other musicians to play with. Mitchell had never been a foursquare folk songwriter, but the songs she’d written since Blue were more complexly rhythmic than anything that had come before. Evidently, their contours suggested to her the sound of an ensemble, in contrast to the largely solitary delivery of her work until that point. For the Roses, in its final form, is a transition between masterpieces, with the starkness of Blue on one side and the jazzy full-band exuberance of 1974’s Court and Spark on the other. But as demonstrated on Archives, Vol. 3, the excellent latest entry in a series of releases that collect previously unreleased demos and alternate versions from her back catalog, she already had a germ of the Court and Spark sound in mind when she began recording its predecessor.
The box set—which also includes the exhilarating live album Miles of Aisles and the impressionistic The Hissing of Summer Lawns—covers a period of Mitchell’s career that already resists linear narrativizing. It was a time when she seemed to be pushing her music closer to an ideal that only she could see or hear, and her most radio-friendly work rubbed up against her most experimental. Asylum Years, at 5 CDs and 96 tracks in its full version, is an exhaustive presentation of Mitchell’s process in this era. Some of the recordings are so good that it’s difficult to understand how they sat in the vaults for this long. Others are brilliant, but close enough to the released versions that anyone with less than a scholarly interest in Mitchell would be better served by the official albums. Still others—like an instrumental jam that flirts with classical Indian music, or a duet with James Taylor on a medley of early rock’n’roll covers—are more like sketches or larks, exceedingly rare peeks at the discard pile of an artist who edited herself pitilessly, so that even demos often sound more or less finished. There’s even one wholly unheard song: “Like Veils Said Lorraine,” a document of spiritual conflict recorded as a demo for For the Roses, whose imagery—“More veils beyond veils/Always walls behind the walls”—is evocative but feels unfinished, a dreamlike wisp from a songwriter who favored lived detail. The set’s revelations don’t exactly clarify the journey from solo singer-songwriter to barnstorming bandleader to uncategorizable avant-gardist she partook in the early-middle 1970s. In the case of the early For the Roses sessions, they only complicate it further.
Back to the tape: “See You Sometime,” a plainspoken ballad about lingering affection in a relationship’s aftermath, performed on solo piano in its finished form, is the song on For the Roses that could most easily fit on Blue. But on that day in April ’72, Mitchell had a rhythm section with her: bassist Tim Drummond and drummer Kenny Buttrey, Nashville session killers who’d recently backed up Mitchell’s friend Neil Young on Harvest. Mitchell tells them to run it again, Buttrey counts off, and for a moment you’re hearing a premonition of Court and Spark.
The hi-hats gently pulsate and the bass offers a descending countermelody, bringing Mitchell’s song out of the folk idiom and toward the groove she would find in a couple of years. But in the bridge, the rhythm’s subtlety falters. Mitchell’s piano gets a little funkier, and Buttrey and Drummond overshoot their mark, playing an R&B rave-up that only lasts a few moments before they get back to the amorphous beat of the verse. The solo version that made the album is more conservative, in that it more closely resembles Mitchell’s earlier work than the future sound she seemed to be reaching for, but cutting the drums and bass section was a wise choice: when she’s on her own, the rhythmic switchbacks don’t come across as ostentatious, but as natural extensions of her idiosyncratic vocal phrasing. Soon, she would find the musicians who understood how to follow her.
The session with Buttrey and Drummond also produced an early version of “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” this time with Young himself playing harmonica and electric guitar. If there’s one recording to hear on Asylum Years, this is it. They take it a little slower than Mitchell eventually would, drawing out the wistful feeling in the descending chords of its verses. Young plays beautifully on both instruments, adding a winding melody on harmonica but keeping his guitar accents minimal. It sounds just about exactly how a fan might imagine Mitchell playing with Young and his Harvest band might sound, an ideal union of her compositional intricacy and their easygoing sway.
The story goes that Mitchell wrote “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio” in response to her label boss David Gefffen’s complaints that she didn’t have enough pop material. It is perhaps the album’s most richly contradictory expression of her relationship to fame at the time: a baldfaced pander to radio DJs, a sly satire of its own attempts at mass appeal, and a love song with all the emotional nuance of her less commercial material. The final version, with Mitchell’s insistent acoustic guitar driving the rhythm and the band mostly stripped away, feels truer to her sensibility at the time, and was her first single to crack the Top 40. But the take with Young sounds more like a radio hit: a glimpse of a path not taken, on which Mitchell fully inhabited the Southern California soft rock sound, a box that in reality could never contain her.
There’s one more Young collaboration on Asylum Years, from just over a year later, a time when both artists were in vastly different places from their previous studio meeting. Mitchell was preparing to record Court and Spark, and Young was in the middle of making Tonight’s the Night. On one side: sunlit, danceable, intellectually probing. On the other: sunglasses at night, apocalyptic, stoned to incapacitation. Joni dropped in on Neil’s sessions one day and they ran through “Raised on Robbery,” whose three-chord boogie and lyric about an ill-fated barroom romance make it a surprisingly apt candidate for the doom and gloom Young and his band were doling out at the time. There was no way the results were ever going to make it onto a Joni Mitchell album, but it’s a thrill to hear them trying: Young shredding leather-jacket lead guitar licks and moaning incoherent backing vocals on the choruses, Mitchell swaggering and swinging above the din.
By the time of Court and Spark, Mitchell had found the players who could follow her, and it wasn’t Neil Young and his goons. A drummer friend had suggested that jazz musicians might get her closer to the sound she wanted, and eventually she hooked up with the L.A. Express, a fusion group led by saxophonist Tom Scott. Something like “jazz pop” is the quickest shorthand to describe the album’s sensibility, though the music doesn’t have much to do with swing. The harmonic vocabulary, full of airy suspended chords, has something in common with the language Miles Davis and his bandmates (future Mitchell collaborator Wayne Shorter prominent among them) developed in the ’60s, but the rhythms are pure Joni. On Asylum Years, this period opens with another major highlight: a 12-minute solo piano suite encompassing fragments of “Down to You,” “Court and Spark,” and “Car on a Hill,” with improvised instrumental passages connecting the sketches of each song. In a liner-note interview with Cameron Crowe, Mitchell dismisses her own playing on the suite as noodling, but it provides an invaluable window on her compositional process: trying out a harmony, sitting with its ambiguity for a while, moving on to the next one.
There are several other solo Court and Spark demos on Asylum Years. An acoustic guitar take on “Trouble Child” shows how holistically the album’s arrangements emerged from Mitchell’s initial conception of each song, filling out the frame of her music rather than imposing themselves upon it. You can hear the band’s entire low-slung groove in the simple guitar figure she uses to open the demo. “Help Me,” Mitchell’s biggest-ever hit, isn’t quite as close to completion in its demo take, but there are faint outlines of its slick instrumental hooks in the chord voicings of Mitchell’s guitar. The stripped-down take highlights the ingenuity in the song’s bones: the way Mitchell expands and contracts the rhythm to accommodate the flow of the lyric, or uses an unusual chord change to inflect the feeling of the single sustained vocal note that rides atop it. The song addresses a relationship that the narrator knows won’t work, and the joyous interplay of the musicians on the album version can fool you into thinking the stakes aren’t all that high, that Mitchell is on a breezy patio somewhere, assessing her situation at a distance. In the final section of the demo, she repeats the title with increasing edge and ardor over a single churning chord, and you know she’s down bad.
1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns was Joni’s biggest break yet from the mold of her early work, an album that was misunderstood at the time but later emerged as a classic of her catalog. The demos on Asylum Years are most striking for how traditional they sound in contrast to the finished album, whose smeared textures seem to emanate directly from the subconscious of the characters in its third-person narratives. As with Court and Spark, there are some flashes of the final versions in the rhythms and harmonies that Mitchell outlines on guitar and piano. But little in the strummed early version of “The Jungle Line,” for instance, could prepare you for the rumble of synthesizers and sampled field recordings that characterize its incarnation on the album, a gesture that still sounds jarringly radical today. “Harry’s House” is present here without its hallucinatory detour into the jazz standard “Centerpiece.” The Hissing of Summer Lawns may have been a heroic leap into the darkness for Mitchell, but it started as a searching step.
Two full live concerts round out the bulk of the Asylum Years tracklist. Both are spectacular, as standalone listening experiences and demonstrations of how far Mitchell’s music progressed in two short years. The first, a February 23, 1972 appearance at Carnegie Hall that has been floating around for years as a bootleg radio broadcast recording, is presented in much better fidelity here. It was her first show back after the hiatus in rural Canada, and the setlist is roughly split between songs from Blue and the not-yet-released For the Roses, with a few earlier chestnuts thrown in. The crowd is rapt, responding to even the songs they don’t know yet with roaring applause. Performing solo, save for a faintly audible cameo from her friends in CSNY singing harmonies on the set-closing “Circle Game,” Joni meets the audience’s enthusiasm with gregarious banter and vocal performances that are as good and sometimes even better than what she put down on the records. Her rendition of the Blue classic “A Case of You,” in particular, is breathtaking.
The second is a March 3, 1974 show at Los Angeles’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, backed by the Court and Spark band. Some of its setlist is familiar from Miles of Aisles, which documented the same tour. The highlights are songs from earlier albums that didn’t make that official live release, reworked with arrangements that are bigger and more energetic than their presentation on Mitchell’s stark first few albums. Set opener “This Flight Tonight” is rendered as rollicking rock’n’roll, reminiscent of the Grateful Dead, a world away from its intimate solo delivery on Blue and at the Carnegie Hall show, which it also opens. Ladies of the Canyon deep cut “Rainy Night House” gets a suitably sultry reimagining, the instrumentalists slow-burning like the world’s greatest cocktail lounge act (complete with jazz flute) and Mitchell crooning and belting with newfound bravura. She hadn’t lost any of the depth of her early years, but now she was complementing it with the showmanship of a professional entertainer.
Compared to Bob Dylan, whose similarly minded archival releases reveal a penchant for writing and rewriting, Mitchell was more deliberate, less antically stream-of-consciousness. Most of the melodies and words were already in place, though the occasional odd phrase will strike listeners who are accustomed to the finished product. (In “Help Me,” the love object is a “rambler and a gambler and a boogie man,” rather than a “sweet talkin’ ladies man.”) The most pronounced of these changes is in “Down to You,” Court and Spark’s orchestral centerpiece, in which a one-night stand prompts a broader meditation on transience and change. The piano suite, recorded in summer 1973, presents the earliest version in the box set. Addressing a “constant stranger” who may or may not be the singer herself in the first verse, Mitchell gives a blunt assessment: “You’re a good person/You’re a bad person, too.”
You don’t often encounter this sort of binary logic in her songs, which are more oriented toward observation than judgment. Within a few months, she had found the right phrase: “You’re a kind person/You’re a cold person, too,” as heard on a demo from September or October, and again on the final album version. The emotional valence is the same, but now the language is just a little more precise, and a little closer to the realm of neutral description. Anyone could decide anyone else is bad for any reason at all. “Cold” still has a note of accusation, but it isn’t as sweeping, and it refers to a specific set of behaviors. A bad person is condemned, a cold person is just cold.
That small but consequential edit shows us something important about the philosophical project of Mitchell’s songwriting. There’s kindness in looking closely, forgiveness in rigorous commitment to simple truth. That commitment was already firmly in place by the period covered by Asylum Years, which is marked primarily by her development as a musician rather than a writer. But maybe its allowance for ambiguity and openness also encouraged her to pursue the same principles in her rhythms and harmonies, unfurling the vistas of her groundbreaking mid-’70s work for exploration. It’s the kind of cliche Joni Mitchell would never dream of using in a song: The truth will set you free.


With post-Throbbing Gristle outfit Psychic TV, Genesis P-Orridge bent together the opposing poles of psychedelia and industrial music. Two new reissues show the extremities of their early catalog.

Psychic TV: Pagan Day / Allegory and Self

Pagan Day / Allegory and Self

In his post-punk history bible, Rip It Up and Start Again, writer Simon Reynolds notes that psychedelia and early industrial music were as spiritually in tune as they were sonically antithetical. After all, many of industrial’s key progenitors were lapsed hippies themselves, adapting 1960s-schooled principles of sound manipulation, visual stimulation, anti-establishment rhetoric, and communal living to the unforgivably harsh landscape of late 1970s post-punk Britain. Psychedelia and industrial were essentially opposing poles on the same horseshoe magnet—and no one put more effort into bending them together than Genesis P-Orridge.
If punk was an attempt to revitalize rock’n’roll, then P-Orridge’s proto-industrial performance-art troupe, Throbbing Gristle, were on a mission to annihilate it altogether. Absconding with all of rock’s signifiers (guitars, drums, melody, any possibility of deriving pleasure from a song, etc.), Throbbing Gristle believed subjecting audiences to all manner of ugliness—be it ear-drilling synth frequencies or concentration-camp imagery—was necessary to dismantling Western power structures and emancipating the self. But if Throbbing Gristle aurally and visually terrorized their fans with the cool, cruel efficiency of a military operation (complete with their disturbingly SS-like insignia), P-Orridge’s post-TG outfit practiced a similar liberation philosophy under the rubric of a religion. Their provocation agent of choice shifted from Nazism to the Manson Family.
Featuring P-Orridge alongside TG’s resident visual specialist Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and multi-instrumentalist Alex Fergusson (also of first-wave punks Alternative TV), Psychic TV were conceived less as a proper band than the musical arm of upstart occult organization Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY). Its fundamental belief, in P-Orridge’s words, is that “the conscious and unconscious mind should be integrated.” Like Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV were as much a visual as musical entity, the “TV” functioning as both a simple callback to Fergusson’s former band and a recognition that their most effective pulpit was the burgeoning medium of home video. After attempting to destroy rock’n’roll with Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge’s mission with Psychic TV was to infiltrate and infect it, and transmit the Temple’s message to a wider audience.
True to their name, the music that Psychic TV released at the outset effectively mirrors the act of mindlessly flipping through television stations and being subjected to a series of jarring, seemingly unrelated images. From song to song, Psychic TV could be as warm, congenial, and nostalgic as a rerun of your favorite sitcom, and then as horrifying as images of some warzone massacre on the 11 o’clock news; they could sound as low budget as a public-access show and as droning and repetitive as a test pattern. Two new reissues filter that experience through radically different lenses—one with all of grainy resolution a UHF-dialed black-and-white TV, the other in glorious HD. Pagan Day (1984) and Allegory and Self (1988) represent extremities in the early Psychic TV catalog—the former was once the rarest and rawest of their recordings, the latter was their most pop-oriented and commercially successful. But these two oppositional records share a significant amount of DNA.
Like followers of any religion, TOPY parishioners were occasionally subjected to tests of faith. And for those wishing to procure a copy of Pagan Day upon its release, that meant showing up at London’s Rough Trade Records on December 23, 1984 at 11 p.m. (i.e., the 23rd hour of the 23rd day) to snag one of 999 copies before the record was removed from racks at midnight forevermore (or at least until 1986, when it received a proper release). Pagan Day was Psychic TV’s subversive take on the traditional limited-edition Christmas release. Like many holiday-themed records, it’s a celebration of being with family—after hearing her cry as a newborn on PTV’s 1982 debut, Force the Hand of Chance, Genesis’ daughter Caresse graces the cover of Pagan Day and delivers the album’s welcome message in garbled toddler-speak. However, unlike most holiday-themed albums, this seemingly innocent package contains hazy-headed psych-blues jams with self-explanatory names like “Opium” and minimalist synth-disco advocating for “New Sexuality.”
Comprising four-track recordings that P-Orridge and Fergusson had amassed over the previous years, Pagan Day was a byproduct of, as explained in a recent SPIN interview, becoming “re-obsessed with the wonderful simplicity but sort-of brutal use of studio techniques in psychedelic music” (like using metal plates to create natural reverb). The album is an exercise in futurist primitivism, split evenly between the sort of intimately melodic serenades P-Orridge introduced on Force the Hand of Chance and 1983’s Dreams Less Sweet, and crude, rhythmic instrumental sketches in search of a song. For the tracks that fall in the latter camp, the sense of slap-dash improvisation is all too palpable. On “Cadaques,” a brittle drum-machine beat provides the wobbly foundation for a flute-like synth melody and a jittery acoustic guitar line—and when the song runs out of gas before the two-minute mark, they just spark up the beat once more and do it all over again. Later, on “L.A.,” a sprightly, mechanistic rhythm gets weighed down by a heaving keyboard that sounds like a wheezing, detuned accordion.
But Pagan Day’s embrace of psychedelia went beyond a fascination with recording techniques. The album’s centerpiece is a stripped-down but reverential cover of “Translucent Carriages” by psych-folk figureheads Pearls Before Swine, and this reissue adds a boombox-raw but still disarmingly wistful rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “As Tears Go By” (titled “Farewell” on the tracklist). And in “Cold Steel,” Psychic TV deliver a beautifully baroque ballad that, even in this rudimentary recorded form, can stand proudly among those ’60s standards.
“Cold Steel” is actually the Fergusson-sung demo version of “The Orchids,” which first surfaced on Dreams Less Sweet (and was covered to wonderful effect by Califone in 2006). Its appearance here reinforces the fact that Pagan Day is less notable for what it is than what it became—a handful of these first drafts would get fleshed out into superior form on other PTV releases. And the greatest beneficiary was 1988’s Allegory and Self, where “We Kiss” would be upgraded from somber, synth-shaded folk ballad to sweeping, cinematic set piece; the tinker-toy Velvet Underground-styled romp “Baby’s Gone Away” would acquire a Smiths-ian shimmer; and “New Sexuality” would get stripped of its lyrics but blown up into the neon-tinted Moroder-esque fantasia of “She Was Surprised.”
Allegory and Self arrived after a mid-’80s avalanche of EPs, live records, soundtracks, ballet commissions, and other projects. If Psychic TV’s early recordings saw them trying to reconcile their avant/industrial roots with their irrepressible love of psychedelic pop, Allegory and Self forged a more harmonious relationship between vintage psych-rock and its modern permutation: rave. While Psychic TV’s full-blown conversion to acid house would soon take effect, Allegory and Self captures the moment right before the E really kicked in—if it doesn’t explicitly assume the form of dance music, it chases its blissful, weighty highs. The result is a record as splendorous as it is surreal.
But before they left rock behind for a subsequent slew of dance-oriented releases, Psychic TV effectively invented Britpop with “Godstar,” the 1985 single that serves as Allegory’s opening track. Overtop a hip-shaking Stonesy groove, P-Orridge delivers an elegy to that band’s late guitarist Brian Jones, undercutting the song’s ecstatic swagger and elated harmonies with intimations that Jones’ 1969 death may not have been as accidental as it appeared. “Godstar” proved to be Psychic TV’s one and only hit single and P-Orridge claims its chart ascent was curtailed by the Stones’ management coercing BBC Radio 1 to stop playing the song. Still, its ’80s spin on ’60s psych showed rhythmically inclined rock bands like the Stone Roses and Primal Scream the way to the dance floor, while its post-modernist sensibility would eventually take root across the Atlantic in U.S. acts like the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre.
Allegory and Self does yield equally sublime moments: the hand-clapped go-go goth of “Just Like Arcadia,” the heavenly Beach Boys homage “Being Lost.” In true PTV fashion, they serve as the Trojan Horse decoys that lead you into some forbiddingly unsettled soundscapes. That said, Allegory and Self’s ugliest, anarchic moments are rendered with the same lustrous detail and shot through the panoramic scope as its big-ticket pop songs. “Starlit Mire” is a house-quaking industrial behemoth that builds into an apocalyptic hellfire of creepy incantations, screeching klezmer violins, and suffocating dissonance. And “Thee Dweller” is at once the album’s most horrifying and hypnotic track, unfurling like a dub remix of the haunting “Mother Fore” section on Pink Floyd’s “Atom Heart Mother,” with P-Orridge’s demonic Beefheartian patter fighting for oxygen against wolf howls that resound like air-raid sirens.
And yet smack dab in the middle of Psychic TV’s artistic and commercial high point, they make room for “Caresse Song,” a Casiotone doodle featuring P-Orridge’s then-five-year-old daughter seemingly making up lyrics and chords on the spot. (Collectively, her cameos on these early Psychic TV records were like the ‘80s industrial equivalent of getting periodic photo updates of your friends’ kids on Facebook.) But as incongruous as this child’s play may seem in the context of Allegory and Self’s grandeur, “Caresse Song” was arguably the most important piece of the puzzle. Amid all of Psychic TV’s controversial efforts to promote new ways of thinking and being, it served as a poignant reminder of who they were fighting for.


On his third album of 2020 and first for Griselda Records, the Detroit rapper continues to pry open windows onto his past, soul, and psyche.

The Versace Tape

The Versace Tape is the third album the Detroit rapper Boldy James has released in the last six months. It follows February’s The Price of Tea in China, a skeletal but psychedelic collaboration with the acclaimed Los Angeles producer Alchemist, and last month’s constantly molting Manager on McNichols, which was helmed by the veteran but comparatively obscure Sterling Toles, from Boldy’s hometown. Versace pairs the rapper with someone from, well, the internet: Jay Versace, the former Vine star who has lately turned to producing music. It was a surprise this spring when Versace popped up in the credits of Westside Gunn’s Pray for Paris; The Versace Tape is Boldy’s first album for Griselda Records, the label co-founded by Gunn, and fits neatly into a machine that promises steely, ambitious street rap, delivered at regular intervals.
Boldy’s catalog has the quality of genre fiction: his songs hit familiar notes and live in an instantly recognizable milieu. The style is repeatable without being repetitive, its dials tweaked slightly for each new iteration. The Versace Tape’s intro smartly signals that the rapper has refitted his approach for Griselda Records, whose releases––especially Gunn’s––are littered with, and in some ways defined by, references to luxury goods. This intro is a local news clip about a thief who walks into a gas station and steals a “very expensive pair of Cartier glasses” right off of a victim’s face before sauntering out the door and into a waiting car. The police, this news anchor says, described the suspect as “bold and nonchalant.”
That nonchalance is one of Boldy’s signatures; it’s slyly funny when, on the already muted “Maria,” he deadpans that all the money he’s been raking in is making him emotional. Early on “Brick Van Exel”––he can cook with his left hand––Boldy recalls two generations of his relatives growing into the drug trade. The moment is allowed to land, but not linger; there are instructions about burner phones and stern warnings to give. Later on in the same song, he raps, “Every time I met up with the plug, felt like a setup,” before once again dropping that idea to follow a new tangent. This structure and affect makes his music compulsively listenable, because it suggests these stark personal revelations and jaw-dropping asides will be meted out consistently, as if from a metronome. They are.
Versace’s beats are similarly reliable. It is perhaps ironic that such an antic internet personality is turning out beats that fit so neatly in the post-Dilla, -Madlib, -Marcberg world of contemporary underground street rap, where drums are of little concern and loops are often laid bare. This album is warm, as if it was all dipped in sepia.
To that point, one of the most pleasantly surprising aspects of Boldy’s work this year is the sentimentality that creeps in at the margins. “Long Live Julio,” one of the record’s standout tracks, begins with an ad-libbed redux of a famous Eazy-E hook, where the “boys in the hood” are not meant to be menacing and mythic, but rather young and full of promise, frozen in memory. Boldy throws the song into fourth-period lunchrooms and cramped bathrooms where he’s scrubbing Nikes with a toothbrush; he makes the life sentences that hang over murder cases sound like speedbumps in his school parking lot.
Even in these moments, though, Boldy is the consummate technician. From the time he says “Rest in peace, Eric Wright” at the song’s beginning, he never strays from that rhyme pattern; it strings together prayers to God and homage to Fredo Santana. This trio of 2020 albums suggests that the windows into an artist’s past, soul, and psyche can be pried open not only in fits of mysterious inspiration, but also by relentless, uniform effort.

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Telefon Tel Aviv's latest-- released on the heels of the death of bandmember Charles Cooper-- is a detailed and smartly programmed reimagining of 1980s synth-pop.

Immolate Yourself

Hit the right couple of notes and you could convey even the most complex of feelings. Our ears are hyper-attuned to nuance, whether we notice it or not, and certain sounds can telegraph an avalanche of emotion. Enlisting this shorthand sometimes encourages laziness in musicians, but nobody minds when the results work. For example, "The Birds", the lead track from Telefon Tel Aviv's third album Immolate Yourself, isn't much on paper-- some sequenced synths, an insistent snare, some ghostly, hard to make out vocals-- but its six or so minutes set the stage so nicely for greater things to come it doesn't matter that there's not much there.
The fact that the rest of the disc only occasionally delivers on that promise shouldn't be held too strongly against its achievements. Immolate is arranged and produced with almost microscopic attention to detail by the Chicago team of Joshua Eustis and Charles Cooper, who was tragically found dead the week of this album's release, and the emotions it evokes are undeniably effective-- and musically similar to Junior Boys or M83, sentimental groups that specialize in electronic music imbued with a certain elusive pop glow. Indeed, one of the pleasures and frustrations of Immolate is how subtly it similarly exploits the nearly invisible barrier separating song from simple synth sketch.
Yet unlike the more cohesive albums from those aforementioned acts, Immolate is a one-step forward, one-step back proposition, marching in place to an internal setting somewhere between chilly background mood and something more melodic and engaging. It's impeccably crafted but oddly non-committal, pulling you in and out like a dream. Part of the problem stems from the practical matter of sequencing-- not in programming terms but simply how the album progresses. Following "The Birds", "Your Mouth" pulls off nearly the same sleight-of-hand trick, implying more substance than what's actually there, priming you for something bigger to happen but ultimately leaving you hanging.
The payoff arrives with the next track, "M", which after its slow swoosh of a start develops into an honest-to-goodness song, with vocals, a hypnotic hint of a melody, and herky-jerk drums equally informed by the clubs and contemporary top 40. It's not a Technicolor Wizard of Oz moment, but the effect is largely the same. Something's different, something clicks, or at least clicks and connects in a better way than what came before, even more so on "Helen of Troy", which sounds like a great lost Depeche Mode single-- there's even an actual chorus! With the subdued but still solid "Mostly Translucent", it again sounds like Telefon Tel Aviv found their inner Martin Gore, and the super "Stay Away From Being Maybe" finds the group heeding that advice, the listening experience shifting to a more enthusiastic "definitely."
Then, disappointingly, Telefon Tel Aviv retreat back to mood piece on the pretty but ephemeral "Made a Tree on the World", which once again relies too much on a few well-placed chords and the easy sentiments they suggest. "Your Every Idol" doesn't justify its five minutes of echoing drums, droning synths, and disembodied voices and the record closes with the relatively perfunctory title track and like riding a Mobius strip, we feel back at the beginning again. For all the pleasant stops along the way, the album hasn't come full-circle so much as spun its wheels in place.


On his dense but meticulously rendered new album, the British folk singer uses grander pop arrangements to wade into the barbarism of modern life.

2020

A man wakes in the middle of the night to the glowing screen of his partner’s iPhone. He sees a flirty text from an unfamiliar number and sneaks to the kitchen for a carving knife to enact his revenge. If this were the extent of “Heart Emoji,” a highlight on Richard Dawson’s new album 2020, it would still be a strange, modern horror story. But there’s more. Additional details include the phone’s passcode (daughter’s date of birth), the contents of the text message (“I miss you ❤”), the unwelcome creatures infesting their home (spider, slug), the music playing in the narrator’s earbuds (classical), and a story of how the couple met that leaves you questioning their power dynamic and long-held resentment toward each other. It’s a lot to process—and this is one of the shortest, simplest tracks on the album.
The songs on 2020 all involve first-person narratives that tend to swerve toward grander, anti-capitalist themes, set in Dawson’s native UK. “Obviously a lot of talk has been about Brexit,” he recently told Q Magazine, “but there’s so many other things without the fanfare.” To accompany these complex stories, he makes music that’s equally overstuffed. In “Heart Emoji,” there’s a creeping guitar part—the sound of stalking through the house at three in the morning—and a wobbly synth solo that mimics a blurry unnatural light in a dim room. Dawson himself, a singer whose thick Geordie accent and primal howl seem to emerge from somewhere deep in his stomach, is restless in his delivery, slurring and braying and dipping into a squeaky, heartbroken falsetto to deliver the words “heart emoji,” as if the thought alone might bring him to tears.
Those two words—“heart” and “emoji”—offer a good survey of the album’s themes. On his previous record, 2017’s Peasant, Dawson explored the medieval age, using archaic diction and characters whose dark, grotesque humor left you wondering how distant the past really is. But in the present, amid vape shops and YouTube channels, watching soccer and eating brunch, he finds just as much barbarism. “I don’t want to go into work this morning,” he sings in the opening song, “I just want to lie here and play the new Call of Duty.” And if you think there’s a metaphor somewhere to be uncovered, he makes his point even plainer a few lines later: “I refuse to do this filthy work anymore,” he sings, bellowing the word “refuse” several more times until it sounds like he’s having an actual breakdown.
It’s Dawson’s least beautiful music, but it’s also his most expressive. By comparison, Peasant was lush, conventional even, with its sing-song melodies and pastoral texture. On 2020, the arrangements are proudly inorganic as they lurch and blast, sputter and break. The long-form structure of the record feels more like a short story collection, and taking it in front-to-back can have an overwhelming, exhausting effect. But unlike the sometimes hopeless characters in his songs, Dawson can wield this glut of information in his favor. The extraordinary first single, “Jogging,” embodies this challenge: Dawson sings about seeking therapy in exercise as he tries to cram his thoughts into its vaguely motivational rock melody. It seems like a tight, uncomfortable fit, and that’s precisely the point.
For “Jogging” and several other songs, Dawson took inspiration from conversations he had with fans at shows, and his intimate tone makes you consider words and phrases you’ve never heard in a folk-rock song before: dehumidifier, voluntary redundancy, Nando’s. There’s a level of difficulty to this combination of banality and mythology (minotaurs and sirens also lurk these songs), and Dawson’s mastery as a writer guides you along without hiding the awkwardness of addressing the world at its ugliest. Compared with other sprawling, self-referential works from this year—say, Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! or Bill Callahan’s Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest—Dawson succeeds by finding surreality and horror in his everyday musings. The title seems pointed, referring both to our near future and the power of hindsight.
While the album is placed in hypermodern scenarios, in a world burdened with violence, xenophobia, and generational exhaustion, its most stunning moments lead you to unexpected places. There’s “Black Triangle,” a tale of a UFO sighting that patiently evolves into a less fantastical tale of being dumped for a pilates teacher. Even more ambitious is “Fulfillment Centre,” a 10-minute parable that takes place inside of an Amazon shipping warehouse, transporting you with shuffling sound effects and a robotic call-and-response. “There has to be more to life than killing yourself to survive,” Dawson sings in the closest thing this album has to a thesis statement. Of course, there’s no easy answer, so to follow it, he gives us this thought: “One day I’m going to run my own cafe.” For a minute, the music turns bittersweet and his words feel so tender and close that you could hold them in your hand. And one day, you think, maybe he will.

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The Anti-Pop Consortium rapper and producer imagines the death of hip-hop as a means for exploring histories both personal and political: “To write like it’s the afterlife.”

Magnetic Memory

The opening gambit of Hprizm’s Magnetic Memory is a familiar one. On the album’s first track, “Keep Pushing,” the founding Anti-Pop Consortium MC and producer, aka High Priest, blesses a beat that’s formed around clipped snares and sinister strings with the proclamation, “I resurrected rap by killing it then restoring the feeling.” Hip-hop artists are fond of diagnosing the genre’s ailing health. But rather than a simple autopsy of the genre, Magnetic Memory presents a holistic treatment of hip-hop in which Hprizm time-travels back and forth through personal and political memories. The concept imbues the 25-minute album with a powerful, ghostly aura.
Magnetic Memory’s opening stretch sketches out the ambit of Hprizm’s vision, which he relays over self-produced beats that embrace a compositional approach to sampling rather than relying on extended loops. In “Resuscitate,” frantic snare taps and live sax blasts from James Brandon Lewis prompt the line, “I can’t relive it or bring it back to life/My mission’s to write like it’s the afterlife.” “Waking Them Up,” with mournful synth contrails embedded in static, introduces the idea of furrowing through the memory banks to reach a state of “flashback and future forwards—call it total recall.” On “Break the Body Down,” Hprizm imagines hip-hop as a living organism and invokes the metaphor of a body at war with itself. “When pain heals under the skin it leaves scars/I wear that/No mask on these bars,” he raps, before broadening his horizons: “Robbed of our identity, history and our language/Stress breaks the body down/Fear breaks the body down... Let’s build.”
This building involves journeying deeper into a cache of memories to weave the album’s themes together. The shuffling, backwards tape loops of “F08 Soul” inspire a restatement of golden-age hip-hop standards, with Hprizm hollering, “My team was molded from Kanes, the De Las/For those that said bars were dead, this is a seance.” The song is followed by the frantic “Asia (Adrenaline),” a blast of upbeat ’89-tempo hip-hop smartly sparked by an interpolation of a Big Daddy Kane lyric. Then the spunky boom-bap of “And Bet” gives way to “After the Storm,” a percussion-free vignette that heralds the album’s closing stretch, with Hprizm contemplating a picture of himself as a child, complete with “beams shooting out of the photo/Reflecting back at me rapidly…/Avatar me with my mask off.”
This reflective tone sets up the album’s dramatic climax, “Electric Ladyland,” where Hprizm’s verse becomes figuratively “ghostwritten” as he pays respects to two victims murdered by the police. “Shot Philando on the camera/Korryn died saying she’s sovereign/As I’m writing this, had to light a candle on the mantel/Wax melting down the alter." As the track crescendos into a heady swarm of electric guitar, Hprizm signs off: “Let the lightning flash/All colors and sounds clash/Grabbed a few jewels from the past and made a smash.” With those departing words, Magnetic Memory dissolves into the sampled sounds of a rainstorm. Like everything in Hprizm’s moody seance, it’s a reminder that we often look back in order to travel forward, because we can never escape the specter of the past.


Ben Bondy makes ambient music shot through with sharp, pristinely mixed drums. This album for Huerco S.’s label is psychedelic in a way that suggests a faint sense of nausea or discomfort.

Glans Intercum

Glans Intercum isn’t really Latin, and if it sounds like something dirty, it’s supposed to. The cover looks like a fruiting fungus at first, but look closer and it’s clearly a moldy dog turd. (Those are mushrooms of a very different kind, though, in his Bandcamp artist photo.) There’s no doubt about it—Ben Bondy is a bit of a jokester. The Brooklyn-based producer and graphic designer might seem like an odd fit for West Mineral Ltd., best known for a vaporous and murky strain of ambient concealed in fog and shadow. But as boisterous as Glans Intercum can be, it really isn’t all that different from what associates and collaborators like Huerco S., Picnic, Pontiac Streator, and Ulla Straus do: ambient music shot through with the pulse of the club.
The difference is that while those artists rarely let anything more than the slightest beat penetrate the murk of their productions, Bondy relegates the more vaporous elements of his music to the back of the mix, using them as a moving platform for some of the sharpest, most pristinely mixed drums you’re likely to hear on an electronic album this year. In the absence of stereo panning, these drums take on a fearful symmetry, and Bondy subtly treats them with echo so they seem to duck in and out of the darker corners of the mix, where all the pads and squishy sounds live. “Ash in Emerald Casing,” “Drip on Nape,” and “Skizz'' are the album’s most relentless drum workouts. Meanwhile, the more ambient tracks that divide them seem composed almost entirely of the pops and snaps and pointillist clicks that usually find their way into West Mineral productions as textural grit.
At first, there seems to be a clear divide between the “ambient” tracks and the “club” tracks, but one of the record’s strengths is how the two feed into one another. There’s always something gorgeous going on deep in the bowels of the bangers, like the great swooning chords that perfume “Emerald Casing” or the wonderful droplet synth on “Drip on Nape” that moves in and out of fields of echo. Meanwhile, the ambient tracks hint at a beat with little shudders and snare rolls, until finally the whole album unburdens itself into the title track, which comes across as an extended sigh. It’s refreshing that Bondy doesn’t treat these tracks as foreplay. There’s always something weird going on in the background (is that the sound of someone chewing on “Spangled?”), and he never relies on loops or drones or synth-pad ruminations to kill time.
This is a spongy, tactile record, and it sustains an organic quality without incorporating anything resembling a “real” instrument. Maybe that’s because of how it always seems to be writhing and twisting. Spoken word by Andrea Stella appears on two tracks, but the words are less important than the way Bondy distends them so they seem to curl back on themselves like a Möbius strip. Bondy, as a lover of all things mycological, must have internalized the way the body wants to squirm out of itself in the throes of a mushroom trip. This is an intensely psychedelic record—not in the mind-expanding way in which the term is usually used, but in a physical way that suggests a faint nausea, a sense of discomfort. If ambient music is associated with comedowns, here’s an album for the peak.

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A long way from his 1970s folk-rock roots, the veteran guitarist travels far beyond the limits of genre, fusing pedal steel with ambient glitches and piercing insect sounds.

Raft

A 2014 trio of reissues from the Paradise of Bachelors imprint brought the adventurous, early-1970s output of British folk-rock guitarist Mike Cooper to a new generation of listeners. But those reissues also muddied the waters. In the years since those recordings, Cooper has transformed into a maddeningly elusive player, one no longer beholden to folk, blues, rock, or any other genre. In the 21st century, Cooper has kept up a healthy output of woolly music on his own Hipshot label, some 20-plus albums in as many years. Like a small craft traveling from island to island, depending on the album, Cooper might offer up inspired takes on Delta blues guitarist Skip James or Italian minimalist Giacinto Scelsi; for one particularly inspired album, 2004’s Rayon Hula, he ran ’50s exotica through a bank of electronics, rendering your grandfather’s easy-listening into something more akin to Fennesz or Black Dice.
With Raft, he drifts past all of the above touchstones and ventures a bit further out, with each of the album’s seven tracks delving deeper into the 74-year-old musician’s idiosyncratic sound. Nearly 50 years into a recording career that has yielded over 60 albums, it’s hard to suggest a single album as an entry point. If you’re not already attuned to Cooper’s interests of late—a strange brew of shortwave radio interference, gamelan, atonal guitar sounds, field recordings, and Hawaiian slack-key guitar—Raft is a plunge into the deep end.
Opener “Raft 21 - Guayaquil to Tully” glides in with a shimmering drone and rippling notes on steel guitar, which soon butt against glitches and splintering high frequencies. It slides into the album’s centerpiece, the 12-minute “Raft 37 - Las Balsas,” an ambient track that seems to be moving forward and backward at once, and the elongated notes that Cooper conjures on steel guitar are soon joined by their reflection: a guitar accompaniment in the form of a backmasked tape, warping and distending the tones. While the noise and notes don’t ever quite meld together, they do coexist in a curiously easy manner, like gulls floating carefree over turbulent water.
Cooper’s experiments with drum machine comes to the surface on the three-minute “Raft 28 - Vital Alsar,” the album’s most accessible piece. Here his slidework does two things at once, striking crystal-clear notes and also making warped, disorienting figures underneath, producing an effect akin to seeing your legs below you in the ocean. Soon the eerie sound of droning insects at night, combined with foreign-language chatter and the chiming metal of Indonesian gamelan (which sounds like some of Cooper’s own field recordings layered together), makes for the album’s most menacing moments.
“Raft 29 - Honey Hunters,” which opens with Cooper’s slide gently rattling the strings and a motor whirring near the pick-ups, might seem like the most relaxed moment on the album, but the insect sounds that dominate are of such a piercingly high frequency (not unlike this Sublime Frequencies album) that they verge upon the migraine-inducing. And “Raft 36 - Age Unlimited” finds the guitarist in a prickly free-improv mode, coaxing all manner of thwacks, croaks, growls, and scrapes out of his instrument as a canopy of tropical birds chirps across the stereo field. The set’s closing five minutes return to the album’s earlier, more enticing sense of drift, with sounds swelling and receding hypnotically. Glints of old country blues, slack-key guitarist Gabby Pahinui, Fripp & Eno’s (No Pussyfooting), or the KLF’s Chill Out might all come to mind, but if Cooper’s varied and voluminous catalog tells us anything, these are all just tributaries flowing into the man’s particular ocean of sound.


After a lengthy hiatus-- one that has found indie increasingly enthralled with clubland crossovers-- the Notwist finally follow Neon Golden and Shrink with an album every bit as intricate in construction and disorienting in effect as its celebrated predecessors.

The Devil, You + Me

The popular history of the Notwist has been steeped in transformation-- gloomy grunge misanthropes reborn as laptop-pop romantics. But in the six years that have elapsed since the German band's 2002 Stateside breakthrough Neon Golden, the Notwist haven't changed so much as the definition of what it means to be an indie/electronic crossover act.
For the Notwist, the gradual adoption of IDM idioms was less a paradigm shift than a complementary outcome, with the clicks and cuts that permeated Neon Golden and its 1998 predecessor Shrink providing a more modern variation of the tape hiss and crackle that formed the intimate ambience to the classic 80s indie-rock records on which brothers Markus and Micha Acher were raised. But since Neon Golden's release, the indie/electronic divide that the Notwist so carefully toed has been obliterated in a flash of strobe lights, with acts like Cut Copy and Hot Chip pushing shy-guy indie-poptronica out of the bedroom and onto discotheque floors; compared to the outsized, big-room ballast of "Lights and Music" and "Over and Over", the Notwist's brand of mechanized melancholy now seems understated.
Of course, the obvious move would be for resident programmer Martin Gretschmann to beef up the beats and set the synths on squelch. But for all of their rhythmic manipulations and percussive precision, the Notwist have always strived to move the heart over the hips. And if anything, their knee-jerk response to indie's current clubland crossover is to head back to the garage: The Devil, You + Me's stellar opening salvo, "Good Lies", begins with a bright, jangly guitar riff and a pounding floor-tom beat that mainline Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation, while frontman Markus Acher introduces the anthemic, gently fist-pumped chorus. But the song's euphoric rush-- emphasized by its breakdown/rebuild structure-- is decidedly at odds with the betrayals described within. Acher provides a candid glimpse into a troubled marriage by describing it in terms of the material goods used to prop it up-- "I remember good lies/ When we carried them home with us/ To our bedside tables and the coffee sets"-- thereby keenly drawing parallels between dysfunctional relationships and the IKEA-furnished apartments that house them: the cool surface appearances barely concealing the soul-deadening sterility. The equally affecting "Gloomy Planets" works a similar contrast between expression and repression-- overtop spirited folk-song strums, Acher asks "why is everything so locked up?" before the song's ascending, accelerated climax lets it all out in a cathartic gush of tremoled synth tones and motorik motion.
Appearing in the first and third positions respectively, "Good Lies" and "Gloomy Planets" make an early case for The Devil, You + Me as the Notwist's return-to-rock gesture, and the fact that the title track-- a glockenspiel-glistened acoustic lullaby-- is based upon a chorus melody very similar to that of Neon Golden's "Pick Up the Phone" might suggest the Notwist are settling into a comfort of zone of sorts. Though they comprise The Devil, You + Me's most immediate moments, these songs aren't the most representative ones on an album that proves to be every bit as intricate in construction and disorienting in effect as its celebrated predecessors. Melody is an absolute, but everything else is fair play: on the unnerving "Alphabet", a tense one-chord acoustic strum clears the way for a procession of horror-movie drones, power-drill guitar squall, laser-beam synths clattering drum breaks and incessant sleigh bells-- recalling the soundtracky beat-scapes the Notwist fashioned in 2006's 13 & God collaboration with hip-hoppers Themselves-- all while Acher drops one-liners like "I won't sing you algebra" with an eerie sense of calm. Later, on side two, the bedside ballad "Sleep" projects a break-of-dawn optimism that's mischievously undercut by piercing glitches and booming dub breaks, the latter of which also form the backbone for the shadowy slow-motion creep of "On Planet Off". But even as the mise en scène around him mutates in unexpected, sometimes sinister ways, Acher's voice is unwaveringly poised, an eminently curious instrument that manages to project both disaffection and great concern in the same breath.
In contrast to its briskly paced first act, The Devil, You + Me doesn't so much build to a finale as gradually wind itself down, lending the album a sense of anti-climax; in retrospect, it would have been a smart idea to reassign "Gloomy Planets" to the home stretch so as to break up the second side's mid-tempo momentum. But even after a six-year siesta, the Notwist's approach to pop music-- exploiting both its formal properties and endless possibilities-- is no less captivating and visionary than before. And when Acher declares himself "Gone, Gone, Gone" on the album's sweet, uncannily Nico-esque closing ballad, you're left hoping you won't have to wait another half decade for a reintroduction.


The minimal-techno icon celebrates the 20th anniversary of the breakthrough LP where he first established his otherworldly percussive sensibility.

Ricardo Villalobos: Alcachofa (2023 Reissue)

Alcachofa (2023 Reissue)

There is a kind of party that has the rareness and mystique of a beautiful and endangered species, something connoisseurs spend years chasing and feel blessed to experience for themselves. Specifics will vary from person to person, but in many cases this scene may not much resemble what the average person might imagine when they hear the words “nightclub,” “rave” or “dancefloor.” Ricardo Villalobos described his version in a 2007 interview. It would be outside, preferably near a river. It would have exceptionally clear sound. And it would, in ways that are hard to explain, exist outside pressures of the world at large, free from the tyranny of linear time itself, a place where attendees—not so much paying customers eager to be entertained as warm-hearted people down for whatever—return to a state of childlike playfulness. Alcachofa, released on Playhouse in 2003 and reissued this year on Perlon, is both a soundtrack to, and transmission from, the semi-utopian bubble that has long been his domain.
If music is a language, as Villalobos believes, Alcachofa is his first work of poetry. “I prefer a clear, understandable, calm voice in music,” he once said. “I don’t like fortissimos.” The “understandable” part may be hard to square with a record that begins with “Easy Lee,” an afterhours anthem whose lyrics, moaned through a Nord Lead vocoder, no one has ever quite been able to decipher beyond the titular phrase. This sets the tone for an album defined by oblique moods and loose, organically evolving arrangements. Emotions come in subtle shades, from the nervous edge of “Bahaha Hahi” to the quiet determination of “Quizás” (Spanish for “maybe”).
Unlike so much neatly regimented dance music, these tracks unfurl according to the unconscious logic of improvisation, meandering serenely despite their brisk tempos, introducing elements that appear once and never return, and ending somewhere different from where they began. There are melodies, vocals, and hooks, but they’re upstaged by the sounds themselves—crystalline, impossibly tactile, deftly gelling mic-recorded acoustic sounds with electronic instruments (whose inventors Villalobos honors, along with his family and loved ones, in the album’s dedications). The percussion in particular is immaculate, with kick drums (when they appear) like beads of porcelain connecting his delicate structures. In a wise shuffle of the track order, Perlon’s reissue ends with “Waiworinao,” a DJ tool made almost entirely of samples of the Polish jazz bassist Krzysztof Ścierański, and a dazzling contrast to the lean electronics that come before it.
Few artists manage such subtleties in club music, but it’s not surprising that Villalobos does. Rhythmic music has been one of his primary modes of self-expression since childhood. His parents, Chileans displaced to Germany by Pinochet’s coup (part of the ignominious legacy of the recently departed Henry Kissinger), raised him in a house full of South American music and spontaneous parties, where a young Ricardo might be handed a conga in an all-night percussion session. He proved a valuable addition to Frankfurt’s booming club scene in the 1990s—DJing, throwing parties, and making hypnotic house and minimal records that embodied a unique blend of influences: South American music, synth pop (he was a Depeche Mode super fan), kosmische bands like Kraftwerk and Can, and, later, the kind of jazz and classical that might appear on ECM (a label whose catalog he remixed, alongside Max Loderbauer, in 2011). Much of his adult life has followed a weekly cycle: a few days in the studio, then DJ gigs all weekend, rarely playing for less than three hours, and sometimes for eight or more. (“I prefer not to sleep,” he once told an interviewer. “I don’t like it so much.”)
Heard today, Alcachofa is clearly the essential turning point in his decades-long body of work. Before it came a dozen or so distinctive but relatively traditional house and minimal records, among them classics like “The Contempt” and “808 the Bassqueen.” After it came music too wild to fit established notions of club music, or, for that matter, the runtime of a vinyl 12". There was Fizheuer Zieheuer, a 37-minute mind-bender that calls to mind both Latin house and Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4; then his “Apocalypso Now” mix of Shackleton’s “Blood On My Hands,” a haunted 19-minute odyssey whose lyrics will inevitably invite some listeners to ponder the spectacle of September 11th (“when I see the towers fall... fall... fall…”)—a bold move for the wee hours in room one at London’s fabric club.
For many DJs, dance music is an art form tailored to a specific time and place, which might explain its occasionally limited range. For Villalobos, it’s enmeshed with the essence of human life. This is, after all, a man who described himself as “the remix” of his father, says Basic Channel records remind us of being in the womb, and celebrated the birth of a child with a 17-minute DJ tool (2008’s “Enfants”). Alcachofa was, especially at the time of its release, a powerful demonstration that “DJ-friendly” need not imply a dumbing-down. Consider “Dexter,” whose ambiguous blend of warmth and sorrow goes well beyond the emotional range of most dancefloors. And yet “Dexter” is, along with “Easy Lee,” the album’s most famous track. When Zip played it at Houghton festival last summer, sometime around 10 a.m. beneath an overcast sky, its mournful hook got whoops and whistles from the crowd—along with at least one set of misty eyes.
Perlon’s reissue is more than merely ceremonial. The album has been out of print for years, and, like most music from this lifelong internet skeptic, has never been sold digitally. Perlon, the Berlin label founded by Zip and Markus Nikolai that is home to much of Villalobos’ most adventurous music, has reimagined it slightly, packaging its four vinyl discs in a particularly ecstatic orgy of text (their longtime visual signature) and shaking up the tracklist of the original (and divergent) LP/CD pressings a bit—they’ve added “Bach to Back” and “Waiworinao,” from the Alcachofa Tools EP, and ditched two others, “Fools Garden (Black Conga)” and “What You Say Is More Than I Can Say.” Curiously, the final chords from that last one waft over the beginning of “Dexter,” as they did on the Playhouse CD, implying Perlon used those masters instead of the original vinyl cuts—an odd quirk that may lead purists to remain partial to Playhouse’s original vinyl package, but one that won’t to matter to anyone just happy to have their hands on the thing.
This reissue serves a larger purpose, too. Villalobos has spoken about the importance of preserving the delicate community of artists, labels, and clubs that he inhabits, in part by making and releasing music on independent labels, especially on vinyl. In that sense, this reissue of Alcachofa is not just an artifact of his elusive world, but also part of his ongoing effort to keep it alive.


Talking Heads’ fifth album is an inky passport of sounds—art-rock, funk, pop, Afrobeat—meticulously mapped for the collective yet informed by the movements of the individuals.

Speaking in Tongues

In nearly 35 years of David Byrne’s stage performances, some elements have endured: He still dances passionately with floor lamps. He lies supine on the stage, singing into his headset. Brass and woodwind players march around him in geometric shapes. Above all, his hyphenate backing singers/dancers always seem positively euphoric, beaming in a way that transcends professionally rehearsed cheer, as they execute song after song of quirky, nimble bends and leaps, the sort of exaggerated movements that evoke children’s specials and turtleneck-heavy performance art. From Talking Heads’ epochal 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense to Byrne’s celebrated 2019 Broadway show American Utopia, these dancers’ amusement has always been scrawled on their faces: How different this is, they seem to muse while in their Gumby contortions, perfectly identical yet each awed in their expressions. What an absurd, wonderful thing we’re doing now.
Their balance of joyful freedom inside methodical choreography, spontaneity inside structure, perfectly mirrors Talking Heads, who first mastered that equilibrium in the studio. On their fifth album, Speaking in Tongues, Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison indulge their unusual, gamboling whims within solid walls. The record brought along the spry, Afrobeat-inspired polyrhythms and funk saunter of 1980’s Remain in Light while adding in new wave’s synths and the sharp, physical precision of Byrne’s 1981 score for Twyla Tharp’s dance piece The Catherine Wheel; there are also glimmers of the neon pop cheer of Weymouth and Frantz’s side project Tom Tom Club. Together, this inky passport of sounds yields an album that, besides smoothly mixing art-rock with funk with pop, feels meticulously mapped for the collective yet informed by the movements of the individuals.
Even for an album titled after communication—nodding to both glossolalia and Byrne’s famously garbled scatting in recording sessions—Speaking in Tongues is singularly immediate and direct. In each song, one concept—one saucy bass-and-piano walking line, one ricocheting keyboard line, one heavily shouted pyromaniac refrain—repeats into an insistent foundation, so emphatic it begins to burrow into a trancelike state befitting the album name. Choruses are evolutions of verses, of ideas that have repeated enough to feel lived-in. Weymouth’s funk bass, the unsung star of the album, is never far from the foreground.
This rigid framework throughout allows the rest of the instrumentation to cavort above it: A jubilant momentum rises throughout “Girlfriend Is Better,” but its base—a sauntering line from Weymouth, sci-fi synth radiation from guest Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic—is set quickly. This bedrock allows for Byrne’s hoarse, scattered shouting to reach velocity above while still feeling controlled. “Pull Up the Roots” flirts with disco as it rides a tight rhythm section that feels a shade too hectic for dancing; the bass bounce starts at a gallop and the guitar backflips around it. “Burning Down the House,” Speaking in Tongue’s biggest hit—and the only Top 10 single in Talking Heads’ entire catalog—starts with a literal scream from Byrne, and has no clear markers between verse and chorus: It is a full stampede to the howled refrain, an explosion buoyed by such a perky trajectory, it sneakily exculpates some the most insurgently unglued lyrics to ever crack the Billboard charts. (“People on their way to work and baby what did you expect?/Gonna burst into flame!” is some dark, dark weather.)
Byrne’s lyrics have been deemed inscrutable art-school fare by many, minimized as Mad Libs sold as gospel; in fact, as Speaking in Tongues proves definitively, they are is the opposite. Byrne sings like a kindergarten teacher, or a Rosetta Stone language bot: in plainspoken, short observations that make sense individually, yet sequence into a mystifying dialogue. On “Moon Rocks,” when Byrne seems to scoff at alien intelligence—“Flying saucers, levitation/Yo I could do that!”—and follows it up a hair’s-breadth later with a liberal arts pep talk—"So take your hands out of your pockets/And get your face adjusted”—these are perfectly intelligible thoughts, individually. On “Slippery People,” Byrne and sensational guest vocalist Nona Hendryx offer a strange sort of gospel proselytizing—"Turn like a wheel, he’s alright/See for yourself, the Lord won’t mind,” a millisecond before sharing stark memories of cold bathtub water—over a merry funk pulse and scratchy, uber-’80s synths.
For all its charms, and the big single it housed, Speaking in Tongues lies in the shadow of Remain in Light; it’s not as effortlessly cohesive, its diffused interests not as zealous and enchanting as its more focused predecessor. But Speaking in Tongues does have the distinction of ending on the Talking Heads song most likely to be on a skeptic’s wedding playlist: “This Must Be the Place,” a neurotic’s concession to love even as he frets over the transience of life, and a bittersweet pact to let someone into his fearful mind. Byrne is unusually tender; his wild thoughts flow in one direction. As he sings gently to his partner, wondering, “Did I find you, or you find me?” the beautiful messiness of existence seems to soften. Here aren’t 30 thoughts bandying for space in Byrne’s fulminating brain, only vulnerability. There aren’t three synth lines racing off a cliff, just some percussive clang and one light synth wobble. His expression of love feels even more romantic because he clearly still knows love is a distraction. It's the strangest move of all from him, and it almost makes sense.

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The debut album from Meg Duffy and Joel Ford maps the interaction between delicate fingerpicking and precise electronic textures; it is a study in subtle, gorgeous discord.

Yes/And

There is an inherent sweetness in Meg Duffy’s work. As Hand Habits, the guitarist and songwriter is known for their layered, intimate melodies. Their songs sound cracked open, split to reveal a softly glowing warmth. Under a new partnership with producer Joel Ford, prior collaborator of Oneohtrix Point Never and Jacques Greene, Duffy retains that vulnerability, but it is subverted and fortified by Ford’s peculiar, dissonant treatments. The duo recorded their self-titled debut as Yes/And during a series of mid-pandemic studio sessions in Los Angeles. The wordless, 10-song collection maps the interaction between Duffy’s delicate fingerpicking and Ford’s precise textures. It is a study in subtle, gorgeous discord.
Yes/And tugs gently between two realms: the serene and the uneasy. At times, this tension is present within a single piece. On “Ugly Orange,” a sunny, pastoral phrase reminiscent of Duffy’s work with guitarist William Tyler somersaults throughout the song. But there are things creeping beneath the motif that belie its playful nature: A buried, crackling voice, synthesized whale song, and a small, ceaseless drone. As Duffy plays, the loping melody staggers and slowly collapses into this field of sound. Ford’s expanding squeals and static devour the riff, like waves reclaiming flotsam that’s been washed ashore. “Tumble” is also underpinned by tiny, almost imperceivable patches of distortion, but it’s the innocuous friction in Duffy’s playing that is most fascinating. Their guitar strings are tautly drawn and palm-muted, each percussive strum flat and dry. The repetitive cadence is almost grating in its simplicity, yet somehow it is oddly soothing.
These moments of well-placed strain add intrigue, but they do not detract from the album’s mesmerizing pull. Yes/And play with scope as much as they do detail, toying with the listener’s sense of proximity to the music. On “More Than Love,” we feel extremely close to the source: The unsteady, agitated strings scratch around like insects crawling through dry grass. On “Centered Shell,” intricate guitar flourishes sparkle like sun-drenched asphalt. Here we are zoomed in, inspecting each three-dimensional detail under a high-powered microscope. Contrary to these tactile compositions, mid-album track “Learning About Who You Are” is cosmic and grand. Ford employs broad washes of synthesizer, resonant and metallic and mysterious. The noise is all-enveloping—you don’t stop to consider the hands that created it; you just let it sweep over you.
Duffy typically sings on Hand Habits recordings, their light, clean register providing context outside of their agile guitar technique. On Yes/And, Duffy is largely voiceless, their playing recontextualized by Ford’s understated maneuvers rather than the arc of a personal narrative. On the fragmented “Emoticon Scroll,” Duffy’s presence recedes furthest into the background. It is Yes/And’s most abstract piece, split between an extended, scuffed-up groan and pulses of springy, croaking keys. It is at this very moment that Duffy’s role as a guitarist becomes so clear and essential. In their absence, the warmth and sensitivity coursing through the rest of the album also retreats. This lack is sharply felt on “Emoticon Scroll,” though it is likely intentional, given the song’s cold, detached title. As closer “In My Heaven All Faucets Are Fountains” trickles in immediately after, Duffy’s deft plucking returns triumphantly. No matter how disguised or reshaped, their sweet, pure playing is the undeniable heart of this music.

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Darold Ferguson Jr.-- best known as A$AP Ferg, a member of A$AP Rocky’s A$AP Mob crew-- brings a tantalizing skillset to the table, a startling versatility and an electricity that not even his more famous friend can boast. Those skills are evident on Trap Lord, a release that began life as a mixtape and has been transformed into his major label debut.

Trap Lord

Darold Ferguson Jr.-- best known as A$AP Ferg, a member of A$AP Rocky’s A$AP Mob-- brings a tantalizing skillset to the table, a startling versatility and an electricity that not even his more famous friend can touch. He sings (see his star-making debut on Rocky’s “Kissin’ Pink”), he can write (take his bendy, gleeful “Shabba”), and he’s weird-- when he’s feeling purple, he channels his inner Fergenstein, a lewder, more hedonistic persona. He also talks big: “I wanna be as known as Jesus,” he told me earlier this year, later mentioning his affinity for artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Warhol. (Sounds like he’d enjoy Jay-Z’s bathroom). He’s funny, he’s got a peculiar style, and he’s got, for a lack of a better word, a sizeable amount of swag. Like Rocky, he's a uniter of rap audiences and regional sounds, the only other performer in the A$AP crew who’s exhibited that star-like sheen so far. If he were to deliver on that promise with a debut that properly channeled all the potential... next stop, stratosphere.
Trap Lord, Ferg’s debut mixtape turned debut album, probably isn’t that record, though it has quite a few bright spots. While it begins with a fierce, feverish bundle of tracks-- the hulking, patois-smeared “Let It Go”, the infectious knocker “Shabba”, the emotional, mythologizing “Hood Pope”-- it’s also listless in spots, too reliant on underdeveloped ideas. Some of that can be chalked up to the nature of the record's existence-- like Flockaveli, it was originally conceptualized as a mixtape and only later was transformed into a major label debut. But a fair chunk of Trap Lord finds Ferg trying to figure himself out in real-time-- a natural shape shifter, he never stays in the same form for long, switching personalities and flows at the drop of a hat. Where it’s effective on songs like “Hood Pope” and the thundering opener “Let It Go”, it’s less so on scatterbrained songs like “Fergivicous” and “Make a Scene”. For an artist drawing effortlessly from what seems to be a wellspring of creativity and thoughtful tribute, Trap Lord can, at times, feel underdeveloped and skeletal.
But, that’s not to suggest that Trap Lord doesn’t sound great-- A$AP Mob still has the best ears in town. The production is leering and paranoid but rippled with muscle. It’s a dark-tinted record, to be sure, sonically and lyrically. The VERYRVRE-produced “Hood Pope” chronicles the loss of a young child; “Murder Something” uses a Kirk Franklin analogy to underscore a particular, graphic ass-kicking; the closing, experimental “Cocaine Castle” uses a crack house as the setting, a location where the protagonist sees “doctors in their suits”, babies, his mom. It’s heavy shit, reinforced by thick, tense production from under-the radar producers like Frankie P, P on the Boards, Snugsworth and HighDefRazjah. The stormy sonic texture is the backbone that the album aligns itself along, a logical combination of Cleveland smoke (Bone Thugs-N-Harmony incidentally show up on "Lord"), Death Row menace, and classic New York rap radio that's perfectly tailored to A$AP Ferg's reverential package.
When Trap Lord flashes-- Ferg’s speed-it-up-slow-it-down verse on “Work” is pure thrill-- it’s brilliant. But despite its status as his commercial debut, it's easiest to approach it as a low-stakes introduction to Ferg, an artist who, like Rocky and other newcomers like Travi$ Scott, has the ability to push the boundaries of the genre toward more experimental sounds and ideas. Though Trap Lord's vision is refracted through split personalities-- for better or for worse-- A$AP Ferg still sounds like a star in the making.

A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA


This brief EP shows just how much ingenuity and fresh new wrinkles Wata Igarashi can wring out of his Roland-909, Ableton, and modular synth set-up.

Question and Answer EP

Four months into the new year, the Japanese techno producer has already dropped two spacey yet sinister EPs for Berlin, contributed a live podcast mix to Resident Advisor, made the relentless acid cut “Adrenochrome” as part of the Bunker’s massive compilation 15 Years of the Bunker, and now returns to the Brooklyn imprint for another four-track release. Question and Answer may not be as focused and of-a-piece as Mood of the Machines, his standout 2016 EP for the label, but it shows just how much ingenuity and fresh new wrinkles Wata Igarashi can wring out of his Roland-909, Ableton and modular synth set-up.
“Outburst” opens the EP at full throttle, a menacing yet minimal piece of peak time techno that draws from the axis of techno masters like Jeff Mills and Kenny Larkin. As unrelenting as its kick is, the track soon reveals chasms of black space around every beat, with Igarashi making them feel even deeper and more disorienting, especially when the low end cuts out and you feel like you’re dangling in deep space, with a visceral sense of release washing over when the bass finally returns. It’s techno and EDM’s stock trick of the trade, yet Igarashi makes it feel compact yet expansive at the same time. Perhaps it’s thanks to Igarashi’s day job as sound producer on more commercial projects, there’s a crystalline yet never flashy exploration of what just a few sonic elements can do to the listeners’ perceptions.
With just a handful of elements—and at a slightly slower tempo than its predecessor—“Train of Thought” is nevertheless mesmerizing, liable to hijack your own on headphones. With destabilizing synth line, a slow arching sinewave and a ceaseless thump ever so subtly shadowed by a shaker, Igarashi builds the track up to a dizzying peak, to where it hits a cruising altitude four minutes in and stays aloft the rest of the way. “Broken Telephone” is similarly cautious in its build, a slow chugger that soon picks up some steam. And once everything is in motion, the 909 and the modular squiggles that Igarashi uses here bubble up like over-carbonated seltzer, making for a tingly sort of space that’s easy to get lost in.
The title track recently marked an early peak on Igarashi’s RA podcast and it remains a standout entry here. Full of clattering, metal-tinged percussion and an extreme arpeggio liable to make you vertiginous with its high peaks and valleys, it feels like a rollercoaster, the type of track that when deployed at the right moment can turn an underground techno party into a funhouse. A mix of hard percussion and ethereal effects swirling around at the periphery of perception, it’s these sorts of queasy, head-bewildering moments in Igarashi’s productions that reveal his knowledge of Jimi Hendrix and appreciation of psychedelic rock. Perhaps those are peculiar influences for a techno artist, but it’s what fellow producer Peter Van Hoesen called “the right amount of psychedelic sensibility” in his music. Even those averse to experimental techno will find plenty of moments to space out to here.


After the disappointing Indie Cindy and the serviceable Head Carrier, the band shows signs of recapturing some of the spark of their classic albums.

Beneath the Eyrie

During all those years that fans clamored for new music following the band’s 2004 reunion, who could have predicted that expectations for a new Pixies album would ever sink so low? After nearly a decade spent growing rusty on the reunion circuit, the band deflated what little excitement remained following Kim Deal’s departure with Indie Cindy, a comeback that not only failed to recreate their old mystique, but struggled to even understand what made the band so alluring in the first place. The sinister spark, the mischief, that giddy confusion they stirred with their blur of candy and sadism—it was totally absent, replaced by an at best anonymous, at worst obnoxious shrug of secondhand tics.
At least things couldn’t get any worse. It didn’t buy them back much goodwill, but 2016’s Head Carrier was perfectly fine, a serviceable effort roughly on par with the average Frank Black album. And over the last few years the band’s concerts have begun to show signs of life again, thanks in part to replacement bassist Paz Lenchantin, whose happy-to-be-here presence sets an example for her tired bandmates. Having new material to perform doesn’t hurt, either. It at least offers the group a chance to mix it up a bit after years of bleeding the same old Doolittle staples dry.
The Pixies’ modest rebound continues on their pleasant, undemanding, and completely respectable new album Beneath the Eyrie. It won’t win back scorned fans who took the band’s fall from greatness as a personal betrayal, yet it comes closer to conjuring the gleeful chill of the Pixies’ classic albums than anything they’ve released since reuniting. There are moments where, if you zone out just a little bit, it feels like you’re listening to some Bossanova B-sides that you somehow missed. The Pixies have finally made an album that scratches the itch for new Pixies music.
It’s got some rippers on it, too. The romping “Graveyard Hill” (one of several tracks co-written by Lenchantin, an eager presence throughout the album) sets up Black Francis for some of the freest, most feral barks he’s unleashed in two decades. “The Long Rider,” meanwhile, is the album’s big earworm, and prime radio fodder on the off chance alternative stations decide a new Pixies single might be something they’re into. It’s made from recycled parts—repurposed pieces of “Velouria,” mostly—but it lifts off in a way few classic Pixies imitations do.
The band is also learning how to make change work in their favor. Francis’ slithery, sexual energy of yore has given way to an old-man crotchetiness. Instead of feigning the mystique that now eludes him, he leans into candor, touching on his recent divorce in unguarded terms, at least on the tracks where he isn’t singing about witches or mythical half-human sea creatures. The blustery opener “Arms of Mrs. Mark of Cain” and the naked “Ready for Love” cast him as heartbroken and cursed, picking up where his confessional final effort with the Catholics, Show Me Your Tears, left off. Even the spritely jangle of “Bird of Prey” does little to temper the resentful bite of Francis’ lyrics. “You’ve stolen my tomorrow/So I come for it today/You stole it when you stole my yesterday,” he sings in a smoldering, Leonard Cohen growl.
The Pixies recorded Beneath the Eyrie at a creepy old church, which must have helped juice the gothic sound that they’re going for. Of course, in their prime this band could make even the most sterile studio sound haunted, but after two records grasping for ambience, it’s nice to hear a Pixies album with a moody sense of place again. It’s weird that “better than nothing” became the bar for what was once one of the most celebrated bands of their era, but if it’s a choice between more records as solid, if unspectacular, as Beneath the Eyrie or nothing, the Pixies might as well keep them coming. It’s been a long time since this band had anything left to lose.

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Recorded over the last 15 years, and alternating between stripped-down folk and thickets of distortion, Shade takes Grouper’s careful balance between intimacy and inscrutability to a new extreme.

Shade

Liz Harris always seems to be telling us a secret. The catch—and the thing that makes her music as Grouper so fascinating—is we’re never sure what. Titles like “Thanksgiving Song” and “The Man Who Died in His Boat” hint that she’s letting us in on specific moments and memories, but the lyrics lean toward abstraction, and that’s when you can make them out from behind a thick wall of reverb. From 2014’s Ruins onward, Harris has scrubbed away much of the grit from her sound, and it’s been a thrill to watch her music hint at candor before ducking back into the shadows where it thrives. Shade takes this knife’s-edge balance between intimacy and inscrutability to the extreme.
Many of Shade’s nine tracks feel like experiments in how much Harris can remove from her music while retaining its essential mystery. The album’s most notable development is to present her voice and acoustic guitar largely unadorned. The setting is so spare we can hear the buzz of the room and the squeak of her fingers on the frets. On “Ode to the blue” and “Pale Interior,” her words seem to dissolve as soon as they leave her mouth, and the faint slapback echo on “Pale Interior” puts an extra degree of separation between her voice and the listener. Even in such a raw and intimate context, listening to these songs still feels like entering an environment rather than being serenaded by someone with a guitar.
On the other side of the spectrum, we hear songs that retreat deeper into thickets of distortion than anything she’s made since 2011’s A I A. The album opens with “Followed the ocean,” and immediately she’s belting, her voice working with the guitar feedback to push the mix into the red. That song and the dramatically side-chained “Disordered Minds” sound like Laura Nyro singing from the middle of a maelstrom. We get all the ache of a great soul vocal without totally understanding what’s moving enough to merit such an emotional delivery. The contrast with the acoustic material is kind of funny, like Harris is playing with two ways of making sure her message almost gets to us.
A few tracks on Shade feel like love songs. That’s certainly true of “Unclean mind,” with its hushed and naked pleas. The repetitive guitar motions of “The way her hair falls,” in tandem with the oft-surfacing word “pretty,” make it feel as if she’s performing a tender and intimate gesture such as braiding a lover’s hair. But Shade seems just as interested in Harris’ proximity to nature. On “Kelso (Blue sky),” we hear an owl hooting in the distance (Harris likes serendipitous, non-human duet partners; remember the microwave on “Labyrinth” from Ruins). “Followed the ocean” feels buffeted by the elements, like a wanderer on a spiritual quest. And the omnipresent room tone on the quieter tracks alerts us to the presence of the vastness of the surrounding universe, just on the other side of the walls.
Harris recorded these tracks over the last 15 years, in the Bay Area and Oregon. The easy assumption is that the fuzzier songs are older and the newer songs represent the conclusion of the trend toward more unvarnished production on Ruins and 2018’s Grid of Points. But it’s hard to be sure, and on “Ode to the blue,” her voice sounds enough like Vashti Bunyan’s to make me wonder if it wasn’t recorded closer to 2006, when Bunyan’s influence was more pervasive in indie rock. Either way, the possibility of a 15-year leap as “Followed the ocean” abruptly barges into “Unclean mind” is nearly as disorienting as the famous million-year match cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Grouper albums typically pick a mood and stick with it, but the jostling together of the two poles of Harris’ sound gives Shade a distinct tenor within her discography. This push-pull structure accounts for much of what makes the record fascinating, but it also makes it harder to get lost in than some of her albums. The major-key “Kelso” feels like too resolute an ending so soon after “Basement Mix” leads us into the woods down a trail of low-end distortion. And there are a few moments that try too hard for an “intimate” feel, like when a bit of jokey dialogue interrupts the end of “Disordered Minds,” or the take of “The way her hair falls” where she messes up and starts over. But had Shade followed a more disciplined arc, it might lose its sense of floating freely through time and memory, replaying some moments with striking clarity and burying others in the fog.
A more stripped-down Grouper isn’t necessarily more interesting or emotionally resonant, but it’s hard to think of many musicians who are better at transmuting pop and folk structures into abstract, haunted environments, and that strength has not dimmed on Shade. The chain reaction these nine songs generate together produces enough fog and smoke to keep the spell going strong—and to keep whatever secret she’s trying to tell us just on the other side of the speakers.

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