The title of Tegan and Sara's seventh album is a reference to how we relate to the objects of our affection as teenagers. Produced by Greg Kurstin (P!nk, Kelly Clarkson, Lily Allen), the concise, radio-friendly collection finds them exploring a populist pop bent.

Heartthrob

It would have once been obvious to say that a band's fans made them what they were. Now there's almost something quaint about it, especially considering (and not in spite of) the hashtagged millions that comprise the Little Monsters, Swifties, and Beliebers, who are as much a marketing tool as the groups being marketed to. Although they get a decent amount of exposure each time they release a record, until now, Tegan and Sara's sustained success has been down to a core fanbase. The title of their seventh album, Heartthrob, is a reference to how we relate to the objects of our affection as teenagers, that obsessive feeling that you live and die by for a few years, and how those crushes usually end up getting replaced by real, mutually loving relationships. Being someone who's liked this band to varying degrees of intensity for a decade, it's easy to interpret the name as the Quins recognizing their own role in their more devoted fans' lives. Doing so at the same time as they decide to make an album with pop impresario Greg Kurstin and dabble in writing for Carly Rae Jepsen might seem a little like selling their cow for a handful of supposedly magic beans.
Some folks have accused the duo of selling out with Heartthrob-- a concise 10 songs, at least half of which could be pop radio singles-- to which I'd argue that accessibility has always been a part of their appeal, in more respects than just working in friendly acoustic, rock, and electro-pop mediums. Surely part of the comfort of their music, at least to a young person quietly negotiating their sexuality without wanting to be obvious about it, is that it doesn't make a big deal of what it's come to represent. It's not like putting on an Ani DiFranco record in your bedroom and the lyrics sparking a parent's ear. One thing they've not been shy about in their songs, however, is ambition-- there's a sweet example of that on the Chris Walla-produced Sainthood's "Someday"-- and more power to them for deciding to explore a populist bent on Heartthrob, which pulls it off with aplomb.
The clearest sign that the Quins would follow this path lies in Sainthood's "Alligator", an insanely catchy, arid little pop song that had become Sara's trademark. ("Shock to Your System" and "How Come You Don't Want Me" carry on that impulse here.) But it was also a sign of the growing disparity between the twins' respective songwriting styles; Tegan's efforts on that record were stormy emo/power pop blasts, and the two didn't gel to the extent that it seemed fair to wonder whether it made sense for them to continue recording together. The Roxette and Cyndi Lauper-referencing, soaring keyboard pop of Heartthrob is a welcome stylistic reconciliation, if one that sacrifices their sonic weirdness.
Kurstin has taken Tegan and Sara's ability to write a solid refrain (some of their old songs were arguably all refrain) and channeled it into rushing, skyward stadium pop songs where their voices are more upfront, and less tethered to their former prickly structures. "Closer" is the killer, starting with Tegan's coy, tightly wound vocal laying out what she's after-- "All I dream of lately/ Is how to get you underneath me"-- the triumphantly shouted chorus coming off brash and charming, as if she knows she's definitely going to get it. It's a gloriously freeing, retrospective retelling of first infatuations, rewriting the script to articulate what you could only think about furiously back when.
"Closer"'s trad structure is typical of most of the songs on the record, but "Now I'm All Messed Up" breaks through its crackly piano and static whirr of a chorus with piercing, layered pleas: "Go! Go! Go if you want, I can't stop you!" It plays like a Wham! ballad repurposed as a glitchy, modern slow jam, which, in case that needs clarifying, is brilliant. The lyrics are a great, tragic portrait of post-split heartbreak-- "Now I'm all messed up, sick inside wondering where/ Where you're leaving your make-up"-- but the song as a whole never sounds anything less than fully empowering.
On Heartthrob, Tegan and Sara sing about solitude, regret, and self-loathing alongside romance, but most of its 10 songs feel amazing. That's not a sign of cognitive dissonance, but their considerable abilities fusing with those of Kurstin to drag their music out of headphones and into zones of unabashed communal euphoria and delight. The dramatic, ravey swish of "Goodbye, Goodbye" and new wavey tick of "I'm Not Your Hero" actually deal with the problem of coming across differently to your true self, and the risks you incur to reconcile that gap, whether that means losing someone or admitting that you're lost inside.
Making a relatively conventional sounding pop record-- not an acceptably hip, minimalist one produced by Devonte Hynes or Ariel Rechtshaid-- is a small risk in itself for the duo; for one, if its charms don't chime with sales, I can't imagine Warners keeping on a band whose last album sold 110k. Its misfires are few, if pronounced: On "Drove Me Wild", Tegan's voice is pitched up to sound unrecognizable, and the blandness of the music doesn't exactly inspire a wild vocal take-- it sounds like the music on an ad for Ibiza package holidays; "Love They Say" dies under slimy 90s production, bland acoustic verses, and a string of clichés about love ("true," "blind") that an actual teenager would probably balk at scrawling on a "Love is..." notelet.
At its best, however, Heartthrob brings the 32-year old siblings' more adult, romantic touch to a record that roundly avoids turning into any old generic, radio-friendly collection: "Love like ours is never fixed," Tegan sings on the classic piano pop of "I Was a Fool". It's hard to believe you could ever feel differently when you're a teenager crushing so hard you could cry at the injustice of your emotions going unrecognized. One of the strongest ideas Tegan and Sara give anyone who's ever plotted their identity by their music is the potential for change and transformation. For the unconverted, a temporary suspension of cynicism may be required.


Backed by the revered Philly psych-folk group Espers-- and produced by that band's frontman, Greg Weeks-- singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler's latest outing is her best yet, ensconsing songs of sorrow in impressionistic phrases and careful musicianship.

Marissa Nadler: Songs III: Bird on the Water

Songs III: Bird on the Water

At first, Marissa Nadler's Songs III: Bird on the Water doesn't seem especially notable. It's a 12-track breakup album detailing Nadler's pervasive loneliness, her gentle finger-style guitar augmented with cello, percussion, mandolin, synthesizers, and electric guitars. Her voice is remarkable from the outset-- a sad, husky air that climbs to perfect grace notes with ease-- but by the time Nadler sings, "Oh my lonely diamond heart/ It misses you so well," 100 seconds into opener "Diamond Heart", you're pretty sure you've heard this one before.
Not so fast: As Nadler and her gorgeous, incredibly isolated Songs III would have it, there's plenty worth waiting for. Nadler doesn't want empathy for the hurt that caused her to write "Diamond Heart" in a hotel room bathtub in New Jersey or "Bird on Your Grave" for a friend who died mysteriously; she's just trying to ease some of that monumental pain into the next space. And-- though its micro-payoffs may come in the form of a solitary harmony here, a hushed mandolin chord there, or the eerie bells lending a richer atmosphere to the beautiful "Dying Breed"-- such a feeling makes Songs III one of the most focused and engaging singer-songwriter releases so far this year.
Of course, that can be a tough sell for folks accustomed to concentrated emotional whomp. Aside from its presiding atmosphere of pain, little about Songs III feels direct. It peels free in slow, steady layers, Nadler's sorrow ensconced in impressionistic phrases and careful musicianship. As a songwriter, she's still painting relationship trauma in grayscale sadness, occasionally calling on stunning images-- "eyes as deep as brandy wine," "red-painted lips and a jezebel crown," "breaking on the daylight"-- to better realize sullen torment. But that latter layer makes Songs III much more effective than Nadler's 2005 debut, The Saga of Mayflower May.
Nadler's a bandleader now: With acoustic wonderment still in place, she brings most of Philadelphia's Espers to bear here. They augment without distracting, building on her gravitas with quietly breathtaking nuance: A cymbal-scrape pallor from Otto Hauser, or Jesse Sparhawk's weeping mandolin; like Helena Espvall's doubled cello parts smeared over Nadler's "rose-colored dreams" on "Thinking of You", these sounds highlight the words. Even the album's loudest moment, Greg Weeks' piercing electric lead on "Bird on Your Grave", won't wow you from afar, but it will pull you close enough to identify with Nadler's pain.
As a vocalist, Nadler stretches this environment towards infinity: By doubling and tripling her vocals and lacing several distinct interpretations of one melody, she implies that her despair is now as it was then as it always will be. During a splendid, organ-and-guitar take on Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat", for instance, the narrator's desolation comes doubled in verses, tripled in the chorus, and chased consistently by the organ. Doom follows her like a rain cloud, it seems, soaking her feelings but powering this, her best set of songs yet. Sure, that's a mundane thing to say about an artist, but on Songs III, it's notable after all.


The Brooklyn rapper moves carefully between knotty verses and blunt lines to make some of the most immersive and exhilarating songs of his career.

Descendants of Cain

Ka raps as if he’s pulled you into the hallway to talk business. His vocals are often hushed but always forceful, like he’s speaking in a stage whisper and the stage is collapsing. The beats he raps on, his own productions or sourced from a tight circle of collaborators, do away with nearly all extraneous elements—and often with elements that no one would consider “extraneous,” like drums. There are complicated lyrical passages, but some of Ka’s phrasing is disarmingly simple: He’ll say he “saw too much to have blind faith,” or describe the Brownsville, Brooklyn neighborhood of his youth as “the bottom” where “all the tops is slung.” It’s this drive toward the essential that makes Ka’s music singular. He cuts away the sinew from each line, leaving vivid detail and bits of moral code that he will then jam against one another, building a strange latticework of jagged, interlocking bits that he can use to explain or disorient as he sees fit.
Descendants of Cain is the sixth album Kaseem Ryan has released since 2012. Before then, he had taken a job with the New York Fire Department and lost touch with music. But the Ka that re-emerged with 2012’s rewardingly insular Grief Pedigree was inspired, and in the years since, he’s released a string of LPs that has confirmed him as one of the preeminent stylists of his generation. (Although on the fringes in many ways, Ka was big enough by 2016 to be smeared on the front page of the New York Post for his lyrics critical of police.) There are no giant leaps or sharp left turns in his repertoire; there are grooves worn deeper and deeper, facades stripped away.
There have been moments when this near-tunnel vision has seemed limiting; 2018’s Orpheus vs. the Sirens, a collaboration with the Los Angeles producer Animoss under the name Hermit and the Recluse, is an expertly made record that at times feels like the annual Ka album, assembled from a trusty blueprint. Cain, by contrast, exhilarates. Where Orpheus’ Greek-myth motif was an attempt to look at the personal and spiritual struggles Ka often writes about from an abstracted angle, the Biblical story of Cain and his offspring here evokes unshakable feelings about what it means to be damned, what’s learned versus what’s in your blood, and whether clean hands are a luxury everyone can afford. It includes some of the most striking writing of Ka’s career—the knottier verses and the blunter ones, too—and is utterly immersive, whole lifetimes of fear and pain and death and regeneration condensed into 33 minutes.
The Biblical allusions on Cain make the Brooklyn of Ka's memory sound like a fallow land not expected to produce survivors. On “Patron Saints,” he strings simple threads into a complex web of lepers and protectors from his formative years: the tycoons who “moved in vests,” the caregivers who “stole everything we needed.” No one here would be without blame in the eyes of the NYPD, but nearly everyone is daring and principled in his or her own way. “Our yogis did stretches upstate,” he raps, “I saw Lancelots at round tables cutting eighths.” At the song’s end, he does away with the entendre: “Our heroes sold heroin.”
That frankness serves Ka well throughout Cain. The penultimate song, “Old Justice,” opens, simply, “We was living in the living room.” But other tracks move slyly from childhood games to concealed weaponry. See “Unto the Dust,” where Ka remembers that while:

...y’all played the dozens
My favorite cousins spent they youth in prisons
They names known, came home
Now the house got two religions
‘Peace be with you,’ ‘Wa’Alaikum-Salaam’
?Make sure that piece be with you, laced in your palm.

It’s that type of advice—grave but necessary—that guides Ka through one-half of the stories remembered here, and is dispensed by him in the other. Toward the end of “Saints,” he raps about his father shooting a man, then tossing him the gun to dispose of. “He knew how he grew me,” Ka raps, as he flees the scene to deny prosecutors “Exhibit A.” “I was raised to age a few years in a day.”
Cain is a dynamic listen, despite relying on a consistent sound palate: somber pianos, strings, all made to sound like the denouement of a Western you catch on cable at 3 a.m. The exception is the dazzlingly weird beat for “P.R.A.Y.,” which sounds as if a broken elevator’s doors are being pried apart in stereo. Ka has never deployed a wide arsenal of flows or vocal tones; instead of seeming flat, his affectless voice gives the impression of seriousness, of persistence. This is most rewarding on the closing song, “I Love (Mimi, Moms, Kev),” where he writes to his wife, mother, and late friend with a touching vulnerability, but delivers the words with a steely remove, as if he has to gird himself to get through each verse in one piece.
For all the peril of Cain—walks to subway stops that have to be chaperoned, summers full of murder that just won’t end—it retains a strange optimism, in the notion that principled living is its own salvation. It is also something of a capstone on the rapper’s career. The album, and Ka’s entire creative project, is best summed up by the chorus on “Land of Nod.” “You can tell I’m in fact a native,” he raps, “I live this vivid shit—I ain’t that creative.” This is the great trick of Ka’s music: For all the technical wizardry, the innovation in writing style and sound design, he’s made his work seem like the natural, insuppressible product of the blocks that raised him.


The perfect ending to a recording career, this LP shows a band still in its prime, capable of songwriting and recording feats others could only envy.

Abbey Road

One more "like we used to" was how Paul McCartney framed it to producer George Martin; a chance to make a "good album" was George Harrison's take. They were hoping to bounce back after the serious downer that had been the Get Back sessions, which, months after they wrapped, had yet to yield an album anyone was happy with. But what "like we used to" meant, exactly, was rather hard to pin down: The Beatles' life as a band was so compressed, with such a massive amount of music and change packed into a short time, that there was never a single moment that could be used as a reference point for what a Beatles record was supposed to be. So when they returned to the EMI studios on Abbey Road in summer 1969, it wasn't clear how it would go. They still weren't getting along; their musical interests continued to diverge; John Lennon didn't really want to continue with the Beatles; Paul McCartney did, but on his own terms, which meant that he set the pace and got what he wanted. Though it was unspoken, they all had a good idea that this could really be the end. So what now? One more, then.
And what a finish. The Beatles' story is so enduring in part because it was wrapped up so perfectly. Abbey Road shows a band still clearly in its prime, capable of songwriting and recording feats other groups could only envy. Working for the first time exclusively on an eight-track tape machine, their mastery of the studio was undeniable, and Abbey Road still sounds fresh and exciting 40 years on (indeed, of the 2009 remasters, the improvements and sonic detail here are the most striking). Even if it's ultimately the Paul McCartney and George Martin show, as demonstrated on the famous second-side medley, everyone brought his A-game. Where Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band strained for significance, The Beatles was schizophrenic, and Let It Be was a drag streaked with greatness, Abbey Road lays out its terms precisely and meets them all. There's not a duff note on the damn thing.
This applies even if, like me, you've never quite understood the attraction of John Lennon's "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" and sometimes find yourself skipping ahead to George Harrison's second-side lead-off "Here Comes the Sun". "I Want You" is certainly a singular item in the Beatles discography, with its extreme repetition, stark simplicity, and epic three-minute coda, but it requires a certain kind of mood to appreciate. Yet, along with album-opener "Come Together", it also shows how Lennon finally found a way to square his latter-day interest in leaner and edgier rock'n'roll with trippy studio experimentation. Lennon's two big songs on the first side are raw, direct, and biting, but they're also lush studio creations, in keeping with the spirit of the album. And the sophisticated sheen laid over top has the effect of making them seem more like "Beatles songs" compared to, say, Lennon's White Album output. Abbey Road feels like one thing.
Paul McCartney's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and Ringo Starr's "Octopus's Garden", two silly, charming, childlike songs in a long tradition of silly, charming, childlike Beatles songs, round out side one. But then, oh: side two. The suite that runs from "You Never Give Me Your Money" through "Her Majesty" finds the Beatles signing off in grand fashion. Gathering scraps of material that had piled up, McCartney and Martin pieced together a song cycle bursting with light and optimism, and this glorious stretch of music seems to singlehandedly do away with the bad vibes that had accumulated over the previous two years. From the atmospheric rip of Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross" that is "Sun King" to the sharp pair of Lennon fragments, "Mean Mr. Mustard" and "Polythene Pam" (the former given a line about "sister Pam" to join the pieces), and on through the explosive, one-climax-after-another run of "She Came in Through the Bathroom Window", "Golden Slumbers", and "Carry That Weight", the nine fragments in 16 minutes add up to so much more than the sum of their parts.
The music is tempered with uncertainly and longing, suggestive of adventure, reflecting a sort of vague wisdom; it's wistful, earnest music that also feels deep, even though it really isn't. But above all it just feels happy and joyous, an explosion of warm feeling rendered in sound. And then, the perfect capper, finishing with a song called "The End", which features alternating guitar solos from John, George, and Paul and a drum solo from Ringo. It was an ideal curtain call from a band that just a few years earlier had been a bunch of punk kids from a nowheresville called Liverpool with more confidence than skill. This is how you finish a career.
The Beatles' run in the 1960s is good fodder for thought experiments. For example, Abbey Road came out in late September 1969. Though Let It Be was then still unreleased, the Beatles wouldn't record another album together. But they were still young men: George was 26 years old, Paul was 27, John was 28, and Ringo was 29. The Beatles' first album, Please Please Me, had come out almost exactly six and a half years earlier. So if Abbey Road had been released today, Please Please Me would date to March 2003. So think about that for a sec: Twelve studio albums and a couple of dozen singles, with a sound that went from earnest interpreters of Everly Brothers and Motown hits to mind-bending sonic explorers and with so many detours along the way-- all of it happened in that brief stretch of time. That's a weight to carry.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


Pairing the Colombian singer’s voice with the New York producer’s wistful electronic hybrids, this brief but endearing EP feels like a set of missives sent from the depths of a daydream.

♡ EP

On paper, Ela Minus and DJ Python are a woefully ill-fitting combination. Minus is a purveyor of combative, hard-edged techno and coldwave; her lyrics, often revolving around calls for rebellion or resistance against amorphous higher powers, give her songs the redolence of protest music, even if they are sometimes too vague to parse on a political level. Python, on the other hand, is prone to giving endearingly shitposty interviews but makes dance music with a soft touch and a gauzy, achingly romantic spirit. Minus’ music is throwback, nodding to New Order and ’80s European electronic styles, but focused firmly on the future; Python’s has a nostalgic and wistful air about it, even though his trademark fusion of reggaeton and house is quietly innovative. Despite their outward mismatch, though, something about their disparate sensibilities just seems to work together: ♡ (pronounced “corazón”), their new collaborative EP, is one of the best projects either artist has put their name to, a deft and moving dance record that feels casual but profoundly intimate.
At three songs, ♡ is all too brief, but it still covers a lot of ground; unlike Python’s most recent record, January’s Club Sentimientos Vol. 2, ♡ works as well as three distinct songs as it does as a suite of plush, wobbly mood music. The record’s final track, “Pájaros en Verano” (“Birds in Summer”) encapsulates the vibe of the whole EP. Over Python’s gentle, marimba-like synths, Minus sings about the relief of experiencing a relationship after an isolating pandemic:

After all the days that never happened
And the nights that didn’t exist
I can’t complain
’Cause I got you
Now I don’t want to live a life without you

Where the vagueness of Minus’ lyrics can sometimes work against her, the empty space she leaves here is welcome; it’s a pandemic-era track that mourns for lost time without getting weighed down by unnecessary specifics. Python’s work—he composed and produced the instrumentals, which Minus wrote lyrics and melodies to—is as tasteful and restrained as ever, but there’s a driving force to his synth melody that, combined with Minus’ soft, guileless vocal, almost makes the track feel like a chic update of Adrian Lux’s 2010 indie-EDM classic “Teenage Crime,” ridding that song of its extremely era-specific build while retaining its weary optimism.
“Pájaros en Verano” is ♡’s most specifically pandemic-related song, but its themes hang in the air on the rest of the EP. On “Abril Lluvias Mil,” Minus stews in regret over past relationships (“Everything you once said and you wish you could take back/Everyone you once hurt and you wish you could hold now”) over a faint, dubby synthline and barely there dembow beat, one of Python’s signatures. Like HTRK, Python and Minus use dub to convey a kind of pervasive yearning: The fractured, decaying synth line mirrors Minus’ lyrics about loss, a musical palimpsest that becomes more amorphous and distorted the closer you get to it.
These songs are simple, and they’re very much within Python’s wheelhouse: Any of these instrumentals, with their glassy new-age synth tones and slight, muffled beats, could easily slot in on Club Sentimientos Vol. 2. But when Minus sings over them, they feel dramatically different—like love letters or diary entries, missives sent from the depths of someone else’s daydream. Even “Kiss U,” little more than a looping beat and a few lines repeated by Minus, has a compelling, romantic softness to it: “My world has ended many times before/But now that you’re in it/None compare.” The lyrics themselves are nothing special—as vague, if not more so, as anything on Minus’ 2020 album acts of rebellion. But the plain, even mournful tone of her voice feels vastly different when set to Python’s spacious, heavenly beat. The softness of Python’s music has unlocked a new depth to her performance; by the same token, the profound sadness that Minus hints at gives his work, which can occasionally feel like vibe music, a new sense of gravity. They may seem like opposites, but the synergy of Minus and Python’s collaboration feels like a testament to what Minus preaches across ♡: The blissful harmony of two souls finding each other.


The Mountain Goats' new LP is dedicated to John Darnielle's childhood pro-wrestling heroes, using the particulars of their lives to explore his own personal mythology. There’s a noble simplicity to these songs, reflecting Darnielle’s warm memories of his fandom.

Beat the Champ

Take it from French philosopher Roland Barthes, who summarized the appeal of professional wrestling thusly in his landmark essay collection, Mythologies*.* "What wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice," he wrote. Elemental forces faced off in the form of nearly naked men and women hustling and tussling with each other in the squared circle. There was a good guy and a bad guy, and you cheered for one of them.
Since Barthes’ time, professional wrestling has developed in more complex—and some purists would say less satisfying—ways. But John Darnielle, leader of the Mountain Goats, grew up with the old wrestling. "These were comic-book heroes who existed in physical space," he writes of his formative fandom in the promotional copy for Beat the Champ, the band’s new album. "I was a child. I needed them, and, every week, they came through for me." Darnielle rooted for the heroes. His stepfather, who he’s memorialized as a troublesome if not frequently terrifying presence in many Mountain Goats songs, rooted for the villains.
Beat the Champ is not about Darnielle’s relationship with his stepfather. Instead, it’s about those men and women who were the wrestlers of his childhood, and what they went through while bringing him and children like him their weekly entertainment. These wrestlers don’t make appearances on "Today". Like the hero of "Southwestern Territory", they suffer long drives between sleepy towns for the promise of a few bucks and a patchy broadcast on black-and-white TV. Darnielle crawls inside their heads, his voice switching between his recognizably nasal drill and a tender lower register as he chronicles their camaraderie and willingness to hurl their bodies into each other.
The Mountain Goats have been a proper band for more than a decade, and Darnielle is once again backed by the sturdy rhythm section of Peter Hughes and Jon Wurster, who push him forward without getting in his way. The horns from 2012’s Transcendental Youth return on "Foreign Object", in which Darnielle acts out a promo—those speeches where wrestlers shout threats and taunts at each other—by vowing that he "personally will stab you in the eye" with an improvised shiv made from tape.
The rest of the record isn’t as brassy as "Foreign Object", an obvious crowd-pleaser, but it’s occasionally as bold. Darnielle’s exhortations on "Choked Out" channel the bloodlust of a wrestler ready to risk it all for fame. The down-tuned, menacing "Werewolf Gimmick" echoes "Psalms 40:2" from 2009’s The Life of the World to Come as it eulogizes those "nameless bodies in unremembered rooms," the arrangement rumbling like a car coming apart at the screws. "Stabbed to Death Outside San Juan", which loosely tells the story of real-life wrestler Bruiser Brody (who, yes, was stabbed to death outside San Juan) unfolds like a radio play, as Darnielle’s speak-song delivery is intermittently interrupted by a tremendous crash of strings and organs.
These songs describe the psychological states of the wrestlers ("I try to remember what life was like long ago/ But it’s gone, you know?", from "Southwestern Territory") but they also find ways to fit into the mythology of Darnielle’s life. That tyrannical stepfather does pop up on lead single "The Legend of Chavo Guerrero", which narrates the title character's life from Darnielle's young eyes. The case for Chavo as Darnielle’s personal hero is as earnest as it is heart-tugging, and it explains why he made this record: "You let me down, but Chavo never once did/ You called him names to try to get beneath my skin/ Now your ashes are scattered on the wind."
One of Darnielle’s premier talents as a musician is his ability to cast personal mantras as singalong anthems. At his best, his songs feel as essential as water. Mountain Goats fans will testify to the healing powers of standing arm-to-arm with hundreds of people while shouting "I am going to make it through this year if it kills me." Beat the Champ, however, eschews universality by coming from such a specific point of view. You don't necessarily need to know what a heel turn is in order to connect with "Heel Turn 2", but it doesn't hurt.
There’s a noble simplicity to these songs, though, reflecting Darnielle’s warm memories of his wrestling fandom. The respect he has for these men and women, and what they must have been through, is obvious. On "Unmasked!", a wrestler sings to his costumed opponent, whom he's about to defeat and subsequently unmask before the world. For wrestlers who choose to perform with a mask, hiding their real face is everything. To reveal it is an incredibly serious act. But the pressure of maintaining this illusion for the dwindling crowds has gotten to this anonymous masked man, who is ready to move on. "By way of honoring the things we once both held dear, I will reveal you," his opponent sings. When you’re a kid, what’s happening on TV isn’t very complicated. Then, you grow up and learn the truth.


The latest tape in the West Coast producer’s series is understated, but reveals how good he is at letting genre artists approach the best versions of themselves.

DJ Muggs: Soul Assassins 3: Death Valley

Soul Assassins 3: Death Valley

After landing a series of crossover hits, Cypress Hill turned to Indiana Jones for inspiration. Where their early records pulsed with blunted humor and buzzed paranoia, 1995’s Cypress Hill III: Temples of Boom was slower and eerier: DJ Muggs’ spare instrumentals underscored B-Real and Sen Dog’s erratic delivery, the drums echoing like footfalls in a drafty cathedral. Subsequent efforts—including 2000’s Skull & Bones and 2001’s Stoned Raiders—leaned into the same dank ambience and lost-world mysticism, ornamented skeletons glinting on the album art. Throughout their career, Muggs imposed gentle order, wrangling his bandmates’ idiosyncrasies with evocatively bleak production.
When Cypress Hill lost steam, Muggs continued to score increasingly murky soundscapes. His trademark is a deadened gloom—evoking the listlessness that ensues once the anti-psychotics kick in—and his ongoing Soul Assassins series maintains a creeping, hypnotic tension. The latest installment, Soul Assassins 3: Death Valley, showcases regional stylists like Meyhem Lauren, T.F, and 2 Eleven, promoting their expressive quirks. While Muggs’ instrumental loops are fairly static, their ominous chords, spiky guitars, and crafty engineering make for reliably intricate compositions.
Muggs’ discernment elicits striking performances. He knows when to stay out of the way: “Where We At” consists of little more than a bassline and trilling flute, leaving space for Boldy James to parade an anguished, lopsided flow. Scarface has rapped over so many piano dirges that Muggs’ raw snare on “Street Made” is a revelation, revealing the crags and hollows of Face’s cavernous voice. Muggs pairs vocalists for compatibility rather than contrast: Roc Marciano and Crimeapple’s behind-the-beat cadences on “Crazy Horse,” Ghostface and Westside Gunn’s exuberance on “Sicilian Gold.”
Death Valley is understated even by Muggs’ standards, but his steady hand is evident alongside Rome Streetz, whose couplets land in peppery sprays, and Jay Worthy, a gangland chronicler who likes to scribble outside the lines. Each appears twice on Death Valley; Muggs’s production has a humbling effect, centering their musicality and dialing down their usual shit-talking. Slick Rick, of course, requires no coaching—the icon turns in a thrilling, unnerving performance on “Metropolis,” slithering around the drum pattern while mirroring Muggs’s cockeyed sensibility. It’s a moment of mutual recognition, a legendary rapper realizing his percussive capacity on a track tailor-made for his voice.
If Muggs is overshadowed by Madlib and Alchemist, it’s partly due to his collaborative deference, his willingness to cede the stage on his own projects. This quality is one of Death Valley’s many strengths—with Muggs in their corner, genre artists approach the best versions of themselves. The guest roster and sampler format provide entry points to Muggs’ moodier full-length collaborations, glimpsing ideas explored more fully on Death & the Magician, What They Hittin 4, and Champagne for Breakfast. Death Valley is a journey to the threshold, close enough to see the jewels gleaming within.


Wiki’s new album is an acidic and vivid manifestation of his city, at times surreal and too real, with contributions from Earl Sweatshirt, Kaytranada, Ghostface Killah, and more.

No Mountains in Manhattan

”I’m straight New York, what a lot of ya’ll pretending to be!” Thus spat a curly-haired, baby-faced, North Face-clad teen by the name of Wiki back in 2012, his nasally voice sharp and acidic. Two years after “Wikispeaks” appeared on Ratking’s first EP, the trio—featuring poetic philosopher Hak, the MPC-slapping producer Sporting Life, and Wiki minus a few teeth—released their outstanding debut So It Goes and were dubbed the city’s “hip-hop heirs.” Before a proper full-length follow-up ever materialized, the group more or less dissolved with each member pursuing his own projects. But Wiki, born Patrick Morales, has never ceased in his quest to chronicle his New York.
Wiki’s new album No Mountains in Manhattan is a vivid manifestation of the city, at times surreal and too real. After the touring that colored much of his 2015 mixtape Lil Me, Wiki is back in Manhattan shouting out Mario with the bacon egg and cheese, hitting up Chinese joint Noodletown, and getting blunted at friends’ cribs. “I like the 1 train, bagel with lox, crushing the mic/I like the sunset on the Hudson, look at the light,” he spills on the joyous opener “Islander.” No Mountains opens with three of the strongest songs (”Islander,” “Mayor,” and “Pretty Bull”) Wiki has made to date, stories of his “first chapter” and his community. These tracks luxuriate in soul samples and latin rhythms, tones that constantly blast from taxicabs and sidewalk boomboxes. Later on, he’s quick to feature local rappers from ACAB and Slicky Boy to Ghostface Killah, and brings in visiting talent like Earl Sweatshirt, Kaytranada, and DJ Earl to round out the day.
No Mountains in Manhattan would be a great record even if Wiki stuck to this urban bliss, but instead he confronts the city’s shadows to build a complex portrait of himself. While the 23-year-old has never come off as a naively cheerful bloke, his rising fame and professional responsibilities, the addictions and police presence that endanger his community now weigh heavy on him. He often has to snap out of a spiral by reminding himself that he’s no longer spitting in basements: “Alright/Slow down supposed to be the pro type/Tuck in my gold type kid/I ain’t gotta show off shit.” The weight seems to make Wiki decelerate his spitfire pow-pow tempo and savor the thick timbre of each word. The darkest and most dramatic example of this is “Pandora’s Box,” a thinly-veiled meditation on Wiki’s former relationship with rapper Princess Nokia. Over spacey, atmospheric beats provided by Sporting Life and Dadras, he and Vancouver singer Evy Jane recall the intricacies of a relationship that veered into violence as much as it did growth.
But as if emerging from the city’s underbelly, the final moments of No Mountains (particularly the hilariously cheerful “Nutcrackers”) return to the lighter fare. It’s a full-circle that reveals Wiki’s “straight New York” to be one of contrasts: a city that’s vast and small, lonely and overcrowded, hopeless and infinite. No Mountains doesn’t reinvent New York rap, it buries itself in it. Like a passenger on the 2 from Downtown Manhattan to Harlem, Wiki is posted in the corner seat, eyes-wide, cataloguing, getting high, and transforming an earlier visit to a bodega into an existential field study. These are certainly New York images, but Wiki’s attention to detail and personal investment makes it resonate beyond vague concrete jungles. Wiki has called himself Virgil in the past, but on No Mountains in Manhattan he fully assumes the roles of storyteller and leader.


Composed on hardware and recorded straight to tape without edits or overdubs, Adrian Mojica creates visceral, dystopian techno that reflects the deep thrum of the city.

Black Populous

As a student at SUNY Purchase, Adrian “Ace” Mojica had the chance to work with Phil Moffa, a producer of gritty techno who holds office hours and teaches classes on mastering techniques. Even though AceMo has been making music for a while (as a member of the New York club-music collective Swim Team, and with a duo of cassettes for Brooklyn’s Bootleg Tapes), Moffa’s hands-on, hardware-centric approach catalyzed an evolution in AceMo’s live techno to a dusty, wheezing beast, now realized more than ever on the visceral, dystopian Black Populous.
Before the first note of Black Populous hits, there’s a brief sound of hissing tape. This fuzzy electrical undercurrent runs through the album out of practical necessity. Armed with decades-old drum machines, synths, samplers, and a four-track cassette deck, AceMo forgoes the sharp-edged, chrome-plated possibilities of manipulating and arranging sounds on a computer for a more kinetic and expressive approach to making beats: sessions captured straight to tape, without edits or overdubs. This approach continues in the recent tradition of the New York underground: punk-techno from outlets like L.I.E.S., the dusty, muffled house of Terekke, or the low-slung moods of J. Albert. Call it “lo-fi,” but it’s the grimy byproduct of the city’s incessant throb—the take-no-prisoner beats reflect the necessity of hustling to make ends meet in a place as unforgiving as New York. Make noise with the tools you’ve got.
Mojica’s relentless energy bares its teeth on the grinding, eight-minute “Hip Hop Hoax,” and mid-album cut “X Train.” Both tracks are experiments in noise-wrangling, as feedback stretches and squeals into slimey motifs that sound freshly scraped from sewage pipes. The raw energy in “Hip Hop Hoax” is a guttural scream, anchored by a booming 808-style bass drum, trying to break out of its box. The punishing beat pumps through the overloaded mix, and the track sounds at its best with the volume cranked all the way up, as loud as Ace had it running in his studio when he cut the track. “X Train” zips along at almost 140 bpm, effectively simulating an elevated Brooklyn subway car running an express route, the cabin shakes side-to-side while wheels screech and passengers barrel forward.
Opening track “Acid Pact” features Detroit producer 2Lanes alongside Mojica as they dig into an electrical field of sputtering breaks and distant synths. “Acid Pact” feels more situated in the context of a whirlwind LSD trip than the 303/909 acid techno its name implies. Across seven minutes, fluttering synths and a commanding kick drum shift in and out of focus in a kaleidoscopic arrangement. It’s one of the deeper, less abrasive moments on the album, where softer edges feel like momentary comforts compared to the harsh environments these tracks reflect.
The final two cuts, “Black Populous” and “Time 2 Change (Regular Ass Chord)” dive even further into comforting corners. The title track’s gently bobbing melody recalls Huerco S. or Person of Interest, while rapid-fire, iambic kick drums feel like a heartbeat on the verge of attack. At nine minutes, album closer “Time To Change” offers little variation, while a gorgeous chord anchors the slowly building beat in a blunted haze—a gentle coda to a particularly biting, near-80-minute album.
Black Populous’ energy is only hampered by its length, with most tracks stretching upwards of six minutes. But the idea of a “black populous” has universal implications for AceMo, and the album doesn’t need to be digested all at once. Accompanying the release, Mojica writes: “Black is the color of endearment. Black is of pain, black is of freedom, black is cold, black is warm, black populous is whatever you, want it to be.” Even further, Black Populous is the thrum of New York, and in it, AceMo thrives.


Robert Pollard's 2013 included a fine Guided by Voices EP, an okay GBV album, an unfailingly sweet solo collection, and a public fight with drummer Kevin Fennell. He closes the year with Blazing Gentlemen, a headier, rockier solo offering*.*

Blazing Gentlemen

If there's anything like a normal year for Bob Pollard fans, 2013 wasn't it. These past 12 months did offer a fine new EP and an okay-enough album—their fourth since early 2012—from the reunited Guided by Voices. But it's become increasingly clear that a classic on par with the lo-fi legends' peak-era material might've been a little too much to ask for. Then there was the late-summer tiff between Pollard and drummer Kevin Fennell, whose unsuccessful attempt to peddle the beaten-to-shit drumkit he'd recorded many GBV classics on got him publicly shamed and subsequently fired by his old pal Bob. Bursts of drama notwithstanding, shows were few and far between, and side-hustles have been scant and largely of little consequence. The lone bright spot came this summer, when Pollard issued the rich, graceful Honey Locust Honky Tonk, instantly cementing itself as one of the best records under his own name. Now, Pollard's closing out this weird year with Blazing Gentlemen, a headier, rockier counterpoint to the unfailingly sweet Honey Locust.
For a guy who's made records every which way, the approach Pollard took with Gentlemen's construction is especially peculiar. Instead of appliquéing words onto melodies, he built these songs from the lyrics up, scouring his notebooks line-by-line for titles and lyrics, then writing melodies—and then chords—around those. Pollard's always been a collagist—sometimes quite literally—but this method feels especially piecemeal; every few lines, the underriding melody seems to shift, leaving behind any sense of continuity. Much of Pollard's best work has taken a similarly attention-deficient tack, although Gentlemen's disjointment is at the micro level, all mismatched segments and jarring transitions. And, given the wide range in quality between one segment to the next, your time with Gentlemen's spent waiting around for the good part, only to find it gone before you've been properly introduced.
Ramrodding through 16 songs in 32 minutes and change, Gentlemen may be the least classically pretty Pollard in ages; ballads are scant, distortion's applied liberally, and while the fidelity's fairly high and the instrumentation consistent, the collection—throwing Honey Locust's carefully considered lushness in stark relief—opts for the quick and dirty. Pollard and Gentlemen cohort Todd Tobias—together, responsible for every sound you hear on the record—have certainly arranged a plaintive melody or two in their day, but Gentlemen largely leaves these overexcitable songs to their own devices. Opener "Magic Man Hype" is held together by sheer inertia, rumbling through chord after oddball chord. The title track matches a sludgy verse to a towering chorus, which would be fine, if an out-from-nowhere bridge didn't pop up to derail the forward motion. "His passionless kisses are real hits and misses," Pollard sings on "Blazing Gentlemen", and that pretty much sums it up: song for song, Pollard records are typically a hodgepodge, but the eternally jumpy Gentlemen whittles that inconsistency down to a second-by-second basis.
Whenever Pollard can keep an idea in his head for more than a minute at a time, Gentlemen starts to click. The cowbell-imbued "Faking the Boy Scouts" sports the set's stickiest hook; sure, its verses are a tad on the jittery side, but unlike much of Blazing Gentlemen, they at least seem to be acquainted with the chorus that follows. "Tea People" is one of those effortlessly catchy, totally stupid stompers only Pollard can get away with, and again, its verse and chorus seem to have been in the same room before. But for every song that seems to have been conceived as a piece, there are two more assembled from whatever they had lying around. "Tonight's the Rodeo" is elegant enough at first, but its chorus—all three seconds of it—is given neither time nor space to develop itself as anything but a nuisance. The lyrics are just as scatterbrained as the music, notebook dumps turned not-so-exquisite corpses; Pollard-logic is never an easy path to follow, but Gentlemen gets your head spinning in a fashion that'll have you swearing off the stuff the next morning.
Are two half-formed ideas as good as one complete thought? Gentlemen seems to think so. But, for all of Gentlemen's nervy shapeshifting, its fitful thrills never quite make for a satisfying whole; it's too restless, too scattered, too gangly. Even the record's more-consistent-than-usual sound can't help hold these spasmodic, shapeshifting songs together for more than a couple minutes at a time. Some fans will no doubt revel in Gentlemen's endless discrepancies; after all, part of being a Pollard obsessive is learning to take the bad with the good. But, on Gentlemen, the bad and the good are so manically intertwined, it gets to be a little tough telling them apart. Gentlemen's about as interesting as middling Pollard records get, but it's middling all the same, a fittingly abnormal end to a most unusual year.


Dipset were always a theater of the absurd. On their first album in more than a decade, Cam’ron, Juelz Santana, and Jim Jones become a trio of almost no effort.

Diplomatic Ties

If the first Dipset album in 14 years makes you want to retrieve your Blogspot password, hold a beat before you get those computers putin’. In the last decade, Cam’ron, Juelz Santana, and Jim Jones have released massive amounts of music. But when was the last time any of it held public interest for more than a few days—“Pop Champagne,” maybe? Remember when Cam’ron was relegated to Vado’s sidekick for a year or so? Remember that Jim Jones dropped an album called Wasted Talent in April? Does Jim Jones?
This is the phoned-in, diminished version of Dipset that shows up for Diplomatic Ties, an utter lack of engagement serving as its only unifying thread. The posse track with the LOX is titled “Dipset/LOX,” just enough to differentiate from the previous “D-Block/Dipset.” There is a “Dipset Forever,” though unrelated to the Purple Haze closing track of the same name. Diplomatic Ties’ nine numbers clock in just 30 minutes, like they’re suddenly an indie rock band. They couldn’t even bother to pad it out with Cam’ron laughing at his voicemail or an interlude where Hell Rell defends his title as “the Rakim of the jail-phone freestyle.”
Effort has always been tough thing to quantify on a Dipset record, though. Cam’ron can act like the process of rapping is entirely beneath him while smirking at the way the English language bends to his will; Killa Cam deflated the purist enterprise of the Rap City freestyle by counting a stack of bills while letting off the greatest freestyle in the show’s history. The Diplomats were a crew whose disregard for social decorum made them a movement for fans who took their theater of the absurd very seriously—see Das Racist, at times a Dipset tribute act. Juelz Santana referred to himself as the “young Mohammed Atta” of Dipset Taliban soon after 9/11, but they remained New York’s most beloved crew for the next five years. They signed to Roc-A-Fella and spent their entire stay locked in a cold war with JAY-Z. The Heatmakerz flipped Winger and Starship samples into street anthems. Cam’ron’s acts of occasionally unforgivable ignorance have been curated and ranked.
But as they’ve done consistently for the past decade or so, the trio mostly kills time in 16-bar increments over off-the-rack trap production here, putting the bare minimum of work into songs they know will get maybe half a minute of acknowledgment at a live show before returning to something from Come Home With Me. This is supposed to be the fun part of Dipset—Juelz rhyming the same word with itself a dozen times, Jim Jones setting new standards for grandiose ad-libs, Cam finding creative new ways to applaud his car and degrade his sexual conquests. But Jadakiss gets off the most memorable line, if only because “might’ve thought he was Drew the way he bled so” is dorky enough to get laughed out of a Grantland Gchat.
Jones has aged the best because the physical act of rapping always sounded like a draining ordeal, anyway; even at the peak of his powers, he rode the beat with the parking brake on. His new thing is to punctuate half his lines with “#facts,” as if anyone comes to Dipset to foster a healthy relationship with reality. “Inside a catfish/I don’t mean no picture prank,” Cam raps on “Sauce Boyz,” somehow seeming proud of that punchline despite sounding like he recorded Diplomatic Ties while fighting a nasty bronchial infection. As with The Program, Cam’s only impactful lyric comes at Kanye West’s expense, dismissing his claims of mental illness while calling him an Uncle Tom.
Justified or not, this has been standard operating procedure for Dipset, who never crossed a bridge they didn’t later burn. And yet, they continue to forsake everything that made them influential or even entertaining for a last-ditch pursuit of the chart success that eluded them during their critical zenith. Rather than engaging with the rappers they inspired (A$AP Mob, remember, was masterminded by a former Dipset intern, while Roc Marciano has inherited Cam’s throne of deadpan gutter talk), they throw guys like Murda Beatz and Belly on these tracks like they have any chance of filling a RapCaviar gap. Tory Lanez’s cameo on “No Sleep,” meanwhile, is so off-key it’s virtually avant-garde; it’s the most tone-deaf hook to appear on any track from a crew that has already employed Max B and Freekey Zekey.
Diplomatic Ties begins with an interview clip of Drake asking 40 to “make me some Dipset/Heatmakerz shit,” a demand that the actual Heatmakerz tracks from Diplomatic Ties can’t meet. During “Dipset Forever,” they make a Queen sample sound so cheap their only goal seems to be avoiding a clearance lawsuit.
Though noticed by mostly no one except surviving Dipset lurkers, former B-teamers Hell Rell, 40 Cal, and JR Writer united to drop an EP, The Upstage, on the same day Diplomatic Ties arrived. It’s almost entirely unlistenable yet weirdly compelling in its self-regard. During “Presidential,” for instance, JR Writer does his Swaggy P heat-check thing over a remake of “I’m Ready,” from Diplomatic Immunity. “Y’all all in the friend zone/’cause y’all ain’t fuckin’ with me/This shit is straight platonic/Got it?/Cut the shit, dickhead/Lorena Bobbitt.” Yes, these are actual lyrics in 2018, but the way JR Writer treats them like irrefutable proof that he’s the greatest rapper alive is kind of inspiring. We should all listen to it every morning before work.
Meanwhile, the last time Cam sounded even remotely interested in his legacy was on Uncle Murda’s minor Hot 97 novelty hit, “Cam’ron Voice”—a depressing and undeniable acknowledgment of Cam becoming Twitter public domain. If Purple Haze was indeed “the album that launched a thousand rap blogs,” Diplomatic Ties is just more proof that they’ve long been a better source for new Dipset lyrics than the real thing.


Smog man's first release under his birth name is also his least experimental: Anchored by rich string arrangements courtesy of Royal Trux's Neil Michael Hagerty (who also co-produced), the album is a relatively straightforward collage of country, folk, and classic Austin indie.

Woke on a Whaleheart

Like pal and labelmate Will Oldham, Bill Callahan has spent much of the last decade shrouded in quasi-anonymity, recording under the guise of Smog, or most recently, (smog). Appropriately, Woke on a Whaleheart, Callahan's first release under his birth name, is also his least explicitly experimental. Anchored by Callahan's deep, loping pipes and rich string arrangements courtesy of Royal Trux's Neil Michael Hagerty (who also co-produced), the album is a relatively straightforward collage of country, folk, and classic Austin indie.
Callahan may finally be stepping into his own name, but in both narrative and sound, Woke on a Whaleheart is insistently vague, riddled with half-thoughts and muddled images. Accordingly, opener "From the River to the Ocean" flatly implores us to "have faith in wordless knowledge"-- to submit to the nebulous truth inherent to all big things (see: love, nature, and death). Whaleheart's instrumentation follows suit, meandering and slack, with bits of piano and percussion, twisty guitars, and itinerant melodies. Imprecision is hardly the backbone of great art, but it's still strangely easy to be seduced by Callahan's cloud, and if you can learn how to listen to his loose, flowing stories without scouring the sky for a payoff, there are plenty of bits to enjoy here.
Lyrically, themes range from banal (in "A Man Needs a Woman or a Man to be a Man", Callahan finds his rose-addled bedroom kinda girly, declaring "It's pretty womanly in here!") to metaphysical (in single "Diamond Dancer", a girl dances herself into a diamond, "doing the thing as she dreamed it.") The jangly, sweet-faced "Sycamore" finds Callahan crowing hard about the cycle of life over tinny guitar and light drums: "He taught me to love in the wild and fight in a gym/ He taught me the bottle gives birth to the cup/ And you won't get hurt if you just keep your hands up/ And stand tall/ Like Sycamore."
Callahan's voice, meanwhile, is thick and precise, tempered only by the smallest hints of grit-- on "The Wheel" he channels Outlaw composure, sounding like a cross between Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings with all his round sounds and bellows. The track even features gospel-singer back-up (provided by the lovely Deani Pugh-Flemmings) and vaguely biblical spoken proclamations ("The wheel has turned one full circle/ Time for my meal of wood").
Woke on a Whaleheart is a deceptively easy listen-- steady, lulling, and vehemently organic-- but consequently, it can begin to feel invisible. Sound fades into sound, until silence is noise. Still, it's hardly facile: Violinist Elizabeth Warren and guitarist Pete Denton make sparks, and various other players dip in and out, offering Wurlitzer, found sounds, Farfisa, lap steel, glockenspiel, and Hammond organ. Callahan may have ditched the instrumental, uber lo-fi methodology of his earliest days, but Woke on a Whaleheart is still a fully realized event, if not necessarily a game-changing one.


Richie Hawtin's first official studio album in over a decade finds the techno pioneer in an unusually nostalgic mode.

From My Mind to Yours

The title of Plus 8 Records' 25th anniversary release—which is also Richie Hawtin's first official studio album for over a decade—From My Mind to Yours, directly mirrors a compilation put out by the label in 1991-2, From Our Minds to Yours. That symmetry forms a tidy back to the label's origins, and it also serves as the crowning moment of this uncharacteristically nostalgic chapter of Richie Hawtin's career. Thus far, Hawtin has cultivated a reputation as techno's future fetishist, most literally through Minus, the heavily stylized record label that provided minimal techno with one of its key aesthetics during its mid-2000s heyday: subtractively austere, steely and clinical.
The video interview that accompanied the surprise release of From My Mind to Yours in December found Hawtin in a completely different place. He was positively twinkly-eyed with nostalgia, as he talked of "going back to basics." He credits vintage string sounds and production tricks, while speaking of stripping racks of gear back to the essentials in a Berlin studio that, by chance, replicates the dimensions (and spatial sweet spot) of a former production space from his formative years in Canada. In the weeks leading up to the final reveal of From My Mind to Yours, Plus 8 pressed up a series of album teasers; it was widely speculated that Hawtin, an occasional critic of the "pain in the ass" vinyl format, was behind the anonymous, white-label productions. In the midst of this campaign, he revived his 1990s rave night, Jak, for a one-off reunion party in Detroit, and made arrangements to pull the plug on the Ibiza superclub residency of his popular club night, ENTER.
From My Mind to Yours similarly hints towards some gratifying full-circle moments. "Them," under the F.U.S.E moniker, unfolds with slow-reveal hypnotism, and works as a faithful tribute to the classic blueprint of Midwest techno. Album opener "No Way Back" draws together various strands of Hawtin's production personalities, casting a crystalline modern sheen over a thickened kick drum and twisting 303 line. Yet the album's genuinely compelling moments are scattered out over spotless plains of DJ-tool functionality, mechanically loopy acid, and towering-but-harmless walls of precise techno sound design.
The most Hawtin-esque production tropes since the inception of Plus 8 (and Minus) reappear here, but with neither the vigour needed to push his futurist agenda, nor the dynamic context of his rich back catalog."Stretching" requires a vivid imagination to find an appeal beyond its minimalist bare bones, and Circuit Breaker's only appearance—the curiously unmoving "Systematic"—doesn't begin to approach the gruffness of that alias' industrial past. The clutch of tracks that fall under the 80XX alias play directly to the critical cliches that Hawtin is often accused of creating. Plastikman, the most beloved of Hawtin's identities, fares the best across the two-volume album. His signature hyper drums appear on the bold "Purrkusiv," and its visceral power is undeniable; follow-up track  "Gymnastiks" deploys its sleazy bassline and wispy drum echoes to a satisfying yin-yang effect.
Hawtin's '90s techno hero status was cemented with landmark classics like "Spastik" and "Elektrostatik," which in turn assured a spot for Plus 8 in the annals of techno history. The label's only other recent release arrived unannounced last year: an anonymous record that was eventually revealed to be produced by electro house megastar and Twitter hothead Deadmau5. This was an unpopular revelation in certain quarters, but it worked both as a gossip-worthy moment and an effective jolt of renewal for the label's run-up to its 2015 anniversary; the tracks's production standards signalled a revived richness of sound that the label lacked in its latter years. At moments, From My Mind to Yours captures some of that same texture and immediacy, but the spontaneity and looseness that Hawtin speaks of so passionately have been diluted through the process of translation. Rather than feeling like the beginnings of a new phase, From My Mind To Yours presents a version of a fertile past that isn't working toward the benefit of the present.


Derailed by a murky copyright claim, Dark Night of the Soul is worth tracking down. Among the many guests are Wayne Coyne, Gruff Rhys, and James Mercer.

Danger Mouse / Sparklehorse: Dark Night of the Soul

Dark Night of the Soul

The Dark Night of the Soul, a term coined by the 17th century Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross, describes a point in a pious Christian's life when they are unable to reconcile their relationship to God, and take painful steps to purify themselves. Mark Linkous-- better known as Sparklehorse-- would seem to understand something about trials and endurance. If any current performer has endured traumatic, life-altering experiences-- an early-1990s overdose that damaged his legs and almost killed him, several years in and out of states of severe depression and addiction-- while retaining an optimistic disposition, it's him.
In 2005, Linkous' friends tried to pry him out of a depressed state by playing him new music. One record that struck him was Danger Mouse's The Grey Album, which led to a mutually appreciative relationship between the two artists. Danger Mouse worked on a few songs on Sparklehorse's 2006 return-to-form Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain, cutting Linkous' delicate, hermetic songs with a new type of sharpness and color. In interviews for that record, Linkous and Danger Mouse kept dropping hints at a future collaboration: maybe it would be called Dangerhorse, maybe Sparklemouse. It would be something.
It ended up as Dark Night of the Soul, involving more than a dozen noteworthy musical collaborators as well as David Lynch, who signed on to create a 100-page book of original photography inspired by Linkous and Danger Mouse's music. As news leaked the buzz grew louder, and people were excited for a reason: Dark Night combined the best elements of a classic rock event with a very modern strategy. Links between the film, music, and art worlds were established, a ton of stars gathered together under the creative guidance of a couple of relative recluses, a regular old CD was marketed like a Hollywood blockbuster and packaged with a photo album for 50 bucks.
Unfortunately, it's even become a "lost album," as well-- the victim of a record label acting like a lawsuit-happy killjoy. In the last few weeks, it came to light that the record was being shelved due to some sort of mysterious copyright claim from EMI (who weren't too happy with Danger Mouse's first foray into recorded music, either). Danger Mouse, who has emerged as the public face of the project, issued a statement that the book would thus be issued with a blank CD, ostensibly for burning leaked copies of the album.
This is one particular circumstance where a leak-- even at 160kbps-- is a net positive. This project, incomplete as it may be, is certainly worth "possessing," in whatever form that takes. Linkous and Danger Mouse both have proven conclusively in the past that they know how to choose collaborators, and Dark Night is a well-sequenced and unique album that ingeniously balances its contributors' strengths with the overall theme of the work-- self-examination, often under stark circumstances, in the interest of understanding one's own existence.
It's not signaled outright, but Dark Night comprises four sections, and plays like a revue. Linkous has always feared putting himself out there too much, and seeming too "pop." It makes sense that he'd open this collection with a triptych from Wayne Coyne, Gruff Rhys, and Jason Lytle, all of whom frequently sing in Linkous-like registers shot through with delicate, boyish wonder and play with psychedelia in similarly rewarding ways. On "Revenge", Coyne works in a wheelhouse he's not seen since The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi, evangelizing, "Once we become/ The thing we dread/ There's no way to stop," in the form of a plangent ballad. For his part, Gruff Rhys works best at the level of empire, and the fuzzy psych-country of "Just War" could fit nicely on Phantom Power. As is his manner, Lytle's "Jaykub" traces an everyday schlub's dream of receiving official awards for simply being himself-- until the alarm clock wakes him up.
The middle two sections of the record are its weakest, but there are rewards all the same. Julian Casablancas' "Little Girl" opens what could be dubbed the "punk" section, his slick insouciance sounding strangely out of place eight years after Is This It, at a time when punk vocal styles have largely trended toward the amateurish and overdriven. Regardless, he's able to effectively register his everyday/macho character, nonchalantly singing in front needly guitars (and a rock solo!). It's followed by Frank Black's "Angel's Harp", one of the more forced-feeling cuts, and then Iggy Pop's "Pain", on which he ramps up his best, darkest croon, looking back at his life with a mix of regret and pride. The guitars on Pop's piece are strikingly reminiscent of those on the Magazine song "Shot By Both Sides", which is noteworthy because Real Life was re-released in 2007 by, you guessed it, EMI. The guitars are too crucial to the piece to lose, and Iggy's too big of a name to drop from this collection. Perhaps "Pain" is the reason for the forced abandonment of this whole thing?
Either way, Dark Night shifts again after "Pain" to its second psychedelic section, featuring David Lynch himself, another Lytle number, "Everytime I'm With You", on which he is completely resigned to just hanging out and getting resoundingly fucked up, and James Mercer. Lynch's "Star Eyes (I Can Catch It)" is a piece of muddy string-laden psychedelia, but Mercer's effort, the wonderfully titled "Insane Lullaby", is one of the finest moments on the album. Turns out that Mercer is as much a doppelganger for Linkous as Lytle, Coyne, and Rhys, and his cadence and vocal inflections are situated amidst a gently stunning cacophony of glitches, bells, and strings. He sounds like he's lost, but he also sounds like he's loving it.
Dark Night's best sequence is its last one, when Linkous reunites himself with Nina Persson, formerly of the Cardigans, and singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt (both guested on the 2001 Sparklehorse LP Its Wonderful Life). Persson and Linkous split vocal duties on the country-tinged number "Daddy's Gone", the lovely, sentimental sort of "pop" that Linkous has always seemed so afraid of, yet is also exceedingly, seemingly effortlessly, capable of making. Chesnutt finishes the record with "Grim Augury", which, along with the Lynch-feauring title track, is a fitting one-two punch of rural eccentricity that allows Linkous to reengage with the woodshed hermit side of his musical persona.
Dark Night of the Soul has been pitched as a marquee collaboration without precedent, which makes the mundane EMI copyright baloney that scrapped the project all the more depressing. But while Danger Mouse, Lynch, and the dozen or so artists involved with the project contributed their talents, the feeling I get from Dark Night is all Linkous. In genre terms-- punk rock, country, schizophrenic folk, psychedelia, space-rock-- the album neatly indexes his own discography as much as the overriding thematics do. It's fitting, then, that an artist who is on one hand so admittedly fearful of performance, and on the other has such a knack for collaboration, would make an album such as this, on which a group of musical actors present his work while he stands off to the side in the shadows.


Reportedly recorded in 2 weeks, Late Nights: Europe is a polished, 14-track libertine manifesto, wrapping up a trilogy of odes to the grown and sexy. Featuring Ty Dolla $ign, Wiz Khalifa, and more.

Late Nights: Europe

After celebrating his 29th birthday with a set at the Pitchfork Festival in Chicago, hometown hero Jeremih hinted at some new music, which arrived last Wednesday in the form of Late Nights: Europe. Jeremih Felton has been rather bounteous in recent times, adding this mixtape to his discography just a few months after Late Nights: the Album dropped in December 2015. The latter project was his third bonafide studio effort, for those who observe the distinction strictly, trailing 2010’s All About You by five years. Europe materialized at light speed by comparison. Reportedly recorded in two weeks, it’s a polished, 14-track libertine manifesto. Following 2012’s Late Nights with Jeremih and t**he Album, Europe wraps up a trilogy of odes to the grown and sexy.
The tape’s title indicates a concept, insofar as our protagonist still thrives in the hours after the after party. Rather than a sudden desire to sing over French touch beats, the Europe of it all denotes location—recording sessions took place during the overseas stops of his summer tour. Even then the application is loose, as opener “Dubai” proves that he’s limited by neither geography nor genre. With assists from K Camp and Wiz Khalifa, the trio rides on trap-inspired drum patterns laced with a twinkling piano riff, and we get reacquainted with Rapping Jeremih.
This braggart alter ego shows up again on “Lebanon,” “Amsterdam” and “Oslo, Norway,” flexing with a morning-after rasp in his voice, worn and torn during wild nights on stage and in pursuit of overwhelming women. The production, courtesy of Soundz on all but two songs, provides the perfect backdrop for him to hone his delivery, which is at times reminiscent of the drawling, yelping flow that’s currently in style. Think more Atlanta, less Brandenburg, although track three “Berlin (She Wit It)” is noteworthy for an irresistibly simple refrain that you can find yourself mumbling at random moments during the day.
Unsurprisingly, the best songs are the ones that showcase Singing Jeremih and his velvety voice. “Czech Republic,” a love song with a soft-core slant, is the standout track for that reason. There must be something in the Nordic air: because two of the tape’s winners are “Copenhagen” and the raunchier “Stockholm.” Pillow talk is present throughout but “Paris (Who Taught You)” is essentially sonic porn, thanks to Ty Dolla $ign.
Their collaborations are studies in lewd one-upmanship, with Ty Dolla $ign usually winning. But that’s a huge part of Dolla’s brand, an arguably more knowable one than Jeremih’s. Notoriety in post-Internet pop culture comes from either persistent productivity, or commitment to a level of visibility that generates interest—even in the absence of creative output. Jeremih’s approach lies somewhere in between these two modi operandi.
He’s constant, if not necessarily prolific, while revealing very little of himself via today’s most social media channels. You recognize him from the hook of that one song, and he has independently parlayed his immense talent into platinum-selling triumphs, but he still remains something of an enigma. Jeremih almost never releases videos to accompany his singles, and through your mind’s eye it’s hard to picture his face without sunglasses on—like a less rambunctious Lil’ Jon. On “British Headboardz,” a hazy slow jam complete with bed squeaks that would make Trillville blush, his ideal companion is one who knows that there’s no “a” in his name.
This harks back to 2009’s “Birthday Sex,” Jeremih’s cheeky breakthrough single that was popular long before everyone learned how to pronounce his name properly. His sound has evolved a lot since then, perhaps as a conscious effort to rebrand away from that single, but undoubtedly because of the lifestyle change that followed its chart success. If t**he Album was the realization of his new sound, Europe was his chance to experiment with it away from the label pressures that hounded his previous release.
It’s rare to go through trials without error—the juke-riffing “Belgium (Get Down)” ends up sounding like a reference track in context. But the fault for any missteps on Europe lies for the most part with the tape’s supporting players. Verses from the Game and Krept & Konan are superfluous, although the dancehall-tinged “London” is all the better for a coquettish appearance by Stefflon Don. Fame has taken Jeremih to many different places this summer, and his openness to creative inspiration in far-flung cities has paid off. If this is what he came up with in a fortnight, running on what couldn’t have been much sleep, the wait for what he does next should be worth it.


Young hypna-delic New Zealander Connan Mockasin's languid, mind-submerged Forever Dolphin Love is the work of someone sounding small but dreaming big.

Forever Dolphin Love

Young New Zealander Connan Mockasin's low-wattage, shuffle-footed, hypna-delic kiwi-pop's a little like shaking Syd Barrett awake from a nap, or maybe Tortoise jamming on Chills songs underwater. Or is it Black Moth Super Rainbow's Haunted Graffiti? Tricky as it is to pinpoint just what's sliding past in Forever Dolphin Love's psyche-mining slipstreams, it's awfully easy to get caught up in its current all the same. Mockasin's languid, drowsy psych-whimsy-- with its occasional brain-bending detours into a self-made language, more Sigur Rós goobledigook than WU LYF cookie monstrism-- seems to emerge from a gauzy dreamland state, only semi-conscious of its constantly shifting positions. But if you don't come to Connan Mockasin expecting too much pep the first few minutes he's up and going, the gears eventually start to turn.
Forever Dolphin Love opens with a gaggle of children shouting salutations at Mockasin: It is, by some distance, the loudest sound on the LP. The stark, almost gestural tunes, Mockasin's wiggly, high-pitched vocals-- whether slathered in Tobacco-style smear or unadorned-- and the record's murky, two-floors-up mix don't exactly get the heart rate rising, but Mockasin's ease around both hooks and arrangements offer plenty to catch your half-attention. Its spindly guitars and squirmy vocals suggest nobody's in any particular hurry to get anyplace, yet Forever Dolphin Love's drifty hooks, when he gets around to them, never seem to wander too far off course. (Once awoken by those kiddies in the record's first few seconds, Mockasin may be a bit crust-eyed throughout Forever Dolphin Love, but he's always got his wits about him.)
Opener "Megumi the Milkyway Above" is something of a slacker samba, its gently descending melody and chipmunk vocals beamed directly from Mockasin's subconscious to yours. It slides into the untethered, almost subliminal "It's Choade My Dear": Half-travelogue, half-come on, the tune wafts its way into the room and seems to hang there like a fog. Mockasin's oft-treated, clarity-averse, dare-I-say-wimpy vocals swallow syllables whole, further lending these slippery, spacious tracks their dreamlike quality. It's probably best, all told, that literal meaning takes a backseat to glorious nonsense on a record called Forever Dolphin Love. To that end, the title track-- all 10 minutes and four seconds of it-- is the album's deliriously comatose highlight, a rusty motorik giving way to a kooky, faux-naif, head-sticking hook. An occasional semi-Floydian found-sound burst swirls around the stereo field: The almost skeletal arrangements occasionally give way to a jazz-rock flare-up, but these eyelid flickers never seem to disturb Mockasin's semi-conscious state.
Dolphin glides casually through song and snippet, its construction almost elliptical, its effect amniotic. As such, its highlights seem to emerge after-the-fact, burrowing in while it's on and bubbling up later. Mockasin's a more ambitious songwriter than his sleepy demeanor would sometimes suggest, though-- the epic unravel of his tracks are proof enough of that. Ultimately, the ever-unraveling, mind-submerged Forever Dolphin Love reveals itself to be the work of a guy who's sounding small but dreaming big.


Following months of anticipation and hype, Odd Future's anarchic leader drops his second full-length: the bleak and uncompromising Goblin.

Goblin

A year ago, very few people knew Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. The nihilistic, mostly-teenaged L.A. rap collective has been releasing free mixtapes since 2008, but until recently, they were ignored by most of the rap blogosphere. Full of pathos, humor, and hatred, the group has worked tirelessly to establish their own intricate world online-- from their YouTube account, filled with self-produced videos, to their individual Twitters, Tumblrs, Facebooks, and Formsprings, all of which they update prolifically. To this tight-knit "us," virtually everyone else is a "them," to be mocked, laughed at, and fucked with.
Lots of people have been noticing OFWGKTA lately, though, and no wonder: They're new and exciting and divisive and youthful, a magnet for controversy and commentary, and near-perfect think-piece-generating machines-- due in part to the brutality and stomach-turning sexual violence of their raps. At the fore of OFWGKTA's 10-member army is Tyler, the Creator, whose feral stage presence, distinctive growl, and misanthropic lyrics have won the group a legion of obstinate followers. His 2009 debut, Bastard, with its lush, Neptunes-inspired productions and starkly confessional subject matter, is a transgressive, creative burst of anxiety and absurdity. It was one of Odd Future's early catalysts, and along with 16-year-old Earl Sweatshirt's Earl and the OFWGKTA mixtape Radical, it's one of three underground classics in their pocket.
While critics have attempted to square Tyler's talent with the frequent mentions of rape and murder in his rhymes (Sean Fennessey wrote a piece for Pitchfork early on, and this blog post by Pitchfork contributor Nitsuh Abebe is also essential), fans have pushed his number of Twitter followers well into six figures. And between he and Hodgy Beats' performance on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" and his excellent "Yonkers" single and video, the industry noticed, too: Billboard put OFWGKTA on their cover, a major label secured them to a record deal, and Diddy, Kanye, and Jay-Z all showed interest. Odd Future have earned so much attention so quickly that Tyler, the Creator kicks off his second solo release, Goblin, venting to his therapist about fame, message boards, critics, hype, expectations, media scrutiny, and being a role model-- before selling a single album.
There are a lot of expectations placed on Goblin, namely, that it will serve as a potential crossover. But while that might have been the hope for a lot of those industry co-signers, or even a lot of listeners, it's clearly not Tyler's intention. Goblin does not sound like a record made by the goofy, smiling kid with the pulled-up tube socks riding Jimmy Fallon's back. Instead, it's a natural sequel to Bastard-- a dark, insular indie-rap album. Where Bastard was more accessible and inviting, this album is bleak, long, monolithic, and can be a slog to get through. It's also uncomfortable and brave-- a brutal but honest look at Tyler's image of himself.
Musically, Goblin is essentially a turn-of-the-millennium indie rap record-- abstract, difficult for outsiders to locate a way in to, and bled completely of anything that resembles pop. It features almost nothing that counts as a chorus, making few gestures to the mainstream. It's a purist's record, leaning on inventive production and Tyler's flow and meter. With hindsight, then, it makes sense that the rise of Odd Future started in the avant UK music mag The Wire, which a decade ago was putting leftfield rap groups like cLOUDDEAD and Anti-Pop Consortium on its cover. In another world, before the Internet was the music industry's central delivery system, that might have been the limit of Goblin's reach-- it could have been a well-received indie hip-hop record to place alongside releases on Def Jux or Anticon. (Fittingly, it comes via XL Records, the imprint that last decade signed Dizzee Rascal, another culturally omnivorous, incredibly hyped teen rapper and producer who added a new wrinkle to independent hip-hop.)
Of course, Tyler isn't interested in the political questions that drove many of his indie-rap forbearers. Instead, his primary mode of thought is negation. From the Stooges to Sex Pistols to NWA to Eminem, telling the world to fuck itself can be a compelling, even meaningful or necessary expression. Yet while each of those artists gave a multi-layered voice to specific disenfranchised groups, Tyler sounds underdeveloped when he attempts to articulate for anyone other than himself. His takes on slash-and-burn, knucklehead rap-- especially the "kill people, burn shit, fuck school" refrain of "Radicals"-- is particularly cringe-worthy; stock phrases shouted with no larger purpose. Goblin is at its best when Tyler sounds isolated, frightened, and confused. It's the work of someone trying to figure out the world around him and his place within it, someone who often doesn't like the conclusions he's drawing.
To his core fans, Tyler is accessible and approachable, and not just on record. He's online constantly, forging a unique bond with his listeners, and is probably right now shouting down this and other Goblin reviews. He comes across as an everyday kid. He lives with his grandmother. He likes porn; he hates collard greens. This relatability and strong audience/artist bond, and the diaristic nature of his rhymes, make him as much emo as hip-hop. His place in the indie music landscape is oddly most reminiscent of Salem, another gothic, often-derided group beloved by a core of committed young listeners but shrugged off by those with a more developed perspective. In short, he's made this record for alienated kids like himself. If you don't already like his music, you probably won't like Goblin. And that's apparently the way he wants it.
For everyone else, the album remains an either/or prospect. For one, the record could have used an editor-- it'd be stronger if it were 20 minutes shorter. Yet the highs are very high: "Yonkers" remains a potential frontrunner for song-of-the-year, and tracks like "Sandwitches", "Analog", "Tron Cat", and the Frank Ocean feature "She" work as standalones away from the album as a whole. Tyler's most inwardly focused songs-- the therapy-session set pieces "Goblin", "Nightmare", and "Golden"-- are also fascinating portraits from an unmoored mind struggling to remain grounded.
The record's feeling of drift and desperation also lends a very different tone to the controversial nature of Tyler's raps, which even at their most sickening feel like the ramblings of a lonely outsider. His fantasies and lack of filter are still huge roadblocks for many if not most listeners. They're depraved and despicable, tied in part to a long and unfortunate legacy of gangster and street rap. They're also one aspect of a larger, character-driven story-- a license that we grant to visual arts, film, and literature but rarely to pop music. That's not to claim Tyler is making some broader commentary about the world, or gender politics, or adding multiple layers of complexity to his more violent thoughts; he's not. Instead, his more reprehensible lines come across like a pathetic attempt for an underdeveloped, disconnected mind to locate some emotionality, control, or simply attention.
They certainly aren't jokes for his friends-- there's not a lot of humor on Goblin. The album really compartmentalizes the group's darkness and confusion, which makes sense because Odd Future guys like Frank Ocean and Domo Genesis usually weren't expressing anger or violence anyway. You sort of get the feeling-- since they are officially a package deal now-- that the weed stuff or the laughing-with-your-friends stuff might come out in a group effort. And even here, when other Odd Future members join Tyler, they tend to let a little light into the album-- particularly the Hodgy Beats pairings "Sandwitches" and "Analog". The coziness and camaraderie between Tyler and his cohorts even meets with a nasty end on Goblin, which concludes with a suite of tracks in which Tyler inexplicably kills his friends before suffering a total emotional breakdown.
What is here is more promise than delivery, yet it's still a game-changing record for indie hip-hop-- a singular and sonically complex album neither in hoc to 1986-88 "real" hip-hop nor created by rappers aiming to define themselves in opposition to the mainstream. (It takes about three minutes for Tyler to align himself with other artists here, but he chooses Erykah Badu, Pusha T, and Waka Flocka Flame instead of Immortal Technique.) Alongside Lil B and Soulja Boy, OFWGKTA are harnessing the Internet to communicate directly and often and pushing a new kind of indie hip-hop-- often rambling, not always musical, frequently surprising, and absolutely beloved by some. It takes work to get through, and a lot of its success rests on cult of personality. Those two barriers are particularly why it's so successful: You have to commit to it in many ways. You have to want to be an insider. And that's a club that's quickly expanding.


Turning their atmospheric soft focus on everyday life, this is as close as the Detroit dream-pop duo has come to making a pop record; it’s an ideal entry point into their sprawling catalog.

Allegiance and Conviction

Ambient and shoegaze musicians often like to cloak themselves in mystery, but Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren, who’ve been toiling at the seam between those genres for nearly three decades, are oracles of the ordinary. There’s no stylized anonymity, no attempt to persuade us that their drones are about the astronomical treatises of Johannes Kepler or whatever. They’re a married couple that runs a shop called Stormy Records in a suburb of Detroit, and while their music sounds enigmatic, it’s presented as a chronicle of domestic life at its most murky and poignant and, sometimes, quotidian: Blues for a UFO was framed by a text that might have been mistaken for a neighborhood-listserv rant. Refusing to put on esoteric airs, Windy & Carl reveal the complex, ambiguous timbre of even the plainest lives.
They aren’t a duo you look to for startling turns. Their dozens of releases since 1993 consist of minutely varied, grayscale watercolor studies of rain on windows, as their current press photo, so on the nose it has to be 15 percent joking, illustrates. But their new record, Allegiance and Conviction, stands out in two ways. The first is that the nine-minute “Moth to Flame” is the exception, not the rule; the other songs are almost half that length, each getting to the point and moving on more briskly than usual. The second is that the majority of them feature Weber’s vocals, which are usually more elusive. It’s as close as Windy & Carl have come to making a pop record (don’t worry, it’s not that close), and it’s an ideal entry point into a sprawling catalog.
Rather than relying on standard songwriting arrangements, Windy & Carl expertly draw out layer after layer from hulking yet delicate walls of quivering pitches and soft-edged shapes. Weber plays bass and sings; Hultgren uses delays, reverbs, and an EBow to multiply one electric guitar into an ambient orchestra, which he’s been doing since before it was a cliché. (He arguably helped invent that tactic, alongside contemporaries like Stars of the Lid.) The duo’s music has traces of 1980s dream pop and 1990s slowcore, particularly Low, another married-couple band. There’s more to the comparison than ink on a certificate. Marriage’s suffering and devotion breed a particular kind of intimacy. Windy & Carl often resemble an ambient version of Yo La Tengo, another group that centers on a long-wed duo and conveys a secret, profound sense of life beyond the music.
The record starts with “The Stranger,” with Weber’s vocals unusually high and exposed in the mix. She affects an almost tuneless Nico style, and your response might change from “This is bad singing” to “This is interesting singing” to “I could listen to this singing forever” in the space of a few lines. The bass is like a growl coming out of a cave, and Weber’s voice is a trail to follow as Hultgren sends shimmering timbres and echoing tones vaulting above. “I’m in plain view/Out looking for you/In the underground/We’ve got a job to do,” Weber sings. She might be talking about her uncharacteristically unveiled performance, her band’s cult-favorite status, or both, but it makes for a sharper, more sinister song than we’ve heard from these peddlers of pure atmosphere in ages.
From there, Weber’s voice sinks down, an unintelligible haunting, or a sound among sounds. But “The Stranger” incites a pressure that lasts through the giant, gentle pieces to follow. On the ravishing “Recon,” Hultgren patiently draws out a gently crying lead from sliding basses and slowly swirling plucks. “Alone” varies the graceful register with some tension, a tinge of desperation creeping into Weber’s voice amid the minor-key smears and anxious guitars. “Crossing Over” is the only time we hear anything resembling riffs, but even the supremely static “Moth to Flame” flickers with interior sparks. Though it’s as comforting as the whistle of a teapot, the music captures the feeling of storms—the atmospheric charge and churning motion—without resorting to volume or force. Being ordinary seldom seemed so wonderfully strange.


The singer-songwriter, inspired by seven national holidays (including Bruce Springsteen’s birthday), finds love, death, and wry humor in a few spectacular originals and a collection of covers.

2019 EP

Nothing ruins Mother’s Day quite like the death of one’s own mother. I suspect that the month of May has been ruined for me forever, that I’ll be averting my eyes from pastel window-dressings every spring until the good Lord takes me. A friend of mine struggles similarly with Halloween. And no holiday is more fraught, in this era of child separation and travel bans, than the Fourth of July. Taylor Swift went so far as to cancel her party this year, citing a “disillusionment with her country.”
Fittingly, in the holiday singles of her 2019 EP, Lucy Dacus isn’t throwing a party. She adopts a tone similar to Sufjan Stevens’ yuletide songs, sifting through the kitschy refuse of culture for little sentiments only she knows how to share. Mother’s Day becomes a moment to reflect on and heal from generations of matrilineal trauma. The opening lyric of “My Mother & I”—“My mother hates her body/We share the same outline/She swears she loves mine”—never sounded more gorgeous than when she performed the song alongside her own mother, during a Mother’s Day show in Asheville. On “Fool’s Gold,” New Year’s Eve fades into New Year’s Day, and Dacus sits alone and anxious in the ruins of the party she threw. And the Fourth, her favorite holiday, loses its luster as she asks listeners to consider their own complicity in American atrocities. She treats her weighty subjects with careful concision: short lines, simple phrasing. These are among the best songs she’s ever written.
For a host of other holidays, she opts for covers over original compositions, from a wry Halloween rendition of Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight”—according to her, “the best eerie bop of all time”—to a swooning, utterly sincere take on the Valentine’s Day standard, “La Vie en Rose,” sung first in French and then in English. Dacus’ singular voice—the warm, honeyed quality of her lower register, especially—sounds even better spilling over French syllables than English ones.
Her greatest effort, though, is a punchy romp through Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” recorded for the Boss’ birthday. In a recent essay titled “The Queerness of Bruce Springsteen,” critic Naomi Gordon-Loebl praised Bruce as something of a dykon, “so practiced and so precise that he might as well have learned it from the oldest lesbian at a gay bar.” There’s a special thrill, then, in hearing one of his standards rendered so lovingly by a queer woman like Dacus, especially given the long years she spent “in denial” about her sexuality. She comes closest to really celebrating when she’s channeling Springsteen; it’s the sound of a young woman who’s wanted to throw her arms around another girl for the longest time finally allowing herself to do so.
The collection’s one real dud is a riff on “Last Christmas,” which sounds, to borrow Dacus’s own phrasing, “a tad psychotic.” The fast, furious pace of the arrangement is meant to draw out the song’s long shadows, but it’s got about as much bite as one of those mid-2000s Punk Goes Pop compilations. Still, a single misstep in a year full of superb work is easy to overlook, and her “Last Christmas” is far from the most cringe-worthy offering of the season. Dacus intended 2019 EP as something of a diversion from her usual work, a series of stand-alones intended to flex new musical muscles. Perfect as these songs are for our moment, there’s an unmistakable staying power to them, too.

Buy: Rough Trade
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