Not out in record stores until late September, the Canadian indie pop band and its label Arts & Crafts wisely made its theatrical new album available for digital sales before it leaked.

In Our Bedroom After the War

For Canadian romantics Stars, love is war. And their modern love is strikingly similar to the world's modern war: confusion and anxiety topped with a sense of semi-staged dread. The presentation is great-- clean production, fine instrumentation, and careful arrangements-- but its undercurrent is pure self-doubt and longing. So while the quintet pushes its passion-based politics to the fore and includes the phrase "after the war" in the title of its fourth album, the emphasis is still "in our bedroom." Assuming you can dodge enough bullets to make it there.
Of course, the intricacies of relationships have always been Stars' specialty. "I am trying to say what I want to say without having to say I love you," chirped co-leads Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan on 2004's minor masterpiece Set Yourself on Fire, and the line's roundabout Valentine's Day logic could double as a band mantra. What sets their new album apart from previous material is setting, scope, and a newly inflated theatrical bent. Considering his decade-spanning IMDb resume-- not to mention an award nomination for 1983's boy-meets-sea creature drama The Golden Seal-- Campbell's mannered, Moz-y vocal delivery is hardly surprising. He's a ham, plain and simple. The singer's over-the-top preening is Stars' most divisive characteristic but, instead of toning things down, his acting chops and sense of Broadway pomp permeate Bedroom's high-gloss pop more than before. And, as any Hollywood-type will tell you, an actor is only as good as his script.
Playing a pill-popping whore looking to shatter his dead-end existence on the U2-style "Take Me to the Riot", Campbell brings his pitiful role to life with compassion. Backed by smashing cymbals and chiming tones, his ad-libbed plea to "let me stay, let me, let me stay!" erases the distance between the performer and his character. The Les Mis-esque weeper "Barricade" doesn't fare as well: Its storyline is trite (a couple brought together-- then torn apart-- by a common, radical cause!) and, accompanied by a lone piano, there's nothing for Campbell to hide behind. But even if it approaches cheeseball bluster, at least it's sorta ballsy. Muddled by forced postmodern nonsense and an oddly lifeless narrative, "Life 2: The Unhappy Ending" is about as boring as its title. Ironically, though she might not possess a SAG card, Millan's dramatic abilities often trump her partner's on Bedroom-- she's more subtle and natural whether nailing the album's straight-ahead pop songs on her own or bringing out Campbell's best on a couple stand-out duets.
Both "My Favourite Book" and "Bitches in Tokyo" find Millan pining for affection in unequivocal terms. "Book" runs with the blind optimism of the group's indie-hit "Ageless Beauty"-- a rare moment of guilelessness buoyed by an easy listening backdrop that would make Burt Bacharach giddy. The song provides a brief but welcome respite from the hurt and rejection surrounding it. (As if to immediately deflate the cheeriness, Millan snaps out of her rose-pedal haze with the first words of the following track: "Sweetness never suits me." Never say never.) "Bitches" isn't as dizzy-- after a plethora of "mistakes," "lying" and "sabotage," Millan can't help but beg an ex to take her back. But even with all that baggage, the singer makes a convincing case with the help of some blistering girl-group drums, piano and horns. Short and without reservation, the song avoids some of the indulgent outros and solos that tank Bedroom's lesser Millan-sung tracks including the guitar-grinding "Window Bird" and lethargic pep talk "Today Will Be Better, I Swear!"
As on Set Yourself on Fire's incredible "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead", which had Campbell and Millan not just backing each other up but interacting and playing off each other in a bittersweet boy-girl tale, Bedroom's "Midnight Coward" and "Personal" take full advantage of the band's unique two-headed attack. The former is a neurotic internal analysis of that oh-so-important first-date question: Should I stay or should I go? "I don't want to say too much," whispers Millan, rifling through the night's possibilities before finally joining Campbell into the unknown: "I can see what's coming, but I'm not saying it." On the surface, "Personal" is a gimmick-- a song written in personal ad parlance ("Wanted single F/ Under 33/ Must enjoy the sun/ Must enjoy the sea"). But both vocalists give the song their most impressive performances-- Campbell distant and cold, Millan vulnerable and pained-- turning its showy conceit into something genuinely wrenching. The ambiguously antiquated details emphasize its timeless central struggle: Stamped missive or Match.com, the face-to-face (dis)connection's the thing.
Growing more staged, warier, and a little less playful with age, Stars don't quite match the wily rush of Set Yourself on Fire here. After three albums of artistic quantum leaps, they slow down gracefully on Bedroom, replacing Fire's indie-symphony twists and turns with more overt dramatic airs that can fall into blubbering melodrama, e.g., the title track, which suffocates under its own ticker-tape parade epic-ness. But when they're on, Stars are one of only a few current bands that can make war seem so appealing.

NB: This record is available for digital download via Arts & Crafts.*


The underground Atlanta rap star teams with DJ Marc B, who backs his signature bouncy flows and silly punchlines with gleaming, thudding beats.

Marquis

Key! has been one of underground Atlanta’s best-kept secrets for years, a stylistic chameleon with a golden ear for emerging talent. For over a decade, he’s released solo projects and single-producer collaborations at a wicked pace, and any of his albums can cover a wide range of lyrical and sonic territory. It’s not easy being the kind of rapper who compares guns to Harry Potter’s broomsticks one minute and begs a lover to “wear my shirt, spend the night” the next, but Key!’s work has always swerved between moods. His latest, Marquis, follows a run of falling action: He went to rehab and got sober after years of drug addiction and last year signed his first-ever label deal. Despite the changes, he’s still the same endearing, emotional goofball with a chip on his shoulder.
Like the Kenny Beats-produced 777 and the Tony Seltzer-manned The Alpha Jerk, Marquis is helmed by one producer, this time fellow Atlanta pulse-chaser DJ Marc B, who offers up a potent mix of rattling bangers and gleaming beats. Key! is rapping about much of the same stuff as before—absurdist money talk, tear-soaked love ballads, odes to friends—but there’s a wizened edge to his words. Lead single “You Need God” has the bouncy flows, sprinkles of melody, and silly punchlines that have become Key!’s trademarks, but his lifestyle adjustments occasionally come through in the lyrics. Bars like “If you can trip off life, I need a hit” or “Shut up sons, I got one daughter” would be corny if they didn’t sound so sincere.
Key! doesn’t bring up his recovery often, but his sense of adventure communicates his gratitude. His boundless enthusiasm glows like sunshine, and Marc B’s beats attempt to follow suit. Typical booming fare like the Soulja Boy-referencing “Crank Dat” or late-album highlight “Racks Don’t Talk Back” are fun, but the duo shows out by experimenting. “Cheat Code” dabbles in digital flutes and Nextel chirps that split the difference between plugg and chiptune and give Key!’s warbling voice ample room to swim. The ominous piano line and tinny trumpets of “That Fye” sound chintzy, like they could’ve been cut from the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas soundtrack, but Key!’s growls juxtaposed with fellow Two-9 member (and recent Dreamville signee) Jace’s nasal voice are urgent nonetheless.
Key! shares the Marquis stage with underground stalwarts and a new generation of Atlanta talent, but it never feels like regional nepotism—each guest brings as much to these songs as Key! does. Longtime collaborator ManMan Savage’s croons on the back end of closer “Love Like This” anchor the song after Key! hops between melody and straight rapping. Local maverick Tony Shhnow brings his brand of slick shit talk to “You Need God” (“I told the jeweler I’m a plug, put a brick in it”), contrasting Key!’s more affable verse with steely flexes.
In a recent interview with the Not97 podcast, Key! extolled the virtues of casting a wide musical net: “If you can be a little bit of everything, you’re the one.” He’s not talking about the calculated versatility of a megastar like Drake, or copycats attempting to suck the marrow from the bones of proven ideas. Key!’s appeal comes from how organic his world feels, his ability to adapt to nearly any style, his willingness to mix silly and serious. He never sounds like he’s forcing himself to keep up with a trend. In turn, his influence is everywhere, in the work of artists like WifiGawd, Duwap Kaine, and Luh Tyler. Marquis remains restless in the most forward-thinking sense.


UK house and breakbeat veteran Paul Woolford connects the dots between club-music styles from across the decades, finding a through line in lush, transporting melodies.

Special Request: DJ-Kicks: Special Request

DJ-Kicks: Special Request

The history of electronic music, particularly in the UK, has been one of fractures and splits, as ever more specific styles and subgenres spin off into their own orbits. Special Request (aka Leeds’ Paul Woolford) is one of the enlightened few moving the other way, with his diverse catalogue including everything from chart-house bangers (“Looking for Me,” with Diplo and Kareen Lomax) to pungent nu-jungle (Special Request’s 2019 album Zero Fucks).
Woolford is better known as a producer than a DJ. But his entry into the venerable DJ-Kicks series offers him a chance to showcase his turntable chops as he weaves a captivating musical thread across historical and generic boundaries. Songs on this mix date from 1962 (Sun Ra & Solar Arkestra’s “Cluster of Galaxies”) right up to the present day, while the styles glide from proto house to techno and IDM to jungle, passing through ambient, disco, electro, and breakbeat.
Eclectic selections can make for bumpy musical rides. But Woolford has based his song choices around his love for “lush melodics,” a decision that adroitly transcends genre. In Virgo’s 1986 house jam “R U Hot Enough?,” this translates into undulating piano chords and ethereal synth strings; in the Special Request mix of FC Kahuna’s “Hayling,” it means bleeps, breaks, and satiny vocal; and in Tim Reaper’s VIP mix of Special Request’s “Pull Up,” melodics come in the form of a pumped-up and billowing bassline that is vicious in its volume and strangely tender in its melodic caress.
As a DJ, Woolford favours layering and smooth transitions over flashy tricks. DJ-Kicks doesn’t so much jump from track to track as ooze ever onwards, the boundaries between songs often impossible to locate. Some of the transitions are particularly graceful, such as the passage from “R U Hot Enough?” to Speedy J’s 1991 IDM classic “De-Orbit” via Krystal Klear’s 2014 techno tool “Tun Valve,” the four decades between the tracks falling effortlessly off the bone. Woolford has the DJ’s gift of taking exactly what he needs from a record, whether that’s 39 seconds of atmospheric noise from “Cluster of Galaxies” or five minutes of song structure from John Morales’ remix of Alicia Myers’ disco anthem “Right Here Right Now”; a given song’s individual merits are secondary to the mix’s common good.
Where the requisite jigsaw piece isn’t at hand, Woolford has the production skills to create it. Previously unreleased Special Request tracks “KissFM NY87 Mastermix” and “Vellichor” help guide the mix from the dreamy, trumpet-led disco of Morgan Geist’s “Lullaby” into AS ONE’s galactic IDM, while new Special Request remixes of “Hayling” and μ-Ziq’s “Twangle Frent” tilt the mood towards the biting nu-jungle of the mix’s closing stretch. Woolford had a hand in 11 of the 25 tracks here, but DJ-Kicks never feels overwhelmed with his work; it’s a compelling example of the way that talented producers can make captivating DJs.
With global nightlife still largely shuttered, it makes little sense to talk of a 2021 club record. But DJ-Kicks presents a powerful case for Woolford’s cosmopolitan dance Arcadia as the unifying sound that could—and perhaps should—accompany the ribbon-cutting when dance floors welcome us back with a spring in our step and a thirst for adventure.

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The Oakland quintet’s debut album is a spirited indie-emo blend driven by intricate underlying themes, channeling a slew of influences even as it exists in a space of its own.

What Life

To Club Night, dystopia is just an arm’s reach away. On their full-length debut What Life, the band ensconce this sense of foreboding in snappy, math-rock-inspired melodies and whimsical instrumentation. Frontman Josh Bertram, as an unabashed fan of ’90s emo cult icons Cap’n Jazz, cites Tim Kinsella as a personal mentor. What Life is crisper and more clear-cut than Cap’n Jazz’s sole album, trading Kinsella’s screamy grit for the vivacious spirit of Los Campesinos! At various points, Club Night evoke the splendor of The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die, the freaky jubilance of Architecture in Helsinki, and the twinkling fuzz of early Now, Now.
But they’re greater than the sum of their influences, making What Life delightfully familiar even as the album exists in a space of its own. Bertram is no newcomer to indie-rock trends: His previous group, Our Brother the Native, rode a mid-2000s wave of experimental folk. Though, by his own admission, those early releases don’t hold up, they weren’t for nothing: What Life not only expands on the musical dexterity of Club Night’s 2017 EP Hell Ya, but it demonstrates that Bertram, now with more than a decade of musicianship behind him, has finally homed in on the cohesive, propulsive sound he was trying to achieve all along.
On opener “Path,” drummer Josiah Majetich’s quarter-note hits prompt a cacophony of riffs and screeches. One of the album’s chief dilemmas arises less than 60 seconds in: “To be honest, I don’t know how long it takes to create a conscience,” Bertram admits in a nervy, androgynous tone. As the song continues, he condemns the “bad advice” of older generations, however well-intended. Club Night’s drive to break ties with the past parallels their ability to channel their predecessors without seeming juvenile or outdated. Some of the album’s sharpest musicianship comes on “Cherry,” by way of pinpricked guitars and rumbling drums that are as joyous as the lyrics are desolate (“I carefully kept this pristine terror from my old life/On the rural atlas where I was born/Feeling like a tourist in my own mind”), before lulling into a relaxed outro that assumes the place of a mid-album interlude.
As often as What Life directs its energy outward, Club Night also indulge in some angst. “So begins the 20-odd years of my idiotic war,” Bertram laments on “Trance,” but the self-pity stops there. “Wit” offers an immediate counterweight, crashing in with an army of power chords separated by breakdowns in 6/8 time. “Village,” the album’s poppiest cut, plants a surprise seed of optimism: “All these hurtful words no longer stir in me/And I move on/Wrote myself a little love song,” Bertram sings. Embellished with eccentric guitar plucks, the song is a sunbeam that diffuses an otherwise gloomy outlook. Rather than let sorrow to turn to despair, What Life grounds its emotional tumult in vivacious intensity.


The group’s second album skates between rhythmic, mechanical churn and abstracted instrumental sweeps, seeking the boundaries between natural, artificial, and supernatural.

Don’t Shy Away

It can be hard to know when you’re done with a creative pursuit. There are endless ways to fuss over the details of an audio mix, the timing of a film cut, the right choice of word; more broadly, it can be just as challenging to know when to call it quits on a project. A sense of unfinished business—and a particularly flattering compliment—drew Cross Record’s Emily Cross and Dan Duszynski and Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg back together as Loma. On their 2018 self-titled debut, the band frayed the edges of indie-rock conventions, balancing stately electronic flourishes within familiar keys-and-guitars structures. The new Don’t Shy Away expands on their capability for total absorption, reaching for a more varied palette of textures and plunging deeper into synthesizers and the human psyche.
Some of Loma’s renewed momentum came from the unexpectedly enthusiastic endorsement of Brian Eno, who said in 2018 that he’d been playing Loma’s serpentine “Black Willow” on repeat. At the band’s request, Eno produced and developed synth programming on Don’t Shy Away’s final song, “Homing,” completing the track from stems sent via email. His appearance scans as a footnote, an unobtrusive assist that primarily plays to Loma’s own biome-building strengths.
Don’t Shy Away skates between rhythmic, mechanical churn and abstracted instrumental sweeps, framing the naturalistic imagery of the band’s lyrics alongside ambient elements. Bird calls peek through the final minute of “Blue Rainbow” before synthetic buzzes edge them out; the short instrumental piece “Jenny” drifts a rippling guitar part over deep percussion and bonfire crackles before ceding to the slowly restless title track. The whole transmission feels less like a battle of human bravado against the wilderness than an attempt to suss out the boundaries between natural, artificial, and supernatural.
Much of the album is shadowed by ominous clouds, blares of horns and low peals of synths that seep across the record like ink into thick paper. “Ocotillo” lurches forward over a foghorn trombone as keys glimmer beneath squalls of brass. From a pulsating beat that presses forth with the insistence of a club track, “Given a Sign” concludes with a wall of synths that underscore its sense of urgency. Don’t Shy Away quickly sounds darker and richer than Loma, and its instrumental obfuscations are as enchanting as they are challenging to unravel.
Below these surfaces, however, the band builds out dazzling instrumental environments like dense, dynamic undergrowth. Synths and guitars intertwine, coiling into a labyrinthine backdrop as their edges blur. Moments of lightness arrive in the jittery opening synth swipes of “Elliptical Days,” which transforms into a stately, swooping number that winks at some sort of futuristic forest cotillion. “Breaking Waves Like a Stone” flits with bright melodic dapples, while its bassline (supplied by Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner) provides a calming counterpoint. Cross’ airy voice is the album’s guiding light, slipping in and out of each song with the unassuming insistence of sunlight leaking through a canopy.
By capturing the space between the ache of yearning and the warm glow of memory, “Homing” exemplifies Loma’s talent for bottling convoluted feelings. The intangible potency of Don’t Shy Away comes from its latent sense of spirituality; in “Homing,” it’s a reminder that geographical distance can’t keep someone from being, in a sense, right here. Humane intimacy prevails within Loma’s landscapes, magnified by Cross’ spoken-word narration and bobbing background harmonies. Though it’s phrased in the negative, Don’t Shy Away is an invitation. It honors the sacred space of uncertainty, acknowledging lingering darkness while trusting in the possibility that brighter, more brilliant worlds lie within reach.

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This Boston singer-songwriter’s second proper album is a treasure trove of self-deprecating wit, melodic complexity and endearingly anxious energy.

No Dogs Allowed

Sidney Gish’s story so far is a familiar one. By day, the 20-year-old singer-songwriter studies music business at Boston’s Northeastern University; by night, she digs deep into lo-fi bedroom pop, anti-folk, and uptempo rock jingles, adding to the wealth of catchy, oddball songs she’s been posting on Bandcamp since 2015. The next step, as everyone from Frankie Cosmos to Car Seat Headrest can tell you, is widespread acclaim and a record deal. No Dogs Allowed, Gish’s second proper full-length, just might be the album that gets her there. Listening to this self-released gem feels like stepping into the brain of an insecure, hyper-aware, gifted young person who may or may not be totally oblivious to how endearing they are.
As a solo artist, Gish is versatile enough to serve as her own backing band. Over the album’s 13 tracks, she uses electric guitar, melodica, MIDI instruments, and assorted percussion to evoke a one-woman show full of clever melodies, inventive hooks, and borderline-jazz guitar licks. (“i’m not studying jazz guitar i just looked up a ii V I tutorial once and want to get ok at it before i die LMAO,” she says in a typically self-deprecating note on her Bandcamp page.) Her rich vocal harmonies cascade on “Where the Sidewalk Ends” and encourage sing-along moments on “Impostor Syndrome.” Gish has credited her knack for complex arrangements to her naturally having perfect pitch—“If a car beeps in an F sharp, then I’ll know it’s an F sharp,” she told The Boston Globe—but the ingenuity of her songwriting is about much more than luck. Just listen to “Not But For You, Bunny,” where she introduces contrapuntal, almost contradictory vocal parts and channels Tom Tom Club to serenade her pet rabbit. Moments like this show that she’s been honing her virtuosic skills for years, with or without an audience.
Gish’s uniquely skewed sense of humor is the album’s best hook of all. On “Good Magicians,” she twists a story of manipulation and emotional sleight-of-hand into a flirtatious ode to a trickster: “I would end up with Trix cereal’s mascot suffocated in a hat/And half a torso cut in half...” she muses. “That, the rabbit, and a non-comedic lawsuit on top of that.” Later, she mocks dull conventionality with titles like “I’m Filled With Steak, And Cannot Dance.” But most of the time, she’s just trying to point out her weaknesses before someone else does. “Two-faced bitches never lie/And therefore I never lie,” she sings on the guitar-scaling highlight “Sin Triangle,” using tongue-in-cheek phrasing to suggest something subtler than a garden-variety melodramatic sulk. On the same song, she puts her noncommittal attitude in geopolitical terms to satirize the benefits of distance (“Maybe I wanna see him/But then again, I’m an isolationist”). Elsewhere, she chides herself for mispronouncing a Greek goddess’s name as “purse-a-phone” and questions her individuality through the eyes of a city rat, nodding to solipsistic philosophy, The Matrix and video-game NPCs as she goes. It’s as if Gish is standing atop a pile of books, so overcome with nerves that she repurposes their facts into self-effacing darts. Yet the more she does this, the more she stands out as a smart, plainspoken, entirely relatable young person in the post-Tumblr era.
In the year that followed her 2016 album Ed Buys Houses, which earned her acclaim as one of Boston’s best new artists, Gish strengthened her approach to production. She’s still using a USB microphone to record, but there’s an invigorating new clarity and sense of fun to her sound. Between guitar scuffs and synth notes, Gish will throw finger snaps, a camera shutter, or an old recording about teaching parakeets to talk into the mix. Sometimes these intrusions clog the flow of the record—campy vintage vocal samples occasionally enter without any real purpose and obstruct her guitarwork—but mostly they just add to the engaging eccentricity that’s earned Gish comparisons to Regina Spektor.
Despite her habit of describing herself as unsure or erratic on No Dogs Allowed, Gish is remarkably consistent in capturing what it’s like to enter your twenties without a clear sense of whether you’re living life correctly, or what living life correctly even means. Midway through “I Eat Salads Now,” she quotes the opening line of Frankie Cosmos’ 2016 song “I’m 20,” a nod to the universality of feeling young and washed-up. But where Frankie Cosmos sounds whimsical, Gish finds herself at a crossroads with no roadmap, standing on her toes to better find direction. Melodically, the song is bubbly and dips its chorus in falsetto. Lyrically, it’s full of masked dread and laughed-off anxiety. This is Gish’s trademark: She confronts challenges with erudite analogies, then conceals them with earnest, unaffected charm. With No Dogs Allowed, she pinpoints the feeling of entering the adult world as a creative person who’s not yet scarred by jadedness, but far from immune to doubt.


Newly reissued, the duo’s 1999 magnum opus queers ambient music in a psychedelic journey through sex, death, and gardening.

Musick to Play in the Dark

Balance and Sleazy were one of music’s great romances. In the early 1980s, Geoff Burton, aka Geoff Rushton and then John Balance, utilized fan letters and zines to will himself from a troubled childhood of precocious homosexuality and occult aspirations into the arms of Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson. As a photographer whose portraits shocked the Sex Pistols, graphic designer for Peter Gabriel’s early albums, and member of the notorious “Wreckers of Civilization” Throbbing Gristle, Sleazy had already earned a reputation. But in true alchemical fashion, when the two came together they created something much stronger, and stranger, than most life-work partners, amassing dozens of albums and EPs and homages to back-of-the-lab psychedelics and antiquarian gems. Coil devised an uncanny, stained, ever-shifting kaleidoscope of musique concrete, kosmische, techno, drone, cabaret, jazz, and glitch, with guest stars including aliens, the ghosts of ancient kings, and “the accumulation of male sexual energy.” (Hence the stains.)
Coil planted seeds. They introduced into their devoted fanbase the effluvia of early queer mystics like Austin Osman Spare and presented them the evidence of modern queer existences fundamentally opposed to assimilation. Their cross-pollination of futuristic tech and ancient texts would sprout various tangles: Björk’s pagan poetry and Sunn O)))’s postverbal omm, the antibody music of Autechre and Dreamcrusher, the probiotic post-goth of FKA twigs and the Knife and even Perfume Genius, all seeking out healing in the abject.
Like most romantics, though, they were at their best in the shadows. Musick to Play in the Dark, their magnum opus, released just as the last millennium turned, is part Muzak and part Magick. It’s effective, setting a mood like marital aids Music to Keep Your Husband Happy and the Love Unlimited Orchestra, or Haruomi Hosono’s ’80s music for department-store shopping, or Spotify’s yawning chasms of vibey playlists—yet far more potent, almost domineering. If you give yourself over to it, odd things transpire. (Many moons ago, I spent a year or so falling asleep to it. One night I did not. My house burned down the next morning.)
“Are You Shivering” sets the stage with a ferocious roar, like a groaning opening of black rubber curtains; it recedes to reveal a glistening expanse of slippery little noises sliced into dripping tinsel. Balance’s voice hovers among them, first cut and honed into amorphous moans, then clear as an echoing bell: “I lay down and shiver in your silver river/Out drips the last drop of this vital fluid… This is moon music.” Others have twinned male potency and lunacy, perhaps, but no song has made semen so spellbinding.
Post-coital from the start, Musick then spaces out with “Red Birds Will Fly Out of the East and Destroy Paris in a Night,” an epic of arpeggios and buzzing analog threads spun largely by synth whiz Thighspaulsandra, who, along with Drew McDowall, are the album’s crucial collaborators. “Red Birds” spirals ever larger before self-immolating in toxic fizz. The little noises return, licks of flames soundtracking a fireside chat—and out stumbles the “Red Queen,” in which Balance recriminates via sped-up chitter chatter and coruscates with crisp, shady intonation. “Is it so awful to be seen to feel and fail?” he asks of those too proud to admit they’ve been fooled by the foolish. The band plays on behind him, the beat an entirely blotto slur of heaving bass and vicious minces of piano. “An unsafe male trait,” Balance calls out, snide in the face of macho vanity. “What are you going to do if they don’t believe you?”
Safety’s for the birds. “Strange Birds,” that is, in which clicks and cuts flutter and take flight and presage recordings of their real, feathered brethren. It’s a grounding pause for an album with its head in the stars. But it’s not a relief. In 1999, bird songs often augured the end of an ambient set, and loons sang across jungle tracks; here, they don’t offer a consolation of dawn so much as a warning from the sky. “One day your eggs/Are going to hatch,” Balance whispers. “And some very strange birds/Are going to emerge.”
Like so many of music’s great romances—Ike and Tina, Kurt and Courtney—horror attended the astonishing beauty of their creation. Balance, a long-suffering alcoholic, fell from their mansion stairs to his death in 2004; Sleazy died in Bangkok just six years later. The horror was inextricable from the beauty of albums like the AIDS-haunted Horse Rotovator, or the limited-edition records cloaked in white covers streaked with Balance’s own blood, loosed during a lunatic episode. Myths are made from such mayhem.
Yet the most profound moments of Musick are somehow the simplest and sweetest. Closer “The Dreamer Is Still Asleep” summons the uncanny power of, say, Portishead remixing Arthur Russell. A rhythm shuffles like a lover’s gentle snore; Balance’s voice, never more gentle than here, and cloaked in reverb thick as warm blankets, duets with a warm organ. Lonely chords swell as Balance ponders the legacy and latency of trauma. “Is that hurt you?” Balance wonders. “We forget, and don’t notice the loss/Crossing into venerable degeneration.”
We all return to the soil. At the center of the album, Coil’s finest moment blossoms. “Broccoli” is perhaps the only Balance and Sleazy duet, an astonishing meditation on familial duty, death, etiquette, gardening, and the titular vegetable. “By working the soil we cultivate the sky,” Sleazy sing-songs, and Balance chants over bass as deep as the grave. “We embrace the vegetable kingdom.” Death as vegetative state, death as generation. Coil are dead, but we’re still feasting on their harvest.

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Undergoing personnel changes and toying with new technology, the band changed gears in 1998, adopting an atmospheric sound that left both longtime fans and recent converts scratching their heads.

Up (25th Anniversary Edition)

In February 1999, R.E.M. walked into a Los Angeles nightclub to tape an episode of Fox’s prime-time drama Party of Five. “Who would have thought we’d ever do stuff like this?” bassist Mike Mills quipped of their cameo. But then, the veteran alternative rockers were at an unexpected point in their career. Their appearance on the show was meant, in part, to promote Up, their exploratory 11th album, released just three months prior. By the time R.E.M. filmed the segment, it was clear that Up was dead in the water. “Daysleeper,” its lovely, lilting first single, had been their first lead single not to reach the Top Ten on Billboard’s Modern Rock charts, and “Lotus,” the hardest rocking cut on the record, barely scraped both the Modern and Mainstream Rock charts.
With hindsight, it’s clear that Up was a transitional record, the pivot point between R.E.M.’s reign as the biggest band in the college-rock underground and their subsequent act packing arenas. A dense, adventurous record, Up—newly reissued in an expanded 25th-anniversary edition that includes the Party of Five live recording as a second disc—seems designed to play directly to longtime fans predisposed to follow the group wherever it leads. Heavy on atmosphere and leisurely in pace, it requires close attention. Yet somehow Up wound up alienating followers enamored of R.E.M.’s jangle and chime as well as recent listeners brought aboard by the earnest introspection of Automatic for the People and overdriven fuzz of Monster.
That’s quite a trick, and, in some respects, the alienation was intentional. Fresh from re-upping their contract with Warner Bros.—in the fall of 1996 they inked a deal for a reported $80 million, a staggering amount for a group that crawled out of the Athens scene of the 1980s—guitarist Peter Buck and bassist Mike Mills were eager to continue the explorations of New Adventures in Hi-Fi, the 1996 album largely recorded while touring Monster in 1995. They immediately faced a significant roadblock: At the inception of the sessions for Up, drummer Bill Berry left the band. Berry’s decision was understandable. He had suffered an onstage brain aneurysm in 1995, a health scare that prompted him to hang up his rock’n’roll shoes and retire to a farm in Georgia.
Berry’s departure threw the band’s dynamics off balance. They’d long ago settled into a familiar working rhythm: Buck and Berry workshopped material in the studio prior to Mills’ arrival, and the trio would then hand over tracks to singer Michael Stipe. Buck had already been seeking new sounds, amassing old keyboards and drum machines prior to the start of the album sessions. Once recording was underway, Buck, on bass, started each day laying down tracks with drummer Barrett Martin and multi-instrumentalist Scott McCaughey, while Mills added color and textures with keyboards. Stipe suffered a massive case of writer’s block toward the end of recording, leaving the rest of the band to tinker with overdubs and mixes as they waited for the vocals. Navigating such shifts would be tricky under any circumstances, but R.E.M. also switched producers from Scott Litt, who had helmed every one of their records since 1987’s Document, to Pat McCarthy, a sympathetic collaborator who helped facilitate Buck’s experiments with electronics, achieving sounds that, while not out of step with the alternative rock of the late 1990s, were still new to R.E.M.
R.E.M. pushed their machines to the forefront on “Airportman,” a song that Mills insisted on having as Up’s opening track—“like a signpost,” he said: “‘This way lies madness.’” If Up never quite succumbs to derangement, “Airportman” nevertheless serves as a fitting keynote for an album about being in transit, moving inexorably from one location to the next. The forward motion isn’t without pauses. Up often digresses, lost in its own ambience and introspection. Partway through the record, a series of hushed, elongated songs skirts the edges of a drone for nearly 20 minutes, a span as long as a mini-LP. Sometimes, it seems as if Up was sequenced as a series of interlocked EPs: The first third contains the brightest, hookiest material; the second segment ( from “The Apologist” to “Why Not Smile”) is the darkest; and the final stretch splits the difference between the two extremes.
Undercutting that sequencing is the fact that each song sounds both like a beginning and an ending. The album’s elliptical flow makes it appear that the band keeps returning to the starting line. Succumbing to the era’s propensity for CD bloat didn’t help matters: The record expands and contracts for over an hour, then abruptly finishes with “Falls to Climb,” an elegiac number that plays like neither a conclusion nor an epilogue. The almost arbitrary ending supports Buck’s contention that “Up never really did get finished.”
The Party of Five set that rounds out the 25th-anniversary reissue shows the band making tentative steps back into the light: Surrounding Up material with older hits, R.E.M. sound relieved to be entertaining an audience, their levity and muscle giving such cloistered songs as “Walk Unafraid” and “The Apologist” space to breathe. But as welcome as it is, the Party of Five disc winds up emphasizing the curious nature of Up, as the point where interpersonal tensions collided with broader cultural shifts.
Aligning themselves with the artier elements emerging in the wake of the ’90s alt-rock explosion—the electronics can’t help but suggest Stereolab, while the Beach Boys fascination recalls the baroque indie pop of the High Llamas—Buck and Mills celebrated esoteric sounds at a time when Stipe’s words grew increasingly direct. The slight dissonance between the two approaches adds intrigue, particularly because it’s never resolved. An undercurrent of tension runs beneath the album's best moments. “Suspicion” simmers sensually; “Hope” hums along to an understatedly urgent pulse; “Why Not Smile” summons a glimmer of hope in sadness; and “At My Most Beautiful” channels its debt to Brian Wilson into an uncommonly open-hearted love song.
Another point of tension: After having grown their fanbase exponentially in the previous years, with Up R.E.M. introduced a newly nuanced sound to a public that wasn’t much interested in subtlety. In the waning years of the ’90s, the alt-rock explosion winnowed down to radio-ready rockers, nascent rap-rockers, and cutesy novelties, leaving little space for a record as willful as this one. Up isn’t challenging, exactly, but R.E.M. nevertheless demands that the audience meet them on their own terms. At the time, the album’s maze of byways, detours, and dead ends may have left many fans by the roadside, but a quarter century later, it serves as a fascinating reminder of a moment where the band’s future was anything but settled.


Defiantly queer, proudly Canadian, and righteously stoned, Ontario’s Partner infuse their bubble-grunge indie-rock riffs with a slyly subversive spirit.

In Search of Lost Time

The debut album from the Windsor, Ontario, duo Partner is the ultimate write-what-you-know exercise. Listening to In Search of Lost Time, you will learn that singer/guitarists Josée Caron and Lucy Niles are proudly gay, proudly Canadian, and proudly, deeply stoned. They’re part Tegan and Sara, part Beavis and Butt-Head: Their record is filled with stories about being best buds looking for the best bud, arcane jokey references to ’90s Canuck cartoon-pop act Prozzäk (a.k.a. the proto-Gorillaz), and at least two songs about just wanting to curl up at home and watch TV in sweatpants. Sprinkled throughout are a handful of phone-call skits that make virtue of their general ineptitude, whether they’re campaigning their label head to let them put a portrait of Melissa Etheridge on their album cover, or breaking down into a giggle fit on the self-explanatory “Piss Pants Tampon.” But if Partner go to great lengths to present themselves as lovable fuck-ups, they’ve totally got their shit together with their tunes.
Compared to the rickety indie rock of the band’s early singles, In Search of Lost Time displays the blown-up bubble-grunge riffage and maximal shredability that wholly encourages Caron’s use of a double-neck guitar in concert (not to mention the occasional impromptu Bad Company cover). On the album’s opening track/self-fulfilling prophecy “Everybody Knows” (“you’re high,” natch), Caron describes her weed-induced meltdown as such: “Now everything is cinematic and The Big Lebowski/I’m in the California desert, it’s the 1990s.” So the least she can do to make herself feel better is provide a period-appropriate soundtrack. In Search of Lost Time imagines a Veruca Salt that take their cues from Weezer instead of the Breeders, applying the duo’s glowing harmonies to an unmistakably Rivers Cuomosian combination of nerdy neuroses, faux-rap repartee, and the kind of candy-coated crunch that inspired him to outfit his band’s logo with Van Halen wings.
But if songs like “Comfort Zone” and “Daytime TV” (the two aforementioned couch-potato anthems) aspire to be nothing more than the musical junk-food equivalents of the binge-watching pleasures described within, other tracks reveal the subversive spirit lurking behind the surface. After all, Partner first gained attention in 2015 for their single “The ‘Ellen’ Page,” which was less a fan letter to the Juno star than a clever comment on stereotyping lesbians. (“People say that I look like Ellen Page/They say it’s my face or maybe something they can’t place/I hate to say it but I think they’re mistaken/’Cause we’re far from spitting images/We’re just two gay Canadians.”) Even Partner’s name feels like a cheeky dig at the polite, sanitized term for a same-sex lover. Certainly, when Caron and Niles talk about wanting to put Melissa Etheridge’s picture on their album cover, they’re doing it for a laugh—but it’s also their heartfelt way of honoring a trailblazer who has allowed them to be as queer as they wanna be.
The open expressions of woman-to-woman desire on euphoric, radio-ready rave-ups like “Ambassador to Ecstasy,” “Women of Dreams,” and “Play the Field” are refreshing and necessary at a time when the biggest queer stars are still being extra-careful about what pronouns they use. The latter song also yields the album’s most poignant moment, when it interrupts its stream of tawdry sports-as-sex metaphors to yield Niles’ candid dispatch from the high-school locker room: “In the year 2004, staring at the tile floor/Of the gym class changing room, and trying not to look at you/’Cause even though I’d really like to/It’s not worth being called a dyke to see you in your sports bra.” Sure, Partner’s definition of a well-balanced lifestyle is having a bong in one hand and a remote control in the other. But In Search of Lost Time is also the celebratory, liberating sound of no longer having to feel ashamed about who you are.


Mixing gothic mysticism and hazy dream pop, Gardens & Villa step out with a promising full-length debut.

Gardens & Villa

On their 2008 tour for Devotion, Beach House had a t-shirt for sale at their merch table featuring the album title spelled out in the sort of gothic font you see on death-metal album covers, creating a cheeky contrast between the grim presentation and the band's tranquil hazy-headed dream-pop. But those two aesthetic poles blurred into one upon hearing the striking debut single from Gardens & Villa. Ideal for summertime strolls through a cemetery, "Black Hills" pits vibraphone chimes against an icy synth pulse overtop an unnervingly steady beat. And while "Black Hills" presents magisterial images of mountains, seas, and high tides, its environment feels tensely claustrophobic, with Chris Lynch's elastic, androgynous voice projecting serenity and severity in equal measure. It's the sort of song you could easily imagine Beach House coming up with, were they to follow-up the lushness of Teen Dream with something more sinister.
But the self-titled debut album that "Black Hills" opens shows Gardens & Villa to be something more complex than just a Beach Hearse. That such a moody outfit hails from sunny Santa Barbara is but a surface indication of their curious qualities. With a lyric sheet that's preoccupied with nature and mysticism-- not to mention a singer who's not afraid to whip out a flute-- Gardens & Villa could easily be pegged as hippies. But they're also keen on playing up the artificial qualities of their music, foregrounding synthesizers and mechanized, metronomic rhythms to create a peculiar hybrid of 1960s and 80s sensibilities. (One song bears the particularly apt title of "Neon Dove".) As such, the austerity of their sound can make them seem both sternly serious and, at times, rather goofy. (See: the ping-ponged synth-pop of "Spacetime", wherein the title is repeated in a comically spooky voice, as if it were the intro to some old Saturday morning cartoon.) Given their fondness for the classic and the plastic, it's no surprise Gardens & Villa feel equally at home recording their album with piano-bar bard Richard Swift as touring with hipster hype magnets Foster the People.
But if the ambiguous quality of their sound sometimes makes it hard to become emotionally invested in Gardens & Villa, in Lynch, they're blessed with a singer who has remarkable presence and poise. For all the effeminate intimations in his voice, he never uses it for pure affectation or gratuitous, histrionic effect. And though the band has been quick to cite the percussive funk of Talking Heads as a driving influence, they truly excel at crafting atmospheric ballads: the Low-like hymn "Chemtrails" and, especially, the foreboding "Sunday Morning", a rainy-day requiem that favorably recalls the retro-futurist psych-pop of the United States of America or Broadcast. It's hard to predict where Gardens & Villa might go from here: bombastic, drum-circle-ready closer "Neon Dove" carries the possibility of Yeasayer-styled transition from misfits to populists, while "Orange Blossom" suggests a desire to join Wild Beasts on the art-funk fringes. But in the flute-tootin' Lynch, they've got a pied piper worth following down whichever path he takes.


Remix disc added to the Kanine band's debut LP features contributions from Dntel, Soft Pink Truth, and Ariel Pink, among others.

The Remixes

It's practically a Brooklyn fairy tale: Sensitive dude makes hushed, lo-fi folk-pop in his Greenpoint bedroom after hearing just enough Iron & Wine. Dude has talented, arty friend who adds just enough arboreal, backwards-reverbed oddness to draw comparisons to the latest local avant-garde "scene" (other than noise, of course). The hirsute and horn-rimmed hordes rejoice; dudes reissue debut album with a disc of snazzy remixes by all their cool neighbors, plus some non-locals. Crotchety Pitchfork critic makes gratuitous opening Brooklyn references, claps hands, says "dude" too much.
Much of Horn of Plenty's sheepish beauty lay in Christopher Bear's eccentric blurrings of Edward Droste's naturally melodic, one-microphone campfire koans. At times The Remixes sharpens the focus on Droste's songwriting, which was often submerged in Bear's abyssal touches; Safety Scissors, for instance, accelerate the syrup-sopped "La Duchesse Anne", add buzzing, intermittently shuffling beats, and expose a catchy "do-do-do" leftfield pop gem. Simon Bookish makes the most immediately satisfying turn, adding a goofy new verse about "London Calling" and file-sharing to a clatteringly optimistic take on the wounded "Eavesdropping". Still other tracks-- such as Son's fuzzy "Shift" or Circlesquare's coruscating expansion of the same song (whistle-choir front and center, natch)-- serve to further abstract the originals.
Either way, The Remixes serves as a revelatory set of reinventions, while not a song-for-song do-over like Bloc Party's latest thingy. Listeners old and new are likely to find remixes they'll prefer over their forebears: not just Bookish's "Eavesdropping", but also Final Fantasy's "Don't Ask", which takes one of Horn of Plenty's most conventional tracks and dresses it up in strings and snug melodrama. Soft Pink Truth takes "A Good Place" all over the damn place-- underwater vox, "Slave 4 U" stripclub rhythms, meowing pet-store horn samples-- while concentrating on the song's evocative "blow by blow" lyric. And get me Jimmy Tamborello: Dntel does "Merge" as pulsing, wistful "Chariots of Fur" laptronica. Efterklang's opening "Campfire" rattles the halls of Rivendell with triumphant woodwinds that neuter the orig by comparison.
Helps, too, that so many of the artists featured aren't among remixing's usual suspects. First-time second-mixers Ariel Pink offer a droning, crackly "Disappearing Act", like "Our Prayer" Brian Wilson collaborating with Syd Barrett and then vanishing like the drum fills amid reverent, one-chord acoustic strums. Castanets apparently took "Deep Sea Diver" literally, plunging into three minutes of groaning, rippling guitar noise-- The Life Subaquatic! As in real fairy tales, freak-folk's emperors are sometimes accused of lacking clothes; Grizzly Bear's songs beguile however they're adorned.


Harpist Mary Lattimore, who has worked with Thurston Moore and Sharon Van Etten, teams with mult-instrumentalist and War on Drugs producer Jeff Zeigler for a hypnotizing, semi-improvised score.

Mary Lattimore / Jeff Zeigler: Music Inspired by Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur

Every New Year’s since 2008, Texas’ Ballroom Marfa has invited musicians to provide a live score for a silent film. The fifth edition paired the harpist Mary Lattimore, who’s accompanied the likes of Thurston Moore and Sharon Van Etten, with the multi-instrumentalist Jeff Zeigler, a longtime engineer for the War on Drugs who produced their 2014 epic Lost in the Dream. (They’ve both worked with Kurt Vile). In Marfa, the duo scored Philippe Garrel’s 1968 experimental film *Le Révélateur, *which ultimately inspired a collaborative album called Slant of Light**. And now comes the release of their semi-improvised score as Music Inspired by Philippe Garrel’s Le Révélateur.
This collection presents two version of the score: a 45-minute album composed of 11 tracks, roughly split for each of the film’s scenes or major moments, and a version synced up to the film’s 67 minute runtime. Without the images, this is a fascinating entryway to Lattimore’s very unique way of playing. Her harp experiments make for perfect wandering music. You can hear strong echoes of her recent solo album, At the Dam, in this score.* *The ping-pong machine of sounds her harp makes with its array of effects pedals is no doubt hypnotizing. It’s a sound so multivalent and warped that it’s always made me want to close my eyes to digest the weirdness of it all (a hindrance, of course, to a project that is also visual).
Zeigler’s use of the melodica, especially in the song “A Tunnel,” strangely and successfully resembles the bold flourish of Ennio Morricone’s harmonica in his western scores. Throughout, it nearly haunts the background of Lattimore’s stray plucks. Zeigler’s synthesizer manipulations create ambient waves of noise that lend all Lattimore’s harp gymnastics an odd disembodied feeling. She responds in like by deploying delay pedals to elongate sounds and taps the body of the harp to use it as a drum. They also experiment with straight noise, in songs like “A Forest,” which is almost Glenn Branca-esque in its wall of dissonant tones.
When I did try to watch the film and listen to the score all at once, I was always just a little off, the film or the score always out of sync—human error framing it all. So watching Lattimore and Zeigler perform the score in person earlier this month, at Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema, felt necessary. Lattimore set up at her 47-string Lyon and Healy harp on one end of the auditorium and Zeigler was behind a synthesizer, array of knobs, and melodica at the other end of the theater. Her harp was so large and grand that one of its wooden corners obscured the edge of the screen. The very physicality of the experience was overwhelming. Lattimore’s harp echoed and bounced off the walls at random angles, making the live sound a strange flickering presence that stuck with you as each new note lead into the next. The harp is a dramatic choice for the rather minimal and rather metaphysical film; it slathers across the story. Their score, in its own way, provides an alternative narrative for the silent film, because it creates a sense of drama and tension that is more openly up to interpretation.
The film is so intensely visual, so obliquely shot, and so very weird that the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze said *Le Révélateur *was a primary example of what he called the *cinema du corps *(“cinema of the body”). In his theory of film, *cinema du corps *was defined by a pronounced physicality, the cerebral faculties overwhelmed by the mass of sensations a film could produce (such as the awareness of the beat of your heart, or the ringing in an ear). When your body is able to fully internalize this, the experience of what Lattimore and Zeigler are doing is so one of a kind. But the profound difficulty of achieving the perfect experience makes the album a tad disappointing, with its disconnect between lived experience and what will always be just a recording.


The Scottish post-punk band's new box set isn't just a lavish retrospective, it's the complete Orange Juice.

Coals to Newcastle

By the time Orange Juice released an album-- 1982's You Can't Hide Your Love Forever-- their early 45s were already the stuff of frustrating legend. Their first home, Postcard Records, had come and gone and left the band in the unfortunate position of having a stellar reputation based on material few could now hear. Everything they subsequently did was judged against those initial releases-- four lost singles which defined lovelorn, literate indie pop. Combined with their sputtering commercial fortunes, it gave Orange Juice an air of underachievement. Come the CD age and those first blasts of inspiration were well served-- compiled and recompiled, most recently on 2005's The Glasgow School. For most of the last decade it's been the group's later career that's fallen into shadow.
This is a band long defined by unavailability. But no more: New box set Coals to Newcastle isn't just a lavish retrospective, it's the complete Orange Juice. More complete than complete, in fact: As well as The Glasgow School, a radio sessions CD, and a DVD, each of the group's four albums gets an expanded disc to itself, which means the six-song Texas Fever is saddled with barely different alternate mixes. But most of the wealth of extra material is worth a play-- Orange Juice were never shy of throwing experiments onto B-sides, and tracks like "Tongues Begin to Wag" are droll sketches of their working process. The most treasurable rarity here, from a 1981 John Peel session, is "Blokes On 45", a medley of those early singles set to a faux-disco backbeat and a vision of proto-indie as an oldies' circuit variety turn.
That was the essence of Orange Juice: They were always self-conscious, and they were usually very funny. The former came with the post-punk territory-- at the end of the box set there's a radio interview where Edwyn Collins talks about being "into" something then chastises himself for sounding like a hippie. The latter was more unusual, but wit and self-deprecation are what links the jangle and rush of their first releases with the louche pop-soul precision of their final ones. That and Collins' immediately recognisable voice-- a plummy, permanently amused croon.
Collins was very cautious of pigeonholing-- he'd emerged talking about fusing pop and soul and then ended up sitting on the sidelines while the s-word became the era's most overused. He resisted the idea that Orange Juice's career was a steady progression towards slickness. But that's unavoidably what it sounds like. You Can't Hide and second album Rip It Up are full of spashy, amateurish collisions of pop, funk, indie, and latterly African sounds which somehow resolve into joy. But by the final, self-titled LP there's a muscle and poise on tracks like "What Presence?!" and "Salmon Fishing in New York" that's completely absent from the band's earlier work.
Collins' persona, and his love of melody and language, is what makes the contrast seem like a complement, not a trade-off. His killer lines are best discovered for yourself, but a common thread is his talent for picking up on the odd little idioms of everyday speech: "Here's some mud in your pretty eye," "Poor old soul." It makes the songs at once more conversational and more articifial: At the end of "Tenterhook", his most smouldering song, he sings "you tell me don't make any bones about it," and in the slow-burning context it sounds deliciously odd and curiously moving.
Coals to Newcastle is studded with such moments-- the real test of the indie soulboy was how they managed at ballads, and like Scritti Politti's Green Gartside, Collins passed it. The slow numbers help to offset the non-stop wryness, but the indended audience for this box wouldn't have a problem with it in the first place. This isn't an introduction: If you're not sure about Orange Juice, pick up a compilation first. If you've acquired the taste, you'll adore this, and welcome the opportunity to rediscover the group's less influential but often delightful latter days.


The San Francisco rapper’s laid-back presence is the perfect foil to tales of luxury rides and big-money moves. On his latest album, he slips into a more romantic mode.

Spaceships on the Blade

Is Larry June the new ultimate hustler? Last year, Complex sat the rising San Francisco rapper down and asked him to pass judgment on the hustling credentials of some of the genre’s biggest names. June draws his authority on the subject from experience: He overturned a disappointing stint on Warner to find success with his own label, The Freeminded, while making music with a consistent message of diversifying one’s portfolio and making smart investments. On “Financial Freedom,” from 2020, he mused on a regret that he once bought a watch instead of stock in Amazon.
June’s hustling finishing school was the streets. “We was fucking with anything we can get our hands on and make some money,” he told The Ringer. If he doesn’t reveal more, it’s because his music requires minimal backstory. Spaceships on the Blade plays like a weekend in the life of a hustler, our protagonist’s journey told in hazy late-night drives behind the wheels of purring sports cars. The album begins with the sound of some super-fly, string-drenched soul-funk and June shares the demeanor of any number of legendary on-screen hustlers: Youngblood Priest, “Fast Eddie” Felson, Huggy Bear. Calm as you like, he teases out smooth bling’n’nice-things rhymes. The title to “I’ll Make Time” feels like a fallacy: June comes across as a man who has never felt rushed in his life.
So you get a song like “Private Valet,” where June describes parking his Lamborghini near his speedboat, stepping off a jet in a mink coat with a beautiful woman by his side, and sleeping just fine after spending a half a million dollars. Spaceships on the Blade largely eschews the investment raps in favor of many tales of June treating his lady, so much so that he sometimes slips into a more romantic and melodic vocal style. It’s Jay-Z’s “Excuse Me Miss” video extended to 53 minutes. There’s an inherent silliness to these Rick Ross-sized indulgences, but June’s laid-back presence keeps the mood light. You take him as seriously as you want to take him.
Born Larry Eugene Hendricks III to teenage parents in San Francisco, June moved to Atlanta at age 5; he spent much of his childhood vacationing to the West Coast, where he longed to live permanently. At 14, he moved back to his native Hunters Point neighborhood briefly before heading to Vallejo. His music proudly reps the Bay, relying on post-hyphy pop’n’snap beats, and like many regional forefathers, June releases music at an unconquerable level of prolificacy. Yet some Southern influences seep through: “5.0 Chronicles” features a screwed-down hook and a guest spot from Curren$y. Another Southern diplomat arrives on “Still Boomin” in the form of 2 Chainz. Spaceships on the Blade regularly looks to synthy 1980s R&B, too: the romantic “For Tonight” receives a velvety hook courtesy of Syd.
There are some obvious setbacks. The lack of specificity can make the writing feel generic at times, especially over the course of a 20-track release. On “In My Pockets,” June celebrates closing a deal without going into detail about the deal itself. And sometimes his ultra-relaxed flow can slide into the realm of lackadaisical. But it’s impossible to throw on Spaceships on the Blade and not come away feeling that June is a guy who’s just dope—a rapper with the natural magnetism and confidence that correlates with the success he wants to convey.


The British pop star Emeli Sandé writes power ballads that start at “cinematic” and scale upward. Her second album places that massive voice atop tracks of stately but interchangeable gloom.

Long Live the Angels

For the better part of the 2010s, the role of British misery troubadour has been occupied by two people named Adele: Adele Laurie Blue Adkins—the Adele-Adele—and Adele Emily Sandé. Industry-wise, they occupy much the same niche: colossal-voiced balladeers of inoffensive angst and outlier sales. But the two artists are subtly different. The mononymic Adele’s music is rooted in Northern soul and not much else; when she brought popmaker Max Martin in for 25 it was both surprising and, for Max, restrained. Sandé follows more trends; her solo debut “Heaven” was hitched to the UK’s breakbeat revival, and subsequent singles have brought in grime and David Guetta’s brand of EDM. Adele’s music was adopted quickly by the X Factor-industrial complex; Sandé, who began her career as a Syco songwriter, was part of it from the start.
Perhaps as a result, Adele’s music, with the notable exception of “Rolling in the Deep,” is human-sized—her songs are written to slot into the mundane heartbreaks and little resignations of everyday life. Sandé writes songs that start at cinematic and scale upward. (She must have been peeved she didn’t get to do the theme to Skyfall.) Her natural home is the place many Britons first met her (if not Americans): the 2012 London Olympics, where she performed in the opening and closing ceremonies.
This is all well and good if you’re cheering on thousands of athletes, or soundtracking a trailer. It’s somewhat less so if you’re recording an album. Several tracks on Long Live the Angels, Sandé’s second, long-gestating LP, were co-produced by English DJ Naughty Boy, best known for crossover hit and Sam Smith showcase “La La La.” But instead of doing what he did there—curating bubbling-up dance trends like the ones on Sandé’s best hits—Naughty Boy indulges his, and her, most maudlin tendencies. A gospel choir appears barely one minute in; it remains in residence for most of the album. Sandé sings, well and interchangeably, over over a dozen tracks of stately but amorphous gloom—the sort of beige dramatics The Guardian dubbed, in 2011, “the new boring.” This is your pain with an acoustic guitar. This is your pain as a piano ballad. This is your pain with “Bleeding Love” drums. This is your pain with a small choir. This is your pain with a large choir. When Sandé finally perfects the formula, on “Highs and Lows,” it's after at least eight other tries.
“Garden” would normally be a waste of Emeli—she’s barely on it—but here it’s triply a relief: for its sinuous, minimalist beat, for the bookending performance by British poet Áine Zion, for its being among the rare times Jay Electronica is a refreshing presence. “Tenderly” isn’t much of a song on its own, but the inclusion of the Serenje Choir—a nod to Sandé’s Zambian heritage—at least distinguishes the track. “Hurts,” the big single, takes a bit to get going, but once it does, it really does: a sudden tempo shift, handclaps, mood like gathering clouds. The tempo leaves no time for X Factor emoting, which means Sandé can provide emotion instead; her voice goes ragged and her words turn bitter (“oh man, what a tragedy, ha ha”). Being an Emeli Sandé song, it eventually turns into a power ballad like the rest, but the swell feels earned. Too much of Long Live the Angels just feels turgid.


On her most personal album to date, the UK experimental musician retains her focus on the ambiguities of the processed human voice while bringing traditional instrumentation to the fore.

Lifetime

The musical sensibility that the South London experimental producer Klein has developed over the course of her previous records and assorted performance commissions is unmistakable and evolving. Jagged soundscapes made from loops of melodic fuzz and pop-culture samples harbor memories both personal and cultural. Klein’s own voice floats throughout—sometimes as sung language, sometimes in the form of abstract groans or ululations. Her surfaces are uneven, and there’s a multitude of weird, hyper-specific detail to get lost in; the overall effect, though, feels like searching—for sounds, for workable forms, for lost or hidden selves.
On Lifetime, Klein sprawls more comfortably into sonic space than she has before in her recorded music. Totality becomes a possibility: the approximation of a whole. Lifetime is structured as a series of interlocking cycles, and as it resolves and unfurls, it seems to ask: What does the tension between duration and transformation sound like?
Klein has said this is a deeply personal album, akin to “giving someone your diary.” That doesn’t mean it’s informative in some extractive sense—more that it’s characterized by an abstract sort of openness throughout. Especially on the album’s A-side, she plays with proximity in the way she collages sounds: The opener toys with a wordless sung pop hook, first at the front of the listener’s ear, piled atop ambling distortion, and then, once the instrumental portion of the track has suddenly dropped away, at an echoey distance. A chorus emerges, combining both vantage points to a lightly dissonant effect. If we can access a person through their voice—an idea that is present but certainly not stable in these songs—we contend with her as simultaneously a performer and an intimate.
I’ve long associated Klein’s sound with a combination of vocal experimentation and the distorted grain of digitally collaged sound. Instrumentation, however, comes more crisply to the fore here, drawing our attention away from the record’s crackling interstices and toward a set of classical sounds perhaps more confidently invested with representational power. “Silent” blooms with cycles of hurried, ecstatic percussion, against which a brief, stunning piano line is introduced; a version of this pairing resurfaces a few tracks later on the choppier, more discordant “Never Will I Disobey.” Saxophonist and sound artist Matana Roberts guests on the gently roiling “For What Worth,” and her playing is one of the clearer shapes within the blurry samples that form the song’s shifting ground. Present, too, are samples of dialogue from Spencer Williams’ early-20th century American race films, sculpted with spiritual vocals on “We Are Almost There” into a swell of vocal expression—featuring Klein’s voice, too, and thus developing a textured chorus that spans a century.
The 10-minute track “Honour” is one of the least musical offerings here, and gives Lifetime its unlikely pinnacle. Spoken voices—Klein’s? Her mother’s?—are presented in a sort of field-recorded argument about theology, faith, family. “Forgiving and forgetting. What does forgiving and forgetting require? Accountability. The Bible also speaks about accountability,” Klein says. The voices that make up the conversation become processed with vocoder effects, and background sound takes the shape of an ominous, percussive squelch. We return from that sound to music proper, ambivalent ambient tones and a series of swelling, slow-burning textures: to resolve the conflict to which we were just privy? To echo or to burn away the everyday pain of family and faith? In these soundscapes, the banal and the intense, music performed and sound happenstance, collapse into one another. Lifetime is marked by aesthetic and personal conflict, and while it doesn’t uncover easy resolution, its beauty (and it is a remarkably beautiful record) derives in large part from the acceptance, or even embrace, of those conflicts as what generates a lifetime’s meaning.


The engimatic Swedish band Ghost's 2013 sophomore album Infestissumam was supposed to be metal's second commercial coming, but it was mostly a bore. With Meliora, their third full-length, they've returned to a heavier direction, and created a far more engaging collection of their seductive Satanism.

Meliora

The engimatic Swedish band Ghost (briefly known as Ghost B.C.) are in an odd place in the metal world right now. They're maybe the only modern metal band to earn accolades from both Darkthrone's Fenriz (one of their earliest supporters as a part of his "Band of the Week" feature) and Dave Grohl (who has played with them live and produced their covers EP If You Have Ghost). Ghost's main appeal is not only their throwback sound, but also their presentation, which combines black metal's anonymity with a theatrical, sometimes silly macabre bent only slightly removed from King Diamond. Even if we didn't ask for a new Kiss, Ghost is just that.
But if their 2013 sophomore album Infestissumam was supposed to be metal's second commercial coming, there couldn't have been a worse album to place that expectation upon. Opus Eponymous, their unabashedly derivative 2010 debut, at least had solid hooks. There's that whole thing about catching more flies with honey than vinegar, but vinegar is a crucial ingredient of metal. With Meliora, their third full-length, they've dropped the temporary B.C. from their name and returned to a heavier direction, ditching most of the lite Mercyful Fate/Blue Öyster Cult hybrid for more folk and Deep Purple influences. It's far and away a more engaging record than Infestissumam, but still, you have to wonder if Ghost should be metal's new chief representative.
Commending a metal record for having an upfront guitar sound seems unnecessary; that said, Andy Wallace's mixing was what Ghost needed, and now their desire for the metal big-time at least has a fitting production. Ghost also stepped up when writing more aggressive material befitting of the menace they wish to breed. While opener "Spirit" takes its time kicking in, "From the Pinnacle to the Pit" has that drive sorely missing from Infestissumam. The choral breaks and aggressive organ drives, like Purple in their prime, contrast so well, their fullest realization of "seductive Satanism" so far. And even if the Rainbow groove and driving bassline aren't anywhere close to new, some things still work decades later for a reason.
"Cirice" was a wise choice for a first single, a combination of familiar strengths given new life. Again, the contrast of somber acoustic guitars and foreboding strings has been used time and time again, but it's just the launching pad for the song's main riff. In metal, it's very difficult to write a compelling midpaced song—Tom G. Warrior and Dimebag Darrell are among the few to not be cursed—so that Ghost gets that rare boogie right is enough of an accomplishment. "Majesty"'s intro must have been lifted straight from Deep Purple's Perfect Strangers, oozing blusey swagger that Ghost has never tapped into before. Ghost's presentation works better in a live setting with a powerful PA, and that song has all the potential to become a live staple.
Meliora also reveals the limitations of Ghost's vocalist, who this time is the third incarnation of satanic pope Papa Emeritus. (Part of Ghost's gimmick is that each Papa Emeritus "dies" and is succeeded by a different Papa Emertius with every album, even though it is, in fact, the same vocalist.) His soft approach to incantations is apt for "He Is", which shows off the folkier side of Ghost. Otherwise, it can't keep up with his Nameless Ghouls (the name of the Ghost "band"). For all of "Mummy Dust"'s strengths, as it plays with the loud-soft dynamics in a spookier way, a little more drama in the vocals would have really brought it to its full potential. There are plenty of moments where you wish Papa wouldn't just coast on a croon, but would instead let out a maniacal laugh or scream.
That goes back to the central problem of Infestissumam: no matter how accessible you want to be, metal is nothing without a little tough confidence. Granted, getting compared to King Diamond must get old by now. That doesn't mean Papa Emeritus III couldn't vary it up, whether he wants to take it up himself or bring in a rival Pope with a different vocal range. (It'd add to the stage show.) In "Pinnacle", he brings a little snarl to his delivery, which should have been applied more liberally throughout the record. Papa Emeritus also doesn't add much to closer "Deus in Absentia", which makes the song feel twice as long as it actually is, and ends up being the weakest track on the whole.
Except for "Pinnacle", "Majesty", and "Cirice", none of these songs feel essential or ready for headlining festival slots. That brings us to the ultimate question around Meliora and Ghost in general: What are they bringing to metal, especially for those who are not super into the underground? Say what you will about hair metal's shred pyrotechnics and blatant bubblegum tendencies, it at least brought something new to mainstream metal. Grunge was not the anathema to metal as is the popular narrative, but actually reaffirmed Black Sabbath's status as metal masters by taking more from them than most bands before. Since then? Most of the innovation and excitement has gone underground. So, what is Ghost doing, exactly? Is metal so desperate for a commercial force that we're willing to accept a crooning Pope as our savior? Is Ghost for Kiss fans who want their kids to have another Kiss, instead of something new? When the cloak comes off—and it will, sooner or later—there may not be much left behind. Ghost don't deserve outright scorn that hellishly opinionated metal fans can dish and dish, and Meliora is a step in the right direction, but their pandering can only go so far, and even then, it might be misguided.


The Peruvian-born, Berlin-based musician’s debut EP is the kind of house music that skirts convention and renounces rote functionality without ever forgetting that its purpose is to make people move.

Sofia Kourtesis EP

Last year’s Studio Barnhus Volym 1, the first full-length compilation from the cheerfully leftfield Stockholm dance label, was a group portrait populated in large part by class clowns and loveable misfits. Co-founders Kornél Kovács, Pedrodollar, and Axel Boman all delivered reliably off-kilter takes on their twinkling brand of house music; Kompakt’s Superpitcher jumpstarted a senior center’s AM radio with some help from a battered drum machine; and Baba Stiltz did his stoned lothario bit. But virtually everyone on the record—even DJ Koze, whose ambient beats took on an unusually opalescent glow—was upstaged by Sofia Kourtesis’ bewitching “WinWin San.” With easy-listening vocal harmonies looping dreamily above garbled voices and a deceptively bass-heavy house groove, the song swirled like a cotton-candy kaleidoscope.
That was Kourtesis’ first appearance on wax, save for a guest vocal on Gold Panda’s “Half of Where You Live,” in 2013; now, just six months later, the Peruvian-born, Berlin-based musician returns with a debut EP that’s every bit as magical. It’s easy to see what the Studio Barnhus label hears in her. Like the imprint’s founders—and like Koze himself, whose offbeat, low-key sensibility provided the blueprint for the Stockholm crew’s whole aesthetic—she makes house music that skirts convention and renounces rote functionality without ever forgetting that its purpose is to make people move.
Her tracks bound all over the place. Steady kick drums suddenly buckle at the knees; scrappy accents tug at the beat’s already lopsided center of gravity. Her drum programming, which seems to have been cobbled together from mismatched drum-machine hits, rickety breaks, and percussive abstractions, amounts to a hyperkinetic hodge-podge of clinks, clanks, zaps, and pows—a veritable comic book’s worth of onomatopoeia.
A sense of mystery runs through all four songs, beginning with the cloudy circumstances of their very genesis. There’s no telling exactly how they were made, but they sound largely sample-based. In “Lana Gaye,” a dramatic strip of harmonized vocals is chopped up—possibly backwards, though it’s hard to tell for sure—over a beat that rattles like a stick against a washboard. In “Trains & Airports,” a half-sung, half-shouted call-and-response refrain triggers memories of Ricardo Villalobos’ Christian Vander-sampling “Enfants (Chants).” Often, a wordless vocal loop becomes an overstuffed bed of tone that incidental elements get bounced off of, like quarters tossed on a lumpy mattress.
There’s always something just out of earshot, just past the limits of comprehension: garbled street noise, a snatch of overheard dialogue in another language, a yelp that might be a hiccup. In “Ios Santos,” the EP’s most placid cut, what might be a market vendor’s cry briefly harmonizes with the song’s melodic elements, an inspired bit of collage that reveals the music hidden in everyday life.
Kourtesis says that many of her sounds come from her travels—the din of the Amazon, the shouts of children selling papa y queso—while others come from movies, old records, or children’s toys from the flea market. None of these techniques are new, but, putting them in the service of such expressive melodies and surprising arrangements, she makes them wholly her own. This is as playful and as spirited as house music gets. It’s not enough, she seems to say, to make people move; Kourtesis’ songs make a compelling argument that the real purpose of dance music is to make people dream.


Seventh album from this ambient mainstay draws its source material from recordings made at the MIR space station.

Autour de la Lune

Biosphere's Geir Jenssen knows from cold. Residing as he does near the Arctic Circle in Norway, Jenssen understands the psychological implications of a sun that, like a lamented deadbeat parent, routinely disappears for months at a time, and the absence of that essential lifeforce takes an inevitable emotional toll that informs Jenssen's art. It's tempting to say that Biosphere's bleak music sounds as it does for the same reason countries of Norway's approximate latitude make the world's best Vodka. But then Jenssen's other great passion is mountaineering (he has climbed the 26,906 foot Himalayan peak Cho Oyu without oxygen), suggesting a kernel of inspired humanity frozen in the tundra.
The vacuum of space gets pretty close to absolute zero, cold's recognized ideal, so it makes sense that the conceptually minded Jenssen sets albums there. His latest trip into the beyond started when French radio commissioned Jenssen to create a piece using their archives. He selected sounds from a radio dramatization of Jules Verne's space travel story De la Terre à la Lune ("From the Earth to the Moon") and pulled additional material from recordings made at the MIR space station, then combined the fragments with his own new music. The result is Autour de la Lune, a single 74-minute piece in nine movements.
The samples are used sparingly throughout Autour de la Lune, and the beat-driven side of Biosphere is completely absent. Mostly, the record is a showcase for long and impossibly deep drones. The 21-minute opener "Translation" is an exception here, as a cluster of midrange notes that braid to form a definite melody. Rather than referencing found sound or environmental recordings, "Translation" seems inspired by film music, with tense throbs and horn-like synth lines that suggest captured images of a spacecraft leisurely moving in front of stars. The scene is set.
The following "Rotation" does away with the fanfare to send faint pings and bass swells into the blackness, but the exceptional "Modifié" is where the record starts to get creepy. Jenssen processes human voices-- hard to tell if they're from the radio broadcast or MIR cosmonauts-- in a way that merges them completely with the electrical noise that carries them. They sound lost and unreachable, the last little whimpers of a doomed crew about to be swallowed by the event horizon. And yet, they're singing, kind of.
We follow them into darkness with the next few tracks, which consist of little more than the most punishing bass tones I've ever heard on a CD. On "Déviation", sounds hover at the bottom end of human audibility, causing all but the heartiest subwoofers to sound like an open newspaper flapping in a strong wind. I've approached this bass from three different sources (two sets of headphones and my living room speakers), and I can only guess the genuine sound through triangulation.
Strange things happen when I listen to "Circulaire" loud on headphones; the low end is total and all encompassing, but with the kind of throb that happens when you can hear your heart beating in your ears. The contrast means that the ambient sounds wherever I happen to be create "notes" in between the pulses. Because it seems so grounded in biology, I can't help but imagine this middle section as a musical approximation of the ambience in a suit during a spacewalk, where you hear nothing but your own body. If that's so, "Tombant" is accompaniment to the final drift back into the docking hatch, as it reprises the textures and symphonic swell of the opening "Translation".
Autour de la Lune is an excellent record that is nearly victimized by its awesome conceptual success. It offers such a compelling and internally complete idea of interstellar space-- moods, textures, samples, cover art, all of it-- that it loses some flexibility when it comes to individual interpretation. Still, Jenssen gotten exactly where he wanted to go. Upon reaching the icy mountain peak, he kept climbing into the stars.


Juliana Barwick’s revelatory new album asks us to picture healing at a moment when the task feels impossible.

Healing Is a Miracle

In a pandemic, cynicism is a crutch, and optimism is a meme. It’s easier to be a skeptic than it is to imagine a path forward. The ironic internet mantra “nature is healing” pokes fun at viral glimpses of post-apocalypse (goats reclaiming a Welsh town, dolphins in the Bosporus) but also casts the possibility of recovery as a joke. As the days drag on and the extent of our disconnection is reinforced, that possibility feels increasingly abstract.
Julianna Barwick’s new album, Healing Is a Miracle, couldn’t be more at odds with the dreary landscape in which it arrives, and yet it’s difficult to imagine it existing at any other moment. Refuge has always been the promise of her music—the restorative power of those sylph-like vocals, soaked in reverb and looped ad infinitum. But her vision of ambient music is also fundamentally open-ended; it asks you to make something of it, to pin it in time and space before it fully unfurls. Healing is a warm, shifting collection that doesn’t so much anticipate the current moment as adapt to it: it’s a medium for the unconscious, a salve for the collective wound. At a time when healing feels impossible, Barwick asks us to picture it together.
Where 2016’s Will was hushed and intimate, Healing Is a Miracle is comparatively forceful. “Safe” is made up of just a few elements, tracing a wordless shape in air before a whole-step loop rises up and overtakes it. There’s new power in Barwick’s layered singing, which feels distinctly present; you’re never worried it might slip away into the ether. “Inspirit” is reminiscent of John Tavener’s porous, holy minimalist chorales, but it’s set apart by thin waves of decaying bass. The earnest plea at its center is in keeping with Barwick’s project: “Open your heart/It’s in your head.” As with the album’s title, the frankness is almost startling.
Healing hinges on “Flowers,” which maxes out the knob on the bass components teased on “Inspirit.” Haunting, cavernous ambience melts into stuttering dark as Barwick traverses high and low registers, summoning up strange, wordless glyphs. It unsettles more than it invites us in. These aren’t feelings one traditionally associates with respite, or with Barwick’s music, and yet the track is a necessary descent that shades the rest of the album, making for a more complete psychic journey. It ends in chaos, with what sounds like a lightning storm, and an abrupt cut to black.
There’s something cinematic about what Barwick is doing here, a quality that’s most explicit in the album’s twin climaxes at the end of its A and B sides. “In Light,” written and recorded with Jónsi of Sigur Rós, pairs anthemic choruses with slow, incantatory verses. This is star-straddling, world-filling music—the kind of thing that risks cheesy bombast before arriving at transcendence. Its structure is also fundamentally different from Barwick’s earlier music: sturdier, less diaphanous. The Nosaj Thing collaboration “Nod” is shaped around an urgent rise and fall, and heaves like a living thing. The effect is profoundly empathetic.
Though her previous music has frequently been compared to Brian Eno’s, Barwick has pushed back on the idea that she’s taking any significant cues from his ambient series. And while it’s clear she’s drawn from that conceptual reservoir to some degree (her sound installation for a hotel lobby space was commissioned by avowed Eno fans), on Healing Is a Miracle, she’s never been further from the category of background music. Sincerity this pure draws attention to itself. It’s a genuine revelation.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This 4-song EP includes producers Diplo, Jacques Greene, Geeneus, and Zinc, along with Jessie Ware and rappers Iggy Azalea and Wiley. Proving herself an excellent curator, Katy B uses Danger to explore a softer, more forlorn aspect of nightlife.

Danger EP

The opening track on UK pop talent Katy B's new EP, Danger, is called "Aaliyah". At this point we generally know what we're in for when mention is made of the late singer-- some haphazard reappropriation of a vocal track or Timbaland beat, the trademark baby coos of "Are You That Somebody?" buried behind layers of echo or slapped onto somone else's production. But Katy flips expectations here by creating a song that sounds nothing like an Aaliyah original, instead paying homage by making her the subject of the track's lyrics. "Aaliyah, please-- this is green envy/ Why must you taunt me, girl?," she sings over a bass rhythm. Katy trades lines seamlessly with guest Jessie Ware, another UK breakout vocalist, crafting a lyrical love triangle that gazes at Aaliyah from a brand new angle. Together the singers take low-hanging fruit and make something complex from it.
Ware joins a stacked lineup of collaborators on the four-song Danger EP that also includes producers Diplo, Jacques Greene, Geeneus, and Zinc, along with rappers Iggy Azalea and Wiley. Which could have very easily made for a crowded, linkbait-laden mess of an EP under another artist's jurisdiction (see: Charli XCX’s Super Ultra EP), but Katy B proves herself an excellent curator. Danger's a collective effort that's diverse but never motley, warm never weak, tough but never harsh, slick but never washed out. While Katy's the centerpiece of the release, she's also an expert chameleon who bends to accommodate her collaborators without sacrificing her vision of gentle UK bass-bred club music. She invites them to see things her way.
On paper, the easy weak link appears to be "Light as a Feather", which pairs Diplo's "Set It Off" beat with notorious Australian rap robo-doll Iggy Azalea. It's a recipe for a capital-A annoying song, but Iggy makes what might be her least grating showing ever, adding a brief and subdued verse before passing the buck back to Katy. "Show me your wild side/ I'll be your Vegas/ Don't hold back/ It's yours for the taking," she raps, just as Katy swoops in and cleverly lifts the word "take" for her own part. "What does it take/ To make you feel/ To get you excited/ To see you smile?," she asks as the soft synth fizz percolates.
As she did with On a Mission, Katy B uses the Danger EP to explore a softer, more forlorn aspect of nightlife, braiding the nuances of parties and relationships together. "Yeah you passed my love to the left-hand side/ Smoked it right down to the roach/ So I might as well put it out," she sings on the slinky Jacques Greene-produced ballad "Danger". She and Drake might get along well. But the message is clearest on Friday-night anthem "Got Paid": "Straight to the floor/ I let the beat mend my broken heart." Katy never sulks for long.
Dropped out of the blue in the year's mid-December deadzone, Danger is another triumph of the EP-length release. Some of the year's best music-- Dum Dum Girls' End of Daze, TNGHT's self-titled debut, and Solange Knowles' new record True-- has been released in the brief, punchy form, and now we can add Danger to that list. In Katy's case, it serves several important purposes: It's a placeholder that reminds us of her existence and shows us she's established some exciting collaborative relationships since On a Mission. It gives us a sparkling peek into what she might have lined up for her scheduled full-length next year. Most of all, it just makes us want to dance.


A grab bag of styles, SMD's latest features Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor, SFA's Gruff Rhys, Jamie Lidell, Beth Ditto, and Yeasayer's Chris Keating.

Temporary Pleasure

When it comes to making pleasure-centric middlebrow pop-dance albums, you can't fault Simian Mobile Disco's instincts. Vocalists are good. Filler is bad. Hooks are a must. Nods to underground sounds must not alienate the unfamiliar. And an approach to genre that ranges somewhere from "catholic" to "aggressively eclectic" is the only way to hold the attention of the uncommitted.
Sure, judged by those increasingly out-of-date album-qua-album standards, Temporary Pleasure is something of a mess. It doesn't "flow." Sonically, SMD sticks to the neon thread that runs from the glittering prizes of 1980s synth-pop through Latin freestyle roller-skating jams and on into the earliest house and techno whose smiley-faced exterior wooed radio programmers. TP feels like 10 distinct singles, each pastiching a slightly different side of well-trod retro-modern electronic/club culture, connected by an album title and little else. And the disparity in quality between those singles can be pretty stark.
The album also lacks the immediate replay value of the best pop craftsmanship, the kind of choruses, breakdowns, or random spine-tingling musical asides that make you rewind a track before it's finished to relive the shiver all over again. Sure, even the most uninspired femme diva material (cf. Beth Ditto doing her best bedroom-mirror Crystal Waters on the somnambulant "Cruel Intentions") on Temporary Pleasure never irritates like "Poker Face". Young Fathers' skills on "Turn Up the Dial" surely best anything Flo Rida's farted out in the last 24 months. But you also can't picture a single SMD song besting Billboard's current kings when it comes to the kind of dance-pop that works as well on drive-time Top 40 as it does during a club's peak hours. Less irritating than Lady Gaga or "Low" is one thing, but SMD would still pale next to fellow 80s fetishist The-Dream's lesser efforts.
At their worst, SMD's turns toward "songwriting" are crass and half-assed at once, slapdash stuff that points out the mix of sweat and inspiration that goes into even the most effortless-seeming bubblegum. A truly terrible song, "Audacity of Huge" dares you to make it through Yeasayer's Chris Keating pulling on an ill-fitting sassy diva costume and snapping his way through an increasingly ridiculous big-spender shtick. (Swimming pool filled with grape Kool-Aid, mother-of-pearl oyster fork, bio-diesel dirigible, et friggin' cetera.) The song is a reminder of why so much electroclash stiffed on impact: A guest vocalist and sarcastic high-life signifiers do not a sure-shot jukebox hit make.
Not so shockingly, Temporary Pleasures delivers more reliably on its title when it sticks to straight-up dance. "Synthesise" is a fierce little slice of hyper-compressed gospel-techno, somewhere between an abstract Blaze belter and Justice at their less intentionally abrasive. "Ambulance" is a slow-burning accumulation of acid squiggles and Emergency Broadcast System sirens that stays just on the pleasing side of shrill.
But throw on SMD's best (old) single, "It's the Beat". Listen to how the track builds and maintains interest with good old inhuman techno building blocks-- nagging bleep, a few overlapping synth squiggles. The sampled snatches of rap are useful punctuation, but the track wouldn't collapse without them. It becomes clear that for a distressingly large chunk of Temporary Pleasures, the duo has forgotten to do much of interest with the backing tracks in favor of roping in a rolodex's worth of singers and rappers and hoping the songs write themselves. Yeah, Technotronic had Ya Kid K. But what everyone really remembers is those riffs.


The second LP from People Like You is a fusion of jazz musicianship, emo spirit, and indie-pop tunefulness. It’s a mix so coherent that even the ugly parts are beautiful in their precision.

Verse

People Like You call themselves “indie jazz,” but the “indie” is hard to spot as their second LP, Verse, begins. Their chops are impeccable and the production is immaculate on the opening “You Need a Visa,” as the quintet hits every lope, skip, and stutter-step with precision, cross-hatching silvery guitar ribbons, clacking percussion, and horns just so. And then there’s the last three seconds, which features some of the ugliest vocals you’re liable to hear outside of a black metal record. If you’re familiar with lo-fi emo from either 1994 or 2014, you’ve heard this style before: Chris Lee-Rodriguez steps far away from the mic, not even singing so much as hyperventilating to purge himself of the words. And yet, this interjection makes for a seamless segue as People Like You immediately accelerate into “The Baker,” which represents Verse at its best—a fusion of jazz musicianship, emo spirit, and indie-pop tunefulness so coherent that even the ugly parts are beautiful in their precision.
Lee-Rodriguez’s outburst doubles as a callback to where People Like You were three years ago on their loftily-titled debut “This is what you learned.” When they formed in Boston, the group imported 75% of the lineup from emo-mathletes I Kill Giants—losing that group’s distortion, but not their spasmodic guitars and will to puncture the superficial niceties of their scene. People Like You’s “A song about white supremacy” could be taken as a sequel to I Kill Giants’ “just because it’s a joke doesn’t mean it’s not racist” (both released in 2014). But while the guitar filigrees were pure Kinsella, that version of People Like You could be more accurately compared to Joan of Arc due to Lee-Rodriguez’s prickly relationship with pitch, the occasional spoken word interjection, and intimidating reference points spiked with obtuse humor. (Witness the highbrow-pop Philip Glass/TLC homage, “Kneeplay 5: Forever Left-Eye.’”)
The “Kneeplay” interludes remain, as do the post-genre fluency and high-minded time signature trickery. But while pianist/vocalist Michi Tassey contributed guest vocals to three songs on “This is what you learned.,” she’s completely altered the texture and color of her surroundings as a full member on Verse. During the more winsome pop songs in Verse’s first half, her tonality can be so clear and bell-like that it’s inseparable from the horn parts. It can leave Lee-Rodriguez and Tassey sounding superficially unbalanced in their harmonizing, but that never stopped the Anniversary, and the amicable dissonance sounds perfect in the way these things so often do in a realm where community and physical wonder serve as frequent subject matter (“Talking about the universe/And how we’re small/And how our loneliness/Connects us all”). Even the whimsical, seafaring tone of “Variations on an Aria” is countered by Tassey’s concise longing, as she voices lyrics penned by Lee-Rodriguez about displacement from his Puerto Rican ancestry.
The band just sounds tighter on Verse, but credit also goes to the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die’s Chris Teti, who provides the 3D glimmer and percussive body that elevates just about anything he touches in their respective realms. It’s especially appreciable during the smokier second half, wherein Tassey fully embraces her role as not just a lead vocalist, but a focal point on the incense-lit “Eulita Terrace” and “Josephine Ave.” The careening “Hackensack Hospital” is the only time where Lee-Rodriguez retakes the lead, recalling the skittish and precious nature of their debut. But even then, People Like You never sound as grating or pitchy as they once did on “This is what you learned.” Surely, it’s the production and the redistribution of vocal roles. But as Lee-Rodriguez meets tragedy head-on (“You’re half my size but you still made me feel so small/I’m still your grandson after all”), it’s indicative of People Like You’s evolution into a band that no longer needs to be pushy when a warm embrace can be far more moving.