The ascendant singer’s star-making second album is a collection of sophisticated, hard-bodied pop-funk that gives way to slick, Kylie Minogue-inspired disco.

Future Nostalgia

No 2017 pop release had legs like Dua Lipa’s self-titled debut. “New Rules,” the know-your-worth anthem that became her breakout, was actually the sixth single from an album delayed eight months past its original release date. While Dua Lipa’s long shelf life built the British and Kosovar Albanian singer’s fanbase, the trickle of new music she appeared on in the interim—a major hit with Calvin Harris’ “One Kiss,” the throwback house of Diplo and Mark Ronson’s “Electricity”—maintained her momentum. Three years later, the Dua Lipa release schedule looks very different: Her second record, Future Nostalgia, arrives a week early, ostensibly because of the coronavirus pandemic, though maybe because fans had already leaked it.
Anchored by lead single “Don’t Start Now,” an instant staple of pop DJs and barre classes, Future Nostalgia is a collection of sophisticated, hard-bodied pop-funk that gradually gives way to slick, Kylie Minogue-inspired disco. Capitalizing on a love of ’80s pop and ’90s club culture, Lipa and a team of career producers (Stephen “Koz” Kozmeniuk, Ian Kirkpatrick, Stuart Price, Jeff Bhasker) tunnel deeper into retro-pop revival, a flashy dancefloor timewarp aimed at the type of pop fan who can’t hear Olivia Newton-John’s original 1981 hit “Physical” without imagining what it might sound like with the string sample from “Hung Up” chopped and layered on top. Future Nostalgia sounds like three Madonna eras at once, like Giorgio Moroder making blog house. Like all classic dance music, it’s more concerned with the thrill of new passion than with what happens after the sun rises.
At 24, Lipa has been working towards this moment for almost 10 years, and her sights are set higher still. A false start in modeling impressed the importance of going where you’re wanted; in Lipa’s case, to Warner Records, who sought a female pop icon to compete with the Rihannas and Lady Gagas of the world. She leveraged her talent as a songwriter, developing an early Dua Lipa single, “Hotter Than Hell,” in the first session with her prospective management team. Her sly swagger and fashion-plate style gave her the presence of someone who’d achieved diva status already. “I’m a bit too far down the line for anyone to try and tell me something,” she said of her creative autonomy in 2017, even before the release of her first record.
But where many of pop’s most recent stars are emphatically emotionally available, Lipa radiates blithe coolness. Her brand is style, competence, taste—this is, in a way perhaps not obvious to those who actually remember the ’80s, entirely tasteful pop music—and the sultry low voice that makes her the star of even a middling Martin Garrix collab. Future Nostalgia is nonstop, no ballads; for 10 tracks, the closest it comes to feeling vulnerable or revealing is “Pretty Please,” a plea for stress-relief sex with an ultra-thick bassline. When Lipa proclaims, “You got me losing all my cool/’Cause I’m burning up on you,” on the Tove Lo cowrite “Cool,” she rhymes it with, “In control of what I do.”
It’s Lipa’s strongest stance: all-in on self-determination. The thrill of Future Nostalgia—the title itself a claim to modern classic status—is in hearing her tailor the retro-funk form to suit her commanding attitude. “No matter what you do, I’m gonna get it without ya/I know you ain’t used to a female alpha,” she proclaims on the title track. Which is why it’s a disappointment when the album’s confident strut falters, first with the “bad/mad/sad” rhymes on “Good in Bed” and finally with the awareness anthem “Boys Will Be Boys,” a funk-free flip of the sexist trope (“…but girls will be women”). Layered choral arrangements soften the ultra-literal writing, but as a closer, it brings the party to a screeching halt, with a serious tone that feels at odds with everything preceding it. What should be heartfelt and meaningful—a song to contrast Lipa’s aloofness and demonstrate her range—instead undermines what Future Nostalgia does best: proud, flawless bravado.

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The Atlanta rapper’s official debut is an album that works almost completely from its own lunatic script. It is a perversely infectious sugar high, rap that fundamentally recalibrates the brain’s reward centers.

Die Lit

Being a great rapper has never been a prerequisite for making great rap music, but few rappers have ever tested that premise quite as aggressively as Playboi Carti. On his self-titled 2017 debut, the twitchy Atlanta rapper compensated for his shortcomings as a lyricist with vision and spirit, bouncing his sticky ad-libs off of gloopy, gummy beats that played out with the insane logic of a “Double Dare” obstacle course. “Damn, my shit so radical,” Carti bragged, and it truly was. Yet, amazingly, that project sounds almost conservative compared to Die Lit, a 57-minute sugar high that’s even wilder, more disorienting, and more perversely infectious than its predecessor.
Atlanta swag-rap pioneers Travis Porter and Rich Kidz paved the way for Carti’s giddy style, but even they never took it to such delirious extremes. Die Lit is all cream filling, no Oreo. It’s letting a 4-year-old pour his own salad dressing then watching as he absolutely floods his plate with Hidden Valley Ranch. It’s those levels of Mario where the pipes and clouds spew so many coins and one-ups at you that you wonder why you spent all those other levels collecting them one by one. This is music that fundamentally recalibrates the brain’s reward centers.
Once again, the primary architect behind these addictive fragmented tones is producer Pi’erre Bourne, working from a reserve of what sound like hacked Gameboys, busted subwoofers, and chopped and screwed snippets of Ratatat records. Bourne is a one man Acme Corporation assembly line, and in Carti he’s found the perfect foil for his mischief, a fellow iconoclast similarly willing to test the boundaries between catchy and obnoxious. The two have some of the most quixotic chemistry of any producer/rapper combo since Zaytoven and Gucci Mane disrupted Atlanta’s rap scene more than a decade ago.
Where Carti’s full-length last year was technically a mixtape, Die Lit is being marketed as his official debut, which is often when commercial considerations set in and the fun ends. But while the album is loaded with guest features, including ones from Travis Scott and Nicki Minaj, they never upset its surrealist vision. Even “Fell in Luv (feat. Bryson Tiller)” isn’t as cynical as title threatens; it’s just a typically loopy Playboi Carti song with a Bryson Tiller verse that’s mixed like somebody tried to erase it then gave up. With its victorious pianos, the Lil Uzi Vert-assisted triumph anthem “Shoota” is the album’s one obvious concession to radio’s ideal of tunefulness, but it’s an absolute stunner of a track, and it also works as a window to the world outside of Bourne’s studio, highlighting just how odd and malformed all the beats around it are.
Mostly, Die Lit uses outside voices as accent pieces. London grime icon Skepta elbows his way into “Lean 4 Real,” and although his accent cuts a sharp contrast against nearly any American rapper, here it’s just his mere enunciation that comes as a shock. Young Thug joins Carti in making lots of silly noises on “Choppa Won’t Miss,” and they sound like kids playing over a toy chest. Bourne even gets two verses, because really almost any voice will suffice on music like this, and his is serviceable enough (“Bags of the future/Did it all off computers” is also a pretty solid brag for a producer).
In an Atlanta rap scene that tends to progress incrementally, with artists building off of a shared pool of ideas and advancing the breakthroughs of others, Die Lit is an anomaly, an album that works almost completely from its own lunatic script. At its best—which is to say almost the entire thing, really—the album almost seems to suspend gravity. How does a rapper this basic pull off a project this electrifying? No, Carti’s rapping isn’t any better this time out. And no, it really doesn’t matter. When the carnival itself is this magnificent, there’s no need to nitpick the ring-leader.


A young writer with a working sense of humor and no apparent agenda, Courtney Barnett feels like a refreshing anomaly in 2015: smart but not intellectual, humble but not wimpy, into the past but not theatrical about it. Her debut album delivers on the promise of 2013's EP collection.

Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit

A young man adrift ditches work mid-commute... a swimmer passes out trying to impress the person in the next lane... a couple goes house-hunting and ends up peering into the life of a widow: These are just a few of the ordinary-extraordinary moments captured on Courtney Barnett's Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. And like all moments, they pass, sometimes with event but usually without. Not that event seems to matter either way to Barnett, who shows up in her own songs like a bemused local taking questions from a camera crew that rushed to the scene in hopes of finding someone more interesting. "I had goggles on," she notes in the swimmer song ("Aqua Profunda!"). "They were getting foggy/ I much prefer swimming to jogging."
Sit is Barnett's first album, the follow-up to two EPs collected on a Barnettily-titled product called The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas. Its music is descended from 1990s grunge, descended in turn from '60s garage and psychedelia—the rocks to the balloons of Barnett's thoughts, which blow back and forth above the distorted guitars buoyed by gas we can't actually see. Without her words, the music would sit there; without the music, Barnett would drift away. Half the time, she doesn't even sing, but talks, slipping into melody mid-line as though she just remembered she was playing music.
A young writer with a working sense of humor and no apparent agenda, Barnett seems like a throwback to a simpler time—Simpler Times being less a period in history than a fictional place visited through fairytales, Buddhist anecdotes, and characters like Winnie the Pooh, whose creator, A. A. Milne, is sometimes credited with the line from which Barnett takes her record's name. An ease surrounds her music, a looseness: Even at their most clever, her songs glide from line to line and thought to thought, a stray observation about cracks in the walls leading to something about the wrinkles in Barnett's own palm, propelled by rock'n'roll that seems to find itself plenty serviceable but nothing to stop and fuss over. "I just know what I know," she recently told The New York Times; "I think I'm shit some days, and some days I think I'm pretty good," she told Grantland. To paraphrase the composer and philosopher John Cage, Barnett has nothing to prove and she's proving it.
Doting too seriously on Sometimes I Sit misses what I take to be Barnett's point: Life is but a dream, tra la la, whatever. Even the album's biggest moments grow from small places, like the washed-up seal corpse in "Kim's Caravan" that spins out into a meditation on mortality, pollution, what it means to be stewards to our environments and to ourselves—a mental crescendo matched by a band that keeps ebbing deeper into feedback. In the end, Barnett returns invariably to herself, a subject she finds hard enough to understand.
If all this seems a little heady in discussion, it's to the credit of Barnett and her band—Dave Mudie, Dan Luscombe, and Bones Sloane—that it doesn't sound that way on record. I don't know how things are in Barnett's Australia, but here in the U.S., A.D. 2015, she seems like an anomaly: A young songwriter who is smart but not intellectual, humble but not wimpy, into the past but not theatrical about it, aware of her feelings and aware of how too many feelings makes everyone bored.
Sometimes I Sit's most sentimental song is that house-hunting one. "Depreston", it's called—a quiet, countryish ballad that breaks up the noise around it. Barnett takes us into the neighborhood, into the house, into the sad little details that make her seem like a writery-writer: the picture of a young soldier, the safety rail in the shower. She mentions them once and doesn't linger because she knows there's no point—nothing she could add to the image would make it sadder than it is. Instead she slips into a refrain of how much it might cost to tear the house down and build a new one, which she repeats over and over again, until the memory of the shower is gone. A little life is plenty.


The New Jersey singer-songwriter’s five-song EP tries out different frames for her strikingly powerful voice, variously exploring reggaetón, futuristic Americana, and psychedelic club pop.

Get Lost in the Music EP

Don’t operate heavy machinery while listening to Ambar Lucid: Just a couple releases into her career, the songwriter has already demonstrated a natural talent for songs equally capable of distracting your thoughts and seizing control of your physical movements. The New Jersey musician started out with a sort of soft-psych R&B on her debut, 2019’s Dreaming Lucid, which skewed more toward singer-songwriter introspection than pop spectacle. But on last year’s Garden of Lucid, she embraced more luxurious beats and dove into the low end, opening a portal to a sleek alternate dimension. Both contexts served to illuminate her wonderful voice: lethally sharp and surprisingly hefty, slicing cleanly through the open air with just the slightest vibrato, like a javelin.
Lucid’s new release sharpens the portrait of a young songwriter ravenously building a repertoire of frames for her voice. The five-song EP probes five different directions, ranging from Mazzy Star cosplay (“Space Cowgirl”) to movimiento (“Un Animal (Divina Existencia)”) to a song about falling in love with a lizard that sounds like she’s singing from inside a video game (“Lizard”). (Los Angeles duo the Wavys produced the majority of the EP, save for “Un Animal (Divina Existencia),” produced by Julian Cruz and Kel777.) The distance between a song like the vulnerable Dreaming Lucid standout “Eyes” and Get Lost in the Music’s funk-filthy closing track, “The Door,” is far enough to suggest an artist who is still trying to figure out who she is, but somehow Lucid never sounds lost. You get the same sense when she flips easily between Spanish and English, even rhyming the two languages with each other and basically code-switching mid-verse: The 20-year-old wants to try it all, and she can get comfortable anywhere.
The EP rides waves of sheer fervor and endurance. At every turn, Lucid sounds passionate in pursuit of the perfect song, young and restless and incapable of letting up for even a single four-bar section. Her pivot from the first verse to the refrain of “Lizard” is a perfect example: One moment she’s practically bulletproof, rap-singing in staccato bursts and letting her worries bounce off the beat. In the next, she retreats so fully into a softer, hypnotized voice, you’re convinced that this lizard whose presence she dissolves in must be as magical as she says—and that she must have met its gaze in that split second.
Get Lost’s one true shortcoming is that its lyrics aren’t as satisfyingly strange or emotionally evocative as Lucid is capable of writing. (She definitely does not lack a talent for lines that you keep turning over in your head; I’m still trying to pin down “Without you, I don’t know what I would cease to do,” from “Eyes.”) She instead favors some slightly cheaper psychedelic signals: She is “traveling through space and time” on the opener; she urges you to wake up on “Un Animal (Divina Existencia)” and to “get lost in the music with me” on the title track. That last one sounds tailor-made for the club, but instead of racking up vodka Red Bulls, she meets a psilocybin god who schools her in ego death: “Magic mushrooms singing to me/Telling me all of the answers are in front of me.”
In the era of streaming and playlists, the distinction between EPs and LPs might be losing its meaning entirely. But the five-track package still can still be the perfect vehicle for a significant artistic step forward, when not treated as a collection of scraps or between-albums stopover, and instead given proper autonomy and attention (as Sofia Kourtesis did, for example, on her recent Fresia Magdalena). Get Lost in the Music feels more like the toe-dipping that precedes that stride than the step itself: Lucid seems to be trying on some new outfits here, testing which styles suit her best, with one eye on herself and one eye on her next move. Not one of them looks like a bad fit right now.

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On its third album, the Spanish quartet adds complexity to its hooky brand of indie pop, fleshing out its arrangements and digging into darker themes.

Ahora

The first two albums by Spanish quartet Melenas exude pure joy. On 2017’s Melenas and 2020’s Días Raros, ebullient hooks and bright rhythms abound in infectiously catchy tunes. Their brand of energetic indie pop topped by crafty vocal harmonies is wide enough to encompass moments of reflection and even some darkness. But it’s hard to come away from either album without feeling uplifted.
It would be wrong to say that Melenas’ new album, Ahora, isn’t also uplifting. The first single from the record, “Bang,” is as bouncy as it gets, sparked by a motorik beat, sprightly keyboards, and criss-crossing voices; the accompanying video shows the four band members literally skipping along to the tune. But Ahora is more nuanced and more textured. Melenas have added complexity to their music without abandoning their hooks or their vibrant spirit. In essence, they’re doing what they’ve always done, but on a deeper level than before.
Part of that new depth comes down to arrangements and production. Synthesizers are more prominent on Ahora, sometimes layered with guitars and drums, sometimes taking the lead. On the wistful “Two Passengers,” a rising keyboard provides both backbone and pace until the band’s unison vocals melt into the glistening notes. Those blended voices are another reason why Ahora is denser than previous Melenas efforts. Nearly every track includes more than one vocalist, and often all four members sing. These harmonies are so frequent that the music feels collective and multi-dimensional, folding in an abundance of angles and numerous shades.
Ahora’s lyrical themes are similarly deep. The title means “now,” and most songs deal with the idea of time—particularly appreciating the present and processing the past. The band confronts the subject head on: On the second track, the ear-worming “K2,” they admit, “Cuando miro atrás no sé medir la distancia/El tiempo que pasó ¿a quién se lo dí?” (“When I look back I can’t measure the distance/The time that passed, who did I give it to?”). In “Mal,” time is a bandit in the form of wasted effort: “Cuánta vida/Se quedó atrás/Cuántos planes/Por trabajar” (“How much life/Was left behind/How many plans/Because of work”).
As direct as their lyrics can be, Melenas can be subtle, too. On Ahora’s catchiest tune, the stair-stepping “1986,” the dangerous attraction of a flame becomes a metaphor for fascination and repulsion. The wistful “Flor de la frontera” beholds the miraculous way a plant dies and re-emerges every year, while the elegiac “Promesas” measures time by how often plans get pushed down the road.
If this all seems a little sad, don’t worry; Melenas bathe these reflections in beaming music, sweetening even the most downbeat themes. And they find some answers, too. On Ahora’s most profound piece, “Tú y yo,” they celebrate the fact that time never stands still. “El cielo tiene otro color/Las calles son solo de dos” (“The sky has a different color/The streets belong to only two”), they sing. “Y hoy también podría ser mejor” (“And today could be better too).” It’s a refreshingly unjaded finale that helps the album earn its sunny outlook.


On their second LP for DFA, Factory Floor’s post-punk past has dissolved into hardware dance pieces of monomaniacal repetition and stiff precision. It’s tirelessly energetic, but often in a brute way.

25 25

To date, Factory Floor have appeared in a state of constant flux, each successive release resembling a snapshot taken on the eve of a new mutation. Beginning as a claustrophobic post-punk band in 2008, their accelerated evolution has seen the North Londoners graduate through Chris & Cosey-style industrial dance, white-hot analog synth attacks, hi-NRG acid traxx, and New Order-indebted dance pop. The main point of continuity has been a manic energy that lingers somewhere between the ecstatic and the oppressive.
True to form, 25 25, the group’s second long-player for DFA, marks the start of a new phase. Following 2013’s Factory Floor, modular synth player Dominic Butler quit the band—he now records thumping dance as part of the Diagonal-signed Bronze Teeth—leaving just the core duo of Gabriel Gurnsey and Nik Colk Void. This slimmed-down line-up means the Factory Floor of 25 25 feels less like a live rock band than ever before. Their post-punk past has dissolved into extended hardware dance pieces characterized by monomaniacal repetition and stiff, grid-like precision.
Repetition has always been a part of the Factory Floor user’s manual, but here it appears to have become the guiding principle. A single acid gurgle loops throughout the eight-and-a-half minute opener “Meet Me at the End,” and while other sounds enter play—blocks of brittle handclaps, treble-boosted synths, and a ghostly voice commanding the listener to “work… work… work… work”—its abiding feel is one of confinement or suspension, of being trapped in a groove. A similar sense of limbo permeates “Relay” and “Dial Me In,” which rearrange a small palette of synths, hi-hats, and drums interminably.
Such commitment to sparsity is evidently the result of aesthetic decision rather than low horizons. Gurnsey and Void have talked in interviews about paring back their music to bare necessities, and here any dynamic that feels surplus to requirements—which includes verses, choruses, drops, and breakdowns—has been ruthlessly expunged. This forced austerity even extends to Void’s vocals, which appear as fragments, often treated or time-stretched—perhaps a nod to the days when samplers could capture just a couple of seconds of low bit-rate audio.
Even working within these self-imposed strictures, 25 25 is in places very good. “Ya” is the highlight, a fusion of jackin house and ’80s industrial dance that recalls New Order’s “Blue Monday.” It builds around a simple formula, but tosses in all manner of little tricks and flourishes—flurries of clacking woodblock, a sick acid line, a tom-tom roll dispatched with the flick of a wrist. (It definitely helps if you picture the vocal line as a laconic German robot sending up LCD Soundsystem’s “Yeah,” a sly little acknowledgement of the DFA pedigree.) “Slow Listen” filters an admonishing female vocal through groans of hoover bass and piston-pumping snare, while “Wave” is a slow-burner that builds elegant lattices of percussion, even as it bores down hard on one chord.
But ultimately—at least placed next to Factory Floor’s largely excellent earlier records—25 25 feels a little undercooked. It is tirelessly energetic, but often in a brute, functional way. And while it works just great on a treadmill or running machine—I checked—I’m not sure that alone constitutes success on an artistic level. Revisit older Factory Floor tracks like “A Wooden Box” or “(R E A L L O V E)” and there remains something tantalizing there—the way they morph back and forth between live band and broiling techno, a trompe l’oeil for the ear. On 25 25, they’ve shed this dimension, and the results can feel depthless and a little flat. Pare back and pare back and pare back, and eventually you’re left with a blank canvas. Hopefully now, Factory Floor will figure out how to fill it anew.


Latest from Doug Martsch and co. marks the first steps of an unexpected third chapter in the group's saga, casting off the usual meticulous guitar overdubs and studio polish in favor of a less refined, more spontaneous approach.

You in Reverse

It had seemed as if the story of Built to Spill was already more or less written: Indie pop band forgoes simple, summery perfection of early work to craft epic, melodic guitar-rock. From 1996's Perfect From Now On through 2001's Ancient Melodies of the Future, Built to Spill records served as a reliable platform for Doug Martsch's plaintive and layered songwriting, brought to life by a band whose talent and proficiency at times seemed boundless. You in Reverse marks the first steps of an unexpected third chapter in the group's saga, casting off the usual meticulous guitar overdubs and studio polish in favor of a less refined, more spontaneous approach.
While the results are spotty, the change itself is welcome. Ancient Melodies of the Future was short on inspiration but flawlessly executed; tracks like "You Are" showed that the band could still make good on a paucity of musical ideas. By contrast, they sound downright energized on You in Reverse. The first Built to Spill album in a decade not to feature Phil Ek's crystalline production, You in Reverse wastes no time in establishing itself as its own distinct entity within the band's catalog: As the album begins, drummer Scott Plouf lays down an urgent backbeat that immediately blasts away the band's recent complacency, establishing opener "Goin' Against Your Mind" as one of their most insistent and muscular songs.
That same spirit is evident on "Conventional Wisdom", which evokes the best of 1999's Keep It Like a Secret by pairing an explosive guitar hook with a characteristically strong Martsch vocal melody. While Ek might have pushed "Conventional Wisdom" toward restrained transcendence, here it conveys an unchecked exuberance that hasn't graced a Built to Spill record since There's Nothing Wrong With Love. Or at least, it does so for about two minutes, at which point Martsch stops singing and a totally unnecessary four-minute guitar jam ensues.
Long songs are by no means new for Built to Spill but You in Reverse suffers from a lack of structure that leaves much of it sounding indulgent and extraneous. The longer songs on the classic Perfect From Now On invariably included a few grand but unobtrusive structural changes, as well as subtle shifts in dymanics and feel-- "Velvet Waltz", with its layers of shimmering guitar and reverberating percussion, seems downright economical at eight minutes. Most of the songs on You in Reverse start at full-blast, and the band often seems to have trouble figuring out where to go from there-- when the chorus rolls around at minute five of "Wherever You Go", not much has changed since the chorus three minutes prior.
Aside from its abundance of overlong songs, You in Reverse is marred by a lack of strong melody when compared to Built to Spill's other records; aside from "Conventional Wisdom", nothing on You in Reverse approaches the seamless melodic dexterity of the band's best work. And yet this is also their most promising statement in years; far from the lovely stagnation of Ancient Melodies, You in Reverse suffers from the awkwardness of new beginnings.


To cut through and leave a lasting impression of Nick Jonas, the artist, would require a vision much bolder than what this album has to offer.

Spaceman

To those paying attention, Nick has long been known as the most ambitious of the brothers Jonas—the de facto bandleader, whose outsize aspirations drove them to their highest late-aught heights, and then over the edge to their breakup in 2013. In adulthood, Nick is certainly the most ubiquitous of the trio: Catch him on the big screen colonizing space, on the small screen doling out pop star wisdom to contestants on The Voice, on Broadway, in your local liquor store peddling branded tequila, and, of course, in the studio. Including Spaceman, his latest, Jonas has four solo albums to his name. Between the two of them, his brothers have just one.
Jonas is rich, famous, hyper-visible—a member of a class whose behavior over the past year has arched many an eyebrow. In the throes of pandemic, celebrities have flubbed efforts to boost morale, and failed to disguise the ways that wealth—and the healthcare, real estate, mobility, etc. that it brings—mitigated the need to modify their lifestyles in the interest of public health. Still, relatability is a virtue in pop music, so Jonas approached Spaceman with an eye to shared experience. When, on the album’s first single and title track, he sings, “Mask off minute I get home/All safe now that I’m alone,” it’s clear that he’s not speaking metaphorically.
Spaceman is divided into neat quarters, each with a distinct theme: distance, indulgence, euphoria, and commitment. Jonas has waxed poetic about the significance of the chapters, pegging each to the broader pandemic experience. The first three tracks explore the emotional toll of social isolation; the next two, the coping mechanisms he employed to deal with it. The “euphoria” segment proposes an antidote to the pain, and the final chapter, “commitment,” doubles down on that antidote (spoiler: it’s love). This is all a bit self-help-y. It also scans as an after-the-fact effort to make the album more topical, when its material is actually quite straightforward, and doesn’t warrant this sort of explanation. Using Nick’s liner notes to decode Spaceman feels a bit like cheating on the Monday crossword.
He needn’t try so hard. There’s enough to like on this record, at least initially. With co-writer and executive producer Greg Kurstin—a champion of pleasurable, unchallenging pop, whose past clients have included Maggie Rogers, Maren Morris, and three-fifths of One Direction—Jonas concocts a gaseous synth-pop sound swollen with reverb, punctuated with Phil Collins-style drum fills, and elevated by liberal application of falsetto. The space theme enters the mix via futuristic blips and fragmented radio signals. Modulating synths gracefully bridge gaps between songs, demonstrating interest in the album format beyond its potential as a vessel for singles (though continuity goes out the window on Spaceman’s “Classics Edition,” which interpolates the four biggest hits from Jonas’ previous records into the new material).
There are particular bright spots in the “indulgence” chapter, which ducks the album’s overall self-seriousness. “Delicious” is a juicy slice of blue-eyed funk, the sort that Jonas might have aspired to when he recruited core members of Prince’s New Power Generation to back him on 2010’s Who I Am. “2Drunk” lands lightly, and with a wink; Jonas sets a delightful scene (“Now I’m dancing in the kitchen/Breaking all the dishes/Breaking all the rules that I set myself”) and gamely makes himself the butt of the joke (“I think I just hit my stride/’til I wake up and hate my life”).
He can’t sustain the buzz, though. In the morass of the album’s second half, we get “Deeper Love,” a song that, despite its title, doesn’t quite grasp the profundity of lifetime commitment. “I wanna know what it’d be like to know what I believe in/I wanna find it in your eyes,” Jonas sings, ambivalently. He’s 28 and married, but still relies on eye contact as a locus of stability, the same way he did on the Jonas Brothers smash “When You Look Me in the Eyes”—initially penned for his first solo album, which he released at age 12. If he’s is trying to light a fire with “Sexual,” he smothers it with the ham-handed lyric, “You put the sex in sexual.” The song namedrops Marvin Gaye, but has no place alongside “Sexual Healing” or “Let’s Get It On” in the hallowed canon of horny jams (though the electric sitar is a cute nod to wife Priyanka Chopra’s Bollywood roots).
The dud parade marches on: The placid synth of “If I Fall” is soothing, but the song doesn’t hold water conceptually. Jonas is ostensibly singing about his current and forever love, but pretzels the premise by looking ahead to the next: “If I fall again/It’d be the last time.” What? “Death Do Us Part” is genuinely the record’s sexiest song—Jonas’ delivery is cool and relaxed, his ad libs additive—but verses comparing wedded bliss to assorted snacks (watermelon, Cool Whip, Pringles, caviar) verge on absurdity.
“Wife guy” is a prominent part of Jonas’ public persona these days, the way “Disney kid” once was. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it does bind his identity to that of another pop culture heavyweight, casting his music in the shadow of their combined celebrity. To cut through and leave a lasting impression of Nick Jonas, the artist, would require a vision much bolder than what Spaceman has to offer. The album’s interstellar concept is interesting enough to get it off the ground, but too quickly Jonas retreats to his domestic comforts, without really probing the relationship that so inspires him, or charting any new territory in the pop universe. It’s hard to imagine anyone who wasn’t already a Nick Jonas fan playing this album on repeat. His brand may sell, but this music is less desirable.

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Adele is still young by any sensible metric, but much of 25, her third album, concerns itself with the passage of time: the inevitable accumulation of both years and vantages. Almost every song addresses heartache in one form or another and her instincts as a singer remain unmatched.

25

Adele is only 27 years old, still young by any sensible metric, but much of 25, her third album, concerns itself with the passage of time: the inevitable accumulation of both years and vantages. It’s as if she knows intimately the nauseating experience of waking up one morning, surveying a half-lived life, and thinking, "Oops." She never adopts a schoolmarm’s consternation (and she is entitled to some authority, having sold a boggling 30 million copies of her last record, 2011’s 21), but she is nevertheless cautionary, encouraging her listeners to do better, act faster, stop being such a bunch of clowns. Get up and get over, friend, she seems to be saying—you are a grown person now.
Or: "We both know we ain’t kids no more," which is how she puts it on "Send My Love (To Your New Lover)", a song co-written by Max Martin, the 44-year-old Swedish super-producer who has now penned almost as many number one singles as Lennon and McCartney. Stack ‘em up, and all of Martin’s songs follow a particular formula: they’re prickly, quick-moving affairs that braid the precision of Swedish pop like ABBA with the more groove-oriented rhythms of American R&B. To that end, Martin is as exacting of a songwriter as I’ve ever heard: like he did with the tracks he made for Taylor Swift ("Shake It Off", "Blank Space", "Style") and Katy Perry ("I Kissed a Girl", "Teenage Dream", "Roar"), he relies on some enigmatic internal cadence, clipping syllables like a hiccuping poet, taking a tiny scalpel to his melodies. He keeps his lines pointy and balanced. "Send-my-love/ To-your-new/ Luh-uh-ver." The results are like encountering a person with perfectly symmetrical features—both instantly appealing and deeply, existentially unsettling. The song opens with carefully plucked acoustic guitar, and when the chorus comes in it’s as if someone yanked the curtains up on a dark room.
Lyrically, Adele leans on a familiar kind of outrage, reckoning with a lover who broke every promise he ever made to her. There's unrequited love, but then there’s love that changes shape; if you’re unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of that transaction—made unwilling witness to the mysterious, alchemical shift in which devotion suddenly thins, sours—true understanding is impossible, a fool’s errand. This is the love that Adele sings of, the kind where there’s nothing left to do but resign: "I’m giving you up, I’m forgiving it all." Nurturing grudges is a young woman’s game.
Almost every song on 25 addresses heartache in one form or another. "Send My Love" is anomalous in its confidence; more often, Adele sounds excruciatingly aware of her own blunders and bereavements, and the ways in which time has made them indelible. Sometimes, Adele herself is the agent of grief, like on "Hello", in which she attempts to reach an ex-lover on her flip-phone. Surely, on some level, Adele knows the message she’s so hungry to deliver—"I’m sorry/ For breaking your heart"—is not the kind of sentiment that’s going to yield her much more than a slowly raised middle finger (the indignation of the recently forsaken is vast, merciless). She is arguably more desperate to reach an earlier iteration of herself, to correct something, quiet some panic.
Other times she is a victim of loss. In the piano ballad "When We Were Young", which was co-written with Tobias Jesso Jr., she sings: "Let me photograph you in this light/ In case it is the last time/ That we might be exactly like we were/ Before we realized." The instrumentation swells, quiets. The precise nature of that realization is not named, but of course it doesn’t need to be, or not explicitly (as Joan Didion wrote, in 1967, "It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends."). The song itself is a kind of homage to the booming, soft-focus singer-songwriters who dominated AM radio in the 1970s (Barbra Streisand, Shirley Bassey), and Adele’s vocal performance is astonishing, full of vigor and beauty.
Still: the cumulative effect is sometimes as treacly as the heavily frosted sheet cake being slid onto the buffet table in the carpeted banquet hall where this song will be blasting, on a loop, for all of eternity. Even your most adorable aunt—the one who loves a Yankee Candle—will eventually drain her flute of sparkling wine, lean forward, and be like, "Dog, this shit is corny."
Taken as a whole document, it is truly staggering how many of these songs—all of them, as far as I can tell—address the foibles of romantic love. It’s not so much that Adele’s lyrics are platitudinous (although they often are), it’s that the album’s prevailing sentiment eventually becomes wearying. In his book The Song Machine, John Seabrook interviews Bonnie McKee, the 31-year-old songwriter behind some of Katy Perry’s bigger hits and a frequent collaborator of Martin’s; McKee offers a pat, sorry-dude response to the question of lyrical uniformity in contemporary pop. "Most people still just want to hear about love and partying," is what she tells Seabrook. A shrug—a "Hey, it’s not us, it’s you! You dummies are the ones who want that!"—is implied.
Perhaps that is what people want: Adele is presently on track to break N*Sync's record, held since 2000, of 2.24 million copies sold in the first week of release (on Friday, more than 900,000 people downloaded 25 from the iTunes store alone). And perhaps these songs are trifles, foregone conclusions that, instead of facilitating or inviting a deepening, allow for just one outcome: a peaceable head-bob, a wistful smile. They are one-way, dead-end roads, emotional shortcuts to wells of loss and contrition. But regardless of how one might feel about the spiritual utility of pop music, Adele’s instincts as a singer remain unmatched; she is, inarguably, the greatest vocalist of her generation, an artist who instinctively understands timbre and pitch, when to let some air in. It does not seem unfair to ask that dynamism of her songs, too.


Progressive country's lead tastemaker changes his path again. A Sailor's Guide to Earth finds Sturgill Simpson weirder and more adventurous than ever, forging a bold new way forward.

Sturgill Simpson: A Sailor's Guide to Earth

A Sailor's Guide to Earth

Sturgill Simpson's 2014 sophomore release, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, dragged "outlaw country" into modern times with acid-tongued clarity and a world-weary sense of humor. Its perspective was so refreshing that other like-minded albums came to be: Chris Stapleton enlisted Metamodern producer Dave Cobb to craft his own revivalist release Traveller, which won the 2016 Grammy for Best Country Album. While Metamodern Sounds of Country Music is certainly a record that invited imitation, it's darker and deeper than Stapleton's award winner or even Jason Isbell's most lauded recent solo albums (also produced by Cobb), a sometimes-nihilistic opus that proclaims things like “Ain't no point of getting out of bed if you ain't livin' the dream" and declares hallucinogens like DMT as lenses with which to see the truths of existence. The combination of the vintage music and the album's contemporary subject matter made for one of the most memorable releases of the last five years.
While Simpson could have easily milked a few records out of that glum sound and guaranteed industry adulations for decades, A Sailor's Guide to Earth represents a startling change in tone and presents a wealth of rewards for every creative risk. Instead of counting turtles and finding a voice in classic country—Simpson himself smirks at the notion that he is a modern Waylon Jennings, because he doesn't listen to Waylon Jennings' music, though the connection is by no means inaccurate—Simpson is doing something far more difficult. Embarking on song cycle that draw upon sounds and songwriting styles that aren't found on his first two records at all, Simpson draws from his time in the Navy, where he was stationed in Japan, and the record is framed as a sailor's letter home to his wife and newborn son. (It's loosely based on a letter his grandfather wrote his grandmother).  It's a deeply personal album that, while establishing Simpson as the defining songwriter of his class, displays an artistic growth that defies any sort of easy label.
The premise—a concept album addressed to his own son and wife—might sound corny, but the result is a beautiful and earnest record that flips the defeatist subtext of Metamodern on its head. The moods on A Sailor's Guide to Earth are brighter than on Metamodern, and the instrumentation on songs like “Keep It Between the Lines"—much of it provided by Sharon Jones' backing band, the Dap-Kings—is denser, bolder, and more rhythmic than anything Simpson has steered previously. (Simpson produced the record himself, deciding to spend his Atlantic Records budget chasing his instincts to their logical extreme). At the climax of side A, Simpson tosses in a countrypolitan Nirvana cover; one of the LP's more jarring moments occurs when Simpson sings “Sell the kids for food" on an album addressed to his son. To watch Simpson stretch (and succeed) is thrilling.
The back half of the album is less audacious, making room for more contemplative moments like the tender ballad "Oh Sarah." Simpson holds onto the sneaky cleverness that distinguished Metamodern—"Get high, play a little GoldenEye/ That old 64!" Simpson shouts on "Sea Stories," like he's fondly remembering an old Cadillac—while taking a completely different journey.  If Metamodern was Waylon Jennings eating tabs of acid on a Tennessee back porch, A Sailor’s Guide is something like the musical combination of Moby Dick and Elvis.
A Sailor's Guide to Earth plants Simpson at the forefront of the current crop of artists living beneath the always-contentious "alt-country"  banner. But what's most striking is how it completely redefines Simpson's own career, and sets him on his own unique path. Metamodern became the subject of trendpieces, where critics and fans alike willingly read into the drugs-and-darkness subtext that Simpson has himself been reluctant to endorse. But A Sailor's Guide to Earth is such a rearrangement of Simpson's sonic universe that any previous categorization now seems out of date. His earlier records communicate a weariness, dedicated to the journey to whatever's at the end of that long white line, even if it's sorrow. A Sailor's Guide to Earth takes a trip somewhere entirely different and life-affirming.


Inspired by rap and R&B in equal measure, Drake becomes the first of the post-Kanye, emo-y rappers to fully deliver on his debut LP.

Thank Me Later

Drake sings or raps the word "I" 410 times on his debut album. Even in the realm of hip-hop-- a style famous for its unswerving solipsism-- this is a feat. For comparison's sake, noted mirror watcher Kanye West managed to work only 220 "I"'s into the verses and hooks of his big break, The College Dropout. Illmatic; 210. Reasonable Doubt; 240. With Thank Me Later, Drake attempts to enter the pantheon of those rap game-busters by the sheer force of first person singular pronouns. All eyes are on him-- especially his own. But considering this mixed race, half-Jewish, all-Canadian "Degrassi: The Next Generation" alum looks and sounds unlike any major rap star before him, betting the house on nothing but himself turns out to be a wise gamble.
Drake is the guy you get drinks with who talks about himself for a few hours-- if you're lucky, he might ask you for advice on one or two things. But this is OK because Drake's stories are better than yours. Like the one about how Lil Wayne befriended and signed him at the height of Weezy's powers. Or how he got with Rihanna last year. Or that time he flashed from a Toronto has-been to a top-flight hit maker off the strength of a self-released mixtape. Of course, there's the classic about sipping a few too many glasses of Ace of Spades and asking Nicki Minaj to marry him. Sounds like a sweet existence.
But there's a problem. Even though he's a rich and handsome 23 year old spreading his music around the world in a five-star fashion, Drake really wants to be in the bottom bunk, hooking up with a girl next to the laundry basket at Totally Normal University, as he raps, "I wish I wasn't famous/ I wish I was still in school/ So I could have you in my dorm room/ I would put it on you crazy." Elsewhere, the irony is not lost on him, but he's not taking anything back: "I know that niggas would kill for this lifestyle/ I'm lookin' forward to the memories of right now."
Simply, Drake is in love with his own lovelessness. But instead of lashing out against his would-be wifeys à la 808s and Heartbreak or falling into token misogyny, his relationship with women is more complicated. Whereas the unofficial mainstream hip-hop LP rulebook previously demanded a couple "ladies' night" tracks that were often pandering, insulting, or both, Drake lives for such softness. The brilliant and spare "Karaoke" finds him singing about a girl who can't deal with his newly jet-setting ways. "I was only trying to get ahead/ But the spotlight makes you nervous," he says, sounding more committed than a host of melisma-drunk heartthrobs. His relatively progressive and gentlemanly style is contagious, too; on the soon-to-be smash "Fancy", T.I. ditches the "superficial gold-digging bitches" he once praised on songs like "Whatever You Like", instead opting for a single lady with her own BMW and Jaguar in the garage. As if that wasn't enough, Mary J. Blige spiritually co-signs the sentiment by adding some subtle harmonies as the song draws to a close.
Meanwhile, Drake's fellow Young Money upstart Nicki Minaj adds to the gender ambiguities, out-manning her host on the diabolical "Up All Night", and the album's steamiest pairing has him teaming with The-Dream for the uber-slow jam "Shut It Down". That song ends with Drake shamelessly trying to get in a new acquaintance's pants-- "take those fuckin' heels off, it's worth it, girl," he suggests. He's no angel. But even when this Romeo starts tossing dollar bills at a strip club on "Miss Me", his ogling is somehow lonely and level: "I don't judge her but I could never love her/ 'Cause to her I'm just a rapper and soon she'll have met another."
As much as rap is built on artful navel-gazing, it's also founded in struggle. And just as Drake's dramatically exposed selfishness is unique to hip-hop, so are his adversities. He grew up in an affluent Toronto suburb and was graced with everything but a functional pair of parents, who split when he was three. Like Kanye West before him, Drake vies for superstardom while embracing his non-drug-dealing, non-violent, non-dire history-- one that connects with most rap fans in a completely reasonable way. And, suddenly, all that "I" turns into a lot of "we."

Young Money Entertainment / Cash Money / Universal Motown


This posthumous release from the much-missed Detroit producer and MC was completed by Karriem Riggins and features guest spots from Common, D'Angelo, and Black Thought.

The Shining

Before his untimely passing this year, Detroit producer and MC J Dilla had established himself as one of hip-hop's most reliable auteurs. "He didn't overthink things," said Karriem Riggins, whom Dilla enlisted to finish the nearly completed The Shining shortly before his death, to the Detroit Free Press. Dilla's knack for intuitive and engaging beats served MCs well: His lucid, live-instrument-and-breakbeat-intensive production is synonymous with socially conscious rap's 1990s heyday-- a milieu on which Dilla left huge footprints with production credits on staples like the Pharcyde's Labcabincalifornia, A Tribe Called Quest's Beats, Rhymes and Life, and De La Soul's Stakes Is High.
Yet his prevailing focus on soulful, dynamic listenability instead of jazzbo hokum (let us pass over Common's Electric Circus in silence) instilled a durability in his music that allowed it to survive the seismic shifts in aesthetics that rocked hip-hop over the past decade. Despite the erratic quality of his own group Slum Village's output, Dilla's consistently sharp production kept the flame alive for the soul-jacking, pop-friendly rap that would enjoy a resurgence with recently influential records by Common and Kanye West.
A good hook, in other words, never goes out of style, and in a rap climate broad enough to allow for everything from deep-space funk to minimal snap music, Dilla's classicism acts as a control group amid more exotic strains. His other 2006 release, Donuts, with its profusion of brief instrumentals, was his record for heads-- a glorified beat tape that put the raw stuff of his vision on enticing display. In contrast, The Shining is more of a general audience record, by virtue of its song-length tracks and pervasive vocals from Dilla and his crew. As such, it presents challenges that Donuts didn't.
On a beat tape, you can make your point in a few bars and move on to the next boom-bap, but an album wants structure and continuity. Dilla imposed this structure upon The Shining by two primary methods, with varying levels of success. The first was by cultivating a sense of unified variety, and this is where The Shining truly excels-- it's a great digest of Dilla's various moods and modes. We get sumptuous neo-soul: "Love" recreates the Impressions' "We Must Be in Love" as a crackling swoon punched up with hearty brass, while "Baby" uses sped-up infant samples as bold, primary-color accents for its supple pastels. We get vertiginous, Madlib-esque fire: "Geek Down" weaves a sinister net of thunderclap drums, weird wavering bass, demonic incantation, and a dominant line like a sliced-up kazoo; the rock-solid stomp of "E=MC2" radiates as variegated vocoder textures swell and decay. And we get straight-up trunk-rattle: "Jungle Love" laces wowing sirens over skeletal trash-compacter percussion, while "Body Movin'" carves up a cymbal-heavy wash with off-kilter squelch and abrupt vocal drops.
The Shining's second layer of structural integrity resides in the guest vocals that dominate the album. Many of the record's guests also rose to prominence in the 1990s, though none of them remind us how much hip-hop has changed since then more starkly than Busta Rhymes: The guy who once had one of the most bugged-out flows in rap squanders "Geek Down" with thuggish, boring ad-libs that pay homage to the "fucking godfather Dilla" while contradicting the essence of his playful spirit. Common fares a bit better on "E=MC2", dropping innocuous party raps into the tight slots between the scratches and drums. He's equally passable sparring gently with the always sublime D'Angelo on "So Far to Go", which sports the sort of inventively dreamy yet perfectly coherent landscape Dilla also showed off on Steve Spacek's "Dollar", reminding us that the producer was as good with r&b atmosphere as he was with rap thwack (he makes Dwele sound way better than he has any right to on the "Dime Piece" remix). MED and Guilty Simpson spit nails that are well-suited to the junkyard jangle of "Jungle Love", while Black Thought mounts a commanding presence amid the overlapping click-tracks of "Love Movin'". Dilla embeds his own utilitarian rhymes in the deep digital swirls of "Won't Do", and while they don't add much force to the track, they pretty much stay out of the way.
Staying out of the way was one of Dilla's assets-- one hears his productions, first and foremost, as songs, not as stylized renditions of his brand. This is why his music is at once so enduringly listenable and why it never fully cracked a mainstream obsessed with personality and trademarked tics-- Dilla's trademark was self-effacement in the service of the groove. The mainstream wanted him, but he mostly didn't want it, preferring to work with friends and kindred spirits, admitting as much with the sample that closes out "Baby": "How do I feel about radio hip-hop? I think it's wack. Most of the shit they play is straight garbage." Whether or not one agrees with the sentiment is beside the point in the context of The Shining-- it's simply an expression of Dilla's steadfast commitment to his own vision amid the shifting tides of rap culture at large.


Stax issues an expanded 3xCD box set commemorating what is arguably the definitive r&b festival, featuring handfuls of artists-- including Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, and the Bar-Kays-- at the peaks of their careers.

Wattstax

As the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles was still reeling from the effects of the riots that tore it apart in 1966, a different epicenter of black culture was taking similar pains to recover and rebuild. Stax Records was hit with a series of events in the span of a year that would have sunk almost any other independent label: Warner Bros. bought Stax distributor Atlantic Records, swiping the Stax master tapes and distribution rights from label co-founder Jim Stewart. A December 1967 plane crash claimed the lives of marquee star Otis Redding and all but two members of session band the Bar-Kays. And five months afterwards, Martin Luther King-- a man who embodied the racially-integrated social philosophy that Stax couldn't exist without-- was assassinated in the same Memphis motel where Steve Cropper and Eddie Floyd co-wrote the #1 r&b hit "Knock on Wood". But as Stax's fortunes changed in the early 70s-- bolstered by the success of artists like Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers and Johnnie Taylor-- a combination of financial uninhibitedness and social goodwill drove the label to organize a concert that would both showcase the label's expanding roster and serve as an inspiration to a community that the outside world considered second-class.
Seven years after their first revue tour outside Memphis saw a number of their artists stranded in Los Angeles during the Watts riots, Stax returned to L.A. and put on one hell of a show. Some called it "the Black Woodstock", which isn't completely accurate; the cost was a dollar more than free, everyone on the bill was great (Albert King or Sha Na Na? Not a hard choice), and the attendees tended to dress a lot better. As a concert, film, and live recording, Wattstax is possibly the definitive r&b festival; only James Brown's shows have packed more energy and showmanship into a live set, and every artist-- from the Oscar-winning Hayes to the no-hit wonders that gigged in clubs around town in the week before the main event at the Los Angeles Coliseum-- is either at the peak of their artistic powers or damn well plays like it. Stax's 3xCD box set commemorating the event, re-released in the general vicinity of its 35th anniversary (though this particular collection first appeared in 2003), isn't the most important document of the show-- that'd be the concert film, directed by Mel Stuart (less than two years removed from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory)-- but it's easy to get an idea of every extra moment that made the whole experience legendary: Kim Weston's rendition of black national anthem "Lift Every Voice and Sing", Richard Pryor's comic yet cutting interstitials, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson's legendary introduction, which incorporated his poem "I Am - Somebody" into a 100,000-strong call-and-response.
The concert proper is well-represented here, and it goes a long way toward showing how Stax was able to stay solvent in the early 70s even without longtime standbys like Sam & Dave or Booker T. & the M.G.'s. Not that there isn't any of the old guard represented here: Eddie Floyd busts his ass during a forceful rendition of "Knock on Wood", where he spends just about every moment he's not singing urging the crowd to get up and clap their hands. Carla Thomas reaches even further back, peppering her extensive set with a roll call of r&b's phases in the 60s, from 1960's post-doo-wop classic "Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes)" (which gets an absolutely rapturous response from the first syllable) to 1966's slice of prime Hayes/Porter r&b "B-A-B-Y" to the churning, Southern-fried soul-funk of 1969's "I Like What You're Doing (To Me)". And Carla's father Rufus, one of Stax's first hitmakers and a graying 55 at the time, commands the stage with a rapid-fire succession of his iconic dance-craze songs-- likeably dippy novelties on record, but live they were the catalyst for a glorious stage-rushing Funky Chicken contest.
The post-Atlantic hitmakers are just as powerful. The Bar-Kays hit the ground running with a medley of "Son of Shaft" and "Feel It": the former is a funk explosion that makes the original Isaac Hayes composition sound like an exercise in restraint, while the latter is a sick, organ-heavy extended vamp with a memorably lascivious monologue ("I'm told that havin' fun is like havin' sex: That is, the more you put in to it, the more you're gonna get out of it"). David Porter, who started coming into his own as a performer at the end of the 60s after years of songwriting, is featured in a 20-plus-minute orchestral soul suite that devotes ten and a half minutes to the heartbreak ballad "Can't See You When I Want To", the most epic and gut-wrenching performance included in the set. And Johnnie Taylor-- who had 12 r&b top 10 singles for Stax from 1968 to 1974-- turns his slinky, sly love song "Steal Away" into smooth, upbeat proto-disco that sees Philadelphia International cresting over the horizon and fires right back.
Where the new box set differs greatly from previous records devoted to the concert is in its breadth, especially with unreleased performances. Over a third of the material here is previously unavailable, and much of it is devoted to the also-ran artists that never cracked the r&b top ten but didn't fail for lack of trying: belter Lee Sain's gut-bucket contribution to the Great Hot Pants Frenzy of 1971, "Them Hot Pants"; the Temprees' velvety falsetto showcase "Explain it to Her Mama"; Louise McCord's raw, Aretha-esque "Better Get a Move On". You could come to the conclusion that a few of these come at the expense of a few crucial omissions, some more forgivable than others; Isaac Hayes is represented solely by "Theme from Shaft" (though a more complete set is available on the must-have Isaac Hayes at Wattstax), while Luther Ingram's smoldering infidelity ode "If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don't Want to Be Right)" is only available on the Wattstax: Highlights from the Soundtrack comp that this set makes mostly redundant. But that's searching for complaints. The box set still captures the concert's spirit intact, and the Reverend Jackson's introduction delivers as precise a summary as you'd hope for: "We know that music is music, all of our people got a soul, our experience determines the texture, the taste, and the sound of our soul...all of us are one people, singin' our music, popping our fingers and doing our thing."


On her fourth studio album, Greta Kline gamely stares down her middle twenties, that messy period where one’s early projections about the future tend to start unraveling.

Close it Quietly

Greta Kline’s early work as Frankie Cosmos earned the New York songwriter a reputation as a dazzling twee prodigy, a teenager who deftly encapsulated the weighty uncertainties of humanity in two-minute bites of melody. On her EP Fit Me In, the followup to 2014’s breakout album Zentropy, she mocked her own press coverage, which seemed more preoccupied with her age then her work: “Have you heard? I am so young.” Every Frankie Cosmos album since has felt like an attempt to take stock of what transpired since Kline’s last release, with moving meditations on touring, friendships, and the alienation of being a public-facing figure keen on safeguarding her private life. On Close It Quietly, her fourth studio LP and second Sub Pop release, she gamely stares down her middle twenties, that messy period where one’s early projections about the future tend to start unraveling.
Kline’s language has always been the tightly coiled heart of her work, and here she offers a wealth of indelible imagery that smears together the winsome and the grotesque. “Spit out diamonds/Cough up rubies,” she sings blithely on the chorus to “Windows,” a beguiling couplet that offers no window onto her interior state. The song’s peppy, full-band instrumentation recedes at the hook, an inversion of typical power-pop song dynamics—the synthesizers melt away and Kline’s voice darkens, supported by little but the tick of a cymbal.
“I wanna give you all my marbles,” she offers over a spare fingerpicked guitar on “Marbles,” twisting an old phrase until it becomes an expression of generosity rather than instability: If she’s going to lose her marbles, she might as well give them away. On “So Blue,” she envisions a cheery sky soaking the whole world in its melancholic hue (blue’s only a happy color when it doesn’t touch the ground). And with “A Joke,” Kline enlists wildflowers in an embrace of her own chaos: “Flowers don’t grow/In an organized way/Why should I?” She observes a field of dandelions and then pans down to where they’re strangling the soil, imbuing a well-worn image with new ferocity.
Listening to Frankie Cosmos, I hold up the person I was at 19 and the one I was at 25, a six-year chasm full of molting and tumult that the first self never could have foreseen. I had a good sense of self in my late teens, and then I shed it, and shed what replaced it. Kline wades fearlessly into that process of continual unearthing, casting off what used to make sense and what doesn’t anymore—old relationships, old habits, old vantages on a world that grows more complex by the day. Close It Quietly is honest about the pain of rebirth, but it doesn’t dwell there. Kline’s more interested in what grows out of that mess.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Inspired by soul singers like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield, the D.C.-born singer puts a modern spin on classic concepts. His genre-bending debut operates at a fever pitch.

Green Twins

Nick Hakim songs brim with yearning. There are glimpses of lovers, both lost and present, but he emphasizes the feelings they impart in specific moments. This was the hallmark of his early standout, “Cold,” a break-up song that longed for a reconciliation that would never come, settling for the memory of her smile and gaze. Each of Hakim’s scenes carries singular flourishes, like the souring regret that can come with nostalgia, or the blush of a daydream. These details all bear love’s pull—lusty remarks, frenzied expressions, delicate tremors, caught in the thrall of romance. Hakim’s debut album, Green Twins, is a shrine to these entanglements made entirely of soft-spoken love songs that erupt into psychedelic hymnals.
Growing up in D.C., Hakim’s parents would sing and play nueva canción, the socially-charged folk music of South America. Meanwhile, his older brother was deeply immersed in the city’s vibrant punk scene, and introduced him to the Clash and district legends like Fugazi and Bad Brains. Hakim’s friends were in go-go bands and he sat in on rehearsals. It all shaped his formative years. Nourished by a rigorous musical background, Hakim landed at Berklee College of Music, and as a student, he released Where Will We Go, a two-part project about isolation, intoxication, and how they feed each other. Those arrangements were more hushed and still, but Green Twins is full of life and energy, often operating at a fever pitch.
Inspired by soul singers with an intimate understanding of both the conscious and the sensual—Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, and D’Angelo among them—Hakim evokes the bluesy heart and gospel tinge of soul music. His songs are indelibly marked by the genre’s forebearers, but there are nods to the sounds of his youth, too. It all might recall the rawness of Archy Marshall’s Zoo Kid phase, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s psych soul fusions, or Miguel’s “Adorn.” Hakim clearly likes modern takes on classic concepts. “TYAF” and “Bet She Looks Like You” burn traits from neo-psychedelia down into kindling for Hakim’s potent ruminations on the divine. After surging into a steady groove, “Miss Chew” opens in the middle, hollowing out for scattering sax blurts. These are genre-bending songs that find communion in love’s simple truths. Reflective and forgiving, they treat soul like a remedy.
Hakim studied music therapy at Berklee, a major that encompassed theory, composition, and arranging along with clinical skills, and Green Twins has a therapeutic quality. Every reflection, dressed with hums and coos, feels healing, stewing until it finds catharsis. The most intimate moments unravel as hazy reveries. As summery guitar licks and billowing bass bubble into a current of shrieks on “Slowly,” it’s rapturous. Hakim writhes in pleasure, recalling a fantasy, wrapped in the throes of ecstasy as the song swells toward its climax. On “Cuffed,” he relives being devoted and lovestruck—or cuffed—as his enchantress, literally cuffed to her mother’s bed, lies in wait. In its final minutes, it slows to a chug with Hakim reciting the same lyrics like a mantra. The rich brew of tones and textures is intoxicating: Shrinking refrains give way to colossal, layered arrangements; whispers and wails give voice to bliss.
For all the intimacy and sentimentality knotted in every phrase, these songs aren’t so much about what Hakim sings as how he sings them. On “Needy Bees,” his light rasp producing a gentle reverb. On “Farmissplease,” he sways from a falsetto into a whine. Every note is used precisely; when he isn’t drawing outlines with long breaths, as if trying to fill a room, his singing cowers into whimpers, forcing closer listening. The dynamics help construct Hakim’s plush sonic sanctum, and they add depth to his vignettes of old (and ongoing) flames.
In the last minutes of Green Twins, on “The Want,” his harmonies crescendo into a melismatic collage, conveying passion and how unsustainable it can be. As the song ends abruptly, there’s a sense that Hakim has been trying to summon something lost, but is suddenly snapped out of it. The songs on Green Twins feel like attempts to save remnants of the cherished encounters that fill up a lifetime. So few of these moments last long. But Nick Hakim has set out to preserve his any way possible.


After several years of singles and an EP, the NYC-based electro-pop outfit makes its full-length debut.

Holy Ghost!

As much as the standard model has shifted from the full-length album to the individual track, there's still a lot of baggage to the phrase "singles band." A group with a couple of great songs and a few unremarkable ones might've gotten more of a pass for hiding the mediocrities on B-sides back when "sides" were the only game in town, but the nature of an album still has a certain weight to the idea of consistent front-to-back listening that doesn't forgive hitches so easily. Still, even though Holy Ghost! have followed up a string of singles and an EP (2010's Static on the Wire) with an album where the big stumbling blocks are redundancy and an overextension of a few good ideas, it's surprisingly easy to toss those concerns aside and just go for the choice stuff piecemeal-style.
Holy Ghost! do have a good amount of choice stuff, actually, at least if you've warmed to the idea of a band that does for 1980s electro-pop and some of the era's more forward-thinking AOR what the Juan MacLean did for deep house. But it depends on how much you take in at once. That's another paradox of a singles band-- put a bit of chronological distance between a few soundalike tracks, and the water-treading doesn't seem so bad. On an album, it's easy to notice that, say, the lyrical conceit of "Hold On"'s hook is recycled for the bridge on "Say My Name" ("Hold on, hold on, hold on/ Even though you know you shouldn't"). But with a few years separating those tracks' original releases, the original impressions hinged more on a stylistic progression from the former's chirpy yet suave electro-pop to the latter's frosty, anxious, and immaculately mannered minimal new wave. That's why it's a bit harder to parse the tracks that make their debut on the album.
A few of these stand out immediately. There's "Jam for Jerry", a subtly guilt-stricken yet touching tribute to drummer Jerry Fuchs, and "Some Children", which not only drops a youth chorus on your head but throws in an honest-to-god Michael McDonald appearance on the chorus to boot. Both sound like textbook Factory-replica synthpop with faint underpinnings of Fourth and Broadway-eclectic dance music and R&B. Think Chromeo with a straighter face. But these songs have enough staying power in their catchiness to feel distinct so long as you keep them isolated from each other. And the songs on Holy Ghost! you might've heard already still hold up, whether after 3 1/2 years (the aforementioned "Hold On") or just under one, like the yearning electro-funk of Static on the Wire's title track, reintroduced here.
Other tracks aren't so lucky when strung in succession, and the familiar, unchallenging pleasures of each individual song-- the semi-industrial churn of "Do It Again", the piano-flecked Jellybean Benitez pop-lock of "Wait and See", the aloof disco of "Slow Motion"-- are quickly canceled out by the next, losing detail and impact in the cumulative procession. That'll come with time, and there's plenty of momentum to grasp hold of when the music's actually playing. But the "I need to hear this again right away" jolt might not grab on for good.
While Holy Ghost! don't have the compositional knack of Hot Chip or Cut Copy, Alex Frankel's cool, reserved, yet subtly emotional vocals and the duo's solid knack for no-bullshit dance grooves are served well by a consistent mood of tense detachment-- the sort of mildly intriguing disconnect that comes with the combination of upbeat synthpop and downbeat lyrical ennui. It's not always the most distinct lyrical ennui, granted, with words that don't get any less vague than the titles and sentiments that often need to be heard between the lines. Just meet it all halfway, and it'll be fine. As slippery and elusive as this album's thrills can be, they'll eventually fall into place, one track at a time.


On his 12th album, Bill Callahan relies almost exclusively on acoustic strumming and easy melodies, forsaking much of the biting cynicism of his more highly regarded work.

A River Ain't Too Much to Love

Bill Callahan, the man behind Smog's dark, conflicted narratives, is often critically thought to be "enigmatic"-- mainly because he addresses frequently passionate subjects with dispassion. In that sense, the tag becomes more like shorthand to describe a singer-songwriter who doesn't spill his every weepy desire. But I've never really bought into the idea that Callahan is an exotic, unknowable creature, and I've never bought into the idea that his work has to be inscrutable (or let's be more rock critic-y and say "inaccessible") to be effective.
Even at his least explicit, Callahan's music comes across as an honest assessment of its creator. For that, he's sometimes also labeled a jerk and a misogynist, among other things, but that may be the price of doing business for an artist who refuses to paint himself in the rosy hues of everlasting love or the antique sepia of "heartfelt" loss-- in short, refusing to paint over his own complexity. The existential nature of Callahan's music has been touched on before, as he presents himself allegorically in his albums-- a hash of emotions, desires, and needs, frequently uncertain of the world beyond the nose on his face, aware only of himself and his mortality, and, most crucially, drawing his own detached security directly from that awareness. He gets called an enigma because he resembles a human being in a medium where people are used to seeing caricatures.
And all that is just a way of excusing the kinder, gentler Smog that has settled in on 2003's Supper and now A River Ain't Too Much to Love, Callahan's 12th proper album. The more confrontational sound of early Smog-- the distinct instrumentation and the sometimes sardonic and sometimes nasty edge-- has been blunted, whether by age or simply a desire to not repeat himself. Instead, Callahan relies almost exclusively on acoustic strumming and easy melodies, forsaking much of the biting cynicism of his more highly regarded work. Although not as compelling as his more subversive material, this softening of his sound doesn't carry the negative connotation of an artist losing steam later in his career; Callahan's distinctive baritone and cutting inflection are unchanging and iconic, and show that this sensitive appearance is just one more spin of the kaleidoscope. As Callahan deadpans on "I'm New Here", "I did not become someone different.../ No matter how far wrong you've gone/ You can always turn around."
For the gentleness of its tone, a listen to "Say Valley Maker" makes clear the message here: "Bury me in wood, and I will splinter/ Bury me in stone, and I will quake/ Bury me in water, and I will geyser/ Bury me in fire, and I'm gonna phoenix". It's about transcendence after death, or-- for a man so clearly wrapped up in his own mortality in the past-- one of peace after the tumult of confronting that mortality. On previous records, after tossing a broken bottle into the woods-- frustrated because he couldn't work to open "The Well"-- Callahan-as-Camus might've mused on the inconsequence or futility of the act. Here, he still throws the bottle, but suffers pangs of conscience, feeling sorry "for the doe-paw, and the rabbit-paw," and goes looking for the shards.
Callahan's a bit new to this sort of territory, occasionally tripping over some surprisingly hokey imagery, and it may not suit those who crave the immediate emotional impact of his more tormented work. But, like any other Smog album, it would be incomplete if it pandered to a one-dimensional view of its creator. In that sense, A River Ain't Too Much to Love makes perfect sense. An album that might be superficially seen as inappropriately becalmed, in its own subdued way, feels instead like life welling up where it had once been suppressed, as human as anything Callahan has ever done.


The latest from Tame Impala and Pond’s Jay Watson smooths out the pastiche psych-rock and dials down the eccentricity to create a more seamless song cycle.

The Underdog

Jay Watson isn’t shy about self-deprecation. His recent string of albums as GUM have functioned as billboards for his own diffidence: Glamorous Damage, Flash in the Pan, and now, The Underdog. Perhaps such humility is a natural byproduct when you’re a silent partner in both Australia’s most famous psychedelic rock band and its most rambunctious, while trying to carve out space as a solo artist beyond their long shadows. By Watson’s own admission, GUM’s past records effectively served as storing houses for whatever ideas are bouncing around his head when he’s not playing with his other bands. But the encouraging evolution of the project suggests that Watson may not be able to keep up the false-modesty act for much longer.
The Underdog is built from the same toolkit as GUM’s previous releases—psychedelia, prog, ‘70s soft rock, disco, electro—but smooths out their pastiche quality and dials down the eccentricity to create a more seamless song cycle. According to Watson, The Underdog is a quasi-concept album that presents a dusk-to-dawn snapshot of his life. The passage of time isn’t so much marked by specific events as impressionistic shifts in mood, where the promise of the night gives way to intense wee-hours introspection.
As per GUM tradition, the album opens with a brief instrumental teaser—in this case, a sun-beamed synth aria—however, the fact Watson actually titled this one “Introduction” reinforces the greater attention to structure and sequencing in effect here. It leads us right into the album’s title track/theme song, a shot of swaggering cosmic funk where Watson throws down his mission statement: “Always go for the underdog!” His declaration is instantly undercut by a rejoinder that’s perfectly Lennon-esque in both sound and cynical spirit: “Someone’s always in the way/And that’s not gonna change.”
It’s tempting to read that exchange as a comment on Watson’s relatively humble standing next to Tame Impala frontman Kevin Parker and the challenges of establishing GUM’s own identity. At times, it’s impossible to ignore the, ahem, under-Currents flowing through The Underdog: the lo-fi ballad “After All (From the Sun)” blossoms into a bass-synth bounce that will have you mentally transposing the woozy chorus refrain to “’Cause I’m a Man,” while the soft-focus intro of “The Blue Marble” is upended by a booming break that could pass for a pitch-shifted remix of “New Person, Same Old Mistakes.” But the big difference this time is that GUM no longer sounds like the idiosyncratic, lo-tech offshoot of Tame Impala: In both its more luxuriant production and more emotionally resonant songwriting, The Underdog finds Watson pursuing his own widescreen vision of lonerism.
Following a playful opening stretch, The Underdog reveals its wounded core during its more absorbing second act, where Watson slips into an insomniac’s fever dream wracked with anxiety and self-doubt. “Rehearsed in a Dream” is a dark-night-of-the-soul reckoning embedded in a hazy fog of Floydian psych and quiet-storm R&B, and that encroaching sense of existential dread peaks on the gripping “Trying My Best,” a self-help mantra amplified by the sort of dramatic, throbbing synths you hear on a ’70s European sci-fi-flick soundtrack. But with the neon-tinted disco of “The Fear,” Watson opts for the most effective therapy: losing your mind at the club. “I’ve got the fear!” he repeats, and the directive is clear: sing along if you know the words—or, better yet, tremble uncontrollably if you’re all too familiar with the feeling.


The fourth album from the country outlaw is another left-turn with synth-rock at its scuzziest, boogie-rock at its cheesiest, all held together by Simpson’s fearless songwriting.

SOUND & FURY

In 2017, Sturgill Simpson publicly declared that Nashville—every country musician’s master—does not dictate who he is or what his music sounds like. After his third studio album, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, Simpson busked outside the 2017 Country Music Awards in protest of a statement CMA sent to journalists demanding they refrain from asking artists about the Las Vegas massacre, gun rights, or politics in general. One of the signs in his open guitar case read, mockingly, “Struggling country singer.” If the country music establishment didn’t feel he was fit for them, he’d show them that they were correct. He expands on this idea on SOUND & FURY, his fourth full-length, an extension of that protest in album—and anime—form. The album is the soundtrack to an accompanying Netflix film, which is essentially a 41-minute music video.
Fitting, then, that the album opener is titled “Ronin,” meaning a wandering samurai with no master. The song kicks off with some grade-A foley work—boots crunching rocks on a dirt road, an old gas-guzzler wheezing to life, Alex Jones on the radio—and evolves into a swampy extended guitar solo that lays bare Simpson’s intentions for the rest of the album. Across 10 tracks, Simpson trades subtlety and plaintive guitar work for full-bore skronk and sleaze. It’s a hard but fearless turn away from what Simpson’s calling card of blurring the lines between country and psychedelia. On SOUND & FURY, Simpson throws both genres into the trunk of his car and does 85 down the backroads.
Musically, SOUND & FURY has more in common with ZZ Top’s 1983 album Eliminator than Merle Haggard’s Hag—or any country album, really. The tracks are woven together by the car radio first heard on “Ronin,” as if Simpson is changing the station for us, showing that he can glide between synth-rock, glam, dancefloor-fillers; songwriting is king in his world. It doesn’t matter if he’s playing a dreamy campfire song—there are none here, by the way—or a two-minute instrumental stomper. Simpson is the one dictating his sound, take it or leave it.
What works for Simpson is when he lets his soulful voice shine through, like on “All Said and Done,” the closest fans will get to a Simpson song of yore on the album, or “Mercury in Retrograde,” a bouncy pop tune with electric strings and a fluttering synth about fake friends who barge on to his tour bus to ask him if his songs are about them. This one is.
What doesn’t quite land are tracks like “A Good Look,” co-written with John Prine, if you can believe it. It’s a frenetic disco-funk song, with a police-siren lead guitar and an overworked bassist. Its genuinely interesting and introspective lines about creating art, like, “I write my poems in the dirt with an oily rag/I have to wear a gas mask just so I don’t gag” become frustrating afterthoughts when followed by an incessant cowbell. There are a few more moments like this, where Simpson’s reliance on ’80s disco and funk often feels more like artifice than art, a reactionary and deliberate hard-right away from what has served him so well in the past: lush, beautiful soundscapes and sweeping choruses.
The lyrics from “Make Art Not Friends,” anticipate such criticism. The song begins with an extended arpeggiated synth part that wouldn’t sound out of place on Tangerine Dream’s Tangram, before eventually evolving into a cohesive thesis for the album. “This town’s getting crowded, the truth’s been shrouded. I think it’s time to change up the sound,” Simpson croons. “The wheels keep turning, the flames get higher, another cycle rolls around.”
Simpson has always looked for an escape. His first album, High Top Mountain, was his traditional country debut, a hail-mary attempt to make it; Metamodern Sounds in Country Music was his refutation of that style, with stoned panache; and he said he wrote A Sailor’s Guide to Earth because “people think I wake up in the morning and pour LSD on my Cheerios.” SOUND & FURY is miles down the road from any of his previous albums. As the album’s closer, “Fastest Horse in Town,” reaches the seven-minute mark and the radio sounds return, we hear that same car from “Ronin” revving up and speeding away. He’s likely already done with this sound, and on to the next one. Hell, he told his wife a few years ago that he’d make a bluegrass record someday composed of ’80s covers of her choosing. Only the real ones will be along for this ride, but, as he sings on “Mercury in Retrograde,” the album’s penultimate track, “the road to hell is paved with cruel intentions.” He’ll travel it solo if need be.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Aaliyah’s final album, her masterpiece.

Aaliyah: Aaliyah

Whether you believe in the afterlife or not, it’s easy enough to picture Aaliyah in heaven. The video for “Rock The Boat,” the 2001 single that would be her last, looks as if it were beamed down from one of the mythical seven heavens: gently lapping water, the flare of a bright sun, women dressed in all white. She seems peaceful, softer than in previous clips. In August, after wrapping her scenes in the Bahamas, Aaliyah boarded a flight home. The Cessna twin-engine crashed moments after takeoff, killing the singer and eight others. She was 22. In life, Aaliyah was often described by friends and collaborators as angelic; in her death, that image persists.
Just weeks earlier, she had released her third album, Aaliyah, a well-received collection of songs that mapped her personal growth during the five years since her second full-length, 1996’s One In A Million. During that hiatus, she’d taken an interest in acting, starring in a couple of films and lining up others, including two upcoming Matrix movies. But in between being on set during the day and in the studio at night, Aaliyah also had a lot to reckon with. In 1995, she’d ended a professional and allegedly predatory sexual relationship with R. Kelly, who’d produced her 1994 platinum-selling debut Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number. Today, especially following testimony aired in Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly,” Aaliyah is understood to have been a survivor of his predation, but at the time, many people blamed her for the secret relationship and the falsification of her age on a clandestine marriage certificate.
Internally, there was a concern that her career would flounder, that she would not be able to match Kelly’s production and songwriting elsewhere. But with members of the Supafriends—Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and, eventually, the late Static Major—by her side, Aaliyah easily eclipsed her work with Kelly. “Tim and I were new producers," Missy told Rolling Stone in 2001. "From day one, she had that much faith in our music that she treated us like we already sold a million records, when we hadn't sold anything yet. She really helped make us what we are today.” The gamble paid off. Where Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number was defined by Kelly’s rote new jack swing and carried by her vocal depth, One In A Million was clever, fun, and forward-thinking. A couple of years later, “Are You That Somebody,” a single made for the Dr. Dolittle soundtrack, changed everything: Aaliyah wasn’t just sweet and sly; she revealed herself as endearingly weird and aspirationally cool—over a bizarre drum pattern and the sample of a baby’s coo, at that.
Aaliyah took that many steps further. By the time she began working on the album in 1998, she had developed an interest in both the experimental and traditional, and her collaborators on the album—the Supafriends as well as producers signed to her family’s Blackground record label—were up to the task. She veers wildly, but cohesively, between the futuristic, triple-time experimentation of singles like “We Need A Resolution” and “More Than A Woman” and the throwback soul of “Never No More” and “I Care 4 U.”  It was Aaliyah’s voice that strung it all together. Her falsetto had earned an edge, and her multi-part harmonies, arranged ingeniously, added grace and texture. Even Timbaland’s grating, awkward raps and ad-libs are softened.
This time, Aaliyah had added Static, who’d cut his teeth working with Ginuwine and in the R&B group Playa, as a writer. The result was something that diverged from the pop language du jour, yet somehow remained in conversation with it. Though Aaliyah hadn’t yet become a writer, she was inordinately good at picking songs, absorbing them, and interpreting through her bright, wispy soprano. The album’s singles—“We Need A Resolution,” “More Than A Woman,” “Rock The Boat,”—are among her best, boldly off-kilter, imaginative, and alternately mellow and razor-edged. But the deep cuts are just as solid. “Never No More” is an emotional song about enduring and then rejecting abuse at the hands of a partner, “U Got Nerve” and “I Refuse” are formed around a similar suspicion and self-assurance. Her primary currency was an effortless cool matched only then by Janet Jackson and, all these years later, by Rihanna.
In reviews and profiles from the time, Aaliyah is praised, at the expense of some of her peers, for eschewing the “candy-coated” sound and style of the charts; actually, she was simply pre-empting the trends many of her peers would eventually try on. The glossy girl- and boy-band era was at its peak at the turn of the century, and before pop acts would attempt to replace that sheen with cool, calling on “urban” producers like Timbaland and The Neptunes, Aaliyah modeled the perfect balance of pop, R&B, and hip-hop. Months before Britney Spears made headlines for performing with a snake at the MTV VMA awards in 2001, Aaliyah had done it in the video for “We Need A Resolution.” Her personal style, creative direction, and choreography were legendarily inventive. She made comfort look luxe as the original little shirt, big pants girl, and tore through dark-and-mysterious years before Keanu Reeves made leather trench coats trendy (in the early years, her omnipresent sunglasses and then side-swooped hair prompted widespread rumors of a lazy eye). By the time of Aaliyah, she’d reinvented herself yet again, this time brighter and more streamlined. Her dancing, unlike that of many of her peers, was fluid and interpretative, designed to communicate more than to be imitated by fans in bedrooms and basements around the world. Her image was like her music: risky and adventurous, with a fondness for just the right amount of cheek.
Nearly 20 years after her death, she persists as a moodboardable influence, finding lasting presence not purely of nostalgia but as aesthetic inspiration for a generation that came to age in her absence. Searching Aaliyah’s name on Tumblr brings up thousands and thousands of images—watermarked red carpet photos, GIFs and photo sets ripped from music videos, and the occasional ode of fandom. One photo, of what appears to be a performance look, appears to be a direct inspiration for Solange’s current tour wardrobe: a triangle bikini top with straps crisscrossed across the torso and a pair of flowing, loose-fitting pants.
But Aaliyah has been a reference for Solange, and others, elsewhere, too: The multiple-part harmonies that have become the younger Knowles’s signature were in fact once the signature of Aaliyah, most in focus on, Aaliyah.  On what would have been Aaliyah’s 36th birthday, Frank Ocean shared his own take of the Isley Brothers’ “At Your Best,” which she’d first covered more than 20 years earlier, in 1994. She’d updated it with a spare, solemn almost-whisper, and Ocean’s version,  which was eventually given a proper release on Endless, draws equally from Aaliyah’s falsetto as from the Isley Brothers’ original. There are traces of her influence elsewhere, too; the layered harmonies and gentle melodies of Beyoncé’s “I Miss You,” co-written by Ocean, could easily have been recorded first, albeit with more restraint and whimsy, by Aaliyah. Understandably, among the most common refrains about the singer was that she was ahead of her time.
And yet, paradoxically to its significance, the legacy of Aaliyah is now diminished by its absence from streaming services. After her death, Blackground Records, run by her uncle and cousin, faced some operational and legal issues. The label’s domain name has lapsed, and a final release promised by an associated publishing company has not materialized. There have been a couple of false starts—a posthumous album helmed, and then abandoned, by Drake and 40; an unsanctioned greatest hits release; the sale of her catalog to a publishing company—but most of Aaliyah’s catalog has remained unavailable to stream or download. Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number, the album written and produced by her abuser, is the only accessible release. For many artists, this could mean being written out of history, forgotten to more convenient nostalgia. For Aaliyah, it means something rarer—a legacy defined not by industry profiteers and hologram start-ups but by friends, fans, and kindred artists.


Big K.R.I.T. is at the top of his game on his new double album. It’s an even split between booming subwoofers and tough-guy talk on one side and a considerable vulnerability on the other.

Big K.R.I.T.: 4eva Is a Mighty Long Time

4eva Is a Mighty Long Time

In July of 2010, Big K.R.I.T. made an unannounced appearance at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan, opening for rapper du jour Jay Electronica, fresh off the heels of “Exhibit C.” The crowd—anxious to see the reclusive Jay Electronica in a rare performance—was clearly not there for K.R.I.T., and when he broke into his hit “Country Shit,” he was roundly booed.
The scene was reminiscent of the 1995 Source Awards, when a provincial New York crowd met the announcement of OutKast’s victory for Best New Rap Group with jeers. With Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, OutKast had made a record that was unapologetically of, by, and for the South. And it was always dope—it just took the rest of the world a few years to catch up. From the podium at Madison Square Garden, amid a chorus of boos, Dre declared “The South got somethin’ to say,” and over the next 10 years, people started listening.
More than two decades later, it’s clear that Big K.R.I.T. was taking notes. From the jump—his 2010 breakout K.R.I.T. Wuz Here—K.R.I.T. cemented his reputation as a Southern rap traditionalist. His unapologetic reverence for UGK and Organized Noize is well-documented; his work as a producer feels like a synthesis of the various branches of Southern rap history. In that way, he shares a similarity with the early work of New York formalists like Joey Bada$$ and Roc Marciano, who made their names capturing an aesthetic pulled from their city’s most classic records. But unlike his New York contemporaries, K.R.I.T. has never been overly concerned with lyrical dominance, brushing off Kendrick Lamar’s name-check on “Control” like he was annoyed to even have to respond. “More spiritual than lyrical,” K.R.I.T. doesn’t really seem to care if anyone thinks he’s the greatest rapper alive, as long as you know he holds it down.
K.R.I.T.’s latest LP, 4eva Is a Mighty Long Time, finds him defiantly redrawing blurred lines between his work and home life—the first disc is dedicated to his Big K.R.I.T. persona, he of the booming subwoofers, candy-painted Cadillacs, and tough-guy talk. The second, marked by his government name, Justin Scott, is considerably more vulnerable, with earnest tales of love, his relationship with God, and the “Price of Fame.” And in this way, at least, he’s well-served by the double album construction. By saving much of the O.G. uncle wisdom for the Justin Scott half of the record, he avoids any awkward juxtaposition of his flexing and his meditations. Reflection rap from grizzled veterans is often poignant, and K.R.I.T. is at his strongest lyrically when he drops the macho facade (“Played it too cool, almost like I froze, had to turn my flame on,” he raps on “Drinking Sessions”), hindsight’s clarity granting him a more evolved perspective. He’s got some high-profile guest appearances from Southern rap titans (Cee-Lo, T.I., UGK), but spread out over 22 tracks, he manages to avoid being overshadowed.
As a producer, he’s mostly lived up to the promise he flashed on K.R.I.T. Wuz Here, evolving to encompass the sounds of various parts of the South—Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and his home of Mississippi—into an aesthetic that is instantly familiar to its fans, if not specifically attributable to any one city. And while K.R.I.T.’s spirituality feels more personal than communal, the church’s influence is still prominent on organ & gospel chorus jams like “Keep The devil Off.” The spaced out synths on “Aux Cord” (co-produced by DJ Khalil and Rogét Chahayed) feel like they could have been pulled from a Curren$y record at his peak in 2010, and the controlled chaos of the T.I. collab “Big Bank” sounds like the sequel to Killer Mike’s “Big Beast.” But mostly, it’s on the low end of the frequency spectrum where K.R.I.T. really shines. To put it mildly, K.R.I.T. likes bass, and while the rumbling low-end might not translate well to laptop speakers and cheap earbuds, it’s right at home on a booming system.
K.R.I.T. is operating at the top of his game here, and the South has finally been recognized for its considerable hip-hop bonafides. But 4eva Is a Mighty Long Time still feels decidedly average. For some time now, K.R.I.T. has been suffering from an originality crisis—it’s the only real knock against him. He’s happy to keep making music that sounds great on the 15s in the trunk of his car, scoring a familiar sound of the South that doesn’t necessarily need updating—even if it doesn’t sound as fresh as it once did. Subwoofers are admittedly very cool, but by volume 4 (“Subenstein (My Sub IV)”) of K.R.I.T.’s magnum opus of adulation for the bass speakers, the conceit has worn a little thin. Still bumps, though.
Where does that leave the King Remembered in Time? Five years after getting booed at the Highline, he returned to a friendlier climate, this time as a headliner, the world appearing to have caught up with K.R.I.T., too. But unlike Dre, he never really got bored with slammin’ Cadillac doors, and his latest work feels stuck in a time capsule that pop has left behind. Still, in a hip-hop landscape largely defined by artists from the South, he’s managed to carve out his own lane. And he seems content to ride it out, on cruise control, 4eva.