Their career was just beginning, but the Jam were already the hardest-working band in U.K. punk. A new box set revisits their breakthrough year.

The Jam: In the City / This Is the Modern World / The Polydor Demos: February 1977 / Live 1977 + John Peel Sessions

In the City / The Polydor Demos: February 1977 / This Is the Modern World  / Live 1977 + John Peel Sessions

The Jam began 1977 without a record contract. By December, they had recorded two albums—In the City and This Is the Modern World, released a mere six months apart—and catapulted from the bottom of the bill to headlining halls throughout England. Much of the trio’s remarkable rise, as chronicled in the four-CD/single-DVD box 1977, can be attributed to the fact that they were an unusually disciplined band. Paul Weller, the group’s lead singer, songwriter, and guitarist, took rock & roll very seriously, especially in those early days, when he treated even trifles like “Non-Stop Dancing” as calls to arms. Good times were a matter of life or death, a sensibility that led Weller, bassist Bruce Foxton and drummer Rick Buckler to sound urgent even when the stakes were relatively low.
That signature urgency came through in the quickened trajectory of their career. 1977 was the year punk swept through the United Kingdom, with record labels eager to snap up the latest sensation. But that didn’t mean that everyone was moving as fast as the Jam: The Sex Pistols, for instance, took a full year to deliver the full-length sequel to their 1976 debut single, “Anarchy in the U.K.” During that gap, the Jam cut two albums, made a muddled attempt to break into America, and—once Weller decided he’d had it with punk rock—promptly chose to embrace the mantle of new wave instead.
“Punk rock is a big flashy neon sign which sells commodities, whereas new wave is an attitude,” he told the American late-night talk show host Tom Snyder during a probing October 1977 roundtable on punk that also featured the Runaways’ Joan Jett and Kim Fowley, the L.A. rock & roll huckster whose depravity would be revealed decades later. Asked by Snyder to elaborate, Weller added that new wave is “an attitude of the youth,” echoing a lyric from the Jam’s debut single, “In the City.” On that lacerating song—a two-minute, 17-second blast that makes all the possibilities in this world seem endless—Weller vowed, “I wanna tell you about the young ideas,” explicitly positioning the Jam as ambassadors of adolescent culture. Compared to their punk peers, it was a fair claim. British punk was filled with pub-rock refugees—guys on the other side of 25 who decided to don leather and rush the tempo upon hearing the Sex Pistols. And while Foxton and Buckler were the same age as most of the Pistols, the Clash and the Damned—all hovering somewhere in their early 20s—Weller was 18 when his group signed to Polydor. He sounds keenly aware of his age on the band's early catalog, composing rallying cries of teenage rebellion and romance, and happily conflating the two emotions in his songwriting and performances.
Even now, some 40 years after its recording, the music collected on 1977 feels charged and vital, particularly on the whiplash live show recorded at London’s Nashville club on September 10 of that year. Speedier on stage than on record, the Jam don’t flail; they slash with precision, drawing fuel from their own racket. Early punk rarely retains its power in concert recordings—it’s often sloppy and diffuse—but the Jam are so furious here that they seem to exist entirely within the moment.
The visceral kick in the Jam’s music can obscure the fact that they were considerably more musically conservative than the rest of the class of 1977. The thick book included with this box set is full of reminders that the British press viewed the Jam primarily as a latter-day version of the Who: A March 1977 story from Sounds is titled “Maximum New Wave,” with an even less subtle subheadline of “People try to put us down just because we sound like the Who.” Then again, the trio themselves never hid their hero worship. Quite the contrary: the Jam flaunted their influences, savoring the idea that they belonged to a storied rock & roll lineage. Their haircuts were styled after the Small Faces, their suits borrowed from the nattily tailored Yardbirds. They loaded their setlists with oldies, mixing Motown (Martha & the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave”) up with Stax (Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour”), and they loved the Beatles so much, they excavated “Slow Down,” an old ’50s R&B hit by Larry Williams that the Fabs had covered on a 1964 EP.
Prior to the Jam’s arrival in 1977, rock bands generally didn't dwell on the past in such an explicit fashion. The Beatles covered girl groups and the Rolling Stones played blues, but that was part of their complicated attempt to interpret American culture for English audiences. The Jam, on the other hand, helped establish the revolutionary idea that there was a British rock & roll tradition to be upheld—a notion that became rock sacrament, with a legion of bands mimicking the Jam’s ’60s mod revivalism by the close of the ’70s. (Later, in the ’90s, the same aesthetic helped propel the rise of Britpop, turning rock & roll into a retro hall of mirrors.) Yet despite the Jam’s evident love of yesterday, they managed to dodge the usual pitfalls of nostalgia. Weller listened to new music alongside his old favorites, getting turned on not just by the Sex Pistols, but by the hard, clean attack of Dr. Feelgood, the Canvey Island renegades who made traditional values seem lethal. The Jam followed suit, pushing so hard that even the rare ballad on their first two albums—such as the aching “Away From the Numbers”—twitches like a live wire.
The Jam would soon expand their range, with Weller sharpening his observational eye on 1978’s All Mod Cons and the group leaving punk definitively behind on 1979’s Setting Sons, but the fevered concentration they had in their first year is intoxicating. The music on In the City and This Is the Modern World may not be multidimensional, but it is potent, with Foxton following Buckler’s manic rhythms and Weller bashing his guitar above their clamor. As fresh as those albums still sound—particularly compared to the razor-thin Polydor demos collected on disc two, six of which are previously unreleased—the most revelatory part of this box set is the final CD and accompanying DVD, both of which gather live performances from throughout 1977. On their two Peel Sessions, recorded on April 26 and July 19, the Jam are coiled and precise, a focus that can also be seen in clips from “Top of the Pops” and “Marc,” the short-lived variety show hosted by T. Rex’s Marc Bolan. Watching this footage, it’s startling to see just how young the Jam are—particularly Weller, who has the fresh face of a teenager and the steely determination of a righteous adolescent. It’s a fitting look for the eternally youthful music his band was making.


The pop star’s debut is decadent and deeply silly, with songs delivered by the kind of person who uses even the slightest bit of emotional turmoil as an excuse to immerse herself in sex, drugs, and money.

Clarity

Kim Petras isn’t a revolutionary. Unlike her collaborators Charli XCX and SOPHIE, she doesn’t want to push pop into the future or dismantle it and play with the parts; instead, she takes the genre as it’s being expressed this very moment and renders it brighter, bolder, and more aggressive. If heavy hitters like Ariana Grande and Halsey are making fruit juice, she’s a tier below, churning out frozen concentrate: similar taste, but in an undiluted, hyper-dense package.
Despite her extremely online aesthetic and streaming-era approach to releasing new music, she’s ultimately a traditionalist. I listen to her music and hear someone who fell in love with the idea of pop from a distance—she grew up in Cologne, Germany, half a world away from the American music industry—long before she had the chance to make it herself. She’s a scholar of the hit, and she’s honoring her passion by iterating on the form.
Clarity, her debut full-length project, feels less like a major statement than the culmination of a lengthy, controlled burn. After breaking out in 2017 with “I Don’t Want It at All,” a strobe-lit sugar-baby anthem that made “Material Girl” seem demure, Petras slowly assembled a portfolio of strong singles that demonstrated her impressive stylistic range. She glided from gleaming, Robyn-esque anthems (“Heart to Break”) and wistful trap-pop ballads (“Homework”) to faithful bloghouse revivals like “Close Your Eyes,” a highlight from last year’s goofy Halloween-themed EP Turn Off the Light, Vol. 1.
It’d make for a heartwarming underdog story—an aspiring star moves to Los Angeles to make it in the music business, writing songs and crashing on couches until the dream comes true—if her chief creative partner wasn’t Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, the superproducer-turned-pariah whose career entered a precipitous decline after Kesha accused him of sexual assault and physical abuse. When Petras has been asked about or criticized for working with Gottwald, her responses are equivocal but unapologetic: “While I’ve been open and honest about my positive experience with Dr. Luke, that does not negate or dismiss the experiences of others or suggest that multiple perspectives cannot exist at once,” she tweeted last July. “I do want to express my sympathy for any and all abuse victims.”
Yet there exists a stark contrast between the complexity surrounding Petras’ career and the flagrant, almost pointed frivolity of her music. Clarity is a collection of decadent, deeply silly songs, all of them delivered by the kind of person who uses even the slightest bit of emotional turmoil as an excuse to immerse herself in sex, drugs, and money. (Consider this representative couplet from the bratty “Blow It All”: “Shorty in the bathroom and she’s asking ‘where the coke at?’/I spent 20 thousand just to leave it on a coat rack.”) Feeling sad, feeling horny, feeling sad and horny, living like you’re dying—these may not be novel themes, but they’re delivered with palpable enthusiasm and good humor. Petras loves pop enough to celebrate its tropes. When she takes a second in the middle of the raunchy “Do Me” to sing about hitting “high notes” in bed, you’d better believe she’s going to cut the backing track and jump up an octave just for that phrase. It’s hard not to giggle.
Petras’ keen scholarship of pop is also readily apparent in the purity of Clarity’s craft. Along with  Gottwald—who co-wrote and produced every song on Clarity alongside a series of other close collaborators—Petras understands how songwriting can seem like alchemy when a single beat, modulation, or syllable can transform an average song into something magical. Those moments are everywhere: the crisp, snapping rhythm and rich chords of would-be booty call anthem “Got My Number,” the Daft Punk-lite breakdown in the middle of “Do Me,” the touch of grain on the disco loop at the core of the magnificent “Sweet Spot.”
Grouping these songs together in an album-length context sheds light on both Petras’ strengths and weaknesses. She’s so versatile that it’s difficult to identify her musical ground zero: Is it the updated French touch of “Sweet Spot” and “Do Me?” The bouncy, dewy R&B of “Got My Number” and “Another One?” She turns in convincing impressions of Drake, the Weeknd, and Juice WRLD on “Meet the Parents,” “Icy,” and “All I Do Is Cry,” respectively, singing and rapping with surprising speed and fluidity. This kind of diversity might feel incoherent or unfocused from another artist; from Petras, it feels like a natural expression of her interests and talents. She’s the glue holding everything together—think a female Travis Scott, one who grew up worshipping Madonna and the Spice Girls instead of Drake and Kanye West.
At the same time, the sheer intensity of every song on Clarity makes it tough to digest in one sitting. (You wouldn’t pull a can of Minute Maid out of the freezer and eat the entire thing with a spoon, right?) Releasing singles weekly gave each new song room to breathe, and when they’re jammed together into a single 40-minute block, they amount to less than the sum of their parts. This effect might explain Petras’ reticence to call Clarity an “album”: If she takes pop as seriously as I think she does, she might be waiting to apply that title to a project with more coherence and narrative thrust. Clarity is still worth your time and attention, even if it ends up being little more than a stopgap measure. For listeners who decide to charge ahead despite the lack of moral clarity around Petras’ career, it’s the best introduction yet to one of pop music’s brightest talents.


The self-described “mutant” reps the New York underground at its freakiest on a fast-past, collage-heavy album of club rhythms, noise blasts, and unsettling humor.

AXIS

For the last couple of years, Bonnie Baxter has been calling herself a mutant. That’s the term that she and her bandmates in the noise trio Kill Alters have come to prefer for their small community of weirdos in the New York underground. The scene—per one of its most fervent supporters—is “historically psycho,” vibrating with heavy, hyperactive music from artists like Deli Girls, Dreamcrusher, Machine Girl, and Channel 63, among a host of other like-minded freaks. Most of the artists exist on the borders between punk, noise, techno, and rap, but few, if any, belong squarely to any one tradition.
Baxter’s music, both under her name and with Kill Alters, is close to the spiritual center of this scene. Over the last half decade, she’s masterminded a handful of hard-to-categorize tapes and dozens of Bandcamp releases, and her prolific output runs the gamut of contemporary DIY experimental sounds. Generally, the Kill Alters material is oozy and psychedelic, while her solo tracks largely hew closer to the dancefloor, offering bruising beats that might sound like techno if she wasn’t consistently destroying them with static and noise.
Even in that context, AXIS, Baxter’s second solo album for Hausu Mountain, is wonderfully bizarre. More than half of its 12 tracks are less than two minutes long, but it’s packed with more experiments and in-jokes than most records twice its length. Even in the shortest songs, like the minute-long “GLOWNG TROLLS,” she layers tons of overlapping synth lines and rhythmic interchanges. For a second, it sort of sounds like Hausu Mountain co-founder Mukqs’ underwater electro experiments before collapsing into horror-score ambience and unsettling vocals that suggest a possessed Speak & Spell—and that’s all in just over a minute.
Most of the tracks are constructed in this fast-paced, collagist way. It can feel a bit like some of the more surreal electronic music from the late 1990s, like Kid606’s unsettling glitch work or Aphex Twin and µ-Ziq’s Mike & Rich record, but Baxter doesn’t ever let things get too frantic or overwhelming. “SPIRIT ENEMA”—the record’s longest track, at nearly six minutes—transitions from Rephlex-ian acid to stuttery sample torture before settling into a breakdown in which Baxter sings, barely holding in a laugh, “I need some fucking help with my asshole/So please take me to the fucking doctor, thank you very very very much.” Another track, “NO DICC” consists almost entirely of ping-ponging drums and the lyric “I don’t want your dick!” That’s how things largely go: She builds otherworldly, unpredictable tracks, then undercuts off the wildest passages with prankish experiments and goofy jokes.
AXIS is a demanding record. Not only do listeners have to have a taste for Baxter’s delirious instrumentals, they also have to swallow her confrontational sense of humor, the combined effect of which can feel, at moments, like Wolf Eyes playing behind a Tim and Eric sketch. But even the most seemingly off-putting moments—like when she starts believably retching at the end of “NO DICC”—feel weirdly infectious. She has a giddy enthusiasm for always making the strangest possible decision for where a song can go next. Each mutation is more exciting than the last.


Scottish indie-pop musician Patrick Doyle died in 2018, just 32; this posthumous recording with bassist and tourmate Helen Skinner offers a poignant snapshot of his “bent music for bent people.”

Keeping Up Appearances

There aren’t enough queer people in this world and we don’t listen enough to the ones who are here. So when one of them leaves us—as did Patrick Doyle, who passed away in March 2018, just 32—the loss is huge, with its own special echoes.
Doyle had spent at least half his quick life in bands with casual indie characters that inspired fast devotion. In the post-Pastels, Belle and Sebastian-besotted Scotland where he grew up, Doyle jangled his guitar in cult bands Dot to Dot, the Royal We, and the Sexy Kids, and strummed the bass along with Franz Ferdinand’s Paul Thomson in Correcto; in 2006, B&S immortalized his charisma, not to mention his handsome face, across the back of their The Life Pursuit album. Doyle taught himself drums and then went on to pursue fame with bandmate Roxanne Clifford in London as Veronica Falls, whose two rather accomplished albums of lush, lovely indie rock, released by bookish noise-pop heroes Slumberland, sounded like a platonic 21st century Mamas & the Papas where the dreams never end. They were one of those bands that if you heard them, you loved them, but too few ever did.
Ever on the move, Doyle spent time in New York, Los Angeles, and London, releasing his first real solo record in 2016, as Boys Forever. If you were ever in a gay bar with a decent jukebox in any of those cities back then, you likely met him and wanted to get to know him better. Insouciant and stylish as its creator, Boys Forever repositioned classic indie verse/chorus/verse into queer forms. “Bent music for bent people,” Doyle called it; at its best, it seemed to identify musical corners the heroic gay men who’d come before him had painted themselves into—the endless genre drag of the Magnetic Fields, the so-ironic-it’s-earnest (or is the other way around?) productions of the Hidden Cameras—and just sort of breeze past them. Harder than it sounds.
Just after the album’s release, Doyle relocated full-time to L.A., living with his husband, the journalist Max Padilla; developing a body of work as a photographer; and writing songs via email with Helen Skinner, a bassist and member of Boys Forever’s touring lineup. A year later, Padilla died. Doyle released a single, “As You Disappear,” in which his boyish voice is weathered and worn, a cold wind bothering the trees. “And now everyone I know, I used to know,” he sings. And then Doyle was dead, too.
Keeping Up Appearances, released under the moniker Basic Plumbing, collects the tracks Doyle and Skinner finished. Their beauty is immediate, accessible, and, at least for the moment, almost inextricable from all the loss surrounding them. “As You Disappear” starts things off, a gut punch; then “Lilac” tries to start the party, but its organ lick just wells up “96 Tears” while Doyle sings “I hear the voices in my head/No, I don’t want to hear them in my dreams” in an uncanny evocation of Kurt Cobain’s clenched snarl.
The enraged ennui of Nirvana is all over this record: in the way the guitars rattle beneath the beams of his dread-filled voice in “Sunday,” or wrap around his voice like a sweater that will never be warm enough in closer “Strangers,” the bleakest song in Doyle’s catalog. Doyle saves his keen ear for harmonies for lines like “He’s bad news, baby,” in the achingly sweet “Fantasy.” But the sour “Bad Mood” weaponizes melody, as two vocal lines intertwine, circling each other like snakes. One sings “I won’t be in a bad mood anymore.” The other? “I just didn’t think it would happen.” Neither wins.
The mobilizing swish Doyle lent Veronica Falls fuels the title track, but Doyle seems to feel like he’s faking the verve. “It’s all in your head/When you say/The things that you said,” he sings, barely mustering up polysyllables, “And it’s all over/Keeping up appearances.” It’s rock’n’roll as rumination, jittery and damaged, the sound of self-recrimination and self-possession doubling and collapsing in on itself. It’s an earworm and a heartbreak.
Keeping Up Appearances arrives with a reprint of Max, a book of Doyle’s photos published just after his death, all fuzzy sunlight and boners in boxer shorts. The photos look like these new songs sound: assuredly retro, gazing back to both the ’90s and the ’60s; charming, if a bit too charmed by their own self-deprecation—sexy but somehow disembodied. Distant, detached. It’s a testament that, in his awful absence, others keep pushing his work forward. Veronica Falls’ Marion Herbain helped bring Max into the world, and into the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of Art. Skinner and Doyle’s family have made a place for Basic Plumbing, and have pledged proceeds to L.A.’s LGBT Centre and CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserable, a UK organization working to prevent suicide. Queer people keep disappearing. But to the great fortune and comfort of those who remain—and the great benefit of everyone else—Doyle left records of his life. They live on.


Tera Melos guitarist Nick Reinhart turns to grunge and power-pop, embracing the limitations of verse-chorus structure with some of his best songwriting to date.

Disheveled Cuss

Nick Reinhart does not write simple songs. The Los Angeles-based guitarist makes oblique math rock in his primary band Tera Melos, whittles experimental noise pop alongside Death Grips drummer Zach Hill in bygones, and dreams up bizarre prog parts in supergroups like Big Walnuts Yonder. After a 15-year career guided by a “Why not?” attitude, Reinhart has finally decided to give self-described “‘normal’ songs” a try with Disheveled Cuss, his new solo project for all things grunge and power pop. On his self-titled debut album, Reinhart uses the limitations of verse-chorus structure to condense his ambitions and rein in his trains of thought, establishing boundaries that help him scratch a pop itch with some of his best songwriting to date.
With drummer JR Kurtz and engineer Patrick Hills contributing bass, Reinhart wastes no time defining what “‘normal’ songs” means to him. It’s the unabashed hooks of Weezer’s Blue Album, the fuzzy texture of ’90s alt-rock, the satisfying payoff of a great bridge and an even greater chorus. He modifies those influences with vocal registers and guitar trills, like on “Nu Complication” and “Generic Song About You,” always grounding the tracks with lush guitar tones. Throughout, he sings about letdowns and lonely days, lyrics that later helped him to recognize his depression. Perhaps that subconscious mental state is what gives Disheveled Cuss its restive energy, as if a sudden breakdown is looming in the background.
The best pop songs leave you wanting more. That’s where Reinhart, who built his career on going over the top all of the time, momentarily stumbles. “Oh My God” focuses its five-minute runtime on a repetitive guitar loop, dulling its own edge by waiting too long to introduce a delightfully unpredictable riff just before the end. Reinhart knows how to save an unconventional earworm for a surprise ending, but this time, the tension fizzles long before the buildup finishes.
Despite his commitment to conventional structures, Reinhart also sprinkles weird sounds throughout: jazzy, high-register string plucks, bittersweet voicemails from his grandfather, warped whammy bar effects that sound like a strip of film dissolving. Even a straightforward track like “Shut Up” packs enough pep to masquerade as a TV show theme. No matter which moniker Reinhart works under, his playing style and ear for production can make a technical trick sound uncomplicated. “She Don’t Want,” easily the best song on the album, rides an elastic melody into blasts of neo-grunge production and a radiant solo-turned-riff recall, a combination that’s an instant mood-booster. In a way, it’s the reason Reinhart started this project to begin with: to forgo the intricate compositions of his other bands for the welcome familiarity of 4/4 time signatures and pleasing refrains. It’s a sharp left turn in his career, but as his ideas roam freely and joyfully on Disheveled Cuss, it pays off.

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Steeped in Acadian musical heritage, the Louisiana songwriter’s sketchy four-track recordings and odd, dreamy storytelling evoke the likes of Jessica Pratt or Elliott Smith.

Renée Reed

Renée Reed grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, the daughter of Cajun one-stop shop owners who hosted regular jam sessions. Music and folklore surrounded her: Her great-uncle, Revon J. Reed, was a sort of Cajun Alan Lomax, a folklorist who recorded the traditional songs that make up the region’s cultural history. Her grandfather was Harry Trahan, a local accordion legend who wheezed out zydeco at neighborhood events for nearly his entire life. Her family has ties to Mamou, a small rice farming town about three hours west of New Orleans, where residents celebrate an annual ritual called Courir de Mardi Gras, in which the men of the town dress up in colorful rags and pointed caps and ride horses from house to house, chasing chickens and collecting ingredients for gumbo.
A lot of this history swirls through Reed’s self-titled debut, but not in obvious ways. She’s described her music as “dream-fi folk from Cajun prairies,” citing Kate Bush and the Beatles as “my gods that I worship.” Her songs—recorded simply on four-track, performed mostly on acoustic guitar, with some light organ as occasional embellishment—recall Jessica Pratt’s first album, or Either/Or-era Elliott Smith, more than traditional Cajun music. And yet her heritage peeks through, sometimes in sneaky ways: Queue up the single release of opener “Out Loud,” for instance, and you’ll find a photo of someone, likely Reed, sporting the traditional garb for Courir de Mardi Gras, looking like some kind of Midsommar Muppet.
Reed’s music is full of dreamy, odd notes, and a sense of unreality shimmers around her songs. On “Où est la fée,” she sings, in French, a dark fable in which she wanders into the woods and finds a letter addressed to her. She plays straightforward, rough-hewn fingerpicking melodies with the skill and sensitivity of someone capable of playing anything, and she sings with abstracted intensity, like she’s staring out a car window. Her words extend until they dissolve into pure sound, and everything she sings has a riddling, Cheshire-Cat quality: “Who am I?/You’re about to find out,” she offers on “Out Loud,” but the moment of discovery never arrives.
The closest Reed comes to revealing herself is on the final track, “Drunken Widow’s Waltz.” It’s in French again, but this time, it’s the Cajun variety, the language of her grandparents and of kitchen jam sessions and front-porch family concerts. The drum track ticks out an unsteady waltz time, the guitar oom-pahs, a fiddle scratches, and Reed opens up her throat. She sounds joyful and uninhibited, lost in the pure pleasure of her singing, now that she’s certain no outsider can understand.

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The debut album from the Colombian-American singer is a world of her own. Her wide range pulls in sounds from reggaetón, funk, and R&B and positions her to become a new gravitational force in pop.

Isolation

Kali Uchis opens Isolation with a breezy Brazilian-jazz intro, psychedelic and motoring, as she coos birdlike about physical intimacy. Rio singer/goddess Flora Purim immediately springs to mind, and its ambitious vocal runs invoke cocktails and caftan weather, like Uchis recorded it by the beach. It’s an empathetic way to welcome a listener into an album, but more than that, it’s a statement piece: pointed evidence of the way she’s deepened her range en route to her debut album. “Just come closer, closer, closer,” she intones. Kali Uchis did not come to play.
The 23-year-old Colombian-American singer has spent the last six years in the flourishing landscape of West Coast soul. She was often compared to Billie Holiday for her resonant alto and ability to imbue a dreamy love track with a wistful melancholy without giving up any of her power. That quality naturally invited comparisons to Amy Winehouse, too, but Uchis is slightly more plain-sad than self-destructive. Her ability to shimmy between genres has been exemplified by her omnivorous taste in collaborators—Snoop Dogg, who helped put her on in 2014, Colombian superstar Juanes, and Miguel, with whom she sang one of the best tracks on his 2017 album, War & Leisure. She has a baseline in R&B and often veers into the territory we used to call neo-soul. But Isolation projects how far out there she’s willing to go, exploring doo-wop, funk, bedroom pop, and reggaetón with equal enthusiasm and reverence while painting a fuller picture of herself as a dreamer, the femme fatale with around-the-way swagger who takes no shorts.
The track most congruous with her past work—most specifically, her 2015 EP Por Vida—is the lo-fi surprise “In My Dreams,” which finds the Gorillaz calling upon the ghost of 2003 for its Casiotone-adjacent, ice-cream-twee production. She makes her voice uncharacteristically chirpy on the sardonically escapist lyrics: “Everything is just wonderful here in my dreams,” the subtext being that life is not so rosy. To emphasize that, Damon Albarn pops in to inject the affair with a slightly more pointed missive that “The moments we are happiest/Are the moments that we don’t exist.” It makes for a solid mission statement on an album where good news always comes with caveats. That notion is underlined in “Your Teeth on My Neck,” a deceptively perky indictment of industry vampires, labor exploitation, and general inequity, with a live-jazz backing by Los Angeles’ Wldrness. “What do you do it for, rich man keeps getting richer taking from the poor,” she sings, her voice a soaring scold. “You gotta get right.”
Uchis has always been interested in speaking truth to power, and she mines her personal narrative—binational upbringing, immigrant parents, living out of her car—for a slyly political backdrop that feels neither too obvious nor preachy. That wisdom and storytelling acumen in her music feels strongest here on “Miami,” in which she and boricua rapper BIA narrate an immigrant perspective against a gossamer backdrop of the city that basically invented bisexual lighting. With languorous swing, Uchis parallels immigrant hustle with the rudely empty promise of the American dream, as in the line, “Why would I be Kim, I could be Kanye/In the land of opportunity and palm trees.” It’s a type of cinematic storytelling that feels almost vintage in this era of diaristic confessionals. Plus, it’s always nice to hear this kind of devotion to the concept of making a song about Miami that would sound great driving around Miami.
“Miami” features production from TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, Frank Ocean collaborator Om’Mas Keith, Drake hitmaker DJ Dahi, and it’s a gleaming example of the veritable brain trust of musical talent assembled here, all serving the same purpose of showcasing Uchis’ fascinating confidence as a singer. Even as the album traverses genres, it’s united by a slinky desert vibe, a document of the way young Angelenos have opened up the way for sounds and genre to gloop in on each other like a lava lamp. In the early 2000s, this often manifested in navel-gazing and weeded beat experiments whose prime objective was headiness. But this generation—here, including Isolation guests like Tyler, the Creator, the Internet’s Steve Lacy, and BROCKHAMPTON’s Romil Hemnani—has found a way to make that style of experimentation inviting and friendly through an openness that is intellectual, but doesn’t depend on intellectualism as its prime objective. As a uniting force, Kali Uchis could not be stronger, nor as nimble with her ability to match lush beats with an even lusher voice. Isolation is a star turn from an artist who has proven she’s ready for it.


On her breakout debut, the promising Melbourne rapper wrestles with big ideas about peace, family, and home.

The Return

Near the beginning of Sampa The Great’s debut album The Return, we hear a voicemail from a concerned friend. She implores the rapper to realize what she’s up against as a black woman in the music industry: “I don’t think you have time for all this ‘finding yourself’ spiritual shit.” But that’s just what The Return is about. Sampa—who was born in Zambia, raised in Botswana, and now lives in Melbourne—is trying to find a sense of place in a world where she’ll always be ticked as “other.” Accordingly, The Return is a dense and sometimes-challenging record, with beats that pull in bits of jazz alongside ’90s R&B and hip-hop. When taken together with her darting, head-cold flow, the album can be intimidating, but the arduous journey it traces is one toward peace.
Running 78 minutes, The Return is a dynamic suite of a record, touching on multiple genres without losing focus. The sprawling sounds mirror her thoughts—racing, fully formed, everywhere at once. It requires a patient ear, and as it backflips from brassy dance tracks to languid soul, The Return occasionally feels like it’s beating you over the head.  But that’s also part of its charm: this is a record about the uncertainty lurking behind every major decision, the doubts that persist even as you tell yourself you're making the right choices. On “OMG,” Sampa interrogates the idea of "home" through the lens of her African upbringing; in her view, African natives should return to re-teach local language, culture and spirituality. With each interlude, the record shifts to a different mood—from uncertainty, to romantic love, to eventual reassurance.
As the album plays, Sampa comes to understand that her contentment isn’t tied to geography. “I guess I found my fortune,” Sampa declares on “Mwana,” The Return’s opening track. “I don’t need home to feel important.” Then on “Dare to Fly,” the rapper doubles down on this epiphany: “Home is my home is my self … I will reside in myself.” The moment is as triumphant as it is poignant.
Sampa’s 2017 mixtape, Birds and the BEE9, won the Australian Music Prize for Best Album, but it barely made a ripple in the U.S. It dropped in November, two weeks before Thanksgiving, right when music publications start thinking about end-of-year album lists, which might have accounted for the apathy. But she has the slow-burn intensity of someone who takes the long view. On “Final Form,” the album’s most pointed cut, Sampa quips, “only four years, fantastic,” reminding us that she’s only been rapping professionally for a short time and still has a ways to go. If her thousand-yard-stare determination on The Return is any indication, her journey is only beginning.

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The Liverpool four-piece’s debut experiments liberally with pop’s conventions, taking a collage-like approach to chopped samples, ghostly harmonies, and pedal-driven guitars and keyboards.

Chinatown Slalom: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

The house that Chinatown Slalom live in, on Little St. Bride Street in Liverpool, has the words “Everyone’s Invited” sprayed across its walls. It’s become something of a motto for the band, borne out in their home’s open-door policy and the trippy house parties that inspired this, their debut album, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? But the motto is most keenly felt in the group’s pick ’n’ mix approach to songwriting: One that dips exuberantly into musical and cultural history to absorb the best and oddest bits before resurfacing to piece the collage together from a palette of chopped samples, ghostly harmonies, and guitars and synths driven through a squall of analog pedal effects.
The band’s Liverpool home, four-piece lineup, and psychedelic leanings—their name comes from a stoned expedition to the city’s Chinatown neighborhood—may invoke comparisons to the Beatles. But what they really have in common with the Fab Four is their playful experimentation within pop’s otherwise stringent confines, and their buckets of artistic chemistry. Listening to the album feels like sitting in on a jam session and, despite their intricate, precise construction, there’s an appealing, thrown-together feel to the album’s 10 tracks.
The hand-clapped a cappella intro to “People Always Say What They Want” builds with snippets of laughter, studio chatter, and a new instrument joining the fray every few bars, but never loses its shape. “08:30” opens on drifting choral harmonies before descending into a scuzz of square waves and thrashed-out guitar riffs; “Dreams” is just as unpredictable, with its sparse, wiry vocals disintegrating gorgeously into metallic percussion and crunchy synths. “Bullets on a Screen” and the album’s title track follow more obvious, chorus-led song structures, but don’t necessarily suffer for it. Both sail on beguiling three-part harmonies and effortless riffs and serve as fixed posts for the album’s remaining tracks to drift in and out of. Occasionally—on the aimlessly repetitive “Just Love,” or in the meandering bombast of “Every Minute of the Day”—their agreeably thrown-together approach verges on slapdash, but these minor missteps don’t dampen the mood too much.
Landing somewhere between a beat tape and an alt-pop record, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? finds inspiration in unexpected places: early Battles, maybe, or Forest Swords if he wasn’t quite so serious, or the xx if they weren’t so caught up in their feelings. As such, it’s a welcome addition to the UK’s musical landscape which, beyond London’s fizzing homegrown jazz community and a few other exceptions, finds itself amid a dearth of exciting new bands. Like the party scene in your favorite teen movie, this is neatly constructed chaos. And infectiously fun too. It’s a bold debut, frothing with ambition and a desire to push at the bounds of what a pop band should sound like in 2019. The challenge now will be to hone that ambition and tighten up the songcraft that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? has given fans a glimpse of.

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Once a famously fractious noise band, the trio continues its slow transformation into an unpredictable and surprisingly tender rock group.

2020

Just after the start of this century, Magik Markers felt like a spectacular explosion that would soon burn through all available fuel. A noise-rock trio that earned the back half of that hyphenate chiefly by virtue of playing drums, guitars, and bass, the Markers were famously belligerent, ripping into audiences that appeared apathetic while ripping riffs and rhythms into shards. It was exhilarating and exhausting, the kind of spectacle that never seemed to account for sustainability. But for the last dozen years, the Markers—once maniacally prolific—have slowed their schedule and softened their attack, seesawing between the pastoral wallop of Crazy Horse and the fragmented beauty of Kim Gordon. Though most people continue to associate Magik Markers with that early racket, they’ve now been getting weird on the other side of the hyphenate for most of their career.
If the nine-song 2020, the Markers’ first album in seven years, doesn’t finally recast their primordial reputation, it’s hard to imagine anything will. They mostly tuck the dissonance and bedlam beneath the surface of these tunes, like a weapon hidden between hem and skin. That restraint highlights the band’s surprising breadth on their most diverse set of songs yet. “That Dream (Shitty Beach)” is the kind of blast from the garage Ty Segall might howl; its chaser, “Born Dead,” is a tender Mellotron-and-guitar waltz detailing cosmic loneliness and salvation. The opener is a guitar anti-hero epic, its elliptical solo gathering direction and distortion across the song’s exhilarating second half. The finale, however, is a woozy pop lullaby for the dispossessed, like Julee Cruise coming back to earth.
None of this is to say that Magik Markers now sound “normal.” In July, they released a four-track preamble to 2020, stretching Elisa Ambrogio’s spectral voice across smeared guitars and refracted meters. Those pieces felt wonderfully surreal, like hymns spirited from a distant galaxy. The centerpiece of 2020 is “Hymn for 2020,” an eerie collage of long phosphorescent tones, sporadic drum thuds, and vocals that conjure ghouls and angels. It’s like huddling inside a tornado shelter as a twister races by outside—a momentarily safe space, burdened by knowledge of what’s on the other side of the door. Ambrogio intones the brittle “CDROM,” a seven-minute tone poem about astrology, psychedelics, and extreme existential angst, with a coolness that suggests she’s succumbed to these worries. Her dazed voice and acidic guitar, along with Pete Nolan’s roiling drums, recall the dread that precedes a panic attack.
But by and large, Magik Markers’ longtime touchstones, abrasion and arrhythmia, add depth to these songs without dominating them. “Born Dead” never gets too pretty or plain, since the country licks sometimes sour and Ambrogio occasionally loops her voice like she’s her own shadow. “That Dream (Shitty Beach)” might be the Markers’ most thundering rock song ever. It’s an open-road, windows-down jam in a very unexpected and literal sense—whipped by static and a sense of vertigo, the song sounds as if it were recorded in a convertible careening down the highway, wind lashing the microphones. “You Can Find Me” is a perfect power-pop song about adolescent frustration; you may wonder, though, if it were bashed out inside a crinkled aluminum can and captured with dying recording gear.
Amid the lurid excess of their beginnings, Magik Markers bucked against any expectations they encountered, from songform to the understanding of where the stage ended and the crowd began. They punished their instruments as often as they played them and avoided any semblance of a straightforward catalogue by releasing whatever whenever. The thrills were sudden and pure. But it’s been even more satisfying to watch the Markers—partners, parents, adults with solo or side-projects and day-jobs—mature into a singular rock trio, funneling all their ire and wonder and doubt and humor into enduring songs.
At its best, 2020 is as probing as those early paroxysms, asking similar questions with similar instruments in more developed ways. These songs plunder modern unease and desire, whether pining for deeper connections or wanting to escape an increasingly hostile planet. Against most odds, Magik Markers have become long-term reminders that settling down doesn’t mean settling, shutting, or stiffening up, even when you’re making less racket.

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Driven by civil war from his native Sierra Leone to New York, Janka Nabay joined with members of Skeletons, Chairlift, Highlife, and Saadi to make En Yay Sah, a powerfully modern, cosmopolitan introduction to bubu's complex and vibrant rhythms.

Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang: En Yay Sah

En Yay Sah

When war drove him from Sierra Leone to New York, Janka Nabay was one of the most popular musicians in his homeland. He'd been one of the primary performers in the revival and fusioning of bubu music, an ancient folk form that had survived the 18th-century introduction of Islam to the country. At a time when the Sierra Leonean music scene was dominated by imported forms, and especially reggae, the old bubu rhythms injected an energizing shot of local flavor into pop music. For a time, Nabay used to his music to speak out against the country's spiraling civil war, but when rebels co-opted his music during their destructive drives into rural villages, he found himself with few options but to leave.
In the United States, he searched for collaborators while working as a fry cook, and found them not in the Sierra Leonean ex-pat community, but in Brooklyn's indie rock scene. The Bubu Gang, Nabay's backing band on En Yay Sah, comprises members of Skeletons, Chairlift, Highlife, and Saadi, and their method of collaboration was simple: Nabay showed them the rhythms he was working with and the songs he'd written, and he turned them loose. Jon Leland's drums hold down the heavily syncopated bubu beats, the music's strongest tie to tradition, and the rest of the band cooks up a backing for Nabay that sounds so intensely modern it's practically futuristic. Guitarist Doug Shaw plays no rhythm, instead adding color to the music with mildly psychedelic leads that focus on melody when Nabay isn't singing and recede to tonal washes during the verses.
Nabay's weathered but agile voice is the kind of instrument that would likely sound at home on a sparse field recording, so it's curious how well it integrates with Jason McMahon's sleek-toned bass and Michael Gallope's bright, tropical keyboard sounds. The integration is helped by the backing vocals of Syrian-born Boshra AlSaadi, who sings answering phrases to Nabay's leads and functions essentially as part of the rhythm section. Her repeated vocal line on "Ro Lungi" becomes the song's primary hook, complementing and reinforcing the keyboard phrase that serves as the other hook and gives shape to Nabay's rapid-fire lead vocals.
Nabay sings in four languages on the record: his native Temne, a syncretic combination of English and African languages that originated in Western Hemisphere slave communities called Krio, and small amounts of English and Arabic. It reflects his country's complicated history, as well as his own emergence into a wider world from his homeland's small music scene. Bubu music is ancient; En Yay Sah offers a powerfully modern, cosmopolitan introduction to its complex and vibrant rhythms.


During the recording process of Little Dragon's fourth LP, singer Yukimi Nagano wandered around the band’s longtime hometown of Gothenberg in winter while listening to Janet Jackson. When Nagano and the band don’t stick too closely to dance music or downtempo on the album, the results are adventurous.

Nabuma Rubberband

Yukimi Nagano sums up her approach to Little Dragon’s fourth LP, Nabuma Rubberband, in a R&B-flavored sound bite at the end of the record. “Let go of everything I know,” she sings over a booming, slow-rolling bounce on “Let Go”. Speaking to Rolling Stone late last year, the Swedish-Japanese vocalist explained that, for this record, the Gothenburg-based band started with nothing—no ideas, no vision, no plan. “We dove into different worlds,” she said. “New spaces we haven't been to before.” Some of that uncharted territory turned out to be more familiar than suggested: the interactive website that factored in the album's unveiling was set in Nagano’s pleasantly kitschy home studio, and during the recording process she wandered around the band’s longtime hometown of Gothenberg in winter while listening to Janet Jackson.
This wintry mix of fresh and familiar suffuses Nabuma Rubberband, which opens as if Nagano stepped inside from one of these walks with “Twenty Foreplay” stuck in her head and started writing before her fingers uncramped from the cold. The intermittent thuds throughout “Mirror” depart noticeably from the magnetic rhythms of 2011's Ritual Union, hinting at the album's changing focus. Though their very first release, 2006’s Twice, showcased Nagano’s voice with spacious, somber piano chords, she said in another interview that Little Dragon felt self-conscious about writing “slow jams”. It took them another three years to arrive at the Prince-indebted funky freakouts of 2009's Machine Dreams, as well as the beat-focused collaborations with SBTRKT, Gorillaz, and Dave Sitek’s Maximum Balloon project that followed.
Little Dragon's continued to explore the dichotomy between dance music and downtempo since, and when Nagano doesn’t stick too closely to one or the other on Nabuma Rubberband, the results are more adventurous than on the catchy but slightly underwhelming Ritual Union. There's a Japanese game show-styled interlude (“Lurad”), string accents by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (“Nabuma Rubberbands”, “Pink Cloud”), and “Killing Me”, which coats Machine Dreams’ synthesizer freestyles in grimy noise. It’s nice to know Little Dragon can still pull off the same rhythmic variations and textural contrasts that made their earlier output such a rewarding listen, even if it doesn’t always go smoothly: just when they settle into a groove on the ominous, glittering “Only One”, the song whiplashes to a close with an industrial beat that sounds tacked on.
Nabuma Rubberband's slow jams are perfectly sexy, but they lack originality. Even after repeated listens, the album's velvety sequence of “Pretty Girls”, “Underbart”, and “Cat Rider” fail to leave a lasting impression. Nagano’s beguilingly smoky voice has also lost a little bit of its allure, and when Little Dragon foray into already well-trod territory—there’s even a song called “Paris”, complete with breathy French lyrics—they invariably disappoint. It’s great the band was able to find a throughline between the comfortable and the experimental this time around, but on Nabuma Rubberband they let go of a little too much of themselves in the process.


More than any other MSTRKRFT release, *Operator *sounds like the work of a band — one with punk DNA coursing through its army of analog synths.

Operator

Even before Death from Above 1979 went nuclear in 2006, leaving behind a miasma of ringing ears and beer-stained v-necks, MSTRKRFT had already formed with hopes of producing even sexier results. Bassist/keyboardist Jesse F. Keeler and producer Alex Puodziukas (a.k.a. Al-P, who also manned the boards for You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine) chose a glossy, vocoder-heavy approach to electro-house years before bloghouse would go mainstream. MSTRKRFT was an immediate fixture on the festival circuit, meshing well with arena-ready acts like Steve Aoki and the Ed Banger crew. A decade later, however, the landscape has changed: EDM is now the music of the masses and DFA1979 have reunited, releasing a new record. MSTRKRFT, for their part, seem destined to return to their status as a side project.
Operator, the duo’s first album since 2009’s Fist of God, fits right alongside Death from Above 1979’s The Physical World as a return to the sounds of the mid and early ’00s, embracing distorted electro-punk and eschewing the poppier sensibilities of their second LP. Rather than include another laundry list of guests like those on Fist of God, *Operator *sounds like the work of two guys united by a singular vision. (That there are no John Legend or E-40 features on the record is ultimately for the best.)
When MSTRKRFT first arose—*dude from Death From Above doing an electronic record—*many assumed the project would sound something like Romance Bloody Romance, the DFA1979 remix album, which featured Justice and MSTRKRFT themselves. *Operator *plays like a mea culpa to fans who were disappointed that MSTRKRFT didn't go in that direction to begin with: more than any other MSTRKRFT release, *Operator *sounds like the work of a band—one with punk DNA coursing through its army of analog synths. The new record’s stripped-down take is clear from the first single, “Little Red Hen,” whose glitched-out tones evoke Contra if it were fed Adderall instead of quarters. More aggressive is album closer “Go on Without Me,” which thunders and throbs like it belongs inside the S&M club from The Matrix.
Operator also looks to ’90s acts like the Chemical Brothers and the Prodigy for inspiration on tracks like “Party Line” and “Wrong Glass Sir.” Like those groups, whose driving, purposefully unsubtle production was equally suited to dancing or moshing, *Operator *trades pop accessibility for pure momentum. If you managed to catch Death From Above 1979 circa 2014, you likely saw a band more polished and just as ferocious as they were at the their heyday, and some of the energy seems to have crept into MSTRKRFT as well.
Listening to Operator today, however, one has to wonder if returning to such well-trod territory is really worth the time. The ten tracks here are all honest executions of a sound that was essentially perfected ten years ago; nostalgia alone can’t justify how little legitimately new material MSTRKRFT bring to the table. It’s a shame that *Operator *wasn’t MSTRKRFT's first album—had it been, the conversation around the band would probably be different than it is today. As it is, we have a decent album—probably MSTRKRFT’s best—but few compelling reasons to really get excited. That said, the distorted funk wizardry on “Runaway” is so damn fun you’re almost forced to take its groove at face value, which is probably all MSTRKRFT want from listeners anyhow.


The UK producer casually throws house, UK garage, R&B, pop, and breakbeats into varied songs that are as emotionally relatable as they are instinctively danceable.

Capricorn Sun

British dance producer Teisha Matthews, aka TSHA, exited 2021 with a much higher profile than the one she entered 2020 with. This might seem a curious state of affairs for a producer and DJ who specializes in dance-friendly jams—and who, like everyone else, saw her touring schedule canceled for the better part of a year. But TSHA’s music, unlike that of her clubbier kin, feels approachable, honest, and laden with pop hooks, going far beyond the ravenous demands of the dancefloor. Perhaps it’s not surprising that it prospered in a time of widespread emotional trauma, when so many people were looking for a friend.
Hard-won feelings abound on Capricorn Sun, TSHA’s debut album—from “Sister,” a song about Matthews discovering a half sister she never previously knew, to “OnlyL,” an ode, she says, to “changing the pace of life and focusing on the things that bring love and joy.” Matthews says that she tries to appeal to as many people as possible with her music, which she sees as “emotive and eclectic,” and this range is very much in evidence on Capricorn Sun. You can dance to TSHA’s excellently crafted house tracks, but you can also relate to them.
Capricorn Sun is stylistically diverse. TSHA casually throws house, UK garage, R&B, pop, and breakbeats into the mix, in keeping with the relaxed dilettantism currently heard across much modern dance music. Matthews grew up in a household of clubbers—DJ brother, ex-raver mother—and you can hear this familiarity in her work. This is a warm glow of a record, an album that reaches out to the listener without patronizing their tastes.
Extending the family feel, Capricorn Sun features a number of guest vocalists, including London duo NIMMO, Malian legend Oumou Sangaré, friend/producer Ell Murphy, and Mafro, who recently got engaged to Matthews—an interweaving of the personal and the professional that sits well on such a comfortably intimate record. The strongest song, “Sister,” is also the one that feels the most personal. Over a moody guitar lick, Bollywood-esque strings, and a sturdy house beat, Murphy sings, “Feels like I’ve just woken up/And I was always waiting for us,” with the unchecked joy of a dream fulfilled. It might not be TSHA’s voice, but the emotion is all hers—and, indeed, ours, if we have a heart to share in this perfectly constructed moment of dancefloor pop. “Power” pulls off a similarly emotional move, combining a judicious sample from “I’m the One” (an obscure tune by Paul Hardcastle’s 1980s funk band Direct Drive) with the suggestion of a breakbeat, French touch filters, and what might be steel drums, creating a perfect summer soundtrack with just a hint of autumnal melancholy.
Both songs largely confirm what we already knew: TSHA is capable of broad emotional strokes that can connect with an audience beyond dancers and club kids. “Dancing in the Shadows,” with well-traveled singer songwriter Clementine Douglas, suggests TSHA could go even further. Over a titanic breakbeat garage rhythm and Bicep-style stadium-house production, Douglas unleashes a brilliantly catchy pop vocal, both vulnerable and powerful; the combination suggests that TSHA could step up to festival headliner status with a few more such anthems under her belt. The song isn’t exactly subtle—a common trait on an album where song two, the galvanic “The Light,” already feels like a set closer—but you imagine future festival audiences will care not a jot.
TSHA says she envisaged Capricorn Sun as a way to get into playing live. The mix-friendly extended intros and lengthy instrumental passages that dominate many dance albums are replaced here by songs that make their mark in four glorious minutes, then leave triumphantly. This relentless buoyancy ends up a little overwhelming, occasionally spilling into blandness over the album’s 12 songs. But this is easily overlooked among the spell of familiarity that TSHA has spun. Capricorn Sun proves that in a world full of villains and blowhards, a little likability can go a long way.


On Dope Body’s follow-up to 2012’s Natural History, the Baltimore noise rock band refresh a subversive approach to racket-making. Drive Like Jehu, Girls Against Boys, Brainiac, Chavez, U.S. Maple: This is Dope Body’s deliciously warped version of '90s pop history.

Lifer

Did Dope Body really need to boldface its '90s fetish by naming a song "AOL" on their new album? The answer is no. They did it anyway. On Lifer, the Baltimore band’s follow-up to 2012’s Natural History, "AOL" is the most blatant reference to that bygone decade of dialup Internet and weirdo alt-rock that made In Utero sound safe. Drive Like Jehu, Girls Against Boys, Brainiac, Chavez, U.S. Maple: This is Dope Body’s deliciously warped version of '90s pop history, and accordingly, they’ve been able to pull that into a tight knot of noise that doesn’t actually sound too retro at all; there are sonic nods here and there, some obvious and others of the Easter egg variety, but mostly they’ve managed to refresh a subversive, aggressively squirrelly approach to racket-making that never had the chance to become played out in the first place. "AOL" is as good an example as any on Lifer. It slinks, thrashes, boils over, shrinks down, gets jazzy, and is stabbed with jagged hooks by singer Andrew Laumann, who babbles and slurs while guitarist Zachary Utz surgically cripples his own riffs like a true '90s guitar antihero.
Despite all that, "AOL" is not the most thrilling demonstration of Dope Body’s prowess. A foaming-at-the-mouth intro lapses into a leaden breakdown; rather than dynamic, it feels slapdash. Most of Lifer is better, but there’s a marked drop in energy to the album as compared the band’s prior work. Yet somehow, the record sprints along at a brisk pace; that velocity, though, doesn’t seem to go anywhere. "Repo Man" splits a simmering, Fugazi-esque buildup with Laumann’s mush-mouthed, vaguely angry poetics, but none of it coagulates into a single focused hook or mood. On "Nu Sensation", tar-pit guitar stews in its own mock-stoner-rock filth while the vocals meander, ramble, babble, and attach to nothing.
When Lifer clicks, though, it’s unkillable. "Hired Gun" slices open its own means of entry with Utz’s needling, staccato harmonics; Laumann’s lax snarl hits peak slacker charisma, and the swaggering riffage mixed with wah-pedal leads imagines J. Mascis jamming with Rocket from the Crypt. Things get downright punk on "Toy", although the album’s angriest track, "Day by Day", scratches and swarms without fully blowing the hatch off. "Rare Air" is the album’s best song, a snakelike sashay through pinging effects and a dub-worthy bassline from John Jones, formerly of fellow Baltimore band Roomrunner. But even then, Utz’s thick, surfy riff could have come straight off a Pixies outtake. "Wanna be original/ Don’t wanna be a wannabe," Laumann sings, and it’s not clear at all if the irony is lost on him.
Laumann, at his worst, can lapse into a frat-scat leer that comes across unsettlingly like Anthony Kiedis; he goes there on the slinky, smoky "Echo", and it doesn’t help that in the lyrics of "Toy", the three words "under the bridge" actually appear in that order. If Lifer were either catchier or crazier, it would be far better. As it stands, it feels like a placeholder, something to pass the time until a more rounded, less pastiche-leaning version of Dope Body gets dialed up. As soon as they figure out that they don't have to lift wholesale chunks of inspiration from any of their heroes in order to make their point, they may find a way to more creatively harness their '90s worship. Until then, Lifer has just enough life of its own.


The Ethiopian 11-piece band's sophomore effort is a big, brave roar of an album, reaching and surpassing the heights of their excellent 2012 self-titled debut.

Ere Gobez

The struggle to pronounce some of the more difficult Amharic consonants and constructions—difficult for English speakers—will often meet with an encouraging exclamation of “gobez”! Translations for the word range from smart to brave to courageous to talented to witty. Debo Band’s saxophonist, leader and ethnomusicologist Danny Mekonnen translates the phrase “Ere gobez” as a “call of the lionhearted—it's a term used to inspire.” It’s certainly an apt label and message for the Ethiopian 11-piece band’s second album, a record the reaches and then surpasses the heights of their excellent 2012 self-titled debut.
Because not only do the varying definitions of *gobez *fit the range of music on this record, but the music of Debo Band is that of a big, brave roar, song after song. This is a powerful, and, perhaps, inspirational record: it certainly inspires dancing__,__ filling spaces and capturing a dynamic live sensibility. It’s no surprise that this is a band that takes up a great deal of room. With so many members, some in Boston, some as far away as Addis Ababa (violinist Kaethe Hostetter established a String Center in the Ethiopian capital), Debo is true to its name, which means “communal labor.” The community of Debo Band includes a bold, shimmery horn section, complete with sousaphone, but also slick guitar, a tight rhythm section, orchestral strings, an accordion and, on occasion, a masinquo—a one-stringed Ethiopian fiddle. There’s a quaver in lead vocalist Bruck Tesfaye’s voice that is in keeping with Amharic-language singing style, but it is a powerfully pure energy that sits on top of each song, rising  along with all the other instruments.
If you know anything about Ethiopian music and musical traditions, it’s most likely that you have a good relationship with the over two-dozen edition strong Éthiopiques series, lovingly curated by France’s Francis Falceto. The series focuses on the 1960s and ‘70s, and Debo Band certainly draws from this era, but they also pull from more recent times as well as from funk, rock and pop. Debo’s material is reinterpreted and reconsidered, pushed through a creative process that remains true to source as well as their own specific sound (7 of the 11 tracks on the album draw from previously existing works, which are well cited in the liner notes).
There is an adaptation of Somali Dur-Dur band song “Rafaad iyo Raaxo” (originally performed in the mid-'80s) on “Kehulum Abliche” and Debo Band dips into Okinawa, Japan in “Hiyamikachi Bushi” (a song composed almost 60 years ago). Ere Gobez provides numerous examples how Debo Band seems to taking part in conversations that are happening in multiple spaces and places at different times. Heck, “Yalanchi” sounds almost like a smooth groove that might, just might, be in good company with some Yacht Rock luminaries.
For those unfamiliar, it’s valuable to note that the specific rhythms of songs such as “Oromo” and “Ele” draw upon the musical cultures of the Oromo and Gurage. The infectious spring of these two tracks is undeniable. It’s near impossible not to dance to, even if you aren’t familiar with the exact dance styles necessary, though it’s certainly fun to take a little YouTube trip to find out the level of skill and control involved in Oromo as well as Gurage dancing. By doing so, one can understand just how important the big sound and speed of the songs function for dancing. And it’s hard to imagine any of the band members standing still during the recording of this record. Or anyone who will listen to *Ere Gobez *or see Debo Band live either. Each track seems to bounce around the room, pulling the listener along with it.


The Montreal singer-songwriter’s debut album addresses the strangeness of nascent love, channeling feelings of derealization and disconnect in intricately detailed electronic pop miniatures.

Someone New

Helena Deland writes songs about love from the vantage point of a dream state. The Montreal-based songwriter’s music channels feelings of derealization and disconnect: those moments when your body no longer feels like your own, or your words seem to hang like language suspended, illuminated in midair. Deland writes in fragments: On her last release, a strange series of EPs later packaged as an album titled From the Series of Songs “Altogether Unaccompanied”, she told cryptic and poetic stories tinged by psychedelic drugs and loneliness and longing. She spoke in hushed couplets paired with swollen bass and guitars that felt sympatico with early Elliott Smith albums. Deland’s stunning, intricate debut album, Someone New, a record about the complexities of new relationships, is a more cohesive, full-color version of those early sketches, with the sharp angles and harsh lighting of a Dutch vanitas painting.
Despite its frequent darkness and sullen mood, Someone New shudders with a digital glow. Deland often takes the structure to what might otherwise be a simple indie-rock song and imbues it with guitar processing, looping, and stormy, low-end frequencies. The textures she favors come from the ’90s, landing somewhere between the breathy, honey-coated vocals of Hope Sandoval and the heady, fermented eroticism of Portishead. Opener “Someone New” is cut from the same cloth as Portishead’s “The Rip,” with its glassy kick drums, looped vocals, and unexpected key changes at the song’s midpoint. Deland evokes the torrent of complicated emotions that come from kissing someone new for the first time: “I’ll be covered head to toe/In the faded flower patterns of/Memories/Of nights like these,” she sings as the song softens and warms, like a body lowered into a steaming bath. Then, there’s a deep exhale, and the music’s prettiness gets bruised a bit. Deland sighs a promise to give herself a “fucking break,” in the way that one might in a moment of uncertainty, when a new person’s face is hovering in front of your own and the noise inside your head drowns out everything else.
Someone New replicates the push and pull of a complicated relationship, one that Deland often seems to feel ambivalent about. “Dog” is decadent like roses resting on a velvet blanket: Muffled loops of lo-fi guitars and distorted drums seem to emit from a jewelry box while Deland’s voice is coolly removed, as if dissociated from the situation at hand. She sings about a potentially unhealthy relationship, wryly likening herself to a dog on a leash. “Truth Nugget” zeroes in on the feeling of being unknowable in the eyes of another. “I am another solid mystery when it comes to you/Michael, I’m the puzzle in the other room,” she sings, her eye contact unwavering. Meanwhile, “Smoking at the Gas Station,” underscores the volatility of Deland’s situation. She sings placidly about the risk of losing oneself in another person: “Trace the outline of my hand/So I’m reminded where I end.” Disembodiment and derealization, as conditions inextricable from the nascent stages of love, reach their apotheosis on the bloodshot “Pale,” where the bass gets so noisy it gives the sensation of having your ears duct-taped to a subwoofer. “Spending this time/In my naked body’s/Not making it familiar to me,” Deland sings in a tone that is unnervingly calm and chill, as if the feeling of corporeal alienation that accompanies standing naked in front of a new lover were as anodyne as buying orange juice.
“Mid-Practice” is the record’s most understated song, so subtle you wouldn’t be faulted for missing its brilliance on first listen. Percussion clicks like beads on an abacus, and guitar swims in a reverberant haze. Deland sings of waiting and loneliness, of “rehearsing love ’til it’s real.” “What I find worse/Than a love that hurts when it’s captive/Is a love that thrives/On being the hunter,” she sings in a daze, in conversation with herself. “Off I go again,” she continues—yet for a hunter, she sounds remarkably placid. You can almost imagine her smiling as she sings the line. It’s jarring. As a songwriter, Deland has a gift for creating extreme juxtapositions as bewildering as palm trees on Mount Everest, always managing to sound extraordinarily at ease while tackling complex thoughts about human existence. Her songs are like islands: self-contained, gorgeous little worlds where nothing is obvious—especially the genesis of love and its unsteady first steps.

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The latest on the adventurous West Mineral Ltd. label finds the mysterious duo crafting something with classic ambient earmarks as well as off-kilter addenda.

Pontiac Streator / Ulla Straus: 11 Items

11 Items

Ambient labels are generally contemplative, serious endeavors, from Brian Eno’s Obscure and Haruomi Hosono’s Monad to early chill-out imprints like em:t, each intently mapping out soundworlds and then fully immersing themselves in them. So when Brian Leeds set up the West Mineral Ltd. imprint last year, it seemed on the surface to further the ambient tracks he makes as Huerco S. and Pendant. But each new entry on the label seems to question the very nature of ambient music. Can it only be calming and relaxing? Is it only chill? Can’t it also be a little funny? And might ambient also embrace those decidedly non-chill feelings of anxiousness, alienation, and nausea? Leeds and friends plumb that dread zone with every new release.
The music crafted by the mysterious duo of Pontiac Streator and Ulla Straus has mostly been relegated to limited cassettes, until last year’s tantalizing yet too brief Chat EP, which showcased their penchant for goopy, 4th-world excursions. Now, given a full-length album, they craft something with classic ambient earmarks as well as off-kilter addenda—vocals clipped so as to render everyday language strikingly alien and hand drums that melt like spilled mercury with every hit—so that 11 Items sounds disquietly immersive and uneasy.
That sort of intangible quality gives 11 Items an unsettling feel, a world wholly inside a funhouse mirror. The fraught, reedy male voice bubbling up on “Item 7” could get mistaken for a Thom Yorke track, especially with the metallic thrums and fidgety circuitry churning in the background. But what to make of the applauding studio audience that keeps surfacing? The heavy bass, digital squelches, and ritualistic drums of “Item 3” bring to mind something like Miles Davis’ “Black Satin,” but Streator and Straus neither let the track gather velocity nor density, letting its elements instead slither away. “Item 3” strikes a perfect balance between hand percussion, stretched out electronics, and the distant sound of birds in the trees.
The latter part of the album most closely adheres to the template of Selected Ambient Works Volume II, full of foggy lullaby melodies, submerged voices, and unsourced noises that border on the nightmarish, as on “Item 10.” And “Item 1” features shimmering, floating keyboard chords that on their own would be relaxing, only to have the duo ladle atop it slippery drums and a slurred mechanical voice. Add to it some bird chirps and a mechanical whirring not unlike a rotating sprinkler head working overtime, it imparts a leaden feel like getting drunk too fast on a hot summer day.
In the interplay of voices on “Item 8,” it brings to mind the push-pull of ‘90s R&B tracks like this one: chirpy female coos and bassy masculine tones (think Timbaland’s uh-huh elongated into a lecherous groan), all cooked down to a viscous substance. But there’s another sample saying “No fucking way!” that continually knocks the mood off balance. Elsewhere, a hiccuping voice—after three minutes of just spitting out “OK”—finally spits out “OK, I just downloaded it.” Which is funny in its own peculiar way, even if you don’t choose to download it. Rather than simply use their loops and effects to cast a mesmerizing spell, Streator and Straus are just as happy to rupture it.

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Blending slowcore, ambient, and folk with lo-fi musings on memory and entropy, Portland, Oregon musician Kyle Bates joins a grand tradition of Pacific Northwestern gloom.

Wane Into It

On foggy days, the sea stacks of the Oregon coast appear and vanish without warning: hulking rocky outcrops transformed into floating islands in the sky. The most famous of those sea stacks, Cannon Beach’s 235-foot Haystack Rock, appears on the cover of Drowse’s new album, Wane Into It. Kyle Bates, Drowse’s sole member, visited the coast as a child. This photo, though, reflects the way time has distorted the picture in his mind’s eye, rendering a carefree summertime snapshot as a ghostly, looming mass of gray. On Wane Into It, he deconstructs music and memory into a nonlinear yet meticulously organized canvas of sounds and images.
Since 2013, Drowse has carved out a niche blend of slowcore, ambient, and folk, all wrapped in a largely self-recorded lo-fi gauze. When the cut-and-paste noise collage of Wane Into It opener “Untrue in Headphones” drifts into the undoctored acoustic strums of “Mystery, Pt. 2,” Bates ensures that the transition is unexpected but not jarring. In the bleary, somnambulant territory of Drowse songs, sounds float by like hallucinations, vivid yet too fleeting to grasp.
Early Drowse recordings were inspired by the psychiatric prescriptions Bates received following a mental breakdown in 2011. “I was trying to represent different drug effects that I felt,” he said of his 2015 debut, describing its sound as “woozy” and “washed out.” With references to recreational MDMA and the anticonvulsant gabapentin, Wane Into It still carries the specter of pharmacology. Bates has now spent over a decade “stumbl[ing] around therapy and self-destructive tendencies,” as he puts it on “Mystery, Pt. 2,” and recent years were marked by more personal upheaval, including the death of a family member. This exhausting cycle defines the album more than any particular substance. “I hope this is good for me,” he sighs at the song’s frigid close.
In its chilly atmosphere and eclectic-but-complementary instruments and effects, Wane Into It achieves what feels like an effortless sense of musical identity. In reality it’s the most labored-over Drowse release to date. In the first six years of the project’s existence, Bates produced nine releases, including three full-lengths, but aside from one ambient contribution to a four-way split in 2021, Wane Into It is the first new Drowse music in over three years. Recorded primarily in bedrooms in Oakland, Portland, and Los Angeles, the album also features contributions from a number of friends, including Midwife’s Madeline Johnston on “Untrue in Headphones.” The liner notes’ lengthy breakdown of recording details gives lie to the homespun sound.
While it would be inaccurate to call Wane Into It a drone album, Bates is almost constantly manipulating noise, whether it appears in the forefront (as on “Telepresence” and the back half of “Ten Year Hangover / Deconstructed Mystery”) or churning in the background of acoustic guitar-led passages. His carefully constructed atmospheres drive the album. “Untrue in Headphones” gets its name from Burial’s Untrue, and “Ten Year Hangover” recalls an obsession with Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica, reference points that help to explain Bates’ interest in texture. In this, he has a clear forebear in the Microphones/Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum, whose visionary studio experimentation expands lyric-driven folk songs into immersive worlds. Ever the dedicated student, Bates quotes No Flashlight’s “I Know No One” on “Three Faces (Cyanoacrylate)” and had Wane Into It mastered at the Unknown, a studio in Elverum’s hometown of Anacortes, Washington.
These hat-tips connect the dots of Drowse’s sound, and their appearances also add to the album’s time-out-of-joint befuddlement, like favorite songs passing through Bates’ subconscious. Untrue appears “in the abstraction of a memory,” Elverum’s lyrics (“I know no one/And no one knows me”) as an affirmation of confusion. Wane Into It, the title track confirms, is a “lean in” pun about embracing the inevitable decline of our mental capacity and remaining lifespan. Depressing but oddly comforting, seamless but constantly churning, it’s an album tailor-made for ponderous gray winter days.


Led by guitar virtuoso Yvette Young, the California band looks beyond math rock with an album full of musical twists and emotional thrills.

catharsis

The highs and lows of Yvette Young’s chaotic 2022 all revolved around a new set of wheels. In November, the tour van that the California guitarist and songwriter had just bought for her rock trio Covet was hotwired and stolen from the parking lot of an Oakland studio while she was inside recording. This was the cherry on top of a rough summer that included an evidently acrimonious separation from Covet’s longtime bassist David Adamiak, followed by the departure of her longtime drummer Forrest Rice. It might have been enough to throw in the towel, but Young already had big plans. “This is my shot at trying one more time,” she said in a statement announcing Covet’s new rhythm section and their Rebirth tour, which kicked off one week after the van theft. The lineup was armed with several new songs, including the rubber-burning highlight “firebird,” an ode to possibilities named for the first car that Young’s mother bought as an American resident.
New possibilities abound in catharsis, Covet’s inspired third album, and not only in its hopeful sound. In these complex, cross-disciplinary compositions, Young reaches further out for textures and sheens on guitar as ex-drummer Rice and studio bassist Jon Button hold down heavy beats with occasional against-the-grain inflections. They land on an intriguing cocktail with notes of Battles’ cyborg-rock, strained through the guitar-rig obsession of Steve Vai, and—particularly in the wistful opener “coronal,” the lone track featuring new drummer Jessica Burdeaux, as well the only one with lyrics—a little My Bloody Valentine.
Young is a guitar virtuoso with a deep love for post-rock quilts with common colors but clashing patterns, and Covet’s prior albums lived and died by this craft. A twinkling 4/4 groove colliding into one single bar in 11/16, immediately doubling down with seven bars in 5/16, then jumping on a wave of grungy 7/4 and riding it out for two minutes to end an album? Hell yes. But rock music that overvalues complexity can sometimes undervalue the songwriting itself, and this is the issue Covet set out to solve on catharsis, evoking feelings that extend beyond that dizzying rush of math rock.
One of their biggest successes is “bronco,” which flaunts an odd, stutter-stepping guitar effect. When it fires, the song suspends in mid-air for a few ticks before popping right back into the pocket, and there’s a clear moment of relief when the beat picks back up, like rediscovering a lost train of thought. But it’s that stutter that carries the feeling, so instead of plugging it into a time signature that might seem picked out of a hat, “bronco”’s motion answers the sound: Rice and Button manipulate a crunching pace that surrounds Young’s satisfyingly crunchy guitar noise.
At 28 minutes, catharsis is Covet’s shortest LP, and brevity serves it well. With a smaller window, every sudden shift feels that much more exciting. The way the distorted and heavy-footed “coronal” transitions into the sleek and nimble “firebird” feels like it’s been blasted with a power washer. The spare and pretty piano intermission “interlude” offers a respite from the frenzy, while closing track “lovespell” sends the album out sweetly with saxophone played by Alex Rose of Minus the Bear. Most importantly, the sense of intention behind each decision helps Covet dodge the risk of over-noodling. Young is constantly changing gears, but she stitches her routes together with a deft touch that makes the arc feel surprisingly fluid. She navigates these eight songs like an expert traveler in a new city.


On the heels of a disappointing Bobby Digital record, another longtime Wu-Tang member proves he still has a deft command of language, metaphor, and narrative.

Pro Tools

In a crew filled with acrobatic swordsmen, drunken boxers, and masters of the flying guillotine, GZA always struck me as the type of dude who kills opponents with carefully placed acupuncture needles: not quite as flashy, but just as impressive considering the pinpoint precision it requires. GZA possesses a well-worn, refined delivery that packs a lot of calculating wordplay behind a relaxed, almost deadpan façade. It's a smooth presence that makes workmanlike beats sound like taut head-nodders and meticulously crafted production like pure cinema. His new album, Pro Tools, is another in a line of notoriously delayed Wu-Tang-affiliated records; as a result, instead of being greeted with excitement it's being considered the work of a guy with something to prove.
What Pro Tools does prove is that the Genius is still lyrically sharp. The conceptual rhymes he's known for work well without getting too overbearing, and GZA still has a knack for building metaphors without stretching them thin. Sometimes it's simple, like the chorus to "Alphabets", which fuses Five Percenter linguistic mysticism and show-off vocab in a divine trip through the ABCs ("Universe, Victory, Wisdom, unknown/(why/Y), zig zag zig, and now back home"). Other times he runs through every possible twist of phraseology, as in "0% Finance", which runs with the girl-as-car metaphor and throws in enough make and model name references to fill an issue of Road & Track. And the title of "Columbian Ties" looks like a typo until it becomes clear that he's switched the rise-and-fall-of-a-hustler references from victims of Bogota cartels to people killed from D.C.'s foreign policy, and it's a cutting joke that he didn't have to change the scenario too much ("A place where the majority is goin' for self/ With the agenda not far beyond personal wealth").
Like most upper-tier MCs, GZA can still sound compelling big-upping his own skills ("Pencil") or taunting his foes, as he does in G-Unit dis track "Paper Plates"-- which is actually pretty damn funny. But aside from his lyrics, his biggest asset is the pull of his voice and how it bolsters even the most perfunctory, cheap-ass-sounding production-- which is fortunate, because there's not much here that you'll remember for the beats. Most of them are passable enough, even if they consist largely of textbook digital-era RZA mannerisms and the occasional derivative knockoff (particularly Jose "Choco" Reynoso's beat for "0% Financing", which sounds like a Xerox of Arabian Knight's beat for Legend of the Liquid Sword cut "Stay in Line"). And they compare semi-favorably to the two tracks that the RZA himself contributes-- the tinny but sinister "Paper Plate" and "Life Is a Movie", which liberally incorporates Gary Numan's "Films" to compellingly weird effect. But it's hard to overlook how ordinary they sound when the voice connected to them is the same one that spit over some of the most immaculate beats ever put together by the RZA (Liquid Swords) or DJ Muggs (Grandmasters), and even production-by-committee records like Beneath the Surface and Legend of the Liquid Sword had more stylistic cohesion to them.
As a pure lyrical record goes, Pro Tools doesn't disappoint, but fans who want everything to be a banger will be let down to find that there's not a lot of headknock here. The buzz around Pro Tools is that GZA just sounds too tired to get people amped, and while that's a more negative assessment than he deserves, this still doesn't really sound like the kind of album you'd call on to fill anyone's late-summer barbeque party soundtracking duties. But high-energy anthems aren't what made GZA great in the first place, and if you're into his most characteristic attributes-- high-concept extended-metaphor lyrics, hard-boiled storytelling, that calmly authoritative voice-- Pro Tools is still sharp enough to draw blood.


The free jazz collective takes a more patient and self-reflective approach to politics on their new album.

Irreversible Entanglements: Protect Your Light

Protect Your Light

Irreversible Entanglements is a band built on improvisation, five jazz virtuosos—poet/vocalist Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, and drummer Tcheser Holmes—coalescing around an idea and discovering where it takes them. Their live shows are typically presented as a single piece of music, one movement seamlessly evolving into the next as they explore their anti-colonial and anti-fascist politics through sound. Their albums so far have mirrored this approach. After bonding during a Musicians Against Police Brutality event, they recorded their self-titled 2017 debut in a single day in Brooklyn, their first time performing as a collective.
Their fourth album, Protect Your Light, represents a departure from this free-flowing process. Recording across several days, the ensemble leaned into the tools of the studio, reexamining material and layering overdubs with help from multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily. The list of production credits dwarfs the lyrics sheet; each member wields multiple instruments, producing an album that sounds bigger than the five-piece group that created it. Cymbals crash, saxophones scream, horns swirl, and basslines walk confidently before tumbling down the stairs. But the chaos is controlled. The songs are relatively concise for Irreversible Entanglements, with the longest one clocking in at seven and a half minutes.
Their early work was often confrontational, demanding engagement with uncomfortable topics such as systemic racism, gentrification, and the struggle to preserve community in spite of these forces. On “Land Back,” they continue to evoke anti-colonial struggles around the world and challenge the West’s self-appointed role at the center of geopolitics: “In Ethiopia, in Nigeria, in the so-called Middle East/Who knows what happened?” But for the most part, Protect Your Light takes a more patient and self-reflective approach, vibrating on a different frequency. It’s the act of refilling one’s vessel in song form.
That process begins, of course, with love: love for one’s self, neighbors, and family. “Free love/That lives in you,” Ayewa begins on the album’s opener, the start of a poem that ruminates on the bi-directional nature of love. Her voice is airy and drenched in reverb, radiating into the atmosphere as the drums roll along with her. Then the cymbals fade, the bass struts in, and the drum kit pulls you back down to earth. “root<=>branch” pays tribute to the late trumpeter jaimie branch, former labelmate and friend. “We can get free/Free from the pain/Free from the struggle/Let’s get free,” Ayewa pleads, as a layer of synthesized static crescendos to a high-pitched squeal. In the song’s second half, the horns and sax dance and scat joyfully, but by the sixth minute they seem to cry out in pain.
This is Irreversible Entanglements’ first album for storied jazz label Impulse!, home to greats like John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, and Pharoah Sanders. To record it, the band set up shop at Rudy Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, a historic space inhabited by the ghosts of jazz giants. And though the studio is not referenced specifically, its spiritual energy seems to carry through the album. On “Soundness,” Ayewa beckons us inside (“You are safe here/In the room”) and lets fluttering horns and reeds wash over us, connecting the practice of prayer to the safety of the spaces in which it is conducted. These are the places where the energy of the universe is concentrated, cultivated, and protected: the places where music is made.


Live at Third Man Records* *is the first live album by comedy duo Scharpling & Wurster. It's a concise set that seems focused on celebrating their act, rather than expanding on it.

Scharpling & Wurster: Live at Third Man Records

Live at Third Man Records

Live at Third Man Records, the first live album by comedy duo Scharpling & Wurster, opens with the titular performers’ disembodied voices nervously chatting behind a curtain. Stricken with stage fright, the two privately brainstorm ways to perform the show without having to actually step onto the stage. A supposed false start to the performance, it also serves as a subtle means of introducing a few of the pair’s favorite themes. Wurster—who also plays drums for Superchunk, Bob Mould, and the Mountain Goats—touches upon the pathetic banalities of rock stardom, admitting that most of the music at his concerts is prerecorded (“I’m back there reading a Kindle half the time”). Scharpling, meanwhile, lashes out with non-sequitur braggadocio to take down his fans (“You think I wanna go up there in front of these hay seeds?”). But it all culminates in both the set’s greatest in-joke and its largest understatement: “Let’s just do what we do normally,” suggests Scharpling, who has, since 2000, hosted the cultishly beloved “Best Show” (formerly on WFMU, and now hosted independently): “They’re used to hearing our voices—they don’t need to see us.”
For nearly two decades, free-form radio has served as the perfect format for Scharpling & Wurster’s wordy, outrageous world-building. Occurring unannounced in between fan callers and guest appearances, Wurster calls in, always in character, and carries out ludicrous, pre-scripted conversations with Scharpling, the disgruntled straight man. On the radio, Wurster can be anyone—say, a two-inch-tall white supremacist or Marky Ramone—and he uses that freedom to shapeshift almost every week, resulting in the rare show that seems to get more complex and untethered the longer it goes on. Wurster’s calls have been compiled on S&W’s numerous comedy albums and were collected in bulk on last year’s 16-CD Best of the Best Show* *box set: The Numero Group release that resulted in the duo’s first tour. The Nashville performance from that tour has now been issued as a vinyl-only release by Jack White’s Third Man Records.
Lasting only 40 minutes, *Live at Third Man *is neither the most definitive nor the most essential Scharpling & Wurster release, but it’s still a great one: a concise set that seems focused on celebrating their act, rather than expanding on it. But *Live at Third Man *is a strange kind of album. What you hear when you put the needle down is a recording of a live set written specifically to be seen, as opposed to heard (remember: “They’re used to hearing our voices, they don’t need to see us.”). Despite the potential awkwardness of the concept, Scharpling & Wurster are too well-versed in their art to avoid the pitfalls of many comedy albums (and live albums, for that matter). They keep things moving swiftly, switching between comedic monologues, mock interviews, and even a few musical numbers, thereby distilling the anything-goes nature of the “Best Show” into a digestible album-length event.
Like any good episode of the “Best Show,” the set includes plenty of obscure music references, insane song lyrics (“Mama, let me into those khakis/And I’ll take you down to orgasm street”), and even a guest appearances by guitarist William Tyler, who serves as the night’s musical accompanist and rips several scorching solos in the closing-and-opening renditions of the “Best Show”’s theme song. Wurster brings out two of his most beloved characters—the spiteful, hoagie-toting Philly Boy Roy and the perennially-congested, wannabe rocker Barry Dworkin—and plays them with the same hoarse-voiced theatrics that makes them come alive on the air. Scharpling, meanwhile, is deft as always at countering Wurster’s surrealism: his purposefully dead-end monologue about a hotel breakfast buffet will be the album’s highlight for fans of the show’s more understated moments.
Like most things Scharpling & Wurster do, it’s a lovable, infectious listen that warrants multiple plays. If you’re already initiated, you probably don’t need me to sell it to you: you’ve already attended (at least) one of these shows and know exactly what to expect. But if this is your first brush with Scharpling & Wurster, then it’s hard to imagine a better introduction to their strange, beautiful, and constantly expanding universe.


The UK rapper celebrates her wins and flexes her Portuguese on an EP that pulses and jumps with a funky digital spark.

Drop 7 EP

After half a decade staking her claim as one of the UK’s sharpest rappers, Little Simz is the most relaxed she’s sounded in years on Drop 7, the latest in a long-running EP series. While full-lengths like 2021’s Sometimes I Might Be Introvert and 2022’s No Thank You engaged big discussions of celebrity worship and exploitive music-biz politics with conceptual flair, the Drop series operates on lean efficiency. Take 2020’s Drop 6, which funneled pandemic isolation into tense soul-searching over moody, frenetic beats. Simz is still hungry on Drop 7, but it’s her first time in a while not fighting her way out of a corner. We rarely get to witness her working outside of statement-piece urgency.
“Nothing left to prove ’cause I done enough,” she says bluntly on the glitching “Torch.” After winning the Mercury Prize and touring the world to the point of exhaustion, she’s standing in her accomplishments. There’s talk of seaside vacations, “building mansions up on Venus,” and sipping tea in her fortress of solitude. On “Fever,” she gets caught up in a fling while on vacation in São Paulo and flexes her skills in Portuguese. When she does come with venom, she delivers with cold sarcasm. “Talk behind my back and then they go into a shell,” she says in a breathy, TiaCorine-like tone, using her role on the Netflix crime drama Top Boy to remind folks just how much she’s holding back: “Shelley’s nail bar only exist on the TV.”
After three stately albums produced by longtime collaborator (and SAULT bandleader) Inflo, this time Simz recruits British producer Jakwob to create sounds that pulse and jump with a funky digital spark. On opener “Mood Swings,” one of the more aggro songs, Simz darts between Jakwob’s synth plucks and drum hits while interpolating Solange’s “Binz.” But just as quickly, they dip into dance-friendly rhythms that Simz rides with the steadiness of an EKG machine. “Fever” and the booming centerpiece “SOS” both dabble in Brazilian funk; the stone-cold “I Ain’t Feelin It” cruises a metallic groove that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Surf Gang album; closer “Far Away” mixes rattling Jersey club beats with Social Experiment-esque horns that play up the melancholy in its story of lost love. The variety makes for a dark and sensuous mix worthy of a late night.
Drop 7 is slight in the way all Simz’s Drop projects are slight—they’re musical side quests. Her music is rarely this loose, this willing to smell the roses, even while she’s got eyes in the back of her head. “Head hot, say the wrong thing, might lose it/But I’ma always channel through the music,” she says over the dubby drum slaps of “Power.” Where does Simz see herself right now? Far enough away from life’s stresses to tinker and ponder while at the top of her game.