Kyle Thomas’ fifth album as King Tuff is more fleshed out and lustrous than before, now preoccupied with death, environmental degradation, and technological dependency.

The Other

Garage rock is the natural musical manifestation of a room where junk is collected and neglected, where the floors are stained with grease spots, and where plugging in always carries the thrill of pissing off your parents as they try to sleep upstairs. It is by nature a closed-off, confining space, impervious to external influence and the passage of time. And there’s only so long you can wallow in its gas-rag stench before you start choking on the fumes.
The garage has been Kyle Thomas’ spiritual home for the past 10 years, where he’s revved up the flame-job Camaro of his dreams and gotten high off the exhaust. Over the course of four albums as King Tuff, he’s smeared ’60s garage rock into ’70s glam and ’80s rock sleaze until it turns into bubblegum, all while cultivating a party-hard persona that’s made him something of an Andrew W.K. posi-vibes guru for the Burger Records set. But over time, the garage has started to feel more like a prison: after touring behind 2014’s Black Moon Spell, Thomas was starting to fear for his health—physically, mentally, and creatively. So, on his first album in four years, he’s flipped up the proverbial sun visor, hit the button on his clip-on garage-door opener, and peeled out for parts unknown.
With Black Moon Spell, Thomas pushed his garage-glam amalgam as far as it could go without sacrificing his essential dirtbagitude and cheeky charm, by applying liberal dollops of lip gloss and mascara to give it a greater shine, but not enough to cover up the greasy stubble. In one sense, The Other is a logical extension of its predecessor’s more lustrous moments, like the jangly acoustic outlier “Eyes of the Muse” and the stargazing ballad “Staircase of Diamonds.” But the execution here is more sophisticated—and the overall tone far more serious. Within its first 10 seconds, The Other has already established itself as such a different beast from what’s come before, you almost wonder why Thomas didn’t just retire the King Tuff name entirely along with his penchant for cartoon cover art.
Nothing announces an artist’s maturation quite like a waft of wind chimes. That sound eases you into The Other’s opening title track, whose dulcet organ tones provide a suitably melancholy backdrop for Thomas’ confessional lyrics about bottoming out and finding the will to carry on. It’s the sort of atmospheric vignette that would be highly effective as a two-minute scene-setter… but it goes on for three times as long as that, subtly layering additional textures yet never quite building up to the big emotional payoff suggested by its epic proportions. Beyond introducing the album’s overarching themes of pain and perseverance, the song also proves emblematic of a record that’s always reaching for the stars, yet sometimes strains too hard to get there.
With The Other, Thomas has arrived at the same point Bowie did with Diamond Dogs, or Alice Cooper with Welcome to My Nightmare, where the campy hijinks old have given way to more worldly apocalyptic concerns. On his previous records, Thomas seemed concerned with little more than chasing girls, getting fucked up, and listening to records; here, he’s preoccupied with death, environmental degradation, and technological dependency. And the record’s ostentatious touches—brass, funk grooves, sci-fi synths—only serve to tease out a more sinister energy. Certainly, the horn-powered voodoo rhythms of “Neverending Sunshine,” “Psycho Star,” and “Raindrop Blue” blast open uncharted territory for Thomas to roam. But they forsake his melodic songwriting gifts in favor of a more plainspoken theatrical exposition, with Thomas devoting so much energy to loading up his narrative verses with mystical metaphors that he has little left for the half-cooked chorus chants. And where his previous records were always delivered with a smirk that could sell you on the goofiest throwaway lyric, Thomas delivers his heavy-handed treatises with all the subtlety of a protest placard— on the stern folk-rock parable “Circuits in the Sand,” he essentially comes up with a smartphone-era answer to Aquarian-age rants like Five Man Electrical Band’s “Signs.”
Fitting for an album born of an existential crisis, The Other resonates best when it wades into more personal terrain. On the poignant “Thru the Cracks,” Thomas delivers a cosmic country-rock elegy for a departed friend with a luminous guest-vocal assist from Jenny Lewis, while “Infinite Mile” broaches the album’s grave topical concerns from a more playful perspective, fusing a ’65-Dylan ramble to a swaggering ’70s-Who acoustic groove. And if The Other shows that Thomas’ evolution from slack stoner to conscientious art-rock oracle has not come without growing pains, he makes good on the album’s magisterial promise with the closing “No Man’s Land.”
The song serves as a bookend echo of The Other’s title-track opener, revisiting similar themes of loneliness and disillusionment, but Thomas finds solace in its gorgeous celestial sweep, and braces for the great unknown with a smile on his face. “Someday maybe you’ll find me like a wild Santa Claus,” he sings, “in a tin-foil hat, talking on a disconnected telephone.” King Tuff, the non-stop party machine, may be gone, but he’s been replaced with someone even more off the hook.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1993 album from the technically dazzling jazz-rap group that changed the national perception of West Coast hip-hop.

Innercity Griots

A couple decades before Kendrick Lamar galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement with the rallying cry “we gon’ be alright,” a different group of Los Angeles rappers were saying something similar. The year was 1993 and the words rang out on “Everything’s Everything,” a song from Freestyle Fellowship’s Innercity Griots. The album was released on April 28, one day shy of the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots. “Unhh! Unhh! It’s alright y’all!” the group chants over a rollicking funk track. Rather than steeling their community against an unsympathetic future, their words felt like a much-needed reassurance, a James Brown chorus line assuaging themselves and no one else: “Everything is gonna be alright!”
Freestyle Fellowship were some of the first technically dazzling rappers to come out of California, paving the way for a number of artists who would soon change the national perception of West Coast hip-hop. When it comes to the history of flows, it can be tempting to jump directly from Rakim to Wu-Tang Clan without making a detour through Los Angeles. But the frenetic interplay between Clan members on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) is reminiscent of the Fellowship. Their fast, melodic “chopping” double-time raps were an evolutionary step for lyricism, one that influenced chart-toppers like Busta Rhymes and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. Denzel Curry is a fan. You can even hear echoes of the four rappers today in the triplet flows and freewheeling strangeness of Future and Young Thug.
But in 1993, Myka 9, Aceyalone, P.E.A.C.E., and Self Jupiter were just trying to put out their major-label debut. They hailed from Leimert Park, a South Los Angeles neighborhood known as “the creative center of Black Los Angeles,” home to several performing arts centers and a thriving music community. 1991’s To Whom It May Concern... was a staggeringly inventive and restless burst of offbeat conscious hip-hop—the first run was only 300 vinyls and 500 cassettes. After signing with Island Records subsidiary 4th & B’way and parting ways with founding members J. Sumbi and M.D. Himself, the group were primed and ready to make a grand statement.
Produced primarily by the Earthquake Brothers with additional beats by Bambawar, Daddy-O, and Edman, the Fellowship’s new tracks tiptoed between organic and programmed music, largely forgoing sampling for live instrumentation. Innercity Griots was a pioneering example of this hybrid production style, helping to set the stage for later albums by groups like UGK and OutKast. Several songs used jazz tunes like Freddie Hubbard’s “Red Clay” and Miles Davis’s “Black Comedy” as templates but spiraled off into different directions as the house band, the Underground Railroad, jammed together. Though turntablist DJ Kiilu made sure the production didn’t stray too far from hip-hop, the tracks feature a cornucopia of instruments rarely present on a rap album in 1993: saxophone, trumpet, timpani, flute, trombone, vibraphone, upright bass. Compared to the muddy, traditional beats of their first album, the sound was substantially richer and more detailed.
A Tribe Called Quest breathed new life into their parents’ jazz records. The Roots were a live jazz band that made hip-hop music. But Freestyle Fellowship were the only rap group in the ’90s that seemed to embody the style and spirit of jazz on a molecular level. They shared the effortless cool and tough countenance of the great bebop players from the ’50s without verging into jazz-rap parody. Their innate jazziness felt tangible and hard-earned. Days after the release of Innercity Griots, the Fellowship chose to perform live with jazz legends Horace Tapscott and Don Cherry, as well as proto-rap spoken-word ensemble the Watts Prophets, at Hollywood’s Ivar Theatre instead of sharing the stage with other contemporary rappers.
Rather than sounding like a group of emcees rapping over jazz records, they more closely resembled a free jazz horn quartet taking turns soloing. “My rhymes take the direction of a jazz trumpet or sax solo, like Miles or Trane,” Myka 9 told L.A. Weekly in 2000. “If I was to rhyme in the same meter as those notes... that’s my concept.” Their A&R at 4th & B’way liked the album’s musical direction but wanted them to re-record the vocals. JMD from Earthquake Brothers disagreed: “No, it’s jazz. They’re reacting. Everybody’s reacting to one another.” Writing about rap and the L.A. riots for the Los Angeles Review of Books, critic Jeff Chang noted that many welcomed Innercity Griots as “rap’s equivalent to [Ornette] Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come.” When he was born, Self Jupiter’s parents named him after Ornette. The jazz was in them.
Freestyle Fellowship found emancipation through jazz, but they found their styling within the confines of the Good Life Cafe. Founded in Leimert Park in December 1989, the Good Life was an earthy health-food restaurant with open mic nights every Thursday that became an incubator for groups like the Pharcyde and Jurassic 5. In the early ’90s, these events attracted big-name attendees like Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Ice-T, Pharrell, and John Singleton. The Good Life served as a predecessor to the Project Blowed scene, and inspiration for influential club nights like Low End Theory and rappers such as Busdriver and Open Mike Eagle (Ava DuVernay, herself a Good Life emcee, directed a documentary about the venue called This Is the Life in 2008.)
The cafe’s commitment to health went beyond just the food they were selling: profanity, xenophobia, and misogyny were strictly prohibited. If you swore, the crowd would boo you. (It famously happened to Fat Joe.) It wasn’t puritanical—it was intended to promote a professional artistic environment. Experimentation was welcomed, and the tough, discerning audience helped separate the wheat from the chaff. If you were wack, the crowd would yell “please pass the mic!” in unison as a form of “constructive criticism.”
Freestyle Fellowship were the most respected group in the Good Life scene, and their music became a prime example of the freedom that can come from imposing limitations. Their whimsically funky single “Inner City Boundaries,” featuring stylistic forebear Daddy-O of Stetsasonic, received a tastefully minimalist black-and-white promo video of the group performing in the studio with a full jazz band, intercut with shots of people holding up cue cards like Bob Dylan in “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Myka 9 scats and plays an imaginary trumpet as he raps. Compared to the playful Hollywood largesse of other videos from the same year, like Snoop Dogg’s “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” and 2Pac’s “I Get Around,” it looks like a Truffaut film.
The Fellowship weren’t all that concerned with following industry trends or being commercially viable. Another video, for “Hot Potato,” featured an alternate version of the song with different lyrics and performances than the one on the album. It was their way of recreating the atmosphere of the Good Life open mic nights, and of saying that rapping was like a beloved schoolyard game to them. But a bunch of guys angrily rhyming about root vegetables didn’t exactly set the charts on fire, and 4th & B’way struggled to market the group and get their songs on the radio. Other jazz-rap acts such as Digable Planets and Arrested Development enjoyed more mainstream success, but Freestyle Fellowship lacked those groups’ familiar samples and clear pop sensibilities.
Instead, the label commissioned ads for the album featuring magazine quotes that focused on how good the group was at rapping. An interview in an April 1993 issue of The Source describes the group as having a reputation for being “rapper’s rappers.” When asked how they fit into the world of hip-hop, P.E.A.C.E. responded, “I see us in the doorway, but nobody’s offered us seats to sit down and lounge in the hip-hop arena yet, so we kinda in the middle.” They earned a 3-and-a-half mic review that praised them as “style junkies.”
In an era when few rappers straddled both sides of hip-hop’s ideological divide, Freestyle Fellowship’s image was somewhat ambiguous. “People may say that we should talk more about what the gangsta rappers talk about,” Myka 9 told The Los Angeles Times in 1993, “but we’ll leave that to those rappers. We’d rather broaden our musical horizons than complain.” He saw his group as “liberators, liberating rap from its R&B/funk structures—that 4/4 (time) prison.” For Freestyle Fellowship, process was more important than politics.
Listening to the album, it’s not hard to see which way their moral compass points. “I gotta be righteous, I gotta be me/I gotta be conscious, I gotta be free” could’ve been a slogan for the conscious rap movement that would be in full bloom by the turn of the millennium. “I am a Black man, I’ma survive!” Myka 9 repeats on “Bullies of the Block” with delirious, almost bemused anger, as if he were trying to convince himself that it’s true. But the next lines quickly shifted the sentiment from Martin to Malcolm: “Yesterday I had a fight in a nightclub/But I had my gat and I bust alive!” In the song’s video, an American flag burns.
As much as the press tried to flatten their vibrant personas, Freestyle Fellowship complemented each other perfectly in the music. P.E.A.C.E., who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia, never sticks to a distinct rhyme structure or a particular voice for long, shifting restlessly from track to track and moment to moment. Aceyalone tethers the group to earth with his erudite personality, spinning a world-weary collection of Black fables sprinkled with elements of the Funkadelic, Run-DMC, and Egyptian Lover tracks that inspired him as a youth. On “Everything’s Everything,” Self Jupiter compares his recorded performances to competitive gymnastics. His verses occasionally take on a haunted affect, as if Vincent Price could rap. (Jupiter went to jail for armed robbery not long after the release of Innercity Griots, derailing the group until they resurfaced after his release with 2001’s Temptations and 2002’s Shockadoom.)
But Myka 9, the group’s spiritual leader, is the kind of rapper whose exploits other emcees speak of with wide eyes and hushed tones. Daddy-O once introduced him to Afrika Bambaataa as “the best MC I’ve ever heard in my life.” His mellifluous, twisting flow skitters over beats like stones skipping across a pond. He never repeats himself stylistically but is nonetheless unmistakable on any track he appears on. Unpredictably free-associative, he scats, hums, roars, whimpers, and howls, opening up new galaxies of possibility with every verse. Among other influences—John Coltrane, the Last Poets, Miles Davis—Myka 9 also claims to be inspired by birds, his verses an attempt at replicating their songs with his human voice.
Together, the four emcees luxuriated in their own creativity, rapping for the sake of rapping, a practice of pure technique where what was said wasn’t entirely the point. Even when they occasionally resorted to rap cliché, there was always something off-kilter about their approach that set it apart. The obligatory songs about weed (“Mary”) and women (“Shammy’s”) were way too bugged out for the masses. The vividly foreboding P.E.A.C.E. solo cut “Six Tray” details a twisted drive-by shooting where the aftermath of murder takes on macabre specificity not typically found in gangsta fare from the same time period: “Split second too late, brown hearse/Right door second, left door first.”
On “Bullies of the Block,” Aceyalone raps about “making the kind of music that will outlast you all.” To me, that sounds like the ultimate goal of the griot, the African storyteller referenced in the album’s title. The griot’s purpose is to share wisdom from generation to generation by setting words to music. Over the years, this record has been passed from rapper to rapper and from fan to fan as a rite of passage, a lodestar that unlocks new potential in whoever hears it. The album’s verses are oral histories that have yet to lose any of their potency. In a 1993 interview with Rap Sheet, Myka refers to “the spirit of the die-hard rapper” as the essence of what keeps the Fellowship together. Through the music and legacy of Innercity Griots, that spirit seems destined to live on forever.

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With barely more than her voice and a piano, Annie Clark strips her hypersexual, neon-clad 2017 album Masseduction for parts. It is a welcome antidote to a career defined by cult and concept.

MassEducation

The acoustic album is a rite of passage. It marks a period when the tour, the band, and the press has left an artist yearning to be seen in a soft new light: For Nirvana, their MTV Unplugged performance was a middle finger to the hype machine—one of the biggest, loudest rock bands on earth settling in for some quiet covers and deep cuts. Mariah Carey’s 1992 acoustic EP set out to disprove naysayers who claimed her lack of touring equated to lack of talent. For St. Vincent, whose promotional circuit for 2017’s Masseduction featured latex accessories, pop-up art galleries, and interviews given from inside a hot-pink cube, an intimate, no-frills album is a welcome antidote to a career defined by cult and concept.
Masseduction used locomotive synths and schoolyard call-and-responses to project an image of manic sensuality, while Annie Clark took on the public persona of “dominatrix at the mental institution.” It was a vision that deferred and distracted from questions of a more personal nature, perhaps a defense mechanism following her whirlwind year in the spotlight with her relationship with model and actress Cara Delevingne. But behind all the leopard print and leather, the record was a romantic opus filled with simple melodrama: “You and me, we’re not meant for this world,” she sang on “Hang on Me,” as if starring in her own John Hughes movie.
Recorded over two days at Manhattan’s Reservoir Studios studios, MassEducation strips its hypersexual, neon-clad predecessor for parts, exposing its songs as tales of longing and nostalgia. Clark seemed to always know that her record contained two lives: “This needs to be something people can really dance to,” she said of a song on her last album, “until they listen to the words and then they’re crying.” Hiding melancholy behind pop production is nothing new, but on an album so saturated with sadness, these pared-down renderings give Clark a chance to indulge in their underlying sentiments.
Accompanied by longtime friend Thomas Bartlett (a frequent producer for Sufjan Stevens) on the piano, Clark’s voice expands and contracts, varyingly snarky and flat, honeyed and affectionate, husky and sensual. On “Slow Disco,” her voice wells up, rich and velvetine, as she muses, “Am I thinking what everybody’s thinking?” On an earlier club remix of the same track, dubbed “Fast Slow Disco,” the line is more of a wink towards promiscuity. Here, the same lyrics come off as a desperate cry for connection. “Young Lover,” a tragic depiction of drug addiction that once masked itself behind triumphant electric guitars, reveals the frustration and pain in her voice, an almost uncomfortably close portrayal of a disastrous relationship. The record also gives Clark room to be completely vulnerable—on Masseduction’s “Sugarboy,” the closing refrain of “Boys! Girls!” sounds like an industrial machine running out of juice. Here, Clark embodies this exhaustion, as if fatigued by her own sexual intensity.
Bartlett recontextualizes Clark’s delivery throughout the record via his reinventions of the piano. It builds tension and foreboding in the maudlin dance-with-death “Smoking Section,” punctuating the air between Clark’s increasingly morbid verses. On “Savior,” Bartlett plays the inner strings of his instrument like a violin, the staccato notes fighting against Clark’s drawn-out vocals. The high-octave, mile-a-minute progressions on “Sugarboy” lend a strikingly expressive counterpart to her animalistic, baritone interpretation of the song’s chorus. It might not sound as alien as Clark’s glam guitars, but it makes room for the otherworldly range of emotions in her voice. On “Fear the Future,” the wailing of electric guitars is replaced by maximalist, thundering crashes on the piano, turning an apocalyptic screed into a frenetic fear of the unknown.
Of course, there are natural limits to the acoustic format. Without the sleek production posse of Jack Antonoff and Sounwave, prosaic lyricism has nowhere to hide. The already saccharine chorus of “Pills” sounds like the theatrical performance of a junk food jingle here. Similarly, her thinly veiled criticism of image-obsessed Angelinos on “Los Ageless” loses its sexiness and sheen, leaving in its wake a smokey, hollow cabaret crooner. “Hang on Me,” a woozy post-club comedown, takes on a second life as a kind of modern lullaby, one with a bit of added schmaltz but no less flair than the original, a rendition that wouldn’t feel out of place over a tender familial flashback from “This Is Us.”
For Clark, the intimacy of MassEducation is the natural conclusion to nearly a decade of life behind rotating personas: a jealous, pill-popping housewife, a self-described “near-future cult leader,” and most recently, a sexed-up, technicolor seductress. But on the cover of this record, all we see is Annie Clark: blurry, yes, but also literally laid bare. She has discussed the idea of songs having multiple lives, and that people, too, can live more than one existence in parallel, always aware of their diametric opposite. These songs bridge the gap between the two, exposing the overwhelming darkness that unifies her eclectic output along the way.


Alex Paterson and his band of merry pranksters pay tribute to the golden age of ambient house with subtlety, occasional silliness, and a slyly subversive edge.

Abolition of the Royal Familia

With Andrew Weatherall gone and the KLF occupied with conceptual art, the Orb are the last act standing from the magical moment in British music when house, reggae, and ambient collided with a mischievous sense of humor. Abolition of the Royal Familia, the Orb’s new studio album, is no match for Chill Out, Screamadelica or other landmarks of the post-acid-house era. But it feels like a guardian of the flame that Weatherall and his peers ignited: melodic, adventurous, and slyly political, a far-out dispatch from one of the most brilliantly infuriating sonic adventurers of the electronic age.
After the rambling of 2018’s No Sounds Are Out of Bounds and the horizontal ambience of 2016’s COW / Chill Out, World!, the opening half of Abolition of the Royal Familia is a return to the pop-house Orb of “Toxygene” or “Perpetual Dawn,” where abstraction and atmosphere cede place to beats and hooks. The opening “Daze (Missing & Messed Up Mix)” and “House of Narcotics (Opium Wars Mix)” are both straight-up vocal house numbers whose mixdowns betray the slightest touch of the Orb’s dub influences. “Hawk Kings (Oseberg Buddhas Buttonhole)” is even more rambunctious, a pumping house gem that incorporates spinal-stretching string rushes and wistful robotic chatter in tribute to Orb fan Stephen Hawking.
House isn’t the only element to come clattering to the fore on Abolition of the Royal Familia: At times, the album feels like the Orb are peeling back the layers to reveal their inspirations. Reggae has long been an influence, usually stretched out and dubbed off into the cosmos, in keeping with the band’s origins in London chill-out rooms. But tracks like “Shape Shifters (In Two Parts) [Coffee & Ghost Train Mix]” and “Say Cheese (Siberian Tiger Cookie Mix)” are notably earthbound, the work of dialed-in humans on actual instruments rather than smoked-out alien adventurers. On songs like these, the Orb don’t feel so far removed from similarly enduring musical travellers the Grateful Dead, albeit a Dead brought up on Scientist LPs and Monty Python specials, rather than Owsley and the blues.
This touch of humor is important. For a band whose best moments—particularly their debut album, Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld—are gorgeously otherworldly, this excursion into the human realm can feel a little too close to reality. But the free-spiritedness of Abolition of the Royal Familia, with preposterous samples stacked on top of each other in gleefully arranged collages, separates the Orb from their more po-faced peers while providing a through line to their gag-packed career. “Say Cheese” starts with what appears to be British actor/director Richard Ayoade talking about cheese, while the intro to “Ital Orb (Too Blessed to Be Stressed Mix)” features a news item about the effect of “killer dope” on a baby squirrel. Depending upon your tolerance for musical tomfoolery, you might be charmed, revolted, or bored stiff.
Like good situationists, the Orb mix this absurdism with a political edge. The album is intended in part as a retrospective protest against the British royal family’s historical endorsement of the East India Company’s role in the opium trade, while “Slave Till U Die No Matter What U Buy (L’anse Aux Meadows Mix)” is a glistening ambient remake of Jello Biafra’s blistering spoken-word piece “Message From Our Sponsor.” On paper, this sounds ludicrous: politics meeting cheese on a reggae-influenced ambient-house album that dredges up the last 30 years of electronic music. But the Orb’s particular skill—much like the KLF before them—lies in stirring these ingredients into sweetly melodic stews that go down like honey, their silliness a feature rather than a bug. It’s not so much that no one else could make this ridiculous album, more that no one but the Orb would even think of it. Abolition of the Royal Familia is a testament to their sadly singular talent.


Produced by Merrill Garbus, aka tUnE-yArDs, Thao Nguyen's fourth album, A Man Alive!, is her most rhythmically robust and gleefully discordant release to date.

Thao & the Get Down Stay Down: A Man Alive

A Man Alive

Over the course of four albums, Thao Nguyen has been on a mission to get down more than stay down. From her winsome 2008 debut onward, twee has given way to twitch, her formative folksiness gradually overpowered by funk. And with that shift, her lyrical focus has turned less contemplative and more communal, with her 2013 album, We the Common, inspired by her advocacy work for imprisoned women in California.
But her fourth album, A Man Alive!, is something of a full-circle move. Built from the bottom end on up, it's Nguyen's most rhythmically robust, gleefully discordant release to date. It also marks a return to the more self-analytical approach of her earliest efforts, yielding her most candid songwriting yet. These two approaches never feel at odds with each other somehow, and instead, A Man Alive! reinforces the symbiotic relationship between personal trauma and ecstatic physical release.
Guiding Nguyen through this process is her friend and occasional collaborator Merrill Garbus (a.k.a. tUnE-yArDs), who's credited as the album's producer. However, her approach is more like a remixer, as she playfully manipulates the band's constituent elements and amplifies their irreverent qualities. At times, it recalls the Clinton-era alt-rock of The Breeders, Luscious Jackson, and Cibo Matto—bands that shot a distinctly female perspective on life and love through cut-and-paste productions and absurdist funk.
Nguyen and Garbus also share an ability to wade into messy, difficult conversations with poise and clarity. If the sound of A Man Alive! is informed by Garbus' unmistakable presence, lyrically, Nguyen is grappling with absence—specifically, that of her father, who abandoned her family at a young age. "Half of all my blood in vain," she shouts amid the hand-clapped beat and acoustic shredding of "Departure," channeling her pain into puns. Later, on "Guts"—a cool-down strut sounds like its slinked off some mid-'70s Rickie Lee Jones record—she boldly declares, "I've got the guts/ I don't need my blood." The implication: It's one thing to mend a broken heart; it's quite another to extract your DNA.
If much of A Man Alive! sees Nguyen powering through her troubles with grace and groove to spare, she bravely lets her guard down on the tremolo-sparkled centerpiece ballad "Millionaire," which hinges on a line that's both defiant and devastating in its simplicity: "Oh daddy, I broke in a million pieces/ That makes you a millionaire." Atop the blissful dub fadeout "Endless Love," Nguyen sings, "I've got an endless love/ no one can starve," before cheerfully adding this shockingly unsentimental rejoinder: "I don't want it/ I don't want it/ Carve it on out of me." The scar tissue on a healing heart inevitably hardens it, but A Man Alive's great virtue is that Nguyen can still sound like she's having the time of her life even as she's recounting the darkest moments from it.


The solo debut from the Hunx and His Punx frontman finds him reflecting on the past, writing ballads to his old friend Jay Reatard, his departed father, and the Bay City Rollers.

Hairdresser Blues

Seth Bogart, better known as Hunx, has been spending the past few years upending the certain heteronormative rock'n'roll clichés, whether through creating a girl-group with himself at the center, or through subverting the machismo of 1950s greaser icons by adding a liberal dose of glammy homoeroticism. Last year's Too Young to Be in Love proved to be a valuable contrast to the heterosexuality of first-wave rock'n'roll, but more importantly, it was an enjoyable garage-pop record. Bogart and his "punkettes" sounded like they had a ball recording it, embracing the kitsch of malt-shop soundtracks. And while the album certainly possessed the air of "sock hop night" at your favorite gay bar, it also had a universal emotional core, with many of the songs detailing the highs and lows of teenage infatuation-- which, in spite of what you're told, doesn't get much more mature when you enter young adulthood.
When it was announced that Bogart would record a solo album, speculation arose. A Hunx record with no punx, no punkettes, and no Shannon Shaw to potentially steal the show. Is Bogart heading into pensive singer/songwriter territory? Would he go from the unbridled fun of Too Young to Be in Love to releasing his own Nebraska? Recorded by Bogart and Too Young producer Ivan Julian (with help from Daniel Pitout of British Columbia punk band Nü Sensae on drums), Hairdresser Blues finds Hunx reflecting on the past in a major way, writing ballads to his old friend Jay Reatard, his departed father, and the Bay City Rollers. With the newfound emotional weight comes punchier production and fuller arrangements, sacrificing the girl-group harmonies of songs like "Lovers Lane" for driving surf-rock numbers and Flying Nun-indebted Farfisa organs.
The songs still traverse into the realm of Nifty Fifties homage by way of pastiche à la Hairspray ("Do You Remember Being a Roller?", right down to the title, is the album's most overt nod), many of them still carry an undercurrent of writhing lust. (Hint: "Private Room" isn't exactly about those spaces in the library hallway with the opaque glass doors.) But whereas Too Young to Be in Love was the excited doodles of a crush's name in a notebook, Hairdresser Blues is the discarding of the love letters that came after.
Most of the album's songs finds Bogart singing about wanting to turn the clock back to past experience, the time-honored method of dealing with bleak periods by thinking about simpler times. "Say Goodbye Before You Leave" is an ode to Reatard, with Bogart singing of the fun he had opening for him on tour and their late-night phone conversations, wishing he could run his fingers through his hair or just hang out one more time. (When he sings, "We can talk about girls," in the second verse, there's a clear hint of compromise in his voice, a plea that they could do whatever he wants to do, as long as he just comes back.)
Closer "When You're Gone" is the classic case of when a departed loved one feels like a phantom limb, when it hasn't quite sunk in that someone is gone for good, and all you do is wait for them to come back. Like Too Young to Be in Love closer "Blow Me Away", the song is about his father, who passed away when Bogart was a teenager. Through heartbreak and death, Hairdresser Blues is very much an album about loss and the different ways it affects us. But the darker recesses of Bogart's memory are tempered with moments of levity, the moments of waiting up for someone who's never coming back sitting alongside dreams of Bogart having a blow dryer between his thighs.


Steven Julien specializes in a jubilantly no-frills strain of house and techno, and his debut album is bare-bones—just gnarled acid sequences, bare-knuckle drum programming, and drifting synths.

Fallen

Steven Julien is a committed disciple of the jam econo. Since 2009, recording mostly as FunkinEven, the London electronic musician has specialized in a jubilantly no-frills strain of house and techno. His rugged workouts for a stripped-down setup of synthesizer and drum machine are unvarnished, unfussy, and unsentimental. Often recorded in single takes, they have a gestural quality to them, like the arc of a hand slicing through air. And they tend to move in one direction: forward.
A lot of the same qualities hold true for Fallen, his debut album, and his first major release under his own name. It’s not lo-fi, exactly, but it's proudly bare bones, giving no corner to excess. There’s no advanced digital signal processing here, no fantastical sound design, no psychoacoustic sleight-of-hand—just gnarled acid sequences, bare-knuckle drum programming, and drifting synths. In most cases, the technology behind these tunes hasn’t changed much, if at all, in the past 30-odd years; nor, for that matter, has their style.
He covers a lot of ground: “Jedi” is smooth, pinging techno in the vein of Jeff Mills or Robert Hood. “XL,” which he made some 15 years ago, as he told The Wire, brandishing an old floppy disc on which he'd saved the song, teases rolling jazz piano over an excitable house rhythm, ragged filters in constant motion. “Kingdom” is a spacious, starry-eyed acid cut similar to Joey Anderson or Levon Vincent; its structure is simple, but the dimensions suggested by its spiraling arpeggios are vast and expansive. “Reficul” is a greasy, mean-mugging drum-machine fugue in the spirit of “Night,” a 2012 collaboration with Kyle Hall under their Funkinevil alias, and “Disciple” is a thrilling explosion of breakbeats and stuttering horn stabs that throws off energy as though exorcising demons.
But Fallen also marks an important shift from Julien’s earlier work. While there are plenty of storming club cuts here, the whole thing is more varied, more nuanced, and more contemplative than any other record in his catalog. “Begins,” an ambient miniature that opens the record with mercurial timbres and complex harmonies, sets up a full-on jazz fusion number in the form of “Chantel,” flush with digital chimes, flute synth, and squirrely bass work reminiscent of Jaco Pastorius or Stanley Clarke. (It comes as no surprise to learn that Julien cites Plastic People’s Co-Op parties as a major influence; jazz fusion and electric soul played a huge part in the development of the broken-beat aesthetic.)
Fallen is clearly a transitional record for Julien. He recently told The Wire, “I don't like half the stuff I’ve released. This is exactly where I’m at in my head at the moment and hopefully forever.” The album dramatizes that transition in its sequencing. Broken into two halves, it follows a loose kind of narrative, with the first half bathed in warm colors and rich harmonies and the tangled second half caked in grit and worry before emerging into the rosy glow of its ambient outro. The dichotomy is clearest in the juxtaposition of two songs at the album's center. “Oshun,” named after a fertility spirit from the Yoruba and Ifá religions, is a shuffling, meditative cut whose earthy, swirling tones evoke a whiff of petrichor; with “Fallen,” we burrow underground to the tune of a brooding, minor-key synth melody. It’s the album’s darkest moment, and also its most unembellished, just a spindly series of notes pacing up and down the scale for three-and-a-half minutes. It digs a bleak pit smack dab in the middle of the album, a black hole of worry against which everything else shines that much brighter.
It’s easy to make moody electronic music, but it’s harder, and riskier, to pull off something as stark as “Fallen.” But Julien is skilled at achieving complex ideas using modest means, and part of the pleasure of Fallen is the mutability of its emotional terrain; pleasure is tinged with doubt, and fretfulness wears a halo of ecstasy. It’s a good record for introverts who love to dance, and dancers who can’t help but brood. In fact, although the title implies a particular trajectory, the album works just as well heard back to front; it may set up a dichotomy between light and dark, but its treatment of the subject turns out to be far more nuanced. On Fallen, FunkinEven’s one-way streets of yore have funneled into a mazelike warren of alleyways that invites and rewards extended exploration.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Thin Lizzy’s greatest album, one that embodies the myth and grandeur of classic rock.

Jailbreak

You don’t have to be a boy to be one of the boys. All you need are good times, good friends, and the kind of self-acceptance that comes with looking around knowingly and nodding in appreciation. When you hang with the boys, there’s a bunch that gets said, but there’s a bunch more that goes without saying—that you’re leaving your worries behind, that this right here, being with the boys, this is the real living, and everything else is what you navigate to get here. It feels good to be with the boys. You lose yourself a little bit, sitting in your camp chair or at some wooden picnic table or in the corner booth of your local bar and grill. You feel a little bit bigger, too.
Thin Lizzy singer Phil Lynott seemed like he felt this way even when nobody was around. He always believed he was a superstar, and on the song that finally proved it, he swells with the feeling of what’s coming. “The Boys Are Back in Town” is a romantic proclamation, Lynott the grinning town crier with a pack of cigs tucked into his shirt sleeve who sings with the pluck of someone who thinks this time, he might join them. Guitarists Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson crack open the song with a thunderous chord and they sign their names to the chorus in battery acid, twin-tagging it with a heroic pride and triumphant humor that makes them sound like John Williams scoring Woody Woodpecker. The danger is totally theatrical, mostly theoretical. The boys want to fight each other for the girls, the girls aren’t all that impressed, and this is all happening where? A place called Dino’s Bar and Grill. It’s pure romance, pure bullshit, exactly the kind of story you tell over a pint, knowing and not caring how stupid it sounds. It’s a perfect rock’n’roll song.
Like many songs of its era, “The Boys Are Back in Town” evangelizes the poseur myth of rock’n’roll: It wants you to believe that the music can whisk you away from who you actually are. On Jailbreak—their most focused, most confident album—Thin Lizzy’s unwavering belief in their power as a band and the simple joy they get from playing together is so strong, it nearly makes the legend feel like it’s worth believing in, no matter if you know how all of these stories pan out. Who wouldn’t want to feel this free, even if the freedom dies the moment the record’s over?
Despite the persistence of “The Boys Are Back in Town,” the reputation of Thin Lizzy in the U.S. is that they don’t have a reputation. While they stayed on the UK charts longer, reaching their highest mark with 1979’s Black Rose: A Rock Legend, they flamed out in 1983; Lynott himself passed away three years later, his body severely ravaged by a heroin addiction. He and Lizzy left behind an uneven but greatly rewarding discography whose fingerprints can be seen in the needling harmonies of everyone from Prince to Iron Maiden to 311 to Ratatat. Nick Lowe not only aped Thin Lizzy in “So It Goes,” he set the song’s first verse at one of their gigs. Henry Rollins claimed they were “streetwise as any punk could hope to be,” which made Lynott, Gorham, and drummer Brian Downey the most authentically punk members of their short-lived supergroup the Greedies with Paul Cook and Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols. They’re probably the only band to have the same song covered by Titus Andronicus, Belle and Sebastian, the Cardigans, and Huey Lewis and the News. And in their home country of Ireland, Lynott is revered as a poet and cherished son. He is beloved in a way that perhaps no other Irish rock star has ever been. They built a statue of him in the middle of Dublin. There are no statues of Bono anywhere.
Lynott and Downey began Thin Lizzy in 1969 as a power trio that also included guitarist Eric Bell, an alum of Van Morrison’s Them. Together they put out three strong but poorly selling records in the early 1970s and had a novelty hit with their version of the traditional Irish song “Whiskey in the Jar.” From the age of 7, Lynott had been raised by his grandmother in Dublin while his mother lived in Manchester, and when Bell and his successor Gary Moore left the band in rapid succession in 1974, he hired Gorham and Robertson partly to appease his fear of abandonment.
This is not speculation. Lynott was explicit about his reasons for bringing on the two guitarists: “The next time one of those cunts walks out there will be another one there,” he told the band’s former manager Brian Tuite, as related to Graeme Thomson in his biography of Lynott, Cowboy Song. In addition to the added security, the twin-guitar attack brought a new sense of purpose to Thin Lizzy’s songwriting. While recording Fighting in 1975, the two guitarists—one a laid- back Californian, the other a hard-drinking Scotsman—would figure out how to braid their disparate styles together. Robertson and an engineer had been playing around with super-short delays in the studio, allowing the guitarist to accompany himself. Gorham overheard and they began experimenting with playing in tandem. While the Allman Brothers had been knitting tight harmonies for years, the stripped-down simplicity of Lynott’s hard rock songs put Gorham and Robertson’s playing in the center of the frame. The metallic glint of the guitars gave the new Thin Lizzy a sparkling chrome finish.
Primed by the experience of Fighting and ready to record again, Lynott honed in on the core of what he was experiencing on stage, where he found himself in command of huge crowds of teenage boys who were ready to rumble at his command. He had always composed songs about dashing loners scheming on the outskirts of society, but he was now making a conscious effort to dress his characters in black leather and chains. “When you reach the age of 14 or 18, you suddenly find strength that you’ve never had before,” he explained to an interviewer. The lifelong devotee of Van Morrison and Jimi Hendrix was now in search of something to do with the power he received on stage, something greasier than his idols, something less transcendent and more connected to the crusty highway life Steppenwolf touted in “Born to Be Wild.”
Despite his efforts and the atomic thrust of Gorham and Robertson, Lynott never quite gets there on Jailbreak, to the album’s tremendous benefit. The band is simply too happy, too taken by how much they enjoy what they’re doing—both the music they were making and the way it allowed them to see themselves—for the power and aggression of these songs to come across as truly dangerous or liberating. When the band added Gorham and Robertson and changed their direction, Thomson writes, “[there] was a tenderness, a starry-eyed innocence and adventurism that did not wholly survive.” This is true, but what did survive of that original sweetness makes Jailbreak a hard rock album like no other. In effect, it turned the band into something like professional wrestlers working the circuit—the muscles they flex are real, the fights themselves aren’t, and they can still feel the humming in their bodies for days afterward.
They knew how to use this to their artistic advantage. On its surface, the title track serves as a warning shot, the cry before the battle: “Tonight there’s gonna be trouble,” Lynott promises. It’s tough-guy shit, but it’s impossible to believe. All four of them are strutting, making a show of how easily they can control their power. This swagger—the knowingness of it, how plainly they telegraph their pleasure—is absurd; escaping prison has never sounded less risky. The original Thin Lizzy played with David Bowie and Slade, and Lynott’s experience observing expert showmen up close, as well as the band’s own connection with their audience, let them embrace the absurdity of living one’s life as a rock star. It’s a trait they shared with ZZ Top, and it’s what makes Lynott as irresistible on “Jailbreak” as Billy Gibbons is on “La Grange.” He’s clearly having a ball, savoring the posture of the chorus as he leans deep into the words “Don’t you be around,” practically cooing for the listener in a way that is anything but threatening. He obviously wants you to be around.
American critics ignorant of Lizzy’s back catalog heard Lynott’s alternately yawping and dewy vocals and assumed they were stolen from Bruce Springsteen, who had released Born to Run only months before Jailbreak. In reality, they were simply drawing from the same source. Both singers nicked their style from Van Morrison, who approached both a song’s meter and its melody as something he could drape his voice across and twirl around. You can hear it as Lynott rounds into the second verse of “Romeo and the Lonely Girl,” when he suddenly belts himself off track, his voice nearly breaking as he vamps near the high end of his range. It’s as though what he’s singing means so much to him that the restrictions of a rock song, even a loose Celtic boogie like this one, can’t contain it; he simply has to break the rules to make you understand how he feels. When he’s at his hammiest—rhyming “Romeo” with “out on his own-ee-oh,” say—you still feel close to him.
Lynott pulls this trick over and over again on Jailbreak, and it works every time, especially when he clearly doesn’t believe what he’s saying. Whether he’s reassuring a former lover on the sax-laced power-pop of “Running Back” or throttling the word “Lord” as “Cowboy Song” rises to a canter and he ruminates on “a certain female,” he flat-out refuses to sound lonely or contrite. He sings with relish, soaking in the intensity of the memories while keeping his eyes on whatever’s next. It’s consequence-free music, total fantasy, and he knows you’re OK with that.
Lynott enjoyed a reputation as a poetic lyricist, and his rakishness has an air about it that is popularly associated with poetry, or maybe just with poets: He implies a self-contained sensuality, a somewhat tragic devotion to love, a presumed dedication to deeper things. Put another way: He was a little pretentious. It’s certainly a way of saying that his lyrics were usually decent at best, but that pretension makes him a compelling figure; it gives these songs a charge they would lack in hands that weren’t so silky.
Still, Lynott’s suavity sometimes failed him. The son of an Irish mother and an Afro-Guyanese father, he strongly identified as an Irishman—Jailbreak’s “Emerald” is but one of the many odes to ancient Celtic lore that dot Thin Lizzy’s discography—but in 1976 he seemed unsure of what it meant to be a Black person in a very white rock’n’roll context. “American Black artists all seem to be rolling their eyes and wearing suits,” he told Rolling Stone’s Patrick Snyder before lamenting the apparent dearth of “rebellious ones.” “I’d like them to feel they can play rock and roll if they want to,” he added.
His attempts to write about his Blackness were similarly ambivalent. “Fight or Fall,” which already has the unfortunate luck of being stuck between “The Boys Are Back in Town” and the bucking “Cowboy Song,” oscillates between a need to stand together with Black folks and Lynott’s insistence that he’s “not that way inclined.” It’s the quietest song on Jailbreak, and while the closing shout of “Brothers, we gotta fight for one another!” could be read as pat, it comes across as an authentic attempt by the singer to navigate between his identities as a Black man and an Irishman. “I’m very proud of being a Brother. Don’t get me wrong,” he told NME in 1977. “But I think that there are a lot of people like Stevie Wonder [who are] more apt than me to put it across.” By staying true to that reticence, “Fight or Fall” is probably the closest Lynott gets to exposing himself on this record.
Disclosure, social responsibility, idealism: These are not Jailbreak’s values. But the album does speak clearly about who Phil Lynott and Thin Lizzy were, what they desired, and how they felt. Put aside the swashbuckling lyric and the serrated guitars, and “The Boys Are Back in Town” is Jailbreak at its most tender. Downey serves up a soft shuffle in the verses, while Robertson and Gorham fill the song with minor-key chords that turn the action back in on itself, their regret and vulnerability complicating the good cheer of Lynott’s vocal. The lyrics obviously aren’t sincere in their violence, but the boys’ battle royale isn’t quite camp, either; yes, he sings like he knows he’ll be running off soon, but there’s something sad in the sundown way Lynott emphasizes the word “again” when he sings the chorus for the last time. It makes you wonder what life was like when the boys weren’t around.
Lynott was attempting to write an American song—it started life as “Here in Dallas,” then became “G.I. Joe Is Back”—and he was struck by the bar and grills he saw on tour the way an American in Ireland might be struck by the pubs. Though Thomson suggests it may have been influenced by the legitimate scumminess of the Rainbow Bar and Grill on the Sunset Strip, the reference to Dino’s Bar and Grill nevertheless makes it sound like this song takes place in a Chili’s. And that one quirk does make it feel American to its core, though not in the way that Lynott intended. Coupled with the guitarists’ trick chords, it softens the song, makes it more palatable. It lets us all in on the joke: that rebellion isn’t really rebellion when it’s this agreeable. It’s not a hard rock song; it’s simply pretending to be one. And in that way, “The Boys Are Back in Town” has become the kind of song that could be played ad nauseam in any suburban bar and grill in the U.S., just another small part of the American experience.
This is the rock’n’roll life for most people who survive it: cashing checks for songs you wrote decades ago, struggling to balance adulthood with the demands of your livelihood. It becomes a job like any other job, defined by decisions you made before you were old enough to be trusted to make them well. Lynott lived long enough to see his star begin to fade as the punks who embraced him gave way to new wavers who didn’t. Thin Lizzy’s influence on metal and hard rock was already apparent, but his days at the center of the culture were over even before the band broke up. For a time, he was reduced to playing pubs and hotels back in Ireland, often to minuscule crowds.
Jailbreak did prove that Lynott was right to think of himself as a superstar, at least for a little while. But the smoke and lightning and leather that got him there eventually overtook him. “He got wrapped up in the suit you’re supposed to wear as a rock star,” former bandmate Midge Ure said. In his finest moment, though, just before he was overtaken by the version of himself that had swelled in the spotlight, he and his boys managed to capture everything that’s beautiful and good about rock’n’roll, and none of its ugly truth.

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Since his 1998 breakout hit “Beau Mot Plage,” the German house producer has been associated with tropical idyll. On his first album in 12 years, he takes a more ambivalent look at paradise.

Resort Island

Triangle of Sadness, The White Lotus, The Resort: The luxury holiday has taken a cultural battering over the past few years as creators have explored the tensions between escapism and exploitation, opulence and poverty, that are inherent in these posh getaways. Resort Island, the fourth album from German microhouse pioneer Rajko Müller, may be the first house record to explore this idea, which is ironic, given that Isolée’s breakout track, the eternal “Beau Mot Plage,” was a mainstay of the polite dance compilations designed to soundtrack well-groomed decadence in the intimidatingly expensive hotel bars of the early 2000s.
On first impression, Resort Island appears to occupy a similar niche. It is, by some distance, Isolée’s most brushed-up album. There’s something very ordered about the record, particularly the beats, which have the clean lines and attractive symmetry of a well-designed airport. The drums and bass are both perfect—witness the beautifully scuffed open hi-hat sound on “Con o Sin,” which has the percussive scratch of steel wool on glass—and perfectly ignorable, well-designed foundations that barely raise a second thought. You can imagine an overworked concierge sticking Resort Island on to greet the latest batch of pampered guests, in a way that would be implausible for the wibbling electro rock of “Jelly Baby / Fish” (from 2005’s We Are Monster) or the diffuse, nervous funk of “Going Nowhere” (from 2011’s Well Spent Youth).
On one level, this withdrawal into luster is disappointing; the world is not exactly crying out for more hotel-lobby house. Yet the album’s minimal production allows Müller’s exquisite sense of melody, which tends towards the wistfully melancholic, to shine its doleful light. “Let’s Dence” [sic], a beguiling beatless number, is reminiscent of Brian Eno’s classic ambient albums in its gentle, introspective harmonics, which curl up into themselves like puppies snuggling up to their mother, while “Modernation” has a gorgeously understated air of blues to its central theme, reminiscent of the melodic sketches that underpin Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. The result is some of Isolée’s most straightforwardly moving music since “Beau Mot Plage.”
What’s more, it becomes apparent that Müller has not so much abandoned his idiosyncratic ways as hidden them deep within his radiant productions. Resort Island operates according to the subtle push and pull between repetition and variation. Most of the album’s 10 songs are based around what appear to be simple, looped melodic motifs—like the oddly perky riff at the center of “Canada Balsam” or the descending bassline on “Tender Date”—which, on closer examination, don’t quite repeat, as if the idea of reiteration is simply too vulgar for a work as finely tuned as this. Instead, Müller introduces slight variations in tone or timing—a note falling off beat, or a melody suddenly scuffed by electronic effect—that weave a cerebral and hypnotic spell on the unsuspecting listener. Implicit in all this is a sense of degradation. One of Müller’s favorite tricks, employed beautifully on “Clap Gently” and “Coco’s Visa,” is to use detuned synth sounds to create the impression that his melodies are diminishing before our eyes, their notes dragged down by strong underseas currents or melting in the midday sun.
In this decaying opulence lies the tension between elegance and superficiality that underpins Resort Island. There’s considerable beauty to the album’s reverie, but, as for a hotel guest fretting over their looming departure date, the shifting sands of fantasy are not built to last. This may be a slightly charitable interpretation of Müller’s work: Shorn of its title and visuals, Resort Island could potentially be about any kind of impermanence or decline. But this speaks mainly to the limitations of instrumental electronic music, and Resort Island should be applauded for engaging with an emotion as fundamentally elusive as ambivalence. In the end, it’s fitting that Resort Island is a qualified success—not Isolée’s best work, but the closest he has sailed to the zeitgeist since microhouse was the underground darling, back in the EasyJetset 2000s when the budget airline boom was paving the way for decades of techno tourism to come.


Collaborators including Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr and members of Mdou Moctar’s band reinterpret the guitar virtuoso’s songs, reinforcing his growing stature as a singer-songwriter.

Nakama

When he was getting started, 15 years ago, it would have been strange to guess that the dividing line between a good Steve Gunn song and a great one would ever be drawn by his voice rather than his guitar. But that’s arguably where things have stood since he released last year’s Other You, a dreamy California postcard that shares more wavelengths with Gram Parsons than John Fahey. The case gains further credence from the way Gunn’s collaborators treat his voice on Nakama, an EP of five deep reinterpretations that sometimes rival the excellent originals.
Gunn’s fortunes once seemed inseparable from his guitar playing for the simple reason that he hardly ever sang. In his early psychedelic blues and cosmic ragas, he’s too busy working a lot of heavy influences—such as Michael Chapman, La Monte Young, and Bardo Pond, the Philly scene elders he grew up admiring before moving to Brooklyn—into the whorled grain of his own soft-spoken guitar virtuosity. Sometimes electric, often acoustic, it always has an intricate momentum and a sort of scarred lyricism, as if gouged from hard bark with a dull knife.
When he did start singing, it was with something between shyness and wariness. In 2009, on Boerum Palace, his voice appears on a single song, a far-off moan reverberating in a scrubby canyon of guitar. As his singing grew more prominent and expressive, it retained a trace of those modest, hesitant origins. He said as much to Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker in 2016, when his quiet rise from Kurt Vile sideman to headliner was well underway. “I came into songwriting a little bit late; I always thought of it as a selfish endeavor—playing live and having people hear us is such a privilege,” he said. “I don’t want to be like, ‘I’m a guy living in Brooklyn, and I love this girl who works at the bagel shop!’ I mean, who cares.”
As Gunn developed his identity as a singer-songwriter—one who tenders grave observations with almost superstitious caution, cladding them in harmonically interesting yet effortlessly melodic runs—it’s not that his guitar playing stagnated. It’s more like it became as good a tool for its purpose as it could be, and it took its rightful place behind the increasingly distinctive songcraft. The collaborators Gunn chose and worked with closely to rewire Other You songs on Nakama seem to recognize this. Though they employ very different settings, which are responsive to their own idioms and the respective songs’, they all find ways to make Gunn’s voice stand out in sculpted isolation.
The original “Protection” is a bright, brittle electric blues that imperceptibly shades into a kosmiche jam (genres don’t really govern Gunn’s music; they kind of just flow in and out). Mikey Coltun and Ahmoudou Madassane, from the band of the Tuareg guitar hero Mdou Moctar, frame Gunn’s voice with a lean, warm acoustic arrangement, ingeniously recasting the original’s dubby effects with tweaked field recordings of Tende drums and chants in Niger.
On two songs, Gunn worked with the bassist Joshua Abrams, a mainstay of the Chicago jazz and free-improv scenes, and his band Natural Information Society, known for its adventures in expansive minimalism. But Abrams, working with Lisa Alvarado, is also a gifted miniaturist. “Good Wind,” originally a new-age jazz kaleidoscope focused by the voice of Julianna Barwick, is rearranged to emphasize the slippery downward slide of Gunn’s syllables. The effect is like colored oils dripping into water. Though it warbles a little like old Boards of Canada and seems about to resolve into quiet-storm R&B, it’s unique. Similar alchemy changes “On the Way” from a soft, horn-seared country pleaser to something dark and earthen, crawling out of the slowcore heyday of bands like the Black Heart Procession.
Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr is plainly most interested in Gunn’s melting vocal on “Ever Feel That Way,” suspending it in an eerie void and then arranging it with strophes of intense orchestration. She wrings every ounce of drama and pathos from Gunn’s torchy vocal, probing to depths that the serene acoustic arrangement of the original couldn’t reach. Bing & Ruth’s trip-hop take on the weary, winsome “Reflection” comes closest to a standard remix, but it’s still good, if not a revelation or replacement.
Though surely without strategy, Gunn’s evolution has been right on pace with indie rockers’ tastes in rusticated yet cerebral guitar music by white guys. He transitioned quite easily over the hump from the fingerstylin’ late ’00s, when it seemed like James Blackshaw could put out five or six records a year, to the more songwriterly, Oxford American-y ’10s, when all your William Tylers and Hiss Golden Messengers started coming up. But his nearest analogue is probably Six Organs of Admittance’s Ben Chasny, another restless yet patient explorer who, perhaps unexpectedly, found his voice in the distant frequencies buzzing through his strings. Nakama, which is far more than an afterthought, makes us very glad Gunn did.


Ontario musician Daniel Romano's fifth solo full-length finds him relying on classic country flourishes to build simple songs that look to the great beyond.

Mosey

Canada’s Daniel Romano is neither an outlaw nor a good ol’ boy, a bro nor a balladeer. He's made power pop and indie rock, but since going solo in 2010 he's been making his twist on classic country. He might not be tearing up the Stateside country charts, but his new Mosey still makes for a solid entry in the new-school canon of hybrid country. Rather, Romano’s fifth full-length under his own name finds him relying on classic flourishes to build simple songs that look to the great beyond.
For the duration of its dozen songs, Mosey is married to the aesthetics of a forgotten B-movie about the wild West. Romano’s voice sounds weary, the guitars are all a little fried, and mariachi-style brass seals the deal. Psychedelia seeps in, too, for a hazy fever-dream finish. The resulting LP sounds like a dusty, abandoned postcard, a yellowed “wish you were here!” that curls at the corners.
“Valerie Leon” gets the record off to a scorching start, in which Romano races through a near-breathless yarn about a forbidden love that becomes a different sort of disaster—getting what you want doesn’t always yield the best results, it seems. But the bright chorus enlivens the song and makes it sound like a wry joke of sorts. Romano offers an intense triple stack of loneliness toward the middle of the record: “One Hundred Regrets Avenue” sounds hopeless, thanks in part to Romano’s off-kilter piano lines, while “I’m Alone Now” and “Sorrow (For Leonard and William)” trade in melancholy malaise even as they swing and shuffle.
Mosey isn’t all gloom, though it boasts plenty of excellent bummer songs. “Toulouse” is a cheeky, slinky number that finds Rachel McAdams adding wobbly hound-dog “woo”s and breathy lines in French, and “Hunger Is a Dream You Die In” is beguiling in its measured patter. There, Romano sounds barely patient as he contemplates growth and solitude: “Somethin’ in you’s not the same, when there’s no one to share your pain.” Mosey speaks to restless, if uncertain, ambition: you know you need to go, but you’re not sure where or how to get there.


Years into her solo career, Larsson is still just a disembodied voice floating over the beat. On her third album, she tries out some different sounds, but the result comes off like a Who's-Who of 2011 radio.

Poster Girl

Zara Larsson makes breezy, digestible electro-pop: all shine, but no substance. She found her niche in the years after EDM crept into pop, crooning over bright, sanitized synths on her 2015 breakout track “Lush Life” and sighing over wobbling bass on Kygo and Clean Bandit tracks, her voice reduced to a murmur. On her third album, Poster Girl, Larsson attempts to incorporate Dua Lipa–style disco, with stabs at the kind of retro gloss that filled Lady Gaga and The Weeknd’s albums last year. But the record sounds more like a sun-splashed artifact from decade-old pop charts, filled with dated references and fizzy hooks, clunky metaphors and boundless optimism. Even when Larsson stays firmly in her comfort zone, she struggles to convey a sense of character or identity. Years into her solo career, she’s still just a disembodied voice floating over the beat.
These are wispy songs, and Larsson’s at her best when she allows them to drift and dissolve. “Need Someone” melts over a knock-off Tame Impala bassline. “Ruin My Life” starts with fluffy strings before receding tastefully into the middle distance. These are pool-party soundtracks, songs to hum while driving around—pleasant at times, but mostly just tolerable. Too much of the album is hindered by grating, overly accessorized production: hand claps and layered, distorted vocals, theatrical spritzes of synths. On “WOW,” Marshmello slings Larsson’s limp vocals over teetering bass, looping her deadening “Make your jaw drop–drop” hook 10 times in a row.
Larsson and her collaborators — a cast that includes Dua Lipa producer Ian Kirpatrick and boy-band whisperer Mike Sabath — have a penchant for clumsy lyrics, slippery vowels, and mangled subject/verb agreement. “Is this a story arc/’Cause if it are/We’d be iconic,” she chirps over bleating, tinny beats on “FFF,” apparently code for “Falling for a Friend.” The song fumbles over a well-tread narrative in pop, a “Will they or won’t they” dynamic with no charm or suspense. The title track is supposedly dedicated to Larsson’s love for weed, with a chorus of “Holy smokes!” and gasps about “sweet organic healing,” but the song crumbles under its own nonsense:“Someone call a lifeboat,” Larsson moans, “Because I’m drowning in your vibe.”
It’s easy to pinpoint Larsson’s influences, a “Who’s Who” of 2011 radio. The sludgy Young Thug duet “Talk About Love” rehashes Lil Wayne’s croaking Auto-Tuned ballad “How to Love.” The half-spoken bridge in “What Happens Here” tries on early Kesha cadences—“Even if I kiss it, touch it, feel it,” she drawls. What’s harder here is identifying Larsson herself; these songs seem like glitzy containers with nothing inside. When she started making music, Larsson told MTV recently, she didn’t focus on formulating lyrics or testing out guitar chords but on crafting the persona of a star. “I would stand in front of my mirror and sing into a fake mic and tell my fake crowd, ‘I can't hear you! Sing it louder’,” she said. “Poster Girl” is so enraptured with this idealized vision of a pop star that it leaves no room to learn about the woman behind the mic.

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Inspired by The Caretaker’s corroded loops of antique 78s, the Kentucky guitarist creates hypnotic dialogues with the past by mining and responding to his own vast collection.

Nathan Salsburg: Landwerk/Landwerk No. 2

Landwerk/Landwerk No. 2

For nearly a decade, Nathan Salsburg has managed a remarkably compartmentalized career. A dazzling solo guitarist, he’s released a series of largely instrumental acoustic albums that capture bucolic and bittersweet scenes. As sideman and collaborator, he has added restrained elegance to records by Joan Shelley, The Weather Station, and even Shirley Collins. The longtime host of a global folk show on New York’s erstwhile East Village Radio, Salsburg became the curator of the Alan Lomax Archive; as one of the compiling minds behind many of its recent revelatory releases, he assembles box sets and expounds on the virtues of folk music repatriation. The synthesis of all this work is sometimes audible on his albums, but it is not hard to imagine an old-time music enthusiast admiring the Lomax-centric gig without having heard the remarkable Third—or even knowing it’s the same Salsburg.
But Salsburg’s enthusiasms dovetail in plain view on Landwerk, a compelling pair of hypnotic records he completed during this year where time itself seemed to falter. In 2019, Salsburg began poring over The Caretaker’s self-made universe of borrowed ballroom recordings, sampled and looped and damaged to suggest a mind’s gradual slide into dementia. Inspired, Salsburg began digging through his own 2,800 or so 78s in search of evocative snippets from the past, ghosts he might revive long enough to play along with. Salsburg adds his emotionally nuanced guitar to century-old cultural flotsam, lending and receiving new meaning through the process.
On the first Landwerk volume,Salsburg responds in real time to the samples he has plucked, such as a wobbly Turkish dance band or the orchestra of a Finnish socialist society in New York. During the first piece, he lifts an organist’s sighing introduction to a Jewish High Holidays standard and uses its pillowy static as the textured canvas for the crosstalk of his guitars. His pensive electric lead and playful acoustic slide feel cautiously hopeful, suggesting the end of an arduous journey that never arrives.
Meaning emerges from these exchanges. Salsburg moves gingerly around that immigrant orchestra on the second piece, reinforcing their insistent horns patiently. By the end, though, he tires of waiting for them to change, stepping into the foreground to add new energy through a charged pointillist solo. For the 11-minute finale, Salsburg lets a wartime snippet of a pipe-and-drum band repeat, their cadence marching only toward oblivion. His melancholy guitar wraps around that rhythm like vines, suggesting a solemn war memorial overtaken by time and wisdom.
By comparison, Landwerk No. 2 may feel listless or repetitive at first. Like a searchlight through fog, Salsburg’s silvery electric guitar lines flash through the static-caked samples—a 1928 side from an orchestra of Slovakian coal miners in Pennsylvania, a sliver of a tender 1924 plea from the globetrotting “People’s Diva” Isa Kremer. These four tracks are self-contained pieces with distinct themes and textures; Salsburg’s piano even takes a surprise star turn near the start of “Coincident Constellation,” locked in an exchange with woozy strings.
But as with the best work of Earth or Eliane Radigue, these 36 minutes form a slipstream, entrancing you from the first dusty murmur to the last decaying drone. After half an hour, you may find yourself wondering exactly how you’ve already heard three pieces, and where the demarcations landed. Salsburg seems to disappear inside this music, subsumed by these whispered dialogues between past and present, between creation and discovery. Recorded late during this year’s sweltering and transformative Kentucky summer, these experiments feel like a harbor for Salzburg, a space to sit with worry and hope as long as needed.
More than the guitars, this sense of retreat—of taking care of one’s self—is the key difference between Salsburg’s work here and James Leyland Kirby’s enormous output as The Caretaker. Kirby’s music imagined the experience of others, especially the helpless sensation of the loops in your mind disintegrating into confusion. (Perhaps that’s why The Caretaker has enjoyed new life as a viral challenge on TikTok, our most expedient avenue for distilling life’s complexities into something resembling a commercial.). But Landwerk captures the exact feeling of this shared uncanny moment and the quest to be present even when the days tick by on repeat. These records feel like Salsburg’s own creative coping mechanism. They’re spacious enough to extend an invitation to you, too.

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After replacing their lead singer, the reborn metal duo Cobalt make their best-ever record, as accessible as it is aggressive, with magnetic hooks, shout-along mantras, and sparkling riffs.

Slow Forever

When do you last remember a respected band replacing a lead singer and actually getting better? This is the central anomaly of the brilliant and brave Slow Forever, the first album in seven years from the reborn metal duo Cobalt. For a decade, Cobalt made mad, warped dashes through black metal, summoning the spirit and language of hero Ernest Hemingway alongside the imagery and intensity of singer Phil McSorley’s stints in the U.S. Army. But without McSorley, Cobalt has opened its sound, fully embracing the blues, country, hardcore, and hard rock strains that have long been latent in its music. Slow Forever is as accessible as it is aggressive, with magnetic hooks, shout-along mantras, and sparkling riffs all anchoring this eighty-minute maelstrom. It is an electrifying, enthralling opus.
Two years ago, it seemed Cobalt would never make another record. Half a decade had passed since the pair’s landmark Gin, when, in March 2014, McSorley announced he was out; a month later, he was back in, set to work on new material with childhood friend and Cobalt co-founder Erik Wunder. But in December of that year, McSorley took a series of brutally misogynistic, homophobic online shots at other bands. Wunder cut him loose. In retrospect, it seems like serendipity, as Lord Mantis, Charlie Fell’s manic sludge band from Chicago, was publicly splitting at the seams, too. Wunder asked Fell—"the only guy that came to mind when I thought about somebody who could replace Phil," he has said—to enlist. They spent the third quarter of 2015 reinventing Cobalt in a Colorado recording studio.
Those fraught beginnings ripple through Slow Forever, where the songs stem from abject depravity, or from a mindset where nothing goes right and hope is only a useless four-letter word. Images of drug abuse, sexual frustration, emotional exhaustion, self-mutilation, wanton violence, and outright dejection flash by one by one, suggesting a Charles Bukowski biopic produced by David Cronenberg. "I am not a man/I am just a dog," Fell shrieks and repeats above clattering drums and bullying guitars within the first six minutes. "Condone the act of self-destruction," he roars much later, with militant drums and a clarion riff buttressing his pronouncement. "A ritual/And bury it, bury it in the veins of lovers." Fell paints a sort of cosmic portrait with these very human flaws and faults. These failures—the "pinnacle of the archetype," as he puts it at one point—are the natural order, the way it will always be. "The past in a pile of ash, forgotten in the cycle," he offers by way of summary.
Even during instrumental interludes and extended introductions, Cobalt seems to be preparing for conflict, for coming face-to face with the demons inside Fell’s words. "Beast Whip," a song about perpetual dissatisfaction, batters its subject with a series of blast beats and D-beats; Fell seems to be screaming at his own thoughts, demanding more from himself. When "Elephant Graveyard" takes up the cycle of addiction, the music illustrates the mania by inciting a circle pit before fading into a long, slow comedown.
Fell is more versatile and nuanced than McSorley, his predecessor. His work here even suggests a range and finesse that his time in Lord Mantis didn’t, firmly establishing him as one of metal’s great new vocalists. During "Cold Breaker," he launches from a hardcore yammer to a doom-metal roar, alternately summoning the Dead Kennedys and Eyehategod as the music shifts around him. When he emits pained, animalistic screams or haunting, ghostly yells, he’s horror-film terrifying. But he’s not averse to fists-up, muscles-clenched chants, either, and those are what make Slow Forever so unexpectedly approachable. For "King Rust," he returns to a credo—"Hoisting myself out of myself," shouted in a staccato clip and enunciated so that it sticks. It feels motivational, inspiring. "Ruiner" hinges on a duet between Fell’s voice and Wunder’s winding riff, the two trading lines like they’re in Thin Lizzy. Of all the things Cobalt or Lord Mantis ever were, "catchy" was never one of them. On Slow Forever, Wunder and Fell, gleefully grim, stumble into that territory.
Cobalt’s albums have always depended upon a sense of ultimate urgency—life or death, do or die, kill or be killed. Because of the circumstances around its creation, Slow Forever felt that way before it was finished; had Wunder bungled Cobalt’s restart without McSorley, he would have looked like the fool who just didn’t know when or how to stop. Slow Forever thrives in that existential anxiety, as though Wunder and Fell realized they had a lot to lose but even more to gain. As surprising as it may seem for an album where death, despair, and destruction linger in every word, Cobalt gambled on resurrection and, against the odds, advanced.


On Muchacho, Matthew Houck's sixth full-length as Phosphorescent, he gathers together everything he's attempted to date-- beery, rollicking country-rock, haunted tribal hymnals, regret-soaked bar room heartbreak-- and fashions it into something close to a defining statement.

Muchacho

When Phosphorescent's Matthew Houck came off the road in support of his last album, 2010's Here's to Taking it Easy, he was mentally and physically exhausted, uncertain he wanted to make another Phosphorescent record. So he dispatched himself to Tulum, a small community in Mexico, where, he said, "I just checked out of my life for a while." As he took long solitary walks in the woods and swam, the pieces of what would become Muchacho began taking shape in his mind.
As with everything Houck does as Phosphorescent, from 2007's urban-rustic classic Pride to his 2009 Willie Nelson tribute record, this little story has an endearingly second-hand ring to it, as if Houck was obediently following the dictates of some dog-eared country-drifter playbook tucked in his back pocket. But this credulousness is also key to his music, which glows with simple reverence and purity. On Muchacho, Houck gathers together everything he's attempted-- beery, rollicking country-rock, haunted tribal hymnals, regret-soaked bar room heartbreak-- and fashions it into something close to a defining statement.
The first layer of Muchacho to savor is the simple gloriousness of its sound. Houck records his music largely alone, bringing in key players for individual parts but crafting the end results meticulously, in isolation. With the assistance of engineer John Agnello (Kurt Vile, Male Bonding), he has produced a bright, rich, warmly three-dimensional record, one that fuses the headed-for-the-big-city bar-rock signifiers of Here's to Taking it Easy with the night-sky awe of his earliest work. In fact, the album feels like a daylight version of Pride, a point hammered home by the contrast between that album's "Be Dark Night" and this one's two book-ending hymnals.
Accordingly, listening to Muchacho often feels like being warmed by afternoon sun as it floods your window. Every sound is lovingly recorded and given a cradle of space: The rounded pop of the drum track on "Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)", paired with tumbles of upright piano and softly pattering bongos; the dryly whispering bowed harmonics that open "A Charm/A Blade"; the mournful little mariachi trumpet solo winding through the country waltz of "Down to Go". The first thing we hear on the record, introducing the opening "Sun" hymnal, is a dreamlike, welcoming major-key synth flutter. Those synths reappear on "Song For Zula", mingling with crystalline threads of pedal steel guitar, lifting country's signature instrument further heavenward.
At the center of all these majestic noises sits Houck himself. His voice is an unreliable instrument-- reedy, hiccuping, prone to cutting out entirely mid-note-- but he plies it heartbreakingly, never more than on Muchacho. On "Sun, Arise!" and "A New Anhedonia", he stacks himself into massed, keening layers, like a church full of choirboys. It’s a technique that he’s used before, but he has never sounded as overwhelming as he does here. The persistent catch in his voice, meanwhile gives him an unstable, baby chick fragility, magnifying the pathos of a line like, "See honey I am not some broken thing/ I do not lay here in the dark waiting for thee" from "Song For Zula".
One of Muchacho's main thematic concerns is redemption, and it’s one Houck explores with his customary ringing, allegorical language. Sometimes his writing grows so high-flown that it eludes sense: "I was the wounded master, and I was the slave… I was the holy lion, and I was the cage/ I was the bleeding actor, and I was the stage," he sings on "Terror in the Canyons (The Wounded Master)". More straightforward is this, from "Muchacho’s Tune": "See I was slow to understand/ This river’s bigger than I am/ It’s running faster than I can, though lord I tried." It’s a simple sentiment, pitched somewhere south of Zen koan and just north of heartland-rock cliche, and it maps out the coordinates of Houck’s world: It’s a place where well-worn sounds are the most beloved, where ideas and poses are settled into like old chairs. On Muchacho, Houck invests this world with new beauty and profundity.