In proving herself as a rapper, Doja Cat offers up an uneven album that is accomplished but gets bogged down in reactive and repetitive songs.

Scarlet

Doja Cat’s arachnidemonic no-features rap album would like a word with anyone who ever said that she’s not really a rapper. Scarlet asserts Doja’s ability to rap, and her right to be multi-talented and difficult—“difficult art” is high praise. If only anything about Scarlet were difficult. It’s reactive and repetitive, pairing unsurprising takes on traditionalist hip-hop with sharp retorts to last season’s insults. Conceptually, the album is pitched somewhere between Rico Nasty’s Anger Management and Taylor Swift’s Reputation, a razor-edged heel turn that has always something to prove. It’s probably the biggest album to be so concerned with posting, which doesn’t give it the blockbuster quality it deserves.
Doja Cat has answered doubters before, once saying that “it’s fine if people think that I can’t rap,” but Scarlet—working title First of All—implies maybe it isn’t anymore. In one of many spring-summer 2023 tweets later deleted, but not before they made headlines, Doja wrote, “i also agree with everyone who said the majority of my rap verses are mid and corny…. I just enjoy making music but I’m getting tired of hearing yall say that i can’t so I will.” Scarlet’s relatively straight-ahead approach to hip-hop sounds like ’90s boom-bap retrofitted with an eye to contemporary sample drill, rage, and cloud rap. Frequent Lil Yachty collaborator Earl on the Beat has a hand in four tracks including singles “Paint the Town Red” and the dreamy love song “Agora Hills”; Jay Versace is behind the most California-sounding beats, channeling West Coast old school on “97” and L.A. beat scene on “Often.” A generous sample budget pays for classic material like the Ric Flair soundbite on “Balut” and Earl’s Dionne Warwick sample, the first sound on the album: a dove of peace over Evil Doja’s shoulder in “Paint the Town Red,” the No. 1 hit that’s an exact fit for her fake-bloodied, take-no-prisoners horrorcore persona.
After the opening “Red” and “Demons,” Scarlet is a purgatorial run of similarly paced songs that play like progressively shallower echoes of the singles’ pride and bluster. Moment to moment Doja’s performance is dynamic—sweet falsetto, thick nasal drawl—but her writing can make her sound like a sore winner bringing playground taunts to a flame war (“You look like a butter face”) and flatlining on “Love Life” as she congratulates her business team. Remy Ma, who last year reported that the Doja Cat fanbase “came for my life” after she’d said she didn’t think of Doja as a rapper, merits a subtle dig hidden in a stream of punning wordplay on “Ouchies,” and Doja spends not a little time beefing with those same “extremist” superfans on her own behalf, commentating on minor controversies and reminding them that every hate click counts.
Who but those very people are supposed to enjoy this? The rest of us get low-effort bars like “She like it from the back/’Cause she don’t ever front” in songs individually and cumulatively longer than they should be. The quest to settle the score starves Scarlet of opportunities for whatever Doja might have come up with independently—remember “Mooo!”? The woman is so gifted you almost forgot she started out in cow spots. It’s easy to be unsympathetic to the internet troll who gets more attention than you, more attention than any human brain is meant to process. Online pop fans can be relentless, especially to women—ask me how I know—but the only way to survive creatively on the internet is to trust the opinions you value and no one else’s.
Let’s bring it back: “Paint the Town Red” is a well-deserved Halloween hit and the smirking way Doja says “I’d rather be famous instead” sounds like Slim Shady-era Eminem. I love the irreverent way she flexes about not needing a drink to have fun—horrorcore should be scary and fun and Scarlet desperately needs more of the second. That creepy demon-bat-visits-Bella-Goth single artwork for “Demons”? Should have been the album cover. I wish she’d called up some other chronically online rappers, like Rico or JPEGMAFIA for instance, and set everybody loose. Scarlet should be a madhouse but instead it’s like a trip to the rap clinic waiting room.


Writing for string octet plus soloists Nate Wooley and Brian Chase, the New York composer’s work is rooted in the ways that sound absorbed by the body can both reflect and influence emotional states.

Lull

Scattered throughout the score for Jessica Pavone’s Lull are instructions to “choose independent tempo,” and “alternate freely” between set pitches. Time stamps guide each player between sections of spontaneously interpreted notes or drones; at other times, players are instructed to listen to a specific performer for a given tempo or tonal center. The violist’s work is difficult to categorize; recently she has composed primarily for orchestral instruments, especially chamber ensembles, but these types of directions in her scores allude to her background in jazz and free improvisation. Pavone has made numerous albums with guitarist Mary Halvorson and recorded extensively with avant-garde jazz icon Anthony Braxton, which just begins to scratch the surface of her involvement in New York’s creative music scene over the past decade and a half. Yet Pavone’s music, often consisting of slowly undulating tones sustained and modulated over long durations, hits the ear much differently than the chaotic ecstasy of free jazz. Instead, her compositions are wholly absorbing, sinking the listener into a nebulous pool of sound.
Lull expands upon many of the ideas Pavone has been developing on recent quartet releases Brick and Mortar and Lost and Found. The ensemble has grown to an octet—two players each on violin, viola, cello, and bass—and swells further to include soloists Nate Wooley on trumpet and percussionist Brian Chase (of Yeah Yeah Yeahs fame). In an interview with Halvorson published as she was writing the pieces that would become Lull, Pavone mentions an interest in cymatics—the study of physical shapes manifested by sound and vibration—and how sound absorbed by the body can influence and reflect emotional states. These methodological tangents encouraged her to give her collaborators more latitude to play notes and sounds that felt good to them, that literally hit their body in pleasing ways and were comfortable to play, going so far as asking both Chase and Wooley what their favorite notes were so she could compose pieces for the octet around those tones. This music is generous in the way it prioritizes the physical and emotional capacities of its performers; it is by turns gorgeous, knotty, and expressive.
Of the four pieces on Lull, “Ingot,” which features Wooley, most elegantly embodies these ideas. The trumpeter sustains a G for the nearly the entire duration of the piece, subtly adjusting its timbre using an assemblage of mutes, a sheet of aluminum, and his own voice, while the octet drones ominously beneath. Exploring the possibilities inherent in a single note has been a cornerstone of classical minimalism for over half a century, but Wooley’s masterful command of texture, coupled with the heaving waves produced by each string player’s independent tempi, produces a unique effect and intensity that grows as the piece unfolds. What begins as a tentative tremble gradually dilates and bursts into a panoply of overtones as horsehair scrapes the steel strings right where they meet the bridge.
Dissonance and chaos lurk at the edges of each piece. This might be expected of music that offers numerous freedoms to a group of eight musicians, but Pavone directly builds many of these moments into the score. “Indolent” begins with violin and viola gently overtaking one another like placid waves lapping at a shoreline, but four minutes in, each pulse becomes more biting and claustrophobic as the tonal center dissolves and pitches start to veer wildly. “Holt,” which centers on Chase’s pitched snare drum and amplified cymbal, is turbulent from the outset, the spastic snare hits augmented by violins and violas tapping the wooden side of their bows fitfully against the strings. The piece climaxes with rushes of noise as Chase bears down on the electrified cymbal.
The beauty of musical expression is the way it can harness emotions of all types and intensities, and what feels “good” to the performer can be experienced in an infinite number of ways by the listener. Pavone studied with a sound healer prior to writing the music on Lull, and although the bowls and gongs used by those practitioners are not always consonant to ears acclimated to Western scales and harmonies, they are nonetheless deeply affecting, just as this music is. The power of these pieces comes from the inherent subjectivity of sound: the vast number of ways that any given tone can be interpreted and experienced by the composer, performer, and listener. By centering the pleasure of the performer, we learn more about their personalities, preferences, and pleasures. And that knowledge, in turn, allows us to drift closer to a space of shared understanding and bliss.

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If you were a Dinosaur Jr. fan the first time around, it still seems amazing, three albums into their post-2005 reunion run, they're together at all. But at this point, the early drama isn't as interesting as the fact that the new albums-- 2007's Beyond, 2009's Farm, and now I Bet on Sky-- are all good to very good.

I Bet on Sky

If you were a Dinosaur Jr. fan the first time around, it still seems amazing, three albums into their fantastic post-2005 reunion run, that they're together at all. People mention that Lou Barlow was dismissed and that he and J Mascis had clashes, but it felt darker than that. I went to one of Sebadoh's early shows during the tour for 1991's III; Barlow was sour about being fired, and he punctuated songs with jokes about J Mascis. Pointed tunes like "The Freed Pig" were followed by pre-recorded taunts played on a portable tape deck, which usually targeted his former bandmate, or the situation in general. You imagined punches being thrown the next time they were in a room together. It's unclear where everyone is in the reconciliation process at this point-- Mascis isn't all that effusive outside his guitar solos-- but part of what's made Dinosaur Jr. a great band is the ongoing tension between the group's leaders. (For his part, the eternally mellow drummer Murph doesn't seem to be bugged by the bickering.) At this point, though, the drama isn't as interesting as the fact that the new albums-- 2007's Beyond, 2009's Farm, and now I Bet on Sky-- are all good to very good.
These days, bands getting back together to relive the glory days is nothing special. But it takes a certain kind of group to reunite and create vital music. In most cases, you have older bands solidly recreating their past (see: Mission of Burma); it's rarer to see artists with the ability to top what they did the first time around (see: Swans). Judging the dialog around the post-break Dinosaur Jr. records, J, Lou, and Murph are straddling the line between the two: On Beyond and Farm, outside small modernist details, they sounded very much like they did in the pre-Green Mind SST years. I Bet on Sky's title offers a hint that they've gone in a slightly different direction for  album three (it's worth noting they've now matched their output of the first 80s run). The shift's easy to explain: I Bet on Sky feels like the material that emerged after Barlow was fired: 1991's underrated Green Mind, 1993's alt-rock crossover Where You Been, and the most commercially successful album, 1994's Without a Sound.
There's a softer, more spacious feel to those albums; if you go back to the 1985 self-titled debut, 1987's masterwork You're Living All Over Me, or 1988's also classic Bug, it's amazing just now noisy and claustrophobic those albums were. (It's there that they reminded you of their earlier days in the hardcore/punk band Deep Wound and Mascis' later work with the metal group Upsidedown Cross.) The albums after Barlow left had plenty of dirt and distortion-- especially Green Mind-- but they offered more space in the compositions, probably because Mascis suddenly had more space in general to work with. I'm always reminded of those 90s videos of him skiing or playing golf; you get that kind of cleaner vibe, nobody living all over him anymore.
That feeling continues onto the lilting, sunny I Bet on Sky.  The uptempo mid-album track  "Pierce the Morning Rain" even sounds a lot like Green Mind's opener "The Wagon", and I Bet is Dinosaur Jr's cleanest sounding album to date. The feel is laidback, and as Mascis promised during the pre-release press run, fairly "funky." He's has always had a knack for lodging hooks in his feedback, but these are some of his tightest pop songs: Tracks like "Watch the Corners" or opener "Don't Pretend You Didn't Know" bring to mind Built to Spill's warm, welcoming psychedelia. This time, outside the more plaintive "What Was That", the downcast vibe comes this time from a pair of Barlow tracks, the prototypical Sebadoh dust-kicker "Rude" and the jaunty, autumnal rocker "Recognition".
Throughout, Mascis' voice is calmer, less ragged; Sky sometimes feels like his acoustic album Several Shades of Why married to a fuller backing band. There's also a push beyond the basic guitar/bass/drums setup with a twinkling piano on"Don't Pretend" and "Stick a Toe In". These tracks and the "Baby Britain" bounce in general bring to mind what Elliott Smith did when he decided to indulge his Beatles obsession on XO. This is not a complaint: It goes well with the graying hair. All in all this is a kinder, gentler Dinosaur-- you won't have another "Severed Lips", sorry-- making a very solid album, one that finds the band gelling with half the fuzz. It's a subtle shift, but this is neither a move away from their sound nor toward the raging rock of old (even with all those warm-and-fuzzy Mascis guitar solos). In the sprawling, happy anthem "I Know It Oh So Well", Mascis asks, "Is there light ahead?" Judging from the music here, the answer is a resounding yes.


Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985 features artists from all over Canada combining Native American culture and popular music. The tracklist has been carefully curated to not only to emphasize the diversity of the artists and their ideas, but to reveal the vibrancy and energy of this large and largely undocumented scene.

Various Artists: Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985

The members of the Canadian rock group Sugluk saw their small, remote village electrified in more ways than one. Located in the northernmost tip of Quebec, just outside the Arctic Circle, their town—previously called Sugluk as well—consisted primarily of tents and igloos, with the first few permanent structures and power lines added in the 1960s. Even after that initial modernization, most teenagers traveled down to Kuujjuarapik or even as far south as Quebec City for school. The four musicians returned home with loads of pop records by the Beatles, Hendrix, and others, which they used as textbooks to teach themselves how to play their instruments and write their own songs. Soon they were playing community dance halls around the region, and their reputation grew to the point that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation recruited them to record two 7" singles in 1975. That remains the extent of their catalog, although Sugluk continued touring into the 1980s and reunited in 2013.
Of their handful of extant tracks, three are included on Light in the Attic’s new comp Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966-1985. Those songs show a band developing an identity even as it stamps popular folk-rock with its own personal flourish. "Fall Away" opens with a thundering drum fill and a shaky one-note bass groove, setting the stage for singer George Kakayuk’s bittersweet tale of thwarted romance. The song has the folksy grit of Neil Young, but the rambunctious energy of the Flamin’ Groovies. Guitarist Tayara Papigatuk takes over on "I Didn't Know", which sounds so loose and rambling the rhythm section might be the only thing holding it together. Showing their range, "Ajuinnarasuarsunga" (which translates from Inuktitut as "I Tried Hard") is a folksier number defined by the band’s careful harmonies and a lovely piano rambling in the background. "Though the band was not 100 percent satisfied with these raw one-take recordings," writes Kevin "Sipreano" Howes in the Native North America liner notes, "they remain one of the earliest examples of original Inuit rock music recorded in Canada and carry an exceptional spiritual weight."
If Sugluk emerge as one of the stars of Native North America, it’s largely because you can hear a very particular struggle in their songs—not necessarily to be heard by a mainstream audience, but to define themselves through some combination of Native American culture and popular music. That endeavor to some degree informs every song here, as artists from all over Canada calibrate their own equations for personal expression. Some, like the group Sikumiut, sound like they could play shows alongside Young or Joni Mitchell. Others, like Morley Loon and Shingoose, barely nod to pop music at all. But almost everyone on Native North America writes and sings about the impulse to both imitate others and distinguish oneself. Gordon Dick, a member of the Lil’wat Nation and a self-taught guitarist, even gives a name to this music: "I dreamed I was in a rock group, playing on a Saturday night. Our name wasn’t like the Beatles, but I found an old Indian name: Siwash Rock."
Native North America might have easily buckled under the weight of good intentions. Howes, a Toronto-based vinyl collector, DJ, and blogger, spent years scouring record stores and flea markets all over Canada to locate these rare records, then tracked down and researched the unsung artists behind them. That process by itself is important, as it provides valuable information on lesser-known chapters in the history of Canadian rock, but that alone doesn’t ensure a 2xCD/3xLP set, much less the first in what appears to be a multi-volume series, will be listenable or engaging as anything other than an artifact. Fortunately, Howes does not conflate the idea of the music—its origins, its politics, or its import—with the music itself. He has curated the tracklist not only to emphasize the diversity of the artists and their ideas, but to reveal the vibrancy and energy of this large and largely undocumented scene.
Native North America likewise shows the extent to which popular music welcomes and nourishes marginalized perspectives; the form is endlessly adaptable and fundamentally democratic—even when democracy itself is not. Most of these artists faced prejudice or hardship of varying severity, which naturally informed their music. "Police they arrest me, materialists detest me," Willie Dunn sings on "I Pity the Country". "Pollution it chokes me, movies they joke me." The impression is one of forced isolation, as though society has stripped away every refuge that might comfort the singer—except music, that is. It’s a startling opener to the comp, especially since Dunn’s steadfast voice conveys resignation more than anger. He’s not fighting the system, but pitying the sad men who perpetuate their own unhappiness.
"I Pity the Country" is not too different from the politically-motivated folk, rock, and country coming out of the North American mainstream at that time. Many of the artists on Native North America were weaned on early country & western, in particular the lonesome ballads of Hank Williams, but their music has more in common, both sonically and politically, with that of Buffy Sainte-Marie, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash (whose 1964 album Bitter Tears looms large over this set, even if it is never mentioned). Tribal drums become a rock'n'roll rhythm section on Lloyd Cheechoo’s "James Bay" and "Tshekuan Mak Tshetutamak" by Groupe Folklorique Montagnais, a powerful means of announcing the artists’ aboriginal roots. The Chieftones (who billed themselves as "Canada’s All Indian Band") kick off "I Shouldn’t Have Did What I Done" with a drum pattern practically quoted from some cheesy old Hollywood Western, but it turns out to be more than just a marketing ploy as the band’s energetic garage-rock attack subverts any expectation of stoicism associated with Aboriginal stereotypes.
The idea of pop music as a means of presenting oneself to the world gives Native North America some cohesion despite the range of ethnicities, geographies, and genres represented in its tracklist. The comp celebrates those distinctions even if it can’t quite underscore them, which means the extensive liner notes become a crucial guide for listening. A problem that affects so many compilations becomes especially acute*:* You not only want to hear more songs by these artists, but also want to hear more songs in their original context. How did Willy Mitchell expand on the folksy urgency of "Call of the Moose" for his 1981 album Sweet Grass Music? Does the rest of the Saddle Lake Drifting Cowboys’ material sound as good as the Ventures-meets-Buckaroos "Modern Rock"? And what about the 1981 comp Goose Wings: The Music of James Bay, which includes tunes by Lawrence Martin, Lloyd Cheechoo, and Brian Davey? Of course, stoking your curiosity about underrepresented artists only means Native North America is doing its job.


On her bright and self-assured solo debut, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner offers the most all-encompassing document of her tastes yet, incorporating dreamy indie rock and digital pop.

If You See Me, Say Yes

At some point, for Jenn Wasner, all the praise she attracted as a guitarist began to grow complicated. “It felt so strange to have the focus shift from my songs and ideas to my guitar playing,” the Wye Oak leader shared in an essay this summer. “‘This chick shreds!’ ‘Hey, you can really play!’” Wasner saw how her own guitar work was often cast as a spectacle, in contrast to her equally talented male bandmates. “No one draws any additional attention to them — it is taken in stride,” Wasner wrote. “Meanwhile, time and time again, you are fawned over like a child who’s just taken her first steps.”
It’s no wonder, then, why Wasner took a trial separation from the guitar with Wye Oak’s 2014 *Shriek—*though it only served to reinforce how integral the instrument was to the band’s identity. That record fit a pattern of extremes: Wye Oak’s 2011 breakthrough Civilian was guitar-rock; Shriek was their synthesized reinvention; and the one-off LP from Wasner’s side-project Dungeonesse was an exercise in Mariah Carey-worshipping pop. In contrast to those albums, each built around clear or implicit parameters, her debut LP as Flock of Dimes, If You See Me, Say Yes, is simply a Jenn Wasner record. It’s the most all-encompassing showing of her tastes yet, representing in equal measure guitars and synths, dreamy indie rock and digital pop. Along with Wye Oak’s Tween, a collection of outtakes released earlier this year, it’s proof that Wasner does her best work when she doesn’t impose restraints on herself.
Wasner has adjusted her vision for Flock of Dimes since its early singles. She began the project as a channel for beat-heavy experiments that didn’t fit under the Wye Oak umbrella, but as that band grew increasingly synth-minded itself, Flock of Dimes became more straightforward, an outlet for her most revealing songs. It’s a meaningful evolution for a songwriter who once thrived on obfuscation. An air of secrecy hung over Wye Oak’s best records, a haze that rendered key sentiments cryptic. Even the consonant-swallowing slur in Wasner’s voice seemed like a form of omission.
But her songs on If You See Me are bright and open, documenting with clear prose new beginnings, the passage of time, and—poetically for an album she mostly recorded alone—the hermetic tendencies that keep her at a distance from even the closest people in her life. On the rippling “Given/Electric Life,” Wasner admits that she’s “Afraid to be seen as I see myself/Even more to be seen as I really am” and resorts to counting down the days. And as if summoning the more approachable, carefree person she longs to be, the music is deliberately outgoing. The radiant “Everything Is Happening Today” looks to the extroverted thump of her neighbors and labelmates Sylvan Esso, while “Ida Glow” corrals its Gary Numan-esque synths around a pumping disco-house beat. Even “You, the Vatican,” a Wye Oak-sounding number about the most Wye Oak of subjects—death—is delivered with reassuring warmth.
On an album like Civilian or Shriek, that song might have chilled to the bone, with guitars either severely squalling or eerily absent. But here Wasner’s guitars amble amicably alongside her, refracting light over her songs without upstaging or overwhelming them. There’s never the slightest threat they’ll erupt into a blistering solo, the way they so often used to. As awesome as those solos always were, they’re barely missed here. If You See Me may lack some of the tension and menace of Wye Oak’s best records, but that’s a fair tradeoff for an album this personable and at peace with itself.


After 30 years together, the hardcore dynamos hit a nadir. Their collaborative album with Chelsea Wolfe and Stephen Brodsky is exhausting and predictable, a ceaseless barrage of the banal.

Bloodmoon: I

Converge have never been big on acting their age. Consider 2017’s The Dusk in Us, released as the band neared the end of its third decade. On the opening track, vocalist Jacob Bannon hurled himself into guitarist Kurt Ballou’s boobytrapped thicket of riffs like a teenager dive-bombing from the stage apron of their first hardcore gig. They occasionally came up for air during those 44 minutes, but The Dusk in Us mostly felt as splenetic and urgent as their breakthrough, Jane Doe, an album by then old enough to drive. In 30 years, the quartet has taken multiple forays into doom, noise, and musclebound rock, but they’ve always returned to warped hardcore. Outliers in a field where vim and nuance tend to trade places with age, Converge always seemed renewed by the collision, an inspiring trait as three-quarters of the band approach 50.
Their new album Bloodmoon: I is the first time Converge have truly shown their wear. For these 11 tracks, they resort to a trick so predictable even Itchy and Scratchy tried it: Add new members to an old mix that always worked. Gothic singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe and Cave In livewire (and former Converge member) Stephen Brodsky wrote and recorded Bloodmoon with the band, following years of sporadic collaborations. About half the time, as on the arcing opener, the results are a kind of Converge With Friends affair, the flagship’s primal fits given extra melodic or theatrical flair. For the rest, as on the smoke-haloed doom of “Scorpion’s Sting,” Converge sound as if they’re trying to be anything other than themselves, to shake loose hardcore strictures once and for all. These new forms mostly flatter no one; bloated, maudlin, and tiresome, Bloodmoon is the surprising nadir of a career that long seemed dauntless.
Every bit of Bloodmoon, of course, isn’t a waste. After an initial 2019 session, lockdown stymied further real-time collaborations, meaning the bulk of the record was built via pen-pal exchange. Especially considering that Ballou, one of metal’s most vital producers, patched the album together from these long-distance pieces, it sounds phenomenal, its complex layers tucked together with the intricacy and care of a prize-winning baklava. Thrilling little moments lurk in the recesses—the barbed glissandi beneath the outbursts of “Blood Moon,” the bells twinkling around Nate Newton’s jarring bass on “Flower Moon,” the way Wolfe and Bannon tangle with the heat of Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen during “Crimson Stone.” Taking lead vocals on “Failure Forever,” Brodsky coaxes Converge into relaxing just enough to net a pop-metal winner, a stern anthem of perseverance with a soft hook at the center. “Viscera of Men” slides gracefully between hardcore pummel and operatic majesty; when those styles meet about 40 seconds into the song, it is scintillating, a concise demonstration of how to play well with others.
But such thrills are few and far between amid this hour-long morass. Bloodmoon suffers from two problems that seem as though they should preclude one another: It is thin on fresh ideas and unexpected twists. Its hard rock-meets-hardcore permutations are familiar to anyone who has ever heard, say, Evanescence and Breaking Benjamin. Despite those predictable modes, the sounds are so overdone and unfocused that listening in one sitting is exhausting. The ghoulish chants of “Tongues Playing Dead,” the overwrought crisscrossing harmonies of “Daimon,” reams of purple poetry about liars and cowards and flowers and (obviously) moons that say so very little—Bloodmoon feels like a prog-rock collage built from the scraps of the overblown metal bands that tend to get nominated for Grammys. It is a ceaseless barrage of the banal.
For a decade now, Wolfe’s own albums have colored in shades of dark gray, and those spells have sometimes worked. Pushed too hard, however, her limited palette can start to feel like costume-shop occultism. That happens on Bloodmoon, as Wolfe’s increasingly predictable parts hamstring the momentum. “Lord of Liars” thrills with tech-metal flashes, but Wolfe’s refrain drapes them like blackout curtains, blocking out the frisson. Both the heaviness of her heartsick waltz, “Scorpion’s Sting,” and the darkness of her spectral conjuring, “Coil,” feel superficial. In these moments, you wonder what Windhand leader Dorthia Cottrell or singer-songwriter and Thou collaborator Emma Ruth Rundle—powerful and believable singers whose blues feel more lived-in—could have done in her stead.
Ahead of Bloodmoon, Brodsky said, “It’s been a real treat to see one of my favorite bands continue to do cool stuff and break the molds.… It’s a very rare thing in this kind of music to go an experimental route and challenge the ‘rules.’” Right on, man. But is there anything more cliché in rock’n’roll than the band that hangs on too long, fading away slowly with live versions of classic albums and guest-laden clusterfucks? Bloodmoon is indeed the latter, the sound of a band adding some different fuel to its 30-year-old fire. Here’s hoping the embers still burn after this noxious smoke has cleared.

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Originally released in 1984 as a companion to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music for Nine Post Cards, this collection of Satie’s solo piano pieces is a cornerstone of Japanese ambient.

Satsuki Shibano: Wave Notation 3: Erik Satie 1984

Wave Notation 3: Erik Satie 1984

Erik Satie casts a long shadow. The eccentric French composer’s distinctive approach to melody and harmony has traveled decades downstream from his starting point in the 19th century, imparting lessons not only to musicians in the contemporary classical world, but also jazz artists and New York minimalists like John Cage (who, in a 1958 essay, praised Satie’s innovations as “indispensable” to his own work). Few, however, have been as thoroughly transformed by Satie as Tokyo-based pianist Satsuki Shibano. Her lifelong fascination with the composer began in 1977 when, as a university student, she attended a recital of Satie’s music at an art museum in Ikebukuro. “It turned out to be my starting point for awareness toward the concept of music and the way it should be listened to,” Shibano said of the experience.
Following the concert, Shibano reached out to Satoshi Ashikawa, the musician and record-store owner who organized the event, and asked to be introduced to the pianist: Jean-Joël Barbier, a Satie historian from France who recorded the composer’s full oeuvre of piano works across a series of LPs. Barbier agreed to take Shibano on as a protégé and whisked her away to Paris for two and a half years of intensive study. Upon her return to Japan in 1982, Shibano played her own recital of Satie compositions—and this time, Ashikawa approached her with a request. In the time that Shibano had been away, Ashikawa had founded his Sound Process label and released two albums in what he called the Wave Notation series: Hiroshi Yoshimura’s ambient masterclass Music for Nine Postcards and his own Still Way, which took inspiration from Brian Eno’s Music for Airports. He wanted Shibano for the third installment.
Wave Notation 3: Erik Satie 1984 was conceived as a compilation of Satie’s “furniture music,” which proposed the idea of music made to soundtrack daily life long before Eno or anybody else did. Ashikawa and Yoshimura were developing a radical idea of “environmental music” together, in which the pieces they composed were inextricably linked with places. Satie’s furniture music was fundamental to this theory; Japan was at the apex of a renewed interest in his work. (One national newspaper called it a “quiet boom.”) But there was an abrupt change of plans; Ashikawa passed away in a car accident only a year after commissioning the album, and Shibano was left to complete it on her own. She opted for solo piano, played without accompaniment. It’s just Shibano and her muse.
The record is unusual as a Satie anthology. Rather than arranged chronologically or by theme, the tracks are simply sorted (mostly) alphabetically. It’s not comprehensive, either; Shibano plays a selection of Satie’s Gymnopédies, Gnossiennes, and Nocturnes (alongside more obscure works like Caresse), but not his most famous of these. Gymnopédie No. 1, which has been widely used in television and film, is a stark omission. There’s a sense that Shibano is actively resisting the commercialization of Satie, imploring the listener to assemble their own picture. Even the subtitle that adorns the original obi, 1866-1925, seems to suggest this. Those aren’t the dates of composition, but the years of his birth and death. Erik Satie 1984 is honest about what it is: a wide-ranging but incomplete portrait of the man seen through the eyes of the person in front of the sheet music.
In a short span of time, Shibano learned a lot from Barbier—but she also learned how to set herself apart. Her playing speaks volumes in the subtle ways it differs from her mentor’s, her touch lighter and her sound brighter as her fingers dance along the keys. Hearing these interpretations, it becomes clear why Ashikawa saw her as a critical piece of his new vision for ambient music; Shibano lets each note linger in the air, fulfilling Satie’s promise of music as interior design. She would stick with Satie for the rest of her life, evolving her approach over 10 albums as she continued to learn the nuances of listening more meaningfully. She would probably say she’s only improved with time, but Erik Satie 1984 remains a pivotal work that deserves to stand beside its Wave Notation sisters. It captures the moment when Japan’s premier interpreter of a legendary composer found her voice.


It's a bit late to be talking about New Year's Resolutions, but mine was to dig through the ...

Broken Social Scene: You Forgot It in People

You Forgot It in People

It's a bit late to be talking about New Year's Resolutions, but mine was to dig through the boxes upon boxes of promos that arrive at the Pitchfork mailbox each month, and listen intently to hundreds of them in one sitting, in an attempt to discover those rare, impossibly great bands that would otherwise slip through the cracks. It's been an absolute bitch so far, and awfully disheartening, but I've hit paydirt a couple of times, and in those moments of glory, it's been worth wading through every cut-up Cuban big beat record, every generic Midwestern rock record, every bar band, every swing band. See, the problem is, it's impossible to know what's what; you have to just dive in and hope for the best, because sometimes the bands with the worst names and most hideous packaging are just great musicians who would make terrible image consultants.
Case in point: Broken Social Scene. No one wants to admit that they like a band that goes around calling themselves this-- a band who, judging from their artwork, stands around all day looking pensive, crouching, and feeling the music in dramatic grayscale, a band that finds its home on Arts & Crafts/Paper Bag Records, who puts the message "break all codes" above their own barcode, and who dedicates their album to their "families, friends and loves." I already had them pegged! How could they not be the most unimaginative, bleak, whiny emo bastards in the whole pile?
I don't know. But this disc is nothing like you'd imagine. Not even almost. I've been over it again and again looking for some cause, some reason, anything, that would compel a band with this much unfiltered creativity and kinetic energy-- a band without even the slightest suggestion of tear-stained poetry or bedroom catharsis-- to fall victim to the worst possible Vagrant Records clichés. I can't find it. All I know is that when I press play, and this disc whirrs to life, it inexplicably sheds its crybaby façade and becomes... sort of infinite.
I've been listening to this disc for months on repeat-- sometimes just this disc for days-- but it wasn't until I began doing research for this review that it began to make sense how a band like this could materialize from out of nowhere with such a powerful and affecting album. I knew from the liners that the group has ten members (fifteen if you include guests); what I didn't know was that all of them have been wandering from band to band within the wildly experimental Toronto music scene for years, or that they all came together from groups like Stars, Do Make Say Think, Treble Charger, A Silver Mt. Zion, and Mascott with the unified goal of making, of all things, pop music. One of its members told a Toronto weekly that "we'd already made our art-house albums... the whole ideology of trying to write an actual four-minute pop song was completely new to so many of us."
Who could have imagined it would come so easily? You Forgot It in People explodes with song after song of endlessly replayable, perfect pop. For proof, pick virtually any track: the sound barrier-bursting anthem "Almost Crimes", the subdued, gossamer "Looks Just like the Sun", the Dinosaur Jr.-tinted "Cause = Time", or the shimmering, Jeff Buckley-esque "Lover's Spit". And there's plenty more where that came from. How about the chugging guitar-pop of "Stars and Sons", which spins a distant, churning keyboard drone beneath the best moments of Spoon's Girls Can Tell and punctuates it with a barrage of percussive handclaps. Or "Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl" which showcases Emily Haines' melting alto caught in a beautiful, cyclical refrain and intensely modified by vocal effects while violins float atop subtle banjo plucking and cascading toms. Or "KC Accidental", which blasts searing, super-melodic guitar, a drumkit alternately galloping and relentlessly beaten, and an impenetrable wall of accelerating orchestration, before crash-landing into a deliquescent pop lullaby.
The band's aforementioned art-house pedigree goes a long way toward making You Forgot It In People more than just another fantastic pop record: One of its foremost traits is its airy spaciousness. On many of its tracks, the sounds seem to resonate indefinitely, as if played at top volume on a Greenland hillside and recorded miles away. Simultaneously, the album is dense with the baroque instrumentation of all fifteen players, each part beautifully arranged, and all of them bleeding together in perfect harmonic unison. Chalk one up for heretofore unknown producer David Newfeld, who isolates the song's key instruments upfront in the mix, and captures all others as delicate nuances-- an expansive, pillowy bed of ethereal violins, muted trumpets and flutes to softly support the traditional guitars, bass and drums.
Rock critic Michael Goldberg recently speculated that what makes music fanatics thirst for the obscure is the desire to discover music that is "uncontaminated by the commerce machine." This, he says, is the reason we cling to the abstract and unmarketable, the outlandish and abrasive. And yet, this is also the guy whose favorite album of last year was the painfully vacuous adult-contempo masterflop by Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man. Granted, not all of us share Goldberg's taste for sub-folk cheddar, but there's something like that record in each of our collections. So, how can there be room for both challenging, forward-thinking music and straight-up accessibility?
Well, we're not total fucking assholes, right? We can kick back with Ekkehard Ehlers or Electric Light Orchestra-- there's inherent greatness in both. But the holy grail for people like us is the record that combines outright experimentation and strong hooks, something that engages us mentally while appealing to the instincts that draw us toward pop immediacy. Some of the best records ever have been ones that put these two seemingly disparate elements together-- and you can go as recent as The Notwist's Neon Golden or as far back as Sgt. Pepper's (and probably farther, if you want). This kind of music shouldn't be hard to come by; it's just that not many artists are able to perfect that balance.
Broken Social Scene have, and even made it seem effortless. I wish I could convey to you just how perfectly this record pulls off that balancing act, how incredibly catchy and hummable these songs are, despite their refusal to resort to pandering or oversimplicity. I wish I could convey how they've made just exactly the kind of pop record that stands the test of time, and how its ill-advised packaging and shudder-inducing bandname seem so infinitesimal after immersing yourself in the music. And I hate to end this saying, "You just have to hear it for yourself." But oh my god, you do. You just really, really do.


Jon Spencer and his New York blues-punks return with their first new album in nearly two decades—a powerful showcase for singer Cristina Martinez and the fiery, apocalyptic buzz in her wake.

Brood X

The cover of the November 13, 2016 edition of The New York Daily News featured a photo of an enraged anti-Trump protester, mouth agape in mid-scream, hoisting a placard reading “Reject President Elect.” Whose scowl should it be but that of Cristina Martinez, lead singer in Boss Hog, the sleazy, funked-up blues punk band she formed with her husband (and ex-Pussy Galore bandmate) Jon Spencer back in 1989.
For many Boss Hog fans, it was the first glimpse of Martinez they’d seen in a long while. The band hadn’t released a new album since 2000’s Whiteout, and had only played sporadically in the interim. The front-page appearance was all the more surprising given that Boss Hog weren’t exactly model activists in their day—their entire oeuvre was an assault on good taste that included nude album covers, profane provocations, and covering Ike Turner at a time when he’d been branded public enemy number one. But in hindsight, Martinez’s Daily News snap was a perfect promotional poster for Boss Hog’s first new album in nearly two decades, a record that—like that portrait—captures its subject feeling alternately defiant, enraged, and, frankly, a little scared.
Back in the ’90s, Boss Hog’s evolution ran parallel that of the Blues Explosion, and by mid-decade, the two bands were at their creative zeniths, funneling their grimy blues-punk, Blaxploitation funk, and break-beat influences through an interconnected sewer system. And that symbiotic relationship extended to the lead couple’s playfully combative duet dynamic, with Martinez rebuffing Spencer’s come-ons like she was splashing a drink in his face. But even though the two bands are enjoying second winds this decade, their aesthetics have diverged considerably. Like Spencer’s most recent Blues Explosion blast, Brood X is about coming to terms with the changing nature of the city that he and Martinez call home. But where Spencer’s record was filled with nostalgic nods to the golden days of New York punk and rap, Brood X is consumed by feelings of dread and dislocation.
Certainly, it’s several degrees darker than the pop-oriented Whiteout, where Boss Hog had essentially streamlined into a trashier Garbage. Brood X also downplays the dusty-grooved blues/funk vibes of their mid-’90s releases to wade back into the primordial stew of goth, No Wave, and post-punk that coursed through the ’80s New York underground at the band’s infancy. At the same time, the addition of keyboardist Mickey Finn—initially recruited for a string of 2008/2009 reunion dates—gives Boss Hog the means to project their grit with a vivid, cinematic grandeur. The frantic opener “Billy” serves as the showroom model for their retooled capabilities: Over Spencer’s needling guitar riff, Martinez purrs out apocalyptic intimations (“I want all the darkness!”) like PJ Harvey fronting PiL, while the lock-step battery of bassist Jens Jurgensen and drummer Hollis Queens effortlessly alternate between a galloping death-disco and a gut-punching thrust. And then Finn’s ray-gunned keys thread it all together like a B-52’s channeling Richard Kern instead of Ed Wood.
Even though the songs on Brood X were written well before last fall’s election nudged the Doomsday Clock a few seconds closer to midnight, their unsettled energy is well in sync with these troubling, trembling times. The album may have been envisioned as a critique on the cost of living, but it now sounds like an anguished, existential address on the fear of dying: The organ-hummed “Ground Control” recasts eerily serene scenes of a gentrified New York (“Where did my city go?”) as a haunted-house horror flick, while “Shh Shh Shh” finds Martinez writhing atop a queasy, repetitive bass throb, her echoing distorted-telephone voice slowly degenerating into madness. And when Martinez asks, “How does it feel to feel good?” on “Black Eyes,” the song’s stalking, sludge-covered lurch suggests she won’t know the answer anytime soon.
Boss Hog’s sporadic track record—and Martinez’s decision back in 2000 to choose child-rearing over touring—can mean she’s often overlooked by listicle celebrations of great ’90s frontwomen (even as her soulful sneer has endured through progeny like Peaches, Karen O, and Alison Mosshart). Brood X feels like necessary recourse in that regard. With Spencer playing a mostly silent partner here, we get an unfettered, full-screen view of Martinez’s particular POV—not just as a paragon of pre-Giuliani New York, but as a working mom stepping back into the punk-rock trenches.
Brood X’s quiet closers are no less visceral than their high-voltage predecessors, providing a more intimate manifestation of the agitated feelings coursing throughout the record. On “Sunday Routine,” Martinez renders domestic doldrums as a Nick Cave psycho-drama, her spite becoming all the more audible as the details of her day turn more mundane. (“Hiding under wolfskins! Reading airport novels!”) When she seethes, “we lack for motivation / we need the agitation,” she gives voice to the simmering restlessness that’s thrust her back into the spotlight after so many years away.
Most striking is “17,” a ghostly acoustic blues that initially sounds like it was scraped off an old 78, but gradually morphs into a piece of musique concrète built from synth shocks, chopped-up vocals, and feedback scraps. “I was swallowed by the noise/I was just 17,” Martinez sings, offering a fever-dream reminiscence of her teenage-delinquent days in Pussy Galore. But in the song’s dying moments, she’s swallowed by a different sort of noise: an encroaching torrent of cicadas. Brood X is named for the variety of cicadas that spend 17 years underground before swarming to the earth’s surface to lay their eggs—only to die shortly thereafter. With the band hinting in interviews that their comeback could very well be a one-and-done affair, it seems all too obvious: They’re crawling out of the darkness covered in dirt, using their rare moment in the sun to unleash an infernal buzz.


19-year-old Brooklyn rapper Desiigner emerged from nowhere to collaborate with Kanye on The Life of Pablo. On New English, he sounds like the last five years of hip-hop watered down.

New English

On the face of it, Desiigner seems like he might be intriguing: A nobody just a few months ago, the 19-year-old rapper is fresh off collaborating with one of the most famous musicians on the planet. And on top of that, his entire persona is built off another one of the most famous rappers alive? That’s some alternate universe, sci-fi shit, forget about Gucci Mane being a clone. His mixtape New English, unfortunately, is a lot less intriguing to listen to: It sounds like the last five years of hip-hop watered down.
New English is so woefully derivative it almost builds itself a new vocabulary from the Lego blocks of other rappers it stands on. There’s Waka Flocka Flame’s and Lex Luger’s maximalism; the overwhelming, in-the-red sing-song mayhem of Chief Keef, and, of course, the distinct promethazine-enhanced drawl of Future. Aside from his Brooklyn-borne lilt, there’s nothing separating what Desiigner’s doing from any of these artists. Travis Scott has gotten away with a lot of Desiigner’s sins because some of his textures are nice, and Mike Dean and a gang of wizard producers turned Rodeo into something occasionally enjoyable. But there’s nothing you can do here to redeem this material—which is maybe why it’s stuffed with a needlessly lush intro and several interludes, a consummate filler move so Tidal users could enjoy strings in high-def.
There are a few times the sheer audacity of this thing works. There’s “Caliber,” whose hook is just “caliber” a bunch of times, and is such a baldfaced Future rip it’s galling (yet addicting). “Monstas & Villains” sounds like a 2012 drill track (specifically, it sounds almost exactly like this deep King Beece/Lil Reese cut). “Overnight” lurches like a good Future song, and is actually pretty decent, a spacey bit of pathos like *EVOL**’*s “Lie to Me,” but unfortunately that's the catch: it’s more of a “decent 2016 Future song” than a “good 2013 Future song.” There’s an almost experimental quality to these flagrant stylistic excursions, like when you zoom in closer and closer on a photo until you see the Ben-Day dots. You're looking at the elements, and they create a nice pattern, but you miss the artwork's essence.
Desiigner just turned 19, which means when Waka and all those guys first broke in 2009/2010, followed up with drill’s 2012 moment (to say nothing of Gucci’s ascent years before that), he was anywhere from 12-15. I imagine that plays a huge role into how he creates, but if age were an excuse, how do you explain Kodak Black, who cops a Boosie flow but transcends his easy comparison checkpoint with engaging music? I want to applaud the Desiigner that writes a song called “Pluto,” performs like this on national TV, and crashes the BET Awards, off sheer gumption, but where are those tendencies on this tape?
I never thought “Panda” sounded like Future. If I cocked my head a certain way, yes, I heard it, but his stuttering, double-time flow is something not really in Future’s toolbox, and the more I listened, I thought the song's twists and turns, light on its feet like a boxer, was enough to make it more than a novelty. “What is he saying? Why does he sound like that?” Those two questions can get you pretty far in rap. This was even more true with his now infamous XXL Freestyle, dubbed “Timmy Turner.” Over finger snaps, Desiigner sang in a playground cadence with a thick patois: there was something there, a melodic sense of unease, a tease of a dark story delivered with the menace of a troubled adolescent. It had personality. It stuck in your mind. It did more in 45 seconds than New English does in 36 minutes.


Scottish post-rockers provide the soundtrack for an experimental feature that follows Zinedine Zidane throughout the course of one full Real Madrid match.

Mogwai: Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait OST

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait OST

The most exhausted adage of the post-rock boom was that bands placed within that genre's elastic borders were "making soundtracks for imaginary movies." It's a popular knee-jerk response to instrumental music, the assumption that if the artist doesn't provide a verbal story themselves, they must be creating accompaniment to a visual narrative, a sentiment reinforced by the ubiquitous film-and-slide visuals of the scene's live shows. But cliché or no, it was only a matter of time before this questionable logic was repeated often enough to become fact, and the big bad industry actively began to pursue post-rock acts to score their films. The only surprise of this inevitable partnership is the recurrent subject matter of post-rock-scored movies: The criminally un-indie wide world of sports.
Consider the trend started by Explosions in the Sky with their ponderous music for the high-school football drama Friday Night Lights, which fit the trappings of a film that attempted to make the sport look every bit as grandiose as the participants and spectators felt it to be. Post-rock's crescendo swells and somber atmospherics were surprisingly apt supplements to the slow-motion and deadly serious vocabulary of sports propagated by NFL Films' stylized highlights, helping transform athletic struggles into the substitute for war and violence sociologists keep telling us about. But still, football seemed to be an incongruous fit for an indie rock score, given the (admittedly stereotyped) assumption that not many Texan high school football players probably have Explosions in the Sky on their iPods.
Soccer, on the other hand, has become the indie rock of sports in America, with a small, fiercely loyal crowd that aggregates in designated locations, a thriving internet community dealing in esoteric terminology, and a raging streak of Anglophilia. So, from an outsider's perspective, a post-rock album about soccer doesn't seem so weird. Of course, Mogwai are Scottish, which means their perspective on soccer is more traditional, while tracks like "Helps Both Ways" from Come on Die Young and "Hugh Dallas" from Matador's Everything Is Nice compilation tipped the group's affinity for sport. Thus, on paper, they seem like the perfect outfit to score a documentary on the career of one of the most acclaimed and controversial of recent soccer superstars, Zinedine Zidane.
Without having seen the movie-- unsurprisingly, it hasn't yet made it Stateside-- I can't fully judge how well the 11 songs included here fit the film's subject matter, but certain predictions can be made. Certainly the film-- which follows a full match from Zidane's perspective, a film experiment that was also conducted in the 1970s with George Best as its subject-- is not in the Nike/MTV quick-cut style, with the compositions of Mogwai so tortoise-paced that watching soccer at regular speed seems to outrun the album when played simultaneously. Besides the crawling tempo, the music is also uniformly grave and bleak, thick with low-end and storm-cloud piano, feedback-drone guitars, and sparse, brushed drumming. YouTube links seem to indicate that the film is entirely made up of Zidane close-ups, suggesting that the music is meant to underscore the loneliness of the midfielder, playing a team sport but isolated on the pitch in front of millions of eyes.
That's all well and good in a theatre, but independent of its visuals, Mogwai's Zidane is a bit of a slog, exhibiting fewer dynamics than the band's usual work. Like a nil-nil game, the record contains rewards for those willing and able to focus on the subtleties, but feels ultimately unsatisfying, producing endless buildup without any payoff-- even songs with enthusiastic titles like "Wake Up and Go Berserk" or "I Do Have Weapons" fail to ignite. Part of this circular effect is the repetition of melodies; three of the songs appear in two versions, and many of the songs ride a similar lead-bass arrangement.
But soundtracks are generally less about variety and more about establishing mood, something that Zidane does very well. It can also be argued that, in the limited arena of musical translations of a singular person or character, that Mogwai's music captures the somber, conflicted essence of Zizou, a player whose long career of accomplishments was overshadowed by an unfortunate flare of temper in his final game, an Algerian who became a national hero for his home country's former occupier, a playmaker who maintained a stern gravity amidst occasionally weak-kneed and histrionic opponents and teammates. The album's success along these lines may lie not in post-rock's supposed adeptness in reinforcing the external drama of modern sports, but because its instrumental tumult perfectly reflects the internal conflict of the athlete himself.


The UK producer’s debut album, 12 years into his career, bridges his popstar songwriting with his work in the UK funky scene.

Yesterday Is Heavy

Lil Silva has amassed a scroll of writing credits for the likes of Adele, Mark Ronson, BANKS, and serpentwithfeet, to name a few, all while holding his own style in the UK funky scene as a DJ and producer. As his career bifurcated, he slowly connected those two worlds through ideas first auditioned on his 2016 EP Jimi, a stark blend of UK bass, house and hip-hop beats. The production on his debut album, Yesterday Is Heavy, still employs the synths and rhythms that have been a staple of his work from the beginning and bridges it with his popstar songwriting. Released 12 years into his career, it sounds like a piece of music someone has spent their entire life up until that point trying to make.
On Yesterday Is Heavy, Silva wanted to concentrate on the present while considering the past. The album title is a shortening of the old adage, “Yesterday is heavy, so put it down”—in this case, he’s laying it to tape. This is an electronic album that placates the listener as much as it fires them up. This is most evident on the emotionally stirring opener “Another Sketch.” Beginning with his fizzing synth, it builds a rushing airspace with a ream of textures before he enters with an illuminating croon. His words question the systemic racism ingrained in his country as his voice is swarmed by gilded strings. It sounds very busy, but Silva never loses the balance of these productions.
Family is an important pillar of Yesterday Is Heavy, not just in terms of kinship. The collaborations with friends old and new act like tour guides that stretch Silva to the outer reaches of his sound, like the melancholic lead single “Backwards” with old-time creative partner Sampha. The song’s descending hook is an excellent piece of musical signposting that personifies the vivid imagery of being physically pulled under by one’s intrusive thoughts. As Sampha’s voice skims down the scale singing, “It’s backwards how you cyclone me/Sinkhole, black hole, control me,” he marches in lockstep with the rest of the track to create a shuffling momentum.
The collaborations don’t always lead to interesting places: “Leave It” with Charlotte Day Wilson is easy to glaze over with its dry guitar licks and muted hook, and is the sole instance where Silva’s presence isn’t felt other than as a background vocal. A much stronger pairing is “To The Floor” with BADBADNOTGOOD, who lead the way with a bassline that Silva subtly chops up to ensure his fingerprints are on it, or the grimey, string-backed beat he sews for Canadian rapper Skiifall on “What If?”
Though Silva is keen to workshop his poised production around other voices, the few beat-focused cuts on the album manage to invite in the emotionally progressive club experience. “September” does the Jamie xx trick of recycling an old soul sample by pulling it into his world through a cloudy dream bubble; to further the notion of family, he brings on scene affiliate MC Judah on the soaring track “Vera.” Judah professes to Silva, “I said it once and I’ll say it again/You are important to the lineage of the UK club sound.” Consider this album an extension of UK club’s instinctual soul.


On his latest album, Jack Tatum incorporates newly vulnerable songwriting into his ’80s dreamworld.

Hold

On May 25, 2010, Brooklyn’s Captured Tracks released a pair of homespun debuts by bands whose re-interpretations of first-wave indie pop would help spearhead a wave of millennial DIY nostalgists. Since then, Beach Fossils and Wild Nothing have charted parallel paths: Both followed their debuts with a studio-grade sharpening of their sound, then pivoted to baroque songcraft with vintage electric keys and saxophone solos. Following a joint tour celebrating the bands’ 10th anniversaries, their respective frontmen each settled down to start families before returning this year with unusually personal albums that re-examine their past work through the lens of fatherhood. Beach Fossils’ Dustin Payseur returned to his surf-pop style on June’s Bunny; Wild Nothing’s Jack Tatum finds new meaning in his dreamscape on Hold, emerging with some of his most touching tracks to date.
Hold was written shortly after both the birth of Tatum’s son and the onset of the pandemic. The inability to tour or book studio time, coupled with the parental learning curve, forced him to reconsider his priorities—a shift that’s reflected in the exploratory nature of his new work. In contrast to the distinct aesthetics of 2016’s Life of Pause and 2012’s Nocturne, Hold adopts a refreshing sense of whimsy. Self-producing for the first time since 2010, Tatum dabbles in one-off genre experiments, toys with eccentric lyrical devices, and embraces a maximalist ethos that sets this album apart.
Loosening up Wild Nothing’s sound also allows Tatum to peel back the obscurity of his lyrics. On “Pulling Down the Moon (Before You),” the Peter Gabriel-inspired closer, he indulges in a newfound sentimentality, describing the renewed purpose he’s found in fatherhood and the anxiety that comes with it. “A whole existence I can hold/But won’t ever weigh me down,” he sings, reverb-gated snares and delayed lead guitar echoing all around. His vocals nudge to the front of the mix, a deluge of psychedelic effects highlighting the vulnerability in each word.
The most gripping moments dissect Tatum’s insecurities with surreal, self-deprecating humor. “Suburban Solutions,” inspired by his move from Los Angeles back to his home state of Virginia, second-guesses the desire for domesticity. He pictures his new setting as an ironic advertisement for the bourgeois lifestyle, soundtracked by a chintzy array of synths. “Take a big bite,” he commands in the cartoonishly pitched-down voice of a commercial announcer. Where dreams once represented escapism in his music, the subconscious now feels occasionally antagonistic. It’s strange to hear a Wild Nothing track to adhere so tightly to a concept, but Tatum grounds the material in his trademark stuttering rhythm guitar and booming motorik beats.
When Tatum returns to dreams, he seems eager to wake up. In “Histrion,” he recounts a familiar nightmare: standing in front of an audience and forgetting every word. (In the final verse, a crane hoists him offstage.) Bolstered by warbling Auto-Tune, he belts with unprecedented abandon, slamming piano chords and wailing in a Todd Rundgren falsetto to amplify the ecstasy. This ability to surprise is Hold’s greatest asset. After dabbling in Eno-esque ambient sounds, straight-ahead shoegaze, and baggy beatcraft, Tatum lets the layers of nostalgia overlap when “Dial Tone” calls back to that old, breezy jangle circa Golden Haze, a time when Wild Nothing’s ’80s revivalism set a new benchmark for bedroom pop. He can still rekindle its magic on cue.


On a double EP for Nina Kraviz’s Trip label, the Russian producer delivers punishing techno shot through with happy pandemonium.

badtrip

Like Yello, Pépé Bradock, and Aphex Twin before him, Buttechno is an electronic artist who takes his music both very seriously and with a welcome dollop of humor. His careful attention to the craft of production is accompanied by a tongue permanently in search of cheek.
The prolific Moscow producer’s two contributions to Happy New Year! We Wish You Happiness!, a scene-setting 2018 compilation on Nina Kraviz’s Trip label, marked Buttechno (aka Pavel Milyakov) as the jester in the Trip camp, his songs bursting with mutant gabber, silly noises, and arcade-level Autechre experimentation. badtrip, a double EP that marks his first full release for the label, confirms his trickster reputation. While there’s nothing laugh-out-loud funny here, all nine tracks are marked by the kind of puckish mischief you might find in Aphex Twin’s “Milkman” or Captain Beefheart’s legendarily opaque Trout Mask Replica, with an admirable degree of chaos underlying their punishing techno sound.
“U.D.U.” is key to understanding the EP’s happy pandemonium. At first, the song sounds like a mess, an anarchic frenzy of industrial-grade bass drums, hi-hats, snares, and toms suggesting two entirely unrelated tracks leaking into your headphones. Listen closely, though, and “U.D.U.” starts to make a wonderful kind of sense as the various beats—forward, backward, pitched up and down—pull at the limits of a 4/4 cadence to create a bizarrely funky breed of chaos that is all the more sublime for being slightly unfathomable. The fabulous “wb movement” is similarly bewildering, with shakers, hi-hats, and snares positioned around the bass-drum pulse in off-kilter patterns that seem designed to unsettle the listener’s rhythmic instincts.
“j become,” on the other hand, is sneakily mischievous. On first evidence, the track is a fairly standard replica of the early Trax records that were designed to put the wind up your nightgown via pummeling beats, relentless synth hooks, and menacing vocal lines, only for Milyakov to yank the bass drum backwards half a beat, so that the mix briefly resembles the kind of botched drop that gives amateur DJs waking nightmares. That he punctuates this effect with the sound of a record spinning back—precisely the move a nervous DJ would make to rescue the situation—suggests a producer who cares very little for the DJ-centric nature of techno.
The manipulation of vocal hooks, a hallmark of recent Trip releases, is also in evidence here. On “BBBASE” vocal samples tumble about the octaves like socks in a washing machine, spinning a psychedelic web of noise around the nonchalant central riff, while the gruff robotic vocal that runs through “pkds” and “tr-919” becomes so maddeningly repetitive you suspect annoying the listener might actually be the point.
These two songs illustrate badtrip’s principal weakness, namely an occasional tendency to ramble that seems at odds with the lunatic energy of “U.D.U” or “wb movement.” “Ferenz-18” worries at its central synth melody like a cat with a dying vole, the track prickling along like a distressed take on Isolée’s classic “Beau Mot Plage”; it could stand to lose a good two minutes, while “pkds” and “tr-919” are seriously overstretched.
badtrip doesn’t give any simple answers. DJs will be put off by the EP’s rhythmic roguery, while home listeners may be frustrated by sporadic needless repetition. At its best, though, badtrip’s musical imagination rides gloriously roughshod over the conventions of techno.


Less than a year since Laurel Halo released her debut full-length for Hyperdub, she returns with a four-track EP for the label. If Quarantine resembled an amalgam of flesh and machine, here Halo goes one step closer to erasing humanity from the frame by including none of her trademark vocal swoops.

Behind the Green Door EP

It's less than a year since Laurel Halo released her debut full-length album for Hyperdub, the brittle, beautiful Quarantine. This four-track EP for the same label makes that record feel light-years away. The vocals are gone, the sense of space has all but vanished. If Quarantine resembled a Cronenbergian amalgam of flesh and machine, here Halo goes one step closer to erasing humanity from the frame. Those swooping vocal takes feel absent at first. It's hard not to mourn their removal, and worry about the premature halting of an idea that had long life in it yet. On further plays, though, Behind the Green Door casts a different shadow over Quarantine, just as that album did with her prior work. It makes Quarantine a stronger, bolder piece, gaining a little extra weight due to the sense of isolation, even among Halo's own work, that surrounds it.
The sense of forward momentum merges into the music on Behind the Green Door in a quite literal sense; these aren't exactly club bangers, but the feeling of propulsion is aided by the beats that underpin all four tracks. Those rhythms guide Halo down a purposefully tangled path, picking up elements of house music and minimal techno along the way, but cloaking them in a sense of agitation that's barely kept below surface level. This isn't exactly angry music, but there is a feeling of itchy unease that runs as a theme throughout. "NOYFB" is the best embodiment of this, with each new layer feeling slightly out of step with everything that came immediately prior. It's disorienting, which is, it seems, Halo's favorite place to be, allowing her to construct worlds that immediately get pulled down and discarded on the cutting room floor. She never appears fully satisfied in the present moment, always eager to move on somewhere else.
Halo has commented on the "sexual energy" of these tracks, setting up a fascinating disparity between the title of the EP (taken from a well-known porn film from the 1970s, which was among the first hardcore pictures to gain wide distribution) and the tender pound that thumps through a track like "Sex Mission". If there is a sexual energy, it's wide-ranging, bridging from moments of quiet joy and reflection to feelings of loneliness and alienation. But the sense of distance being gained while human aspects recede, at least compared to what came before on Quarantine, adds a further twist. The bass drum beats and bursts of stiff electronics that rise in "UHFFO" suggest a darker sensuality, something more akin to the dystopian sci-fi dreams of Demon Seed, the 70s horror feature in which Julie Christie is impregnated by a supercomputer. The underlying themes of that film-- of technology being abused, breaking down, fudging the lines between what's real and artificial-- serve as a useful parallel to the feel of Behind the Green Door.
It's interesting to listen back to Hour Logic, Halo's 2011 EP for Hippos in Tanks, in light of the moves she's made here. In many ways the two releases feel like the flipside of a utopian dream, with the earlier work all brash outward moves, caught up in a moment of cautious optimism. "Throw" from this EP is noticeably harder, more pessimistic in outlook, with the warped, house-y piano stabs the perfect dysfunctional hook to signal a sense of restlessness. There's a feeling of moving away from something, not to a space necessarily much darker than some of Quarantine, but certainly one where chaos and decline are taking a stronger hold. The title of the EP makes more sense in that context, if you take the enormous popularity of Behind the Green Door as a sort of ground zero for the subsequent wave of seedy profiteering that the adult film industry would be built upon. This work feels more in tune with decay and exploitation in sexual portrayal, the numbness accrued from a constant barrage of imagery, than anything that’s notionally "sexy."


Plot twist: Diplo’s star-studded new EP will not make you twerk, but it might make you cry.

California EP

Before worldwide stardom and innumerable A-list collaborations, before mobilizing an endless parade of twerkage with Major Lazer, even before his revolutionary work with M.I.A. on “Paper Planes” and Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol. 1, a 25-year-old named Thomas Wesley Pentz released an album called Florida. It was a strange, compelling trip-hop record, notable, in 2004, for its multi-genre fluency. But the other striking element—then and particularly now, for those who have followed Pentz’s career as perhaps the best-known DJ of his generation—was the sadness at the album’s core. Damn, it’s true: Even Diplo gets the blues.
Fourteen years later, Diplo has released another solo record named for a state. The modest-seeming California EP harkens back to the mood of that first album, channeling the DJ’s sadz through understated downtempo production and a star-studded guest list. Here though, Partyboi Diplo has asked his energetic vocalists to change things up, like Judd Apatow trying to coax depth from Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen in Funny People. In a smart opening gambit, he enlists Lil Yachty, Mr. Happy himself, for the hook on standout “Worry No More,” which also features early Diplo collaborator Santigold. It’s a straightforward song about chasing your dreams, embellished with familiar dancehall touches. But Yachty’s plaintive singing steals the show and gives the track an emotional weight rarely present on a Diplo record. His delivery is heartfelt, as if he’d never made it big in the first place.
For years, Diplo’s brand has been reliable enough that, if you were DJing a party and running out of ideas, you might be willing to throw on his latest release without vetting it first. But try it with California, and half your guests could be sniffling by the end of the third song, “Look Back,” a vocal showcase for DRAM, who rips into it with the force of Cee-Lo on a juice cleanse. A similar turn comes from Desiigner, who sounds completely morose on “Suicidal”—and not that xanned-out type of morose either. He’s genuinely torn up.
It’s hard to imagine that Diplo, whose success has been built almost entirely on his savvy ability to give the people what they want when they want it, just decided one day to make a sad record. He’s been paying attention. He knows that emo is now openly beloved, that the SoundCloud wave has made even Swedish moper Yung Lean seem as if he was critically underappreciated. (He wasn’t.) With their naked SoundCloud aping, California tracks “Wish” and “Color Blind” make Diplo’s calculations a bit more obvious, reminding critical listeners of the producer’s parasitic tendencies. “Color Blind” in particular, feels like an overproduced mainstream ripoff, its rainbow synth and handclap chorus a poor match for rapper Lil Xan’s bummed delivery.
And yet. It’s not unimaginable that Diplo, who turns 40 this year, has grown reflective. In a recent interview with the BBC DJ Annie Mac, the producer expressed envy of his younger collaborators. “They have all this freedom,” he said. “They’re not afraid to try anything.” By contrast, he saw himself as “working on borrowed time.” So as this brief EP draws to a close with the cathartic “Get It Right,” a potent mix of piano keys, stadium-status drums, a power chorus from MØ, and one of those pitched-up bridges that Diplo so adores, don’t be surprised to find yourself actually, emotionally, moved. Damn, it’s true: We all get sad sometimes.


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 Jyoti Mishra’s 1997 major-label debut, a collection of tender homemade synth-pop that spawned an unlikely global hit.

Women in Technology

Sometime around 1978, Jyoti Mishra saw Pennies From Heaven, a BBC miniseries that interspersed period drama with actors lip-syncing old songs. In the second-to-last episode, a schoolteacher has resolved to return to sex work when her adulterous lover, a sheet music salesman played by Bob Hoskins, breaks out in a bleak lament. Titled “My Woman,” the song was originally by Bing Crosby, but the show’s version, recorded in 1932 by London crooner Al Bowlly, stands out for a funereal, three-note opening trumpet phrase. You might even know it: BUM, bum ba-bum, bum ba-bum, bum ba-bum.
Born in 1966 in Rourkela, India, Mishra emigrated with his middle-class family to the UK when he was 3, eventually settling in Derby, in central England. He endured bullying, racist and otherwise. “I was the annoying know-it-all kid at school, a title I held alongside fattest lad,” Mishra has said. He started playing keyboards when he was 12, and, as he tells it, quit school at 16 “specifically to go on the dole and play in a band.” During the 1980s, he began to identify as a revolutionary Marxist.
After attending a “life-changing” Pixies concert, Mishra formed White Town as a conventional guitar band in 1989, citing standard indie-rock influences of the time: the Wedding Present, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and My Bloody Valentine. At their third gig, White Town opened for Primal Scream. “The name White Town was a reference to growing up as an Asian person in Britain,” Mishra told Sound on Sound. “That’s not been depressing, but there certainly was a sense of alienation.” A government program for the unemployed, the now-defunct Enterprise Allowance Scheme, helped Mishra start his own label, Satya Records.
The funding enabled him to release White Town’s first single, 1990’s “White Town,” in a run of 1,000 7" vinyl copies. “There are some things in life that have to be done regardless of success or failure,” reads a typewritten note tucked within the sleeve. The A-side casts a handy lens on Mishra’s nascent sensibility. He sings in a hushed voice that evokes quintessential Sarah Records indie-pop groups like the Field Mice, joined by cello throbs like Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle” and propulsive streaks of MBV-style noise-rock. But the lyrics address a lover who, it’s implied, has left him under racist pressure from her parents. “If it’s not worth fighting for,” Mishra sighs, “it’s worth nothing at all.”
White Town were still deeply underground, but they caught the ear of Geoff Merritt, owner of Urbana, Illinois-based indie label Parasol, which put out several of the group’s subsequent records. The other band members drifted away, and Mishra recorded White Town’s full-length debut, 1994’s Socialism, Sexism & Sexuality, by himself on an eight-track. Fascinating if flawed, the album tends toward run-of-the-mill jangle, and though some of the songs are among Mishra’s catchiest, as a whole the 67-minute outing is uneven and overlong. But he also experiments with gender ambiguity on the buoyant “My Baby Will Love Me,” and rails against racists and fascists. In verbose sleeve notes, Mishra name-checks radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, while backing away from Marxism or any other orthodoxy. He sums himself up as “amateur philosopher, semi-pro songwriter, and career pervert.”
By 1994, Mishra was studying at the University of Derby. He has claimed that he’d long since given up “completely” on any youthful dreams of a major-label deal. But around this time, he acquired a sampler and began working with loops. “I was influenced by hip‑hop, Cabaret Voltaire, and musique concrete, and thought that the creative use of sound in avant‑garde was brilliant,” he has said. “It was a little bit like the Marcel Duchamp school of ‘readymade’ art: You find an object in real life, and you make it your own by putting it in a different place and context.”
Mishra’s most significant spin on the readymade concept was his treatment of “My Woman,” the 1932 jazz record he’d heard as a child on Pennies From Heaven. He spotted the CD soundtrack in the 1990s. “If I could remember the riff from all those years ago, I figured it must be catchy,” Mishra has said. He built an answer song around a sample of that nagging horn fanfare, drawing inspiration lyrically as well as musically: “The original song was so anti-woman that I wanted to twist it another way.”
The result, “Your Woman,” overflows with lofty ideas. The lyrics are coy about the narrator’s gender and sexuality; they also incorporate Mishra’s disillusionment with certain leftists he viewed as hypocrites. Off-kilter beats crunch like early hip-hop, and guitars stab toward Chic’s disco-funk, while bouncy keyboards bring to mind both vintage synth-pop like Bronski Beat or Yaz and the acid-house hangover of White Town’s fellow postmodernists Saint Etienne. (Mishra has mused that the song’s juxtapositions appealed to his “intertextualist” mindset.) But “Your Woman” also has a scruffy, underdog charm. Mishra made the record at home, taking up only five tracks on his trusty eight-track mixer, with gear he estimated as worth “about a grand.” His whispery vocals, often more like Paddington in a library after marmalade, are fey and even sultry, but they’re cloaked in distortion that could be from Jay Gatsby’s Victrola or a telephone booth down the block.
“With ‘Your Woman,’ I tried to mix ideology and autobiography and put elements of pop songs from the ’30s alongside those of the ’80s to come up with something meaningful for the ’90s,” Mishra has said. “But people listening to the radio don’t have to get all that, of course. They can just dance around to it. And if you couldn’t get people to do that, they wouldn’t listen to anything you had to say anyway.”
In 1996, Parasol released “Your Woman” on the four-song CD single >Abort, Retry, Fail?_, named after the error message Mishra’s computer kept giving him the weekend he tried to mix the tracks; the dreaded MS-DOS prompt “sort of characterizes what’s been going on for me the last few years,” he wrote in the sleeve notes. He was 30. Then one night, in Mishra’s telling, he was DJing in Derby when he noticed that people on the dancefloor “really, really liked” the new single, so he sent copies to five big labels and five radio DJs. On October 28, 1996, BBC Radio 1’s Mark Radcliffe started playing “Your Woman.” And kept on playing it. Suddenly Mishra was at the center of a label bidding war, and a few days before Christmas 1996 he signed with Chrysalis/EMI affiliate Brilliant!. More than a hard drive had been reset.
When “Your Woman” hit No. 1 in January 1997, becoming only the fourth “debut” single to do so since the UK singles chart began in 1952, delirium ensued. Major labels traditionally held a vise grip on the means of music’s production, distribution, and marketing. Now here was this chart-topper out of nowhere who refused to go on Top of the Pops or appear in his own music video. To the fevered British press, “Your Woman” proved that advances in technology had democratized recording to the point that aspiring artists no longer had to play in dingy clubs or suck up to label A&Rs. Mishra was “merely the first of the No. 1 bedroom superstars.”
The frenzy cooled a bit as “Your Woman” spread internationally, but the song’s popularity continued. U.S. modern rock radio was in its “faux-ternative” phase, a post-grunge interregnum where pop acts could pass for alternative before the forthcoming chokehold of nu-metal. Another unknown outfit, Primitive Radio Gods, had notched a sample-based hit the previous year. Beck’s genre-mashing Odelay was the incumbent critics’ darling. Prince’s decade-old “If I Was Your Girlfriend” still faintly rippled in the zeitgeist. With the original Star Wars films enjoying a theatrical re-release in 1997, some fans surely gravitated to the unmistakable similarities between the “My Woman” horn riff and John Williams’ Darth Vader theme. In a puritanical country where the Supreme Court was still six years away from striking down anti-sodomy laws, tabloids questioned the obscure White Town singer’s sexuality.
But maybe, as Entertainment Weekly put it in a track review lauding “Your Woman” as worthy of comparison to the Spice Girls (high praise, then and now!), the song was simply “powerful pop.” As a teenage Arizona transplant, I distinctly remember a letter from a friend back in my Northern California hometown hipping me to “that ‘I could never be a woman’ song.”
Women in Technology, which came out in February—only about two months after Mishra signed with Chrysalis—was no match for the “Your Woman” phenomenon. But it’s an eccentric, endearing album in its own right. An overjoyed and perhaps over-confident Mishra writes in the liner notes, “I hope you like this album. But hey—if you don’t, just go and record your own. It’s really not that difficult.” Such demystification was in the post-punk tradition of the earliest UK indie bands such as the Desperate Bicycles. But White Town’s wispily lovelorn synth-pop more closely resembled post-punk’s ’80s pivot toward New Pop glamour—in particular, fellow lapsed Marxist Green Gartside and his group Scritti Politti’s transition from skittery mess to electro-soul sweetness. Women in Technology was a gateway to the wider world of what Mishra has called “unpopular pop.” It’s still an odd, enjoyable listen, a horny, housebound cousin to the sublime Scritti of Cupid & Psyche 85, and a featherlight harbinger of cultural trends to come.
Nothing else on Women in Technology is like “Your Woman.” Still, some of Mishra’s best work comes when he experiments with similar abandon. “Thursday at the Blue Note” remains sui generis, with its melange of dreamy Indian instrumentation, distorted-to-hell drum programming, and night-out-in-the-life storytelling that prefigured the Streets (“Look, I know I’m no oil painting/But my face doesn’t need re-arranging,” Mishra sings). Another highlight, él Records-worthy bossa nova ballad “A Week Next June,” is when Mishra keeps it most basic, capturing his pleading vocal and nylon-string guitar strums in a single mic (with a lovely solo overdubbed by guitarist Robert Fleay, who guests on a handful of the tracks). Today you could compare it to early Belle and Sebastian, but back then not many people had heard Belle and Sebastian yet.
Most of the album, though, is in that peculiar synth-R&B, post-New Pop no man’s land (and no “Your Woman”’s land). “Undressed” opens the record with slow-jam drum machine en route to sweet nothings like “I’ve had too many one-night stands,” murmured between Theremin-like synth wobbles. Second single “Wanted,” buzzing electro-pop featuring guest vocalist Ann Pearson, was admittedly chosen to “defy hit parade expectations” and did its job only too well. “The Function of the Orgasm” delivers decent one-liners (“Is it me or him that you’re screwing?”), and “The Death of My Desire” is a chaste return to the punkish guitar of earlier White Town, but neither song is as memorable as their titles.
Still, a few glimmers invite the prospect of what might have been—if “Your Woman” had been a smaller hit, if the second single had been better selected, or if the entire album were simply more coherent. With shoegaze textures and another boom-bap beat, “The Shape of Love” is an alluring look at long-distance romance in the computer age (“I know the world is turning/I know it’s yesterday for you,” Mishra sings). The track that resonates most in a more socially conscious era is a reworking of that first 1990 single, “White Town.” This time, rudimentary guitar arpeggios and frosty drum machine provide the sole backing for Mishra’s stark lyrics, leading into a coda of gorgeous synth. The love interest’s name has been anonymized to “baby,” but the hurt lingers.
The world was as confused about Women in Technology as I remain, all these years later. By the numbers, it was a shocking triumph. Outside Britain, “Your Woman” also went to No. 1 in Iceland and Spain, peaking at No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. A month after release, the album had sold more than 120,000 copies in the United States alone. But reviewers, many presumably unaware of UK indie arcana, mainly seemed divided on whether the album showed White Town was or wasn’t a “one-hit wonder.” A sign of the times was a cringey Village Voice double review of Women in Technology with tender Australian pop duo Savage Garden’s self-titled debut album: “High school girls will buy Savage Garden,” Chuck Eddy opined, “but college chicks’ll opt for White Town.”
As time passed, “Your Woman” secured a minor place in the pop pantheon. The Magnetic Fields, cited in the sleeve to Women in Technology, returned the favor a couple of years later, with Stephin Merritt noting in the booklet to his 1999 triple album 69 Love Songs that “Your Woman” was one of his “favorite Top 40 songs of the last few years.” In 2010, Pitchfork ranked “Your Woman” as one of the Top 200 Songs of the 1990s, situating it alongside sample-based indie chestnuts of the era such as the Land of the Loops’ “Multi-Family Garage Sale.” But the album’s legacy feels unresolved; like “Your Woman,” White Town was at once overexposed and under-examined.
Predictions that White Town’s unlikely ascent heralded an overturning of the music industry order were right and wrong. No doubt quite a number of bedroom solo tinkerers took inspiration in Mishra’s wake. The internet clearly made it easier for musicians and listeners to connect—I recall Mishra responding personally to my request on a fan email list about how to play “A Week Next June” on guitar. In the mid-2000s, wide-eyed indie bands like Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and the Boy Least Likely To could spring up from relative obscurity, along with one-person twee pop factories like Jens Lekman or the Honeydrips, abetted by blogs and webzines.
“Pop is accessible,” Mishra said. “I’m a nerd, not Jim Morrison.” He was adamant that what mattered wasn’t the equipment used, whether good or bad, but the song itself: “You should judge things only with your own ears.” Another do-it-yourself auteur, Sufjan Stevens, would later espouse a similar view. But the Village Voice’s critique was right about one thing: White Town did present a false dichotomy in the liner notes, where Mishra writes, “I still believe that music is about emotion rather than fashion.” Of course, it’s about both. A new wave of bedroom pop led by Billie Eilish, Clairo, and Beabadoobee has generated its own seemingly overnight breakouts, fueled by an au-courant stylishness well-suited for TikTok virality. And why not? There was always a disconnect in presenting White Town’s major-label debut as authentic and unmediated. If anything, it’s the enduring commercial appeal of “Your Woman” that’s granted Mishra artistic freedom—most recently on this year’s Fairchild Semiconductor, billed as the soundtrack to an imaginary TV series. White Town’s own Bandcamp page self-deprecatingly quotes a biography calling Mishra “one of the more intriguing, although frustratingly inconsistent, musicians in ’90s indie pop.”
Maybe Women in Technology holds up best as a testimony to Duchamp’s notion that the ordinary can be elevated into art. Because of Mishra, the “White Christmas” guy collaborated across centuries with grime trailblazer Wiley, and Prohibition-era trumpet rings out on last year’s pandemic album by UK pop star Dua Lipa, herself a daughter of immigrants. Who knows what’s next? “I feel like I’m the luckiest person alive,” Mishra said in March 2020. He must’ve suspected as much when writing Women in Technology’s future-nostalgic finale, “Once I Flew,” which samples astronauts. “Though it’s easy to forget,” Mishra sings of a past brush with the infinite, “I don’t seem to have managed yet/And I don’t think I ever will.” Imperfect sound can last forever too.

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