In the 1980s, the women of Look Blue Go Purple helped define the Flying Nun label’s Dunedin sound, putting their own enchanted spin on gentle guitar pop. This new comp surveys their catalog.

Still Bewitched

In the late 1970s, punk swept through the UK and washed away any remaining mop-top mods. In Dunedin, New Zealand—among the furthest possible cities from London—kiwi punks applied this self-sufficient ethos and wrote pop songs. Their lo-fi jangle pulled from the Byrds’ ’60s pop melodies, the psychedelia of Pink Floyd circa Syd Barrett, and the Velvet Underground’s corporeal dronings. It would be dubbed the historically influential Dunedin sound after a 1982 compilation from its most iconic label, Flying Nun Records. Two of the bands on that comp, the Chills and the Verlaines, along with their Flying Nun labelmates the Bats and the Clean, would come to define New Zealand’s mid-1980s indie rock scene. Amid all these humbly named acts, Look Blue Go Purple—Francisca Griffin (formerly Kathy Bull), Norma O’Malley, Kath Webster, Denise Roughan, and Lesley Paris—were bound to stand out.
Like their optimistic, kaleidoscopic moniker suggests, Look Blue Go Purple poured vivacity into a scene that was already chock full of cheery, sparkling songs. But unlike a majority of their peers, the quintet never released an LP, which prevented them from finding a foreign audience despite their mainstream success on the New Zealand pop charts. Still Bewitched, a recent compilation of Look Blue Go Purple’s three EPs and unreleased live rarities, promises to expose a new crowd to the band’s enchanting style.
After forming in 1983, Look Blue Go Purple debuted with a tight, distinct sound on 1985’s Bewitched EP. The five women fused the gentle guitar pop that was then well-established by their Dunedin/Flying Nun labelmates with the post-punk experimentation of the Slits and the Raincoats, and to a lesser extent, Swell Maps and Television. Three of Bewitched’s four tracks each focus on a different sound: the whistling synths of “Safety in Crosswords,” the new-age flute and staggered drumbeat of “Vain Hopes,” and the cloudy chill of “As Does the Sun.” But it’s “Circumspect Penelope” that gathers these elements together and affirms Bewitched’s pleasant distance. “She’s been waiting 20 years/And you just walk in/Telling stories of the sea/She should hate you, your Penelope,” the band bitterly scold The Odyssey’s titular character, whose wife has been waiting years for Odysseus’ return. Thanks to the crystalline sound of O’Malley’s organ, Webster and Roughan’s saccharine guitars, and the tight interplay between Griffin’s bass and Paris’ quick crashing drumbeat, Look Blue Go Purple’s condemnation is by far the poppiest, catchiest track on the EP. But their layered vocal harmonies seem to be the murmurs of sirens from a world beyond.
When Look Blue Go Purple returned the next year for LBGPEP2, the band shed their winter coats for a bright new life. A whimsical song like “Cactus Cat” would have been a shock on the staunchly post-punk Bewitched, but on the LBGPEP2 it feels right at home. “Cactus Cat”’s sun-streaked bubblegum style flows into “Grace,” a hypnotic, lilting tune about a girl whose beauty has faded from her namesake to something far more foul. “100 Times” and “Winged Rumor” recall Bewitched’s subdued mysticism thanks to the former’s hushed, airy chorus and the latter’s reverential flute. But the gossamer feel of both songs give way to a ramshackle groove, something Bewitched’s songs never achieved. The spoken-word incantation “Hiawatha” is the band’s most new wave song, though its punctuations of shrill synths and howls surpass in imagination anything their peers were making.
“Cactus Cat” in particular propelled LBGPEP2 to No. 26 in New Zealand’s pop charts in January 1987. The band used the track’s popularity to address a topic that had haunted their press. At the end of the song’s succulent-stocked music video, an anonymous interviewer queries whether there are any difficulties being a female band. “Only the presumption that it means something, that it’s a bunch of females together,” says Webster. “But we just happen to be five musicians who get on well and play music together but it can be a hassle.” Look Blue Go Purple never labeled themselves as feminist, nor was the content of their music remotely political. The only people who seemed to find the band’s gender worth noting was the media; players in the New Zealand indie scene considered it a non-issue. Women “were very active participants in a very creative and politically active era, charged with post-sexual revolution and determination to create anything but typical male music,” says the Chills’ Martin Phillipps. That said, “[It’s] rock’n’roll, gender has got nothing to do with it,” Griffin concludes in the video.
Shortly after the release of 1987’s* This Is This*, Look Blue Go Purple broke up to pursue other personal and professional ventures (notably, Paris became the manager of Flying Nun). The quintet’s final release is their most indie pop record, and echoed the concurrent work of England’s C86 bands like the Shop Assistants and the Pastels. The bouncy “I Don't Want You Anyway” makes rejection seem fun while the docile “Year of the Tiger” could be a Sarah Records cut. Perhaps because of its spare compositions, for the first time the band’s eloquent lyrics are placed in the limelight. “I’m a fool to believe in love and its channels/I’m a fool to believe in it at all,” Griffin sings on “In Your Favour.” But by the end of This Is This, Look Blue Go Purple fall into the same pattern as *LBGPEP2 *and return to the sleepy melancholy of their first EP.
Still Bewitched ends with seven unreleased live takes handpicked by the band from their final years—all originals except for an impassioned cover of folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “Codeine.” The most intriguing of these are the funky sleuthing “Spike” and “A Request,” which show the Raincoats’ abstract influence more discernibly than any of their official releases. The inclusion of these tracks on the compilation is a refreshing peek at what Look Blue Go Purple sounded like in their prime: a little mythical, a little goofy, overflowing with wistful indie pop hooks and eloquence. Without Look Blue Go Purple, any definition of the Dunedin sound is insufficient.


The notoriously kooky singer/songwriter's fifth full-length picks up the thread of 2005's schizophrenic Cripple Crow, alternating between kitschy genre exercises and the sweetly emotive folk songs that have always been his greatest strength.

Devendra Banhart: Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon

Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon

In the age of computerized music-listening, calling an album "too long"-- a dubious complaint even two decades ago, when CDs first made track-skipping simpler-- seems absurdly outdated. After all, it's easy enough to make an iTunes playlist of a record's best songs, right? So I don't get it when people call Devendra Banhart's albums too long. Not only is that problem easy to rectify, but his rambling style needs room to breathe, and space to wander toward its inspirations. Banhart's valleys have rarely diminished his peaks, and often provided ramps to them.
But after spending time with the 16-track, 66-minute Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, I'm starting to understand. It's not so much that the quality varies, but that a bloated, lethargic feel permeates the record. Banhart has too much skill and creativity not to hit on something good when given 16 chances to do so. But in the context of the album, even the best pieces sag, bathed in a blurry haze that bleeds over from other songs. And it's hard to shake the feeling that the highlights would've been brighter given the extra time and attention they were deprived of by the lows.
The easiest fix would have been for Banhart to restrict his tiresome love of genres. This cloying infatuation pops up on all of his albums, but he usually keeps it to a minimum, and often tweaks the clichés of the styles he apes. But more than one-third of Smokey consists of indistinct genre exercises. There's a flat Samba piece ("Samba Vexillographica"), a middling Reggae jaunt ("The Other Woman"), a weak Motown rip ("Lover"), and a sub-Santana Spanish rocker ("Carmencita"). Worst of all is "Shabop Shalom", a Jewish love song done in doo-wop style and filled with painful couplets ("When I'm ever in a foul mood/ I've gotta see you in your Talmud"). Banhart labors to distinguish these tunes with his stellar voice, but they remain stubbornly forgettable. Only "Seahorse", a classic-rock epic that's sort of Banhart's "Layla", rises far above mimicry, but even it doesn't make any moves that you can't see coming.
Smokey does have a handful of songs that capture Banhart's idiosyncratic mix of odd folk and warbling emotion. For the most part, this happens when he keeps things simple: Opener "Cristobal" is a modest tune with a worm-like melody, while "Tonada Yanomaminista" is energetic and sharp, practically caffeinated compared to the sluggishness around it. Even better is "Bad Girl", whose gentleness is hypnotic rather than sleepy, much the way the slower shuffles on Stephen Malkmus' solo albums find tension in patient strolls. Over small slide guitar and pitter-pat percussion, Banhart's tale of romantic ambivalence is achingly pretty.
Similar simplicity bolsters the album's end. The Gordon Lightfoot-esque soft rocker "Freely" benefits from a nice Banhart vocal turn, while the wistful piano and voice of "I Remember" feels like an update of "Autumn's Child" from 2004's Rejoicing in the Hands. Best is the final cut, "My Dearest Friend." As Banhart bemoans how he will "die from loneliness," the track does the opposite, gaining strength from its unadorned setting and lack of heavy effects, indulgent flourishes, or winking genre baggage. It's a strong way to close Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, but an even stronger reminder of how much better Banhart can be.


The underrated titan of West Coast gangsta rap stays true to his classic formula on an LP featuring guest verses from spiritual descendants Conway the Machine and Dave East.

Lessons

Two weeks after the 1992 L.A. uprising concluded with 63 dead and 12,000 arrested, Compton’s Most Wanted returned to the studio to cut their third full-length fronted by then-20-year-old Aaron “MC Eiht” Tyler. That the resultant album, the visceral Music to Driveby, didn’t incite the same moral panic as Death Certificate, O.G. Original Gangster, or The Chronic wasn’t a reflection of its quality relative to those records so much as its zoomed-in worldview. Eiht’s bloody tales of blacktop warfare weren’t, at first glance, political in the mode of his neighbors wit’ attitudes. Instead, they charted the insular dynamics of his hometown with nihilistic affect. A mostly unrepentant antagonist prone to flashes of lucid reflection, Eiht approached the carceral state, militarized police, and Southern California redlining with sorrow rather than revolutionary rage. On Driveby’s vibrant follow-ups We Come Strapped and Death Threatz, he leaned into the chaos, flaunting territorial pettiness like a pro-wrestling heel. If he was, as he often claimed, a menace to society, it’s because society was, well, a menace.
It’s testament both to Eiht’s consistency and the sputtering American experiment that his music still resonates three decades on. By the mid-’90s, C.M.W.’s best work had been adapted by lesser descendants like Watts Gangstas and South Central Cartel, but Eiht’s ability to convey his environs in a succinct, visual manner kept him afloat in a crowded market. Lessons is a worthy late addition to the MC Eiht Cinematic Universe, its scenery familiar in a way that doesn’t invoke cheap nostalgia; there’s nothing to be reclaimed or recaptured because, for better or worse, Eiht’s music never strayed beyond these settings in the first place. When he deadpans, “Rollin’ up trees on a magazine/Another n***a died, sippin’ lean” on the smooth highlight “Things We Go Through,” you can hear the disquiet in his grizzled voice. Eiht always made shootouts and drug deals sound like nine-to-five drudgery, and on Lessons they’re relayed with a survivor’s wariness.
The solid guest roster on Lessons adds color to a template of hard snares and sturdy hooks. On the sinister “Get Money Man,” B-Real makes for a perfect vocal foil, his jittery opening verse paving way for Eiht’s dour world-building. Mitchy Slick’s excellent appearance on “Stand Up” is buried a bit within the album’s 20 tracks, but the effect is similar—his eager flow veers around the drum pattern before Eiht steers back to center. Dave East and Conway the Machine appear as emissaries from the new school, but in practice they’re the same breed of glowering quick wit as Eiht. If rappers had coaching trees, Eiht would be Rick Pitino.
The beats, supplied by Ferhan C, Hermanata, D-Ace, and C.M.W. comrade Tha Chill, are clean in a clinical, post-2001 way, sun and palm trees with whiffs of gunsmoke and diesel exhaust. They settle into their grooves and stay there. To say that these tracks would’ve sounded at home in 2005 or 2015 isn’t really a critique, but it does underscore how deliciously weird Eiht’s classic compositions were—while his peers mined the P-Funk catalog for any samples Dr. Dre might have neglected, Eiht enlisted SOLAR Records session player Willie Zimmerman to help build orchestral arrangements and long, rolling “Endoludes” comprised entirely of ad-libs. Lessons offers some adequate chipmunk soul on “That’s Perfect,” a bright horn fanfare on “Ambition.” It’s all professionally competent, if not particularly distinctive.
Eiht’s timeless narratives on “Hood Took Me Under” and “All for the Money” were kinetic and claustrophobic, sweeping cause-and-effect arcs which encompassed decades in the course of individual verses; when he wasn’t scaling fences and fleeing S.W.A.T. teams, he was training his own infrared beams on whichever saps were unlucky enough to be wearing the wrong color. Lessons is comparably static and, it must be said, recounted largely in the past tense. (“I know the theme of this song is familiar,” Young Noble admits on “Magic.” Well, yes.) It’s an unlikely trajectory for the Compton Cyco, but Eiht plays the elder statesman admirably. “Whut U Really On” and the title track do nice jobs dispensing hard-earned wisdom without resorting to soapbox proselytizing.
There’s a real chance Eiht wouldn’t have lived to see 30 if he’d kept making records like Death Threatz. But having listened to his last few projects, I still don’t know much about what middle age looks like for MC Eiht, and frankly I’d like to—he’s a clever writer and a perceptive, charismatic narrator who’s lived a remarkable life. His famous cameos on “m.A.A.d city” and “One Life to Live” were such show-stoppers because they served as reminders of what singular presence he has. If he could manage to land a few weeks with a Rick Rubin or a Madlib, I’d love to see what happens when Eiht’s genius gets loose and deconstructed.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


After the vulnerable masterstroke Alopecia, WHY? unleash a record that's darker in content but often gorgeous in sound.

Eskimo Snow

During an interview with Pitchfork earlier this year, WHY?'s Yoni Wolf called Eskimo Snow, "really the least hip-hop out of anything I've ever been involved with." This might just be a less verbally economical way of saying, "we did this with the guy who produced the last Clientele record." Wolf's got a dry sense of humor like that. It's telling that he put it in those terms-- though 2008's staggering Alopecia won plenty of well-deserved plaudits, the most often-heard criticism I heard was a bizarrely general one, essentially that listeners were expecting a hip-hop record and got subjected to 50 minutes of indie rock. The Anticon name must still be heavy in the streets, but the truth is, as long as Wolf continues to be as candid and vivid as he's been in the past, he'll have more in common with the expressionists of outre rap than the straight-laced indie vanguard.
To a large degree, Eskimo Snow comes off like an acknowledgment of that gap rather than a collection of songs culled from the same sessions that birthed Alopecia. For better or worse, Eskimo Snow eschews the musical and emotional contours of Alopecia for a resigned saunter to the gallows. The shift is made apparent from the album's killer first line: "I wear the customary clothes of my time/ Like Jesus did with no reason not to die." But as "These Hands" progresses, it never builds into a larger statement, just an insular word collage.
But thereafter, the latest from WHY? is almost completely devoid of the black humor that typically undercuts Wolf's most uncomfortable confessions, save for centerpiece "Into the Shadows of My Embrace", which serves as the album's reservoir of nebbish quotables. The drum roll that follows "it'd take a busload of high school soccer girls to wash those hospitals off me" could just as easily be replaced by a rimshot. By the song's midsection, Wolf can barely contain himself, hyperventilating, "I wish I could feel close to somebody, but I don't feel nothing/ Now they say that I need to quit doing all this random f-f-ff...," biting his lip at that last word, embarrassed as much by his situation as the ease of the rhyme itself.
That's pretty much the last bit of levity before the second half's unyielding bleakness. Balancing it out-- and Wolf's curdled, nasal honk-- is one of the unexpectedly pretty albums you'll come across. Much of Eskimo Snow continues in the manner of "A Sky for Shoeing Horses Under" (which gets reprised on the stormy piano ballad "One Rose"), favoring loops of mallet percussion, live drumming, and acoustic guitar. "January Twenty Something" introduces honest-to-god vocal harmonies that blossom and split apart with surprisingly delicacy. But as the album progresses, only the brief, coiled intensity of flanger-lashed "On Rose Walk, Insomniac" proves to be a counterpoint to all those literal bells and whistles. Considering WHY?'s shift towards indie, the mixed meters of "Berkeley By Hearseback" seem influenced by Chicago post-rock. Meanwhile, many have remarked on the similarity of "This Blackest Purse" to the more maudlin side of Ben Folds, while the title track is in the style of the exhausted, finger-plucked acoustic send-off that served as the closer on the last couple of Death Cab albums.
It is easy to focus on what's missing here-- nothing strikes with the surprising pop instincts of "Fatalist Palmistry" or the unsettling hilarity of Wolf's far-fetched and yet somehow affecting closet-cleaning about buttfucking Berliners, throwing up behind Whole Foods, or "jerking off in an art museum john til my dick hurts" (this line went over surprisingly well at a performance in L.A.'s Natural History Museum). But as the cryptic refrain of "no flash photography" gives a new dimension to the weary C&W crawl of "Even the Good Wood Gone", it's clear that there's a hangover to be nursed, a need to "feel nothing" after Alopecia had Wolf "doomed to feel too much," as Pitchfork's Jason Crock said. Eskimo Snow just feels like the right kind of album for an incredibly gifted and increasingly prolific band like WHY? to release as a quick palate cleanser, reaching an endpoint of a certain sound rather than trying to top its predecessor's unmatchable extremities.


In songs adapted from her book-length poem Orlam, the British singer-songwriter crafts a hallucinatory dreamworld out of folk instruments, primitive electronics, and warped field recordings.

I Inside the Old Year Dying

PJ Harvey has dedicated the second half of her career to finding new ways to sound unlike herself. Since her 2007 reboot, White Chalk, Harvey has retired the seething yowl that was once her signature, replacing it with whatever high trills, strained cries, and utterly unlikely expressions she can squeeze from her upper register. During the recording sessions for I Inside the Old Year Dying, her first album in seven years, she committed to stretching her voice even further beyond its apparent limits, employing longtime collaborators John Parish and Flood to overrule her any time she sang in what she now calls “my PJ Harvey voice.”

That sounds like a miserable way to work, with your co-creators acting as a kind of bark collar, correcting you for defaulting to the notes that come most naturally from your throat. But constraint has a way of breeding creativity, and there’s no denying the indelible, almost dissociative quality that Harvey’s left-field vocal choices have given her recent albums, most memorably her 2011 autoharp-freaked antiwar masterpiece Let England Shake. The effect is like witnessing an out-of-body experience—a worshipper speaking in tongues, perhaps, or a method actor losing themselves a little too deeply in character. Her displaced voices create a sense of transportation, discovery, and, fairly often, panic.

With I Inside the Old Year Dying, Harvey has again crafted something with no precedent in her discography: a hallucinatory dreamworld woven from non-traditional folk instruments, primitive electronics, and field recordings warped and distorted beyond recognition. She adapted these 12 songs from her 2022 book Orlam, an epic narrative poem that she spent the better part of a decade completing, in part because it required mastering the nearly forgotten dialect of Dorset, the English county where she was raised. Her verses depict an upbringing presumably something like her own but heightened by fantasy, juxtaposing the mundanities and seasonal rhythms of rural youth—school days, farm work, sexual awakenings—against a blend of horror and magical realism.

A spiritual realm tugs at the boundaries of Harvey’s imagining of Dorset, with a cast that includes a supernatural oracle in the form of a dead lamb’s eye and a Christ-like figure named Wyman-Elvis and modeled after The King himself. (In addition to lyrics about peanut butter and banana sandwiches and Memphis, “Love Me Tender” repeats as a refrain throughout the album, sung as both serenade and scripture.) Allusions to Shakespeare, John Keats, and Joan of Arc lend additional comp-lit intrigue to her lyrics, though it’s unclear whether they’re keys to unlocking the album’s puzzle or merely Easter eggs.

The mythology of I Inside the Old Year Dying is inscrutable even by Harvey’s standards, a nonlinear story told in a language you can’t fully understand. Dorset’s archaic dialect includes words like mampus, inneath, scrid, gawly, charken, and chammer, and even with the glossary that Harvey has included to help decode them, her sentences still read like a cryptogram that’s been solved incorrectly. “I laugh in the leaves and merge to meesh/Just a charm in the woak with the chalky children of evermore,” she sings on the boisterous “I Inside the Old I Dying.” The title track, on the other hand, is hushed and vaporous, trading the other song’s stomp for the raw, lips-to-mic intimacy of ’60s folk records.

In an early imagining, the album was conceived as a theater piece, and Harvey brings a stage director’s sense of sound design to Dying, unsettling her compositions with manipulated and distorted field recordings that create a sense of uncanny nature. Ultimately, the record’s greatest gambit isn’t any individual bold choice but the decision to stack so many on top of each other: the disquieting production, the odd instrumentation, the ancient tongue, the daffy vocals. Her falsetto on “Autumn Term” is so cracked and fragile it’s almost farcical, like something out of a Bob’s Burgers credits sequence. When she pinches her vocals on “Lwonesome Tonight” she sounds like a Punch and Judy puppet’s Neil Young impression.

On another record, those vocals might scan as whimsy. Here they become one more element left disquietingly out of place. Dying’s sinewy strangeness may come at the expense of the immediacy that was once Harvey’s strong suit, but this is how PJ Harvey albums work now: You feel them without being able to explain them. Where her early records pummeled the gut, now she toys with the mind.


Pilloried in the press for her every misfortune, Lily Allen scrutinizes her public persona on an album that dilutes staggering sincerity with uninspired beats.

No Shame

In the four years since Lily Allen released Sheezus, her ill-received attempt at pop-culture satire, the English star has been pilloried for her every misfortune. She’s been targeted for her drinking habits, endured a very public breakup, and—most despicably—gotten blamed for the stillbirth of what would have been her only son. Tracking every sensational headline associated with Allen would require a secondary hard drive, as her public profile has always been shaped by tabloid interpretations of her private life. On her new LP, No Shame, the singer scrutinizes that persona from the perspectives of internet trolls and family members, as well as through her own self-deprecating gaze.
Thematically, Allen’s approach is more nuanced and genuine here than in the celeb-baiting bangers of Sheezus, but thin production bleeds much of the record dry, often draining the color from its impassioned material. The album’s least interesting songs sound like prefab pop, assembled and packaged for any available vocalist. The P2J-produced “Higher,” with its spare finger snaps and bonfire guitar, recalls a Justin Bieber single; Allen’s two-dimensional vocal drifts just above the mix like a paper plane losing altitude. “Your Choice” and “Lost My Mind” suffer from a similar overfamiliarity, both featuring the same rhythmic snapping and whispered lyrics. The issue isn’t that these songs are transparently bad but that they bear no trace of Allen’s personality. On each one, her point of view is buried by the unimaginative whims of her producers.
Fortunately, she resurfaces on “Waste” and “Trigger Bang,” two doses of perfect pop that could have appeared on Allen’s exceptional 2006 debut Alright, Still. The latter has some of the most varied production on No Shame (thanks to Sheezus collaborator Fryars). Its downtempo snares, moody synths, and frolicking piano make for a lovely bit of bubblegum that doesn’t lose its flavor as you chew; Allen is bolstered, not bogged down by the beat. She sounds courageous, reflecting on her gregarious party days, and making the decision to step away from them for the sake of sanity. Opener “Come On Then” is another highlight, addressing how Allen is perceived by the press and her lumpen haters. “Yeah, I’m a bad mother, I’m a bad wife/You saw it on the socials, you read it online,” she coos over a frantic drum machine. Her tone is subtly barbed but vulnerable, a duality she conveys well.
That vulnerability is the record's greatest asset, and Allen communicates it most effectively in the mid-album triptych “Family Man,” “Apples,” and “Three”—ballads that find her wandering the rubble of her marriage and slumping under the weight of parenthood. “Family Man,” produced by Mark Ronson, showcases her most powerful vocal delivery, as she implores her partner to stay while reminding him of her irreparable flaws. Fashioned from even greater despair, “Apples” is the bedridden acceptance of failure that follows the pleading. In her shrinking falsetto, Allen lists off milestones of a defunct relationship as if she’s flipping through her wedding album with a handle of vodka in hand.
“Three” is No Shame’s most affecting song. Over sparse barroom piano, Allen laments being left by a loved one. Its opening measures could be sung from the point of view of a pining wife or a desperate husband, but the perspective shifts when she confesses, “This afternoon I made a papier-mâché fish, mum/I made it just for you/Please don’t go/Stay here with me/It’s not my fault, I’m only three.” It’s a staggering moment, one that communicates the yearning of a child, the guilt of a parent, and the societal pressure to be a perfect mother, all in a couple of concise lines.
If Sheezus was Allen at her most ironic, Allen’s new album marks a return to sincerity—and its assessments of motherhood, failing relationships, and infamy are penetrating. Sadly, these potent themes are often diluted by antiseptic production. The press may love to pile on Lily, but it isn’t her persona that undermines No Shame. Blame it on the beat.


Avery Springer and her bandmates grow into a bigger, bolder sound on their second album, pushing beyond obvious hooks and taking new risks with their songwriting.

Runaway Dog

The song titles on Retirement Party’s second album read like a checklist of responsibilities on the path to maturity, each a bit more dispiriting than the last: “Runaway Dog,” “Compensation,” “Old Age.” By the time we reach “I Wonder if They Remember You,” it can be hard to recall that the band’s primary lyricist, Avery Springer, is barely out of college. But even on their debut LP, 2018’s Somewhat Literate, adult obligations loomed in the background, anxieties spurred by the expectations that set in when college finals give way to job applications. The standout song on that record, the blown-out “Passion Fruit Tea,” offered jamming with friends as a respite to the drudgery of work. But two years later, having graduated with a degree in music business, Springer has an understandably more jaded outlook. Her newfound angst is palpable on Runaway Dog, channeled via slick, outsized refrains.
Runaway Dog pursues a more atmospheric and anthemic sound than Retirement Party’s debut, one that doesn’t lean on an onslaught of immediate hooks. This might be a result of the record’s more collaborative process, with drummer James Ringness and bassist/guitarist Eddy Rodriguez providing input from the beginning, rather than simply coming in to record Springer’s fully conceived songs.
The resulting melodies are more patient, their progressions more meandering and less obvious. On “Fire Blanket,” which opens with distorted power chords punctuated by blasts from the drums, it takes almost 30 seconds for Springer to start singing; for a band whose biggest singles previously featured her voice within the first beat or two, it’s a sign of restraint. A gleaming new guitar melody introduced in the second verse propels the song to the final refrain with a newfound polish. The same is true of the title track, which opens with a galloping rhythm guitar; drums don’t enter the picture until nearly a minute in. That deferral—building up the song in layers, stacking two verses before anything resembling a chorus—creates a tension that was missing from their previous releases. Trusting that the audience will stay beyond the hook is a bold choice; executing it so confidently from the first track shows a band eager to transcend pop-punk expectations.
They take risks with songwriting structure as well, with opening lines often beginning somewhat in medias res; on “Compensation,” Springer drops us into an unfiltered lamentation: “Oh when the quality’s poor, how can you sell a feeling/Without unethical means of promotion?” It’s a rapid-fire mouthful, syllables stretched to fit the rhythm guitar, a rambling tactic that seems designed to blunt the force of her criticisms. But lest the song sound like pop punk by way of Slint, the band lands on a shout-along chorus that’s just abstracted enough to speak to generalized anxieties: “I’ll always know to look both ways before I cross the road/If I get hit all that means is compensation.” In context, it’s a bleak evaluation of the current state of the industry, and a line that establishes what Retirement Party do best: cheeky mixed metaphors, often pulling from childhood lessons, that point out the ironies of adulthood.
Verbosity is a standard trope of emo songwriting, one Retirement Party deploy frequently to lend a sense of breathless anxiety to ostensibly cheery instrumentation. But where Springer’s rushed delivery on Somewhat Literate was charmingly dizzying, impressive in its tight enunciation over whip-fast guitars, that approach falters when the band takes its time. With each word painstakingly drawn out, the sheer syllabic effort on slower tracks like “Old Age” and “Afterthought” sounds taxing, as if she’s fatigued by so many vowel sounds. On a record only 10 songs long, the odd vocal crack or awkward rhyme can threaten to derail the momentum so steadily built in the first half.
But the inclusion of slower songs—ballads, almost—also signals a conscious effort to avoid premature categorization. They’re an emo band from the Midwest, but they don’t have the twinkling orchestral melodies of “Midwest emo.” They sing about anxiety over power chords, but their lyrics are couched in a layer of detached poeticism that sets them apart from the frustrated, lovelorn cries of their pop-punk peers. Springer nods to the patterns expected of her band on the quiet, twangy closer “Wild Boyz”: “Write a song that they can sing along with/Make friends that you don’t even have to talk with.” It might be a recognition of the band’s current ambitions, and a confession that she wants something more. As a distorted guitar breakdown sweeps over the track like an approaching storm, we’re left with a band fit for a stadium, no matter the size of the rooms that they’re currently playing.


Reissued on vinyl for the first time in four decades, the Yellow Magic Orchestra drummer and vocalist’s 1981 solo album isolates his infectious hooks, powerful rhythms, and modern pop sensibility.

Neuromantic

Released only a few months after Yellow Magic Orchestra’s legendary BGM, Yukihiro Takahashi’s 1981 solo album, Neuromantic, attempted to isolate what the group’s drummer and lead vocalist brought to the table. “I wanted to see what would happen if I pulled out only my own part,” Yukihiro Takahashi told music editor Yuji Tanaka in an interview. The album’s title gestures to Takahashi’s fascination with the UK’s New Romantic cultural moment of the early ’80s, while also doubling as a wry pun on his “neurotic” desire for self-expression. A fully formed expression of an artist on the bleeding edge of a revolutionary movement, Neuromantic—reissued on vinyl for the first time in four decades—functions as a process document illustrating the inner workings of one essential piece of Yellow Magic Orchestra’s futuristic machine.
To make Neuromantic, Takahashi took a pilgrimage to London with English DJ and YMO associate Peter Barakan in tow, seeking to collaborate with musicians from the UK. Tony Mansfield of synthpop group New Musik was tapped to provide backing vocals and keys (New Musik’s 1979 hit “Living by Numbers” was a favorite of Takahashi’s), and Phil Manzanera and Andy Mackay of Roxy Music—the group credited as a primary inspiration for the New Romantic movement—offered their talents too. “Drip Dry Eyes,” which Takahashi previously penned for YMO protégé Sandii, wouldn’t have sounded too out of place on Roxy’s Flesh and Blood from the year before, with Takahashi giving his best approximation of Bryan Ferry’s silky voice. But there’s something extra here that sets it apart: Takahashi drums with the rigidity of a seasoned session-player-turned-technophile, and YMO bandmates Haruomi Hosono and Ryuichi Sakamoto lend a hand, imbuing the track with their signature alien synthesizers.
While the other two YMO members appear occasionally on the album, this is Takahashi’s chance to shine, and what comes through clearest is his modern pop sensibility. Gone is Sakamoto’s experimental edge and Hosono’s folksy Americana, leaving only a powerful focus on rhythm and infectious hooks. On “Connection,” Takahashi’s drums roll in over a soaring guitar riff and percussive, stabbing synth as he croons a lament: “I haven’t got a clue/How to connect with you.” The instrumental “New (Red) Roses” sounds more like a typical Yellow Magic Orchestra number—de facto fourth band member Kenji Omura shares a writing credit—unfurling yet another helix of the group’s DNA. Its thumping beat shuffles along in a triumphant march, underpinned by warbling synth. The track is heavily reminiscent of Solid State Survivor’s “Rydeen,” which was, of course, also a Takahashi cut.
Neuromantic’s original working title of Ballet—a name it would have shared with BGM’s opening track, which Takahashi composed—speaks to a prescient understanding of the need to iterate on YMO’s innovations while they were fresh. Takahashi was fully aware that he was in the center of a revolution, and acted quickly to place his personal handprint on the moment before it crystallized. “BGM on the radio,” Takahashi sings on “Extra-Ordinary,” nodding to the popularity of Neuromantic’s sister album; it’s partially a victory lap, but also a signal that he wasn’t finished pushing the envelope.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The grunge survivors leap back into the moshpit of time on a live album culled from their 2016 tour of Europe.

LiE

As anyone—or at least anyone over the age of 30—will tell you, the world is moving way too fast. Five weeks ago might as well be five years ago in today’s news cycle. Our social feeds are loaded with “want to feel old?” listicles of stuff that really isn’t that old. The avalanche of music now available at our fingertips—with our virtual listening piles growing exponentially by the second—can feel overwhelming. But then you remember that Mudhoney are still around, doing what Mudhoney have always done: laying down a fuzz-punk sludge that’s murky and quicksand-thick enough to stop time itself. And suddenly it’s as if order in the universe has been restored. Because in a world where everything is constantly changing, Mudhoney’s decision to endure and staunch refusal to evolve feel less like a case of comfort-zoned arrested development than a valorous act of defiance.
For a band that’s always trudged forward at its own unassuming pace—having survived peak grunge, the Judgment Night soundtrack, the ’90s alt-rock bust, cameos in Chris Farley flicks, the departure of original bassist/unofficial band mascot Matt Lukin, and the near-collapse of the music industry—2018 marks a rare moment of reflection. Mudhoney turn 30 this year, and they’re throwing themselves a party in the form of LiE, their first proper, widely available live album, featuring recordings culled from their 2016 European tour. Its purpose is seemingly two-fold: LiE functions as both career overview (albeit a highly selective one), and a testament to this veteran band’s undiminished snotty insolence.
Anyone who’s seen Mudhoney on recent tours knows the band can still bring it, and then some. After years of having his snarling voice compared to Iggy Pop, frontman Mark Arm has taken to acting more like him, too, by relinquishing his guitar for long stretches of the show, and becoming one of the few men of his vintage who can still credibly command a mosh pit. But LiE is ultimately less a vicarious recreation of the Mudhoney live experience than an oddly procedural vacation-slide-show summary of one. The individual performances are gut-punching in their potency—“Get Into Yours” in particular exudes a raw-nerved, I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-1989! quality, while the roiling “Poisoned Water‚” is a worthy ambassador for 1998’s way-underrated Tomorrow Hit Today. But the discrete presentation of the songs sucks them dry, with the abrupt fade-outs robbing the album of any in-the-room ambience and natural momentum.
Given that even the most produced Mudhoney album comes slathered with in-the-red scuzz, what you get here are essentially soundboard-quality live versions of songs that, with a couple of slightly jammed-out exceptions (like an extra-droned “The Final Course”), don’t differ all that much from their studio-recorded incarnations. The sequencing and song selection also leave something to be desired: the sullen Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge dirge “Broken Hands” (the closest this band has ever gotten to a power ballad) feels like a bummer note to go out on, especially when Mudhoney routinely end their nights with a blitzkrieged rip through Black Flag’s “Fix Me.” (As a consolation prize, we get their black ‘n’ blue cover of Roxy Music’s glam stomper “Editions of You” one track earlier, with Steve Turner’s queasily contorted leads ably subbing in for Brian Eno’s sci-fi synth squeals.)
Naturally, LiE peaks in those rare moments when successive tracks from a given show are presented seamlessly—like when the mid-tempo Vanishing Point strut “What to Do With the Neutral” tees up the survivalist rallying cry “I’m Now,” from 2008’s The Lucky Ones. Not only is the latter track the best song Mudhoney has put out this century, it speaks to the band’s current state of mind as soundly as “Touch Me, I’m Sick” did back in 1988. True to this band’s contrarian, anti-sentimental nature, that signature, grunge-spawning single is nowhere to be found here—and neither are any of the other classic tracks from their iconic debut EP Superfuzz Bigmuff or the associated early seven-inches, even though they still comprise a healthy portion of the band’s current set lists. Mudhoney may be celebrating a milestone birthday this year, but LiE would prefer to highlight the band’s agelessness, by showing how more recent rave-ups like “I Like It Small” can hold their own alongside stage-diving standards like “Suck You Dry.” And if nothing else, the album proves that, for Mudhoney, there’s still no time like the present to get ripped apart.


On their Epitaph debut, veteran metal band Converge sound more polished but no less ferocious.

You Fail Me

Despite their tendon-tearing, odd-time calisthenics, tech-metallurgists Converge are just a bunch of dudes with guitars. Oh, but they're not. They're good at deceiving us: What hits the tongue like straight blitzkrieg metal leaves a peculiar aftertaste.
It isn't always easy to find the mosh-pulse at the center of You Fail Me, Converge's seventh and definitive album, so unless you don't mind a stiff neck, you might want to internalize these songs before rushing out to the band's live show. Converge are some of the most fearsome technicians in metal, but unlike Dillinger Escape Plan, whose songs are like feats of 22nd-century civic engineering, they're unusually organic. You Fail Me is all hardscrabble local hardcore in its gritty viscera.
Ever maturing and honing, Converge have maintained a fairly consistent sound over their nearly 15-year career, so how does You Fail Me differ from cult classics such as Jane Doe and When Forever Comes Crashing? For one, the band have jumped ship from Equal Vision Records-- a veritable subterranean hardcore dynasty and Converge's home for the better part of the last half-decade-- to quasi-major Epitaph. You Fail Me is a more polished album, but this works to their advantage: Not only have Converge retained (even sharpened) their razorblade cut, they're now bolstered by a brawny low-end. Jacob Bannon's vocals are mixed lower than on previous efforts-- a popular metal technique-- and though his sautéed larynx is still a distinctive part of the mix, it takes on a comelier, more elemental quality.
The real magic of the record lies in its pacing. You Fail Me is Converge's first capital-A album. The one-two combo of "First Light" and "Last Light" is an auspicious opening. In the former, Kurt Ballou's echoey guitar peals are a perfect prelude to one of the band's most concussive, exacting and anthemic songs. Ever. "Last Light" is inestimably great, industrially precise but quaking with vitality. Ballou even squeezes in a reprise of his opening cadenza before the super-colossal breakdown, which somehow manages to reign in the song's momentum without sacrificing velocity.
You Fail Me never peters out. Converge are still programmed for hyper-speed, but Ballou throws in some artier stuff where he can, leveling "In Her Blood" and "Hanging Moon" with fairer-- if not quite huggable-- melodies. Can you spell 5/4 without prog? "Heartless" can; its jaunty odd-meter intro is almost danceable, in an early Dismemberment Plan sort of way. The album's totemic centerpieces-- the title track and "In Her Shadow", which combined account for a third of its runtime-- juxtapose the album's densest and most pastoral moments without seeming forced.
Fifteen years is a long fucking time. And yet Converge still look young, to say nothing of the way they play. There's always something to be said for sticktuitiveness, but the unbroken lineal ascent of Converge's ouvre is a lesson to those of us who thought we'd long outgrown our scene days: Don't judge too soon, for the dudes in cuffs may yet return to kick your perfidious ass.


A new reissue of this influential 1991 Japanese psych compilation—with gems from Ghost, Keiji Haino and others—is a revelatory listen.

Tokyo Flashback

Hideo Ikeezumi had worked in Japanese record stores for a decade when he realized “there was almost nothing coming out that I liked.” So in 1980, he started his own shop in Tokyo called Modern Music, stocking it with underground sounds—noise, free jazz, and, most importantly to him, psychedelic music—that mainstream stores wouldn’t touch.  A few years later, still unsatisfied with many of the records he heard, Ikeezumi decided to put one out himself. He chose a band called High Rise whose members often hung out at his store, and whom he liked because their music was “obscure and chaotic.”
High Rise’s 1984 debut album, a maelstrom of adrenaline-addicted rock damage, was titled Psychedelic Speed Freaks. Realizing that the record needed a catalog number, Ikeezumi added “PSF-1” to the spine. His label was henceforth known as PSF, and though Ikeezumi didn’t consider Psychedelic Speed Freaks an official name, that phrase certainly fit the music he went on to release. By the ’80s, psychedelic music had been around for almost 20 years,  but the artists Ikeezumi supported—most of whom came from the Japanese avant-garde—found myriad ways to give it new life. “At that time, in the ’80s, the people who liked noise and free jazz...understood without explanation the value of psychedelia,” Ikeezumi said in 2000. “When they heard psychedelia, they really got it.”
The freshness of the psych-rock that Ikeezumi championed was clearest on 1991’s Tokyo Flashback, the label’s 12th release and first multi-artist compilation—an underground touchstone that influenced countless musical speed freaks around the globe, but went out of print for years before being reissued this month. Subtitled “a long awaited sampler of 8 artists who drive the Tokyo psychedelic scene,” the eight-track CD included noisy jamming, haunting folk, punkish blasts, and even experimental a cappella. It was all tied together by brutally-primitive sonics—Ikeezumi loved raw, imperfect production—and a communal vibe, due largely to the fact that many participants frequented Modern Music, including several who actually worked there.
The most immediately exciting material on Tokyo Flashback is drenched with fiery guitars and mammoth rhythms, mixed into a cacophonous lava pouring from speakers. High Rise, Marble Sheep & the Run-Down Sun’s Children, and Fushitsusha (whose first two albums on PSF, released before Tokyo Flashback, are legendary for their bleeding psych bombast) all stomp on the gas pedal until it breaks. But there are other gears on Tokyo Flashback too: Ghost’s seance-like acoustics, White Heaven’s Blue Cheer-style string wrangling, Kousokuya’s slow-burning metal, and a closer by Fushitsusha’s Keiji Haino that consists solely of his harrowing vocal calisthenics.
Tokyo Flashback’s initial release helped spread PSF’s name internationally and led to wider exposure for several of its artists. Examples include Ghost’s later work on Drag City and the still-growing stature of Haino, whose constant stream of diverse experiments over the past four decades have made him a living underground legend. And while Ikeezumi passed away this past February at 67, he had authorized American label Black Editions to reissue the PSF catalog. Their newly released version of Tokyo Flashback—the first on vinyl—features stunning packaging by Black Editions founder Peter Kolovos and Rob Carmichael, and original liner notes by Hideki Shimoji, a name the label says is likely a pseudonym for Ikeezumi himself.
Over 25 years later, Tokyo Flashback still offers the thrill of glimpsing the Japanese underworld circa 1991, dipping back into a vibrant moment when artists were finding something new and challenging in a forgotten genre. Even better, it’s a chance to connect with the thrill that Ikeezumi enjoyed as a maniacal music fan on a quest to unearth weird gems. “Do we really need this kind of music in this peaceful era of ours? Not necessarily,” Shimoji/Ikeezumi writes. “However, I believe the sounds on this compilation can serve as a good barometer, allowing us to distinguish true music from the overwhelming amount of background dross.” That claim has aged well: Tokyo Flashback still sounds loud, bold, and wild enough to drown out almost anything else that calls itself “psychedelic.”


The 22-year-old singer fits into a burgeoning pop niche where angsty emo rap, frothy trap-pop, sunny Top 40 choruses, and punchy pop-punk riffs congeal.

on to better things

Iann Dior grew up writing poetry and worshiping Paramore, pirating pop-punk and popping on headphones to drown out the world with Panic! at the Disco. He stumbled into a studio after a breakup and posted a mournful mixtape on SoundCloud; soon after, he moved to Los Angeles, and within weeks, he’s said, the labels came calling. He connected with the hip-hop production collective Internet Money, known for their work with Juice WRLD and Trippie Redd, and pumped out a track a week, lacing songs about heartbreak and death with chugging chords and candy-coated hooks.
Some listeners thought Dior was a label prop, engineered to succeed in a porous streaming ecosystem; in 2019, his debut album arrived with the tongue-in-cheek title Industry Plant. As he grew more popular, scoring a feature on rapper 24kGoldn’s inescapable 2020 TikTok hit “Mood,” Dior fit easily into a burgeoning pop niche where angsty emo rap, frothy trap-pop, sunny Top 40 choruses, and punchy pop-punk riffs congeal alongside peers like Post Malone, blackbear, and Travis Barker’s recent crop of protégés. The result is perky, digestible music about dread and suffering. Dior’s new album, on to better things, grapples with the fallout of his newfound fame with mopey self-seriousness. At 22, he sounds weary. “I’m picking up where Juice WRLD left off,” he told NME. It’s an ambitious statement and a stark one; so much of the despair in his music feels descended from artists whose success stories became tragedies.
Sorrow is the default in these songs. Dior spends most of the album treading water as he rehashes familiar sentiments—fame is hollow, love is a trap, Instagram is annoying. The momentum comes from how nimbly he switches genres, swerving between sanded-down pop hooks, strutting basslines, and soupy synths. He tries on a tortured rockstar aesthetic, interpolating Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” for an unconvincing breakup ballad (“She not a surgeon, but she really took my heart out”). The stylistic plasticity is a testament to his stable of production talent (Internet Money’s Taz Taylor, Cashmere Cat, and Barker, who’s featured on three of 15 songs), but also the conventions of the artists Dior emulates. He’s said that he considers Machine Gun Kelly a mentor, and he tries his best to borrow Kelly’s slick hooks and disaffected rasp. The Barker-featuring “obvious” sounds like a Tickets to My Downfall B-side with lazier lyrics. (“Got me feeling wavy,” Dior sings, “Don’t fuck up the vibe tonight.”) “thought it was,” a two-minute pity party about the disappointments of fame, opens with a strumming guitar and Dior wailing about his life “in the hills”; it sounds like a diluted version of Kelly’s “I Think I’m Okay,” until Kelly himself shows up to growl about getting high.
The governing philosophy of the album seems to be if you can’t beat them, join them, or at least corral them into a feature. “V12” is the most effective song, a twinkling bauble of TikTok bait that drags Lil Uzi Vert along over thudding, blown-out drums. “Don’t forget who did this shit first,” Uzi lilts, echoing Dior’s chorus but also stating the obvious—this is a blatant copy of his squelchy production and crooning flow. Dior swipes at melancholy almost casually; it’s jarring, on a song like “let you,” to hear him toss out a line about not wanting to die young between spirited acoustic strums and trite lyrics about the breakup-to-makeup cycle. The narratives that drive Dior’s writing—the anxiety of ending a relationship, the depletion of depression—sink into an anesthetized blur. He’s less likely to sing about individual feelings than he is to slot the occasional diamond or pair of designer shades into the general morose template. These songs have the gravity and specificity of a crying emoji.
Dior stays vague and vacant throughout the album, invested in his feelings but short on interesting ideas. (Hollywood? Toxic! Heartbreak? Difficult!) “I’m a punk with a twisted brain,” he wails, and asks us to take him at his word. But there was a sense of fun in the pop-punk that Dior listened to as a kid and venerates now, a playfulness to all the skinny ties and side parts and melodrama. Dior seems so focused on convincing us he’s miserable that he doesn’t leave room for character or charm. “Fame doesn’t feel like I thought it would,” he sings. Fame seems to mean not feeling anything at all.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


This Brooklyn duo traffics in spare, low-lit R&B, its elements bleeding together or blurring just out of focus.

love and noir.

“open wide.,” the first video from Denitia and Sene’s second full-length album, oscillates from oversaturated white daylight to bleary nighttime shots of the group. Shot by Brian Marc (Sene’s an alias) that filmic quality carries over to the Brooklyn duo’s music, which renders spare, low-lit R&B with its elements bleeding together or blurring just out of focus. Three years have passed since their debut introduced their fuzzed-out trip-hop/soul, and it wasn’t easy to sort what they were up to at the time. love and noir. continues along the future R&B template they introduced on His and Hers., more often than not favoring a simmering, slow-moving pulse that falls closer to the pace of a resting heartbeat than almost anything else on modern R&B radio.
That deliberate pacing gives opener “favorite.” a gentle feel, weary but calmed, befitting the song’s theme, when the other half has returned from a long day’s work. Synth brass bubbles up and finger snaps accentuate the bass throb, as Denitia admits: “My favorite part of the day is when I see your face/I know it sounds cliché/But when I see your face/Everything’s okay.” But even though the lyrics acknowledge their own triteness, they don’t quite escape it.
The album explores love, doubt, and the pins and needles in between, territory that R&B has traversed for decades. But despite delving into the shadows of love, the duo too often stretch their imagery to the breaking point. “strung.” twines a halting beat and deep bass wobble to a prickly guitar lick that get layered to the point where it approaches shoegaze-thick fuzz. A deft bit pizzicato strings blips up midway through, but listen to the lines about being “torn at the seam” and said strings belabor the metaphor running through the track, which asks: “Whose strings have you strung?”
Denitia and Sene are adept when it comes to establishing a seductive mood for the length of a song, but over the course of this twelve-track album, it turns sluggish. “roulette.” warns “don’t try this at home” against a muffled kick that never rises above the haze and long stretches of the album feel lethargic. “open wide.” remains the highlight of the album, achieving a balance between ’80s anthemic balladry and ’00s R&B noisiness.
Only as the album draws to a close do the slow tempos  gain traction and push forward the songs. “alone.” finds Denitia toggling between defiant and forlorn against a slippery breakbeat and pleading guitar. “How far can we go?” the duo harmonize on closer “too far.”, Denitia’s voice reaching a poignant note;. But just as the mood settles in, the beat fades away before the three-minute mark and casual chatter takes over, like a door opening from a darkened studio back into daylight.


On this impressive debut, the 11-piece Boston band puts its own spin on Ethopian music, mixing a few originals in with a well-chosen selection of "Golden Era" compositions, folk tunes, and troubadour songs.

Debo Band

I've listened to a lot of Ethiopian music, and not just from the most widely-known "Golden Age" of Ethiopian pop so masterfully plumbed by Francis Falceto's Ethiopiques series. I'm talking folk music, modern pop made with synths and drum machines, and the music recorded to cassettes during the long dictatorship of the Derg from 1974 to 1987. Even so, I didn't really know what to expect when I first put on the debut from Debo Band, an 11-piece Boston band that's billed as putting its own unique spin on Ethiopian music, a spin that covers that same gamut rather than simply going to the Ethiopiques well.
The band acquits itself amazingly well, mixing in a few originals with a well-chosen selection of Golden Age songs, folk tunes, and Azmari troubadour songs. They don't limit themselves to a faithful homage to the music. Ethiopian music's reliance on pentatonic scales and modes makes it harmonically compatible with a wide array of other folk music, and even if you've spent hours listening to Mulatu Astatke and Alemayehu Eshete, you'll hear plenty of fresh ideas here, as the band spikes its arrangements with hints of Romany brass and even Celtic melody.
Those moments are flourishes, though, building off a style born of the distinctive sounds of one of the oldest countries in the world. The band is led by ethnomusicologist Danny Mekonnen, an Ethiopian born in Sudan and raised in the U.S., and its vocalist is French-raised Ethiopian Bruck Tesfaye, who sings powerfully in Amharic, the language whose rhythms this music was primarily built around. They've taken their instrumentation in an adventurous direction, giving their horn section a huge low end with sousaphonist Arik Grier and incorporating electric violinist Jonah Rapino and acoustic violinist Kaethe Hostetter (Hostetter has established her own music school in Addis Ababa). Guitarist Brendon Wood also adds a highly original voice to the music. His wild psychedelic leads on "Habesha", "Asha Gedawo", and "Ney Ney Weleba" sharpen those songs' already wickedly funky edge.
All that is what makes Debo Band far more than a genre exercise. These people have clearly spent time in this rhythmic and harmonic world and learned how to use the vocabulary not only to play the music, but to expand it. Tesfaye's pleading, intense vocal on the group's spare arrangement of the traditional "Medinanna Zelesegna" owes a debt to Tlahoun Gèssèssè and other powerful Ethiopian singers of the past, but the way it mingles with Hostetter's melancholy, drone-based violin part doesn't. Likewise the thrillingly dissonant climax of "Habesha" and the snaking accordion solo that follows it. It's not an easy feat to pay tribute and transcend that same tribute simultaneously, but over the course of their debut, this band manages the trick. As I said, I've listened to a lot of Ethiopian music. Debo Band may be from Boston, but this album leaves no question that they deserve to be included in that count.


Hip-hop legend frustratingly collects the hits, saves some of his best work for a tack-on bonus disc, and adds a few mostly insignificant new tracks.

Curtain Call: The Hits

Frankly, I don't want to hear these songs anymore. Nothing personal, but are there people who think "Without Me" has resonance? Eminem has even worn himself out. It shows in interviews, and as he watches hard-won respect slip through his fingers whenever he shits out another scatological invective like "Just Lose It". He's been swindling his audience for some time now, milking stardom for all its goopy dairy: D12, the 2Pac album, the outrageously overrated 8 Mile, a cartoon, radio station, DVDs, and books. His most recent LP, Encore, was a shell, full of flow-fuckery and canny hooks, signifying nothing. Eminem's rise, in all its Great White Hope glory, paralleled the rise of modern hip-hop as America's dominant musical form. But it also happened mostly in conjunction with Em dipping into the pop well. It's a sad state of affairs now for someone who could have been the premier musical artist of the last decade.
For all intents and purposes, Eminem's position as globo-mega-star and intriguing personality began to wane after the release of his second album, The Marshall Mathers LP, a record regarded by most as his masterpiece. But his 1999 debut The Slim Shady LP marked his creative zenith. Only two songs from that album are included here: the hits. "My Name Is" remains blissful and more complex than the novelty it was written off as-- it's funny and bizarre, and each punchline could have been a chorus. "Guilty Conscience", the role-playing jaunt between Eminem and mentor Dr. Dre, also holds up, especially when Em puts his producer on blast as "somebody who slapped Dee Barnes." Eminem's strengths-- verbal elasticity, the ability to write thunderous hooks, chameleon-ism, being white-- have hamstrung him psychologically, but in these early days, before fame, 65 million albums sold, and media persecution, his joy for rapping shone hard.
From the moment Dre and Interscope CEO Jimmy Iovine forced Eminem back into the booth to record "The Real Slim Shady", the cake icing on his colossally important second album, his fate was sealed. The songs Curtain Call culls from that album are fine, but had little to do with the outrage he caught from parents, GLAAD, and the conservative right. "The Real Slim Shady" made him profitable; songs like "Kim" and "Kill You" made him interesting. "Stan", however, still stands out as an exception. Overplayed as it may sound today, it remains a cultural milestone-- throngs of people, fans and not, flipped upon first hearing it, essentially forcing the label to release it as a single. All didn't end well, though: Dido has a career now.
Third album The Eminem Show is repped here by two songs: "Without Me", and the underrated "Cleanin' Out My Closet", which contributed as much to the confusing Freudian glints in Em's persona as anything else he's done. Which leaves the compilation's four new throw-ins: the Nate Dogg collaboration "Shake That", the ridiculously inane "FACK", and new single "When I'm Gone" are all desolate placeholders-- lesser versions of Eminem songs that already piss me off. "Gone" is the worst offender, yet another love letter from Em to daughter Hailie, it, like Encore's "Mockingbird", is heavy-handed and saccharine. The final new track is the live version of "Stan", performed with Elton John at the 2001 Grammys. Its inclusion is pointless.
Eminem has always had a self-loathing streak. He still comes across as uncomfortable with both stardom and his standing as a white rapper, and in a recent MTV interview seemed unhappy with this compilation's tracklist. This isn't his art-- it's his commerce. That's partly alleviated by Curtain Call's seven-track bonus CD, which contains five of the 10 best songs he's recorded. Included are two incredible album cuts from his debut, "Role Model" and "Just Don't Give a Fuck", one of his earliest, funniest thrillers. "Kill You", from his second LP, is psychotic mania but it's also hilarious and paramount to his dichotomy. Also featured are tracks he recorded with two giants: The first, "Renagade", comes from Jay-Z's The Blueprint, and finds each MC handling two liquid verses apiece. It's also a rare occasion in which Eminem's funeral dirge production doesn't sound overwrought. The other, Notorious B.I.G.'s posthumous "Dead Wrong", is about as vicious and beguiling a thing as I've ever heard, featuring both men pulling the razors out from under their tongues. The fact that Em stands toe-to-toe in the face of two potent Biggie verses was a sort of unofficial "okay, we can all fuck with this dude" moment for hardcore fans.
Eminem was a battle rapper first, then a backpacker, then a hook-slinger, now a tortured artiste-- the last bastion of the overexposed. He's still a star, but he no longer seems nearly as fascinating as we've been made to think. And Curtain Call, an inevitable and adequate document of his hitmaking, allows him the opportunity to remain in the spotlight while also receding from it. And with that, he's back into hiding for the forseeable future, building mystique: His next album is unscheduled, and, promo for this collection aside, his profile never seems to rise above churning out goth-rap backing tracks for lesser artists. Which, of course, is all probably intended to get me wishing the guy who once pleaded, "Some people only see that I'm white, ignoring skill," would come back around once in a while.


The Griselda rapper’s second album of 2021 is his statement of reinvention, a neat balance between glitz and grime.

La Maquina

When Conway the Machine launched his imprint, Drumwork Music Group, in 2020, he declared it “another branch on the Griselda label tree,” in the vein of cousin Benny the Butcher’s Black Soprano Family. Even with this clarification, though, Conway’s subsequent retirement tweets earlier this year—along with his absence from the collective’s film debut Conflicted and its accompanying soundtrack—became grist for the rumor mill. Amid speculation of his departure, Conway opens La Maquina with a larger chip on his shoulder than usual.
Opener “Bruiser Brody” promptly squashes reports of tension between Conway and Westside Gunn. “I started Drumwork, and people think it’s beef with my brother/Maybe every endeavor, we supposed to eat with each other,” Conway raps, pledging that his next chapter will be his best. Over JR Swiftz’s menacing production, he sounds invigorated: “Reinvented myself—this the Machine redesigned.” This statement of reinvention proves to be the thesis of La Maquina, and it’s a promise he keeps across the album’s 11 tracks.
Conway’s most impressive retooling is his experimentation with new flows. Since his electrifying appearance on Juicy J’s 2020 album The Hustle Continues, he’s become a notably less rigid rapper, slipping into different pockets like denim. On “KD,” he channels “Bodak Yellow”-era Cardi B while weaving in and out of producer Murda Beatz’s sprinkling of keys. “Scatter Brain” sees him rapping ahead of the beat and shrewdly withholding punchlines. The bars themselves are standard Conway fare—a mix of gallows humor, gun talk, sports references, and the odd pearl either reminiscing on drug dealing or mourning those snatched up by the system—but all these tweaks in his delivery help lighten his hardened bars.
As recently as his last proper Griselda album, 2020’s From King to a GOD, Conway has leaned toward the pomp of contemporary mainstream beats. La Maquina takes his fascination to the next level, bringing producers like Bangladesh and Don Cannon into the fold for the most luxurious tracks Conway has ever touched. Bangladesh’s “6:30 Tip Off” recreates the game-day atmosphere, complete with a swelling horn sample and skittish drums. Cannon’s “Clarity” and “Scatter Brain” both place rattling hi-hats and snares over ominous vocal samples. Conway relishes the challenge, claiming he could pull a muscle handling all his money and inviting haters to watch “this Rolls I parked.” None of these songs approach the gloss of Benny’s recent Burden of Proof, but there’s a neat balance between glitz and grime.
That isn’t to say the filth has taken a backseat. La Maquina’s more grandiose experiments are the exception. Conway frequently revisits the sludgy breakbeats he made his name on and emboldens new guests. He’s right at home over the gossamer vocals and light drums of the Alchemist-produced “200 Pies,” trading bars with a relaxed and reflective 2 Chainz. But it’s recent Drumwork signees Jae Skeese and 7xvethegenius who show out the hardest. 7xve’s mid-range cuts through the pounding rhythm of “Sister Abigail” (“They eyes on me like a token blackie in the mall/Guess that’s the price of bein’ in charge, so, shit, I paid it off.”) Meanwhile, Skeese has three verses across the album and earns the real estate. His retelling of how he connected with Conway and signed to Drumwork on “Grace” reveals the same sharp fundamentals and conviction that pushed the Machine to stardom over half a decade ago.
New blood aside, there’s no passing of the torch or resignation on La Maquina. Conway’s journey hasn’t been an easy one—his struggle with Bell’s palsy alone nearly ended his career before it began—but he’s stayed consistent and staked his claim as one of the fiercest rappers working. La Maquina is Conway’s best project since 2015’s Reject 2, with an eclectic mix of beats and bars that tie everything together like twine around a turkey. Maquina should be the feather in his cap that’s eluded him ever since Griselda first broke big.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

Griselda / Drumwork Music Group / Empire


On a handful of releases in the early 2000s, the trio of Jay Reatard, Alicja Trout, and Rich Crook mastered a stabby sort of punk/new wave hybrid. Lost Lost is a collection of rarities for Lost Sounds, a group that really didn't have many non-rarities.

Lost Sounds: Lost Lost: Demos, Sounds, Alternate Takes & Unused Songs 1999-2004

Let me tell you about the time I almost made Jay Reatard kick my ass. This was in 2000, back in Memphis. The Glands were playing a show at a small club ominously named the Last Place on Earth, and Reatard's band, the Final Solutions, had been added as a last-minute opener. It was not a good match: Where the Glands played studious southern indie rock, heavy on ambience and melody, the Final Solutions were loud, snotty, abrasive, and confrontational. They took the stage drunk and dressed in police uniforms. Reatard played drums. (Well, he sat behind the drumkit, but he did more arguing with his bandmates than time keeping.) At one point, he whipped out his dick and pissed all over his snare, while the rest of the band flailed around the small stage, knocking over the Glands' equipment and intentionally alienating the small audience.
At the time Memphis rarely got any good bands coming through, so I was pissed that a couple of locals would ruin an opportunity to see a non-local group. Besides it wasn't like the Glands were the Vines: Despite a breakthrough album, they remained obscure and cult-ish. But even after the Final Solutions' last song, the nightmare was far from over. Reatard planted himself in the audience-- right in front of me and my wife, in fact-- and heckled the Glands throughout their set. "Piss on your drums!" he shouted more than once. "It's been done before," was their deadpan response. Shitfaced, Reatard wobbled and stumbled into people, elbowing my wife drunkenly. Right about the time I was getting sick and tired of it, right about the time when I was ready to give him one big push from behind and watch him hit the concrete floor, right when I was ready to kick him while he was down, his friends finally led him away. The show was ruined, but true violence had been averted.
Such is the dark side of Reatard's talent, which contained both creative and destructive impulses. A member of several local bands-- the Solutions, the Reatards, Terror Visions, Lost Sounds-- he sent energy out in every direction, some of it good and some of it bad. At the time, I thought ruination was his endgame, but with some perspective, I see that he was trying to tear down the scene in order to build it back up. At his most publically belligerent, he made some of the city's most exciting music, and it's unfortunate that it took his tragic death for his earliest bands to reach a larger audience, to be considered as something more than local music.
Of course, the Final Solutions were stunt rock, programmed to piss people off, but Reatard's other outfits proved much more durable, compelling, even exciting more than a decade later. The Reatards rewrote Memphis pop history-- R&B, early rock, Elvis, 1960s frat rock, early-90s lo-fi-- into snotty, ahistorical punk whose self-loathing streak seemed to speak for a city convinced its best shit was in the past. Lost Sounds, on the other hand, sounded like nothing local: On a handful of releases in the early 2000s, the group-- Reatard, Alicja Trout, and Rich Crook, with a revolving door of guest musicians-- mastered a stabby sort of punk/new wave hybrid, full of sharp guitars, inhuman synths, and accusatory vocals. Last year Fat Possum collected their best material on Blac Static, an essential entry into Reatard's catalog: It's some of the bleakest, more relentlessly dark, most nihilistic music he ever made. Lost Lost, a new comp released by Memphis label Goner Records, makes a fine complement: It's a collection of rarities for a band that really didn't have many non-rarities. Even rarer, it's the kind of odds-and-sods collection you might actually want to listen to as much as the albums. Songs like "A Foreign Play", "No Count", and "Total Destruction" rival the best material on Blac Static, even if the noisy between-song interludes prove distracting.
Lost Lost gives the impression of a new band struggling to capture inspiration on tape-- to secure a sound, an identity, a mission. If they sounded almost cocksure on their albums, behind the scenes they had their hands everywhere, grabbing at various genres and suturing them together hastily and sometimes violently. They cover the Crystals' "Frankenstein Twist" as a rattily streamlined surf jam, led by Trout's sulfuric-acid vocals. Ratcheted to a kaleidoscopic keyboad riff, the too-short "No Count" is a fairly straight Nuggets rewrite but may be Reatard's finest moment here: "Well, I'm a retard, baby, and my head don't work right," he sings with a mix of dejection and defiance.
Perhaps the single most defining aspect of Lost Sounds wasn't Reatard's scabrous guitar, but Trout's vintage synths. In the late 1990s, she was fresh out of the sadly short-lived group the Clears, who performed whimsical pop songs in feather boas and full Bowie makeup. If that group sounded joyously deviant with its cheerleader choruses and melted-ice-cream keyboards, Lost Sounds deployed those same instruments toward something dark, nervous, feverbrained. That's nowhere more apparent than on the six-minute anthem "Total Destruction", which begins with a Clash stomp before morphing into what sounds like a giallo soundtrack, like they're eating Argento mid-murder. There's fake blood all over the place. Trout's keyboards allow the band to attack and feint effortlessly as the song unfolds to reveal new layers of apocalyptic dread.
People may come to Lost Sounds to hear Reatard, but I'm guessing they'll stick around for Trout, who currently plays in MouseRocket and the River City Tanlines. Reatard is more of a sideman than a frontman here. Trout is the star, thanks to performances on "Look at Me" and "No One Killer" that mix punk aggression and classic-rock melodicism. It's her delivery of the chorus-- "Ya ya ya ya ya! Total destruction!"-- that puts "Total Destruction" over and justifies its length. By contrast, she adds gravity and vulnerability to the early version of "No Genetic Engineer". Still, despite her strong presence, Lost Sounds never come across as a solo project. The trio was small enough and close enough that it pretty much had to be democratic: By nature of its lineup, every instrument played a prominent role in every song. The personal push-and-pull between the band members (Reatard and Trout were on again/off again dating during this period) created a musical friction that constantly redefined what the band could be from one song to the next, leaving them unsettled and musically adrift. For some bands that might suggest unfulfilled potential, but in this case it was Lost Sounds' potential, a constant cycle of creation and destruction and creation.


Over the course of his first two albums, New York rapper Roc Marciano established himself as one of the foremost purveyors of classicist New York slick-talk. His latest release, Marci Beaucoup, finds Marciano stepping out of the spotlight and focusing on his production chops.

Marci Beaucoup

Roc Marciano works in details rather than large, dramatic brush strokes. Like fellow New York MC Ka, Marciano's voice rarely rises above a conversational purr—you need to really lean in close to get the full effect. He doesn't build narratives as much as construct small, distinct images and then stack them on top of each other. Even his beats are designed to shade, rather than color, his songs. Over the course of his first two albums, he's established himself as one of the foremost purveyors of classicist New York slick-talk, digging into a very specific sound and exploring just how far down he can go. His latest release, Marci Beaucoup, finds Marciano stepping out of the spotlight ever so slightly and instead focusing more on his production chops than his already-proven lyrical skills.
Whereas 2012's Reloaded was a comparatively lighter sonic affair than its predecessor, the bleaker Marcberg, Marci Beaucoup hews closer to the grimier aesthetic of Marciano's debut, where the production felt more off-the-cuff and rougher around the edges. Like that album, the beats on Marci Beaucoup are handled entirely by Marciano, and they alternate between minimalist RZA-esque menace and monochromatic soul. As a producer, Marciano shares the same penchant for bite-sized vocal loops that were J Dilla's bread and butter, and he's able to create a palpable tension by drawing out the hypnotic qualities in them. "Love Means" is only allowed to unspool during its brief hook—otherwise, it's all creeping dread masquerading as a serenade. These sorts of little touches can be found everywhere: horns lazily snake into the corners of "Squeeze"; shouts from what sound like children on a playground litter "Dollar Bitch"; elsewhere, a single bleat from an ill-timed chop signals the end of each loop on the loping "War Scars".
These beats are insistent and physical, even when they're made out of lullabies twisted into unnatural shapes, as is the case with "Didn't Know", an example of Marciano's willingness to think outside of the box as a producer. Like every track on the album, a few friends pop by to help out, but only Freeway sounds totally out of his element here, his verse only made worse by the virulent homophobia contained within it.
Because there's not a single track where Marciano raps on his own, Marci Beaucoup feel like a compilation curated by Marciano more than a true solo effort. And as solid as these beats are, they best fit the kind of rappers who operate in a headspace similar to Marciano's, but that's not always who ends up on them. Those with tightly-coiled deliveries fare best—Boldy James scrapes the bottom of "Trying to Come Up" as if he hasn't eaten in a month, and Action Bronson adds some much welcome levity to "456".
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's Ka, the rapper who best compliments Marciano, who steals the tracks he shows up on with his blank-faced gravitas. Unfortunately, too many appearances from third-stringers like Knowledge the Pirate and Maffew Ragazino just made me wish Marciano was rapping instead, and a few more solo cuts would've helped alleviate the frequent soggy stretches. As a proper third album, Marci Beaucoup doesn't stack up to its precursors, but as an advertisement for Marciano's services as a beatsmith, it's much more successful.


The brooding, cryptic world of Spencer Krug is more straightforward on the latest Sunset Rubdown LP, the easiest to digest of the prolific writer's career.

Dragonslayer

Sunset Rubdown's 2007 album, Random Spirit Lover, served up richly orchestrated, baroque suites-- each song awash with melody, counterpoint, and complex dynamic shifts. It was rewarding, but it was also cramped and fussy. And it was long, or at least it felt long. There was also leader Spencer Krug's cryptic wordplay and metaphors; he hinted at a narrative that the listener wasn't in on. Across his many projects (Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, Swan Lake), Krug often comes off as brooding, wise, and unknowable-- his music attracts because it's difficult to decode his lyrics and untangle his melodies. However, on his latest Sunset Rubdown album, Dragonslayer, Krug gives us a fluent, easily likable version of his work.
Dragonslayer is a looser Sunset record-- easier to like, easier to understand. Tension used to come from stops and starts in the songs, but now the mood changes between tracks. Dragonslayer shifts from stately formality ("Silver Moons"), to heart-pounding new wave skitter ("Idiot Heart") and anxious, head-over-heels tumbles ("Apollo and the Buffalo and Anna Anna Anna Oh!"), but it generates continuity between songs. Dragonslayer still centers on piano and keyboard, with Krug picking out (instead of pounding out) the tunes. "You Go on Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II)" in particular boasts a beautifully clean melody. But this song-- like many Sunset Rubdown tracks-- gets more strident noisier as it moves. It's just that Dragonslayer moves forward with more finesse.
Krug's lyrics feel, at first, as knotted and complex as ever. But now it's easier to draw connections and dig around for meanings. Thematically, this album has a lot in common with Random Spirit Lover, as Krug continues to sketch half-told tales of lovers or friends caught in their own recklessness. His lyrics seem formal, but with a natural twist. Krug obsesses over the rare and ephemeral: black swans, virgins, or paper lace, which either burns, fades, or "crumples into ugly shapes" ("Paper Lace"). What seems like a pile of metaphors is just Krug simplifying the world. Actions are products of instinct or fate, always out of our control, easier to describe than understand. It's Krug's way of-- perhaps insufficiently-- interpreting the world without fully taming it.
Take "Paper Lace". It first appeared in sparse, hollow form on Swan Lake's Enemy Mine earlier this year. "Those were good ideas, but they weren't diamonds and pearls," Krug sings while the drums laze to the ending. So his work wasn't done. Here he revamps it into a sinewy, shimmering form. Then there's "Paper Lace"'s sly invitation: "Come be a wild thing." Krug knows things will end (badly), and secretly hopes that it is so. There's no doing laundry together, none of the city buses of Wolf Parade's "Grounds for Divorce", no beer runs in Dragonslayer's world. It's escapist fantasy fiction (though there's only one real dragon, right at the end).
But, that's the way we're used to Sunset Rubdown sounding: fussy, untouchable, otherwordly. Let's not associate difficulty wih quality though. RSL had a greater chance for escape and awe; Dragonslayer was built for performance, and it sounds good live because the songs sound comfortable and straightforward. Sunset Rubdown are best when they are unfettered by those concerns, when they are fully soaked in their own set of thematic and sonic touchstones and could give a shit if they're understood or not.


Colin Meloy and co. follow their proggy rock opera The Hazards of Love with a breezy country-folk record. Peter Buck and Gillian Welch guest.

The King Is Dead

Like any band with a clear, identifiable concept-- in this case, a penchant for verbose, high-concept screeds-- the Decemberists are beloved and chastised for all the same reasons: The quirks that make them such a target for snickering, disaffected aesthetes (namely, stuffing their songs with arcane historical allusions and library language) are also what make them a boon for drama kids in three-button vests.
Whether the Decemberists are actually any nerdier than, say, Animal Collective isn't worth arguing-- the ambition is the thing, and the Decemberists reached a gumption apex on 2009's The Hazards of Love, a proggy rock opera based loosely on an EP by the British folk singer Anne Briggs. The record follows the story of a woman who falls in love with a shape-shifting creature she meets in the woods; there's forest-sex, spells, an overbearing queen, and plenty of thick, quasi-metal guitar. As an antidote of sorts, the band comes back with The King Is Dead, a breezy country-folk record with no discernable narrative. The concept here-- wait for it-- is that there is no concept.
Recorded in a converted barn on Oregon's Pendarvis Farm, The King Is Dead eschews the high, mystical wailing of British folk for its North American counterpart. Rustic and roomy, the record nods to Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, early Wilco, the Band, Neil Young, and especially R.E.M. In places, it almost feels like a disrobing: "Let the yoke fall from our shoulders," frontman Colin Meloy bellows on opener "Don't Carry It All", his voice loose and easy, freer than he's sounded in an awfully long time.
Meloy is an established fan of certain strains of Americana music, and he's enlisted a few inimitable guests: R.E.M.'s Peter Buck plays on three tracks, Gillian Welch sings on seven, and Welch's songwriting partner, the guitarist Dave Rawlings, appears every so often as a backing vocalist. There are moments when the record's twang can feel a little overcooked (the Decemberists have never been great at spontaneity, exactly), but there's an interesting tension between the inherent unpretentiousness of country music-- it's rural, it's populist, it's based in universal emotions-- and the Decemberists' literary cartwheeling. So while there's still plenty of fussy wordplay ("Hetty Green/ Queen of supply-side bonhomie bone-drab," Meloy bleats in "Calamity Song") and at least one Infinite Jest joke, there are also loads of simple, rousing choruses. In the past, Meloy's ability to write a sweet, memorable melody has occasionally gotten lost, but on King, his songwriting shines.
A few tracks feel like homage ("Down By the Water" is an easy analogue of "The One I Love", while "All Arise!" seems to repurpose bits of "Honky Tonk Women"), but mostly they're solid showcases for the band's best features: On the exquisitely pastoral (and guest-free) "January Hymn", Meloy sings about time and snow ("April all an ocean away/ Is this the better way to spend the day?") while Chris Funk adds the tiniest bit of octave guitar to Meloy's acoustic strums.
For all its rural pedigrees, The King Is Dead is still a clean and meticulously crafted album; the production is smooth and the performances are unnervingly error-free. Consequently, it's missing a little vulnerability-- the best Americana records tend to feel a little lawless, but the Decemberists just can't quite relinquish control.


After breakthough Spiderman of the Rings, Dan Deacon returns with another great record whose palette is richer, the samples smoother, the space larger.

Bromst

Midway through 2007, someone asked me the usual question-- the one about which records I'd want to take with me to a desert island. The first answer that sprang to mind seemed somehow perverse: Dan Deacon's Spiderman of the Rings? I certainly didn't think this was one of the best, most profound, or most life-sustaining records I'd ever heard, and it wasn't as if I had some great personal attachment to it; I'd only first heard the thing that spring. But it seemed like a lifetime on a desert island would get awfully lonely, and there was something about the album that seemed like a solution to that problem. All the happy massed shouting on a song like "Wham City"! There's plenty of music in the world that conjures up the feeling of crowds, but so much of it feels mob-like and jack-booted, or else it's just hero-worship of whoever's posing on the stage in front. Here, on Spiderman, was at least one song where the crowd felt joyous and inviting, like people celebrating the fact of sharing something. Which seemed about as essential, desert-island-wise, as a good sharp knife.
The press material for Deacon's follow-up, Bromst, talks about the notion of community, and the odd knack Deacon has for evoking it, but I'm not so sure that's entirely the point anymore. Sure, Deacon's method and sound remain mostly the same here; if you feel like you recognize the chord progressions from Spiderman, there's every chance you're right. The guy trades, after all, in movements that feel simple: He creates a dense rush of sound and then guides it through changes as broad as mountains, these shifts that slide together like blocks and burrow straight into some basic pleasure center deep in the gut of the western scale. What's different, on Bromst, is the texture and size of it all. Deacon does what most acts do to follow up a small hit: The palette is richer, the samples smoother, the space larger, the programming slightly less buzzy. Actual instruments, the kinds with microphones next to them, abound-- live drums, layers and layers of mallet instruments, a player piano that goes fluttering up and down the scale like it's stuck in the lobby of an avant-garde department store.
As for community? Deacon's still fond of massed shouting, and the overlapping exhortations of electronically processed cartoon vocals-- and all the pounding of toms and ecstatic chanting can leave much of Bromst feeling like the pagan rituals of some woodland filled with chubby, bespectacled Deacon-gnomes.
But those small changes manage, strangely enough, to change everything-- including the question of the happy crowd. Spiderman felt grainy, cheap, and primary-colored, an overload of cartoon buzz and bodies dancing. The denser, more sedate sound of Bromst shoots off in the opposite direction; it makes Deacon's music feel almost solipsistic, like it's ceased to come out of speakers and now lives deep inside your brain. If Spiderman was for dancing on sticky floors, Bromst feels better suited to sleeping, or contemplating the sublime, or anything else that happens mostly between your ears. As it closes, with the gorgeous "Get Older"-- building from malfunctioning-modem synths into dreamy sheets of buzz on an achy major-seventh chord-- it actually begins to resemble the heavy, romantic sound of acts like M83, or Pluxus, or shoegazer bands, or the 8-bit "chiptune" programmers Deacon shares some kinship with. These are people who make music for getting lost inside your own head.
What makes this change worthwhile is the complexity of Deacon's project. Most of us could have been forgiven, after a cursory listen to Spiderman, for not noticing that Deacon was conservatory-trained. But as Bromst rushes steadily by, mostly avoiding the big crowd-pleasing breakdowns and exclamations of its predecessor, the clearer production lets you sink into the minutae of it-- say, the Steve Reich-style rhythms of different mallet or drum patterns overlapping one another. The music becomes something like a natural process: one clean, simple sweep, but built from an insane complexity of detail. And there's enough to un-knot in there to make this a terrific step for Deacon-- out from the sticky basements into a space where he can try to tackle the sublime.


The mega-selling grunge band's recent reunion has a par-for-the-course, procedural air: Soundgarden are back together and making new music because, well, that's what dormant alt-rock institutions are supposed to do now, right?

King Animal

Of all the grunge bands that went multi-platinum in the 1990s, Soundgarden pulled it off with the least amount of drama or fall-out. No antagonistic relationships with the media, no publicized addictions, no scandals, no suicides. Their legacy is instead one of hard work, perseverance, and pragmatism; after all, Soundgarden had already embraced the benefits of signing to a major label several years before Kurt Cobain had developed a self-loathing attitude about doing the same. Even the band's dissolution in 1997 was less of a bombshell than a simple product of boredom with the biz.
So it follows that the band's recent reunion has a par-for-the-course, procedural air: Soundgarden are back together and making new music because, well, that's what dormant alt-rock institutions are supposed to do now, right? Even the band's would-be comeback coronation, King Animal's "Been Away Too Long", is less a statement of celebration than obligation, the titular declaration undercut by Chris Cornell's admission that "I never really wanted to stay."
Still, the return of Soundgarden is something to get excited about, if only because it momentarily delays the release of another Cornell solo album. And fortunately, the singer's interim attempts to reinvent himself -- as a Jeff Buckley-esque crooner, Timbaland's favorite mobile-phone pitchman, and wet-blanket warbler for a squandered hard-rock supergroup opportunity-- have little bearing on the outcome of King Animal. However, your enthusiasm for this album will ultimately depend on how often you return to 1996's Down on the Upside, an album that scored the band another platinum disc to hang in their bathrooms but felt like a holding pattern after the impressive four-album progression charted from 1988's sludgy Ultramega OK to 1994's steely Superunknown.
On the latter album, Soundgarden got their formula of muscular hard rock, brooding, psychedelic power ballads, and acoustic mysticism down to an exact science, and Upside simply repeated those same moves to slightly diminished returns. (Consider how the surreal, bad-trip Beatleisms of Superunknown's "Black Hole Sun" got processed into the melodramatic and obvious "Blow Up the Outside World.") Now, imagine that same formula rehashed and diluted even more and you've got King Animal.
The result is all the more disappointing given a strong start that showcases the band's regained command of rhythm and ballast. "Non-State Actor" grooves menacingly like a funkier "Spoonman", while the album's hands-down standout, "By Crooked Steps", reminds us that Soundgarden is at its best when making Ben Shepherd and Matt Cameron's stuttering time signatures, Kim Thayil's contorted riffage, and Cornell's glass-shattering wail sound like perfectly natural FM-radio fodder.
From there, the band simmer down into moodier, mid-tempo realms-- minus the skyscraping, MTV-baiting hooks that once allowed them to mellow out without boring the mosh pit. And after a while, you get the sense that Soundgarden are checking boxes off on a list: "Bones of Birds" is the "Black Hole"-sized psychedelic centerpiece that boasts an affective, downcast riff from Thayil, but is bogged down by an undercooked, overwrought chorus. And there are two attempts -- back-to-back, no less -- at a congenial, acoustic-strummed exercise a la "Burden in My Hand" ("Black Saturday" and "Halfway There"), but without the anthemic refrains to put them over the top. Likewise, the rare excursions outside their classic-rockin' comfort zone lead to dead ends, as when the dubby outro on "Worse Dreams" shoots for trippy, free-form chaos but winds up an aimless, uneventful mess. The autopilot nature of King Animal's second half is perfectly summed up by the repeated chain-gang chant of the closing "Rowing": "Don't know where I'm going/ I just keep on rowing/ I just keep on pulling/ Gotta row."
King Animal makes for a respectable display of Soundgarden's proficiency, but lacks their once-imposing majesty. Listening to the record, it's easy to forget what a disorienting, brutalizing effect songs like "Rusty Cage" and "Jesus Christ Pose" had on the early-90s rock landscape, even after Nirvana had nudged post-hardcore-schooled noise to the right of the dial. And in the decade and a half that Soundgarden were out of commission, there have been many art-metal aspirants-- from the Deftones and Queens of the Stone Age to Mastodon and Boris-- who've aimed for a similar balance of brains and brawn. The best hope for King Animal was that Soundgarden would be inspired enough by their spiritual successors to want to outdo them, and set a new benchmark for ambitious aggression. Instead, the group's first album since 1996 just sounds like the one they would've churned out in 1998.