On her first album of all-new solo material since 2012, the Vermont-based folk singer reflects on her life with measured reverence.

Anaïs Mitchell

At the start of the pandemic,  Anaïs Mitchell and her family relocated from Brooklyn to her grandparents’ former home on a Vermont farm. Combing through the physical evidence of her past led Mitchell, now 40, to craft Anaïs Mitchell, a collection of songs about youth, age, memory, and relationships that reflects on her life with measured reverence. Buoyed by pure vocal melodies and thoughtful lyrics, it’s warm-toned folk with a gentle, optimistic heart.
After spending over a decade immersed in Hadestown, the Broadway musical that spun out of her 2010 concept album based on a Grecian myth, Mitchell now focuses on telling her own story. Throughout, her thoughts are pulled in two directions: backward to her younger self and ahead to the magnificent, “one in a million” future. She approaches her childhood with care and concern on “Revenant” and “Little Big Girl,” while “Bright Star” and “On My Way (Felix Song)” chart ascension and ambition—though the latter is equally occupied with mourning the late songwriter and producer Edward “Felix” McTeigue. “You get one take,” Mitchell sings. Anaïs Mitchell feels appropriately daunted; aging is surreal and unstable, the road to success steep and intimidating. On the closing piano ballad “Watershed,” the climb is all but endless.
Minute vocal manipulations render Mitchell’s words more complex than they first appear. (Look to the first line of the opening song: “Over Brooklyn Bridge” soars vocally then falls nasally, quietly, into “in a taxi.”) She often closes her lines with defined consonants, setting off a phrase with the gravity of a gentle click. She has a deft touch with rhetorical elements, as on “Little Big Girl,” which teases out the tension between age and youth by repeating the words “you grow up” until the variations mount into decades.
At times Anaïs Mitchell suffers from a lack of variation: The “Backroads” intro echoes the opening of “Bright Star,” and the repetitive themes occasionally feel heavy-handed. But more often, Mitchell uses repetition thoughtfully, whether touching on the anxieties of growing older in “Now You Know” or engaging a prayer-like personal meditation in “Revenant.” She doesn’t rely on vocal fry or quavering to invoke pain or worry—the undulation of melody does the work for her, and spare moments of speak-singing make the mundane sacrosanct.
Because she so often focuses inward, certain external moments feel unfinished or unaddressed. In “Backroads,” a one-off comment about racist police rings odd in its singularity. The sexual violence implied in “Little Big Girl” (“Let him have his way instead of/Saying what you want” and “You grow up underneath the gaze/Of many grown men’s eyes”) lands more powerfully on a song occupied with girlhood, though it’s still jarring among far idler and more nostalgic concepts.
Even as she memorializes her past, Mitchell’s eyes are focused on the horizon. She sings of wanting to be “one of a kind,” “once in a lifetime,” and “the one you ride beside,” all at once. There are no great musical innovations here, but that’s not to say the songs aren’t affecting: Anaïs Mitchell is a compelling, earnest rumination on the desires and possibilities that arise when you start looking for significance in small moments. Sitting next to your love in a taxi, suspended high over the East River, is enough to make anything feel possible.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This very promising mixtape from the up-and-coming New York rapper is filled with booze-soaked, antisocial rants that are detailed and funny but also show a surprising vulnerability. Guests include Das Racist and kindred spirt Danny Brown.

Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire: Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation

Full disclosure: I am totally cognizant of how this review might be utterly pointless. A rapper named Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire has chosen that for his album cover. Your mind's already made up. That is, if it wasn't already after his searing, anti-everything calling card "Triple F"-- that's "fuck 'em" in triplicate-- or "Huzzah", eXquire's dangerously catchy single produced by horrorcore vet Necro, with a hook that packs boundless socio-pathology into five words: "drunk driving on a Wednesdayyyy." Such an assault of antisocial behavior would lead to you believe there's nothing pleasant or new about Lost in Translation. But it's a nice surprise how it reveals itself as a comprehensive and ultimately human, if not always humane, portrait of eXquire's consummate underground ruggedness.
eXquire's been getting a healthy share of buzz of late, in large part because of the most divisive aspect of Lost in Translation: this is a New York mixtape and one that's provincial as fuck. His cantankerous and bullish flow can be traced to all purveyors of unwashed hoodie rap, but he boasts of a "Vote for Pedro" tattoo representing the underdog and all of the alcohol being abused is within the budget of the listener. Casual fans will easily spot the interpolations of Jay-Z and Lil' Kim tracks from 1996 but bonus points if you spot the hat-tip to a 50 Cent freestyle on Hot 97. Likewise, it's not enough to have a boom-bap medley called "Pissin' Between Train Cars" stuck between "Cockmeat Sandwich" ("if you ain't seen Harold & Kumar, that means suck my diiiiick") and an indefensibly drawn-out blowjob skit-- he tells you where his stop is on the C Train from Euclid (Utica, if you're interested).
That some of these beats are ripped from Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein might be the best illustration of the realm in which eXquire functions. It's a world of post-Wu murk where even the gulliest sounding dudes escape into comic books and hip-hop CDs because girls just don't understand. Even if it all takes place within a couple of city blocks, eXquire makes it feel like a universe of experience where he comes of age as a microphone fiend ("I Should Be Sleepin'"), lays out some deeply nerdy storytelling raps ("Maltese Falcon Pt. 1 and Pt. 2"), and joyfully gets on some Anthony Bourdain shit as an ambassador to his local chicken spots ("Plus they got pizza, y'all can't fuck with this/ Got macaroni salad too, but I don't trust that shit").
But don't think that this is merely a celebration of New York… or really a celebration of much of anything. His focus on humility and grind doesn't separate eXquire from many other up and comers, but when I hear, say, Green Ova Undergrounds, their hustle raps seem to take place in some sort of vacuum, and it's unclear what they're pushing against other than themselves. Translation is similar in a lot of ways to Danny Brown's XXX mixtape in that eXquire's sharing some very uncomfortable and often unflattering aspects of his life in order to fully express just how real this is to him. You get the feeling Lost in Translation wasn't chosen as a title for the fact it's a cool phrase: Despite the occasional guest rap, it shares the movie's overwhelming loneliness and desperation. He's in command railing against hip-hop ass kissers-- dud skits named "Hip Hop Networking 101" and "YeahRight!.com" should make that obvious-- but when bills, guilt, and the impending sense he's fucked up his life get the better of him on "Nuthin' Even Matters (Regrets)", eXquire's surprisingly effective singing voice rings out like a distressing call from someone who might end it at any moment. Likewise, while the drowsy hooks on "Lovesponge" and "Build-A-Bitch" might initially signal the point where this 18-track tape should've packed it in, eXquire sounds more confused than misogynistic.
On "Huzzah", eXquire boasts, "publicist asked me what's my gimmick, I said 'going in,'" and it's based in truth: these aren't the kind of lyrics filled with punchlines and tricky wordplay, and his fairly unglamorous strengths lie in his ability to pick beats, flesh out concepts, and develop stories. There are plenty of easily identifiable precedents in his tone and cadence-- Method Man, 50 Cent, hell, even a hell of a lot of Dr. Dre-- whether topically or vocally, eXquire covers so much ground that I'm not sure I'd be able to spot an uncredited verse from him. Particularly on "The Last Huzzah!", he sounds a little indistinct compared to highly pronounced stylists like Danny Brown, Das Racist, and El-P.
The "Last Huzzah!" remix is easily one of the best posse cuts of the year, and besides hearing Brown continue his hot streak and Das Racist come through with the kind of quotable jaw-droppers that were few and far between on Relax, there's the sense that some kind of vanguard is being established. Along with Brown, Roc Marciano, and Action Bronson, in a different era, they're the type of song-savvy hardheads whose skills and sound might have landed them on a major label with no real idea of what to do with them. But the freedom they have allows them to honor and revive "New York rap" as an artistic framework rather than a matter of geography: Of course that designation was going to generate skepticism when the personality-free likes of Skyzoo, Maino, and Saigon were all too eager to claim the throne. But eXquire has less to do with "real MCing" than a relatable realness, so yeah, that cover really does make sense: eXquire is flaws and all, and it's tough to look away.


The Bronx rapper pulls you into his orbit with dark humor and trademark absurdity on his latest project, more focused than any of his previous work.

100 Miles and Walk’in

Rx Papi doesn’t sugarcoat anything. In the past few weeks, a particularly bleak chunk of his song “Cousin Tito” has circled the internet: “So high, I don’t think I’m gonna get home/Might run off the road and kill myself,” he raps. “Sometimes I wake up, wanna kill myself/How would you felt if I killed myself?” The lines read extremely grim on paper, but when rapped in a cavernous deadpan somewhere between Lil B and Max B, they become dark comedy. No matter how far Rx Papi pulls you into his troubled thoughts, he weaves in his trademark absurdity, rapping in a loud bark that often evolves mid-song into a full-throated scream. The joy of listening to him is bearing witness to an artist at his freest, seemingly unpolluted by any kind of refinement or recalibration from the industry.
That energy seeps into his latest album 100 Miles & Walk’in, where he appears to demo flows, voices, and cadences in real-time, mirroring his anxious storytelling. The record is a mere blip in his catalog—he released eight projects in 2020—and yet Walk’in feels more focused than any of his previous works. Besides a lone feature from Detroit rapper Boldy James, Papi carries track after track (nearly all of them hookless) on his own, sometimes fancying himself a sort of Upstate M. Night Shyamalan. On “Dead Man’s Letter,” he recalls getting so high he didn’t recognize himself in the mirror, then going to his bathroom to find his own body bloody and beat up in the tub.
More often, Rx Papi’s songs are delirious mood boards, mixing moments of paranoia with humor. He’ll mumble about taking Percs to relax his muscles before flat-out screaming that his pockets are “fatter than Mrs. Puff” (“SouthSide Mike”). There’s the middle of “One Last Dance,” where he ties off a stanza about his love-hate relationship with Jordans by saying, “I don’t miss the shot, I’m Michael Jordan/Walked out and stabbed you, Michael Myers.”
Like a long-running sitcom, his music gets funnier the more you dig in, often self-referential and reliant on tropes. There’s Auntie, a character who pops up on almost every track. There are his 5.56 shells and his Glock that looks like Bernie Mac or Crunchy Black based on the day. Then there’s “Walk in This Bitch,” which confirms there’s a seemingly infinite number of ways to “walk in this bitch.” Across the album, Papi walks in this bitch like an improbably extensive cast of characters, including Mystikal, Freddy Krueger, Styles P, Steve-O, DJ Clue, Ox from Belly, Rico from Paid in Full, God, a dead man, and John Wayne. “I walk in this bitch like John Wayne/I don’t know shit about John Wayne,” he raps on “Rush Hour,” on which producer DiorDaze’s crater-deep low end threatens to blow out speakers.
In general, Papi picks quality beats from the SoundCloud trenches that are suitable for him to be as loud and angry as he desires. The best is JXHNSCXTT’s for “Terry,” which sounds like death; the strangest is St. Los’s for the Pet Shop Boys-sampling “East End Boys.” It’s a bunch of musical ideas that cohere mostly because Papi, like a large planet, sucks them—and you—into his orbit. Some of them should’ve stayed in his inbox—the flimsy opener “A Man Apart (Intervention)”—but when everything is clicking, it’s hard to turn away.
The catch of black comedy, of course, is you’re not sure you should be laughing, but with the way Rx Papi so convincingly pulls it off, he takes that choice away entirely.

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The Spanish producer who made his name with buzzing, colorful, maximalist free-for-alls returns with his most resolutely electronic work yet.

Hiperasia

El Guincho has always been attracted to bright colors and garish patterns; his first two albums, Alegranza! and Pop Negro, were buzzing, maximalist free-for-alls in the tradition of Animal Collective and Tropicalía. So when the Spanish musician born Pablo Díaz-Reixa says that his latest album was inspired by a visit to Hiper Asia, a chain of sprawling dollar stores in Madrid that carry beads, baubles, doodads, tchotchkes, trinkets, bric-a-brac, and all manner of climate-warming, air-polluting, late-capitalist gimcrackery, you can guess what pricked his senses so. The rush of all that plastic, all those shiny surfaces; the accidental and tragic beauty of all that useless crap.
El Guincho was way off his album cycle at the time. His last album, Pop Negro, had come out in 2010. In the years since, he ended his contract with Young Turks, left Barcelona for his birthplace, the Canary Islands, to care for his mother, who was dying of lung cancer, and, following her death and a subsequent breakup with his girlfriend, moved to Madrid in search of a new direction. When the epiphany washed over him in those fluorescent-lit aisles, he scrapped the album he had been working on, which he has described as a set of bass-heavy tracks in the Night Slugs vein, and set about translating Hiper Asia's sensational surfeit into song.
The resulting album, the most resolutely electronic work he's done yet, buzzes like an ice-cream headache: His voice is slathered with Melodyne's pitch-correction software, and he sings in strange, sing-song cadences whose melody and rhythm seem less like songwriting than the byproduct of algorithmic processes. His beats bob between the lurching rhythms of the L.A. beat scene, the snap of dancehall and reggaetón, and the shuddering, double-time pulses of jungle and footwork, and his synths recall both Dâm-Funk's fat, augmented chords and Rustie's dynamics-squashing compressors. The way jagged samples are shoehorned into the mix is reminiscent, at times, of the Bomb Squad—or a tropical take on them, anyway, like an MPC that's sticky with mango and mojo. Touch down almost anywhere on the record, and you'll discover details that trigger a hair-raising rush of sensation—brittle 909 snare rolls, crystalline choirs, video-game melodies, and basslines that reach frequencies most indie-electronic fusions never knew existed.
Like its namesake, however, Hiperasia sprawls. The melodies that give early tracks like "Rotu Seco" and "Cómix" their sugary kick soon turn syrupy and heavy and undifferentiated; tracks just four minutes long can seem eternal. Spanish speakers will have an edge on other listeners, because the lyrics' wordplay and surrealistic vignettes extend the songs' staying power. Some feel like riddles outsiders aren't expected, or even intended, to crack: "Stena Drillmax," named after a brand of oil-drilling ship, juggles images of drones and chemtrails with a lover's lips. But scrape away all the glitter and there are moments of real pathos: "Sega" closes with the brutal couplet, "You thought your father loved you/ But it was all a joke."
The title song, a tribute to the retail emporium that gave the album its name and shape, asks, "How do you get so much heart into a cement box?" But the real key to the album's muchness might be "Abdi," in which Díax-Reixas reminisces about his teenage years, shoplifting from electronics stores and then sitting on a park bench with a friend, listening to hardcore on his Walkman. His voice is squished and metallic and tinny, like something coming out of an old FM radio. "That was a big deal for me," he sings. "I know it wasn't for everyone." In the dime store of his imagination, the shelves are stuffed so full, and stacked so high, that half the treasure is out of reach; only he can get to it. But even to the casual observer, it still sparkles brightly, and—in small doses, anyway—alluringly.


Ibeyi consists of 20-year-old French-Cuban duo Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Díaz, twins whose father was Cuban conguero and master percussionist Miguel "Angá" Díaz of Irakere and Buena Vista Social Club. The duo ground themselves firmly within these traditions, but they weave them together with jazz, soul, hip-hop, and downtempo/electronica.

Ibeyi

"Ibeyi" is the Yoruba term for the divine spirit that exists between twins. It is also the name of 20-year-old French-Cuban duo Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Díaz. Currently based in Paris, Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi grew up on both sides of the Atlantic. Their father was Cuban conguero and master percussionist Miguel "Angá" Díaz of Irakere and Buena Vista Social Club. Díaz passed away when Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi were only 11, and their older sister Yanira followed him seven years later. But the sisters have taken up their legacies via their own music and their family's shared beliefs in Regla de Ocha. Regla de Ocha, also known as Santería, is a widely practiced Afro-Cuban religion based on the worship of orishas, which have roots in West African Yoruba culture. Musically, Ibeyi ground themselves firmly within these traditions, but they weave them together with jazz, soul, hip-hop, and downtempo/electronica. The result is their deeply evocative self-titled debut.
In many ways, Ibeyi is an extended ritual—a consecration of life and love, both past and present. Fittingly, the album opens with a Yoruba prayer to Eleggua, the gatekeeper of crossroads and pathways, whose blessing alone allows ceremonies to proceed. The presence of Eleggua and other orishas saturates the album, thematically and musically. In "River", for example, Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi pray to Oshun, the orisha of rivers and fertility. As the song begins, a bass-heavy drum beat churns through a slow-moving current of looped "ah"s, and Lisa-Kaindé intones, "Carry away my dead leaves/ Let me baptize my soul with the help of your waters/ Sink my pains and complaints/ Let the river take them—" she chokes up, "—river, drown them!" The track feels monumental; this is, after all, a call for rebirth. Yet, upon stripping away the vocals and reverb, it becomes apparent that the only other instruments involved are a MIDI controller (or two) and the occasional smattering of piano. And that's exactly what makes Ibeyi so remarkable. Instrumentally, their music is sparse. But it always feels full, with emotion and the kind of spirituality that is as deep as the people and circumstances that created it.
And so it makes sense that Ibeyi is teeming with ghosts. Most prominent among them, of course, is their father's. On "Think of You", the sisters sample Angá's drumming, which fades in and out, specter-like, during the refrains when his daughters list the things that remind them of him (laughter, walking on rhythm, etc.). On "Mama Says", he resurfaces in the frustrations Lisa-Kaindé expresses as she sees her mother struggle to find meaning in life after his death. And during the chant break, she and Naomi pray to Eleggua, who was their father's orisha.
Vocally, Lisa at times channels Nina Simone, and in her higher register, she can even recall Kate Bush circa "Wuthering Heights". Her ability to imbue deep emotion and otherworldliness into simple lyrics, meanwhile, is Björk-like. Naomi, in turn, explores the ways that Yoruba tradition and contemporary rhythms can meet. It's not quite what her father did on his last project, in which he fused Afro-Cuban music with jazz and hip-hop, but they both move from the same impulse. Naomi will sometimes play hip-hop beats on cajón, or add electronic booms and claps that thunder through a track like "Oya", in reference to the song's namesake—Oyá, the orisha of storms and cemeteries.
The texts and subtexts in Ibeyi keep unfolding, but it feels immediate and direct regardless of how much of that text the listener is familiar with. Part of that is the nature of the language: Ibeyi do not just sing about their father, or Yanira, or once-lovers, or the orishas; they sing to them. By and large, they sing in terms of "me," "you," and "we," and at times, the lines between those entities are blurred. Which means that we are automatically implicated, living with them, or at least standing very nearby.
If there is a critique to make, it's that the production can at times feel too smoothed over. Some of the rougher edges and raw(er) emotion that got the twins noticed in the first place get ironed out a bit. And one side effect is that a few of the album's final tracks sound somewhat similar in tonality, tempo, and their vibe. But Ibeyi still find subtle ways to create shape, as in the single piano key that pulses like a heart monitor in "Yanira", their song to their late sister, or the chilling dissonance in the twins' harmonies throughout.
By the end of the album, Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé come full circle to face themselves, ending as they began: with a prayer. This time, it is to their namesake, Ibeyi. It is a joyful moment. And it is also, as every debut album attempts to but doesn't always succeed in being, a declaration of self.


The South London experimental musician shifts from her usual leftfield electronics and avant-garde R&B to an album of blistering guitar noise. She has a few more tricks up her sleeve, too.

marked

More than once, the shapeshifting experimental musician Klein has joked with interviewers that her next move will be toward the mainstream—a hip-hop album, a drill album, signing to Roc Nation, moving to L.A. to become an Oscar-winning actress. And every time, she’ll return with a record that sounds like a church organ gaining sentience in a Category 3 hurricane, or something just as dubiously marketable. It’s a revealing setup, though, because the South London artist has consistently positioned herself as an outsider to the walled-off world of the avant-garde, more schooled in Hot 97 hits than the underground artists—Dean Blunt, Mica Levi—to whom she was initially compared.
Eight albums into Klein’s discography, that claim gets harder to back up. She’s performed at London’s Barbican and ICA, adapted her own stage musical into a film, and has Björk’s number saved in her contacts. And yet, as her brilliantly weird live performances attest, Klein still defies categorization. On marked she doubles down, restricting herself almost entirely to a palette of blistering guitar squall that you’d more likely associate with the anti-rock extremism of Wolf Eyes and Aaron Dilloway. Technically, she’s explored this sound before. “top shotta,” from 2022’s Cave in the Wind, could be a lost bootleg of an Einstürzende Neubauten soundcheck; “grit,” from 2020’s Frozen, sounds like a far-off cement mixer munching down on a Telecaster. But on marked, almost every minute is claimed by Klein’s guitar, distorted to oblivion and shuddering with feedback.
Overdriven riffs burn holes in the VU meter on “gully creepa,” opening a portal to a nightmarish loop that’s half dub soundsystem, half doom metal. Muddy drones are juxtaposed against trebly scrapings and blown-out drum machines on “Blow the Whistle”—a leap into heavy new territory for Klein, but one that will feel familiar to fans of JK Flesh and Dreamcrusher. It’s tempting to interpret the mood as one of anguished introspection. On “more than like” she goes swimming in an inky pool of piano, sinking into the sustained low notes, despondent. That’s followed by the extended circular drones of “enemy of the state,” where serrated chords are slowly mulched into one enormous slug of noise, à la Glenn Branca’s guitar orchestra.
Klein’s signature flamboyant vocal runs are largely absent from the album; ditto the patched-in supporting voices that often populate her dreamy narratives. Exceptions come near the end on three a cappella fragments: the voice-note R&B of “frontin,” an off-the-cuff mini-duet with La Timpa titled “neek,” and the closing “exclusive.” Flipping the script on the entire album, “exclusive” is pure, unmistakable Klein—hyper-melismatic vocals, a pitch-shifted loop over ticking trap drums, a snotty rap (repurposed from “black famous,” on last year’s touched by an angel): “I just look around and what do I see/Another mini me,” she spits through crackling Auto-Tune, “Sweet girl big dreams/They call her fleabag.” The contrast with the previous 45 minutes is like pressing a bag of frozen peas against a bruise.
The lingering question is whether these diversions into burly guitar noise are remarkable in their own right, or interesting mainly because Klein is the author. There’s certainly something endearing about an artist feeling her way into a genre apparently by accident. “I’ve always made stuff without thinking of anyone else,” she said in 2021. “I’ve never had time to think about what I’m doing or what this means.” Whether or not you buy that claim, such confidence in the process, in the freedom of not knowing, is worth dwelling on at a time when so much experimental music—and culture, in general—is delivered with a thud of literalism, wearing all its subtext on its sleeves.


On its frequently excellent debut, this Glaswegian band-- like early Delgados or BMX Bandits before them-- reflects its city's love of rough-edged, unpolished indie rock.

Sing the Greys

Belle and Sebastian are from Glasgow, but fellow Glaswegians Frightened Rabbit are nothing like B&S. Instead, they display their city's love of another sound: rough-edged, unpolished indie rock. On their charismatic debut Sing the Greys, Frightened Rabbit keep the instrumentation simple-- drums, bass, guitar, and straightforward washes of keyboard and accordion. The arrangements, too, are linear and humble, often blending shaggy elements with rigid ones to create a sense of purposeful drift. Setting loose guitar jangle against a tight bass pulse, the excellent "Yawns" finds singer Scott (just Scott) wrapping his coarse moan around some stirring moments of relationship inertia ("She yawns because she's bored/ He yawns because he can't sleep any more"). "Go-Go Girls" starts off tightly coiled, with a hellacious circular bassline zipping through volleys of percussion, before cascading into a triumphant garage-pop shuffle.
Camera Obscura are from Glasgow, too, but Frightened Rabbit's not like them, either. Where Camera Obscura's roots plunge into the annals of music history from Lee Hazelwood to Dory Previn, Frightened Rabbit's rambunctious bursts of enthusiasm seem to refer to little beyond indie rock's ahistorical everymen-- dudes having a good time with music in whichever way they please. Indie rock loves apathy, and Frightened Rabbit pay lip service to that tradition on "The Greys". It's a catchy, ragged ode to numbness ("What's the blues when you've got the greys?") that's belied by its impassioned delivery: Frightened Rabbit don't go to great lengths to sell disaffection; this is fun, unpretentious music. Two of the members are brothers who pose for their press photos in Lucha Libre masks and only go by their first names, if that gives you some idea.
Mogwai are from Glasgow, too, but Frightened Rabbit's definitely not like Mogwai. Where Mogwai's music is all about creating a grand atmosphere that dwarfs the listener, with little emphasis on the band members' personalities, Frightened Rabbit's is all about homely charm. They take a stab at ambiance on three brief, pleasant interludes-- the fuzz wash and martial clatter of "The First Incident", the baggy harmonies of "The Second Incident", and the choppy keys of "The Final Incident"-- and at the epic, with the seven-minute-plus "Square 9". But for the most part, grandeur is not their thing-- the thumping drums, silvery guitars, and blurring vocals of "Music Now" all unfold in modest human scale. Naysayers will find an easy jibe in the lyric "Make your music/ Make it so loud and so trite," but for Frightened Rabbit, this is a rallying cry, a rejection of the stylish and self-serious, and a redemption of the trite through the embrace of its universality.


After breaking to work as School of Language and the Week That Was, the brothers Brewis return for a new Field Music LP.

Measure

When Field Music announced in 2007 the group was going on hiatus, the band stressed that the break was not a break up. In the ensuing months, brothers David and Peter Brewis kept working-- the former as School of Language and the latter as the Week That Was-- each occasionally enlisting the services of the other. And now, a couple of years later, Field Music have indeed reunited (albeit minus keyboard/utility player Andrew Moore, reportedly training to be a chef). You've got to love a band that stays true to its word.
Field Music last left off with 2007's Tones of Town, a relatively manageable 11 songs over a modest 30 or so minutes. The pair now seems refreshed and reenergized for the third Field Music LP, Measure-- it runs a staggering 20 tracks spread out over 70 minutes. Factor in the formidable arrangements, which often make a single song sound like two or three or four crammed together, and before you even press play you know Measure won't be casual listening.
In that regard the brothers Brewis don't disappoint, either. Retaining an affinity for the fussier side of XTC, Field Music values careful precision over outright prodigious velocity, which keeps their music from tipping over into the proggy abyss. Further, it laces their songs with winningly fragmented melodies that don't always resolve or even repeat but still provide a vital point of entry to the band's rigorous compositions. That's the upside.
The downside is that Field Music have a tendency to come off so cerebral, their charms are sometimes buried beneath the non-stop musical flourishes. Constantly inventive/evolving electric and acoustic guitar filigrees, meticulous percussion, strings, finger-snaps, handclaps, and intricate harmonies that bounce from speaker to speaker: Measure is, if nothing else, a truly crafted record.
In fact, Measure crams so many complex twists and turns into each of its tracks that it starts out imposing and rarely lets up, making it a lot easier to give up than give in. That'd be a shame, since even though the band's constant motion can be exhausting, its pleasures aren't as far-flung as they first appear. "Them That Do Nothing", with its interlocking acoustic guitars, steady beat, and genial vibe, is a pop gem, and the surprisingly lithe "Let's Write a Book" sticks to a groove long enough to prove that the Brewises understand well when to keep things simple(r). "The Rest Is Noise" is proud pomp that gives way to a sinewy but satisfying denouement.
It helps that the Brewis brothers have such a sharp understanding of space and, despite the sprawl, pacing, which is why they can get away with music this busy without completely overwhelming the listener. At times Measure feels like a suite, each track a separate part of the same (long) song that settles naturally into dynamic peaks and valleys. Admittedly, once closer "It's About Time" winds down into traffic sounds and hushed piano, you're likely to feel as much relief as exultation that Field Music made it this far without toppling off their precarious high wire and making a mess of themselves. But music this simultaneously careful and out of control would never get made if failure weren't a real risk.


On these ruminative solo guitar pieces, the Berlin-based artist takes an idiosyncratic and emotionally expressive approach, making even the most ordinary gestures sound mutated and strange.

World in World

Editor’s Note: This review is presented as it was originally published in 2022 and uses the artist’s prior name.
At the start of Julia Reidy’s new album, World in World, the Australia-born, Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist and producer makes brief sweeps across their electric guitar strings, each note pinging against the next at uncanny angles, like alien electrons bouncing through the thermosphere. Just as the sound of an orchestra tuning reassures an audience of quality control, Reidy’s strums and plucks offer warranties of intrigue, a promise you’ve rarely heard a guitar sound quite like this. Pedals click on and off, their pops framing an incidental rhythm as their electronic purrs unspool and recede. Reidy repeats this ostensible warmup—prismatic notes, pedal pops, droning tones—until you barely notice you’ve slipped into the opening title track. Warped chords and distant vocals shape a meditative hymn, as if bent by funhouse mirrors; you may soon hum along, even if the sound is unfamiliar.
Reidy’s recent work, especially 2020’s spellbinding Vanish, used the guitar as a springboard for immersive and audacious art-pop universes, like Julia Holter facing dioramic canvases. But for these nine subtle and intimate pieces, they stick largely to pensive guitar ruminations, with electronics emphasizing certain phrases and Reidy’s spectral voice seeming to haunt others. World in World is a solo guitar album in the way that, say, William Tyler’s Behold the Spirit is a solo guitar album, Mary Lattimore’s Hundreds of Days is a solo harp album, or Nils Frahm’s Spaces is a solo keyboard album. The guitar is Reid’s entryway into wider explorations of sound on a path toward emotionally expressive idiosyncrasy.
For World in World, Reidy played a custom guitar built by innovative instrument designer and engineer Sukandar Kartadinata, whose prior projects have included a “data violin” and ways of better incorporating digital software in analogue instruments. Reidy’s request, though, was incredibly hands-on: an electric guitar with moveable frets and “fretlets,” to allow for a wide range of very exact tunings. Reidy wanted to play in just intonation, meaning that the ratio between the notes are whole numbers, rather than the irrational divisions of equal temperament, the reigning system in Western composition. For Reidy’s purposes, the justly tuned guitar reorients familiar picking-or-strumming patterns until you feel like you’re hearing them for the first time. Reidy capitalizes on this sense of newness, making blues and ballads sound novel.
Talk of just intonation can sometimes be proudly academic, the details of specific systems acting like theoretical moats. But Reidy operates more on intuition than ideologic devotion in tuning. “I try to treat it as a tool,” Reidy said in an email, “but I’m not precious about logic or precision.… I like establishing systems and then fucking with them.” You may hear the lugubrious syncopation of John Fahey in “World in World” or perhaps the Delta blues during the spectacular and spry “Loom.” These unusual and personal tunings, though, delightfully dodge easy interpretation. Reidy’s every move shimmers in peculiar ways, so even ordinary guitar gestures become mutated and strange.
These songs often communicate the sensation of being on an edge you’re trying to get off, or of trying to calm nerves by first acknowledging them. Reidy begins the standout “Walls and Clearings,” for instance, with ululations that invoke a more forthright Grouper. They circle around those moans with broken scales and long, lurid tones until it all coils into a wail, an attempt to push some unnamed pain. The song fades in waves of beautiful fluorescence, triumphant.
There are simple delights here, too, tracks that suggest a new avenue of approachability for just intonation. “Paradise in Unrecognisable Colors” is gorgeous, a piece of pastoral wonder that has the grounding effect of Vashti Bunyan’s folk songs or Harold Budd’s piano meditations. Harmonics chime through open space while warbling drones arc beneath them, occasionally rising to commingle; it feels like watching a rainbow emerge from a thunderstorm to crown some verdant expanse. “Ajar” is giddy with expectation, little tufts of bright notes spiraling over Reidy’s murmured vocals and gnarled chords. Again, it’s like finding promise at the edge of calamity.
During a 2016 conversation about influences and development, an interviewer asked Reidy about the pleasures and limitations of guitar strings. “Main limitations of the strings? They break,” Reidy quipped. It is galvanizing to hear Reidy, not yet 30, tackle solo guitar improvisation and just intonation together—two modes often wrongly criticized as stodgy or antiquated—with such play and gusto. Where just intonation has frequently been seen as the territory of scholars or outlier eccentrics, solo guitar has been dominated by white dudes. But Reidy made this accessible and eccentric gem at home in Berlin, a DIY expression of just intonation’s possibilities that puts them in league with a growing international crew of fellow young apostles like Kali Malone and Duane Pitre. On World in World, Reidy is offering the familiar thoughts of anxiety, despair, and twinkling hope in a singular dialect, all their own.


The first posthumous album from Mac Miller plays like a companion piece to Swimming. It’s an optimistic epilogue to the life of an aspirational artist.

Circles

Mac Miller’s death from an accidental drug overdose sent ripples across the rap community he helped cultivate. He was a kind-hearted collaborator and invested heavily in others’ growth, but his musical arc was left unfinished. In August of 2018, he put out Swimming, an album that was like a quantum leap in self-discovery. Then, a month later, at 26, he was gone, unable to realize that potential. Now there’s Circles, a posthumously released Swimming companion piece that gives his years of work a bit of closure. It’s the culmination of a career spent improving, a fitting epilogue to an aspirational life.
Miller had worked closely on early versions of these songs with composer-producer Jon Brion, who was committed to finishing the album after Miller’s death. It’s unclear how deep Miller was into the process at the time of his passing, but this sounds like a completed work, or as complete as it can be. “This is a complicated process that has no right answer. No clear path,” his family wrote in a letter on his Instagram. “We simply know that it was important to Malcolm for the world to hear it.”
If Swimming wasn’t Miller’s best album, it was certainly the one where he came into his own as an artist. There are moments on 2015’s GO:OD AM where his rapping is sharpest, 2014’s Faces accommodated his most ambitious ideas, and 2016’s The Divine Feminine is his most diverse and complete project, a testament to the community of musicians he’d established around him. But Swimming hinted at an artist who’d finally cleared his mind and found his footing. Circles provides some resolution and helps finish Miller’s final thoughts.
Miller seemed to envision Circles as the completion of a loop. “My god, it go on and on/Just like a circle, I go back to where I’m from,” he rapped on Swimming closer “So It Goes.” That record was about being fine on the surface while struggling with anxiety; this one is about knowing there’s something to be done about it. Both records are about working through depression, how the bad days are long and the good days feel fleeting, but the tone is more optimistic here. The imagery of a cluttered mind is a near-constant in Miller’s final songs. On the plucked single “Good News,” he likens the recovery process to spring cleaning, which feels fitting for someone looking to hit the refresh button. “Sometimes I get lonely/Not when I’m alone/But it’s more when I’m standin’ in crowds that I’m feelin’ the most on my own,” he raps on “Surf,” a poignant realization for someone who spent his last years surrounded by throngs of fans. But it comes with an epiphany, a sort of thesis for the album: “And I know that somebody knows me/I know somewhere, there’s home/I’m startin’ to see that all I have to do is get up and go.”
Circles never really opens up into a full-fledged rap album, content to push back and forth between lo-fi beat music and singer-songwriter indie folk, working almost entirely with live arrangements. After doing his most-ever singing on Swimming, he crosses a threshold into doing almost no rapping on Circles. That was the entire idea: two albums bringing balance to each other. The few songs that do have raps in them display his love of the form and improvement as a writer. On “Hand Me Downs,” he raps about moving carelessly and stumbling through the same patterns. “Hands,” the only full rap song, works through negativity while displaying the subtly knotty lyricism he fell in love with as a teenager.
Miller was always trying to balance being the guy who started Facebook’s first Big L fan page with his love for the nakedness of 1970’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. He didn’t live long enough to get to really reconcile those sides of himself, but as halves of a complete work, Swimming and Circles come the closest. Together, they establish the rapper-producer as comfortable in his skin, no longer out to prove to naysayers he could bar out. These are mellow, relaxed songs in search of that exact state of being. “‘Fore I start to think about the future/First can I please get through a day/Without any complications,” he sings on “Complicated.” It’s more Plastic Ono Band than Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous—lots of guitars, some keys, light bass, the occasional synth line—but not beholden to any one sound.
The chill-out aesthetic won’t come as a surprise to those familiar with Mac Miller’s Space Migration Tour, which transformed the songs in his catalog with warm Internet-laced grooves from their days futzing with electronica and experimental jazz. He was a huge rap nerd but he also loved the prospect of playing with a live band. These songs feel like an attempt to smooth down his interests into something comprehensive, and Brion seems like the perfect person to usher them to completion. He serves as a co-producer on most songs, an additional producer on all the others, and his work makes the songs shapelier without compromising Miller’s vision for them.
When a young rapper dies too soon, fans start listening to their music much more closely, combing over their lyrics to find the writing on the wall. With Miller, you don’t have to dive too deeply. “God Speed” is rife with thoughts about going down a destructive path and on “Brand Name,” he wrote a disclaimer that proved tragically prescient: “To everyone who sell me drugs/Don’t mix it with that bullshit, I’m hopin’ not to join the 27 Club.” But Circles dispels any sense of fatalism in his music. He was still idealistic; in these songs, he is searching for a way to break the cycle, a way forward. It’s only appropriate that Mac Miller’s final musical act be one of self-reformation.

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On a set of originals for the hallowed Folkways label, the California singer-songwriter and his pal, a Bay Area preschool teacher, know when to honor the past and when to break from it.

Mr. Greg / Cass McCombs: Mr. Greg & Cass McCombs Sing and Play New Folk Songs for Children

Mr. Greg and Cass McCombs’ Sing and Play New Folk Songs for Children, released as part of Smithsonian Folkways’ ongoing 75th anniversary celebration, is an ambitious entry in the label’s rich history of children’s music. The lifelong friends have written a set of new songs that attempt to cover the entire Folkways kids’ curriculum in one go: civil rights, flora and fauna, language, conservation, self-image. In the liner notes, each song is accompanied by suggested lesson plans; these ideas usually involve listening to one or more records from Folkways’ sprawling (and never out of print) catalog. In turn, the catalog folds itself back into the record: There are spoken cameos from folk lifers Peggy Seeger and Michael Hurley, as well as samples of children’s recordings from Woody Guthrie and Ella Jenkins, who made her Folkways debut in 1957 and celebrated her 99th birthday this month.
With all those canonical references, this album could have easily ended up as a glorified syllabus. But McCombs and Mr. Greg (aka Greg Gardner, a preschool teacher in San Francisco whose students make frequent appearances here, along with his own kids and even the family cat) generally know when to honor the past and when to break from it. For every “A Builder’s Got a Hammer and Nails,” with its cheery light-industrial percussion and a melody cribbed from “The Wheels on the Bus,” there’s a “Roll Around Downtown,” a jaunty tribute to skateboarding backed by drum machine and a guitar that coughs up chalk dust. It sounds like McCombs building a Tinkertoy model of George Thorogood. On “The Sounds That the Letters Make,” McCombs opts for beatnik jazz, content to scratch some feedback against Ben Sigelman’s tense, crabbed cello. “We Build a Lot of Muscle When We Exercise” is surprisingly glum, with a title that’s practically longer than the song; at the last moment, keyboardist Sean Trott pulls the arrangement out of an indie-twee death spiral.
I admit: If I were a kid with computer privileges, that description might make me shut the laptop. Children’s music is the rare genre that’s not defined by formal characteristics or place of origin, but by its audience. Which means, in theory, that it can take pretty much any form: the chirpy, rhyme-free dada of the Pinkfong empire, the emotional-regulation ditties of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, or Pierce Freelon’s Grammy-nominated forays into psychedelic R&B and chamber soul. Still, its intended listeners are more or less captive to parental preferences. For a certain cohort of grown-ups, that means folk that’s lightly didactic, of antique provenance, and performed solo. (“A lot of those old Folkways records are like that: just a banjo and a vocal or something,” McCombs notes, approvingly, in the press material.)
Thankfully, his genre infidelity wins out. The more avant arrangements stand like secret passageways to possible futures, while the strummy pop tunes—such as the chooglin’ opener “Little Wilma Wiggly Worm”—are as comfy as a library nook. Of the strummers, “Things That Go in the Recycling Bin” is the highlight. The two artists harmonize over a lurching country-folk backing, sorting the recyclables (“cardboard scraps, outdated maps”) from the compostables (“apple core, cold soup du jour”). Wilma shows up, eats the compost, worm poop becomes dirt. It’s a commendably blunt choice, as is the matter-of-fact depiction of an owl’s mealtime—from prey to pellet—on “I’m a Nocturnal Animal.”
In style and subject matter, Sing and Play New Folk Songs for Children achieves the dual aims of folk music: to depict the world both as it is and as it could be. Incidentally, these are also the tasks of a parent. You spend years hammering together an impossible armor, trying to build something that can deflect any pain while admitting all joys. And you may never know how the work ends. In high folkie style, this album includes tributes to two bygone political figures: “Wave a Flag for Harvey Milk” and “Requiem for Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” The tension in these songs, between tenuous present and triumphant progress—what is and what might be, in other words—could snap you in half. But the folkies and the parents agree: You gotta keep it together for the kids.


On her stunning debut, the tenor saxophonist and rising member of the London jazz scene meditates on her humble family heritage, the continuum of jazz history, and the power of collective action in our present moment.

Source

For new listeners and latecomers, there was no handier introduction to London’s vibrant, bustling jazz scene than Gilles Peterson’s 2018 compilation We Out Here. Curated by the scene’s own breakout star Shabaka Hutchings, the set showcased a new generation of artists melding jazz classicism to Afrobeat, neo-soul, electronic music, and ambient. And no one worked harder than tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia, present on five of the comp’s nine pieces. Hailing from an immigrant family—her mother from Guyana, her father from Trinidad—she grew up in a musical family in the London borough of Camden, starting first on piano and violin before gravitating to a “broken as hell” old clarinet. She came up with other groups like Maisha and the septet Nérija, and she’s remained busy ever since, her presence felt on Makaya McCraven’s Universal Beings and Sons of Kemet’s Your Queen is a Reptile as well as Moses Sumney’s grae. No matter where she appears, she brings an exploratory, energized spirit, always playing in service to the song, never overshadowing the music, only elevating the proceedings.
That spirit and openness translates readily to Garcia’s long-anticipated debut, Source. Recorded with producer Kwes, whose credits range from Solange and Bobby Womack to Nérija, the album pushes Nubya Garcia and her tight-knit group into new territory while also remaining firmly rooted in jazz. And while her previous EPs popped up and soon disappeared on smaller labels, she now finds herself label mates with another dynamic jazz figure, Esperanza Spalding. Switching from dub reggae to cumbia to classic balladry, Garcia meditates on her humble family heritage, the continuum of jazz history, and the power of collective action in our present moment.
“Pace” serves as an empathic mission statement. As she recently told Downbeat, it refers to the hectic lifestyle of a gigging Londoner, but “Pace” embodies a whole range of emotions. Propelled by keyboardist Joe Arman-Jones’ cascading chords, the group soars and then deftly lands back where they began. Garcia’s solo calmly navigates it all: fiery and supple, dizzying and lyrical. You can hear how she’s garnered comparisons to the greats: Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Gary Bartz.
Garcia never overpowers her bandmates, instead slotting into the contours her band provides, whether it’s the nimble soul jazz of “The Message Continues” or the Ethio-jazz flavor of “Inner Game.” On the meditative R&B of “Stand With Each Other,” augmented by Nérija trumpeter MS Maurice (aka Sheila Maurice-Grey) and a trio of vocalists, Garcia’s horn barely rises above a purr, and doesn’t need to: her tone entwines with the wordless humming to generate a low-key warmth and benevolence.
Source thrills most when it delves into non-traditional jazz rhythms from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, as on the traditional “La cumbia me está llamando,” recorded in Bogota. But it’s the sprawl of the title track that best captures Garcia’s creative arc the past few years. “Source”’s exploratory 12 minutes open with the echoing snares and firecracker hi-hats of drummer Sam Jones and skanking staccato chords from Arman-Jones, all earmarks of dub reggae. Airy vocal “ahhhs” slowly lead us into Garcia’s solo, which carefully scales up from dubbed-out vibrato lines to blowing full-on fire by the end. Arman-Jones’ toggles between electric and acoustic, subtly pulling the piece into cosmic jazz territory.
By the end, the piece has seemingly traveled miles, and in so doing traced Garcia’s own steadfast journey. She has called the album a story “about my heritage, my ancestry, exploring those places and those stories from my parents and my grandparents.” On Source, she weaves together so many threads so masterfully that she instantly establishes herself as a foundational voice in the larger, ongoing story of the London jazz scene. Her debut is a stunning introduction.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This live album captures one night in the unlikely, alt-rock-superstar-laden tour behind Minutemen legend Mike Watt's first solo album, featuring Eddie Vedder, Dave Grohl, and more.

“ring spiel” tour ’95

“ring spiel” tour ’95 captures one night in a superstar tour that assembled in support of the legendary Mike Watt’s  first solo album, Ball-Hog or Tugboat?  The former-Minutemen bass player turned fIREHOSE band leader gathered an insane and unlikely roster of alternative-rock superstars to not only support his album, but follow him on tour. Evan Dando, Kathleen Hanna, Ad-Rock and Mike D, Eddie Vedder, the Kirkwood brothers, Dave Pirner, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, J Mascis, Nels Cline, half of Sonic Youth, and Mark Lanegan— these are just a few of the names in the long, long credits list. The title of the live record, recorded at the Metro in Chicago on May 6, 1995, references Watt’s concept of Ball-Hog or Tugboat? as being a wrestling match, where each group of musicians “got in the ring” with Watt.
The touring band for “ring spiel” would end up being Grohl, Vedder, Pat Smear, and William Goldsmith, freshly ex-Sunny Day Real Estate and newly christened Foo Fighter. Opening were Hovercraft, the multi-media project helmed by Beth Liebling (whose husband happened to be Vedder) and the then-fledgling Foo Fighters. The tour was run according to Watt’s ‘we jam econo’ ethos from back in the Minutemen days; there were no fancy tour buses, no blacked-out windows; everyone was in a van, driving themselves to gigs, 31 shows in 42 days, the kind of thing that Watt could do in his sleep. The kids, although they were more famous, needed to keep up.
The tickets were sold as a Mike Watt show, and as the liner notes (written by Michael Azerrad) point out, promoters were under strict instructions to not use Grohl or Vedder to promote the tour. But the jig was up, not because of local promoters trying to sell tickets, but because of fan networks on the internet. The Nirvana, Pearl Jam and even Foo Fighters fan bases were already well-entrenched, and word travelled fast, via Usenet and BBS and listserv. Then MTV showed up to a gig and poked their nose around, and any pretense of subterfuge was gone. Vedder could wear a floppy hat and drum in back of Hovercraft’s video projections all he wanted to, but the remaining shows, all in theaters and clubs, far below Pearl Jam or Nirvana capacities, sold out quickly. This was undoubtedly bittersweet: on the one hand, getting Watt in front of a larger audience was surely part of the point of the parade of stars on the record; on the other, the star power's ability to hang back in the shadows was gone, the Halloween costume (in the case of Vedder, a wig) removed.
But the newfound attention didn’t distract the band from the task at hand: the show. “ring spiel” tour ’95 catches the band about halfway through the outing, and they’re tight and cohesive: for all of the econo ethic of the tour, it’s their hard-earned experience of the musicians that makes them tremendous. As a concert package, it was a great lineup: Hovercraft’s psychedelic shimmer as an amuse-bouche, followed by the explosive energy of the early Foo Fighters, and then the journeyman punk rock stylings of Mr. Watt and his group. The set, as represented here on the live album, was constructed from eight of the 17 songs on the record, along with well-chosen covers of songs by the Minutemen, fIREHOSE, Madonna, Blue Oyster Cult, Daniel Johnston, and others.
The 16-song set veers around punk and country and country-punk, as well as flat-out pop (“Piss-Bottle Man,” improbably enough), and it’s tight and well-sequenced and varied in texture, just like a package-tour set needs to be. Watt had fIREHOSE fans and his credentials from his days in Minutemen were unquestionable, but you don’t assemble a roster of high-powered guests for your record to fade into oblivion. Hopefully, a kid who liked the Lemonheads or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or never got to see Nirvana would come check out the album or the tour, and become a fan of Mike Watt. Or so that was the thought.
The songs from Ball-Hog… absolutely hold their own against the rest of the material. “Forever...One Reporter’s Opinion” maintains the urgency of the Minutemen original, Pat Smear on lead vocals sounding like he wrote it himself. “Chinese Firedrill” pulls straight from the Flying Burrito heart of California folk rock with no irony. “E-Ticket Ride” has a jazz-like energy, with both Grohl and Goldsmith on drums, complementing each other seamlessly as though they’d been playing together forever.
“Against the ’70s” would end up being the most well-known song from the record, because it was a duet with the then-reclusive Eddie Vedder. Later in the set, Vedder has a solo turn where he breaks out what would become a new Pearl Jam song: “Habit” would see the light of day on 1996’s No Code. Stripped down to essentials and anchored by Watt’s fat, fluid notes, “Habit” feels like it belongs here as much as anything else in the set.
The encores are fun: “The Red and the Black” by Blue Oyster Cult, who were kissing cousins on the edge of punk, and an old Watt/Minutemen love, becomes a pneumatic drill when in the hands of these guys, with Grohl taking lead guitar. But the real esoteric number is the Madonna cover, a Ciccone Youth special interpretation of “Secret Garden” from Erotica, sung with love and camp by Pat Smear, powered only by Watt and Goldsmith, not that far away from the original arrangement.
At their best, live albums capture not just a concert performance, but also document the energy and the context around the music. “ring spiel” tour ’95 manages to accomplish all of the above; it’s a nice time capsule if you were there, and it’s a great document to have if you weren’t, commemorating early years of musicians who are now canonic. At one point, Watt admonishes what were undoubtedly a disproportionate amount of amateur crowd-surfers: “Do you like those people rolling all over your heads?” (The crowd responds with a unanimous “No.”) “Then why don’t we give it a rest. Have to have your old man come up here and act like a fucking cop, to tell you that shit,” Watt says, the disgust obvious in his voice. If nothing else, this tour is a tribute to his instincts as a band leader, and a scene elder. He might have had some trepidation on starting over after ending fIREHOSE, but this record proves that he never should have doubted his instincts onstage.


Daniel Lopatin returns with a nostalgic jam session full of proggy synth passages and ’90s alt-rock touches. It leaves a lot to admire but a little less to think about.

Again

Daniel Lopatin is hung up on the past: how it shapes us, and how we shape it in turn; how the songs on the radio of your parents’ minivan can frame your perception of the world, and how your recollections of the same songs can morph and distort over time. As Oneohtrix Point Never, Lopatin has reveled in this slippery process: “My impulse to create often comes from some kind of confusion I have around memories of music,” he recently told The Line of Best Fit, examining how the music he loved (and hated) as a child still informs his present-day self. “I always go to the endless wellspring of my false memories.”
But Lopatin’s attention has gradually shifted away from theories of nostalgia and taste toward what to make of his own unlikely career. In his evolution from an avant-garde sculptor of smartphone psychedelia into a full-fledged film composer, pop producer, and Superbowl musical director, he has sometimes seemed unsure of what to do with the project that first put him on the map over a decade ago. There have been awkward forays into vocal pop, premature career retrospectives, and an ever-accumulating pile of instruments and sounds threatening to crush his music under its weight. While Rifts and R Plus Seven painstakingly constructed worlds where each timbre vividly reinforced Lopatin’s haunting vision of a life spent online, his overstuffed recent albums are likelier to evoke bleary nights of passive doomscrolling.
Oneohtrix Point Never’s latest album, Again, is his least conceptual project yet. Though Lopatin has described the record as an interrogation of his younger self and the roads he might have taken, you wouldn’t necessarily pick up on that from listening to it. He wheels out all his favorite tropes, stirring JUNO-60 arpeggios, choral pads, and MIDI instruments straight from the uncanny valley into a churning soup. The only real developments include a newfound interest in string-laden orchestration and an unexpected turn toward ’90s alt rock—if you’ve ever wondered what Lopatin’s impression of a Smashing Pumpkins ballad might sound like, you can rest easy now. These detours may hint at alternate OPN timelines, but more than anything, Again plays like Lopatin’s jam record: He’s laid out his tools, knows what he likes, and is content to noodle around the playground he’s built for himself. When he brings the requisite energy, it’s still a pleasure to witness him shred. But for all its surreal soundscapes, Again leaves surprisingly little to the imagination.
Compared to the darkly mesmerizing dread of records past, here Lopatin practically kicks off his shoes and settles in for a comfy night on the couch, flipping channels through one distorted display after another. Without a clear framework tying it all together, Lopatin’s logic itself becomes the album’s defining quality. Early highlight “Krumville” seamlessly blossoms from a peaceful guitar loop into static string plucks, and before long Lopatin is leading a strummed slowcore singalong with Xiu Xiu sighing wistfully at his side. Lopatin constantly searches for ways to build his mangled pieces up as grandiosely as possible (he has cited a Rate Your Music list called “Crescendocore” as an influence on the album, channeling his inner Godspeed on a bite-sized scale). “Nightmare Paint” goes through multiple disparate movements in the span of four minutes, phasing between mutant piano grooves, math-rock finger tapping, a proggy synth climax, and a manically accelerating coda. As dissonant as it can all get, Lopatin still finds fun ways to glue disparate shapes together without the whole thing collapsing.
In spite of Lopatin’s sheer technical prowess (“Memories of Music” strikes a particularly sweet spot with its barrage of squiggling keyboard solos and shimmering Cisco hold-music synths), it’s difficult to shake the pervasive sense of randomness writhing through Again. The idea that literally anything could happen in this music has the perverse effect of making Lopatin’s world feel smaller, in the same way that the limitless capabilities of CGI can be less evocative than creative, practical effects deployed with purpose. When he uses AI programs like Riffusion and Jukebox to conjure up melismatic vocal jitters on “The Body Trail” and “On an Axis,” there’s nothing profound in the nondescript mush. As the album’s nearly hour-long runtime drags on, songs like “Locrian Midwest,” “Gray Subviolet,” and the title track meander with a shrug. It’s exploratory music that often doesn’t actually seem to be going anywhere.
OPN albums used to evoke a world ensnared in an endless cycle of remembering itself. Throughout Again, Lopatin attempts to recreate some of those moments from earlier in his discography, but without their melodic poignancy or textural allure, those flashbacks sound less like hypnotic recursions through time and more like files simply being dragged from one folder to another. Even on the supposedly dramatic finale of “A Barely Lit Path,” it’s hard to get swept up in the track’s swirling laser-beam church organs when they ultimately scan as a retread of R Plus Seven’s “Boring Angel.” Lopatin shouldn’t have to reinvent himself with every album (even if he’s proven shockingly adept at doing so), but it’s beginning to feel like he cares less about making sense of his own amorphous memories than just lumping them all into a pile together. Listening to Again, it’s unclear what else Lopatin has to impart about the nature of nostalgia, other than, yes, it is a trap after all.


A handful of tracks recorded during the Indigo sessions suggest an artist more concerned with creating a vibe than conjuring sincere feeling.

Laughing Gas

This year marks a decade since Gemini, the self-recorded debut that catapulted Virginia Tech senior Jack Tatum into contemporary dream pop canon. As his project Wild Nothing took off, Tatum’s music drew as many comparisons to 4AD royalty like the Cocteau Twins as it did to contemporaries like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Over time, as Tatum gathered confidence, Wild Nothing’s sound became glossier, steering away from lo-fi guitars to embrace an exactingly produced vision of chillwave. With each subsequent release, the ethereal haze gradually cleared, putting Tatum’s wistful melodies and insubstantial lyricism in clearer view. By 2018’s Indigo, he seemed so focused on aesthetics that any potential for emotional connection withered. The new Laughing Gas EP—a handful of tracks recorded during the Indigo sessions—suggest an artist more concerned with creating a vibe than conjuring sincere feeling.
It’s Tatum’s habit to follow each full-length album with a shorter collection of songs: Gemini outtakes appeared on the Golden Haze EP, while 2013’s Nocturne was followed by the Empty Estate EP. Ideally, this pattern of alternating full albums and EPs of leftovers would offer insight into his creative process, or at least some memorable deep cuts. But Laughing Gas suffers from the same issues as its predecessor without introducing any new ideas. Even Tatum’s usually enjoyable melodies feel bloodless. The psychedelic chug of “Sleight of Hand” too closely approximates Tame Impala’s “Let It Happen.” Closer “The World Is a Hungry Place” would make a passably lively B-side; still, it sounds like something Tatum could’ve conjured in his sleep.
By far the strongest moment here is “Blue Wings,” first released as a standalone single more than a year ago. Driven by bass arpeggios that culminate in a massive, shimmering chorus, the song feels like it could’ve been demoed in the Nocturne days. And there’s the rub: However much Tatum might begrudge the fact, Wild Nothing is still synonymous with the warm nostalgia those early albums exuded. No amount of busy synth squiggles or dry drum loops can clear enough space to forge your own daydreams. The harder Tatum tries to snap back to reality, the further he lands from the mark.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This is Angel Deradoorian's debut solo album, but she played bass and sang in Dave Longstreth's Dirty Projectors in the Bitte Orca years, and she's one third of Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, the most recent side project of Animal Collective's Dave Portner. Her debut album is full of unusual juxtapositions, but her voice is the thread that holds it all together, and once the album has finished, it's her voice you remember most.

Deradoorian: The Expanding Flower Planet

The Expanding Flower Planet

Angel Deradoorian's debut album is full of unusual juxtapositions: '60s psych and Georgian polyphony; classical minimalism and laser-show maximalism; dulcimer and church organ. But her voice is the thread that holds it all together, and once the album has finished, tied off with a ribbon of wailing trombone, it's her voice you remember most. Crystalline and unerring in pitch, it dominates the album, both solo and in multi-tracked close harmonies that radiate an eerie glow, like pyrite glinting through fog. It's not hard to imagine that an a capella version of this album would be captivating all on its own.
This is Deradoorian's debut solo album, but she has played a key role in a number of arty, ambitious indie rock projects: She played bass and sang in Dave Longstreth's Dirty Projectors in the Bitte Orca years, and she's one third of Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, the most recent side project of Animal Collective's Dave Portner. As a singer, she's also worked with Vampire Weekend, Charli XCX, Flying Lotus, U2, and Matmos, a list that suggests an unusually robust  versatility. She began releasing her own music in 2009, with the Mind Raft EP, but the new album represents a quantum leap in complexity and ambition. The Expanding Flower Planet feels like an album full of trap doors, where a single, unexpected sound can deposit you into new worlds.
Playing the bulk of the music herself, with help from two drummers and a handful of backup vocalists, Deradoorian explores krautrock rhythms, microtonal tunings, and various Eastern scales, including those of her Armenian heritage. And she lets those scales dictate a melodic line that takes her far away from the hidebound formula of indie's usual four-bar chord changes. "A Beautiful Woman" begins as a garage-soul rave-up and then explodes into the eerie, cascading harmonies of the Black Sea region; "Your Creator" stacks ghostly chords to the heavens and trips up and down their intervals, a dizzying game of chutes and ladders.
The album's title comes from a Chinese mandala tapestry that hung in Deradoorian's studio, and, accordingly, she wrestles with big, metaphysical themes: elemental forces, catacombs and mosaics, hearts and eyes, clutching and binding, love and knowledge, and above all, oneness. The theme of self-actualization runs from the first song's daily affirmations ("Beautiful woman/ You're the one I wanna be") to the last song's healing mantra ("Love/ Grow/ Love… Grow grow grow grow grow"). But the focus is rarely narrative; the lyrics tend to operate like koans, spells, small tokens supercharged with symbolic power. The quest for knowledge drives it all. "How do you know?/ Who can tell the truth?" asks "DarkLord". In the title song she sings, "We all know much more than we really think we know," and in "Grow", that idea becomes a question:" How do we learn so we can all teach?"
And then there's "Komodo", probably the only song you'll hear this year that seems at least nominally to be about a Komodo dragon attack ("Komodo coming through/ Run for your lives/ Run for the hills/ Don't close your eyes"). It contains some of the album's most vivid lyrics, particularly in a cooing chorus whose dulcet tone contradicts its stark imagery ("Drone/ Between the grass/ The blades are rough/ Your metal skin/ Protects your hunt/ Death is in your clutch"). Despite this reptilian foray, though, the album's wide-angled macro perspective suggests that Deradoorian's true spirit animal is likelier to be a hawk or an eagle.
There is an aching sense of space in her music: with her soaring vocals leading the way, her arrangements begin to suggest patchworks of fields and freeways and mountains and beaches as seen from above. "I love the beauty of the state, but there's a whole other aspect of it that I struggle with," she told Self-Titled magazine of her attempt to come to grips with California's sprawl. As she wends her unpredictable way up and away, through strange intros and outros and across mantra-like choruses and far above bridges to nowhere, she offers a bird's-eye view of a landscape unlike any other, a place at once familiar, as though half-remembered from a dream, and spellbindingly alien.


This short EP is the proper solo debut from XL Recordings boss Richard Russell. Like all of his work, though, Russell is in the background, more an orchestrator than a frontman.

Everything Is Recorded: Close but Not Quite EP

Close but Not Quite EP

After 28 years in business, XL Recordings occupies an enviable place in the hierarchy of record labels. Nominally, it’s an independent, but it has the punching power of a major—able to devote time and attention to artists big and small. Over the last three decades, XL’s releases have dictated sizable shifts in style and taste in music across the world, be it with enigmas like Jai Paul or megastars like Vampire Weekend or M.I.A.. Behind all this was Richard Russell, who joined the company as an A&R scout shortly after XL started in 1989. At XL, he helped discover Adele and has produced records for Gil Scott-Heron. Undeniably, Russell is one of the music industry’s most powerful players, with a rolodex that few can probably match.
But before he got wrapped up in the business of running a label, Russell had a budding career as a rave DJ and producer. He was one-half of the group Kicks Like a Mule (with XL co-founder Nick Halkes) and had a minor radio hit called “The Bouncer.” These last few years, however, Russell has stepped away from the daily operations of running XL and returned to his passion of making his own music. Released under the moniker Everything Is Recorded, the compact five-song EP Close but Not Quite serves as Russell’s proper debut as a musician.
Though, Russell, like in almost all of his work, is in the background of this music—an orchestrator rather than a frontman. For four of the tracks, he’s recruited vocalists to sing over his productions, while the closing track is a short instrumental. The EP is barely over 16-minutes long, and each of its tracks touches on a different genre, encapsulating Motown soul, grime, garage, UK bass, and more. Given that, Close but Not Quite is more of a sampler—a tasting menu of what Russell could possibly do in a larger project.
This is immediately apparent in how far apart the EP’s best song, its title-track and anchor featuring Sampha, differs from everything else on it. The song is built around a sample of Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 song “The Makings of You,” which Russell showed Sampha in a studio session, noting their falsettos were quite similar. The production from Russell bears a light touch—just featherweight piano chords, soft drums, and handclaps, tied together by winsome flourishes of colorful strings. Sampha and Russell deliver a ghostly duet that’s both uplifting and filled with ennui, as the song discusses how it is impossible to find the words to describe how one feels at any one moment.
The following track, “Early This Morning,” is a kind of slow, old-school grime track with British rapper Giggs. It’s a quick sea change from “Close but Not Quite,” with its blasts of sulfurous horns and blown out percussion. This song, too, is carved around a vocal sample: Russell’s production for Gil Scott-Heron’s “Me and the Devil,” a guttural baritone that is anything but relaxing. It’s insistent and sometimes haunting, though Giggs’ rapping is too clumsy to mesh with Scott-Heron. (It’s only a little funny when Giggs raps, “Got the coldest lyrics up in the folder/And got the cognac mixing up with the cola,” shortly after Scott-Heron talks about opening up the door to the devil.)
In fact, after “Close but Not Quite,” the EP never returns to its soulful start—making those blissful opening minutes seem like a red herring. Following “Early This Morning” is “Washed Up on the Shore” with Warren Ellis and Nigerian-born songwriter Obongjayar, which is equally ominous—laying on the hellfire and brimstone vibe thick. “D’elusion” is a collaboration with newcomers Infinite and Mela Murder, as well as Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, and it’s a rather crowded hodgepodge of electro-driven R&B and UK bass. Reprieve arrives with “The Rhythm of Life and Death,” the closing instrumental collage, which mixes together churning static, pianos, and cold drums. By the time you reach the end of this short collection, you’ll be hard pressed to find a single cohesive vision. Rather, it presents many possible records that it could have been, never settling into one comfortable mood.


On their seventh album, the Decemberists sound like a polite, modern folk rock band with only a touch of the usual antiquity. They seem wrapped up in themselves, wistful and mature, careful not to become caricatures while also trying to push their sound forward.

The Decemberists: What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World

The Decemberists have always aimed their sights at bookish fans who wanted music to be significant, who were interested in legends and myths and theatre and thesauruses. Instead of feeling good in a Decemberists song, there was "a rush of ripe élan," and it wasn’t just seeing some girls over there, it was "15 lithesome maidens lay along in their bower." The vellum-bound folios of Colin Meloy’s songs are full of heightened verse that make them fun in the same way that Kate Bush singing about Heathcliff and Cathy, or Peter Gabriel’s cape from "Watcher of the Skies", or swirling wine around in a glass is fun. There’s so much joy, however affected, in Meloy’s language: It’s camp for fans of Hawthorne.
The Decemberists also have a habit of over-correcting. The tripartite song suite on 2006’s The Crane Wife was blown out of proportion into an exhausting prog opus on The Hazards of Love in 2009. Then they bounced back in an exercise in restraint with their previous album, the ambling and dusty The King Is Dead. It was a necessary addition to the band’s canon, and a concept album in so far as it was proof that they could just write a few songs without culling themes from Elizabethan texts or Japanese folk tales. On their seventh LP, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, they balance out and cruise down the middle of the road, sounding more like a polite, modern folk rock band with only a touch of antiquity here and there. It’s a charming but predictable album aimed at the faithful, but provides few if any new tracks that measure up to those in their back catalog.
Part of what made their first several albums so entertaining was both that unique counterpoint and, well, they were kinda fun. There was a joie de vivre in the way Meloy sang "joie de vivre" on his first album in his signature voice that turned every simple vowel into a triphthong. Lovesick soldiers, chimbly sweeps, lovers’ suicide, a mom whoring herself out for money to a ship of sailors: It was nothing if not entertaining.
Now the Decemberists seem wrapped up in themselves, wistful and mature, careful not to become caricatures while also trying to push their sound forward. The one new impulse they find here is meta songwriting. In some world it might be fun to hear a band sing about how they "had to change some" to keep those bookish fans and put in a cute line about selling out for Axe shampoo, but turns out it’s quite a bit more grating than the errant Victorian quirk. That’s how the album opens, "The Singer Addresses His Audience", with another kind of cuteness and it’s hardly any fun at all.
The self-reflexive angle comes up again on "Anti-Summersong", a reference to their "Summersong" from The Crane Wife. "I’m not going on just to sing another sing-a-long, suicide song," Meloy sings, a flippant but not entirely serious jibe at his past. The tune is orchestrated like a traditional Stephen Foster folk tune, with square fiddle lines, a little banjo, a plucked acoustic guitar, and a true Americana harmonica solo. It’s more of the same roots feel they put to work on The King Is Dead, but everything feels a little paler and undercooked. The band’s live-tracking and Meloy’s plea to just move on from his past attempt to break new ground, but outside of a few lite rafter shakers, so much of what may pass for tuneful songwriting here is mostly just pleasant and formless outlines of songs.
But they had to change, and Meloy doesn’t want to sing about lovers' suicide pacts anymore, so we get Meloy the dreamer, Meloy the ponderous, Meloy the contemplative. Some tracks are more autobiographical, like the literally effortless "Lake Song", recalling a snapshot of lakeside love when Meloy was 17 and "terminally fey." The only anchor to its saccharine lines ("You were full and sweet as honeydew") is an acoustic guitar strumming in a rhythm that was perfected by kids in college dorm rooms years ago. It’s followed immediately by "Till the Water's All Long Gone", a narrative-based tune that wanders around in 6/8 and is quite possibly about protecting the fountain of youth from a tribe of hill folk.
Those big sing-a-longs of the past now scan more power pop and less sea shanty. "Make You Better" might as well be the New Pornographers, especially with the use of Kelly Hogan and Rachel Flotard as back-up vocalists, who add beautiful harmonies at the climax. The band has never lacked the musical bona fides to write a great anthem. And here it’s not a macabre, smirking tale about military wives or some Spanish monarch, but a song about how prescribing love is by no means a way to fix our own problems. You start to see Meloy himself more than ever, and it’s at once refreshing and a little unsettling how much he still hides behind poeticism.
But the failure of this album, in addition to being overlong and under-ambitious, is the idea that maturity should beget lazy, hammock songs. Some songs were written as long as four years ago, just after The King Is Dead. There's pleasure in feeling time pass on the album, but it passes so slowly, and at some points, interminably. The pro forma folk-rock of the entire thing is a slog. Of course the marks of the Decemberists are still there: A nod to Tennyson ("Cavalry Captain"), a lazy obsession with style (for things are both ill- and misbegotten), a healthy vocabulary (prevaricate, sibylline, eidolon), and the cheeky and bawdy song about oral sex ("Philomena"). But gone is the wild-eyed, fearless, nerdy-ass band who once said "fuck it we’re gonna do a 10-minute song about a revenge-murder inside whale." To borrow a theme from the album, this is the part of the the Decemberists’ story where you skim to the next chapter.


With the passing of Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, Iggy returns to being a solo artist, issuing an LP he claims "comes dangerously near jazz."

Préliminaires

It's hard not to root for Iggy Pop. At the very least, his initial tenure with the Stooges earned him more than his share of bricks in the modern rock foundation. Beyond that, his very survival in the face of untold self-destruction merits a few slaps on the back, too, and his first two solo albums, recorded with the help of buddy and benefactor David Bowie, remain classics in their own right. Since then, however, there's hardly been an Iggy Pop record worth listening to more than once, if that, and sadly that includes the unlikely Stooges reunion record, The Weirdness. With the untimely passing of Stooges guitarist Ron Asheton, that reunion unfortunately becomes a one-off, and sends Iggy back to wandering the wilderness as a solo artist.
Of course, given his all-over-the-place career, there's no reason to believe Iggy wouldn't have made Préliminaires, the follow-up to The Weirdness and the first Iggy Pop solo disc since 2003's Skull Ring, anyway. Still, Préliminaires comes as a sharp left turn: Inspired by The Possibility of an Island by blithely provocative French novelist (and occasional filmmaker and musician) Michel Houellebecq, Préliminaires "comes dangerously near jazz," Pop claims in the press notes, clearly forgetting, like everyone else, that he recorded some of the shitty Avenue B with Medeski, Martin & Wood. But in truth Préliminaires is less jazz than Iggy Pop as Euro-pop, á la Leonard Cohen circa I'm Your Man, crooning over a bed of mostly mushy and melancholy electronics and beats.
Préliminaires was recorded largely with collaborator Hal Cragin, who may as well be Hal Wilner for all the satisfaction he takes in tossing Iggy in relatively unfamiliar waters. But Pop makes the most of his new environment to expand his palette and his palate in one fell swoop. Heck, the disc even begins with Iggy mumbling Joseph Kosma and Jacques Prévert's "Les Feuilles Mortes"-- in French!-- ceding the microphone for a swooning smooth sax solo, about the last thing anyone would have expected from him, but yet further proof that the singer is not the dum dum boy people have always made him out to be.
Recasting himself as a Gallic crooner isn't necessarily a smart move, granted, but it is audacious, and amidst the drifting ennui Iggy demonstrates his trademark nihilism does translate even distantly removed from his caveman roots. "It's nice to be dead/ It's nice to be underground/ Free of the ugly sounds of life," intones Pop on "Nice to Be Dead", one of the more memorable tracks on the album, and also one of the few that veers closer to rock than easy listening. The sentiment's a fine epigraph for a singer several lives beyond his allotted nine but clearly comfortable where's he landed late in his career. Plus, even if the music rarely rises to such rousing heights elsewhere, Iggy's lyrical passenger is still clearly riding through the city's backsides, taking notes.
Elsewhere Iggy contemplates death by the sea ("Spanish Coast"), covers Jobim ("How Insensitive"), slops out some existential blues ("He's Dead/She's Alive"), and goes faux disco with the blasé irony of "Party Time". "It's party time," he grumbles, "and I smell slime/ The stupid people/ Make me evil." It's a misanthropic sentiment worthy of the Stooges in their prime, but here Iggy sounds beaten, the lyrics revealing his innermost thoughts even as his body goes through the motions.
"Like Daniel, [The Possibility of an Island's] protagonist, I too have grown weary of a career as an entertainer, and I wish for a new life," revealed Iggy Pop in a statement perhaps not out of character for a highly physical (and likely perpetually sore) rock star in his sixties. Weary it (and he) does sound here, beaten, even bored, if not outright boring. But by being boring on purpose, Iggy ironically proves himself oddly more compelling than on his many past accidents. If it's not an album for the ages so much as for the aged, at least it's one you may want to hold on to a bit and give another shot when you get closer to where Iggy's at himself right now.


Sorrowful lyrics against spirited playing create a magical crux on the experimental singer-songwriter’s latest, a powerfully maternal and spiritually yearning collection of dark folk music.

Chasing an Illusion

There’s plenty of darkness on Larkin Grimm’s Chasing an Illusion, but more than ever, she leans toward the light. On her first release since 2012’s Soul Retrieval, the experimental singer-songwriter deepens the drones and trances she’s toyed with over her decade-plus career. Grimm frees herself to more fully embrace her spiritual yearning, all while tempering the transcendental edges of her obsidian music with the acknowledgment that joy and tranquility, while worth pursuing, can be fleeting and complicated when sharing your reality with other flawed human beings.
Joined by a full cast of musicians that includes longtime David Bowie producer Tony Visconti on bass, Grimm softens the qualities that used to get her music filed squarely under freak-folk. There’s less surface quirk, fewer references to nature, and more lush and expansive instrumentation. Even her voice sounds different: more open, more relaxed. Instead of the sharp curls that embroidered albums like 2007’s The Last Tree or 2009’s Parplar, she issues long, breathy syllables, often multitracking her vocals and scattering her presence across the album’s field of sound. On the lovely, droning “Fear Transforms into Love (Journey in Turiyasangitananda),” she pronounces the word “physically” as Björk might, savoring every percussive consonant. Between ruptures of harpsichord, she sings as if from across a quarry, eager to be heard from a wide, damp distance.
Though much of Grimm’s back catalog comprises love songs—beautiful, terrifying love songs that explore the carnal aspects of human desire—Chasing an Illusion addresses a kind of love heard less often in pop music. She sings from her position as a mother, full of hope and fear for her child. “The hardest thing I’ve done in my life/Is just keeping you alive,” she sings on “Keeping You Alive.” “You throw your body into ocean waves/Expecting them to catch you like I would/I can’t always break your fall/Sometimes I can’t be there at all.” It’s a stirring note of apology as she laments her inability to be the whole world to the person she loves most. On “A Perfect World,” she imagines just that for her child, an accepting paradise “where you can be happy and free.” Again, the song feels ringed with apology: We’re not in that perfect world, and teaching a child to survive a violent one ranks among the more painful challenges of parenthood.
On multiple tracks, Grimm overlays her lyrical content onto tonally contradictory accompaniment. “I Don’t Believe,” written as a love song to abuse survivors, counts among the album’s most soothing tracks. Grimm repeats the title over and over like a mantra or a lullaby, lulling herself into a trance even as she’s wishing death upon both herself and her tormentor. Later, the album’s free-form closing title track sees Grimm howling the stanza, “My heart is empty/My soul is empty too/I feel dead inside/Don’t you?” Behind her, her band breaks into one of the most upbeat sequences on the whole album, like they’ve finally found their groove and started to cut loose. Grimm’s vocals turn wordless, and she lets collaborator Margaret Morris have the final spoken word: “And how do we go about forgiving?”
These paradoxical moments of sorrowful lyrics against spirited playing make up the crux of the magic Grimm weaves on Chasing an Illusion. Pain can be paralyzing, but it can also level the ground for something new to grow. Pain and the healing that follows it can turn us loose. In Grimm’s world, the most important thing a person can be is free.


On his new EP, Danish electronic artist Loke Rahbek creates a landscape of yearning choral pads and dubby loneliness, nodding at themes of love and despair.

Finding People EP

Though it has roots in confrontational noise, Loke Rahbek’s project Croatian Amor has spent the last four years with love on the brain. Releases like 2013’s *The World *function as a sort of ultra-romantic library music, nodding towards grand themes of tragic devotion, heartbreak, and sacrifice without committing to specifics. The action is always off screen, the music an inscrutable cypher. You sense it all comes together in Rahbek’s brain, the project soundtracking his own private film. But last year’s Love Means Taking Action pushed past the patina of lovely haziness and got into the nitty gritty details. Jarring cut up techniques, breathy vocal samples, and disquieting de-tunings fleshed out a haunted, dreary, and stressed worldview. Love is happening, but only over spotty internet connections or in dank rooms, with a murmuring backdrop of the news cycle, the surveillance state, and frayed economies.
Finding People, the new four-song EP on Rahbek’s own Posh Isolation label, goes even farther in this direction. The record is notably more digital, more computer-based, than its predecessors, and it glitches and stutters its way through a landscape of yearning choral pads, dubby loneliness, snatches of video game dialogue. If there’s a love story here, it’s again nested within a larger tale of worldwide despair. The collage of voices on “Sky Walkers” smears together into an ephemeral chorus whose collective utterings, whisperings, and monologues point to a larger meaning. “You’re gonna die… don’t shoot… help us… One life ends, another begins,” it goes, then the sound of panting and running. “You always have to wake up.”
If this sounds familiar, well, it is. Rahbek owes a clear debt to Burial on Finding People, though to his credit, it’s not a direct copy. His melodic sensibility twists into more nervous and aggressive contours, and the locales are more continent-hopping, more transient. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to imagine the grandiose loner-isms of “Keepers” or Khalil’s autotuned R&B crooning on the title track without “In McDonalds,” “Stolen Dog” or “Gutted.” It’s all there: the leaden mood, the self-aggrandizing first-person-shooter narratives, the rainy ambience of the city, fragments of memory swimming around in the background. It’s the sound of losing yourself in another world when the one you live in has too much sorrow to bear.
Each of these four pieces holds up well enough on their own merits, with “Keepers” and “Breathe Into Me” standing out in particular. The former washes over you with an assured drama, while the later ups the menace with a ghostly melody and churning bottom end. As a whole, though, Finding People is slight. The statement that Rahbek seems to be trying to make comes off more as a gesture. Any or all of these tracks would work fantastically on an album, sandwiched between more definitive songs, but taken as a group they coast through moodiness without ever landing on something more substantial. It’s the sound of an artist in transition, taking a few strident steps forward into new territory, then pulling back a few to more comfortable footing. There’s a vibe, but no story. If Love Means Taking Action showed us the scope of Rahbek’s vision, Finding People proves he’s not done searching.


The massive lite-EDM duo the Chainsmokers portray themselves as hilariously repugnant caricatures, and on C**ollage, they paint a photorealist portrait of their manspread over the charts.

Collage

Bret Easton Ellis recently said if he were to rewrite American Psycho for modern times, he’d change the setting from late-’80s New York to today’s Silicon Valley, and his psychotic anti-hero Patrick Bateman would haunt the offices of a startup. In this updated version, Bateman probably spends his weekends cruising through Northern California in his Tesla Roadster for getaways to Napa, and presumably makes regular trips to Burning Man. As he drives his sports car with wanton abandon, the speakers rumbling with bass, I like to imagine he’s listening to the lite-EDM duo the Chainsmokers. On some balmy day somewhere in the Valley, he has perhaps downloaded their latest release, Collage EP, onto his smartphone to enjoy at his leisure. And he is listening to them not only because everyone in the country is (they’ve dominated the Billboard chart this year with three songs in the top 10, each for multiple weeks on end), but because the DJs Drew Taggart and Alex Pall, on a fundamental level, would be his people: bros in the prime of life, and caricatures of society’s most reviled.
If charts are the most reliable reflection of who the most powerful artists in the country are, the Chainsmokers are without a doubt kings of the hill. Yet, unlike any of their peers, even in the world of festival-ready EDM, Pall and Taggart have lent their full-throated support to the tech-bro lifestyle and all its connotations. They speak in the garbled lingo of “iterating” and “disrupting” culture. They preview bits and pieces of songs on Snapchat, and use Hype Machine as a market research tool to hone in on an audience. They wonder aloud about the “return-on-investment” and “reach” their relationship with the press warrants. When networking with Calvin Harris, they say they “basically brain-raped him” with their inquiries and curiosity.
Yet, they don’t want you to forget they are red-blooded males. As Pall so lovably admits: “Even before success, pussy was number one.” Taggart famously beefed with Lady Gaga and Halsey on Twitter, unleashing a casual flurry of misogyny in his wake (later claiming he was hacked). On their website, a bio provided by them proudly reads the Chainsmokers are “17.34 combined inches” (the measurement of their penises measured from tip to tip). Taggart lists “Entourage”’s manic Ari Gold as an inspiration, but they also want to be seen as “curators,” “creators,” and “nerds.”
All of this is to say, they have painted themselves as hilariously repugnant and horribly fascinating all at once. Moral turpitude and coarse language withstanding, they are still massively popular, and they themselves are not on trial—the music they make is. With Collage, they paint a photorealist portrait of their manspread over the charts.
Collage conveniently collects the group’s biggest from the year, and each of these songs works on a finely tuned algorithm. The recipe for a Chainsmokers song is basically two parts airy hook, one part lilting female vocal, and a few dashes of saccharine melancholy and sugary synths. Aesthetically they are close cousins to Calvin Harris’ poptronica and Kygo’s soporific trop-house, but their song structure borrows from forebears like Deadmau5 and Avicii. They’ll still use drops, but they have softened the edge of that serotonin spike by highlighting choruses and melody in pastel color. It makes their music instantly familiar and malleable, and thus radio-friendly.
Take “Closer,” for example, their biggest song and a duet between Drew Taggart and the alt-pop singer Halsey. The song derives its power from a sleek and simple chord progression that mirrors the song’s chorus (“We ain’t never getting older”), and borrows heavily from the Fray’s mid-2000s soft-banger “Over My Head.” The chord progression reinforces the chorus, as if it were humming behind Taggart in unison. The song’s narrative is relatable and anthemic but intimate-sounding: A man meets an ex at a party, hooks up, but then remembers why he hated her in the first place. The millennial populism of the lyrics (“Stay and play that Blink-182 song/That we beat to death in Tucson, okay”) make the track feel manically personal. Add in a little bit of sneering class resentment and conspicuous consumption (“So, baby, pull me closer/In the backseat of your Rover/That I know you can’t afford”) and you’ve got a giant hit on your hands. It’s undeniable—powerfully catchy and easy to whistle, with a light veneer of sad-boy sweetness covering EDM’s biting aggression.
Elsewhere they are more faceless, feeding off of the energy that a series of female vocalists gives to their tracks. Alex Pall has said that his main function in the group is as A&R, booking guests for individual songs and tailoring each one to fit a different demographic. With Daya, they crudely masquerade as the xx in “Don’t Let Me Down,” and (in their parlance) put forward “LMFAO with better clothes” in “Inside Out” (featuring Charlee). In each case, they find a different route to the reptilian brain, stripping back the McMansion architecture of an EDM song and redecorating with items procured from Anthropologie.
Perhaps, what is most interesting about the Chainsmokers is the cynicism of their approach. Their music is essentially an accretion of trends, a packet of market research. EDM’s boom-and-bust cycle has come to an end, and they’ve weathered the drought, presenting themselves as part of a lovably hateable lifestyle brand that grips the nation’s young and powerful. One thing about cynics is they tend to survive, and Chainsmokers seem engineered above all for survival.