Alternating between ruthless hardcore punk and melodic post-hardcore, the Los Angeles band seek emotional truth that still rips.

Militarie Gun: All Roads Lead to the Gun (Deluxe)

All Roads Lead to the Gun (Deluxe)

When the pandemic forced Seattle powerviolence band Regional Justice Center to cancel tour plans, it marked 28-year-old Ian Shelton’s first break from the road since age 17. He found solace in daily songwriting sessions where he worked on untangling his pent-up vulnerabilities, a process that birthed his new project, Militarie Gun. “I had to let my subconscious bring it out of me,” he later explained. After debuting with the 2020 solo EP My Life Is Over, Militarie Gun released a pair of EPs in 2021 that transformed them into a five-piece post-hardcore band. Relentless touring opening for acts like Touché Amoré and Fiddlehead soon landed them a record deal with Loma Vista. On All Roads Lead to the Gun (Deluxe), which repackages last year’s dual EPs along with four new songs, Militarie Gun take stock of their whirlwind origin and showcase why their subtle brand of self-help is so much fun.
Militarie Gun alternate between ruthless hardcore punk and the alt-rock undercurrent of post-hardcore, a logical outcome of the members’ previous bands. Regional Justice Center delivered tireless, aggressive testimony to the need for prison reform: Shelton handled vocals and drums while his incarcerated brother, Max, penned lyrics from behind bars. Militarie Gun guitarist Nick Cogan splits his time in Drug Church, the invigorating post-hardcore band with an unapologetic approach to controversial topics. Rounding out the lineup are guitarist William Acuña, bassist Max Epstein, and drummer Vince Nguyen, who indulge in playful alt-rock licks (“Fell on My Head”), pogo-worthy drumming (“Big Disappointment”), and blistering post-punk attacks (“Disposable Plastic Trash”). No matter how scratchy Shelton’s scream, Militarie Gun always lead with emotive melodies. It’s what allows him to improvise lyrics about spite, relationship missteps, and newfound empathy for his parents, unleashing passionate real-time confessions while the band streamlines his emotion into concentrated, memorable hooks.
The four new songs tacked onto the deluxe release further demonstrate Militarie Gun’s emotional range. “Let Me Be Normal” is a burst of distorted power-pop about embracing adulthood, college-radio bait fit for the 1990s or its Gen-Z revival. The remaining tracks are unexpected collaborations: “Can’t Get None” is a spacious noise-pop number featuring vocalist DeeDee from Mississippi punks MSPAINT; “I Can’t Stand Busy People” and “Pull It Out” are comparatively mellow indie rock jaunts, with acoustic guitar strums and sweet vocal harmonies from Giles Roy and Heather Black of Vancouver band Woolworm. The trip from Militarie Gun’s typically heavy sound to these lighter ventures produces mild whiplash, but the new songs speak to the band’s skill at integrating a worthwhile hook to the vehicle best suited to carry it, like the wistful chord progression that makes “Don’t Pick Up the Phone” a tender affair.
Not even Militarie Gun can escape the lure of their own hooks. During moments without lyrics, Shelton sings along by uttering a husky grunt, an “oof oof” that sounds like a dog warning off a passing stranger. It’s an idiosyncrasy akin to a rapper’s favorite ad-lib, like Cardi B’s “okurrr” or RZA’s “bong bong,” and once you notice it, you start to hear it everywhere. When Shelton lets loose another “oof oof” during “Can’t Get None” or the bridge in “Ain’t No Flowers,” you can imagine his cheeks turning red from trying to hold it in. It’s a primordial feeling that any music fan with a favorite karaoke spot knows firsthand.
As he stared down his 30th birthday, Shelton penned lyrics that occasionally sound like unsolicited advice from a hardcore veteran: “Don’t pick up the phone when you’re on drugs”; “They say be grateful for what they give to you”; “This punk shit needs to pay, man.” These aren’t reprimands, though, but a pact with himself: After logging more than a decade in a scene outwardly defined by fortitude, masculinity, and punk ideologies, Shelton is level-headed enough to recognize it’s not the sturdiest career ladder. “When it ceases being fun, run,” he sings on the title track. Fortunately it’s more paranoia than prophecy: All Roads Lead to the Gun (Deluxe) is both a personal space for Shelton to unpack his self-doubt and an opportunity for the rest of us to revel in melodic post-hardcore done right.


For Salutations, Conor Oberst rearranged songs from 2016’s Ruminations with a full band and shuffled, expanded tracklist. It’s one of his most demanding albums, and also one of his least ambitious.

Salutations

Last year’s Ruminations was like no Conor Oberst album before it, and hopefully, none to come. Performed entirely solo, released with little fanfare and bearing a distressing, cabin-fever ambience, it offered the first and final word on a once-unspeakably rough time in his life. Ruminations was Oberst’s strongest record in years, but no one would want him to make it a second time. Less than six months later, Salutations is an even more curious move. Oberst re-recorded all 10 songs with a full band and a host of guests, added seven new ones and hit shuffle—a decision that drags Salutations down and bring its predecessor along with it.
After a series of lesser-loved guises—inscrutable mystic, folk-rock yeoman—Oberst has found a more interesting and sustainable point of view. A kind way of putting it would be “world-weary raconteur.” Perhaps a more accurate way would be “kind of an asshole.” The prospect of hearing another dude do this for about 70 minutes is a hard sell at a time when Father John Misty, Drake, Mark Kozelek, and Future have released approximately 9 hours of music in the past year that wearily postulates from a position of privilege on their dissatisfaction with sex, drugs, and everyone outside of their immediate circle. The difference here is that Oberst only hops on a pedestal for the purpose of knocking himself down.
In his post-poster boy phase, Oberst is no longer trapped by expectation or myth; he can play his past personas against each other. “Afterthought” and “Overdue” respectively caricature the roles he played on his 2005 diptych of protest song and smack-addled narcolepsy, presenting the narrator as someone for whom extreme politics and heroin are just another fix. On the opener “Too Late to Fixate,” he half-asses his way through transcendental meditation only to find serenity in the luxuries of a hotel feather bed and a mistress to lay upon it: “You know I don’t mind the money/It beats betting on sports/And though it might get expensive/It’s cheaper than divorce.”
These aren’t new topics for Oberst, but he’s never been this flat-out funny, providing a necessarily salty and bitter edge as he reverts back to the tasteful roots rock that has defined his past decade. This approach reflects of Oberst’s status as a Nonesuch recording artist who hangs out with the Felice Brothers and Dawes, but it also shows the dividing line between “crowd pleaser” and “cult builder.” Though Ruminations was the inverse of the fire-breathing agitpop of his band Desaparecidos’ 2015 LP Payola, both serve as proof of the extreme measures necessary to steer Oberst away from the middle of the road—where Salutations spends well over an hour.
The most rewarding records of this length carry a mutual assumption of risk. Listeners will indulge the occasional faceplant as long as the artist is making an attempt to reach new personal heights. Though Salutations is one of Oberst’s most demanding albums, it’s also one of his least ambitious, even before taking these new arrangements into account. The righteous indignation of “You All Loved Him Once” was devastating when it was Oberst alone; recast now as “Oberst and the Felice Brothers against the world,” it’s less believable. “Counting Sheep” dulls its edge in the most literal way imaginable: On Ruminations, Oberst mused on the death of two local youths, hoping it was both slow and painful while censoring out their names. He actually reveals them here, but changes the lyric to “Hope it was quick, hope it was peaceful.”
Even if *Ruminations *is now rendered a collection of demos, it was unquestionably an album—thematically and sonically coherent and perfectly sequenced. Salutations muddles that. On Ruminations, “You All Loved Him Once” was the penultimate track, settling scores. And it led into “Till St. Dymphna Kicks Us Out,” which implored those who stuck around to forget old memories and make new ones. The latter is now stuck right in the middle of Salutations and this diminishes the song’s effect. (Just imagine if Oberst had lost his nerve in 2005 and recorded the caustic electro-pop of Digital Ash as folk songs and slapped them onto I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning.) From a songwriting standpoint, Salutations is an undeniable triumph—for people who haven’t heard Ruminations yet. If they exist, I envy them.


Live at the 12 Bar

During Bert Jansch's five-decade career, he released records where nothing seemed out of place. The folk singer, who died in 2011, often wrestled with the torment of young lovers and restless souls in his lyrics, but those worries came in near-perfect packages, in which the blues and intercontinental folk, jazz, and pop moved together with riverine fluidity. When a New Weird America contingent led by Devendra Banhart and Noah Georgeson worked to revive his career with the The Black Swan LP in 2006, it made sense; he and his band, Pentangle, were godheads for pockets of that scene. It was, however, an odd fit, since Jansch, even as the young man who had made Birthday Blues or It Don’t Bother Me 40 years earlier, never seemed one for letting loose and getting wild. There was very little freak in his folk.
Live at the 12 Bar—a 16-song set from 1996 that Earth Recordings has resurrected for the launch of an extensive series of Jansch reissues—is not some unbridled onstage affair. An intimate solo show, Jansch plays without much pause for about an hour, laughing at himself when he doesn’t leave the stage ahead of the encore. The sound of his amplified acoustic guitar is thin and modest, and his voice ranges from furtive murmur to broad-shouldered bellow. He speaks softly to the audience, and he doesn’t indulge in the great between-song yarns endemic to such releases.
You do, though, get a sense of Jansch’s modest personality, wry wit, and self-effacing charm. He momentarily forgets song titles and awkwardly stumbles through a birthday greeting for a gleeful audience after his definitive take on "Blackwaterside". He flubs or altogether drops some notes in the turnarounds of the gorgeous aubade, "Morning Brings Peace of Mind", and he strums hard enough during the protest number "Let Me Sing" to break the reverie his music inspires. For such an on-the-record perfectionist, Jansch sounds humble and approachable during Live at the 12 Bar. On this "authorized bootleg," a fan favorite for years, he lets the imperfections stand. The errors give his precise work a newly human touch, spotlighting the deep folk origins of his tender tunes.
There are nearly a dozen live releases crammed into Jansch’s catalogue. Live at the 12 Bar stands out in part for the sweep of its songs, a range that reflects the roots of his work and how much he was able to grow within its traditions. He moves from the impetuous opener of his 1965 debut, "Strolling Down the Highway", to "Walk Quietly By", the beautiful and bothered beginning of When the Circus Comes to Town, the album he released not long before this show. He saunters and pleas through American R&B ("Come Back Baby") and stands at the threshold of loneliness and love for an endearing turn on the Irish standard, "Curragh of Kildare". He picks gracefully through the transcontinental standard "The Lily of the West", and he seems to smile through the blues of "Trouble in Mind".
Four years after his death, Jansch’s legacy often revolves around his guitar playing. Frequently presented as an other-side-of-the-Atlantic foil to John Fahey, Jansch is the less deliberate of the two. Where it felt like Fahey was often pulling notes from his instrument, Jansch’s skill seemed to be holding their flow back long enough to articulate their shape. But this career-spanning set from a late London club known as an incubator for great songwriters is a welcome reminder of his skills in that regard, too. He plunges into romantic neuroticism for "A Woman Like You" and moves between sensuality and sensitivity for "Fresh as a Sweet Sunday Morning". In turn, he gets mad, sad, and nostalgic, feelings he communicates as capably with his underrated voice as he does with his fingers and strings. No, Live at the 12 Bar, unlike much of Jansch’s catalogue, isn’t perfect. You hear mistakes, clumsy knocks at the microphone stand, and even his breath as he plays. But mostly, you hear this master traversing a musical map of his life, hard times and all.


Long a collectors’ holy grail, this 1975 session is the keyboardist and bandleader’s only known recording: a fierce half-hour that pushes the limits of jazz, funk, and R&B to their breaking point.

Second Wave

Nobody is quite sure who Roland Haynes is. As far as anyone knows, the keyboardist and bandleader played on precisely one record—his own, this one, from 1975—and then disappeared, leaving behind a half hour of ankle-snapping jazz-funk played so fast and with such meticulousness it’s practically comical. What’s more, because Haynes shares duties on Second Wave with one-time Pharoah Sanders sideman Kirk Lightsey, and nobody thought to write down whose keyboard is whose, we can’t even be sure what Haynes is doing on this record, which means he’s a ghost in his own machine, playing with ferocious anonymity from either the extreme left or extreme right margin of producer Gene Russell’s beautifully wide stereo image. When it comes to obscurity, Roland Haynes makes Jandek look like DJ Khaled.
Despite this frankly incredible obfuscation, Second Wave reveals plenty about its creator—most obviously, that he was intent on pushing the willing containers of jazz, funk, and R&B to their absolute breaking point with as many notes as he could cram into them. His quartet flies through these six songs with the virtuosity of a prog group approaching terminal velocity, their playing buoyed by unalloyed joy and the steady pulse of Henry Franklin’s bass. Second Wave is a funk record playing by jazz’s rules—mostly in order to break them—but it possesses a sweetheart streak that puts Haynes’ group in conversation with Brazilian legends Azymuth, who also made their debut in 1975. Like much of the Black Jazz catalog, which languished for decades following the label’s shuttering later that year, Second Wave is possessed of the kinds of breaks and riffs that have made it a holy grail for collectors for decades. Now reissued by Real Gone, Haynes’ only known recorded work should take its rightful place as a minor but crucial piece of one of jazz’s most innovative eras.
Black Jazz began releasing records in Oakland in 1971 and positioned itself as the Bay Area’s answer to Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and Brooklyn’s Collective Black Artists. Label heads Russell and Dick Schory proposed to release work exclusively by Black musicians, and in their embrace of then-ascendant spiritual jazz and ongoing experiments in free jazz, they explicitly rejected orthodoxy. This was politically and spiritually conscious music made by artists who were as influenced by poets and comics like Nikki Giovanni and Dick Gregory as they were by Archie Shepp, McCoy Tyner, and Alice Coltrane.
At first blush, it’s not totally clear how Second Wave fits in this milieu. While the album’s two ballads—the opening “Eglise” and breath-catching “Aicelis”—both capture a bit of reflected starshine from Lonnie Liston Smith’s piano-based astral journeys, the band under Haynes’ direction doesn’t seem to be in pursuit of the transcendental. They’re far too locomotive for spiritual jazz, and much too melodic for free jazz. Like Herbie Hancock, whose embrace of funk and danceable grooves in Head Hunters had turned jazz on its ear two years prior, Haynes’ protest against the status quo leads him into more populist territory, making things difficult for the performers but not their listeners. Indeed, following these four as they navigate the intricacies of Haynes’ arrangements often feels like watching a Formula 1 race: They sprint along at extraordinary speeds on the straightaways, then navigate tight turns with absurd precision, their playing so tightly bound as they enter the corners it feels like a miracle when they emerge without ramming into one another.
Much of the success of Second Wave comes down to the spaciousness of Russell’s production. He situates Haynes and Lightsey as far apart from one another as they can reasonably go, then fills in the space between with Carl Burnett’s drums and Franklin’s bass. With the two keyboardists throwing out fitful constellations of notes from their electric pianos—the left channel frequently running through a wah pedal that makes it sound like Jimi Hendrix, the right comping with the lyrical swagger of Hancock—the rhythm section’s clarity and presence at center stage make them the de facto leads. Franklin takes advantage of the low-end space ceded to him by the keys and elegantly slides in and out of his runs. Burnett, who kept time on Cal Tjader’s stately 1967 album Along Comes Cal, kicks off the title track with a tense, in medias res fill that seems destined for a Flying Lotus mix; rather than resolve it, the quartet burrows into the tension, doubling down and not allowing the song to break into a comfortable stride until nearly four minutes in.
It’s not hard to spot Haynes’ antecedents—Hancock, Les McCann, and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever were all making similar music around this time—but the willingness to sit with the song’s tension long enough to see where it goes speaks to his instincts as a composer. It happens again and again across Second Wave: The quartet breaks down the wiggy funk of “Kirstn’s Place” only to rebuild it as an arch showtune, coaxes the Grateful Dead-ish explorations of “Descent” into sweet soul-jazz, and dresses up a simple blues progression with silky vamps in “Funky Mama Moose.” For all their flashy playing, Haynes’ group are at their best and most entertaining in these small transitional moments, where they’re forced to follow their leader’s instincts and bring them to life. Their strokes paint what is possibly the only portrait of Haynes we’ll ever have.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In composing radiant new-age music inspired by plants, the Los Angeles-based musician encourages a sense of empathy with nonhuman life.

Music for Living Spaces

A simple, open sense of awe suffuses the music Olive Ardizoni makes as Green-House. Their debut record under that alias, the calming, contemplative Six Songs for Invisible Gardens, came out in early 2020 via the Los Angeles label Leaving, a longtime home for music with a spiritual slant and a reverent embrace of nature. Like Mort Garson’s 1976 cult classic Mother Earth’s Plantasia, the first Green-House release took plants and their caretakers as its intended audience. Ardizoni similarly followed Stevie Wonder’s mesmerizing 1979 score Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants in mapping the behaviors of flora onto synthesized compositions, trying to imagine what kind of musical patterns plants might like to hear—or, conversely, what kind of rhythms and melodies might induce in people the opportunity to empathize somatically with their still, unspeaking neighbors.
Ardizoni’s second release as Green-House, Music for Living Spaces, sustains their fascination with nonhuman life. Songs like “Royal Fern,” “Nocturnal Bloom,” and “Sunflower Dance” imbue their subjects with a sense of animist agency, using melody as a vehicle for imagining the interiority of an organism without a central nervous system. To Ardizoni, plants and wildlife don’t merely supply the backdrop to human activity; they are deeply entwined with our species, and available to commune with us should we grant them the opportunity. The world rendered in these songs is not the setting of any one protagonist’s arc, nor does it exist merely to support the narrative of humanity as a whole. It’s a tightly woven mesh of interconnected movement in which we as people are lucky enough to find ourselves tangled.
The soft triumphs of Music for Living Spaces make it easy to see reality on this scale. This album furthers the palette and techniques of Six Songs, relying largely on the pearly tones of simple synthesis: pure sine waves; simulated horns and woodwinds that make no bid for realism; the compressed peal of a xylophone dreamed up inside a computer, untethered from mallet or key. Some tones, like the one playing out a countermelody on “Sunflower Dance,” beep like scientific instruments steadfastly recording data. Ardizoni keeps their melodies unhurried, sticking largely to placid tempos. In this world, there’s no anxiety and no rush. The music invites diffuse attention across its entire field; Ardizoni doesn’t designate particular sounds as leads and accompaniment so much as they let dynamic and static melodies mutually support each other, giving each equal weight in an abundant expanse.
One of Ardizoni’s greatest strengths as a composer is their sense of pacing: the patience to let the natural arc of the work emerge over time. Close to the end of the album, they introduce their singing voice into the mix for the first time on a Green-House project, and the music suddenly blooms. Like their synthesizers, their voice suspends melody with a gentle, oblique touch. When they repeat the title of the song “Rain,” their voice is layered and processed such that it finds kin, not contrast, with its electronic environment. It’s like the clouds have opened up and a ray of sun has drawn out the full colors of the scene, warming it through the lingering dew. “I follow the wind/And I fly home,” Ardizoni sings on “Find Home,” their clear voice flowing into a stream of pristine synthesized sound. This world is already their home; all they have to do ease into its path.
The album’s title suggests that this music is intended to be played in rooms where people carry out their daily lives, rooms people keep clean and decorate to maximize their pleasure and productivity. But it also gestures to the idea that on Earth, there is no such thing as an unliving space. Music can play wherever there’s air; wherever there’s air, something is striving, growing, resisting entropy to take on new and astonishing shapes. Green-House’s music invites you to consider yourself not as an isolated subject clawing against an antagonistic world, but as an organism among organisms, a locus of growth and becoming, unweighted by directive beyond the urge to keep living.

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On his sophomore EP, DJ/producer Caleb Halter positions his music between ambient atmospheres and clubby bombast—this time pulling in opposing directions rather than seeking balance.

Nexus

“100 Fold,” the leadoff track on this sophomore EP from DJ/producer Caleb Halter (a.k.a. Feral) begins with a soothing keyboard fade-in that lasts all of 20 seconds before Halter interrupts it with rolling layers of abrasion. First comes a supremely fat bass note, then a jarring touch of glitch, followed by a pitch-shifted four-note hook that sounds like a digitized blend of human vocals and wood flutes. If you’ve set foot anywhere near a dance floor in the past, oh, 15 years or so, you instinctively expect a tune like this to unfold with a bass drop followed by a forceful groove based on the hook, with some whiplash-inducing glitch thrown in for good measure.
In a club setting, Halter could’ve easily ridden that stereotype into a repetitive trance. But the bass drop and groove never arrive. Instead, Halter teases at both while “100 Fold” froths with atmospheres that threaten to reclaim the spotlight. After a minute and a half, the music simply fades away, but in that space Halter establishes the central dynamic at the core of the five tunes that comprise this EP: From start to finish, he keeps one foot in an ambient headspace and another in the ear-rattling clamor of the club.
On Feral’s first EP, last year’s Relay, as well as on his contributions to comps by Ghostly and Lucky Me, Halter appeared to be searching for a comfortable medium between those two modes. On this new material, he sounds restless and focused on sonic opposition as much as balance. If you like the element of surprise—or if you enjoy hearing boisterous dance-floor gestures through headphones and, in reverse, gauzy ambient nuance at loud volumes—Nexus keeps in perpetual flux, never quite resting in one world or the other.
Nexus also demonstrates Halter’s deliberate attention to timing. After he leaves you pining for a beat at the abrupt conclusion of “100 Fold,” he delivers on the remaining four songs, all of which are either anchored by strong beats (“Hyphen,” “We Feel You”), arrangements that suggest them even without any percussion (“Sum”), or a combination of both (“Wasp”). In all four cases, though, Halter continuously throws curveballs, some more subtle than others. “Wasp” starts off with a digital frost-like coating of atmosphere that appears to be heading straight for ambient territory, which makes the sudden onset of brash 808 pomp feel almost rude. From this point onwards, Halter allows the grooves to establish themselves enough to bob your head or move your body to them. However if you actually try to dance to this music, you’ll be presented with challenges.
In the middle of “Wasp” there’s a section where the groove drops out and the music just hovers, suspended, before it’s clear where things are going to go next. Meanwhile, when he captures the ham-fisted bombast of drum‘n’bass and glitch on “Hyphen,” for example, one gets the sense that some of his choices verge on satire. (“Nexus” is also the name of a software plug-in that Halter describes as dated and cheesy.) It takes attentive listening to notice that Halter often undercuts his gaudier sounds with finer details.
Nexus ends with “We Feel You,” a track whose triumphant overtones and skittering rhythm recall Middle* of Nowhere*-era Orbital. It sounds like the fabricated optimism of a closing credits sequence to a Hollywood blockbuster. But when you compare it to the more overtly uplifting “Ceremony,” the tune that closes Relay, it’s clear that Halter is moving away from emotional directness and into more guileful self-presentation. At times, Nexus appears to overstate what it is, only to leave you questioning whether you've properly read or even misread its intentions. Given Halter’s sense of precision, the push-pull of his music is both intentional and very rewarding.


On his most extreme and cohesive solo album yet, the Swedish producer and Fever Ray collaborator steers from the dancefloor while locating a sense of humor within techno.

Daily Routine

Peder Mannerfelt has had an exceptionally busy decade. In addition to his production work for Fever Ray, Glasser, and Blonde Redhead, he has issued four albums with the duo Roll the Dice and, with the new Daily Routine, four solo albums in four years. The Swedish producer’s own daily routine likely involves quite a bit of time in front of his computer. When he’s there, things get strange.
Though Mannerfelt has put his hand to some rather straight-up techno tracks, the majority of his solo work since 2014’s Lines Describing Circles has proposed an unusual mixture of analog grit and hi-def digital treatments. Halfway between Cabaret Voltaire’s murk and SOPHIE’s glistening artifice, it’s like a high-resolution hologram wreathed in the acrid smoke of an electrical fire. The imaginative dimension of his largely instrumental music plays out in titles like Transmissions From a Drainpipe and Black Holes, or How We Lost Solidarity—equal parts sci-fi escapade and subterranean nightmare. As 2016’s flag-waving Equality Now showed, he can also be refreshingly unambiguous. You might say that he makes dystopian rave with a utopian core. Still, Daily Routine is as extreme as anything Mannerfelt has ever made, its tempos either amphetamine fast or death-gurgle slow.
Several of Daily Routine’s highlights were clearly crafted with peaktime in mind, but much of this album doesn’t come anywhere near the dancefloor. “Hibernation Hyper Nation” is a drifting mixture of ersatz pan flutes and underwater pianos roiled by slow-motion laser bursts and subwoofer tremors; it sounds a little like what you may get if Arca moved to British Columbia and started making new-age house. Even further out, the beatless “Belgian Blues (Black MIDI Mix)” and “Weighing My Brain” are deep dives into the guts of his electronics, all unsteady flutter and viscous dissonance. “How Was Your Day? (Numb)” approaches the pumping cadences of club-centric bass music. Just when it feels like it’s building toward a steady groove, though, the beat drops out. The track slips sideways across a jagged expanse of distorted breaks and doomy pads in one of the rare occasions where you can hear an echo of Fever Ray. Even the 184-BPM juggernaut, “This Machine Shares Memes,” isn’t really a “dance” track; strafed with mournful sirens and piledriving kicks, it feels more like an audio document of a construction-site accident.
But the album’s seething heart lies in its heaviest songs. “Cigarettes (Eurofierceness Mix)” is a skulking rave anthem whose synths hang like lead blankets. “Temporary Psychosis” loops its titular phrase over thundering drum programming and minor-key streaks, embracing its campy excesses without losing any power. Best of all is “Sissel & Bass,” a collaboration with Sissel Wincent, a fellow Swede signed to Mannerfelt’s label. His beat here—kick drum, crash cymbal, a sampled man incessantly saying “bass”—is practically a parody of rave music. But the heaving sub-bass isn’t kidding around, and neither is Wincent. “I have some questions for you all: Are you doing things the way they’ve always been done?” she spits at the outset of a lecture on risk-taking.
It’s a bracing screed against the complacency of nostalgia, particularly when paired with Mannerfelt’s looped whoops and crescendoing gabber kicks—the best sort of meta-music, the kind aimed at expanding one’s mind while losing one’s mind. In the midst of her lesson, she asks, “Can you play it harder. Can you play it faster. Can you play it funnier?” One of those things is not like the others. But that’s the genius of Mannerfelt’s approach: By embracing a sense of humor, he brings life back to techno. At a time when dark, experimentally minded dance music sometimes seems to suffocate in self-seriousness, a little laughter is the best medicine.


The cult death metal act returns with a fresh blast of hellish air, full of joyously absurd keyboards, hyper-technical guitars, and apocalyptic sci-fi visions.

Paradox

Nocturnus’ “Destroying the Manger,” from their 1990 record The Key, is one of the most perplexing songs in death metal. It details an unnamed protagonist traveling back in time to kill a newborn Jesus, thus eliminating Christianity and allowing evil to reign over Earth. Going Terminator on Jesus is exactly the kind of fervent anti-Christian energy on which death metal thrives, and “Manger” is an iconic example of it. But if there were no Jesus to oppose, there would be no death metal. This contradiction epitomizes how absurd “Manger” is, which is also what makes it one of the best death metal songs ever.
Nocturnus were one of the first death metal bands to incorporate sci-fi themes, and they outfitted their bizarre visions with an equally unlikely blend of new age keyboards and hyper-technical guitar, drummer/vocalist Mike Browning whipping the cosmic chariot along with brimstone-as-paradise energy. While Tampa’s death-metal sound has long been the world’s death-metal sound, no band has ever been able to capture The Key’s singular weirdness, which is why it remains a cult record among the faithful. That is until Browning revived Nocturnus as Nocturnus AD, with members of his band After Death. Thus, Paradox is less of a debut than a continuation, and in every respect it  proves a worthy successor to one of death metal's lost classics.
Leadoff track “Seizing the Throne” follows The Key’s opener “Lake of Fire” in structure, beginning with drifting keys and wind chimes before quickly descending into a whammy bar-driven frenzy. Save for the fresh 2019 production, you’d think it was ripped from a lost B-side. It’s remarkable how well Browning and his new band replicate The Key’s sound: Demian Heftel and Belial Koblak are faithful to original Nocturnus guitarists Mike Davis and Sean McNenney, who were more technically advanced than a lot of death metal at the time but still moved with chaotic unpredictability. “The Bandar Sign” ends with tight, frantic syncopations like a death-metal Moving Pictures.
Even the keyboards sound like they haven’t been taken out of the vault since The Key’s release. They are not secondary or mere texture — they drive an already-maddened band to their brink. Keyboardist Josh Holdren abuses the pitch shifter in “Bandar Sign,” making the guitars sound more even more out-of-control and hyperspeed. In “Aeon of the Ancient Ones,” he goes from faux-orchestral placidity to doomy, cobweb-ridden synth organ, and in instrumental closer “Number 9,” he conjures a fevered intersection of “The Final Countdown,” “Mr. Crowley,” and Klaus Schulze. The keyboards are permanently set to "ridiculous," and Nocturnus AD wouldn’t be the same without them.
Paradox is both a revival record and a continuation of a whacked-out, singular vision. It’s an ideal revamp: familiar enough for those around the first time, fresh enough to rejuvenate the genre. Appending “AD” to your band’s name is usually a tired old-metal-dude move, a way to skirt copyrights and cash in on your legacy. But it is the only such move here: In every respect, Paradox is a fresh blast of hellish air, breathing new life into once-lost possibilities.


On his soundtrack for the film This Is Bate-Bola, the Chicago cornetist, keyboardist, and composer summons the dread and excitement of the lesser-known Rio festival.

Ben LaMar Gay: Confetti in the Sky Like Fireworks (This Is Bate Bola OST)

Far from the beaches, big floats, bikinis, and festivities that define Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival, there is the Bate-Bola. A more raucous affair, wholly ignored by the media and middle and upper classes of Brazil, the Bate-Bola is the celebration of the working class and the poor, living in the city’s favelas. Most descriptions of the festival allude to fever dreams and monsters, which hints at the hallucinatory fun and underlying violence of the affair. Costumes can take a year to make, and each turma–or bate-bola group– boasts its own booming soundsystem. In North America, it might bring to mind the Gathering of the Juggalos invaded by Mardi Gras Indians, but that doesn’t quite encapsulate the madness. “The Bate-Bola costume has an energy unlike any other,” says a voice in Ben Holman and Neirin Jones’ short film, This is Bate-Bola. “When we put it on, we get that cold feeling in our stomach...It’s like something from another world.”
In scoring This is Bate-Bola, Chicago cornetist, keyboardist, composer Ben LaMar Gay had his work cut out for him. Gay lived in Brazil for a number of years, and parts of last year’s lovely and eclectic Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun alit on bossa nova and baile funk. But on Confetti In The Sky Like Fireworks, outside of a few explosive moments, Gay conveys the sound of Brazil via smeared abstraction rather than explicit homage. The soundtrack opens with a backmasked song, as if attempting to plumb a hazy bacchanalian recollection, hinting that what’s to come won’t be sun-warmed and bright, but rather chilly and haunted.
Within the confines of a soundtrack, Gay ranges wildly. Clattering percussion mixes with flickering synth lines and dark drones, and lording above it all is “Nos Reunimos Em Fantasias,” a 14-minute epic that’s by turns ethereal and disquieting, as if David Lynch opted to film in the narrow alleys of a favela rather than along Mulholland Drive. The title loosely translates as “We Meet in Fantasies,” and as such, it toggles the thin line between dream and nightmare. Gay lets the sounds here expand slowly, allowing the open, twilit spaces to fill with dread and uncertainty. As often as Gay earns comparisons to the likes of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and other jazz figures, he’s in a rarefied ambient space here, closer to the likes of William Basinski or Tim Hecker.
The rest of the soundtrack contains mostly short cues and interludes, brief fragments that heighten the charge of on-screen images but feel slight when reduced to audio. “O Rugido” is a muffled rustle that darkens some of the film’s footage, yet it becomes all but inaudible if you’re listening with a car window rolled down. Mercifully, the clanging alarm-clock din of “Casos De Vidro Soam Como Sinos” recedes after two minutes. One of the set’s strongest moments –the buzzing, beat-centric “Kingdom Come/ Strong”– vanishes at the one-minute mark, just before it can burst into full bloom. Closer “A Saída” pulls a hard left, reminding us that Gay is equally adept at baile funk. Full of queasy bass and a with a rowdy MC hollering atop the beat, it shows that Gay can also match that feeling of the Bate-Bola costume, balancing cold sensation with jolts of unexpected energy.


The British singer, rapper, and producer’s second project approaches the challenge of self-discovery through graceful avant-R&B.

GLOW

U.K. polymath Wesley Joseph’s psychedelic, existential ballads play like a score for an Oscar-nominated thriller. Paired with hazy production, his diaristic words of self-reflection and self-deprecation ring out loud. The London-based singer, rapper, and producer has a knack for vivid storytelling on emotional despair and introspection that serves as makeshift therapy sessions. GLOW, his second project, centers the anticipation and fear of unlocking one’s own potential. This intimate collection of avant-R&B songs wallows in growing pains, embracing late-night anxieties of not feeling good enough for anyone, least of all yourself.
Across the record, Joseph airs stream-of-consciousness musings on fear and hopelessness with apparent ease and warmth, sounding like he’s ready to welcome the confidence to overcome. He first established that vision as a founding member of Birmingham musical collective OG Horse, which also included childhood friend and fellow singer Jorja Smith. In 2016, the Walsall-raised artist moved to London to study film. His 2021 debut, ULTRAMARINE, was soulful and upbeat, but relied heavily on cinematic aesthetics that left its themes of loneliness and longing feeling boring. GLOW is far more evolved.
Throughout the project, Joseph’s music evokes a mix of Pip Millett’s gritty neo-soul, Blood Orange’s colorful textural exploration, and SAULT’s funk-inspired melodies. His songs translate deep feelings into futuristic pop and R&B that sounds as sinister as it is grandiose. The project opens with its title track, a five-minute emotional goliath that dissects Joseph’s inner turmoil and desire to be perceived: “How do you see me/When you glow so bright/So bright?” he repeats in a melancholic tone over moody, blue-lit strings. What happens when dark thoughts are so ubiquitous that standing in the light feels like a distant dream?
On “I Just Know Highs,” a Leon Vynehall-produced track that twists Joseph’s eerily Auto-Tuned vocals into a flute instrumental, Joseph examines the personal lows that paradoxically make him feel most alive: “I’m lost out my mind/Well, most of my mind/If I look down I’m dying, or maybe I’m flying,” he croons. On “Cold Summer,” he juxtaposes optimistic bars on moving past self-deprecation against wistful strings that bring the emotional work within reach. GLOW sags at “25,” where Joseph’s personal stocktaking is stunted by a vague and repetitive wish to find “a different side of me.” The song ends abruptly before we find out which side that might be.
It’s the album’s least interesting moment, but the missed opportunity doesn’t overwhelm the breadth of Joseph’s skill to delineate his feelings in a way that evokes comfort and reflection. With GLOW, Joseph underlines the often scary process of uncovering insecurities with a sense of reassurance that suggests your own introspective forays could be just as rewarding. What lies on the other side of fear? GLOW’s warm and encouraging approach to finding the answers makes for a stellar introduction to a multidisciplinary artist dedicated to conquering his own limits.


The haunted folk singer's latest album is her most tactile, thanks in part to producer Randall Dunn, best known for his work with metal bands such as Earth, Sunn O))), and Wolves in the Throne Room.

July

The question of whether Marissa Nadler's elegant folk music ought to soundtrack our dreams or haunt our nightmares has been a thread through her uncannily cohesive catalogue. With six albums in 10 years and never a misstep, Nadler has grown her own perceptive language—she's an old-soul lost in time like Sibylle Baier, but her music is blackened and more literary. Her songs have come steeped in misery and macabre, cobwebs and ashes, but Nadler is not a doomy aesthete merely for gloom's sake. She is devoted to Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, and her music understands folk tradition. While her songs sound isolated and spiritually vintage, as if beamed from the grayscale interior of a Victorian home, her stories have been generous, selfless tales, heavy with metaphor and imagery. Nadler's poetic temperament and steady grace point to a darkness within us all—though her singing always seems to hone on mortality not for the purpose of crushing, existential missives, but in order to protect us.
Each of Nadler's albums has signaled subtle evolution. After channeling a bewitched Hope Sandoval and establishing a gothic heart, her sound became gorgeous and nuanced on 2007's III, broke from the freak-folk tag on 2009's astounding Little Hells, and incorporated sing-song Gillian Welch-inspired country pop on 2011's gleaming Marissa Nadler. Still, she has never let her dark essence slip away—this is a singer whose first record mixed traditional English balladry with an arrangement of Edgar Allen Poe's "Annabelle Lee" and a song about the death of Virginia Woolf. "I once was young and I once was strong," she sang then, in 2004, at age 23 on "Box of Cedar". Nadler's music has been tinged by country blues and murder balladry, by people who died alone and old loves who creep her memory. But empathy has defined her work. See, for example, Nadler’s tender treatment of the recurring figure Mayflower May, a lonely and reflective old woman, or the 20th-century siamese twin circus performers Daisy and Violet (2011's spellbinding "Daisy, Where Did You Go?" explores what happened to Violet when Daisy died first, an especially harrowing piece of historical subject matter).
Nadler's self-described "dreadfully shy" wallflower persona fits in well with these earlier records, filled with swaths of muted color and third-person characters. July is another side of Marissa Nadler; if she sounded older back on Little Hells, Nadler is younger and bolder now, in confessional mode. Here are intimately personal accounts of misread desire, an empty heart set by winter blues, and years wasted on a lover who could do no right. "I called you when I was drunk all the time," Nadler sings on the quiet, finger-picked "Holiday In", stranded on a mountain in winter, recalling a depleted love. This is the "beer/thank-you" of Nadler's new honest approach. "I'd rather watch crime TV than see you again," she sings. It is a shocking but humanizing charm to hear Nadler reference even basic technologies in song. More so than any of Nadler's records, July is a self-knowing and zenlike advocate of change; "I know better now/ I don't get as high," she sings on the intensely detailed breakup song "Firecrackers," pointing blame at herself as she steadies her own romantic mess of ghosts and lovers.
July is more tactile thanks to new producer Randall Dunn, best known for his work with metal bands such as Earth, Sunn O))), and Wolves in the Throne Room. (Dunn has also worked on folkier projects for Akron/Family and Six Organs of Admittance, but Nadler has ties to the black metal community, having collaborated with Xasthur and Locrian.) The pairing befits Nadler's sound. Like black metal, her songs are atmospheric, austere, and engulfing. At times, Nadler's resonant acoustic strums are coated thick, as if emboldened by the deep ebony outline of a Sharpie marker. Her gothic touchstones return more deliberately melodic, and the audible strength of her voice lends to a more idiosyncratic sound; even the quiet acoustic songs and piano ballad sound like they are set up on-stage. There are textured synths and the occasional electric guitar underneath, and the dramatic orchestral strings that underpin "1923" offer the song a sense of grandeur—"I called you from another century/ To see if the world had been kind and sweet," Nadler sings, offering not just an impressionistic line but a pointed one that sums up an essential idea about her work. It's Nadler's stacked, carefully pronounced harmonies, though, that really make these songs stand so tall.
The forward movement of July can be entrancing and propulsive: "Drive" and "I've Got Your Name" are evocative Americana road songs, the former cast with a cruel road-weary disaffection that she medicates naturally: "Still remember all the words/ To every song you ever heard," Nadler sings, conjuring more direct, intuitive emotions than usual. There are grittier details here, too: "Changed in a rest-stop into my dress/ Made sure not to touch the floor/ I've done that kind of thing before," she sings from the side of the I-95. Nadler always sounds like a journeying soul poet, but here she makes her rootless experience clear, as on the piercing "Holiday In": "You have a girl in every state/ I know I'm in the way."
"Dead City Emily" is July's hypnotic centerpiece, the realization of Nadler and Dunn's work at the stone-cold polar vortex of folk structure and doom metal mood. Nadler's rain-streaked music has an overcast glow here, one that comes with a first snowfall, the realism of dead leaves and paralyzing ice. Nadler has few direct contemporaries—Bill Callahan, Sharon Van Etten, or Alela Diane come to mind—but here, on July's most extreme song, she could sensibly share bills with, say, Iceage or Deafheaven. The song’s fictional conversation is made of inner-strife, trapped in a devil town and a dead-end love, jaded towards the innate beauty of trees or birds—images Nadler has used throughout her songbook. Nadler typically speaks through female figures, and while there is struggle in this exchange, there is also power, like she is teaching another woman or warning her in secret. July's stories are rich with such wisdom.


The Louisville rapper has a keen talent for bridging regional styles. The uninspired beats on his new album fail to light up the map.

MAD

In the mid 2010s Yo Gotti’s label CMG stood for “Cocaine Muzik Group,” until 50 Cent told him that the name was “too harsh” and would scare people off—which I took to mean potential investors and fans. That inspired Yo Gotti to tweak the name to the vague and non-threatening Collective Music Group. If I were to guess what Yo Gotti’s dream is, it’s for CMG to be to the 2020s what Quality Control was to the 2010s: A dependable hub for mainstream Southern rap that eventually gets sold to a bigger label for hundreds of millions. So while CMG has a solid roster—new star Glorilla, golden boy Moneybagg Yo, Detroit firecracker 42 Dugg, and the steely Louisville rapper EST Gee—it doesn’t go unnoticed that Gotti is shaping artists into the most palatable and innocuous versions of themselves.
Look no further than EST Gee’s MAD. It’s a relatively by-the-book 14-track album that interrupts his coldblooded, stone-faced raps with wannabe Lil Durk melodies and strips away the regionality of his production in favor of generic “trap” made for the playlist grind. Gee’s breakout 2020 mixtapes Ion Feel Nun and I Still Dont Feel Nun worked because his central location in Louisville allowed him to fold stylistic elements from many Midwestern and Southern cities into relentless raps full of melancholic memories, cruel imagery, and twisted humor. There was Memphis in the bounce. Chicago in the menacing mood. Detroit in the jerky rhythms. Atlanta in the gloss. Baton Rouge in the way he carried himself like a walking wound. With MAD, it’s hard to pin down where Gee is on the map—unless he’s explicitly telling you by jacking T.I.’s singsongy “24’s” flow on “The One & Only” or tapping Boosie for a song called “Hotboys.” It’s hard to feel anything when the music sounds like it’s from nowhere.
The beats are the most glaring problem. Did Yo Gotti accidentally send over the Moneybagg Yo scraps folder? Too many tracks coast on vague familiarity. On “Ball Like Me Too,” the 808s are lifeless, the rhythm is slow, and the Shirley Bassey sample is played out. “If I Stop Now” has a piano-driven groove so plodding that even resident  Florida sadboy Rod Wave would say it’s a buzzkill. The flute-led beat of “Slam Dunk” does roughly sound like it could have been on Lil Baby’s It’s Only Me—too bad that’s probably the worst Lil Baby album to be inspired by.
Save for the punchy, drum-fueled burst of “Blow Up” and the smooth elegance of “Us,” this is some of the most uninspired production I’ve heard this year so far. It’s a waste of Gee, who is otherwise still a good rapper with an ability to condense complex emotions and conflicts into just a couple lines. “Lethal injection by the needle, I ain’t forcin’ nothin’ on my people/And they ain’t force it on me neither, we both addicts, so we equals,” he raps as he tries to weigh the effect he had on his community on “Undefeated.” His delivery on the album intro is icy and understated as he reflects on how his mother’s death left a hole in the family. Occasionally he pushes his flow to creative extremes, like on “25Min Freestyle” (which is actually just three minutes), slurring his words so hard that it sounds like he’s rapping with his jaw wired shut.
The singing, though—that will hit you like a jump scare. It’s bad. Gee’s melodic aspirations were a mystifying whiff on last year’s I Never Felt Nun and he’s decided to double down. The knockoff Kevin Gates croons of “Lie to Me Some More” and the Durk-like switch-ups between bullish raps and scarred wails on “Stay Focused” feel forced and unnecessary because they don’t add any new emotion. Gee’s rigid delivery already said so much: the pain, the inner strife is there even when he’s just rapping about having too much cash in his jeans. All the melodies do is make the album feel cleaner, less harsh, easier to categorize. Judging by the origins of the CMG name, that’s on purpose.


On their latest record, the Scottish post-rock heroes sidestep some pitfalls from recent releases and sound like they're enjoying being themselves again.

Mogwai: Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will

Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will

Mogwai never seemed like a particularly good bet to age well. They came out of the gate as a band that Meant Something to many people, namely fans of heavy guitar music and rock critics. They established a clear, identifiable, and exciting new sound, but their latest LP-- Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will-- doesn't change the pattern Mogwai have set for themselves on recent, often middling, releases: There are some anthemic guitar blasts, some prettily drifting comedowns, and one or two vocal tracks.
The band has regained none of its prior fierceness, but Hardcore is, importantly, the band's least self-conscious album in ages. There are no attempts to be really heavy, man. There are no stale electronics. The songs that wander out of the band's comfort zone-- most notably the Neu!-indebted "Mexican Grand Prix"-- are the types of genre exercises a veteran rock band of Mogwai's stature should probably undertake. Hardcore feels comfy and lived-in, backhanded compliments only to those who didn't slog through The Hawk Is Howling and Happy Songs For Happy People.
The price for all this hominess is basically any lingering sense of mystery. Mogwai can chime away pleasantly during "Death Rays"-- featuring the band's best guitar lick in years-- but it can't turn "Rano Pano" into "Stanley Kubrick". This is fine, as long as we're willing to admit that we get different things out of Mogwai albums these days. This is a record of savvy rock vets kicking at distortion pedals until something frothy emerges. I'm on board if the results are going to be as page-turning-ly melodic as "How to Be a Werewolf" or as playful as the pitch-shifted "George Square Thatcher Death Party". The mistakes are easy to forgive: "White Noise" is the band's most vanilla opening track ever. The slide-guitar panorama of "Letters to the Metro" will still your blood just as surely as "Like Herod" once boiled it, but it's merely the type of innocuous doodling the band has long padded its albums with.
Mogwai's prior output and general demeanor has made it difficult for them to be a group that fans simply enjoy. The band built its reputation on sonic extremes, and that purview has infected their reputation: deliver a masterpiece-- I don't think they have it in them-- or suffer indifference. On Hardcore Mogwai sound like they're enjoying being Mogwai again. I'm ready to enjoy them being Mogwai again too.


On her second album, the Dutch-Zimbabwean musician feeds off the energy of a move from Amsterdam to Peckham, England, turning the minutiae of daily life into bold, 1980s-inspired synth pop.

In a Galaxy

Less isn’t always more. In 2014, the Dutch-Zimbabwean artist Rina Mushonga released The Wild, the Wilderness, a pleasant but mild debut record that didn’t look much further than the coffeehouse for inspiration. But a recent move from Amsterdam to Peckham, a culturally diverse community in London’s South End, has unlatched something grand in Mushonga. Her sophomore album, In a Galaxy, is expansive, integrating sounds gathered from her native country and her newfound home in the UK. Thinking big suits Mushonga, and over the course of this 12-track LP, she dramatizes the banal trappings of daily life with her fortifying melodies, making a case for maximalist, ecstatic pop as a balm for it all.
In a Galaxy is richly embroidered: Warm horns, plucked guitars, and sparkling arpeggios are threaded through the album like jewels adorning an imperial robe. But these luxe soundscapes aren’t excessively opulent—one of In a Galaxy’s virtues is that the colossal scope of its arrangements is tempered by the intimate subject matter. Were Mushonga to chase topics as giant as her melodies, her songs might sag under all the weight. Instead, the telescopic range of the instrumentation is countered by her microscopic observations of daily life, making her music both poignant and tangible. As James Joyce put it, “In the particular is contained the universal.”
Mushonga best achieves the balance between vast sounds and common problems on the oozing slow jam “Good Vacation.” Here she depicts a crumbling relationship with concise language. “Let’s go back there,” Mushonga pleads, her voice simultaneously robust and fragile; “We’ve been to Mazan but we could go again.” Synthesizer slinks around the verses like an eel stalking tropical waters. With a few well-placed words, Mushonga sketches out a couple that forfeits the pleasures of daily life for the promise of a holiday. “We don’t sleep at the right time/We don’t drink and dance at the right time,” Mushonga laments. “’Cause we hold out for a good vacation.” Her words, detailing a romance that has become as routine as the 9–5 grind, land like a punch in the gut.
While Mushonga found inspiration for the album in the street noise of Peckham—traffic, kids returning from school, snatches of conversation—it’s fair to say that her eclectic new sound is due in part to producer Brett Shaw, who’s worked with pop titans like Florence and the Machine and Lady Gaga. But Shaw’s gilded touch doesn’t outshine Mushonga’s personality or press her into a Top 40 mold. In fact, her music borrows more from the 1980s—particularly Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, and Phil Collins—than from contemporary music. Songs like “For a Fool” and “AtalantA” are particularly rooted in that era; the former unfolds like the train scene in Risky Business, complete with smears of saxophone and syncopated keys. “AtalantA” has the makings of an arena anthem, creeping in with rubbery bass before bursting into a battle cry buoyed by shrill organ and layers of thunderous percussion.
The title track is a testament to the album’s diversity and overall disregard for the confines of genre. Mushonga glides effortlessly between synth pop and dubstep, interlacing flute samples and vocoder flourishes without gilding the lily. Here, the intricate details embellishing her music do more to enrich the whole than draw attention to themselves, just as individual stars complete a constellation. A similar effect arises from the very short list of players credited on In a Galaxy (Mushonga, Shaw, and few others). Despite its minimal lineup, the record feels like it was forged by a community of collaborators, each contribution representative of a much larger whole. But it could just be that the staggering reach of Mushonga’s music summons multitudes.


This eight-year retrospective comprises robust and fierce re-recordings from the group’s decidedly lo-fi catalog, featuring the best of Ian Svenonius’ sneering rock ‘n’ roll anthems.

The Best of Crime Rock

Ian Svenonius’ is at once one of rock’s shrewdest intellectuals and one of its most primal performers. But there’s no dissonance between those two modes—the ideas of the former fuel the physicality of the latter. Since surfacing with D.C. post-hardcore heroes Nation of Ulysses a quarter-century ago, Svenonius has fronted several different bands—from gospel-ye-ye purveyors the Make-Up to the frisky psych-funk crew The Scene Creamers—but they’ve all been rooted in the late-'60s belief in rock ‘n’ roll as an agent of radicalism, and in the potential for a three-minute single to instantly make you question and dismantle everything you’ve ever known.
As such, Svenonius’ sideline writings—be it in books or magazines—aren’t so much extracurricular pursuits as the expository DVD commentary for his music. Though he’s always drawn from the proto-punk garage rock and black-power soul, Svenonius isn’t so much nostalgic for their sound as their revolutionary intent, pining for a bygone era when pop stars could show up on a network talk show and spend the better part of an hour talking about race, feminism, and U.S. immigration policy.
He also remembers an era when greatest-hits albums weren’t just quickie cash-ins for rock bands, but the tool that cemented their legend. Svenonius’ current band, Chain & the Gang, has released five albums since 2009, making it his longest-running, most prolific outfit since the Make-Up. Where the band’s name once served as its cheeky organizing principle—with stripped-down, call-and-response chants in the prison blues tradition—by 2014’s Minimum Rock ‘n’ Roll, the proverbial chain had come to represent a whip, with Svenonius smashing windows and busting bricks on the sneering anti-gentrification anthem “Devitalize.” The song distills the band’s insolent essence into a Molotov cocktail of bruising soul-punk rhythm, shout-it-out-hooks, and lyrics that deftly toe the line between pointed anti-capitalist critique and a sly, knowing sarcasm toward the impractical extremities of their mission. In two minutes, they go from calling for a decline in real-estate values to wishing ill will on fresh fruit and child educational standards.
“Devitalize” is thus the perfect opening salvo for Crime Rock, which, ironically, seeks to revitalize. It comprises more robust and fierce re-recordings of the best songs from the group’s decidedly lo-fi catalog (plus two new tracks—the organ-spun soul of “Logic of the Night” and surf-ready power pop of “Come Over”—the fit right into the post-mod milieu.) It’s an uncharacteristic concession to the marketplace for a band that’s more liable to wage war on it, but then it also illustrates just how prepossessing and powerful this band can be under the right conditions. Chain and the Gang is the most accessible group Svenonius has ever commandeered, and with the Crime Rock revamps, he matches the white-hot intensity of The Make-Up (with bassist Anna Nasty playing the Michelle Mae-like foil), but with that band’s JBs-funk engine stripped out and replaced with revved-up Motown motions.
Where he once used his shriek like a weapon, Svenonius now wields a sense of humor that’s as cutting as it is absurd. The garage-blues strut “Certain Kinds of Trash” functions as a companion piece to his 2014 essay in defense of hoarding, its lyric sheet presenting a laundry list of arcane, discarded consumer products (“typewriter ribbons, TV dinner pans, you just don’t see ’em”). But embedded within his fetishization of refuse is a thinly veiled contempt for planned-obsolescence sales strategies and the iCloud age’s premium on intangibility. For Svenonius, garbage and decay represent a freedom from a culture of constant commodification—when something has no value, it’s truly priceless. “I see progress,” Svenonius sings on the bass-swung song of the same name, “in paint peeling/And I like a leaky ceiling!” He punctuates the line with a high-pitched Princely gasp that finds the eroticism in rot.
Several of the new versions on Crime Rock just amount to tighter, better-quality recordings. In other cases, the changes are quite dramatic: the nihilist to-do list “Why Not?” gets pumped up from a stripped-down busker-blues shuffle into a taut, motorik garage-rocker; the militaristic psych-folk march “Deathbed Confession” becomes the cinematic, piano-pounding curtain-closer its ridiculous conspiracy-theory lyrics demand. But in all instances, Crime Rock greatly improves upon its source material, by amplifying the tension between Svenonius’ hard-knock lyrics (from “Livin’ Rough”: “I’m livin’ in a bathroom stall/With no paper on the roll/I can’t believe it!”) and the Gang’s punchy performances. Chain and the Gang cheekily (or maybe not) describe themselves as the world’s “only anti-liberty rock ‘n’ roll band,” dismissing the genre’s ingrained wild-child mentality as an emblem of unchecked capitalism. But after spending years in a small holding cell, Crime Rock finally transfers them to the maximum-security penitentiary they deserve.


The once wildly unhinged psych-rock maverick grows into adulthood, though his backing band brings some much-needed weirdness to the proceedings.

Murderburgers

“I wasn’t born in ‘77!” Arish “King” Khan declares on “Born in 77,” off Murderburgers, but he knows that you know it’s a lie. Khan turned 40 this year: The man who played bass for the Spaceshits, who dressed up like Tina Turner and howled like James Brown, who strode the grounds of the 2008 Pitchfork Fest wearing a centurion helmet and little else—that guy survived long enough to mature into a music veteran and family man. But the Gris Gris, his backing band for this album, maintain the ruse with a manic glam-punk jam, tempo-rushing piano chords, glitter-crust guitar riffs, and a sax solo that sounds like it’s being mobbed by zombies. The song is a gleefully irreverent take on the Berlin punk being played around the time Jimmy Carter was taking office, with Khan playing Iggy to producer Greg Ashley’s Bowie.
When Khan emerged more than a decade ago with the Shrines, there was still something rattling about the way he turned psych-rock and R&B conventions into vehicles for outrageous self-expression. He preached a radicalized version of freedom where each song offered some promise of triumphant escape, whether from poverty (“Welfare Bread”), gender identity (“I Wanna Be a Girl”), American exceptionalism (“Land of the Freak”), or the strictures of polite society (pretty much every other song). Idle No More, released in 2013, was his first real adult album, with a real U.S. label and a sound that buffed away some of the rough edges but maintained that sense of the ridiculous.
That charisma comes through on Murderburgers, his debut solo record and the first on his own Khannibalism Records (an imprint of Ernest Jenning Co.), although it’s more muted and even more mature. Khan once wrote about love through the lens of freakdom, as though the sexual and romantic bonds between people didn’t have to adhere to old rules or puritanical decrees. Murderburgers, on the other hand, is mostly just love songs. “It’s a Lie” plumbs romantic paranoia, but Khan can’t make anything new of it. When he sings, “I’ve see you with your arms dealers/Bombmakers and undertakers,” on “It’s Just Begun,” it’s nothing as timely as a protest song, but just another “love is a battlefield” metaphor. It’s hard to give that idea much weight when there’s a very real nuclear threat looming.
Fortunately, he’s got the reconstituted Gris Gris backing him up, and they prevent his 1960s obsession from curdling into pastiche rock. Onetime members of Khan’s vaguely defined death cult called the Kukamongas (which also included the Black Lips and Mark Sultan), the Oakland group disbanded more than a decade ago, but Khan reassembled them, seemingly by force of will, for sessions at producer Greg Ashley’s Creamery Studio. The Gris Gris add some grit to opener “Discreate Disguise” and some skronk to “Run Doggy Run,” an otherwise blandly vindictive diss track. Especially on the album’s second side, they bring some much-needed weirdness to the proceedings, with the band bashing out a snot-covered rockabilly beat on “Teeth Are Shite” and adding some gloriously sloppy guitar licks to the melancholic beach ballad “Winter Weather.” Perhaps it’s about the fate of weird Oakland in the face of encroaching gentrification (which has already claimed Creamery), or perhaps it’s a roundabout comment on being born in ’77 and alive in 2017: “When the winter weather’s done/Gimme some gimme some summer sun.”


The cheeky London duo put their own spin on UK bass music, and their latest EP of compu-heaters is one of the most substantial releases of their young but already impressive career.

Icons EP

Given their playful public image, it might seem like Two Shell crashed into the murky world of UK bass like a glitter bomb in a cement factory. But in reality, the mysterious London duo came in a Trojan horse made of unassuming stuff: brittle textures, stark tone colors, sternly syncopated beats. Their 2019 debut EP for Livity Sound fit neatly with the lean, percussive style of leftfield UK club music. Their anthemic tendencies earned comparisons to Overmono and Bicep, UK duos known for supersizing underground tropes for big-room crowds. And Two Shell’s edits—like “Wedding Practice,” which makes zero attempt to disguise a sizeable chunk lifted from Alicia Keys’ “If I Ain’t Got You”—put them in a class alongside artists like Four Tet and Jamie xx, who wield canny bootlegs as floor-filling festival wildcards.
But not long after they’d established themselves as promising new talents working within a well-defined lane, a switch was flipped, and the anonymous duo turned out to have much more mischievous inclinations. On Two Shell’s 2020 mix CD, ɪᴍᴘᴀᴄᴛ21, songs by canonical acts like Skee Mask and the Prodigy bumped up against shards of digital-native styles like nightcore and hyperpop. They’ve recently dusted their music with helium-huffing vocals reminiscent of SOPHIE and peppered their sets with cheeky flips of Sugababes and the Corrs. Digging is part of any DJ’s job, but hearing Two Shell drop chirpy remixes of unknown emo randos suggests an affinity with Gen Z’s digital avant-garde that you won’t find among most of their post-dubstep peers.
The audaciousness of Two Shell’s productions is matched by the slipperiness of the duo’s presentation. In their Boiler Room appearance at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound last month, they performed wearing absurd disguises—chain mail and cloth goat horns on one, clown wig and nylon-stocking face mask on the other—and were almost certainly pantomiming to a pre-recorded mix. There are even rumors that the two people behind the decks weren’t Two Shell at all. The deeper you descend through the Two Shell looking glass, the more the whole enterprise begins to take on the air of a grade-A piss take, a no-fucks-given sendup of contemporary DJ culture. Yet on Icons, their most substantial release to date, the music, at least, is no joke.
Compared to the breakneck pace and cotton-candy textures of their recent jungle edit “Home,” Icons’ five tracks at first sound almost staid. There are plenty of sped-up vocals and zippy synths, but the tempos are more measured, the structures more streamlined, the beats more in keeping with the past decade of bass-heavy UK techno. Joy Orbison’s game-changing 2009 single “Hyph Mngo” is their obvious lodestar; you can hear it almost verbatim in the hiccupping vocal loop of the opening “Ghosts” and the fluttering synths of “Pods,” which follows. While it’s hardly an obscure pick—no song did more to mark the end of the dubstep era and the beginning of the amorphous stylistic free-for-all that followed—it’s been a while since anyone zeroed in so doggedly on the song’s ecstatic qualities. Virtually every element of Icons feels engineered to replicate the dizzy rush of nightclubbing at its most exhilarating, when a new sound gets its claws into you for the first time.
Two Shell are master manipulators of tension. “Ghosts” just keeps cresting upward, promising release and then pulling out the rug as its towering pillar of synths collapses in a shuddering heap. “Dust” uses a brisk, stuttering effect to accentuate its pulse-raising intensity. “Pods” is even more white-knuckled, running an indistinct vocal sample through a tinny metallic filter that makes it sound like someone is screaming bloody murder somewhere deep in the bowels of the track.
But as full-on as the music can get, they top it off with a jokey flourish of something like metafiction. “Pods” pauses halfway through to make way for a sing-song computer voice intoning database commands. “Calling digital rockstar,” it warbles, and is swiftly answered by an ersatz electric guitar. The relatively linear and groove-driven “Dust” is repeatedly interrupted by the sing-song voiceover of an android flight controller, recalling similar gambits by Drexciya, Daft Punk, and DJ Koze’s trio International Pony. “Memory” makes the most extensive use of these self-consciously digital textures; its melancholy, Vocaloid-inspired singing could have come from a folder of unused PC Music stems. All of these additions have the effect of undoing any potential self-seriousness; the beats may be heavy, but the mood is as light and frothy as Cool Whip.
The final song, “Mainframe,” breaks with the lithe rhythms and wide-eyed rapture of the preceding four tracks. A mid-tempo breakbeat tune marbled with gnarled streaks of acidic bass, it’s a pretty unambiguous homage to the garish big beat sound of the late ’90s, right down to the turntable scratching effects. Bogged down by its half-time rhythm and sticky midrange, it’s the only song on the EP that never achieves liftoff, but the style, at least, is entirely in character for Two Shell. Armed with concussive beats, sardonic wit, and the fairy dust of a sneakily deployed sample, they’re clearly intent upon reclaiming the lineage of UK dance music at its boldest and brashest, taking their place alongside iconic duos like the Chemical Brothers and the KLF. They’re not there yet, but Icons suggests they have a really good shot at it.


The French foursome's fifth album scans as a post-success commentary, dropping you into a fast-changing world of K-pop synth melodies, Californian glamor and Scandinavian leather where they appear distinctly uncomfortable. The only reliable constant is the band's winning, shiny, jacked-up formula.

Bankrupt!

Phoenix are a total anachronism-- can you name another post-millennial power-pop band of thirtysomethings that made the jump from cult curio to festival headliners 10 years and four albums into their career? But if their trajectory feels old-fashioned, the French foursome are so perfectly emblematic of our present. Sure, you could chalk up the surprise, runaway success of 2009's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix as some fortuitously timed, crossover-appealing fusion of big-tent indie anthems and glossy synth sheen; but then, this band has embraced huge hooks and smooth moves since day one. Really, Phoenix started making the big dollars once they stopped making sense: By intensifying the jiterry energy introduced on 2006’s It’s Never Been Like That, with Wolfgang, they perfected an ADD-via-ESL approach to pop that matched the pace of our hyperactive, distracted, smartphone-sucking lives.
And through that process, Thomas Mars’ lyrics became Phoenix’s most frivolous yet essential quality. Once a heart-on-sleeve romantic, the frontman now revels in jabbering out seemingly intelligible, ultimately inscrutable streams of words, starting one sentence only to finish another, as if he writes songs by making random copy-and-paste errors. Phoenix songs are that party conversation you weren't really paying attention to or didn't fully understand, but to which you nod in agreement anyway; you don't so much sing along as tentatively mouth along, like when you're doing karaoke and realize you don't know the words to your favorite song. Part way through the band’s fifth album*, Bankrupt!*, Mars even drops a kooky chorus line that doubles as an advertisement for the band’s addictively tuneful disarray: “It’s a jingle jungle/ Jingle junkie-junkie jumble.”
But on Bankrupt!, that sense of confusion is so pervasive it practically coheres into concept-album formalism. Even with Mars’ whimsical wordplay in full effect, the band’s fifth album scans very much as a post-success commentary, the sound of a band who, just two albums ago, was making dates for protest rallies, but now finds itself hobnobbing with the 1%. Lead single “Entertainment” shares its name with Gang of Four’s debut album and also a similar self-awareness of commodifying their art. In the wake of a deliriously ascendant, laser-beamed chorus that’ll give the band’s lighting guy a perfect excuse to shine the house high beams on some festival crowd, the music cuts out and Mars blithely admits, “I’d rather be alone.”
Mars is too amiable a vocalist to express pure disillusionment, but he’s great at communicating discomfort. Bankrupt! doesn’t so much ruefully reflect upon Phoenix’s whirlwind, globe-trotting lifestyle as drop you right in the middle of it. Its K-pop synth melodies and snapshots of Californian glamor and Scandinavian leather give you that sensation of seeing the world but only as a blur from the backseat of your chaffeured car, as you’re whisked from after-party to after-party for just enough time to make bullshit small talk and exchange contact info with people you have no intention of ever contacting. On the album’s heart-racing standout “S.O.S. in Bel Air”, Mars agitatedly shouts out the title as if summoning some sort of Bat signal escape from high-society banality; on the belt-it-out power ballad “Bourgeois”, he tosses a life-saver to a girl stuck bartending for fat cats on a cruise ship. And tellingly, a song named for d-bag cologne-of-choice “Drakkar Noir” is paired with one titled “Chloroform”, the implication being that they’re both just as toxic: the former equates its titular fragrance with sleazy seduction, the latter is a devastating slow jam that chronicles the inevitable morning-after kick to the curb, with Mars delivering the album’s most lucid and frank line: “I don’t like it if you miss me/ Why would I long for you?”
But if Bankrupt! catalogues a set of circumstances Phoenix never expected to find themselves in, they’ve at least grown accustomed to their surroundings. After all, the album rarely deviates from Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix’s winning formula; befitting the band’s ascendant status, everything’s just that much more shiny, jacked-up, and frantic. But the more-is-more approach fails them on the now-customary moody mid-album odyssey: Compared to previous downtempo turns like It's Never Been Like That's “North” and Wolfgang's two-part “Love Like a Sunset”, Bankrupt!’s seven-minute title track is less a cool comedown than a colossal brick that threatens to sink the whole record. The typical Phoenix song is already overstuffed with melodic change-ups, quirky instrumental flourishes, and fragementary logic; this concerted effort to go prog proper-- with its awkward hodge-podge of space-age bachelor-pad synth doodle, Vangelisian sci-fi soundscape, and forlorn folk ballad-- can’t help but sound forced and undercooked by contrast.
It's not the only moment on Bankrupt! where you wish Phoenix would stop overthinking and let their songs accrue a more natural momentum. Although “Don’t” begins as another fine addition to the band’s repertoire of snappy, post-Strokes skip-along jaunts, it’s derailed by a plaintive, saggy chorus that makes the song feel a lot longer than it is. Bankrupt! is most effective when blurring the line between celebrating decadence and reeling from it, as on the deceptively exuberant closer “Oblique City”, whose title presumably serves as a stand-in for any random stop on the band’s tour itinerary. It’s a song that seemingly celebrates the freedom of not knowing what city you’re waking up in, capturing the momentary rush you get from all the busy streets and massive neon-lit Coca-Cola ads. But couched within its boisterous bustle is a cry for help ringing out of the executive suite at 3 a.m.: “Am I gonna do this alone?,” Mars sings, a contradictory bookend to his anti-social “Entertainment” salvo, but one that encapsulates Bankrupt!’s conflicted, unsettled essence. The song’s synth-buzzed whirr eventually dissolves into gentle acoustic picking, but you know it’s just a brief moment of calm before Mars must brace himself to face another jingle-jungle morning.


In songs as slick and futuristic as the screens that surround us, the Danish electro-pop musician uses technology as a frame for deeply human feelings.

Skinned

From its dramatic first synth splash, Mary Louise Buch’s debut album, Skinned, seems as uncanny as an android. Its disorienting first minutes shift between sleek sonic touchstones—sci-fi keyboards, synthesized baroque strings, echoing drum crashes, and a warped, robotic vocal—with mechanical ease. But then we get a true shock: Delicately fingerpicked guitar clears the air for a soft human voice. The song, called “Can You Hear My Heart Leave,” is much like the album that follows: wrapped in technological wonders that never hide the human heart beating at its core. Instead, Buch works the two in seamless conjunction, creating a striking collision of experimental and pop sounds.
Primarily based in Berlin, Buch is more closely associated with her hometown scene in Copenhagen, where women like Astrid Sonne, Gel, and PANXING have crafted a fusion of modern classical, cutting-edge club music, and electro-acoustic experiments that sounds like nothing else in the world. Even in that context, Skinned stands out for its remarkable songwriting, fueled by Buch’s soaring voice, tender lyrics, and a guitar as malleable as clay in her hands.
Technology is a constant on Skinned, but Buch uses it as a means rather than an end. These are songs about love, heartbreak, and the unpredictable space connecting the two—and while technology does populate them, it serves more to frame those human feelings. “I’m a Girl You Can Hold IRL” explores intimacy via webcam with only a tender bassline and an airy vocal, before bursting into a moment of magical realism as she sings, “I’m coming through the screen/Crawling on your table/My mouth against your neck.” It’s a scene straight from The Ring reimagined with synth swells and dreamy romanticism. “Can’t Get Over You With You” inverts that sensation, grappling with breakups in the social-media age and the unsettling voyeurism of clicking an ex’s profile, something she finds unable to resist in the opening lines. Buch may sing a lot about screens, but depending on her approach they become portals, windows, or mirrors.
Nowhere is this more powerful or universal than on “Touching Screens,” a bright pop rush that sounds like Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place On Earth” 3D printed in the plastic mold of James Ferraro. The ecstatic chorus (“Touching screens/More than skin”) is delivered with cymbal crashes, guitar fireworks, and, in a perfect final minute, a stadium-sized rush of kick drum. Whoever she’s connecting with is left playfully ambiguous; instead, Buch focuses entirely on the relationship with the object itself, the addictive rush of “picking it up again” captured in balletic images of “fingers gliding” over glass. Whether the notification will spawn butterflies in the stomach or inflict sinking dread is unimportant—Buch focuses entirely on the brief moment between feeling our pocket buzz and checking our phone and blows it out with a surge of endorphins.
These colossal songs are well served by the adventurous instrumentals Buch creates as connective tissue. “O” shoots emotional flutters of trance synths, bridging the thrill of “Touching Screens” and the somber aftermath of “Can’t Get Over You With You.” On the atmospheric Astrid Sonne collaboration “Stone Bridge,” Sonne transmutes her viola from ashen drones to silvery high notes, an otherworldly addition that expands her own spectacular 2018 debut, Human Lines. The transformations continue right up to closer “MW,” a track littered with false endings and quick mutations, from a seasick guitar riff to a reprise of “Can You Hear My Heart Leave” to a crash of drums that builds to an overwhelming peak in the final seconds. For all its careful structure and tenderness, Skinned ensures you enter and leave it utterly dazed.
Much contemporary music tends to approach the subject of technology with the redundancy of that old Black Mirror joke, “what if phones, but too much.” But it’s so much more complex than that, because people are more complex than that. Technology is how we communicate now; we use it to grieve, and fall in and out love. ML Buch shows a remarkable understanding of our sci-fi present by crafting futuristic songs that, at their emotional core, feel timeless. The question she asks at the start is, “Can you hear my heart?” After Skinned, the answer is loud and clear.

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Seekers Who Are Lovers' Ángel Sánchez Borges returns under the name he uses for instrumental journeys into beat-driven minimalism on this, his first release for the Tijuana-based label Static Discos.

Kraut Slut

Late last year Ángel Sánchez Borges released a mini-album of ethereal drone-pop under the name Seekers Who Are Lovers. Seekers could be considered a side project for Borges if he didn't have so many things going on at once; he's also an experimental video artist of some renown, and now returns as Antiguo Autómata Mexicano, the name he uses for instrumental journeys into beat-driven minimalism. In 2005 he released his debut AAM record Microhate on the German label Backgroung; follow-up Kraut Slut is his first release for the Tijuana-based label Static Discos.
Given the titles of the album and the first track here, "Rother, Dinger, You, and Me", you might guess you're in for a concept record. And "Rother" certainly delivers on that score, channeling the spirit and the sound of classic Neu! with almost frightening accuracy, but doing so in an even more compact and completely digital package. It's basically a cover tune, but covering a sound as opposed to a song; Borges programs a simple series of pulses to mimic the interplay between Dinger's stark and insistent drum pulse frames Rother's buzzing, carefully picked guitar. Both the idea and the execution are fantastic.
But Kraut Slut doesn't stay long on the motorik road. "Mitte" sticks with sharp, crackly beats but drapes over them a soft curtain of static and lush chords suggesting a much more amorphous and dreamy headspace. It has the pulse of techno, but in terms of mood "Mitte" is closer to the shadowy and sensual world of his Seekers work. Same goes for "Extirpe" which is mostly slow-drift synthetic drone, with just a few percussive beeps and rips lurking in the shadows, while "Harm and Jazz" kicks up so much digital dust it the foreground, a constantly shifting collage of machine noise and buzzes, you can barely make out the steady bass and drums moving somewhere behind. "Malandro de Culto" and "Ill Stijl" are Borges' excursion into more dancefloor-oriented techno, and the latter especially, with its precise but busy array of bleeps, is a particularly focused beam of forward-moving energy.
So then, album title and opening track aside, what exactly binds these disparate elements into a single project? Borges seems most drawn to micro-leaning computer music as a way to conjure atmosphere; there's a lot of suggestion in Borges' music, hints at various possibilities, and you never get the sense that the technology-- always at the forefront considering the persistent use of glitches and noise-- is the music's subject. On its own, Kraut Slut is an evocative sampling of the potential of computer-based minimalism with a handful of fantastic tracks; considered along with Borges' other recent work, the record makes him seem an even more compelling artist worth following closely.


Nonfiction, the first full length from electronic producer James Hinton (aka the Range), is a meticulous record filled with pretty sounds: soft pianos, fake strings, bass that stretches like taffy, and synth blips that twinkle like itsy bitsy stars. Even at its busiest, it feels tidy and compact, like the gears of a prewar pocketwatch.

Nonfiction

Albums like Nonfiction, the first full-length from producer James Hinton (aka the Range), never get the credit they deserve: They’re too neat, too industrious, too polite—too many of the qualities we look for in coworkers and roommates and not enough of the ones we look for in artists. “I studied some math in school,” Hinton told us in a recent Rising interview. Math! Terrific. A sentence later he brings up his admiration for soft-rocker Bruce Hornsby. At 25, Hinton may have already blown the youth vote.
Nonfiction isn’t an album easily pegged to any scene or narrative currently circulating about electronic music. Its rhythms are rooted in hip-hop, drum & bass, and late-90s R&B, rendered on the scale of someone making music more for home listening than club play. Even at its busiest, the album feels tidy and compact, like the gears of a prewar pocketwatch. (What’s interesting to me about Hinton’s syncopations—the jazzy, double-time blasts of hi-hat and snare drum—is that syncopation is usually used to make a straight beat sound momentarily off-balance, whereas on Nonfiction, the more syncopated the tracks are, the more orderly they feel.)
Nearly every track here is pretty, in the most conventional sense of the word. Soft pianos, fake strings, bass that stretches like taffy, and synth blips that twinkle like itsy bitsy stars—if the sounds on Nonfiction showed up on your doorstep in the dead of night, you’d probably let them in without question. On a lot of the album*,* Hinton’s approach reminds me of Aphex Twin circa Richard D. James tracks like “4” and “Girl/Boy Song”—songs that juxtapose a cute surface with a hard-hitting, even threatening undercurrent. The difference is that James is a perennial misfit who always seemed to be half-joking and Hinton operates with the earnestness of a post-rock band working in miniature.
Nonfiction's highlights-- "Metal Swing," "Jamie" and "FM Myth"-- are built around vocal samples. House and dance music have a long tradition of making the human voice do contortions on tape that they could never do live—a possibility afforded by samplers and digital recording, which enable producers to chop, cut, paste, and loop in ways that would’ve been agonizing in the analog era. On Nonfiction, Hinton allows his vocalists full phrases, sometimes even sentences. Usually, these vocalists are gruff-sounding English dudes who seem to have been wounded by something they aren’t ready to get too specific about. (Hinton says he mostly finds them on YouTube, a site that lets us glimpse into the lives of strangers in a way that feels both intimate and yet impossibly cryptic.) They repeat their laments, sometimes for minutes on end, while the music grows steadily around them. The result feels like a series of time-lapse portraits of people refusing to change despite their changing environment—a nice, melancholy touch on an album that tends to take extroverted music and turn it inward.
Even if you listen to Nonfiction—and even if you like it—it probably won’t inspire you to call anyone up and say, “[Expletive], I just got back from the library, or the office, or picking up [friend’s name] at the airport, and I had this new Range album on at a reasonable volume the whole time, and it totally increased my general sense of well-being!” What it might inspire, though, is a kind of passive, slowly gestating admiration—the kind usually best measured in iTunes plays three or four months down the line, the kind you tend to recognize several hours into a workday in front of your computer, the kind that doesn’t surge like a fire but instead grows patiently, like a vine.


Recorded in a Virginia mountain town named Rural Retreat, the debut from this quartet of fringe-folk veterans beautifully articulates the weirdness and magic of life outside of the city.

Doran

F-150s and Fox News, Christians and country music, ammunition and American flags: These are defining symbols of modern life in the rural United States, a landscape often assumed to be so stubborn and insular that liberal pundits write it off as a lost cause. That stereotype overlooks not only an incoming tide of militantly progressive country folks but also the sort of longstanding wonder that can emerge from life outside of the city. This is the ever-weird America that fascinated Harry Smith and the Lomax lineage, after all, a place so attuned to the skies and the seasons, and so isolated from trends, that it can produce an esoteric entertainment that feels worlds apart from its city kin. Its so-called “outsider art” transmogrifies life’s joys and impositions into something transcendent.
That practical magic is the lifeblood of Doran, a spectacular new quartet composed of four musicians long situated on the fringes of American folk, all of them singers and multi-instrumentalists with a shared fondness for puppet shows and far-flung folk myths. Doran are a pair of pairs: Channing Showalter and Annie Schermer are known as West of Roan, a group whose sublime and haunted songs speak to time split between North Carolina’s Blue Ridge and Washington’s Cascades. Elizabeth LaPrelle, meanwhile, earned attention with Anna & Elizabeth, a transgressive outfit responsible for one of the most transfixing albums of the past decade. Her husband, Brian Dolphin, is a songwriter and ethnomusicologist steeped in the traditional sounds of the Ukraine and U.S. They channel all this into their self-titled debut.
In the winter of 2019, the two duos rendezvoused in the tiny Virginia mountain town where LaPrelle and Dolphin lived until recently. They entertained themselves in the ways that life in a place named Rural Retreat might suggest—cavorting in fallen leaves, stewing broth for hours, and escaping to an attic to record 13 songs that capture the strange majesty of lives so tied to nature that the occult and the ordinary overlap. Where Bonny Light Horseman subtly reimagined very old songs for now, Doran’s originals deny that the march of time actually exists. Their debut lands like a lost treasure salvaged from the vaults of the Watersons in the ’70s or Devendra Banhart and his Gnomonsong cohort three decades later. Sweet, sad, and often surreal, Doran is content to be out of place, a bounty stolen from the deepest woods.
Doran’s four voices—or, rather, the ineffable ways they intertwine—are Doran’s most immediate and expansive tool. Hymnody and balladry, shape-note songs and madrigals: The quartet’s breadth and skills as singers evoke a rural Roomful of Teeth, retrofitting that ensemble’s sense of the palatial conservatory for a modest cabin. Eerie harmonies cast the enchanting prelude of “Deer People,” an invocation fit for either the fall harvest or the tarot. Individual notes gather and scatter like a small symphony of bells throughout “Old Moon,” the steady melody bejeweled by brilliant vocal flashes. As Showalter sings of silvery nocturnal walks during “Solstice,” the rest of the quartet moves in and out of a round, latching onto syllables or phrases to form a rhythm that resembles a trance. I find myself hoping it will never end, then idly humming to sate that desire.
But Doran does not exist to dazzle. These songs are vivid if elliptical snapshots of love and woe, joy and devastation. They celebrate simple pleasures. Rivers, trails, and winds, for instance, act as little gifts during the measured dulcimer gem “Down the Road.” Set against a plaintive fiddle drone, “Day into Night” is Dolphin’s tender ode to a dying friend, soon to be released from the tedium of doctors and pain. The rest of the band gathers him around in the last chorus, an act of encouragement for the living. And Schermer insists that light cannot function without dark during “The Shadow Walks Behind You,” her spectral thesis on the coexistence of pleasure and despair. “Without them, we are only walking. We cannot really dance,” she says over autoharp strums, coolly imparting a bit of country wisdom.
To that same end, the sounds here set these tunes on edge, with foreboding lurking behind every studied harmony. The sense of eternal mystery written into “Bread and Water” is reinforced by the bowed dulcimer beneath it, steadily howling like the ghost of Tony Conrad. The melody of “And We Are Going” is a fuzzy blanket, but the slackly tuned guitar strings conjure an old barn in winter, wind slipping through the cracks. Bells that clatter at the end enhance that forlorn mood, as though this song lives in the loneliest place in the world.
A few days ago, and not so far from where Doran cut this introduction, I was walking through the woods, listening to these songs as the first hints of winter appeared. My mind was focused on the rippling fiddle of “Bonefolder,” a tune forever suspended between a dance and a dirge, when I looked up and spotted a bobcat only feet away. We stared at one another for a while, waiting for anything to happen. The encounter felt dangerous and thrilling and real, an instant of rural life where the demands of the modern world seemed nonexistent—the exact same sensation, turns out, that Doran delivers for 46 minutes.

Buy: Rough Trade
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