Common teams with Karriem Riggins and Robert Glasper for an album whose best moments suggest a dignified, modern maturation.

August Greene

The cluster of songs that open August Greene’s debut album offer a precious glimpse into how a 40-something rapper can continue to sound modern and, more importantly, dignified. The MC in question is Common, who heads up the trio alongside pianist Robert Glasper and drummer Karriem Riggins, two longtime collaborators who share his interest in the places where jazz meets hip-hop. The first track, “Meditation,” is, simply, a beautiful rap song. Over nothing more than gently wavering Mellotron synth lines, droplets of acoustic piano, and a shuffling, clipped drum pattern, Common recites sage lyrics, even twisting a rowdy party-starting anthem made by Redman in the ’90s into rap-referential commentary on the mental health of the world: “They body-snatching black girls in D.C./Politics and propaganda on the TV/Distractions distracting us from action/It’s time for some, time for some passion.” The song is a testament to economy: It’s impressive to hear experienced musicians like Common, Glasper, and Riggins let the emotional essence of a song glow rather than swaddle it with unnecessary trinkets.
This restrained, compassionate tone makes the first part of August Greene a poignant listen. On “Black Kennedy,” Common connects families and dynasties through a simple but emotional hook that moves from institutional politics to a warm memory of hanging in Detroit with the departed hip-hop icon J Dilla. “Let Go” performs a similar trick, linking political movements to introspective thoughts as Common invokes a Michelle Obama speech to confess, “I’m supposed to go high when they go low/I forget the big picture and snap like a photo.” He’s left dealing with the ensuing “clouds of doubt and gloom” that form in his head before hollering, “I yell freedom ‘cause I’m free to be dumb.”
At this point, you’re struck by the feeling that you’re listening to three wizened souls taking a step back to reflect on the world around them while younger generations buzz by chasing after trends. Experience is being channeled through music. In Common’s case, this involves the maturity to develop from someone who rapped some of hip-hop’s most misogynistic lyrics in the early ’90s to landing philosophical observations like “forgiveness is a synonym for live and live again,” as he does on the melancholic “Practice.”
But just as the album looks like it’s about to settle and prosper in this zone, in comes “Piano Interlude,” and the tone of August Greene shifts messily. When Common moves into spoken-word territory and rolls out the debatably deep line “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears the sound, did it really ever happen at all?,” it’s like he’s uprooted all of the carefully considered words that have come before in favor of reciting a motivational poster. What plays out next is an uneasy mix between a jam session and something you might unkindly suggest has the timbre of coffee-shop muzak. The more the songs’ vibe is fleshed out, the lesser the emotional impact. Case in point: “No Apologies” is a punchy, funked-up workout, but the call-to-arms hook feels like it’s waiting to be experienced at a live show, and it punctures the nuances of the tracks that came before. (Common’s revolutionary bent isn’t helped by lyrics that outline a plan of action that also involves watching Amélie.) Likewise, “Optimistic” is a cover of the 1991 Sounds of Blackness hit that drafts in a vocal cameo from Brandy. The song certainly hits that ’90s R&B vibe, but it stands out instead of contributing to the grand fabric of the album.
The 11-track album closes with the patience-trying “Swisher Suite,” a song that features guest vocals from Brandy, Estelle, Bilal, and jazz musician Samora Pinderhughes. For the most part, it sounds like a 12-minute ramble about scouring a city in an attempt to hunt down some weed. Even before the track settles to a close with Riggins’ bare drum outro, the only craving it musters up is a wish to return to the bucolic fresh air of August Greene’s graceful opening moments.


Kesha’s musical career has been defined by her work with Dr. Luke. On her third album, she begins something new and promising.

Rainbow

The story of Kesha Rose Sebert can be told with two songs from her first demo tape. They were written in her teens after she moved to Nashville with her mother, country songwriter Pebe Sebert. The first, Billboard described as a “gobsmackingly awful trip-hop track... at one point toward the end, Ke$ha runs out of lyrics and starts rapping, for a full minute or so: ‘I’m a white girl/From the ’Ville/Nashville, bitch.’” The other? “A gorgeously sung, self-penned country ballad that hints at what could've been had Ke$ha pursued a different path.” Former producer Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald, with whom Kesha is embroiled in a series of lawsuits about his alleged sexual and emotional abuse, preferred the high-octane rapping track. This choice would define Sebert’s sound, image, and career as the flagship artist for his label Kemosabe—a career she’s grappled with ever since. The fact that Rainbow exists at all is a feat unto itself.
In the years since her 2010 debut Animal—which housed the massive No. 1 club-pop hit “Tik Tok”—much has changed in the greater music world. Virtually every pop star of the early ’10s has written off the gonzo sound just as Kesha has. Rihanna released an album proclaiming herself “anti”-it all. Lady Gaga shed glamour and gimmicks for a guitar-based album with her middle name instead of her noble sobriquet. Miley Cyrus quit twerking in a butter costume, made lite-rock, and called it a spiritual awakening.
Kesha has more claim to this career trajectory than some—her Nashville roots are established, and any new music by her would basically have to depart from Gottwald’s sound. For the past few years, Kesha was legally barred from releasing music, a clause she bypassed with a series of unofficial-ish concerts. Yes, it’s remarkable that Rainbow exists, but the fact that it’s pretty good is even more remarkable. The album could easily have been designed to fail, like a vengeful Sony Music fulfilling the letter of their responsibilities by foisting upon Sebert C-list producers. Just as perilously, it could have been a stolid album, Kesha as the prodigal pop star, apologizing for her past hits via self-consciously “authentic” tracks that snuff her personality.
There is still some of that; Rainbow is inevitably heavy with subtext and a need to prove something, especially on “Praying.” Kesha commits emotionally and vocally (one high note spawned actual reaction videos); the lyrics—righteous warnings that tiptoe up to the line of litigation (“We both know the truth I could tell”)—execute their intention precisely. But it’s still a pro forma piano ballad, produced by collaborator Ryan Lewis (of “Macklemore &” fame) with a plodding track and sloppy comping of Kesha’s vocals, particularly on the verses. It works more as a statement than a song. The title track, a collaboration with Ben Folds that blooms into a string arrangement, is an improvement, but still sedate.
Thankfully, the rest of Rainbow lets Kesha be her usual OTT self. Studio banter is left in; on some tracks she breaks down into laughter like her ad-libbed, “I like your beard.” Since Warrior, Kesha had fought for rock tracks, with limited success; Iggy Pop made that album, but a very toned-down version. Rainbow substitutes Eagles of Death Metal. The exuberant “Let ’Em Talk” is like closing-credits music for her own story, and “Boogie Feet,” despite the inauspicious title, is surprisingly beefy, culminating in a glam call-and-response as fun as anything she’s done. Kesha tears through country as she does rock. “Hunt You Down” is a blatant June Carter homage—it name-drops “I Walk the Line” halfway through, for those who hadn't gotten it before—and its goony stalker glee makes for something like a rockabilly version of her song “Stephen.”
If there’s a reason that Rainbow doesn’t seem cohesive or an album that autonomously belongs to Kesha, it’s more a byproduct of her situation. Kesha still owes two more albums to the label she fought to leave, and here she grapples with her commercial whims. While “Praying” is hanging on at adult pop radio, very little is positioned to follow it. One promising direction is, of all things, twee: “Bastards,” “Godzilla,” and “Spaceship” land somewhere between Kacey Musgraves and freak-folk, lightweight campfire songs that make monster rampages and profanity sound wholesome and weirdly touching. Sebert could also return to her roots, as on “Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You),” Pebe Sebert’s biggest hit, popularized by Dolly Parton. Parton, always known for supporting her acolytes, guests on this fuller arrangement, and there’s an appealing sense of a legacy passed on.
Perhaps the most promising direction on Rainbow is “Woman,” featuring the Dap-Kings Horns. The mere existence of this song is something of a conceptual coup. Kesha has replaced the producer who once suggested that “A-list songwriters and producers are reluctant to give Kesha their songs because of her weight” with the backing band beloved by Mark Ronson, not to mention the late Amy Winehouse and Sharon Jones. Like most artists would, Kesha inhabits this lineage a bit tentatively, and “don’t touch my weave” is a lyric perhaps best delivered by someone other than Kesha Sebert. But she’s having fun: laughing through the song, proclaiming herself a “motherfucking woman” on the colossal hook. Her early records, of course, were meant to be fun; here, one can unequivocally say Kesha has joined in.


On their 13th album, the Canadian indie lifers play to their strengths with classic rock worship and power-pop hooks.

Steady

Since signing to Geffen at the apex of the grunge explosion, Sloan have succeeded at writing timeless songs that don’t sound “hysterically 1993 twenty years later.” They’ve occasionally tweaked the formula—like the 30 short songs of Never Hear the End of It, or their tributes to hardcore—but on Steady, their 13th album, the Halifax-born, Toronto-based quartet play to their strengths, returning to a seemingly bottomless well of power-pop hooks and unabashed classic rock worship. With the variation provided by four primary songwriters, Sloan reign in the frills and achieve an unlikely accomplishment for a veteran band: aging gracefully.
Before they settled on the name 12, Sloan’s previous album had the working title Essential Services. Its concept of reaching into the vault to rework old ideas with fresh ears resulted in songs like the Smeared-inspired shoegaze of “The Day Will Be Mine” and the self-referencing “Don’t Stop (If It Feels Good Do It).” Focusing on the core of their sound was a step in the right direction, but it occasionally felt like staring into the rearview mirror. The sound of Steady is no less nostalgic, but its lyrics about COVID masks and fossil fuel dependency keep these songs painfully set in the present.
Bassist Chris Murphy has written many of Sloan’s most enduring hits, and he takes the MVP title with four songs on Steady. His love of the Beatles flows through the Lennon-esque piano pop of “Human Nature,” with lyrics about how being infamous is better than being ignored, and the jaunty bounce of “I Dream of Sleep,” an exhausted response to “I’m Only Sleeping.” Guitarist Jay Ferguson shares a love of retro rock with the softest touch of the group, packing his songs with handclaps, tambourines, and sweet vocal harmonies. Midway through Steady’s “Dream It All Over Again,” he describes the band’s core ethos: “If you wait a while/Then we’ll be back in style.”
Drummer Andrew Scott is Sloan’s George Harrison—the soulful outlier who quietly makes the most interesting artistic choices. His song “Panic on Runnymede” is a case in point: No one besides him would choose to interrupt its hazy groove with the sound of barking dogs. The cooing sunshine pop of “Close Encounters” is relatively straightforward by comparison, but Scott’s politically incisive lyrics contrast the song’s laidback melody: “It’s so depressingly sad/How held hostage we are/By the wifi bars/And all the gas in our cars.” In an album full of diaristic songs from four middle-aged dad rockers, Scott’s contributions still feel the sharpest.
Guitarist Patrick Pentland has always excelled at writing Sloan’s biggest, catchiest singles, tailor-made for a beer commercial or hockey arena. He continues with “Scratch the Surface,” a song about finding solace from existential dread through “peace and love, liquor and drugs.” (It’s not the first time he’s referenced Iggy Pop.) Pentland’s other two songs for Steady were written in the wake of a divorce, with musical responses on opposite ends of the stylistic spectrum. “Spend the Day” escapes into the man cave of his mind with bombastic drum fills and a soaring guitar solo. “Simply Leaving” is one of the saddest songs he’s ever written, gingerly pushed forward by the “Be My Baby” beat—musical shorthand for epic melancholy.
From their second album, 1994’s Twice Removed, onwards, Sloan decided to move past the My Bloody Valentine influences of their debut, “so that you wouldn't know what year it was from.” On Steady, they accept their position as indie-rock elder statesmen. Without Murphy’s sardonic humor, Ferguson’s power-pop wimpiness, Scott’s psychedelic odysseys, and Pentland’s rock anthems, they wouldn’t be Sloan—and thankfully, they’re not trying to be anything else.


Hailed as a UK buzz artist for her blend of folk and pop sensibility, this newcomer is more akin to Scandinavians Lykke Li and Jenny Wilson.

Lights

In the UK it's hard to hear Ellie Goulding above the hullaballoo of the hype-cycles. Tipped in January as the sound of 2010 in two tastemaker polls, she's received distinctly underwhelmed reviews now her album has been released. It's an odd record to have been caught in the crossfire: There's no high concept or big personality, it doesn't ride any particular fashion wave or nostalgia agenda. Instead critics have seized upon a sense of contrivance, the idea that UK pop culture is meme-splicing from the recent past, and that Goulding has been cynically designed to hitch the nu-folk fad of 2008 (Laura Marling) to the 1980s pop vogue of last year (Little Boots) and achieve full-spectrum media approval from Mojo to Popjustice. And so she's getting shot by both sides: not folky enough for purists, not sensational enough for the pop crowd, but mid-market, middlebrow-- the new Dido.
If she'd been born Else Goldsdottir, and hailed from Helsinki rather than Hereford, Goulding probably wouldn't have these problems. Maybe it's because ABBA started out in folk groups, but the Scandinavians seem more comfortable with the idea of a confessional pop that marries immediacy with intimacy. Goulding would fit in perfectly alongside Lykke Li, Jenny Wilson, even Robyn.
Outside of its immediate context, Lights is a sometimes great, always promising debut. It's an album about leaving home, and it works best when the contrast between the folk singer and the pop production chimes with the tensions between the pull of home and the allure of the city. "Guns and Horses" may be the best opening invitation for travel since "Two Divided by Zero" kicked off the Pet Shop Boys' Please: "Let's join forces, we've got our guns and horses...." It builds from spare acoustics to urgent trance pop-- "I left my house, left my clothes, door widen open, heaven knows, but you're so worth it, you are..."-- concluding with a desperate a cappella coda, and a brief breathless chuckle at her casual audacity.
"Wish I Stayed" is apparently the first song that Goulding emailed to Vincent Frank (aka Frankmusik, south London's bedroom pop auteur) as an acoustic songwriter. It's still the song that best captures the tensions of Lights, with Goulding singing of "skipping ropes, trampolines" and crafty schoolgirl smokes. It's reminiscent of the suburban pop of the Sundays (if they'd had an electro makeover like their forbears Everything But the Girl)-- the details of small lives and sitting room triumphs, the low horizons and "the carelessness of running away."
Lights is mostly produced by Frank's protégé Starsmith, and he does a largely good job, notably on the euphoric e-rush of "Starry Eyed" and "Under the Sheets", a grand, almost Björkian hyperballad. On the negative side, "The Writer" is a big bluster of a song, with a chorus where the spectre of the Cranberries' Dolores O'Riordan is all too vivid, whose future success could be Goulding's undoing. The cheap tinsel backing track to "I'll Hold My Breath" is reminiscent of Wham!'s "Last Christmas", while "Your Biggest Mistake" could be a Frankmusik cast-off.
But at its best Lights feels remarkably uncontrived, cantering across genres, following personal whims and visions rather than marketing agendas. Unusually for a British pop debut album, it doesn't seem desperate for the immediate approval of chart success. You get the feeling Goulding could write another album or two (after Lights, Cameras, and then Action) before she really gets going, becoming the sound of 2012 or 2015 or whenever. Whether the UK pop industry has the patience to bear with her remains to be seen.


On its straightforward but deeply felt sixth album, the Ohio rock band positions music itself as a salve against the horrors of the world.

A Beautiful Life

Erika Wennerstrom succinctly lays out the Heartless Bastards’ motivation on “Revolution,” the epic opener to the band’s sixth album. “Big Brother’s watching you and trying to sell you something new,” she sings, as though she’s trying to warn you away from a cliff edge or a Facebook questionnaire. “And I just want to take away, take away the blues.” Music has always been her salve against the horrors of the world, a means of buttressing her mental health, and now on A Beautiful Life, it’s a corrective to late-stage capitalism. The song’s sentiment—“The revolution is in your mind”—might sound straightforward and her nostalgia for the days before fake news a bit pat, but the music is ambitious, even thrilling. The song opens with just Wennerstrom’s voice and guitar, then builds gradually to a crunchy, jangly payoff that’s one of the best and most bracing moments in the Bastards’ catalog.
Like their fellow Ohioans the Black Keys, the Heartless Bastards started out as a fairly spartan throwback rock band, pounding out sturdy, bluesy plaints on their 2005 debut, Stairs and Elevators. But they have grown beyond that sound with each album, dipping into country music on 2009’s The Mountain and classic rock on 2012’s Arrow. Through it all, Wennerstrom’s voice has remained the most distinctive instrument in the band’s sound, although she has had trouble calibrating that mighty instrument to quieter moments, especially on 2006’s All This Time. A Beautiful Life is her best album as a vocalist, as she finds new ways to bend her voice to different styles and sounds. She’s not trying to drown out all the bad news; instead, she sings her lyrics like mantras, as though constantly reminding herself to take deep breaths and find perspective. “You got to let go of your worry,” she tells herself on “Doesn’t Matter Now.” “Oh honey, you didn’t do nothing wrong.”
Leading a band of session players and sidemen—including members of Okkervil River, White Denim, and My Morning Jacket, not to mention longtime Bastards bassist Jesse Ebaugh—Wennerstrom dips into the 1960s to create a kaleidoscopic palette. Situated at the center of the album, “The River” and “Photograph” are free-floating, hallucinogenic forays into crunchy psychedelia. “You Never Know” takes it back a few years, piling on the lush orchestration and staccato strings of mid-decade bouffant pop, and Wennerstrom layers her voice to sound perfectly at home channeling Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black.
A Beautiful Life is inevitably grounded in the worries of the here and now. “Have you forgotten when there was a time filled with hope instead of fear that’s in your heart?,” she asks on “Revolution.” It’s a misnomer, however, to call it a political album, because Wennerstrom internalizes all of that fear and anxiety. Her songs are less about specific issues and more about her own personal responses to them. Her lyrics occasionally sound like talking points (“Oh, the world is filled with so much greed”) or, worse, like cliches (“If at first you don’t succeed/ Try, try again”), and she ends the album by deferring to the Beatles’ most overused line: “All you need is love.” But every song here poses the same essential questions: How do you keep living in a world that presents nothing but ugliness? Where do you find something nurturing, something sustaining, something beautiful? “Music” might sound like too easy an answer, but at its best this album makes it sound like an epiphany.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Weezer’s 1994 debut, filled with geeky humor, dense cultural references, and positively gargantuan hooks, took alt-rock in a striking new direction.

Weezer (Blue Album)

Weezer mastermind Rivers Cuomo was such a somber kid that his second-grade teacher trained the other students to tell him, in unison, “Let me see the smile.” Childhood in Yogaville, the ashram and Integral Yoga HQ led by “Woodstock guru” Swami Satchidananda in eastern Connecticut, was isolating, devoid of much pop culture and adventure—until Cuomo heard Kiss. When a family friend brought their fifth album, 1976’s Rock and Roll Over, to the Cuomo house, it sent Rivers and younger brother Leaves launching off furniture in a way only formative music can. “I’ve pretty much based my life around that record,” he has said. With their comic-book personas and distorted riffs, Kiss cracked Cuomo’s young brain wide open and rewired it for good. He had little idea what debauchery they were singing of, but from that point on, Cuomo began having intense dreams about becoming a rock star, and he began obsessively studying the work of his songwriting heroes.
For Rivers, music offered both a coat of armor and an identity. As a pre-teen enrolled in public school for the first time, Cuomo went by a different first name and his stepfather’s last name (Kitts); his chosen moniker—Peter Kitts—was awfully close to that of Kiss drummer Peter Criss. And while Cuomo was still picked on as he made his way through puberty, he eventually found his people: the metalheads. In 1989, Cuomo moved from Connecticut with his high school band to Los Angeles, ground zero for the AquaNetted and Spandexed. There, he found himself in the midst of shifting tastes, both culturally and personally. He started working at the Sunset Boulevard Tower Records, where he was schooled on quintessentially “cool” music like the Velvet Underground, Pixies, and Sonic Youth.
Also in the mix at this time was a new band called Nirvana. When Cuomo first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the radio in late 1991 while washing dishes in an Italian restaurant, he was sorta pissed he didn’t write it himself. “Rivers says, ‘I should have written that,’” remembered early Weezer guitarist Jason Cropper in John D. Luerssen’s band biography, River’s Edge. “And I’m like, ‘Yeah. That’s totally true.’ Because the music he was writing was improving in quality every day.” Cuomo’s interest in Nirvana became an obsession. He’d taken notes from Brian Wilson, the Beatles, Scorpions, Yngwie Malmsteen, and, of course, Kiss. But for all his knowledge of rock history, he still cared deeply about writing anthems that spoke to his generation, even if he had trouble looking his peers in the eyes.
Weezer anthems were destined to be different. In 1994, the acts dominating the modern rock charts were pushing against something, from the British aesthetes (Depeche Mode, New Order, Morrissey) to the singular weirdos (Beck, Tori Amos, Red Hot Chili Peppers) to the disenfranchised youth (Nirvana, Green Day, Pearl Jam). With rebellion came a facade of cool, and that was something Weezer could never manage, at least not in the traditional way. Cuomo always tried a little too hard. He would become the fidgety anti-frontman with a thousand “revenge of the nerds” taglines and a Harvard degree to prove it. That dichotomy—the big-time rockstar in khakis and Buddy Holly glasses, who never seems totally comfortable in his own skin—is what launched his cult and anchored his unlikely sex appeal. And his band—drummer Patrick Wilson, bassist Matt Sharp, and guitarist Brian Bell—played along, accentuating their innate geekiness to make Weezer feel like a unified front.
By the summer of 1993, Cuomo had written a number of songs strong enough to convince the alt-rock major DGC to sign Weezer (this despite a lack of buzz around the L.A. scene) and have the Cars’ frontman Ric Ocasek produce their first album. When the group’s self-titled debut—typically known as The Blue Album—arrived in May 1994, Cobain had been dead for a month. A feeling of dread hung over the alternative rock world whose prominence was ushered in by the Seattle sound. With their wired energy, effortless power-pop-punk hooks, and Beach Boys harmonies, Weezer took the alt-rock explosion in a new direction. You couldn’t quite tell if Cuomo was mocking his song’s regressive narrators or sympathizing with them. But once you got past his defense mechanisms and sorting through the humor and cultural references, you found a portrait of a young man’s psyche, riddled with angst and insecurity. And it arrived on the wings of massive riffs and gnarled guitar solos that sounded like they were emanating from a Flying V—on every single song.
The Blue Album’s exploration of the fragile male ego is in full swing by the record’s second track, “No One Else.” Taken at face value, this is likely the most misogynistic song Weezer has ever released. “I want a girl who will laugh for no one else,” Cuomo sings while the band rushes through the fuzzy pop-punk changes, evoking the hyperbole of masculinity. But there’s more beneath the surface. “‘No One Else’ is about the jealous-obsessive asshole in me freaking out on my girlfriend," Cuomo has said. The song acquires even more resonance in the context of its sequencing on the record. Cuomo described the following song, “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here,” as “the same asshole wondering why she's gone.” In actuality, he spends most of “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” muttering to his ex’s wallet photograph and masturbating to her memory, getting in a joke along the way, saying she enjoyed the sex “more than ever.” It’s an absurd scene, but imagine the sentiment coming from the wrong person and it’s suddenly not so funny. Weezer were masterful at walking this line between knowing jokiness and legitimately creepy dysfunction.
This base kind of arrested development shifts back and forth between the narrator’s relationship with girls and his views on himself. If “No One Else” and “The World Has Turned and Left Me Here” are mirror twins, so are “Surf Wax America” and “In the Garage.” Given that Weezer were named after a common term for asthma sufferers, no one expected them to be out on a board riding the waves. That tension animates “Surf Wax America,” a well-crafted jumble of harmonic puzzles and barreling punk guitars where the hedonistic surfer lifestyle is both celebrated and chided for its simplistic worldview. Even while the song sneers, the ferocity of Cuomo screaming “Let’s go!” juxtaposed with the solemnness of the band’s Wilsonian harmonies make you believe, once again, in Weezer’s sincerity. Meanwhile, “In the Garage” is an homage to that happy place where no one judges you for your comic books, D&D figurines, and Kiss posters. It seems like over-the-top self-parody, but the garage was indeed a real place where early Weezer practiced and recorded when Cuomo, Sharp, and original guitarist Justin Fisher lived together in the “Amherst House” near Santa Monica. The hopeless ambition of “In the Garage” would make it the defining song of nerd-rock.
In between “Surf Wax America,” a fantasy about someone completely different, and “In the Garage,” a hyper-detailed song about himself, lies a song about his father. There are two more nakedly emotional songs on Blue, which are set off further by Cuomo’s rare embrace of laid-back guitars. Atop a bluesy jangle, “Say It Ain’t So” details the moment when Cuomo’s deepest worries are realized: He sees a beer in the fridge and, remembering how his father drank before he walked out, he senses his stepfather is doing the same. He fears now that he, too, is destined for this fate. Pinkerton, Weezer’s sophomore album, is often described as the tortured confessional to end all tortured confessionals, essentially a diary of Cuomo’s notorious Asian fetish. But “Say It Ain’t So” is just as raw, and arguably has more that its listeners can use, throwing its arms wide open to anyone who’s known the trauma of dad issues. The music is constructed perfectly, building and building until what's left of Cuomo's vulnerability comes out as a bitterly frayed "yeah-yeah," all capped by a guitar solo worthy of the Scorpions.
The desire to write a perfect song can drive some songwriters mad, as their belief in music as a vehicle for emotional expression reconciles itself with the belief that pop is a puzzle that can be solved. On Blue, Cuomo found the ideal balance, as he rarely has since. He understood the rules so well that he also knew when to break them, from Sharp’s super silly new-wave keyboard in “Buddy Holly” to the mumbled dialogue that runs through “Undone” (the band and their friends chatting were a backup plan after DGC refused to clear dialog from an old sci-fi film, “Peanuts”) and more.
The fact that “Only in Dreams” is eight glorious minutes long is Blue’s greatest example of self-indulgence gone right. It confronts the two most perilous teen-boy anxieties—talking to a girl you really like and dancing in public. It’s fiery, gorgeous, well-played, and devastatingly sad. Sharp’s trudging bassline guides the way forward for the narrator, whose fear of stepping on his crush’s toenails is temporarily silenced by the band’s total calamity. Rock’n’roll teaches us that extreme volume can quiet the voices of doubt inside our heads and numb the pain of living inside our awkward bodies. In this sense, the climaxes on “Only in Dreams,” starting around the song’s midpoint, are rock’n’roll lessons of a lifetime. But it’s the big build at the 6:45 mark that plays like a beta male transfiguration. Having re-recorded Cropper’s guitar parts in one take after essentially firing him following Blue’s 1993 recording at Electric Lady, Cuomo ends up axe-battling himself until he’s soloing like the metal gods he grew up worshipping. Wilson’s drumming—an underrated and idiosyncratic force throughout Weezer’s discography—drives home the catharsis. His cymbals crash from every angle and his tricky rolls play like percussive triple axels. By the end of the song, you’re back to reality, exhausted but ready for a fight—even if it’s just against your own doubting voices.
For all the talk about Rivers Cuomo’s anemic masculinity, The Blue Album has a unifying thread of identity that supersedes gender. An essay on the Smiths pointed out that, “Asking people about their interest in the Smiths is another way of asking this question: ‘How did you survive your teenage years?’” The same could be said of Weezer’s debut. Blue quivers with isolation if you look past the pastiche, the deflective humor, and the guitar lines that make you sit up tall. The emotion Weezer tapped into is echoed in music sometimes considered distinctly millennial due to its high levels of anxiety, from Death Cab for Cutie and Car Seat Headrest to Mitski’s Puberty 2 and even Drake at his most neurotic.
For as classic as the album is considered now, Blue didn’t make the 1994 Pazz & Jop year-end critics’ poll. Back then, Weezer were considered alt opportunists or even Pavement ripoffs—a comparison that seems silly now, looking at the distinct rock strains since indebted to Cuomo. But MTV and radio airplay for “Buddy Holly” and “Undone — The Sweater Song” made Weezer huge, and The Blue Album went double-platinum within 15 months of its release. Over the next three years, as Weezer 1.0 slowly imploded (bye-bye Matt Sharp, hello rotating door of bassists), the record would sell a million more and be well on its way to canonization. By 2003, Pitchfork named it one of the best records of the 1990s; two years later, Rolling Stone heralded it as the 299th greatest album ever. And so Blue now sits in a sweet spot of commercial accessibility and critical adoration, a combination that guarantees the album will make its way into the hands of a certain kind of bespectacled teenager for decades to come—the ones who really need it. Cuomo never wrote a song as indelible as “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” but he did reach generations of rock kids, proving that coolness is optional if you study hard enough.


Jack Tatum’s Los Angeles album finds him expanding his ambitions, but neither his songwriting nor his mood-setting measure up to the polish or the scale of his aspirational, accessible indie pop.

Indigo

“I’d rather live in dreams,” Jack Tatum sighed, one minute into his Wild Nothing debut, and as one of the great philosophers of our time would say, who can relate? As long as a functional definition of “dream pop” exists, its adherents looking to opt out of reality will find Gemini to be a readily accessible escape hatch. But in the time since, Tatum appears to be the only guy who’s taken the message of “Live in Dreams” literally: Indigo opener “Letting Go” is basically a rewrite of 2010’s “Golden Haze,” and the lo-fi limitations of his early solo set-up—synth-string drizzles, low-res drum-machine patter, and fuzzy evocations of transcendent romance—have all been replaced by the real thing. In all senses, Tatum’s fourth LP is his “Los Angeles” album: It presents him as another New York indie-rock transplant flipping LA’s “Welcome to the Jungle” stereotype and relocating after becoming successful, settling down, and starting to say “synergy.” In other words, living the dream.
Indigo takes Wild Nothing to places Tatum likely couldn’t have imagined from his Virginia Tech dorm. Whereas Gemini earned an honorary induction in the lineage of UK indie-pop shut-ins, the wave-running acoustic guitars on “Oscillation” merge with a string section to recall the lavishly produced and largely anonymous Brit-rock acts that emerged to fill the post-Kid A void. “Partners in Motion” sways to a Balearic breeze, saxes blare from the lido deck on “Through Windows,” and “The Closest Thing to Living” recalls not just the sound of Hounds of Love but also a budget big enough to earmark a Fairlight. Tatum co-produced Indigo with Jorge Elbrecht, a guy whose recent resume includes the most polished Ariel Pink, Japanese Breakfast, and Frankie Rose albums to date—the guy knows how to give former bedroom acts a stylish redesign worthy of Dwell: aspirational and accessible.
Yet Tatum himself can’t tie the room together. Just about everything on Indigo serves as a testament to both Tatum’s increasing facility in the studio and his limitations as an actual frontman. This wasn’t an issue on Gemini or Nocturne because Tatum didn’t make it one: His gauzy, glimmering guitars set a mood where you could follow his prompts about Heather or running away with clouds in your eyes or whatever to blot out whatever mundane bullshit was keeping you from your daydreams. In 2012, Tatum even admitted, “I don’t place too much importance on words… I didn’t try and say anything terribly meaningful.” His position in that regard has evolved as well, as Indigo sorta-kinda dabbles in Being Extremely Online—phrases like “heartbreak 2.0,” “swiping through the headlines,” “when I look at you, it’s a screen turned blue,” and “the age of detachment” all roll past like matter-of-fact tweets from your Sorta Online friend, favorited out of obligation. He notices these things, but does he really care about them? Hell, why should we?
It’s a rhetorical question that defines Indigo. “Through Windows” and “Shallow Water” are song titles and concepts that would have fit on any previous Wild Nothing album, but they’re grounded in reality by Tatum’s increasingly specific but inert lyrics—play them against “Through the Grass” and “Summer Holiday,” and there’s the distance between imagining a life together with your crush and having a frank discussion about whose turn it is to take out the trash. Role-playing an obsessive voyeur on “Partners in Motion,” he sounds like he’s channel surfing from his couch. On “Letting Go,” he’s on the verge of truly holding nothing back when he bellows, “I wanna be happier now.” But minutes later, Tatum’s emotional tenor remains fixed in place while singing of a love, “Pulling me close/Pushing me back.” Indigo is rife with these kinds of pop platitudes—“Let’s stay together, baby”; “Now and forever”—that can be taken as universal truth if you can at least believe that the singer believes it himself. Maybe Tatum felt this all very deeply when writing Indigo, but he’s either unwilling or just unable to modulate his delivery enough to distinguish whether he’s singing about the love of his life or simply filling up space.
But Indigo isn’t sunk by Tatum overreaching; much like the similarly lovely and insensate Life of Pause, its failures stem from Tatum being betrayed by his one true strength. When Gemini emerged in the transitional phase between chillwave and beachy indie, Tatum was unrepentantly vibe-first and continues to claim as much, even when that mindset is a narrative liability. But while it’s easy to get the gist of every song on Indigo, Tatum never sets an actual mood.
It’s the kind of perfectly listenable and unchallenging album that inspires critics to go on autopilot and rely on noncommittal terms like “accomplished,” “ambition” and “craft”—the kind of language that hides a sense of frustration in grappling with material that doesn’t return the favor. Nothing makes the fifth or tenth listen more impactful than the first; a close listen is no more revelatory than hearing it in a Crate & Barrel. The only time Tatum sounds fully engaged is when he plays his most unexpected role to date: the already over-it LA native on “Canyon on Fire,” snickering at the “Needless palaces kissing the hillside/Take your pick/Every dream exactly like the last.” That’s the thing most people in Los Angeles realize awfully quick: “Living the dream” is what people say when they’re going through another boring day at the office.


The Minutemen's classic double album is unlike any punk record, or double album, before or since. It is a compact explosion of ideas and a prism for the energies coursing through the ‘80s underground.

Double Nickels on the Dime

When hardcore punk emerged in the early ’80s, it was partially a reaction to the tired old rules of bloated commercial rock’n’roll. But it didn’t take long for hardcore to start devising its own rules, which is why the Minutemen were such a welcome jolt to the scene. They weren’t outsiders; formed in 1980 in the southern Los Angeles community of San Pedro, they often opened for neighboring hardcore trailblazers Black Flag, whose guitarist Greg Ginn signed the Minutemen to his SST label after the first time he saw them play. They had punk bona fides, too: bassist Mike Watt, guitarist D. Boon, and drummer George Hurley were working-class kids, sons of a sailor, a mechanic, and a machinist. They all held onto day jobs and stayed loyal to San Pedro throughout the band’s existence.
In outline, the Minutemen’s sound fit with punk’s  minimal, straight-to-the-point ethos. One of their most quoted lyrics—“We jam econo,” later used as the title for a 2005 Minutemen documentary—referred literally to the cheap Econoline van that they drove and slept in to save money. But it perfectly characterized their taut, efficient music, doled out in quick jolts —most tunes lasted less than two minutes—in order to move onto new ideas as fast as possible. Even the short, sharp sound of the five-syllable “we jam econo,” which the band would sometimes shorten further to simply “econo,” demonstrates its own point.
Yet as compact as they were, Minutemen songs sounded nothing like hardcore punk. Boon’s guitar was scratchy and wiry; Watt’s bass was busy and melodic; Hurley’s drumming was polyrhythmic and syncopated. Some tracks were like fractured jazz, some like moody folk, some like off-speed funk. They weren’t interested in pure volume or aggression; what drew the trio to punk was the chance to play anything they wanted. “Punk rock doesn’t have to mean hardcore or one style of music,” Watt told Flipside in 1985. “It can mean freedom and going crazy and being personal with your art….it really blows people’s minds because here we are the most hardcore-looking bunch out there and our music is the furthest from it.” In a scene that was already drawing lines in the sand about what was and wasn’t hardcore, declaring that kind of liberation was pretty rebellious.
One of the most famous Minutemen songs, “History Lesson (Part II),” sounds like a homage to the hardcore milieu that birthed them. “Me and Mike Watt played for years/and punk rock changed our lives,” Boon sings matter-of-factly, over a gentle melody inspired by the Velvet Underground’s “Here She Comes Now.” But the tune was also a plea for acceptance into hardcore circles that didn’t know what to make of the Minutemen. As fan Mike Brady said in Craig Ibarra's San Pedro punk oral history A Wailing of a Town, “The Minutemen shocked everybody when they first saw them, because you went to punk gigs expecting poor music. A lot of the bands weren’t that good back then, they could barely play.” Or as Erik Korte of fellow punk band Throbbing Members bluntly put it, “They just weren’t that hardcore.” That opinion was often shared by audiences. The first time they opened for Black Flag, the Minutemen were showered with spit from the crowd; even two years later, during a headlining set in their own hometown, they were booed off the stage.
“I wrote (History Lesson - Part II) to try to humanize us,” Watt said in Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991, Michael Azerrad’s book on punk history whose title comes from a “History Lesson - Part II” lyric. “People thought we were spacemen, but we were just Pedro corndogs... You could be us, this could be you. We’re not that much different from you cats.”
“History Lesson - Part II” appeared on the Minutemen’s third album, 1984’s Double Nickels on the Dime, a two-record set that showed this band actually was pretty different, even when they fit in. Most of the album’s 45 songs were fast and short, but Double Nickels as a whole is not really “econo.” It’s as much an art record as a punk record, using found sounds, off-the-cuff experiments, cut-and-paste lyrics, radical politics, and references to all kinds of art that influenced the trio. It reveals a band eager to try things even if they don’t work out (one side is self-deprecatingly called “Side Chaff”). Double Nickels’ closest parallel isn’t any punk album, but the alternately tight/loose sprawl of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band’s Trout Mask Replica.
The concepts underpinning Double Nickels came about partially by accident. In early 1983, the Minutemen had recorded enough songs to make a single album. But before they finished it, their friends and SST labelmates, Minneapolis trio Hüsker Dü, came to town and recorded the two-LP set Zen Arcade in less than a week. Watt took this as a dare: if their pals could make a double album, why couldn’t the Minutemen? (He would later add a playful “take that, Hüskers!” to the liner notes of Double Nickels).
They  were certainly up to the task. They had already made seven records in just three years as a band—two full lengths and five EPs—and songs continued to pour out of them. They wrote and recorded 20 more in just a few weeks, with all three band members contributing music and lyrics, though Boon sang on most tracks. In total, Double Nickels took just six days of recording and one all-night mixing session. But because the double-album idea emerged in the middle of the process, finding a unifying concept was a tougher job. Zen Arcade had an overarching story—that of a young boy running away from home—but the most the Minutemen could come up with was two smaller schemes.
First, Watt borrowed a concept from Pink Floyd’s 1969 double album Ummagumma: each side included a solo song by one band member, and the rest of that side’s songs were chosen by that person (side four got all the leftover songs, and was thus deemed the “chaff” side). Second, Watt chose the album title and artwork as a response to Sammy Hagar’s insipid 1984 hit “I Can’t Drive 55.” “Double nickels” meant the 55 mph national speed limit that Watt is seen driving on the album cover—a way to say he’d rather live safely and play radical music than the other way around. The two concepts overlapped in snippets of car engine sounds at the head of each side—a suggestion from SST’s Joe Carducci—which were recorded directly from each band members’ own vehicle.
These ideas were clever but perhaps too subtle (Watt has admitted that few outside of the group caught onto either reference). The Minutemen’s aesthetic was never about grand concepts anyway, but about curiosity and openness and hunger for something new. They were interested in highbrow and lowbrow, mainstream and underground, influenced as much by Blue Oyster Cult and Creedence Clearwater Revival as Wire and the Pop Group. They were also as political as any punk band at the time, but their songs were more about complex issues that you had to research than generic anti-Reagan rants.
Take the opening lines of Double Nickels’ “Viet Nam”: “Let’s say I got a number/That number’s 50,000/That’s 10% of 500,000.” As Michael Fournier points out in his 33/3 book on the album, that sounds at first like random math, but it turns out that roughly 50,000 Americans were killed in the Vietnam War, as opposed to over 500,000 North Vietnamese. These kind of granular details were the work of homegrown intellectuals, DIY aesthetes: when the Minutemen argued about history or culture during band practice, they’d jump in their van and drive to the library to settle the conflict.
On Double Nickels, this mindset produces songs that are concrete and abstract, bold and subtle, workmanlike and postmodern. “Shit From an Old Notebook” sounds like a blunt screed: “Let the products sell themselves!/Fuck advertising and commercial psychology!” screams Boon over a circling Watt/Hurley rhythm. Yet its creation was less about protest than chance technique: Watt pieced together the song’s words from scraps of notebook pages he found in Boon’s van. Similar juxtapositions arise in “One Reporter’s Opinion,” which at first seems to be Boon’s critique of Watt: “What can be romantic to Mike Watt?/He’s only a skeleton!” But Watt wrote the song himself, inspired by the perspective-switching narrative voice in James Joyce’s ultra-dense classic Ulysses. (Watt’s obsession with Joyce also emerges in the instrumental “June 16th,” titled after the date on which Ulysses takes place.)
Throughout Double Nickels, chance experiments and artistic influences abound. “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?,” a slow acoustic song with hard-biting lyrics, is a study of how words are manipulated —“should a word have two meanings? Should a word serve the truth?”—inspired by the semiotics theories of Umberto Eco. Watt’s solo song, “Take 5, D.,” was a response to Boon thinking his lyrics were too far out. To be more “real,” Watt read words from a note that a landlady left for a friend—“Hope we can rely on you not to use the shower”—followed by passages of improvised guitar. Hurley’s solo tune—which he chose to open his side, to the surprise of Watt and Boon—is a smattering of cycling percussion and wordless scatting.
Some of the experimentation on Double Nickels was born from necessity. Forced to generate lots of songs quickly, the Minutemen turned to San Pedro comrades for help. Some lyrics were written by non-band-members (Watt admitted that the band never even met one of the contributors, Joe Brewer, cousin of fellow San Pedro musician and Saccharine Trust singer Jack Brewer). They took other input, too. Though they had recorded a version of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Don’t Look Now” in the studio, Carducci suggested including a live version instead. He liked its field-recording quality, particularly the way the crowd chattered casually throughout. Watt agreed without even hearing the tape first.
The Minutemen’s use of outside contributions on Double Nickels wasn’t just about experimentation. It was also an attempt to foster community. Watt wanted the band to be, as he put it, “a prism” for the whole San Pedro punk scene. “Mike was asking everybody for lyrics,” explained Jack Brewer, who contributed a lyric to Double Nickels. “It made people feel like they were a part of it. ‘Hey, I have some lyrics on the Minutemen record!’ They were sharing their success; they didn’t just keep it to themselves.’ ”
If Double Nickels had been nothing but experiments and collaborations, it would have still been interesting, but it wouldn’t have sold out of its original 10,000-copy run nor gotten near-universal acclaim for decades. Most of the album’s 45 songs are tight, catchy, and infinitely repeatable, with D. Boon’s knifing guitar and untethered vocals reacting to Watt and Hurley’s complex yet pogo-ready rhythms. The music is spoken with a vocabulary the Minutemen created themselves and were fully fluent in by just their third full-length. That’s perhaps clearest when they take on other bands’ songs: on the “chaff” side they translate Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love” and Steely Dan’s “Dr. Wu” into a new language.
That language was so developed and distinct that it’s proven hard to mimic in the three decades since Double Nickels came out. Watt predicted this a bit in his 1985 Flipside interview, discussing why the Minutemen don’t get airplay. “I think one of our problems with radio is that we don’t write songs, we write rivers,” he said. “We play against each other, guitar and bass; we don’t set up a background for our narrative.”
As a result, few bands who’ve come along in the decades since actually sound much like the Minutemen. (The band would go on to make two more full lengths and a handful of EPs—including one Project: Mersh that somewhat-jokingly tried to exploit some of the poppier sides of their songwriting on Double Nickels—before D. Boon died tragically in an automobile accident in late 1985). They have influenced many: the Red Hot Chili Peppers dedicated Blood Sugar Sex Magik to Watt, Pavement was named after a line in the Minutemen song “Fake Contest,” Unwound and Sebadoh recorded Minutemen covers, and Jeff Tweedy wrote a song called “D. Boon” for Uncle Tupelo’s Still Feel Gone.
They’ve likely inspired more people with their ethics and attitude than their sound. As a model, they are one of the purest DIY punk bands, on a par with groups famous for independence like Minor Threat and Fugazi, Beat Happening, and the Minutemen’s godfathers Black Flag. But the legacy of Double Nickels on the Dime isn’t just that the Minutemen did things themselves. It’s also that they tried everything, ignoring artificial barriers between forms of art, classes of culture, and kinds of influence. “One of the reasons we play all these kinds of musics is for them—to see how seriously they take ‘No Rules’ and ‘Anarchy,’” Watt said to Maximum Rock’n’Roll in 1984. “We throw all this soft music, folk music, jazz, etc. not only to avoid getting caught in just one style, but also to show them that ‘see, you didn’t want any rules— this is what you wanted.’ I know it’s hard for them. It’s easier when it’s all set up for you.”


On their first album in 16 years, the Scottish duo situates themselves in the current moment, teasing out new modes of songwriting while remaining as wry, dark, and self-lacerating as ever.

As Days Get Dark

Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat will never come up with a more striking opening line than the one that introduced 1998’s Philophobia: “It was the biggest cock you’ve ever seen/But you’ve no idea where that cock has been.” However, the lyric that ushers us into As Days Get Dark comes awfully close: “I don’t give a fuck about the past/Or glory days gone by,” Moffat seethes in his signature surly monotone. Like the best Arab Strap lyrics, the line is candid, confrontational, and highly amusing all at once. But it’s not just funny because it kicks off the Scottish duo’s first album in 16 years, a gap that inevitably forces listeners to consider their past and how this record measures up against it. No, it’s funny for Arab Strap to invoke the phrase “glory days” because they have always sounded like defeated old men fixating on the most awkward, embarrassing, painful moments of their lives while staring down the bottom of another empty pint glass.
Among the contingent of indie bands that briefly turned Scotland into the next Seattle in the late ’90s, Arab Strap were always the most daunting proposition. They were respected enough to earn a side-eyed nod from Belle and Sebastian in the title of their most beloved song/album. But while the two bands may have shared an affinity for detailed and intimate storytelling, Moffat was ultimately the anti-Stuart Murdoch, forsaking wistful melodies for grimly spoken monologues. And even if you viewed Arab Strap through the lens of post-rock rather than indie-pop, they were still a freakish anomaly: Though Moffat and his multi-instrumentalist partner Malcolm Middleton could challenge their fellow countrymen Mogwai for the title of Biggest Slint Fans in Scotland, they rarely displayed the same penchant for noise-rock crescendos and catharsis, preferring to let their songs stew in discomfort and dread.
But if their former labelmates-turned-label bosses can lay claim to a No. 1 album in 2021, then surely Arab Strap can be embraced as patron saints to the current generation of melody-allergic sing-spielers detailing the minutiae of life. And so, on As Days Get Dark, Arab Strap are reborn as Sleaford Mods on meds, taking stock of a world whose soul has been rotted out by internet addiction, xenophobia, and toxic masculinity. But as much as it resituates Arab Strap in the current moment, As Days Get Dark is not a work of observational social commentary—as ever, Moffat aims his most lethal blows at himself.
Back in the late ’90s, few writers in indie rock put male behavior under the microscope as eagerly and unflinchingly as Moffat, exposing all the fragile egotism, insecurity, and regret that lurks in the hearts of men. And with As Days Get Dark, he continues to interrogate those traits in equally hilarious and heartbreaking ways—with the added weight of an extra decade-and-a-half of middle-aged pathos. On “Another Clockwork Day,” he frames his inadequacies in the context of shifting online porn trends: “And the films these days, with their surgery scars and bad tats/And it’s all stepmoms and stepsisters now/What the fuck’s all that about?” But what begins as a comical caricature of some (literal) wanker slowly reveals itself to be something more devastating when Moffat’s protagonist starts pleasuring himself to bygone digital images of the same woman he still sleeps beside every night, but no longer finds as attractive. “When he removes his glasses/She looks just the same as she does in the pixels of those old JPEGs,” he notes. In an Arab Strap song, this is what passes for a heartwarming love story.
If “Another Clockwork Day” coaxes tragedy out of comedy, “Tears on Tour” works the other way. After Moffat chronicles the debilitating grief he felt when learning of two grandparents’ deaths while Arab Strap were out on the road, he starts cataloging the somewhat less traumatic events that have reduced him to an equally blubbering mess: “I cry at rom-coms, dramedies, the news and children’s films/The Muppet Movie, Frozen, Frozen 2.” But that revelation is less of an expression of embarrassment than pride, an admission that crying is a healthy, cathartic act all men should undertake more regularly. And in that sanguine, open-hearted spirit, As Days Get Dark embraces the old misery-loves-company adage by wrapping Moffat’s wounded words in Arab Strap’s most accessible and near-danceable songs to date.
Of course, with Arab Strap these are relative concepts—this is, after all, a band less interested in soundtracking your Saturday-night bender than in giving voice to the street cleaner who has to sweep up your used condoms and syringes in the wee hours of Sunday morning (see: “Kebabylon”). But while the duo jokingly gave this album the working title of Disco Spiderland, the steely drum-machine grooves of “The Turning of Our Bones” and “Compersion Pt. 1” seriously deliver on that promise, investing their respective narratives of tribal resurrection rituals and open-marriage sexual exploration with an even more salacious, sinister edge. And in the surprisingly anthemic “Here Comes Comus!”, we get a glimpse of the more streamlined indie-rock band Arab Strap could’ve become had they opted to chase that Interpol money back in the day, while the forlorn electro-folk of “Bluebird”—a deceptively serene account of shitposting—suggests this group’s true legacy was preparing the world for the brooding romanticism of the National.
As Days Get Dark doesn’t just honor the past, it also forecasts a possible future. On the six-minute epic “Sleeper,” Moffat closes his laptop and retreats into the theater of the mind, weaving an eerie, vividly surreal narrative about a stranger on a train, while Middleton piles on the clamoring piano chords, dramatic strings, and five-alarm saxophone squeals. The purpose of our hero’s journey is never made clear, though it becomes pretty obvious that his “final destination” is an early grave. But while the song represents a bold leap beyond the band’s usual hyper-analytical narratives, it nonetheless remains true to subversive form: In this portrait of impending death, Arab Strap have never sounded more alive.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Foals’ streamlined seventh album does away with their trickier instrumental interplay and subtler emotions, leaving nothing at all open to interpretation.

Life Is Yours

Though they’ve long served as a more thoughtful alternative to the Big Britrock Lads with whom they’ve shared festival stages, Foals aren’t trying to be the thinking person’s alternative to anything anymore. If not exactly dumbed-down, Life Is Yours is Foals for Dummies—a breezy, step-by-step simplification for people who want to get the gist and don’t mind being talked down to a little. They’ve gained far more fans than they’ve lost on the path from “math rock” towards algorithmic pop-rock, now fitting snugly between  Glass Animals and Måneskin on KROQ. And Life Is Yours is not a hard left turn but the end result of a gradual streamlining: from a quintet to a trio (keyboardist Edwin Congreave departed last year); from an indulgent, self-produced double album (spread out over seven months) to a propulsive, Dan Carey-assisted 41 minutes; from the stadium-scale, wooly funk of the Cure and Red Hot Chili Peppers to Chic and Duran Duran’s sleek, subversive pop.
What remains in the first half of Life Is Yours are songs that do away with Foals’ trickier instrumental interplay and subtler emotions and leave nothing at all open to interpretation. Yannis Philippakis sings earnestly and often clumsily about positivity, nostalgia, sex, dancing, and drugs in songs with appropriately blunt titles: “Wake Me Up,” “2AM,” “2001.” Their impact is entirely based on how much the listener is willing to give Foals the benefit of the doubt: The feeble jabs against climate crisis and Trump on 2019’s Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost shouldn’t have been taken as a mandate for more of the same, so isn’t counterprogramming a better use of Foals’ skill set? After establishing their own formula over six albums, aren’t Foals justified in seeking liberation in someone else’s?
Or is this style of music a path of least resistance—more accommodating of Philippakis’ increasingly generic songwriting? Rhyming “fire” with “burning up my desire” instead of “burning higher” on “Wake Me Up” is what passes for a surprising turn of phrase here. There’s dissonance between the darker sexual impulses of “2AM” (“No I can’t sleep alone/I just want to go home and it’s 2 a.m. again”) and its chipper backing track, but no tension; I don’t hear a desperate nightcrawler so much as someone casually flirting in an afternoon beer queue at Glastonbury.
Then again, those are the spaces which Foals have always occupied; no actual dance DJ was likely to reconfigure their playlist to accommodate a “2AM” 12" remix. If the goal is to keep the party going for people who entered the tent during Total Life Forever and Holy Fire, Foals absolutely have the right idea. Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost didn’t serve a double album’s typical function of either securing a band’s legacy or exploding its boundaries; if anything, it proved that, left to their own devices, Foals probably could’ve filled a quadruple LP with lesser takes on “Spanish Sahara” or “Inhaler.” No longer saddled with the windswept ballads and aggro riffing that kept them firmly in the good graces of UK rock mags, Life Is Yours is the most consistent Foals album almost by default.
If it doesn’t achieve the long-promised outcome of “filler-free” Foals, Life Is Yours unexpectedly thrives when it reintegrates the studio trickery that used to weigh down previous side Bs. The one-step solution: applying all of these things to higher BPM. “Flutter” shifts from a vaguely urbano bump to full-on screamadelica, a bold new context for the same old octave-shifted riffs. Philippakis’ falsetto becomes fully entangled in the elastic groove of “Looking High,” the one instance where Foals remember they have one of popular rock’s most inventive drummers. While invoking a band that’s been far more successful at reconciling their club- and arena-rock influences, even the title of the penultimate “The Sound” suggests a lesson that came too late: The more Foals lose themselves in the joy of pure sonics, the more they remind us who they actually are.


Band's third album of convincingly vintage-sounding soul is slightly smoother and more refined than its predecessors, tending to evoke late-1960s Motown rather than early-70s r&b.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: 100 Days, 100 Nights

100 Days, 100 Nights

From the first notes of 100 Days, 100 Nights, it's apparent that Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings are in a different mood than the one they were in when they made their first two albums. Where Dap-Dippin' and Naturally were full-on heavy funk workouts that perfectly captured the spirit of early 1970s soul, this record draws more of its feel and atmosphere from late-60s Motown. It may seem like a fine distinction, but it results in a slightly smoother, more refined record that nonetheless bursts with raw emotion and stinging grooves.
The opening swirl of horns sets up the darker, airier vibe right away, settling your ears into the sound before the rhythm section kicks in and Jones drops in with her powerful, gospel-trained voice. Jones shows her Augusta, Georgia, roots at the song's mid-point when she pulls a classic James Brown move, calling on the band to slow down and give her time to think, a command they dutifully obey.
Among the biggest keys to the Dap-Kings' success is that Jones is a fantastic singer, a masterful soul vocalist in the best tradition of Etta James, Bettye Lavette, and Irma Thomas. She can wail when she needs to, has access to a gentle falsetto when the song requires it, and has impeccable control, with a full-throated tone that grabs your attention. Jones isn't a fresh-faced youngster imitating her heroes, either-- she was at it in the 70s, singing backup on funk and disco records while seeking her own big break, but moved to gospel in the 80s when her style fell out of favor. In between her early career and her revival in the mid-90s, she worked as a prison guard and also did armored vehicle security work, and she brings the same tough, no-nonsense approach those jobs require to her music.
The band, and lead composer Gabriel Roth (aka Bosco Mann) in particular, has a firm understanding of the material they're channeling. This is not pastiche-- it's soul music that came along about thirty-five years late. The production is so spot-on it's like a time warp, and drummer Homer Steinweiss inhabits his decades-old beats so thoroughly he makes them feel fresh again. You get the sense of musicians in a room together, and the horns blend in the air of the studio before ever reaching the mixing board. This music is a throwback for sure, but it's so uncontrived that it doesn't come off like one.
Jones and the boys have grown quite well into their spot at the forefront of the old-school soul revival, ahead of fellow travelers like the Poets of Rhythm, Lefties Soul Connection, Nicole Willis, the Budos Band, and Amy Winehouse, who's become the movement's commercial and tabloid face. They follow their muse across the soul map, cutting a sublime Motown groove on "Tell Me", jumping on a nasty funk vamp on "Nobody's Baby", slowing things down for a burning southern soul ballad on "Humble Me", and going back to Jones' gospel roots on the jaw-dropping closer "Answer Me".
Anyone with a taste for old funk and soul will love this record, from the most dusty-fingered crate diggers to kids who just like what they hear on the oldies station. They may not be doing anything especially new, but Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings are the very best at what they do, and they've made another excellent album.


Her third album in two years searches for peace, tracing the quiet work of piecing yourself together and delighting in giddy new romance at the same time.

Positions

During the spring of 2019, in the interval between two titanic releases, Ariana Grande posted her brain on Instagram. The image was from a scan, and it showed regions of her mind lit up from the effects of PTSD, the disorder revealed in clear, screenshot-able form. “That’s why her hair’s so big,” she joked, referencing a line from Mean Girls, “it’s full of trauma.” The grace with which Grande has navigated horrors—the ability to name their impact and steer towards healing, to make a top-charting song about a panic attack—has become fundamental to her music. Sweetener dazzled because its joy was defiant. thank u, next caromed through phases of glee and grief, moving from pink Champagne bravado into stark confessions. Positions, her third album in two years, searches for peace. It traces the quiet work of piecing yourself together, the terror of re-learning how to trust. “All them demons help me see shit differently,” she sings 20 seconds into the album, “so don’t be sad for me.” That statement clears the way for some of the record’s goofier moments; it also functions as a kind of thesis.
The giddiness that propels the album also heightens its tension. She’s both in love and scared of it, and the frenzy of new romance animates the contrast. “Just give me them babies!” she yelps on “34+35,” a track constructed around an almost-subtle joke until the final seconds. (“That means I’m trying to 69 with you,” she hums. “No shit.”) A slew of slinky sex jams—the title track, “my hair,” “nasty”—drape her harmonies over hazy synths. On “just like magic,” she ticks off her calendar: meetings, meditations, “read a fucking book,” ardent manifesting. The song is both winking and not, a sequel to sweetener’s “successful” that shimmers from behind volleys of drums. But then she sings about writing “love letters to heaven,” and the instruments dissolve. The song quiets for a moment, and the gravity of what she’s said sinks in.
Grief sneaks up on you, and on Positions, it’s woven into Grande’s attempt to process love. Musically and spiritually, much of the album builds off of “ghostin,” a delicate, pulsing track from thank u, next about navigating a lost love with a new partner. “Though I wish he were here instead/Don’t want that living in your head,” she sang then, before diving into the mantra-like refrain: “We’ll get through this, we’ll get past this.” On the new record, the hopeful conclusion is less immediate. You hear her wrestling for control, asking instead of answering. The stunning Ty Dolla $ign-assisted “safety net” interrogates and negotiates with fear: “Don’t know if I should fight or fly,” she sings, the physiological language set over constant, murky sighs. “Will I ever love the same way again?” she cries on “off the table,” a syrupy ballad with The Weeknd. “Do I just sit this one out and wait for the next life?” The song blooms over wisps of strings and heavy, heady drums, like an artifact from his Trilogy mixtapes. “I’ll wait for you,” he sings, “Even though it feels like I’ll always be number two to someone you can’t hold anymore.” On “six thirty,” Grande’s silky harmonies glide in over and over to ask, “Are you down? What’s up?”, but the lyrics framing it reveal the weight of the question. “I know this shit kinda heavy,” she murmurs, wondering if her lover’s equipped to support her, and if she’s even ready to ask.
Many of these songs stem from hesitancy, from rejecting risks or articulating their costs, and their production is largely sleek and muted. The flourishes live in the transitions between tracks—the Broadway-eque orchestral burst at the end of “shut up,” the burbling synths that close “obvious.” Grande’s voice remains nestled in a breathy sway, occasionally stretching into a rap-adjacent cadence. If these songs lack the sticking power of her stadium power ballads, there’s still dimension to their glazed reveries. (“west side” in particular is an understated, simmering highlight.) In any other year, “motive” might have been written as an internet-breaking banger (Murda Beatz! Doja Cat!), but here it’s twinkling and hushed. Positions suffers a bit from its sanitized precision, the way slippery harmonies wind around trap-drum exoskeletons; you wonder what the title track would sound like if London on da Track’s presence were actually felt, instead of a fun fact for the credits.
But maybe this isn’t the place for that. Positions doesn’t broaden Grande’s sound the way her past few albums have, and it isn’t buoyed by a heroic anthem, like “no tears left to cry,” or guided by a specific mission, like how “thank u, next” honored her relationship history. The record resonates partly because it doesn’t weld grand statements out of living with trauma; it narrows in on the wobbly path of pleading with yourself, the begging and bargaining of healing. “I want to trust me the way that you trust me,” Grande belts on “pov,” her voice throbbing and raw. This is the root of every love song on Positions, the ache at the album’s core. It’s the urge to take tangible pain and make something from it, to feel safe—again, at last—in your own head.

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Grime saw a major resurgence in 2013, and Butterz heads Elijah & Skilliam are central to London's scene. Their second official mix CD, for Fabric's Fabriclive series, serves as an overview of the producers and tracks in their orbit rather than as a representation of their DJ sets.

Fabriclive 75

Last summer Simon Reynolds published an update to his seminal book on rave music, Energy Flash, that included his thoughts on, among other recent trends, dubstep. "Instrumental music goes international so much easier," he mused, explaining how one knobby, London-centric bass sound—dubstep—had elbowed another—grime—out of the spotlight. Reynolds looks prescient now: grime, minus its thickly accented MCs, saw a major resurgence in 2013. The sound went global, too, as producers from Texas to Tokyo aided a gaggle of UK artists in re-introducing grime's cagey melodic contortions to club culture.
As heads of the Butterz label (and the eponymous recurring party), Elijah & Skilliam have been central to London grime's re-emergence. Their imprint outstrips newfound interest in the style: since 2010, their label has housed grime veterans (Terror Danjah) and fostered new talent (Royal-T). Their weekly radio show on Rinse FM has served as a hub for the sound's widening pallette. Alongside Keysound Recordings, Hyperdub, and Night Slugs Butterz has erected a platform for grime more durable and prominent than that of its heyday, clearing space for veterans such as Wiley and Footsie to co-habitate with the upstarts.
The genre now encompasses everything from Visionist's nimble dub mutations to Preditah's reptilian lumber, but it's generally characterized by stabbing mid-range synthesizers, spare, idiosyncratic percussion, a deep-space sub. The mark of a good grime track seems to be just how unstable it can sound, taking a childlike glee in contrasting pretty, ethereal melodies with amoeba-like sub-bass.
Fabriclive 75 is the pair's second official mix CD, following their 2011 effort for Rinse's series. They're unique in that they're not producers, instead functioning as true scene stewards. As such, Fabriclive 75 serves as an overview of the producers and tracks in their orbit rather than as a representation of their DJ sets. They peddle a distinctly UK sound, largely focusing on grime's chunky mid-range gymnastics but also incorporating the clubbier house sounds of UK Funky while ignoring recent trap and footwork influences. There are lots of dark, outre sounds on Fabriclive 75 but the overall effect is cheeky and effusive. It's difficult to imagine dancing to much of Fabriclive 75, but it is party music, better suited for having some beers and bouncing around than getting stoned in your living room.
When you listen to old grime tapes (the Wire has a potent collection here), their roughness is inescapable: awkward cuts, run-backs, dropped sound, lots of airhorn. Even more recent efforts, such as DJ Slimzee and the always golden Flow Dan's Radio 1 mix, have a homespun, improvisational quality to them. Grime MCs, like the jungle and UK Garage MCs before them, emerged from the storied tradition of reggae soundclashes: a constant dialogue with the selector interspersed with boasts and taunts. In retrospect, it's obvious why grime MCs never made good hip-hop records: these guys are inveterate shit-talkers, not storytellers. (Grime as a pop phenomenon, though, has also experienced a resurgence in the UK.)
The 70-minute mix DJ mix, in comparison, is a relatively ascetic, formal environment, one where rough cuts can't simply be attributed to the DJs playing to the crowd's energy. Fabriclive 75 suffers at times, due in part to Elijah & Skilliam's choice to showcase such a wide variety of sounds. Mixing in and out of tracks such as Joker and Swindle's blockbuster anthem as 040 "Let It Be Known" and Murlo's slinky lullaby "Into Mist" is difficult even under more forgiving circumstances. Some of the best cuts the duo selects—DJ Q's "Two Faced" into Sir Spyro's grind-worthy "Pull It Up"—have more to do with house and R&B than grime.
Fabriclive 75 survives some rough patches, though, because it's a bounty of vibrant, creative music. A couple of proper dubs—with grime MCs hyping Elijah & Skilliam over familar tracks—are a nice touch and a nod to the increasing frequency with which MCs are being invited back into the booth.  It's a bit difficult to recommend in light of Elijah & Skilliam's Rinse mix—less comprehensive but fiercer—and, more importantly, their weekly (and downloadable) show for Rinse, which is both free and a more natural way to follow the ebbs and flows of the scene. As a jumping off point for further exploration, though, you won't find a more concise or considered collection of grime's talents.


The disgruntled member of Griselda Records is often overlooked, but he remains a secret weapon. The couplet is his canvas, and few can challenge him on his turf.

Big Ghost Ltd / Conway the Machine: If It Bleeds It Can Be Killed

If It Bleeds It Can Be Killed

Sometime in 2018—after signing a distribution deal with Shady Records, before the thunderous arrival of Westside Gunn’s Supreme Blientele—Griselda became too big to fail. Having cornered a lucrative premium-vinyl market, the overachieving Buffalo trio swiftly established primacy within the realm of loop-based neoclassical rap. Soon, everyone in this crowded lane of East Coast hip-hop—from legacy acts like Roc Marciano and Smoke DZA to upstart revivalists like Flee Lord and Estee Nack—was funneled through a barrage of free-wheeling Griselda projects, the group’s cosign functioning as a tastemaker’s imprimatur. On their solo efforts, Griselda’s members have pushed their own visions, even if they don’t always cohere: Gunn inhabits a Scorsesean coke dream of Virgil collabs and art-world gravitas, while Benny the Butcher aspires to the assured verbosity of a young Jay-Z.
Amidst rumors of discord within the trio’s ranks, Conway the Machine continues to bring his hard hat and lunch pail to work. Still lacking a landmark full-length of his own, his profile is analogous to Styles P’s—a prolific genre artist, an invaluable group member and guest rapper, and such a self-possessed technician that, if you aren’t careful, you might take him for granted. On his new tape If It Bleeds It Can Be Killed, Conway’s verbal precision makes for snapshots that linger even after he’s flitted on to the next idea. He plows through knotty rhyme patterns with conversational ease; not only does he make every bar count, but his grunts and hesitations convey expressiveness even when he’s pausing for breath.
If It Bleeds reunites Conway with Big Ghost Limited, a blogger who achieved notoriety for prickly criticism written in the voice of Ghostface Killah (you had to be there) and parlayed it into a production career of his own. Like Griselda’s in-house composer Daringer, Big Ghost is a spiritual disciple of the Alchemist, pulling samples from film scores and dusty B-sides. Ghost’s atmospheric instrumentals advance with the slow force of a Humvee: the bass is low, the guitar chords scuzzy, snares optional. Dramatic violins highlight the early standout “J Batters,” and a bright piano sample buoys the Knowledge the Pirate duet “Sons of Kings.” On “Losses to Blessings,” a slick beat change kicks in just as Conway’s second verse reaches its emotional climax. Ghost’s loops, like Daringer’s, can feel like abridged takes on the obsessive tinkering of The Alchemist—by now, Griselda has the real Alchemist on speed-dial—but Conway’s continued loyalty to the next-gen producers is emblematic of the group’s D.I.Y. ethos.
There aren’t many surprises on a record like this, but If It Bleeds brims with sparkly little thrills. “Highly Praised” showcases Conway’s ability to find pockets even in the most unyielding production, his syllables stretched into a languid cadence that mirrors the slowed-down vocal sample. His free-standing couplets unfurl with the weight of narrative crescendos rather than simple punchlines: On “J Batters,” he boasts, “I don’t need rap, I’ll just contact my guy/He throwin’ bricks like Shaq at the line when he was past his prime.” For the most part, he’s just talking shit (“Lotta blemishes on your record, it’s a few errors/So you built a brand off a cap, like New Era”), and the seeming effortlessness is key to his appeal. Gunn and Benny often sound like they’re exerting themselves, but Conway never tries to be someone he’s not; If It Bleeds is yet another accomplished project that sounds like it was knocked out over the course of a weekend.
The couplet is Conway’s canvas, and few can challenge him on his turf. That he hasn’t attempted the sort of interrogative, high-concept album typically associated with prestige rappers isn’t a shortfall so much as a recognition of his particular genius, his adeptness with blunt tools. Nor does it diminish his star capacity—like Styles, he’s thrilling in bursts, his bars are resplendent, and he doesn’t need 50 minutes to get his point across. If It Bleeds is for the die-hards, but that was kind of the point of Griselda in the first place.

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Oakland rapper G-Eazy seems unafraid to wrestle with mature ideas and his work is well-crafted and considered. While one does get the feeling that there’s a better album somewhere inside of him, his new These Things Happen shows promise.

These Things Happen

In Macklemore’s wake, there’s a hardened consensus that hip-hop is whiter, the old patterns of cultural co-option well underway. G-Eazy slid easily into this old new world, building an organic, devoted fanbase without the explicit mass support of hip-hop’s original audiences. This isn’t a strike against the quality of G-Eazy’s work; his new album is well-crafted and considered. He seems unafraid to wrestle with mature ideas—about himself, or the sobering realization that living a dream is no exemption from life’s daily indignities. While one does get the feeling that there’s a better album somewhere inside of him, These Things Happen shows promise. If Macklemore is the first white rapper to find mainstream success with a mainly caucasian audience, G-Eazy will be the first to do so without relying on a dated notion of hip-hop’s sound. But ultimately These Things Happen’s strongest statement concerns the seismic impact of the artists who influenced its creation.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that G-Eazy hails from Oakland—although, he went to school in Albany, California, according to this early interview, which is closer to Berkeley. But regardless of the specifics, Bay Area hip-hop is historically a diverse ecosystem, so it makes sense as the first frontier for middle class-appealing white rappers to express themselves in a way that scans authentically. With a fertile independent scene largely cut off from hip-hop at large, the Bay was one place where regional stars were popular across cultural boundaries, with white kids as familiar with Mac Dre as Jay Z.
So it was with G-Eazy, whose early work shows the evident influence from the Bay’s cultural blender. His lyrics on These Things Happen include references to growing up on Mac Dre and the hyphy movement, and the album features appearances from E-40 and Bay producer Jay Ant. But outside of guest spots and textural references, the Bay Area influence feels absent G-Eazy’s current music, never mind the Oldies revivalist single that sparked his rise. Instead, the record is consistently moody and atmospheric, with a chilly downtempo ambiance less reminiscent of E-40 than Drake’s producer of a similar name.
This is not a record of hits, and there are no real pop moments. It's solemn, sincere, and deliberate, seemingly more influenced by self-serious auteurs like Kendrick Lamar than G-Eazy's hometown heroes. It’s not the only place Kendrick’s influence looms; the way G-Eazy’s voice dips in “Opportunity Cost” is a deadringer for his delivery, and “Downtown Love”’s moralizing comes complete with a hammy chorus that would have fit comfortably alongside similar records on Section.80. “I Mean It", meanwhile, suggests Big Sean may have had a bigger influence on millennial rap fans than has generally been acknowledged. Even the appearance of his mother’s voicemail at the end of “Opportunity Cost” can’t help but recall Chance the Rapper’s dad’s cameo on Acid Rap.
Perhaps most distracting is a song like “Tumblr Girls", where a Dom Kennedy flow can’t save him from Drake’s blurry, neurotic solipsism. Here his writing is at its most cliched. He drinks with a beautiful nameless woman who’ll soon be forgotten, a story that borders on parody in 2014. All in all, These Things Happen’s sonic fingerprint feels like an unconscious echo of meteoric impact of post-Kanye rap stars of the past five or so years.
This is, after all, the sound of “respectable” sustainability: perhaps a bit of a flatline, These Things Happen is at its best when it twists the lens onto G-Eazy’s more personal writing. Although his fanbase was built on a grind that included the Vans Warped Tour and accompanying frat rapper Hoodie Allen, his immersion in hip-hop’s artistic language is real. His actual rap style is somewhat plain, but not distractingly so, and—”Tumblr Girls”-records aside—his writing is often purposeful. He’s started to emerge as a distinct voice: humble yet confident, the record is at its strongest when he’s taking stock of his rapidly shifting world and finding his place within it. On the album’s opener and title track, security stops him from going backstage, embarrassing the rapper: “Wait up, who the fuck are you?” These moments of humanity—the album’s best writing, that is—are only here in pieces, and to release a truly great project, he will either have to explore them in more depth, or start having a little more fun.


This instant cult classic returns in a lavish deluxe edition complete with bonus material, commemorative playing cards, and yes, a lunchbox.

Operation: Doomsday

Whether a classic archetype like Superman or a self-fashioned alter ego like Bobby Digital, embodying a comic-book figure holds a large appeal in hip-hop, an art form driven by mythology and boasting of superhuman capability. But Daniel Dumile might be the only rapper who based his persona on a supervillain whose origin story sounds uncannily like his own. To recap: While a promising student at Empire State University, Fantastic Four nemesis Victor Von Doom conducted experiments attempting to communicate with the dead, and a resulting explosion completely deformed his face. After roaming the world and studying under monks in Tibet, he built a suit of armor with a matching mask to protect him as he sought the destruction of those at fault for his disfigurement.
Meanwhile, Dumile, then known as Zev Love X in early-90s rap group K.M.D., suffered the loss of his brother and musical partner DJ Subroc, who was hit by a car. That same week, K.M.D. were dropped from their label when the cover art of their Black Bastards LP proved controversial. Retreating from hip-hop completely, Dumile plotted his revenge on an industry that had broken him spiritually. This meant performing in lyricist lounges with his face completely obscured; all the while, his legend grew as bootleg copies of Black Bastards make the rounds. Then, in 1999, after the release of a couple of singles on Bobbito's Fondle 'Em Records, came Operation: Doomsday, an instant cult classic that now gets a well-curated and altogether fun reissue courtesy of MF Doom's own Metal Face label.
Doomsday was birthed at a pivotal point in rap's trajectory-- at the height of the record industry's boom years. Bad Boy's commercial reign was giving purists plenty to carp over, but it still had crate-digging production and New York rappers in its midst. But soon after, rawer collectives like Ruff Ryders and Ca$h Money subsequently took hip-hop to a more hedonistic, nihilistic, and violent place, with Swizz Beatz, Mannie Fresh, the Neptunes, and Timbaland commandeering a clean break from traditionalist, sample-based production. This opened a lane for underground crews who often defined themselves in opposition of these artists: Anticon and Def Jux sought to completely dismantle hip-hop with abrasive sonics and intimidatingly dense lyrics, while Rawkus and Okayplayer had the magnetic personalities and smooth musicianship to be inside operatives potentially bringing mainstream rap to a more positive place.
On the title track, Doom announces his intent instead to "destroy rap." Operation: Doomsday doesn't sound like much of a manifesto, though: You may have come for the street cred, but you didn't stay for any hang-ups about authenticity or the state of the genre. That's mostly due to the sonic template established here, chunky and proudly un-quantized drums meeting samples you might hear at your dentist's office or on hold with your cable company: saxes, flutes, and smooth, vintage synths. While the autumnal, twinkling backdrops of "Doomsday" or the Coral Sitar-laced "Red and Gold" wouldn't upset tables at your local coffee shop, they provide a truly symbiotic relationship with the paradoxically gruff and calm persona Doom manifests here, where the villainy is more implied than anything.
In fact, for an album that introduced the Metal Face alter ego, it's his warmest and most benevolent work, almost entirely bled of the angrier material that would mark future releases. If anything, Doom is still in mourning here, and there's a palpable sense of loss that rears itself sporadically: Doom imagines rejoining his brother in a tomb "either unmarked or engraved" and holds a seance with Subroc on "?". For an MC not associated with emotional bloodletting, this record has some astounding moments.
If you're familiar only with Doom's post-Madvillainy work, it might be a jolt to hear just how lighthearted this sounds otherwise: Doom sounds surprisingly young, with a sprightly bounce to his muddy rush of words, and the song structures are among his most traditional. Whether it's the entire-verse hook of "Rhymes Like Dimes", Doom and Tommy Gunn flowing like blood brothers on "The Finest", or the Monsta Island Czars posse cut "Who You Think I Am?", Doomsday is above all else an extremely accessible album. In most ways, Doomsday doesn't work on a heady plane: Topically, the majority of it centers around mic skills, women, stick-ups, and alcohol. Though you're never too far removed from a dazzling run of internal rhymes or an "oh shit!" pop-culture namedrop, there's no rhymin' for the sake of riddlin'. Doom's technique, vocabulary, and knack for trivia never asks that you come away impressed. He approaches lyrics the same way he does beats, unearthing gems hidden in plain sight, completely legible without a quick check of Google or Roget's.
Doomsday is often held up as Doom's masterpiece, in part because it's a beachhead upon which he'd begin an astonishing five-year run: as King Gheedorah, 2003's Take Me to Your Leader was a more prominent display of his production prowess, while in terms of sheer lyrical mastery, Vaudeville Villain has few peers. And of course, there's Madvillainy, his crowning achievement. Doomsday does have its imperfections and perhaps more than the LPs to follow. Some of its minor flaws can be read as lo-fi charm, the droning wheezes of Scooby-Doo flip "Hey" bleeding into the red, and the "slow it up, speed it up" gimmick of "Tick, Tick..." outstaying its welcome. And of course, there are the skits and the guest appearances from his Monsta Island Czar crew, which are charming but have little replay value.
The album goes a long way toward demonstrating Doom's incalculable influence on some of the leading lights of current underground hip-hop: Lil B has dedicated an entire album to Doom, the lurching production style of Odd Future owes him a heavy debt (most obviously shown in "Odd Toddlers" flipping the same sample as 2004's "One Beer"), and K.M.D.'s referential raps and playful yet incisive deconstructions of racial politics are a clear influence on Das Racist.
And while Doomsday is a must-hear in just about any format, I can't give enough credit to Metal Face for the actual packaging of the Deluxe Edition. If there's any feeling of sticker shock, you are definitely not simply rebuying a record. The collection of bonus tracks and beats might get a one-time tryout by non-obsessives, but the lunchbox and commemorative playing cards included here are beautifully designed collectors items that justify the purchase price. The coolest inclusion, though, is what brought us here in the first place: the lyrics, fully transcribed and collected with comic sketches and new artwork. Appropriately, the thing is so thick it barely fits into the CD case.