Much like a recent move by his friend and collaborator Nobunny, Seth Bogart's Hunx and his Punx make a sudden turn for a much more pointedly aggro sound with Street Punk. The versatile record also features Shannon and the Clams' Shannon Shaw.

Street Punk

To date, one of Seth Bogart's great defining works is the 2010 Hunx and His Punx compilation Gay Singles. With its cover emblazoned with the visage of his greasy crotch sheathed in a zebra-print Speedo, the comp featured songs that were heavily indebted to girl groups. Bogart, aka Hunx, sang about wanting to kiss somebody who just ate Del Taco on the mouth, hangin' on the telephone, and wanting to get inside Rocky's pants. On some of those tracks, Hunx had songwriting assistance from Justin Champlin, the jovial masked madman Nobunny. To say the least, Champlin and Bogart's early works were a natural aesthetic match, and that connection carries over to Bogart's newest Hunx album, Street Punk.
Last year, Nobunny continued his streak of power pop gems with "La La La La Love You", but shortly after that single came out, he made a sudden turn for a much more pointedly aggro sound. And now, it seems that Seth Bogart has made a similar transition. After releasing last year's ballad-lined solo effort Hairdresser Blues and the girl group joy of Too Young to Be in Love, Bogart has reminded us why he calls them His Punx. Street Punk exhibits the same kind of shrugged off sneering, swearing, and intimidation as Nobunny's latest punk onslaught. Take "Everyone's a Pussy (Fuck You Dude)"-- a song that's exactly 30 seconds long-- a hard-hitting cut that has an all-intimidation bass riff on the low end and features exactly six angrily screamed words. That song is proof enough that Hunx and Nobunny are still on similar wavelengths, except now, the two men owe more to G.G. Allin than Phil Spector.
But while the Punx may have shifted into a tougher mentality, these tracks can still be genuinely funny. "Bad Skin" escalates things pretty quickly by threatening to "kill you with a knife". Why? Because they have bad skin. Perhaps the most sly track of the bunch is "You Think You're Tough", where the narrator makes a gradual transition from irrational anger ("I think you're gross") to the moment when they realize their disdain may actually be affection ("Oh no, what have I become? Am I in love?"). And like a lot of Hunx's romantic material, it's got a sweet sentiment, one not unlike Emma (Cher) arguing with Mr. Knightley (Paul Rudd) until she suddenly realizes her true feelings.
"You Think You're Tough" is a standout that also showcases the range of Street Punk, a track sung by Shannon Shaw of another great Oakland garage pop outfit Shannon and the Clams. On Too Young to Be in Love, Shannon sang back-up, and it's an extremely smart call to put her voice up front a few times. On Shannon and the Clams' LPs Dreams in the Rat House and Sleep Talk, Shaw and Cody Blanchard created a bubblegummy garage sound with a whole mess of bite. This album similarly finds strength in two voices, though Street Punk jumps from Bogart's nasal to Shaw's soulful rasp and back again. It's exactly what this album needs. With 12 short and fast punk tracks, it's nice to hear sonic shifts not only in tone and tempo, but also in its variety of voices.
Though closing track "It's Not Easy" goes on for nearly four minutes, the rest of Street Punk is appropriately brief. The whole album is just under 20 minutes long, which works well for this kind of thing. Bogart's lyrics, sense of humor, and ear for melody sound great in a bite-sized format. "Don't Call Me Fabulous", for example, is 25 seconds of enraged screams, and that's exactly the right amount of time for a track that's this loudly angry. Hunx's knack for efficient and fun brevity is a double-edged sword in its way, as the strength of Gay Singles could easily paint him as more of a singles guy than an artist who makes great full albums. Fortunately, Hunx's punk rock versatility has made Street Punk his most through-and-through entertaining full-length to date.


Still arguably struggling to escape the weight of "Young Folks" and Writer's Block, the affable Swedes return to the sound of their breakthrough LP.

Gimme Some

Some bands struggle their entire careers to get out from under the shadow of one great single. In the popular imagination, that might be the case for Peter Bjorn and John-- three affable Swedish popsters doomed to be forever remembered for one damnably catchy whistle. But such a reading would be to forget that "Young Folks", with all its whistling and bongos and Victoria Bergsman verses, came surrounded by an album of other outstanding pop songs. "Young Folks" was the tip, but Writer's Block was an iceberg-- a much bigger, more difficult obstacle for follow-ups to navigate around.
Their next proper album, Living Thing (which came following a solo album from singer/guitarist Peter Morén and the instrumental effort Seaside Rock), attempted to skirt such expectations by dramatically shifting the band's sound and mood-- from the cheerful nostalgia and romantic struggles of Writer's Block to a darker, more embittered outlook; from spring thawing guitars and drums to a more intentionally spare and sharply frozen sound.
Gimme Some has been spun as a return to the band's sunnier, more winning sound, but it too often fails to reproduce Writer's Block's unexpected spark. The band seems to acknowledge as much on lead single "Second Chance". Over claps and cowbell, Peter Morén coos in his slightly mushy, softly accented voice, "You can't can't count on the second try/ The second try is such a comedown." It may be an apt sentiment, but the song feels intent on proving the point [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| via its own limpness. By far the most galling thing here, though, is is the cruise-ship conga-line leading "Dig a Little Deeper", with its sing-song "oh-oh!"s and the dull semantic argument of its chorus: "All art has been contemporary."
Elsewhere, the album is merely listless. Opener "Tomorrow Has to Wait" is a sort of PB&J-by-numbers lope better hidden in the back half of an album. "Eyes" has a pleasant, clappy shuffle, and a catchy, Spanish-inflected guitar line, trilling and pinched, that dissolves into a fuzzy solo for the song's final minute. These guys are capable musicians and studio heads, and mechanically speaking, these are fine pop songs-- well crafted, ably produced, everything in its right place-- but they don't particularly move you.
The album's better bits pop up on its second half, after some listeners' interest will have waned. "Breaker Breaker" briefly re-invigorates things with upbeat, ramshackle drums, a churning rhythm guitar, and a quick, rising melody on the chorus. "(Don't Let Them) Cool Off" begins as garage-rock pastiche but opens up into more delicate guitar picking without losing its momentum. "Down Like Me" is a fine, downbeat ballad, Morén's voice up in the mix so that you can just hear every gulp and breath before he launches into his self-pitying refrain. And Gimme Some's best song, far and away, is "Lies", a high-reaching and high-scoring number that more than anything here recalls what made PB&J so endearing in the first place. It's just nothing to whistle home about.


FIDLAR's second record continues the hormonal, party vibes of their enjoyable debut, but seems to have bigger things in mind for itself. Most of the record revolves around frontman Zac Carper's road to sobriety, and the many inherent pitfalls and setbacks faced along the way.

Too

For a band like FIDLAR, the idea of artistic growth seems kind of oxymoronic, or for anyone familiar with the L.A.-based punk dirtbags, maybe just plain moronic. On the jokily earnest, chillaxed last few strummed seconds of "Punks", the second track from their sophomore LP Too, frontman Zac Carper muses, "Relationships are fucking wack/ They make me want to smoke crack/ And girlfriend or boyfriend can suck my dick/ Masturbate, let's make it quick." It's a perfect encapsulation of FIDLAR's outlook (the band name is an acronym for Fuck It, Dog, Life's A Risk), one that they already cemented on their enjoyably party-hardy self-titled debut, a hormonal love letter to getting fucked up and fucking up. And while a title like Too might lead you to believe that FIDLAR are wisely committed to not fixing what isn't broke— there are more scuzzy guitars and songs about bad medicine, bad habits, and stupid decisions (all of which happen to be song titles)— it seems to have bigger things in mind for itself.
FIDLAR were initially met with the obvious-but-apt comparison to kindred West Coast spirits Wavves, and Too seems to greatly admire Nathan Williams' transition from disaffected skate rat to pop-punk Beach King. It's a crisper, almost radio-friendly effort that's feels slightly jarring in comparison to FIDLAR. Part of this shift can be chalked up to the fact that in the past two years, FIDLAR have made a concerted effort to clean up, as Carper has since kicked everything from heroin to booze after a band intervention. The result is a more levelheaded FIDLAR, an incarnation that likely won't scare away too many fans as it aims to convert new ones. Gone is the feral scrap and the forays into sunburnt surfabilly, replaced by a more MTVU-friendly approach that only feels "grown-up" in the sense that it's graduated from 40s in the high-school parking lot to Smirnoff in the frat house basement.
It's too bad Too doesn't boast more numbers like highlight "West Coast", a song about getting wasted on the road. But FIDLAR aim a little lower, offering dated-sounding blues stompers ("Punks"),  Black Lips-lite junkie laments ("Overdose"), interminably bratty nose-thumbing ("Sober"), questionable arena rock ("Bad Habits") and a weird little detour into the British Invasion ("Why Generation", which is hopefully supposed to be taken as tongue-in-cheek). The hooks feel forced this time, a byproduct of their desire for a broader audience that dilute the essence of what made them appealing to begin with.
But it's undeniable that Too comes from a good place. Most of the record revolves around Carper's road to sobriety, and the many inherent pitfalls and setbacks faced along the way. "I figured out when I got sober that life just sucks when you get older," he sings on "Sober", and it's a brief but affecting peek inside the head of a guy on the other side of addiction and staring down his thirties. A song like "Leave Me Alone" carries more weight when you realize it's about Carper's intervention, but too often, the songs break down into digestible little nuggets of stoner wisdom. So while Too is at times brave, that doesn't necessarily make it compelling.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Germs’ (GI), a touchstone of California punk.

(GI)

Trying to get the straight story of Los Angeles punk band Germs is like trying to piece together the timeline of a debaucherous night out: The specifics are blurry, the headache is blinding, and everybody has a different take on what happened. One lucid fact pierces through the hangover: Germs were a mess of contradictions. Doomed frontman Darby Crash was a well-read savant and a mumbling cretin, crowds adored and abhorred them, and the music they made in four belligerent years reached decades beyond their downfall. By the time their sole studio album (GI) arrived in 1979, Germs had swaggered their way to local infamy, and Crash had crowned himself the genius king of Hollywood’s juvenile delinquents. He died by suicide a little more than a year later at 22. The first LP ever released by Slash Records, (GI) captured Germs in top form. It documents four hardworking iconoclasts who somehow translated their chaotic live sets into a classic record.
Before punk-rock brevity came into vogue, Germs opted for glam flamboyance: After forming in 1977, their working name was Sophistifuck and the Revlon Spam Queens. Crash (then known as Bobby Pyn) started the group with friend and classmate Pat Smear. Crash and Smear both attended IPS—an alternative education program within L.A.’s University High School that imparted principles of EST and Scientology. It was there that Crash first dabbled in amateur mind control. “[Darby] had this natural power,” Crash’s friend and schoolmate Paul Roessler recalled in the Germs oral history Lexicon Devil. “It was either that he was so much smarter than anybody else… or he had techniques that he learned from the books he read or from IPS. Or he just had magic.”
It was this “magic” that somehow had Germs on everyone’s lips before their first gig at the Orpheum in ’77. Their live debut, opening for the Weirdos, included very little music. “Germs were absolutely fucking terrible!” recalled Weirdos drummer Nickey Beat. “They came on stage, tuned up for 10 or 15 minutes, and then got through maybe one-third of their first song and stopped and started over again… [Darby] took the mic and stuck it in a jar of peanut butter… The Germs weren’t to be taken seriously after that night… for a while.”
What Germs lacked in serious prospects they made up for in absurdity. They taunted interviewers like bratty siblings, destroyed property, and got their first single, “Forming,” on the radio by calling KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer multiple times a day until he relented. The band’s fuck-it-all approach seemed both carefree and calculated: long before merch bundles and lengthy album rollouts, Germs had T-shirts, a logo, and a loyal mob of fans, known as Circle One, before they ever laid down a record. Circle One members, typically women, identified themselves by wearing the band’s blue circle insignia, or with grisly “Germs Burns,” which were administered by searing the inner wrist with a lit cigarette from tip to filter. Once healed, a tidy, circular scar formed. “I completely control a number of people’s lives,” Crash once said. “Look around for the little girls wearing CRASH-TRASH T-shirts.” By late ’77, Germs were headlining Brendan Mullen’s notorious nightclub the Masque; punks queued out the door to watch Crash smash beer bottles and bleed on stage.
Despite early lineup shuffles—their original drummer was future Go-Go Belinda Carlisle, who came down with mono and enlisted a friend to replace her before the band’s first gig—Germs’ circle wasn’t complete until percussionist Don Bolles joined Crash, guitarist Smear, and bassist Lorna Doom. Similarly, the boy born Jan Paul Beahm did not seal his fate until he rechristened himself Darby Crash. “Whereas Bobby Pyn seemed to me a much more innocent, goofy, carefree character,” Brendan Mullen wrote, “Darby Crash became much more demonic, complex, intense, intoxicated, as he gradually began to exude a much darker persona.”
Prior to (GI) (short for “Germs Incognito”), the group had released only a couple of singles. Pronounced the “world’s most volatile band” by writer Kickboy Face, and the “worst band ever” by themselves, it seemed unlikely that any label would sign them. But Slash Records founder Bob Biggs was up to the task. He presented a contract, enlisted Joan Jett to produce, and fronted the cash for Quad Tech studios. Biggs later described his role in (GI) as more “glorified babysitter” than label maven.
Something about their impending debut rearranged Germs’ molecular structure. Despite their prior shenanigans, Crash, Smear, Doom, and Bolles got their asses in gear. “My fondest memories of the Germs are right after the beginning and up to recording (GI)... which was a thrilling experience for me,” Doom said. The band rehearsed more than ever, putting in four hours a day, multiple times a week. Their work ethic in the studio was undisputed, although the same cannot be said for Jett, who was frequently passed out, according to many accounts (Crash even makes a crack about it in closing track “Shut Down”).
Jett wasn’t the group’s first choice of producer—Crash had his heart set on Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders, but he was too expensive. Jett, who insists she only slept on the job one time, was chosen for her talent, proximity, and friendship with the band. Asleep or not, she managed to channel their focus. “Darby took it pretty seriously,” she said. “We didn’t have to do a lot of takes. He was certainly not out of control in the studio. He respected me. Did what I asked him to do… It was controlled nuttiness at that point.”
(GI) was yet another page in Germs’ tome of contradictions. Suddenly, the peanut butter-smeared, tantrum-prone little freaks had (nearly) sobered up and delivered one of the most influential records in punk history. Darby Crash’s progression from blathering imbecile to secret rock’n’roll poet shocked everyone. X’s John Doe was particularly surprised by Crash’s vernacular: “You didn’t know the words because it was all like ‘Warrrrrrrrwarrrwarr,’ when Darby’d sing them live,” he said. “So everyone was just astounded when they got that first Slash record and actually read the lyrics. They were great!”
(GI) is often considered the first-ever hardcore album. Bolles’ drumming style was fast and savage, doubling the BPMs of anything the Sex Pistols or Television had released. Meanwhile, Crash’s vocals were far removed from X’s harmonies and Joey Ramone’s chewed-up bubblegum. Crash didn’t sing: he growled. On (GI) centerpiece “Manimal,” he assumes the pelt of a rabid feline: “I came into this world like a puzzled panther/Waiting to be caged… I was never quite tamed,” he snarls. “Manimal” contains some of Crash’s most succinct and effective writing. It has none of the stilted, two-dollar words that sometimes appeared in Germs’ catalog (even Smear admitted that Crash’s lyrics could be “a bit pretentious”), and the song marries thematic and sonic elements better than most of their tracks. It is also one of many cuts on (GI) to hint at Crash’s impending death. “Evolution is a process/Too slow to save my soul,” he sneers, before letting out a pained roar like a wildcat being dragged off by poachers.
Like many bands, Germs’ ingenuity grew from limitations. When they formed, no one could really play an instrument, save for Smear, who dabbled in guitar throughout high school. As they performed and rehearsed, they realized they could play better and faster. Bolles perfected his machine-gun drumming, Doom fine-tuned her trademark “wall-of-whump” basslines, and Smear developed a guitar style that was shrill, gritty, and metallic—it often sounded like he was scraping his strings with a cheese grater. Their playing on (GI) is a balancing act of personality and restraint, leaving space for Crash to run the show.
Crash was a born prophet, a “premeditated would-be apocalyptic cult leader,” as friend and producer Geza X put it in another oral history, We Got the Neutron Bomb. Darby’s followers were already chauffeuring him around L.A. and footing his endless bar tab long before (GI) arrived. “When you have people for friends and they’re not the kind of people you want, what do you do?” he once asked an interviewer. “You make some better ones.” On (GI), Crash’s frightening magnetism was spelled out in song, and “We Must Bleed” is the most stirring distillation of his power. Crash repeats the titular line with such conviction, he sounds like a deranged preacher distributing the poisoned applesauce to his disciples.
Crash was intrigued by the charisma of cult leaders and dictators, from Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard to Charles Manson, Hitler, and Mussolini. “Richie Dagger’s Crime” portrayed a more benevolent side of Darby’s coercive nature. The song’s narrator is a holdover from Crash’s glam roots—a swaggering “boy that nobody owns.” Dagger was a dead ringer for Crash, who grew from “a child despised” into a teenage messiah. When he sings, “I can take on your heroes” it’s both a threat and a premonition—and the closest Germs ever came to pop music. “Lexicon Devil,” perhaps (GI)’s most iconic entry, repurposes Crash’s favorite manipulation device, suffered by everyone he knew: “Gimme, gimme this, gimme, gimme thaaaaaaat.” The song was an admission of Crash’s thirst for supremacy, confirming that nothing he did was by accident.
If any of (GI)’s songs were out of step with Germs’ repertoire, it was “Shut Down,” a nine-minute, narcotized jam session. Smear, Doom, and Bolles made minor detours from one circular riff, while Crash improvised lyrics that volleyed between playful and disturbing. One minute, he mocked Belinda Carlisle for being a cheerleader. Measures later, he nodded to the needle: “When I put that in my arm, I know that it done no harm.”
(GI) came out at a time when Led Zeppelin, Supertramp, and the Eagles were topping the Billboard 200. It didn’t get anywhere near the charts, but local critics took note. In his Los Angeles Times column, Richard Meltzer crowned (GI) album of the year, calling it “the most remarkable L.A. studio achievement at least since L.A. Woman.” At last, there was documentation that Germs were a legitimate band who could write and cut a record, and a great record at that. It was their best work—the gold standard they never got the chance to improve upon.
In the following year, Darby Crash rapidly eroded due to substance abuse. Filmmaker Penelope Spheeris’ punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization captured his incoherence, making previous claims of his “genius” seem ridiculous. As Crash’s drug use escalated in his final months, so did his sense of alienation. Germs broke up, Crash made a failed attempt at going solo, and he became increasingly distraught over his closeted sexuality—many of Crash’s friends didn’t learn he was gay until after he died. On December 3, Germs played a reunion show. Everyone agreed it was the band’s best performance ever. Don Bolles was so happy playing the concert, he was convinced Germs would regroup for good. But Crash had other plans. “The only reason I’m doing this is to get money to get enough heroin to kill myself with,” he told Smear before the gig. Crash had threatened suicide so many times that few people took him seriously. Four nights later, Crash and friend Casey Cola procured $400 worth of heroin, drove to Cola’s mother’s house, and shot up. Somehow, Cola survived. When she came to the next day, Crash was lying dead next to her.
In a cruel twist of fate, Darby Crash died a day before John Lennon, and the news of his passing was largely overshadowed by the Beatle’s murder. It took years for Crash to be widely recognized as a gifted writer, but his work took on a new life after his ended. Germs had an immediate impact on their L.A. peers, but their contributions were particularly felt in the following decades, when artists like Hole, L7, Melvins, Henry Rollins, Meat Puppets, and Red Hot Chili Peppers cited the band as a major influence. After a string of odd jobs and musical exploits, Smear joined Nirvana as a second guitarist in 1993. As a touring member for their In Utero trek, Smear played on the band’s famed MTV Unplugged session in 1994. Following Kurt Cobain’s death, Smear became a founding member of Foo Fighters. He still plays with them today.
Bolles continues to perform with a handful of bands, and works as a radio DJ. Doom, who passed away earlier this year, retreated from the music scene after Crash died, remerging briefly in the early 2000s to play a few reunion gigs with Smear, Bolles, and actor Shane West filling in on vocals. West starred as Crash in the 2007 Germs biopic What We Do Is Secret, a heap of schmaltz that is hard to watch, but confirms the ill-fated frontman’s eternal allure. Darby Crash knew that Germs’ music was the first step in establishing his legacy. “Records are only a medium to get something else done,” he once said. “I want to die when I’m done.” (GI) serves as the final testament from one of punk’s most divisive figures—a man who was sadistic and kind, brilliant and obtuse, and destined to eclipse his inner circle.


I was teaching the Dwight highschoolers how to drunk-drive when I first heard The Ascension. "When\n\ the vision's ...

The Ascension

I was teaching the Dwight highschoolers how to drunk-drive when I first heard The Ascension. "When the vision's getting blurry, when you can't handle yer liquor or yer speed," I said, "cover one eye and your head'll stop spinning. It takes that binocular dilemma right out of there so you can see straight. Visionary or not, it's easy to steer straight with only one eye working."
Glenn Branca knows nothing about this: he was never one to limit his vision. Seeing Rock out of one side and Academic out the other, the two only blurred together in his third eye. By 1981, Branca had already played in Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio for four years, and had disbanded his No Wave groups Theoretical Girls and The Static to focus on larger movements for amplified guitar. He had even completed compositions like "Lesson No.1" and "Dissonance", bringing to light the possibilities for multiple guitars beyond the Molly Hatchet formations of the early 70s.
But the group he assembled to play a rare tour of the States around 1980 would cohere in such a way as to make his most recent work to that point, "The Ascension", his most fully realized. Featuring David Rosenbloom from downtown group Chinese Puzzle, as well as future Sonic Youth guitar-beating beat Lee Ranaldo, the piece was scored for four guitars, bass, and drums; his sextet was Times Square neon and the ghost-light luminance of the city at 3 a.m. focused into a laser-like intensity.
It was ferocity never seen nor heard before, not even on that coast-to-coast tour, where the guitars would slash it out on stage nightly, roaring alive like the 6 train, one-eyed through dank tunnels across the country. Trying to capture that essence in the elitist Power Station studio, even Ranaldo-- in his excellent liner notes for this reissue-- admits it was hard to recreate the actual beast. Whatever Weasel Walter was able to glean digital remastering from is unbeknownst to me, but this thing is fucking huge.
You can sure bet Branca knows about driving drunk: he swerves about on these city streets between two musical extremes like a pilled-n-pompadoured Popeye Doyle on his way to the French Connection set. On one hand, he seems to be in the slow lane with all the Sunday drivers moving to Brahms and Buckner on the West Side Highway, making symphonic movements with the blinker on for miles before the turn. Riding on the Neu!-like toms of Stephan Wischerth and a bassline that lunges out like Drive Like Jehu, the four guitars in "Lesson No.2" quickly gain on traffic, buzzing and droning about 88 miles faster than anyone else clogging the lanes. It sounds almost reckless, as he steers and swerves the guitars into the other lanes, right at the oncoming lights of punk-crushed cars, weaving in and out of traffic, and then suddenly cutting down dark Chinatown alleys of urban rot. Your knuckles turn white, clinging to the door handles-- it feels so out of control, but every movement has been precisely laid-out.
"The Spectacular Commodity" is precision defined, the massive guitars gleaming like metal and glass towers in a grand opening movement, its bass menacing the very foundations with a low rumble. The manic speed of the piece increases to white-hot levels of crashing, cacophonous overtone; from these bloodied guitar strings and twisted metal carnage you can discern not just the euphoric guitar bliss of everyone from Sonic Youth to My Bloody Valentine, but also the mighty crescendos of Sigur Rós, Mogwai, Black Dice, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, or whomever, here executed with a plasma-like energy and melodic/harmonic structure still light-years beyond the forenamed.
"Light Field (In Consonance)" is as majestic as its title would suggest: guitars rain down like torrents from thunderclouds, but with a savagery typical of back alley stabbings. When the guitar strikes like sheets of lightning into these ascendant runs at the apex, it's as anthemic and all-powerful as anything I've ever heard from a six-stringed electric, in rock or any experimental context.
I've had the symphony of the streets do a little winking dance in a light drizzle to Monk's solo piano playing before, I've had Ellington make the lights of Broadway glimmer and dance for miles. White Light/White Heat split my skull open with the cold cruelty of the last exit to Brooklyn, while Paul's Boutique foretold the coke-smoking pleasures of the Vice lifestyle ten years before I arrived. Daydream Nation carved out the skyscraper shapes and dungeon scrapes of the sewer below in sound, but none of these quintessential New York records made every single movement of the Gotham populous move as one quivering entity in my head as does Branca's finale, "The Ascension".
Every step pounded out on concrete, every seeping bag of dragged garbage, every rat squeal, every metal-on-metal cry of the arriving train on the third rail, every disfigured bum, and all the echoing voices seem to be notated for these detuned guitars. The nasty city these compositions were birthed in appears no longer to be with us. A ghost city, seemingly isolated to Martin Scorsese and Abel Ferrera videos, still haunts us as an ineffable layer over the cleaned city of Disney, as brutal and terrifying as the city has always been. She's never left; it's nice to have her back.


The undervalued singer/songwriter/producer offers a bedroom-friendly five-track EP filled with slow-motion songs about lust, desire, and regret.

Love You to Death

For over a decade now, The-Dream has demonstrated a keen emotional intelligence, a willingness to throw his heart on the table, and an uncanny understanding of the female psyche—all while coming through with dozens of brilliantly dummy sing-along choruses made for belting and drunk dancing. As a songwriter/producer/singer, he’s breathed melody into his own songs as well as hits by Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Kanye West, adding humor and grace to their superstar personas. With his finest work—think “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” or “Fancy”—it can feel like he went to the mountaintop, met the god of song, and returned with a message.
But he’s never been able to truly take off as a solo artist; after scoring a few minor hits with his first couple of albums, his own work has been met with an increasing indifference by the masses across the last six years. His latest EP, Love You to Death, won’t do much to change that. It’s just as layered and melodic as ever, but unless a more adventurous quiet storm DJ latches onto it, it won’t make it out of bedrooms. Which is where some of it belongs. Over a squiggly flute on “Madness,” a musically adventurous booty call, he rivals the raunchiest of rappers: “I would die to put my lips on it/I would love to rub my face in it/But you just gotta rub my face in it.”
But blunt literalism isn’t his most powerful gift. He’s such a master of songwriting that he can play with language, lodging not just a phrase in your ear, but even abstract baby talk—think the “ellas” and “ehs” on Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” which he co-wrote. Similarly, Love You to Death opener “Lemon Lean,” the most obviously catchy song here, has no chorus other than some high-pitched cooing, but it’ll run like ticker tape through your head for days.
Along with lust, The-Dream is always drowning in desire or regret, wrenching emotions that live very close to each other in the heart. And suffer he does on Love You to Death. “Daddy told me good pussy could kill ya,” he memorably laments on “Rih-Flex,” a clever ode to Rihanna. “I forgot about them things you did in college/Can you forget about them things I did last night?” he asks on “College Daze,” in a subtle nod to “Be Careful” by Sparkle and one of his clear inspirations, R. Kelly. Like Kellz or Jill Scott, The-Dream taps into the real grit of relationships by using ’round-the-way colloquialisms (“Now I don’t wanna just buy you shit… girl I wonder how lit you get”), yet he also has no problem elevating language and extending metaphors, either, alluding to a relationship teetering on the brink of failure in “Ferris Wheel.”
By his own admission, The-Dream is less blessed as a singer than a songwriter and a producer, but that calling-card falsetto sounds crystalline here, and his note intervals are precise, shimmery, and sweet. The disappointments in this moody, make-up babymaker of an EP, then, have more to do with its tone. None of the songs trot along on his signature bright chords, and the closest he comes to going faster is at the very end (but if you’re using the EP as intended, well, perhaps it’s paced perfectly). While lush as ever, the songs never quite catch the “ghost”—that ineffable, humbling streak of god in songs that reduce you to tears—like “Fancy,” “Rockin’ That Shit,” “Yamaha,” and others did. Still, he has captured greatness more often than nearly any other modern-day triple threat, and that alone should make you scream his name.


Lil Uzi Vert's latest mixtape comes at a moment of fever-pitch buzz for the young rapper, reaffirming his talent for synthesizing trends into a catchy melodic soup.

The Perfect Luv Tape

Lil Uzi Vert has been pegged as the center of rap’s widening generational gap, his name tied to other dismantlers of rap convention Lil Yachty and Playboi Carti. But he’s mostly a product of the traditional industry machine: He was rapping fast like a ‘little uzi’ when DJ Diamond Kuts started playing him on local radio, which plugged the youngster with DJ Drama and Don Cannon. (He’d later sign with their Generation Now label, an imprint of Atlantic.) Those same radio spins caught the attention of Philly producer Maaly Raw, whose manager grew up with Uzi and linked them. Maaly subsequently became Uzi’s sonic North Star. After that, Uzi was nurtured by the A$AP Mob, particularly the late, great curator A$AP Yams, who was one of the first A&R figures to give the rapper a signal boost. His voice was much leaner then, on a tape interestingly titled The Real Uzi, which seemed to invoke Young Thug. These days he sounds like the offspring of *Bang 2-*era Chief Keef, minus the Xan addiction (See: “7AM”), but then again so do many of his contemporaries: guys like Carti and (to a different extent) Desiigner. What’s separated Uzi from his peers is his ability to distill entire subgenres of rap into a tonal soup, and more importantly, his songcraft, a knack for hooks and an understanding of how Auto-Tune best suits his abilities.
Uzi’s buzz reached a fever pitch on the strength of two love-centric mixtapes: 2015’s Luv Is Rage and April’s Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World, neither of which were really interested in saying anything substantial about romantic love, instead opting to rubber-stamp random songs with hearts and cliches. Lil Uzi Vert songs rarely see thoughts through—perhaps because he doesn’t usually write his lyrics down—so he isn’t really built for the “concept mixtape” formula. It’s odd, then, that he’d continue to chase it with The Perfect Luv Tape, another basic love-inspired outing. The entire tape essentially boils down to a single lyric from “Of Course We Ghetto Flowers”: “You a broke boy got bad luck, don't even talk to me/ You know his girlfriend stalk on me.”
The Perfect Luv Tape is a spiritual sequel to Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World, which was also fascinated by love as a concept, only this time around the central theme, as the opener “Do What I Want” posits, is that Uzi now has enough clout to cut corners. Unfortunately, that occasionally applies to his songmaking, too. Everything is coming easily for Uzi now, and it’s opened a gateway to boredom. Some songs are carefully and skillfully crafted, but the vocal performances are less dynamic. At every turn there is a girl after him, either for his money or his status, or a girl he’s taken from an unknowing boyfriend with little effort. It all becomes pretty dulling after awhile. He hasn’t grown much as a writer, but he’s becoming a pretty epic rambler, stumbling upon gems just by simply drilling away at concepts. The hooks are effortless and earwormy, even when they don’t have a core idea, and his arrangements continue to surprise: some songs have bridges that split verses; others are entirely bridges and hooks.
Even with these new song constructions, though, Uzi seems content to replicate past successes on The Perfect Luv Tape. There are lots of similar tonal ranges to vs. the World, thanks in large part to a similar cast—producers Maaly Raw and Don Cannon, mostly. But Uzi stretches occasionally: See the astronautical space screeches of Nard & B (“Seven Million”), the piano roll-led bass mash of DP Beatz (“Alfa Romeo AW30 (I Can Drive)”), and even a very (uncharacteristically) tropical thumper from Metro Boomin (“Ronda (Winners)”). He embraces an apparent chemistry with both Future and Zaytoven, first exhibited on the Project E.T.: Esco Terrestrial cut “Too Much Sauce,” for the standouts “Money Mitch” and “Seven Million.” Though it doesn’t have the highs or the hits of vs. the World, it is sequenced more carefully and it foregrounds his central appeal: In the spirit of one of his cosigners, Yams, he synthesizes catchy sounds from rap’s most dynamic corners. It might not make him a visionary, but it could make him a star.


Though weighted with a complicated backstory, Vincent’s latest album contains some of the most organic and sincere techno to come out this year.

For Paris

The American-born, Berlin-based DJ and producer Levon Vincent is famously acrid and anti-capitalist. He has decried the “incestuous” art of remixes and the evils of fast cash in the music industry. (“You break off a piece of your dignity for cash—unless it's between friends,” he once said in an interview.)  His 2015 self-titled debut had a track called “Anti-Corporate Music” and he explicitly said that album was an “action against” the lemmings in the corporate “rat race.” Two years later, the implicit political spirit undergirding his music can partially explain how his follow-up, For Paris, came about.
The backstory of Vincent’s second record is pained and complicated. Shortly after the 2015 attacks at the Bataclan nightclub in Paris, Vincent posted on Facebook imploring people to “arm themselves” with a “knife” or “mace” to stop attacks before they get out of hand. Following an intense backlash, he posted an apology, and as he admits in a statement introducing For Paris, the experience led him to reevaluate his life philosophy. He says he’s read everything from the Book of Psalms to Patti Smith, all in search of an understanding of war and peace. As such, he hopes his music and his message can “ignite a new peace movement.”
His ambition—like the album’s artwork—can come off as a bit mawkish, but the jump from independent, almost socialist techno producer to pacifist hippy is not such a wild shift. The flower-power rhetoric is not just for show, it’s something that’s seeped into Vincent’s technique. Scoff as we may at clunky titles likes “If We Choose War,” this album contains some of the most organic and sincere techno to come out this year.
Take for example the palatial nearly nine-minute “Hope For New Global Peace (in 3 parts),” which is nowhere near techno, but closer to a Terry Riley-inspired composition. (Riley might be the secret godfather to the music here conceptually and sonically—lest we forget the pacifist poetry that introduced A Rainbow in Curved Air.) Three suites, filled with harps, jaunty hand drums, clouds of synths, and any number of beautiful string instruments, it's the best demonstration of Vincent’s gentler, more psychedelic palette. Elsewhere, he deploys his new toolbox to create songs brimming with childish energy—“If We Choose Peace,” built from arpeggios and what sounds like xylophones, comes close to the tie-dyed techno of DJ Koze.
While he has retained some sense of the uncompromising minimalism that has defined his sound in the past—in songs like “Baseball” or “Slander Is Terrible”—his music is no longer so cold and austere. Even in the more conventional techno tracks, he draws out a kind of squishy, bodily sensation that can be hard to find in dance music’s grid. The well-wrought “Late Reflections,” with its fluttering chords and balletic percussion, is tightly produced and naturalistic—you get the sense sometimes that he’s leading a band and not manipulating hardware. There’s also an emotional element to his music now that changes its intention and utility. The melancholic “Only Good Things” has all the moving parts of a classic dance track, with mean synth breakdowns and hard-scrabbled drums, but Vincent deploys these tropes with a softer effect in mind. In the same way someone might put a colored scarf over a harsh light, Vincent mutes the aggression of his tools in order draw out a more sensitive sound. There’s an almost wistful and hushed air to the song, a feeling not many techno producers can replicate.
The heartfelt feeling that Vincent chases throughout For Paris comes into focus on its final track, “Dancing With Machiavelli.” It’s the most human song on the record, with its chaotic drum line and splatter of piano keys. It’s unevenly stitched and almost improvised. This is not a smooth or “well-made” song, but that doesn’t matter because Vincent can touch something more emotive. This album is interested in eliciting a reaction that can be difficult to squeeze from any artform—the 10 songs here can be downtrodden, joyful, and meditative all at once. Vincent reveals the seams of his compositions and leans into the albums quirks, mistakes, and maybe you could call them errors. Both in the events leading up to this album and in the music contained within, Vincent has proven imperfect. That messiness comes to define this album, making for machine music that’s lovingly flawed and human.


Diamanda Galás: Defixiones, Will and Testament / La Serpenta Canta

In November of 2002, as part of a conference honoring the late novelist Kathy Acker, Diamanda Galás' multi-octave voice bellowed and howled through the midrange speaker's of NYU's Fales Library. Due to a previous engagement in Canada, the vocalist was unable to perform in the flesh, so she sent a multi-track recording in her stead. As preferable as it is to watch her unleash her intense Siren songs onstage, I enjoyed the disembodied presentation and the wraith-like shadow it cast upon the proceedings.
As well as textual linkages, the two artists shared a mutual admiration. In a brief article on her performance at London's Royal Festival Hall, Acker called Galás the Maria Callas of her generation. In my mind, generations are broad and formless; so more specifically, Galás is a graveyard Callas (sans corpsepaint) who channels anonymous victims and sings their eulogies. In keeping with her baroque oeuvre and aesthetic, Defixiones, Will and Testament and La Serpenta Canta, Galás' first full-lengths since 1998's Malediction and Prayer, are densely wound, parabolic double albums. Released concurrently, each documents a very different approach, though both are by far creepy enough to make even the gothest shiver.
Defixiones, Will and Testament is a meditation on the Armenian, Assyrian and Anatolian Greek genocides carried out by Turkey from 1914 to 1923, and the Turkish and American denial of the atrocities. According to a statement about the project at Galás' website, "'Defixiones' refers to the warnings engraved in lead that were placed by relatives of the deceased on the graves of the dead in Greece and Asia Minor. These warnings cautioned against moving or desecrating the corpses under the threat of extreme harm. 'Will and Testament' refers to the last wishes of the dead who have been taken to their graves under unnatural circumstances." Like 1990's Plague Mass-- a work for people with AIDS, inspired in part by the death of her brother, the playwright Philip Dimitri Galás, who succumbed to the disease in 1986-- once Galas affixes her sound to something concrete, the effects are often near sublime.
As we chalk up important numbers of the dead (on calendars, and outlined out sidewalks) and commemorate days of mass murder, Defixiones issues a creepy formal purity, as Galás discusses ethnic cleansing: choirs rage, skies are torn, Galas speaks in tongues. In "Orders from the Dead", "Our dead watch their daughters butchered, raped, and beaten in the still burning of those flames." In light of the tortures at Abu Ghraib, notions of genocide and violence are currently in the forefront of many minds (and even USA Today). Certain lines like, "A man without a God/ Cannot be burned alive/ He never was alive/ Not as a man, giavour/ But as a dog," coupled with recent imagery of Iraqis on leashes, expands Galás' anger to encompass more than her initial subject. Towards the song's end, she turns her phraseology towards the humanizing first person and achieves the voice of victimhood: "I am the man unburied/ Who cannot sleep/ In forty pieces."
Elsewhere in the cycle, she incorporates and expands traditional compositional forms from Smyrna and Asia Minor and poems and by Armenian poet Siamanto, Syrian poet Adonis, Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, and Rumanian-Jewish poet Paul Celan. Throughout Defixiones' 99 minutes, Galás accrues packs of identities, all looking for remembrance. It's a chilling agglomeration: More about absence than a cult-of-personality, the soul-catching proves an angry and unmanageable lament riddled with grief, often as laden as it is uplifting.
La Serpenta Canta, on the other hand, is surprisingly playful, tackling major standards and classics of American blues, country & western, R&B;, Motown, and soul. Each, of course, becomes hers alone. For instance, when Galás holds a particularly cackling note towards the three-quarter mark of Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You", it's the stuff of a real hex, not just an interpretation of another's poetry. This is followed by a restrained take on Chip Moman and Dan Penn's "At the Dark End of the Street", which proves more Tom Waits than the violently cascading Pandora's Box that erupts at the coda of her reprisal of John Lee Hooker's "Burning Hell", a song she performs twice here with equally glorious results. Elsewhere, her guttural "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" transforms Hank Williams' tear-in-my-beer ballad into a spiraling downpour that carries with it a banshee wail from the top of Mount Olympus.
But despite these warped old favorites, it's her own "Baby's Insane" that steals the show. Taken from The Sporting Life, her unlikely but surprisingly fruitful 1994 pop-art collaboration with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones becomes the campiest of torch songs in a live setting. Recorded at Joe's Pub in NYC on August 31st, 2001, the cabaret lilts, and she jokes with the audience about the song's macabre subject matter before issuing the central warning: "Baby's insane/ Baby's insane/ Baby's on a trip to the morgue again/ Hide all the knives/ 'Cause baby's insane."
Though La Serpenta Canta consists of lighter fare than the gorgeously pained Defixiones, Will and Testament, there are stylistic linkages (Galás, after all, is Galás). In both, the palette consists of her voice, piano and minimal electronics. Another less stylistic connector is the across-the-board inclusion of the traditional "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean". Equally powerful on both releases, the song's central request ("There's just one last favor I'll ask of you/ See that my grave is kept clean") carries more intense resonances in the context of Defixiones. What's a grave keeper to do, for example, if the site's left unmarked or there's no burial at all?
Yes, Galás' caustic voice is at times overblown, and you won't likely plop these discs into your stereo after a rough day at the office; like a complex modernist tome, their richly idiosyncratic materiality demands patient intelligence. At times, listening to these records is like treading water in the Black Sea: To experience them fully involves unraveling codes, grabbing after spirits, and immersing yourself into sinking shadows. It's an effort, but with more and more classifiably ephemeral and easily digestible sugar blasts erupting in the underground, breaking a sweat now and again with something that feels like it's been shot straight out of hell provides a nice change of pace.


Chicago drill star Lil Durk cedes the floor to his capable crew on a 23-song victory lap that memorializes his own hard-earned fame alongside the memory of his late protégé, King Von.

Only the Family: Only the Family - Lil Durk Presents: Loyal Bros

Lil Durk has spent the past decade on a long, grueling trip to success. The Chicago rapper began his career on Myspace in 2010, fresh out of high school and filled with ambition. By 2013, his melodic, war-torn stories led to a deal with Def Jam. But a series of setbacks threatened to derail his ascent: A short-lived rivalry with fellow drill pioneer Chief Keef, several felony charges, his departure from Def Jam in 2018, and, most notably, the shooting deaths of his cousin OTF Nunu in 2014, friend and former manager OTF Chino Dolla in 2015, and protégé King Von this past November. Durk persevered through it all, moving to Atlanta and steadily releasing new music, culminating in the one-two punch of his feature on Drake’s smash hit “Laugh Now, Cry Later” and the release of his sixth studio album, The Voice, last December.
So if anyone has earned the right to host an album-length victory lap with their peers, it’s Lil Durk. Only the Family - Lil Durk Presents: Loyal Bros, released barely three months after The Voice, uses Durk’s second wind to give his Only the Family collective—comprised of Memo600, Booka600, Lil Mexico, Doodie Lo, Slimelife Shawty, Chief Wuk, THF Zoo, and the late Von—a chance to impress on a national scale. Having survived the vice grip of the industry once, Durk is ready to clear the safest possible path for his squad. “I fell off once and I’m still lit,” he croons confidently on opening song “JUMP.” It’s all the more refreshing, then, to see him take a backseat; he appears on only six of the album’s 23 songs, largely ceding the floor to his crew, who prove to be up to the challenge.
Loyal Bros is hardcore Chicago drill through and through, setting dispatches from the trenches of street life over ominous minor-key melodies and 808s capable of punching holes in your chest. The album’s velocity translates to the group’s interplay, which is fluid and piercing. Though ultimately too long for its own good, Loyal Bros is well-sequenced and fine-tuned, providing breathing room to nearly two dozen different artists without devolving into a clown-car pileup.
On “Do It for Von,” Booka600, Memo600, and THF Zoo pass flawless laterals across one winding verse. The duo tracks play to the group’s strongest relationships (like Durk and Slimelife Shawty on “Dying 2 Hit’em”) and find exciting contrasts in outside guests (Lil Uzi Vert steals the show on “Let It Blow” and Detroit neighbor Tee Grizzley runs off with two different songs). “Kennedy,” a solo showcase for member Lil Mexico, sounds ready to devour space on playlists and radio. Unlike Dreamville’s Revenge of the Dreamers III compilation, which leapfrogged effortlessly between different styles of contemporary rap and R&B, Loyal Bros’ hyper-focus on drill aims to demonstrate the strength of the collective’s bond through its grasp of their hometown style.
The OTF bond feels even more crucial in the face of King Von’s untimely passing. Loyal Bros features one song released in Von’s lifetime (“Me and Doodie Lo”) as well as two posthumous verses, all showcases for his sharp diction and gift for straightforward storytelling. On “Me and Doodie Lo,” Von and Lo trade stories like war veterans over a staccato beat, bringing decaying bodies and their own stoic remorse vividly to life. Of all the OTF members, it’s Von whose verses most closely match the emotional fervor of Durk, and the spirit of their fallen lieutenant rallies the entire collective. “Von died, we kept that game face, he hate when niggas cry,” Booka600 laments on “Game Face.”
Even in the face of tremendous loss, the OTF unit stands tall on Loyal Bros. Durk’s belief in his brethren manifests on a record that not only acts as a coda to his own hard-earned stardom but helps the collective shine as a whole. No one rises to the vacant spot left by Von, probably by design. Loyal Bros is a family affair, one that distances itself from the genre excursions of Durk’s recent solo work to stay rooted in traditions of Chicago drill as old as OTF themselves.

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Made mostly on an iPhone, the first project from 18-year-old producer Steve Lacy—also a member of the Internet—sparkles with classic Southern California funk and soul.

Steve Lacy's Demo

There are only 13 minutes of music on Steve Lacy’s debut project, but that’s enough time for him to make a serious impression. Over the course of six tracks that sparkle with classic Southern California funk and soul, the producer, just barely out of high school, offers up a dazzling number of musical ideas. Steve Lacy’s Demo is all the more remarkable for the fact that most of the record was produced on an iPhone.
Lacy, 18, joined his school’s jazz band in ninth grade, where he met Jameel Bruner, the younger brother of superstar bassist, Thundercat. When Bruner was recruited to play keyboards on the Internet’s third album, Ego Death, he invited Lacy to join the group in the studio. The band must have been impressed: Lacy ended up earning himself individual production credits on six of the album’s 12 tracks and an executive producer credit, becoming a full-on member. The album was a breakthrough success for the Internet, occasioning rave reviews, winning the group a Grammy nomination, and reminding the world again that its young members—Syd, Matt Martians, and now Lacy—had massive potential.
All three have released solo projects in early 2017. Lacy has classified Demo as a “song series” rather than an album or EP, a modesty belied by the fact that he has called the songs “perfect.” He’s not far off—the music here is startlingly mature, full of dimension and depth, as if Lacy were accompanied by a full band rather than doing everything, right down to the mixing, by his lonesome. The opening song, “Looks,” kicks off with drums, adventurous bass, a wobbling synth, and gorgeous falsetto harmonies that lead in to the solitary verse. All those layers are in service of a song that’s, of all things, a rejection of superficiality. “What if I got with you and turned out to be a total dick,” Lacy cautions. “Would you be happy ’bout that?” The song is all too brief—it melts in your mouth before two minutes are up.
Talented musicians often lean on their chops, noodling at their instruments at the expense of tight songcraft. If anything, Lacy has almost the opposite problem: Many of the outstanding musical moments here feel teased rather than fulfilled. The verse that opens “Ryd” could easily become a hook anchoring a full song—instead, it’s merely a bookend, a sliver of something great. But Lacy is so multitalented in his vocal range and his creative percussion (check the drums on “Haterlovin”), in his ability to wring soulfulness out of guitar and bass alike, that it’s hard to isolate one single element at which he most excels.
“Dark Red” is the clear standout, the only song in which each part lingers for the appropriate amount of time. The swirling melodies on the chorus float atop the beat as a melodic counterpoint, an effect Lacy has said was influenced by David Longstreth’s work with Dirty Projectors. And the aching quality of the music, complemented by the Motown harmonies that round out its back half, matches the song’s theme, a plea lobbed at a partner who’s beginning to turn away.
Despite its brevity, Demo is reminiscent of another auspicious debut, one that emerged more than 15 years ago. Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo had already made their mark as producers with the Neptunes, but their first album in the band NERD, In Search Of…, was stronger and stranger than anything they had come up with before. And as its songs became cult classics, In Search Of... announced Pharrell as someone who could star in front of the camera, not just behind the boards. Steve Lacy’s Demo evokes that record in its charisma and musical ability. Given that it’s not even 15 minutes, the record can’t be said to be anything more than a particularly tasty appetizer. But it’s hard to imagine the listener who wouldn’t yearn for the next course.


The East London rapper and producer’s debut has the feel of a mixtape, luxuriating in the tension between her reticent persona and raw lyricism.

SHILOH: Lost for Words

John Glacier’s confessional dictaphone raps sound like intimate notes to self, intended for one listener only. She writes to untangle her mind. “Got weed for the low times too/What’s low times two? I dunno/Double negative makes a positive, or so they say/So I’m playing with the words again,” she drawls over the stretched-out guitar of “Green Elephants Freestyle,” a highlight from the woozy final third of her debut album. SHILOH: Lost for Words shines in the moments when Glacier lets her vocals float a little outside of the beat, luxuriating in the tension between her reticent persona and raw lyricism. On “Boozy,” she duets with her own muffled practice takes; on “Some Other Thing,” her stream of consciousness solidifies over an echoing drone.
SHILOH is the East London rapper-producer’s most substantial work to date, following a handful of wispy feature verses for fellow rap esoterics Babyfather, Jeshi, and LYAM; it arrives via scene-shaping producer and Frank Ocean collaborator Vegyn’s PLZ Make It Ruins. Vegyn made contact after coming across Glacier’s SoundCloud page; pay a visit yourself and you’ll find a handful of snippets with functional titles like “Sounds from Friday evening” and “A Child was Sad so I made this infront of her to make her laugh.” As the pair exchanged messages, they realized they’d met multiple times before—trading gripes at the back of parties, each grateful for an understanding ear.
In 2019, Vegyn opened up his studio space to Glacier—she favored the night shifts—prompting a loose back-and-forth of ideas. Two years later, their sketches emerge as these 12 mostly brief tracks. SHILOH has the feel of a mixtape: Works in progress nestle alongside more carefully structured songs (the percussive cascades on “If Anything” are nothing if not meticulous); ad libs are replaced with Glacier’s in-the-moment reactions to her own output (a gargled “ergh” of apparent disgust on “Timing” is comical as it is vulnerable). But Glacier’s productions—completed alongside a tight-knit ensemble of Vegyn, Holly, Psychedelic Ensemble, and Tn_490—coat the record with a cool, understated gloss and keep it from unravelling.
Glacier’s music toes a fine line between noodly bedroom art-rap and something more substantive. She comes out on the right side with reassuring consistency. The smartarse wordplay on “Green Elephants Freestyle” is knowing enough to retain its smirking charm; “Trelawny Waters” pairs the infectious lilt and measure of a nonsense poem with a tribute to Queen Nanny and the Windward Maroons, a guerilla army of former slaves who battled British colonizers in 18th-century Jamaica. For listeners of such intimate music, there’s a similarly fine line between voyeurism and the privilege of being offered a window into another person’s inner monologues, be they banal or profound. Even when it’s obscure, SHILOH is wholly inviting.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This reissue of a 1982 dub reggae favorite tells a good story, exemplifies a particular moment in Jamaican music history, and offers a new way to hear how dub reggae works.

Various Artists: Junjo Presents: Wins the World Cup

Junjo Presents: Wins the World Cup

It’s not often that a reissue reframes the narrative around a record. This edition of the 1982 ….Wins the World Cup tells an interesting story and exemplifies a particular moment in Jamaican music history—all the while providing a bit of an object lesson in dub reggae.
The cheekily titled album’s release coincided with the 1982 FIFA World Cup—complete with Tony McDermott’s tell-tale album art depicting a reggae-fied team beating England 6-to-1. Originally titled Scientist Wins the World Cup, the record features the legendary Roots Radics and the studio stylings of Overton H. "Scientist" Brown, with producer Henry "Junjo" Lawes acting as "referee." The tracks are labelled "Dangerous Match," numbers 1–10, followed by five separate tracks entitled "Extra Time" and the final track aptly named "Golden Goal." Initially reissued in 2002, the new version seriously ups the ante by providing the whole World Cup-winning game, and then the original versions of the songs. There are also some extra counteraction deejay tunes—vocal versions that provide an alternative perspective. This move places the emphasis on Junjo—and the title therefore shifts to Junjo Presents: Wins the World Cup. Doesn’t have the ring of the original, but it points to the role played by the producer in advance of the dub treatment.
Dub reggae is its own particular thing. A bass-driven, heavy version of reggae, dub breaks down songs into component parts and then sticks them all back together after playing around with all the pieces. Scientist was one of the masters of the form. Born in 1960, he was a teenager as reggae edged into the era of extreme studio experimentation, exemplified by the creative genius of producers such as Lee "Scratch" Perry and Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock. It was Tubby who apparently dubbed him "Scientist" after hearing the young Brown talking about his ideas for adjusting and altering studio technology (http://www.niceup.com/interviews/scientist). In the case of …Wins the World Cup, Junjo produced and arranged a series of songs with the Roots Radics and a range of vocalists. These recordings were taken from Channel One on Maxfield Avenue to King Tubby’s Waterhouse Studio in another part of town to be experimented with by Scientist.
The record demonstrates that the general sense some folks have about a shift between the roots- and-culture focus of the 1970s and the degenerative digital dancehall 1980s isn’t really the case. The production prowess of Junjo paired with Scientist’s touch created classic late-70s reggae songs like "Collie Weed" by Barrington Levy and Sugar Minnott’s "Oh Mr D.C.", but also slack dancehall king Yellowman’s tunes in the early 80s. …Wins the World Cup is the sweet spot right in the middle.
As for the tunes, this collection provides an insight into the dub process by allowing easy side-by-side comparison between vocal originals and dub versions. Listening to Johnny Osbourne’s well-known "Ice Cream Love" followed by "Extra Time One" draws attention to Scientist’s dropping of the vocal after the first line, echoing in the distance until it is but a trace in the background, just audible under the bass and the added wobble on the guitar. At moments, even the bass drops out, leaving the spare, metallic rhythm, and the reverberation of the drum and that bit of tinny melody. It’s much easier to hear how this provides a near opposite to the "warmer than chocolate fudge" original when you can switch back and forth. Little sounds stick out—it’s difficult to not play the game of what’s missing and what’s been added.
The wobbly bits on "Dangerous Match Three" the dub version of Hugh Mandell’s "Jacqueline" sound like they might be the reason for dubstep being called dubstep. The echo of the drums rings out each measure, being pushed along by the bass, accompanied by the clear jangle of guitar and sparkle of horns. Wayne Jarrett’s vocal on "Ranny and Lou," a song about two of Jamaica’s most well-loved performers, is virtually eliminated in "Dangerous Match Ten," drawing attention to piano and organ. The dub treatment tends to play with listener focus, pulling attention from one instrument to the next, seemingly adding extra creaks and beeps just to confound the listener. Regardless, the weight and depth of these tunes lend them to being played loud and for a long time.


Using corroded samples and languid tempos, Bogotá artist Nicolás Vallejo casts an eerie and sorrowful light on Colombia’s hidden traumas.

En Átomos Volando

Before DJ Screw, there was Gabriel Duéñez. Born in Zacatecas in 1947, he moved to Monterrey as a boy and fell under the sway of the Colombian music that was then becoming popular in the northeastern Mexican city. In the 1960s, Duéñez became famous as a sonidero, or soundsystem DJ, spinning cumbia and vallenato at dances and block parties across the hilly working-class district of Independencia. It was at one of these parties that fate placed its hand upon his turntables: After hours of music in the sweltering heat—subwoofers throbbing, signal bleeding red, motors grinding ceaselessly beneath whirring platters—something went awry, some busted fuse or melted circuit, and the music began to play back at an abnormally slow speed. The guitars and vocal harmonies turned thick and syrupy; the loping beat crumpled into a narcoleptic shuffle. But, as these things so often go—cf. Belgium’s sensual popcorn, D.C.’s woozy moombahton, and of course DJ Screw’s opiated screw music—the “wrong” speed sounded even more entrancing than the correct one. Inspired by the error, Duéñez began recording cassettes of slowed-down cumbia songs, and the style known as cumbia rebajada was born.
It was Colombia that initially exported cumbia to Mexico, and an echo of this Mexican variant returns to Colombian soil in the music of Ezmeralda, aka Nicolás Vallejo, formerly of the “gothic cumbia” outfit La MiniTK de Miedo. On his solo debut album, last year’s Patrimonio Inmaterial de la Nada, the Bogotá musician translated his previous group’s sepulchral inclinations into a foggier and more atmospheric sound, in which accordion, flute, and marimba cast a melancholy glow from deep inside misty thickets of shakers and reverb. En Átomos Volando springs from the same source, but this time the tempos are even slower, the vibes wispier, the samples further corroded. “Rebajada” means reduced, lowered, diluted; here, the sounds of the Afro-Indigenous musical tradition seem to physically dissolve into thick, tropical air.
Where Ezmeralda’s previous album explored the “immaterial legacy of nothingness,” En Átomos Volando is more ethereal yet. The accordions and electric organs of his debut still bore obvious traces of the records he was sampling from, but here there’s scant evidence of his source materials, save for the boomy, high-low pattern of tambora and tambor alegre. Cumbia’s distinctive, foot-dragging pulse remains audible, but strange things happen to it at this languid tempo. Those intricate syncopations drift apart like blocks of sea ice, opening vast distances between drum beats; wreathed in echo, hissing shakers dissipate like raindrops on pavement.
Ezmeralda’s murky, moody sound bears some resemblance to Burial’s forlorn poetics of worn-out vinyl, and also to Dominican producer Kelman Duran’s miasmic reggaetón. But his closest compatriot might be the late Philip Jeck, whose plodding loops of battered thrift-store wax have a similarly mesmerizing effect. “When you slow a record down that much,” said Jeck, who used his turntables’ 16-RPM setting to truly psychedelic ends, “other things start appearing out of the sound.” In an email about his own work, Vallejo noticed something similar: “When you slow down the cumbia, the ghosts start to emerge.”
The ghostly qualities of Ezmeralda’s work aren’t just metaphorical; his music is shot through with a powerful sense of mourning. The opening track, “Niños Flotando en el Cielo,” begins with a sample taken from a 1990 documentary about gamines, the boys who live on the streets of Colombia’s cities—shining shoes, sniffing glue, and surviving however they can. “Glue was really sweet,” says a boy who, in the documentary, looks like he can’t be much more than seven or eight years old. “I felt like I was flying like Superman.” In the background, the unsteady call of an ice-cream truck warbles in the distance as the boy rhapsodizes about watching the stars in the sky above him at night; the looping melody and downy reverb combine to form a vaporous concoction of childlike wonder and crushing melancholy.
The EP’s other four tracks are similarly bittersweet. In “Nochear,” airy synth pads imbue cumbia’s languorous pulse with a weightless feel; “Flores en el Río” is meant to evoke petals drifting on the surface of a slow-moving river. A tangle of hand drums, agonized groans, and soupy drones, “Duelo (Cumbia del Fantasma)” marks the record’s darkest moment; its enervated rhythm evokes a nightmare where you cannot scream or run. The closing “Summer of Sacol” seems at first to lighten the mood, with softly pulsing synths casting a gentle ambient shimmer over unsteady percussion. But “Sacol,” it turns out, is yet another reference to the inhalants that plague Colombia’s impoverished youth. While initial doses may provoke agreeable hallucinations, long-time users of the drug may walk unsteadily and suffer from lethargy and convulsions. The same dichotomy plays out in the music itself: The gentle synths evoke the feeling of flying, while the rhythm mimics twitching, stumbling limbs. The deeper you sink into Ezmeralda’s music, the more such dualities become apparent, with bright tropical colors giving way to fathomless shadows.
One reason that Colombian cumbia initially caught on in Mexico is because it appealed to the country’s internal migrants. Colombian records, with their songs of “peasant longing, with that way of expressing those distances, that desire to feel the land… became the choice of the dispossessed, of the newcomers, of those who were not from here,” the cumbia DJ and producer Toy Selectah told Mexico Daily Post in 2021. That is to say, even at its sunniest, cumbia always harbored a sense of tension in its heart. In Ezmeralda’s En Átomos Volando, a music of displacement returns to its place of origin and, made strange once again, casts an eerie and sorrowful light on Colombia’s own hidden traumas.


Kamaiyah’s debut mixtape lightly recalls the rap and R&B of the ’90s, but her approachable and assured presence is all her own.

A Good Night in the Ghetto

Kamaiyah’s debut mixtape Good Night in the Ghetto initially comes across carefree and effortless, which might seduce you into thinking it was easy to make. The songs are simple, unfussy, and full of space, with a low-key mood meant less for a raucous house party and more for a casual basement hangout. Kamaiyah’s calling-card song, "How Does It Feel," is here, and it’s as wistful and sunny as it was when it came out last year. But now it’s joined by 15 other tracks that hit on the same energy: It feels good to be young, but it’s even better to be smart enough to appreciate how fleeting that feeling is.
*Good Night in the Ghetto'*s production is the aural equivalent of watching  Too $hort and TLC videos half-asleep through one of Hype Williams’ custom ’90s fish-eye lenses—a blur of reference points from across hip-hop's glitziest decade. Kamaiyah is 20, which means her earliest impressions of that decade’s music would have come around the time the industry was locked into a death spiral and rap was vanishing from the charts. Seen through this filter, it’s easy to see how a video like, say, "Ladies’ Night" would seem like the peak of some lost civilization. But while she carries a brick phone around as a prop for her throwback image, she otherwise she treats the whole back-in-the-day thing lightly, a personal quirk rather than a defining mission.
Besides, Bay Area rap has been celebrating the power of silky Anita Baker and Sade keyboard patches for years. These sounds have been recreated so lovingly for so long that they've become a thread snaking through a wide range of music. Kamaiyah is part of a tradition that extends back to early-‘90s hits like Conscious Daughters’ "Something to Ride to (Fonky Expedition)" (she told Pitchfork that Conscious Daughter’s Karryl "Special One" Smith gave her the mixtape title) and continues today: the Trackademicks-produced "Come Back" could easily have been given to fellow East Bay artist J. Stalin, whose music often has the same plush retro-funk feel.
Kamaiyah stands out from her peers, though, with her appealingly natural presence. Her voice sounds as unaffected and assured singing as it does rapping, and she writes big hooks: The chorus to "Swing My Way" is full-bodied enough to picture a shirtless male guest star belting it, but she handles it herself, her small voice giving off its own heat. The little interjection "woopty woopty woo" on "Out the Bottle" is fearsomely catchy, "I hope I don’t yelp this involuntarily in a roomful of strangers" catchy. But it’s a detail, a grace note on an album that never oversells anything. Restraint is a slippery virtue to enthusiastically trumpet, but it usually marks the separation between an artist who can hold down a single and one who can comfortably occupy an album.
This poise is what makes Kamaiyah someone worth spending time with. There's a great song on here in the Too $hort tradition ("Niggas") about loving sex, and severe disinterest in being obligated to have it with one person. But it’s not a sexual tall-tale meant to make Kamaiyah sound superhuman: "Hit the back room come back, my dress undid/ He gon’ zip it back before they notice we be fucking," she sings playfully. On "Freaky Freaks," she falls asleep in her Jeep because she’s too high to drive. This is: a) not something it’s easy to imagine Nicki Minaj rapping about, and b) something an affable-everyman like Devin the Dude has probably done in real life. Approachability is a cornerstone of Kamaiyah’s style.
And then, of course, there’s her good-life ode "How Does It Feel." Despite some stiff competition, it remains her best song, something she implicitly acknowledges by reprising it for the introductory track "I’m On." It sounds even better on Good Night without eclipsing anything around it. The emotions on the tape—joy, yearning—are never better expressed than in the two questions she poses in the chorus: "How does it feel to be rich" and "How does it  feel to just live?" The underlying subtext—that these might be two versions of the same question—is present, without insisting on itself. Just like everything else on Good Night, the essential substance is just there, a cocked eyebrow and a meaningful pause from someone who’s confident enough to put it all out there in her own way and allow you a minute to catch up.


Following their collaboration on last year’s Atrocity Exhibition, the Accelerator 12” finds Danny Brown and producer Paul White coloring even more brazenly outside of hip-hop’s lines.

Accelerator

Speaking to an audience in Glasgow during a Red Bull Music Academy lecture in 2015, Danny Brown attempted to describe Atrocity Exhibition, his then forthcoming album. “I’m just trying to push myself as far and make rap as progressive as possible,” Brown explained. “So maybe like, I’m on some Trent Reznor shit with this one, you know what I’m saying?” Atrocity Exhibition made good on this, employing lumbering post-punk rhythms, industrial textures, and obscure musique concrète samples in service of Brown’s dystopic vision. Of course, Brown didn’t work alone; the English beatmaker Paul White produced the bulk of the album. The pair have a long history of pushing boundaries together. White has contributed to every Brown album since 2011’s XXX, and with Atrocity Exhibition, it felt like they had finally managed to tear down whatever barriers remained between hip-hop and their wide-ranging influences.
A victory lap of sorts, the Accelerator 12'' feels even more uncompromising. Take the title track, wherein White pummels the listener with disorderly polyrhythms and driving intensity. Included here in the barrage of sounds are a tangle of bongos that clop like hooves at a horse track; a buzzing, prog-rock guitar run; a rolling, rubberband bassline; and a psychedelic, reverb-soaked guitar solo. If that sounds like an emcee’s worst nightmare, you wouldn’t know it from Brown’s nimble rapping. He manages to effortlessly surf the track’s competing drum lines. “Rappers rap about it/But never really live it/I never glorify it/I tell it how it is,” he yelps in his signature squeaky register, neatly summing up his documentarian appeal. Of course, Brown can’t help but see the sonic chaos around him as a metaphor for a mind on drugs, half-singing, “Walking light the ground is so shaky/Losing sight, ’cause things is so hazy.” The song’s video features a man chasing his escaped, anthropomorphic brain through the streets of London, which feels about right.
The B-side, “Lion’s Den,” takes a slightly different tack—while it’s plenty unorthodox, it slows things down to an even keel. The song is built around a loop of a yé-yé singer set atop a plaintive pan flute melody; instead of a hi-hat, the steady boom-bap beat lands on a tambourine hit. Brown knows a thing or two about juxtaposition and here he delivers on the promise he makes in “Accelerator,” weaving a tale of street life and addiction that’s anything but glamorous. Brown details days spent hustling “just to get up out the gutter,” admits to “serving out our momma’s house” and finally concedes, “the pain never ends.” Still, the song’s ultimate message is one of defiance in the face of hopelessness: “We gotta break the cycle, a future for our kids/You see it half empty, I see it half full.”
White’s audaciousness on Accelerator is commendable, though the single suffers a bit for its maximalism. As bold as Atrocity Exhibition was, it also felt refined, with the record’s sharpest edges counterbalanced by moments of restraint. Accelerator throws that moderation out the window, resulting in two songs that feel unnecessarily cluttered; in particular, the vocal loop that runs throughout “Lion’s Den” distracts from Brown’s rapping, holding back what’s very nearly a great song. That said, both of these tracks do seem to be abrasive by design—like White is intentionally pitching curveballs at Brown, just to see if he can hit them. To that end, Accelerator also feels like a dare to any other emcees who think they could tackle these beats. It seems unlikely that very many will try.


The Cardamom Times EP sounds like a lush, pristine folk-rock gem rescued from the 1960s. Project leader Natalie Mering sings with a dusky, soulful soprano that draws you into her world as well as into a larger tradition, and her arrangements are at once classic and sneakily innovative.

Cardamom Times EP

Weyes Blood is the project of multi-instrument folk musician Natalie Mering. She recorded the four-song Cardamom Times EP on a reel-to-reel deck in her Rockaway, N.Y., home studio; it sounds like a lush, pristine folk-rock gem rescued from the 1960s. The playing is patient and assured, and you can't say enough about her voice, a dusky, soulful soprano that draws you into her world as well as into a larger tradition. She has the kind of voice that’s both distinctive and familiar, and it fits perfect with her style: the arrangements are at once classic, sneakily innovative, and entirely her own.
Cardamon Times follows Mering's second album, 2014's The Innocents. It's more pure, and the overall sound is less composed. Instead of a complex studio creation, it comes off like an overheard monologue in the woods. The rural, solitary video for the stunning five-and-a-half-minute closer "In the Beginning", which was shot on Super 8 film in Northern Canada and finds Mering wandering the countryside by herself, captures this feel.
Cardamom sounds a bit like an archival folk collection but it's filled with suprising details. The lengthy "Take You There" opens with a minute of melancholic organ drone; for the rest of the track, she sings over the fluctuating keys without any percussion. Opener "Maybe Love" has pretty, Sundays-like guitar strums and eventually, at songs's end, noise is layered beneath ghostly multi-tracked voices. On "Cardamom", her voice is almost distorted beside crystal clear guitar picking and a piping flute. As you listen more closely, subtle touches distance Mering's music from the purely nostalgic.
Her lyrics feel personal. Cardamom Times mostly focuses on love, lost and found and lost again. "Maybe Love" includes the touching, realistic detail: "I like seeing you notice me/ When I’m feeling better about/ You and me." The old-timey sounding "Cardamom" snaps into the present when she sings: "I like your band, can I hold your hand this time?/ Do you find what I do kind of cool?/ Would we last a minute or two?" Nothing seems permanent here, even when the music is timeless.
"In the Beginning", her best song to date, features a melancholic but catchy melody and an arrangement of guitars and organs and her voice. She sings about a field of stars. She sings about suffering and changing, of bittersweet meetings that happen at the wrong time. She asks "Have you ever walked in on a Queen before?" She admits she's not trying to relate at the moment. And she just keeps going, and it's astonishing. Her music seems so simple at first, but it keeps deepening.


Levon Vincent

Levon Vincent's self-titled record, which consists of 11 tracks spread across eight sides of vinyl, is a half-lit maze, an exploration of dance music at its most subterranean. But even as the record reinforces his reputation as one of techno's most determined purists, it also suggests that his talents are more varied than perhaps anyone has given him credit for.
Vincent, a New Yorker now based in Berlin, has been making records since the early 2000s, but only in the past six or seven years has become a key figure in the underground. He's a bit like techno's own Fugazi: He has mentored up-and-coming artists, supporting them out of his own pocket, and he uploads vinyl rips of his own releases to SoulSeek. (In fact, the day before this album was to hit shops, he gave it away via WeTransfer.) His records, mostly self-released on his own Novel Sound label, may sell in modest numbers, perhaps a few thousand copies apiece, but sales are only a small part of the story. On YouTube, some of his tracks and DJ sets have been played hundreds of thousands of times. Those numbers might be surprising, even to his fans, given the monochromatic rigor of his music, its single-mindedness. His productions are radically austere and unusually somber—the color of an overcast sky, or a bruise.
That hasn't changed, exactly. The music on his debut album is moody and, sometimes, a little counterintuitive. It's not necessarily trying to be difficult, but it's intractable out of habit. Drums are scarce, for one thing, at least for a techno record: The four-to-the-floor kick is omnipresent, but for long stretches, the merest hint of washed-out hi-hat is the only percussive element audible. Swathed in murk, these skeletal sounds give the impression of stone rubbings, or a metal frame showing through where paint has been worn away. "Phantom Power" goes even further and does away with the low end entirely; for more than five minutes, it is as though the bass EQ has been turned all the way down, leaving tentative synthesizer figures tumbling weightlessly in midair. Which only accentuates the pile-driving wallops of the following track, "Junkies on Hermann Strasse", a classic Basic Channel-style clanger as physical and pliable as sheet metal. "Junkies" eventually dissolves into a cacophonous delay chain as contorted as Cabaret Voltaire's early tape works, but not everything on the album is so relentless or so ugly. "For Mona, My Beloved Cat, Rest in Peace" is every bit as sentimental as the title promises; this time there is no kick drum, just hi-hats mapping infinity across a glowing swirl of keyboards and mallet instruments, part Philip Glass and part Rainbow Bridge.
There's plenty of "proper" techno to be found here; "Anti-Corporate Music" comes closest to the dubby style of Vincent's singles, with its brushed stainless steel textures and its deeper-than-deep sub-bass. (The title offers a glimpse of the politics implicit in Vincent's DIY project. "This is music for the ugly ducklings of the world," he wrote in a Facebook post announcing the LP. "If you're a member of the rat race…you may of course listen, but know—this is not music for you. This is action against you.") But nothing on Levon Vincent is merely functional, and some of the best cuts jam a crowbar into club-music convention. For its first seven minutes, the side-long "Launch Ramp to tha Sky" unrolls relatively smoothly, just a lively, vibraphone-like lead over swinging cymbals and chilly reverb. Without warning, the beat falls away and is replaced by slack organ riffing, and that, in turn, gives way to a chromatic freakout laced with angel choir. Piling nightly-news themes atop dial-tone fugue, this coda to the coda is as unabashedly prog as a gatefold LP sticky with weed resin; give a medal to the DJ who manages to play the whole side to a dancefloor and get away with it.
Thanks to its pared-down gear list and capricious flow, Levon Vincent feels like the work of someone left alone in the studio, sketching in real time with what's at hand and moving on. And that spontaneity gives it an even greater sense of intimacy. My favorite track, "Black Arm w/ Wolf", is, in many ways, the most melodic, with a stately bassline and contrapuntal melody that could lodge in your head for days. The tune is daubed on in broad strokes, left to drift free of the beat—a sure sign that it was played by hand and not drawn across a grid in the browser window. Throughout it all, Vincent keeps his hand on the knob that controls the cymbals' pitch, and they rise and fall like swallows at dusk. It's freedom rendered four bars at a time—a snapshot of utopia that's made with dancefloors in mind, but not limited to them.


The German experimental musician teams up with a Japanese organist prone to taping down the keys of his instrument; together, they conjure massive, buzzing slabs of drone.

Signals Bulletin

Among the turn-of-the-century click + cuts crew, Berlin’s Jan Jelinek stood out against his low-key contemporaries. Flickering masterpieces like Loop-finding-jazz-records and Textstar—deeply listenable rather than dial-up noisy—outlasted the subgenre. But in the ensuing decades, Jelinek has gravitated towards more destabilizing terrain: glottal sound art, woozy vibraphone, avant-garde radio plays, and collages incorporating the voice of the future President of the United States.
A live performance by Naoyuki Arashi, the Japanese sound artist and organist also known as Asuna, enticed Jelinek with yet another topsy-turvy sound. Asuna’s method involves methodically taping down keys on his organ, generating dense cluster drones with an economy of movement Jelinek compares to “the calm gestures of an office worker.” Jelinek describes Asuna’s static, barely changing sounds as “a music without breaks.” Signals Bulletin captures their subsequent collaborations over the past three years; it is the densest, most opaque of Jelinek’s recent works.
“Relief,” the 13-minute opener, is at a slight remove from the warm, weird terrariums of sound Jelinek makes with vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita. It’s dreamy and incremental, its drones built from hums and the slow swell of Asuna’s taped-down keys. But it’s also uneventful and bulky, tethered in one place rather than properly adrift. Its most visceral moment comes as it approaches the 12-minute mark, turning suddenly spare and dark, wherein unmentionable rustles become menacing. The near-growling noises that draw the piece to a close feel frustratingly incomplete.
Another epic excursion follows, but this one, the 11-minute “Pulsating Primary Structure,” teems with life, suggesting further possibilities the two might achieve in the future. The piece is built from gentle thrums that incrementally increase in pressure until they are relentless in their throb. The way Jelinek and Asuna stack tiny sounds can be deceptive: Tracking their movements is like studying a colony of ants piling up grains of sand and suddenly realizing that the heap is the size of the Taj Mahal.
In comparison, the four-minute “Fountain” feels like a musique-concrète bagatelle. It’s full of whooshes, bloops, R2-D2 whistles, and rubbed-crystal drones, but nothing really sticks together. The slightly longer “How a Spiral Works” features the same slab-like keyboard drones and some oscillations from Jelinek’s setup; the piece in another exercise in increasing the density of sound and then ever so slowly peeling back the layers. As it diminishes, you might catch Terry Riley-like arpeggios, shuffling footsteps, the clicks of a birthday-party noisemaker, and some whistles from the audience as they all shake out of the mix.
Despite the lengthy opening tracks, closer “Blinking of Countless Lines” weighs heaviest, topping 14 minutes. For the first half of it, the metallic drones the two conjure are the album’s most dizzying, about as serene as an alien abduction. By the midway point, Jelinek’s whirlpool loops and oscillations wash over the piece. Although busier on the surface, his contributions match Asuna’s in that their respective elements barely change across the tracks’ durations. But the music feels smothering rather than immersive; relief comes only when the two open up space within the sound. Signals Bulletin, a music without breaks, could use more breathing room.


From knotty wordplay to hip-hop in-jokes only a head would attempt, the North Carolina rapper’s latest mixtape provides much to savor.

Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon : I’ve Really Never Been Better

I’ve Really Never Been Better

Listening to a Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon mixtape has the same episodic feeling as reading the latest issue of your favorite comic book. It’s just nice to hear what nuggets of hip-hop history he mines (“I’ma have to teach these new boys to stay on yo’ feet like the New Boyz”), pop culture references he weaves into his twisty wordplay (“Next year see my bitch on the cover of Time like Naomi Campbell, no more Campbells”), and double-take inducing relationship drama he gets himself into: “Don’t ask about my rising moon ma’, I don’t give a damn.” He reps his birthplace—Akron, Ohio—and the city where he was raised—Charlotte, North Carolina—but brings to mind wordplay virtuosos of ’90s and ‘00s New York, from Ghost to Cam to MF DOOM; in an interview, he geeks out over an Mm..Food? lyric that took him until his “30 or 40th” listen to comprehend.
His latest project, I’ve Really Never Been Better, is another solid entry into his fast-growing catalog. The raps are fly, punchlines sharp even when they occasionally border on nonsense; songs are sprinkled with comical tricks that only a hip-hop head would attempt. For example, it’s a cliché right of passage to pen a rosy ode to your first love, one that comes away with some sort of vague lesson (see: Slick Rick’s “Teenage Love”). But Jah-Monte is aware of how played-out that is, and on “Eight Pregnancy Scares” the skeptical voice of “the one that got away” chimes in repeatedly with fact checks. “You wrote this whole song about me being your truest love, stop lying,” the voice says at the end, an audio hand to the face. He’s basically putting on his rap critic hat.
Jah-Monte won’t bullshit you; he doesn’t shy away from describing his flaws in his affairs and flame outs, though he gets a kick out of acting irrationally. On “Receipts & Screenshots,” a fling is ruined after the items in the song’s title are presented against him; he responds by calling his lover a “cop.” A confrontation on the opener leads him to command “If I’m sittin’ in the judgment seat, at least ho rub my feet.” Most of the time, he’s just having fun getting off flagrant boasts: “Don’t @ me unless you look like Tracee Ellis Ross,” he barks on “Nah She Got Little.” Or cracking jokes about the underground rap grind—from being done with Greyhound bus rides to imagining one day sending Beyoncé and Rihanna an invoice for a feature.
What holds back I’ve Really Never Been Better relative to better projects like 2021’s Too Little, Too Late and 2022’s Here, There & Everywhere, is the beats. They’re fairly warm yet anonymous soul and funk loops that feel like lesser versions of a style you can find everywhere in New York and New Jersey right now. To the credit of Jah-Monte—as well as guests like the sharp-tongued Denzel Davon—he often sounds too cool to suffer, like when he spits “New BBC apparel, cupid missed with his arrow/Was nominated like Will Ferrell, not singing Christmas carols,” which is rapped in such a blur that it took me three or four listens to parse. Savoring his rhymes and going back to find the wisecracks that previously went over your head is the point; his mixtapes are a world you want to spend time in.


It was the worst day of my life. I get home from the plant and there's my woman: rolling ...

Okkervil River: Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See

It was the worst day of my life. I get home from the plant and there's my woman: rolling around in my bed with my best pal, Big Whitey. And there's my mutt sitting on the floor, watching them go at it with his stupid dog-grin. I just can't get that image out of my mind. Man, I flew into a crazy rage, stormed out to my 81 Buick and tore dirt right out of that greazy hellhole.
The only thing that helps this pain in my gut is the new album by Okkervil River. I don't know what you'd call their music-- alt-country or indie rock or avant-folk or some such crossbred super-genre. Calms the nerves, though. Sure, it's kind of a downer, but without hitting the gutbucket misery of real country. And Okkervil can also let fly, too: the best song on the album, "Lady Liberty," smokes like a raccoon in a chimney, with horns blasting behind singer Will Sheff as he moans about loving the wrong woman. "I can picture you inside some stranger's house/ Inside some stranger's bed/ You're trying to seem mysterious/ The covers pulled over your head." Ain't nothin' stings like the truth.
Okkervil River sounds like a loose outfit; their self-released 1999 debut, Stars Too Small to Use was raw, shambling stuff, but with this new record they're starting to pull it together. The songwriting is impressively poignant, and the music is as tight and comforting as any old noose: under producer and engineer Brian Beattie's wing, the band has filled out and arranged these songs beautifully with every southern-flavored instrument you could dream up-- mandolin, pedal steel, fiddle, organ, and strings and horns. The record maintains a nice, lush air, but manages to stay somehow raucous simultaneously-- it's ponderous indie rock and country charm frequenting each other's local haunts.
But while these guys may be rising stars, they're still looking for comfort and a little love, if the lyrics are any indication. Damned if "My Bad Days," for one, isn't as stark as they come: Sheff can sound like a man who's been beaten back to a lost little boy. "Dead Dog Song" is a mandolin-propelled tune with great, hokey lyrics ("He'd never been to church, so he doesn't have a soul"). And the guys even bring in Daniel Johnston to duet on "Happy Hearts," just coming straight out and pleading for what we're all after: "Unconditional love, why did you leave me?" Come on, guys, you're killing me.
But one song in particular got my attention: "Westfall," the account of a murderer coming to trial. As alt-country serial killer ballads go, this one has nothing on Jim White's "The Wound That Never Heals"-- but it's a good song about evil and murder, and it almost sounds convincing when these nice boys sing: "They're looking for evil/ Thinking they can trace it/ But evil don't look like anything."
So it's past two in the morning and I'm still driving, when suddenly I see someone by the side of the road-- a woman, hitch-hiking-- and damned if she doesn't look like, well... just like my wife on her best day (twenty years ago). I know it can't be her, but I'm transfixed. She's got her thumb out and though I know it's wrong, I decide to pull over. I swerve to the side of the road and let her walk up to my car. Satan was arm-wrestling for my soul, but this time the Lord won: I hit the gas and skidded away before she got to my door. She didn't look too happy, but hell, she doesn't know how close she came to having something awful happen to her, 'cause I know I'm still in a funny mood. Anyway, there isn't room enough in the trunk for a third body.