The music is a highlight of Quentin Tarantino’s new film, an undeniable, oft-disquieting mixtape of golden-age rock’n’roll, radio DJ patter, and period-specific commercials.

Various Artists: Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

In the 1960s, Paul Revere & the Raiders were a goofy garage-rock band popular with well-behaved tweens. Calling the band square doesn’t go far enough; they were altogether edgeless. Among the Raiders’ many sins was a habit of dressing in full Revolutionary War regalia, tri-corner hats and all. In Quentin Tarantino’s ninth movie, the actress Sharon Tate (played by Margot Robbie) teases an ex about enjoying the Raiders and, moments later, there’s a shot of Charles Manson leaving the area. The music grows ominous. The message is loud and clear: The Raiders may have been cheesy, but when compared with a countercultural menace, those tri-corner hats start to look pretty good.
Since K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the ’70s closed out the opening scene of 1992’s Reservoir Dogs, music has played an outsized role in Tarantino’s films. Some songs take star turns, as with Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” at Jack Rabbit Slim’s in Pulp Fiction or the Coasters’ lapdance scene in Death Proof. But given Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood’s Los Angeles setting and the density of its references, and given that it’s the first of Tarantino’s “history” pictures to be set in the pop music era, this soundtrack has more resonance than any before it.
Essentially a buddy comedy featuring Leonard DiCaprio as an aging actor and Brad Pitt as his stunt double who pal around on the periphery of the Manson murders of 1969, the movie is pretty, pretty, pretty (especially when cars and Brad Pitt are involved); its politics, however, are ugly, ugly, ugly: violently reactionary in their treatment of the late ’60s counterculture and its concomitant burnout. The music that connects the fictional and non-fictional worlds of the movie is a soft-serve swirl, pretty even when it’s ugly, an undeniable, oft-disquieting mixtape of golden-age rock’n’roll, radio DJ patter, and period-specific commercials.
Like the Raiders, the groups here evoke the mythic surf-rock ’60s, good timin’ before the vibes went bad. Deep Purple, the prog and metal pioneers, offer two songs from 1968, the year in which the movie begins, the year before the band went feral. One of those songs is a cover of Neil Diamond’s “Kentucky Woman,” and Diamond’s oddball “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show” is on the soundtrack, too. It’s either a celebration or a parody of gospel music; evangelicals didn’t know in early 1969, and it may be that Diamond didn’t either.
The rest of the offerings are from minor groups of the mid- and late-’60s, like the Buchanan Brothers, Roy Head and the Traits, the Box Tops, and (the better-known) Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. These songs bleed tension from the film; it’s hard not to smile at the ringing harmonies on Los Bravos’ “Bring a Little Lovin’” or Dee Clark’s syrupy croon on “Hey Little Girl.” Frequently, they accompany shots of Pitt’s character, Cliff Booth, cruising around town. But it’s all unimpeachable car music, propulsive and melodic, a playlist assembled by a know-it-all who’d be unbearable were it not for the fact that he knows a lot.
When less obscure, the music is flagrant in its allusions. Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” shows up briefly (The Graduate was released in December ’67) to whisper of transgression. “Paxton Quigley’s Had the Course,” by the British duo Chad and Jeremy, is a song with a rock’n’roll introduction that, two minutes in, shifts to a gorgeous keyboard interlude. It’s a formal playfulness worthy of the Beatles and it’s exciting to hear minor moptops playing similar games.
There are other familiar songs here, handholds to guide the listener through the obscurities. A cover of Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game” by Buffy Sainte-Marie accompanies a scene of Sharon Tate driving through Hollywood. Mitchell’s original is nostalgic, but Sainte-Marie trills of daffy innocence, forever-youth unmarred by darkness. The carousel imagery is particularly poignant given that so much of Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood deals with westerns and painted ponies; with color, motion, and distraction. Sainte-Marie speeds up when she sings, “We can’t return/We can only look,” as if to race right by it.
Other, less cheerful lyrics are lent emphasis by their presence in the film. “Treat Her Right” stresses chivalry only as a means to an end, while the chorus of “Son of a Lovin’ Man” makes a singalong of a genetic predisposition for lechery: “I’m the son of a lovin’ man/My daddy told me get you all the lovin’ you can.” Phrases like these are vestiges of the period, but given the way the movie valorizes old-fashioned men—drinking, watching television, hitting others in the face—they stand out all the same.
The DJ patter we hear coming out of the movie’s radios, introducing songs and leading out of commercials, seems more intentional. The ads hawk perfume and cologne and cars and tanning butter, an explosion of superficiality that, Tarantino indicates, was overripe and turning rotten. But they were so funny. So weird. So beautiful. Those are the qualities the director’s fantastical, ultra-nostalgic film means to celebrate. The dream of the ’60s is alive, eternal. We’re urged to ignore the lame cultural context of Paul Revere & the Raiders because you can have fun dancing to their song “Good Thing.” This kind of fun is what makes the movie provocative. It’s a dare: Come on, those hippies are murderers, you have to admit you’re enjoying this. And maybe you’re not. But that’s less of a risk with this soundtrack, which, despite its countless references, doesn’t want you to think too hard. It wants you to push down the pedal and drive.


Senegal’s Arouna Kane and Sweden’s Karl Jonas Winqvist, plus a host of musicians on two continents, spin improv sessions and long-distance overdubs into airy, dreamlike music as generous as it is joyous.

Yaral Sa Doom

It takes less than a minute for Yaral Sa Doom to begin levitating. Multi-instrumentalist Arouna Kane and producer Karl Jonas Winqvist ground their collaborative effort in the playing of Kane’s Senegalese countrymen and contributions from Winqvist’s fellow Swedes, but in their production, the duo massage guitar, hand drums, sax, and flute until each is pliable, soft, and almost putty-like, molding the instrumentation to tissue-thin synths and richly reverbed vocals. Everything is so light, so wispy, it sometimes seems like a decent wind—or just a little mild cynicism—might blow the whole thing away. Instead, Yaral Sa Doom holds its ground, its extreme sweetness balanced by Winqvist and Kane’s exploratory ethos.
The project came together when Winqvist made a trip to Toubab Dialaw, a former fishing village an hour down the coast from Dakar that’s now home to a thriving arts community. Over the course of several weeks, he befriended local musicians, including Kane, and recorded a few improv sessions. Back home in Sweden, Winqvist enlisted friends to augment the tapes with sax, keys, and more, then passed the files back and forth over WhatsApp with Kane, and the two men refashioned the pieces into a fluid fugue of a set. Their dub-like edits—sliding a track’s levels around the bass, winding up a spoken vocal with reverb and delay—unify two very different styles of music; neither the Senegalese nor the Swedes ever seem to be in total control of the record, but instead their contributions work off of one another. This sense of cooperation elicits what is at times an almost childlike joy in these songs, and ensures that, for all its starry-eyed wonder, Yaral Sa Doom stays on the right side of naivete.
Of course, if the notion of a white European parachuting into Africa and emerging with a sample pack to manipulate and peddle gives you pause—well, it should. The history of the Western music industry’s engagement with African musicians is littered with appropriation, extreme economic exploitation, and general confusion, even among well-meaning artists. Sahel Sounds, which in addition to Yaral Sa Doom is responsible for bringing Mdou Moctar and Les Filles de Illighadad to North American and European audiences, has distinguished itself by forfeiting exclusive rights to the music it releases and splitting the take 50/50 with artists. Wau Wau Collectif seem to slice up the aesthetic pie in a similar way: All of the artists who appear on this album are credited by name, as are the songwriters, while Winqvist and Kane’s exchanges ensured that Senegalese hands helped to form the album’s overall shape. These are crucial details to consider any time a European or North American artist brings a microphone to Africa, but they feel especially pertinent in Yaral Sa Doom’s case, where inequity could easily be masked by the overwhelming kindness that characterizes the album.
Indeed, generosity is Yaral Sa Doom’s guiding virtue, even as its singers address Senegal’s social ills (the album’s title is a Wolof phrase that means “educate the young”). The songs here seem to drift into existence, emerging from mists of synth and stepping into a rosy sunrise hush. Album standout “Thiante” foregrounds Jango Diabaté’s bejeweled xalam, surrounding it with sympathetic puffs of flute as it nestles into a Naugahyde keyboard line that echoes the Cure’s “Close to Me.” Winqvist divebombs the beach jazz of “Si Tu Savais Juste” with a toy synth while Ndongo Faye’s steady drumming chops Henry Moore Selder’s organ line into Bitches Brew hash. Elsewhere, when Winqvist’s Omnichord gasps with delight at Kane’s gentle vocals, you don’t need to know the song is called “Salamaleikoum” to feel welcomed by it.
That hospitality is also evident in Kane and Winqvist’s attention to texture. The Swede chants us into the album, whispering chk-chk percussion like he’s singing a ska lullaby, and Andreas Söderström’s ukulele is mic’d so close, the sound of the pick hitting the strings is louder than the strings themselves. These little sounds draw you in, so when the song breaks into a wider vista, you can’t help but be awestruck by the view. Winqvist and Kane drown what sounds like a guitar in hiss in “Mouhamodou Lo and His Children,” making the song feel like it’s set in a sunken Polynesia. Even the way the rippling tone of Kane’s voice is treated with delay in the opening moments of “Riddim Rek Ya Niouy Mom” puts the focus on its grain as much as the words he’s saying.
The album’s inverted priorities—mood over structure, micro over macro—make it feel more like a collection of contemplations than proper songs, which is to its abundant credit. At times the construction of Yaral Sa Doom resembles that of Theseus’ ship, with new elements replacing what’s already been established as we coast through time. It’s a trick whose effects are often genuinely moving, as when Ousmane Ba’s flute and Kane’s bass fall into sync on closer “Legui Legui,” only to be sent away while Annarella Sörlin’s own flute and Lars Fredrik Swahn’s piano trace one another’s lines from across the stage. When Ba leads the ensemble back into the center of the circle, they emerge with the grace of an aging star being ushered out for one last curtain call.
The music that Winqvist, Kane, Ba, Diabaté, and the others made in their Toubab Dialaw improvisations is uniformly gorgeous and brimming with mutual pleasure, and Yaral Sa Doom’s production frames those sessions as a beautiful dream. The gleeful disbelief, the happy hunch that things are not as they usually are, dizzies up the record just a bit, pulling it slightly out of time and space—all while staying close enough to terra firma to not lose sight of where it came from.

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The Japanese footwork producer largely steps away from the genre on this five-track EP, exploring an illusion of motion through a woozy sense of space and stillness.

Moriyama EP

In the most frenetic footwork tracks, a curious thing happens: Despite the breakneck tempo, the music seems to slow down, even freezing in midair. It’s a disorienting version of motion, like catching a glimpse of spinning chrome hubcaps from a moving car. For a long time, the Japanese producer Foodman strove for that illusion by stripping away most of the genre’s percussive hallmarks. You could hear the effect in “Oyaji Voice,” where all the elements seemed to bob in space, nearly untethered from the downbeat. Of late, though, he has been intentionally slowing his music; on the five-track EP, Moriyama, Foodman largely leaves footwork and its tempos behind, using a broader range to explore an even woozier sense of space and stillness.
The opening “Mizuboro” shows how he’s honed his hyperkinetic style. His technique remains as pointillistic as ever, daubing on tiny blots of tone that are more fanciful than functional: canned congas, horn blats, laser bursts, water splashes. But where his drip-drop assemblages once verged upon chaos, now the steady pulse—a three-against-four cadence folded into a polyrhythmic pretzel—shapes a multi-dimensional matrix reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, with brilliant points of light fanning out in all directions. While he used to work in miniature, dipping in and out of his jittery compositions in a minute or two, “Mizuboro” unspools across six minutes, strengthening its hypnotic pull as it goes.
“Kishimen” has more in common with the herky-jerky antics of his previous records, though this time the playful palette splays out over a four-to-the-floor kick drum. It’s what house music would sound like in the hands of someone who grew up in the back room of a novelty store full of noise-making gewgaws. If you’ve ever sat at a cheap Casio keyboard with a young child, you’ll recognize that the fundamental impulse at work within this parade of ridiculous sounds is its very incongruity. “Soudesu” employs similar inspirations for more atmospheric ends; between its dog barks, Woody Woodpecker woodblocks, and laugh-like loops, it feels like an ambient remix of Saturday cartoons.
But two tracks suggest more radical departures, as well as avenues for further exploration. “Nanika” is as provocative a collage as he’s ever fashioned, roping together Detroit-techno chords, cut-up sax bleats, free-jazz flute, and other sampled textures reminiscent of Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica. Despite the way snapped guitar strings and rolling percussion jostle the track, the energy remains meditative. “Tokai Desu” is even dreamier. It saunters along leisurely, an absent-minded melody floating above calming synth chords. Flutes pipe up like the sparkling eyes of forest creatures; woodblocks, chimes, and cowbell carve out crisp, high-definition shapes against the misty backdrop. It’s the most tranquil thing in Foodman’s catalog, but it doesn’t sacrifice any of the inventiveness of his earlier music. It simply makes the dream of floating on air seem closer than ever.


This 4xCD/1xDVD set comes packaged in a wooden container with popcorn-bag-style sleeves, postcard tracklists, and even a pewter medallion. Oh, the music: It culls tracks from the four recording sessions that fed Jason Molina's 2006 album, Fading Trails, and yet, these generous odds and ends make for a better listening experience than the release for which they were intended.

Sojourner

Names don't seem to be terribly important to Jason Molina. He began recording under various guises during the mid-1990s and released his first album as Songs: Ohia in 1997. Earlier this decade, he unceremoniously changed the band's name to the Magnolia Electric Company (such that Songs: Ohia's final album, called The Magnolia Electric Company, is often filed under both S and M). Recently, whether by choice or by common usage, both the The and the mpany have been dropped, leaving only Magnolia Electric Co. It's not as drastic as the moniker-shifting of Will Oldham, but it is interesting considering that Molina (who also releases under his own name) is the sole long-term member of Magnolia Electric Co.
That most recent incarnation of the name appears on every piece of the Sojourner box set-- the wooden container, the five discs, their popcorn-bag-style sleeves, the postcard tracklists, even the pewter medallion. Only the fold-out map of the stars carries no insignia, which seems vaguely appropriate. This branding implies a more rooted identity, but Molina apparently knows that names changes as easily and as quickly as the scenery, and one assumes that for him it's never the same from one day to the next. It's difficult to tell whether his nomadic lifestyle (he tours nearly constantly) is the impetus behind his music, which obsesses over displacement through lunar and celestial imagery, as if he's constantly navigating by the stars. Or perhaps it's the other way around: Maybe his musical fascinations demand displacement and rootlessness. Like Isaac Brock in the 1990s, Molina is concerned with constant motion through an American landscape. His albums, and especially Sojourner, are postmillennial road-trip art-rock, albeit in a very traditionalist, rather than an existential, vein.
Molina's view of the country has more in common with Dust Bowl itinerants or even nineteenth-century landscape painters than with most current touring acts. Sojourner is his largest canvas yet, and perhaps his most detailed and deliberate. The 4xCD/1xDVD set culls tracks from the four recording sessions that fed his 2006 album, Fading Trails, and yet, these generous odds and ends make for a better listening experience than the release for which they were intended. Perhaps it's the length: Molina's musings sound like products of long drives spent looking at barren scenery, and it often seems like that's how they're best consumed and considered. Sojourner will get you pretty far.
So let's start in Memphis: Sun Sessions is the shortest disc in the set, with only four patiently paced songs forming a solid EP. With its full sound that plays into the local mood without trying to re-create Bluff City sounds, "Talk to Me Devil, Again" goes down to the crossroads, but "Hold on Magnolia" and the traditional "Trouble in Mind" extol the virtues of strength, perseverance, and hard-won hope-- the last a rarity for Molina. "I won't be blue always," he sings on "Trouble in Mind", finding solace in the century-old words. "You know the sun is going to shine in my backdoor someday."
Not everything is so rosy: "Everything in its place," Molina sings on "Steady Now", the opening track on Shohola. "The world does have to end in pain." Featuring Molina accompanied only by his guitar and the roomy hiss of the recorder, Shohola is lonely and quiet like his 2006 vinyl-only album Let Me Go Let Me Go Let Me Go, although never quite as intense. It's a perfect setting for his off-kilter vocals, which are often compared to Neil Young despite not sounding very much like that grizzled Canadian. On "Spanish Moon Fall and Rise" and "The Lamb's Song" he sounds just barely on key, with a steeliness in his voice that is often mistaken for detachment. But here even his breaths are audible as he tentatively picks his way through "Night Country" and "Shiloh Temple Bell", as if driving down some dark road.
Nashville Moon and The Black Ram both return Molina to a full-band setting. The former, produced by Steve Albini, emphasizes his classic-rock chops on "Lonesome Valley" and "Texas 71", allowing for jammy passages, short guitar solos, and underlinable declarations like "I make my mistakes on my own time." The band is especially solid, most notably Mark Rice's drums and Mike "Slo-Mo" Brenner's stately pedal and lap steel, but there's an almost self-consciously workmanlike spirit to these dozen road hymns, as if Albini is highlighting a blue-collar ethos in Molina's words. The straightforward arrangements on "Hammer Down" and "Don't Fade on Me" strengthen their impact, however, and the clear, clean melodic lines tie all the songs together, almost too neatly.
Black Ram is something weirder altogether, and the most satisfying disc in the set. David Lowery's production highlights the odd and the atmospheric in Molina's music, creating a weary travelogue that strives to pinpoint the epic in the everyday. The title track clamors dramatically, the guitars on "What's Broken Becomes Better" churn tensely, and "Will-O-the-Wisp" sounds like a Morricone soundtrack for some unfilmed Western. It's a long drive for someone with too much to think about.
The DVD, titled The Road Becomes What You Leave, wraps all these disparate approaches together as Molina and his road band travel through cold, rural Canada and play a few of these compositions. But it only points out how different these four discs are and how multifaceted and expandable Molina's seemingly limited artistry can be. Spanning multiple styles and states as it maps out both a personal and a national landscape, the set is perhaps accidentally one of the strongest releases of his career, despite its catch-all organization. Molina still sounds rootless and displaced, but Sojourner triangulates a place that's as close to home as he ever seems to get.


The pop star’s first live album is a collage of Miley’s various eras and personas, not all of which have aged well or translate coherently to a live setting.

Attention: Miley Live

Miley Cyrus built a brand as a Disney Channel pop star and then spent the rest of her career setting fire to it, contorting through one highly-stylized phase after another in order to announce herself as anyone other than Hannah Montana. Sometimes, it seemed like she was actively trying to confuse her audience. Every album cycle brought something wholly different: She zigzagged through the foam-fingered, twerk-to-tweet pipeline of 2013’s Bangerz, the Flaming Lips acid trip that churns through 2015’s Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz, the country twang of 2017’s Younger Now, and the leather jackets and platinum mullet that ushered in her most recent studio album, 2020’s Plastic Hearts.
The longer this has gone on, the more she’s defined herself by her ability to transform. Like Taylor Swift perching on a pile of her past selves, Miley likes to wink at the caricatures she’s created over the years. She commemorated the tenth anniversary of the leaked TMZ video that lost her a Walmart deal by posting, “Happy 10-year anniversary to the groundbreaking video of a teenager smoking a bong & saying dumb shit to their friends,” on her Instagram. A decade after she had to issue an “apology” for posing for a Vanity Fair cover that showed her bare back, she tweeted a New York Post headline from the time that read MILEY’S SHAME. “IM NOT SORRY,” she wrote in all caps. “Fuck YOU.” These slot easily into the wave of maligned female artists reclaiming their media narrative, and with every new declaration, she seems intent on articulating her legacy.
Midway through Attention, her first live album outside of the Hannah Montana concert recordings, Cyrus bellows to the crowd, “People, when they think about me, they think of someone…that’s been a million different things… A lot of different identities.” Over the 80-minute set, she toggles between poses, seemingly arguing that all these shards of Cyrus can coalesce into a cohesive musical identity—that she can compel a crowd not in spite of, but because, this disjointedness.
Attention captures parts of Cyrus’ November 2021 set from the Super Bowl Music Fest, where she opened for Green Day at what is now called the Crypto.com arena. Fans allegedly curated the live album setlist, and only two of the 20 tracks here are new, including the abrasive title track where she repeats the word “attention” over blares of faux-metal guitar before the layers of distorted shouting—“You’ve got questions? I NEED ANSWERS!”—kick in. It’s play-acted performance art, confused and unironic—and by the fourth time you’ve heard Cyrus screech “WRONG ANSWERS ONLY!” you wonder who this is for, or what it’s supposed to signify.
“You,” the other new offering here, fares better. It’s a throaty ballad, as Cyrus pleads for a specific vision of love: someone to get thrown out of bars with, someone to flip off her exes with. She interrupts the song’s charm when she chirps about a “horsey and carriage” in the chorus, but the baby voice becomes more tolerable when she soars out of it and starts to belt. That’s the allure of a Miley Cyrus live album: stripped from all the spectacle and scandal, the butter costumes and the prosthetic penises, you just get to hear her sing.
The strength of that voice—a guttural alto that’s raw and robust and gleaming—has made Cyrus uniquely gifted as a cover artist, imbuing motion and meaning into any track she touches. It’s telling that, on this album of fan favorites, seven songs are either entirely or partially covers. On some, Cyrus mashes her tracks into classic staples. She slips “Nothing Compares to You” into the middle of a slower, more ragged “Wrecking Ball.” Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang” fades right into the thump and throb of “See You Again,” a jarring pairing that works because Cyrus’s voice can make a song she sang on the Disney Channel sound menacing. She shines on a ragged, stomping cover of her godmother Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”—“I cannot compete with you,” she spits, the hurt clear in her voice. “Jolene” bleeds right into “High,” a stunning one-two punch that highlights one of the best tracks Cyrus has ever written. The lyrics are sparse and shameless and acute—“In my head, I did my very best saying bye/And I don’t miss you, but I think of you and don’t know why I still feel high.”
It’s not just disconcerting, then, but disappointing to flashback to the more grating songs in her catalog. On the live album, it’s clear just how little irony there is in some of her notoriously nonsensical lyrics. “We run things/Things don’t run we,” she trills on “We Can’t Stop,” in the same tone she uses to belt the motivational speaker fodder, “The Climb.” “Driving so fast ‘bout to piss on myself,” she coos on “4x4,” nonchalant and unfussed. It would be unfair to expect Cyrus to edit her set down to only her strongest songs, but she seems hesitant to acknowledge the absurdity in her past music. Cyrus’ speech about her disparate identities comes at the end of the nearly nine-minute long version of “23,” one of a slew of Mike WILL-Made It collaborations that anchored her through the Bangerz era. “I’m in the club/High on perc/With my shades on,” she bleats in the chorus, her vowels clipped and staccato. Cyrus sounds limp, drowned out by the constantly swirling siren that underpins the song. It’s jarring to hear these songs now, and the appropriation baked into their legacy. For years, Cyrus clung to hip hop stylings and aesthetics, creating controversy after controversy, but here, she sounds barely committed to the Bangerz stretch of songs.
“When people hear my music, they hear a fragment of a time,” she told Vanity Fair in 2019. Attention gives a lot of fragments, but Cyrus can’t pull them together convincingly. All we have are snapshots of an artist who still can’t tell us what any of them mean.


The Los Angeles-based producer and composer adds singing to his repertoire, setting snapshots of past romances against warm, nostalgic production.

Love’s Last Chance

Taylor McFerrin released his 2014 debut, Early Riser, on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label. Channeling McFerrin’s jazz chops through a spacey, synth-heavy lens, Early Riser fit snugly into the forward-thinking Brainfeeder vault. But its reliance on guest singers—including McFerrin’s father, the gifted improv vocalist Bobby McFerrin—made the album feel more like a collage of influences than the arrival of a sharply defined new voice. Five years on, McFerrin’s second album redresses that issue: The Los Angeles-based producer and composer adds singing to his repertoire, and emotes nostalgic feelings over self-produced backdrops with the detectable  influence of late-’80s UK soul. Love’s Last Chance intends to establish McFerrin’s talents as a lyricist, rather than simply a production foil for other vocalists.
The album’s vintage synthesizers bring a warm quality to the songs, complimenting McFerrin’s romantic lyrics. Lush string samples on instrumental opener “Her Entrance,” played by composer Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, roll into the wistful “All I See Is You,” where McFerrin’s steady but funky drum programming brings to mind the sultry snap of ’80s British R&B troupe Loose Ends. The song retells a familiar scene: Two people in separate relationships catch one another’s desirous eye. The glance prompts McFerrin to muse, “Either you’ll be love or trouble.”
McFerrin frames songs around such tiny moments, restraining his language to avoid overcomplicating his sentiments. Like a dusty box of photos or an abandoned social media account, Love’s Last Chance collects snapshots of past romances. On “Memory Digital,” a stuttering bass-powered track shot through with slivers of Fender Rhodes, McFerrin marks the end of a tryst in thoroughly modern fashion: “All that I have left of you are pictures on my phone.” The vintage sound of the production beds his words in fuzzy texture, at times conveying the same moodiness as Dev Hynes’ Blood Orange.
The sumptuous production peaks in the album’s first half, where gently pulsing bass lines and mid-tempo drum patterns create a seamless groove. But the sepia tint begins to fade in the home stretch. With flute by Elena Pinderhughes and a samba-inspired rhythm, the perky instrumental “As You Are” abruptly breaks the seductive atmosphere. It’s followed by “I Can’t Give Your Time Back,” a melodramatic ballad infused with sullen electric bass and guitar. But when McFerrin trills, “You should leave me, baby, before I leave you,” the threat sounds toothless and whiny. After that, the would-be redemption of closer “So Cold in the Summer” feels hard to believe.
The uneven second half of Love’s Last Chance fails to match the charms of the first. But by trimming the guest list and writing lyrics inspired by personal experience, McFerrin has found a clearer sense of purpose. Having the confidence to vocalize his own feelings suits him well. It isn’t quite a complete realization of his songwriting voice—McFerrin is more convincing when he’s introducing standalone scenarios than attempting to draw fulfilling conclusions—but on Love’s Last Chance, he sounds comfortable as the main attraction.


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 a career-defining jazz masterpiece, collecting two hours of improvised solo performances from the piano virtuoso.

Keith Jarrett: Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne

Solo Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne

“My first experience composing was adding a note to the last chord of a Mozart concerto,” Keith Jarrett told Down Beat Magazine. “I’d play it right at the teacher’s house and the other way at home.” It’s a quintessential anecdote from the pianist, confirming his early years as a prodigy and an innate belief that he might improve upon the work of the composer that many consider the greatest who ever lived. For Jarrett, a boy growing up in Allentown, Pennsylvania in the 1950s, who so loved his piano he wished to sleep underneath it at night, a single note, placed perfectly, could make all the difference. And he never underestimated his own talent. One imagines that in his mind, he was maybe the only person who could find that note and place it precisely where it belonged.
In 1973, a couple of decades after that youthful foray into composition, Jarrett was touring Europe, playing solo piano concerts, and traveling with his friend, the producer and founder of the ECM label, Manfred Eicher. Together they were embarking on and recording a new idea for a live album—evening-length shows in concert halls where classical pieces are typically presented, in which a pianist plays no predetermined material, but rather improvises for 60 to 80 minutes. Two of those gigs—Lausanne, Switzerland on March 20, and Bremen, Germany, on July 12—would be gathered in a 3xLP box set called Solo-Concerts on ECM in November. This release, which Down Beat named Jazz Album of the Year in 1974, fully established Jarrett as the kind of musician who is both admired by his peers and also has great appeal to the general public, many of whom were not especially familiar with jazz.
Jarrett was already 10 years into his classical studies by the time he discovered jazz around age 14. He graduated high school early and was accepted at Berklee College of Music in Boston, though he didn’t finish his degree. After moving to New York, he sat in briefly at the Village Vanguard one night, and drummer Art Blakey was in the audience. He joined the Jazz Messengers shortly after and eventually connected with saxophonist Charles Lloyd, who invited him to play with his group in 1966.
The pianist’s three years with Lloyd, in a quartet that also included young drummer Jack DeJohnette, put him on the jazz world’s map. The group was a major live draw, one that won over enthusiastic crowds in rock venues such as the Fillmore in San Francisco. Lloyd was a charismatic figure who firmly embraced the budding new age spiritualism of the hippie movement. In a time when many jazz artists would still show up on stage in a coat and tie, Lloyd’s quartet wore colorful shorts and beaded necklaces, and their albums had names like The Flowering (1971) and Love-In (1967). They also threw the occasional Beatles cover into their live sets.
Lloyd recognized Jarrett’s talent and was shrewd enough to know he needed to indulge the young pianist’s creative whims to keep him in the group. He gave Jarrett ample space to build solos live, and the band played a handful of his compositions alongside Lloyd’s. On Jarrett pieces like the buoyant gospel jam “Sunday Morning” from Love-In, distinctive elements that would crop up regularly in his solo work in the decade after—funky left-hand grooves paired with ringing, melodic, and instantly memorable right-hand leads—are easily identifiable.
Lloyd, who would later become a devotee of transcendental meditation, also made an impression on Jarrett’s spirituality, turning him on to the work of early 20th-century mystic George Gurdjieff. Besides his writing, Gurdjieff composed hymns for piano, and Jarrett would eventually cut an album’s worth of them for release by ECM in 1980. By that time, recordings of his solo concerts, especially 1975’s The Köln Concert, which went gold, had been so wildly successful he could record whatever he wanted.
But that was later. While Jarrett was still working with Lloyd, both he and DeJohnette caught the ear of Miles Davis, who was riding a wave of adulation and controversy following Bitches Brew and was putting together a band to take his new vision of jazz on the road. Jarrett was resistant to the idea of electric instruments, but after playing with the band in 1969, he quickly changed his tune, and he and DeJohnette were in the group and on record by the time of October 1970’s Miles Davis at Fillmore. While Jarrett was in Davis’ group, Eicher wrote asking if he would record for his new label, ECM. Where Miles was experimenting with density—more keyboards, more percussion, more electrification—Eichner’s label, as embodied by its famous motto, had a different ethos: “the most beautiful sound next to silence.”
Jazz was changing rapidly in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and by some measures it was in trouble. Rock and soul were ascendant in youth culture, jazz labels were struggling, and clubs were closing down. To adapt, many artists, following Davis’ lead, were incorporating rock rhythms and instrumentation into their music, and fusion would develop a healthy audience in the first half of the ’70s.
But labels also adapted to market pressures by issuing records that only made sense in a jazz context. The post-free-jazz avant-garde was well-established and flourished on smaller imprints and in communities like the loft scene in New York. It even made inroads with the majors, as with releases by the likes of Anthony Braxton, the Revolutionary Ensemble, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago on Arista, the A&M offshoot Horizon, and Atlantic.
Jazz as “art music” was a point of differentiation, and solo albums were on the rise. Braxton’s For Alto (1971) and Lee Konitz’s Lone-Lee (1975) were two of many records, featuring a single horn that required a very particular kind of listening to resonate. Along with Facing You, other highly regarded solo piano ECM releases were Chick Corea’s Piano Improvisations Vol. 1 (1971) and Paul Bley’s Open, to Love (1972). In 1973 and ’74, the Newport Jazz Festival hosted for the first time concert showcases for solo pianists specifically, including performances by Jarrett and McCoy Tyner.
In this milieu, with the audience changing and the market scrambled between jazz as a “serious” art form and jazz that returns to its populist roots, Jarrett was positioned to make an impact. His musical interests ranged widely between folk tunes you could hum, Western classical forms, the mystical end of spiritual jazz informed by non-Western music, and jazz proper of every kind. In the coming years, he’d write pieces that could be seamlessly incorporated into pop (see “Long as I Know You’re Living Yours,” which Steely Dan lifted wholesale for “Gaucho”) and music that captured a soothing mood so well it was absorbed into new age (“pipe in a little Keith Jarrett” was an important component of Tony Blundetto’s plan to open a massage studio in season 5 of The Sopranos). And with his solo piano concerts, these developments were brought to bear in a spontaneous expression. Each night, as first heard on these European tours, he would sit down with no idea what he would play, and the music would come out of him.
When you first encounter Jarrett’s solo work, it feels a little like a trick. Did he really not know what was going to happen ahead of time? Did it really come to him at the moment? In one sense, what he does could be considered “free improvisation,” because there are no pre-set restrictions on where a piece might lead, no fixed tempo or harmonic structure that determines its shape. But free improvisation is not the same as non-idiomatic improvisation. At the piano, Jarrett is steeped in idiom, and after many years of listening to them you think, “Here’s the funky groove section,” “Here’s the nod to Harlem stride,” “Here’s the atonal passage,” and so on. Rather than tuning into someone inventing something from nothing, we’re hearing a musician who has absorbed a great deal from across genres, who assembles what he’s borrowed into something new and all his own.
In 1970, psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi introduced the concept of the “flow state,” and it easily maps onto our perception of what Jarrett is doing (at least one dissertation connects the psychologist’s ideas to the latter’s playing). Csíkszentmihályi’s 1990 mass-market book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, was popular in part because its central idea seemed so obvious: We all know what it’s like to be so immersed in an activity that we lose track of time, where a certain amount of our conscious awareness falls away and we’re operating from a more instinctive place. And if you’ve known and identified this state, it might inform how you hear an album like Solo-Concerts. At its best, this album is the flow state on wax, an auditory expression of how it feels to be deep in the zone, where one’s relationship to time shifts or dissolves altogether.
Part of the Jarrett legend is that important solo works are created under less-than-ideal conditions. For The Köln Concert, it was lack of sleep from touring paired with a substandard piano. Here, his health was the problem. Though both evenings on Solo-Concerts have extended passages of serenity, during this period, he often found himself in excruciating pain because of a nagging back injury that had never fully healed. At the Bremen show, in particular, he wore a brace and was in such rough shape it was unclear if the show could happen at all. He was on a regimen of painkillers, and at each new stop on the tour, he followed a careful routine of bedrest and minimal exertion until showtime.
Because of his presence on the piano bench and his own constitution, music has always been hard on Jarrett’s body. That would be true of anyone playing an instrument at this level of frequency and intensity, but he had some quirks that exacerbated his problems. The way he sat and his penchant for rising, falling, twisting, and contorting his frame when he plays is part of that. Watch videos of Jarrett performing when he’s feeling the music—he scrunches his face, shakes his head, stands up. He’s dancing, more or less.
The structural coherence of these lengthy improvisations across two one-hour sets is astonishing. Jarrett and the audience agreed to share the space for 64 minutes, and his role, to paraphrase Frank Zappa, was to take this fixed unit of time and decorate it. There are sections that channel the array of genres and idioms mentioned above, but almost everything flows as if it’s been carefully mapped out in advance. A melodic motif that’s hinted at may not fully blossom until 10 or 15 minutes later, and when it finally arrives it feels inevitable, as if this were the only possible outcome of the seed planted earlier.
Where Jarrett’s improvisational skill and talent might suggest music described as “effortless,” some of the beauty of his solo piano work is that you can hear the exertion. It “flows,” yes, but you hear the guiding hand of the maker, and sometimes he has to give the music a push to set it off in a new direction. “Bremen, Pt. 1” opens with a tender ballad section that at first seems like a rendition of some barely remembered standard, and it has a melody clear enough to imagine that it was once sung. It’s so gentle, it’s an invitation to lean in a little, maybe turn the volume up a touch, to better share in this period of time. After about four minutes, Jarrett picks up the pace and dynamics with his left hand and shifts the harmonic structure from something song-like to a repeating cycle, but the rhythmic drive grows and decays, like he’s climbing a hill and pauses periodically to rest.
As “Pt. 1” gains strength, Jarrett throws in some high-speed trills and lets the dissonance build with his left hand. The bass clef of a piano played with the sustain pedal down has always conveyed the feeling of meteorological systems—a crashing chord low on the keyboard thunders, and the harmonics that gather and multiply and dissipate are often described as “clouds.” Such are the weather patterns of “Pt. 1,” where the pianist zigzags between light and darkness.
The early passages of “Pt. 2” are a fascinating exploration of thick, earthy gospel chords, every one of which seems to involve all 10 of Jarrett’s fingers extending the root notes up to heaven. Where he typically uses such material as the basis for a rhythmic vamp, in the first few minutes here he sounds as if he’s trying to wrestle them into shape, discovering their harmonic contours and then figuring out how to craft it into a new song. Eventually, the chords congeal into a syncopated beat, which he wallows in while exploring how he can subvert the bounce with a pretty melodic digression. Here and there, this passage, like many of Jarrett’s blues/gospel vamps, makes me think of Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy,” the primordial banger that so many children internalized before they had ever heard the word “jazz.” And there’s a childlike delight in bopping your head and moving your body, twisting it into the kinds of shapes that we imagine him adopting as well as those colorful two-dimensional figures we absorbed from the television.
About 16 minutes in, Jarrett locks into a drone-heavy pattern that recalls Philip Glass, with a steady-state left-hand pulse whose repetition makes it sound like electronic music in the vein of Tangerine Dream. It’s a heady passage that makes you think of the physical properties of the matter that surrounds us, the mathematics behind shapes and angles and the gravity holding everything together, and then he explodes this digression with a deeply funky boogie-woogie section halfway through. From there, he moves through a neo-classical section redolent of a Chopin nocturne and then another pulsing minimalist piece that feels more orchestral in scale. When that builds and then crashes down, he offers a brief encore built around a folky tune, something you could imagine in a Cat Stevens song, bringing the evening back to the easeful melodicism where it began.
The mix of styles from Bremen—boogie-woogie, gospel, folk, funk, impressionistic classical ranging from the regal prettiness of Chopin to the humid romanticism of Debussy to the quaking rupture of Brahms, tinkly balladry, modal drone—are also present to varying degrees in Lausanne. And there are some additional wrinkles exclusive to this set, including discordant free playing and a passage where Jarrett explores the sound of the piano beyond the keyboard.
The latter begins after a brief pause almost exactly halfway through. Jarrett wrapped up the first half with a twitchy drone passage that ran for several minutes, filled with pockets of melody that seem to explode periodically as if they’re escaping from the stranglehold of the throbbing left-hand chord. After a rest and a few seconds of applause, he picks up by beating out a rhythm on the piano’s body while simultaneously plucking the strings inside the instrument while holding down the sustain pedal. He’d been using variations of this technique since the Charles Lloyd days, and his fiddling around with the guts of the thing produces a feeling of delight and a sense of possibility. From there, Jarrett might be showing off as he jumps between a catchy gospel/R&B motif and then back to the atonal strumming and banging, as if to demonstrate that whatever sound he imagines when he’s in the presence of a suitable Steinway he can bring to life.
To my ear, the concert from Switzerland—perhaps because it was re-edited in the digital era into a single piece—has a stronger thread stitching the various sections together. The breadth of styles on display recalls John Fahey, another solo instrumentalist from the time who was hard to classify and who absorbed music from everywhere and distilled it to a highly personal and expressive style. But Fahey was not primarily an improviser, and the structure of Lausanne, though it has integrity, is also marked by a feeling of uncertainty and unpredictability. Once in a while, you might even find yourself bored, and that’s all right. The album, and each individual concert, are ultimately about the experience of time, of the listener sharing their own perception of how it unfolds with that of the person onstage. And to give yourself over to this temporal experiment is to allow yourself to move through a wide range of feelings, even those that might scan as unpleasant.
As much as I enjoy hearing Lausanne as one uninterrupted hour, the story of Solo-Concerts: Bremen/Lausanne is also a story of consumer formats. Much was made of the album’s success despite it being presented in a package, a 3xLP box, that seemed for an artist relatively early in his career to be slightly indulgent (a release recorded three years later, Sun Bear Concerts, would up the ante considerably with 10 LPs). But Solo-Concerts unexpectedly sold well, eventually moving hundreds of thousands of copies. And the LP format ultimately makes it a little easier to digest, at least initially. The 20-or-so minute LP side is a good way to take in what Jarrett’s doing on the occasions when you don’t have an hour or two of time for focused listening to spare.
I mention the 3xLP version of the set, too, because the finale of Lausanne, comprising the closing 22 minutes and 35 seconds of the concert, is an album-side of sublime beauty that works as a standalone experience, especially once you’ve internalized the concert in its totality. It begins with a simple and lovely folk-like melody, and then it pauses, curls in on itself, and turns into a slightly spooky meditation on a minor chord. Jarrett is in drone mode now, seeing how much he can squeeze from a narrow range of keys played quietly. His notes seem like they are shifting with the wind, and then, so slowly you almost can’t hear the change, he increases the tempo and the density until the piece becomes a kind of march.
His pounding major chord moves up the keyboard, adding a feeling of delicacy and vulnerability with each octave—at points the sheer gorgeousness of it all is almost hard to bear. And then in the last couple of minutes, the piece begins to break apart, as if we’re seeing a time-lapse film of life withering away. As Jarrett plays them, the notes in the piano’s highest register, the ones you bang on as a child when you first encounter the instrument to hear how they ring like tiny bells, seem to tumble upward, as if shedding the unseeable force that binds them together. The tones then get quieter, there’s a pause, and then there’s one final note, the highest C: Jarrett plays it so softly that if his touch were just slightly lighter, it would make no sound at all, the hammer would fail to strike the strings. But we hear the faintest ping, like a final breath. It’s a poignant ending to his hour at the keyboard—one note, almost lost but perfect, that lands exactly where it’s supposed to.


New Brunswick's Long Beard makes romantically restless dream pop with shades of Azure Ray and Galaxie 500. It might be a little unpolished, but Long Beard is good at making music that sounds best played in a lit bedroom, late at night, on a suburban street when everyone else is snoozing in their beds.

Sleepwalker

Sleepwalker, the debut by New Brunswick's Long Beard, is a romantically restless record, but in an inward, idle way. Their reverb-laden dream-pop calls to mind Azure Ray, Yo La Tengo, and Galaxie 500, and it conceals an antsy yearning. "You'd hide out for hours, dreaming of other rooms to lie in," lead singer Leslie Bear sings on "Dream".
When Bear asks questions in her songs, as she often does, her inquiries seem more directed to the silence of her brain than to someone in front of her. "If I ask politely, will you ask me the question of: who do you love?" she sings on "Porch", repeating her question again and again. If there is a drama played out on Sleepwalker, it’s the sort being played out to a mirror, or a diary, or to a love interest’s face imagined in the ceiling above one’s bed.
Sometimes the album meanders, shuffling around noncommittally before finding its footing. "Turkeys", "Dream", and "Morning Ghost" sound nearly made up on the spot, with their minimalist set-up of noodling electric guitars and pitter-patter percussion not quite synchronized. And on "Moths", Bear’s voice is obscured by scratchy, layered guitar and the watery echoes of her own already-breathy vocals.
They sound like a band not trying to find their voice, but to project the one they have with confidence. Bear's voice is a literal manifestation of that hesitance: She’ll draw out words until they’re so high-pitched and thin that they seem to evaporate into the rest of the track mid-song, becoming hard to decipher. "Alone in the dark, is it more alone, than alone in the light," she sings on "Hates the Party", every word spoken firmly as if they exist alone on the page, until "light," heightened in her sing-song and suddenly like another instrument.
Sleepwalker is a very cozy record, full of porch-sitting, moth-watching, sunset-watching. It even ends with a warped rendition of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". Bear said in an interview that she ended up writing most of these songs "very late when everyone else was asleep," which is exactly when you should be listening to this album. Sleepwalker doesn’t quite feel polished, or take many risks, but Long Beard is good at making the music that sounds best played in a lit bedroom, late at night, on a suburban street when everyone else is snoozing in their beds.


Montreal band follows its underrated 2008 Laurel Canyon-like debut Parc Avenue with a more plugged-in, boisterous record.

La La Land

La La Land, the second album from Montreal-based trio Plants and Animals, should be excellent. Their woefully overlooked 2008 debut full-length, Parc Avenue, was ripe to be expanded upon. Full of spacious, mostly acoustic almost-folk sounds, it spackled rich, otherworldly harmonies and honeyed, finger-picked guitar lines over rambling epics. On Parc Avenue, P&A drew a direct line between the bearded Laurel Canyon folk-rockers of the 1970s and the modern psychedelia of bands like Animal Collective. But La La Land, unfortunately, is more concerned with plugging in and cranking up the volume than it is with the subtleties that colored its predecessor.
As its title suggest, La La Land sounds very much like the glitzy, tough L.A. It's not just song titles like "Tom Cruz", "American Idol", and "Kon Tiki" (named for a tacky L.A. hotel) that recall the entertainment capital, but also the album's fuzzed-out Sunset Strip guitar tones, kinetic, urban rhythms, and glossy production makeover. Yet while there is laudable roughness and robustness to these harder charging tracks, no amount of energy or amplification can obscure a song's bloat or lack of memorable hooks. Plants and Animals' strong suit was never the sing-along chorus or the earworm melody, but this new album's aggressiveness-- which plays in stark contrast to the casual, country-stoner pace of its precursor-- combined with the punch of its guitar sound, makes you long for tight pop hooks that never come.
However, amid the album's overstuffed and more conventionally paced tracks, some beautifully strange gems can be unearthed. Unsurprisingly, the album's best moments most closely resemble the meandering songs of Parc Avenue. Songs like "Game Show" and "Undone Melody", which hinge on gritty acoustic foundations and climax with uplifting harmonies, represent the band's most logical progressions from Parc Avenue. The best use of their new plugged-in sound is "American Idol", which, with the rhythmic patter of its vocals and the percussive groove of its riffs, sounds more like Talking Heads than Plants and Animals. So while La La Land may not be the stellar follow-up that Parc Avenue deserved, it does offer something for fans willing to look beyond its tarted-up exterior.


The Gallic duo aim to dust off the disappointment of Pocket Symphony with their first LP to be written and recorded without a major outside producer.

Love 2

There are a few things I'm impressed with Air for doing: resuscitating crusty, decades-old Moog blorps amidst the frenzy of millennial techno-utopian futurism, turning a new generation on to a certain vintage Gallic notion of jet-set sophistication, and getting indie- and punk-dominated college rock stations to play what essentially amounted to lounge prog. Most of all, there's the way they composed their music as an unapologetically frothy sort of cheese-pop without letting it get dominated by snorting insincerity or self-conscious hokeyness. You could still hear the kitsch, but it wasn't the driving force, and they had a sneaky way of lulling you into forgetting you weren't "supposed" to like this kind of thing. Hell, lots of people actually had sex to Moon Safari, which is about as unironic as you can get. (At least I hope they were being unironic.)
A half-decade of Balearic/glo-fi/'lude-house has since refined that mellow aesthetic to the point where taste-conscious end-runs around potential irony have become increasingly unnecessary. But while that refinement applied readily to the subtle songcraft of Talkie Walkie and Pocket Symphony, both of which provided ample evidence of Air's vintage pop smarts, they've somehow stumbled their way into a pit of lite-FM treacle on their new album. Love 2-- as titles go, a bad pun disguised as a sequel nobody needed-- is a dopey little slice of not-much that feels like a noodly rendering of yacht-pop weightlessness. Much has been made about Air's new independence in the process of making this album; it's the first one to come out of their new recording studio, Atlas, and the first to be written and recorded without the input of any major outside producers (though they still brought in Moon Safari engineer Stephane "Alf" Briat to tinker behind the boards). Far be it from me to accuse Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin of being a couple empty vessels who need a Nigel Godrich to whip them into shape, but maybe they could've used someone looking over their shoulders to warn them away from indulging in some bad ideas.
Bad ideas like, say, "Tropical Disease". This song is the album's longest, worst, and most emblematic of Love 2's problems, nearly seven minutes of malaise that bookends a preciously chipper, tin whistle-punctuated slab of Playskool krautrock with two movements of plastic surgeon's waiting-office Muzak. It's laughably oily when its Econolodge-noir sax oozes in crotch-first, and even more uncomfortable in its second half when Dunckel's pitched-up voice chirps, "Woman/ Make me feel... warm inside." God, it's awkward. That empty yet still uncomfortable theme of louche, inarticulate romance is all over the record's ill-advised vocal tracks: pining over a walking (albeit softly walking) cliché in "So Light Is Her Footfall"; trying to milk intrigue out of the lifeless phrase, "there is something going on between us," in "You Can Tell It to Everybody"; murmuring about love in "Love" (lyrics: "Love/ Love/ Love/ Love/ Love"). The lyrics read less like the work of someone who didn't grow up speaking English than someone who knows it well and thinks it's kind of a stupid, pointless language. That'd explain the empty, tense-based babble-talk in "Sing Sang Sung", at least.
Maybe they've always been perpetrators of petty crimes against lyrical songwriting and it's only now that their music's been weak enough to avoid hiding it. The exoticism that made their instantly recognizable brand of music compelling-- the outmoded technology, the unexpected world-music left turns, the almost detached baroqueness-- has been diluted to the point where all their old tricks sound listless. Leadoff track "Do the Joy" is maybe the least-botched attempt at doing something new, though its fuzzed-out slo-motion strut is quickly rendered absurd by a "spooky" B-movie synthesizer melody. Most everything else runs a diverse gamut of uninspiring retreads: uptempo krautpunk that sounds a bit like The Virgin Suicides standout "Dead Bodies" without the intensity ("Be a Bee"), lightheaded, minimalist tweaks of hotel-lounge disco ("Love", which scans like George McCrae's "Rock Your Baby" in a coma), mid-80s David Bowie with gastrointestinal discomfort ("Missing the Light of the Day"), a half-baked instrumental caricature of Blondie-sans-Debby ("Eat My Beat"), and a couple of pretty unconvincing attempts to incorporate Afrobeat ("Night Hunter") and township music ("African Velvet"-- I wish I were making up that title).
Thing is, it still sounds entirely like an Air album-- just a remarkably bland one. The complementary piano/synth lines that Dunckel and Godin made their stock in trade still dredge up a few legitimately nice melodies, though they typically prove fleeting. And session drummer-turned-auxiliary member Joey Waronker, well, he tries; he's one of the better motorik beat-deployment specialists going, and even he can't jostle much excitement into the proceedings, especially when his job most of the time is to tap out minimalist beats in one of the many tracks that pushes downtempo rhythms into complete stasis. Love 2 exhibits the band's style by just about every familiar metric, except the one that made them fascinating in the first place-- that uncanny ability to make schlock sound beautiful. In its place is a strange reversal: beauty rendered schlock, pop melodies and space-age wonder curdled by damaged whimsy.


Niki and the Dove's Malin Dahlström has one of the most fantastic voices in pop, and on their new LP she whirls herself into a frenzy to nip malignant growths like heartache and hate in the bud.

Niki and the Dove: Everybody's Heart Is Broken Now

Everybody's Heart Is Broken Now

Niki and the Dove's Malin Dahlström has one of the most fantastic voices in pop. The Gothenburg native has that slightly wry, raspy delivery that distinguishes all the best Scandi singers, as well as Stevie Nicks' pout, Prince's faith, and a way of selling her lyrics as if she's working through her dramas in real time. Skrillex recognized these qualities when he sampled her vocals from Niki's debut single "DJ, Ease My Mind" on his 2014 album Recess, which could have primed the Swedish duo (completed by Gustaf Karlöf) for a move into the EDM big leagues. Their 2012 debut Instinct was halfway there already, as massive as the mountains Dahlström sang about. But on the long-awaited follow-up, they've gone in the opposite direction, filing down the piercing sharp edges of their debut in favor of luscious synths, aqueous funk basslines, and gated drums.
It's a painfully familiar pop trope in 2016, but Niki and the Dove aren't shooting for muted cool or ’80s sparkle—instead, they have a consummate, melancholic soulful touch, reminiscent of Patrice Rushen or Evelyn "Champagne" King, and a superb way with melody. Dahlström's lyrics are also full of sumptuous details that make their songs feel like living things rather than period pieces—the guy with a soul like a Wolf-Rayet star, the "sea fire" of the city, "African violet and neon blue" skies, and in the gorgeous dancehall lilt of "Coconut Kiss," a tropical hideaway so vivid you can practically feel the sea breeze wafting your pineapple-print kaftan. (It's important to note that she's not just the singer, but writes and produces with Karlöf, too.)
Everybody's Heart Is Broken Now is essentially a record about heartbreak, but in-keeping with the vast scope of Niki's debut, they're thinking on a global scale. As Dahlström told MTV News, "We wanted to write about this greater sense of … a loss of caring. You know, it's pretty tough times in the world right now." They've previously mentioned the rise of racism in Sweden as an influence on the record, but thankfully, they tackle these issues in spirit rather than manifestos.
"Play It on My Radio" is the only vague acknowledgement of that societal shift, where Dahlström yearns for a song that you never hear anymore: "People looked so different then/ Because they were smiling," she sings tenderly over drowsy Balearic synths and a light flickering beat. Across the record, she recognizes how cruelty can fill the void made by sadness or fear—she's "an empty shell," fighting the "poison that sucks the root," and the sorrow that's found a home inside her. "I'm not the same/ Can I change it back again?" she asks on the very Stevie-circa-Tusk "Lost UB."
The solution, natch, is dancing on her own, whirling herself into a frenzy to nip malignant growths like heartache and hate in the bud. "Strangers, move away/ I'm a volcano and I'm about to blow you away," she commands on the strutting "You Stole My Heart Away." As on Instinct, her conviction that redemption can be found in the depth of the night is unyielding, and totally convincing. The songs themselves fill space with the same zeal—every song is flooded with pearly, dazzling synths. There are a few straight-up bangers, like "So Much It Hurts," or the enjoyably silly "Shark City (Tropico X)," with its cartoony Tom Tom Club vibe, and the euphoric, hopeful "Pretty Babies." But often, Niki favor the slow build, where a flash of emotion in Dahlström's voice prompts the song to ascend somewhere else entirely, like the massive gospel chorus that emerges from "Scar for Love," or "Everybody Wants to Be You," which starts off quiet before striding through three massive crescendos and screaming key changes. When so much ’80s-indebted pop slurps the silliness out of the era, their occasional embrace of excess is a tonic (even if the record runs a bit long as a whole). They always sound nostalgic, but the immediacy of Dahlström's vocals yanks all the warm, communal feelings associated with that sound into a present where they're in short supply.


The Dutch songwriter follows behind-the-scenes work with Rex Orange County, The Free Nationals, and others with a breezy new solo record. Featuring collaborations with Mac Demarco and Emily King, the album does a good job distilling his charms into a single package.

Music

The Dutch songwriter Benny Sings whittles his chipper songs down to their foundations. “I’m not a very adventurous music maker,” he told an interviewer a couple years ago. “If the chords work,” he added, “what do you need more than just a kick and a bass and a vocal?” Benny, whose real name is Tim van Berkestijn, has made a study and a production line out of that approach. In his hands the album format is pure vessel: Here’s a song. Here’s another one. And then here’s eight more. That’s an album.
Benny’s eighth studio album Music is his second for the Stones Throw label. He’s spent a career simplifying his songs, and his current crossover from Amsterdam onto the American indie pop scene feels as much like a pitch for Benny the songwriter as Benny the performer. Coming after recent behind-the-scenes collaborations with artists like Rex Orange County, PJ Morton, and The Free Nationals, Music prominently features Mac Demarco, Emily King, and Tom Misch on the tracklist. All of Benny’s albums read more like songwriter exercises than grand statements, but Music does a good job distilling his charms into a single package.
Music gravitates towards blue-eyed soul and yacht rock, and if you’ve heard anything about Benny Sings before it’s probably that he makes happy, breezy music. Taken at face value, that sunshine-on-your-face vibe belies the sturdiness of Benny’s songs. The boxy simplicity of the production hints at his affinity for hip-hop beats, and most of his songs chunk cleanly into verse-chorus-verse formations. “Here It Comes” and “Sunny Afternoon” are both slinky pop-soul numbers with a boom-bap framework, and Benny’s voice has a sweet, barely-there quality.
Lyrically, the songs on Music can trend a bit too safe, which often works in Benny’s favor but sometimes makes a track feel generic. Benny has a knack for writing an opening line that sets a song immediately into motion: “There you are, right out of bed” he sings on “Rolled Out,” like he was nudging the track awake. But since so many of Benny’s songs are about love, sometimes the innocuousness of his lyrics can make a refrain sound obvious or preprogrammed, like it was a placeholder that made its way into the final draft. Some songs come off quaint, even twee as a result. “Lost Again” would be a saccharine even as an instrumental, and so a handclap-punctuated line like “I’m lost again/All these different ways to get inside your heart” pushes it over the top. It's hard to imagine this wasn’t a nebulous soundtrack assignment from a Disney executive to write a post-credits anthem.
At its best, Music brings other artists full of their own personality into the fold and highlights Benny’s songwriting. The slouchy guitar groove of “Rolled Up” sounds like it came fully formed from a Mac Demarco album, until Benny’s voice comes in and it feels at home here. They sing in entirely different registers, but both Mac and Benny wistfully sigh their lyrics, and Benny settles easily into Demarco’s slacker-cool vibe. The spunky,Emily King-featuring “Miracles,” meanwhile, is a gospel-tinged love song railing against the concept of one true love. “I don’t believe in miracles...but I believe you’re beautiful, let us just start there,” he sings. It’s clearly a song meant for and written in the image of King though, who brings it home with her breathy weightlessness. It’s not the only time a guest brings his ideas all the way to life. Benny’s voice has a gentle purity, but he uses it almost like a scratch track—just enough to get the idea across. There might be some irony baked into his stage name: Benny Writes is truer, but doesn’t have the same ring to it.
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Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger captures the band clicking on all cylinders. The album sustains a level of focus, cohesion, and intensity that the band’s later, more varied albums lack.

Badmotorfinger

With their detuned guitars, plodding tempos, permanently downcast expressions, and hardware-store dress code, Soundgarden looked every bit the “grunge” part, at least on first glance. If your first introduction came, for instance, via the image of frontman Chris Cornell baring his chest on a dimly lit soundstage in the video for “Loud Love,” you could easily mistake Soundgarden for a bunch of oafs wading in the same tarpit where the brontosaur remains of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin lay fossilized. In fact, at points on their 1989 sophomore album/major-label debut Louder Than Love, Soundgarden came off as a ham-fisted Zep/Sabbath mashup.
Clearly, the band underwent a period of profound growth sometime prior to recording Badmotorfinger, the 1991 follow-up that captures the band clicking on all cylinders. In its breadth and execution, Badmotorfinger dramatically surpasses the band's previous work. (Just don’t judge by the even more oafish video for leadoff single “Outshined”). The album also sustains a level of focus, cohesion, and intensity that the band’s later, more varied albums lack. It is also the moment where Soundgarden’s unique four-way interplay comes into alignment in earnest, along with their collective sense of songcraft and ability to create atmosphere.
In the oversized coffee table booklet that accompanies the seven-disc “super deluxe” version of this reissue, three dozen musicians offer their recollections, including Henry Rollins, Les Claypool, Vernon Reid, Kirk Hammett, Buzz Osborne, Dale Crover, Krist Novoselic, Tom Morello, Steve Von Till, etc, etc. High praise even comes from ancestral giants like Zeppelin leader Jimmy Page, Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler, and Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson. The mental image of Lifeson cranking Badmotorfinger with his kids, as suggested by his notes, is probably the most endearing. Sadly, though, Mudhoney’s Mark Arm doesn't re-tell the story of how, on hearing the final mix for the first time, he sent the band a postcard with the disparaging note: “Fuck, you guys sound like Rush now.”
Though Louder Than Love cemented the band’s appeal with metal audiences, Soundgarden had first struck a national chord among college radio deejays who were keyed-in on the band’s underground pedigree. After working with the iconic independent label Sup Pop on their debut EP Screaming Life in 1987, Soundgarden initially turned down major label offers to release their debut full-length, 1988’s Ultramega OK, on SST, the venerated indie imprint founded by Black Flag’s Greg Ginn. Those two releases in particular reflected the band’s affinity for underground/post-punk acts like Hüsker Dü, Bad Brains, and Sonic Youth.
In the new Badmotorfinger liners, Jello Biafra likens Soundgarden to a cross between Zeppelin and Killing Joke. But it’s not like the post-punk influences jump out at you on Badmotorfinger. That’s because, by that point, Chris Cornell and lead guitarist Kim Thayil had combined their individual guitar approaches into a complex latticework that remains somewhat inscrutable even as it grips you. For every Badmotorfinger passage that makes you want to bust into a fit of air guitar—the unevenly metered, Sherman tank trudge that closes “Rusty Cage,” the blues-metal crunch of “Drawing Flies,” the quasi-thrash gallop of “Jesus Christ Pose,” etc.—the music is rife with ten times as many intangibles. To choose just one, then there’s the high-end ambient buzz that permeates the album from start to finish, imbuing it with a static charge not unlike the electricity one feels in the air when entire sky darkens under a massive storm cloud.
Indeed, much of Badmotorfinger’s power resides in its suggestion of a violence that rarely erupts and offers little catharsis when it does. The best example can be found on “Slaves and Bulldozers,” a seething seven-minute crawl where Thayil spends most of the time strangulating his guitar strings for spasms of noise that almost seem to emanate from an inhuman source. If you've ever been rendered speechless by the sight of the ocean, stars, volcanic activity—anything that suddenly makes you aware of your minuscule place in the order of life—Thayil’s “leads” (if they can even be called that) surge with the same coldly neutral ferocity.
Meanwhile, even when Cornell unleashes his famous throat-scraping roar on the line “now I know why you’ve been shaking,” the enormity of the music feels choked back rather than triumphant. In sharp contrast to other heavy music—which is mostly designed to take frustration out on external targets—Soundgarden's signature rumble doesn’t give you an athletic rush. All of that gnashing turmoil on “Slaves and Bulldozers” actually points inward, collecting in your muscle tissue as a kind of seismic potential energy. And when the entire band pulls back for Cornell to switch to a bluesy murmur before the song’s wailing climax, Soundgarden show a command of dynamics they simply hadn’t been capable of before.
As you listen more closely, it becomes increasingly apparent that none of the songs lend themselves to primary hues like “angry,” “sad,” or even “rocking.” In its most rousing moments, Badmotorfinger is anchored by a pensiveness that fosters daydreaming as much if not more than it gives you reason to bang your head. Fittingly, the album’s lyrics venture well beyond heavy rock’s typical purview: Where other bands would choose to emote more directly from the gut (or elsewhere), Soundgarden temper the attack of the music with painterly images Cornell delivers with Beatnik flair. On “Room a Thousand Years Wide,” Thayil’s refrain of “tomorrow begat tomorrow” extends the song’s ambiguously woebegone perspective over timeless eons. And though bassist Ben Shepherd’s “Somewhere” doesn’t quite disclose itself as a love song, the sense of romance is undeniable in lines like “From the likes of her/To the time of me/Like the moon to earth/Or the sky to sea./Only we’re no longer/Allowed to be.”
Badmotorfinger is also anchored by drummer Matt Cameron’s inimitable way of dragging the beat back while also smoothing-out Cornell and Thayil’s preference for uneven time signatures. Even on punkish uptempo bangers like “Rusty Cage” and “Face Pollution,” Soundgarden never simply barrel forward, switching gears on a dime and moving sideways with the dexterity of a prog act. (Hence Mark Arm’s Rush comparison.)
With all four members stretching more than ever before, at several points the music verges on the transportive, head-trip vibe of space rock or psychedelia. On the dreamlike “Searching with My Good Eye Closed” swirls of guitar twine around Cornell’s voice, heavily draped in reverb to give it the weight of a mystical presence speaking through clouds. When playing together in a room, the band tended to lumber through the song—evidenced painfully by the bonus concert and demo versions included in the deluxe package.
Speaking of which: The studio outtakes here may be interesting from a forensic point of view, but they’re basically glorified demos that lack the agility of the finished songs. And while the version of “Black Rain”—with lyrics that would later be refitted for the Superunknown hit “Fell on Black Days”—works as a curio, the song selection could have gone deeper to include the early version of “No Attention,” a tune the band attempted during the Badmotorfinger sessions before settling on a later version for 1996’s Down on the Upside.
In its definitive form, though, “Searching with My Good Eye Closed” is the most dramatic example of Soundgarden’s ability to touch the otherworldly. If you listen very closely to the fade out, you can hear the last wisp of Cornell’s voice trailing off: It’s barely audible and lasts for just half a second before it's smothered out of the frame by the leaden trudge of “Room a Thousand Years Wide.” The same thing essentially happened with the band’s career two years later, when Soundgarden went on to sell five million and became alterna-rock household names with their next album, 1994’s Superunknown. Much like when a director known for working in black and white switches to color, the obvious change in palette is initially what dazzles about Superunknown.
But as both albums have aged, you could make a case that Soundgarden actually accomplished more with the comparatively limited shading of Badmotorfinger. Listening back now it’s an album that would have sounded fresh and vital released at any time over the past quarter century. The band didn’t do the music any favors with that dreadfully dated “Outshined” video, but it doesn’t take long for Badmotorfinger to reveal itself as something far greater than a relic of its time.


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 the arrival of Sean Paul, who brought dancehall with all its complexity to the masses.

Dutty Rock

Showbiz always comes for the teeth. Early in Sean Paul’s career, at the start of the millennium—nearly two decades before Cardi B rapped about aspirational dental surgery on “Bodak Yellow”—the Jamaican musician embarked on a global debut with cornrows in his hair and braces on his teeth. The intended effect of the makeover? To align Paul with the big-budget hip-hop and R&B stars of American urban radio in the early aughts.
In order to cross over and become successful beyond the confines of dancehall, a genre then in the shadow of Bob Marley posters plastered on college dorm walls, Sean Paul would first have to go pop. Dutty Rock fits the template of how global pop breaks today: take an indigenous sound, affix it to a pop template, and attach a legible ambassador to the project (orthodontics may be required). This is the price of access to a monolithic industry. But now, after dancehall has once again gone mainstream, the stakes of crossing over are higher. Audiences are more open to genre, but they also have shifting and conflicting values and are more vocal about equity issues within pop culture, such as representation and cultural appropriation.
But before all of this, in the late ’90s, Paul was a bald-shaved, baby-faced loverboy proselytizing the hollowed-out cadence and bark of dancehall OGs like Super Cat and Shabba Ranks. Me and my friends drove around listening to flea market-sourced riddim mixtapes and hitting repeat on tracks like “Baby Girl,” “Infiltrate,” and “Deport Them.” The bass made our bodies vibrate and Paul’s boy-ish chat felt less intimidating than the grown-up raunchiness of other artists we loved, like Mr. Vegas and Elephant Man. Before he conquered the world, Paul’s club-ready dancehall was a kind of guide to our suburban adolescent mating rituals.
His first album, Stage One, barely hit the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop 100 in 2000. A majority of the music on Stage One, including now-classic tunes like “Deport Dem,” and “Hot Gal Today,” had been floating around on riddim tracks for a couple of years before the release. But its lackluster commercial performance might also be indicative of incompatible listening cultures, or: conversational, informally distributed riddims versus the individualist, heavily categorized and marketed nature of modern LP making. “Riddims were an economic thing,” Sean Paul told me in 2016. “The tape could hold a certain amount of tracks, so there’s one producer and he has many artists on [the riddim]. That struck such a vibe in Jamaica because it was cool to hear different perspectives. You could have one guy singing about a girl with a fat ass, and another person singing something more conscious—and it’s on the same riddim.”
Thematically, dancehall is seeded in the thorny social morass left behind by colonialism. From its origins in the late 1970s to the present day, the music has often chronicled, “the gritty realities of Kingston’s ghettos...sharing crude truths about the conditions of Kingston’s poor, their connections to Jah (Rastafari for “God”), the medicinal and recreational benefits of smoking weed.” Paul was an uptown kid with an artist mom and an incarcerated father, who grew up playing competitive water polo. “A lot of my first songs were really conscious,” Paul said. “A couple of songs I wrote for my demo were talking about the ghetto story—I was drawing comparisons between uptown, where I’m from, and downtown.” But it was the gyalis tunes about chasing, watching, and dancing with women, that would become his niche.
In 2002, Sean Paul’s second album, Dutty Rock, hit big. By then he’d “gone international” after guesting on “Money Jane,” a posse cut by Toronto’s Baby Blue Soundcrew, which became an unexpected success on Canadian commercial radio. By the time Dutty Rock dropped, its first single “Gimme The Light” had already warmed up the clubs and streets via the Buzz riddim, a crackling, suspenseful loop that sounds like a tiny string section trapped in the digital chaos of a video game. It peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard Top 100—and then “Get Busy” leap-frogged it to reach No. 1 with a raucous music video in tow. Filmed in an unfinished basement in the suburbs of Toronto, the video by Director X prominently featured kinetic dance crews performing the latest dancehall moves and captured the innovative energy of a culture in diasporic translation.
The videos from Dutty Rock immortalized trends originating in Kingston dance halls, with help from Director X and perceptive choreography by Tanisha Scott. The visuals were also in conversation with what was happening on BET and MTV. In the video for “Like Glue,” Paul’s brother gets on the mic, calling out dance moves as a crew performs on stage: “row the boat,“ “signal the plane,” “parachute.” Just the year before, in 2001, everyone—from Diddy to a bunch of kid dancers—was doing the Harlem Shake in G. Dep’s videos for “Let’s Get It” and “Special Delivery,” and the decade would go on to birth the Dougie, Stanky Leg, Crank Dat, and more.
Dutty Rock also gave mainstream audiences a glimpse at the emotional complexity of dancehall. Scott’s choreography is precise, dramatic, and intimate, (her Kate Bush-meets-Patra work for Drake’s “Hotline Bling” captures this dynamic!). In the video for Dutty Rock’s third single, a cover of Alton Ellis’ twinkling 1967 track “I’m Still In Love With You” featuring Sasha, the waist-to-waist ballet reveals the promise of affection that keeps people on the floor until late. It’s tenderness between friends and (heterosexual) lovers: girlfriends, getting ready to go out and circling their hips to the beat in a bedroom mirror, and the charged delight of two strangers finding a rhythm within the competitive silo of the club.
Some dancehall fans consider the ’90s and early aughts a kind of golden era when production was precocious, raw, and experimental. Dutty Rock was a success because Paul’s tectonic hooks and uncanny pop melodies brought out new undertones to the gritty and ingenious riddims that are a staple of Jamaican production. The harpsichord intro to “Can You Do The Work,” on Jeremy Harding’s Liquid riddim conjures the odd pageantry of monarchical period dramas, but it’s Lenky’s clappy Diwali riddim, on which Sean Paul recorded “Get Busy,” that is totemic. It is peak creativity, a deceptively simple loop that conjures movement like a snake charmer’s horn. There’s a sample of the folksy syncopated handclaps that power the traditional Punjabi giddha dance, a hollow and steady bass drum to keep pace with a racing heart, gasping vox synth patches, and a sensual otherworldly whining noise, among others whimsical effects. It fit right in with the mass appeal, shiny suited, post-9/11 Orientalist hip-hop of the time, of which Timbaland and Missy Elliott were chief architects. Although Paul has noted that tracks like “Get Busy” and “Gimme The Light” were polished “by foreign mixers from America so that it could sound as big as whatever Justin Timberlake song was playing on the radio in the States.”
Lenky said that around 2001, "No one wanted [Diwali Riddim] because no one knew what it was. I was trying to give it to [vocalists] and they say it was too ‘noisy-sounding,’ so I put it back in my drawer." By 2002 it took off, and a collaboration with Paul was sorted. “Get Busy” went on to become their first U.S. No. 1 song, and that win paved the way for arguably the best song on the riddim:  Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go.” That track was also a Billboard smash, as was Lumidee’s take, the charmingly off-key teen anthem “Never You Leave (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh).” Lenky’s ingenious production spent multiple years on the globals charts, and Paul’s place as the world’s translator of Jamaican pop music was secured.
And then came “Baby Boy,” the Scott Storch-produced Beyoncé duet that was included in the international re-release of Dutty Rock. It’s probably Sean Paul’s most profitable single: 17 years after release, Beyoncé still performs it as part of her live show. For the singer’s Homecoming performances at Coachella 2018, she played “Baby Boy” as a medley, cut with interpolations of Tony Matterhorn’s frenetic “Dutty Wine,” the staccato dembow of the Fever Pitch riddim, and Dawn Penn’s blissfully lovelorn “You Don’t Love Me (No, No, No).” Years before Beyoncé became an arbiter of Black diasporic pop, she was looking to the Caribbean, and Paul was the gateway.
There has always been a bit of pushback to Paul from some dancehall fans because he’s a light-skinned, racially ambiguous artist from the relatively affluent “uptown” Kingston. Moving conversations about equity and appropriation forward requires consideration about the kinds of artists often received as innovators within genres, like dancehall, that long functioned independently of the commercial industry. A globalized music industry churns on the fracking of flourishing Black musical and aesthetic traditions, for consumption (and interpretation) by outsiders: from Snow to Apache Indian to Paul Simon to Justin Timberlake... to the entire K-Pop industry. Artists like Diplo, Bad Gyal, Ramriddlz, and Drake populate the current iteration of this debate as it pertains to dancehall.
Given that he was born and raised in Jamaica, Paul’s worldwide success might seem more comparably equitable. But the price of international stardom, or crossover success, remains legibility. Does crossover success empower anyone other than the artist in question? What could counter “appropriation” in a way that doesn’t rely on a neocolonial institution like the music industry? An AllMusic.com review from the time described Dutty Rock as “almost revolutionary.” If we were to revisit that statement today, it might be important to ask: revolutionary for who?


The Chinese-American multi-instrumentalist's works are sensuous and lively but evoke a vast loneliness.

Xiao Gong

Take a minute to scan Li Daiguo’s discography and you’ll find tracklists full of evocative titles. “A steady heartbeat is the sound of death” is one such chin-scratcher, but there are others that rival the length and bemusing dramatics of Keiji Haino’s inscriptions. Li’s dedication to the poetic form mirrors the deceptive simplicity and lingering beauty of his music: he mixes instrumentation—both Western and Eastern, traditional and contemporary—in a manner that’s uncomplicated yet thoughtful, his works always grander than their discrete elements suggest.
Insatiable curiosity is foundational to Li’s music. While he attended college in California for violin performance, much time was spent exploring other instruments. The liner notes for his latest album, Xiao Gong, assert as much: more than a dozen instruments are listed, including the pipa, guzheng, mbira, Moroccan flute, and cello. But for the Chinese-American multi-instrumentalist, maximalism isn’t as important as maximal impact. On the opening track, “I just want to find someone to love again, I haven’t really done it yet,” he uses abstracted electronics to mimic wheezing train whistles before summoning his own makeshift train-like rhythm with a booming drum. These instances of intra-track shapeshifting bear witness to an inquisitive nature that invites you to sense every textural juxtaposition, to relish every sonic throughline.
To be certain, Li has never offered such a rich tapestry in his solo music before. While his collaborative albums with Kink Gong and Rick Parker were busy, their syntheses of disparate elements were inelegant. Li is fully committed to maintaining cohesive atmospheres here: late-album highlight “I need to work hard to make it seem like I’m living a good life” blends disorienting blips, spiraling whirrs, and the lone plucks of strings—the disenchantment that informs its song title is never far away.
The meaning of Xiao Gong itself also hints at the drabness of modern living and the unrewarding paths taken in search of happiness: Xiao translates to “smile” or “laughter” while Gong connotes an achievement attained through virtuous work. Each track provides an opportunity to feel this hollowness and grief more deeply. The album’s fourth song, “I can’t stand it myself,” circles around a noisy, despondent vortex of strings, while the incessant electronic pulses and soaring flute melodies of album closer “I don’t know what I’m going to do, I’ll let it be for now” make the track as vast as it is lonely. Elsewhere, “These things must be bought, in the future” offers charm in its unexpected beatbox interludes, but these moments are fleeting and quickly dissipate—any resulting joy is squashed in favor of elegiac piano.
Music that captures listlessness without the aid of lyrics is often tedious, so it’s no small feat that Xiao Gong is so sensuous and lively. This is largely because Li’s compositional approach involves using electronics to instill energy. “I was interested in playing with electricity like an element of nature, like fire, that doesn’t really care about what you want once it is born,” he said in a recent interview. You can sense that in the woozy album centerpiece “Why is everything done well, but nothing is done well,” wherein electronic filigrees meander until they vanish into silence. For those in a similar position—wandering aimlessly through life until death swallows them whole—Xiao Gong feels like a damning, distressing mirror. Li doesn’t offer any solutions; instead, there’s only the familiar desire to escape anhedonia, something most succinctly relayed in Xiao Gong’s third track title: “I want to find a hobby or sense of meaning at any cost.”

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Curated by London DJs Shannen SP and Joe Cotch, this 17-track compilation takes the pulse of the quickly evolving South African genre built around log-drum grooves, bright synths, and jazz-inflected keys.

Amapiano Now

In South Africa, dance music has always been intrinsically linked to the country’s enduring inequality, its sounds born of the struggle and hope of township life. From the lo-fi synth pop of bubblegum to the slowed-down house beats and deep basslines of kwaito, the DIY approach of diBacardi and the dark atmospheres of gqom, music has been a way for young Black South Africans to express their frustrations, create new narratives, and form their own identity.
Amapiano is the youngest in this musical genealogy, borrowing elements from its predecessors while very much looking to the future. Along with its signature log-drum sounds (the warm tones produced by traditional hollowed out instruments also known as slit drums), bright synths, and jazz-inflected keys—the “piano” in amapiano—its different styles may be infused with the melodies of kwaito or the thumping beats of techno. Having emerged in the townships of Pretoria and Johannesburg, in Gauteng province, this music captures the duality of life in the hood: It is rooted in the pain of living in a racially and economically divided society while also soundtracking the euphoria of Gauteng’s nightlife, offering revelers a glimmer of brighter days ahead. Over the past year, amapiano has burst onto the mainstream, but like the genres that preceded it, it works outside of the usual channels: Music is shared through WhatsApp, file-sharing apps, or YouTube, bypassing traditional industry gatekeepers. It thrived in taxis and local clubs long before commercial radio stations caught on. This placed the power directly in the hands of the artists and led to a scene so dynamic that it can be hard for the uninitiated to grasp what’s going on.
Amapiano Now, a 17-track collection put together by London DJ Shannen SP and Cotch International founder Joe Cotch in collaboration with NTS, offers a deeper look into this scene. The compilation of unreleased music places the genre's veterans, like Vigro Deep, Mr JazziQ, Caltonic SA, and Gaba Cannal, alongside rising stars like Kamo Mphela, and Teno Afrika, prioritizing underground sounds over mainstream hits. Since developing as a mostly instrumental style, amapiano has branched into several different varieties. The percussion-heavy sound of “dust” amapiano dominates the compilation, while the sunnier pop vocals and brass-led instrumentals of mainstream amapiano are less prominent, in favor of more avant-garde sounds influenced by Afro-tech and deep house.
Instrumentals driven by hardcore drum patterns and heavy basslines sit next to soulful tracks peppered with lilting keys and sax solos. King Jazz’ “Lockdown” is relatively laid back, with playful piano keys that seem lifted straight out of a Sunday church service; it’s followed by Teno Afrika’s “Power Station”, which blends relentless log drums and breakbeats in an adventurous percussive experiment. Although there are brooding atmospheres and gritty beats throughout, the jazzy chord progressions and layered drums have a propulsive effect, creating anticipation, tension, and release.
Despite the almost complete eradication of clubbing over this past year and a half, artists have never stopped producing formidable tracks in anticipation of the reopening. Amapiano Now is full of them: CaltonicSA’s “Super Star,” with its heavy bass and jagged beats, recalls the producer’s gqom beginnings but leaves ample space for Thabz le Madonga’s stirring vocals; on DBN Gogo’s “Possible,” signature shakers slowly build anticipation, with bright vocals creating a transportive, feel-good atmosphere; the bouncy rhythms and bright synths on lead single “Shona Le” promise a world unburdened by the struggles of the present. At times, the percussive patterns and crescendoing synths take on an almost spiritual dimension. Rather than hedonism, the mood conjures memories of carefree moments, whether dancing in a sweaty club or driving with the windows open as the light turns golden.
Thanks to its innovative young producers, amapiano is always on the move, giving birth to new subgenres and dance trends, and quickly bleeding into other styles and dancefloors all over the world. As artist manager David Ngoma says in the documentary SHAYA!, amapiano is a sound that “comes from the hood and goes out everywhere else.” The compilation doesn’t quite work as a cohesive album, but that might not be the point. Instead, it’s a look at amapiano right now—a snapshot of a dynamic style whose joyful spirit feels more necessary than ever.

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