This reissue of William Basinski's 2009 album finds the composer doing what he does best, creating haunting loops and drones that have a way of burrowing into your life.

92982

When you travel to 351 Jay Street on Google Maps you’re greeted with the image of a nondescript office building. On its ground floor is an art supply store. The rest of the scene is anonymous. Much of Downtown Brooklyn looks like 351 Jay: brutalist buildings of medium height that evoke industry and bureaucracy. Thirty-six years ago, in this building, William Basinski lived in a loft space that he called the Music Laboratories. He moved in at the beginning of the 1980s with his partner, the artist James Elaine.
Most of the work Basinski released in the 2000s consisted of remixed, reworked, and wonderfully garbled homages to the archive he started to build in the Music Laboratories. While there he made hundred of tape loops, organizing the ribbons of magnetic tape on a tree branch he kept near his mixing desk. The loops were a combination of recordings of his own compositions and incidental noise that seemed to come his way from the whirl of urban life outside his window or from the whisper of radio broadcasts seeding themselves into his recording equipment. He didn’t release his experiments at the time, choosing to record, finagle, connect. The impulse was a natural reaction to the time and place, as he later said: “I was getting all this great stuff. It was just coming from the sky.”
One day in September of 1982 he was experimenting on the fly, collecting fragments, and maybe hours later the backbone of a piece was made. He called it 92982, a clinical name designating the date of the composition, as if it was just a file to be tucked away. He released the recordings for the first time in 2009, long after he garnered widespread acclaim for his monumental 9/11 elegy The Disintegration Loops. Seven years after its initial release, 92982 has been remastered and reissued as 2xLP set of startlingly crisp and veritably haunted music.
92982 is over an hour long, and the original improvisation makes up the first two tracks, while the back half of the album includes an extended rework of a piano-based piece from Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive and another loop constructed from the 1982 material. Given the sources, the tracks present in 92982 seem almost unstuck from time, floating between dates and points of inspiration. The continual cutting up, editing, and processing of a tape loop was something closer to necromancy than normal composition. It’s a quality that actually infects the overall feeling of the music, creating an environment for free-floating listening.
The album’s opening track, “92982.1,” drifts, separates, grows quiet, and then rumbles loudly. The wash of noises is teeming with potential, a quality that defines the inner workings of 92982. All four tracks are open canvases, they invite the rest of the world’s sounds to participate in making the experience of listening different each time. The sound of a helicopter whirling in the atmosphere and the Doppler splatter of a police car’s siren on “92982.2” mix into the sounds of banal moments, like laying in bed, listening to the buzz of an air conditioner, the honking of cars, the rustle of leaves, the drip of an open faucet. The drifting of “92982.4”’s piano loops hang like flickering presences hovering above a room. Overall, a disembodying and strange thing slowly happens as this album keeps playing: it sucks the noises of your environment into the loop. What’s contained here is sometimes not exactly a piece of music but an experiential filter.
Basinski’s music is constantly toying with the idea that rote moments in life can be engulfed with emotion, and it has a way of burrowing into your life. As his perpetual loops drift across the surface of experience, they are incredibly porous, and invite a listener to complete them by taking a walk around their block or just go about their day. 92982 accomplishes this more successfully than much of Basinski’s work; compared to The Disintegration Loops, it’s more open to interpretation and devoid of the same weight of history or narrative. It is an extremely plastic and pliant piece of music, an eternally empty vessel that gets filled up from listen to listen.


Parquet Courts’ new mini-LP Monastic Living contains just one song with words; the remaining eight tracks aren't just wordless, they're also tuneless. It feels like their first true statement of total rejection.

Monastic Living EP

On "No No No!", the opener of Parquet Courts’ new mini-LP Monastic Living, Andrew Savage declares in a mangled grunt, "I don’t want to be called a poet/ Don’t want to hang in a museum/ Don’t want to be cited, tacked onto your cause/ No, no, no/ I’m just a man." From a band who've typically resisted disenchantment against the odds, it’s an alarming statement of rejection. On 2012's Light Up Gold, Savage and co-songwriter Austin Brown blazed through mundane minutiae–"train death paintings, anti-meth murals"–yet saw beauty in the banality; on last year’s "Content Nausea", released as Parkay Quarts, Savage yelled denunciations of the digital era in excited bursts, like a smalltown newsreader reporting alien landings. Pitched between stoner gags and urgent instructions, their sizzling one-liners felt like a bulwark against capitalist dread, the battle between righteousness and resignation. Monastic Living, their debut EP for Rough Trade presumably ahead of a full-length in the new year, is them saying, "We’re tired, that’s enough."
"No No No!" is unique to the record, in that it has words, a hook, a rhythm you could tap, a sonic and philosophical destination, and replay value. In the liner notes, the track’s expanded lyric sheet blends cliché ("We’re just a band," "retreat into solitude") and aphorism—"Perhaps silence is purity of spirit"—into a grave mission statement. The remaining eight tracks aren't just wordless but tuneless; they're sometimes baffling, often boring, and always deliberately so.
Part of what makes "No No No!" work is that its litany of targets—"open letters, long reads"—is broad enough to appeal to everyone’s digital unease. Parquet Courts are resolutely unchill ("Life’s lived best when scrolling least," Savage sang on "Content Nausea"), bewildered by the hot takes and the jostling think-pieces, as are we all. But these are popular targets, and without the counterweight of wit, Parquet Courts' grand disavowal feels reactionary. On Monastic Living, they make a personal decision to reject a web culture constantly renegotiating what it means to be socially conscious ("I don't want to be an essayist!" begins Savage's salvo), and in doing so they reclaim art’s right to political neutrality. As statements go, it’s fine but hardly revolutionary—a passionate shrug.
Redeeming moments in the music are scarce. One is "Vow of Silence", with its clattering drums, pleading, squealing guitars, and haywire arpeggios, which resemble the misfiring pistons of a manic brain. "Alms for the Poor", comprising several seconds of a postpunk riff that dies suddenly, sounds like the husk of a practice session; a chugging number called "Monastic Living I." is Battles without the epiphanies.
Unlike that paragon of artistic rejection, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, which actually coheres rather nicely, the EP has little textural detail; the music is not immersive, much less transcendent. It isn’t just a score to modern ennui but a work that itself feels indifferent. Yet it’s presented with a straight face: The band are touring the EP and we can buy it, though I’m unsure why anyone would—perhaps its existence as a paid-for product is part of the statement. What it means for the band’s future is, for now, a mystery, though not the kind it is fun to unravel.


Once best known best as the cryptic PC Music character QT, Hayden Dunham returns with an updated electro-pop sound that strips away some of the artifice from their previous project.

Hyd EP

On the 2014 single “Hey QT,” the artist known simply as QT used pop as a vehicle to travel deep into the uncanny valley. A collaboration with hyperpop pioneers A. G. Cook and SOPHIE, the bubblegum bass anthem took the form of a marketing campaign for a (mostly) fictional soft drink, fetishizing the sound of soullessness while crystalizing key PC Music elements: hyperphysical synths, chipmunk vocals, advertising as genre. After seven years of silence across a rapidly changing pop landscape, the mysterious face behind QT, Hayden Dunham, returns as Hyd. Co-written by a coterie of experimental pop icons like Cook and Caroline Polachek, their four-track debut EP lacks some of the radical thrill of QT’s lone single; the songs mix stellar electro pop with some curiously tame stylistic choices. But Hyd still constitutes an intriguing statement of self and renewal from a performer who, after disappearing for the better part of a decade, now strips away the artifice of their previous project.
Pearlescent opener “No Shadow”—a ballad inspired by a temporary loss of vision the artist experienced in 2017—explores identity in the binary opposition of light and dark, asking, “Am I finally home?” over stark bass synth. Dunham’s skill as a producer is readily apparent throughout the EP: On the excellent “Skin 2 Skin,” their kinetic, hair-rising whispers seem to directly penetrate your ear. They sleekly dole out an assonant waterslide of “Gemini”s and “thigh”s and “ride or die”s that could rival Charli XCX’s “Claws”; they gasp, leaving suggestive gaps in their bitten-off phrases, flirting through fragments like “feeling kind of ___ on the inside” and “sweating through the ____, take it outside.”
Elsewhere, the influence of current-day PC Music affiliates takes hold. Though Hyd skirts the extremes of hyperpop—QT’s characteristic chipmunk vocals are nowhere to be seen, and the texture of the music’s electro pop is mild by current-day standards—Brooklyn producer umru still brings a deep bubblegum bass sound to “The One,” building its framework on metallic, claustrophobic synths. As the song darkly changes textures, Dunham innocently observes, “Now you’re gonna smash it to the ground/Now you’re gonna have to smash it to the ground.” Half love song and half lament, the track divides its time between twinkly, yearning ballad and quietly violent breakdown.
Polachek’s influence is even more obvious, sometimes to the point of eclipsing Dunham’s own identity, which can border on indistinguishable within the polished art pop of “Skin 2 Skin” and “No Shadow.” Hyd often bears traces of an early-’10s Tumblr landscape that no longer feels quite so relevant; single “The Look on Your Face” is a strangely straightforward ’90s bedroom-pop pastiche built on a foundation of acoustic guitar and hushed, untreated vocals. Both the lyrics and delivery—“I know she’s with you/But in my mind/We’re still back at your place/Back at your place, yeah”—are stilted and awkward, calling to mind an Olivia Rodrigo demo.
The pop innovations that PC Music helped catalyze—bubblegum bass, deconstructed club, hyperpop—have evolved dramatically since the singular “Hey QT.” As Quinn Thomas, Dunham symbolized the scene’s conceptual hijinks; seven years later, their belated debut presents them as a living, breathing, feeling person. But their updated sound feels like a lateral move into merely competent pop, rather than anything genuinely new. Hyd offers a sideways look into 2021’s alt-pop landscape, if not its advance.

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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 great jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s 1972 opus, a one-of-a-kind dispatch from the vibrant, polygenic, and contested lofts of downtown New York.

Science Fiction

A decade after he arrived in New York and reshaped jazz to come, Ornette Coleman purchased a co-op. He wasn’t searching for valuable real estate when he bought two stories of a former factory on Prince Street, in the bloodless heart of the then-barren post-industrial neighborhood known as SoHo. It was 1968, and the saxophonist, who laid the foundation for free jazz, wanted a place where he could compose, sleep, shoot pool, and host friends’ concerts. His 10,000-square-foot residence on the third floor was sparsely furnished, in true downtown bohemian fashion, with an inflatable raft he used as his couch and a myna bird who greeted guests. On the ground level was a concert and practice space he called “Artists House,” which he lent to fellow musicians nearly for free. Just a few years later, in the 1970s, jazz players galore began moonlighting apartments, storefronts, galleries, and warehouses as live venues, birthing the genre’s legendary loft scene. Artists House presaged this generous ethos and its paper-thin walls between home and work. A 1972 album Coleman made while living at his urban perch anticipated the movement’s aesthetic: Science Fiction’s style-agnostic, Afrofuturist vision thrums with city life, logging an unusual moment in time that rippled far into the future.
The native Texan had already indelibly influenced the loft generation with his mythic run between 1959 and 1962 on Atlantic, during which he all but rewrote the language of his medium. Coleman abandoned fixed tonal centers and scaffolded the chromatic scale with quarter tones, sometimes while playing a plastic, flamboyantly white alto. He flouted the expected but based his originality in a wide range of musical traditions. Coleman’s upbringing in Fort Worth, where he was born in 1930 and grew up in a series of tiny, rented shotgun shacks, inundated him with big bands, bebop, and a kind of expanded American songbook—spirituals, ragtime, blues, R&B, Tejano, Western swing—that either predated jazz or molded it into a regional vernacular. When he was 14 his mother gave him his first horn, which soon became a way of making cash. As Maria Golia discusses in her terrific biography Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure, he gigged around his hometown’s vibrant scene during the late 1940s, helping out in a single-parent household. Coleman’s father had died when he was 7. His sister found him work as a musician in clubs that catered to varied clientele yet remained starkly segregated.
Coleman hated most of these performances, which felt racially and creatively conservative, although he went along with whatever she rustled up. He rebelled on other stages; his high school band booted him for improvising during a traditional Sousa march. In 1948, while soloing at an all-white joint, he had a revelation: What if he left the melody behind entirely on “Stardust,” pulling instead from the bounty of other notes he heard in the chord changes—wouldn’t that make a tired standard less boring? The dancers who led the crowd in their revelry froze, confused by his improvisations, and the club owner fired him. Soon after, Coleman taught another player bebop while he traveled the South with a variety tent show, performing for audiences who were more accustomed to ragtime and Dixieland than the compositional modernism in vogue among New York’s edgier audiences. He was ejected from the bandstand and left penniless in Natchez, Mississippi, where cops harassed and chased him out of town. Downriver in Baton Rouge, belligerent locals beat him up and smashed his instrument beyond repair. They found the 18 year old’s long hair offensive, and his strange sax styling—a preview of how he soon outgrew bebop’s complex harmonies in favor of the more open-ended and dissonant music that the world deemed “free jazz”—freaked them out, too.
Such tales often come with the implication that Coleman fled the South and Texas—which he did, but merely in terms of geography. In Los Angeles, during the 1950s, and in Manhattan, where he made a home for himself from the decade’s end until he died in 2015, Coleman stayed close to his roots. His small crew of collaborators included a couple of high school friends, saxophonist Dewey Redman and drummer Charles Moffett. A cousin from Fort Worth, James Jordan, produced Science Fiction; Coleman’s son, Denardo, drummed frequently for his father, beginning on 1966’s The Empty Foxhole, when he was just 10 years old. Other mainstays in Coleman’s numerous groups had backgrounds in the gradient of Black culture that bridged the Lone Star State and the Southeast, which gave glimpses of a wider, freer musical universe. His perennial right-hand man, Don Cherry, was born in Oklahoma; another trumpeter, Bobby Bradford, hailed from Dallas; drummer Ed Blackwell came up in the musically fertile crescent of New Orleans. Coleman’s sound was otherworldly, but he never left Texas behind.
Science Fiction is a welcome return to the singable, quintessentially Southern melodicism that counterbalanced his dauntless early oeuvre, but was increasingly absent from his more recent work. It also reflects the palette-broadening connections he forged at Artists House. By the dawn of the ’70s, free jazz had been a fixture for a decade. Fusion, which mixed jazz with electrified funk and rock, looked like a fertile new frontier. Science Fiction isn’t strictly a fusion record, but it is etched with the zeitgeist. Coleman incorporates vocals, poetry, amplifiers, overdubs, and a bevy of jazz customs he refracts through the trick mirror of his characteristically wonky arrangements. This seemingly shaggy digest from mid-life is in fact one of his most eloquent, succinct, and consequential statements: The album is a chronicle of a culturally fecund era, a diary of where Coleman had been since his Fort Worth days, and a star chart for where he wanted to navigate next.
Coleman had been criminally underpaid throughout the 1960s, like other avant-minded peers, and so he stopped touring domestically in the decade’s middle and reduced his recording to a trickle, allowing his collaborators to move on to other bands and projects. Artists House offered an answer to both his resulting creative fallow period and his constant fury at being cheated by club owners. The germ of loft jazz was the recognition that playing challenging music didn’t mean you had to be a victim of other people’s business models: Coleman and his acolytes may have lost money by putting on their own shows, but at least they lost on their own terms.
Science Fiction is fully on Coleman’s terms—it’s a kaleidoscopically personal experience, like a new home filled with old furniture and beloved mementos. Several compositions resuscitate and twist foundational traditions of his youth: blues (the opening bass figure on “Law Years”), bop (the frenzied horn races of “Civilization Day”), Dixieland (the staggered lead lines of “Street Woman”). Coleman reunited his early quartet of Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins for the latter two tracks, which from a different bandleader might scan as nostalgic, or otherwise like a glib marketing hook. But Coleman extends and upends their nuclear family by bringing new folks into the fold from song to song, replacing familiarity with the splatter of possibility.
The composer engages in a brilliant dialogue with his era, an exchange and not a prescription for change. On 1961’s Free Jazz, the release that named the genre, he employed two quartets playing at once. Science Fiction abounds with overstuffed, misshaped ensembles, but they feel like notions of what a band might be, not final destinations. Blackwell and Higgins pound at their drum kits simultaneously on the clamorous title track and a couple of spiritually soaring vocal features, “What Reason Could I Give” and “All My Life.” Fusion takes hold on “Rock the Clock,” which forefronts a multi-reed attack, as Redman blows a musette along with his tenor. The song deals in overdubs and, for the first time in Coleman’s recorded output, electric instruments: Haden’s wah-wah bass enters midway, accompanied by Coleman’s untutored violin, a shoutout to the fiddle customs of the American West. Yet “Rock the Clock,” like the surrounding record, refuses to lean on fusion’s signature 4/4 backbeat. Instead, Science Fiction offers a blend of approaches, temporalities, and traditions, melding the old with the new, the Texan and the Yankee, and especially the cosmopolitan and the rural. At heart, this is a suite of urban transplant songs, tracing a variety of styles that people—particularly people of color—brought to the cultural melting pot of Lower Manhattan.
Opener “What Reason Could I Give” features Asha Puthli, a fresh-faced New Yorker from India who would go on to be an eclectic and frequently sampled disco diva. Coleman had never recorded with a singer in the studio, but in proto-loft spirit he elevated an archetype from a prior iteration of jazz, the once-prized role of the vocalist, which was often eschewed by composers in the late 1960s and ’70s. Puthli brings to her two songs the embellishments of raga tradition, and also simmering, hungry emotion. Her vocals on “What Reason Could I Give” sound like the lamentations of a recent arrival in the city sitting on their fire escape after a tough day: weary, homesick, welling with melancholy. She sighs alongside a doubled-up brass section, toggling between dissonance and sweet harmony, her melody in search of a resting place. The title track layers samples of a baby’s wails, a sound familiar to any denizen of a cramped tenement. “My mind belongs/To civilization,” the phenomenal Harlem-raised poet David Henderson recites beneath the fray, a man trying to hear his own thoughts by speaking them out loud.
“All My Life” gleams with rosier fortunes: The love song feels like living someplace new long enough that it begins to seem hopeful. “To wait for you, I’m glad,” Puthli sings, and later, “Joy that I never knew.” Coleman, Redman, and New York Philharmonic trumpeters Gerard Schwarz and Carmine Fornarotto restate her vocals triumphantly on their horns. The presence of classical musicians is yet another example of Science Fiction’s uneasy relationship with jazz, its zigs and zags into space-age lieder, spoken word, and sound collage. Coleman’s initial innovations can seem quaint today, if you’ve absorbed enough of the avant-garde music that came in their wake. Science Fiction shocks, paradoxically, because it didn’t generate a totalizing revolution: It envisions culture as a field in which multiple strains could thrive under the wide umbrella of the vanguard, like fellow travelers making room for each other in the mountingly inhospitable landscape of ’70s New York.
The set is never laser focused, unlike Coleman’s own frame-shifting breakout albums, or other saxophonist-turned-auteur masterworks like A Love Supreme. The composer’s mid-career opus proffers a patchwork of celestial dreams, hurried bits of supernatural musical chemistry, and aesthetic left turns. Even the more “typical” jazz compositions push out toward impending styles. “Street Woman” is ostensibly orthodox because it centers around a head, squawked by Coleman’s sax and Cherry’s pocket trumpet. The song’s blues conjures an image, as though Coleman is observing a desperate scene from a park bench—a frantic counterpoint to the gentle melancholy of its spirit sister “Lonely Woman,” perhaps the best-known composition from Coleman’s early repertoire. But the solo sections on “Street Woman” unsettle expectation, miring us in Haden’s swampy bass and Higgins’ exclamatory drumming. This bottom-heavy minimalism reflects the stripped-down grooves of funk, and even predicts, albeit obliquely, disco’s eventual turn toward the grittier rhythms of techno and house.
Coleman’s economical renderings of urban claustrophobia echoed throughout the next decade of experimental music. All eight compositions sound like brief, profound sketches that point to the prospect of future expansion. Each style gets a moment in the sun; every ostinato repeats just enough times to imprint its contours on our minds. The album’s marriage of urbane resignation and wide-eyed artistic possibility points toward David Bowie and Brian Eno’s 1977 collaboration Low, which similarly introduced a slew of novel notions without harping on them, as well as Suicide’s self-titled debut, also a product of the downtown loft era. These projects forefront a metropolis’ buzz and refuse to either compromise or indulge: All that contradicts their conceptual severity is a frazzled, searching beauty.
Coleman continued to unspool Science Fiction’s aesthetic knot throughout his life. In 1988, the twangy Virgin Beauty again reached into the regional sounds of his childhood, and his dabbles with electric instruments and large, layered bandstands blossomed with the jazz-funk group Prime Time, who joined Coleman from the late ’70s until the ’90s. Perhaps the best proof that Science Fiction was the catalyst for Coleman’s second act is a long-unused session highlight, “School Work,” which he saved for 1982’s companion LP Broken Shadows. Its horn motif kept popping up, morphing into a symphonic arrangement on the superb Skies of America later in ’72, before it became the basis for much of 1977’s repetition-obsessed Dancing in Your Head. The exclusion of “School Work” from the original release is less a liability than a sign of Coleman’s vision. The tune may have continued to reverberate in his head, but its refrain-centric structure was perhaps one nod too many to bebop for the thrillingly motley Science Fiction.
In the mid-’70s, when loft jazz was at its peak, Coleman was forced out of Artists House. Prejudiced communities often used eviction, just Jim Crow wearing Northern garb, to persecute even the most exalted jazz musicians. His neighbors complained about noise, and the courts pushed Coleman from the ground floor, seizing on the semi-licit, predatory grounds of the original sale in the former industrial area. The law tried to strip his apartment from him, too, but after an excruciating legal battle Coleman managed to sell it. Unlike many of the jazz visionaries who followed him, Coleman had indeed made money from music—he was able to buy Artists House in the first place because he was one of the first composers without a classical music pedigree to receive a Guggenheim grant, in 1967. Yet by choice, habit, or maybe a less conscious impulse, Coleman spent the late ’70s flitting between cheap hotels and cold-water flats, a touch-and-go lifestyle he knew well from his first decade in NYC. Sometimes he slept in the back room of his manager’s office. Coleman invested much of his income back into his practice, and he gave to the poor and to people in his life; his exuberant, glorious wardrobe aside, he was unlikely to shell out on personal luxury.
He tried home ownership again in 1982, acquiring a building on Rivington Street near the East River, a former elementary school he envisaged as an “art embassy”—another benevolent dream in an unsympathetic society—that happened to be located at the epicenter of the Lower East Side’s drug trade. Well into middle age and eminent, Coleman was beaten multiple times and held hostage in his property during the several years he stayed there. The IRS targeted him simultaneously, claiming that he owed considerable back taxes, investigations he ultimately managed to skirt. Coleman had left behind the dangerous path of playing jazz in the South, only to face a new set of perils as a famous, eccentric Black composer in the largest cultural and financial hub of the North. Science Fiction is the most diverse and enduringly wild dispatch from an imagination that found joy and sustenance in itself, and was hardly wanting for public recognition—but also one that understood firsthand how the United States turns misery and terror into a persistent fact of life. Coleman’s art contains experiences that clash with the unwieldy brilliance of two quartets playing at once: a celebration of Afrofuturist reverie, a wallop of American realism.


Male Bonding's full-length debut cleans up the sound of their ultra lo-fi early singles but the music is still fast, noisy, and full of hooks.

Nothing Hurts

Male Bonding's songs are fast, noisy, and full of hooks, a combination that might remind you of any number of things: Nirvana-era fuzz-pedal stompers, 1990s American indie rockers, Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr. followers, not-quite-shoegazer English bands. Like a lot of those acts-- and like their contemporaries in No Age and Abe Vigoda-- Male Bonding started out making more abrasive music. Two of the three members used to be in the noise-pop band PRE, and the rich London scene they're coming out of-- a loose collective of bands with more of a common spirit than a common sound-- is full of scratchy post-punk, lo-fi fuzz, and hints of classic labels like Teenbeat, K, and Flying Nun. These are the kinds of foundational sounds that indie rock often turns back to when it needs to clear its head. But with Male Bonding, part of the treat is hearing them jump out of that and find room in the wide-open field where amped-up, rangy punk stuff collides with tuneful slacker pop. (Early on, they covered both Black Flag and Blur.) No surprise that they've wound up signed to Sub Pop, a label that built part of its reputation on that sound.
"That sound" isn't new, of course. It helps that Male Bonding are shockingly good at it, and remarkably efficient. The songs on Nothing Hurts are short, direct, pared down to essentials, and tightly packed-- with hooks, with changes, with instrumental fireworks. They move rapidly from zoomy rock to more atmospheric breaks ("Franklin"), and from a terrific run of loose, spiky gems in the middle ("Crooked Scene", "Weird Feelings") to some surprises toward the end. (The closer, a scratchy acoustic number, features guest vocals by Vivian Girls.) Frontman John Arthur Webb's vocals and lyrics can be a little hazy and non-committal-- often that's part of the charm-- but they're not really in the spotlight. Listening to tracks like "T.U.F.F." and "Pumpkin", you get the sense that this band's songwriting starts from the way their instruments lock together when they're playing in a room-- cymbal-bashing drum parts, chunky bass lines, and Webb's shattered-sounding guitar leads-- leaving this record as a fuzzy, no-nonsense, half-hour document of what they do.
And then there are the hooks. The hustle, the energy, and the sheer number of them make this an easy album to love-- especially if you're in the mood for some feedback, Nirvana moves, and punk-rock energy along with your melodies. One of the best comes during the killer chorus of a slack pop song called "Nothing Remains", which runs back and forth between a punk-rock build and a burst of high, cooing backing vocals; it's loose, noisy, and wonderfully graceful. Nothing Hurts is full of that kind of excitement: the sound of a fast, fuzzy rock band racing from hook to hook, plowing happily through breakdowns and guitar blasts, springing through scrappy melodies with style. It's one of the happiest surprises of the year so far.


On Deerhunter’s swaggering fifth album, Monomania, they almost completely jettison the dreamy ambience that usually characterizes their work in favor of straight-up raw, bleeding garage rock, populating the songs with junkyards, leather jackets, and motorcycles.

Monomania

Bigmouth strikes again: the latest target of Bradford Cox's verbal jabs was none other than Morrissey himself, but this particular barrage had a precision of intent that went overlooked by most online gawkers. "Have you ever read Morrissey's description of the Ramones?," he asked Buzzfeed. "I will always be on Team Joey, and Team Dee Dee. I come from America, where Bo Diddley was born!" While Deerhunter's always had a thing for indie rock advocacy, Cox's pointed patriotism was a new kind of stump speech, and in light of Monomania, his typically hilarious candor doubled as media savvy. On Deerhunter’s fifth album, they almost completely jettison the dreamy ambience that tempered even their noisiest work for straight-up raw, bleeding garage rock and populate these songs with junkyards, leather jackets, and motorcycles. The message from Deerhunter: We’re an American band.
So adjust your expectations accordingly, and if this sounds like the protracted playacting usually associated with Cox's work as Atlas Sound, you’re on the right track. The stable democracy of the past few Deerhunter albums has been upended; Josh Fauver left the band, and besides writing most of “Nothing Ever Happened”, his basslines kept Deerhunter rooted in proper rock. Meanwhile, after increasingly proving himself to be a top-notch songwriter in his own right, Lockett Pundt took advantage of a rare year in which Cox released no new music by dropping the excellent Spooky Action At A Distance as Lotus Plaza in 2012. His sole contribution on Monomania is “The Missing”, a fine piece of wistful, ringing indie pop that gets placed between “Leather Jacket II” and “Pensacola”, the album’s raunchiest songs. It could easily be seen as Cox defending his turf, if not for a hazy, meditative stretch during the middle of Monomania that sounds like his take on Lotus Plaza.
But while the songwriting power has become centralized, Monomania as a whole represents Deerhunter’s attempt to get outside themselves. This is particularly true of Cox; whereas on Cryptograms’ “Hazel St.”, he imagined what it might be like to fit in with the normal kids during his childhood in Georgia, years later, this dynamic is fully inverted and he’s found a group of outcasts that’s emboldened in their idiosyncratic embrace of a Dixie upbringing. You can hear the influence of neighbors/collaborators Black Lips in dirtbag storytelling like “Pensacola”, or just in the plain fact that Monomania is the first Deerhunter album that would be welcomed in a dive bar. Their previous physicality was defined by coiled intensity and quick strikes, whereas here they swagger and flex beer muscles. The perverted classic rawk riffs of “Neon Junkyard” and “Leather Jacket II” twist and yowl while “Back to the Middle” and “Dream Captain” are so immediately accessible, they could somehow come off as beneath Deerhunter.
The more prevalent inspiration comes from fellow Athenian and mentor Michael Stipe; you can hear echoes of R.E.M.’s Monster in both the obscene distortion and the decision to follow up their richest, most rococo record with a defiant squall. Cox similarly plays against his reputation given the opportunity, using winks and irony to deviate from the impression that his band’s music is somewhat humorless and sexless. It’s every bit as confrontational as Deerhunter in their dress-wearing, blog-attacking days, only more fun. This can manifest in the glammy stream-of-consciousness from *Monomania’*s opening duo (“I am the Queen of Bass,” he announces on “Leather Jacket II”), or any of the first-person narratives that make good on his purported Hank Williams and Bo Diddley listening. Taking as many liberties with “Werewolves of London” as Kid Rock, “Dream Captain” might come off as puerile southern comfort if it wasn’t such an obvious defilement of it-- bratty boasts like “I’m a boy, man/ And you’re a man, man” are tough to hear as anything other than comedy. Likewise, on “Pensacola”, an unfaithful woman leaves a Greyhound-riding somebody who is clearly not Bradford Cox with “a bald head and trouble.” Is it unfair that Deerhunter can get away with these because they’re Deerhunter, whereas it’s pure shlock from any number of southern rock revivalists? Perhaps, but having a laugh at one's own expense is hardly the most egregious form of an earned indulgence.
But while Monomania as a whole is an unpredictable fulfillment of an unforeseen whim, it’s Deerhunter’s least revelatory and surprising album on a song-by-song basis. There isn’t a clear showstopper along the lines of “Helicopter” or “Nothing Ever Happened”, though the title track makes an admirable effort. They’ve always had a knack for mantras, and after a verse of plaintive gospel shouts (“Come on God, hear my sick prayer/ If you can’t, send me an angel!”), the nagging phonetics of “mono, monomania” get repeated ad infinitum before dissolving into white noise, motorcycle revving, and a soap opera device that Deerhunter makes frequent use of: after all this time, Cox unexpectedly wakes up.
“I was a dream of myself,” Cox admits during “Nitebike”, a startling confessional of nothing more than his reverbed vocals and acoustic guitar. Perhaps taking another step back towards the medical maladies that pervaded both his youth and early Deerhunter, he imagines himself on his Big Wheels, “On the cusp of a breakthrough/ When they took me out/ And stuck it in/ It went so deep, man.” Another line gets repeated in greater detail on the Baudelaire-referencing closer “Punk (La Vie Antérieure)”, where Cox muses, “For a year, I was queer/ I had conquered all my fears/ Not alone anymore/ But I found it such a bore.” It feels something like Cox’s “All Apologies”, a litany of wearied, bemused dissatisfaction with everything that he presumed might save him-- getting drunk, being punk, friends, lovers. The plainspoken finality of “Punk” suggests it’s not just a closure on Monomania, but of everything that preceded it.
And that could be disappointing for a lot of people since Monomania is the first Deerhunter record that isn’t a quantifiable leap from what came before; the narrative and artistic arc that ran from *Cryptograms *to Halcyon Digest was clear and upward, their diametrically opposed centrist indie songwriting and diffuse, noisy ambience eventually converging into a brilliant horizon point. While a knocked-out, “back to basics” approach makes a lot sense as the follow-up to Halcyon Digest, it adheres to someone else’s idea of “basics” and follows the longest break between Deerhunter albums. But Monomania is certainly a strong effort on its own merits, and more importantly, they’ve avoided making their deflating “diminishing returns” record-- their King of Limbs, Centipede Hz, Transference, Sky Blue Sky, etc.-- that casts doubts about whether they’ve gone too far down the same path. They’ve pulled off something admirable in making an illogical left turn feel like the logical next step where one didn’t exist. For the first time since Cryptograms, Deerhunter’s next move will be harder to predict than Cox’s.


The Atlanta MC's third album is billed as a response to the nation's current economic crisis, but instead finds him appealing to his base: synthetic beats that drop like anvils, ad libs by the freight load, and all-or-nothing punchlines.

The Recession

Young Jeezy "fucks with John McCain," but he's an ardent Barack Obama supporter. This confused stance makes more sense after listening to the Atlanta MC's third LP, billed as a response to the country's current economic troubles. But really, The Recession relates to the recession about as much as McCain relates to pacifist immigrants; there's no mention of subprime mortgages or the credit crunch throughout its 18 tracks. Jeezy, like McCain and Obama, is a quality politician who knows how to appeal to his base. So instead of offering Economist-style predictions and Dowd-y editorials, Jeezy gives us a Jeezy record: synthetic beats that come down like anvils, ad libs by the freight load, and all-or-nothing Bald Bull punchlines. Like the world's most famous 72-year-old Republican, the rapper is trying to tweak a working formula to his advantage. If there's any sort of recession happening on the album, it's a mental one-- for the first time, Jeezy questions the world around him instead of simply reveling in it by any means necessary. And, like a certain history-making Harvard Law School alum, Jeezy is searching for change from the inside out while trying to maintain a superhero guise.
"It's a recession, everybody broke/ So I just came back to give everybody hope," huffs the street preacher on the title track. This is Young Jeezy the Savior-- the same guy who wore a Marvel-like seal on the front of his chest at a recent New York City concert. It's the guy who stacks his hoarse vocals in an effort to inspire and motivate on albums like The Inspiration and Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101. Minutiae is his enemy. After all, there's no time for Plato (or KRS-One) style philosophizing in 2008, when sound bites talk and your iTunes hotness pales compared to the Jonas Brothers. In this version of The Dark Knight, Jeezy is everyone: caped crusader, diabolical villain, jolly fatalist, big guy who surprisingly takes the moral high ground.
On the wicked Okayplayer bitch slap "Word Play", he drops a drug-selling campaign slogan ("You niggas want word play but I got bird play"), reveals his anti-matter approach as ingenious strategy ("I'm way too intelligent to play up my intelligence"-- still President Bush, take note), and floats democratic ideals before snatching them back with an iron fist ("If [Pac] had to pass the torch that bitch would go to me/ Now wouldn't you agree?/ Doesn't matter, I accept!"). A few songs later, on the regal "My President", he begins by throwing out his cue cards ("I ain't write this shit, by the way!") and suckering old-guard delegate Nas to finish things off sounding tinier than ever. Chalk up another win for the NYC outsider with the hearty guffaw.
But not even this highly inflatable rapper can solve all of America's problems with a tautological twist and a spirited "yeeeaaahhh!" Whereas he once supported going crazy, Jeezy's now thinking twice about a planet gone nuts on "Crazy World". Flip-flopper? You decide: "They want that Young shit, that dumb shit, that 'where you from' shit/ That ride around your hood with your gun shit," he starts-- whether it's a lament or a statement of purpose isn't entirely clear. He later considers swiping his "granny's nerve pills" before ending up at a "how many houses do you own?"-esque dilemma: "I want a new Bentley, my auntie need a kidney/ And if I let her pass her children never will forgive me." Apparently, Def Jam's health care package is kinda stingy.
The self-recession can be ridiculous, but it's there if you look hard enough. Though he's made mainstream inroads with cameos on tracks from Usher and Mariah Carey this year, "Hustlaz Ambition" has Jeezy retreating from the spotlight: "As far as award shows, we all know how that goes/ So what's all the doubt about, because he ain't sellin' out?/ Because he ain't givin' up?/ Because he don't give a fuck?/ I guess he ain't lame enough." While Jeezy may piss away his Grammy chances, he also allows Mr. Grammy Family, Kanye West, to spew Auto-Tune and steal all sorts of shine on stellar single "Put On". Between his verse's wrenching pleas to his late mother and mildly intimidating pick-up lines, West embodies the crazy world Jeezy is still too scared to fully admit exists. People like to see their heroes break down now and then.
The Recession is a third-term bid that can't help but repeat talking points of its previous incarnations. Bolstered by a gimmick and a catchphrase, the album is by-and-large Jeezy qua Jeezy, and the new fissures aren't enough to keep pundits gabbing. Nobody else can pull off this brand of big, and its singularity is noteworthy but oftentimes second-rate: "Welcome Back" was more welcomed when it was called "Standing Ovation" or "Hypnotize", and "Circulate" pulses Philly Soul like a less crazed "Go Crazy" or "Mr. 17.5". "I know I ain't there yet, just know I'm gonna be," says Jeezy during a rare moment of self-reflection. But where is "there"? A staid state of survivalism characterized by baseless crowd pleasing or something more dynamic, elusive and ultimately hopeful? The choice is his.


The French musician’s giddily maximalist solo debut maintains the spirit of his group Justice’s debut album; though inspired by ’70s prog and disco, it inhabits a singular universe of its own invention.

Escapades

If EDM had been created in the 1970s, it might have sounded like Escapades, the debut album from Gaspard Augé, better known as one half of French electronic duo Justice. Like EDM, Escapades is utterly in thrall to scale, an album of colossal gestures; like ’70s prog, it shows warm eccentricity and extreme melodic prowess. Escapades is, by some distance, the most ridiculous electronic album released so far this year, a giddy tour de force unrestrained by common sense or conventional tastes.
In the wrong hands, this improbable stew could have been stomach-churning. But Justice, Augé’s alma mater, have a history of turning the preposterous into the potent. Justice’s innovation in the ’00s was to turn rock music’s most ludicrous ideas—vast Marshall stacks and handlebar moustaches, the children’s choir on “D.A.N.C.E”—into an unlikely breath of fresh air for a European electronic music scene still recovering from the excesses of the late ’90s. Escapades proves that Augé has learned well from the day job.
The album is less abrasive in tone than the early Justice records that defined the duo’s sound—it’s incredibly sleek, for all its volume. But it maintains the spirit of Justice’s debut album, †: unabashed and unshackled, dance music stripped of the finicky trend-watching. “Force majeure,” the second track, builds to a climax of drum rolls and meaty synth lines that could level Shea Stadium; “Rocambole,” one track later, ends with an echoing piano note that appears to reference the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”—the kind of cheekily audacious, go-big-or-go-home pop plunder that can trigger a sharp intake of breath.
Escapades isn’t entirely stuck in a time warp. “Rocambole” takes equal influence from ’70s Elton John and producer Alan Braxe, a kind of Harold Faltermeyer for the French touch generation; “Pentacle” is reminiscent of Air’s proggy masterpiece 10,000 Hz Legend; and the ultra triumphant “Hey!” is contemporary only in so much as it references the same Giorgio Moroder records as so many current house records. On the whole, though, Escapades floats around in a singular universe of its own invention, like dance music whose only points of reference are Paul and Linda McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” and campy magic shows.
Escapades is maximalist to its core, but this isn’t maximalism in the Rustie or Venetian Snares sense of many things happening at once. Rather, every element is primed for enormity—a sandwich packed with hefty slabs of prime rib, rather than the sensory overload of experimental modern cooking. The album’s basic sound comprises synths, drums, and comically serpentine bass. But Augé and collaborators Victor le Masne and Michael Declerck spent a long time improving the sound of Augé’s original demos, availing themselves of the technological dreamland that is the late Philippe Zdar’s Motorbass studio. Escapades sounds gorgeous throughout: big but not overbearing; tender but not cloying.
The record’s melodies are also excellent. Much like Daft Punk’s Discovery (or, to a lesser extent, Justice’s third album, Woman), Augé calls on the European baroque tradition, as re-interpreted through prog rock or ABBA. For a largely instrumental record, Escapades is packed to the hilt with sharp hooks and clever melodic tricks, like “Captain” swerving in and out of a melancholy descending chord progression, or the operatic mid-section of “Belladone,” which sounds like a disco flip of Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky.”
At moments like these, you may find yourself singing along to the most unlikely of elements, twanging air bass with gusto and looking completely ridiculous. But what Escapades teaches us, more than anything, is that Adam Ant was right when he said that ridicule is nothing to be scared of. Augé may be hip, the kind of artist who can inspire a generation of club kids to sweat their brains out in ill-fitting leather jackets. But like all true style mavens, he knows that real panache exists at the opposite extreme from accepted notions of cool. Escapades is entirely in line with this gleeful approach, guilelessly reaching beyond musical norms to seek out ecstasy in the patently absurd.

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After a few lame actual records, Jadakiss responds with a surprisingly taut and triumphant mixtape.

The Champ Is Here 3

Jadakiss' most recent proper LP, The Last Kiss, was unmemorable save for its ability to move over 100,000 units in its first week. Those numbers wouldn't have generated much money, power, or respect during the LOX's heyday. For Jada-- in 2009's cratered rap economy, and coming off two heavily A&R'ed solo albums--  it was a commercial triumph. Kiss would go on to praise The Last Kiss as his best marketed album, and all the while, tracks like "Broken Safety" and "Cartel Gathering" had everyone else wondering if a record of nothing but vivid gun talk over grimy beats would've done just as well as all of those joints with Mary J. Blige and Trey Songz. It certainly would've been cheaper.
One of the year's most entertaining mixtapes, The Champ Is Here 3, now makes you wonder if it's a moot point anyway: If nothing else, The Last Kiss helped finance this. Like most of the best mixtapes around, Champ is informed by the spirit of competition, and it's no coincidence that boxing and basketball are the parallels to which Jada draws his own work. As with his best stuff, there's a pugilistic grace to his rapping here; nearly every line draws contact, but unlike associated "punchline" rappers, there's little wasted movement surrounding his pithier bon mots. Beyond proving Jada can create a cohesive document of his prodigious skill, Champ Is Here 3 combats some of the problems that have dogged him over the years. There's a run with instrumentals from the Game's "Bang", Young Jeezy's "Sky's the Limit", and Rick Ross' "Maybach Music 2" that suggest Jadakiss doesn't have the poor ear for beats after all.
This is unlikely to be anyone's introduction to Jadakiss, more likely to appreciate by his connoisseurs. And that's perfectly fine-- 90s East Coast rap mavens will appreciate Jada rapping over Brand Nubian's "Slow Down" and "Who Shot Ya", as well as Uncle Murda returning from the major label hinterlands to steal "Pussy" and "It's Whatever" with his absurdly hilarious brand of blustery ignorance. LOX historians can indulge in Jada and Styles' nearly unparalleled tag-teaming raps on "Top 5 Dead Or Alive", while Sheek Louch becomes increasingly entertaining in his delusion, boasting "I wore shiny suits when I was down with Diddy" as if anyone listening to a Jadakiss mixtape in 2010 was unaware of that.
The Champ Is Here 3 ain't perfect, but at least it's for the reasons mixtapes typically ain't perfect. Original tracks like "All Falls Down" make you wait out forced hooks for Jada to start rapping again, and are here to remind you why Jada's Def Jam records so rarely live up to their capability. Meanwhile Champ's second half is littered with also-rans-- the D-Block d-listers who are effortlessly eclipsed by Jada on "Coach of the Year", while Masspike Miles and inexplicable DJ Drama associate La the Darkman prove why they remain the definition of "bum-ass mixtape rappers." But with all that said, The Champ Is Here 3 serves as comfort as Jadakiss says things like "it's enough money for everybody" while talking about the proposed follow-up, *Top 5 Dead or Alive. *Maybe it'll be the fourth straight lame Jadakiss solo album, but isn't it a bit ridiculous that his followers complain that his retail albums are weak when his best work is available for absolutely nothing?


The “ICY GRL” rapper’s debut EP is a low-stakes but gratifying listen, full of witty one-liners and cheeky quotables.

High Maintenance EP

Saweetie has no qualms letting anyone know what she’s about. She’s tenacious and has little tolerance for anything, or anyone, that doesn’t get her closer to her goals. Within the first 30 seconds of her debut EP, she says as much: “Get into your bag, stay focused, and leave these bum-ass niggas alone,” the California rapper tells a member of the paparazzi on High Maintenance’s opening skit, offering a personal statement that doubles as a CliffsNotes preview of what’s ahead.
A native of the Bay Area who now lives in Los Angeles, Saweetie has documented her rap proficiency over the last year and a half by treating her Instagram followers to snappy video freestyles over beats like JAY-Z’s “Dead Presidents,” Iamsu!’s “By My Side,” and Migos’ “Bad and Boujee,” all recorded in her car. Her breakthrough 2017 single “ICY GRL,” a hookless stream of thought set to Khia’s X-rated classic “My Neck, My Back,” began the same way, and it remains a standout moment on High Maintenance. She reels off go-getter lines like “You tryna get a bag of weed/I’m tryna get a bag a week” and “Looking in the mirror, I thank God for what I’m about to be” with an unmistakable assuredness that gives the song a life apart from its source material.
The EP is built around that magnetic confidence, with verses that are concise enough to fit in a 30-second video, but injected with enough personality to last much longer. Her witty one-liners are perfect for fly captions, and her cheeky quotables are ready-made for nights when you’re feeling yourself or want to boss up on an ex. This is what hairflips would sound like if they made music.
For the most part, Saweetie’s lyrics strike a balance between relatable and aspirational, with her delivery setting a cooler, more restrained tone than those of many contemporary rappers. One exception comes on the brazen highlight “B.A.N.,” where Saweetie turns an old flame to ash with a fiery tirade. “Got your role models in my phone and they all wanna smash,” she raps, before adding the ultimate newly-single mood: “Ever since I cut you off, my skin glowin’ like Rihanna’s.”
More typical of the EP are “Good Good” and “23,” two playful tracks that share a flirty, insistent feel. The former is a demand for her love interest to pull up and stop playing games, backed by a whistling beat courtesy of the L.A.-based French producer CashMoneyAP, whose credits include Lil Skies’ “Nowadays” and YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “Love Is Poison.” Saweetie is similarly shooting her shot on the latter, but her use of a more narrative form sets it apart from the rest of the album. The hook features a lyrical nod to Nas’ “Oochie Wally,” one of many homages to Saweetie’s late ’90s and early ’00s influences. Another comes on the title track, a brief verse-only affair based around Too $hort’s “Shake That Monkey” that harkens back to her days of rapping in her car and includes a Big Tymers call-back.
At only 22 minutes, High Maintenance is a low-stakes but gratifying listen, revealing plenty about Saweetie’s ambitions, but little about the person behind them. Even without taking many creative risks, it’s an effective introduction to her strengths. If “ICY GRL” was banking on the laws of attraction and a little bit of faith to make her glam-life dreams come to fruition, this EP shows she’s already come close enough to start celebrating.


Exploding death metal into atmospheric and experimental new dimensions, the dream-doom duo’s monuments to melancholy have never felt so crushing or beautiful.

Song of Salvation

The guitar riff that introduces “Ecstatic Reign,” the 16-minute closing track on Song of Salvation, is a sad, wispy melody that sounds a little like distant birdsong filtered through a chorus pedal and amplified inside an empty church. When a slow-motion drumbeat enters, drowned in echo that suggests a noirish fog lifting from the cymbals, it also sounds a little like “Lazy,” a 1994 slowcore lament by Low. The landscape slowly fills with distorted guitars, gothic synths, and death-metal growls that sound like a volcano erupting. Within moments, you are fully immersed in the world of Dream Unending, the dream-doom duo whose monuments to melancholy have never felt so crushing or beautiful.
Before Derrick Vella was the guitarist of Dream Unending—or, as the liner notes credit him, the “Architect of Dreams”—we first met him as a member of the Canadian death-metal band Tomb Mold. In the mid-2010s, they emerged as one of several groups carrying the genre to wilder, artsier territory, taking notes from its most eccentric forebears to help shape its future. Across their increasingly ambitious catalog, Tomb Mold crafted songs that felt as likely to explode into pit-ready climaxes as collapse into murky, dead-space ambience. There was a shared sense among their bandmates that death metal—with its vicious tempos, dissonant melodies, and guttural, indecipherable vocals—was a means of channeling complicated, troubled emotions that would otherwise go unprocessed.
In Justin DeTore, the Innumerable Forms frontman who provides drums and vocals (in the credits, “the Bridge Between Two Worlds”), Vella finds a partner to further explore those emotional threads. Without death metal’s unrelenting speed and volume, and free to let the runtime of any given track wander into the double digits, Dream Unending is a place to wallow, wander, and explore. On a more traditional metal album, the horn-accompanied intro to “Secret Grief” (an homage to “Let’s Go Out Tonight” by the Scottish ambient-pop band the Blue Nile) or the downright gorgeous soloing in “Murmur of Voices” (which wouldn’t be out of place on an ECM release) might be relegated to a breath-catching interlude. On Song of Salvation, these are the destinations, glorious and uncharted in contemporary metal.
Where the group’s 2021 debut, Tide Turns Eternal, introduced these textures, Song of Salvation lives inside them and pushes beyond. Vella and DeTore formed the band as a means of experimenting outside their primary projects, and the pair created both albums remotely, in quick succession. Their collaborative process uses distance to its advantage (DeTore tracked his parts in Philly and Boston, while Vella recorded in Hamilton, Ontario). In each song, you can hear how a germ of an idea—take, for example, that opening riff of “Ecstatic Reign”—could unravel into a thousand different shapes given enough time and space and concentration; the songs themselves feel discursive, shapeshifting. The album’s structure—two bookending epics with a suite of three muted compositions in between—creates such a distinct experience that singling out individual tracks seems to be missing the point. This is the type of record you carve out space to listen to in its entirety, putting on your headphones and entering its world.
The cumulative effect is intense and a little dangerous if you are in the wrong mood. It only takes a few minutes before the atmosphere of Song of Salvation becomes clear. In the opening title track, Vella introduces the general tenor: spectral-sounding minor chords, stretched and embellished with deft picking—the sound of peering through a window at a gray-white sky. The song also introduces the average tempo at which DeTore operates: a doomy stutter whose minor variations can feel like sinking into a pit of despair (“Secret Grief”) or rushing into a triumphant gallop (the bracing finale of “Ecstatic Reign”). Because of these subtle shifts, and the record’s exquisite pacing, the music never feels monotonous, despite its deep focus and overwhelming gloom.
Under the heavenly swirl of electric guitars and slow, pounding drums, you can also hear traces of further collaboration, a means of making the band’s emotional palette more expansive. There are passages of spoken word—whispered overdubs in “Murmur of Voices” and a recitation in “Ecstatic Reign”—along with backing vocals from singer-songwriter McKenna Rae and warm, spacey keys provided by Vella’s father. As on Dream Unending’s debut, these touches sometimes lend an aura of new age, never quite tipping into pastiche but present enough to help distinguish the music from their death-doom influences and indicate that they are following no rule book but the one they are writing for themselves. In each moment, you can hear them striving for the light.


The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s third album, his most polished to date, covers the full spectrum of brokenheartedness.

Tomb

Dirty Dancing holds a special place in Angelo De Augustine’s heart. The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s mother, Wendy Fraser, sang alongside Patrick Swayze on 1987’s “She’s Like the Wind,” which soundtracked the romance between Jennifer Grey and Swayze’s characters in the 1980s classic. For De Augustine, a recent breakup heightened the song’s significance. Hollywood’s quixotic image of love also clashed with De Augustine’s personal history: His father, also a musician, left when he was five years old—an old wound reopened by fresh heartbreak.
With a woozy and unrequited eye, De Augustine analyzes the hereditary nature of abandonment on his third album, Tomb. His gentle vocal delivery, lyrical tenderness, and introspection feel familiar, particularly on a label helmed by Sufjan Stevens, who achieved all three on his last studio album. Similarly to Sufjan, De Augustine travels back to his past to square away ineffable loss in the present. On Tomb, he uses infectious pop melodies and spectral guitar work to frame patterns that recur across generations. Notably, “Bird Has Flown” grapples with his father’s absence, with muted piano and buoyantly plucked chords replicating cycles of pain and joy.
The hurt De Augustine examines doesn’t feel alienating. His sound is sympathetic and effortless. The resonance of acoustic guitar and roaming, arpeggiated melodies complement his balmy vocals. His hushed tone sometimes recalls early Bon Iver or Iron & Wine, but his ache is less apparent than the former’s, and he strays beyond the traditional folk that the latter is known for. Things get playful when an uncomplicated drum machine pulses in the background (“I Could Be Wrong”) or a bassline develops a casual swagger (“Time”). These simple instrumental flourishes make De Augustine’s music affable even when the lyrics’ distress suggests otherwise.
De Augustine is known for intimate, lo-fi recordings—he has even recorded in his bathtub—that personify vulnerability. But despite being his most polished full-length to date, Tomb shows him at his most candid and introspective. Trading his habitual fuzz for high-definition clarity, Tomb continues to emphasize De Augustine’s rustling vocals. Even though he’s grappling with heavy sentiments, De Augustine has a talent for cultivating calm. It is a private and ablutionary album, like retreating into a warm shower’s clouds of steam.
Many songs feel like unsealed letters to his ex-lover. From desperation to self-reflection, Tomb covers the full spectrum of brokenheartedness. “I Could Be Wrong,” a melancholy track apt for a Wes Anderson film, laments love’s illusion of permanence. In “Kaitlin,” someone who was once a source of solace triggers fresh agony. The title track, one of the album’s highlights, invokes the myth of Osiris, who was drowned and dismembered by his jealous brother Set. Reassembled and resurrected by his wife, Isis, Osiris ended up retreating to the underworld. As cited by De Augustine, it’s a chilling testament to the fact that love does not, in fact, heal all wounds. Still, despite the album’s dark, damp, sepulchral title, light manifests numerous times on Tomb. In the dizzying chime of his careful fingerpicking and high-pitched howls, De Augustine captures love’s bright blaze.


Easter embraces and rebukes rock’n’roll. It’s a love letter and a break-up letter all in one, the album that brought Patti Smith fame, the rebirth of her career, and her most controversial song.

Easter

In early 1977, the Patti Smith Group was on tour opening for Bob Seger, as part of Arista Records’ ham-fisted strategy to push Smith into the mainstream. She had just released her second record, Radio Ethiopia, while Seger was touring against Night Moves. While the PSG were steadfast in their resolve to win over the crowds, they were fighting a losing battle. Lenny Kaye—Smith’s guitarist and majordomo—would later say about *Radio Ethiopia, *“...that wasn’t an album of songs. It was an album of fields.” Fans who paid to hear “Rock and Roll Never Forgets” were not ready or willing to open their minds to Smith and her band’s mix of esoteric, ecstatic punk-flavored garage-rock, performed by a bunch of scruffy, black-wearing hoodlums led by a woman who conformed to no one’s gender expectations but her own.
At a Tampa stop in January, Patti Smith whirled into final bars of “Ain’t It Strange.” As the song reached its climax, she spun, lost her balance, tripped backward over a monitor, and fell off the stage onto the concrete floor 15 feet below. Miraculously, she did not break her neck, but she still emerged from the hospital with two cracked vertebrae, broken bones in her face, and 22 stitches to close the wounds on her head. Smith interpreted the incident as God’s response to her constant challenges (“I feel it was his way of saying, ‘You keep battering against my door and I’m gonna open that door and you’ll fall in’,” she told Melody Maker a year later); but in matters more mundane, her fall cancelled the tour and obviated any support for the struggling Radio Ethiopia.
Smith’s injuries would confine her to bed rest for weeks before she entered into intense physical therapy in lieu of spinal surgery. She took to the challenge of PT with gusto and insisted to her doctors and to anyone else who would listen that she would be ready by Easter Sunday. She even had a new poem, called “Easter,” as a representation of her return to battle.
After the commercial failure of Radio Ethiopia, there was an unspoken understanding that the next record needed to move Smith’s career forward. Smith was the first downtown artist to sign with an uptown label with her seven-album deal with Arista Records. She thought she could handle Arista’s demands by insisting (and getting) complete creative control, but she also understood that she would lose her access to the kids she wanted to serve if she was not able to translate her vision into something for the masses. “When we started, we believed we had responsibilities that nobody else was taking on, to take this work that erupted in the ’50s and take it somewhere,” she told Circus in 1978. This was the kind of statement for which Smith would be pilloried by peers and the press, but this wasn’t just a front—she meant it.
So after working with John Cale on Horses and Jack Douglas (Cheap Trick, John Lennon) on Radio Ethiopia, she chose to work with a new producer named Jimmy Iovine, because she liked what he’d done as an engineer working with Bruce Springsteen. It was a deliberate business decision, no matter that she would later insist that the album was “more communicative. I don’t like the words accessible and commercial.” Lenny Kaye would back her up: “There was no conscious drive to sell records, that was our last thought.”
It made sense that Smith and Kaye would publicly try to disavow intent. “Ambition” was a four-letter word downtown, even though every single band that ever set foot on the CBGB’s stage hoped that it was a step up. But Smith and Kaye were sufficiently immersed in rock’n’roll history to know better. If Easter hadn’t been successful, Smith would have been dismissed as a one-hit wonder, post-punk also-rans. Even as early as Radio Ethiopia, the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau noted that Patti was “caught in a classic double-bind: accused of selling out by her former allies and of not selling by her new ones.”
The band entered the studio in November of 1977. On the shortlist were songs that were road-tested, such as “Space Monkey,” “Privilege (Set Me Free),” and “Rock N Roll Nigger,” as well as a handful of newly written songs. “Rock N Roll Nigger” was both Smith’s original choice for the album’s title as well as for its lead-off single, which was naturally a nonstarter for the label, much to Smith’s dismay. Unfortunately, out of the material Smith had assembled for the album, it was the only song strong enough to be a single.
This was when Iovine went knocking on Bruce Springsteen’s door, asking about a certain outtake languishing in his archive. Smith was at first reluctant to even listen to the demo, wanting to write the record with her band. Iovine tried to sell her on the idea by suggesting that he loved the thought of a woman singing from a man’s point of view; Springsteen added that the song was in her key. One night, while waiting for a late-night phone call from someone she was romantically involved with, she decided to listen to the cassette, “...and the words just tumbled out of me,” she told Zig Zag later. By the time she recorded “Because the Night,” Smith already knew she had her hit single, and the rest of the album fell into place.
Smith could try as hard as she wanted to disguise or disavow her ambition, but Easter was not an accidental assemblage of material. It wasn’t an “album of fields,” it was an album of huge songs—songs that would effectively showcase the heart of the Patti Smith Group. So, yes, the album unironically opens with “Till Victory,” the kind of battle cry that made the cognoscenti roll their eyes at Smith and her band, and she doubles the cynicism by also using it as a petition to the mighty, announcing her return, and her intent: “God, do not seize me please, till victory,” Smith sings with the kind of iron-clad conviction that would make you follow her anywhere.
Even the cover concept was Smith’s twist on sex appeal; while it was probably the first major-label album cover to show a woman with unshaved armpits (which Arista tried to airbrush out), it was created with the object of selling records. After that inimitable Robert Mapplethorpe shot on the cover of Horses and the black-on-silver abstract by Judy Linn that graced Radio Ethiopia, for Easter, Smith went with Lynn Goldsmith, who had just founded the first photo agency that focused on celebrity portraiture. Smith would even tell Rolling Stone that she had masturbated to her own album cover: “I thought if I could do it as an experiment, then 15-year-old boys could do it, and that would make me very happy.”
But Smith’s version of “Because the Night” was an absolute monster of a hit. What she forged lyrically out of Springsteen’s unfinished, unwanted demo was an anthem of frank and unapologetic desire. In 1978, a woman wasn’t allowed to be an overtly sexual being in public unless she met the standards of the male gaze; if she did, there were always repercussions, and there would be constant attempts to diminish her power and/or her legitimacy. The fact that it went to No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was on every FM radio station, especially the ones who never played her before, was righteousness incarnate, as would be Easter’s eventual ascension to #20 on the Billboard 200.
The other love songs may not be as legendary as “Because the Night,” but their complexity is vital to the story being told on the album. The first line of “We Three”—“Every Sunday I would go down to the bar where he played guitar”—speaks absolute volumes. It is Smith’s history, it is rock’n’roll history, it is a quiet sentence whispered with a veneer of the innocence of early love, then immediately contrasted with a torch ballad, decisive and resolute, the expression of unresolved ardor, the saga of her relationships with Tom Verlaine and Allen Lanier. It’s not tragic so much tinged with the sadness of resignation, but it’s not the type of love song women had been writing.
Smith then flips the switch to “25th Floor.” This is when the woman in “Because the Night” takes out a match and lights the whole damn place on fire. “Love in my heart/The night to exploit/Twenty-five stories over Detroit,” she sings, tales of unabashed emotion in the ancient Book Cadillac Hotel in the Motor City, where she and Fred “Sonic” Smith had taken rooms. “25th Floor” then transmutates its closing ecstasy straight into “High on Rebellion,” the title of which is accurate and illustrative. It is about another important relationship, this time a treatise about Smith and her electric guitar: “...I never tire of the solitary E and I trust my guitar…” The band manifests its own chaos effortlessly behind Smith, before the exemplification of that solitary E fades out slowly.
On the subject of treatises, we come back to the literal black sheep of the album. “I haven’t fucked much with the past, but I’ve fucked plenty with the future,” Smith intones in “Babelogue,” plucked from Smith’s 1978 Babel, which firmly represents her artistic manifesto, issued with the pulsing energy of a heartbeat. “In heart I am an American artist and I have no guilt,” she cries as the music and the energy builds to a crescendo, before crashing head-on into “Rock N Roll Nigger.” The song is intensely rousing and absolutely spits fire, and as a rallying cry for those who feel like they were also “outside of society,” everything about the song is awesome except the title, which is the opposite of awesome.
Even in the ’70s, the slur was not something any reasonable person was going to feel comfortable yelling out loud, or feel comfortable standing in the middle of a large group of people yelling it out loud, even if the music and the performance are otherwise electrifying. Smith has been explicit over the years in her justification behind it: “The redefining of an archaic slang term as a badge for those contributing on the fringe of society was not favorably embraced,” she wrote in 1996. For someone as intelligent and empathetic as Patti Smith, this is the one moment in this otherwise triumphant record that just doesn’t make any sense. If, in 40 years, your attempt at the redefinition of a word that is pejorative and hurtful to a large part of society is unsuccessful, how, as an artist, do you not try something else?
The legacy of “Rock N Roll Nigger” overlaps with Patti Smith the iconoclast. Though Smith placed the song an album that embraces and subverts the vast spectrum of rock, underneath all of Easter is Smith’s ambivalence with rock as an art form. It is insufficient. The men for whom she wrote, the women for whom she sang, the labels to whom she catered, all are miniature underneath the soul of Smith which Easter captures in spite of the limits of rock’n’roll. A hint is hidden in plain sight at the end of the liner notes, a quote from the New Testament: “i have fought a good fight, i have finished my course…” are the last words of Paul the Apostle before his martyrdom. Smith may not have known that she would soon retire as “r.e.f.m.” (radio ethiopia field marshall), but the possibility was on the horizon, and it feels like she was trying to make her departure easier by leaving clues, early warnings for her fans that she was getting ready to say goodbye.


Their gothy sound is reminiscent of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Cabaret Voltaire, but on their first proper full-length Zola Jesus show a distinctive voice.

The Spoils

On their first-full length, Zola Jesus assert the potential of their earlier work, flex a bit more songwriting muscle, and shatter the idea that their style should make them a niche interest or a cult wonder. Their earliest singles, EPs, and CD-Rs were promising, with an immediately identifiable aesthetic and an obvious talent in singer/leader Nika Roza Danilova and her enormous voice. Though there were hints of more melodic directions on her earlier work (see "Nativity" from New Amsterdam), they were pulled in a few different directions, between structure and atmosphere, or vulnerable longing and stark, theatrical wailing. Their influences were impeccable, and the music, in nodding to avant-garde and proto-goth forbearers while using back-in-vogue bargain-basement production, sounded both familiar and fresh.
But The Spoils is much more than an exercise in reverence. No doubt that this record is a little gauzy-sounding, but it's not just making something sound new by making it sound shittier-- this is a potent mix of layered and otherworldly vocals, muddy electronics, and storefront-church keyboards that congeal until it's hard to pick out where one instrument ends and the other begins. When the tension swells, there's no volume that gets turned up or pedal that's kicked; it just suddenly feels more anxious, often terribly so. The muffled industrial beat of "Six Feet (From My Baby)" sounds like someone dragging student desks up the stairs, with watery drones and Danilova's powerful wail. It's familiar ground for the group, until the synths come in at the minute mark with a brief melody, setting up a push-pull dynamic between a familiar swoon and an anchorless anxiety in the verses.
Even as the record veers away from songs and structure toward creepier pieces that concentrate on mood and tone, the music never loses its visceral impact. The backward effects and wordless upper registers Danilova explores on "Sinfonia and the Shrew" are as compelling as they are disorienting, and the piano from the fragile interlude "Lullaby in Tongues" is even pretty, while closing tracks "In Hiding From the Crow" and "Tell It to the Willow" are as unsettling as intended. But when the album's haunted feeling sneaks in an emotion like yearning, it moves from compelling pastiche to a sucker-punch to the gut. The Spoils is compelling throughout, but the peak comes much later in its runtime, with "Smirenye" and especially "Clay Bodies". The distorted keys of the former sound like chimes over Danilova's sweetened vocals and the song's dogged mid-tempo beat, and the simple wedding-march piano of "Clay Bodies" is overwhelmed by clattering percussion-- though none of it ever distracts from the vocals. Nearly anything Danilova sings sounds like a matter of life or death, especially so on these later tracks; the words are almost beside the point.
Yes, some will lose patience for the scrappy bedroom/basement production on display here. But that's no reason to preclude anyone from hearing The Spoils; the intensity of its emotion is real, and given its theatrical roots, it never veers into cartoonish exaggeration or caricature. Danilova exhaustively charts these emotions while creating temples out of stray sonic parts to house them in, creating something distinctive out of sounds often explored and emotions commonly felt.


On Universal Themes, Mark Kozelek's songs are longer, the hooks are fewer, and the observations are less profound and less likely to have you reflecting on your own life. It is ultimately a spotty album from a guy who has released a lot of spotty albums.

Universal Themes

A decade ago, it would have been hard to imagine Mark Kozelek's Sun Kil Moon as a project embroiled in online controversy. Since Red House Painters evolved into Sun Kil Moon in the early part of the last decade, almost everything about the latter band was low-key and under the radar. Kozelek often toured alone with his nylon-string acoustic guitar, his music was generally slow and quiet, and he released a great many records that were happily received by his cult and mostly ignored otherwise. But nothing about the band seemed keyed into the now or connected to the churn of digital culture.
All that changed in the last 18 months, for two reasons. One, Kozelek noticed that the stupid things he'd been prone to saying for many years (what has been described as a "sense of humor") could have a life outside the concert hall, from calling concertgoers "hillbillies" to picking fights with other bands. And two, in the last five years Kozelek's music has become diaristic in the extreme, which allows the mundane details of his life to enter his songs, lending them a bloggy quality. At times, these two streams came together in an ugly way, as when he wrote and released a single called "War on Drugs: Suck My Cock" and, more recently, when he disparaged a female journalist (and Pitchfork contributing editor) from the stage in London. The end result of these developments is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to imagine Sun Kil Moon's music outside of how it, and he, are discussed on social media. And since Mark Kozelek's music is so specifically autobiographical, and because he is the central character in each of these songs, it's doubly hard for his behavior not to have some impact.
Even setting all that aside, if Mark Kozelek had spent the last year and a half playing his music and—to reference a lesson he supposedly learned from his father in Benji's "I Love My Dad"—minding his own business, Universal Themes would still be a disappointing record. The songs are longer, the hooks are fewer, and the "then I did this, then I did that" observations are less profound and less likely to have you reflecting on your own life. It's ultimately a spotty album from a guy who has released a lot of spotty albums.
Universal Themes does have a certain amount of experimentation; some of it is almost proggy as it moves through sections and adds and removes textures while Kozelek plays with instrumental breakdowns. "With a Sort of Grace I Walked to the Bathroom to Cry", for example, pivots between spacious arpeggiated acoustic segments to what is more or less "hard rock," even if the latter is unconvincing. "Ali/Spinks 2" has a middle section of Sonic Youth-like guitar screeches that sounds a little out of place considering how relaxed and minimal the rest of the arrangement is. There's plenty of time to add these wrinkles: the eight songs average almost nine minutes each, and in a few of them you feel every second as it ticks by. Even so, a few tracks, despite their length, make no impression even after many listens. "Cry Me a River Williamsburg Sleeve Tattoo Blues" is a funny title in search of a song, while "This Is My First Day and I'm Indian and I Work at a Gas Station" is an unfunny title in search of a delete key.
Still, the fact is, no one else writes songs like this, and when everything clicks, Kozelek's music can still be moving. Opener "The Possum" uses an image of a wounded rodent as a jumping-off point for a meditation on life, death, friendship, and the beauty of the struggle through it all. "Garden of Lavender"—which really is, in part, about a garden where Kozelek is growing lavender—has some lovely guitar arrangements and manages to convey the ineffable feeling of time passing and living inside of a moment while also watching it happen from the outside. But these are exceptions. For the record as a whole, the fact that Kozelek is droning on in so much detail is more interesting than what he's actually saying. There are many, many words, but, unlike with Benji, they add up to very little.
Benji remains a one-off masterpiece because it's the place where Kozelek's rambling style cohered around a concept, the perfect meeting of content and form. The narrator of those songs seemed vulnerable, like he was risking something by putting it out there, and the stories of life and death were riveting in part because they seemed so familiar. It was a record of a particular time, place, and circumstance, and it was sonically as well as thematically coherent. It was also a record in large part about others, of Kozelek looking outward and trying to figure out what made people tick and what they cared about and what their lives meant, even if the answers weren't always clear. Here, there's nothing at stake. Universal Themes moves in the other direction, away from connection, and it pulls inward. It feels claustrophobic, a world drawing in on itself and getting smaller and smaller.


On his sophomore LP, the Manchester-based electronic producer again pushes batida into hazy new territory with an unusually subdued interpretation of the sound of his native Lisbon.

Código de Barras

Unlike the howling sirens that opened A.k.Adrix’s debut, the chaotic and aggressive Album Desconhecido, the Portugese electronic producer’s second LP begins, instead, with a deep breath: tender “ooh-oohs,” delicate piano trills, and syncopated beats that crackle like static. It’s soothing, and by almost every measure, a surprise. Adrix and the record label Príncipe Discos are closely affiliated with batida, the raucous, electric, turbulent sound that booms throughout nightclubs and block parties in Lisbon’s projects and slums. The style tends to explode with urgency and defiance, but Código de Barras is considerably less extreme, smoothing the sharp edges to an after-hours sheen. It’s a notable albeit curious departure from batida’s thunderous, disruptive core, but such mutations are inevitable in hyper-local strands of dance music. Besides, it’s captivating to hear this sound rendered with such melody and warmth.
Adrix, formerly known as P. Adrix, was never a purist anyway. A Lisbon native of Angolan descent, he moved to Manchester, England at the age of 19, in 2015, and soon began incorporating elements of the UK underground into his Afro-Portugese palette. Album Desconhecido, released three years later, connected disparate traditions, intermingling kuduro, kizomba, and zouk with grime, jungle, and drum’n’bass. On Codigo de Barras, which translates to “bar code,” he continues this evolution, bending batida’s feverish rhythms into dense, hypnotic atmospheres. Using sleek synths, sensuous soundscapes, and playful polyrhythms that bubble and shake rather than clang and collide, he reveals a groovier side to batida—one that casual listeners can more easily sink their teeth into.
Accessibility was not always the point. Príncipe’s releases are often dizzyingly complex, a signal to outsiders’ ears that this particular Afro-club hybrid is an inherently local sound. Core catalog cuts like Puto Tito’s “Melodia Daquelas” or DJ Marfox’s “2685” harness free-form energies, with spiky synths and spiraling flutes that ricochet aimlessly, while Nídia’s S/T sounds almost militantly percussive. Preserving this dissentient spirit has been important to the label, a way to show respect to the immigrant communities who have cultivated batida in response to Portugal’s racial tensions and colonial past. As Nídia told the New York Times in 2018: “When something comes from the ghetto, it can’t come softly.”
So how do Codigo de Barras’ pastel sketches fit into this bold-type mission? The answer appears to be in the shading. Despite their relative softness, these short, experimental songs are able to stimulate more nuanced emotions than brasher iterations of batida ever could: restlessness, suspicion, mischievousness, delight. Adrix seems curious about aggression’s limitations; what else might you hear, or feel, if you lowered the volume? His heady, inquisitive compositions, each hovering between two and three minutes, feel like attempts to fill in the edges. The balmy “Positividades” evokes an almost beachy atmosphere, melting syncopated rhythms into the surrounding synths. “Ambient Spirituale” and “Espuma Nocturna,” meanwhile, are dusky vignettes that turn inward, conjuring images of the natural world in gusts, ripples, and chirps. The laid-back pulse of “Ritmo Surfista” (“Surfer Rhythm”) finds a companion in “FL Studio, Obrigado,” a tune with flute-like synths and maracas that sounds like something you’d hear in a thatched-hut retreat. In these moments, it’s possible to forget the unbridled tension that typifies Príncipe’s lineup and consider batida in a more relaxed context.
The album’s highlights, however, arrive in songs that leverage that unique tension into something exciting and new. “X50” is an irresistible, off-kilter, chopped-up club banger with an energy that belies its rhythmic complexity. And “Desenhos Animados” (“Cartoons”) is a revelation—a minimal symphony of woodwind melodies and asymmetrical beats that sounds at once precise and wholly spontaneous. Occasionally, it’s hard not to feel like something has been lost—bite, rebelliousness, a sense of rage—as Adrix has drifted further from batida’s boisterous center. But even if dissent is no longer his driving creative force, his curiosity is palpable. Innovative, left-field interpretations like this will propel the sound forward.

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I suspect it's somewhat mauvais temps, but let me first sing the praises of the Goldfrapp website-- more specifically ...

Black Cherry

I suspect it's somewhat mauvais temps, but let me first sing the praises of the Goldfrapp website-- more specifically its "history" page, which depicts a brilliantly detailed goth nightmare. In a wintry forest, a human with a crudely pasted-on horse head embraces a dog, frost breath issuing from its snout. In the background are two wild boars, and upon contact with your cursor (mouseover, in the HTML parlance) the beasts lift off, rise several feet in the air and proceed to dangle there, irritated. It's not a terribly functional page-- one boar bears an MP3, another a video-- but it's one of the most distinctive I've ever seen, a formidable piece of art in itself.
And the inevitable segue: I wish I could say the same about Goldfrapp or their new album, Black Cherry. The bestial spookiness is there-- disturbing woman-dog hybrids are all over the booklet, and "Wolf Lady sucks my brain" is actually a prominent lyric of the first single-- but that's it. This platter of overproduced come-hither electropop is a polyester successor to the band's silky 2000 debut Felt Mountain.
Continuing the sartorial analogy, vocalist Alison Goldfrapp's purr is still decked out in the sexiest sonic lace money can buy: swooping string passages, languid sampler bleeps, whooshing pads, double bass. These are, by now, pretty rote signifiers of sophistication; while the loungy orchestration of Felt Mountain didn't raise any flags at the time, Black Cherry's oh-so-timely shift to electro beats will make many scream "ambulance chasers!" Add my reluctant voice to that growing chorus.
From the title on down, the new CD tries hard to conjure an ambiance of languid sin-- opium, absinthe, vintage porn-- but that aesthetic is just a few steps from your average bachelor pad with a zebra throw and ceiling mirrors. In fact, that's where copies of this album will inevitably spin, a soundtrack to excruciatingly banal seduction.
The songs themselves, though hard to see through all this velvet fog, are a grab bag of trendy tactics. The first single "Train" is an ancient shuffle, rendered in quantized beats and fuzzy synths. You may recall that Liz Phair used this idea on "Baby Got Going". Goldfrapp's lyrics (opening line: "Plastic brain scar/ I want laser") are probably supposed to bewilder, but instead they annoy. On the mellower end, the title track sounds like early Air, and "Tiptoe"-- the strongest song on the record-- mightily recalls Tori Amos circa From the Choirgirl Hotel. (Pardon the barrage of direct and obvious comparisons, but the songwriting is faceless enough to warrant it.)
It couldn't be more ironic, then, that it's Black Cherry and not its predecessor that's truly broken the Brit duo in the homeland, netting them a Top of the Pops appearance and a place in the charts. The bad news is that the opacity of Goldfrapp's intentions will turn against them: they could be first-class ironists, but that will hardly matter when Alison's soft coos begin to lull customers into buying $200 panties at Agent Provocateur.


The Dutch quartet undercut their perky, grunge-lite melodies with just the right amount of pop-fuzz aggression.

Boat

Since the dawn of the internet, multitasking has become a way of life. In her namesake four-piece band, 23-year-old Amsterdam native Pip Blom cleverly weaponizes lapses in concentration to craft perky, grunge-lite melodies. “I’ll watch a documentary while playing guitar,” she explained earlier this year. “When I play something on my guitar that stands out more than the documentary does, then that becomes something I should use.” While she’s immersed in stories about interesting people or mental illness (her preferred choice of docs), a hypnotic melody or peculiar chord progression pushes to the front. These become the quartet’s thumping heart: moody riffs, steady post-punk percussion, and ebullient hooks that sink deep.
The catchiness and ease of the songs on the band’s debut album Boat overshadow the self-aware lyrics. Blom’s vocals, although clear, are undercut by just the right amount of pop-fuzz aggression. Boat is an enjoyable and uncomplicated listen, but it’s hindered by the sense that the production and vocals are built on top of each other, instead of building space for each other. Some songs feel rambling, while others have clear conviction. On standout “Bedhead,” lethargic strums and tempered drums build around Blom’s vocals in perfect symbiosis. “I woke up, felt like I never slept/No one knew what was wrong,” she sings, describing a mental exhaustion that goes well past everyday grogginess into a dark, depressive hole. Her voice comes closer during the chorus, strengthening the band’s scruffy pop with emotional intimacy.
In the rustling urgency of “Daddy Issues” and the zig-zagging laxity of “Sorry,” Boat offers many crisp, cozy moments. Throughout, the band teeters between themes of distraction, isolation, and victory over apathy. On “Ruby,” Blom sings about the dilemma of finally recovering: “The worst days are all over/But now that I feel fine, I don’t know what to do with all that time.” Whatever scenarios surround these new feelings are mysterious, sometimes sinister. Elsewhere, Blom seeks to numb her emotions as she prepares to act on an unnamed mistake—seemingly one of passion. A grimy bassline lurks like a devil on her shoulder, urging her to follow through. “Caught off guard by feelings/I felt happy,” she sings, with eerie perplexity during “Tinfoil.”
Blom has said that it’s fine if listeners don’t hear all her words; she “finds the melody more personal.” By focusing on melody, their greatest strength, the band also emphasize their struggle to fully captivate. The songs on Boat are comfortable but far from the irreverent edge of the earlier singles like “School.” Some tracks have the excitement and magnetism of an encounter with a fascinating stranger, while others are merely pleasant. There’s solace in distraction; it can be satisfying just to let the noise wash over you, whether it’s an obscure documentary or a pacifying wave of distortion. There is no grand thesis or groundbreaking concept on Boat, but Pip Blom provide a welcoming nook for spacing out.