The South Florida native’s second album is a tribute to the regional raves of her youth, filtered through the wide array of global club styles that defines her style as a DJ.

Call for Location

The cover of Jubilee’s Call for Location may be adorned with an illustration of a gecko—a salute to the South Florida native’s tropical upbringing—but perhaps a chameleon would be more appropriate. Jubilee (Jessica Gentile) has largely built her name in the DJ booth, adhering to an old-school approach and adapting her sets to the requirements of the room. Dancehall, hip-hop, UK bass, electro, hip-hop, R&B, Miami bass, grime, reggaeton—it’s all in her crate, which might help explain why she’s just as comfortable playing an Opening Ceremony fashion event as she is a Fool’s Gold hip-hop party or a Mixpak bashment rave during London’s Notting Hill Carnival. While her music (and her gig calendar) may be varied, there are two constants in her work: fun and a serious love of bass.
The Mixpak label crew, Jubilee’s primary affiliation, is a perfect home for her genre-hopping sensibilities. Headed up by Dre Skull, a producer who’s worked with Popcaan, Vybz Kartel, WizKid, Burna Boy, Future, Santigold, and numerous others, Mixpak has been at the forefront of bringing the dancefloor sounds of the Caribbean and the global South into the larger international pop sphere. Jubilee has been releasing music with the label since 2012, and her first album, After Hours, dropped in 2016. A largely instrumental affair, the LP pulled heavily from the bouncy electro, breaks, and Miami bass that soundtracked Gentile’s youth, while also offering some woozy trap cuts and a delightful bit of dancehall pop (“Wine Up”) voiced by Bronx MC Hoodcelebrityy.
Three years later, Jubilee has returned with Call for Location, a title that flashes back to the hotlines that once guided her along many late nights out as a teenage raver in South Florida. Musically, the album occasionally nods in that direction, particularly on “Disconnected,” a thundering bass-techno hybrid that pairs its relentless low end with a cascade of synth stabs that could have been lifted straight off a 1990s UK hardcore record. The nostalgia is palpable, but the track’s beefy construction is more than suitable for a modern dancefloor.
Echoes of Miami appear elsewhere on the album, most notably in the snapping breakbeats of LP closer “Let Go,” the churning rhythms of “I Don’t Think So,” and the buoyant, pastel sounds of “Call for Location,” which sounds like an ideal soundtrack for cruising down Collins Avenue in a white Cabriolet with the top down. “Speed Limit” opens with a drum pattern that could have kickstarted an old freestyle record, but then suddenly shifts gears with a sinister bassline and a series of warbling, drawn-out synth melodies that wouldn’t be out of place on a Dorian Concept or Jacques Greene production.
These kinds of hybrids help make Call for Location not just an enjoyable listen but also a stronger album than After Hours. At this stage in her career, Jubilee has learned to harness the best bits of her influences, but she also knows how to transcend them, bringing in other sounds and genres that she’s encountered during her many years in the DJ booth: grime, dancehall, hip-hop, breaks, ambient, synth-pop, and countless flavors of electronic music, some of which are a total surprise. “Liquid Liner” is a stompy, industrial-leaning techno romp whose dark and crunchy EBM rhythms have got pretty much zero to do with South Beach.
More impressive still are the LP’s three singles, all of which feature guest vocalists and return to the same sort of pop (or at least pop-adjacent) territory Jubilee traversed on “Wine Up.” While many dance producers struggle to work with MCs and singers, Gentile understands that success with these kinds of collaborations often requires stripping things back, laying a sturdy foundation, and then largely getting out of the way. “Shots,” a dreamy, heads-down tune excellently voiced by South London grime MC P Money, might be the best of the bunch, but the bubbling pop dancehall of “Fulla Curve” is similarly excellent, with UK artist IQ sing-rapping over the song’s warmly sashaying riddim. “Mami” also has a bit of a dancehall feel, albeit with a more rigid, electronic strut and a healthy dose of fierce bilingual sass from Bronx vocalist Maluca.
As a DJ, Jubilee has long been fusing seemingly disparate genres into single, cohesive statements, but on Call for Location she applies that same skill in the studio, often within the context of a single track. Whether or not she heads further down the pop production path—and with her Mixpak connections, one would assume that door is open—Jubilee has already focused and sharpened her work without having to cut loose any of the elements that make her a special talent.


Celebrated with an elaborate new box set, their 1967 pop-art experiment remains the band’s dark-horse favorite, when they were scrappy enough to laugh at themselves but strong enough to write the music that would define their career.

The Who: The Who Sell Out (Super Deluxe)

The Who Sell Out (Super Deluxe)

The Who’s early catalog offers a crash course in what to look for in any worthy classic rock discography: the cinematic song cycle, the tour-de-force live album, the music-as-healing-force-of-the-universe masterpiece, the mythologically overambitious lost album, the rarities comp that rivals the greatest hits set. It is a fitting legacy for Pete Townshend, their guitarist and primary songwriter, who was not only making up the rules as he went along but also coining the terminology, from “power-pop” to “rock opera.” From the beginning, he was one of the genre’s first practitioners-slash-scholars, a self-aware believer in his own myth.
He was also among the first artists to strike gold from a total lack of inspiration. Exhausted and frazzled from a tour with Herman’s Hermits in summer 1967, he surveyed the material that he and his bandmates—drummer Keith Moon, vocalist Roger Daltrey, and bassist John Entwistle—had amassed while the label grew increasingly impatient awaiting their third album. There was “Pictures of Lily,” a recent single he considered placing as the centerpiece. (He even had the title to go with it: Who’s Lily.) There was “I Can See for Miles,” a sweeping anthem he imagined would be their next big hit. And then there was… some other stuff: a cover of “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” an instrumental called “Sodding About,” a story-song that slowly revealed itself to be a deodorant ad...
Rewind the tape—that’s it! Pad out the tracklist with a few radio jingles, arrange some product placements for the cover art, and we’ll call it The Who Sell Out. Cobbled together by their manager Kit Lambert, the pop-art experiment was released in December 1967, just months after the BBC introduced Radio One to replace pirate stations like Radio London. As a result, the concept also worked as a loving tribute to the institutions where the Who first found an audience. Even if the radio-broadcast structure mostly crumbles after side one, the songs form another landmark in the Who’s catalog: the moment before 1969’s Tommy solidified their place in rock history, when they were scrappy enough to laugh at themselves but strong enough to write the music that would define their career.
The dark-horse favorite in their catalog, The Who Sell Out is the latest recipient of a Super Deluxe Edition, spanning five discs, two 7" singles, and a book of essays and ephemera. The first two discs are your basic mono and stereo versions of the album, tacked with familiar addendum from previous reissues. The third disc is a collection of related studio material: outtakes, alternate versions, isolated elements. The fourth set guides us through the music that arrived as they began working on the record that would become Tommy. The 17-month gap between these albums was fruitful, and some of the material here, written before Tommy’s narrative was developed, was actually due for release on its own (working title: Who’s for Tennis?). The best and most essential part is the fifth disc: Townshend’s solo demos, scratchy and awkward, like a novelty private press album by someone with far too many ideas to capture on tape, on his own.
The good news is that it all holds up. Minus the eternal “I Can See for Miles,” none of these songs found a permanent home on classic rock radio and so they belong entirely to this album, unburdened by decades of overplay. Maybe that is why The Who Sell Out remains such a charming, even surprising, record: It is the one that feels most relevant to the Who’s influence on ’90s indie rock—bands like Yo La Tengo and Guided by Voices who learned from its collage-like flow, classic songcraft, and smart, surrealist humor. From the psychedelic opener “Armenia City in the Sky” to the operatic mini-suite “Rael,” the Who would never again sound so lighthearted and playful.
As evidenced by the bonus material—attempts at hit singles next to earnest anti-smoking ads, repeated efforts to capture the ringing chaos of their live show alongside in-joke studio concoctions—the Who were desperately searching for their next move. Even the album proper is something of a mixed bag, with Townshend taking an uncharacteristic amount of lead vocals, and guest writer Speedy Keen singing alongside Daltrey in “Armenia City in the Sky.” In other words, they were a band in transition. And while songs like “Dogs” and “Faith in Something Bigger” on the post-Sell Out disc suggest more ambitious work to come, Townshend’s original demos offer the clearest insight: His solo arrangement of the harmonies in “I Can See for Miles” and the frantic jangle of his guitar in “Glow Girl” showcase a musician coming into focus, testing the limits of his equipment, pushing toward the future.
In his liner notes, Townshend is humble about this period in the band’s history, describing the Sell Out concept as a gimmick to distract from a “rather pathetic selection of tracks.” This box sometimes affirms his position: Mostly comprising recordings that fans have known for ages (a live set would have been appreciated, even if most of these songs never became staples of their set), it results in multiple takes of the same song sequenced beside each other, sometimes giving the feeling of a data dump more than a carefully curated listening experience. Of course, the jokes about cashing in have always been part of The Who Sell Out, even when these guys were in their early 20s, already seeming burnt out and older. The magic is that they were able to flip their exhaustion into something so full of life. When Townshend first heard the album front-to-back, he remembers laughing out loud, “partly with joy, partly in awe.” Separated into its core elements, more than half a century later, it can still elicit the same response.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Wrekmeister Harmonies' newest collection of sacred choral music, experimental ambient, and doom finds J.R. Robinson taking a developmental leap forward in all three arenas. It features contributions from Marissa Nadler and members of Einstürzende Neubauten, the Body, Indian, Anatomy of Habit, Come, and Twilight, among others.

Wrekmeister Harmonies: Night of Your Ascension

Night of Your Ascension

We don't always recognize it, but the ability to hold back until precisely the right moment is crucial to the act of making even the most concise or chaotic forms of music. As listeners, we both expect music to adhere to familiar formulae while also teasing our ears with traces of the unexpected. And, as with foreplay, certain artists are just more skilled at extending climaxes into exquisite torture.
On Night of Your Ascension, it takes a full 15 minutes of guest vocalist Marissa Nadler's chanting within a funereal 16th-century/Renaissance-styled organ/string/choral arrangement before elephantine guitar chords and drums come crashing through the mist. Even if you listened to this album without any context, you would get a sense that it was building up to something. And if you're aware of the backstory or personnel going into it, you'll no doubt wonder when the metallic element is going to rear its head. Either way, Ascension tests your patience in the best possible sense.
Like Wrekmeister Harmonies' two previous albums, Night of Your Ascension consists of madrigal/sacred choral music, experimental ambient music, and doom. This time around (thanks to help from arrangers Eric Chaleff, Cooper Crain, and Sanford Parker), J.R. Robinson takes a developmental leap forward in all three arenas, but it isn't until the beginning motif of the second track "Run Priest Run" where all these disparate elements actually blend together, in a passage that lasts in excess of 8 minutes and could easily have appeared on Hundred Waters' last album. Before being gradually overtaken by electric guitars à la the title track, "Run Priest Run" initially fulfills the potential that Wrekmeister Harmonies show on paper as a 30-plus member ensemble drawing on musicians from metal, rock, and new music circles.
Alongside Nadler, harpist Mary Lattimore, electro-acoustic sound artist-composer Olivia Block, and Alexander Hacke of Einstürzende Neubauten, the album features members of the Body, Cave, Indian, Bloodiest, Anatomy of Habit, Come, Twilight, and Mind Over Mirrors. Robinson leans heavily on these musicians to flesh out his compositions and give Ascension its shape and character. For the title track, Robinson nods to 16-century Neopolitan composer Don Carlo Gesualdo, whose experimental approach to madrigals pre-dated widespread use by a good 300 years.
Gesualdo is also infamous for murdering his wife and her lover. Robinson bases the first half of the title track on Gesualdo's techniques which, incidentally, influenced Igor Stravinsky and inspired author Aldous Huxley to describe Gesualdo's work as "a kind of musical no-man's land." The juxtaposition between the tune's classical and doom modes is clearly meant to invoke a sense of the friction between Gesualdo's towering creative presence and the internal torment that drove him to commit murder. Likewise, for "Run Priest Run" Robinson looked to the case of Boston Catholic priest Father John Geoghan, who was accused of sexually abusing over 130 boys, convicted, and murdered in prison in 2003 while serving a life sentence.
Once aware of these narrative backdrops, the atmosphere on Night of Your Ascension (and in particular the black metal-styled vocal screeching on "Run Priest Run") becomes charged with a dread that elevates this music above the ho-hum gestural negativity of other doom outfits who sound like they're reaching for something to frown over. Robinson draws from real-life tragedy and sexual pathology and does his earnest best to honor the nuances of each case. At the same time, this album's obvious equation of heaviness to violence and psychological despair comes off as heavy-handed.
Nevertheless, Night of Your Ascension faces rote themes like killing, death, and despair from a fresh perspective that aspires to be illuminating. It's also, strangely enough, an album listeners can use to make new friends. Given the way Robinson disposed of musical boundaries to put this music together, it spurs the audience to do the same practically by default. If you're into experimental rock or metal, Night of Your Ascension naturally incites curiosity about madrigals and Renaissance composition. The same applies in reverse. If your tastes fall in any of those areas, you can use this album as a bridge to another world by walking up to someone across the aisle and asking "Have you heard this? What's your take?" It's bound to be a lengthy, engaging conversation, not unlike the album itself.


Get open or go for the dance floor? That's the big question for so many producers when it comes time to produce a full length. Cooly G has made music in both directions. This EP is back to her more OG roots as a post-dubstep producer, but it's mixed with the personality of her newer, quieter releases.

Armz House EP

When given the opportunity to craft their first solo full-length, some electronic producers veer from the sounds and the scenes that first made them popular. Consider Maya Jane Coles, who first rose in the electronic scene making deep house. Her 2013 solo debut effort, Comfort, retreated from standard, four-on-the-floor, bringing in moody, rousing elements of trip hop and dubstep. George Fitzgerald made a similar departure with his debut Fading Love earlier this year, foregoing the instant likability of early singles "I Can Tell (By the Way You Move)," or the addictive depths of "Magnetic" for a more smoothed-over mood.
Cooly G (born Merrisa Campbell) seems to have fallen into this impulse as a delayed reaction. Her first two solo albums, the beautiful, righteous Playin' Me and the eerie and sensual Wait 'Til Night, were singer-songwriter experiments, ones in which Campbell used music as an outlet for and compliment to her sexual reawakening. Blending icy-cold synths with vulnerable lyrics, she speaks profoundly to women within the electronic music scene, evoking the simultaneous terror and power of long nights, either alone or in the comforting arms of a lover. It felt uncomfortable but necessary, the kind of sound you can’t immediately turn away from even if its complicated internal wiring is difficult to comprehend.
That is why it was frustrating to find Campbell pulling back the reins on herself – her openness, that now-signature rawness – while listening to the Armz House EP. This is the club-ready Cooly G of old. She told the Quietus recently that she wanted to find a way to work her vocals back into her club sets, and her solutions seems to treat them like another tool, mechanically inserted into the mix rather than front and center. Most times, her voice is barely perceptible: Her whispery coos appear for only a handful of seconds on "Tippin B" before they are overwhelmed by her pointed use of synths and drums.
Most of the time, this restraint pays off.  The addictive tension of album closer "Horrors in the Dance" sounds  like the pushing and tearing of strong muscles. Both Playin' Me and Wait Til Night were the sort of records one sits with alone rather than dances to, but Armz House, from its first few seconds, aims hard at dancing crowds while keeping the sensuality of her previous records. "Booboo" is a cheeky and energetic club banger featuring at least three vocal samples, echoing the energy and nimbleness of "Horrors in the Dance". If you arrive at Armz House expecting a journal of her emotions, you will be disappointed, but Campbell displays a mastery of her form here that's impossible not to admire. She pushes her songs to their limits and then pushes them a bit more, making complicated tracks sound and feel simple. Even if the results aren't as showy or bombastic as her peers, she still manages to ultimately make music that is, while not perfect, very fun. For dance music in 2015, that has become an increasingly rare feat.


On a sleek and subdued new album, A.C. Newman takes the lead and reflects on the isolation of modern life.

The New Pornographers: Continue as a Guest

Continue as a Guest

After 20 years, it’s hard to stop calling the New Pornographers a power-pop supergroup, even if neither is really true at this point. Dan Bejar and Neko Case have ceded creative control almost entirely to A.C. Newman, now the sole songwriter and house producer. The music itself has tamped down the unruly exuberance of their peak for an amplified version of the wry, singer-songwriter fare typical of Newman’s solo work. But for the first three minutes of Continue as a Guest, it’s a new New Pornographers, hitting like a ton of feathers. The uplift of “Really Really Light” takes after its title, radiant and buoyant, yet its origin story pops the balloon: Newman admits it was salvaged from a Bejar hook left over from 2014’s Brill Bruisers, the last album from their classic three-headed monster lineup.
Bejar made it a hot line—Newman made it a hot song. As he has for most of the past decade, Newman treats pop as an artisanal pursuit on Continue as a Guest, writing for connoisseurs who appreciate the science of bubblegum as much as the flavor. Even the most immediate moments bear the assumed weight of countless revisions and tweaks, the original emotional core of each lyric meant to be puzzled out like a crossword clue. Newman’s fastidious, occasionally fussy writing ensures a level of quality control as he tinkers around the margins, even if his bandmates never quite catch the spark. Where recent records showed a cursory curiosity toward Brill Building pop and krautrock, the most notable upgrades here can’t help but reiterate Bejar’s absence. Whether it’s the guitar-free sophisti-pop of “Cat and Mouse With the Light,” the title track’s oily bass leads, Newman’s sly lower register on “Last and Beautiful,” or the featured role of saxophonist Zach Djanikian, the New Pornographers have never sounded this much like Destroyer.
The upside is that Newman’s benevolent autocracy allows a single, discernible perspective to emerge—a personality that runs deeper than “power-pop supergroup.” Though the songs rarely say it outright, there’s a general sense that Newman has many thoughts on the Way We’ve Lived since the group’s last release in 2019. “On three, we burst through the Overton window/And fall through the kaleidoscope of your mentions,” Case sings on the fizzy “Pontius Pilate’s Home Movies,” thankfully the only time Newman’s cerebral writing goes full Twitter brain. Besides, it doesn’t get its point across as effectively as the album’s understated title. The existential quandary of “continue as a guest” resonates for anyone resigned to participate in the online world without fully surrendering your identity to it.
The creative process mirrored a familiar work-from-home hybrid, with Newman workshopping arrangements in isolation and collaborating in unconventional ways—exhuming scraps from a decade ago, a “pen-pal” style co-write with Sadie Dupuis on “Firework in the Falling Snow.” In a generous mood, the subdued and synthetic sound of Continue as a Guest suits the subject matter. “Bottle Episodes” tips its hand in being a meta exercise on lockdown living, spending nearly four minutes trapped inside a single melody. But the monotony of the more ambitiously conceived “Marie and the Undersea” and “Wish Automatic Suite” doesn’t come off as intentional: You keep waiting for something other than the same old group harmonies or buzzy keyboards to cut through the clutter and express how anyone actually feels.
The New Pornographers never needed to rely on confession or candor to achieve that end. “Sing Me Spanish Techno” remains perhaps their definitive anthem, a testament to the power of music to transcend language, effectively replicating the transformative ecstasy of its namesake without sounding anything like it. But even if it’s judged against “These Are the Fables” or “The Fake Headlines” or whatever your platonic ideal for a wistful New Pornographers ballad, Continue as a Guest exposes in absentia how they once tapped into the big, sloppy emotions of pop music without succumbing to its obviousness. They achieved it through the second-hand thrill of seeing songwriters at the peak of their powers in friendly competition. There was also the force of drummer Kurt Dahle, who always kept New Pornographers in the physical realm when things threatened to get too heady. For all the lyrical meditations on emptiness and isolation throughout Continue as a Guest, what’s no longer present speaks loud and clear.


The Atlanta singer-songwriter’s latest record taps into freewheeling acoustic jam-session vibes. It’s ostensibly a breakup album, but rather than spilling her guts, she sounds more reserved than ever.

Faye Webster: Underdressed at the Symphony

Underdressed at the Symphony

Don’t ask Faye Webster about her dog. She will only reveal his breed off the record, and she’s suspicious that locals in her town have already learned too much. “My neighbors know his name/Thought that was weird but I’m over it,” she sings halfway through her fifth album, through a vocoder’s digital mask. Her protective impulses extend beyond her beloved pet. The Atlanta singer-songwriter finds ways to experience music away from the public eye, dropping in unannounced as the bassist for local punks Upchuck and ducking into the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra at the last minute; the latter habit inspired the title of her latest record. On Underdressed at the Symphony, she frequently steps back from the mic and allows her band, or occasionally just silence, to fill in the empty space. It’s a record about hiding—from heartbreak, from fame—that, whether through vocal processing or omission, fittingly obscures Webster from view.
Webster began building a richer sound around her wispy, honeyed vocals on her 2022 EP Car Therapy Sessions, where she brought in a 20-piece orchestra to cover songs from her previous two albums. For Webster, the EP was a chance to lose herself in the music swirling around her confessional songs: “I would just forget lyrics or forget where I am because I was listening to [the orchestra] play,” she said. But where that album accentuated the ethereal qualities of her songs, Underdressed at the Symphony emphasizes the naturalism of her songwriting, building melodies with a grand piano, a drum kit, and an electric guitar.
Gone are the sweeping synths that provided a cushion for her diaristic musing; this time, Webster leans into the acoustic sounds of a freewheeling jam session. Her backing players—many of whom have been performing with her since her early days—take steps into the foreground. On “Wanna Quit All the Time,” where she admits that “it’s the attention that freaks me out,” yawning pedal steel and sparkling Fender Rhodes seem to speak in her stead. Here, as on the similarly impressionistic “He Loves Me Yeah!,” she brings in a new voice to help further obscure her own: the sound of Wilco’s Nels Cline on the guitar, plucking out elegant solos where another verse might otherwise go. “Lifetime” stretches the repetition of a single phrase—“in a lifetime”—into something like jazz, Charles Garner’s drumming keeping a loose pace as Nick Rosen’s piano carries the song to its quiet conclusion. As Webster tells it, she didn’t want the song to end, so she asked Rosen to keep it going through subtle chord changes. The extended coda lets her linger in the shadow of his piano a little longer, an audience to her own private symphony.
This is loosely a breakup album, but Webster is loath to discuss the dirty details, either in lyrics or interviews. The quips and pithy one-liners that captured her tangled views on love and friendship on previous records are largely absent here, replaced by simple phrases or single syllables, repeated endlessly. Her longest songs—“Lifetime” and “Thinking About You”—reveal the least, their lyrics like set dressing for the band to take center stage. When she’s at her most verbose, guest features and the dense distortion of a vocoder serve as a shield. “Lego Ring,” featuring Webster’s childhood friend Lil Yachty, offers relief from the somber themes across the rest of the record, as she leans into the playfulness of Yachty’s processed vocals. On “Feeling Good Today,” Webster buries her anxieties about fame behind electronic manipulation. The closest we get to a glimpse into her relationship is “But Not Kiss,” an “anti-love” song that uses a single word—“Yeah”—as its chorus. “I want to sleep in your arms,” she croons before the second half of the sentence delivers the blow: “But not kiss.” Sparsely written yet powerfully delivered, commanding in its patience, it’s a signpost for where Webster's music might go next, one that uses her voice as another instrument in an ever-growing orchestra, rather than the conductor at its center.
If you previously came to Webster’s music for her lyrics, this album might seem like a retreat. But if you, like Webster, feel most at home in the warm glow of a band in the pocket of a groove, Underdressed at the Symphony delivers just under 40 minutes of gentle melodies and extended jams, a soft landing pad after the end of a romance. It’s understandable that the vulnerability that accompanies a breakup might have encouraged Webster, already averse to fame, to take a step back from the spotlight. But there are also moments where her voice is sorely missed; it’s hard to not dream of a world where these rich arrangements made a home for her sharp writing, as they did on her orchestral EP. Here, Webster isn’t so much underdressed as overshadowed by her own symphony, but that might be by design: On Underdressed at the Symphony, Webster seems most comfortable singing in silhouette.


Ryan Adams' latest pair of releases show off the duality of the artist—the straightforward singer/songwriter, and the rascally punk, that is. His self-titled LP offers a nice, 1980s-imbued twist on the singer/songwriter mode; the 1984 EP plays like a super-obscure hardcore EP that you might find in a crate at the back of an ancient record store.

Ryan Adams/1984 EP

There are two versions of Ryan Adams out there in the world jostling for your attention. There’s the singer/songwriter who plays it straight and, on some level, tries to appeal to a mainstream audience that still buys records—that’s the Ryan Adams who duets with Sheryl Crow and records albums like Gold and Easy Tiger, which are so precisely and tastefully wrought that they come off as almost lifeless. And then there’s the unreformed punk who loudly broadcasts his love of hardcore and black metal, who impulsively announces he’s quitting music just weeks before he releases another EP, who records a theme song for his website. This Ryan Adams releases one-offs like the Finger’s We Are Fuck You / Punk’s Dead Let’s Fuck and the metal sci-fi concept album Orion—most of which are funny-ha-ha for one or two listens, then are forever shelved.
Because they both fit a bit too perfectly into our preconceptions of selling out and keeping it real—concepts so old-fashioned in 2014 that they’re difficult to even type with a straight face—superficially, these two doppelgangers ought to exist in direct and even deadly opposition to one another. It’s not hard to imagine Ryan Adams the punk gobbing on Ryan Adams the serious singer/songwriter, and who wouldn’t buy tickets to see that? But the reality is, thankfully, much more complicated. Each Ryan Adams needs the other in order to survive in the music business; soundtrack placements, after all, bankroll hardcore EPs, which in turn provide a creative outlet for the kind of aggression and humor that aren’t typically prized by the roots-rock crowd.
These two Ryans duke it out on two of his new releases. The aptly titled Ryan Adams is a Ryan Adams album, not too far removed from his last few LPs even if it jettisons the twangy Americana for a different, darker, but no less historically grounded sound. The EP 1984 is the first in his Pax-Am Singles Series (which are essentially 7-inch billboards for his Hollywood studio) and lives up to its name by evoking the hardcore punk of the mid ‘80s. While these two releases seem to represent very different sides of the notoriously multi-faceted artist, they actually have a great deal in common. Both mine the past for inspiration and allow that inspiration to determine more of how the music sounds than it should, and both prove that there are no fine lines separating the various Ryan Adamses.
Released as a limited-edition 7” that quickly sold out in roughly an hour, 1984 wants to play like a super-obscure hardcore EP that you might find in a crate at the back of an ancient record store, stuck with bubblegum to the back of Negative Approach’s Tied Down. The playing is fast and furious, the tone predictably nostalgic, as Adams indulges his taste for musical extremes. Yet, for all its aggression and speed, the EP ultimately sounds like a bunch of catchy Ryan Adams songs played at twice the normal speed and truncated before they hit the two-minute mark. Slow them down, drag them out, and you’ve got a Cardinals album.
But the hardcore milieu imposes an intriguing set of restrictions on Adams, who played all the instruments himself. He knows the genre allots a very short amount of time to get his point across, so he arranges these songs to grab your attention quickly, either with a sharp guitar riff or an exaggerated vocal melody. He hits the first note of “What If You Were Wrong” almost before the song even starts, and he sings like he’s trying to outrun the scissoring guitars. "Change Your Mind" is all hook, condensed and concentrated, and “Rats in the Wall” flails wildly, barely holding together, until it explodes in a sample of broken glass. 1984 sounds like an exercise, a test to see if he can pare his songwriting down to its barest essentials: a straightforward lyrical sentiment, a catchy melody, and an off-the-cuff performance. Even though the EP ends up sounding repetitive and therefore much longer than its 15 minutes, Adams emerges as a careful craftsman with clear affection and reverence for the genre.
If that seat-of-his-pants release reveals Adams the punk as a serious artist, then this carefully planned self-titled album undercuts any self-seriousness he might possess as a singer/songwriter. On the cover of Ryan Adams, he looks perfectly stoned or possibly lobotomized, his hair exploding in the kind of bedhead bouffant that requires a lot of time and product. Even the title is delivered with a wink. Is that font Bryan Adams Serif Bold? Adams is too much of a rock nerd for that to be an accident, so it’s possible he’s trolling with a deliberately “bad” album cover for an album of well-crafted and well-behaved tunes released on Norah Jones’ label.
If the packaging is suspicious, the music itself offers a nice twist on the singer/songwriter mode. This time around, he’s less interested in the blah folk rock of the 2011 LP Ashes & Fire. In fact, with its murky production and throwback guitar sound, Ryan Adams sounds like it could have been recorded at any time between 1979 and 1987. There are period-specific nods to deep-cut Bryan Adams, Kenny Loggins, even Robbie Nevil and Richard fucking Marx. “Stay With Me” could be a synth-era Tom Petty tune, its snappy guitar theme recalling the Heartbreakers’ jangly dynamic, and “I Just Might” rustles up a rough guitar lick to conjure the Springsteen of "Brilliant Disguise". “Don’t wanna loose control, baby, I just might,” Adams sings in his best Bruce, but the song is so laden with specific references that it’s clear he’ll never have the chance to get too wild.
There aren’t your obvious touchstones, at least not for a guy sporting an Emperor backpatch on his denim jacket. Most of the time, Adams gets the sound just right without being too obvious about it, but some of these songs—specifically “Shadows” and “Let Go”—sound like they were written to fit this particular triangulation of influences. As a result, the rock-historical allusion rather than the music becomes an end in itself. On the other hand, Ryan Adams is a persuasively dark album, one defined by themes of struggle, instability, isolation, and regret. He sings like a man who knows something bad is going to interrupt each song. Adams may spend most of “Am I Safe” telling us that he’s having thoughts instead of telling us what those thoughts actually are, but that clipped acoustic strum conveys a potently jittery paranoia that says a lot more than the lyrics. On “Tired of Giving Up”, he admits that he’s “tired of giving up” and “tired of fighting,” as though this particular crisis offers no other options.
It seems impossible that Adams has never written a song called “My Wrecking Ball” before now, but that tune may be the best song on Ryan Adams, its austere arrangement conjuring the mood of a late-night drive to nowhere in particular. Musically, it recalls the directness and eloquence of Heartbreaker updated for 2014. “Hey, you’re my wrecking ball,” he sings, “won’t you come and maybe knock me down?” Perhaps he relishes the idea of romantic obliteration, perhaps he dreads it. But the song’s world-weariness is so intense that such destruction might actually revitalize him by giving him a chance to start over, build from the ground up, write, sing, and record with no preconceptions from himself, his fans, or anybody else. Ryan Adams may shed the confessional impulse in Adams' songwriting, but “My Wrecking Ball” plays like a deeply personal expression of creative paralysis and renewal.


On its debut album, the New York band’s expertly contained noise-rock din is the perfect foil to frontman Cole Haden’s white-hot charisma.

Dogsbody

In Model/Actriz’s music, sex is everywhere and might sound like anything—a meltdown in a crowded train, a terrible fight heard through the wall, the crunch and squeal of two colliding cars—but never, at any point, does it sound like very much fun. Lead vocalist Cole Haden howls about bodily desire as if it were a loathsome, all-consuming affliction: “With a body count/Higher than a mosquito,” he wails on “Mosquito,” the album’s first single and statement of intent. Lust as contagion, as predation, as Biblical plague: Both as performer and writer, Haden aims to make a harrowing, provocative, often hilarious mess of all of it, and succeeds wildly.
Although Dogsbody marks their debut full-length, recorded largely during the pandemic and released via True Panther last week, Model/Actriz have been stunning small New York audiences since their formation in 2016. Live, Haden prowls the stage and wanders into the crowd to confront audience members, while behind him, the band unleashes an unholy but expertly contained clatter and blare, Ruben Radlauer’s drums and guitarist Jack Wetmore’s sculpted shrieks merging into a single sensory assault. “Everything is a drum,” said bassist Aaron Shapiro succinctly when asked about the band’s approach.
On the surface, their sound recalls early-’00s New York dance-punk bands like Liars, but Model/Actriz are a touch too haunted to slot neatly into the ongoing “indie sleaze” movement. The lyrics sheet writhes with clenched palms, bit lips, shut eyes, ragged breaths, trickling fluids—sex scene as slasher film, as Grand Guignol. Haden has told interviewers that he started writing their “sex positive” material while still a virgin, and the lyrics ring with the wide-eyed terror and religious ecstasy of recent initiation.
Haden doesn’t sing, exactly. He declaims, his delivery landing somewhere between impassioned moan and battlefield soldier’s dying grunt. “Delicious/And everything’s gushing/Ripe and crimson,” he mutters on “Mosquito.” “All night/Me and my wretched device,” he shrieks in “Donkey Show.” Some of the lines are so ripe they feel ready to drop off a tree: “Doric colonnades leading up the drive/Staring down the verdigris covered faces of the divine.” If there was a wink in his delivery, the whole thing would collapse into giggles, but Haden’s devotion to his chosen aesthetic is unblinking and fearless. He’s the perfect host, a magnetic and unlikely blend of Joel Grey from Cabaret and the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow.
Haden has cited the musical Cats as lifelong inspiration and said the album is meant to “feel like my life, as a cabaret: a very earnest, kind of ridiculous, melodramatic, homespun opera.” In the album’s most charged moments—on the subdued “Divers,” for instance, when he whispers the line “I seem to find it/But not within myself”—he sounds earnest, even operatic. But it’s a measure of the band’s swagger and confidence that the word “ridiculous” never once suggests itself.
The players’ precision attack and Haden’s white-hot charisma help explain how a band so devoted to stirring up bad neurochemicals winds up offering such a tremendously good time. Any exploration of hedonism’s rot and underbelly ought to contain a fair helping of hedonism itself, and Dogsbody is a party, no matter how panicky and wild-eyed. The songs are sequenced like an extended mix, with some tracks fading directly into each other—the final line of “Crossing Guard” (“Oh it feels like/Oh it feels like…”) segues directly into the first words of “Slate” (“...Like pressure”). At the teeth-grinding climax of “Crossing Guard,” Haden invokes Gwen Stefani and Lady Gaga (“Germanotta”) asking for them to “pull the weight from under me.” It’s a spiritual callback, maybe, to the “Greta Garbo and Monroe” bit from Madonna’s “Vogue,” a roll call of pop-cultural saints. Haden has called the album “a violent ode to the explosive joy of being alive,” and in moments like these, you feel the will toward communion rearing its head in even the darkest and ugliest of corners.


In the big leagues now, one of the architects of lo-fi house tries to class up his goofy name with a four-track EP and a high-def vision.

Aphelion EP

Dance music loves a tempest in a teapot, and few have whistled louder over the last few years than the dust-up over lo-fi house. The term popped up around 2015 to describe a wave of producers like DJ Boring, DJ Seinfeld, and Ross From Friends, who lacquered moody vocal house in tape hiss and racked up millions of plays practically overnight. Their memetic nostalgia attracted the kind of extremely online fans who were probably commenting “a e s t h e t i c” on Chuck Person videos six months prior, and rankled the usual suspects, who picked up a whiff of ironic detachment.
A little fun never hurt anyone, but purists had a point when they argued that this scene seemed more like an exercise in re-branding familiar house tropes for Gen Z audiences than a truly fresh sound. In fact, lo-fi offered a fascinating case study of how songs that fuse several common genre elements—say, house beats and nostalgic R&B samples—receive an advantage from the machine learning algorithms that drive music discovery on streaming platforms. That’s why Ross from Friends’ “Talk To Me You’ll Understand” pops up so often in your recommended tab on YouTube.
Despite their initial struggle to be taken seriously, the lo-fi producers’ schtick masked real ambition. “I think my name is very far down on my list of ‘things that are important about my music,’” Ross wrote during one climactic battle (read: Twitter spat with a blogger) in the lo-fi wars. In fact, his real name is Felix Weatherall, and he’s from Colchester, UK, but he’s right that this is beside the point. Arguments about whether he and his peers “really mean it” have faded over the last 18 months, as they’ve released a stream of solid tracks on crucial labels and emerged as genuine stars on the club circuit. Weatherall, for his part, recently signed to Brainfeeder and played live at Berghain’s hallowed Panorama Bar.
He’s in the big leagues now, and the four-track Aphelion EP feels like an attempt to class up his goofy moniker with la-di-da cover art and a Greek non sequitur. (An aphelion is “the point in the orbit of a planet, asteroid, or comet at which it is furthest from the sun,” FYI.) The effect is of a self-conscious bro trying on his dad’s itchy tweed blazer before an intimidating date. That’s fine—artists deserve the chance to reposition their brand upmarket, as long as they have the tunes to back it up.
Weatherall’s older material used sepia-toned tape hiss to gesture at nostalgia. Yet the simplistic compositions never seemed to pin down what exactly he was nostalgic for, beyond a blurry idea of “the ’90s, man.” On Aphelion, he wipes the fog off his lens and a widescreen vision blossoms into focus. Keys drip with detail. Synths shimmer. Kicks and snares land with a 4K thwack.
Lead single “John Cage” is a holdover from an old hip-hop project that Weatherall started with a friend named Guy. The song’s moving parts unfold with a patient logic. A sample from a daffy guided meditation exercise introduces billowing new age textures. Pitch-shifted vocals, via Guy, warble a jazzy lullaby. Seagulls squawk in the background. Synth streaks accent the mix with oversaturated hues familiar to anyone who’s ever spent a psychedelic afternoon at the beach, staring at the sky.
The most forgettable track is the one most indebted to lo-fi tropes. “There’s a Hole In My Heart” has a sweet, yearning vocal, but its 4/4 shuffle never really goes anywhere, and Weatherall falls back on drowsy chords you’ll recognize from a zillion Soundcloud mixes. I prefer the limpid electro bauble “March,” which is basically a DJ Stingray tune in relaxed-fit sweatpants. Some may be partial to electro with more gas in the tank, but in Weatherall’s hands a little syncopation goes a long way.
Best of all is “Don’t Wake Dad.” The beat flirts with R&B; in fact, it sounds like a friendly ghost that’s crawled into the warm hollow of a memory-foam mattress only recently vacated by N.E.R.D.’s 2010 masterpiece “Hypnotize U.” I couldn’t stop humming “touch it girl, touch it girl, touch it girl, ahhh” when the break comes in.
Then, just when you think you’ve got it figured out, Weatherall unleashes a blast of beatific sax. It’s schmaltzy and totally disarming, like something you’d hear at a rave thrown by the Life Is Good™ stick figures. Here we have the clearest picture yet of what a Ross From Friends track should sound like: hands in the air, tongue in cheek, heart pulsing on its sleeve.


This thoroughly modern folk singer continues his stunning recreations of classic folk, with help from Ben Frost, Nico Muhly, and Beth Orton.

I See the Sign

Sam Amidon's idea of recomposition-- of excavating Appalachian folksongs; rearranging, repurposing, and creating a dissociation that feels uniquely contemporary-- isn't exactly unprecedented. Musicians-- like A.P. Carter, who scrambled up and down Clinch Mountain in the late 1920s, collecting local songs for the Carter Family's repertoire-- have been reinventing folk songs since before we knew to call them folk songs. That's part of what folk music is, and does. What separates Amidon from the scrum of revivalists and archivists is how modern these renditions are. I See the Sign, Amidon's third folk LP, doesn't contain any original tracks, but his interpretations are so singular that it stops mattering how (or if) these songs existed before-- all that matters is how they exist now.
Amidon grew up singing folk music in Brattleboro, Vermont; his parents were members of the Word of Mouth chorus, a community choir which performed sacred harp hymns in the 1970s. Culturally, folk music is inextricably linked to the south (and Appalachia in particular), but rural Vermont has birthed its fair share of traditional strummers (pick up Margaret MacArthur's Folksongs of Vermont for an impeccable primer). Amidon inhabits these songs comfortably, with an ease that belies a childhood spent with a fiddle in one hand and a banjo in the other.
Much of I See the Sign's success can be chalked up to its arrangements, which are fractured and frequently off-kilter; Amidon and his cabal of collaborators-- Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, Shahzad Ismaily-- have been merging chamber music with indie rock for awhile now (see also: Sufjan Stevens, Thomas Bartlett, Owen Pallett, Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National), and their touch is nuanced and, on occasion, delightfully odd. Bits of percussion, distorted bursts of Moog, and hits of celesta pop up and recede, snapping into place like puzzle pieces. The arrangements are never bombastic (unlike what happens when, say, a pop artist gets paired with a philharmonic)-- instead, they're violent (the stabbing bass and scuttling percussion of opener "Here Come That Blood") or stiff and lonely (the restrained electric guitar and puffs of strings on "I See the Sign"). On "You Better Mind", Amidon, harmonizing with Beth Orton, gets backup from threatening squeals of strings: "You've got to give an account of the judgment, you better mind," they caution. Their voices are grave, concerned.
As a vocalist, Amidon is preternaturally calm, and his flat repetition of certain couplets ("Found my lost sheep," "Loose horse in the valley") feels mesmeric and mantra-like. He's poised, but never cold, and I See the Sign can play like a gospel record, with all the attendant modes and lessons. These are songs to live by (or in), and these iterations-- despite their sophistication, despite his stoicism-- never feel like museum pieces or anything less than functional.
The only non-traditional track here is a cover of R. Kelly's "Relief". On paper, the choice feels a little like a trap (R. Kelly fills an odd role for overeducated indie rockers), or at least a posture-- and while it could be didactic or a lame grasp at irony, Amidon's rendition is stunning. "What a relief to know that/ The war is over," he and Orton sing, their voices earnest and tough, rising over the album's thickest, most optimistic swells. When Amidon finds an affirmation of faith-- "What a relief to know that/ There's an angel in the sky," he sings, grateful-- it's hard not to feel that liberation deep down in your gut.


On their debut album No Passion All Technique, Detroit's Protomartyr excelled at crafting a post-punk onslaught that was thrillingly breakneck and oppressive, showcasing a new band capable of stomping, shredding, and obliterating. On their follow-up, they've cleaned up their sound a bit and sanded down a few of their rough edges without becoming tepid or tame.

Protomartyr: Under Color of Official Right

Under Color of Official Right

On their debut album No Passion All Technique, Detroit's Protomartyr excelled at crafting a post-punk onslaught that was thrillingly breakneck and oppressive, showcasing a new band capable of stomping, shredding, and obliterating. The songs ranged from anthemic and rafter-reaching to churning and bleak, grounded by frontman Joe Casey's deep, looming vocals that moved seamlessly from a croon to a deranged bark. It was an impressive showing of both mastery and versatility.
On their follow-up, Under Color of Official Right, they've cleaned up their sound a bit and sanded down a few of their rough edges without becoming tepid or tame. This time around, the band's embraced a consistent ebb and flow, continually shifting back and forth from simmer to full-boil. For listeners well-versed in No Passion's steadfast ferocity, this new one may appear comparatively declawed, but the more subtle approach comes with more tonal and emotional nuance. Greg Ahee's ringing, hollow guitar clack on "Bad Advice" gives weight and urgency to a narrative about Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, while the tenderness of Scott Davidson's slow-burning bass intro on "What the Wall Said" is a perfect counterbalance to an imminent and overwhelming barrage of guitars. "Come & See" begins with guitar chords that are given space to ring before being enveloped by huge, oppressive waves of guitars, and the effect is oddly uplifting. The hooks are diverse in mood—dark, subtle, playful—but just as cohesive and powerful as they were on their first outing.
As they did with No Passion, Protomartyr seal the deal with Casey's lyrics. Often inspired by books and news stories and filtered through the band's deadpan abstractions, they don't always make perfect sense right away. Album opener "Maidenhead" is directly influenced by Patrick Hamilton's black comedy novel Hangover Square. It's about George Harvey Bone, a lonely alcoholic who suffers from spells where he feels no pleasure or pain. Casey sings about a "clack" in his brain, which triggers "dead moods". At the chorus, drummer Alex Leonard and Ahee ramp up their attack, and when things cool down again, Casey sings, "Maidenhead, here I come," referring to the happy place where Bone longs to return—where he can finally find respite from the darkness. "I have arrived."
But here's the hitch: When Bone reaches Maidenhead in the book, he isn't peaceful there—he's just as tortured as he always was. And as Protomartyr push out into the rest of their album, they're still mired in darkness. They outline betrayal, treason, extortion, corruption, bad dads, insufferable randos, and of course, violence. It's tempting to comb through the album to find clues that reveal Casey's initial inspirations, but going line by line and decoding its "secrets" is about as arbitrary a practice as naming every sample on a Girl Talk album: it's nice to know the details, but look at the big picture instead. The overall strength of Under Color of Official Right doesn't come from its big words, Detroit cred, or works-cited page; it's from lyrics that, while fraught with symbolism, feel emotionally resonant and, sometimes, viscerally unpleasant. If you listen carefully to Casey's voice, this stuff can hit hard.
Perhaps it's the seething, self-assured vocals, but the album's most bleak phrases are also some of its most memorable. "Stumbling around for a hand in the dark/ Slapping you down, choking you out," he casually croons on "What the Wall Said". A vengeful son kills off a pack of barfly dads in "Scum, Rise!", while Davidson locks into a rollicking groove during "Tarpeian Rock", named for the Ancient Roman cliff where murderers and traitors were flung for their crimes. Casey lists the different sorts of people who should meet their demise—emotional cripples, internet personas, rich crusties, adults dressed as children, and so on—while his swirling, primal vocals insist, "THROW THEM FROM THE ROCK".
Amid all the chaos and fuzz, the album's crown jewel might be "Violent"—the most calm, spare track of the bunch. It's a bedtime story with multiple layers: a bandit about to kill a man for snoring too loud, a dark shape in the water that's about to sink a boat, a husband poisoning his wife, cats hunting mice, dogs eating their young. "If it's violent, it's understood," sings Casey, and that's the reality they present throughout Under Color of Official Right: no matter where you look—in books, at your loved ones, at your pets, at the sports bar—there's violence and death and destruction. It's a bummer, but at least Protomartyr wrote and recorded an impressive album around that idea.


The Memphis rapper takes a well-earned victory lap on the latest edition of his Cocaine Muzik series, a consistent double album filled with reliable raps and familiar beats.

CM10: Free Game

Yo Gotti has been rapping reliably about selling drugs in Memphis since at least George W. Bush’s first inauguration. He’s an old-line model gangster rapper, wedded to language and sounds codified in the 2000s, maintaining high levels of street cred without ever fully breaking from those lingering Jeezy comparisons. CM10: Free Game, the tenth edition of his long-running Cocaine Muzik series, is short on innovation, but as a concentrated dose of the Yo Gotti formula, it finds a main vein.
In old times, CM10: Free Game would simply be a double album. Instead, it dropped to streaming services in two halves. The cover of Side A features a topless Gotti wearing sagging pants and a clean hat and kicks. On the artwork accompanying Side B, he’s kitted out in some of his sharpest formal wear. This suggests a duality to the two sets, but any thematic disparity is basically undetectable. Gotti’s still live from the kitchen, cooking bricks over a stove, “making that pot go do the beatbox.” There’s little tension because CM10: Free Game swerves colder portraits of a dealer’s life, keeping the viewfinder firmly on the benefits.
So you get a song like “Palm Trees in Memphis,” where Gotti recalls memories of childhood poverty over a sumptuous soul sample from producer STREETRUNNER. But his brooding is brief, and he quickly moves to an accounting of the pleasures that make up his present opulence: Dior threads, a house that feels like a hotel, a garage comparable to a stable with “a lot of horses.” Gotti’s modus operandi is to pepper listeners with surface-level references to hustling and wealth. It would be nice if he delved deeper, if only a little more often. When he drops a line like, “Mama pray for me, help me with this anger,” in the middle of “Palm Trees in Memphis,” I want him to pull at that thread further and put more of himself in the song.
If the narratives are familiar, so are the beats: There are creeping, bass-heavy trap rattlers and soul loops that owe a debt to Just Blaze and early Kanye West. But it would be wrong to say that CM10: Free Game plays like a 2008 record that fell through a crack in time and landed in modern day. Principally, Gotti can’t hide that he’s getting older. On “Crypto,” the 40-year-old sounds half intrigued, half baffled by digital currencies and other new tech (and this is the guy, by the way, who knows the benefits of a slick DM slide). Gotti describes seeing dealers getting paid via money apps and being pulled into meetings about the metaverse. “I’d sell a brick and put blues in my pocket/Now they talking digital money and wallets,” he says, sounding like he’s talking to a friend after being pitched in his label office by 20-year-old tech bros.
Fortunately, Gotti doesn’t flow like an old guy. He’s still not the nimblest rapper in the game—at his laziest, he can sound sedate and pensive, his wheezy voice gasping for breath—but he’s evolved from a Jeezy soundalike to something more eerie. On “For The Record,” his rapping is low-rumbling and intense as he describes friends stealing his money and his baby’s mother leaving him. Yet that weathered, guttural rasp can also be turned to something more triumphant: see “Recession Proof,” present as a bonus track, where his stunt-to-camera boasts have the appropriate swagger.
The most gripping song here is “Rap Check.” Gotti sets his voice to a dry, grainy drawl to give a revealing depiction of his earliest interactions with Cash Money Records, Jeezy, Dr. Dre, and others. “I was right there with Wayne, back Carter 1/He had a Cash Money chain, shit, I wanted one.” It's a biographical detail that lays out just how many times Gotti has been around the hip-hop block. Yet he’s still here. Yo Gotti will never do reinvention, nor should he. CM10: Free Game isn’t his most vital album, but he’s entitled to a victory lap.


Rooted in demos made early in the pandemic, Avey Tare’s fourth solo album is unusual and slightly disarming: a head-over-heels-in-love album that’s also prickly and claustrophobic.

7s

Avey Tare’s solo records have always sounded like opportunities to break away from whatever Animal Collective was doing at the time. Co-founder Panda Bear’s solo work has roughly followed the group’s trajectory, morphing from folksy and melancholy to expansive and dubwise to shroomy and feral on a parallel path. Avey, meanwhile, released a willfully frustrating album meant to be played backwards just as his band was becoming the toast of American indie rock; got swampy and personal on Down There just as Merriweather Post Pavilion pushed them into bigger venues; made the sprawling and sparse Eucalyptus a year after AnCo’s hyperkinetic Painting With; then embraced dance music on Cows on Hourglass Pond just as his main band was starting to make music that… sounded like Eucalyptus.
Now, as Animal Collective rides the success of last year’s rhythm-driven road odyssey Time Skiffs, regaining some of the goodwill lost in their long 2010s wilderness period (one worth revisiting now that it no longer exists in Merriweather’s monumental shadow), here’s an Avey Tare album in the long tradition of baroque-pop hermits hunched over keyboards and consoles, a showcase for studio trickery that sounds the most out of any Avey Tare solo work like the great psychedelic Beatles and Beach Boys albums to which AnCo’s early music was frequently compared.
7s is rooted in demos Avey made early in the pandemic while living with his girlfriend Madelyn and working remotely with AnCo on Time Skiffs. This situation accounts for its unusual, slightly disarming tone: It’s a head-over-heels-in-love album, full of invitations to come and do whimsical things, but it’s also prickly and insular. If the influence of house and techno led Cows on Hourglass Pond to feel extroverted, 7s is a vision of a world where the clubs are shuttered and the walls are closing in. It’s not Avey’s shortest album (that would be Down There, at 34:44), but it feels the smallest, in part because it has the fewest tracks (seven) and in part because it continually retreats towards its own center.
Avey is blessed with an excellent scream. You will not hear it on 7s. His vocals are uncharacteristically reserved throughout, thinning to a whisper on the sickly-sounding “Cloud Stop Rest Start” and at the end of “Lips at Night.” At 43, his voice has grown huskier and deeper, and he’s developed a lisp that’s also audible on Time Skiffs. As is common in his work, his vocals squirm through effects that make them sound oily and slightly nauseous, but unlike on Cows and Eucalyptus, this has the effect of making them less comprehensible. Even on a focused listen, you’ll probably only understand about 50 percent of the words.
This turns out to be a blessing. 7s does not benefit from reading the lyrics, which are crammed with grammatically bizarre turns of phrase (“Your corporeal tube doesn’t seek me out from the fishies/I relish a homemade cast”) and pseudo-deep platitudes that make “Stairway to Heaven” sound profound (“Too often we are our villains and our heroes/Save ourselves and then we dig ourselves a fresh tomb”). The psychedelic pop tradition is conducive to nonsense, from the sly non-sequiturs of the Beatles to the impossibly evocative scenes conjured by Van Dyke Parks and Robert Hunter. But there’s good nonsense and bad nonsense, and 7s unfortunately errs on the wrong side.
The album’s strongest lyrics tend to be the simplest and most direct, especially on “The Musical,” a song about Avey’s two decades in the music biz.  “Is your audience the trees, or do you crave to be a professional?” he asks aspiring musicians. It’s an expression of hard-won road-warrior knowledge that still shines with gratitude and amazement. “I remember T&C and I’ll surely remember your hand in mine,” Avey sings to Madelyn on “Lips at Night.” Listeners are unlikely to understand what he’s saying in the first half of the line, let alone what it means, but as his voice crests in the second half, the brain fog parts, and the declaration of love shines through.
7s works best seen as a whole, as a triumph of love and empathy over adversity. It’s hard to know who Avey Tare is singing about on “Invisible Darlings,” though some of the language echoes early-pandemic sentiment towards essential workers, but the sense of opening one’s heart to the world is unmistakable. “Lips at Night” plays like gibberish until all of a sudden Avey says something like “we kissed,” and then it becomes a love song. Like the B-movie horror films that Avey loves, it’s better if you don’t nitpick the script. And though 7s is a step down in scale and inspiration from Cows on Hourglass Pond, the triumph of Time Skiffs means it’s hardly a worrying sign for his career. It’s actually kind of exciting. I can’t wait to see if the next AnCo album sounds like 7s—and how far opposite from it Avey can get.
Correction: Lyric quotes in this review have been updated.


On an exhilarating but exhausting new EP, the Indonesian rapper strives for maturity but remains at his best when he’s at his silliest.

Brightside

Rich Brian’s music is a breakneck odyssey through one man’s encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, careening from one reference to the next. Per usual, the 22-year-old Indonesian rapper and viral sensation’s latest EP, Brightside, resists even the gentlest tap on the brakes. “I wanted to remind people that I still love to rap,” Brian said in a press release. And remind us he does, switching up beats and flows with merciless speed, often several times over the course of a single track. It’s exhilarating at times and exhausting at others. Though the EP runs less than 13 minutes, by the end of the fourth and final song, you might feel like you’ve been busting through wall after wall like the Kool-Aid Man, strapped into the passenger seat of a Tesla that never seems to die.
The beats on Brightside are clean and seemingly meant to denote seriousness, both in style and aspiration. The menacing piano riffs that blossom into lo-fi sadboy chords on “New Tooth” evoke the production favored by Tyler, the Creator, while “Lagoon” and standout “Getcho Mans” take on the hysteria of a Denzel Curry song.  “Lagoon,” however, taps into that style for only about 45 seconds before slacking into a moodier beat. It’s a shame, because the feverish first half is one of Brian’s most arresting maneuvers to date. His drawl plods on the second half as he debates the relative merits of Porsches, Lambos, and “Tess-uh-lah”s (which “ain’t got no guns but the wheels automatic”). Though Brightside checks off more mainstream-rap-hit boxes than ever, Brian’s greatest strengths have always been his embrace of absurdity and his penchant for quip-slinging and provocation—lines like “pussy bald like Joe Rogan.” This brand of silliness is far more believable than his stabs at profundity, as on the blatantly 88rising-manufactured depression-core anthem “Sunny,” which opens right on the nose with, “Going through some shit.”
Despite the superficiality of his lyrics and the exaggerated vocal affectations, these songs are well-produced and still kind of a riot. Collaborators Diamond Pistols and Powers Pleasant are heavy hitters, embellishing the music with a darker and more frenetic pulse than Brian’s previous work. Still, there’s a reason that “Getcho Mans,” featuring fellow Indonesian rapper Warren Hue, is Brightside’s best track, and it’s not just Powers Pleasant pulling weight: It’s that both rappers seem more interested in having a good time than making something marketable. More than his musings on the pitfalls of fame, the laid-back absurdism of the song’s lyrics (“Man, I’m only joking,” he admits at one point) renders his music compelling in spite of its flaws. We get to enjoy Brian at his best—when he’s least concerned with being taken seriously.

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Stephen Steinbrink has been bouncing around the West Coast indie underground for over a decade now.  The singer/songwriter's new album is his best, with winsome shades of Elliott Smith's XO.

Anagrams

Born and raised in Phoenix, Stephen Steinbrink has been bouncing around the West Coast indie underground for over a decade now, releasing numerous records of bittersweet, folk-inflected pop on a handful of tiny labels. While the 27-year-old songwriter is a dedicated nomad as a performer—he’s been touring off and on since his teens—Steinbrink’s music is a deeply intimate affair, a series of bedroom obsessions brought to life.
Steinbrink’s last album, 2014’s excellent, wide-ranging *Arranged Waves, *garnered some attention outside his close-knit DIY circles. And *Anagrams *is sure to boost Steinbrink’s profile further. Recorded over two years in a de-sanctified church on the northern coast of Washington state, *Anagrams *is Steinbrink’s most fully realized vision yet—an album of compulsively well-crafted, yet warmly inviting guitar-pop that calls to mind the Beach Boys, early Beatles, and Fleetwood Mac without losing an iota of Steinbrink’s quirky charm. Arrangements that felt loose or tossed off on past records have been tightened here; vocal lines that once wandered now sparkle and shine. There is nary a note out of place.
Anagrams is a close sonic cousin to Elliott Smith’s later work, particularly XO. Both Steinbrink’s record and XO use classic pop songwriting tools and organic, fine-grained production to uncover (or in some cases mask) some very dark stuff: depression, alienation, drug addiction, relationships in decline. On “Impossible Hand,” Steinbrink recounts a love grown cold over an urbane mix of shimmering acoustic guitar, twinkling piano and perky bass. On “Shine a Light on Him,” Steinbrink imagines himself coming to after blacking out in the middle of a car crash (or a night of heavy substance abuse; it’s not clear). “It’s easy to forget what you can’t remember,” he sings over soft fingerpicked guitar.
But *Anagrams *is no secondhand Elliott Smith record; Steinbrink is far too idiosyncratic for imitation. In fact, Anagrams’ best songs break the singer-songwriter mold entirely. The eerily hypnotic “Building Machines” nods to Death Cab for Cutie and early post-rock, as its chiming guitars march head-on into a wall of vicious feedback. The breezy title track, meanwhile, is an irresistible slice of mid-’80s indie rock—all bitter heartbreak and R.E.M. jangle.
Steinbrink is clearly the type of guy who’s always living in his head, in his studio, or both. He’s also hyper self-aware and hyper-articulate. All of which means that his music can sometimes turn precious and claustrophobic, reveling in the minutia of this or that memory or this or that worry. “Creosote,” from 2011’s *Rennet *EP, is about staying at home and doing laundry. 2013’s I Drew a Picture is essentially a concept album about Phoenix’s water-shortage crisis. * *
With a few minor exceptions, Steinbrink avoids these traps on *Anagrams *by pulling away from himself and his hometown—writing abstract songs about his late-20s malaise with a more universal appeal—and by improving his craft, layering sharper melodies over increasingly sophisticated arrangements. Steinbrink’s music—so often insular, gorgeous in its way yet tentative—has grown up, becoming wiser and more confidently strange, ready to embrace the world outside his bedroom window.


The St. Louis metalpunks put their politics at the forefront of their music—except they’ve also got riffs, and they can write the hell out of a catchy, confrontational punk song.

Cages

Punk has a long tradition of political soapboxing, whether an anti-Reagan screed or a howling demand for trans rights thinly cloaked behind a veil of distortion and d-beats. St. Louis metalpunk outfit Redbait, however, put their politics at the forefront of their music. They approach every note and syllable with unwavering intention, down to their self-identification as “proletarian crust” and the name “Redbait” itself—a thumbed nose to the right wing’s long history of smearing leftists.
The idea for Redbait germinated not at a basement show or a bar, like so many other notable punk acts, but as their press materials note, at the “healthcare rallies, vegan potlucks, and protests against police brutality” where these six musicians initially got acquainted. The band’s members—vocalists Rebecca Redbait and Madeline B., guitarists Will J. and B., bassist Nicholas J., and drummer Cody A.—came up in the St. Louis activist community, and they apply that knowledge and praxis to their music. In a way, Redbait follow the lo-fi Crass model of politics—except they’ve also got riffs, and they can write the hell out of a catchy, confrontational punk song.
Their latest EP, Cages, rails against racism, white supremacy, capitalism, wage slavery, factory farming, and, on the pummeling title track, the Trump administration’s brutal ongoing campaign to rip migrant children from their parents and pen them in concentration camps. “They use power to divide/Power to imprison/In a country so free it incarcerates children,” comes the song’s snarling climax, delivered in a duet of guttural roar and ragged shriek. The EP is stuffed with disparate influences and palpable rage, serving up five distinct and ambitious tracks in a blistering 13 minutes. Less is often more when it comes to punk, and despite Redbait’s obvious allegiance to the more metal (and historically more indulgent) side of the aisle, their commitment to brevity is admirable.
Thanks to a brutally sludgy mid-song break, “Cages” is also the band’s most metal track, while on “Bred for the Knife,” a furious diatribe against the cruelties of factory farming, they soar to their breathless, Tragedy-referencing best. Redbait’s self-identification as “proletarian crust” works on multiple levels: Not only is Cages grounded in radical working-class politics, it’s also alive with the clang of machinery, the screech of grinding metal, and the smell of blood on the factory floor.
Blink-and-you’ll-miss-it opener “Capital Gains” is more straightforward: The minute-and-change track rails against capitalist exploitation while charging along to the tune of mid-2000s thrash and swinging its knuckles like a mid-2000s pit boss (undoubtedly the only kind of boss Redbait recognize). The most personal track, “Forever Ends Now,” opens on a maudlin melodic note, its first stanza cleanly sung before a bolt of chaos kicks in to close out the EP. Elsewhere, the potent crust of “Our Town” offers an uptempo hometown anthem with teeth, skewering racist NIMBYs and name-dropping nearby Ferguson, Missouri: “Talk back to a cop/And you can lose your life/Shut it down!”
Every generation of young punks needs its Dead Kennedys, its Crass, or its Anti-Flag; with any luck, Redbait might be this one’s.


On the follow-up to 2011's Digital Lows, Memphis rapper Cities Aviv submerges his natural tendencies beneath a strong post-punk influence, making for a bold collection that works with regard to his wordplay, but not always on the production.

Black Pleasure

For all the talk about how iPods and Megaupload have exponentially advanced listener curiosity, post-punk and rap have long coexisted in the collections of anyone who simply likes great music. Still, those two genres have rarely mixed in the time since-- you could point to off-the-grid acts like Dälek, while Clipse's Hell Hath No Fury has as much clangor, negative space, and nihilism as Metal Box, but the influence of post-punk on hip-hop has been mostly relegated to the theoretical realm. At least until now. Memphis rapper Cities Aviv definitely displayed an iconoclastic streak on 2011's Digital Lows, in which serious Three 6 Mafia homage and a straight-up "People Are People" sample found equal footing. On Black Pleasure, he goes all in with one of the first rap albums that sounds it's angling for a deal with Pendu Sounds or Captured Tracks. It's bold and possibly forward thinking. What's less certain is whether he actually made a good record.
He does have the voice for it. While an adept wordsmith, Aviv's vocals have a stiff and shouty cadence. At the outset, it's surprisingly effective. The militant kick drums that power "Forever" are the domain of no-fi coldwave revivalists like the Soft Moon and Black Marble, while Aviv's vocals are initially lost in impenetrable, well-bottom reverb. By the time he emerges to rap clearly intelligible words, you mostly catch the punchline where his insecurities have him "hanging like I'm Ian Curtis." It's something of a "shock tactic," not so much in its allusion to a man's suicide, but one that can be cynically viewed as an easy "in" for indie listeners. But you can't really doubt his commitment, as later on he and his girlfriend are making love to Joy Division and Psychic TV, while porn star Mary Carey and Debbie Harry also get namechecked in succession.
Fortunately, Black Pleasure isn't a half hour of Cities Aviv trying to score cred points; there's plenty of material here that would fit within the confines of the searching and introspective Digital Lows were it not for the severity of the production. Aviv remains a relatable and personable rapper who's mostly falling in or out of love during Black Pleasure, while taking stock of his own situation and those of his peers. The most instantly ear-turning quotables come to the fore on "Simulation", which takes shots at e-rappers ("you thuggin' but you only sendin' shots over Gmail") and pretty much all internet-based interaction ("with 30,000 user names which is the real you?") over distended production from Green Ova Undergrounds associate L.W.H..
"Simulation" is one of the few tracks where the words take precedence, and that's a problem. It isn't about the compatibility of Cities Aviv's influences so much as the actual mix, the way Black Pleasure sounds coming out of speakers and headphones. Nearly every production tactic that makes Black Pleasure so distinct ends up working against the strengths of its creator. The blown-out reverb and aluminum aftertaste won't be too unfamiliar, but while most rock bands using these tricks consider lyrics to be a non-entity or the vocals another sonic layer, Cities Aviv is a talented rapper who conceivably wants his words to be heard. The moaning sample that punctuates every bar of "Escorts" completely dominates the sonic field and the lack of definition on "Remynd" makes the appearance of Maria Minerva a complete non-event. Perhaps it's meant more as a consumptive, textural experience than as a beats and rhymes record, but if that's the case, Black Pleasure forfeits its main selling point; so much of the production relies on the acidic, warping qualities of distortion that without Cities Aviv's instructions on how he wants Black Pleasure to be heard, you could just as easily assume he was catching up with chillwave or cloud-rap.
At the very least, you have to admit there isn't anyone else making music like this right now, but it's debatable whether Cities Aviv is in his own lane here because others consciously chose to avoid it. And while there's no such thing as a "free" mixtape, since time and creativity are limited resources, you could argue that unlike, say, 808s and Heartbreak or even Rebirth, this lacks the stakes of Cities Aviv putting his money where his mouth is. Maybe thats the real issue with Black Pleasure-- it feels more laudable for its ethics and process than the actual product; even if it isn't felt, it can certainly be discussed, and talking points are probably more valuable than actual hits at this point in Cites Aviv's trajectory. But I'm more interested in hearing what Cities Aviv is capable of when he doesn't surround himself in so much figurative and literal noise.


Following Yeah Yeah Yeahs' overstuffed LP Mosquito, Karen O's debut solo album—culled from recordings made between 2006 and 2010—feels like an extension of her soundtrack work for Where the Wild Things Are and Her.

Crush Songs

Karen O opens “NYC Baby”, a minute-long track off her solo debut, with a quiet “One… two… ready go…” She whispers the words carefully, as though she’s less interested in establishing a tempo than she is in not waking a sleeping child. Featuring only acoustic guitar and hushed vocals, the song sounds like a nursery rhyme set to a wisp of a melody, building on obvious rhymes (city/pity) and worrying a single sentiment (she misses someone) until it’s threadbare. It’s not a song so much as it is the memory of one, something hummed while doing housework or waiting for the subway. Crush Songs is an album full of count-offs, flubbed notes, and background noises, each one signaling an unrehearsed quality to the music. Karen O sings and plays like she wants as little time as possible separating the idea for a song from its execution. Some even sound like she’s writing them as she sings them.
That these fourteen tracks sound like demos rather than fleshed-out tunes is the whole point. A crush is a fleeting emotion, a moment of intense affection rather than the drawn-out ups and downs of love or obsession. “When I was 27 I crushed a lot,” O writes in the liners, underlining for emphasis. “I wasn’t sure I’d ever fall in love again. These songs were written and recorded in private around this time.” It’s clear she wanted to get them down on tape before their respective crushes dissipated, and the album culls recordings made from 2006 through 2010. Mostly it’s just O strumming her guitar and singing softly, although occasionally she adds a drum loop, backing vocals, and what sounds like a harpsichord.
It’s an intentionally modest album, perhaps a reaction to the overstuffed Mosquito or to the KO at Home demo leak. It certainly sounds like an extension of her soundtrack work for Where the Wild Things Are and Her, but perhaps it’s too modest: these are all very short songs, with only three out of fourteen surpassing two minutes, and the whole thing runs a short twenty-six minutes, barely registering as a full album. That such brevity is thematically appropriate doesn’t make it any more musically satisfying. Most songs, including first single “Rapt” and even the Doors cover “Indian Summer”, fade out quickly before they’ve even established much in the way of melody or stakes. Only a few sound complete in this lo-fi state: A paean to Michael Jackson, “King” conveys a perfectly apt sense of childlike innocence through both its running time and its playful imagery: “Is he walking on the moon? I hope I don’t find out too soon.” The spoken-word part on closer “Sing Along” heralds some of the album’s most emphatic vocals on the album, yet just as it’s getting interesting, the song stumbles to an abrupt and unceremonious stop.
In its off-the-cuff aesthetic, Crush Songs isn’t too far removed from Karen O’s early work with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, except that the shrieks of “Art Star” and “Black Tongue” have been replaced by acoustic strums and falsetto notes. For the past decade or so, she has proved herself one of the most surprising and in-the-moment performers of the young century, through not only her vocals but her entire self-presentation: the smears of lipstick, the pre-Gaga outlandishness of her outfits, the unlikely balance of confrontation and communalism she projects from the stage. Even when seemingly every band out of New York was landing a record deal, Karen O lent her band a colorful volatility that their peers couldn’t be bothered to muster. While others played it painfully cool, she put herself as far out there as she could.
So it’s all the more disappointing that, despite the rawness of these recordings and the private nature of their creation, O sounds weirdly noncommittal on Crush Songs, as though the sparse demo arrangements were a form of holding back. It’s no coincidence that the album sounds best when there are several ideas and instruments in play at once, as with the drum loop and harpsichord on “Visits”. But how much better would “Body” sound with even a rudimentary band behind her? How easily might the Yeah Yeah Yeahs turn that half-hearted hook on “Rapt” into a show-closing punk anthem? In the end, very little is gained from the austerity of the presentation on Crush Songs, and we can only imagine what is lost.


Produced in her home studio in Los Angeles, Sharon Van Etten’s sixth album embraces the complications of the past two years. It is her most epic record, yet lyrically it is her most insular.

Sharon Van Etten: We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong

We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong

All through “Darkish,” a song toward the end of Sharon Van Etten’s sixth album, birds twitter away in the background. It’s the sparest track on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, which Van Etten produced in her new home studio in Los Angeles: just open-ended chords of inquiry on her acoustic guitar, buoying a similar openness to her steady but inconclusive meditation on what it takes to nurture the home you always yearned for. There is a thread between “Darkish” and Van Etten’s earliest CD-R recordings, a set of similarly intimate vignettes on which you could often hear a train rattling past the window of her tiny New York apartment. The changing ambience plots the material distance she has traveled in 14 years, from her DIY beginnings as a young woman fleeing an abusive relationship and claiming a space of her own, to a mother, partner, and beloved songwriter. What has remained constant—and compelling—is her instinct to use music to both shape and challenge her domestic environment.
The idea of a “pandemic record” already seems passé to many musicians apparently determined to avoid the association. Yet Van Etten has enthusiastically characterized We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong as one, and despite its declarative title, she embraces the complications of the past two years: how this rupture has affected her relationships, her priorities and responsibilities, and her capacity for hope. It’s her most epic record; her tenaciously beautiful voice is streaked like burning embers through the terrible black wildfire smoke she watched creep toward her new family home. But it’s also lyrically one of her most insular. She morphs between disembodied texture—as she sings about craving destruction, she becomes just another weightless shade of oblivion amid the cosmic winds of “Born”—and stinging, bewildered focus. “Been writing on the dust,” she all but roars over the uneasy martial rumble of “Darkness Fades,” a reference to the wildfire ashes that caked her car in the driveway. Here, in the confrontation between fatalism and futility, she captures the absurdity and anxiety of having one’s small life buffeted by dramatic external forces.
With every record, Van Etten has managed the difficult feat of expanding her sound without smothering her appeal: After 2014’s fluid Are We There, her 2019 album Remind Me Tomorrow embraced distortion and damned atmospherics. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is a raging bonfire, and although its scale is monumental, it boasts a revealing depth of field, every dramatic arc finely detailed. The tension doesn’t break until the third song, “I’ll Try,” when a hard, sharp drum roll lets loose a staticky ooze and a crescendo that sparkles with a little new-wave glitter; meanwhile, she considers helplessness in the face of fear with sincerity and a sneer. The album’s choruses are fierce, primal pleas, though Van Etten knows that want is never that straightforward, and surrounds them with verses mired in distance and confusion. “You come home to me,” she yearns on “Home to Me,” a future message for her young son that anticipates him resenting her professional commitments, and confronts the reality of who needs who more.
As beast-sized as it is, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong is also a destabilizing record. Remind Me Tomorrow opened with Van Etten telling someone that she almost died, but she didn’t tell us how—a pointed non-disclosure from an artist whose early work detailed the emotional violence she sustained from a partner, and who came to feel the weight of that association as a public figure. Here, her lyrics are more fragmented and opaque than ever, keyed to an internal logic (often they take place at night, and contour conversations between lovers) and sometimes feeling almost unfinished, or purposefully restrained: “It was something like a window, and I wanted to break free,” she soars on “Born.” Fans of Van Etten’s sharp songcraft could find that frustrating, but her impressionistic approach builds a more effective picture of fear and human insufficiency than simply stumbling to articulate the ineffable might. “You love him by the stove light in your arms,” she sings in a tremor amid the tumult of “Anything,” a rare, tangible moment of safety.
Many of these songs invite you to drift in their tidal lurch, which gives the few moments of directness their prickle. Van Etten saves her most corrosive textures for the most intimate song: “Headspace” is a declaration of need set to a dangerous, industrial throb that’s strewn with sonic detritus—a powerful evocation of how sex can become conflicted territory in a long-term relationship. “Pull my hips, remind you, see/Ten-year-old white cotton briefs want play,” she pleads with disarming awkwardness, before finding indignation and vulnerability: “Baby, don’t turn your back to me,” she sings in a towering refrain. It’s followed by “Come Back,” a blast of Van Etten at her most classic and clarion, a reliable lighthouse illuminating a path to safety.
When romantic realignment comes, it brings humor and us-against-the-world swagger. “Even when I make a mistake, mistake, mistake/It’s much better than that!” Van Etten sings triumphantly on “Mistakes.” It’s the biggest pop song she’s ever written, a terse disco beat grounding her alluringly cool and close vocals. “I dance like Elaine,” she admits, “but my baby takes me to the floor/Says ‘More, more.’” Sparks fly, restoring her confidence for the length of a song. We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong isn’t the sort of album to offer instructions on how we might make things right. But having faith in one another, and ourselves, Van Etten hints convincingly, might be a good set of foundations to build from.


The Atlanta singer’s subdued new EP is less interested in reliving drama than finding peace.

Clear 2: Soft Life EP

There are few things more emotionally gutting than being abandoned by a romantic partner during your first pregnancy. Well, maybe the women he cheated on you with gloating about it on social media. On 2021’s Still Over It, Summer Walker aired her dirty laundry, calling out her ex for being a liar, clout chaser, and deadbeat, sometimes over his own production. “I wanna start with your momma, she should’ve whooped your ass,” she sang. Now, some boyfriends and babies later, she’s less interested in writing about life resembling an episode of Love & Hip-Hop. She’s finding serenity.
Navigating romantic love is a hellscape for Black women; degradation and fetishization seem pre-programmed into your life script. It’s why artists like Megan Thee Stallion and City Girls adopt confrontational, borderline misandrist personas as suits of armor. Walker knows that maintaining a tough exterior gets exhausting, and the title of her latest EP, Clear 2: Soft Life, aspires to comfort and ease. On the wearied neo-soul of “Hardlife,” she longs for someone to provide for her, jealous of women “with they feet kicked up/And they glass in hand.” Black men were a source of animus in her earlier discography, but on the slow-grooving opener, collaborator J. Cole offers flattery and gratitude: “I’m sendin’ you, SZA, and Ari my love/Y’all holdin’ us down, y’all holdin’ the crowns,” he says in an “audio hug,” a bare minimum gesture that models Walker’s current bar for the men in her life.
Progress isn’t linear; Walker still indulges in some thrilling dysfunction on “New Type,” where Childish Gambino plays a lover who can barely afford dinner at McDonald’s yet still finds a way to criticize her body and choices. You can tell there’s something about a fixer-upper that she finds irresistible, but when she invokes another infamously good-for-nothing man, the one on Erykah Badu’s “Tyrone,” it’s because this time she has the wisdom to distinguish between a worthy partner and a time-waster. She is naturally hilarious, an undeniably compelling orator. She feigns apathy to get a man to chase after her on “Pull Up”—“Stop touchin’ me, I’m gettin’ out”—but is unable to conceal that she’s a giggly romantic at heart: “You funny, I love you too.”
Trudging through her messy personal life and emerging on the other side, Walker models growth for the people who saw themselves in the jilted narrator of Still Over It. “We’re going to evolve mentally, spiritually, physically, financially, um, emotionally,” she resolves on the spoken-word closer “Agayu’s Revelation,” backed by twinkling pianos and light woodwinds courtesy of Solange, Steve Lacy, and John Caroll Kirby. For Walker, the “soft life” isn’t just poolside wine spritzers: It’s learning from your mistakes and developing self-compassion. Don’t try to spin the block on her until you’ve got clear chakras and a heavily annotated copy of all about love.


A taster before their new LP arrives, Youth Code's A Place to Stand EP, is comprised of four original tracks and remixes of four earlier cuts by the likes of Sanford Parker, clipping., God Module, and Silent Servant. The new EP boils down the grittiness of their early material and the more polished EBM of last year's *Youth Code *to their common denominators: namely, punk, tempered with an understated pop sensibility.

A Place to Stand EP

Angry as they may seem, the driving hearts behind Los Angeles duo Youth Code are madly in love. It all started three years ago, when Ryan George—a veteran punk who cut his teeth playing with straight-edge band Carry On—met heavy metal roadie Sara Taylor at a mutual friend’s gig at a club in their native Los Angeles. As the two’s relationship blossomed, they discovered a mutual adoration of aggressive music: hardcore punk, speed metal, and curiously, minimal electronica. Early on, the duo's dates consisted of long strolls-turned-jam sessions conducted in the LA backstreets, searching for any scrap of metal capable of producing a beat, eager to milk music from even the rustiest old machines. Their low-fi, high-volume vision rapidly expanded, though, resulting in a crushing 2012 demo and last year's glossier (but nonetheless crushing) self-titled debut. These days, Youth Code's idea of a date night resembles a political rally for the Wax Trax! crowd: against a backdrop of riot footage and snarling dogs, Taylor thrashes around onstage, pounding her chest with her fist and unleashing glitch-ridden screams as George plugs away at the ancient keyboards in the corner. They’re two gears operating separately, and yet they share the same cog.
A taster before their new LP arrives, their latest set of tunes, the A Place to Stand EP, is comprised of four original tracks and remixes of four earlier cuts by the likes of Sanford Parker, clipping., God Module, and Silent Servant. The new EP boils down the grittiness of their early material and the more polished EBM of last year's *Youth Code *to their common denominators: namely, punk, tempered with an understated pop sensibility. Associations with the former genre have been reiterated by the band numerous times in interviews, both with regards to their musical upbringing (“We’re these shitty punk kids making industrial,” Ryan shrugged in response to the band’s vociferous reception) and their steadfast devotion to D.I.Y. craftsmanship. But despite Taylor’s recent declaration that her band was “not going to write a fucking pop record”, there’s no questioning the influence of styles well-removed from the hostile terrain Youth Code calls home.
As a result, these songs strike a curious paradox: they're aggressive, noise-ridden, angst-ridden and forlorn, but the soundscapes shouldn’t put off anyone who’s heard a lick of Godflesh or tour mates Skinny Puppy. Sure, Taylor's snarls on opener “Consuming Guilt” sound like her vocal cords were rubbed with steel wool, and the clattering factory noise on the chorus will definitely prove aural candy for the Ministry set; but within the context of the song’s steady four-count, verse-chorus-verse blueprint, the song's melodic flourishes (the mournful keyboards on the chorus, the dark-wavey driving hook) belie a popper construction that solders surprisingly well to Youth Code’s punk worldview. Mechanical ambience and surly new wave make for compelling bedfellows on “For I Am Cursed”, with Taylor’s vocal glitches punctuating George’s piston-pumping beats at odd intervals. “To Burn Your World”, meanwhile, could have been a cut on the soundtrack to some hellish arcade game: the whooshing crescendoes that echo her vocals sound like some sinister power-up.
Given Youth Code’s roots (along with their penchant using for propaganda footage in their stage shows), it’s unsurprising that their personal politics stretch beyond a musical context. These concerns are laid out in detail on the last new track on the EP, an airing of grievances fittingly titled “A Litany (A Place to Stand)”. As the drum kit totters wildly in the background, a steady stream of sixteenth-notes alternated with quick bass jabs, Taylor warns of all toxic baggage that will be entrusted to the next generation: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and above all, hatred. Her diction is blunt and arresting—"The time has come where we stop mandating what rights others do with their free bodies, where we stop looking upon other as if they were just bags of discarded, unworthy flesh”—but as the beat rages on in the background, with nary a dynamic shift or noise blast in sight, the track begins to sound like a soapbox postscript without a working compass. This transience overshadows A Place to Stand as well, making it less a unified statement and more along of a sounding board for the musical and political concerns with which the band continues to grapple. Youth Code have handled things pretty well by themselves up to this point—and as any self-taught engineers know, sometimes the instruments of destruction just need a closer inspection.