A collection of odds-and-sods cobbled together over the course of nine years, Lioness: Hidden Treasures presents a picture of a talented singer at her most restrained and polite.

Amy Winehouse: Lioness: Hidden Treasures

Lioness: Hidden Treasures

Lioness is not Amy Winehouse's long-lost gem or interrupted follow-up album, nor is it a revealing view of a tortured star in the fraught final stages of her life. Instead, in true record-industry fashion, Lioness is a collection of odds-and-sods cobbled together over the course of nine years of recordings to create something that kinda-sorta feels like an album. Executive produced by longtime partner Salaam Remi, who helmed her 2003 debut album, Frank, Lioness carries little of the subversive swagger or playful arrogance of the Mark Ronson-dominated Back to Black. Whether it's merely all the material that was left, or an effort to salvage her image after years of tabloid drama and self-abuse, Lioness presents a picture of a talented singer at her most restrained and polite. And let's be honest: Polite is the last thing we expect (or want) from Amy Winehouse.
That's not to say the results aren't satisfying: No matter what she's singing, it remains thrilling to hear that voice come to life again. On Lioness, for better or for worse, she takes on the role of standards singer: It feels like a hearkening back to her jazzy Frank days, the result of having Remi at the head of the project rather than Ronson. When it works, it really works: Opener "Our Day Will Come" is a gorgeous blend of triumph and autumnal wistfulness, a savvy intro to a record that's bound to evoke emotions just as nuanced and conflicted in its listeners. However, on tracks like "The Girl From Ipanema" or first single and Tony Bennett duet "Body and Soul", she sounds like a lounge singer, that unmistakable wit and smarmy charm only a faint glint in otherwise serviceable performances.
Considering that Mark Ronson-- producer of her signature tracks like "Rehab"-- is probably more responsible for her fame than anyone else, it's surprising to see his involvement reduced to such a minuscule level. As ever, his contributions are the highlight: A new version of the Zutons' "Valerie" turns what was a tongue-in-cheek cover into one of her most infectious vocal performances. Meanwhile, his melodramatic rendering of Carole King's "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" toes the line between elegant and overblown, but better yet it's a shroud of pomp surrounding one of Winehouse's most delicately powerful vocals. When she breaks out into her best falsetto on the track's bridge, it's one of the few moments on Lioness that feels truly, heartbreakingly poignant, enough to cut through its stodgy accompaniment.
Winehouse's best material never came from covers or standards, however, but her personality: her bitter sarcasm, her flagrant profanity, and her dominant-but-demure air of not-giving-a-fuck. Even though half of Lioness is by her own pen, it's a different view of Winehouse's songwriting persona: The gorgeous ballad "Half Time" is endearing but lacks the sardonic bite of her other slower material like "Wake Up Alone" (which itself is included in an alternate Remi-produced version here), and it's easy to imagine the fake-cutesy "Best Friends, Right?" being more effective given an arrangement that wasn't so transparently cutesy. Back to Black highlight "Tears Dry on Their Own" is present in its "original version," an almost unrecognizably elegiac arrangement that on the other hand not only emphasizes the strength of Winehouse's own songwriting but its diversity as well.
Chalk it up to fine-tuned and image-conscious execution, but there's little on Lioness: Hidden Treasures that sounds throwaway, or like it should have never been released; but there's equally little that sounds absolutely essential. Released before the album, the Nas collaboration "Like Smoke" seems like an attempt at a new Winehouse jam, a pertinent reminder of her slightly more adult-contemporary-challenging "urban" side, the part of her that made her more than just a Grammy-adorned, technically proficient singer. Here the track sounds like a guide vocal, unsure and smothered in reverb, with Nas filling in an excess of white space rather than just guesting. On the otherwise funny, doo-wop-styled "Between the Cheats", her detached drawl enters full-on mumble territory, Winehouse sounding like she either can't remember or can't enunciate the words. The chorus of backing vocals feels mocking as a result, but it's a necessary moment of discomfort on a record that sometimes feels like it's desperately trying to sanitize a wild spirit after years of chaos.
If that all sounds a little negative, it's because Lioness is still weighed down with the baggage that goes along with any posthumous compilation-- but as these things go, it's a pretty strong disc. It flows well, and if Winehouse didn't sound so oddly neutered on so much of it, Lioness could easily be another solid entry in her catalog. As it stands, though, it sounds like the anachronistic time-travel job it is, going backward through the career of an artist who had a very distinct developmental arc. At least in one regard, Island and Salaam Remi have done the "honorable" thing: There's no pretense of artistic intention here, and no exploitative stabs at an artist in the most vulnerable moments of her short life. But in their mission to present Winehouse as a singer first and foremost, whiting out her personal problems and demons-- the very things that made Back to Black such a transcendent album in the first place-- they reduce her to her pre-Black standard of budding talent. Instead of adding anything concrete to her legacy, Lioness only reaffirms what we already knew about her, and hopefully why she deserves to be remembered as an artist rather than a media circus.


The underrated Los Angeles-based producer returns to his Filipino roots on his latest album, a psychedelic collection of blunted tracks and club compositions.

Kaduwa

Free The Robots (né Chris Alfaro) has been a familiar presence in the Los Angeles beat scene, but he’s never been given the same flowers as Nosaj Thing, Shlohmo, or at least a half a dozen artists who put out records with the word “Brainfeeder” printed on the back. For the uninitiated, beat music is a grassroots movement started in the late 2000s by a loose collective of musicians who typically congregated around the Low End Theory club night at The Airliner in Lincoln Heights, dedicated to testing the boundaries of hip-hop production by transplanting in genres like IDM, jazz, and ambient. Low End wound up almost four years ago now, but Alfaro’s eclectic proclivities have only intensified. New album Kaduwa is a product of a trip to the Philippines, the country of his roots, which unexpectedly turned into a year-long stay when Covid-19 hit. While immersing himself in his ancestral influences on Siargao Island, Alfaro used just the bare-bones equipment he had with him.
It’s a compelling origin story, the kind labels love to seize on to help promote a record. But unlike Free The Robot’s previous album, DATU—which mixed samples sourced from Filipino albums with organic percussion instruments and chirping nature noises—the local influences are identifiable only intermittently. There are some indigenous-sounding drum patterns complimenting the programmed beats; “Aswang” takes its title from creatures of Filipino folklore, but leans heavily on a sample from obscure prog rock band Experience. There is the compelling trip-hop of “Far Away,” which features Cambodian-American singer Chhom Nimol of the band Dengue Fever. For the most part, Alfaro’s compositions are blunted, funky, and psychedelic. There are tracks for club nights, tunes for early morning comedowns, and songs that are suitable for both.
The album stirs to life with “Machine Language,” and immediately there’s a lot going on: a probing bassline, Pharaoh Sanders sample, spliced audio clips from an 1980s Commodore 64 tutorial video. With its loungey keyboard playing and shuffling beat, “Outta Sight” is deep house music for the cocktail club, while “Fangoria” is more head-splitting electronica. If Free The Robots was streamlined by a lack of access to equipment, he has wrangled everything he could out of the hardware he had available.
Kaduwa was also partially recorded in Barcelona and L.A., and Alfaro’s home remains a muse. “Welcome to Los Angeles” features an audio clip from what sounds like an old tourist video, the carefree keyboard play mirroring this pre-packed idyllic image of the city in an ironic, almost derisory, way. Meanwhile, three songs feature singer Salami Rose Joe Louis (real name Lindsay Olsen), who hails from the Bay Area and is now signed to Brainfeeder. Salami adds her soft, magical vocal style to Alfaro’s compositions that slink pleasantly along with unhurried grace—see the European pop flavored “Flowers.” Once more adding new ripples to his sound, Free The Robots continues to explore new frontiers, keeping the torch burning for the L.A. beat freaks.


In the spring of 1970, Miles Davis was fresh off his trailblazing, artistic watermarks In a Silent Way and Bitches ...

Miles Davis: The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions

The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions

In the spring of 1970, Miles Davis was fresh off his trailblazing, artistic watermarks In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, and focusing on the development of his live show. His band included some of the greatest session musicians in jazz at the time: bassist Dave Holland, keyboardist Chick Corea, and drummer Jack DeJohnette, and all were helping Miles to push the musical ideas he'd introduced on his records into uncharted territory in concert. But he was also very much inspired by the concept of using recording studios as compositional instruments, and when he set out to create the soundtrack to an obscure documentary on boxing icon Jack Johnson, it turned out he had many more ideas than could possibly find their way onto two sides of a single LP.
Following in the vein of Miles' recently issued Complete Sessions box sets for In a Silent Way or Bitches Brew (and featuring more raw material than either), this new five-disc collection shows a man consumed with evaluating the arsenal at his disposal. That meant recording countless takes on a theme, and, with assistance from producer Teo Macero, splicing those takes together into one coherent 40-minute release: 1971's A Tribute to Jack Johnson. But now, this compilation documents the sessions in their virtual entirety (there are a couple of missing takes, but nothing too essential), offering an incredible six hours of largely unheard material. As with the previous boxes from this era, fans will delight in hearing just about everything the musicians put to tape, as well as paging through the invaluable session info, extensive liner notes, and unseen photos included in the extensive and beautiful packaging. Obviously, though, anyone who hasn't heard and loved the original Jack Johnson album should check that out before dropping $60 on this exhaustive collection.
Disc one opens with several takes from a February 1970 session of the misleadingly titled "Willie Nelson" (it is, in fact, a Miles Davis original)-- much of which was incorporated into the original LP's largely ambient piece "Yesternow". The band, which here features Miles, Corea, Holland, DeJohnette, bass clarinetist Bernie Maupin, and guitarists John McLaughlin and Sonny Sharrock, set up a downbeat-heavy groove that reminds me of Funkadelic's "Music for Your Mother", if much less drugged-out. Davis enters about 40 seconds into "Willie Nelson (Take 2)" with a typically elongated phrase before settling into his "jab" motif with Maupin. Each take of the song offered here center around melodies similar to this one-- the real differences lie in Sharrock's, Miles' and Maupin's solos. It's a great way to kick off the set, if not quite as fiery a start as the original LP's "Right Off".
Later that month, Miles reconvened with a smaller band, keeping his rhythm section fully intact, but trading in Sharrock, Corea and Maupin for 19-year-old saxophonist Steve Grossman. They recorded a couple of speedier takes of "Willie Nelson" that boast more colorful McLaughlin lines and Grossman's pleasantly spooky soprano. Miles also gives some great solos, even sporting some of his bebop chops at times-- sax player Gary Bartz, a member of Charles Mingus' Jazz Workshop and soloist on Miles' Live/Evil, said that some of the most exciting moments during the shows that eventually comprised the 1974 live offering Dark Magus were when Miles would reach back into history to pull out some of his old runs, and they certainly shine here. This band also tries out three versions of a tune called "Johnny Bratton" (previously unreleased, and starting the run of songs titled after boxers), a very rock-centric piece that sounds a bit like they were unsure of how to really nail this style. "Johnny Bratton (Insert 1)" is basically straight-ahead rock pounding (something like a fusion approximation of "Louie, Louie") with McLauglin doing his best to ensure that any tonal center is wiped out, and Holland entering with some admirable fuzz-wah bass playing.
In early March, Miles again headed into the studio with this same band to cut "Archie Moore" and several versions of "Go Ahead John". The former tune is a hard blues number with some very potent lines from McLaughlin-- in fact, Miles and Grossman sit this one out entirely, allowing the trio to bring it home like a seasoned rock band. Five takes of "Go Ahead John" pop up on disc two, showcasing Miles' midnight cool melody. The first part is a sparse, somber exercise in minimal blues, and features McLaughlin reeling off short, staccato statements similar to the ones played by Sharrock on the first disc. The second part of the tune is an odd combination of jittery funk and acid-rock, with DeJohnette playing a prehistoric drum-n-bass pattern and Holland holding a single bass note while McLaughlin shreds on the right. All five performances were later edited into a version released on 1974's Big Fun.
Mid-March saw Miles lay down two takes of the previously unissued "Duran" with McLaughlin, Holland, Maupin, soprano saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and drummer Billy Cobham. Miles' band was certainly getting a better idea of how to construct "simple" funk, as the basic, syncopated groove here could have been played (though never written) by any number of funk bands at the time. However, the robo-tight interplay of Cobham and Holland, along with McLaughlin's ever-edgy solos, make it much more interesting than just any ordinary breakdown. Miles reports, "that's some raunchy shit, y'all," and he's right. These guys (exit Cobham, enter future Return to Forever drummer Lenny White) also did the stop-time, angular funk tune "Sugar Ray", which Bill Mulkowski's liner notes curiously describe as "Devoesque" and "proto-punk." It sounds more like The Meters playing head games to me.
As April came around, Miles re-entered the studio with McLaughlin, Cobham, Grossman and Mike Henderson, a teenage bassist from Aretha Franklin's band, to record "Right Off" and the first half of "Yesternow". These two songs, of course, ended up serving as the tracklist on the original Jack Johnson LP, and anyone familiar with that record can attest to just how beautifully they pulled off "Right Off"'s uptempo shuffle, with McLaughlin's aggressive outcomping transforming the track from a merely interesting jazz experiment to full-on streetwise fusion. Herbie Hancock dropped by the studio as well (from the grocery store!) and got talked into laying down a fuzz-fried solo on Farfisa, a kind of organ he'd never played before. The track ended up purely celebratory, and the four takes on disc three provide just about every solo angle you could want. The two lengthy takes of "Yesternow" offered here are masterful runs into electric ambience, but inevitably not quite as interesting as Macero's final album edit.
In May, Miles added Keith Jarrett and percussionist Airto Moreira to the mix, cutting versions of "Honky Tonk" and "Ali". A short excerpt of "Honky Tonk" ended up on Live/Evil, but until now, the track has never been released in its entirety. Shame, too, because it's an excellent slice of blues-rock: Miles plays with confidence using an octave pedal while McLaughlin peals out still more spiky color for Jarrett to run rampant over. Considering that Jack Johnson would be Miles' last studio recording until On the Corner over two years later, it's hard to believe this song wasn't issued somewhere along the line.
"Ali", leading off disc four, sees the same band (here including longtime Elvin Jones collaborator Gene Perla, who nicks a riff from Hendrix's "Who Knows") following a groove similar to that of "Willie Nelson", but with a much better idea of how to flesh it out. And then there's "Konda", which the guys recorded without a bassist at all, and which didn't see release until 1981's Directions compilation. Jarrett's opening solo on electric piano perfectly sets up Miles' eerie, beautiful melody, and McLaughlin's harmonic work is practically unearthly, helping to make this track one of the box set's coolest pieces. Miles followed this muse a few days later for takes on Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal's "Nem Um Talvez". Neither of the versions here are the one from Live/Evil, though the second is remarkably close.
Miles wrapped recording in June, but not before taking most of the band from May's sessions (adding old friends Hancock and bassist Ron Carter) back into the studio for one last go at "Nem Um Talvez", three other Pascoal pieces ("Little High People", "Selim", "Little Church"), and another Davis original titled "The Mask". All of Pascoal's ballads seem to advance the side of Miles' music best heard on In a Silent Way, and serve notice to anyone who thought he'd abandoned that style for good at the turn of the decade. Unfortunately, "Little High People" is almost distractingly straightforward, at least in principal: The uptempo pop/rock groove brings Hancock's organ transmissions down to earth, and keeps Miles' wah-wah solos a bit too in check. Meanwhile, "Selim" (really just "Nem Um Talvez" with a different title) ended up on Live/Evil, along with the two versions of "Little Church" found on this set's fifth disc. Dave Holland came back to the fold to record both parts of the previously unreleased "The Mask": the first is a very out, keyboard-heavy free-jam with little assistance from Miles or McLaughlin, while the second-- hardly easy listening-- closes the sessions with an exhausted, punchdrunk swagger, finally collapsing after nearly 16 minutes.
The box, however, ends on a high note, with the original LP versions of "Right Off" and "Yesternow". I hesitate to go through them blow by blow because anyone investing in this box will almost certainly have already heard them many times over. Which, ultimately, is my only real caveat to The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions: there's more of interest here to fans; for a casual listener to tackle all five discs would be commendably ambitious, but an arduous challenge nonetheless. This set ranks behind both the Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way boxes in terms of the amount of music I'd want to just let play, uninterrupted. However, Miles Davis is one of those rare musicians who rarely failed to let a take pass without trying out something cool. As usual, the deeper you dig, the more you find.


The soundtrack to Questlove’s excellent documentary on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival tells a nuanced story of Black creativity and perseverance at the end of a transformative decade.

Various Artists: Summer of Soul (...Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Album Review | Pitchfork

Playing Harlem for the first time was a major step for the 5th Dimension. The St. Louis vocal group had scored a string of hits throughout the late 1960s, but they practically owned 1969 with “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In,” a medley of two songs from the musical Hair. It wasn’t just one of the biggest hits of the year, but a song that continues to define the era when counterculture ideas were infiltrating the mainstream. However, “we were constantly being attacked because we weren’t quote-unquote Black enough,” says singer Marilyn McCoo in an emotional moment of last year’s documentary Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). “Sometimes we were called the Black group with the white sound. We didn’t like that. We happened to be artists who were Black and our voices sounded the way they sound.” The Harlem Cultural Festival in the summer of 1969 gave the 5th Dimension an opportunity to perform for a predominantly Black audience.
And they absolutely killed it. Summer of Soul shows a group that never stops moving, filling the stage with a buzzy energy to match their orange-sherbet outfits. They dance from one microphone to another with synchronized steps, singing harder, louder, rawer than they did on the studio recording. It sounds like they’re trying to fill all of New York with joyful harmonies and hippie optimism, as well as a focused urgency to put those ideals of love, happiness, and community to work. The documentary suggests they’re able to sing the medley very differently in Harlem than they did at other venues. About McCoo’s emotional response to viewing that footage, director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson told Pitchfork: “I was wondering, why is this particular show hitting your heartstrings with the millions of things that you’ve done? And suddenly, I realized that she and I had something in common. No matter what job they have, every Black person in their workspace has to juggle code-switching. Between Motown and certain acts that wanted not to make it but survive, you had to code-switch.”
As a director, Questlove uses the performances at the Harlem Cultural Festival to explore issues like code-switching and to highlight the unique challenges Black artists faced as the ’60s turned into the ’70s. That focus lends Summer of Soul an unexpected emotional power, making it the finest music documentary in a year crammed to bursting with fine music documentaries. Now, it has a fine soundtrack featuring 16 songs on CD and 17 on streaming services. The sequencing is identical to the film, grouping gospel songs in the middle and jazz toward the end. There are some artists missing from the tracklist—most notably, Stevie Wonder, who opens the film—but it’s remarkable how well the music tells a nuanced story of Black creativity and perseverance at the end of the 1960s.
Assembling the documentary and the soundtrack, Questlove had a lot of remarkable material to work with: hours and hours of performances by gospel groups like Clara Walker & the Gospel Redeemers, blues acts like B.B. King, jazz instrumentalists like Max Roach, rock-oriented bands like the Chambers Brothers, pop artists like the 5th Dimension, and R&B singers like David Ruffin. There’s also a lot of Latin jazz, with Puerto Rican and Cuban performers like Ray Barretto and Mongo Santamaria. Both the documentary and its new soundtrack argue for the sweeping diversity of Black creative expression in the ’60s, and both make the most of these very different stylistic approaches: If you want the sublime optimism of the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ “Oh Happy Day” (featuring an incredible lead vocal from Shirley Miller), then you have to take the righteous outrage of Nina Simone’s “Backlash Blues,” too.
Arriving at the end of a decade that saw great strides in civil rights as well as ugly resistance to that progress, the festival showed the many ways pop music might confront political and social realities. This is music filled with optimism and joy, but also anger and urgency. Most of these artists capture all of those emotions at once, in particular Simone. Questlove uses her set as the documentary’s climax, and it’s not hard to see why: She distills so many of the film’s ideas into her three songs, especially “To Be Young, Gifted & Black” and “Are You Ready.” The latter, which closes the film and the soundtrack, is a sharp recitation of a poem by the Last Poets’ David Nelson, with Simone almost needling the audience: “Are you ready? Are you really ready?” Her performance acknowledges the struggles that await them in the new decade, but also emphasizes the power of their shared heritage and community to overcome anything America might throw at them. “Are you ready to smash things and burn buildings?” she asks, barely a year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
King’s death hangs over the proceedings, although he’s only mentioned a few times. The Rev. Jesse Jackson introduces “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” as a memorial to the slain leader, and it becomes a showcase for Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson. Their unrehearsed performance is one of the finest moments in the documentary, although the loss of visuals—the closeups of their faces, the ecstatic quality of Staples’ jumps—robs the soundtrack version of just a bit of its power. It’s a passing of a torch that Staples would carry into the 1970s, but it’s also a glorious impromptu church service, each singer pushing the other to new heights and taking the audience along with them.
The summer of ’69 has become a focal point of white Boomer nostalgia, to the extent that events that don’t quite fit that narrative have been misrepresented or ignored altogether. Woodstock in particular becomes a touchstone for the Harlem Cultural Festival, and Questlove even invokes that event in the film’s first title card. The only overlap between those two festival lineups was Sly and the Family Stone, who obliterated audiences in Harlem just as they obliterated audiences at Yasgur’s farm. They get two songs on the soundtrack, both funky in a way that speaks to unspeakable joy yet acknowledges the misery of the late 1960s. The distortion and PA feedback add a bit of visceral aural violence to “Everyday People.”
Some of this footage aired on TV in 1969, but most of the tapes were stowed in producer Hal Tulchin’s basement, unseen and largely forgotten. It was never truly “lost,” but it might as well have been, considering how thoroughly other aspects of the era have been packaged and repackaged. But the music speaks as loudly and as powerfully now as it did then. It’s alarming how many of the issues cited by artists and presenters persist today—police violence, systemic racism, poverty, cultural erasure—yet that makes the music sound fresh, lively, relevant in its celebration and commiseration. Both the film and the soundtrack bear that weight of history gracefully and jubilantly.

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On their sixth record, a gloriously pretty collection that features guest vocals from Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold, the Walkmen have made a bewildered, giddy paean to their own happiness.

Heaven

"I was the Duke of Earl, but it couldn't last/ I was the pony express, but I ran out of gas." This is the first thing Hamilton Leithauser sighs on the Walkmen's new album, Heaven. It is a distinctly un-rock'n'roll sentiment. In fact, it sounds like the sort of thing your grandpa might say. Ten years ago, the Walkmen were a magnetic, messy young rock band, and they did all the things we expect young rock bands to do: swung in unexpectedly on friends, drunk-dialed exes, pleaded pathetically that things would get better with zero evidence that they would. But over the course of their last two albums, they began receding gracefully into sepia tone: Both You & Me and Lisbon felt like more breezy postcards from abroad than seething dispatches from here. Heaven, their gloriously pretty sixth studio record, marks the moment they shuffle off into that 4x6-sized sunset forever. The title they've chosen says it all: Look where they ended up! We all know that's not where rock bands go.
Heaven, as Talking Heads famously defined it, "is a place where nothing ever happens." For most sentient people, that sounds like the definition of hell, which Byrne's lyrics admitted: "It's hard to imagine how nothing at all/ Could be so exciting/ Could be so much fun." Similarly, it might not thrill longtime Walkmen fans to picture the band as a bunch of rumpled, beaming dads slotting recording time in between play dates. But on Heaven, they've made a bewildered, giddy paean to their own happiness. Heaven feels infectiously drunk on its own good fortune and kicks out a barstool for you to drink alongside it.
It helps that Hamilton Leithauser, with his oddly aristocratic presence, remains a magnetic frontman even when he's basically taking a song to make goo-goo noises at his one-year-old daughter (the lovely if borderline-saccharine "Song for Leigh"). There was always something airily entitled in Leithauser's on-record persona; he was the rich kid who didn't have to do his homework, because he knew you'd do it if he asked. That this kid had feelings too was a fundamental dramatic premise of the Walkmen. To hear this former kid now ruminating on big-picture stuff, like the statistical improbability of lasting love ("Love Is Luck") or the emptiness of perfection ("We Can't Be Beat") is to hear the band's purview expand quietly. On "Southern Heart", he even plays a pleasantly tired cuckold, like the Leonard Cohen of "Famous Blue Raincoat": "Tell me again how you loved all the men you were after," he mutters.
Some longtime fans might not like their Walkmen like this. They were great, after all, at being sexily unstable. But this retro-yearning tendency has been there since the beginning if you looked for it. So to hear them ease out of sturm-und-drang and into something resembling durable adulthood is to witness a great rock band evolve along a logical path. In what may be a tacit acknowledgement of this shift, Heaven glows with nostalgic pre-rock'n'roll sounds: "Jerry Jr.'s Tune" is one-and-a-half moonlit minutes of classic doo-wop; "No One Ever Sleeps" has a faint mariachi-sounding horn section; "Love Is Luck" is a sparkling calypso song. "Heartbreaker" echoes the chords, melody and rhythm of "Be My Baby".
All of the Walkmen's albums have been recorded with meticulous, stone-cutting care; by now, listening to them is like entering a room where you can tap your foot in corners to test its resonance. "We Can't Be Beat", one of a few songs on Heaven rounded out with harmonies from Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold, eases into a full-band march after about two minutes of wry, twinkling acoustic guitar. On "Line By Line", Leithauser croons tenderly over a single rippling guitar until a string section gradually soaks in at the song's edges. The beery, cock-eyed "No One Ever Sleeps" transforms the Walkmen into a schmaltzy gypsy band serenading the outdoor tables at a white-tablecloth restaurant.
This group has always been able to carve out dramatic gestures like this, and even at this end of the spectrum-- far beyond personal explosions and exclamation-pointed delivery-- they continue to craft music of wry vitality. It may be that they can no longer convincingly deliver tortured, existential desperation, and if so, that's just as well. With Heaven, they've turned out a record that finds a thousand affecting variations on contented hum.


Jeff Goldblum’s debut album, a live-in-the-studio ersatz nightclub affair, is a sincere, classy, and competent homage to the golden age of vocal jazz.

Jeff Goldblum / The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra: The Capitol Studio Sessions

The Capitol Studio Sessions

Jeff Goldblum has located fame’s sweet spot. The man veers happily between being a star in lucrative Hollywood franchises and a sort of sentient, benevolent meme. Every sensible person should aspire to this precise degree of celebrity: Goldblum is rich enough not to have to worry about money again, yet he can still wander into a Trader Joe’s without a security detail. He is curiously beloved, but not so beloved that he’s at risk of sustaining paparazzi-induced injury. When Goldblum, with his bespectacled good looks, is summoned to BuzzFeed’s video studio to recite tweets from strangers calling him “daddy,” he seems to genuinely enjoy it. That is the dream, isn’t it?
Goldblum also enjoys an offscreen hobby as an accomplished jazz pianist. He has honed this skill since his childhood, long before films like The Big Chill and The Fly made him a regular in America’s VCRs. The Goldblum Fame Quotient seems ideal for indulging a musical side hustle: He can easily land a deal with Decca Records, yet he won’t be suffocated by public scrutiny. For years, the actor and his ensemble, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, have been bringing big-band-era jazz standards to clubs in New York and Los Angeles. The Capitol Studios Sessions is billed as his debut album, but it feels more like a variety-show special, with Goldblum feeding off the energy of a studio audience and exchanging flirty banter with guest vocalists like Haley Reinhart. In truth, it’s both: The album was recorded at Hollywood’s Capitol Studios, which Goldblum converted into an ad hoc jazz club, with a boozed-up crowd of fans who do not address him as “daddy.” So we get the freewheeling spirit of a live album and the pristine mix of a proper studio LP.
Goldblum is a skillful and competent pianist, whether he is recreating Red Garland’s arpeggios on the Miles Davis arrangement of “It Never Entered My Mind” or improvising bluesy licks during a synthless rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “Don’t Mess With Mister ‘T.’” He is not a showy player. On most tracks, he seems content to cede the spotlight to virtuosic guests like the trumpeter Till Brönner, whose bebop-inspired solos fill up jaunty renditions of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” and the King Cole Trio’s “Straighten Up and Fly Right,” or the “American Idol” alum Haley Reinhart, whose distinct vibrato is an elegant match for the 1930s standard “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” (That song is performed in the Nina Simone arrangement from 1958.) Imelda May makes several appearances, including a slinky, inspired deconstruction of the Rosemary Clooney hit “Come On-a-My House,” which features the sexiest known enunciation of the word “apricot.”
The only track Goldblum deigns to sing on is also the album’s most overtly comedic moment: “Me and My Shadow,” a spirited duet with Sarah Silverman, who plays Sammy Davis Jr. to Goldblum’s Sinatra. The Rat Pack duo introduced topical references of the 1960s to the Kennedys when they performed the song, and Goldblum and Silverman duly insert stale nods to climate change and the Redskins controversy that seem better suited to a Jay Leno routine.
As an homage to the golden age of vocal jazz, this stuff is classy and sincere enough to put on the playlist at your local Italian restaurant without prompting any odd looks from customers. Even the most tedious material (“This Bitter Earth”) matches the nightclub-circa-1962 mood. To his credit, Goldblum fully commits to the kitschy bandleader guise. But there is a lingering sense that Goldblum’s considerable charm is more suited to the club than the turntable. In between numbers, the actor hogs the spotlight as a suave emcee, and bits like an extended riff on Silverman’s elegant attire just hang awkwardly without visual accompaniment. Much of Goldblum’s banter has a you-had-to-be-there quality, like squinting at a friend’s blurry photos from a party you weren’t invited to. That makes The Capitol Studios Sessions feel more like a document of an experience than the main attraction. Goldblum’s most devoted obsessives won't need much persuading to visit his club.


The upstart Connecticut band Sorority Noise’s second LP is motivated by a drive to get over your own bullshit. Their 2014 debut bristled with pop-punk steeped in self-pity, but they've learned to channel their energy in their arrangements, which have become more sophisticated, confident, and well-produced.

Joy, Departed

For those who identified with emo during its artistic (if not commercial) peak in the '90s, the most demoralizing development over the past decade is the term becoming synonymous with a performative, juvenile sadness that commodifies depression, often treats women as props, and is expressed in a voice that sounds like the worst version of your 8th grade inner monologue. And so it's understandable to be skeptical of an all-male band named Sorority Noise, often tagged as emo, making a song called “Art School Wannabe”. In it, Cameron Boucher sings in a nasal tone, pinpointing that post-pubescent sour spot where snark becomes an all-purpose defense mechanism against emotional disturbance. It bops along to a chipper shuffle that brings to mind, depending on your age and generosity, the Front Bottoms, mid-period Weezer, or Ben Folds Five. But it also contains the lyric upon which the entirety of Joy, Departed hinges—“Maybe I’m just scared to admit that I might not be as dark as I think/ Maybe I’m not the person that I never wanted to be.”
On their 2014 debut Forgettable, Sorority Noise's pop-punk was so steeped in self-pity that the title felt like more of an epitaph than a punchline (“Nobody likes me/ That’s what I tell myself...I spent a lot of last year learning I don’t like me too”). As indicated by "Art School Wannabe", Joy, Departed is motivated, above all, by a drive to get over your own bullshit, and this has become an emergent and necessary theme for other bands in its realm. A similar mindset serves as the basis for the near entirety of Annabel’s recently released Having it All and was touched upon on by Modern Baseball's “Two Good Things” and You Blew It!’s “Better to Best”, both of whom contribute guest vocals on Joy, Departed. The Connecticut band also strains with ambition, and the most exciting thing about Sorority Noise and their ilk is that they’re courting a larger audience, reaching for something that seems to be out of their grasp. Both of these aspects can occasionally make Joy, Departed an uncomfortable listen, but they’re also the reason why it’s such a consistently engaging record.
Over the last year, Sorority Noise have learned to channel their energy towards their arrangements, which have become more sophisticated, confident, well-produced and also more vertiginous in all aspects. Boucher’s bedheaded vocals are contrasted against gorgeous, sighing strings on “Blissth” and “Fluorescent Black” and both build to soaring peaks that cruelly cut out, as if Sorority Noise temporarily forgot they were still an upstart emo band and were snapped back into reality out of their arena-rock dreams. “Your Soft Blood” has the gripping bombast of Bright Eyes or Cursive or Say Anything from 2002-2004, projects where an untrained, verbose speaker is pulled between caustic punk and ornate chamber pop, fighting against the perception that they haven’t earned such grandiosity.
They haven't completely overlooked what worked on Forgettable. The clean twee-punk center at the outset of “Corrigan” bravely holds as blaring fuzz guitars encroach in the chorus. During the verses of “Nolsey”, Boucher slumps around aimlessly like a teenage dirtbag, before a surprising barbershop harmony leads into a glorious explosion of symphonic guitar.
The guitars tend to speak more directly than Boucher himself. Whereas Modern Baseball will just flat out admit to staying at home on Friday night, “wishing you were still my girlfriend,”Boucher strives to find more convoluted, pungent ways to make the same point—he wants to be “the heroin that keeps you warm enough,” “the smoke too clear to see,” “in bloom for you.” Instead, he’s “the autumn wind that blows your hair and the hand that’s out of reach,” “a boathouse, alone on a lake,” and “the reason your leaves are withering.” It’s hard not to wince for a split second, but once the initial sting wears off, the underlying emotions are relatable. Much of Joy, Departed occupies an awkward space of figuring whether “love” means being of service or being validated, of wondering whether poetry enhances honesty or obscures it.
And yet it’s the fairly standard palm-mute/pedal-stomp dynamics of “Using” where Sorority Noise’s mania is most convincingly expressed. At the outset, Boucher gives into any number of things: pills, drugs, cigarettes, the like. It’s an inventory of self-negation until a group yell of, “I stopped wishing I was dead!"—the excitement of living again (or for once) expressed with redlining distortion, a surge of joy that’s so overwhelming and unfamiliar it still feels like rage. That lyric pops up a second time, during an ankle-breaking pivot to a new key.
Boucher claims it’s the first song that he wrote while trying to take ownership of the his battles with addiction and mental illness and turning it into something positive. After a friend recently committed suicide, he told Alternative Press, “Depression is not a trend...Stop glorifying sorrow and start lending a helping hand to those that need it the most.” You can tell it wasn’t the first song he wrote for Joy, Departed and that his revelation didn’t come easily: after “Using”, Joy, Departed concludes on its two most despairing tracks. It results in a perhaps unintentional but honest point about the fleeting nature of all emotions and that when the instinct for self-preservation kicks in, it should be grasped upon like a matter of life and death, because it may be exactly that.


A set of previously unreleased demos for the influential Dayton band’s never-completed major label debut offers a fascinating glimpse into their strange, singular evolution.

The Predator Nominate EP

First Ohio, then the world. Brainiac laughed at their own ambition with the tongue-in-cheek cover of their 1995 Internationale EP, which read “Dayton London Paris Tokyo Berlin Moscow.” Still, the band moved from strength to strength with amazing rapidity: A tour with the Jesus Lizard led to a show at Lollapalooza which turned into an opening slot for Beck. A single on Limited Potential earned them an album on Grass Records which caught the attention of Touch and Go. By 1997, Brainiac was one of the most sought-after bands in the post-Nirvana era, fielding phone calls from Rick Rubin and negotiating million-dollar record deals. The pressure led to fistfights and panic attacks until they settled on a contract with Interscope. Then, disaster struck. Lead singer and songwriter Timmy Taylor died in a car accident in May 1997. All at once, the band’s limitless potential was cut short. Brainiac’s thwarted evolution has haunted fans ever since; it’s impossible to imagine next steps when a group takes such creative leaps. The Predator Nominate EP, a collection of demos from this era, gives the fullest picture yet of Brainiac in their final months.
Brainiac started out strange and only grew stranger. Taylor’s fascination with synthesizers—tremendously unhip among rock bands in the early ’90s—set them apart in the wake of the grunge explosion. He ran his vocals through old Moogs, modulating and distorting his voice into a robotic caterwaul. Guitarist John Schmersal, who bassist Juan Monasterio initially pegged as too weird even for Brainiac, pushed their sound even further out with his fried electronics and circuit-bending. Taylor’s pop sensibility broke through on 1996’s Hissing Prigs in Static Couture, setting expectations high for the band’s next album. Brainiac’s follow-up, the Jim O’Rourke-produced Electro-Shock for President EP, was their last official release before Taylor’s death, leaving fans to puzzle over it for clues about what might have come next. The previously unreleased demos on The Predator Nominate EP come from the band’s sessions for their speculative major label debut, making it the last and best hope of charting their trajectory.
At nine songs in 15 minutes, Predator Nominate is piecemeal and incomplete but still full of compelling ideas, like a great artist’s sketchbook. Experienced on its own terms as an imperfect representation of the band, it demonstrates Brainiac’s process at the height of their powers. Taylor may have preferred to wash the raw, clean vocals on “Smothered Inside” in a wave of distortion, just as he did after recording the demo for Bonsai Superstar’s “Collide.” But even without Brainiac’s usual brain-addling noise, this version stands on its own as an exhibit of Taylor’s remarkable feel for melody. As rare Brainiac instrumentals, “Predator Nominate” and “Pyramid Theme”  showcase how adeptly they incorporated outré electronics into their thrillingly propulsive sound by this point.
Despite the lo-fi quality, several songs have all the hallmarks of fully realized Brainiac tunes. The earworm melody of “Kiss of the Dog” is saved from being overly saccharine by Taylor’s unmistakable sasscore vocals. “The Game,” with its nightmarish synths and threatening voiceover intoning “You don’t play the game I play/You know nothing,” serves as a disorienting interlude akin to Electro-Shock’s “Fashion 500.” The dreamy “Come With Me” is the farthest cry from classic Brainiac as Taylor’s repeated call to “Come now, with me” drifts over ethereal hums into silence. Though we’ll never know his creative destination, Predator Nominate is a welcome invitation leading us in the right direction.


The wildly ambitious albums that cemented Rundgren’s legend as a studio genius in the early 1970s return in illuminating new editions.

Todd Rundgren: Something/Anything? / A Wizard, a True Star

One of the first things they warn you about with hallucinogenic drugs is that some people never recover. Many years ago, a teacher might caution, my friend Frank dropped acid. Long story short, now Frank can’t drive his car because he sees frogs in it. An equally evocative tactic might be to introduce students to Todd Rundgren’s discography. In the thirteen months between his two finest records—1972’s Something/Anything? and 1973’s A Wizard, a True Star—Rundgren got deep into mescaline. “Well, I know I wasn’t high on Jesus,” he later reflected on the era. “Every once in a while I took a trip and never came back.”
The effect those trips had on his creative output cannot be overstated. In a transformation akin to the ones pulled off by Scott Walker on Scott 4 and Radiohead on OK Computer, the playful soft-rocker morphed into a three-eared, insomniac prankster who treated the recording studio like a surreal public-access channel he broadcast to the world. The albums he made in this period were high points, in more ways than one, and they have now been reissued on SACD via Analog Spark, offering illuminating, immersive editions of two of the 1970s’ most fascinating works.
There’s more to Rundgren’s evolution, of course, than drugs. In interviews, he has attributed the radical shift in his mid-20s less to his own changing perspective than to other people’s perspective on him—he got tired of being seen as merely another piano-playing, lovesick troubadour. While he still stands by the folk-pop simplicity of his earliest solo records, Rundgren is quick to note their lack of depth, citing their obvious reference points (thematically, a high-school break-up; musically, the work of Laura Nyro). After achieving commercial success on his 1970 debut with the slick single “We Gotta Get You a Woman” and critical success a year later with his moodier sophomore album, Rundgren sought to expand his range. And he wanted to do it by himself.
Before Rundgren turned to psychedelics on A Wizard, a True Star, he turned to Ritalin to make Something/Anything?, an obsessive, feature-length masterpiece in both a creative and technical sense. Rundgren performed the double LP almost entirely on his own, at a time when self-recording meant turning the tape on, running to another room to play each instrument, and then running back to press stop (hence the Ritalin). The album remains the definitive showcase of his gifts. Among its tracks is the very first song he wrote (the immortal “Hello It’s Me,” resurrected from his early band Nazz and later slowed-down and re-popularized by the Isley Brothers). It’s also home to his greatest song (the irresistible power-pop anthem “Couldn’t I Just Tell You”) and one of his biggest (“I Saw the Light”). It’s the perfect introduction for newcomers, and the new reissue makes it sound as overwhelming and virtuosic as Rundgren intended.
Something/Anything?, while being home to Rundgren’s most recognizable music, is a more challenging record than its classic rock reputation suggests. Anyone who grew up on FM radio is used to hearing “Hello It’s Me” sandwiched between, say, America and Elton John. But on Something/Anything?, it sits proudly between the absurd, confrontational tracks “Piss Aaron” and “Some Folks Is Even Whiter Than Me.” Elsewhere, there is plenty of extended jamming, studio banter, and, in one of the LP’s most jarring moments, a full minute-plus track of Rundgren breaking the fourth wall to teach listeners about poor production. (“If you have a pair of headphones,” he says, “you better get ‘em out and get ‘em cranked up, because they’re really gonna help you on this one.”)
The “Sounds of the Studio” bit, in which Rundgren instructs us on how to avoid auditory flaws by deliberately invoking them, might now play like an indulgent dad joke: arguably the geekiest of music geeks pandering to his devoted fanbase of fellow music geeks. But for Rundgren at the time, it was a declaration of freedom. A preview of the rebellious streak to come, it shows the teacher’s pet breaking the rules when no one was there to stop him. Throughout the decade, Rundgren was one of the first prominent artist-slash-producers, as competent behind the scenes as he was in front of the microphone, earning him the admiration of a young Prince and, later, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker. As he discovered his own identity on record, Rundgren was hellbent on learning what happens when those two roles converge. When everything about a record is fully under the artist’s control, he suspected, the product can become something singular.
With the money he made from the hit singles on Something/Anything?, Rundgren built his own studio in New York, called it Secret Sound, and began recording a follow-up there. He learned as he went along, fine-tuning his equipment and writing new songs in one continuous, sleepless process. It was around this time that psychedelic drugs entered the picture. In Paul Myers’ excellent 2010 book about his studio sessions, also called A Wizard a True Star, Rundgren reflects on the influence of the substances he was taking. “I became more aware,” he says, “Of what music and sound were like in my internal environment, and how different that was from the music I had been making.” You get the sense that he exhausted himself on Something/Anything? so that he’d have no choice but to start over.
While the drugs can explain away its album cover, the music on A Wizard, a True Star itself is too beautiful, too intentional to merely play like one man’s acid diary. The flow of the album, however, does more or less follow that path. It turns nonsensical, nostalgic, hysterical, and horny at a pace that defies logic, let alone cohesion. There are tracks that deny any of Rundgren’s strengths—a dismal blues pastiche, 60 seconds of dogs barking—and more familiar ones that seem to mock themselves. There’s a swirling, paranoid breakdown in the exquisite “Sometimes I Don’t Know What to Feel,” and a dizzying rush of confidence expressed through a ten-minute medley of soul covers. Overall, it’s exhausting and electrifying and unlike anything in Rundgren’s discography: his Pet Sounds, Astral Weeks, and Berlin Trilogy, all tie-dyed into one. Its fingerprints are evident on bedroom auteurs to this day, from Ariel Pink to Frank Ocean, who sampled its synths on 2016’s Blonde.
After Wizard, Rundgren’s work remained fascinating if inconsistent. He matured in his own strange way, but he never again reached such moments of enlightenment. On 1978’s Hermit of Mink Hollow—the only other record in his catalog that approaches these two—Rundgren returned to his early works’ stripped-back sound and their themes of lost love. But now it was clear that he wasn’t talking about a high-school relationship. The ballads were heavier, and the moments of levity felt more compulsive, like a man punching himself in the head to get out of a funk. (It’s not surprising that his next solo hit would be a grating anthem about secluding oneself from society to make a deathly, violent racket unto the void.) Rundgren understood all along that things would never be the same. There’s a reason why he sang “I Saw the Light” in the past tense: his life’s work depended on knowing you can never get that first high again.


The Australian songwriter returns with a beachy, airborne set with subtle hints of something darker lurking underneath.

Come Around

After stints in Berlin and London and years of nomadic living on tour, Carla dal Forno returned to Australia. The electropop singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist settled in Castlemaine, a township roughly 80 miles northwest of her native Melbourne. With a population of 6,750, its pastoral, tree-lined streets are a far cry from the dense urban infrastructures that have loomed over dal Forno’s music for the better part of a decade. Her chilling 2016 debut, You Know What It’s Like, felt like a late-night dispatch from a cold concrete tunnel. Dal Forno’s precise synth work was ominous; it could sound like steam hissing from a pothole, or the unsheathing of a blade. Some of the smog lifted on 2019’s Look Up Sharp, the contours of each song gleaming a bit brighter. On her latest album, Come Around, dal Forno seems even lighter, emitting the stillness of her new home. These nine songs are beachy and airborne, with only the slightest suggestion that something troublesome is lurking underneath.
The most menacing entry is dal Forno’s cover of the United States of America’s 1968 ripper “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” Dal Forno’s minimalist interpretation is far creepier; totally tranquil, she lists off an arsenal of poisonous plants, as if she’s already slipped their venom into your tea. “I wanted to produce something enticing and emotionally resonant—a reflection of a false sense of security—alongside these lyrical depictions of scary wilderness,” dal Forno recently said of her version. She heightens the suspense with a tight focus on arrangement, contrasting the song’s botanical lyrics with machine-like instruments. Dal Forno spent months honing the rhythm and timbre of side stick percussion, which underpins the track like a shaky scaffold.
Dal Forno is a perfectionist, but instead of letting that tendency crowd her music, she stakes out a few places in her compositions to plant each refined detail. Many of the songs are grounded by a sturdy, repetitive bassline. On opener “Side by Side,” Dal Forno adorns the spare plucking with swells of static and sickly warped synthesizer. The wordless “Autumn” is anchored by a thick, rubbery bass loop, but more intriguing are the spindly filaments that wrap around it: slight fretboard scratches, simmering metallic thrums, and what sounds like a cricket chirping through an echo chamber.
“Stay Awake” is spurred by digital wind and shrill bells, but the song is stained by a foreboding narrator and a gnawing tension. “When you’re counting the days that you might withstand,” she sings, her voice breathy and serene. Dal Forno’s delivery makes this line especially unnerving—highlighting the contrast between the placid character and the tedious endurance of daily life. In the same chant-like melody, dal Forno offers an alternative to the grind, daydreaming of “when the waves come to shore and take you out.” It makes you question the role she’s playing in the song…self-help cult leader? Or meditation bot with a dark sense of humor?
On the title track, dal Forno sifts through sunnier memories in Australia. “After many years in big cities I’m enjoying being surrounded by trees rather than tall buildings,” she told Brooklyn Vegan last month. In the lyrics, she celebrates exploration, moving to a new town and discovering those “special spots” only locals know. It is Come Around’s breeziest track—like a Beach Boys demo melting in the sun. Delayed surf guitar riffs drift in and out, as dal Forno modulates synthesizers to sound like seaspray. But even her sweetest piece leaves a tart aftertaste. “It’s not every day that I’ll want you beside me here,” she sings, before confessing that previous lovers have all looked the same: “You could be the next one in my life,” she concedes. Old habits have a way of following us, even to the most tranquil places.


Of Katie Dey's peers on the Orchid Tapes label, she finds the closest kinship with Alex G, another purveyor of demented indie pop who makes resourceful use of pitch-shifting and bizarre instrumental choices. But the Melbourne-based artist completely corrodes her voice.

asdfasdf

Like regions, genres have accents. There are pop-punk yelps, post-punk groans, dream-pop whispers, and the clean, enunciated croons of mainstream stars. Katie Dey's first album asdfasdf positions her as an alien to vocal geography. The Melbourne-based artist is a singer as well as a songwriter, but in each of her songs, she completely corrodes her voice. While many home recordings paint the image of the artist singing real words into a real microphone attached to a real tape recorder, asdfasdf refuses to ground itself. It is hard to imagine these seven songs coming from a physical space; chaotic and gritty, they prioritize energy and motion, making audio fidelity feel like an obsolete concern.
Of Dey's peers on the Orchid Tapes label, she finds the closest kinship with Alex G, another purveyor of demented indie pop who makes resourceful use of pitch-shifting and bizarre instrumental choices. But women's voices in music are especially policed for annoyingness, and Dey pushes that quality to an extreme edge. The first you hear of her on "don't be scared" is a high-pitched croak processed beyond recognition among clean acoustic guitar riffs and unsteady drum beats. She later programs a synthesizer to mimic her vocal tone; aside from the vague definition around her words, the line between human and machine feels smeared and unstable, as if Dey were as present in all of her instruments as she is in her own voice.
asdfasdf's most defined and energetic song comes in the form of "unkillable", a minute and 20 seconds of buoyant melodies that constantly threaten to veer off course. Dey's lyrics shine through clearest here, with phrases like "teen poetry" and "sucks the blood from my feet" flashing through in strange, disembodied glimpses. The song is catchy, which makes it all the stranger. Most hooks go down smooth by design, but Dey's nightmare pop forces you to swallow something decomposing and sharp. The name of the song suggests its own inversion—not "unlikable", as it may read on first glance, but immortal, unstoppable, powerful.
Dey is hardly the first songwriter to use broken rules as weapons, but she takes palpable pleasure in the conventions she upends. Voices, especially women's, are expected to be pretty and easy to grasp, especially in quieter, gentler music. Dey amplifies her rough edges, splitting the space inside her tape machine and chasing herself down its fragments. asdfasdf sustains a level of textural complexity that most musicians won't attempt, and its clever melodic core supports the layers of abrasions. A warm playfulness radiates from deep inside Dey's music. Its inscrutability makes it all the more rewarding to wade through over and over again.


Shy Layers’ debut is one of the year's great, unexpected pleasures: a deeply engaging, effortlessly listenable collection of Balearic pop with overtones of yacht rock, Kraftwerk, and Graceland.

Shy Layers

For a while now, the material on Shy Layers’ debut album has been hiding in plain sight as pay-what-you-wish downloads on Bandcamp. His first EP, featuring six of the album’s songs, came out in January last year; its follow-up, from which three more songs were plucked for the album, appeared this past April. But if an LP release from an obscure German label is what it takes to give the music more exposure, then so be it, because Shy Layers’ eponymous debut turns out to be one of the year’s great, unexpected pleasures: a deeply engaging, effortlessly listenable collection of Balearic pop with overtones of yacht rock, Kraftwerk, and Paul Simon’s Graceland. Its almost-August release couldn’t be better timed: This is an album that evokes rumpled linen, Aperol spritz, and balmy Mediterranean breezes, with a bittersweet undercurrent to suggest that autumn is just around the corner.
Growing Bin, the label responsible for releasing the album, is an unusual proposition. It began in 2007 as an MP3 blog for an obsessive collector named Basso to post vinyl rips from his personal collection of rarities—library music, cosmic disco, Polish jazz, German progressive rock, etc. Somewhere along the line, he launched a mail-order operation for secondhand records, and in 2013, he started up the label. By virtue of its founder’s idiosyncratic tastes, the label has carved out a highly specific niche in the overlap between new age, ambient jazz, and lite funk, and if you didn’t know better, you could easily mistake Shy Layers’ debut for one of the vintage, private-press LPs unearthed on Basso’s digging expeditions. It’s a quiet, sometimes cryptic record where purring vocoders veil hushed singing, plucked guitars are wreathed in reverb, and African highlife melodies nimbly snake around echoing drums and arpeggiated synthesizers. It’s hard to say exactly which parts are played and which parts are programmed; it’s not even terribly clear whether there’s a whole band jamming, or just one person laying down overdubs.
In fact, Shy Layers is JD Walsh, a multi-media artist who recently relocated with his family from Brooklyn to Atlanta. Although Shy Layers is the first of his musical projects to achieve any measure of notoriety, he’s been making music forever, and you could guess as much from his deeply intuitive understanding of pop’s mechanics. As understated as a lot of these tunes are, he’s got a keen melodic sensibility that keeps even his simplest chord changes bubbling in your head long after the glossy digital reverb has faded out. While nearly every song floats tranquilly atop a pneumatic bed of synthesizers, the album rarely scans as electronic music, per se. His rhythms combine electronic percussion with acoustic drums cloaked in warm, dry room tone, and guitars frequently take the lead.
Some of the album’s influences are easy to pinpoint. His vocoders sound like kinder, gentler versions of Kraftwerk's robotic choirs, and his bright-eyed melodies share that band’s almost- naïve quality. Highlife and Afropop make their presence felt in lanky electric guitar and mbira-like synthesizers on “Too Far Out,” while “Bees and Bamboos” attempts a kind of ersatz Ethio-jazz with twinned guitar leads and splashes of piano; the chintzy keyboards and dubbed-out saxes of “SEG” have a distinctly Caribbean feel. The dreamy “Holding It Back,” meanwhile, is an obvious Arthur Russell homage, right down to a refrain, “Kissing on the dark side of the moon,” that mingles romance and childlike innocence.
Other aspects of the album’s deeply referential sound are more difficult to put your finger on, even though you know you've heard them somewhere. Plucked guitars, watery synth pads, flanged acoustic strumming, and gated reverb conjure hazy memories of the 1980s: echoes of Tears for Fears, Talking Heads, and Phil Collins swirl together into a home-recorded pastiche of big-money studio polish. And on “Playing the Game,” spindly synths and a high-necked bass melody reminiscent of Joy Division dissolve into giddy falsetto coos, suggesting an alternate universe where goths wear pastel colors. It is the sweetest kind of déjà vu.
As much as Walsh may traffic in the familiar modes and well-worn tropes that have populated chillwave and Balearic retro for over a decade now, Shy Layers really doesn't sound like anything else out there. At times I’m reminded of Sandro Perri’s Impossible Spaces, due to the two musicians’ mutual fondness for Arthur Russell and Steely Dan; Invisible Conga People’s after-hours music for introverts conjures a similar kind of disco hush, while Domenique Dumont’s “L'Esprit de L'Escalier” zeroes in on the same sort of beatific pop. Ultimately, though, Shy Layers’ music flies solo. As the album’s exquisitely melancholy closing song, “1977,” captures so well, the record doubles as a love letter to solitude, offering a different kind of take on yacht rock. It’s not aspirational, and it's not even particularly concerned with leisure. Instead, it’s about standing at the stern of the boat, alone, hands stuffed in pockets, humming a half-remembered melody to yourself as the coastline recedes and the sun dips below the horizon.


George Lewis Jr. adopts a bad-boy persona for the pristine follow-up to 2010's Forget. It's a laser-focused, sharply posturing collection that eulogizes the coldness of modern relationships, and the confusion of lust over love.

Confess

I don't know much about the man who writes Twin Shadow songs, but the man in them doesn't really seem like a good dude. In fact, he's a total dick most of the time. "I don't want to believe or be in love," was George Lewis Jr.'s climactic mission statement on "Slow", and the rest of Forget negated its new romantic sounds with accounts of people who chose to ignore his warning. There was the girl who promised to "never let another black boy break [her] heart" and became the subject of "Tyrant Destroyed", and then there was the partner in crime on "Shooting Holes", who took her father's gun and was sworn into secrecy. And as a message to the fellas, there was "I Can't Wait", where Lewis stole your girl from right under your armpit because she hated your moves, the implication being that she was going to love his.
This persona played a huge role in distinguishing Forget, despite much evidence of it being wholly of Brooklyn, ca. 2010: Pretty in Pink sonic nostalgia, a cosign from Grizzly Bear, smeared cover art. But in light of brash interviews and surprisingly torrid live shows, Lewis' careerist ambition, pretty boy swagger, and leering libido made clear he was not long for the world of back-patting, hand-holding indie rock. You might find the bad-boy posturing on Confess' cover too blatant in announcing Lewis' arrival as a self-identifying pop idol, but he refuses to apologize for anything here: not his brash lyrics, laser-focused songwriting, or glossy production. It's a purposefully arrogant star turn that would otherwise be insufferable if Confess didn't make it abundantly clear that Lewis is one of the few guys out there capable of living up to it.
He's adjusting his role models to fit the situation, staying within the 80s but moving from the Psychedelic Furs and Simple Minds. Instead, he's taking *Purple Rain, Born in the U.S.A. *and Lost Boys as guides. We're talking leather jackets, sullen glowers, salvation through hit-making. And Confess aspires to the excess of the Reagan years, when all genres were competing for the same MTV slots and the production on pop, rock, and R&B records was essentially the same. But while Confess is slick, it doesn't sound slavishly retro or expensive; in fact, there's a eerie, disembodied artificiality to many of these sounds.
Lewis' rangy vocals rightfully remain at the forefront-- sultry and vulnerable in their lower reaches, with a clarion burst in its higher notes that recalls both Peter Gabriel and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe. But nearly every other sound is so crisp and airless that they become compellingly dehumanized. The snares during the disparaging chorus of "Golden Light" hit like open-hand slaps or a glass of cold water to the face, and harsh digital clipping on the kick drums and vocals express the claustrophobic lust of "You Call Me On". "I Don't Care" underlines the startling cruelty of its lyrics with a coda of grunts. "The One" is a rare moment of devotion communicated with blinding acoustic glare, while the exaggerated courtship of "Beg For the Night" accents its chorus with the utmost of new-money sounds, the orchestra hit.
On a purely sonic level, Confess will tell you "greed is good," and it's underlined by the economy of the songwriting, which shows a clear progression from the occasionally stunning but unbalanced Forget. The 10 songs on Confess operate only in power moves, the verses sneering, seducing, doing whatever they can to draw the listener in before every choruses ascends and explodes. Having recorded nearly all of Confess by himself, you hear a perfectionist's internal competition in Lewis, each song subject to merciless editing to assure that if he realizes the death wish alluded to in the "Five Seconds" video, he'll leave a beautiful corpse and a record of 10 fail-proof singles. It's textbook, time-honored stuff, but it's rarely done at this level. Whether it's the lush power-balladry of "Beg For the Night" and "Be Mine Tonight" or throttle-pushing rockers like "You Call Me On", Confess is defined by its melodic and emotional immediacy. This is no where more evident than it is on the cyclical refrain of the all-hook single "Five Seconds"-- "straight to the heart."
The ruthless efficiency extends to the lyrics, and this is what ultimately gives Confess its edge, pushing it into something more illicitly alluring. It's indeed a hyper-masculine record, almost every single lyric occurring at a relationship flashpoint between Lewis and a royal female "you" whose lust only confirms her misunderstanding of him. Combined with his refusal to sugarcoat anything, the first instinct is to assume it's a misogynist record as well, but Confess isn't macho or "bro." The songs are about dishonesty and what is revealed in desiring love but acting out of lust. The arrangement of "Golden Light" takes its cues from the secular uplift of Arcade Fire while flipping the carnal chorus of "Atomic Dog" into something simultaneously metaphysical and cynical-- "Some people say you're the golden light/ And if I chase after you, doesn't mean it's true." It's all to easy to hear a lyric like "I don't give a damn about your dreams/ A whole world that is falling at the seams" from "You Call Me On" as pitiless. But there's an equanimity to Lewis' viewpoint as he offers "that's what it's supposed to do" as a stark epigram of cold comfort.
And he gets as good as he gives, rarely painting himself as a savior or even someone worthy of envy. "Patient" describes a no-strings fling that you'd think would be the optimum scenario in a Twin Shadow song, but the refusal to define it as such is torture for Lewis and you can hear it in Confess' most over the top arrangement, a bridge cobbling together drumline snares, a shredding guitar, and a push of his 80s influences somewhere towards New Jack Swing. Twin Shadow gets into darker metal-R&B territory on "I Don't Care" whose superficially shocking admonishments to a morally suspect woman brings it awfully close to "Dirty Diana" territory. But "I Don't Care", like most of Confess, doesn't sound ego-fueled or even hateful. Lovers on Confess are equal co-conspirators, liars, fully complicit and bent on mutually assured destruction. Records from the likes of Drake and the Weeknd have been instructive on how to toast to groin-led douchebags. But there's little hedonism or depravity here. On Confess, sex is dispassionately viewed like any addictive substance, one that basically destroys people who use it to fill a spiritual void.
This corrosive thread running throughout Confess helps illustrate the difference in intent between Twin Shadow's two simply titled albums. Forget hinted at traumatic experiences that Lewis was trying to process years after the fact and figured he'd be better off ignoring, whereas Confess doesn't actually cop to much-- just the challenge to "say just what you mean and give up everything." So then it's curious that during one of the softer moments of Confess, Lewis admits, "I'll cry when the movie's over." He's the cocky, successful, brutally honest lothario who almost always gets his comeuppance in cinema and is verboten in indie rock. But this is pop music where the bad guy wins.


On his debut Kindness LP, the buzzy UK songwriter Adam Bainbridge offers washed-out new wave, strobing disco, lite funk, atmospheric balladry, and a couple unexpected covers.

Kindness: World, You Need a Change of Mind

World, You Need a Change of Mind

From the project name to the album title to the beautiful hair framing Adam Bainbridge's face on the cover to the competently percolating grooves, everything about Kindness' World, You Need a Change of Mind goes down easy. The UK-born singer-songwriter has a real feel for idiom. He can do washed-out new wave, strobing disco, atmospheric balladry. He'll throw in a sax break and the odd cover. In one way, Kindness represents the end-point of the chilled aesthetic that tints our memories of the summer of 2009 until they have the look of an Instagram photo. Where much of that music was homemade and owed a lot to Ariel Pink, Bainbridge's Kindness gives that "songwriting as mixtape" approach a professional sheen. With production from Philippe Zdar of French dance outfit Cassius, it's all rendered just so, every element placed where it should be.
That might sound like a faint praise, but the truth is it's hard to get music to sound like this. Back when Bainbridge's musical heroes (Nile Rodgers, Jam & Lewis, Cerrone) were at the peak of their game, the industry generated a lot of revenue and a lot of that went back into studios. People knew how to craft records that sounded good, and they had the tools to make it happen. So the fact that Bainbridge's scratchy lite-funk guitars, rubbery bass, and layered, reverb-saturated vocals are all in their right proportions bears note. When World, You Need a Change of Mind is playing, it's unlikely to make anyone who doesn't spend all their waking hours tracking blog trends mad. So on that level, purely as an audio object, World is a success. It can fill up a room and turn it into a cool and friendly place (those choosing music for the sales floor of your hip local retailer are sure to notice these qualities).
Like a lot of young producers in the electro-pop sphere, Bainbridge started out recording covers of songs by favorite artists in order to figure out how it was done. But his songwriting progression since then hasn't kept pace with his technical know-how, and this set runs into trouble when considered outside of pure style. It's telling that the two most memorable melodies on World come from other writers, and oddly, the chosen covers have something to bother people on both sides of the Atlantic. "Anyone Can Fall in Love" is a 1986 UK hit by actress Anita Dobson, and it was the theme song to the show she starred in, "EastEnders". While I have no associations with "Anyone Can Fall in Love", as heard here it comes over as pretty but ultimately cloying and silly, an unearned stab at at soul-driven tenderness.
The other cover is of the Replacements' "Swingin' Party", a song for which I do have a lot of associations. The Kindness version is lovely in its way, with delicate production and loads of atmosphere, but it basically strips the song of its meaning and leaves only an ethereal, vibe-laden shell. "If being afraid is a crime, we hang side by side" is a line of desperation, the kind of thing that made Paul Westerberg such a distinctive voice. But with Bainbridge, you feel like he has the world on a string. There's no vulnerability. His version is "sad," I guess, but almost anything sung with his layered, ghosted-out vocals would be. You don't get a sense of his personality, what he brings to it.
Bainbridge's original material is not quite as tuneful but it does possess a consistency of vision. The appealing "Cyan" sounds like Arthur Russell collaborating with Toro Y Moi, and it finds just the right mix of dreaminess and propulsion. "Seod" has an appealingly thick blend of vintage synths and ping-ponging percussion. And "That's Alright" is the set's one true curveball, zeroing in on that late-1980s moment when Prince and Jam & Lewis were using the gated snare to inflate pop to absurd proportions. Forget that it lifts the vocal hook from Escort's "All Through the Night" and is essentially a genre exercise, and it's easy to wallow in just how well it's all done. "That's Alright" also sounds oddly fresh at this moment, one of the few places where Bainbridge makes a choice that doesn't feel obvious. And that's ultimately the issue with this record. World, You Need a Change of Mind certainly isn't a bad album, and the technical execution is first-rate. Its failure is ultimately one of ambition. This is music to be enjoyed while doing something else, not something you fall in love with.


After coming to prominence as the producer of Robyn's UK #1 "With Every Heartbeat", Kleerup unveils his debut LP, with assistance from Lykke Li, Marit Bergman, the Concretes' Lisa Milberg and Neneh Cherry's baby sister, Titiyo.

Kleerup

Before you waste any more precious eyeball moisture on this record review, stop and look at that face. Framed by stringy, grunge-rock hair, it's the face of Stockholm's Andreas Kleerup, already one of the most internationally successful players involved in Sweden's current reign as global pop incubator. Perhaps unlike, say, Robyn, Peter Bjorn and John, ex-Concretes singer Victoria Bergsman, or Jens Lekman, you probably don't recognize him-- by name or by face. All right, then. That's why they call this an introduction.
If you know Kleerup already, you probably first heard about him as producer of Robyn's 2006 single "With Every Heartbeat", an orchestral electropop ballad full of soulful melodies and the queasy emotional conflict of a breakup that hurts every bit as much as you know it's right. Re-released last year in the UK, the song went to the top of the charts, and the new U.S. single has done well on domestic dance and singles sales charts this year as well. After the Robyn coup came remixes for Shout Out Louds, the Concretes, and others, along with a collaboration on the latest Cyndi Lauper album (seriously).
Kleerup's self-titled album-- currently import-only outside of Sweden-- marks his solo debut, though he has appeared on a few scattered releases (including a remix of the Tough Alliance) as a member of an electropop trio called the Meat Boys. The CD booklet offers seven more portraits of the artist's unsmiling face, each about the same except for different color schemes or shadows. The album itself puts Kleerup's best face forward, featuring "With Every Heartbeat" plus 11 other home-recorded songs; aside from several completely solo excursions, the tracks stay pretty much within the same computer-plus-Swedish-chanteuse template. Good thing it's an enjoyable template.
"With Every Heartbeat" still sounds devastating here, and the other collaborations take a similarly lovelorn path. The best is "Until We Bleed", with up-and-comer Lykke Li, which again relies on strings and a house beat, this time with frazzled synths coaxing out the volatility that distinguishes Li from her peers. It's as good an introduction to the singer as anything on her estimable, Bjorn Yttling-produced debut, Youth Novels. The Concretes' Lisa Milberg brings the gentle anguish and pop-oriented lyrics of her group's latest, Hey Trouble, to "Music for Girl", which sounds like the Knife doing Motown: "The songs, you know, they never leave you for another." Closer to the Robyn track's bright expressiveness are lonesome, Italo-tinged comedown "3AM", with Marit Bergman (who has also been produced by Yttling, including on a 2002 debut titled 3.00 A.M. Serenades) and Titiyo-sung second single "Longing for Lullabies". Titiyo's older sister, none other than Neneh Cherry, strikes a vague, awkwardly worded political stance on children's choir-assisted "Forever", though her smoky voice still resonates.
Kleerup's tracks without guests are the real revelation. "Thank You for Nothing" is another standout, with the producer's own wounded vocal repeating within whirring beats. "On My Own Again" takes a peppy John Hughes-film left turn, with the cheeriest synths on the album and ramshackle acoustic guitars. The instrumentals-- from hard-charging, Simian Mobile Disco-esque opener "Hero" to fragile, ambient-leaning finale "I Just Want to Make That Sad Boy Smile"-- don't break the momentum. Look at that album cover again. Yep, it's the face of a guy who just recorded an accomplished, cohesive debut, one that should please fans of "blog house" and Swedish pop alike. Now if only he owned a razor.


On their new album Bottomless Pit, Death Grips stitch together one of their most cohesive grotesques, renewing their focus on songcraft.

Bottomless Pit

The experimental band Negativland introduced the concept of “culture jamming” to the world in 1984, defining it as “an awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life.” They coined the term largely as a cynical reaction to America’s commercial monuments: billboards, logos, fashion trends and the like, but the phrase’s subtext isn’t as nihilistic as it may seem. By defining the phrase, Negativland and their peers legitimized it as a tool to deface and expose the dark side of capitalism, inviting artists to punch back through graffiti, guerrilla radio, fliers, and other media. With the advent of Internet and social media, culture jamming’s grown more ubiquitous than ever. (As a matter of fact, the word “meme” also refers to the imagery that jammers disseminate en masse.) Just like graffiti, Dat Boi, Boaty McBoatface, and Make America Great Again hats disrupt our global communication systems and incite reactions ranging from befuddled amusement to anger, fear, and dejection.
Zach Hill, Andy Morin, and Stefan Burnett (otherwise known as MC Ride) are easily the most talented, impactful culture jammers of the streaming age: a distinction primarily owed to just how seriously the California trio take those ideas. Never mind the Trojan Horse they pulled on Epic, the deep web album leaks, the no-shows—the real subversion’s in Death Grips' music, which continues to draw huge audiences (see: the massive crowd who filled the Gobi tent for their headlining Coachella set) and unsurprisingly, co-signs from fellow pranksters like Tyler, the Creator and Eric André. It’s no surprise that the loudest contingency of their fanbase resides on an infamous image-board; Death Grips speak directly to the dark worldview that accompanies years wasted lurking online, getting high off digital schadenfreude. (Been there.)
On their new album Bottomless Pit, they stitch together one of their most cohesive grotesques ever, renewing their focus on songcraft, rather than chicanery. It's sure to elicit a sigh of relief among fans who’ve grown jaded with the band’s work. Opening track “Giving Bad People Good Ideas" opens on a feint—an eerie, descending vocal from Cherry Glazerr vocalist Clementine Creevy, the feminine foil to macho, malicious Burnett. The lilting intro gives way to a black-metal sprint, with Tera Melos’ Nick Reinhart churning out jagged tremolo riffs. The follow-up blow carries that momentum further: “Hot Head” starts off inside a cartoon fight cloud spinning off towards oblivion, a blur of percussive jabs, whooshing machines, and screamed gibberish. From there, the song takes an equally disorienting nose-dive into a slack, spacious verse.
Death Grips draw heavily on abrasive styles, but the group are arguably at their most lethal when they're hijacking popular tastes, as they did on 2012’s The Money Store, and as they do here. With their stacked guitar riffs, dissonant samples, and glitchy percussion, “Spikes” and “Three Bedrooms In A Good Neighborhood” invoke an alternate history where hip-hop and metal fusion didn't dead-end into visions of Fred Durst’s punchable mug. The EBM-flavored “80808” supercharges a house-y backbeat with additional crackles and pops; the choruses expand that texture, dialing up the voltage until the synths alight in an arc flash. The most straightforward of these standouts is “Eh,” a rap song anchored in glimmering, burbling synths that dart in and out of the bass drums’ margins. Unmoved by the giddy surroundings, Burnett deadpans his morbid imagery with unusual calm, as if a tranquilizer dart struck him mid-verse: “Catch me hanging from my noose like ehhhh,” he yawns, stretching out the final syllable like putty.
MC Ride has long been regarded as Death Grips’ anchor, both onstage and off: a privilege largely owed to a pair of vocal cords which never seem to tire, even as the man screams himself sick. On Bottomless Pit he offers his most athletic performance to date, double-dutching over fallen power on “80808,” bobbing and weaving over Krautrock shards on “Ring A Bell,” and howling out in agony as the machines draw and quarter him on “Warping.” It’s not all gloom-and-doom, however; “Bubbles Buried in this Jungle” and “Trash" showcase a seething monotone delivery that taps into the absurd, comedic undertones buried in this madcap project. It's certainly difficult not to crack a smile on "Houdini," wherein he roasts hipsters (“Fuck is that, a hairstyle?/This asshole be at pussy church, first”) and instructs us,“Don’t stop that okey doke stroke.”
For all its chaos and fury, Bottomless Pit is Death Grips' most accessible record since The Money Store. It has a distractingly uneven mix, seesawing from grit to gloss and back again, and some of the sparser moments, like mid-album would-be barnburner "Houdini," are trying, but overall it is a resounding success. It might not win them new fans, but "new fans" have never been an integral part of the Death Grips experience: You're either in or you're out.  If you're in, you will probably grin wider than you have through any Death Grips album in years.


Michael Mann’s 1986 film was a critical and commercial flop, but its soundtrack has proved a major inspiration for the music supervision on projects like Drive and “Stranger Things.”

Various Artists: Manhunter Original Motion Picture Music

Manhunter Original Motion Picture Music

By all traditional Hollywood metrics, Michael Mann’s Manhunter was deemed a disappointment upon its release in the summer of 1986, receiving a lukewarm reception both at the box office and from critics. You couldn’t really blame the typical action-flick junkie from walking out of the theater underwhelmed. The movie’s very title was a red herring. Based on Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon, the film received its more generic crime-movie handle to either—depending on which story you want to believe—mollify producer Dino De Laurentiis (who apparently wanted to steer clear of any serpent-themed titles after his 1985 epic, Year of the Dragon, flopped) or avoid people mistaking it for a martial-arts movie.
Audiences expected a movie called Manhunter to be a serial-killer thriller that conformed to the multiplex standards of the day—car chases, buckets of blood, and an unimpeachable protagonist who could take down flagrantly evil bad guys with a perfect shot and a cool catchphrase. Instead, they were greeted with a hyper-stylized, meditative film where the most horrific violence happens off-screen, much of the plot is given over to studious forensics analysis, the nominal hero (William Petersen’s FBI agent Will Graham) is a psychologically tormented shell of a human, and the villain (Tom Noonan’s fearsome Francis Dolarhyde) elicits our sympathy as much as our revulsion. Five years after its release, Manhunter’s ignoble fate was seemingly sealed forevermore when one of its tertiary characters—Hannibal Lecter—became the center of another, infinitely more popular film adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel, The Silence of the Lambs, with Anthony Hopkins’ scenery- (and face-)chewing, Oscar-winning performance all but erasing Brian Cox’s icier, more deadpan turn in Manhunter from collective memory.
But the blockbuster success of The Silence of the Lambs proved to be the catalyst that mobilized a cult of Manhunter fans who prefer Mann’s austere vision of Harris’ world to Jonathan Demme’s operatic grotesquerie (much like the sect of Pink Floyd fans who’ll take the Syd Barrett era over the more famous Waters/Gilmour iteration). Over the years, Manhunter has been salvaged from the 99-cent VHS bargain bin to become the sort of film that’s inspired deluxe DVD reissues, obsessive fan sites, and thinkpiece retrospectives. Yet even the movie’s most ardent boosters can agree with its critics on one thing: Manhunter is the 1980s-est movie of the 1980s, thanks in large part to a soundtrack that instantly carbon-dates the film to its era of origin.
When you go back and read the reviews that greeted Manhunter at the time of its time of release, even the positive write-ups can’t conceal their contempt for Mann’s use of music, which can be as overwhelming as his direction is painstakingly methodical. Not that anyone should’ve been surprised. Whether deploying Tangerine Dream’s electronic vistas for 1981’s Thief or Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” to heighten the nocturnal tension on “Miami Vice,” Mann viewed soundtracks as more than mere background dressing; the music in his work becomes a character unto itself, as integral to the mise en scene as lighting and set décor. Accordingly, with Manhunter, he doubled down on his dual loves of dramatic ambient synthphonies and blatantly expository pop songs, pumping them into each critical moment like a medic administering CPR.
But in contrast to the previous year’s star-studded “Miami Vice” soundtrack, Manhunter is loaded with artists who mostly had little name recognition at the time, and even less today. He tipped Philly new-wave duo the Reds to establish the film’s eerie atmosphere, and their ominous synth-smeared instrumentals make even the film’s most expansive shots—like Graham’s sprint through Lecter’s stadium-like detention center—feel suffocating. This expanded double-vinyl reissue adds a crucial piece of theirs that wasn’t featured on the original 1986 soundtrack release: “Joggers Stakeout,” a Floydian aftershock of distantly echoing guitars that suggests “Welcome to Machine” stripped of its mechanical parts. The other unearthed pieces of incidental music—Japanese new-age master Kitaro’s cosmic reverie “Seiun / Hikari No Sono” and Krautrock pioneer Klaus Schulze’s percolating space-age bachelor-pad doodle “Freeze”—serve to further counterbalance the bombast of the soundtrack’s pop songs, which telegraph the characters’ emotional states with all the subtlety of a Times Square neon sign.
But, separated from the film, Manhunter’s pop-song repertoire is a fascinating time capsule of post-punk’s dying days. By the mid-’80s, post-punk’s obsession with mainstream subversion had rendered the genre indistinguishable from the most craven chart-seeking pop, thanks to all the shiny synths, arena-sized grandeur, and nominal gestures toward worldly exotica. There are three selections from Shriekback, the new-wave supergroup featuring Gang of Four’s Dave Allen and XTC’s Barry Andrews that, before long, had drifted toward plush ballads like “This Big Hush,” whose uncanny mix of brooding romanticism and wind-chimed luster forged the heretofore unrealized subgenre of yuppie-goth. And then there are the Prime Movers, an L.A. band that boasted Paisley Underground roots before morphing into Dread Zeppelin (!). But on the journey between those poles, they delivered “Strong as I Am,” a towering bid for Big Music glory that, despite its promotion to this soundtrack’s lead song and its Mann-financed video, failed to make them the next U2.
In Manhunter, “Strong as I Am” frames a pivotal moment of reckoning for the Dolarhyde character, to the point where the song isn’t so much supporting the scene as choreographing it. But in the film’s white-knuckled climax, Mann pushes that concept to the hilt. The late-game appearance of Iron Butterfly’s 1968 acid-rock warhorse “Inna-Gadda-da-Vida” is both Manhunter’s definitive moment and its great anomaly, not just in style and era, but in its diegetic placement: It’s the song Dolarhyde flips on his eight-track as he torments his blind paramour-turned-prey. (Mann was reportedly inspired by his correspondence with a convicted killer in Texas named Dennis Wayne Wallace, who claimed “Inna-Gadda-da-Vida” was a love song that spiritually connected him to the woman he murdered.)
It’s a selection that belongs in the Music Supervision Hall of Fame—not just because the song infuses an already terrifying scene with even more sinister energy, and not just because its breakdown and build-up sync up perfectly with Graham’s window-smashing rescue, but because Iron Butterfly is precisely the sort of archaic psychedelic rock band that an aging, supremely creepy weirdo like Francis Dolarhyde would still be listening to on his eight-track nearly 20 years after their album came out. It’s a strange, sprawling song that ultimately amplifies the psychological distance between Dolarhyde and normal society (though this soundtrack pares down the original’s 17-minute girth to a tidier eight-minute edit).
As such, “Inna-Gadda-da-Vida” is also a song that sounded as dated and out of place in 1986 as the Manhunter soundtrack did throughout the 1990s and 2000s. But just as the film is now credited with spawning “CSI” and other meticulous police procedurals, the influence of its soundtrack has likewise seeped into contemporary pop-cultural phenomena. Sure, the passage of time remains unkind to Red 7’s “Heartbeat” (the slick, chest-pumping MOR rocker that summons the film’s closing credits with all the grace of a hairspray spritz to the face), but Manhunter’s chilling synthscapes have undeniably left a frosty residue on Cliff Martinez’s Drive score and the sinister pulse of “Stranger Things.” And really, this soundtrack has a lot more working in its favor than mere ’80s revivalism: In a world where vintage kosmische records go for hundreds of dollars on Discogs, new age has been embraced by hip reissue labels, and synth-glossed pop has become the lingua franca of post-chillwave indie rock, everything about this once-anachronistic artifact is now perfectly on trend.


The band formerly known as Teen Suicide has a new name and a fresh outlook on life. Their new album might be the best thing frontman Sam Ray has made so far.

American Pleasure Club: A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This

A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This

Sam Ray seems relatively happy. He’s married, knows some cute dogs, had a lovely little Christmas. And the oldest of the prolific Baltimore musician’s three core projects has changed its name, from Teen Suicide to American Pleasure Club—maybe not quite a 180 degree turn, but at least a hard 90. Earlier this month, in a tweet thread that approached Kanye levels of grandiosity, he congratulated himself and his bandmates, Sean Mercer, Daniel Windsor, and Nick Hughes, for their first proper album under the new name, A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This. Ray rejoiced in having finally allowed himself to make art without the encumbrance of “apathy, fear, [and] anxiety,” and said that this was only the beginning of a new phase for him.
Which is not to say his new record is not filled with apathy, fear, or anxiety. Yet it’s also among his prettiest and least chaotic albums, even as it jumps wildly from the emotional frankness of post-emo, to the gleeful candy of hip-hop beats and samples, to quiet folk, and finally to what has long been Ray’s wheelhouse—his take on the more outré experiments of ’90s and early-aughts indie rock. If you were familiar with Teen Suicide’s past output, or the music he’s made with Ricky Eat Acid and Julia Brown, you already know that he’s as casually dismissive of genre as any SoundCloud rapper, that his albums are collages that would make T.S. Eliot gape (and not only because Ray’s general fuck-it-all posturing would unsettle any member of the early-20th-century gentry). Still, coming in at a cool 35 minutes, A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This is Ray’s most coherent album. His self-congratulation may be grating, but he’s not wrong that this might be the best thing he’s made so far.
The record’s sequencing is somewhat inscrutable. The two most obviously hip-hop influenced songs, “Sycamore” and “Lets Move to the Desert,” are two of its best. But they’re grouped together in the middle, when either could have provided a jolt to the album’s less memorable back half. As it stands, one of the few upbeat songs in the record’s final quarter is “Just a Mistake,” a misguided slice of big beat that sounds like Aaron Maine of Porches being drowned alive by the reunited members of the Prodigy.
Still, there’s an emotional logic at play, if not necessarily a musical one. Even as he moves into his late twenties, Ray remains as combustible as an adolescent, and his ability to channel his feels productively leads to potent songs like “This Is Heaven & I’d Die For It,” a straightforward pop-punk anthem about the excitement of illicit pleasure. That crashes directly into the first of the full-length ballads, “All the Lonely Nights in Your Life,” about the more tender and (not to be all Love Actually about it but) vastly more terrifying thrill of falling in love. Then we move to the chipmunk soul of “Sycamore,” followed by “Lets Move to the Desert,” which uses a sample of Frank Ocean’s cover of “At Your Best (You Are Love)” so deftly that it only feels like a minor blasphemy to call it Dilla-esque.
Ray’s gift for arresting imagery gives many of his songs a quiet profundity that’s at odds with his online persona. The droning “Seemed Like the Whole World Was Lost,” with Beirut-brand horns played by Spencer Radcliffe, might feel tiresome were it not for sparely-drawn scenes like the one in which Ray’s nose starts to bleed, he loses the feeling in his hand and feet and, hauntingly, “the bicycle kids rush in.” (Bikes and bloody noses crop up elsewhere, funny motifs coming from someone who claims to hate “Stranger Things”.)
As his stubborn unwillingness to change his band name to something other than (for God’s sakes) Teen Suicide up until this year suggests, Ray has a talent for undermining himself. He is a strong and curious musician and a good songwriter, one who glories in the bounty of inspirations, musical and otherwise, available online, mining them expertly to make daringly original songs. With his new album, he’s gotten out of his own way long enough to put together a collection of very strong tracks, with only one real misstep. Now, is A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This “ESSENTIAL LISTENING FOR ANYONE WITH A SINGLE SHRED OF LIFE IN THEM,” as Ray has said? No. I mean, no. Not at all. But it’s a pretty good record.