The Gothenburg emo band specialize in commiseration rock, crafting combustible rallying cries for the overwhelmed and underemployed.

The Movie

There’s a utopian dreaminess to the Gothenburg music scene in Sweden that typically trickles down even to the punk acts. But even in paradise, apparently someone’s gotta make copies and take out the trash, and that’s where I Love Your Lifestyle comes in. On The Movie, they sound like they’ve come out swinging from a south Philly basement only to slump back after yet another soul-sucking day at work. They make commiseration rock, proceeding from the understanding that the depression borne from a shitty job and an utter lack of romantic prospects is universal.
Their 2016 debut We Go Way Back made them one of the leading figures of the international wing of the ongoing emo revival—bands for whom Algernon Cadwallader and Glocca Morra are primary sources, as opposed to Cap’n Jazz. It’s heartening to see the remarkable digital footprint of bands that never got much notice in their prime, as kids from Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Italy and Russia wear the same dad hats and shorts, singing about convenience stores while playing tapping solos in odd time signatures as if they were from any suburb in Middle America. In so doing, they avail themselves of the scene’s welcoming leniency, which explains how a math-rock band named Chinese Football is actually opening for the real thing instead of getting mocked or sued out of existence.
Having mastered 2008 simulacra, ILYL have advanced to something genuinely exciting on its own terms—a combustible flashpoint where emo’s unhinged rhythms meets indie-pop song forms. “Failing again, so many failures in a row,” Lukas Feurst sings on the album’s very first line, and the verse on “Imagination Station” ends right there. Really, what else is there to say? Why bother waiting to get to the chorus, especially when it’s specifically about being tired of waiting for something to change? “Adrenaline Rush to Kill My Crush” takes a similarly oblong approach to pop structure, hinting at a version of “Friday I’m in Love,” where no one ever gets past hump day.
ILYL’s power-pop shift echoes the move the Promise Ring made between their first and second LPs, but where Nothing Feels Good sought Zen calm amidst post-collegiate anxiety, on The Movie, there really isn’t a single thing that feels good. “Feelings, I remember when they used to have their meaning,” Feurst sighs on the profoundly dejected acoustic lament “The Party,” sounding like a guy who’d get his lunch money taken by Jens Lekman or José González.  And then comes compare-and-despair anthem “23,” where Feurst catches up with a friend who’s had two kids, “bought a house and voting Green,” only to realize that this guy somehow envies him.  Feurst spends the gorgeous, retro-futurist folky title track watching movies about camping until the smell of garbage becomes unbearable (this is somehow not the song on The Movie called “Indoor Living”).
Such moments explore the classic dissonance in second (and fourth) wave emo—the use of kinetic energy to express the crippling buildup of potential energy. When Feurst doesn’t feel the will to go forward, I Love Your Lifestyle gets him there, one day or even one minute at a time. Where there’s motion, there’s hope, and throughout The Movie, there is always an off-kilter drum fill, a finger-tapping solo, or a shouted melody to indicate a possible way forward.  On the penultimate “Perfect Life,” Feurst  imagines a day when he’ll get off meds and “try something new like yoga.” “Sometimes when you look at me, I think you like me too,” Feurst sings at the end of “Adrenaline Rush,” breaking into an off-key karaoke of his own guitar solo as a preemptive celebration.
He pulls a similar trick on “Dreamy Dreams.” In just about any other genre, the hook of “Dreamy Dreams” would be a cry for help—“When you get home and you can finally be yourself/And you can not believe how you survived another day with that fake plastic version of yourself,” Feurst shouts. But here, it’s a rallying cry for the overwhelmed and underemployed, rewarding and nourishing as those three beers that await at home if you can just make it to 5 PM.


The R&B singer offers the third installment of his sexually charged mixtape series, featuring his latest protegé Mike x Angel on eight of its 11 tracks.

Anticipation 3

At the end of last December, videos surfaced of Trey Songz destroying a stage at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit during a mini-temper tantrum. The event staff who prevented Trigga from performing past the venue’s 11:30 pm curfew presented him a golden opportunity for free promo—the smirk on the singer’s mugshot, which went viral, all but announced “new music is dropping soon.” Sure enough, Trey Songz and his frequent collaborator, Fabolous, surprised fans with their joint EP Trappy New Years on New Year's Eve.  Eleven days later (and fittingly on a “hump day” Wednesday), the singer released the third installment of his sexually charged Anticipation mix-tape series.
Interestingly, Anticipation 3 is a collaborative effort, not a solo turn. Although the cover highlights Trey mid-performance, roaring and ripped, (possibly a screengrab from the Joe Louis Arena incident???), the smaller print reads “FEAT. MIKE X ANGEL.” But Mike x Angel, Trey Songz’s latest protegé, is more than just a featured act:  he’s on eight of the 11 tracks. The singer is Virginia’s answer to Toronto’s Tory Lanez, with hints of R&B cult fave Pleasure P from Pretty Ricky. Trey’s guest opens up the mixtape on the slow, loopy jaunt “A3” promising “party favors, party favors.”
With the assistance of his pupil, Trey Songz delivers on his usual dimpled-grin bedroom talk, but this time around he's consistently upstaged by other featured guests. New York’s Justine Darcenne breathes new life into Anticipation 3 as the female antagonist of “Find My Love,” and the frank voice on the excellent “Vibrator.” “Vibrator” also includes a great turn by Chicago rapper Chisanity, whose sounds like a deeper-voiced 21 Savage crossed with “Atlanta’s” fictional character Paper Boi. On the other hand, “93 Unleaded” could have worked without Dave East, whose bars and flow overwhelm the simplistic beat.
Like Trigga, Anticipation 3 dabbles with trap&b atmospherics, a la Bryson Tiller’s TRAPSOUL. But Trey’s voice is a little too powerful to blend into the background of the wispy production, and he is too much of an old-school star to disappear from the foreground for long. The best is saved for last: “Sho Nuff,” a slow jam suited for the “Quiet Storm” segments of late-night urban radio.  The electric guitar chords and eager hook of “is you still my baby, she say sho’ you right” is Trey at his freshest, throwing all the way back to the vibe of his 2005 debut I Gotta Make It.
Surprisingly enough, the other show stealer comes from Mike x Angel on closing bonus track, “Anxious.” Trey Songz is nowhere to be found as Angel tenderly asks a lover “What are we doing? What should I call this?”. Instead, we’re held to anticipate new music from an up and coming talent, wondering if this could be a sign of an Aaron Hall being usurped by his Kellz. Only time will tell, but based on recent events, it seems highly unlikely Trigga would allow that to become a reality.


Folk legends past and present team up on this intriguing EP.

Animal Collective / Vashti Bunyan: Prospect Hummer EP

Prospect Hummer EP

British folk singer Vashti Bunyan didn't influence the current [insert modifier here]-folk trend in indie rock so much as anticipate it. There's no way to know if records by Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom would sound any different had Bunyan never recorded Just Another Diamond Day in 1970, but songs from her lone album certainly sound fantastic sandwiched between cuts from Nino Rojo and The Milk-Eyed Mender. The record's spare production helps keep it from dating, but what really works today is Bunyan's soft, fragile Peter Pan voice. I imagine her understated whisper sounded out of step in its own time but now it sounds like a founding document of a certain school of indie singing.
Bunyan's return to music after three decades away has been a gradual stroll back to the center stage. Guesting on records from Piano Magic and Devendra Banhart, she hooked up with Animal Collective while they were in London last year to sing lead on three new songs, which, combined with a sound collage by the Geologist, make up this short EP. It's not as immediately obvious a pairing as the Banhart duet on Rejoicing in the Hands because Animal Collective's focus changes so radically from record to record and its priorities sometimes shift from "songs" per se to something else entirely. A thread through the band's work to this point has been a focus on the emotional content of sound, apart from the nuts and bolts of the music. Even with an acoustic and relatively pop record like Sung Tongs the textural fixations remain, if only in the droney guitar sum that's become something of an Animal Collective trademark. How Bunyan's approach would mesh wasn't entirely clear.
Prospect Hummer turns out to be an inspired meeting, as Animal Collective's material meets her Just Another Diamond Day aesthetic halfway. The common ground for everyone involved turns out to be the small details and pastoral mood of rural life. Hearing the familiar guitar swells that opens "It's You" brings us immediately back to the screened porch where Campfire Songs was recorded, while the presence of Bunyan's voice transports to a different but equally remote place. It's like suddenly finding a cluster of Maryland pines rooted on an English moor, something out of a dreamy film, with a vaporous melody that wants to drift up to the stars. The EP's title song is filmic in a different way, conjuring 30s Disney, Bunyan the graceful Snow White with Animal Collective's faithful dwarves trailing merrily behind, with a "wah-wah-wah" chorus that's certainly a marching tune. Words are hard to make out but something like "loved to run up the tree branch/ And in the middle of it is a puddle of water/ Wind of faithful voices" covers three of the four elements in short order.
The Geologist provides the fire, though it's more of a low-level simmer, on his instrumental "Baleen Sample". He wasn't there for the London sessions but his five-minute contribution serves as a contrast with the three vocal songs, incorporating the strummed acoustic but layering in sound effects and various other instruments (nice use of steel drum) to create something comparatively dense. The brief and playful "I Remember Learning How to Dive" has the band singing in unison with Bunyan, ending the record on an appropriately communal note. It's a short EP, in fact it could almost fit onto a 7-inch single, but Prospect Hummer doesn't waste a note or a breathy sigh.


After big-name co-signs for the smooth, self-made producer and vocalist Francis Farewell Starlite, his latest album doesn't quite live up to expectations.

Francis and the Lights: Farewell, Starlite!

Farewell, Starlite!

Francis Farewell Starlite, the creative force behind the contemporary R&B project Francis and the Lights, has always been billed as somewhat of a self-made pop star, a man who bucks record labels and all their corporate trappings for unchecked artistic freedom. Over the last decade, he’s released a string of EPs and one album (2010’s eclectic It’ll Be Better) all under his own imprint, toured with a line of pop acts from Drake to Kesha, and guested as a vocalist or a producer with a procession of influential artists including Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book and Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Clearly, you don’t accumulate this kind this kind of resume without a perceived sense of individuality and vision, which is why the stakes seem high six years after the group’s debut LP. While not totally missing the mark, Farewell, Starlite! doesn't quite live up to those expectations either, a shortcoming that is further compounded by Starlite’s many intriguing triumphs on other people’s records.
All of Starlite’s signature production is present, from swollen synthesizers to super-processed vocal overlays. Opener “See Her Out (That’s Just Life)” shifts from squelchy keyboard stabs to the quiet introspection of Starlite’s falsetto in the chorus. While it succeeds in setting the tone for the rest of the album, it’s a sound that is replicated so often in subsequent songs that after only one full listen, it’s lost its show-stopping power. Turning an album of similar-sounding tracks into a solid, encapsulating block of music takes astounding finesse—doubly so for pop music. The majority of Farewell, Starlite! is something along the lines of James Blake’s stoic pondering and Blood Orange’s futuristic soul, but less compelling. By seeking to avoid both mainstream bombast and underground obscurity, Francis and the Lights have landed squarely in the middle with a safe and uninspired choices.
Farewell, Starlite! is not without its pleasures. The album’s focus is, rightfully, “Friends,” a collaboration with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Kanye West. It’s a deeply affecting, mellow slice of alternative R&B, gliding along on a placid sea of finger snaps and interlocking vocal harmonies by all three artists, like some impossibly cool barbershop trio. When Starlite sings, “We could be friends/Just put your head on my shoulders,” it’s lusher than velvet. It sounds more like a lovesick supplication than a call for restraint. Francis and the Lights have been compared to Peter Gabriel before, but nowhere has this been more apparent as “May I Have This Dance,” a song that truly could be added to a reissue of So without anyone batting an eyelid. Its subtle Afro-pop drumbeat and jubilant chorale of lyrics about reclaiming lost love are so evocative of mid-’80s art pop that it defiantly stands out as an example of the kind of diversity Farewell, Starlite! could desperately use more of.
Surprisingly, another highlight is “Thank You,” a 90-second ballad tucked away at the very end of the album. Layered vocals create a one-man choir and Starlite’s voice shines in its strongest form yet, raw and semi-unfiltered. Towards the end, just as the song gathers momentum before fading out, he chants, “I should say thank you, thank you, thank you.” He knows he’s charmed, that he has both the talent and the connections to make music more or less on his own terms. While Farewell, Starlite! has its share of engaging moments, it’s a shame that under all its technical flairs, its overall mood isn’t gripping enough to do justice to its creator’s vision.


The PC Music alum surveys the history of rave, sucking serotonin from its gleaming extremes: teeth-chattering trance, Thunderdome-worthy techno, and psychedelic chill-out.

Harlecore

Danny L Harle chews pop music into a sugary sludge. From the effervescent radio refractions of his early singles for PC Music to more recent tracks for Rina Sawayama and Charli XCX, he melts down familiar forms into their basest elements, delighting in the gross, glowing sounds that pool around the edges. Each track showcases his surreal sense of humor alongside his love for saccharine melodies and alien sound design, a philosophy that extends across mediums: His most iconic piece of merch is a T-shirt emblazoned with the words HUGE DANNY.
Harle’s new album applies that gleeful approach to another of his obsessions, dance music. Harlecore surveys the history of rave, sucking serotonin from its gleaming extremes: teeth-chattering trance, Thunderdome-worthy techno, psychedelic chill-out, and other chaotic club concoctions. But with Harle behind the decks, the record isn’t just a collection of nostalgic tracks. It’s also an “interactive club experience where the rave never ends,” an immersive digital venue where a resident DJ soundtracks each room. All sorts of experiments like this have popped up as physical clubs remain closed—Harle played a party in Minecraft last year—but Harlecore feels distinct. The album art features some of the avatars that Harle imagines playing these tracks: a towering lupine beast, a being of pure light, a cosmic jellyfish, and a diminutive cartoon character. The album’s fantastical absurdity highlights dance music’s unique power to separate revelers from the mundanity of the day-to-day, to build new worlds.
Credited on the release are DJ Danny, who makes celestial club cuts; DJ Ocean, who plays aqueous breakbeats; MC Boing, who raps with the jittery fervor of an energy drink mascot; and DJ Mayhem, a force of pure gabber chaos. The alter egos reflect the record’s collaborations (Ocean is Danny’s work with Caroline Polachek, the Mayhem tracks are with Hudson Mohawke, and the Boing cuts are with fellow PC Music alum Lil Data), but the concept also gives logic and narrative to the album’s absurd flurry of dance music subgenres. It’s rare to hear so many disparate sounds smashed together on one release, but you can imagine a party where all of these DJs could sit under one roof, united in the collective euphoria of a great night out.
Across the record, Harle works with uncharacteristic intensity. In the disorienting video for DJ Mayhem’s “Interlocked,” a crowd of ghostly revelers writhes in the shadow of a massive bipedal canine who’s destroying the venue with a giant glowing hammer—like if you’d hired one of the monsters from Rampage to DJ your party. Built around a chest-caving gabber beat, the track is fantastical, ecstatic, and overwhelming—just like any memorable rave. Even the more open-hearted and earnest tracks (like DJ Danny’s breakbeat trance ballad “On a Mountain” or the pastel happy hardcore of DJ Mayhem’s “Shining Stars”) are head-spinningly maximal, even by the standards of a producer with a reputation for turning pop music on its head.
The tracks credited to MC Boing most clearly exemplify Harlecore’s unrestrained energy. On “Boing Beat,” a pitched-up voice scream-raps about a night that “never, never, never ends.” It’s a little silly, especially the digital didgeridoo sounds that give the track its elastic beat, but the animated energy is undeniable. It plays like a rambling late-night conversation with friends in the smoking area of a club, optimistic and naive about the world outside its walls. “Everyone here is safe and nice,” he raps. “Makes me wanna have a great life.”
Harlecore takes its name from a real-life club night that Harle started in London in 2017, welcoming friends and DJs like A.G. Cook and Evian Christ to celebrate the maximal dance music of their youths with a crowd of like-minded partygoers. Harlecore, the record, is obviously an attempt to celebrate and preserve the energy of those nights, but it’s also a statement about the power of this kind of music. Harle makes repeated reference to the idea that Harlecore is a party that never stops, a testament to the stubborn resilience of ravers who—even in a time when clubs around the world are shuttered—have found ways to stay connected and keep dancing. When celebration seems impossible, music like Harlecore can ferry you to a world that’s brighter and more interesting than your own.

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Combining synthesizers, field recordings, nylon-string guitar, and hushed singing, the Istanbul-born, Glasgow-based musician creates an intimate take on laptop folk.

In February

Isik Kural’s in february opens with a bleary calm, like the first moment you open your eyes on a clear Sunday morning. Piano notes loop and twinkle with the grace of sunlight bouncing off the window, while Kural’s childlike voice gently wavers in a silk-soft whisper. It’s as comfy as a big quilt. Kural’s blooming synths conjure the delicate aura of Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods or Haruomi Hosono’s Watering a Flower; in february similarly paints a charmingly homemade portrait of domestic whimsy. In his yawning lilt, Kural gives new meaning to the term “bedroom pop.”
With in february, the Istanbul-born, Glasgow-based Kural creates his own delightful take on laptop folk, combining field recordings, nylon-string guitar, synthesizers, and hushed singing, to sweetly psychedelic effect. Like an updated spin on the Orchid Tapes sound of artists like Blithe Field and Ricky Eat Acid in the ’10s, Kural’s music blurs the line between songwriting and sound design; tracks may start with a clear acoustic melody before breaking down into splintered tape loops of passing trains, or float in a haze of spinning bicycle sounds until crystallizing into a tender lullaby. Kural adds a healthy dollop of new age straight from the Leaving Records school as well, channeling the wide-eyed wallpaper music of Green-House and the soothing drift of Ana Roxanne into his fluffy sonic soufflé. In doing so, in february’s tracks feel less like songs and more like music-box melodies distilled to their airy essence.
Each sound feels as pristinely arranged as figurines in a dollhouse. The chattering birdsong in the backdrop of “paperhat,” the hand drums that pitter-patter underneath “hopefullyhopefully,” the cooing that flutters into the frame on the lovely “coral gables”—every piece of in february feels intentionally selected so as not to disturb the peacefulness of the larger picture. On “berceuse,” Kural hovers over guest vocalist spefy’s dainty vocals with a high-pitched synth tone as light and serene as humming wine glasses; it’s so precious that it feels as though the slightest wind could blow the whole thing over. Kural’s own vocals even resemble children’s music—as if Raffi decided to lead a sing-a-long version of Plantasia—and his quietly recited mantras about butterflies, lilies, seagulls, and similarly pastel-pigmented imagery only add to in february’s fragile feeling of innocence.
By the time the album nears its end, Kural’s kiddie vocals begin to teeter on the edge of cloying, particularly as the repetitive lyrics of “slippin” (which comes across sounding like “sleeping”) start to suggest literal naptime music. But with the closing “film festival,” Kural delivers one of his most elegant songs: After a radiant minute-long opening drone, Kural enters with a spliced-up piano loop more pensive and ethereal than anything that has come before. Where the rest of in february is bathed in a cheerful glow, “film festival” is melancholy and mysterious, ending the record on an ambiguous note that expands Kural’s microscopic sense of intimacy into otherworldly realms. It reaffirms Kural’s subtle control and skillful ability to spin just a few stray sounds into something so uplifting, heavenly, and warm. For all of in february’s smallness, it overflows with loving sincerity.


The Purling Hiss frontman teams with Kurt Vile for a record of simple folk songs pairing blissful sounds with plainspoken sentiments.

Long Lost Solace Find

Mike Polizze’s music used to feel like a secret. Public Service Announcement, the 2010 breakthrough from his project Purling Hiss, was classic rock as heard leaking from someone else’s earbuds, anthems that disintegrated into noise as soon as you started humming along. Polizze wasn’t the only artist testing the limits of scuzzy production at the time, but his interests seemed deeper than a mere aesthetic. Through the following decade, his follow-up releases found him cleaning up his sound and sharpening his songwriting, but he still maintained a distance through foggy melodies that swerved and plunged like question marks.
It was Kurt Vile who heard Public Service Announcement and convinced Polizze to bring his music on the road with an actual band. Ten years later, he makes a similar suggestion as his collaborator on Long Lost Solace Find, the first album credited to Polizze as a solo artist. Along with producer Jeff Zeigler (of the War on Drugs), Vile and Polizze recorded the album in their native Philadelphia, and it’s a record defined by closeness: simple folk songs that present Polizze and his acoustic guitar with the kind of intimacy we expect from rock acts going solo. Tonally, it exists somewhere between the hungover campfire songs of J. Mascis’ solo albums and the starkly drawn alt-rock of Greg Sage’s Straight Ahead. It is more straightforward than any of Polizze’s previous albums but no less evocative.
Nearly every song on Long Lost Solace Find opens with a bright major chord, and most of them spend their runtimes lingering in the light it offers. Polizze plays most of the instruments himself, and Vile shows up in the margins with subtle background vocals, slide guitar, harmonica, and, at one point, trumpet. They are natural collaborators; listening to this record can sometimes feel like an extension of both the softer points of Purling Hiss’ discography and the bleary universe of Vile’s own records. Like Vile, Polizze writes lyrics as if he’s muttering them to himself, even when he’s gesturing toward something universal. And if his language rarely feels bold on its own, it does establish an undeniable mood paired with such laid-back music. “Rest assured, enjoy the ride,” he sings in the closing track, and it is the bemused tone of someone confident in where they are going.
Polizze spends much of the album pondering love, but highlights like “Wishing Well” and “Eyes Reach Across” communicate less on the lyric page than they do in his delivery: an effortless speak-sing over gentle strumming and plucked guitar solos. It flows like a well-conceived song cycle and moves gracefully from one thought to the next. In the instrumental “D’Modal,” whose title could be a reference to a feel-good Led Zeppelin hit or his own guitar tuning, Polizze offers a groovy reprieve that segues into the twilight visions of “Sit Down.” In that song, he describes sunlight as “laser beams through my hair,” which seems like a good summary of the world he builds through songs: intimate, warm, a little uncanny.
The sound of the record approaches bliss: the sonic equivalent of a beer on the beach at sunset. But Polizze’s thoughts don’t always follow him there. The narrative in mid-album highlight “Do Do Do” seems fairly bleak: a plainspoken survey of getting older and playing in a band, pledging to change your self-destructive ways before they harden into habits. Kind of a drag. But every time the chorus hits, he ascends into a wordless refrain, echoed by an acoustic guitar stuck on the most amiable notes of a solo, repeated over and over again. It’s a palpable uplift from each verse, and it goes on maybe a minute longer than expected. This is not just the sound of Mike Polizze opening up; he’s inviting you in.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A revolutionary classic of soul music, four string-drenched epics, is reissued 40 years on, in a package that includes bonus tracks.

Hot Buttered Soul

Think about how crazy this is for a moment: Stax loses Otis Redding and the Bar-Kays to a plane crash and the rights to their back catalog (and, later, Sam & Dave) to Atlantic. Without their biggest stars and their best session group, Stax executive Al Bell takes a desperate but necessary gamble: in an attempt to build an entirely new catalog out of scratch, he schedules dozens of all-new albums and singles to be recorded and released en masse over the course of a few months. And out of all of those records, the album that puts the label back on the map is a followup to a chart dud, recorded by a songwriter/producer who wasn't typically known for singing, where three of its four songs run over nine and a half minutes. And this album sells a million copies. If it weren't for the New York Mets, Isaac Hayes' Hot Buttered Soul would be the most unlikely comeback story of 1969.
Since then, the album's had an odd reevaluation process: it hit #8 on the pop charts and #1 on the R&B charts, but also hit #1 on Billboard's Top Jazz Albums chart-- which alarmed partisans of Miles Davis and Sly Stone alike. After another couple of albums in its crossover-friendly, string-drenched vein, Rolling Stone declared Isaac Hayes an enemy of all that was good about soul music in the early 1970s; decades later, a generation reared on hip-hop reverse-engineered the beats on Pac's "Me Against the World" or PE's "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos" and discovered an original brilliance. Now, after a listen to this new reissue 40 years later, Hot Buttered Soul might still seem a little historically counterintuitive. It stood as a newer, funkier phase of Southern soul, but it hinged on a sound more opulent than the most sharp-suited Motown crossover bid. It's an exercise in melodrama and indulgence that lays it on so heavy it's impossible not to hear it as anything but the stone truth. And it's an album whose edited-down singles-- both of which went top 40 pop-- sounded more like trailers for the real thing. (Said single edits are included here and can be safely ignored.)
Yet the success of Hot Buttered Soul owed a bit to a classic crossover formula: start with an easy-listening-friendly pop staple, keep the orchestral sweetness, but layer on a shining veneer of psychedelic R&B, then stretch it out with some soul-jazz vamping and nail it down with a voice that hits like a velvet sledgehammer. Hayes demanded full creative control for this album, and his auteurism resulted in a luxurious rawness that soul artists would scramble to catch up with for years. It wasn't exactly an unprecedented sound, however, and in its own extravagant way Hot Buttered Soul might be to the end of the 60s what Ray Charles' Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was seven years previous: an album that redrew the parameters for R&B's high-class populism.
It's just that it hadn't been quite this audacious before-- not to the extent of Hayes' cover of "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", all 18-plus sprawling minutes of it. Here we have a song that turns the idea of a slow build into something monumental: with a monologue he developed as a way to get apathetic club patrons to pay attention to where he was about to go, Hayes spends the first eight and a half minutes actually setting the stage for the scenario behind the song, from the wife's cavalier attitude and how the husband caught her cheating to the specific year and make of car he finally drove off for good in (a '65 Ford). It should be noted that all this time the band's been churning along with this hypnotic, minimalist swaying organ/bass/hi-hat drone that changes imperceptibly if at all; again, this is eight and a half minutes here. And when it finally does transition from Hayes' conversational murmur to the first actual sung line from the Jimmy Webb composition he's covering, it's the beginning of a metamorphosis that gradually transforms the dynamic of the song from sweet-stringed orchestration into full-fledged, brass-packed, explosively-cresting soul.
But where "Phoenix" is all slow build, the album-opening version of "Walk on By" throws almost everything it has at you right away, nailing you to the floor with those first two drumbeats. Hayes takes the restrained sorrow of Bacharach and David's composition as made famous by Dionne Warwick and chucks it out the window, replacing it with an arrangement that is the absolute antithesis of hiding the tears and sadness and grieving in private. And it's goddamned devastating at every turn: its go-for-broke opening, with those weeping strings and that stinging guitar building to their gigantic crescendo; that moment when it collapses and sinks into Michael Toles' famous slinky guitar riff, which then warps its way into psychedelic keening more Hendrix than Cropper; every hitch and moan and heart-wracked ad-lib from Hayes' deep bass voice ("you put the hurt on me, you socked it to me, mama"). The entire last half of the song's twelve minutes is an exercise in seeing just how long you can not only maintain but build on a frenzied finale, where Toles' guitar sounds like it's ripping itself apart and Hayes' Hammond organ trembles and growls and stammers like a panicking tiger. It might be the most intense six minutes of soul recorded in the confines of a studio the entire decade.
The remainder of Hot Buttered Soul isn't quite as ambitiously excessive, though the other two songs still have an indelible presence. Hayes' version of Charles Chalmers' and Sandra Rhodes' "One Woman" is affecting if short-- "short" in this case meaning a hair over five minutes. As breathers go, it works wonders in proving Hayes' way with a mellow ballad could still have an emotional impact in a more confined space. And Hayes' sole songwriting credit is the linguistically convoluted masterpiece "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic," a straight-up slick-as-hell funk jam which gets a lot of mileage out of humorously-deployed latin phrases and five-dollar words ("My gastronomical stupensity is really satisfied when you're loving me"). Even if it's his only lyrical contribution, he subsequently if unintentionally caricaturizes the ornate but down-to-earth personality of the entire album: it's all self-consciously complicated, but man, the meaning's right there in front of you. And it can't help but hit you right where you feel it.


Second album from these Brooklyn boozehounds finds them molding the reckless shoutalongs of their debut into overdriven beer-soaked party anthems. Vocalist Craig Finn comes into his own here as a lyricist, and as a sweat-drenched and drunk back-alley bawler: His brazen caterwaul may be a brief obstacle for the unprepared, but the bar band blazing behind him is a uniter (not a divider), rapturously comandeering every trick in the rock'n'roll fakebook.

Separation Sunday

Craig Finn isn't a singer. His voice is a harsh, nasal, confused, emphatic bleat, clamping down on certain words and rolling tricky internal rhymes around in his mouth until they come out all broken. He sounds more like the sketchy drunk guy yelling in your ear at a show, asking if you know where to buy drugs, than like the frontman of the band onstage. Finn's voice may be difficult, but don't let it be a deal-breaker.
Finn may not be Art Garfunkel up in this piece, but he uses his adenoidal rasp to blurt twisted, dense shards of squalid back-alley imagery and bruised druggy lamentations, broken teeth and broken bottles, and tattered hotel-room Bibles and hidden knives. He's the poet laureate of the loading dock behind the mall where the runaway kids get together to sniff cheap coke at 5 a.m.
The Hold Steady's first album, last year's ...Almost Killed Me, was a tangled mess of damaged character sketches and triumphant bar-rock thump-- Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle reimagined as an epic of Russian literature. But Separation Sunday is something more, the elegiac Biblical lost-innocence junkie odyssey that Denis Johnson never wrote.
Like Fiestas & Fiascos, the final album from Finn's former Minneapolis post-punk band Lifter Puller, it's an album-length story that forces us to pull bits of narrative from Finn's tangles of words. In Separation Sunday, a confused Catholic girl named Hallelujah hooks up with a motley assortment of shady characters, does a gang of drugs, gets born again when some guy with a nitrous tank dunks her in a river, wakes up in a confession booth, and maybe dies and maybe comes back from death. But the real story is in Finn's virtuoso evocations of menace ("When they say great white sharks/ They mean the kind in big black cars/ When they say killer whales/ They mean they whaled on him till they killed him up in Penetration Park"), hedonism ("You came into the ER drinking gin from a jam jar/ And the nurse is making jokes about the ER being like an after-bar"), and brief shining moments of lucidity ("Youth services always find a way to get their bloody cross into your druggy little messed-up teenage life").
None of this would work if Finn didn't have an expert rock band backing him up. Finn's songs wheel precariously from one unhinged lyrical idea to the next, almost never stopping for choruses or going out of their way to fit into any sort of structure, but the band plays these songs like long-lost fist-in-the-air classic rock anthems. It's well-schooled in every bar-rock cliché, and executes these moves with joy and conviction: the pick-slide before the climax, the weeping Hammond organ on the bridge, the pregnant pause before the big riff kicks back in. Since ...Almost Killed Me, the band has beefed up its sound with the help of Rocket From the Crypt producer Dave Gardner and keyboard player Franz Nickolay, and its Meat Loaf pianos, greasy George Thorogood blooz choogle, and wheedling Journey guitar carry more heft and authority than they had on the last album. This stuff would sound great behind just about any garage-rock hack, but it turns Finn's dirtbag chronicles into something epic and huge and molten and beautiful.


Isis follow their breakthrough Oceanic with the even more epic and swirling Panopticon, which combines their velvety, slow avant-metal with Godspeed marathons and stately Ride-style shoegazing.

Panopticon

When people mention "heavy metal," I still kneejerk and jump back to ultra-specific childhood associations: The Bon Jovi/Mötley Crüe diptych in my sister's purple room, watching "Headbangers Ball" with a pack of Party Mix and decorating my first shiny, black, mall-bought guitar with Slayer stickers, the trashy Maiden fans in my neighborhood with their toothpick legs, seeing pre-suck-ass Metallica in a mid-sized club with a friend of mine who wore a fake wig so he could feel more the part. These memories are just the tip of the Viking's iceberg; the stuff has leaked into my adulthood, especially via first-generation Norwegian black metal, Mastodon, High On Fire, the Polish rockers who ran my borrowed van into a Los Angeles parking deck last spring, and-- mightiest of all-- the glorious slow-release sprawl of Isis.
An odd monster, the Boston quintet has toured with Ipecac rap artist Dälek; had their music tweaked on a series of 12-inches by (among others) label head Mike Patton, Godflesh's Justin Broadrick, Fennesz, Thomas Koner, and Khanate's James Plotkin; and have played both Mogwai's stage at 2004's All Tomorrow's Parties in East Sussex, England, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. They're not your mulletted uncle's bar band. Their album Oceanic was all dark grandeur and waterlogged heaviness, and those qualities define the seven tracks on their follow up Panopticon. Even more epic and swirling than Oceanic, Isis's third full-length combines their velvety, slow avant-metal with Godspeed marathons and stately Ride-style shoegazing.
Panopticon shares the crystalline production Matt Bayles (Mastodon, Pearl Jam) leant to Oceanic-- the drums and vocals are submerged, the riffs intricately monolithic-- but unlike on earlier efforts, the spare electronics are more seamlessly woven with the other instruments. A stronger record than its predecessor, Panopticon pummels but harnesses its sounds to a well-honed, diaphanous template.
In the grand spirit of over-the-top metal, Isis named the album after Michel Foucault's take on of Jeremy Bentham's concept of the panopticon; the tracks are thematically connected via Foucault's Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Because the lyrics are submerged in the mix they're fairly impenetrable, but Isis quote heavily from the French philosopher in the liner notes to make sure listeners don't think they chose the title at random: "The Panopticon is a machine for disassociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen." (See also: The satellite spy cam photos decorating the album.) Considering the light/dark of the Patriot Act's ubiquitous surveillance, Panopticon feels more relevant than the science fiction of Queensryche's Operation: Mindcrime.
Isis's instrumentation also evokes a sense of creeping voyeurism. Astute track placement adds to the slowly building tidal, trance-like rush: individual pieces blend over and flood to the next. With a shadowy sense of repetition-- comparisons to Neurosis and the Melvins make sense-- the shortest track is 6:47 and the longest just under 10 minutes. "Backlit" starts with a delicate intro and stuck-in-the-well melodies before ultimately dam-breaking with gruff whirlpools; the distortion then ducks for cover, allowing a slow, clear bass line, percussion, and cascading arpeggios to bubble to the surface. Such complex dynamics overtake each new wave.
I remember in high school when a scruffy English teacher told me the word "awesome" should be saved for snow-capped mountain peaks not an AC/DC concert. I still don't agree with his Bob Ross-like language mangling-- both "awesome" and the equally 80s-rooted colloquilism "triumphant" are apt descriptions of Panopticon's intricacies. Plus, not to rain on Sir Shakespeare's parade: I grew up in swampy, dank New Jersey and have always preferred the angularity of flat, burnt-out fields to the obviousness of your purple mountains majesty. But for fans of such old-school sublime, Isis connect these overstated zero-oxygen heights with sludgy, brackish small-town waters, creating stellar classical music for kids with bad teenage mustaches-- and those of us who empathize with them.


Glenn Jones' fifth album for solo acoustic guitar and banjo was written in between spells spent caring for his sick, elderly mother at his childhood home. The period induced intensely personal reflections on the cycle of life he's experienced there, taking in discovery, love, and loss.

My Garden State

Glenn Jones turns a trick with the title of his fifth album for solo acoustic guitar and banjo, My Garden State. Jones is known best as a Boston musician, having led the city’s art-rock updaters Cul de Sac through the 1990s and having alluded to his adopted hometown with the names and anecdotes of several cuts on previous records. But Jones grew up in northern New Jersey. During the last several years, he’s often returned to his childhood home for extended periods to take care of his mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease. The bulk of My Garden State was written during these eldercare furloughs, prompting Jones to take the thematically logical step of recording the tunes in New Jersey, too, 60 miles or so south at the farmhouse of friend and collaborator Laura Baird.
But this wistful 10-tune set is called My Garden State, not The Garden State, a clever way for Jones to sidestep songs about New Jersey so as to offer his experience with discovery, love, and loss within the state itself. Sure, the names of several numbers reference specific area locales-- the Tappan Zee Bridge that spans the Hudson River, the teeming county where Jones grew up, the nursing home where his mother now lives-- but these are places that have meant something to Jones. There is no ode to the Boardwalk, no observations on the state’s industrial cornucopia, and no interpolation of “Where Eagles Dare”. Instead, these songs are intensely personal reflections on the cycle of life as he’s seen it here. “The Vernal Pool”, for instance, is an improvisation Jones played shortly after Baird showed him the farm habitat of spadefoot toads, which use the “spades” of their feet to dig into their subterranean lairs for a season’s rest. When it rains in the spring, they dig their way out and become “explosive breeders.” Jones saw the toads in the fall, when they still lurked underground. This piece starts with listless hibernation, his slow notes languishing inside their own decay. Across its five minutes, though, it builds into a bustle, with a thumbed bass line muscling its way through a raga-like flurry of sound. Even at its most vibrant and vivid, “The Vernal Pool” reveals a constant vein of anxiety, as if to acknowledge at once the world’s forever-chained wonder and worry while celebrating it, too.
Indeed, My Garden State is defined by its sincerely bittersweet sense, where Jones never seems too mournful of or sentimental for the past nor overly naïve for some idealized future. Jones’ work isn’t emotionally conflicted; it’s simply emotionally honest, with his fingers doling out lessons as he’s learned them. These instrumentals seem to acknowledge Jones’ feelings as they are-- mixed and confusing and sometimes overwhelming, with the sweetness of childhood memories tempered by the exigencies of the present and the uncertainty of what’s ahead. “Bergen County Farewell”, written after Jones and his sisters had finally sold the family home, sublimates nostalgia into optimism and back again. Its darting melody is bright and cheery, but there’s sadness tucked between the notes, too, like a worried mind behind a well-intentioned smile. “Blues for Tom Carter”, ostensibly written for Jones’ fellow guitar traveler after the Charalambides co-founder fell seriously ill while on tour last year, doesn’t dip into full-lament mode as its title might suggest; rather, it feels like an affable Sunday afternoon phone call to an old friend, as though Jones is simply checking in to make sure everything is OK. You can imagine Carter making a wisecrack on the other end of the line.
Both of the album’s guitar extended guitar marvels-- the eight-minute duet with Meg Baird, “Going Back to East Montgomery”, and the slightly shorter “Like a Sick Eagle Looking at the Sky”-- thrive on such emotional imbalance. They’re both relatively warm and welcoming tunes; in fact, when Baird’s guitar joins Jones’ for the refrain, it’s possible to picture day breaking to the sound of the strings’ bright harmonies. For most of the piece, though, Jones simply winds back and forth through one lithe melody, a reminder that any “sweet shot of joy,” as he calls Baird’s playing in the liner notes, matters most because of the humdrum toil it interrupts. “Sick Eagle” is more dimly lit, but Jones lifts the melody at just the right moments, offering a sudden horizon of hopefulness.
Perhaps it’s strange to call any instrumentalist a master storyteller, but five albums into his solo career, that’s starting to seem like the most apt summation of Jones’ talents. The liner notes of My Garden State include the tuning systems of each of these songs, as well as technical notes about capo placement and a brief narrative about each tune’s inspiration. Aspiring guitarists might need the alternate tuning suggestions, but listeners won’t really need the anecdotes. Rather, Jones puts it all right there in the pieces, speaking volume about the challenges and triumphs of growing up and older without singing a word of the blues. My Garden State is your Garden State, too, a collection of magnetic ruminations that applies to anyone who’s ever struggled to go back home or leave it in the first place.


Steeped in a mixture of indie rock, shoegaze, emo, and ambient, the L.A.-based musician’s debut album is an ambitious attempt to make something new out of familiar materials.

dreamTX: living in memory of something sweet

living in memory of something sweet

dreamTX’s debut album, living in memory of something sweet, is a hybrid of indie pop, shoegaze, emo, ambient, and R&B that’s as unsettling as it is soothing, feral as it is familiar, wily and gnarled as it is unflaggingly melodic. Even without knowing that the Dallas-raised, Los Angeles-based artist Nicholas Das remembers the release of Merriweather Post Pavilion as a life-altering event, an astute listener will likely pick up on the project’s primary touchpoints: Animal Collective, yes, but also Broken Social Scene and Modest Mouse, How to Dress Well and Alex G. living in memory is an ambitious and intuitive psychedelic guitar-pop album that pulls from its predecessors without mimicking them and iterates upon their sound without replicating it.
Das is an NYU alum who co-wrote and produced “On + Off” and “Celadon & Gold” with former classmate Maggie Rogers and contributed music to the 2020 film Shithouse, in addition to playing in the band Kraus and scoring commercials, podcasts, and documentaries. But he aspired to more than piecemeal placements and occasional touring opportunities. When he landed a residency at the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, New York, he tunneled into his work, learning how to make complex compositions sound accessible rather than “hyper-articulate and totally wild.” living in memory is the product of this searching time. “You can either make something new or something good,” he said after the album’s release. “I was desperate to make something that was in some way both.”
The results of Das’ efforts may not sound entirely new, but they sure sound good. A song like “Elated” is clearly in conversation with recent electronic shoegaze artists like Jane Remover and Parannoul, but the vocal performance feels distinct, springing with pitch-shifted falsetto indebted to both R&B and Midwestern emo. The song does have a discernible structure—strummed acoustic guitar in the verses, noise-walled choruses, glitchy bridges—but its shape is slippery, devolving into chaos just when you think it’s going to settle down.
There’s a homespun charm to the album, a DIY spirit that gives character to even the more conventional tracks. It’s easy to imagine a polished and sanitized rendition of “In Too Deep” being performed by a pop-folk troupe like the Lumineers, but Das’ approach is refreshingly eccentric. Aside from the slick vocal processing, several stylistic choices—like the choral chants and synth effects that sneak into the upper midrange of the mix—offset the otherwise standard handclaps and tambourine rattles. Similarly, the clean-cut indie rock of “I Tried” is subverted by a tunneling ambient pad and Das’ warbled falsetto. Even at their most pleasantly straightforward, the songs are marked by an inspired unpredictability, a deliberate weirdness that gives otherwise simple ideas an exciting edge.
A defining feature of dreamTX’s music is the lack of decipherable lyrics. Das is most intelligible on the electrifying “Live Without,” where he sings, “I don’t want to write this song/I don’t want to live without you,” but even this refrain morphs and crumbles. Using his voice as though it were another instrument allows Das to burrow into a feeling and broaden it into a three-dimensional form, but at times I longed for more mappable meaning; the striking melodies of a song like “Cannot Believe” might have been rendered even more affecting had they been paired with some captivating detail or scrap of story. The coos and caws and cries for help, however, construct their own sort of dream logic, one that offers knotty, tempestuous emotions for those times we can’t articulate what feelings we’re actually experiencing.
Though living in memory of something sweet’s first seven songs are rousing and energetic, the album’s pacing is uneven. The closing songs—two droopy indie-rock numbers and an ambient guitar instrumental—are melodically interesting, but in sequencing them together, the record ends on a tepid and unrepresentative note. For a project whose radiance stems from its intuitive ease, the dip in energy is puzzling. But that shouldn’t distract from Das’ achievement: With a curious ear and playful touch, he’s welded together familiar touchstones and made something fresh out of them.


On their third record, the indie-folk duo celebrate choices but settle on none.

Sculptor

You are the master of your own destiny. This is the thread loosely stitching together Luluc’s latest indie-folk album, Sculptor. The third record from Brooklyn-based Australians Zoe Randell and Steve Hassett saunters to the same plodding pace as their previous records—2014’s Passerby and 2008’s Dear Hamlyn—unfolding like a collection of yawning acoustic poems. According to Randell, the titular “sculptor” is emblematic of shaping one’s own world out of bottomless possibilities—but the ambiguity of those possibilities paired with Luluc’s noncommittal compositions result in an album at odds with its objective. Sculptor is said to celebrate choices, but it settles on none.
The theme of volition throughout Sculptor is nebulous at best and precarious at worst. Randell aims to explore “the different lives that are open to us,” but it seems that “us” represents a very particular demographic of people, namely the affluent, white, and educated masochists of Alex Ross Perry and Noah Baumbach films. It’s not that art made about this slice of society can’t be affecting (just look at the literate citizens of Belle and Sebastian songs, or Pulp’s “Common People”), it’s just that the characters stalking Sculptor’s tracklist lack flesh and blood, and the record’s homogeneous arrangements aren’t enough to fortify them.
It’s hard to discern Randell’s intentions in these songs, especially when it comes to the people that populate them. Take the hifalutin writer of “Genius,” whose stodgy lifestyle and rejection of “aesthetic dress” Randell criticizes, but in a terminology that suggests it takes one to know one. She uses overwrought language to critique someone who uses overwrought language, and it’s hard to sympathize with either author. Then there’s the pair of pals drifting between the beach and university in “Cambridge.” Randell sings: “Tonight I’m here in Cambridge and I guess we’re living proof/There are other roads open to me and to you.” The song’s evasive narrative of feeling lost and then (inexplicably) found feels two-dimensional—its subjects are bursting with existential complaints but they’re shy on the subtleties of actual human beings.
Vagueness plagues much of Sculptor, cloaking the album’s protagonists in crudely formed identities, and limiting its arrangements to uninspired combinations of drums, guitar, and occasional flourishes of Hammond organ. On Luluc’s earlier records, Randell’s voice was capable of great range; her lows smoky and arresting, her higher register delicate and celestial. Unfortunately on Sculptor she occupies her deepest timbre the entire time, and her words often drown in a persistent monotone. Hassett’s multi-tracked harmonies, as well as guitar cameos by J Mascis and Aaron Dessner are sadly not enough to pump oxygen into these tracks, and you’re left waiting for the album to break into a gallop, or even a light jog.
Sculptor postures as a manifesto of independent thought, without saying anything specific or of substance. Sure, there’s a teen who’s followed by cops for wearing a “filthy punk rock tee,” but Randell’s attempts at social commentary feel thinly spread, unfocused, and self-congratulatory. On campfire strummer “Me and Jasper,” for instance, she looks back on adolescence, applauding her own rebellious nature and propensity to ponder “something different than just shallow thinkin’ and bitchin.’” But what is that “something different”? Despite Sculptor’s learned characters, we’re never educated on the matter.


The Stand Ins

Life was a crummy movie on Okkervil River's breakthrough album, The Stage Names. On The Stand Ins, it's a lousy rock show. As the interchangeable titles and puzzle-piece album covers imply, this new record is an extension of its predecessor, a further untangling of themes and ideas about music, art, celebrity, love, and the folly of it all. The Stand Ins doesn't quite match the gusto and brainy emotionalism of The Stage Names but it exceeds its bleakness. Pop songs lie, tortured singer-songwriters are wealthy narcissists, groupies have regrets, music scenes wither, nothing changes. Rock promises redemption but delivers only destruction, or at best, cultish relative obscurity. Okkervil River are the anti-Hold Steady. They should tour together.
At first listen, the main difference between The Stand Ins and The Stage Names is that Okkervil's latest lacks the sense of surprise. The band's 2005 record Black Sheep Boy came out of nowhere, a thematic and musical step forward after two strong earlier albums, and The Stage Names revealed a tight, resourceful band who played with enough force to redeem leader Will Sheff's doomed characters. The Stand Ins continues that ambitious musical development, further roughing up the group's sound while sharpening its attack to an even finer point, and refining some of their old tricks while introducing new ones (see: the country shuffle of "Singer Songwriter", Sheff's smooth croon on "Lost Coastlines", and the short orchestral interludes tying everything together like incidental film music.)
The Stand Ins begins with an orchestral prelude, before filling in the pages of Sheff's tattered songbook with "Lost Coastlines", whose boat metaphor and buoyant bassline hint at a connection with Stage Names closer "John Allyn Smith Sails". The song changes shape often, toggling between an acoustic jangle and a tense electric groove until it finally drifts out to sea on a sing-along of la la la's. Those syllables carry as much weight here as any other lyrics. It's a thrilling introduction, maybe even more apt than "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe".
Touring almost constantly since well before Black Sheep Boy, Okkervil River have transformed into an urgent rock band that imbues Sheff's songs with as much energy and personality as he does. At times, The Stand Ins sounds like a bassist's album: Patrick Pestorius plays like he's quit the rhythm section, adding unexpectedly melodic riffs that lend subtle gradations of color to these compositions. It's his bopping theme that connects the dots on "Lost Coastlines" and "Calling and Not Calling My Ex". When "Singer Songwriter" threatens to topple under its top-heavy accusations, Brian Cassidy and the Wrens' Charles Bissell right the song with their determined roadhouse gallop and piercing guitar licks. Then the band does a 180 and follows it up with the soulful, horn-laden midtempo groove of "Starry Stairs" (which may or may not be a sequel to "Savannah Smiles") and the grandiose show-closer "Blue Tulip", which ends with a perfect Byrdsy guitar riff-- one of the album's best moments.
In short, the band complements and counterbalances Sheff's cerebral songwriting simply by rocking out. His braininess is perhaps his greatest asset, and he's become one of the best lyric-writers going in indie rock, with a dense and distinctive style that trades on wordplay and internal rhymes. Song for song, he can jerk a tear with a carefully observed detail or turn of phrase ("Blue Tulip" in particular is a backlash tragedy on a human scale), but it's the way those songs talk to one another that makes Okkeril River albums so durable and fascinating.
Sheff wants to look beyond common pop song notions to discover something truer and more essential, no matter how disillusioning it may be, which is the central, enthralling contradiction for Okkervil River: Even as they ruthlessly deconstruct pop music, they make great pop music. The darker Sheff gets, the more honest he sounds and the more absorbing the song. By that equation, the stand-out on The Stand Ins is "Pop Lie", an exquisitely bleak dismantling of singer-songwriter pretensions. The pop singer lies in his songs, "and you're lying when you sing along!" (Hey, Hold Steady...) It's not hard to imagine a venue full of excited fans singing along, although it's difficult to determine whether he would view their participation as a bitter irony or a sincerely funny cosmic joke. Or if he would just smile and enjoy the moment, knowing that any listener can take that pop lie and make it true.


The music of New York producer Yaeji—part house, part hip-hop—hints at strong feelings with subtle tones. On her second EP, she pushes her sound further to its poles.

EP2

If most dance music works as a solvent drawing people out of their shells and into each other’s space, Yaeji’s songs—part house, part hip-hop—focus more on the shells themselves. The New York producer and vocalist doesn’t see the awkwardness of the club as a wall to be torn down with fast enough beats and deep enough bass, which is not to say that the bass on her second EP isn’t deep; its subdermal quake, especially on “After That,” ranks high among EP2’s many charms. It’s more that the beats, the bass, and the lyrics she drips on top of them all work to remind you of the limits of dancefloor transcendence, and the strange, lonely pocket you fall into when you aim for transcendence and miss.
Yaeji pushes her music further to its poles on EP2. While her first EP established her idiosyncratic vocals—she simultaneously murmurs and raps and sings, as if there’s nothing to shout over, nothing to prove—her second contrasts them with deep, ebbing backbeats and heavy rumbles of bass. She sings (and raps and murmurs) in both English and Korean, sometimes switching between the two mid-thought, as if she’s reached the limit of specificity one language can offer and has to use two to pinpoint her music’s uneasy emotional timbre in parallax. On “Drink I’m Sippin On,” she repeats the phrase “that’s not it” in Korean, emphasizing both its elegant syllabic architecture and the sensation of being not quite understood.
Even the EP’s most crowd-rousing track, “Raingurl,” casts overtones of alienation on its seesawing beat. The refrain of “make it rain, girl, make it rain” scans plainly enough, but like a lot of hip-hop vocalists, Yaeji tends to choose words as much for their sound as their literal meaning (if not prioritizing the former). “Mother Russia in my cup” doesn’t hold much semantic water, but it sounds badass and its meter hits the beat. It’s as if Yaeji is porting slang in from a world just adjacent to our own, one with colloquialisms that roll a little more smoothly off the tongue. She pronounces them so casually it’s disorienting, like you’re expected to know them and you don’t, which makes it all the easier to surrender to her beats.
EP2 closes with a cover of Drake’s “Passionfruit,” a song Yaeji renders in her own muted palette with a dash of Auto-Tune and some extra language play. Between verses, she collapses the phrase “passionate from miles away” into the portmanteau “passionway,” repeating it until it becomes another texture stippling the atmosphere. The line and her elision of it make for a concise summation of what she’s doing in her music as a whole: detailing affect and distance at the same time, hinting at strong feelings with subtle tones. Yaeji doesn’t concern herself much with disaffection; her music isn’t about proving you don’t care, but examining what it’s like to care from far away, through an obstacle that won’t budge. And unlike Drake, whose vocal patterns map so neatly onto hers that her “Passionfruit” almost starts to sound like the original one, she’s not casting judgment on that obstacle. She’s just noticing the barriers that crop up between people despite their better efforts and trying, with a little sub-bass, to echolocate their foundations.


Building on the unusual interpretations it performs live, the Norwegian duo recorded an entire album of covers; unlikely choices including AC/DC's "It's a Long Way to the Top" and Kiss' "Crazy, Crazy Nights" are slowed to a crawl and injected with a sense of bleak foreboding.

Susanna and the Magical Orchestra: Melody Mountain

Melody Mountain

In the bringing-it-down-a-notch tradition of Cat Power's The Covers Record, melancholic Norwegian duo Susanna and the Magical Orchestra have followed its ice-veined 2004 debut with a collection of cover tunes. Speaking with the band members in August, they told me Melody Mountain was originally supposed to be an EP. They decided to record some of the covers they'd been doing live and the idea spiraled into a larger project. However they arrived at this 10-song collection, it plays to the band's strengths: Two years after the release of List of Lights and Buoys, their spare, unforgettable take on Dolly Parton's "Jolene" remains the band's calling card.
Instead of coasting along with expected, aesthetically linked updates, Melody Mountain's oddball set list includes imaginative revisions: AC/DC's "It's a Long Way to the Top", backed by, among other things, cembalo, a baroque keyboard instrument; a simplified, back-porch incision of Prince's "Condition of the Heart"; a Cat Powered ramble through Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right". To the band's credit, every choice, no matter how strange at first, ends up sounding real. They own each unironic, personalized revision; this isn't some indulgent Gus Van Sant meta game.
The honest sound could be a result of the pared-down, two-person lineup, coupled with the crystalline Deathprod production. Rather than lugging along some weepy string section, the "orchestra" is just one guy, ex-Jaga Jazzist and Shining member Morten Qvenild. His instrumental expertise and good taste lends intricately lush, deftly subtle keyboard/piano/church organ-based backdrops. More striking than the band's minimalism are the pristine, unpolluted vocals of Susanna Karolina Wallumrød. A true talent in the vein of Chan Marshall and Mira Billotte, she sings like a Norwegian mountain stream, never over-enunciating or throwing in unnecessary trills.
Melody Mountain's interpretations vary in shades and gradations. Kiss' "Crazy, Crazy Nights" becomes a shivery, damp-highway anthem for the dispossessed; Scott Walker's "It's Raining Today", a spooky, pedal-steeled, echo-chambered finale to a one-woman musical. Live, it was "Hallelujah" that made the people cry. Most versions of Leonard Cohen's transcendent ballad can send tear ducts into overtime, but it's a song Susanna and the Magical Orchestra have been performing for a while and Wallumrod's pacing and phrasing were masterful-- like she snuck herself into each note and lived an entire life inside it before moving onto the next. Here, as the hushed, funereal opener, it's pretty tough to top.
The song earning the most attention is a taffy-stretched "Love Will Tear Us Apart", wherein Ian Curtis's most famous libretto is laid bare and slowed to half speed. The original's nervously bottled dance is replaced by a languid, nearly a capella drift. To go the pop culture route, if this version soundtracked Donnie Darko, that make-out scene would become more tenderly melancholic, less heady and nerve-wracked.
In a great year for mountain albums (think Blood Mountain and Return to Cookie Mountain, among others), Susanna & the Magical Orchestra contribute the most enigmatic collection to the pile. Of course, there's reason to be restrained in the praise: They do a nice job, but these are only covers, and it'll be interesting to hear their own songwriting developments on future records. In the meantime, Melody Mountain is an example of expansive restraint that, surprisingly enough, makes for good driving music. Maybe it's the ghosts of particular songs' rocker pasts propelling the molasses flow? Hypothermia's phantom aches?


Canadian songwriter Crystal Dorval melts away the haze of dream pop for her most clear-eyed and expansive music to date.

Paradise Gardens

As White Poppy, Canadian songwriter Crystal Dorval glides through dream pop’s highest altitudes with a guitar that rumbles like a jet engine. Releases like 2015’s excellent Natural Phenomena hid psychedelic Lisa Frank wonderlands and a distinct, unshakeable melancholy in their thick fog banks. On her follow-up, Paradise Gardens, these clouds clear to reveal her most immediate, adventurous music to date and the always razor-sharp songwriting that lurked behind them.
Whether you’ve just fallen in love or taken drugs, dream pop has always been great at mirroring wild shifts in brain chemistry, but Paradise Garden often sounds like a mind trying to hold itself together. Over the blissful drumbeat of opener “Broken,” Dorval sighs, “There’s a hole in my heart/Don’t know where the pieces are/There’s a hole in my head/Guess I’m better off than dead.” Her ethereal whisper makes no attempt to hide the dire image painted by the lyrics, which culminate in chants of “I don’t want to complain/I can’t help myself today” and a starry guitar solo. “Broken” is a gorgeously, euphoric song about feeling absolutely terrible, but it sets the tone for an album where Dorval achieves trippy highs by simply accepting the lows.
While Paradise Gardens recalls both dream pop originators like Cocteau Twins and revivalists like Dum Dum Girls, the direct and almost conversational way it explores subjects like depression is original. Depression doesn’t fit a tidy narrative, and Dorval’s layered writing captures the struggle of each new day. “Broken” and “Hardly Alive,” a song built on fuzzed-out guitars and driving drums that focuses on feeling trapped in your home, contain the album’s most anxious spirals. Yet it’s when Dorval shifts into the woozier side of her work that Paradise Garden takes on a meditative calm and a zen confidence.
“Memories,” the second track on the album, sets the leisurely pace that’s always suited White Poppy best. Over a shimmering guitar and simple drums, she delivers lines with a plainspoken simplicity that recalls Bill Callahan, letting each word hang for a moment before drifting to the next: “I/Am letting go/Of who/I used to be/Everything/I know/Is rearranging.” Each steady step brings the song closer to a kaleidoscopic beauty, and each fading memory seems to lift Dorval higher. On songs like the dubby “Hawk” and airy “Orchid Child,” Dorval’s hypnotic mantras float over her drifting guitar.
If previous White Poppy albums engulfed the listener in lo-fi guitar haze, Dorval unlocks new musical hues here by adding synths and samples. This experimentation leads to surprises like the magical “Something Sacred,” where Dorval, singing over a steady shuffle and chromatic guitar, is joined by the sound of a dolphin’s laughter bursting into the mix; the strange duet the two form has become one of my favorite musical moments of the year. It also gives us the staggering “Silence,” an unexpectedly uplifting song about feeling isolated that takes on a new power in a time of self-quarantine. “I/Am/Alone,” she sings in a whisper, letting each word hang over a distant glowing guitar, before adding “You/Are/Too.” It’s an equally heavy and heavenly realization, delivered in a moment when we are all trying to understand our situation and ourselves. White Poppy offers both blissful escape and inspiring strength just by taking it one day at a time.

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Jumping from the blockchain to streaming platforms, the four West Coast OGs offer an album’s worth of trunk-rattling traditionalism that celebrates their exalted elder status.

SNOOP CUBE 40 $HORT

If you missed the debut LP from hip-hop supergroup Mount Westmore last summer, you’re excused. In a stunt seemingly designed to persuade blockchain enthusiasts to use multiple Slurp Juices on a single album, the quartet of West Coast OGs (Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, E-40, and Too $hort) released Bad MFs on a shady Maltese NFT platform called Gala Music in July 2022. The release gambit mirrored Snoop’s announcement from a few months prior that Death Row —which he’d just purchased—would become “the first NFT label”; in a similar spirit, Mount Westmore made their live debut in April 2021 at a pay-per-view boxing match featuring YouTube irritant Jake Paul.
Outside the coterie of Bored Ape collectors and stunt pugilists, anyone who’d heard of Mount Westmore had every right to be suspicious of a simple cash grab by four rappers who got bored during lockdown. Once the singles “Big Subwoofer” and “Too Big” started circulating in a more traditional manner, however, actual rap fans—or at least those of us over 40—could feel something close to anticipation for more of the same trunk-rattling West Coast traditionalism. The rappers may all be in their fifties, but between Snoop’s syrupy flow, $hort’s raspy pimp croak, and E-40 rapping like he’s about to throw up at any moment, three of hip-hop’s most inimitable timbres show little signs of wear (Cube’s bark has, understandably, mellowed with time). While the revised, expanded, and retitled SNOOP CUBE 40 $HORT that slipped onto streaming platforms in December won’t likely appeal to anyone born after the first Friday movie hit theaters, and its occasional attempts to court contemporary relevance fall flat, the album more than proves that it’s possible to age gracefully in a young person’s game.
The quartet reportedly recorded several dozen tracks for the project during quarantine, and, true to their chosen name—a nod to the interminable G.O.A.T. debates online and off—the contributions are equal, with few features (save a P-Lo appearance and a very brief spoken-word Dr. Dre cameo) and the collective privileged over individual showmanship. Thirty years after the rappers’ respective primes, it’s still thrilling to hear them trade verses on opening one-two punch “California” and “Motto,” with era-specific production handled by Bay Area veteran and longtime E-40 collaborator Rick Rock. Though 40 isn’t the most famous of the four, he nearly steals the show from the get-go, providing the sour hook for the first song and a wicked double-time verse to open the second.
The quartet is clearly comfortable with its exalted elder status, and it’s worth remembering that the four rappers came up during the hip-hop era that privileged Black entrepreneurship and multimedia stardom. On “Free Game,” over a DecadeZ track that hearkens back to the pre-Dre era of L.A. electro-rap, they outline their CVs and offer a how-to guide for surviving the game. “Fuck the police, pay attention to the OGs,” argues Cube, while Snoop—perhaps the most widely beloved ’90s rapper—reminds us that he’s “gettin’ money out your favorite television stations.” Though these four have crafted some of hip-hop’s most indelible songs about the politics of street life, this album prioritizes the party and bullshit. The small exception predictably involves Cube, who obliquely responds to critics of his dreadful COVID opinions and political allies on “Have a Nice Day” with a weak nod toward cancel culture. Cube’s strangest choice here comes via “On Camera,” which would seem to nod toward his iconic 1992 album track about Black citizen surveillance, but instead, no shit, is about the kind of home-surveillance system often used by suburbanites to profile and incarcerate young Black men: “Yеah, punk bitch, you better put it back/Let ’еm know we got cameras on this cul-de-sac.”
Cube telling trespassers to literally get off his lawn is a reminder of just how far hip-hop has traveled since N.W.A.’s debut 36 years ago. Coupled with the fact that the current crop of twentysomething rappers seem to have less knowledge than ever about the genre’s progenitors, this album could easily scan as a bunch of crotchety elder statesmen demanding respect from the youngsters. Instead, SNOOP CUBE 40 $HORT is merely a good album on its own merits, which is not shocking at all to anyone who’s followed these rappers in their resting-on-laurels decades. Especially when we’re constantly reminded that rappers reaching their forties, let alone fifties, represents something of a minor miracle, it’s worth hoping not just for another Mount Westmore album—there are reportedly dozens more tracks—but for other OGs to stake their own claims to historical status in the present moment.


Already a global star, reggaetón’s reigning hitmaker tries his hand at becoming an auteur with an audiovisual album.

Colores

J Balvin didn’t have to drop a concept album. He also didn’t have to include with it a series of “guided meditations,” or shoot a video for every song on the record. Already well into his global ascent, the Colombian juggernaut could have simply bundled Colores’ radio-ready hits and rode out the streaming wave. Yet Balvin has long outpaced that tactic, eschewing his earliest goals of mainstream reggaetón success for something greater. He recently told Vogue UK he wants to be a “living legend,” punto. So now, Balvin is in the business of crafting a lasting aesthetic—namaste hands and all.
Colores’ concept is steeped in this earnest (if slightly indulgent) pursuit. Each of its 10 tracks corresponds to a different color, in a sort of sonic mood ring. “Rojo” deploys atmospheric synths to evoke romance; on “Gris,” a cumbia-derived guitar recalls the sound of Balvin’s Medellín atop a chunky beat. We even get an answer to fellow urbano upstart Bad Bunny’s “Safaera” with another nasty puro perreo cut (“Negro”). But through all of this, Balvin’s underlying mission remains clear.
He telegraphed his commitment to his idea when he dropped the album’s final track, “Blanco,” as the lead single in late 2019, choosing it over surefire beach hit “Azul” or the rainbow of “Arcoíris” (featuring Oasis’ Afrobeats all-star, Mr. Eazi). In doing so, Balvin effectively slapped down a layer of primer, delivering an absence of color in preparation for the rest.
Directed by frequent collaborator Colin Tilley (who oversaw every video for the album), the accompanying music video for “Blanco” signals the madness of a world gone blank. In it, we see Balvin clad in dystopic drip courtesy of Virgil Abloh’s Off-White brand, as the reggaetonero’s face quite literally drips in glossy alabaster paint. Beside him, bone breakers writhe in zero-gravity, cats go flying, and a polar bear gets X-ray visioned. The only thing left to hold onto is recurrent partner and producer Sky Rompiendo’s clomping bassline, as Balvin’s “ey” spreads into the sparse breaks between each beat.
Given “Blanco’s” gaudiness, some likely chalked up the Colores concept as just Balvin’s latest playground. In some ways, it is: Album opener “Amarillo” (Yellow) teems with funhouse horns sampled from French hip-hop collective Saïan Supa Crew’s “Angela,” as Rompiendo pumps the sample into an addictingly—or, depending on your sensitivity, annoyingly—incessant loop. Overhead, Balvin croons, “¿Cómo te explico? No me complico (How can I explain? I don’t mess around)”/“A mí me gusta pasarla rico (I like to have a good time),” proving he’s still always up for a party. Yet it’s the minimalism of “Blanco”—both in its pared-down production and its spartan visuals—that makes its counterpart shine in equal measure. As an exercise in sequencing, these bookend tracks represent opposite poles of the Colores spectrum—Balvin’s playground, if it is that, has plenty of order.
And that’s because Balvin has always organized his work along visual terms. His offbeat mix of influences has made way for neon dye jobs, Spongebob grills, and luminous tours like last year’s Arcoíris Tour (named for Colores’ penultimate track), where a leopard-haired Balvin centered himself in what can only be described as an army of kawaii Michelin Men and emoji-adjacent mascots, recalling the work of Japan’s matchless visual artist Takashi Murakami.
Speaking of whom: Balvin’s latest cover art is credited to Murakami. It’s a big deal for Balvin, who had “dreams” of working with the artist for a better part of the last decade. In part for his shared whimsy, no doubt. But as it goes, a Murakami collaboration might as well be any nascent pop star’s christening. It puts Balvin in the same camp as fellow tastemakers Kanye and Pharrell, who have collaborated with Murakami to much renown. Now with his own seat at the table, J Balvin will no doubt sigue rompiendo.


German electronic music veteran's second album is an elegant, eminently listenable blend of chirpy beats, homespun voices, and sighing keyboards.

Thora Vukk

A veteran of Germany's electronic music scene, Robag Wruhme released one of minimal techno's more idiosyncratic albums, Wuzzelbud "KK", in 2004. Since then he has quietly issued a handful of singles. In January, Wruhme-- né Gabor Schablitzki-- put together a sly, melodic mix for Cologne's Kompakt, followed in April by Thora Vukk. Released on DJ Koze's increasingly impressive Pampa imprint, Wruhme's second LP is an elegant, eminently listenable blend of chirpy beats, homespun voices, and sighing keyboards.
Wruhme's music has taken a path similar to that of one of his contemporaries, Isolée; tracks that once feasted on funny noises and unexpected pops have been smoothed over, like practical jokers settling into masters of the quip. Thora Vukk also has something in common with Nicolas Jaar's Space Is Only Noise; both are albums of modest treated-keys beauty, though Wruhme's music is deeply rooted in house traditions and tempos that Jaar's plays fast and loose with (or, more accurately, slow and loose).
Thora Vukk is a sunrise album, one that sits lightly. Its tracks don't build and peak so much as arrive and taper. "Brucke Eins", already a placid interlude featuring dollops of organ, ends with someone calmly pecking at a keyboard. Wruhme uses voices sparingly but memorably; "Pnom Gobal" features a back-and-forth between casual scatting and a string section. The closest Thora Vukk comes to cresting is a breakdown during "Tulpa Ovi", in which a skittering break comes to a stop for joyful call and response between a performer and a child audience.
It's telling that Thora Vukk's most memorable moment occurs when the music all but drops out, but it's also misleading. Wruhme's sound design is careful and deep; the album's homespun feel is in tone only (it would be lazy to compare it to the sweet, sepia-toned photograph on the album's cover, but, well, yeah). He leaves plenty of space between the muted chirps of his drums and those lovely velvet keys, and there's lots to be gained by playing the record loudly on a good system. Wruhme's career path and stature make Thora Vukk the type of album that never escapes the clutches of house connoisseurs, but fans of Jaar and even Four Tet will find a lot to like in its pacing and beauty.


The far-reaching sound collage of the electronic musician’s sprawling album consists of gorgeous ambient tones and textures that feel more composed than found.

Holy Palm

Flora Yin-Wong’s Holy Palm is a travel diary in sound, one where temple bells and voice notes replace passport stamps and ticket stubs. The London-born electronic musician sourced its contents from her frequent peregrinations, gathering abstracted rustling and rumbling from all sorts of exotic and mundane places: a supermarket in Tokyo, an airport in Bali, a street festival in Buenos Aires, weddings in Hackney and Thessaloniki. Buddhist monks chant in Cantonese in Hong Kong’s Po Lin monastery; a Greek Orthodox priest is recorded on a car radio in Crete; whales sing off the coast of Trømso. In many ways, her album is a record of motion itself. Not only do many of its sounds come from the actual act of travel—journeys by plane, train, and automobile; transit via tunnel, aqueduct, and escalator—but it is sequenced in a way that emphasizes forward motion. Sounds tumble together, sometimes layering into complex harmonies, but just as often, shoving and bumping into one another, like restless tourists in line for the Pompidou or the Taj Mahal.
But most of those references you might not ever glean with your ears alone; this record of motion takes place largely inside the sonic equivalent of a vehicle with blacked-out windows. In the album’s credits, many of Yin-Wong’s sounds—unlabeled mementos rescued from the depths of her iPhone—are identified only as “unknown.” The organizing principle here is similar to the strategy she used on Ubi Stunt, her 2019 commission for Somerset House Studios, in which a single piece might collage together wind and gravel in the UK, crows in Hokkaido, insects in Bali, and a thunderstorm that has lost its geotag. (Some of those same sounds seem to reappear on Holy Palm, in fact.) Here as there, place and nonplace dissolve into one another; fragments of highly specific environments crumble into a fine, gray dust.
Across much of the album, Yin-Wong’s collage consists of gorgeous ambient tones and textures that feel more composed than found. “Tirta Empul” opens the record with pealing gongs and the rattle of wooden percussion; as metallic drones swell in volume, the pace remains agonizingly slow, the mood ritualistic. In “Vale,” an extended foghorn blast is layered and harmonized with itself; gradually, the barest outline of a melody emerges, backlit against a scrim of deep, bassy tumult. Then, with “Martyrr,” a brief blast of noise—electrical static, a broken air conditioner, who knows—gives way to the mournful singing of a Christian monk, who is himself displaced, in “Bitterness,” by the sad, sour tones of plucked strings looped against keening, minor-key melodies. At times like these, Yin-Wong’s use of texture, contrast, and flow gives her arrangements an unmistakably musical, even lyrical character, like a dark-ambient DJ set accompanied by the tin-roof rattling of a Foley artist.
Venture deep enough into the labyrinth and you’ll find a few stabs at actual club music: In “Aurochs,” white noise is sculpted into the equivalent of techno’s customary kick/hi-hat/snare patterns, and in “Diyu,” heavy percussive strikes are looped into an ominous industrial march. But much of the time, club music appears only as the index of a specific memory. Captured from the green rooms of nightclubs or the backseats of taxis, snippets of grime, UK garage, and techno are recorded on Yin-Wong’s phone—drenched in hallway echo or tinnily compressed through car speakers—and then scattered through the mix like breadcrumbs leading back to late nights remembered only by those who lived them.
On the 15-minute tracks “Loci I” and “Loci II,” Yin-Wong largely abandons the musicality of the rest of the album in favor of a randomized slide reel of places. Layering gives way to simple juxtaposition. Each sound—a snatch of Corona’s Eurodance hit “Rhythm of the Night,” Balinese chanting, a snippet of grime MC—is given a moment’s time, then shunted aside in favor of the next. It is as though she were flipping through files on her phone—perhaps searching for a specific memory, perhaps just scrolling idly. These tracks are less expressive and more cryptic than the rest of the album, and on an aesthetic level, they feel less satisfying, but they also seem crucial to the questions Yin-Wong asks with Holy Palm.
In her quest to understand the nature of the relationship between sound, place, and memory, Yin-Wong’s collage resembles the French filmmaker Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil, an audiovisual essay stitched together with images from a fictional cameraman’s travels in Japan, Iceland, and Africa—department stores, temples, commuter trains—and overlaid with after-the-fact reflections taken from his letters. “He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time,” says the narrator. “Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me.” Like San Soleil’s protagonist, Lin-Wong is a kind of hunter-gatherer, a collector of moments captured and severed from their original contexts. Fascinated by the banal, the forgettable, and the fleeting, she asks: What happens when a memory is cut loose, and only its echo is left?

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In the 1970s, the Downtown saxophonist fused free jazz’s fire-breathing spirit with minimalism’s dizzying swirl. Three new reissues from Unseen Worlds document the evolution of his unique style.

Solos / 4 Cuts Placed in “A First Quarter” / Having Been Built on Sand

To hear Dickie Landry tell it, he’s been in the right place at the right time for decades. Within weeks of moving to New York City in 1969, he had met Ornette Coleman, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, forging lasting relationships with each. He was working as a plumber alongside Glass when he started photographing icons of the Downtown art scene, documenting the embryonic careers of sculptor Richard Serra and multimedia polymaths Keith Sonnier and Joan Jonas, as well as Glass’ ensemble, which he had just joined on saxophone. He bonded with Paul Simon and ended up playing sax on Graceland after introducing himself at a Carnegie Hall performance; he sat in with Bob Dylan at 2003’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, the day after a chance meeting through a restaurateur friend. Despite his relative obscurity, Landry has been ubiquitous, repeatedly finding his niche among artists looking to push their work beyond the familiar.
Landry’s music occupies a peculiar, non-idiomatic zone all its own. He grew up on a farm outside Lafayette, Louisiana, in the 1950s and ’60s, playing saxophone from the age of 10 and diving headfirst into the jazz and zydeco that surrounded him. Early on, the multi-reedist saw the strange and thrilling results of cross-cultural exchange, and he carried that spirit with him to New York, where he shepherded many other Louisianans into the thriving avant-garde art and music communities of Lower Manhattan. Throughout the early-to-mid ’70s, as he became a key member of the Philip Glass Ensemble, Landry staked out his own corner at the intersection of free jazz and minimalism, developing a unique style of improvisation that unites the former’s fire-breathing revolutionary spirit and the latter’s dizzying swirl.
A new trio of reissues from Unseen Worlds—Solos, Four Cuts Placed in “A First Quarter”, and Having Been Built on Sand—documents the evolution of his style. Each album sprang from Landry’s connections across the avant-garde, but even when the music was recorded in a gallery setting, nothing about it is tidy or inert. Like fellow Glass Ensemble member Joan La Barbara, Landry harnesses the technicality and endurance that Glass’ music requires and puts it to work in far more esoteric—at times anarchic—contexts. As the ’70s progressed, Landry’s music became increasingly fixated on tonality and rhythm, but these three albums present a musician determined to confront and confound, even when he embraces repetition and melody. The music runs from rapturous, long-form group improv to hushed, circular melodies overlaid with cut-up poetry, but the most revelatory bits lie squarely in the middle.
From its very first seconds, Solos squirms in a million directions at once. Cut from a single, continuous session at the Leo Castelli Gallery over one night in February 1972, the album is a tangled thicket of bluster and skronk. Joining Landry on soprano sax and electric piano were seven other improvisers, including three additional saxophonists, two bass players, and drummer David Lee Jr., who emerges as its heroic figure and provides relentless forward motion throughout the album’s nearly two-hour runtime. Cohesion seems coincidental throughout, and while each player ostensibly takes solos in turn, collision and overlap are the rule rather than the exception. It’s as close as Landry got to paying homage to Ornette Coleman (whose “Lonely Woman” he quotes about halfway through), John Coltrane, the AACM, and the era’s other giants of improvisation. Here he is at his most unrestrained, reveling in the power of collective instantaneous invention. Yet Solos—immersive and at times overwhelming—lacks his next album’s clarity of vision.
Recorded just nine months later and with four of the same players, Four Cuts Placed in “A First Quarter” takes an introspective turn. Of its four distinct pieces, only the opening “Requiem for Some” features the full ensemble, with Landry focusing instead on solo and duo formations—a format that would define his work for the rest of the decade. “Requiem” showcases restraint, the horns exhaling long, sustained tones while Lee traces out ever-shifting patterns around his kit. For the rest of the album, including in its most brash moments, the empty space around the players is palpable, and Landry and his associates seem to be in constant dialogue with that absence. These minimalist settings are partially a result of practicality—the music accompanied a similarly oblique experimental film by Lawrence Weiner—but divorced from that context, even the most rudimentary musical gestures feel vivid.
“4th Register,” the second and most mesmerizing of the Four Cuts, documents an important step in Landry’s musical progression. Here he stands alone with his horn, working out increasingly abstracted variations on a folk-like refrain until it boils over into microtonal squeals. Each sound that his sax produces is fed into a half-second tape delay, a technique he would expand in live performances over the years leading up to his landmark 1977 album Fifteen Saxophones. “Vivace Duo” features Landry and fellow saxophonist Richard Peck in a 10-minute duel to see who can blow hardest and fastest, and the chaos is accentuated by the stark atmosphere. Each of the Four Cuts is emotive and direct, made all the more powerful by its simplicity.
The simplicity remains on Having Been Built on Sand, another collaboration with Weiner, but there’s a sense of detachment throughout that dulls its impact. Each track features Landry ruminating on a short melodic fragment while Weiner, Britta Le Va, and Tina Girouard recite the title phrase, lyrics of German folk songs, and other short pieces of text, seemingly without much conviction. Despite some inventive embellishment by Landry, and the remarkable resonance of the recording space (which belonged to Robert Rauchenberg), the album’s purposeful obscurity is a letdown, especially after listening to the passionate, laser-focused recordings that preceded it. Landry’s most potent work starts deep in the gut and then reaches for the outer limits of what music can do. That fusion of uninhibited grit and creative expansion illuminates his singular artistic spirit, restlessly in search of transcendence.