If Twelve Reasons to Die was based on a comic, then its sequel is the cinematic adaptation or a reboot of the franchise; the source material is the same, but the execution is tightened in places. It has a bigger-budget feel—stronger guests, better pacing, and a more careful consideration for its audience.

Ghostface Killah & Adrian Younge: Twelve Reasons to Die II

Twelve Reasons to Die II

The first Twelve Reasons to Die scanned like gangster fan fiction. It's Wu-Tang revisionist mob history, the rap equivalent of retroactively inserting Captain America into the World War II timeline. Longtime Ghostface Killah alter ego Tony Starks—Marvel's Iron Man, repurposed—acts as the enforcer for the DeLucas, a Cosa Nostra-esque crime family terrorizing 1960s Italy. He decides to set off on his own, falling in love with the boss's daughter in the process, and he is subsequently murdered by his former employer for his perceived treachery. Starks' ashes are then pressed into a dozen records, and when they are played he is resurrected as Ghostface, an embodiment of the departed's thirst for vengeance.
It sounds like something out of a comic because it is—this is the same rapper who named his debut after an Avenger and commissioned a Marvel artist to ink the artwork for Wu-Massacre. Ghostface has always been enamored with the medium, and his colorful storytelling lends itself well to sequential framing. But Twelve Reasons to Die was rough around the edges, trying to fit too many moving parts into its ambitious conceptual framework. It was limited by obtuse exposition and lazy transitions as transparent as a strip's "meanwhile…" panel. The second installment in the saga, Twelve Reasons to Die II, hits the reset button, hopping decades and time zones, recycling the original blueprint but recasting Ghostface as an anti-hero.
If Twelve Reasons to Die is a comic, then its sequel is the cinematic adaptation or a reboot of the franchise; the source material is the same, but the execution is tightened in places. It has a bigger-budget feel—stronger guests, better pacing, and a more careful consideration for its audience. RZA narrates the passages too tricky to rap. Adrian Younge warps thick '70s soul sounds into a concrete jungle. But mostly, T**RTD II is simply able to succeed where its predecessor failed with the benefit of hindsight. With a proper framing device, more capable bit players (Scarub and Chino XL), and closer attention to detail, Ghostface and Younge do a better job sketching out an alternate universe.
The key to TRTD II is Raekwon, who stars as Lester Kane, an upstart New York City kingpin at war with the DeLucas in the mid-'70s and a foil for Ghostface's Starks. Here, unlike on his recently released gaudy solo album, Fly International Luxurious Art*,* he is noticeably comfortable, penning engaging underworld scenes. He remains an asset to modern Ghostface, whose yarns don't string quite as far these days.
Peak Ghostface could tell an entire story in footnotes; this Ghostface is less subtle. But something happens to him rapping next to Raekwon: On "King of New York" he is as graphic as ever describing Kane ("the New York mob scene is just scared of his suits"). Seconds later, Rae chimes in as Kane, and the exchange breathes real life into the character, who plays a pivotal role in the plot. Raekwon's dense, barreling lyricism is perfect for the action sequences of "Return of the Savage" and "Blackout," where gunfire is exchanged in flurries. Ghostface is still sometimes hilariously literal on TRTD II ("Bash him with a disco ball/ It's the '70s!"), but when challenged, like on the Vince Staples-assisted "Get the Money", he still comes up with great writing.
Ghostface is the visible star at the center of the production, but he is backed by Adrian Younge, the silent star who stitches TRTD II together at the seams with his evocative soul instrumentation. His murky production does a lot of the heavy lifting dramatically: He creates the worlds in which these characters interact, and his work gives everything that happens texture. He chops sequence amplifiers all the way through the finale.
At the end of TRTD II (spoiler!), Ghostface Killah is reborn as a mortal man in the body of Lester Kane, opening the door for a potential third and closing act to this trilogy (RZA: "This is not the last we'll ever hear of Tony Starks/ In actuality, this is just the beginning"). If there is to be a TRTD III, hopefully it embraces the format and flow of this record.


The Boston band’s second and final album is a bright explosion in every atonal direction from math-rock breakdowns to sludgy noise, like virtuosos pushing the self-destruct button.

Urge to Merge

Birthing Hips’ whirlwind of a career teaches a lesson in the second law of thermodynamics, which basically boils down to a), nobody has control over jack shit, and b) any attempt to impose order on energy, be it through law, border, or binary, will eventually fail. The principles may sound dire, but they give us a reason to throw caution to the wind. They also form the scaffolding of the Boston group’s head-spinning melanges, noxious stews of punk, jazz, avant-garde rock, metal, and pop, gesturing wildly across the entire sonic spectrum—from Slayer and Shonen Knife to the Slits and Celine Dion.
Less than two years after their inception on the heels of 2016’s tape No Sorry, the quartet now gleefully reach for the self-destruct button with Urge to Merge, their second and final full-length. As with the rest of Birthing Hips’ modest discography, the 11-track album, which the group recorded live at Brooklyn DIY haven Silent Barn, is anarchic by design: “We wanted to explore just how far we could explode every genre,” the band told Boston music magazine DigBoston, “and see how tenuous the links between improvisation and composition really are.”
Whereas No Sorry shaped these deconstructionist tactics as a protest to formalism, Urge to Merge takes aim at the superseding structures of time, memory, and pleasure wired to pop’s reptile-brain with a relentless barrage of atonal chatter (“I Want This Place Impeccable”), incomprehensible math-rock breakdowns (“24 Million Views”), and ear-splitting sludge spurts (“Internet”).
It’s not that the group are incapable of churning out virtuosic solos, affable vocal melodies, or earworm hooks. All of them, save drummer Owen Winter, attended area conservatories and work part-time as music instructors (or in vocalist Carrie Furniss’ case, a choir director) in their spare time (Winter, meanwhile, cut their teeth manning the kit for Rochester punks Tapehead). Guitarist Wendy Eisenberg and bassist Andres Abenante, in particular, stand out as marvels, provided you can muster up the aural stamina to hone in on their individual performances from amid the racket; their polyrhythmic riff-off on latter-half highlight “HEP” is an avant-garde nerd’s dream, as are the math-rock cascades on “24 Million Views.”
Birthing Hips’ ephemeral invocations of immemorial tunes, such as Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” and the familiar schoolboy singalong “Frère Jacques” provide much-needed footholds amid the unrelenting racket: universally-accessible reference points that embolden the maddening contrasts surrounding them. (That the former’s buttoned-up refrain is queasily invoked on a song called “Strip Tease” is exactly the point.) One can’t help but smile at the wry turn of phrase.
Like all products of this cold, absurd universe, Urge to Merge derives its strength from an ever-draining of borrowed energy. Fortunately for us, the foursome have more than enough to sustain every turn of their swan song’s maddening gyre; what’s more, they’re not afraid to spend it all—at least when it comes to this band, anyway (all four members of Birthing Hips plan to continue making music, either as solo artists or in side projects). Even as the musical equivalent of a dead star, Urge to Merge is a supernova, and no law of thermodynamics can change that.


Leading her thorny rock trio, Clementine Creevy keeps her themes broad and her anger specific as she reflects this moment’s feelings and fatigue.

Stuffed & Ready

Stuffed & Ready—the third album from Los Angeles trio Cherry Glazerr—is a document of exhausted fury. On these 10 songs, the founder, singer, and guitarist Clementine Creevy sounds like she heard about some unacceptable bullshit and came into the studio the next morning, red-eyed and short-tempered and uninterested in hiding it. In this economy, if you’re tough and vulnerable, Creevy tells us, you’re not going to get much sleep with so much fighting to do. In her breathless way, she’s running on fumes.
Stuffed & Ready doesn’t just betray a deep distrust of the world; Creevy sounds skeptical of herself,too. Fighting out from behind the droning introduction of “Stupid Fish,” for instance, Creevy uses her meanest voice to offer, “I’m a stupid fish, and so are you.” In an adrenalized release, she arrives in a rugged scream: “I see myself in you/Maybe that’s why I fucking hate you,” dissolving the enemy into herself. On “Wasted Nun,” she performs a similar double-twist. She coos that she’s going to “make myself tough” before softly pleading, “Let me in through the door/I can’t find it if you hide it under my skin.” Power dynamics shapeshift throughout Stuffed & Ready, as Creevy crystallizes the ambiguities in the way women talk about power—being left out of it, but containing so much.
Last year, Cherry Glazerr lost synth player Sasami Ashworth to her own solo projects, so they’re back down to three, with Tabor Allen returning on drums and Devin O’Brien on bass. This iteration of Cherry Glazerr is tempestuous, using the extra room to lash out and match Creevy’s moods. There’s an arm-flinging quality to the drums, while Creevy’s shrieks and brash guitar have a vital, live sensibility. Glum and abrasive, Creevy’s guitars have graduated from sludge-pop hooks. On Stuffed & Ready, she uses them to shape turbulent atmospheres, pushing recklessly against the melodies.
In the tradition of the inflamed patron saints before her like PJ Harvey, Creevy keeps her themes broad and her anger specific. Coming in hot with sarcasm, the album’s most provocative and sticky single is a showcase of this withering attitude. During the lightly BDSM tune, “Daddi,” Creevy asks with vacant-voiced irony, “Where should I go, daddi?/What should I say?/Where should I go?/Is it OK with you?” There is a slipperiness to her tone, as if we’re all just standing here holding our tits until the patriarchy gives us an order. For the song’s final move, Creevy whimpers, “Smoking makes me taste like metal/To keep you away.” She’s assertive, but at a cost.  Stuffed & Ready often does this tango of self-doubt, laying bare insecurity only to doubt the admission.
Ever since 2014’s romp “Had Ten Dollaz,” Cherry Glazerr have loved to stretch out with a repeated line. On “Self-Explained,” Creevy again finds energy in this insistence: “I don’t want people to know how much time I spend alone,” repeatinng the last phrase. In the final section of “Daddi,” she lingers on “smoking makes me taste like metal,” turning what seems like a non sequitur into an absolute declaration. On an album of doubt, repetition reinforces Creevy’s hardest feelings.
Stuffed & Ready might seem pouty or self-indulgent, and Cherry Glazerr accept this. They add a cloud of boredom to these feelings, as if to recognize the low-key stakes of it all. In “Pieces,” Creevy whispers, “I hold my tongue so I don’t repeat myself/Instead I beat myself.” Our emotions might not always be interesting, she implies, but they’re ours. Cherry Glazerr want us to lash out and lose our temper, to show up exhausted and irritated and ready for the fight.


On his second solo album, the My Morning Jacket guitarist finds comfort in the slow lane of life, eschewing guitar fireworks for easy-chair folk.

4th of July

In certain circles, My Morning Jacket’s Carl Broemel is a bona fide guitar hero, especially among guitar magazine subscribers and jam music enthusiasts most likely to appreciate an inventive solo. It was only after Broemel joined the group for 2005’s Z that they cemented their reputation as a powerhouse live outfit, and his dynamic shredding has propelled their most memorable shows, including the rain-drenched, nearly four-hour 2008 Bonnaroo set that’s taken on nearly legendary status among fans. Among casual listeners, however, Broemel is virtually unrecognized, and even many My Morning Jacket fans don’t give his contributions to the group much thought. Despite the mountains of evidence that My Morning Jacket is a true band, Jim James looms so large over his peers that it can be hard to think of the group as anything other than a vehicle for its enigmatic singer.
For his part, Broemel has shown little interest in challenging that perception. If he wanted to make the case for his talents, his solo albums would give him the outlet to prove that he’s the clear savant of the band—that he deserved his own entry in that Rolling Stone New Guitar Gods list, rather than having to share one with James. Yet Broemel seems perfectly content where he is, even if that means being in James’ shadow. Instead of showing off the same guitar heroics he brings to My Morning Jacket’s Das Boot-length live shows, Broemel opted for a more understated, songwriterly approach on his 2010 record All Birds Say, and his follow-up 4th of July is a similarly folksy affair, another pleasantly low-key outing from a musician with absolutely nothing to prove.
Just once does 4th of July toss some red meat to My Morning Jacket fans, hinting at the guitar lover’s record it could have been. On the panoramic, 10-minute title track, Broemel cycles through one buttery solo after another, each richer and more textured than the last. With Neko Case bolstering the soaring chorus, the whole thing feels that much more decadent. Those fireworks are the exception, though. Opener “Sleepy Lagoon,” with its drowsy tempo and sighing keyboards, is more representative of the record’s sticky, late-night feel (he kicks off the record by literally greeting the moon). From the finger-picked “Snowflake” to the Elliott Smith-esque “Rockingchair Dancer,” a lullaby that Broemel wrote for his young son, the whole thing sounds like it was recorded in an extremely comfortable chair.
Laura Veirs lends some harmony vocals to that last song, while My Morning Jacket keyboard Bo Koster and bassist Tom Blankenship sit in on much of the record. And although James is absent, it feels like he’s there in spirit. Broemel’s serviceable tenor may not have the feral majesty of James’ howl, but his cadence and phrasing are similar enough that many of these songs feel like they were written with James’ voice in mind. Mellower numbers like “Crawlspace” and “In The Dark” invite listeners to color in the empty spaces in their head, imagining how these songs might have been fleshed out if My Morning Jacket had tried to slip them onto The Waterfall.
It’s a safe bet they would have been a lot wilder. 4th of July makes the case for Broemel as the classicist of the band, avoiding the experimental detours into prog, psychedelia, and funk that have made My Morning Jacket’s records so rewarding and/or frustrating. Its pleasures are modest but dependable. Even Broemel’s lyrics are easygoing, dotted with repeated observations that things are just fine the way they are. “I keep telling myself that it’s all the same/ Whether someone is humble or big and grand,” Broemel sings on “Landing Gear.” It’s not the same at all, of course, but where the rest of the world celebrates music’s most restless spirits, 4th of July offers the gentle assurance that there’s merit in being the guy who gets a solid eight hours a night, too.


The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer draws inspiration from shifting tides and centuries-old hymns for a piece that reckons with the unease of feeling adrift in the universe.

Narrow Sea

Few common experiences are as frightening and disorienting as getting taken out by an ocean wave. It starts with the surprise of lost footing, the sudden weightlessness followed by the panic of trying to find breath and bearings. Elbows, knees, and knuckles scrape against sand and craggy detritus as you attempt to right yourself, hoping to beat nature’s clock before another salty sheet crashes upon your head. Emerging intact can feel like a bewildering victory.
Caroline Shaw’s approach to oceanic immersion is less fraught, but the Pulitzer-winning composer’s newest work is a similarly upending force. With Narrow Sea, Shaw draws inspiration from shifting tides and centuries-old hymns for a piece that reckons with the unease of feeling adrift in the universe.
Shaw composed the five-part Narrow Sea in 2017 for Sō Percussion, a New York-based quartet that deploys a deep kit of rhythmic tools. With an array of drums, blocks, marimbas, vibraphones, and shakers alongside repurposed cans and ceramic bowls, they approximate the sounds of maritime bells, prayer chimes, busy machinery, heartbeats, and distant drones. Even flowerpots are fair game, bringing a pleasant, plunking timbre to the project. The music feels fascinated with approximating the shape-shifting capabilities of water—notes ebb and flow, coursing forward or gently trickling over one another.
Taxidermy, which Shaw composed for Sō Percussion in 2012, makes for a fitting counterweight. The flowerpot tones of Taxidermy connect it with Narrow Sea, deploying a chopped-up piece of T.S. Eliot poetry that appears in the composer’s Pulitzer-winning Partita for Eight Voices from 2013. Throughout Narrow Sea, pianist Gilbert Kalish binds Sō’s four-person rhythms to the ascendant melodies of celebrated soprano Dawn Upshaw. The sublime tumble of piano that opens Narrow Sea’s third chapter gives the piece its most serene moments, animating the illusion of water in motion.
Shaw drew Narrow Sea’s text from a 1991 edition of The Sacred Harp, a standardized collection of American hymns dating back to the 18th century. With songs constructed from basic four-part harmonies, sacred harp or “shape note” singing requires little training to pick up and abides by a cheerful rule of “the more the merrier.” The form is built around participation, not performance; by design, the music gets richer and wilder as the group of singers expands and the bonds among them deepen.
On Narrow Sea, however, Shaw relies on Upshaw’s lone voice to carry forth The Sacred Harp’s lines about being a wayfaring stranger contemplating the banks of the River Jordan. Her vocals break from the straightforward tradition of sacred harp singing, leaving behind its more plaintive elements while slicing between the piano and percussion. As a soloist, Upshaw brings a powerful sense of loneliness to Narrow Sea, given how the root of sacred harp singing is finding spiritual unity through communal expressions in song. Whether the mother and father Upshaw sings about meeting are secular or celestial matters less than the sense of yearning in her voice.
Even when Sō and Kalish slide into a near-mechanical whir in Narrow Sea’s second part, humanity prevails when the percussionists start to sing, too. Their voices swell upward as sanguine layers of hums, sounds that can only be made by bodies pumping with blood and oxygen. Sartre may have proposed that hell is other people, but Narrow Sea quietly makes the case that the intimacy people build among one another remains a great comfort.
Even amid the longing, Shaw’s melody-focused approach to percussion brings a lightness to Narrow Sea that ameliorates the crushing weight of feeling alone. The warmth and twinkle of Shaw’s work suggests a sparkle worth following, a beacon that signals a safe place for those still seeking safe harbor.

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There are four small miracles in Can's "Chain Reaction"/"Quantum Physics", from 1974's *Soon Over Babaluma*. The first occurs at about 40 seconds into "Chain Reaction" when the 4/4 stomp of Jaki Liebezeit's drums line up with Holger Czukay's bass pulse, alongside tambourine and percolating drum machine; I realize that this song is closer to trance techno than the minimalist funk or psychedelic motorik of the band's earlier records. In fact, the first time I ever heard "Chain Reaction", I was mostly unfamiliar with trance, and wondered if Can had actually invented the music. I'd never read anything to that effect,

Can: Future Days / Soon Over Babaluma / Unlimited Edition / Landed

There are four small miracles in Can's "Chain Reaction"/"Quantum Physics", from 1974's Soon Over Babaluma. The first occurs at about 40 seconds into "Chain Reaction" when the 4/4 stomp of Jaki Liebezeit's drums line up with Holger Czukay's bass pulse, alongside tambourine and percolating drum machine; I realize that this song is closer to trance techno than the minimalist funk or psychedelic motorik of the band's earlier records. In fact, the first time I ever heard "Chain Reaction", I was mostly unfamiliar with trance, and wondered if Can had actually invented the music. I'd never read anything to that effect, but it seemed obvious they must have had at least a hand in its creation. In any case, the only music I've heard since that approached their primal, impressionistic romp has been by bonafide dancefloor shamans like the Orb or Orbital, or even Aphex Twin's ambient stuff. Of course, I loved Can a lot more: They seemed subtler and messier, like Claude Debussy's ghost tripping over a Mayan ruin mid-thought.
The second miracle occurs at the 6:28 mark in "Chain Reaction", when the swirling mass of synth and Michael Karoli's brain-fried guitar solo is brutally interrupted by a chime and black void of metallic, echo-chamber ambience. The beat stays intact (Liebezeit couldn't stop playing that pulse on a bet), but the mood goes from proto-jam-band orgasm to stark ambience with drums of death. Had Terry Riley not nabbed the Phantom Band moniker for one of his records, Can could have stolen it here-- and Liebezeit did for one of his solo projects in the 1980s! Unlike virtually any other band on the planet, Can were able to straddle the line between primal and progressive, popular and avant-garde in a way that made both extremes seem like the best possible end for Western music.
The third occurs five-and-a-half minutes into "Quantum Physics", when Irmin Schmidt's Alpha 77 synth cluster chord suddenly becomes a fully-fledged major one. By this point in the song, the raging, percussive momentum of the previous track has almost completely evaporated into only the hint of a beat, as if the spirit of the piece had long since been shot out into space, left to dissolve into what popular physics author Nick Herbert once described as "quantumstuff"-- the one true matter of the universe, of which we and everything we see or feel is made. Schmidt lets his tones sustain, and I can hear the overtones forming, one by one, until the chord is more than just major. In fact, the physics of sound dictate that if you let a note ring long enough, you'll get the minor-7th harmonic, and eventually a 9th-- exactly the notes old Debussy liked to insert into chords to make them all pagan and erotic.
The last miracle occurs as the song is fading away from us entirely, when even Liebezeit's drums have dried up and the only discernable sound comes from Schmidt's endlessly spiraling synthesizer overtones. Mid-period Can is arguably the band's most interesting because it witnesses them having to explore more than just the backbeat of experimental rock, more than just the ambience of the space music they helped create. "Quantum Physics" is what happens when discipline and intelligence rams head on with divine inspiration. It is understated and refined, but glowing with life. It's not the kind of song you put on to start a party, but if you want to send a few of your best friends home like angels, you'll put it on at the end. It sounds like the music of the spheres to me.
Can had approached this territory before with 1973's Future Days. After the band's modest success with the "Spoon" in 1972 (buoyed by its use as the theme to a popular German gangster show), they were able to afford a short summer holiday. When they came back to record, it was a collective idyllic, sunshiny aura that most informed their efforts. The title track, fading in on the back of seaside ambience and distant accordion, was Can's smoothest production yet, sounding either like they'd successfully amputated the pulse and precision of Ege Bamyasi, added a lush veneer and forged a new kind of pop music, or somehow invented the greatest tropicalia known to man. Damo Suzuki's cooing ("You hide behind a borrowed chase / For the sake of Future Days") never sounded so alluring, and Can's music had never seemed as sensuous or divorced from gravity. Likewise, the epic "Bel Air" featured Can at their most impressionistic, if not always focused. Czukay once described his band as an "electric symphony group", and the heavily edited and structured "Bel Air" betrays a dedication to long-form statements and an almost painterly sense of blended colors and landscapes.
Following Future Days, Suzuki got married to a Jehovah's Witness and left the band. After trying out several singers, Can eventually decided to keep things to themselves for Soon Over Babaluma, as Karoli took over vocals in most cases, with Schmidt helping from time to time. Due to circumstances, the record sounds obviously transitional, and was in fact the last one Can would complete using their tried and true straight-to-stereo method, before upgrading to more modern, multi-track methods afterwards. However, even beyond the aforementioned "Chain Reaction"/"Quantum Physics" highlight, it's a good record. "Dizzy Dizzy" is something like Can's version of ska (kraut-skank?), and features the first of several future Karoli forays using violin, on which he's surprisingly competent. His refrain of "got to get it up, got to get it over" serves the insistent, space-bounce of the track, and though the band would misstep on world music attempts in later years, this was pretty interesting. The murky electro-bossa "Come sta, La Luna" is also cool, featuring Schmidt's vocals and ominous piano lines. Only "Splash" leaves me underwhelmed, seeming tired and directionless in comparison to the rest of the record.
Unlimited Edition is the CD expansion of the Limited Edition LP, featuring various unreleased tracks from 1968 to 1974, all recorded in Can's private Inner Space studios. Given the nature of the collection, a general lack of cohesion is to be expected, but for my money, Unlimited Edition is one of the most underrated items in the band's catalog. From the heavenly climates of "Gomorrha" and "Ibis", to the more cutting, rock-edged tracks with Malcolm Mooney ("The Empress and the Ukraine King", "Mother Upduff", "Connection", "Fall of Another Year"-- all of which could have comprised a classic EP) to the sometimes bizarre, sometimes funny "Ethnological Forgery Series", wherein Can raid the world's various indigenous music and make stuff that would make both Steve Reich and Boredoms proud. And of course there's "Cutaway": an epic, spliced-together piece that might sound more at home on a Faust record than here.
1975's Landed was the first Can record to get what Czukay describes as a "professional mix", as the band upgraded to 16 tracks and had the opportunity to bring out many more layers of sound. However, what might have sounded like a godsend to fans craving as much Can magic as they could get didn't quite turn out as we expected. Gone were the epic, funky ambient songs or minimalist rock experiments in favor of some pretty straightforward jam-band tunes. "Full Moon on the Highway" bursts out of the gate with a deft pace and Karoli's thin, decidedly non-rock chipmunk chorus. Luckily, his guitar is front and center, though it was clear the band weren't playing space age physics music anymore. "Half Past One", "Vernal Equinox" and "Hunters and Collectors" are variations on the idea of bare-basic chord progression and high-speed beats serving as launching pads for lengthy solos. I give Can credit for having the chops to pull it off, but did I really need to hear them do it? "Red Hot Indians" is more interesting, sounding like bizarre tropical jazz-pop, and featuring Olaf Kübler from Amon Düül guesting on dual sax solos. The 13-minute sound-art closer "Unfinished" doesn't really fit with the rest of the record, but does at least give Can the chance to stretch out their most experimental ideas into 16 tracks, and is reminiscent of "Cutaway" or some of the more out-there moments on Tago Mago.
Like the previous Mute remasters, these albums now sound incredible. Listening to "Chain Reaction", "Gomorrha", and "Future Days", I was constantly surprised at how clear everything sounded, as if the band had recorded all of this stuff in one fell swoop during an unbelievably inspired, marathon session. One of the great things about Can, even in their off moments, was the attention to detail and realization that the affect of each tiny moment in the course of a song can affect the momentum of the entire piece. No small miracles here: even if it's sad to think these albums represent Can's last great gasp, none of their moments have ever sounded better.


The only record by Drexciya’s James Stinson as the Other People Place is prescient in imagining our current connected-yet-disconnected state.

The Other People Place: Lifestyles of the Laptop Café

Lifestyles of the Laptop Café

Last year, Ian Fenton (the man behind the Frozen Reeds label responsible for reissuing Julius Eastman’s Femenine) pointed out a parallel between the artwork that adorned Detroit electronic duo Drexciya’s albums and the illustrations made by Emory Douglas, artist and Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. It came as a history rediscovered, re-connecting the black roots of techno back to its heritage of protest. Listen closer to the frenzied tracks that James Stinson and Gerald Donald crafted over their ten years as Drexciya and the anger is audible. For all of their electro and techno roots, Drexciya’s live wire tracks (some clocking in at two minutes) always felt closer to the furious outbursts of punk. Which made sense, as the group’s origin story was a brutal one: Drexciya was the duo’s name for an underwater country colonized by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off of slave ships during the Middle Passage. It read less like science-fiction/fantasy and more about the modern horror and cornerstone of our American reality.
But by the time James Stinson released what would be his lone solo album as The Other People Place, that anger had been somewhat tempered. By turns luminous and melancholic, low-key and sensuous, wry and soulful, Lifestyles of the Laptop Café hinted at new vistas for Stinson. He had talked about touring, a rarity for the reclusive duo. But Lifestyles couldn’t have had a more star-crossed release, coming out on September 3, 2001 and vanishing soon after. Less than a year later, Stinson would be dead due to heart complications, *Lifestyles *the last record to be released during his lifetime.
For the duration of Drexciya, neither member revealed their names, so attempting to draw a biographical connection is haphazard at best. That said, there’s a gentleness and humanity to Stinson’s programming and production as The Other People Place that makes it sound like a reconciliation of fate, a looking back at the world around him not in anger but instead with a twinge of heartache and a smile. That sensibility seeps through Stinson’s machines and makes it stand apart in Drexciya’s catalog. As such, it’s the perfect gateway for those standing at the banks of their oceanic body of work looking for a way into its depths.
Stinson conveys rich sentiment with the slightest of gestures. With a few hums, the tap of a ride cymbal, and rippling pads, “Eye Contact” casts a spell, both seductive and a little silly. “Something’s happening to my transmitters/Starting to overload/Sitting here in this café/Drinking my latte,” he purrs two minutes in—adding some Chicago acid vocals (think Adonis’ “No Way Back”) reconfigured for the Starbucks set.
By 2001, the “Second Wave of Coffee” was upon us and Starbucks seemed to be on every street corner, one of the few places to enabled users to have high-speed internet access. Stinson looks out onto a world increasingly disassociated, communicating by computers instead of voices. Rather than replicate café society and its public conversations, said cafés now feel eerily sterile and near silent, patron faces lit by the glow of phones and laptops. It makes for a sad state—or as the last single from The Other People Place put it—“Sorrow & A Cup Of Joe.”
Beneath the skittering 808s, unsettled chords and fidgety songs, a sense of melancholy and resignation flow. The twinkling keys Stinson sets atop “It’s Your Love” set off his digitally treated voice, so that he sounds like a heartbroken alien, wistfully sighing: “It’s your love that’s keeping me so lost.” A female vocalist whispers across the snares and swelling synths of “You Said You Want Me,” but as the track flickers its seductiveness gets balanced by sadness and failure to connect, that “want” turning into the past tense. Even the anthemic electro of “Let Me Be Me” has a bittersweet tinge, its chords opening little wormholes of doubt.
The title itself cheekily suggests a room full of people, mute and withdrawn into themselves and their devices, so that even a song like “Eye Contact” reads not as eyes interlocking on the dancefloor but rather two people who can only connect via their laptops. It’s prescient in imagining our current connected-yet-disconnected state, our daily lives increasingly valuing FaceTime over face time, and the album itself anticipates a shift in how people even interact with electronic music, geared more towards home listening than the club. The album ends on a hopeful note though. “Sunrays”—with its bubbling melody, placid ticks and a female voice whispering “relax your mind/slowly unwind”—sounds like Roy Ayers’ “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” for the new century. It’s a warm sunbeam that can best be felt away from a laptop screen.


The young pianist makes an impressive debut as bandleader, with an expansive sound that folds elements of hip-hop, R&B, and ambient into the broad outlines of spiritual jazz.

Black Space Tapes

To the chagrin of purists, in the late 1960s jazz musicians began to turn an ear to pop radio and Motown chart-toppers, fusing those and similar styles into soul jazz. Drummer Donald Dean could be found on some of the best sessions, like Les McCann’s Invitation to Openness and Layers. Watching his grandfather play, Jamael Dean took cues for his own approach to the piano. “That’s what made me want to play jazz,” Dean recently told Bandcamp. “Watching him interact with his buddies—that was something I could see for myself.” Just 21 years old, the younger Dean already has quite the resume, backing Kamasi Washington on Heaven and Earth, gigging with fellow Angelenos Thundercat, Carlos Niño, and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, and now studying jazz performance at the New School.
Black Space Tapes announces Dean’s arrival, and it is an impressive debut, revealing a wide-eyed view of jazz as broad as his grandfather’s. Allowing jazz to imbibe hip-hop, electronic, R&B, and ambient, Dean orients the century-old artform firmly toward the future. All these ingredients are there from the jump in the astonishing, amoebic “Akamara.” The song takes its title from Yoruba cosmology, a concept that Dean breaks down as “the spirit of nothing that expanded the universe into what it is now,” which the piece resembles in form and sound. Across 11 minutes, Dean confidently mingles spiritual jazz and primordial ooze, tension and release, darkness and light. Wordless ululations from vocalist Sharada Shashidhar, field recordings of birds, shamanic percussion from Niño, and looped brass create a vast amount of space at the start, which Dean’s piano whirls through and fills up. It sounds fidgety at first, but as the piece continues to unfurl, Dean nudges the band into uncharted realms, imparting energy during the calmer moments, then easing back as it grows in chaotic density. Throughout, he keeps a firm sense of control, even in those outer-space moments when his touch on the keys is at its airiest.
A quarter of an hour later, “Akamara” returns in a decidedly mutated remix, exhibiting more of Dean’s skill set. As a modern jazz player, his talents extend beyond chops to the ability to chop a beat, and his remix proves him as cagey as Makaya McCraven and Karriem Riggins. Dean flits between dizzying upper-register piano loops and a muted horn, mixing it all with a muddy, low-end wobble; in the song’s back half he takes flight with one of the album’s sweeter solos. “Olokun” continues down the eclectic path, with Dean sussing out a head-nodding beat in ocean waves and seagulls, every warped element Silly-Puttying around like some sort of Flying Lotus soundscape.
Despite Dean’s knack for conjuring weird ambient headspaces, the most contemplative moments of Black Space Tapes arise when they hew closest to the jazz tradition. “Adawa” simmers and assuredly builds, and Dean is at his lyrical best, his solo bringing to mind the restraint and mindfulness of icons like Ahmad Jamal and Andrew Hill. He structures the piece so that every instrument—from Atwood-Ferguson’s nimble five-string viola to Tim Angulo’s deep-pocket drums—can shine. That sense of balance is integral to his approach. It’s a short album—just six tracks, not even 38 minutes in all—but the brevity works in its favor. As far out as Dean and his group travel, they ultimately remain gracefully grounded.

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Accompanied by strings, horns, and more, Haley Fohr has crafted her most expansive work to date, capturing a sprawl of emotions too complicated to be named.

-io

The French are credited with coining the phrase l’appel du vide, naming the intrusive thought of the urge to step off of high ledges. It’s an instinct supposedly born from crossed wires between the primal brain and the conscious mind—not one of self-harm necessarily, but one that reflects the conflict and chaos of human nature. Canyon edges, deep-sea trenches, black holes: They all captivate the imagination with the magnetism of being subject to nothing but gravity.
For -io, her sixth album as Circuit des Yeux, Chicago experimental fixture Haley Fohr faced a creative void. Reeling from the death of a close friend, she accepted a subtropical artists’ residency that backfired in the short term as she spent the first weeks of 2020 on “the saddest beach in [her] life.” The subsequent year-plus of mass death and forced isolation only compounded the woe. She manifested her anguish as 23-piece orchestral arrangements that captured the enormity of her sense of loss, building the small universes that make up her most expansive work yet.
From an opening wisp of breath, Fohr quickly shifts into the dense, thriving energy at -io’s core. Thick layers of organ and grandiose strings feel both devotional and introspective, drawn toward dramatic internal churning. “Vanishing” courses on strings with an innate swagger, like a shark cutting through the open ocean. Inspired by one of Fohr’s PTSD memories, “The Chase” channels the helpless dread and tension of a nightmare, its rhythm bolting under prickling guitars and Fohr’s harrowing whispers.
-io closes the gap between the elegant environs of 2017’s Reaching for Indigo and the oblique, seedy glamour of last year’s Jacqueline, released under Fohr’s neo-outlaw alias Jackie Lynn. Jacqueline’s “Dream St.” and “Casino Queen” danced in the darkness, and on -io, Fohr plunges even deeper. Her distinct baritone remains one of her most powerful assets; amid the roar of strings, drums, and horns, her fantastic vocal sweeps create vast space.
Fohr cuts through the din, singing, almost bellowing, buoyed by a boundless ferocity rarely afforded to women in any other context. Her maxims demand attention with the same gravitational intensity as the cosmic imagery she invokes: “Descend bold traveler and attain the center of the earth,” she intones at the end of the cycloning “Neutron Star.” Though the song begins as a loping country ballad, Fohr races upward into a braid of fuzzed-out guitar and strings made fiery by flares of brass.
At the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida, Fohr was enthralled by the vivid coastal sunsets, a daily shock of color that she described as “a reminder to step outside myself.” To that end, she takes care in her arrangements to recreate the feeling of separating awareness from ego. She distinguishes the concept of a space for entrenched grief from one of all-encompassing darkness, further emphasized in the cover’s bright scarlet border and Fohr’s orange vestments. Her sensory world-building extends beyond the songs, and in an accompanying listening guide she advises set and setting: a lit candle, bubbly water with bitters, a long walk, scents of sandalwood and amber. Surrounding the high stakes of her compositions, she prioritizes degrees of warmth and comfort as part of her immersive design.
The capacious environments offer the relief of suspension, held by sorrow, joy, and calm all at once. There’s room for the sprawl of emotions that are too vast, too complicated, and channeled too deeply to name. “I’m changing while I try to hold the reins,” she confesses on “Walking Toward Winter” against liquid edges of reverberating organ, as if trying to get a grip on a moving stream. As Fohr howls on “Stranger,” the song feels close to an exorcism.
Fohr backs away from heavier orchestration with the breathtaking closer “Oracle Song,” where she gestures at teenage trauma and warns of imminent danger. As Fohr sings about treacherous men and uncaring state institutions, “Oracle Song” fans out over a lilting cradle of acoustic guitar and humming strings; though the resilient spirit can be restored, she sings, “I’d give you every inch I had/To keep that first soul from going bad.” It’s a gentle and poignant lullaby for those tangled in an expanding web of harm.
-io’s sonic mass is enveloping, making for an album that’s both difficult to approach piecemeal and hard to swallow in one sitting. (In her listening guide, Fohr advises taking a break after “Sculpting the Exodus” or “Walking Toward Winter.”) But in claiming such a wide swath of space for herself, Fohr makes room for listeners to release themselves, too. By diving headlong into the yawning internal chasm, it’s possible to find a new autonomy in the freefall.

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Following two previous archival collections, Challenge Me Foolish dusts off unreleased tracks from the late 1990s, when the Planet Mu founder was making breakbeat-laced IDM with a strange sense of humor.

Challenge Me Foolish

Unlikely as it may seem today, there was a time during IDM’s heyday when Mike Paradinas’ copious output as µ-Ziq was on par with that of his good mate and one-off collaborator Richard D. James. Through the mid 1990s, the two kept pace with annual album releases and heaps of singles, all shot through with an off-kilter sense of humor. Perhaps if Virgin had properly marketed µ-Ziq’s 1997 album Lunatic Harness, Paradinas wouldn’t have had to take matters into his own hands with his independent imprint Planet Mu. In the 21st century, focusing more on A&R than his own productions, Paradinas had a hand in spreading breakcore, dubstep, and footwork globally, helping to establish the careers of RP Boo, Traxman, Pinch, Venetian Snares, and others. Since the release of his 2013 comeback Chewed Corners, Paradinas has also dug deep into his old hard drives for archival forays like RY30 Trax and Aberystwyth Marine.
Challenge Me Foolish could be considered the third entry in this unofficial trilogy. Where RY30 Trax dates back to 1995 and Aberystwyth Marine covers the two years between Lunatic Harness and Royal Astronomy, Foolish culls tracks from 1998 and 1999, right as he was finishing Astronomy and Planet Mu was taking form. It was a heady time for Paradinas, who was drawing on rapid-fire IDM, breakbeats, and even English folk music. Unlike James, Paradinas also mixed in a hefty dose of American hip-hop, weaving all of it together at a furious pace. He recently said that he recorded as much as he could in those days, often a track or two a day, and a sense of redundancy shows. The wincing Ren Faire melodies from Astronomy (like “Gruber’s Mandolin”) return as Paradinas pulls the green tights on again for tracks like “Robin Hood Gate” and “Perfame,” and 20 years in mothballs hasn’t made them any less annoying.
But in the intervening years, breakbeats have become fashionable again, so a dusted-off track like “Undone” doesn’t sound quite as dated, with Paradinas playfully bouncing between tympani boom, percolator bip, and dramatic background strings. The snare drum swagger of “Playbox” reminds us that he always had a knack for balancing between IDM and hip-hop breaks. But “Bassbins” also shows that the more aggro and cartoonish take on it (which anticipated the rise of breakcore) remains out of fashion for good reason.
The Japanese vocalist Kazumi, who featured on the Royal Astronomy highlights “The Fear” and “Goodbye, Goodbye,” reappears on five of the album’s 14 tracks. Paradinas stretches and warps her voice into an array of shapes—though as is his wont, even that becomes overkill. For the drill ‘n’ bass dizziness of “Lexicon,” Kazumi’s coos get buried under a rockslide of goofball drums and chipmunk-fast vocal chirps. Same when he speeds up the “Amen” break, only to dump it atop her dulcet vocals on “Sad Inlay.” But Paradinas is more playful in chopping up her doo-dahs on “DoDaDu,” and the loungey “Durian” imagines what a µ-Ziq remix of Stereolab or Pizzicato Five might have sounded like back in the late ’90s. On the title track, Kazumi’s voice echoes against a spare, queasy backdrop, for once not overcrowding the song’s space. It’s a rare instance of Paradinas exercising restraint—and all the more effective for it.


Latest from Chicago-based Numero Group focuses on Joni Mitchell-influenced coffeehouse folk, mostly recorded during the first half of the 1970s.

Various Artists: Wayfaring Strangers: Ladies From the Canyon

Released in 1970, Joni Mitchell's third album Ladies of the Canyon was a crucial document of the gradual segue of the tradition-based folk revival into a new movement of breezy, more introspective singer-songwriters. And while Mitchell obviously doesn't bear sole responsibility for creating the archetype of the long-haired, coffeehouse folk chanteuse, there is no question that her success quickly inspired hundreds of similarly reflective young female songwriters to pick up their acoustic guitars and join in quixotic pursuit of lucrative recording careers. As a result, the following years witnessed a deluge of regionally produced and distributed folk albums-- the vast majority of which eventually found their way to family basements and Salvation Army stores, as their winsome authors returned unceremoniously to quiet obscurity.
Now, in order to better demonstrate the breadth of this movement and the astonishing reach of Mitchell's influence, the inveterate crate-diggers of the Numero Group present Wayfaring Strangers: Ladies From the Canyon. Diligently researched and compiled with the label's characteristic attention to detail, the collection gathers 14 impossibly rare tracks by female folkies from every corner of the nation, covering an era which spans roughly from 1971-76. Variously funded by parents, church groups or community organizations, these songs originally appeared on private-press albums that were issued in pressings as small as 50 copies, and each retains a certain undeniable handmade charm.
The compilation appears at a time when reissues of unjustly overlooked folk singers like Judee Sill, Vashti Bunyan, Bridget St. John, and Linda Perhacs are still fresh on the shelves. Unlike those performers, however, few artists on Ladies From the Canyon project a musical personality distinctive or eccentric enough to carry an entire album. (Nor, it should be noted, are there any truly psychedelic notes ever played or sung.) In fact, the most striking aspect of this collection is the utter uniformity of its perfomances, not only in sound but in mood and spirit. Nearly all of these vocalists sing in a rich, Joni-like alto over spare arrangements of guitar and piano. And despite their differences in geography and background, each performer achieves a nearly identical sense of dreamy, melancholic longing, sounding content to leave the wider dynamic range of rage, lust, joy, and defiance (not to mention humor) to a separate generation of female artists.
It would take a hardened heart, however, to ignore the simple beauty evident in tracks like Collie Ryan's gorgeous, haiku-like "Cricket" or Priscilla Quinby's nautical "With All Hands". And, as one might expect from such a "real people" collection, a couple of these tracks possess that indefinable, unschooled strangeness that is peculiar to outsider art. The most engaging such example is Shira Small's eliptical "Eternal Life", with its casual declaration that "Eternal life is the intersection of the line of time and the plane of now." Not to be outdone, the haunting "Maybe in Another Year," is sung by Peoria teen Jennie Pearl with a clear-eyed innocence that recalls the best moments of the Langley Schools Music Project. Also noteworthy is 15-year-old Ellen Warshaw's surprisingly forceful and harrowing take on the Stones' "Sister Morphine", one of the few cuts that feels out of keeping with the collection's overall earth mother vibration.
Most of the performers on Ladies From the Canyon have long since retired from the music business. One notable exception is Barbara Sipple, who has since gone on to a successful career as an opera singer, and whose "Song of Life" is one of several here that is tinged with the mystic, soft-focused Christianity typical of the era. As further evidenced by tracks like Carla Sciaky's "And I a Fairytale Lady", there is constant yearning that courses through nearly all of these songs, a yearning for some external force-- be it Jesus, a waylaid Prince Charming, or simply a record contract-- to come and deliver each singer from her lonesome solitude. But as Ladies From the Canyon amply illustrates, these scattered, isolated voices were actually far from alone, and maybe their inclusion here within this fascinating time capsule can provide some small echo of the communion they once sought to gain through their long-neglected music.


Despite its title's implied politeness, The Airing of Grievances qualifies more as existentialism wrapped in an anti-suburban screed from a killer live band whose music is at times violent, overblown, and irreverent.

Titus Andronicus: The Airing of Grievances

The Airing of Grievances

Before writing the bulk of his legendary canon of plays and sonnets, William Shakespeare penned the charmingly flawed revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus. Due to its laughable bombast and over-the-top violence, its influence on contemporary culture has emerged mainly in dark comedies like Sweeney Todd or "South Park", and many Shakespeare scholars still balk at seriously analyzing the work. Of course, all these factors make the play a perfect moniker for an indie band as violent, overblown, and irreverent as Glen Rock, New Jersey's Titus Andronicus.
Despite its title's implied politeness, The Airing of Grievances qualifies more as existentialism wrapped in an anti-suburban screed. Frontman Patrick Stickles howls with anguish way beyond his 22 years, often cramming lyrics into tight spaces just to make sure he gets the last word in. Plus, as anyone who's heard five seconds of this band already knows, he sounds like Conor Oberst screaming from the bowels of hell. However, to peg these guys as "emo" would be sadly inaccurate. Sure, torn diary page scribbles clutter Airing's heart-on-sleeve, fist-in-air anthems, but the drama's more Boss than Bright Eyes, fueled by blue collar frustration and, most notably, beer.
So far Titus's rowdy live shows have generated the most buzz around the group; check your local listings, they're probably playing in a friend's tool shed near you. Those small venue acoustics translate wonderfully on the band's debut, its muffled mixing reminiscent of listening to a bar band from the men's room. Yet this inebriated aesthetic only intensifies the literary streak running through Stickles' easily excitable veins. A brusque "fuck you!" cues the band on Pogues-like opener "Fear & Loathing in Mahwah, NJ", but once the rubble clears it's a villainous quote from Titus Andronicus's Aaron the Moor that most elegantly expresses Stickles' bile: "I have done a thousand dreadful things/ ...And nothing grieves me heartily indeed/ But that I cannot do ten thousand more." As if the dreary title and playful, mock-optimistic guitar riffs of "No Future Part II: The Day After No Future" aren't enough to wrench your soul, the song ends with the closing passage from Albert Camus' The Stranger, in which the narrator wishes to be jeered by a large crowd on the day of his execution.
Of course, none of these highfalutin' shout-outs will grab your ear as powerfully as the demonic E Street Band arrangements, rife with constant builds and breakneck rhythms. Nearly every track here starts innocently, usually with a straightforward eighth-note strum or folksy melody unaware of the beating it's about to go through. Whereas a band like Arcade Fire likes to gradually crescendo to enhance the dramatic oomph, Titus can't enjoy that luxury-- not when Stickles is already screaming by the second lyric. Fortunately the band finds unconventional ways to heighten its music, like "Arms Against Atrophy", which waits three-quarters of its duration to unveil a killer, song-altering guitar riff, or the outro on "Upon Viewing Brughel's 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'", when the band corrals a maelstrom of stop-start solos into a steady, almost rockabilly groove.
Three-minute war cry "Titus Andronicus" best encapsulates Airing's pathos, and serves as a fitting primer for an otherwise hefty and (initially) inscrutable album. Bemoaning the creativity-crushing effects of his environs ("I'll write my masterpiece some other day"), Stickles imagines a conformist nightmare of no sex, no booze, and no cigarettes, blurting "fuck everything, fuck me" in between two verses just for effect. As Airing's most memorable moment, the song's taunting chorus maxim "Your life is over!" becomes to these guys what "In the name of love!" was for early U2. On a lyric sheet, Titus Andronicus may appear to espouse the sort of wrist-cutting histrionics emo's typically lambasted for, but the magic lies in the band's oddly enthusiastic grass roots delivery. They've studied their philosophy and found that life actually is pointless, so why not go down swinging?


On her third album, Julien Baker’s self-lacerating storytelling gets a more expansive canvas to work with. The big, full-band sound makes all the small moments of pain surreptitiously devastating.

Little Oblivions

Julien Baker turns being way too hard on yourself into its own genre. The Tennessee singer-songwriter and producer’s debut album, 2015’s Sprained Ankle, delivered gut-wrenching tales of injury and substance abuse while setting Baker’s prayerful voice over little more than twinkling acoustic guitar and a smattering of piano, with a title track that echoed Baker’s real-life experience of running herself ragged. Her follow-up (and Matador debut), 2017’s Turn Out the Lights, added woodwinds, strings, and other flourishes, but at its emotional core was a lone character convincing herself just “not to miss any more appointments.”
With Baker’s third album, Little Oblivions, her self-lacerating storytelling gets a more expansive canvas. Maybe the blockbuster success of Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license” has turned the emotionally specific introspection of young women into pop’s latest zeitgeist, but Baker has been doing this all along. The 25-year-old has become a de facto generational spokesperson who grew up gay, Christian, and hardcore in the American South and survived teenage addiction. Her profile has enjoyed an extra boost lately thanks to the triumph of 2018’s self-titled EP by boygenius, her supergroup with Lucy Dacus and Phoebe Bridgers. Over the past several months, in a grueling gauntlet of fascinating interviews, Baker has talked openly about the relapse and heartbreak that inform her new record, where she hones her craft during a notoriously difficult time.
Although Baker still plays nearly every instrument herself, the biggest change on Little Oblivions is a full-band sound. The shift is most jarring on opener “Hardline,” where organ-like whorls are upended by newfound rumbling, but it’s restrained in a way that softens the sting of a song that begins with Baker’s narrator “blacked out on a weekday” and ends with her asking, “What if it’s all black, baby, all the time?” The jaunty banjo that opens the next track, “Heatwave,” is a much-needed breather before Baker darkly vows, “I’ll wrap Orion’s belt around my neck and kick the chair out.” Particularly given all the mannered singer-songwriters springing out of Indieville in recent years, the jolt of distorted guitar on “Ringside” feels as welcome as the central image is unsettling: “Beat myself till I’m bloody, and I’ll give you a ringside seat.”
A more significant and nuanced development is Baker’s growth as a songwriter and vocalist, particularly noticeable on the piano ballads. Where her melodies once seemed more like vehicles for her words, fine-tuned for emo singalong refrains, on “Crying Wolf” she soars with a dignified aplomb fit for an Oscar contender’s closing credits—never mind that it starts out with another unnerving line: “Day-one chip on your dresser, get loaded at your house.” The album’s musical peak and emotional nadir is another slow, keyboard-based track, “Song in E,” which throws in a fancy chord or two as Baker’s narrator fesses up to having only herself to blame for her drinking, then twists the dagger into herself even further: “It’s the mercy I can’t take.” Over and over again on Little Oblivions, the paradox is that Baker’s craft is most realized when her lyrics are most disturbing.
As skilled as Baker is at this tasteful bleakness, it’s still not easy listening. Reunited with boygenius bandmates Dacus and Bridgers, who lend swooning vocal harmonies to “Favor,” she implores, “What right had you not to let me die?” There’s a huge, thrumming chorus on “Relative Fiction,” but it’s not the feel-good sort (“I don’t need a savior/I need you to take me home,” she insists). Baker’s trauma may not be yours, but if you can recognize a piece of yourself in her soul-searching and despair, Little Oblivions can be surreptitiously devastating.
Since Sprained Ankle, when a 19-year-old Baker sang, “Wish I could write songs about anything other than death,” her work has had an interesting meta quality. Here that’s manifested on “Faith Healer,” a bristling radio-rock anthem that I hear as commenting on the seductiveness of not only drugs, religion, and sex (little oblivions, indeed!), but also the Total Entertainment Forever that is today’s opiate of the masses. Artists are unfairly held up as saviors, especially in an always-on social media world fixated on portrayals of authenticity. Turn Out the Lights ended with Baker proclaiming no difference between demons and saints. Little Oblivions closes, on the trudging “Ziptie,” with an even more bracing dose of iconoclasm: “Good God, when’re you gonna call it off/Climb down off the cross and change your mind?” Her “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” becomes her “I don’t believe in Beatles.”
Baker excels at turning self-mortification into art, but it’s her prerogative as an artist not to have to keep doing it in perpetuity. I’m reminded of someone like Perfume Genius, whose early lo-fi flagellations morphed into glossy art-pop fantasias. As tempting as it is to imagine Baker fully unleashing in one direction or another, the studiously crafted messiness captured here still feels like a compelling next step. Although Little Oblivions describes mainly unhealthy forms of escape, it sounds like something Baker might be embarrassed to admit: true faith in herself.

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On Wolves in the Throne Room's earliest releases, they repurposed the furor of black metal, reshaping its sprints into half-marathons and adding classical overtones. Their latest foregoes the former volume and tempo for a liminal mix of synthesizers and beat machines, droning guitars and cascading horns.

Celestite

When, during the first decade of their existence, have Wolves in the Throne Room not been over it? From the beginning, the music that Nathan and Aaron Weaver made thrived on inherent unease with expectations. On their earliest releases, they repurposed the furor of black metal, reshaping its sprints into half-marathons and adding classical overtones—operatic vocals, instrumental denouements, recurrent themes—to fashion arching, dramatic epics. “Our black metal is the product of our personal and specific history,” they said in an early, telling interview, “irrespective of other bands that share certain stylistic elements.” They wanted to be anonymous. They wanted to cordon themselves from their closest stylistic peers. They wanted separation.
That distance, in turn, became one of music’s great recent press hooks: Wolves in the Throne Room lived on a farm, not off the grid but wanting to be while growing a wide variety of vegetables and raising livestock. That tale became part of most every Wolves in the Throne Room story—how the band couldn’t wait to leave the road, to return “to living in a rhythmic sort of rural way.” Otherness was the very core of their creation myth. True to form, though, that jig was soon up, too; after the agrarian fable had been recounted countless times and driven more than one album cycle, the band admitted that maybe homesteading wasn’t such an imperative, that Nathan Weaver didn’t even like sunlight very much. Still, following the release of 2011’s Celestial Lineage, their most compellingly restless album to date, they announced with some pomp that they were taking a break—not so much breaking up as “reconnecting to hearth and home.” With Wolves in the Throne Room, most everything has always been an antagonistic, reactive event.
Given that steady tradition of ever-shifting defiance, Wolves in the Throne Room’s first album in three years, Celestite, represents a logical oxbow. The 46-minute record foregoes the band’s former volume and tempo for a liminal mix of synthesizers and beat machines, droning guitars and cascading horns. There are no propulsive blast beats or breathless tremolo guitars, no whispering-then-rushing song structures or majestically interjecting vocals. Instead, the Weavers used a panoply of modular and analog synthesizers to improvise collage-like instrumentals that pivot between the legacies of a dozen obvious predecessors. Those heroes come scattered between New Age and doom metal, industrial and electronica: Brian Eno, Coil, John Carpenter, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Wendy Carlos, Mark Isham, Stephen O’Malley and so on. Backed by horns and woodwinds and assisted by producer Randall Dunn, Wolves in the Throne Room weave these five pieces together through slowly cycling beats and gradually decaying tones, attempting to create a seamless if very separate corollary to Celestial Lineage.
“We didn’t want to have songs in that traditional sense,” Aaron Weaver recently told the blog Steel for Brains about the material on Celestite. “We wanted to have soundscapes, and we wanted to have washes. We wanted to have planets moving past each other.” But Celestite isn’t quite the about-face it may first seem or that the Weavers might have you to believe. Ambient and exploratory passages have always been an intriguing part of Wolves in the Throne Room’s approach, from the ululating female vocals that served as preludes to the field recordings and granulated sounds that functioned as interludes. In the past, those moments were mere window dressing, accessories that emboldened the power of everything else. Here, though, they become the main event, the off-ramp from outright rampage to crystal healing. Celestite is a small sample of the Wolves in the Throne Room aesthetic, writ large and with aplomb.
But Celestite falls far short of the canonical references it invokes, offering an attenuated version of the trips that its predecessors once provided. The same dogged mercury that made Wolves in the Throne Room interesting even when frustrating for the last decade turns Celestite into an indecisive mess. The operative pieces of opener “Turning Ever Towards the Sun”, for instance, are the first two words of its title; a montage of notions and ideas, it swivels between twinkling minimalism and droning languor, full-volume noise and movie-theme melodies, icy drift and humid electronica. During the 11-minute piece’s second half, a phantom beat emerges, throbbing beneath the shifts overhead. The pulse intensifies and quickens, suggesting that all this harried motion might lead to one magnetic moment. But the momentum stalls out, the possibility falling either to the band’s technical failure or philosophical non-commitment. It’s less a singular, captivating journey, a la Cluster or Popol Vuh, than a jumble of unsorted notions.
“Celestite Mirror,” the album’s other long haul, suffers the same shuffle mentality. The band moves between colossal organ roar and flute-led New Age vibrations, kill-switching the sounds as though the very concept of transition were poison. The piece ends with the record’s heaviest moment, as horns that could be sampled from a harrowing John Williams score undergird large-pawed guitar riffs. It’s flimsy, though, the Fisher-Price-sized version of Sunn O)))’s Monoliths & Dimensions. That coda is the doom analogy of the effete krautrock and horror soundtrack approximations that litter most of Celestite—the sound is there, just not its spirit.
In the past and at their best, Wolves in the Throne Room have been able to overpower the seams in their composite music, to rely more on the romance of their clamor than their middling skills as composers. They managed to retrofit black metal to post-rock by force, not finesse. But Celestite’s instrumental expanse provides no such quarter. Wantonly skipping between sounds with a dilettante zeal, Wolves in the Throne Room seem woefully under equipped for this music. It’s hard not to get the sense that they’ve simply been reading The New York Times.
Since word of Wolves in the Throne Room’s shift in sound began to spread earlier this year, there’s been a seeming quest for meaning in the decision, a search for profundity in their sudden deviation. Those who haven’t followed along have been dismissed as gate-guarding philistines, limited by definitions of metal or music or meaning at large. But why? Does a band deserve a free pass for making the “bold” decision to alienate its traditional fans, especially if that band’s reputation is built on a history of alienation at large? Apart from your allegiances to or apathy for black metal, isn’t it possible to see Celestite as a middling modular synthesizer record, where occasional moments of grace and power come swallowed by gyres of hesitation, especially when that electronic scene is now mining darkness on its own? Sure, Wolves in the Throne Room might be over black metal, but at least on Celestite, their next step remains far beyond their grasp.


In 2014, Peaches Geldof was found dead at 25, the result of a heroin overdose. After a few lost months, her husband Thomas Cohen finished a '70s singer/songwriter record about his wife and children.

Bloom Forever

In spring 2012, Thomas Cohen appeared on the cover of trashy celebrity rag Hello alongside his pregnant fiancée, Peaches Geldof, daughter of the Boomtown Rats frontman and Live Aid founder Bob. Domestic bliss was a lens twist for Geldof, who until then had been a notorious indie socialite—imagine Paris Hilton rewritten by Diablo Cody. And even more so for Cohen: A year earlier, he had been fronting serious post-punk teens S.C.U.M., who were named for Valerie Solanas' manifesto, and cited the likes of avant-garde Japanese band Les Rallizes Dénudés, Pharoah Sanders, and Throbbing Gristle as influences. They signed to Mute, and were feted by Brian Eno and Portishead. You can't buy that kind of credibility—or sustain it once you're pictured next to a photo splash of Prince William and Kate Middleton's "night of glamor and tears."
This wasn't how things were meant to go. S.C.U.M. split, presumably as a result of Cohen's new celebrity life, and he decided to pursue a solo career, writing about the strangeness of being a young father of two in a British rock dynasty. But the script wrinkled again when Geldof was found dead at 25, the result of a fatal heroin overdose. After a few understandably lost months, Cohen got back to writing, and finished his record, which unfolds in chronological order. All things considered, Bloom Forever (the middle names of their second son, Phaedra) is unexpectedly upbeat: a '70s singer/songwriter record indebted to Pink Floyd, Neil Young, Elton John, and Lou Reed's Berlin.
Mostly recorded in Iceland, the arrangements are at once utterly relaxed yet over-the-top. (If you can't temper a story of being widowed at 23 with a little absurdity, when can you?) But like Cardinal's Eric Matthews, Cohen strikes a fine balance between sweet wooziness and cathartic guitar/saxophone/flute soloing. Where Bloom Forever could easily—and justifiably—have been dark and oppressive, instead, it's filled with inviting warmth and light, and sharpened by Cohen's reedy, Byronesque tone.
In contrast to the music's opulent wallowing, Cohen's plainspoken lyrics initially evoke the closed idyll of a new, young family unit. "As the rivers make their beds, our love will be holding onto each other," he vows in opener "Honeymoon," where smoky, drifting guitar and languid sax ride to a storming climax. On the title track, about Phaedra's birth, he evokes their "lonely weather," new parenthood's sweet and tiring fug. "Let's find a place to hide/One where we'll never sigh," he sings, over loose guitar that recalls the relaxed stateliness of Nick Cave's Push the Sky Away. It's a really lovely space to spend time in—so much so that it's hard to begrudge him "Hazy Shades," a sunny and shameless rip-off of America's "A Horse With No Name" coupled with the lyrics to Neil Young's "Love and Only Love."
Traces of that Americana lilt make it into "Country Home," the one song on Bloom Forever that deals most directly with Geldof's death. Although the lyrics are brutal ("My love had gone, she'd turned so cold/Why weren't her eyes covered and closed?"), it's remarkably measured, cascading on waves of pedal steel and vocal harmonies. Cohen has obviously had to grow up incredibly fast, but even so, the sophistication of the writing, and his resolve within those songs, is pretty extraordinary. His children give him reason to keep going on "Ain't Gonna Be No Rain," and the rollicking sea shanty feel (and flute solo!) of "New Morning Comes” evokes the "sun still shining on, even though it's cold."
"Only Us" is a cavernous, Pink Floyd-indebted piano lament for the intimacy the couple once shared, but on "Mother Mary," Cohen promises to keep everything he's lost inside of him. "I will hold onto the part of me that is in love with you," he sings softly, as graceful as the silvery strings and gentle piano. Without warning, his voice expands, and the song storms to another never-ending crescendo, buzzing and burning like a rocket burning off layers as it breaches the atmosphere. The blurry quality that characterized the record's first half is gone, the focus sharper; the end of a very strange dream. Cohen will never be able to escape the context surrounding Bloom Forever, but he refuses to let himself be defined by tragedy. His bold, distinctive debut album stands a million miles from the celebrity circus, and will endure far longer than mawkish titillation.


The Atlanta rapper’s new album swings seamlessly from upbeat to disruptive without being one-note. It’s her best work yet.

Love Black

Sometimes, Atlanta’s Bktherula cuts raging headbangers big and polished enough for her city’s mainstream machine. Other times, the 19-year-old’s songs are melodic and ethereal, with a demo-like feel that has more in common with the local underground scene. On her fun-enough 2020 mixtapes—Nirvana and Love Santana—that versatility sounded cooler on paper. The problem with both projects was that the lush tracks felt derivative, and her lovestruck lyrics and sweet-sounding melodies weren’t interesting enough to elevate the records beyond vibes. Meanwhile, the haymakers were fully formed, sparked by a no-bullshit attitude and chaotic energy that too often disappeared on her softer songs.
Bktherula’s newest album, Love Black, is her best yet because those two moods—upbeat and disruptive—bleed into one another more seamlessly. “Hit Me” is hummable and, at the same time, sounds like Bk is ready to superkick a hole in a wall. Similarly, Rxlvnd’s beat on “Ye Ho” is so spaced out it might freeze you like sleep paralysis. Bk layers the hazy instrumental with a hypnotic spell of adlibs—“huh,” “yeah,” “uh”—that are more impactful than any lyrics she could have written for the song. The Digital Nas-produced “Incredible” opens with a bang (“I run up them bands and get that guap, that’s what I had to do/You can’t call me Black right now ’cause bitch, I’m fucking mad at you”), and Bk raps as if she could rip a phonebook in half with her hands. The lyrics aren’t as memorable on “Through 2 U,” and they’re maybe even bad (“I got all my niggas in the bus with me like Scooby Doo”), but the ear-splitting drums and her punishing delivery could inspire a fulfilling spree of vandalism and destruction.
Love Black has its fluff, too. Bk half-heartedly coos about some unspecific love over a Mac Demarco sample on “IDK What to Tell You,” a song seemingly designed in a TikTok lab to go viral. “Placement” is dragged down by the demonic filter Matt Ox puts on his vocals and feels like it’s trying to be weird rather than actually being weird. Then on “Nah,” Bk croons over the type of airy Surf Gang beat that would typically go to BabyxSosa, but her whiny melodies are tired. There seems to be a part of this album that wants to slightly clean up the edges and get her swooped up into the algorithm, but her music is more about her city than it is of the internet.
What’s most exciting about Love Black is the way so many feelings coexist on a track; it’s not as one-note as similarly vibey rappers like Ken Car$on—and to a lesser extent Yeat—who swear they’re the ultimate ragers. On “Hide Your Hoe,” Bk is smitten with someone and yet returns to her trifling ways; she’s bitter and doesn’t give a shit on “She Choose Me.” These emotions may seem relatively simple, but it’s the wrinkle she missed too often before and now commands.

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The New York songwriter’s fourth album sacrifices spontaneity for the sake of a character-driven concept, but her sense of humor remains as strong as ever.

Superstar

In the opening scenes of her video for “Feel the Way I Want,” New York singer-songwriter Caroline Rose stands outside a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in Hollywood, California, and receives a phone call. It’s her agent. That audition she has? It’s in Hollywood, Florida. Off she goes on a cross-country dance trip to Florida, where she nails her audition for the role of a bug-eyed lobster.
This is the beginning of a gag Rose sees all the way through her fourth album, Superstar, which tells the story of a character based off an exaggerated version of herself, mixed with bits of Kanye West and 2007 Britney Spears. This character, or “anti-hero” as Rose often calls them, is a study in contradictions—confident and insecure, anxious and optimistic, ambitious to the point of delusion—who, having recently experienced the rush of success, now craves fame and riches.
Looking back, it seems obvious Rose would make such a character-driven album. By the time of her breakout third LP Loner in 2018, she had already started dressing in all red and refining an irreverent onstage persona. Loner was a hybrid offering: Americana-esque stories that played out from multiple perspectives, told through indie-pop melodies that carefully folded in programmatic drums and synthesizers. By contrast, Superstar is a single narrative. Chronological storytelling means the album has only one direction to travel; it’s easy to predict the main character’s impending undoing. Like a book whose author has overcommitted to her outline, the album’s linear structure sacrifices opportunities for spontaneity along the way.
Superstar also lacks some of the musical restraint that made Loner such a balanced listen. Armed with new studio tricks and the desire to create something from scratch, Rose played every position—songwriter, producer, engineer, guitarist, flutist, field recording supervisor. While her intentions are admirable, Superstar suffers from an excess of overwrought effects (reverb! panning!) that an outside collaborator might’ve trimmed. Still, when Rose manages to find the right balance on her own, as on lead single “Feel the Way I Want,” it’s clear she’s a fiercely talented artist with omnivorous taste that extends from the hyper-pop of Grimes to the abstract electronic music of Suzanne Ciani. The opening riff of “Back at the Beginning” recalls the wiry guitar solo from Dandy Warhols’ “We Used to Be Friends.” Given her wide range of source material, it’s easy to understand how Rose could struggle in the editing process.
What remains strong throughout the album are the lyrics. Rose is an undeniably gifted songwriter, capable of cleverness without sacrificing clarity. Her sense of humor is strong as ever, especially on “Do You Think We’ll Last Forever,” a sparse dance track about new-relationship anxiety. “I’m alright, I’m alright, I’m alright/It’s just a heart attack,” Rose insists. Later, on the standout “Freak Like Me,” she describes the object of her affection as a “split-level home,” a “brick through a broken window,” a “skin-tight suit,” a “vicious dom,” and a “drunk conversation.” Cobbled together, the evocative descriptions reveal a person ready to relish their freakiness in front of a lover who’s equally down.
These personal-feeling moments are the album’s strongest, and Superstar could use more of them. By clinging to the never-ending blank page of the bit, Rose winds up in shallower waters. Her previous albums demonstrate her gift for thinking critically about knotty concepts and turning heady observations on subjects like monotony and loneliness into indie-pop gold. Here, each song is a variation on the same ultimate theme: the fine line between aspiration and delusion. And while Rose mines the topic for all it’s worth—exploring the many side-effects and surprises that stem from unchecked ambition—her reluctance to explore perspectives beyond that of her neurotic anti-hero limit the experience.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Briana Marela’s third album of effervescent synth pop is her punchiest effort yet, full of songs that portray the anxiety of falling in and out of love.

Call It Love

Briana Marela’s third album Call It Love punches harder than any of the airy, effervescent synth pop she’s released before, but her newly energetic beats and surging arpeggios still frame the same gentle vocalizations that have marked her work to date. She originally intended the album to have two distinct halves, an ambient side and a pop side, with corresponding “sister songs.” Instead, she melded the two together; drones and echoes float under her drum patterns and multi-tracked vocal hooks, resulting in a work that can paradoxically feel agitated and sedate in the same moment.
Unlike 2015’s All Around Us, which was recorded in Iceland and reflected its serene landscapes, Call It Love renders the anxiety of falling in and out of love both in its restless beats and its lyrics. Marela, who majored in audio production and music technology at Olympia’s Evergreen State College, makes great use of her vocal processing to that end. One second there’s a single Marela, of a single mind; a second later, she’s everywhere, singing to herself across a dozen vocal tracks at the speed your thoughts might race when you’re teetering at the precipice of falling for someone new. “Be in Love” blooms with the giddiness of a new crush, while “Call It Love” digs for emotional clarity in the midst of an ambiguous relationship.
Marela also explores the darker side of that romantic coin. The album’s lead single “Quit” paints the end of a relationship in somber tones; her voice is corroded and stuttering, while the drum machine lacerates the track’s background ambience with a harsh, almost industrial beat. “You quit calling my name/You quit,” she accuses. Though the song hints at feelings of loneliness and abandonment, its desolation comes through more clearly in its spacious production and echoing instrumentation than in Marela’s vocal delivery. She’s skilled at multiplying her voice across an infinite plane, but whether she’s singing about new love or love dead in the water, she sings in the same gentle, tentative register.
The sameness in her voice lends Call It Love a soothing quality, as though her vocals were a pleasant keyboard patch she used consistently across its tracks, tracing square, unchallenging melodies the whole way. She’s not the first vocalist to employ uniformity in this way; My Bloody Valentines use it to great effect, but they also let their guitars do the singing. The lack of anything like a pained or ecstatic voice in Call It Love can make its emotional core tricky to access. Instead of reading it in her voice, you have to read it in her lyrics and the environments in which she’s chosen to nestle them.
That doesn’t detract from Call It Love’s prettiness; it just means it’s not the kind of record you’re likely to bury your pain in after a breakup or your excitement in at the start of the next relationship. It’s not that active. But there’s a third note it hits best on “He Knows”: a quiet insecurity you can’t help enjoying. “Are you my friend?/Oh, don’t answer yet,” Marela sings over keys heavy with reverb. Here, she sings toward the top of her range, stretching out the word “temporary” to at least seven syllables. “Will I ever see you again?/Would I get one more chance?” she asks. She has no idea, but her asking invites us to treat Call It Love more like an ambient record than anything else: a dreamlike space, a seeking. It’s a map to subliminal states that pop, in its loudness, tends to stamp out.


Quickly recorded in 2002 to fulfill a publishing contract, this archival trove cements the singer-songwriter and her steadfast partner, David Rawlings, as modern masters of American folk.

Gillian Welch: Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs, Vol. 1

Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs, Vol. 1

By the end of 2002, when Gillian Welch recorded the tunes that constitute Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs, Vol. 1, she had fully arrived as an unexpected popular apostle of Appalachian folk music. A California kid raised by showbiz parents and inculcated in songcraft at the Berklee College of Music, Welch cut a promising figure in the teeming alt-country landscape of the late ’90s. Her keening voice made her songs about hardscrabble folks and imminent hellfire feel as old as the hills from which she hadn’t come. But her upbringing prompted puritanical concerns about authenticity and appropriation, as if she should apologize for sincere interest in one of her country’s bedrock forms.
For some, though, as the United States quivered with the onset of endless war in 2001, Welch and her steadfast harmony partner, David Rawlings, seemed a national salve. Pushed into the spotlight by the frame-shifting soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the concert film that followed, the couple felt trustworthy and inspirational, a charming portrait of aspirational America that might have been plucked from Grant Wood’s imagination. Welch didn’t shy from darkness, either. Her contemporaneous album, 2001’s Time (the Revelator), explored the country’s vile underbelly, particularly the sense that we were exploiting one another into oblivion. One of the young century’s first masterpieces, Time (the Revelator) tapped the past to contextualize present anxieties and offer the occasional jubilee. What other role should modern folk music play?
Buoyed by this sudden success, Welch resolved she could finally break from the publishing contract she’d signed nine years earlier—she was a successful singer-songwriter now, not merely a writer for hire. During one productive weekend at home in December 2002, six months before releasing the aching Soul Journey, she and Rawlings pored through more than 100 notebooks. They turned scraps of discarded songs into enough quick recordings to fulfill her contract before it renewed January 1.
Those 48 tunes languished in storage boxes for nearly two decades, until the tornadoes that swept through Nashville in March and the financial uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Welch and Rawlings to excavate them. Taken together, the resulting three volumes of Boots No. 2: The Lost Songs—a nominal follow-up to 2016’s Boots No. 1: The Official Revival Bootleg, a collection of outtakes from her 1996 debut—will effectively double the painstakingly patient musician’s catalogue. (Volumes two and three are to follow in coming months.) Singing and playing just to get the job done, she and Rawlings have never sounded so nonchalant on record as they do here, delivering these songs with the candor of an afternoon band rehearsal. Effortlessly balancing light and dark, this first batch of 16 songs is an essential distillation of her ability to tell detailed stories open for endless interpretation.
Welch’s best songs have always evoked mystery. Ambiguity and intrigue are her essential inheritance from the old records and songbooks she internalized. For Welch, the listener should come away from a song with more questions than answers. Time (the Revelator) was her masterclass in that regard: Its elliptical epics teased connections between the Dust Bowl, Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and the sinking of the Titanic, and then (presciently) asked what music might become when stripped of all value. Boots No. 2 plays like a workbook of exercises on that enigmatic mode, a set of three-minute delights that reveal just enough of a story to electrify the imagination.
You may ask, for instance, what exactly happened to the downtrodden protagonist of the tender “Chinatown,” neglected by the postal service and ignored by sunshine until even flowers became phantoms. Why were the Bonnie-and-Clyde couple of “Honey Baby” on the lam, and how did they arrive at the gallows? You’ll pity the exhausted outlaws in “Apalachicola” and “Shotgun Song” while wondering about their crimes. Even “Mighty Good Book,” which first scans as a bounding gospel tune fit for a churchyard picnic, revels in equivocation. “Are you gonna wish you read the story/Of when Jesus paid it all?” Welch sings, rendering commandments as questions, as if to tell you she doesn’t have the answer, either.
There are simpler pleasures, too. “Little Luli” is an irrepressible ode to a proud woman who shakes down traveling men while shaking for their dimes. “First Place Ribbon” relates the story of the shoeless and itinerant Kathy, wooing the boys and evading the preachers as she travels with the fair. Such anachronisms may sound like cosplay, but, for Welch, they’re echoes of the past made resonant again. These are glorious tributes to the wiles of rebellious women, sung in solidarity by someone pushing back against a powerful industry herself. And Welch seems to have reserved “Back Turn and Swing,” a lithe country dance tune, for the perfect moment. Above spring-loaded guitars that beg for a bluegrass band, Welch acknowledges life’s troubles but celebrates the thrills of dancing with friends and guzzling wine. It’s a testament to perseverance and the promise of better days—a timely reminder that hard times come and, with luck, go.
Good news for the music industry has been particularly illusory in 2020—canceled tours, scrapped sessions, delayed releases, Spotify investing $100 million in Joe Rogan. One unanticipated boon has been a change in temperament among some typically exacting artists, who have lowered their guards to put out music, long-shelved and new alike, with less premeditation or preciousness. (What else do you do during endless quarantine?) The same impulse has compelled Taylor Swift’s folklore, a high volume of low-stakes live albums on Bandcamp, and a stream of hard-drive (or tape-reel) dumps just like Boots No. 2. In July, Welch and Rawlings released an off-the-cuff covers album, imperfectly captured on tape during quarantine.
Welch and Rawlings are a famously fastidious pair, self-proclaimed perfectionists who once spent eight years fretting over an album. This meticulousness has sometimes been fodder for critics who say authentic folk music shouldn’t be so calculated. Boots No. 2 should quell that gripe once and for all. Here they are at home during a wintry Southern weekend, churning through songs good enough to be standards by the dozen. They play and sing with an intimacy so easy it seems as if they’ve forgotten the tape is rolling at all.

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Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing, Ubiquity’s long-gestating compilation of highlights from Gloria Ann Taylor’s brief career, gathers five singles recorded between 1971 and 1977. Original copies of these releases—featuring dance music with an unusual touch of dubby psychedelia—are among the most coveted of soul/disco rarities.

Gloria Ann Taylor: Love Is a Hurtin' Thing

Love Is a Hurtin' Thing

A month before the release of their debut album on 4AD, U.S. Girls dropped the video for the Slim Twig-produced single "Window Shades". For most listeners, it was a song about the emotional breakthrough of a woman finally confronting her unfaithful partner. But its production, with looped strings, piano, and hand drum, was startling to deep soul fans. "Window Shades" incorporated a licensed sample of Gloria Ann Taylor's 1973 single, "Love Is a Hurting Thing", a song found on a privately-pressed 12" called Deep Inside You featured one of the more anonymous spirograph sleeves from that era. Seen in the racks, the 12" might have looked like any number of local gospel or marching band albums from the mid-'70s, but this one came with a twist: a copy of the release, credited to Gloria Ann Taylor and Walt Whisenhunt's Orchestra, routinely tops four figures in online auctions, making it one of the most coveted soul/disco albums of its ilk.
Deep Inside You is the centerpiece of Love Is a Hurtin' Thing, Ubiquity's long-gestating compilation of highlights from Gloria Taylor's brief career, gathering five singles recorded between 1971 and 1977. For those of more modest means who've relied on mp3s culled from long-deleted music blogs, Hurtin' Thing fills in her discography as well as her biography. The mystery inherent in her music has led to some strange speculations online. Even her Discogs page puts her birthplace as Alabama, saying that she formed gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock and passed away 10 years ago (no doubt conflating her with one Gloria Ann Taylor-James). As these liner notes clarify, though, Taylor was actually born in a coal-mining town in West Virginia and is still very much with us.
That Gloria Ann Taylor didn't become a household name isn't of much concern now. It's difficult to become a star, much easier to be star-crossed, to find your music lost to time. So the fact that she never made it is not cosmic injustice so much as the actual indifference of the universe. It was in fact at the start of Taylor's career as a soul singer based in Toledo that she had her best shot at stardom. Compared favorably to Aretha Franklin, she had a powerful, church-bred voice that caught the attention of one of James Brown's arrangers and associates, Walt Whisenhunt, fresh off of working on Doris Troy's "Just One Look". They became both musical partners and a couple.
The number of forgotten, obscure, or lost soul singers revived in the 21st century runs long and deep, the "personal sacrifice, failed relationships, and missed opportunity" that these notes describe are all attendant of this peculiar genre. But before allowing hard-knock biography to color the reception of Love Is a Hurtin' Thing, just listen to the opening seconds of the title track. A blistering psychedelic guitar solo, like something left off of Nuggets, flares across the opening 10 seconds, but 20 seconds in, we're awash in opulent strings, piano, and Taylor's voice, a powerful instrument that seem to be echoing from a subterranean tunnel.
As production choices for a potential hit single in the early 1970s go, it's baffling, one part psych-rock, one part Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra, all competing with the fresh wound of Taylor's voice. There's a raw pain and cavernous hurt in Taylor's every exhalation, the lyrics questioning how love could bring such joy and pain. And the music itself is bent on evoking all of the ecstasy and agony, the crazed jags of adoration and confusion that stems from a dysfunctional relationship.
"How Can You Say It" has Taylor talk about giving her lover her last dime, then finding tears on his pillow. That wrenching whiplash of emotions are scored by lush orchestration and percussion swaddled in so much echo so as to suggest the sound Lee Perry would get out of the Black Ark in a few years' time. Same goes for "Deep Inside of You", where the strings, vibraphone, and Taylor's voice are all doused in heavy reverb, and for an instant, everything becomes disorienting and indistinct.
No other soul producer in that era would smother their vocalist in so many effects or arrange backing harmonies at such cross purposes to the main melody. So while Taylor voices heartbreak and anguish, Whisenhunt's idiosyncratic productions suggest something close to madness. But his choices—which no doubt made mainstream success impossible—are staggering 40 years on. On the haunting dirge of "Burning Eyes", Taylor's voice frays before our ears, shadowed by a muted trumpet and a horn section that seems to have lurched up from a graveyard. "World That's Not Real" is ominous yet ephemeral, buoyed by xylophone and Taylor's desolate voice. Almost a minute in, the piano hits a chord that Oliver Wang at Soul-Sides once deemed "Death's ringtone," yet at that, the song briefly brightens, only to sidle back into darkness, perching at the edge of the void.
Harrowing and feverish as these sides are, the most uncanny song remains the seven-minute version of "Love Is a Hurtin' Thing", a befuddling megamix comprised of the original version of the track as well as chunks of previous singles "How Can You Say It" and "Music", all cobbled together in the studio by Whisenhunt. To the mix he adds more stinging wah-wah guitar, silken orchestration, and a re-recorded drum track not quite in sync with the original that trainwrecks the whole thing (no doubt an attempt to cash in on disco fever). With funds low, it had a minuscule press run and was soon forgotten. Yet somehow, it all works. It's glorious and bewildering, magnificent and forlorn, defiant and defeated, an emotional speedball. Heard in 2015, the music is as indelible and inscrutable as ever. Or, as Taylor once sang about love: "It's a mystery no one can explain."