Addison Rae Alex G Algernon Cadwallader Allo Darlin’ Amber Mark Animal Mouth Anna B Savage Anxious Arm’s Length Bad Bunny Barbara Barker Basia Bulat BC Camplight Beach Bunny Benjamin Booker Big Thief Billy Woods Black Country, New Road Blood Orange Bomba Estéreo & Rawayana Brian D’Addario Buscabulla Caroline Rose Car Seat Headrest Cassandra Jenkins Chance The Rapper Charmer Children Of The Sün Chip Wickham Chloë Doucet Clipse Cold Specks Cory Hanson Dana Gavanski Danny Brown David Lowery Deep Sea Diver De La Soul Dom Salvador, Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad Drake & Partynextdoor Earl Sweatshirt Eliza Niemi Eruca Sativa Ezra Furman FKA Twigs Foxwarren Geese Gelli Haha Gloomy June Great Grandpa Gwenno Haim Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover Hand Habits Hayden Pedigo Hayley Williams Home Is Where Hot Mulligan Human Tetris Ichiko Aoba Indigo De Souza James McMurtry Jane Remover Japanese Breakfast Javiera Mena Jeanines Jensen McRae Jethro Tull Juan Wauters Julien Baker & Torres Kali Uchis Karol G Kathryn Mohr Kendra Morris Kerosene Heights Kerry Charles Lady Gaga Lael Neale Laufey Lido Pimienta Lightheaded Lightning In A Twilight Hour Lights Lily Allen L.S. Dunes Lucius Lucy Dacus Maddie Jay Mamalarky Maren Morris Mark Springer, Neil Tennant & Sacconi Quartet Maria Usbeck Marie Davidson Marshall Allen McKinley Dixon McLusky Mei Semones Melody’s Echo Chamber Men I Trust Michael Cera Palin Min Taka Momus Mon Laferte Morgan Morgan Wallen Motion City Soundtrack Nas & DJ Premier Natalia Lafourcade Nation Of Language Naxatras Neko Case Oklou Open Mike Eagle Parcels Perfume Genius Pool Kids Pulp Racing Mount Pleasant Richard Dawson Robert Forster Rodney Crowell Rosalía Rowena Wise Ruby Haunt Saba Sabrina Carpenter Saint Etienne Sam Fender Samia Saturdays At Your Place Serengeti (Ajai 2 The Reimagine) Serengeti (Palookaville) Serengeti (Universe) Silvana Estrada Silverstein Skrillex Sloan Smerz Sofia Kourtesis Sombr Sophia Kennedy Sparks Stereolab Steven Wilson Suzanne Vega Talulah Paisley Tame Impala Tate McRae Taylor Swift Telethon The Beths The Telephone Numbers The Velvet Sundown The Weather Station The Weeknd The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die Tops Tracy Bonham Tyler, The Creator Van Morrison Weatherday Wednesday Wet Leg Will Stratton Youth Lagoon

Addison Rae — Addison  Vaporous club music from a TikTok alum. This is likely only danceable if you’ve had 500 MG edibles, and even then, it would probably have to be the sort of “space dancing” that Bez from Happy Mondays used to do. If you know you know.  Anyway: Charli XCX is an obvious model here.  But while Charli is determined to slam the hook into your head like she’s beating a small animal to death with her shoe, wispy-voiced Addison is content to let the song waft over you in the hope that you’ll remember something about it once it’s over. Or maybe she doesn’t care what you do. These tracks may be pure accoutrement: gauzy stuff meant to pacify the crowd at her next product launch. When she says that money is everything to her, I certainly believe her.  I’m not quite Mamdani enough to be mad at the materialism.  I wish only that she’d directed that financial acumen toward the procurement of catchier choruses. Well. Maybe next time. The Elvira Andrefjärd production “Headphones On” is a decent start. 

Alex G — Headlights  I have come to expect boring music from Alex, but this one really takes the cake and puts the pasty sugar-free icing on it in the process. Flat melodies over beige chord progressions, listlessly strummed and sung, and pushed along in a boring way by canned beats from the boring folder in the recesses of the world’s dullest audio suite. Don’t even get me started on the words. (“Some things I do for money/It ain’t like I’m above it,” Alex and Addison Rae should start a brokerage firm.) After years of boring the underground insensate, this is Alex’s major label debut, and true to form, he has brought the major label snooze. He can now bore a much wider audience. Alex landed that deal on the strength of God Save The Animals, an album that was strangely off brand and maybe even nonboring in places. But that set had actual band interplay on it plus a few arrangements suggestive of cerebral activity. That cognitive exertion probably wiped Alex out. I’m guessing for good. Hey, no big loss.

Algernon Cadwallader — Trying Not To Have A Thought   “I hate the USA,” sans reverb and phasing, right in the middle of the mix. Welp you knew somebody was going to say it. My money would not have been on Algernon Cadwallader, and that goes to show what I know. Yes, the band that taught Philadelphia youth how to twinkle has returned from hibernation in the Schuylkill marshes with protests and provocations about modernity.  No one knows where we’re going in the name of progress, hollers Peter Helmis, right before comparing us to vampires hooked on speed and blood. I dunno, I’ve seen the news and think it tracks. Later he delivers a plainspoken account of the MOVE bombing meant to establish that 1.) every national outrage has many local analogues, and 2.) some stains don’t wash out. This is America, he concludes, in a voice like a punctuation mark. Emopolitico: my favorite nongenre.  As Peter rages against the machine, the rest of the group scrawls away like it’s 2007 and they’re getting that fourth wave hotwired and rolling. Joe Reinhart, unspooler of barbed strands of notes, sounds particularly rejuvenated, making space for guitar heroism in a segment suspicious of heroes. They let you down, heroes do. Stick to grumpy old emos with a message. They’re far less disappointing, and probably less fascist too.

Amber Mark — Pretty Idea  Well isn’t this a tasty tray of petit fours to set down on the table. Each tart colorfully iced and placed right in the center of an ornate doily. So nicely balanced and with such crisp contours and corners that you kinda don’t even want to bite into it. Don’t ruin the Amber experience with your teeth marks, pal. Three Dimensions Deep digested and rearranged classic pop and soul, so astute historiography is no more than what you’d expect from your modern Amber. But I still reckon you’ll be surprised by how Pretty Idea references the past — the whole thing, I mean — all at once. You get some Minnie Ripperton heat, some Lauryn Hill scorn, some oaken midtempo Motown balladry, some late nineties Brandy ’n’ Monica prom music, all handled adroitly by the star, who discharges these melodies with a minimum of melisma (for the style) and maximum grace (again for the style). Even a showy, throaty guest spot from Anderson.Paak can’t put any wrinkles in the smooth satin surface that amber has garment-steamed for you.  There are even a couple of slow numbers that elbow-nudge their way into the pop-country lane in the same sauntering manner that Sabrina Carpenter did, which figures, since Sabrina’s sonic masseuse Julian Bunetta is heavily in on this project.  That’s that him espresso.  Yes, I, too, miss the narrative and emotional complexity of the 3:33 EP.  Since that version of Amber isn’t coming back, we must learn to love the Amber we’ve got. Honestly, she’s making it pretty easy on us. 

Animal Mouth — New Derangements  Sure, why not? If Baby Boose can make a personal playground out of the pop chart, Dan Purcell is allowed to record an album, too.  All is fair in Fayerweather Hall.  Dan has taken this very seriously, bringing in Carly Rae Jepsen session guy Jon Epcar to play the drums and enlisting Kate Derringer of the Detroit rock band Shadow show to do the mix. The results are good and cranky like a middle-aged tantrum thrown by a next door neighbor whose garage you were always a little scared to look into. There are strange noises coming from that thing. Dan’s heroes are the party couple with the vitamin drip and the Klonopin, and his villains are the parents who won’t even send a measly four hundred bucks to their idiot son. In between is the narrator, who worries that his irascibility has permanently fucked up his marriage and chafes at his own Pavlovian responses to the whistle and whatnot. It’s rollicking and exasperated in a manner that feels broadly Pynchonian or at least Davidlowrian, loopy and Left Coast, even as Dan seriously considers ditching California for parts unknown. He sings it all in a voice that sounds like it could be coming from Oscar as he lifts the garbage can lid. Dan has already said he’s not going tour behind this thing, which feels like a shame since everything on it feels pointed directly at the stage — the corner rock stage, specifically.  A Telethon/Animal Mouth/Paranoid Style triple bill makes all the sense in indie showbiz. You could even throw Tris McCall on there if Dan can tolerate the fey elitism and the synthesizers. 

Anna B Savage — You And I Are Earth  Ten tales of Sam The Butcher bringing Alice the meat. Just kidding, this is a winsome folk pop set from a young English songwriter with Ireland and romantic rapture on the brain. She’s deliberately obscuring the line between her two obsessions, even as the implications of that elision have clear political dimensions. Has Anna fallen in love with the gentle red-faced man she meets by the Bishop’s Pool in Donegal, or is she just one of the long line of English people — a queue she acknowledges in her verse — caught up in the blarney of the Emerald Isle? Notable it is that the narrator has her most meaningful sensual encounters with Donegal Bay. It’s big and wild!, she pants. Mostly her human muse rolls up her sleeves at the windy beach, pins roses to the walls of her rustic cottage, and finds handfuls of periwinkles by Seamus Heaney’s house; scene-setting hooey that tourists love, in other words. Far be it for Tris McCall, of all people, to cast aspersions on anybody’s fetishization of a place, but if I were this dude, I think I’d run for the Bluestack Hills. By the end of the album, it seems like he may have done just that: Anna is by herself in Dublin, and her boyfriend is way beyond the Pale. They’ve got the rest of their lives to work it out, an unhurried Anna assures us, and I dunno, she strikes me as way too smart not to put this all in the context of centuries of British-Irish relations and the exploitative treatment of John Bull’s Other Island. Especially its troubled north. Another literate Englishperson said it in ’81: they’re only gonna change this place/by killing everybody in the human race/they would kill me for a cigarette/but I don’t even wanna die just yet.

Anxious — Bambi  It’s been awhile since I’ve heard a band sell out so fully and with such a glorious abnegation of guilt. It’s refreshing: it suggests that there are still a few modern subjects who are not so overwhelmed by despair that they can’t imagine something in the mainstream worth chasing. The members of Anxious are probably wrong about that, but I don’t mind seeing them try.  As an appreciator of Little Green House, I am A-OK with this vigorous tack toward mass acceptability and ask only that they do not become five bitter old men when they’re inevitably disappointed. We’ve already got that disposition covered. Mostly they’ve done what they’ve done by de-emphasizing the screamed support vocals and abrasive guitar and boosting the dulcet tones of Beach Boys-loving frontman Grady Allen. Though Grady’s Ladies (as I like to call the rest of the band) are more than down to help, this is mainly a job for producer Brett Romnes, who does so much straightening, smoothing, tucking, snipping and hot wax bikini hair removal here that I think he just got hired at the Sojo Spa. If Anxious is still recognizable as an emo band, sort of, it’s mostly because Brett empties the bag of tricks you’ll remember from various Oso Oso and Oso Oso-like projects. The truth is that Grady has never convinced me that his emotions were all that important to him. He seemed a lot more concerned with compositional craft and pop arrangement. It’s probably true that you can’t keep a guy capable of writing hooks like “Tell Me Why” and “Counting Sheep” down on the farm for very long, especially if that farm is, as it is in Grady’s case, in Connecticut. You’d want fortune to whisk you away from that stony shit, too.

Arm’s Length — There’s A Whole World Out There  Palinopsia: that’s a good word to know.  It means seeing things that used to be there but aren’t anymore. If you get migraines like I do, you’re probably painfully familiar with persistent afterimages. Sometimes they’re ghost trails, and sometimes it’s exactly like the retinal screen-burn that happens after staring at a bright light for too long. Never a man to pass up a hot-buttered metaphor, Allen Steinberg returns to the fading image of some chick with whom he was in a domestic setup plus his unrecoverable hometown, overwritten as it has been by new retail and fresh development. These twentysomething emos are such NIMBYs.  No, they really are. How are we supposed to solve the housing crisis and give them puncher’s chances of living decent lives with their girlfriends if we’ve got to preserve the fucking moat around their childhood memories all the time? Unless it isn’t really about the girlfriend. Wait, don’t answer that. Steinberg, who gives the impression of an alarmed man poring over his own catscans with a magic marker, follows a song called “You Ominously End” with another called “Early Onset” with another called “Genetic Lottery.” You can see a theme developing that transcends figurative language. Frantically reminiscing just to make sure he still can, Allen is, laying on the dementia imagery with a thickness and bluntness suggestive of some personal experience and occasionally slipping from first-person ferocious emo singer to the voice of an Alzheimer’s patient. “And when I’m braindead/will you still sleep in my bed?”  Will you still need me, will you still feed me, etcetera. McCartney once played it for a wry chuckle.  After COVID, I don’t think anybody is laughing. 

Bad Bunny — Debi Tirar Mas Fotos  A fun and well sequenced record from a fun and well sequenced pop star. That said, it’s also something of a half-measure. Benito’s enthusiastic experiments with salsa and jibaro will get you tropically hype until he pulls the rug out from the traditionalist dancefloor by dropping in that big, blocky reggaeton kick and that cold and bouncy post-Drake bass synth. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with those sounds. They’re just bossy. It’s a little like adding an everything bagel to a bag of plain bagels. Give it a few shakes and everything becomes and everything bagel. Where Bad Bunny’s digital salsa differs from Bomba Estéreo’s digital cumbia (right, don’t call it that) is mostly down to the arc of execution. Simón Mejia of Bomba aims for seamlessness: the tambora and the tree frogs and the MPC are yoked together in an unbroken line of percussive expressiveness. Bad Bunny, by contrast, really wants to call your attention to his old-school departures from expectation. He wants you to hear those drums on “Bokete” and feel the tradewinds. Part of this is political, and maybe even commendable. He’s got something to say about what Puerto Rico has lost via forced assimilation to Western hegemony and the superficial demands of the turistas. Fair enough. But the rest will work to the extent that you care about Benito Martinez Ocasio’s personal quest for a Trans-Caribbean identity, and I’m gonna guess that the answer for you is not very much. The shame is that when he really lets it rip, as he does on ”Baile Inolvidable” and “Cafe Con Ron,” he demonstrates how well that voice of his — a voice as firm and gleaming as varnished teak — works in the salsa discoteca. Does it suit urbano better? Well, yeah. He is what he always been: a man of his moment, no matter how many photos he’s kept.  

Barbara — Barbara  Two brothers from a seaside city make meticulously arranged and somewhat outré soft rock replete with social commentary and music hall overtones. The exuberant, flopsy-haired one sings while the serious one plays the synthesizer. Some songs sound like TV themes while others sound like satires of TV themes. Then they branch out and write a few TV themes for satirical shows that send up TV. No doubt all of this sounds like Sparks to you, but it’s never quite as glam or as weird as that. Instead, the Tydeman brothers spend their debut disc forever on the verge of breaking into “Mr. Blue Sky.”  But no matter how high their harmonies or how hard they hump on Beatles chords, they don’t quite have enough symphony in their pocket to get them there. Now, ELO borrowed their rhythmic mojo from the Kinks, and these two dedicated followers of fashion would like to register some observations of their own about the decline of Arthur’s island. Thus they bop shoo waddy waddy their way through tales of frustrated upward mobility like nervous college a cappella singers on the night before the campus job fair. The Tydemans seem to think that the collapse of civil society makes striving toward betterment futile even as we can’t figure out how to stop ourselves from doing it, which, honestly, makes them not too dissimilar to Billy Woods. I could use a little Woods-like grit in the gears, to be honest. At times this pair sounds a good sight too glib about it all. Regardless, these guys are too artful to discard. Let me get in on the ground floor with a modest investment in attention and see how the stock climbs from here.

Barker — Stochastic Drift  Hi-fi techno for high end hotel check-ins. It’s still playing in the elevator after you get your key. Inescapable, undanceable, unaffordable. You break these beats, you bought ‘em.

Basia Bulat — Basia’s Palace  Disco Polo sounds like a racehorse.  It’s not: it’s a genre of music that was popular in Poland in the ‘80s and ‘90s.  Imagine a little folk, a little country, a little throwback polka, and a whole lotta Eurovision. Nobody in North America is keen on a revival, and that includes Basia Bulat. Her cap-tip to disco polo on Basia’s Palace is mostly a shout-out to her dad, who was apparently a fan of the style. That said, she does add a couple of show-me disco beats to the early songs on the set, and she kicks a few lines in Polish when she can. From context, I think she’s telling us that her mother played guitar and her father liked to get down, and I’m grateful for a peek at a pop singer’s homestead that doesn’t immediately descend into horror stories of abuse or clinical depression. That said, Basia does talk about nightmares during the day and a radio that’s playing too loud, so your guess is as good as mine about what’s happening there. Nothing salubrious, I reckon.  

BC Camplight — A Sober Conversation  Not all therapy rock projects are diary dumps. Some are attempts to reorganize abuse and self-medication and whatnot into a form palatable for the reader.  For instance piano pop-rock dude Brian Christinzio tries here to out-self-conscious Father John Misty, which I didn’t think was possible. He’s determined to coax some bemusement out of his drug problems, and there’s a sense he’s doing it all for the audience.; i.e., if we really have to hear about the underpinnings of his coke habit, he’ll warn us in advance and try to make it witty. Then there’s the one where he takes a ride into the country with a somewhat abusive and possibly horny John Cleese before John Cleese reveals himself to be a metaphor. Annoying?  Irreverent? Brian’s suggestion that something traumatic happened to him at camp is only a distinguishing feature until you learn he is from the Garden State. Everybody in New Jersey had something traumatic happen at camp.   

Beach Bunny — Tunnel Vision  Lili Trifilio weighs in on microplastics. She doesn’t like ‘em. She prefers the macroplastic of contemporary pop-punk, which she’s turned back to wholeheartedly after a season spent messing with synthesizers. Hey, Hayley Williams did it first. I’m reminded of Margaret Glaspy’s Echo The Diamond, a lean, back-to-basics move after the layer cake of electro-overdubs on Devotion. Tunnel Vision is produced by the same guy who did Emotional Creature, so clearly he’s just here to help the ballclub. The main change is that the lead guitar guy who, to be honest, never felt all that necessary, is gone, leaving Lili to fill the midrange on her own. Wisely, she doesn’t try to freight the mules too heavily.  She relies instead on her limited but effective bag of melodic tricks, and her plainspoken, wounded, slightly exasperated delivery, reminiscent as it is of Stella Maxwell of Cruiserweight or Eva Hendricks after getting catcalled by a bunch of fascist construction workers. As many aging spinsters do (Lili, we are told, is twenty-eight), she’s shifted her site of discontent from the men in her life to existential threats and the horrid state of the globe, which, while more sensitive to root causes, is a tough way to do singalong pop. Representative verse: “crying at the supermarket/crying at the DMV/crying at the doctor’s office/crying independently.” Hey, at least she’s not crying incessantly.

Benjamin Booker — Lower  One underutilized way that an artist can upend expectations is by being bad. An audacious pivot to badness from an otherwise decent artist catches them off guard every time. If the artist can enlist a quality producer to help him realize a specific crappy vision, that completes the surprise. Kenny Segal has distinguished himself as star behind the boards, skilled as he is with matching specific sounds to phrases that advance the storytelling and heighten our relationships with the vocalists he’s working with; see Serengeti, Billy Woods, Open Mike Eagle, and a bunch of other narrative-heavy rappers. Here, he yokes his talents to those of Benjamin Booker, an artist few people think of at all. Benjamin started out as a Jack White-like blues rocker with a hand-clapping, foot-stomping rudimentary sound in his satchel. These days, he’s ditched that approach in favor of echoed, quasi-industrial beats unearthed from the goop quarry, overdriven rhythm guitar that sounds like sandpaper grinding on a block of formica, the hoarse-whispered vocal tone of a desperate man summoning a Bourbon Street whore, and lots of irritating grunge-era FX. I have no doubt that Kenny Segal has given Benjamin exactly what he wanted, right down to the last scrape and gurgle. The star is feeling bad, I gather from the downcast words, and he needs a bad sound to match. something reminiscent of the Divine Styler if he’d hooked his microphones up to the dustbin of an Electrolux vacuum cleaner. So this is an experiment of sorts, but not one that produces specific heat. Instead the chemicals sit there like sediment, staining the water, smelling sulfurous, and refusing to interact. Should I agitate the beaker, Ms. Crabtree. Are those bubbles in the Erlenmeyer flask or did somebody beef.

Big Thief — Double Infinity  Gonna turn it all/into rock and roll. All of it. Whatever you’ve got. It all goes into Adrianne’s wood-chipper and trash compactor and comes out of the slot as solid, mossy, patchouli-scented chunks of rock. But what kind of rock, the geologists ask. Not gemstones, certainly, though Adrianne and team do work up a luster, like the gleam of a beetle shell, when they’re on. Not igneous rock; none of this stuff was ever ejected from a volcano. No, it’s sedimentary all the way, sandy and granular and ideal for comfortable stepping stones as you poke your way through the wood toward sun-dappled revelation in a glade, or maybe a date to be eaten by a bear. It’s soft rock, like gypsum or a slivering shale, with streaks of mud and soapstone caked into its sides. Touch it, sniff it, feel the billion year old carbon. No need to get yourself back to the garden, though, because you’re already there. As hippies do, Adrianne stands out on the hillock, gnarled walking stick presumably in her hand, and stares out at the infinities of aeons behind her and aeons to come. (Woah man.) For an insignificant point on the endless trajectory — a locus of transmutation of things to come to things that once were — she sure does know how to mint and sell some sweet folk melodies. This time around she’s down a fellow camper: the bass player who was such a big part of the Big Thief sound has opted not to come along on this hike. Adrianne has compensated in the way that certified 100% rock stars do, opening the tent door wide to collaborators of all sorts, including classically trained jazzbo Josh Crumbly, Adam from Wilder Maker, and ambient zither master Laraaji, who zithers it up all over the set and adds some mystic Youssou N’dour “In Your Eyes” vox to “Grandmother,” a song that extends Adrianne’s well-known fascination with her, um, grandmother. Fans of the loose, zonked-cosmic tracks from Dragon New Warm Mountain and the Bright Future solo album ought to feel right at home.  Time, we are told, is round like a lime, continuing Adrianne’s practice of finding forever in the pantry.  If you’re one of the few left with no patience for this, know that she can and does get awfully specific and even quite grounded in the basics from time to time.  For instance, her inquiries into time and permanence lead her straight to a girl’s vag. All night all day, she purrs, I could go down on you.  Now there’s an eternity I’d be happy to inhabit.

Billy Woods — Golliwog  Technically, this is about as Afrocentric as hip-hop gets, though not Afrocentric in the style of the Jungle Brothers or X-Clan. Those acts were from Long Island and got their Afropositivism from Bambaataa and trips to the Fulton Mall. Billy gets his Afronegativism straight from Zimbabwe. Slave laborers driven through the countryside by the white man, butchering a cow in sacrifice, internecine family violence and hidden passports, paranoia in the bush, actual zombies in the oilfields, Franz Fanon dying of thirst in the desert, chopped-down avocado trees: it’s all horrible, and making things sound horrible is what Billy does. The poetry snaps but the beats don’t always. Billy and his stable of producers would like us to think that the sonic gloom and rhythmic slackness is here on purpose, and the portentous murk and sonic miasma is an aural metaphor for the parlous mental state of characters driven to the brink by extractive capitalism. But if that’s so, that makes this project Hollywood pro forma. Many of the aesthetic choices made on Golliwog — including those by the usually reliable Kenny Segal — owe more to horror movie scores and dystopian filmed entertainment than they do to the funk tradition that rap musicians have been animating in the service of their place-based storytelling since Bam rocked the park in the Bronx. Thus I am not sure who the audience is for this, or whether Billy himself is even in it. My sense is that if he ever did get his hand on that time machine he’s craving, he’d hop back to that spider hole in which he still had unfettered access to the drive and subversion of hip-hop music. Billy’s attitude about women, never too great to begin with, continues to deteriorate: here, they’re either betrayers or outright vampires, or dismissed as “dead fish” in bed by the cheerless, sneering emcee. No artist with such poetic density and gift for description as Billy has could ever be overrated, and his tale of a man confounding a slumlord by paying rent on a building slated for demolition is exactly the sort of urban vignette that few other rappers could deliver. But this exercise in sustained grimness is an endurance test that shortsells the star’s (and he is a star) narrative strengths. Time to backtrack through the underbrush. 

Black Country, New Road — Forever Howlong  Pull the classified ad. The frontperson position in BCNR is a hot potato no more. It is now split between three screwy yarn-spinning girls. There’s a loooooong tradition of this going back to the Norns, or the Fates, or at least Maggie, Terre and Suzzy. Bubble bubble toil and trouble. They acknowledge it themselves — a new number is actually called “Salem Sisters.” May Kershaw is the secretive one, eyeing her lemon plant and her neighbor with equal suspicion and matching her Newsomesque story of a ghost knight to a throwback acid-folk arrangement. Tyler Hyde is the compassionate one with a pep talk for kids bullied and spoiled alike and full-throated toughlove for a filthy whore. The real revelation, though, is Georgia Ellery, who should have spoken up a long time ago. It’s Georgia who gets the first word and the last, opening the set with the lament of a girl with a same-sex crush on her best friend and closing it with a sly reference to “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.” In between, she contributes one of the year’s astounding songs: a western hallucination in which a wayward narrator picks up a horse killer on the lonesome plain. The band doesn’t shortchange any of these, but it’s telling that they reach those squalling Black Country climaxes fastest and with the mostest on the Georgia material. And though this band of chord-stackers and players with pop form aren’t exactly worried about hooks, it’s Georgia who baits the sharpest ones. Even progressive folk-rockers need a few of those to hang their hats on while they’re fiddling and saxing and hoeing themselves down.

Blood Orange — Essex Honey  It has come to my attention that some regular readers of this space are still wondering what I mean when I talk about mushrock. This is it, my friends.  This is it.

Bomba Estéreo & Rawayana — Astropical  Caveat emptor. It says Bomba on the package, but I do not see or hear any evidence that Simón Mejía, architect of progressive digital cumbia, was involved in this project. Instead the recipe is tropical-fruit streambait: two parts sunny-day whistle-chorus EDM, one part reggaeton-lite, one part Norteamericano pop, one shot of strong guaro, and garnish with expectations that the listener is drunk out of her mind. Plus a parrot. Nevertheless, Li Saumet is singing/rapping, and that’s better than a hunk of chocolate Santafereño. Alas, she must share time on the microphone with the pleasant but vacuous Beto Montenegro of Rawayana, who’d be fine with me if his sunbathing wasn’t casting shade in his partner’s lane. The band/album name may be redolent of warmed buttcheeks, but it’s actually a reference to the zodiac. Each of the twelve songs is attached to a different sign in the cosmic hope that Jupiter will align with Mars and a Spotify add will turn up in somebody’s horoscope. All this stargazing may indeed add a pre-Columbian dimension to this redecoration of the seventh house. But I will take it as further confirmation that astrology is stupid.

Brian D’Addario — Till The Morning  I did not realize that D’Addarios were sold separately. I thought they came as a set, like Flo & Eddie or a pair of Bass Weejuns. Lemon Twigologists and Beach Boys nuts recognize Michael D’Addario as the voice of the upbeat ones like “Rock On,” and brother Brian as the man on the mic for the superdelicate songs with chromatic passages and baroque arrangements like “Corner Of My Eye.” Brian’s ultralight solo flight sticks to clear air and sunshiney skies: ornate sixties pop a la the Buckinghams and especially the Left Banke, poised, carefully paced and never the least bit insincere in its stylistic imitation, never pastiche, nothing pinched, inventive in the principal’s determination to mint new soft-rock melodies even while he’s evoking memories of old ones. The technical skill ensures that it’s never boring no matter how Manilow the main man gets, but let’s just say he’s not out to set your speakers on fire. This has been your D’Addario disambiguation page. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended D’Addario.  

Buscabulla — Se Amaba Así   If you’re out in the sun long enough, everything will get bleary. You will need to take a dip in the Caribbean to gather your senses.  If there is no Caribbean handy, my recommendation is a bottle of water. Just take a sip. Like that, yes. Wait, that’s not water. It’s blue and there’s a slice of pineapple and a swizzle stick in it. Kinda has a kick, doesn’t it. Now you are sun-bleary and dizzy and a pool boy is asking you if you want another cocktail. Say no. Dammit, say no.  

Caroline Rose — Year Of The Slug  The most surprising thing about this very surprising surprise release isn’t the extreme parsimony of the arrangements, pared back as they are to chunky strummed acoustic guitar, double tracked vox, rudimentary Bandcamp drum loops and little else. Nor is it the sturdiness of the compositional architecture: the first couple of albums were so good that Caroline was always a good bet to bounce back from a dalliance with showbiz satire and goopy misproduction. No, it’s that Caroline’s voice is different. Utterly. To put it straight, an artist who once sounded like a woman now sounds like a man. The switcheroo is so extreme that you’re likely to do a double-take if you’ve got any familiarity with past Caroline Rose albums. You might check the label on the MP3s made available for free from the artist’s website. (Yep, still says Caroline Rose.) This transformation isn’t evenly applied across the set: a couple tracks, particularly the “Train Song,” are reminiscent of Caroline in haywire mode a la “They Did It For The Money.” But the majority of the set features a brand new Caroline Rose. It could be tape or software manipulation, or extreme vocal command, or chemicals applied to Caroline’s innards. Whatever it is, it’s unexpected. There are a lot of nonbinary/MTF/FTM artists on this list, and by and large they sound the way they always did. They only look different. Caroline, on the other hand, is the best example of aural transgenderism I can think of.  I imagine this mutability exhibition has got to frustrate the heck out of the terfs.  J.K. Rowling, take that.

Car Seat Headrest — The Scholars  Campus novels, Greek myth, the Canterbury Tales, Bob Dylan, the Bible and other apocalyptic fiction: glad to see somebody still reads broadly and across disciplines. Will Toledo’s compendium of letters home from a campus of his own invention use both sides of the paper. Three songs on the back half break the eleven minute mark, and the others aren’t exactly brief.  Most of them are Who-like heavy strummers (which suits his rock opera ambitions) produced in the insular “Adrenaline Nightshift” style of Japandroids alt-music (which suits the collegiate subject matter). I’m not sure there’s quite enough musical happenstance here to justify these running lengths, but you can’t knock the ambition. Will does a nice job of differentiating the narrators even as he sings everything in the same yelpy voice, and his band backs him up with all the ragged grandeur they can manage. What he’s got to say about scholarship and education is another matter altogether. I think Will largely sees it as means through which a young man — and these are all men — might separate himself from his parents. Several of the students wean themselves over the course of painful confessional narrations, and the coolest of the grownups understands this implicitly and sacrifices himself to save the school and pass the torch.  Other characters simply form a band.  As Will himself knows, that will always be the most elegant solution. 

Cassandra Jenkins — My Light, My Massage Parlor  ASMR and therapeutic massage probably tickle the same cranial pleasure centers. Music, I reckon, vibrates a different part of the noodle. On her mushed-out recordings, Cassandra Jenkins has tried to have it both ways. This new one tips straight over the edge and into the spa steambath with ambient piano and lite instrumental versions of tracks from her last set.  That was plenty EZ listening to begin with. I get the strategy and maybe even the joke: you might recall that on “Only Ones” she sang about a skinny Sisyphus in a massage parlor, and she wants to be sure you know she was referring to herself. Me, I just wonder why everything has to go in this direction — why it all has to get softer, and mushier, and more dissipated, until you’re out there grasping at the shadow of who the artist was when the artist was substantial. I know, it’s about aging, and slowing down, and half-life decay, and the erosion of the Appalachians, and Jenny Lewis’s slow fade of love. Is it the slow march to the grave, or just the long walk down the record store aisles to the George Winston section? Or are those things one and the same? Winter into spring, you know how it goes.

Chance The Rapper —Star Line  This poor schmuck can’t catch a break.  First nobody wanted to hear about his marriage, and now nobody wants to hear about his divorce.  FWIW, I agree it is a wee bit pompous for Chance to be comparing himself to Odysseus. What he means to say is that he went on extended tour and contravened his vows by boning some hos. Right, right, you got that. He is, as we’ve come to expect from him, awfully plainspoken about his screw-ups.  He conflates the public crucifixion of The Big Day with the failure of his marriage as if on an unconscious level he blames fan rejection and maybe Anthony Fantano for the breakup. Maybe he’s right. It couldn’t have helped. Back from the dead he may be, but he’s a cowed and cranky Lazarus, perpetually rubbing sleep from his eyes and lapsing into extended groggy narration about everything that went wrong. Even a track about his prettiness morphs into a lovelorn rumination. “My mom told me I’m a nice person/I got left but maybe I ain’t found the right person,” and other desperate reassurances, right before a track in which Jay Electronica whines about getting kicked off of social media for antisemitism. Elsewhere Chance discusses his arsenal of guns more than he ever has, delivers some un-Chance-like death threats against fake friends, calls marijuana dispensaries a government scam, and reminds us how much money he’s distributed to the needy Chicago children who didn’t have a chance (get it) for awhile. In an effort to assure us that he’s really back from public entombment in a Hollywood vault, he’s partially reassembled the old production crew, and Peter Cottontale, Nate Fox et. al. occasionally tilt at the Soulquarian heights of the Social Experiment. They can’t get there, but neither can anyone else. I continue to find Chance a better writer than a rap verse assembler — check out the sustained anticlerical argument on “Letters” — and a more effective communicator than most of his peers, even when his diction is awkward and his subject matter ain’t too original. Even when he’s acting like a schmuck, his craving for love ennobles him.  And yes, I said that about The Big Day, too. 

Charmer — Downpour  Okay, now we are deep in the trenches of the genre. These are the anglerfish emo depths where pop-rock sunlight does not penetrate. You gotta take a submarine past Algernon and Arm’s Length and Free Throw and other janky, abrasive stuff that’s already twenty thousand leagues from the surface.  But it turns out it’s pretty comfortable here as long as you can handle the emotional pressure. You know what you’re getting: suspended chords and sheets of distortion, overdriven lead lines in counterpoint with the melodies, skipped beats, pregnant pauses and unusual punctuation, knowledge of what you did last summer, cries of olly olly oxen free and other fragments of childhood memory, all-purpose hurt feelings. The Charmer guitar player likes to soup himself up and go on Joey Santiago-like excursions, and the singer maintains that specific pout that connotes the cumulative effect of a lifetime of slights and misfortunes that all Midwesterners must endure. So consistent in tone is this Marquette combo that you might find it monochromatic. Thus it is really only recommended to those who cannot get enough of this particular benighted sound. (Meekly but emotionally raises hand.)

Children Of The Sün — Leaving Ground, Greet The End  If you’re going to screw around with gratuitous umlauts in 2025, you’d better have the goods. You’d better know rock inside and out. Otherwise, I might be tempted to call you a bünch of Swëdish pöseürs.  

Chip Wickham — The Eternal Now  Jazzmatazz from a Brighton sax man. Long time blowing. Like many current UK jazz musicians, Chip started out making meticulous electronica and downtempo hip-hop, and you can tell he’s still thinking about the soundscape and the mood as much as he is about personal expression. Some of this stuff is even (gulp) cinematic, but it only really tips into smooth jazz territory when the principal puts down his horn and picks up the flute. Chip gets an assist from drummer Luke Flowers, who breaks every beat like a kid snapping sticks over his knee just because it’s a stick, and sticks are for snapping. Seriously, the guy cannot play a straight beat, and as dexterous as he is, all his shuffling and stuttering gets a little tiresome. And I do find myself wondering whether part of the reason why British rap music is so bad is because it’s full of moonlighters whose first love is jazz. The moment they gain acclaim, they put the MPCs and turntables away and start huffing on acoustical instruments like some withered septuagenarian at Smalls. American hip-hop is, conspicuously, made by hip-hop lifers, and it shows. When Andre 3000 picks up the pan pipes we ride him about it all day. Imagine what we’d do to a non-Hall Of Famer.

Chloë Doucet — Sincerely  If festivals like New Colossus are like scouting combines, here’s your number one draft pick. Chloë Doucet is as close to the complete package as you’re ever going to hear in a club gig context. This young artist has a priceless carrying tool. She knows how to move a melody across harmonic changes. In other words, she’s in firm possession of the essential. Everything else is teachable, negotiable, or dispensable. The obvious point of reference for her music is Liz Phair, and Chloë sure isn’t running from that, but I also hear overtones of other complicated Canadians, including Neko Case and Sarah Harmer circa Weeping Tile. There’s even a little bit of Sabrina Carpenter-style impertinence in the way she addresses her boyfriends, but she’s nowhere near as scathing, which probably makes her a better fit for gentle alt-rock audiences than she is for the ruthless pop masses. Nevertheless, because of the approachability of her affect, her ability to lead a band, and her knack for turning a tune, she could probably be appreciated by anyone; hell, stick her in a cowboy hat and set her loose in Nashville and I reckon she’d do fine. Her album feels like it was recorded fast and on the cheap, and the sweetening and embeefening that ensures pop palatability isn’t evenly applied across the recordings. Nevertheless, all of the elements are here: the clever sequencing of notes in melodic phrases, the sense of place, narrative, and perspective, catchiness, sensitivity to the nuances of her support musicians, a sense of time and occasion and immediate recognition of musical happenstance as it unfolds, obvious intelligence, an the ace singer-songwriter’s ability to balance wit and emotional effulgence. Three of the compositions on this set — “Five Thousand Suns,” “Manitoba Thunderstorm,” and “Over It” — could not have been coined any sharper or polished any brighter by her models. The other six are merely excellent. I was impressed by her writing before I caught her upstairs at Pianos, and watching her negotiate a difficult sonic environment for a rock storyteller and put these songs across anyway confirmed my suspicion that she was the real deal. What she needs now is some bucks, some breaks, and a whole lot of belief in herself. Fingers crossed. I’ll be watching.

Clipse — Let God Sort Em Out  It’s always dispiriting to agree with Pitchfork but there’s no ducking it: Pharrell Williams has really let the Thorntons down. Because of Pharrell, the brothers return to cheeseball fanfare and vainglorious chorus hooks that they were miles above when they first emerged from the alleyways of coastal Virginia. Since Pharrell has always not-so-secretly wanted to be in the Clipse, his inability to provide Malice and Pusha the grime they required has got to bug him somewhat. Though apparently not enough. As for the T brothers, they remain undisputed masters of the standalone hip-hop verse, which is close but not quite the same thing as being master lyricists. They open this family reunion with tales of family loss: little brother Terence handles the stanza about their late mom, and OG Gene follows it up with equally hard rhyme about their late dad. From there, though, it’s mostly clever drug references and referential one-liners (“Bezos of the nasal” indeed), and though they execute it all with the crispness of the coke-rap champs they are, I do wonder if there’s enough new here to justify dragging Malice out of the monastery. He’s here for the money, he assures us, in case we were worried. Mike Tyson/blow to the face, thank you thank you, we’ll be here all week. Elsewhere they reference so much filmed entertainment you’d think they were Siskel and Ebert. As for the rap beefs, they’re mostly pro forma, as tangling with Travis Scott is a little bit like insulting a swamp bush. It’s not going to do anything. It’s just going to sit there, dripping wet, waiting for angry you to paddle on through the marsh in your canoe so it can get back to photosynthesizing.
 
Cold Specks — Light For The Midnight  I feel like this wants to be a big, dumbass, gospel-inflected arena-rock record like momma used to make, and it does contain the all pounding and yearning and constipation-suffering performances that that aspiration suggests it might. Alas, Ladan Hussein’s voice is so nasal and her phrasing so awkward that it pushes this record out of the middle of the road and into the abyssal gutter of indie music. If it was 1985, she’d steal the show at the Concert For East Timor or the Free The Pigeons Festival at Titans Stadium or something like that. As it is, she’ll have to settle for some blog mentions. 

Cory Hanson — I Love People  Word is out that this collection contains only one raging guitar lead. Western Cum connoisseurs are hesitant. They shouldn’t be. This is the best writing that Cory has ever done: strong melodies and good compositional architecture, consistently worthwhile words, classic, confident, and rock n’ roll erudite, with all references to Bowie, Jackson Browne, and Frosty (the Snowman) completely intentional. I Love People also demonstrates, again, that there are shrewder things to do with a six-string than solo. Throughout this quest to find the price of freedom in a place as dark as modern America, Cory is as defiant as a hard-boiled private eye and funny enough to justify his paranoia and maybe even his misanthropy. Comparisons to FJM and Destroyer are accurate but a little misleading, easy though it is to get hung up on the piano and saxophone. It’s more likely Cory gets his newfound Randy Newman influence directly from the source. He knows what to do with it, particularly on “Old Policeman” and “Santa Claus Is Coming Back To Town,” which are both lonesome, emotionally devastated, and literary-ironic in a manner that the master might appreciate. The splashier ones are the best, though, including the thorny title tune, the Eagles-y “Texas Weather,” and the George Harrison-sounding “On The Rocks.”  And the Lou Reed tribute is glorious — proof positive that Cory can be sincere when he wants to be. Not that we’d always want him to be. It’s all beautifully recorded and impeccably performed, everything considered but never too deliberate, elegant, combustible in a controlled sort of way. The only bad thing about this no-filler set is that it’s so clearly a one-off.  As I type, Cory is surely greasing up his pole for Western Cum 2.  Ah well. We fans of Twelve Songs and Good Old Boys will take what we can get. 

Dana Gavanski — Again Again  Here’s hoping that ponderous piano music isn’t the future for this erstwhile new waver.  On Late Slap, she found something novel to do with Lene Lovich hiccups and Cyndi Lauper peeps, not to mention Joe Jackson grooves.  It’s not that these five glacial major-chord mushballads with ASMRcore vox and vague lyrics are bad, or any worse than what you’d get out of What’s-her-face (pick your What’s-her-face) at the eighty-eight.  It’s just that this meditative territory has been very well covered lately.  Perhaps she’s gotten this out of her system and she can get back to jerking us around like a fairground scrambler in need of maintenance. How to feel/how to feel/how to feel uncomfortable, you remember how it goes.

Danny Brown — Stardust    If you thought that goofy-ass Warped Tour Toro Y Moi album would have been great if Chaz Bundick could rap his way out of a paper bag, here’s one for you.  Stardust has been touted as Danny Brown plus hyperpop, which is accurate to the subgenre, I guess, but really it’s just danny plus pop, which suits this cheeseball fine. It also suits Danny, who is as loose and funny as he’s ever been, rhyming “on everyone’s phone like U2” with “start a riot like zoot suit,” cruising along like a big ole smiling shark, cutting through the waves, and occasionally dipping outtasite and underwater to let the sun shine on his young and mostly queer collaborators. You’re not fooled. You know he’s right under the boat, and he’ll resurface momentarily with his mouth open and all incisors showing.  And I know I wrote that I prefer Danny in ruminative Quaranta mode, but damn if I am not enjoying his exuberant return to chaotic neutrality. He’s like a prime period Mix-A-Lot who doesn’t need to digitally pitch shift to turn into Kid Sensation.  (A few of you know what I’m talking about.)  I love the trans-liberation fighting words from Issbrokie and the Ukranian hard rhyme, the pinches from Albini and callbacks to the (Biblical) Book of Daniel, and the crazy rhythms and computer stutters that Danny rides like they ain’t no thing.  So playfully bizzerk are the glitch-pop excursions that when he slows down to send a fidelity pledge to a girlfriend on the Quadeca collaboration “What You See,” I almost believe him. Skeet on buttcheeks and wouldn’t pass ‘em a towel, says Danny about past selfish practices, before admitting it was his own low self-esteem that had him getting them out of their jeans. Always a smidge more honest than the average rapper, Danny is. Sometimes a smidge goes a long way. 

David Lowery — Fathers, Sons And Brothers  Weird how much this meandering twenty-eight song memoir rock project reminds me of Maps by Billy Woods. Hear me out now. David, like Billy, is an odd man out in showbiz because he cannot approximate the entertainer’s bland, genial disposition. He’s a good sight too smart for an industry that supports him sometimes but is basically indifferent to his existence. Thus there is a spectral quality to their travels through the pop demimonde. They’re there and not there. They’re Banquos at the record label buffet table, unpretentious and observant intellectuals accidentally let into the parties of the fabulous and inattentive. David, like Billy, is conscious of the way in which the world around him is aflame, and he’s constantly threading around the residue of war and mortal combat. Those stick-clicks could be a footfall on a landmine, metaphorical or literal. This feeds their paranoia and their creeping feeling that professional music-making and its glittering trappings are nothing but a flimsy veil that can be yanked away at any time. Billy wonders whether today will be the day he is handcuffed and frog-marched, David worries about landing in the Disneyland jail. Billy searches in vain for good pot and coughs up the bad stuff; David passes out drunk under the desk of the publisher of Spin Magazine and winds up praying to the vending machine light in an AA clinic. The rapper has his primal experiences of the Zimbabwe savannah; the folk-rocker has the frozen North Sea, sketchy memories of Seville, and the Inland Empire. Billy never took the skinheads bowling, though, nor would he ever write a song called “I Wrote A Song Called Take The Skinheads Bowling.” There are still uncharted places in the psychological outback that can only be reached via camper van. So buckle up. It’s a long and dusty ride. 

Deep Sea Diver — Billboard Heart  Happiness is not a given, happiness is not a given, over and over. You don’t say, Jessica. Here I thought life was all puppies and obligatory handjobs. Mind you, this is the climax of Billboard Heart — the revelation that Deep Sea Diver has spent eleven tracks building toward. Is Jessica five years old? Perhaps only recently has she internalized a lesson she might have learned from Mister Rogers. Given that the best song on the set is called “What Do I Know” (chorus: “what do I know?”), there’s evidence that Jessica is aware of the problem. Her elves are working on it. While they do, she’ll continue whooping away in that post-Polachek voice of hers, and backing up her art-rock pronunciamentos with vicious, whip-like, welt-raising electric guitar. Amazing how a spoonful of nasty, overdriven riffage makes all the hooey go down easy. With Jessica, it’s always way more than a spoonful. She splatters ultraviolet paint all over these songs and toggles the blacklight as fiercely as she can. She swings her six-stringed bo-stick around like a coked-up ninja. She stings like a yellowjacket and buzzes like a broad-waisted sawfly. She’s a guitar heroine, basically, and it’s always a good day for guitar heroineism. Sometimes Jessica gets help from the bass player and the synthesist, but more often than not, they’re content to lay back like the Washington Wizards when Jordan was on the team and watch Jessica hoop. Even the drummer’s electro-tribal fills are mostly positioned to enhance whatever Jessica happens to be doing. And this is a good strategy!, I believe they call it playing to your strengths. A less confident bandleader would have swamped her iffy lyrics in reverb and distortion instead of bellowing away, right there in public, about her shovel. Like Ted Nugent, she believes that fast guitar forgives everything. She’s probably right. Ted was. Call this what it is: the year’s dumbest good album.  

De La Soul — Cabin In The Sky  First comes love/then comes baby/then comes marriage/maybe. Now there’s the Kelvin Mercer I know. Complication over hardness, cynicism put to the service of social clarity and, as he puts it, the silent life of a truth. When he gets into it, as he does on the first verse of “En Eff,” he remains the best arbiter and negotiator of moral and ethical complexity in hip hop history. He’s more of a street-level metaphysician than KRS, even. “I am I be I am I be,” you remember the mantra. But death, I’m afraid, is a subject that will flummox the deepest of thinkers. Once brother Trugoy was here and now he isn’t?, how does that even work?  You’re telling me that that incomparable word-juggler, that verbal potato-masher has been expunged from this plane?  One held up, as far as I can tell, by the pillars of Native Tongues artistry and nothing more? So Pos and Mase try a few techniques and search for angles to approach the intangible. They lean on friends, which is what the well-meaning always tell you to do when somebody dies. Common “knows that God is watching us and feels like a populist,” Black Thought honors David Jolicouer via Stakes Is High paraphrase, Bilal and Slick Rick just zone out and croon like they’re at a prayer session. Mercifully, only one of these twenty tracks contains a gospel choir. Yet all the positivity and rumination and speculation about castles to come are blown away the minute they drop in the archival Trugoy verses. With no legacy to reflect on or requirement to be meaningful, Dave sounds loose, funny, and as exuberant as he wants to be, and frankly, he mops the floor with emcees whose reputations exceed his by hip-hop miles. Pos and Mase proceed like they know this (and of course they do), gifting him an un-De La and very funny final word in which he’s doing a home invasion, of all things. And hey, all rap albums that incorporate unearthed material by a dead legend are uneven, and this is no exception. But it is indisputably at its best when Pos and Dove trade verses (“Patty Cake”), and sometimes lines (“The Package:), like it is 1989 and these guys are shooting the pure plug bull. Maybe that’s all the theme you need.  Enjoy it here and now, because it ain’t happening again.

Dom Salvador, Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad — JID024 Like most of these Jazz Is Dead projects, this is a bit of a bait and switch. Ali Shaheed Muhammad only appears on two tracks, and he’s not deejaying or soundscaping or summoning the Zooooloooo Nation on either one. Instead, he matches proletarian electric bass patterns to the measured drumbeats of Natalia Lafourcade side-person Leo Costa, who doesn’t do anything too special here.  Maybe he wasn’t asked to. It’s pretty clear that nobody is thinking very hard.  The guest of honor and the reason for the season is Dom Salvador of Rio 65 Trio, who has got to be pushing ninety by now.  He was an outrageous player as a young man, but that was a long time and several Brazilian coups ago.  You’d think that if they were going to drag him out of mothballs for their series, they’d find him some nice easy chair type arrangements for him to settle into and get comfy. Unfortunately, art music dilettante Adrian Younge forces him to compete with a Sun Ra Arkestraful of whistles and slide trombones and electric sitar and all the samba cliché anybody can handle.  This whole Smoke Sessions practice of enlisting elderly legends to play with session guys they’ve never heard of needs to stop. The chemistry across the decades is always nonexistent and the recordings are always noisy and busy and overcooked. I call it shameless cognoscenti-baiting when I’m not calling it exploitative. Cut it out. Leave these old dudes alone to schmolder over in peace in the nursing home. Adrian, don’t be a hip-hop Andrew Cuomo.

Drake & Partynextdoor — Some Sexy Songs 4 U  OVOXO legacy projects are starting to remind me of those ‘80s prog sets like Radio Kaos or Emerson, Lake & Powell where the band drops a ridiculously out-of-place radio single or two in the middle of a long wallow in the slough of despond with Mars The Bringer Of War. This was, as you’ve probably guessed, rush-released to compensate for Drake’s humiliation in the court of public opinion, and it sounds that way. It’s a record designed to climb the charts and soothe the principal’s ego, and one about as sexy as Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND). Most of it is the pink slime version of Drake: Drake mashed up, reconstituted with chemical additives, and squirted through black iron extrusion dies into vacuum-sealed packages. But the “hits” are actual hits. That means “Hotline Bling” successor (or perhaps “Toosie Slide” successor) “Nokia” and “Die Trying,” which is just a goofy middle of the road acoustic guitar strummer. He should do more of those. Noel Cadastre is the latest pinch hitter filling Noah Shebib’s boots, and let’s just say he’s doing the best he can in tough circumstances. As for Drake’s recent subject matter, don’t ask. He’s running with the devil, it’s touch and go.

Earl Sweatshirt — Live Laugh Love  If it is true that, as Earl tells us, we’re never going to get a rise out of a real one, I reckon we’re well within our rights to search out fake ones. I am going to go out on a limb and say that cultivating dynamic emotional range is the key for real ones to connect to a mass audience. (The fake ones too.) None of the vagaries of modern life shock Earl, blunted as he is and gargling marijuana smoke as he mumble raps about this and that but mostly marijuana and his own unflappability. “Things I thought would shake me to the core just made me harder.” Fair enough, but isn’t that an odd thing for a popular performing artist to brag about? Even when it devolves into narcotized syllables reminiscent of sick stork calls, the rapping here is really good, as we’ve come to expect from Earl, and the production finds the artistry in the murk at the bottom of the fishtank more often than it doesn’t. He just needs to summon the energy to pole vault out of the muddy rut he’s dug himself ever since Some Rap Songs. “Tourmaline” suggests he can do it.

Eliza Niemi — Progress Bakery  Last year, artists such as Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo squirted grease-cutting Palmolive right into the middle of the mushrock blob. So why is there still an oily, filmy layer atop the washbasin of pop-rock? Well momma I’m afraid the sink don’t drain overnight. There may be a ball of Justin Vernon’s lint caught in the P trap. Now, one of the major postmush approaches that has been getting gristly traction since the dispersion of the clog is the too-close, semi-whispered, hyperarticulated approach to vox that I like to call ASMRcore. In ASMRcore, the singer sidles right up to the pop screen and mewls the song in as small and powdery a voice as possible. then the fader is pushed as hard as the (digital) board allows, and the arrangements are pared back until every uvula quiver, molar scrape, and saliva bubble is audible on the track. I blame podcasts. Well, podcasts and Phoebe Bridgers. Obviously it is hypocritical for me, Meredith Godreau’s number one fan, to make a big deal out of this, but it really is getting out of hand. It’s making albums that should otherwise be enjoyable into exhibitions of teeny weeny plosives and glottal expulsion. Eliza Niemi is a fine lyricist with interesting diction, and I like the noninvasive, arthroscopic way she’s inserted her cello into her mixes. But by the fifth song, all I can hear is the clicks and lip pops and inhalations of her aggressively EQ-ed face. Eliza is not a !Kung warrior, and I am not half as interested the contents of her mouth as her producers think I am. If I wanted this much spit, phlegm, and breath in my life, I would have become an orel hershiser.  

Eruca Sativa — A Tres Dias De La Tierra  The Los Angeles Police Department has about eight thousand officers in it. It’s large. You don’t want to cross the boys in blue pointing their guns at your four man crew.  But what if I told you that they can’t hold a pistol-shaped candle to New York?  The NYPD has fifty thousand officers.  That’s bigger than the Canadian army.  They’re loaded with military surplus and urban combat gear. They’ve got submarines. They’ve probably got tactical nuclear weapons. I wish I was joking but I’m not. All of this is to say that if the Federal government decides to make the punishment of Mamdani’s New York and New Yorkers a major priority in 2026, I can see about eight thousand ways it could go wrong, because they’re not commandeering the police department without a major tussle. That’s not how the NYPD rolls.  They could try to turn segments of the department on to the project of ethnic cleansing and spark internal warfare in an institution that is armed to the teeth. They could seize control from the top down and use patrol squads to round up political undesirables and perceived enemies of the Trump Administration.  Or — and I can’t believe i’m saying this, but we have to be prepared — there could be outright clashes between invading guard troops from Idaho or wherever and the NYPD.  Tanks on Fifth Avenue, platoons in Tompkins Square Park, it’s all on the table. As the calendar turns, all we can do is cross our fingers and hope that cooler heads prevail and they decide to leave New York alone. That’s all I want for Christmas.

Ezra Furman — Goodbye Small Head  There’s a nice flash of honesty in “Submission,” which, tbh, isn’t otherwise a very good song. Ezra, on the electrolysis table and wincing in pain, counts masochism as a possible motivation for physical intervention in gender presentation. Ezra, we’re told, needs enemies more than those enemies need Ezra. Later on in the set, in a sharp theological observation from a writer who used to be full of them, Ezra makes the same claim about an angel. It’s beginning to dawn on this intelligent underachiever that the self-mythologizing that began in a big way on Transangelic Exodus was a trap — not because romantic notions are bad in themselves (this is pop) but because they radically overestimate how much the universe gives a damn about you. We’re back to Ezra at the red light on the deserted Chicago street at night with nobody watching but God, wondering whether or not to rev the motor and run right through. “I’m not like the guys that you see in most bands,” Ezra once told us, “because I hate everyone and I don’t want any fans.” That was hyperbole, sure. But it was also a loner speaking; not a representative of secret society or a spokesperson for anything, but a solitary queer trying to work out a personal relationship with art, the Almighty, and the audience. On Goodbye Small Head, there is no Springsteenian getaway car coming to Ezra’s rescue, and no gang to ride with: just a weird brain wracked by seizures and the fire of the Lord. After a long detour, it’s a big step in the right direction. 

FKA Twigs — Eusexia  Plain old sex isn’t good enough for her, I see. Human ramming and grinding like grandma used to do won’t bring her to orgasm anymore. No, Tahliah has got to drag the machines into it. In truth this interminable ASMRcore exercise does feel like sticking your dick into a futuristic tube and waiting for suction that never comes. All we get are jiggly glitches. Hmm, maybe we need to drop more quarters into the slot. The music is warmed over Ray Of Light plus those gratuitous trebly and plinky digital beats that British people think are radical. I hear they like blancmange and jellied eel too. The lyrics are mostly about how various people are worth it. Also, she is worth it. She tells us she wants to be touched in her deepest and darkest places, which I assume means her booty hole. Furthermore Tahliah confesses that she tried to have sex with the lights on in order to establish that she’s an open and honest person. Later she subjects us to North West rapping in Japanese. Naturally this has gotten rave reviews, which confirms my suspicion that tastemakers don’t pay attention to a thing they’re hearing. They just get down to celebrity gossip and the rollout campaign. Maybe they let a few tracks play in the background while they answer DMs and do the Wordle. Maybe not.

Foxwarren — 2  Andy Shauf fronts this peculiar band, but it’s not clear if he’s the principal songwriter. The compositional formula feels similar to Andy’s own, but it’s twisted on the X and Y axis simultaneously. This is the kind of set where a song built around a Weir-ish riff is called “Deadhead.” They’re calling attention to the musical phenomenon that gives the track its personality, see, not its story. Andy is a prolific guy and could have been stockpiling vague ones alongside the album-length tales about fickle Judy’s return to town. But the retreat into elliptical verse puts great deal of strain on the soft-rock composition, which must hold the listener’s attention even as Andy puffs away in that talcum powder voice of his. The arrangements are consistent throughout: queasy ballroom strings, pianos gently striking odd chords, airless close harmonies, taped bits from movies, chopped up loops and samples, overexposed photographs, the bleariness of the morning after a bender. It’s never uninteresting, but I’m left wondering what it adds up to. A fussbudget might say that meticulousness is its own reward. Fussbudgets deserve something to rock to, too, or just sway nervously to; I’m not going to tell a fussbudget what to do.

Geese — Getting Killed  What you have heard is true: this album does indeed sound like the Stones tripping on Robitussin. Or maybe you didn’t hear that. Maybe I just made that up. Either way that first impression is a superficial one, since Cameron Winter has no interest in making any moves like Jagger. Subsequent listens reveal something more like Gomez: junkyard blues-rock made just weird enough to feel futuristic, grooves always right on the verge of getting unstitched, various suffocation sounds, gratuitous panning tricks and endless guitar overdub crosstalk, horns, foot-pedal sound FX, vocal harmonies in unexpected places, and a big-voiced groaner getting downtown-theatrical and rasping it up in the middle of the mix. Like Ben Ottewell, Cameron is suspicious of the city but too worried about the repercussions of his own introversion to go pitch a tent somewhere depopulated. Like Ben, he is prone to zonked pseudo-realizations such as “there is only dance music in times of war.” (Whoa man.) Also like Ben, he does bang on. He is consistently saved from his own operatic grandeur by his faith in classic rock melody, his sense of play, and by his shameless flirtations with absurdity. But mostly, he is saved by drummer Max Bassin, who keeps this whole thing hip-swivelly throughout, slams the skins with intent to rattle the floor, and handles the hairpin turns and wild mood swings with no sweat visible. He even helps make sense of Kenny Beats’s clattering production. Seriously, Cameron should give that kid a raise.

Gelli Haha — Switcheroo  Gotta admire a disco duck who makes an electropop chorus out of “what the hell is going on.” She doesn’t sound bewildered or anything. She could just be greeting her friends at the club door. This is beat music, sort of, suitable for the get-downs of frantic dancers high on Yoo-Hoo and heaping bowls of Lucky Charms. Squelchy synthesized bass, ping-pong volleys, linoleum squeaks like a fat man slipping in the shower, cute little bounces, bubbles and burbles and bumblebee buzzes, nuclear meltdowns in counterpoint: those who’ve enjoyed Bolis Pupul production or the early work of Moloko ought to be right at home. Gelli’s pipsqueak voice is not the stuff from which dancefloor commanders are made, but she picks her spots: when she orders me to pop the weasel and eat the patty cake, I certainly get the message. Then there’s the one that rhymes homophobia with cornucopia and diphtheria, and the lengthy spoken word number about urinating in a jar at a topless party. It’s all part of the gooey tactile physical reality that Gelli is trying to bring to life through her music — everything rubbery and graspable like a plastic nipple, crankshafts getting cranked and levers getting pulled, and some overexcited playmate squealing in your ear. I wanna touch! I wanna scream! I wanna know everything! Call it an infant’s-eye view of sexual reality if you like, but you gotta admit that that was a pretty fun stage to go through. Because you, too, can be a twenty-four hour party person. Nobody said the hours had to be consecutive.   

Gloomy June — Gloomy June  Tuneful, sincere, energetic, but an odd duck. Well, maybe not an odd duck, but a duck out of time: a time-traveling duck. Gloomy June is emo-adjacent, but not in the way we’ve come to expect from modern baseb-, er, modern bands. Instead of taking their cues from the Midwest stuff, they nod toward the sound that is still derisively called mallpunk. By people who’ve never stepped foot in a mall, I reckon; if Hey Monday and Hayley Williams had been the sound of the Garden State Plaza, let’s just say my summer vacations would have been different than they were. Anyway, a lot of this sounds like late-period Velocity Girl if they’d come out on Drive-Thru records, which is not not my sweet spot. A few of the tracks, particularly “On My Side,” really nail that enby kid uncertainty and longing that you might remember so well.  If you are me, I mean. I remember. There’s a certain segment of skate ‘n’ surfers who consider Straylight Run a better proposition than Taking Back Sunday, and if that describes you, too, I think you’ll agree that we could use a few more bands like this. And if you have no idea what I’ve been talking about in this paragraph, maybe just move along.

Great Grandpa — Patience, Moonbeam  Here’s one custom-carpentered to suit the decor of my wheelhouse. It’s wordy, heartfelt, heavy with metaphor, complete with rowdy rock arrangements bedecked with vocal harmonies, recurring melodic and lyrical phrases, and that juxtaposition of big wattage and big feelings with heartfelt weenie singing I associate with The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die. Chords are suspended, aspirations are frustrated, girls are dizzied up to the tune of that pine-scented, heartbroken Pacific Northwestern rock (I assume this band is from the Pacific Northwest) that we might hear from the not-dissimilar John Van Deusen. This holds, at a very high level, for about two thirds of Patience, Moonbeam until guitarist and principal songwriter Tim Goodwin runs out of tunes and gives the drummer some. Even that turns out to be a necessary breather before the big finish. Highlights include the countrified “Junior,” twin cuts “Emma” and “Doom,” which end in parallel expressions of astonishment from frontperson Al Menne, and “Ladybug,” which is ragged gorgeousness from top to bottom. It shows to go you that no matter what a bleary, shoegazy mess alt-rock might seem to be sometimes, there are still good, gutsy bands howling away in the corners of the industry. You just need to kick over the right stone and suffer through your allergy to Run For Cover records, et. al.  Remember the lesson that Will Sheff once taught indie nation: a little emotion never hurt nobody. Combine a little emotion with a lot of brainpower and you’ve really got something cooking.

Gwenno — Utopia   I suppose if I had a bipedal organism gestating up my uterus, I’d be pretty interested in it, too. “She’s growing inside of me/and I’m wondering who she’ll be,” sings Gwenno Saunders on “St. Ives New School,” opening a dangerous line of speculation that can never be wholly satisfied within a parent’s lifetime. Babies pop out and they don’t really do anything for a long time but eat and scream. Many of them never stop. Modern adulthood, I notice, is effectively indistinguishable from infancy. One in a billion infants go on to kick spacey mushrock songs in Welsh. Since Gwenno’s dad is some sort of guardian spirit of Celtic dead languages and therefore an objectively cool guy, you can see why she thinks she’s got some genetic hot sauce running through her veins. But let’s be honest: it’s probably just gonna be another crappy brat. Even Gwenno herself has decided to sing in English these days, which is a major downgrade since you can now understand what she’s talking about. Oh, and the one called “Dancing On A Volcano” is not a quartet-era Genesis cover. Boo. It’s a Smiths rip.  Johnny Marr and Steve Hackett are very confused.  

Haim — I Quit  Poor Danielle. Everybody’s trying to figure her out. So exhausting.  Cue Elvis C.: girl, I don’t know how you stand the strain. He knows as well as anybody does that it’s a rock star’s prerogative to demand that all attention accrue to her and then complain about it when it does. And Danielle remains 100% rock star, concerned with practical applications of swag and exhibiting no patience with the human relationships that are often the residue of acts of pleasure-seeking. Particularly sexual ones, because you know what happens when you bang a gong and get it on. Your brain releases mighty morphins. You catch feelings for the gentleman with his hand down your pants. Not Danielle. She just slaps on those post-coke-binge sunglasses and bangs her snare in a disaffected way. These days she’s a lot closer to Robert Plant than she is to Stevie Nicks: a wealthy experience-collector collecting experiences, acting kind of miffed about it all for some reason, and foregrounding that pouty badassery in her singing and playing. The main theme of I Quit is that Ariel Rechtshaid is an inadequate boyfriend, a true drag, and you know what?, I believe her. Free and easy down the road she goes, unburdened by prior producers, abetted instead by a producer once produced by that prior producer.  So, yeah, I guess she hasn’t gone far.  Rostam’s version of Haim is much like Ariel’s only more relaxed, with poorer quality control, which actually suits a long and jetlagged post-breakup ramble.  You might call her a defector from the petty wars that shell-shock love away.  Only Joni had the whole country as the backdrop for her hejira.  As far as I can tell, the next time Danielle leaves Los Angeles will be the first.

Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover — What Of Our Nature  They’re double-billed like Jenny and Johnny, or Mario and Luigi, or Sacco and Vanzetti. Don’t you believe it. Though they both sing lead on five tracks, Haley gets off one word for every five thousand from Max. Or at least it seems that way.  Don’t make me count. The trouble is that Max is a loquacious guy with much to say about Puerto Rrican separatists, neoliberalism, misapprehensions about single-parent families, and the air traffic control strike of 1981.  He wishes to turn his protest verse against oppression. Haley mostly wants to shut her cellphone down, which I believe is something completely within her power to do. Her application of close harmony to Max’s wall o’ text is an athletic feat as well as a musical one, and the occasional sweetening and leavening she adds to his proletarian grumble is half a magic trick and half an act of mercy.  Alas, the real problem here is that Max knows one and a half chords (that I couldn’t help but count) and he humps dutifully on each downstroke like he’s doing data entry.  Haley’s guitar — the number one reason to check out this project in the first place — gets a little lost in all the Guthrieisms. Should Max really want to strike a blow against injustice, he might start by righting the balance in his own folksinging duo. Point the right machine that kills fascists at the fascists, no?

Hand Habits — Blue Reminder  Much ado about Meg Duffy’s wants. There’s also quite a bit here about Meg’s needs. Seems a tad self-absorbed on an album that is ostensibly filled with love songs, but perhaps Meg needs to get all of that sorted before the ol’ romance ball can get rolling. For now, Meg is mostly interested in the effects of love on Meg, which is not the way they tell you to do it in the Valentine’s Day handbooks, or, for that matter, the Discovery Channel. But you know what they say: when you’re an (indie) star, they let you get away with (indie) anything.  That includes hallucinations of forbidden Molly in a passing car on the highway and requests for apology and explanation from objects and people traveling at the velocity of passion. The very next track is called forgiveness. Naturally, it’s an instrumental. Elsewhere, sexy Meg likens a relationship to a dead rat rotting in a wall, which is definitely a great way to pick up chicks, and then goes on to mix metaphors so egregiously that we are soon cuddling with a soft and honey-coated scorpion that twinkles. That inattention extends to the music, too, which only coalesces into memorable hooks and choruses when Meg works up the gumption to care. Mostly there is guitar, and meditation, and languor, and ommmm the sound of the universe, and some hooey about what love can do. No word on whether Meg wants to share this transformational radiance with someone special.  Maybe yes and maybe no. I advise Molly not to hold her breath. 

Hayden Pedigo — I’ll Be Waving As You Drive Away  Here’s a gleaming desert mirage for the spectral folkies out there: an instrumental (mostly) acoustic guitar record that takes direct inspiration from John Fahey and Bert Jansch. Didn’t think they made ‘em like that anymore, did you. Somewhere Blind Joe Death is rocking in a rocking chair and nodding along. Hayden Pedigo has a nifty circular way with a riff and a finger-picked pattern and he knows how to speed up and slow down without defusing any of the minor-key drama. The guitarist didn’t have to add electric overdubs, strings, and synth pads to be properly mesmerizing, but they’re never too disruptive. His playing alludes to the lonesome highway, too much sun on the windshield, the great witchery of not-so-great plains, and left turns taken at Albuquerque. After twenty-eight minutes, he’s through. He’s reached his dusty destination in the dry gulch. Get out, stretch your legs. Beware of coyotes. 

Hayley Williams — Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party  Long worried that she’s too smart for God, Hayley decides instead that she’s too smart for Music City. She makes a case. “True Believer” is about as devastating a takedown of a specific American municipality as I’ve heard in the twenty-first century. Then she backs it up with the putdown of the racist country karaoke bars in the title track. In order to have a proper sex fantasy, she needs to fly to Shibuya, and when she wants her pussy eaten, she asks in Portuguese. She’s really looking to get out of town. Now, Hayley’s pledge of allegiance to Nashville’s ghost is obviously more than NIMBY-ism or mere nostalgia. She’s got an indie artist’s idea about how her city should be, and how the rapacity of Christ Incorporated deadens the people around her. Particularly woeful are the men in her orbit, who keep striking out with the bases loaded. Hayley’s suitors are either burdened with misdirected affection or dithering on the sidelines at pivotal moments. That might make a girl do something crazy, like pinch a chorus from the Bloodhound Gang and shine a blacklight on it. Comparisons to Liz Phair’s repurposing of the “Double Dutch” hook are not far off base. Elsewhere, Hayley dedicates a love song to her antidepressant and writes shrewdly but with no small amount of bitterness about the burdens of first-born children. Thorny content notwithstanding, this doesn’t play crazy at all. Instead it’s a record of the thoughts of an intelligent thirty-six year old woman with a grown-up suite of problems and a track record of disappointments that, as a once and future emo king, she’s not ashamed to overshare. Though she dips into the mushrock well a tad too often for my tastes, the hummingbird-flitting between alternastyles and AAA pop generates a pleasant breeze in the garden. She closes with “Parachute,” one of the year’s best short movies — a retrospective wedding narration from a woman who confesses that she was married in combat boots. In three minutes she manages to condense and extend many of the ideas that made The Tortured Poets Department such a candid look at the dynamics of wanting and being wanted, right out in public where the gawkers can see. She sings the heck out of it, but you already knew that. Should she get tired of the music thing, she might set her sights on a Pushcart Prize, or maybe a place in the Jersey City planning department. Hey, it’s going to be a new administration in search of new directions. This restless searcher would fit right in.

Home Is Where — Hunting Season  I’m not sure what’s more obnoxious: Bea McDonald’s aggressively tuneless yowl or Tilley Komorny’s letter-perfect Southern rock guitar licks. Even in the screechy annals of emo music, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a singer more effectively out of tune than Bea is here — every new note is an opportunity to miss spectacularly and hilariously and a chance to perturb the listener and rub her nose in subversion of expectation. Bea’s utter contempt for pitch is a glorious rebellion, and it’s actually pretty listenable once you abandon your standards (you will). Then there’s the corrosive Tilley, who manages to make every guitar passage sound like Saves The Day covering the Allman Brothers, except when it’s the other way around.  The point, which is rather heavily made here, is that the South is a rotting morass of strip malls, dead lawns, car crashes, bad smells, poor maintenance, abrasion, and boredom, and Tilley and Bea and the rest of the Home Is Where crew love it to death for its honesty. This is where the country is at: a deflated inflatable gorilla puddled up on the side of the highway surrounded by American flags. You’ve seen it. Hell, you’ve been seeing it every day. Other noteworthy images from Bea’s horrible/beautiful lyrics include cheerleaders digging a grave in the middle of a football field, cattle separated from the interstate by a cyclone fence, and goosegrass struggling up through the rusted slats and ties of the disused railway. Imagine Flannery O’Connor, jolted awake, screaming, from a nightmare that augured the twenty-first century. Animals crawl under the narrator’s house to die, not knowing what else to do. Dumb and juicy bugs splatter on windshields. In this environment Bea wonders if there’s a difference between being sweet and being dumb, and finally concludes that in a world where everybody eats shit and each other, the distinction is meaningless. They decide to be sweet anyway. Or as sweet as you can be when you sound like you’re getting electrocuted. They’re defiant like that. May they always be.

Hot Mulligan — The Sound A Body Makes When It’s Still  It is underselling these hirsute hooligans to call them an above-average pop-punk and emo band. Then again, do I look like a Hot Mulligan salesperson?  Don’t answer that. I think the argument can be made that there is no group working in the genre(s) that is any tighter or better at nailing its core elements, such as those barbed Mike Kinsella skeins of guitar notes we associate with Midwest emo, or that frantic chugging we associate with pop-punk shows, or the back-and-forth screaming we associate with a hostage situation. I’m just not going to be the one making it. I’ll leave that to Brett Romnes, who clearly thinks enough of the Mulligans, if I may call them that, to plop himself down in the producer’s chair and try to contend with their gushes and squirts of testosterone. Brett lets the band toggle furiously between modes and generally show off their chops, and he even squeezes a little wistfulness out of them from time to time. It’s pleasant, or it can be. but there’s nothing here as catchy as “Gans Retro Video Games” or as nostril-clearing as the songs on the first two sets, and hey, in general, how much do you enjoy being in the company of bros?  I think it’s a wee bit broverrated, to tell you the truth.

Human Tetris — Common Feeling  Grim and grueling post-punk from Moscow. Factory fresh from the Factory Records replication factory. And I think the reason why this angular style never goes away — even though people don’t like Eastern European brutalism in other contexts — is that everybody can count.  It’s gotta be that. Numerical pleasure. It’s not like you can do anything else to post-punk.  If you tried to dance to it, you’d break your ankles. If you tried to screw to it, you’d end up doing five to fifteen. If you tried following the lyrics, you’ll be so bored you’d need an ammonia inhalant to regain your senses.  No more post-punk, please.  C’mon, folks, I’m asking politely.

Ichiko Aoba — Luminescent Creatures  If Mozart came back to life and heard modern symphonic music, he would never stop throwing up. Take him to BAM and he’d be asleep in ten minutes. In Salzburg he did not have the rock beat or Fender quality amplification at his disposal, but he still attempted to cause a stir by minting and developing memorable melodies and generating harmonic and rhythmic intrigue. We do have the backbeat plus the twin guiding lights of gospel and blues. Thus there is no excuse for albums like Luminescent Creatures: a long, dull, shapeless ramble through the orchestra patch, complete with chimes and woodwinds and a forty thousand piece string section engaged in brutal acts of harmonic redundancy. A certain kind of sophisticate will always make room for this sort of thing at Carnegie Hall. But the truth is that Ariana, Dua Lipa, et. al., are far closer to the spirit of real classical music. Roll over Beethoven; tell Tchaikovsky the news. 

Indigo De Souza — Precipice  The sun comes out in Indigoland. No longer is she asking her boyfriend to kill her. No more does she match her masochism to a thicket of guitar. Now, she’s singing over summertime synthesizers and a joyous, breezy Belle & Sebastian beat about… um… oh.  Oh, okay.  She really put her back into it, huh. Multiple interpretations of the scenario on “Heartthrob” are possible, I suppose, and we can read the song in defiance of its implications. But let’s just say that Indigo hasn’t changed all that much.  She remains willing to stand up at the microphone and sing all types of shit, including quasi-problematic content that makes her look iffy. She doesn’t care. She’s not burnishing her reputation or framing her persona, and in the era of the curated rollout and endlessly retouched selfie, that’s refreshing. Indigo is just on the phone with you, maybe in 1995 with the stretchy cord wrapped around an outstretched index finger, talking frankly about unpleasant stuff, never stopping to weed her words or hide any brutality behind poetic diction. And this attitude, I think, is what makes Indigo such a great rock singer — great in excess of her terrific voice. Indigo sings like singers sang in the time before vocal coaches. She sings like Sandy Denny and Grace Slick used to sing: not obsessing about any particular note or trick of phrasing, but just taking off like a fucking rocket and carrying us along with her, confident that her communicative velocity is sufficient to overcome any turbulence. It works for me, and it probably works for you, but I doubt it works for the headz at Company Z, who are likely to keep passing Indigo over in favor of artists more programmable. There’s some discontinuity between the hook-driven expediency of some of these arrangements and the star’s tendency to play things a little loose. Her obvious appreciation for pop-R&B aside, I think a guitar rock attack suits her temperament better than some of the beat-driven choices on Precipice. Turns out you can take the girl off Saddle Creek, but you can’t take the Saddle Creek out of the girl. Not completely, anyway. Amen to that.   

James McMurtry — The Black Dog And The Wandering Boy  Never again do I want to apprehend the United States through the eyes of a shitkicker. I had more enough of that in 2017. Making me do it in 2025 feels like an assignment from an alcoholic editor with rage issues. No, I do not want to spend any time inside the head of an abusive cop worried about his waning virility. I don’t want to know about drunk Everymen in El Paso and Couer D’Alene. That territory has been very well mapped. I don’t care to know about the psychology of a gun-polisher paying off a double-wide, even if he is, for James McMurtry, representative of certain American pathologies. I realize that Springsteen, who James lifts liberally from here and elsewhere, is partially responsible for this strategy, and there’s even a movie out celebrating his acts of radical empathy on songs such as “Johnny 99.”  But that was then. I hope we can all agree that while we got a lot of great music and deep character sketches from the Boss’s campaign through the swing states, none of those bridges across the bloody chasm turned out to be load-bearing in the slightest. I understand the impulse, believe me. We social diagnosticians believe that if we can figure out what makes Billy Bob tick, we might also be able to see what it is that makes him want to torch the house and himself in the process. We can make sense of the nonsensical and go from there. But what we have learned is that there is no sense to make. There is no depth to plumb and no handshake coming. Old wounds will not be stitched up or even cauterized. And if our poets continue to make Charlie Starkweather, et. al., more interesting that he is, someone we might relate to, we will continue to fool ourselves that dialogue is possible. Those guys are not sitting around wondering how to relate to us.  They see us as adversaries and want us to be deported or shot. Many of them would love to have a hand in the deportation and murderization, and with the way we’re going nationally, their dreams may just come true. So pardon me for not giving a fuck what’s going on in Nebraska. I assume it’s nothing good. I am done with the earnest attempts to look into it, and done searching for redeeming details and saving graces. I’m done especially with throwing good faith after bad. It’s time we took care of ourselves.

Jane Remover — Revengeseekerz   This record could not exist without Whole Lotta Red, but to me, it’s more Young Thug than Playboy Carti. It’s not just the digital hi-hat trap beats or the incessant vocal warping or constant conflation of drug-addled semi-euphoria and weapons-grade horniness (“got the plate hot ‘cuz we fucked up now,” indeed). It’s that Jane is essentially a dirty blues artist with repetitive, pentatonic blues melodies and rudimentary blues-rock chord progressions and riffs. That’s when the chords progress at all. Like Jeffery Williams, Jane chucks as much clutter, bomb noises, 8-bit electronic blurps, crash-to-desktop glitches, and computer-assisted signal warps in the tracks as possible in order to disguise the simplicity of the composition and the subject matter. Should a Jane Remover fan shake off his THC-addled stupor and actually pay attention to this particulars of set — not always advisable — he’ll find that it’s all pretty basic. Jane is swaggering, but heartbroken and lovelorn, bent on some unspecified payback, and singing the blues. Some of the bass sounds are seriously gnarly. Others just sound like Duke Nukem splattering extraterrestrials. Other noises are pulls of the fire alarm during a boring school day. It takes some courage for us to defy the hall monitors like that. But we’ve got the biggest balls of them all.  

Japanese Breakfast — For Melancholy Brunettes (& Sad Women)  It’s one thing to compose a mewling soft rock number that expresses irritation with incels. It’s another thing altogether to hire Jim Keltner, of all people, to play the drums on it. Chutzpah, thy name is Michelle Zauner. At least we’re not pretending Japanese Breakfast is a band anymore.  This combo, such as it is, exists to broadcast this AI pitch-person’s reflections on the parlous state of society, and if she needs to hire session dudes to make her points, that tour drummer is SOL. I mean, she’s actually gone and stuck Jeff Bridges on this thing.  Mostly, Michelle is convinced that the men’s movement (however you wanna define it) will be consumed by its own ferocity, and sure, I guess that could happen any day now.  Annnnny day.  Particularly quaint is the expectation on “Little Girl” that the belligerent dad will experience remorse over his estrangement from his daughter, and haha, you don’t get out of the cosmopolitan centers very much, do you, Michelle?  These people have chat groups on Facebook dedicated to the maintenance of their self-righteous attitudes toward the children they’ve alienated. Lots of firearms, too. Underpinning this tack back to the tepid middle after the surprising heat of Jubilee is an unspoken but desperate desire to effect rapprochement with the boomers whose grody masculinity once put her off for very good reasons. While such rational gentility isn’t unexpected from a memoirist celebrated by the New York Times, it’s also how we coastal elitists got ourselves in this pickle. Because these people in the sticks don’t want to make friends. When they assure us that they’d prefer us dead, we ought to take them seriously. Thomas Mann and Renaissance poetry cannot tell us anything about them. They’re not going to feel remorse for anything they’ve done; in fact they feel quite good about themselves. We need to cut it out and recognize our adversaries before we empathize our way straight to the gulags. 

Javiera Mena — Immersión  Even if you leave her plugged in overnight, it does take awhile for Javiera Mena to warm up. This has been true since right after Esquimas Juveniles, the album that helped kick off this whole Latin alternative auteur thing way back when. You’ve got to let the engine run at low cycles per second for a few songs before the rubber meets the road. It is cold out. Snow is on the windshield. There’s a little bulb lit up on the meter that means you shouldn’t try to take it out of the driveway immediately.  Instead, just enjoy the promising purr and the reassuring hum. You’ll get the paradise by the dashboard light soon enough. 

Jeanines — How Long Can It Last  Lean, direct, downcast indiepop from old reliable indiepop friends Jed Smith and Alicia Jeanine. Every one of these thirteen briefies features a nicely developed melody, and when they’ve turned the tuneful trick, that’s it. They take back the cards, shuffle quick, and deal the next hand. Jed and Alicia keep the arrangements minimal: drums and Hofneresque bass, a untreated jangler of an electric guitar or two, very occasional synthesizer to fill space, close harmonies on the choruses, and that is that. Anything that might distract from the tune has been exiled. That’s one way to keep the audience attuned to an outfit’s core competency. Given Alicia’s lyrical interest in her own trepidation, it probably would have undermined the project to stretch out. There really aren’t any duds here, but “What’s Done Is Done” is a particularly impressive example of how much upward momentum a melody can achieve in a minute and a half. No need for afterburners — songwriters like this don’t lift off like a rocket.  She’s more like a pollinator fluttering her way up a tree. A mayfly, woken up when skies are blue.

Jensen McRae — I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!  Jensen McRae has a better voice than the other pretenders working this post-Bridgers folk-rock territory.  Nevertheless, a voice does not a vocalist create. It’s Jensen’s skill at line reading that makes I Don’t Know How But They Found Me! the year’s most reliable singalong option. She’s able to make highlights out of specific phrases by investing her words with meaning and emotion in excess of the poetry on the page.  It’s kind of like acting, but it’s much nicer. Taylor Swift does it all the time. It’s one of the keys to her empire. Jensen, a Taylor acolyte if there ever was one, builds her entire love letter postal service around those deliveries. So memorable are they that her choruses can feel a little anticlimactic. No knock on the choruses meant; they’re good. The money moves, though?, those come on the verses. I’ll give you some examples. On “Let Me Be Wrong,” Jensen tells us that nothing really shakes her now, and you can actually hear the pain meter rising to meet her capacity as her tone inflates to meet the scope of the realization. When she tells an ex to keep whistling boy/I was never your dog on “Praying For Your Downfall,” she surprises herself, and us, with her capacity for defiance. We discover the narrator’s strength at the same moment she does. It’s all in the way she snaps off those consonants and connects with those high notes. On torchy “Tuesday,” she assures us she’ll be forgetting us soon, and then concedes, a moment later, that until then she won’t know what she’ll do.  It’s a mercurial emotional journey, in other words, and she is keeping us alive to every twist in the road. There are many many other moments just like that, with the love lyric as a vehicle for expressions of ambivalence and emotional complexity. Shrewd it is that the producers have incorporated more country elements into the arrangements, because Music City, for all its faults, appreciates and valorizes this particular storytelling skill above all others.  Just ask Morgan Wallen.  I must say that Jensen has terrible taste in boyfriends. But they love that kind of thing in Nashville, too. 

Jethro Tull — Curious Ruminant  I counted, and it’s taking me about five minutes to do each of these. That’s too long. I dunno, I think I was quicker a few years ago. I used to be a bandsaw ripping through lumber and now I am more of a scrimshaw whittler. Am I slipping? Will I soon be unable to do this? Father time comes for us all. He’s come for Charlie Morton, recently “pitching” for the Baltimore Orioles, he will come for me, and he sure has come for Ian Anderson. Ian has put everything in place to make a Tull record: long songs with intricate lyrics, the Rökflöte, the solos and jigs, the crew of volunteer firemen who’ve arrived to make a go at a classic sound. But try as he might, the poor old sod does not have the lung power to drive these compositions. The impeccable command and arrogant self-righteousness that used to fire the Tull engine is beyond his capabilities, and, lessee, Ian is 77, so I reckon this is the fellow we get from here on in. I covered Jethro Tull at the Garden State Arts Center about a decade ago and wrote in the newspaper that Ian had an off-night, only to get lots of mail from Tull listeners — Tull fans, mind you — who assured me that his voice was fried. Got to give Ian credit for wheezing on regardless. The train it won’t stop moving/no way to slow down.   

Juan Wauters — MVD LUV  That’s MVD as in Montevideo, a city of a million and a half with a climate not unlike that of the coastal Carolinas. I’m just going to assume it’s a nice place without looking into it too thoroughly. Even when he was rocking it in Queens and such, Juan Wauters made his South American heritage a large part of his public identity, so this return home is no artistic half-measure. Instead we get Juan Wauters-style optimistic folk-pop plus candombe: Afro-Uruguayan street drummers. Even the breezy, Lekmanlike sitcom-theme strummers get a Latin shimmy. Sometimes Juan simply stands aside and lets the percussionists take over, just as Caetano Veloso did on Transa, or Kermit The Frog did when Animal got on a roll. Juan continues to be hyper-sensitive to place and the way in which his outlook is contingent on where in the world he is, and the scene-setting on MVD LUV is at least as elaborate as the portrait of NYC on lockdown, with its air-horns, sirens, and fragmentary hip-hop beats, on Real Life Situations. I must say that Juan sounds a lot happier in Montevideo than he ever has in the Big Apple, and for an artist who has always made his good cheer part of his aesthetic, it’s probably for the best that he’s repotted himself someplace less combative than the United States. He’s got his antenna out and a big smile on his face, and he keeps drawing our attention to the beauty of his surroundings and the love that the urban community — all urban communities — deserve. It sure has been an interesting trajectory for Juan. Interesting music he makes. Outrageously upbeat and often surprisingly deep. Not a bad discography from a guy I once dismissed as Mac DeMarco en Español.   

Julien Baker & Torres — Send A Prayer My Way  Country music is a little like teaching. Everybody thinks they can do it until they try. Then they’re up there at execution time and they realize that winging it will not cut it. No, you need instincts, long preparation, and a feel for the material in order to get over. Otherwise there will be no apple from Johnny.  Yes, I am Johnny in this context. Post-Boygenius, Julien Baker continues to cast about for somebody else to take the lead. That’s not the outcome for her I expected at the time of Sprained Ankle, but she may still pull out of it. As for Torres, she remains one of the most unpleasant singers in pop-rock: something like Brandi Carlile with all the sententiousness but none of the skills. They’ve stuck themselves with the most ponderous music they can conjure, including glacial tempos, oaken piano chords and pedal steel sliding to nowhere in particular.  Long winter on the antidepressant farm. Bumper crop of Zoloft we’re harvesting this summer.

Kali Uchis — Sincerely  Kids, don’t nod off in the steam room. People have died in there. Perhaps Kali has died in there and we’re the last to know. In my stages of Kali Uchis grief, I am hopping straight from Kali Uchis denial to Kali Uchis acceptance. There is no sense in Kali Uchis bargaining: this is the very artist she wants to be, and we’d know that even if there wasn’t a Karly Loaiza byline on these exquisitely wrought exercises in somnambulance. No more are we ridin’ round with the top down with this woman. No more rapping and Latin percussion and teen impertinence. Kali is up to her cheeks in the bubblebath and she’s not getting out. Every flower petal has been strategically positioned on the tiled floor to enhance the steaming, drowsy, waterlogged vibe. Because it’s Kali, it’s all very well written, with each overture to ‘50s schlock-pop and telenovela bathos expertly turned, with everything smooth and misty, softly radiant and thermostat controlled, and all the instruments hit their marks, and every sigh and coo precisely echoed and every wrinkle steam-pressed, and every dimmer switch slid toward the boudoir setting, and every observation about love and longing thoughtfully articulated, and every humid melody lazily arcing toward the ceiling like a woman rising from bed in slo-mo to meet the day, and zzzzzzz. 

Karol G — Tropicoqueta  She’s a tropical coquette, I get it. There’s also the coquí, the little island frog that makes such a big noise in the casuarina trees, and the coquito, a cream of coconut drink with enough rum in it to knock you straight off the cigarette boat.  Then there are the cocos en la playa that Natalia Lafourcade sings about, and the pair of conkers that Carolina Giraldo uses as her logo. Her boobies request your attention. Nay, they demand it. So much thunder on the congas you might expect from a bouncy, bikini-clad party record and the follow-up to the very good, very hedonistic Mañana Sera Bonito. What I did not expect from this Colombiana from landlocked Medellín was a swan dive and a splash into various Antillean styles. Maybe I should have: she’s already demonstrated that she can rip it up bar for bar with Young Miko and the like. Her trip to the beach includes the stinging reggaeton you’ve come to expect (“Un Gatito Me Llamó”) but also some very convincing bachata (“Amiga Mia”), a cumbia rewrite of “Careless Whisper” that shouldn’t work but does, some irresistible Lucas With The Lid Off shit on the title tune, a few poolside interluuuuubes, and at least one sopping telenovela-style ballad (“Ese Hombre Es Malo”) that could easily have been written and performed by Mon Laferte. Karol can’t sing like that, but it sure is fun to hear her try.  In its granddaughterly respect for her elders’ folk-pop styles, Tropicoqueta plays as an island-hopping companion to Debí Tirar Mas Fotos. Naturally it’s all over the place in its aim to please. So am I. When I’m on tropical vacation, I mean. Seriously, grab that catamaran. Let’s check out what’s over on the next atoll.   

Kathryn Mohr — Waiting Room  This has got to be a butt dial. Somebody sat on the phone funny during practice. Maybe a song is playing?, who can tell?, there is so much rubbery ass between you and the signal. Maybe it is your mom who has butt dialed you. you hear machinery — for your mom works machines — and a female voice. What’s that? Is she calling you an asshole? Your own mommy. No, wait, I think she just said she’s bringing you a red velvet cake. Or perhaps it is not your mom at all. Perhaps it is the sound of despair, despair personified as a woman, eternally operating a blender, making the world’s most boring smoothie.

Kendra Morris — Next  Okay, who ordered a girl Aaron Fraser?  It… it was me, wasn’t it.  Caught red handed I am.  Next is the sort of trad-soul and retro R&B that could only have been made by people deeply familiar with hip-hop and contemporary pop, and it wouldn’t surprise me if all of these characters, including Kendra herself, moonlight as aspiring hitmakers in other projects. The frontwoman has a nice raspy way with her vowels, commendable urgency, and a line open to ghosts and a Ouija board fired up to receive their messages. She’s supported by a sweet-fingered Hofner guy allegedly named Monti Miramonti, a drummer with an island vibe that wouldn’t get him booted off the Carnival Cruise or the Kingston dock (check the excellent flat tire), and a ‘verbed out guitarist who probably lives inside an amplifier tube. Their backing vocals are nicely spectral, too, especially when Kendra starts kvetching about money. Points for the throwback boardgame on the album cover. You remember what Phife said about Parker Brothers. I’m sure they do, too. 

Kerosene Heights — Blame It On The Weather  I am told by the haters that all of these emo revivalists sound the same. Kerosene Heights could be Exhibit A in their argument, if they could pick the band out of a lineup, which… forget it, that’s not going to happen. To the connoisseur, Blame It On The Weather is a pretty neat amalgam of specific ingredients you will only find in the emo aisle of the emo specialty store. (Lighting conditions aren’t great, but the shelves are kept neurotically clean.) I am talking prime period You Blew It! plus the atmosphere of The Dangerous Summer and a dash of Glocca Morra and a shot of Aaron West. The result is like autumn taking physical shape and slapping you upside the head with a dog-eared calendar that’s almost full. Every winding Cap’n Jazz guitar pattern is reminiscent of a falling leaf, or a falling grade point average after a semester spent staring at your classmate’s bare ankles. Mom is very disappointed. Bandleader Chase Smith lets his hardcore roots show and slashes up track after track like Masaharu Morimoto with a bonito on his cutting board, but he makes time for the dirtbag wedding proposal “New Tattoo” and the piledriver breakup song “Die Trying.” The big feelings are never outpaced by the big guitar, and that guitar is big. Inspirational lyric from “Love Spelled Backward Is Love”: “I told myself I’d grow up but I didn’t/and I don’t care.” To me, I mean. It’s inspirational to me. I promise to stay emo if you will. C’mon, don’t make me be emo on my own.

Kerry Charles — It’ll Be Over Soon  This set doesn’t have the verve of I Think Of You, and the firestarter reed man Max Cudworth doesn’t bring this pot to a boil as often as he used to, preferring to slip into a smooth jazz simmer instead. Disappointing in a way. But after a few plays I’ve come to understand these Oates-over-Hall moves as design choices related to the narrative. Seen from the proper perspective, It’ll Be Over Soon is a funny, artfully pathetic record about a sleaze attempting to maintain his lifestyle after his virility has cratered, propping himself up with medication, but mostly sliding toward the abyss. “We’ve been at this for some time,” he whispers on “Viagra Falls,” “Girl, I don’t think I can do much better than that.” This confession comes right before he sticks her in an Uber and hits the hay. The narrator can’t sleep because of his presentation in the morning; he frets over his bank loans and hits the slot machines; he gets fired and is escorted from the premises by corporate security. The attempts at seduction resolve to a demand directed at a woman to share his sedentary lifestyle: I don’t wanna get in shape/I’m rounding, he tells her. Can you handle a quiet storm jam full of sultry pillow talk about ibuprofen and prescription hydrocortizone? How about Lexapro? Kerry says he’s microdosing it. Party habits die hard.

Lady Gaga — Mayhem  Monster masks and meat dresses retired, we can now see Stefani for the likable goofball she is.  If you follow pop at all, I reckon you’re pretty fond of her by now. That is, however, a different thing from being fond of her music. Mayhem is getting pitched as a rebrand, or a reboot, or a repositioning, or any number of other terms better applied to a soda. Nevertheless the proposition is the same as ever. We hope the power compensates for the low batting average. Gaga still cannot imagine a version of maximalism that doesn’t involve a vulgar sonic blowout, and she continues to bellow every line like she’s trying to reach the cheap seats at the auditorium without the benefit of a microphone. On the single, she rah rah ooh gah gahs her way through her umpteenth “Bad Romance” rewrite, bites from “Hollaback Girl,” and runs the metaphor mixmaster so hard that goopy imagery splatters all over the floor. Her main abettor here is Andrew Wotman, the producer-writer responsible for Hackney Diamonds, and it occurs to me that he’s approached Lady Gaga exactly as he did the Stones in ’23. He sees her as a dance-y legacy act with a past sound worth chasing, and the possessor of a likable-impertinent attitude in need of bolstering with zhuzhed up glam rock and Chic-funk guitar. It’s a logical direction for an artist who comes equipped with a massive rearview mirror, and it might indeed prompt a wheeze of approval from Keith Richards or Tony Bennett or Dorian Gray or whoever. It’s also a fair bit more Animotion than they think it is. Every now and then, they really sink their teeth into one: “Vanish Into You,” the Prince nick “Killah,” the silly but giddy “Don’t Call Tonight.” While I reckon the Little Monsters chafe at the Taylor Swift lift on “How Bad Do You Want Me,” I like it just fine. She’s supposed to be an egalitarian. It’s about time she started stealing from artists younger than she is.

Lael Neale — Altogether Stranger  This wan individual intrigues me because she persists in making records despite lacking skills common to musicians, such as the capacity to change notes. I’m exaggerating, but not by a lot. Lael is best understood as a sonic drone that has achieved human form. Her brief, ghostly albums continue to suggest what Lana Del Rey might sound like if you 1.) limited her studio budget to about fifty bucks, 2.) took away all her drugs including the kombucha, 3.) made her record in a motel with an angry man asleep in the bed next to hers. Sssh. Infatuated as Lael is with the Velvets and Spiritualized, she probably wouldn’t cop to a contemporary influence. Instead she humps humps humps on her two-chord oscillations and cheap, unmodulating electric organ pads like her name is Jason Spaceman, and when that third chord finally comes, it’s like getting a single Nilla Wafer for dessert after a spartan dinner. Thanks, mom. If you can look past all of that, the songs and rudimentary grooves are always pleasant and easily endurable, and all of the repetitive hooks are padded enough that you can hang from them for awhile without getting too chafed. Tell me how to be here, with its distant, descending synth-celeste line, is a pretty good example.  It might even make you forget that there’s nothing here quite as hypnotic as “In Verona.” Now that was one facing famine for.  

Laufey — A Matter Of Time  Jazzy not-jazz: there’s a long tradition of it in pop. The difference with this slim glass of Icelandic spring water of a pop star is commitment to the bit. Where Billie Eilish feints and teases and hints of the speakeasy, Laufey plays it to the hilt, dressing the part and decking her songs in Nelson Riddly strings like it’s 1947 and Lauren Bacall is about to descend the marble staircase. Her knack for pouting her way into the heart of the orchestration makes her a rare card to draw in the deck of modern music, even if she’s not exactly an ace. Though she prints her chords for sophistilisteners, there’s really no need: these are pretty standard modern pop songs with good, if predictable, modern pop lyrics. This time out there’s less piano, which is a bummer, and she doesn’t play “Misty” for us or anything like that. Aunt Diana and Uncle Declan are disappointed. Like most current pop stars, she’s caught a case of Swift envy, and Doctor Record Industry has advised her to take two Dessners and call him in the morning. The Nationalization of a couple of her tracks is done pretty gently with great attention to the specific contours of the Laufey brand, which is in line with what I have come to expect from Aaron Dessner, savvy market-positioner that he is. But I admit I vastly prefer her middlebrow bossa nova fakes.

Lido Pimienta — La Belleza  Well isn’t this a great pile of poop. Gone are the Latin electrobeats, synthetic cumbia, and tribal chants that made Miss Colombia such a hoot.  In their place are lite Boston Pops arrangements with boomping tympani plus eunuch choirs that sound like the music that gets played when the end boss is introduced in a mythological-themed videogame. Sometimes they’ll hit some native percussion (rented from a Museo Antropologico no doubt) just to let you know that Lido is still in there somewhere. She acquits herself fine when she sings, but since the harp tinkles and pizzicato strings and woodwinds aimlessly running scales provide no ballast I’m afraid Lido just floats away like a red balloon. You can see her against the sky, but she’s way up there out of reach. And I really wish I could make these ambitious young artists understand that there is nothing to be gained from going classical. Yes, the dressing rooms are better and the crowds smell nicer, but you are alienating yourself from the main line of popular music. Old people are going to like it and then die out. Nobody else is going to remember your record because there is no backbeat stapling it to mass consciousness. All that Lincoln Center money isn’t worth what you’re giving up in the long run. I blame Björk, for this and so, so much more. 

Lightheaded — Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming!  This chewy caramel eclair of a band recently toured with the Jeanines, and if you took everything about the Jeanines and degraded it by about fifteen per cent, Lightheaded is what you’d get. The lyrics aren’t quite as sharp, the playing and writing isn’t as crisp, the beats don’t hop and skip along as much, and the sound, smothered in bad digital reverb as it is, is a far cry from the clarity of How Long Can It Last. Complaints registered. OTOH, the members of this quintet are a good sight younger than the Jeanines, so one fine day they might yet catch Alicia and Jed by the coattails. 

Lightning In A Twilight Hour — Colours Yet To Be Named  The latest tear-stained missive from Bobby Wratten begins with defiant daughters in bookshops and ends with failing stars wandering across the night sky. No word on whether they are Trembling or Blue. In retrospect it’s clear that TBS was Bobby’s attempt to achieve that particular romantic, heartrending sweep he’s always after via rock band arrangements that were oddly maximalist given the tactical constraints of running such a campaign via air supply. Making love out of nothing at all gets tiring after awhile, and thus he has ended that chapter for good and retired to the bedroom with a geetar, a means of generating preposterous amounts of echo, and a beatbox stuck on the rain patter on a sill setting. Annemarie Davies and Beth Arzy both stop by to keep him company, though not at the same time. Both submit, stone-faced, to Bobby’s looping and processing fetishes. Hold still there while I loop and process you. How far can Bobby ride this three-way? Well, how slow can you go on a bicycle before you stall out and topple over? Four decades after the Field Mice, he’s still coasting on that gravel road. If it’s true that it’s never going to end with dry eyes, one way to deal with that problem is by never letting it end. 

Lights — A6  Wherever pop has gone, I’ve generally given Valerie Poxleitner credit for getting there first. But the road is long and recursive, and it’s doubled back on itself so fiercely that lights is presently on her butt on a highway divider, watching the traffic streak by, or just gummed up in a cul-de-sac somewhere. Several of these A6 tracks sound like “State Of Grace” and/or “Holy Ground” when they’re not reminiscent of Paramore in postpunk mode. Then there’s the song that channels Lady Gaga — the rock Gaga — so effectively that it’s a bit of a problem. These are all really good models to have, but they’re also exercises in fist-pumping arena rock, and I’m not sure that sleek two-chord thumpers show off Valerie’s compositional skills. She sounds and acts pretty badass on them, I’ll give her that, but I think I prefer the overt pop moves on Pep. “Clingy,” the one thing here composed in that style, is by far the album’s most annoying song, but it’s also the only one that I’ve carried in my head after the set stops playing. That’s not a coincidence. Surely it must gall her that others have taken her original style and run up the charts with it, and then stripped it down and blew it out to make it fit the stadium stage. Her desire to get some of her own back is understandable. Nevertheless, she didn’t have to go all ouroboros on us. That tail tastes a little stale.

Lily Allen — West End Girl  Pure pain but a public service. Lily discovers what too many other broadminded people have: the open relationship is a deathtrap. Let your partner poke a person at your peril. Unless you are on absolutely even ground, somebody is going to get emotionally steamrolled and profoundly disrespected. Lily’s narrator, for instance, is on the back foot throughout this vicious breakup story. She becomes a nonmonogamummy under duress, and then learns the hard way about the black pit of egoism under the mask of brutal honesty. And that’s the way it goes. Human beings are just not designed to fuck around on each other in public without leaving terrible wounds. Both the horny husband and his sex partner overload the protagonist’s circuits with honeyed sanctimony, but once the main character starts to investigate what they’re up to, she discovers that the emotional contract she thought they’d signed has been shredded by all the frotting and grinding. This, too, is only natural. Sex is not something that can be scheduled.  That’s the whole point of it: you’re supposed to be swept away by passion and get your mind and your emotions turned inside out. Any plan for ethical nookie will not survive initial contact with the girlfriend. Lily’s dramatization of this dynamic is unsparing, and her willingness to make herself look like a fool and a cuckold in front of the studio audience supercharges the storytelling in a way that righteous indignation could never. We get gruesome scenes from the battlefield, including futile late night phone conversations, bad faith negotiations with cheater and mistress alike, Lily’s lame attempt at retributory online hookups, and a moment of reckoning at a pied-à-terre that, the narrator realizes, is a pussy palace (her words). When the scales fall, Lily amplifies the clatter. The language throughout is wonderfully frank and irreverent as it needs to be without breaking the through-line or jeopardizing the tone of slo-mo revelation, and Lily sings everything in the blank, scorned, devastated manner of Sarah Blackwell from Dubstar. When she slinks away into the digital backdrops like a red-faced teen disappearing into the bushes after witnessing something embarrassing, you’d have to be a real cad not to feel for her.  Let this album be an object lesson to anyone considering the “grownup” polygamy.  Just kick it old school.  Forget that wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack. Go out for a ride and never come back. It sounds like the cruel thing to do. But it saves time, hurt, and hassle. You’re going to be on that highway soon enough. Do yourself and everybody else a favor and cut out the pussyfooting. 

L.S. Dunes — Violet  Thursday rhythm section plus the lead guitarist from Coheed & Cambria plus Frank Iero from MCR plus Will Yip production. Add in vox by Anthony Green, and what do you get?  If you answered an Anthony Green project, you, cynic, may get some dirty looks from Professor Punk, but you will not fail supergroup mathematics. As the other guys in Saosin (and Circa Survive, and Zolof, and a whole bunch of long-forgotten Philly combos) might tell you, it only takes a few drops of Anthony in the beaker to turn the whole solution Green. This is not to say that the other L.S. Dunesters do not make their distinctive musical personalities apparent on Violet, because they do. Tim Payne, for instance, underpins everything with those filthy animal bass parts you might remember from No Devolucion and other nasty New Brunswicky albums. But there is something about Anthony’s soaring, irritating nyeah-nyeah delivery that dominates the proceedings no matter how hard the band rocks. It may also be because, showoff that he is, he’s teetering on an emotional precipice in plain view, using religious symbolism without any particular spiritual referent, spelling “magick” with a k. For all I know, Frank wrote these words, but they sure seem like Anthony’s usual mixed bag of complaints and obsessions. As for the rest of the musicians, L.S. Dunes occasionally aims for Interpol at their roughest, but they lack the discipline and, to be frank, the cosmopolitan vacuousness to pull it off. Instead we get QOTSA with occasional emo inflections. We could do a lot worse. So could Anthony.

Lucius — Lucius  I’ve always been impressed by the way Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig can (sometimes) warble it up side by side without breaking the narrative thread of their post-mac romantic storytelling songs. That’s tough to do. Usually the act of adding reverb to two vocalists at the same time ruins whatever chance they’ve got of communicating anything other than tonal information. I reckon that’s why Roger Waters selected them to do b-vox: he cares about the message in the music, and so do they.  That was a fruitful partnership.  On the downside, Jess and Holly had to deal with Roger Waters. But they seem to have come through okay.  Like all Lucius sets, this one is a mixed bag: you’ve got crisply written adult-alternative songs like “Final Days” and passages as glorious as the outro to “Stranger Danger” right next to a predictably Knoplerish Adam Granduciel collaboration and a couple of numbers so gaseous and wispy that I just had to get up and turn on the dehumidifier. But they prove they don’t need Dave Cobb to get countrypolitan. They’ve escaped the Brandi Carlile compound and returned to tell the tale alongside their old buddies Pete Lalish and Dan Molad.  Keep your friends close and your harmonies closer, Jess and Holly. 

Lucy Dacus — Forever Is A Feeling  Naturally, I would rather hear Lucy sing about her physical desires, such as they are, than her intellectual superiority to her peers at vacation Bible camp. But even on an album that’s supposed to chronicle a sexual awakening, the main thing that comes through is her superciliousness. Here’s Lucy, tisking about Grand Theft Auto like a Sunday school bore, sub rosa talking shit on her girlfriend’s family (“you don’t need to love them,” she says; gee, thanks for the permission slip), biting the showbiz hand that has (over)fed her, and quietly sneering at divorced people on what she assumes is a bad first date. This is a woman so unsuited for romantic gestures that she worries about the structural integrity of lovelock bridges. She’s hyperaware of the location of the sixty day chip of a partner she describes as a pack-a-day habit, she’s impressed by impenetrable marginalia in an old boyfriend’s books, she’s insensitive to the specificity of the places she’s lucky to be able to visit. I could go on. I remember when Lucy said she didn’t want to be funny anymore. That was a long time ago, and she’s still trying to tell jokes. That Lucy has matched all of this stuff to music that deliberately echoes Folklore and Evermore makes a bad thing worse. Taylor Swift does not concern herself with appropriateness. She’d never sing about limerence — she’d just call that being in love. She knows that estrangement from the language of pop is a dealbreaker for a pop-rocker. There is a place for people with Lucy’s upper-middlebrow tastes, persnickety disposition, and determination to autobiographize, and that place is the memoir section of the Barnes & Noble. Hey, I hear some of those people get good money and film options. Look into it, Lucy.

Maddie Jay — I Can Change Your Mind  In these difficult days, a question troubles the minds of Americans from Bangor to mighty Maine. what makes this modern mushtronica exercise so much more effective than the thousands of other Lana-wannabe mushtronica projects that it resembles down to the last elegant synthesizer mushpad? What, in short, makes Maddie such a baddie? Mostly I reckon it’s a matter of authorial control: Maddie is squarely in the producer’s chair throughout, and she knows how to match sonic phenomena to the spikes and troughs of her own emotional experience. That gives these misty songs the sort of shape you’d expect to get from, you know, real rock. Think Francis Farewell Starlight, right down to the memorable choruses. Maddie exercises a firm hand with her digital glitches: they neither dominate the tracks nor are they superficial club hooks in search of an EDM remixer. Instead, they all do something. Better still, they all seem to have been forged at the intersection between Billie Eilish pop, alternative hip-hop, and Tender Buttons-era Broadcast. I can also get into her pouty delivery of young-adult quotables and affirmations (“I hope that I’m prettier than them,” yeah, me too, Maddie), which at times resembles a less suicidal Indigo De Souza. Indigo in pop mode, mind you. I also admit that I find Maddie’s bleary, mid-morning horniness awfully effective, and thoroughly believable, especially when she’s talking about a radical monogamy that she’s oh so eager to surrender to as long as the boy is with it. I suppose he might find it a bit objectifying when she mumbles things like I’m the winner/you’re the prize. If so, his loss.  

Mamalarky — Hex Key  An odd duck for sure. But ducks are super cute, and getting odd will always be a better use of a musician’s time than getting even. The most notable musician in this Atlanta combo is guitarist and singer Livvy Bennett, who proceeds with a welcome disregard for compositional conventions. Basically she is enjoying the heck out of her own weirdness. Whether you’ll agree with her about that will mainly depend on your tolerance for stylistic shapechanging, as Livvy is an amoeboid talent whose limits squiggle around every time you try to fix her on a microscope slide. Some of these tracks reach toward the linear clarity of classic rock, others are as goofy and frothy and spring-flingy as Rubblebucket, a few borrow changes and warbly synthesizer patches from early Eighties sophistipop, a couple are as twee as Hospitality, and at least one threatens to morph into Ziggy Stardust. Livvy builds tricky intervals into her melodies and changes chords with a vertiginous abandon worthy of Winston Office-Culture, and sings with a barely suppressed astonishment that makes her sexy in spite of herself. As for her go-it-alone attitude, she kicks off the set by telling you she’s not going to let her feelings show, and then assures you she doesn’t need awards. Later she insists she always wins at checkers. I believe her. That’s not much of an incitement to sit down and play with her, though, is it. 

Maren Morris — Dreamsicle   If it’s Taylor Swift fakes you want, it’s best to call the professionals.  And Maren is nothing if not a pro. Despite her maverick rep, she 1.) took one for the Nashville team by enlivening Brandi Carlile’s otherwise moribund girl group project, and 2.) took another via a full album apology that foregrounded humility that she sure as heck doesn’t need to have. She’s famous for her impassioned songs about her market positioning; I’m thinking of “Cooking Up My Own Flavor,” now, but there are others, too. I see this as good looking out from a good looker and a good person. Maren is aware that her handlers don’t know what to make of her Eighties Mercedes and Beyoncé quotes and overt lesbian references and Democrat-encoded moves in a red, red, redneck world. She doesn’t want anybody’s head to explode. In ’25, she will shrug her shoulders apologetically at the confusion and remind us that when she sings, people still show up. I trust they always will.  \That’s what talent buys you: a lane you can pop wheelies in even when all the traffic is headed in the other direction. Everything from the Intermission EP is folded into the batter of this set — I don’t even think they bothered to remaster — so if you liked those, you’ll surely like these. She’s bounced her big-voiced signals off of a few more satellites in orbit around planet Taylor, including Joel Little, the Muna individuals, and Trader Jack himself, who is here to slather some of that Turnpike grease of his on the mixes. The reverb and sheen disguises romantic storytelling that’s probably more nuanced than it needed to be, but I admit I find Maren’s tortured psychology a little more interesting than that of her peers. As a forward thinker among the dipsticks and lugnuts, she’s got an excuse for her alienation. Just to make that slamming door sound even more satisfying on the way out of Tennessee, she leaves the haters with another metamessage. She was always too good for their asses anyway. No lies detected. She was.  

Mark Springer, Neil Tennant & Sacconi Quartet — Sleep Of Reason  There is no seal of approval or truth in advertising badge for albums. If the guys from Yes want to put Steve Howe’s likeness on an album that somebody else played guitar on, it’s caveat rockin’ emptor. Neil Tennant does indeed appear on this neoclassical thingamajig — when the curtain goes up, there he is, singing a pop aria in that tarnished angel voice of his. He hangs around for a little while after that. Then he catches a bus to the West End, and we’re left listening to snoozeworthy twenty(!) minute solo piano meditations. I can’t blame Neil: he’s a cosmopolitan guy, and he probably thought that working on this project would be educational and inspiring.  Maybe it was for Neil.  But rarely have I been so mercilessly baited and emphatically switched. Call it exhibit #4080 in my ongoing argument that classical people can’t be trusted. They look pretty sharp playing the cello, though. That much I’ll give them.

Maria Usbeck — Naturaleza  An alien, a legal alien, an Ecuadorian in New York. One who is awfully enthusiastic about manta rays if nothing else. Though she sings, sleepily, in Spanish (most of the time), the soft-rock ritmos and can’t-be-bothered attitude are contemporary American and unmistakably Brookylnian. Maria isn’t much of a vocalist, but she earns some mileage with her transcontinental murmur anyway. The saxophone, the samples, the radio shack synth sounds and electroplinks, the sighing background vocals, gratuitous echoes. and the muffled, listless drumming make this throat lozenge of an album feel like Espanto produced by Avalon Emerson. Likable, pleasantly post-national, music for friction-free border crossings. 

Marie Davidson — City Of Clowns  A grim techno set about extractive capitalism and data mining is exactly what you’d expect to get from Deewee in 2025, so you could call Marie’s album a successful exercise in customer fulfillment. Since this is not exactly a dancefloor burner, the target audience here seems to be those of the opinion that Bolis Pupul would be better if his observations were right on the nose. These loopy Belgians are right that powerful actors are dead set on mapping everything, including your psychic innards, and Marie does a cute job of personifying the digital surveillance industry as a boozy, vampiric whore (“I don’t want your money/I want your data, baby,” etc.) That definitely checks out. Whether the collectors are ever going to figure out what to do with all of this biometric information they’re gathering is another question entirely. As far as I can tell, the artificial intelligence industry crossed the garbage in/garbage out threshhold a couple of years ago, and now bigwigs are scrambling for government handouts in the name of a Natsec development race to nowhere in particular. Predictive medicine is mostly good for dragging people into a healthcare system they don’t trust anymore, and predictive jurisprudence is just a computer-assisted version of racial and ethnic profiling. As for selling us shit, they hardly need a detailed inventory of our souls for that. All that was required was high speed Internet, a fleet of trucks driven by low-wage delivery workers, and human laziness. Our deadly sins are far older than Nvidia, and the devils who exploit them will always be with us. The good news is that the strategies for ducking the pitchforks remain the same as they always were. The bad news is that it’s gonna be a helluva day in the equities market when the lightbulb goes on and all of this digital petroleum turns to sand.

Marshall Allen — New Dawn  It’s not exactly accurate to imply that this is a debut for centenarian Marshall, because he’s been fronting the Sun Ra Arkestra since the Precambrian era. Sun Ra died in ’93, and Marshall has piloted the ark ever since. Even cynical old me cannot help but be impressed by a hundred year old dude putting out an album. I know people in their early twenties who lack the stamina. This is, as they say in the news biz, a human interest story. Whether it will be more than that to you will depend on your appreciation of Marshall’s tone (sweet as ever), your Sun Ra Arkestra completism (though nothing about this set is too avant garde), and your residual Neneh Cherry superfandom (Neneh sings on the title tune). I recall Marshall was one of the pioneers of digital-synth saxophone, and I expect he’s still at it here, but tech, time, and protools have caught up with him and I can’t distinguish between his machine woodwinds and his old-fashioned brass honkers. That’s not a knock on his artistry or his innovation. By the time I’m his age, I expect to be dead for many decades.  

McKinley Dixon — Magic, Alive!  The orchestral hip-hop, with copious chord changes and sonic saturation, sax solos, gospel piano, backing vox from every corner, sound FX carrying tonal information, everything here to signify how far from the BDP boom-bap we have come. I remember when the thinking of rap musicians was primarily subtractive: how can we suggest harmony with as few tools as possible? Can we let the ring of the drum and the screech of the sample and the implicit note in the voice of the rapper do the work of the pop-rock arranger? McKinley works more like a film scorer, allowing intricacy to do the work that his rapping predecessors used to rely on surprise for. As a rapper, he’s a quick-spitter with so much to say so fast that some of it is likely to be interesting. And some of it isn’t; in general, the music, ornate as it is, does outpace the emotional intensity of the narrative from time to time. The through-story concerns a young man who discovers he has the power to bring people back from the dead; he remembers, no doubt, what Q-Tip once said about the resurrector’s responsibility. McKinley’s fairy tale is frequently interrupted by bars from guest rappers, all of whom are competent enough, but whose side-tracks feel like missteps on a set that is otherwise meticulous. As for the star, he does break from the program occasionally for asides and battle couplets directed toward less constructive emcees. It’s easy to write about death, he raps, when none of y’all is really alive. Shots fired. Positive shots. 

McLusky — The World Is Still Here And So Are We  McLusky, Future Of The Left, Christian Fitness, whatever you want to call it, the common denominator is Andy Falkous and his lawnmower mouth. I’m not sure that anybody who participated in the making of this ostensible comeback set had much to do with McLusky mach one. Anybody but Andy, I mean. As long as he shows up for work, he can call it what he wants. That particular amalgam of Nirvana chords, slabs of Big Black Atomizer noise, British music hall mugging, West End theater, and Orwell-style social critique is his alone to use as he likes, and use it he will, I trust, until the day he runs out of battery acid. I was partial to the period when he was overdriving cheap synths and screaming about pterodactyls, but I do understand that such things cannot be forever. This one extends the McLusky brand, which means fuzz, feedback, irreverence, and lightsaber cocksucking blues, and Andy, sure as shooting, makes a bloody mess of a pig and covets his neighbor’s ox before the drummer can even work up a lather. You have to love a guy who can make a pop hook of sorts out of sounds that one might otherwise associate with a torture rack. To be honest, though, I suspect Andy’s heart is in the slower ones these days, especially the meandering “Not All Steeplejacks,” on which he says this about prevarication: “it will certainly condemn you to a miserable life/which will probably involve a lot of gardening.”  Ahahahahah. Oh, Andy, stay you.

Mei Semones — Animaru  Music school kids go mad.  Mad in a studied, circumscribed way, mind you. They’ve got midterms. Mei is a young Japanese singer-guitarist with an agitated approach to jazz pop that involves, among other things, playing bossa, samba, and neo-manouche really fast. That means lots of tricky runs, viola and violin for color and shading, and a rhythm section that knows how to sprint and stot like an antelope on the savannah. At times Animaru can get surprisingly heavy (check that overdriven title tune), and it’s impressive how quickly the group can pivot from pizzicato strings and polite cocktail music to thumping grunge-rock. Mostly they’re there to chase around Mei as she riffs away on acoustic and electric, scats unsmilingly, kicks a few in Japanese, and finds notes to sing in complex chords and holds holds holds them. Easy now.  Even if there isn’t enough differentiation between the melodies from song to song, this is something new under the sun, and possibly the start of something we’ll be watching for awhile. Well, unless she gets pulled over for speeding by João Gilberto. Don’t get points on that bossa nova license, Mei. It may affect your bossa nova credit score.

Melody’s Echo Chamber — Unclouded  Putty in the hands of her collaborators, this person is. When she was working with Kevin Parker and Dungen, her music was adventurous, and, on the second record, even proggy in a Fiery Furnaces sort of way. Now that her main accomplices are the streambait kings in Dina Ögon, she is a newly coronated streambait queen. Stream that girl, watch that scene. You won’t make out a thing she’s singing and she’ll give you no incentive to try. To be fair, her dim and winking LED of a voice fits corporate psychedelica better than it does classic rock. Thus, Unclouded is likely what the stream-masters ordered, given their allergic reaction to anything that interrupts the seamlessness of the flow. Gotta think everybody is happy except those who listen closely. The honeyed strings are the new element here, and they sound every bit as good as the crisply recorded drumkit and the muted funk bass. Everything gleams and nothing sticks, and that’s by design. State-of-the-art background music, circa anno domine MMXXV.

Men I Trust — Equus Asinus  Oncle Jazz was a watershed in the history of mushrock: the most nauseous, note-bendy, seasick album ever made, full of whammy-hammer backwash, phlegm-sticky ASMR whispers and interminable soft-rock beats from the pillow department of an airless and perfumy superstore. It’s a record so sickening that is, in its way, as much of a landmark in offensiveness as Straight Outta Compton or Master Of Puppets. I thought at the time that these kids were really on to something. Something horrid, sure, but it takes skillful navigators to sail to such narcotized extremes. On Equus Asinus, they dispense with the phasing and the portamento and deliver a set of hypnagogic folk-rock songs with Kacey Musgraves chord progressions and brief sidesteps into lounge pop and piano tinkles artfully splashed on the toilet seat. In so doing, they’ve confirmed my suspicions that they really can play and write, even if they do it without an ounce of the urgency that great pop demands. Midway through the set, the mask drops and frontwoman Emmanuelle Proulx starts singing in French. A-ha, you think. And she would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you meddling kids. Next comes a song called — I kid you not — “I Don’t Like Music.” The next two are, naturally, instrumentals. Aw, stay your bad selves, Men I Trust. 

Michael Cera Palin — We Could Be Brave  More work for Brett Romnes: a full length set from the highly likable Midwest emo band that brought you (well, some of you) the excellent “Portrait Of A Man On A Couch With Cats.” MCP leads with midrange guitar, close vocal harmonies, shouting, and a properly scathing attitude about cryptocurrency speculators. I’m feeling them on all of it, even if frontman Elliott Braban isn’t always the easiest guy on the DIY circuit to riddle out. A lyric sheet helps. Provocative verse: “if you are what you eat, I’m more man than you’ll ever be.” Hmmm. That on a song called “Murder Hornet Fursona.” Put Elliott in the same wasp’s nest as the guy from Weatherday at your peril. As is the case for most bands like this, the vim often outpaces the vigor, but they make up for it with their ambition — the last song rambles around for eleven minutes — and the sheer amount of goosed-up musical ideas they’re generating whilst high on Flavor Blasted Cheetos or whatever bagged snack it is that’s keeping them alive. Alas we do have to mention the name, which, wretched as it is, still isn’t as bad or misleading as Carly Cosgrove. A lot of these Midwest emo groups form while the principals are very young. They’re bored in biology class and they’re coming up with stupid handles to amuse each other and pass the time. Some of them stick. What we need is a database of possibilities that young musicians can draw from. It’d save us all from copious confusion and cringe comedy down the line.

Min Taka — I Think We Should Just Move In Together  Generally, when a pop artist claims an unusual overseas address, it turns out that she merely attended the international school in the upmarket Capitol district of some foreign land and has been living in Brooklyn for a decade. So I checked, and it seems like Min Taka is a genuine Bulgarian Turk in Bratislava or something like that. Not that you’d know it from the new wave and bouncy post-Britpop tracks she’s releasing in her own name. They’re all in English, and they’re all peppy and catchy; more impressively, they’re each peppy and catchy in different ways. At twenty minutes this project is barely a handshake and a hello, but it does leave a positive impression of a border-buster taking advantage of the Schengen agreement. Give her that Eurail pass and let her ride.

Momus — Quietism  Say, would you like to hear an old man mumbling Mack The Knife melodies over Holiday Inn cocktail jazz and elevator bossa nova?  Not really, huh.  What if I told you he’d paid a lot of attention to his words, and some of them are even funny? Still not too intrigued, I notice.  Nick Currie pumps out so many projects and writes so many variations on his basic “Hairstyle Of The Devil” template that it always seems safe to let him amble on and catch up with him later. Before you know it, there are twenty new Momus projects on the digital shelf and you don’t know where, or whether, to start. So I’ll give you the general recap. The ages have eroded what was once a sprightly poppish voice, but everything else is the same. On Quietism he remains absolutely confident that his asides, footnotes, and trenchant social observations deserve a broadcast audience — his most endearing characteristic by far — and remains charmingly willing to cut every corner on his production and mastering in order to get them in front of listeners as quickly as possible. As always, he comes with topics-cum-targets: Donald Trump (Nick doesn’t like him), Brian Eno (somewhat more likable than Trump) women who ask for written consent before he can grope them (about as likable to Nick as Trump), fortunate sons suffering from impostor syndrome (again Trump, sorta), his own witty, urbane self (first to the wall when the fascists attain plenary power). It’s all wry, sophisticated, and fatalistic.  But then Nick does a huge disservice to his well-wrought words by performing and recording them. The terrible truth is modern Momus albums work better without the music. You’ll get more from this project by going to the Bandcamp page and clicking on the lyrics tabs than you ever will from pressing play. Nick isn’t the first wag to age out of the pop game. He’s probably right that he’s the only singer on earth who could deliver this stuff, because I’ve heard musicians try to cover Momus, and yikes. Next year, he might look seriously into slam poetry.  Not even kidding. 

Mon Laferte — Femme Fatale  The life of a showgirl.  How do you say it in Spanish?  La vida de una chica de espectáculo?  Like everything else, it just sounds flashier en Español.  This new set finds the great Monserrat returning to the north of the border jazz-pop of 1940 Carmen with some added goosings-up by burlesque horns. The horny horns, you might call them. Sonically, she’s lingering around old-timey stripper palaces with small and live-sounding combos, stopping the show, calming down, maybe sipping some bourbon, stopping the show again, more bourbon, more high notes, maybe a cigarette, bringing down the house, unbuttoning a few buttons, tearing off the midriff, more bourbon, stopping the show, another showstopper, another shot. Velvet curtains, cocktail piano, standing bass and wedding-band jazz guitar, full ashtrays, remorse. She might get you so entranced by the show tunes like “Otra Noche De Llorar” that you might not even notice that it takes her half the album to bring the Latin beats in. Mon remains a strong contender for the title of the best singer in the whole wide world, rising from sultry whispers to long sustained tones that explode midway into shuddering tremors before she yanks the melodic passage away like a cellphone pulled out of your hand to check who you’re texting.  Rosa?!?  You are texting with Rosa?!?  You bastard.  Time for more bourbon and more high notes.  

Morgan — Hotel Morgan  Nobody asked for a Spanish version of Grace Potter And The Nocturnals, but since we’ve got them, we may as well baila. How do you say flick your lighters en Español?; I hope for their sake that’s an untranslatable idiom. Morgan plays gloriously ham-handed funk rock, blooze rock and Adele-derivative soul-pop designed for festival stages and unaccountable bouts of optimism; it always seems like they’re a bar or a bong hit away from breaking into “feel the rain on my skin/no one else can feel it for you” or at least “simply the best/better than all the rest.” Intimate melodramatic farewells at about fifty thousand or so decibels, as Elvis Costello once persuaded Wendy James to sing. I appreciate their clarity and faith in rock ’n’ roll, especially since they’re not satisfied to merely love it. They also want to be good at it. That competence gives heft to the mongo power ballads like “Radio” and “Pyra” and ensures that the rest of this arena se-, er, album is never less than entertaining. At times it reminds me of Sebastian’s Yatra’s Dharma — another American-leaning Spanish-language album goosed up toward something not unlike greatness by the principal’s grotesque amour propre. Hey, real rock runs on that stuff; check out a Stones concert sometime. I can even forgive singer Nina De Juan’s overwrought confession that she’s wicked by natural disposition and well-behaved only through acculturation. Yes, that’s a basic Christian observation about humanity ratified for all of us by years of painful reinforcement, but they don’t even do catechism over there on her godless continent anymore. She just needs to tour America a few times. She’ll get the main idea and she won’t feel alone.  

Morgan Wallen — I’m The Problem  Funny to hear Michael Hardy, of all people, describe redneck identity as a circumstantial thing, contingent on the whims of whatever smoky mountain shiva is in charge of reincarnation. I thought that Bisquick was in your bloodstream, Hardy. If it’s mere class resentment that makes you shoot that buck — fury about coastally-weighted systems of symbolic capital — maybe he can leave the poor animal alone and redirect that energy toward a target that can fight back. It seems to have worked, somewhat, for Luigi Mangione. As for Morgan, he fantasizes about a trip to NYC where he, er, “punches” a boss. This ought to play great on the NASCAR-crash circuit that is and will always be his main constituency, but you can tell his heart really isn’t in it. Instead, he’s returned with a vengeance to the small-town heartbreak scenarios of Dangerous. Only this time around, he’s got a business imperative to fit it to the mold of his historic moneymaker. The “Last Night” team of Joey Moi, Charlie Handsome, et. al., are retained for nearly every track, which means more drum machines than Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk Autobahn levels of vocal processing. Homespun. The big winner in this rebalanced balance of power is guitarist Tom Bukovic, Morgan’s de facto duet partner throughout this long depressive ride. His moody, ‘verbed out, liquid smoke lead lines best suit the rueful, reflective Morgan, and that’s what we get: a shuffled-up through-line about a horny high(?)-functioning alcoholic who tries the patience of a good(?) woman and inevitably gets left flat. She’s off to the city while he’s stuck watching college football and boozing away his sins. The insatiable demands of Uncle Spotify compel Morgan and company to extend this trip for thirty-seven songs, and that puts a truckbed full of pressure on the singing and the storytelling. Water is tread. Beer is poured. Minutes tick by in the Tennessee haze. Even God seems farther away. Yet when Morgan reaches the main plot points, like the cheating story “Twenty Cigarettes,” the morning-after lament “Nothing Left,” and the backwoods reticence of the terrific ”Just In Case,” he brings every line to life with the shit-kicker vividness that has infuriated Saturday Night Live watchers and made him indispensable to everybody else. Ignore him at the risk to your acumen: Morgan continues to be the best Republican bellwether we’ve got, right down to his Putin-esque conviction that he’s been driven to his acts of aggrostupidity by the people around him, inclulding girlfriends, romantic rivals, city slickers in trucks, and creators of inferior brands of chewing tobacco and ammunition. He further concedes that neither money nor power is improving his disposition, and he’s as likely as ever to get hammered and wrap his fancy car around a tree. Maybe Morgan, and those with Morgan’s outlook, should not be given the keys. 

Motion City Soundtrack — The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World  Now here’s as reliable a proposition as there is in pop-rock: a band as brand consistent as Jolt Cola. The word on Panic Stations was that it was a step back from the teeth-chattering brink of overcaffeination, but it wasn’t, really.  It was just a wee bit more mature, and Justin Pierre is, what?, pushing fifty now? That’s just to say that this return to core competency did not involve a long trip. All that you remember from MCS is here, including the midrange buzz and gratuitous overdrive, bass like a superfirm mattress on your backbone, pogo-stick beats, tight harmonies on sugary choruses, Justin’s obsessive relationship to the unknowable void, and pure-wave Moog leads widdly-widdlying over the top. Green Day Dookie plus analog synth: it was a good formula in 2005, and it remains so twenty years later.  They’re not adding much to it, mind you.  Some might say they’ve added nothing whatsoever.  But there’s something to be said for knowing what you’re getting in that box of Frosted Flakes.  Even if it isn’t packing a toy surprise.

Nas & DJ Premier — Light Years  Multiple hitmakers on one album/I introduced it. That’s technically true but not exactly a flex, since the single-producer hip-hop album has been a better meaning-carrier than the Nastradamus model, and nobody knows that better than this born meaning-maker. Nas has been a serial monogamist in the vocal booth since Nasir in 2018, and the protracted partnership with Chauncey Hollis that followed was a demonstration of the kind of fireworks that often follow when a vocalist and beatmaker really take the time to get to know one another. By contrast this Primo teamup is pure Hall Of Fame Game stuff, with both artists doing that thing they do in the exact way they do it and very few departures from expectation. This suits the subject matter, more or less, as Nas gets his historian’s tweed on for odes to female rappers, graffiti writers, journalists, and anybody else who has gotten gummed up in the four elements. He does this very well, which is testament to his sharp memory, his passion for the art form, and his near-pathological need to set every story straight. Among his other accomplishments, he’s probably hip-hop’s best factual chronicler. Remember those “Where Are They Now” songs about old-school emcees who’d fallen from public view: those were compassionate and reasonably well-researched. I even liked the one where he rapped in the voice of a 1930s detective. A word ninja, he is. Mister Cryptocurrency Scarface, as he calls himself.  Well, I don’t reckon that’s much of a flex, either. 

Natalia Lafourcade — Cancionera  I’ve compared Natalia to B&S before, so I hope it does not do too much cultural violence to say that Cancionera is to Todas Las Flores as Write About Love was to The Life Pursuit. This is the calmer, sweeter, weirder album, made by the same personnel with the same sonic palette as the heavy hitter that preceded it. I dunno; maybe they’re coasting a little. Still, it’s beautifully sung and impeccably played. Write About Love had a few tracks that popped out of the mist immediately and became instant Belle & Sebastian classics — “I Didn’t See It Coming,” “I Want The World To Stop,” maybe “The Ghost of Rockschool.” The new Natalia has “El Coconito” and “El Palomo Y La Negra,” which slot right into her forever setlist. Then there are all the duets: precious minutes giftwrapped for guest singers who are, alas, neither Natalia Lafourcade or Stuart Murdoch. Write About Love was the swan song for Mick Cooke; Cancionera brings back the stupendous Emiliano Dorantes on piano for passes that aren’t quite as dynamic as they were a few moons ago. In time I’ve come to appreciate everything about Write About Love, including the goofier numbers, the Norah Jones imposition and the Carey Mulligan cameo. Though I recognize it isn’t quite top-tier B&S, I secretly pine for that version of the band. That didn’t stop me from slagging it with faint praise when it came out. I’m, um, trying not to repeat my mistake.  

Nation Of Language — Dance Called Memory  I’m going to make a sweeping old coot-style generalization now, and I hope you’ll forgive me for sounding like Rick Beato. But sometimes you’ve just got to say it. College rock ain’t what it used to be. Sorry admissions officers and campus entertainment committees but it is so. Time was, the segment belonged to artists experimenting with form, stacking chords funny, developing melodies in surprising ways, upending expectations and telling good stories while they were at it. Elvis Costello, Suzanne Vega, Andy Partridge, Joan Armatrading, Paddy McAloon, Green Gartside, you know who I am talking about. I could go on. So could you. That’s was what college was for. That’s why top dollar tuition was spent. You were there to learn the efficacy of the circle of sharps and flats and to give and get dorm room sleeve jobs and for no other reason. This was what they meant when they talked about alternative music: an alternative to “Cherry Pie.” You knew where Warrant was going from the first downstroke. It was amusing but it did not do much for your frontal lobe. Fast forward to 2025. Almost all of that writerly innovation has moved to hip-hop, Latin music, déclassé emo bands, and, believe it or not, mainstream pop-R&B. Check out the last few Ariana Grande albums before you dispute.  Meanwhile the quads are dead. College rock has become a game of mood and texture exclusively.  Consider a tune like “Inept Apollo” by Nation Of Language, a band we all like for very good reasons. It’s really well performed, it sounds great, and it features some ace synth by Aidan Noell, who has matured into one of the best Moog stylists on Kraftwerk’s tarmac earth. The record is ravishing, remote, and mysterious. The bass throbs and the sequencer sequences. But at base it’s just a three chord stomper, and those chords are the exact ones you’d think they’d be. It could have been written by Twisted Sister. Maybe Dee Snider would have come up a different kind of lyric, but given the bleary way Ian Devaney mixes his vox, who the fuck could tell?  The irony is that Nation Of Language was designed to provoke nostalgia for the very days I’m talking about, which makes their narrow chord vocabulary all the more infuriating. And I could leave this TED talk right here and stop my bellyaching but the college rockers won’t let me. It bothers them (not Ian and Aidan, mind you, they seem very comfortable doing what they’re doing) when their records are treated as disposable and interchangeable.  Landfill indie, is, I believe, the dismissive term. But if you want your music to have legs, you simply have to take chances with the composition. You’re going to have to write.  All the boxes and buttons in the world won’t help you. That shimmering sound may make an impression on the kids at the club, but the kids, as Will Sheff warned you, will grow up and walk away.  If indie tastemakers want to leave a legacy, they’re going to have to hold their noses and start platforming bands that know how to put a tune and a story together. Kiwi Jr. was a nice start.  I dunno, maybe they could look into Telethon. 

Naxatras — V  Greek progressive rock band, long songs and intricate solos, chops to burn. Nobody is gonna mistake these guys for Haken, but there’s a definite metallic edge to some of their instrumental sections. Another distinguishing characteristic: the Balkan and Near Eastern scales and harmonies that they incorporate into their songs. Now it sounds like I’m describing System Of A Down, and Naxatras, meditative, Floyd-y, and Rökflüte-y as they can be, are not nearly so gruesome. At times they sound like Mildlife if they were booked to play at Beyti Kebab. I know; way below Mildlife’s paygrade. But maybe they’d find the belly dancer hard to resist. 

Neko Case — Neon Grey Midnight Green  I’ve traipsed my way through this poppy field quite a few times and I am still not sure whether these mash notes are posted by Neko to other girls she admires or by Neko to Neko herself.  Is she alone in the ladies’ room of her mind (her metaphor) or is she willing to share the mirror with another chick or two?  Lipstick case out, twisted, and correcting the ragged corners of their mouths? Or is she just singing in the shower sha la la. She sure seems to identify with the grody barfly who lives with blood and dirt/and the subway for dessert. A stranger, she tells us. Perhaps Neko is a stranger to herself. J/k, there is no way this topographical mapper of her own emotional landscape has spaced on any contour of the Neko Case experience. For instance, we learn that she drives barefoot to live the ecstasy of animal speed (her rationale). But only sometimes. We learn that her grey hairs at twenty six did not match her youthful bloodlust. We learn that testy, hardworking Neko is a bit annoyed by the ease with which a spider completes its web. We learn that she’s not so easy to love (her observation). Frankly, none of the things we learn are much of a revelation. They’re all exactly what you’d think they’d be, if you were thinking about it at all. She is quite impressed by how fierce and artfully damaged her hard life has made her, and she expects you to concur. She matches her humblebrags to pop orchestral arrangements that sometimes achieve the widescreen quality she’s going for, and sometimes sound like online learning commercials. The commercials are the good ones. 

Oklou — Choke Enough  This exercise in mushtronica and mild ASMRcore from an alleged Parisian (who sings in English) is extremely similar to Maddie Jay’s I Can Change Your Mind. It’s so similar that it’s a problem for Oklou, who suffers by a comparison that wouldn’t be made if proximity didn’t force the issue. The algorithm might put Oklou and Maddie together, but you, human being, can tell the difference. Maddie’s digital glitches are tastier and more surprising. Her choruses are juicier, her singing is warmer, her protagonist is more appealing. Maddie thinks like a bass player and composes accordingly; Oklou thinks like the owner of a top-of-the-line laptop with an M4 processor. Maddie, sadly, does not compare her boyfriend to an ice cream truck and chase after him like a golden retriever like Oklou does. That’s cute. Oklou returns to dog imagery elsewhere on her set. Somebody throw her a bone.

Open Mike Eagle — Neighborhood Gods Unlimited  I’ve never been entirely clear why Michael Eagle is telling us what he’s telling us. That’s neither an insult or a compliment. It’s just an observation. It makes him unique with the literary segment of rappers. Most of those guys are ferociously clear about why they are rhyming and let you know with annoying regularity. At times I have suspected that Michael is showcasing his wit and his quirky personality (“I make faces even when I’m by myself!/I get weird even when I’m by myself!,” you don’t say, Mike) for TV showrunners in the hope of landing a sitcom. Before you call me ungenerous to a worthwhile artist, know that I have gotten that impression from Michael himself, as he is forever dropping hints about pilots and pitches and his ambiguous position in the entertainment industry. But long exposure to his projects has convinced me otherwise. I now reckon that Michael is working exclusively from quasi-conscious thoughts, and it’s this partial awareness that drives his artistry. For instance, on the new one, Michael admits to stealing sneakers from his high school job at an athletics supply store in the Water Tower Mall. The confession, in the Michael Eagle style, is tucked into a colorful and snappily-told tale. His explanation for why he did it feels logical, too: his boss, a white military man, treated him like a credit to his race and Michael, offended by this, was determined to prove him wrong. “He trusted me too much/it felt like an insult.” Fair enough, and interesting enough, too. It’s a good hip-hop story on a good hip-hop track. But after a lifetime of slights and prejudices, why call all the way back to this one? Why has this random instance of youthful petty larceny stuck with the rapper? My guess is that half-buried shame is attached to his actions — not necessarily because he defied the man, but because he participated in an act of capitalist exploitation and gratuitous upselling — and it’s still worrying at some distant quarter of his brain. Mike conflates the robbery with the commandment from the boss to push the most expensive sneakers in the stock. As grumpy as he sounds about it all, he clearly feels bad for this lower-management schmuck, cornered into a mercantile system by circumstance and reeking of coffee breath. He’s no one Michael really wants to do a bad turn to, even in the name of racial justice.  If we see Michael as a person working through guilty feelings via rap verses, it actually makes a good number of his more inscrutable decisions since Brick Body Kids make sense. That’s not a motivation common among rappers, or, for that matter, television personalities.  It is, though, pretty common among academics. Maybe the campus, and not Comedy Central, ought to be the location of the side gig of this very intelligent guy. You might even call him a model minority.

Parcels — Loved  I used to call these guys my favorite streambait act and I didn’t even mean it as an insult.  I meant that they’re able to be creative and exciting while nailing the generic mood and tone signifiers that help the streaming services classify music and sort it into playlists for background consumption in hotel lobbies, restaurants, etc. That’s some hard shit to do. Generally you either strip yourself of distinguishing marks or make yourselves unpalatable to the Swedes. These five Brisbaniacs have managed to transmute the conformity of the modern moment into a pop sound of their own.  Scratchy Nile Rodgers guitar, disco-lite beats, Daft Punk synthesizer, decorative electric piano and polite funkout bass, Fagenesque grooves like “Leaveyourlove,” Beach Boys harmony stacks with wistful lyrics: Spotify couldn’t have ordered it up better if they drew it up in the boardroom. Perhaps they did. But the more I listen to them — and boy have I listened to them — the more they remind me of Maroon 5 before the Benny Blanco sellout. In the early ‘00s, Maroon 5 was a band band; they made radio hits, sure, but they were also an amalgamation of the visions of five musicians with identifiable instrumental personalities.  When they locked in and played live, it was as organic as anything you’d hear at a Jersey basement show.  You don’t believe me, and that’s Adam Levine’s fault.  Nobody made him kick Jesse Carmichael to the curb and rebrand himself as a game show host.  He got the bag, but he torched his group’s credibility in the process. Album number three was around the time Adam started making his big money compromises; by number four, Maroon 5 was effectively undead, a carcass reanimated and controlled by music industry spores. My hope is that Australianism will protect the parcels from such a Southern Californian fate, what with the Great Barrier Reef and all. So far so good. Really good. 

Perfume Genius — Glory  I waited for another number as good as the Aldous Harding collaboration “No Front Teeth” that comes early on this set. Instead I got the usual Hadriatic mush. In part I blame Blake Mills, who always seems to be close at hand whenever a certain type of indiepop singer-songwriter is mushing out.  But let’s face it: I’d prefer not to think of Mike Hadreas at all. So let’s take this moment to assess where we are in the checkered history of homo sapiens. Just about everybody who has taken the pathogen seriously has concluded that COVID causes brain damage. This is the assessment of serious doctors and researchers now, not conspiracy buffs from the darkweb. If you read between the lines of what they’ve written, you can see a scientific consensus coalescing. The microclotting that accompanies covid infection is cutting off the oxygen flow to our brains. Probably a lot of the grey matter up there in your noodle that was boingy and fresh in 2019 has now been razed and converted to vacant lots. Alarmingly, the doctors do not think that severe cases of COVID lead to cognitive impairment of equal severity. Brain damage happens even if your case is mild — even if it is asymptomatic. Subsequent infections worsen the problem. Have you gotten subsequent infections? Have I?  How the fuck would we know?  The government isn’t even tracking cases anymore. When it was, COVID was mutating too fast for the butterfly-netters to keep up with it. To make matters worse, home testing has become a joke. It’s aA drugstore product outdated as the tiny horoscope in a tube and likely no more accurate. Rather than chastening themselves for their part in the debacle, both the medical and the public health establishments have decided to behave like the pandemic never happened, and addled as we are, we’ve gone along with it, even returning the Chief Executive who presided over the COVID rollout to authority. This makes me feel just great. It’s no use saying that Adam Schlesinger died for our sins if we’re so impaired that we can’t even remember what they are (or who he was). You think I’m being hyperbolic. Buddy I wish I was. What but widespread brain damage, frontal lobe asphyxiation on a global scale, could explain the choices we’ve made over the past five years? Wars in which the invading country just kills everybody and wrecks everything, economic policies dredged up from the Great Depression, religious faith in resource-sucking artificial intelligence technology, our determination to select actual cretins to govern us, all of this screams frontal lobe injury. Damage to the cerebral cortex increases belligerence. This is why dummies are always trying to kick the shit out of you for no reason. Given the slurry that our brains have become, it’s no wonder we can’t come close to clearing the FOIA wall that separates us from learning anything meaningful about that which afflicts us. It may even explain why we’ve stopped asking questions. Incuriosity, too, is a sign of frontal lobe impairment. We’re no closer to establishing a point of origin for COVID than we were in 2020, and by some measures, we’re considerably farther away. Famously, the FBI co-signed the lab leak theory and the government left it at that, perhaps believing that we’d all assign blame to whatever boogeyman state actor we accuse of messing up the planet, Israel, Russia, China, North Carolina, pick ‘em. But this cannot be end of the investigation. It’s got to be the beginning. It ought to prompt us to ask the obvious. If COVID is a gain of function experiment that slipped out of the laboratory, what, exactly, was the function they were trying to gain? What were the boffins putting in their coronavirus, and why? I would like to know exactly what it was that ran through my system, and the systems of so many others, some of whom are still feeling the effects of sicknesses they contracted five years ago. They aren’t going to tell us, and I suspect the reason that they won’t is because the answer is so fucked up that we wouldn’t be able to handle it. or there’d be a transnational class-action suit, and the entire medical-industrial complex would go belly up. Better to convince us to forget it happened. We’re going along with it. We’re like cartoon mice, hit over the head and wandering around in circles, staggering, slamming into walls, and eventually tipping over. That’s all, folks. 

Pool Kids — Easier Said Than Done  Surely this is the most sugarcoated of the top-drawer emo records released this year, and if you are the kind of listener who likes to suck off the sugar and spit out the emo, I reckon you could have a good time with this. I would not, however, say it was made for you. I reckon the accessibility of Easier Said Than Done is residue of the band’s formula: Swiftpop plus hard hitting Riot!-era Paramore plus mathy Midwest emo six-string. It’s such a natural amalgamation that it kinda amazes me that it isn’t done more often. It helps to have a frontwoman as flexible as Christine Goodwyne, capable of holding character on the supercatchy ones like “Exit Plan” and “Leona Street” and kicking up an indignant storm on “Dani.”  When she slips into a murky groove on “Sorry Not Sorry,” it’s like Cacie Dalager got the version of Now, Now that gave us Threads back on the road. This is dense, tuneful, wayward, restless, full of betrayals both tacit and explicit. There’s a hovering sense of danger coupled with Christine’s perpetual suspicion that she’s an also-ran and everybody’s second choice. It eats at her. She resents being a doormat. Mostly she sits on it. That tension holds until the climax of last word, when she lets those tangled skeins of guitar notes serve as her scourging whip. Ouch, in an frighteningly satisfying way.

Pulp — More  So if Jarvis has never spoken to the girl with the nice socks and the striped t-shirt who he’s stalking on the train, how does he know her name is Tina? Hmmm? Gotcha, Jarvis! Well [extreme British accent voice] thereby hangs the joke you thick stateside prat. Small wonder that Pulp is not received in America as rapturously as they are in the civilized world. You utter tosser. You compleat bellend. He’s right, you know, the angry British man is. We Yanks do lack the subtlety to properly hear such verses as (checks) “my sex/is hard to explain/you can’t melt it down/in the rain.” Not even kidding. In the UK there still is a lane for the aging white androgyne with wry reflections on his peter and its confusing demands; in the US, we once had Woody Allen, and that’s not… what, buddy? You’re telling me to emigrate? Well I just might do that. As for the man who challenged us three decades ago to take an older lover, he’s ageless as ever, concerned as always with keeping his libido and his compassion in proper balance. He’s not getting much help from his arrangements, which are soupier and more humperdinck that those on his solo albums, even, and drummer Nicholas Banks misses the late bassist Steve Mackey like the UK misses the European Union.  Still, Jarvis and his soldier soldiers through, eschewing the Cialis, boning some individual atop a pile of donation bags in a Salvation Army and enjoying the smell of stale biscuits, inviting his imagination to be the third partner in a three-way, comparing old love to the background hum of a fridge (you only notice it when it’s gone, see). Everything’s a little past its sell-by, a little moldy, even the melodies. It’s nearly sunset and we haven’t had lunch yet, he tells us, with the slightest hint of panic in that arch, Bowie-fan voice he’s been using since the early ‘80s. I believe Billie Eilish expressed a similar concern last year. Who is more likely to have eaten well, Billie or Jarvis?

Racing Mount Pleasant — Racing Mount Pleasant  Three girls, four boys, all postcollegiate and fetching, violins, saxophones squalling in complex time signatures, emotional songs with big theatrical climaxes, hmmm… where have I seen this before? I simply could not say.  All Isaac Wood comparisons aside, there’s quite a bit of Okkervil River here, too, and overtures to Midwest emo and The World Is A Beautiful Place. Now, before you get your outergarments in a moebius loop, allow me to throw, oh, a quarter cup of cold water on your expectations. In the first place, the woodwind section for Racing Mount Pleasant doesn’t really do the klezmer/King Crimson stuff that elevated Black Country, New Road to the front rank of London folk orchestras. In the second, they might have the grandeur covered, but they really only reach the emotional intensity of TWIABP on the tail end of “Emily.”  In the third, the wit and wordplay of Will Sheff is nowhere to be found here, even as the through-storyline of the abused girl who throws herself from the thirty-fourth floor of some Chicago tower or another is plenty Okkervillish.  So maybe the best point of comparison here is another dead serious and slow-tempo set with a doomed heroine whose tragedy pulls the narrator into the whirlpool: Hospice. The Antlers album was set at the main campus of Sloan-Kettering and featured some details that (I should know) could only have come from actual lived experience. Sam Dubose doesn’t leave that sort of breadcrumb trail, but the more harrowing moments of this set do have the ring of truth to them.  He’s even moved to let the alto man Connor Hoyt break out of the recursive patterns and take a legit rainy-night solo on “Call It Easy.” Mel Collins would approve. Betcha Kamasi Washington would, too. 

Richard Dawson — End Of The Middle  Examinations of the past, present, and the future are filed, and Richard has found the same misery everywhere and in every era. Unsurprisingly he’s taken refuge in the quotidian. That turns out to be pretty miserable, too. If these characters aren’t quite as desperate as the Amazon worker peeing in a bottle on 2020, or the digital scapegoat who is the town’s “fulcrum of ridicule” on The Ruby Cord, or the peasant running for his life on Peasant, they’re all abject anyway, sidelined by time, caught in eddies as the river of history rushes by them. Richard is wondering whether any of them have the force of will to dodge the patterns in repeat, as Laura Marling put it last year, those habits of mind and practice, learned from family, or society, or biology or history, that determine the courses of our lives. Like Laura, he’s betting no. The implicit plea for mercy that colors every line that he sings extends to the shellshocked gardener tending to his terminally ill wife, the drunken middle-class jeweler denied an education by her parents whose “dreams died like a dolphin in a net,” the holiday shopper besieged by adverts on the high street, and the amateur writer whose son’s behavior reminds him of the bullies who spat on him when he was in school. “I know you’ve got a good heart,” the dad tells the kid. But does he? It all seems to play in the same tight, damp Newcastle haunted house: one where the drudgery of daily interactions might be interrupted by a lightning strike, or the ghost of a decapitated railway man might interrogate a small girl. Where are you going?, he asks, and he means her station stop, her aspirations, her vexed place in the lives of the people who surround her. There’s more Richard Thompson, specifically Henry The Human Fly, here than ever before, audible in the starkness of the arrangements, the scratchy guitar patterns and the nimble chordal leaps. There’s also a Springsteenian determination to wring some dignity from the lives of these poor palookas. He’s matched his sad-sack tales of post-Brexit English aimlessness to some of the prettiest melodies he’s yet wrought, including a concluding benediction so winsome he can’t bear to run it through his own marsh-wiggly pipes. So he gets his girlfriend to sing it.

Robert Forster — Strawberries William Carlos Williams ate the plums in the icebox. Robert Forster has scarfed some forbidden fruit of his own. William Carlos was contrite about it; Robert just seems pleasantly full. Although ordinariness is something he can’t define, he knows that the strawberries in the container were exceptional, and in his eyes and on the tip of his tongue, that quality justified his indulgence. That’s just the way it goes for a Go-Between: you can’t expect him to appreciate anything fully unless he’s tasted it, can you? Robert’s latest set of character sketches are all about desire for things mysterious but attainable, including and especially desire itself. Especially carnal desire — the kind that lets you know your heart is still beating. I like the one about the stuffy English teacher who falls for the French hippie and the one about the gay man who suspects that his friend might not be as straight as he lets on. Love will find a way, as Trevor Rabin once promised us, and if it doesn’t, sex may compensate. Forster tells these stories in the blunt, flat-footed couplets he’s favored since he tiptoed out of Brisbane and into the spotlight forty plus years ago. Poetry it ain’t, and that’s exactly what’s good about it. “Breakfast On The Train” is nothing special on the page, but in performance, it’s magnificent: line by line, Forster breathes life, color, and detail into a short story about an affair on a rainy day in a Scottish town. He takes us from the rugby bar to the hotel to commuter rail, and he makes it vivid and romantic. Love can be a winning game, he assures us, and in this new Puritan era, I’m glad someone had the nerve to say it. Inspirational chorus: oh yeah/oh yeah. 

Rodney Crowell — Airline Highway The late-career triumph that was Texas is now a few stops in the rear view on the Amarillo Highway. Rodney, God bless him, hasn’t decelerated a bit. Three quarters of a century high, he’s talking through his songs more frequently these days, picking his spots, handing off the high harmonies on the choruses to Ashley McBride, etc. He still knows how to enmesh a band in a barrelhouse stomper, he can still lead us through the twists and turns of a narrative tearjerker like “Maybe Somewhere Down The Road,” and when he tries to get with those girls way down south, he’s still gentleman enough to give us lovely portraits of their personalities in song. When he starts to ramble, he makes sure that his parakeet named Charlie is secured. Investigative verse from “Twenty-One Song Salute”: I wanna know you know how much I wantcha/and if you don’t I need to know why dontcha. Hat tip to a red dirt romantic and one of the true country originals. This won’t be the last we hear from him.

Rosalía — Lux  I asked a Jersey City flamenco professional about Rosalía and immediately wished I didn’t. The flamenco pro did not use the a-word, but she made it clear that she considered Rosalía an irresponsible tourist, grabbing what she wanted from a folk form without ever learning much about it and leaving party garbage in her wake. I hesitated to tell her that I myself am a pop scumbag who loves appropriation and all-purpose transcultural desecration; I thought that might have soured the interview.  But even I, Mon Laferte superfan, find something grotesquely decorative and entitled about Rosalía’s top-dollar strip-mining approach. I can only imagine how classical musicians feel about this one. On Lux, Rosalía has an entire orchestra at her command, and mostly she points it in the direction of sonic provocation, monkey business, and charts reminiscent of a Zales Circle Pendant commercial: like guys what if we have forty thousand Mahler strings and Met-level opera shit plus flamenco grace notes and timpani rolls and Hollywood synth pads? And then we hire a glitch-pop producer to chop it up extravagantly? What then? Such conspicuous consumption in the recording studio does tend to draw the attention of Björk, and wouldn’t you know it, there she is, engaged in an opulence-off with the star, and, IMO, getting the worst of it. Much of this album is the aural equivalent of an heiress slowly flashing a massive diamond bracelet in our direction as we stand across the street from a DeBeers protest. Do we nod and smile? Do we move on? Do we mutter something about extractive capitalism under our breaths even as we’re enchanted by the glitter? The label has flooded the Internet with “classical composer reacts to ‘Berghain’”-type content, all positive, of course, which suggests to me that they’re aware of the problem and they’re trying to head it off at the pass (TikTok is the pass). Aesthete and apologist for Marie Antoinette that I am, I offer only that this is all sung well, if a trifle flamboyantly, and played well, if a trifle speedily, and recontextualized with well-researched expertise, if a little seamlessly.  The artist gets the Duolingo Dilettante award for writing in many different languages, with each song saying nothing particularly interesting about a different saint. Your guess is as good as mine about how she gets away with this shit.  I’m willing to shoulder some of the blame. Right after I finish air-fiddling along. 

Rowena Wise — Senseless Acts Of Beauty  Rowena Wise was my other New Colossus discovery, though I didn’t know it that night. She didn’t come with a band. That seemed like a reasonable economic decision for a traveling Aussie to make, but it meant that she had to put over performance-heavy, sun-baked soft-rock story-songs in a bar without assistance from a drummer. That she was up to the challenge was my first tipoff that she was an artist worth following. My second came when I played Rowena’s album and found out that she’d made a complete and coherent statement. Unlike Chloë Doucet, who is best understood as projectable, Rowena has already gotten to where she’s going. She’s a finished work; she is who she is, and who she is is Julia Jacklin without the anhedonia. Now, you might say that withering self-interrogation and rigorous policing of ego boundaries is the whole point of a Julia Jacklin, and I’d know where you’re coming from. Rowena, romantic though she is, has her own crooked lyrical trails to follow and powerful tricks of occlumency to perform. It must be something in those outback artesian wells. For instance, she opens one song on the toilet bowl, facestalking her partner’s ex-girlfriend. Her response to her jealousy is an assertion of immediacy: only the present moment exists, she assures herself, which is easy to say when you are high and pooping. Then on the tremendous “Indifferent,” she applies the same logic to a breakup in progress, and you hear the gears click as Rowena’s boyfriend moves in a few seconds from present and real to past and spectral. The mountain she has to move is her own emotional commitment, and we hear her do it in real time. Can she snap that ring of stars that chokes her neck? We feel a bond with those that suffer by our side, she tells us, before advising us to save our breath and go. Out into the Australian sun, presumably, the vast desert, and the next shimmering mirage. 

Ruby Haunt — Blinking In The Wind  The sad bastard rock. Some might call it slowcore, but it’s not particularly downtempo. It’s just that everything is hushed and aching and played/mixed to maximize wistfulness. That means lonesome single-note midrange plinks on the piano, dispirited acoustic, rainy whatsits, a snare that sounds brushed even though it probably isn’t, and song forms that are, once examined, pretty standard, as if they couldn’t shake off the depression sufficiently to find that extra chord. What separates Ruby Haunt from the Wellbutrin emo is the frontman’s unwillingness to raise his voice above an asphyxiated mumble. It’s a strategy, but so is keeping all your kings in the back row. If he sustained a story and rounded up a kids’ choir, this could be a stateside answer to Iechyd Da. As it is, it’s a low-key soundtrack for an autumn sulk.  I doubt it’s trying to be anything more. 

Saba — From The Private Collection Of Saba And No I.D.  I made a winery out of hydrants in the street, he tells us. A little awkward as messiah metaphors go, but you know what he’s getting at. He’s inviting you to bathe in the spiritual balm of his lyricism, really splash around, like West Side kids with no a/c in July, desperate to cool off by any means necessary. He’s implicitly comparing his competitors to greedy utility corporations who’ve got the juice but won’t share it. They could be like Saba if they wanted to be, but instead they lie lie lie, starving Chicago people of the free storytelling and versifying that is theirs by birthright. He’s also referring to what the theologian Paul Tillich called holy waste — the excess we allow in the name of joyful exuberance, the sanctification that comes from collective action, holy water blasting straight into the gutters, washing the feet of the dirt-poor praise dancers. Now Christ, as Saba knows, performed the miracle to prove a point (that guy was always proving points). He wanted to tell us something about abundance: that the real wine was the Holy Spirit, and it was all around us, available to all willing to hold out their cup and drink. It also foreshadows his death at the hands of unjust authorities. Pistols pop/guns shot in Saba’s vicinity, and the emcee, humble in his Target t-shirt, grounds his ecstatic reading of Acts 1:5 in a narrative of endangerment. I’m reminded of another Chi-town emcee who once did a lot of that kind of thing, sometimes over No I.D. beats, drawing the connection between Jesus’s walk with old soul music and urban hardship and the American aspirational quality of hip-hop at its best. Saba’s not the concept-master that Kanye is, but he’s a better rapper, keeping up bar for bar with his hero K Dot. Plus his conversation with God goes much better than Kendrick’s does. The big guy reminds Saba that showing love is what it’s all about. And so he does: for the style, for the city, for the ladies, for language and his own quick-spitting eloquence, and for the water that flows all around him, lifting him up, carrying him like a conquering prince in a palanquin.     

Sabrina Carpenter — Man’s Best Friend  They cannot touch the hem of her garment, but I am grateful to modern pop stars for reminding me of all these Joni lyrics. For instance, Sabrina don’t like weak men/she gets bored so quick/and she don’t like strong men/‘cuz… well, hipness to their tricks is not really the issue. It’s more that maturation and self-control makes them less likely to want to get busy. And hey, if my slutty pajamas stopped eliciting boners, I think I’d get worried, too. But it’s worth wondering why Sabrina is so convinced that there’s an inverse relationship between the intelligence of her paramour and his erotic interest in her. She’s playing it for laughs, but I’m not sure how funny it is. It suggests there’s a self-esteem issue that I admit I hadn’t noticed on prior recordings. Telling it is that even as she keeps up a steady stream of double entendres and PG-13 risqué comments, her horniness has ebbed noticeably. These days she’s less interested in being anybody’s Juno than she is in the attention discrepancies that mar all of her love affairs. Amy Allen spruces up the tracks with the usual puns, zingers, and dangled melodic distractions and Jack Antonoff keeps things as punchy as he knows how, so the label clearly isn’t taking any chances. Alas, much of the pith on this set comes from a lemon has already been vigorously juiced. About half of these tracks don’t measure up to the standard set by the Short ’N’ Sweet b-sides. Unsurprisingly, the team does best when they double down on the jokes and leading comments, particularly “House Tour,” an extended gag that features an anal sex demurral and product placement for Chips Ahoy in the same bated breath. Sabrina takes it uptempo and bounces around the playpen with all the flirtation she can manage. I wish only that there’d been more of such stuff. Call this what it is: the year’s most obvious strike while the iron is hot.

Saint Etienne — International   Once more into the breach.  Shakespeare meant, of course, the breach between dance music and bookish storytelling indiepop.  Yes, Sarah, Bob, and Pete have had some company there lately, but when they started, they were virtually alone, staring down the slings and arrows of the rockists and the poptimists alike. Sometimes Robert Wratten would help them mount a spirited defense before skulking away.  They wanted to have their cake and eat it too, and who in his right mind would ever deny Sarah Cracknell her piece of cake? Her sugar frosted red velvet just desserts?  This is, in theory, the final roundup for Saint Etienne as they prepare for their post-playing roles in the rock and roll broadcast booth, and if there is no rock and roll broadcast booth, I say we build one for them to inhabit. You know they’d do great. Since they have always behaved like the most genteel of party people, their going-away party is full of genteel revelry from British gentlemen: the Chemical Brothers and the Doves on the stuttering, glorious “Glad,” urbane Nick Hayward schmaltzing it up on “The Go Between,” Orbital throbbing and U.F.O.-ing on “Take Me To The Pilot,” Vince Clarke writing rapturously about two lovers/forced into secrecy/two lovers/whose future was fantasy. It’s all so fetchingly rendered and masterfully recorded, and it all gandy-dances on the rail line that connects the city-center club with the resort chateau with your quaint English hometown. And that’s really all there is to say, but… I’m not ready to let them go just yet.  As an American disinclined to cut a rug, I did not pick up on Saint Etienne until Steven played me Good Humor in 1998. Mired as I was in the dark days of my indie rock period, I wasn’t head over heels for it. The next one was the ambient-leaning Sound Of Water, and though I recognized “Heart Failed In The Back Of A Taxi” as a post-trip hop masterwork, I considered the album too sedate. It wasn’t until Tales From Turnpike House — a decade and half after the band was formed — that I got the big picture. Once I oriented myself so that I could take in the Saint Etienne message, they never stopped speaking to me. Am I just killing time here? Like the circuit exists as long as I can pump the electricity of words into it? I remember a night in the balcony at the Bowery Ballroom. Hilary had just started chemotherapy but wanted to go out anyway. We caught the first half of a two set Saint Etienne show, sticking it out until we couldn’t anymore. Through my panic I was impressed nonetheless. I sat above the Bob Stanley bank of synthesizers and marveled at the compositional architecture and tonal shading of the songs. Very few bands could have reached me that night. Maybe Belle & Sebastian could have reached me. Maybe not. For Saint Etienne, it was a simple matter of connecting Sarah Cracknell’s wide-eyed congeniality to material that was just cinematic enough to conjure a definite sense of place, time, and mood. Twee yarn-spinners in the London style and star attractions at the discotheque, effortlessly sexy, very intelligent, with cosmopolitan shimmers and true passion for the village green. A vestige of Cool Britannia in an uncool millennium, increasingly anachronistic as the UK has fallen into factionalism and infighting around them. So maybe this is the proper time to bow out. They leave behind admirers but no real replacements. Maybe Neil Tennant can keep reminding us that the distance between the Home Counties tower block, the royal soiree, and the public library is not as great as certain populists have advertised. Maybe he’s tired of it, too. Goodbye to a great one: better than a great one, an inimitable one. One-of-a-kind. I won’t request a polite departure. By now that should go without saying.

Sam Fender — People Watching  It’s tempting but misleading to say that this is what The War On Drugs would sound like if Adam Granduciel could sing. Smitten with People Watching as I am, I went back to the prior albums, and I’m not sure what Granduciel has added to Sam’s music beyond atmosphere. From the jump he had a formula intact: fifty per cent Springsteen, thirty per cent Gallaghers circa What’s The Story, some Dire Straits, a sprinkling of Paul Buchanan and Geordie soul, more Ed Sheeran singing “A Team” than Sam would care to admit, absurd sincerity, passionate Weakerthans love for his roughneck hometown, worries about his own reticence, and a police dog’s knack for sniffing out dead ends. As long as he’s got that working-class steam whistle in his voice, E Street Nation will continue to champion him, and for legit reasons (Little Steven, for instance, is a fan). For a good storyteller with an eye for literary detail, he’s loath to play with words — I think he suspects that any sign of frivolity will undercut his legitimacy as a troof-teller — and the next joke he cracks will be his first. You might wonder, as another anguished northern boy once did, how someone so young can sing words so sad. All is forgiven when Sam hammers home those smelted-iron choruses, complete with sturdy hooks and chick backing vocals and even some Big Man sax rides. He’s as careful to ground his critique of Brexit in Thatcherism as any other conscientious O-levels taker. He swears off the drugs and the local lager and I almost believe he means it. On the excellent “Arm’s Length,” he even demonstrates that he knows how to charm the pants off of the ladies. Hey, it took Bruce eight album cycles to figure that out.

Samia — Bloodless  Spine oil: that’s the stuff that surges up your cerebral column to bathe your pituitary gland in organic psychedelics and create the proper state of mind for receiving the latest transmission from the void that is Samia Finnerty. Unless she’s talking about filleting your bones out of your body and squeezing the marrow from them, which, tbh, seems entirely possible. She might just wanna see what happens, given her interest in secretion and exsanguination and immolation and other such stuff. Rock your body and all that. Oh, did I mention this was a pop album? Because pop it is, no matter how dense her field of reference and twisted her diction. She’s just cut the tether that held her intellect in check. As a tunesmith and hook-sharpener, she’s made good on the promise shown on the first album and banished bad memories of the second with a parade of choruses and releases that turn the trick of getting some very weird and sticky stuff caught in your head. You try to swab it out but the gummy residue remains. Samia isn’t the first writer to spike her pop with horror tropes — just look at Lauren Mayberry, not to mention Abel Tesfaye. What distinguishes Bloodless is that this vision doesn’t derive from Hollywood at all.  Instead it’s a spectral projection from Samia’s messed-up imagination with all tortured images pulled from the pockets of her own too-tight jeans. Samia finds something dark and carnivorous lurking in the tangled root system of female sexuality. At times she sounds resigned to it, and at other times it sure seems like she likes it likes it likes it. Her female characters are constantly bleeding out and desperate to replenish what they’ve lost either through vampirism (I bend well and I suck hard, sings mosquito-Samia) or by devouring some niños. As Samia’s boyfriend masturbates to a pregnant belly, Samia imagines the princess eating the “pea” that troubles her womb and worries her awake. Figures of menstruation and ritual uncleanness reoccur all over the set, in between the stabbings, the painful screwings, and the bloodlettings of girls draped over recliners. When does the hemorrhaging stop? Well, never, reckons Samia. It just continues until the woman is fully evacuated, a ragged hole under a loose frame of skin. Thus when she tells you there’s nothing under her Levi’s, you know she doesn’t (just) mean she isn’t wearing any underwear. Samia’s response to all of this is to lash out and enjoy the gruesome ride as well as she can. I think that’s spirited. It’s exactly how dumber pop stars behave. They just don’t have words for what they’re up to. Samia does. You think I won’t do it/you think I won’t do it/you think I won’t do it/but there’s nothing to it. Guys, I think she’s gonna do it. 

Saturdays At Your Place — These Things Happen  What makes emo the most autumnal music? Is it the winding guitar figures, reminiscent as they are of the trajectory of spiraling leaves? Is it all of the suspended chords, each one bestowing on the harmonic passages the indeterminacy of shortening days? Is it the romantic longing in the voices of the singers, aging as they are and working against the clock, or the back to school screams they unleash?  Is it the hovering presence of death and that mist-like breath of mortality hovering over the mixes? Or is it just the low humidity?, everything crisp and clear, and nothing fogging up the air from here to the horizon?  Piano notes like the patter of cold rain on a suburban windowsill?, blasts of six-string like sudden gusts?, the American Football trumpet calling you home across the darkening skies?  I mean, it’s probably all of that, isn’t it. Late October distilled and expressed as sound waves, plus the ambiguity of early November. Can’t forget the Early November. 

Serengeti — Ajai 2 The Reimagine  Like Better Call Saul or certain books of the Bible, this dejected return to the Ajai segment of the expanded Kenny Dennis universe is neither prequel nor sequel but simply morquel. Some scenes precede Ajai’s encounter with Kenny and the sneaker misdelivery, and a few stanzas take us past the implosion of his marriage, but most of them survey familiar territory from slightly different angles. We get the opera cake slice, the bespoke potholders, the exclusive drops and the Oshkosh B’Gosh, the Scottie Pippen sneakers and the trips to Miami and Paris, the race, class, and ethnic politics, the now-familiar mudslides of brand names and acts of casual oneupsmaship that are the character’s liturgy. Also, “the wife,” as it turns out, has a name. Vanessa is revealed to be an overworked and exhausted cancer researcher with some identity issues of her own that shed some light on the mystery of why she saddled herself with Ajai in the first place. We get a clearer look at her frustration with her “ill house-husband” and his taste for violent rap music and high-end threads, so enthralled by his hypebeast lifestyle that he likens a marital squabble to the aftereffects of a credit freeze after splurging on an exclusive release. But nothing goes to character as ferociously as the vignettes on Ajai Original Flavor do (that amazing scene in the airport kinda says it all), and I’m not sure we learn anything about these characters that wasn’t strongly implied by prior recordings. Ajai was already established as a Paul Auster-type protagonist whose day of reckoning is visible to the audience long before he forces his wife to sit through a movie in Yiddish and tries her patience with endless waits in the drop line. We do discover that he’s completely misread the significance of the breakup, and takes the wrong lesson from it even as he accepts his L. That, too, wasn’t hard to see coming. It’s like Serengeti is always telling us through these and other characters: in order to withstand this life, delusions are necessary. There’s gonna be major collateral damage. The best we can do is wrap ourselves in the Givenchy faux fur and enjoy the bag we get. 

Serengeti — Palookaville  Not Ajai, not Kenny Dennis. This is Serengeti as himself. Mind you, “himself” is just another construction. It’s not like it says Serengeti on his birth certificate. There’s no real reason to think we’re any closer to the source on this collection than we usually are. Yet by some audio trick or another, this does feel less like a created voice than the ones we’re accustomed to hearing from David, or “Ashkenazi Dave,” as he keeps calling himself. Maybe it’s the sincere — and sincerely beautiful — indie rock beats. These are very different from what we’re used to getting from Kenny Segal, a tonal change, ruminative, immersive, reminiscent of those chilling moments on KDIV when the narrator says he needs to stop to think. Palookaville opens with a story about an indie rapper stuck on a six act out-of-town bill where everyone leaves/after seeing their friend Steve (“lotta different cities ain’t a real milestone,” I feel him on that) and ends with a fantasy of traveling to the Met Gala with a quasi-famous acquaintance who has far outpaced him. In between flows a choppy but navigable river of reflections about money, show business, heritage, vexed relationships caught in the distortion field of human ambition, the surprising dynamics of absence, the eternal desire to flee the sticks, and the lengths we’ll go to and prices we’ll pay to participate in the activities that keep us tethered to the world. I like the cubist-associative one, told in mind-warping narrative slo-mo, that connects a spilled plate of fajitas to a woman flirting with the Unabomber and a half-man half-fish who finds a locket on the bottom of Lake Mead. But it’s the emotional story of a lost fur coat that keeps bringing me back, over, and over, and over.

Serengeti — Universe  As the back half of this is machine paste and ocean noises, it should not be confused with essential Serengeti. Yet even inessential Serengeti has its rewards. This downcast electro-rap project neither extends the story of Kenny Dennis/Ajai nor does it pick up any of the narrative threads of Palookaville. Instead it revisits a story alluded to on The Gentle Fall and the collaborative project with Deerhoof: a lament in stereo from two sad sack husbands whose horny wives would prefer to fuck a capoeira teacher (Serengeti, naturally, raps the part of the capoeira teacher). Two subserengetis with gentle beta-manly deliveries play the cuckolds to the flaccid hilt, demonstrating with every despondent utterance why they got ditched. More painfully, they know it. They’re just not able to do anything about it. They’re a pair of weaklings up against a muscular loverman, and that’s all there is to it. When one of them asks “does he treat you like you’re edible?/I bet that feels incredible,” he’s crestfallen but resigned to the blackpilled reality that they can never satisfy a woman in the way that Universe can. This is sad, funny, and satirical in the Serengeti manner — a send-up of rap braggadocio, martial arts, and the hotwife lifestyle. It’s also indicative of David Cohn’s general attitude about the relationship between men and women, and the crudest example of the marriage trap that snaps perpetually at the toes of his male characters. They either lose their wives through misjudgment (Kenny), selfish neglect (Ajai) or sociobiology (the Universe two), and in none of these cases are we’re supposed to sympathize unreservedly with the men left behind. It’s painfully clear they are all quite desperately in love with the girls they can’t have anymore. We see their flaws and we understand why it won’t work out. We know they don’t know everything about their wives, but we know they know enough to know they’re in trouble. That’s literature. Specifically it’s Paul Auster. Auster when he was good, torturing his audience with a plain view of poor schmucks who, in plain view of the audience, could not prevent the one who got away from getting away. 

Silvana Estrada — Vendrán Suaves Lluvias  More soft and rainy jams from the Natalie Merchant of the Global South. Silvana is an artist for whom beauty and grace comes easy, and the other stuff.. well, the other stuff sometimes requires a little work. This is all very well written and impeccably performed as usual, even on the back half where Silvana, I’m sorry to say, plumb falls asleep. Give her a Lincoln center-ready arrangement like the one on the Lauramarlingish “Dime,” loamy-rich with strings and mariachi brass, and she can outclass anybody in any section of the record store. I reckon the key to keeping this old soul in a place where we youngsters at heart can apprehend her talents is for her to have a fucking drumbeat, without which she does have a tendency to slow things to a glacial crawl and torture her phrases until everybody involved gets a strongly worded letter from UNESCO. The larger problem as always is Silvana’s suite of vocal affectations, which include a dreadful tendency to let her pitch die out at the end of her phrases and a complimentary practice of plucking hard at notes like she’s trying to divest an unripe berry from a bush that won’t let go. You’re disturbing the honeybees, Silvana.  

Silverstein — Antibloom  Umpteenth album from the Canadian thirdwave emo/screamo band that nobody thinks of very much. This is kind of a shame, since they’re at least as good as Origami Angel at toggling between yargled heavy metal sections, supercompressed modern pop-rock, frantic hardcore, and Melodyned-out skatepunk. It all goes down so smoothly that I might even call Antibloom an easycore record. The album lumbers out of the gate like a metallic beast, but after about a minute under the piledriver, they wriggle free and start registering melodies on your consciousness in glitter ink. The best by far is “A Little Fight,” perversely over in ninety seconds, just when frontman Shane Todd begins settling into an Ace Enders (or is that Adam Young?) imitation. It leaves such a sugary impression on your lips that the rest of the record can’t help but taste a little sweet, even when they’re yelling their heads off.

Skrillex — Fuck You Skrillex You Think Ur Andy Warhol But Ur Not!!  I’m old enough to remember From First To Last in a parking lot on some disreputable Warped Tour stop or another. I recall Skrillex on the Asbury Park beach at the final Bamboozle, as obnoxious and deafening as any metal band could ever hope to be, and a frustrated member of the Wonder Years on an adjacent stage, begging somebody to turn that damned computer off. It seems unlikely that he ever thought he was Andy Warhol, but Sonny Moore has quite a lengthy track record of perturbation. In recent years he’s dialed down (literally) the sonic irritants upon which he’s built his career and cultivated a more, er, mature approach. This new one, however, dives back into the party pool with a splash big enough to ruin the patio furniture. Forty five minutes of brostep complete with grody bass drops, click-clack noises, beat collisions, track fragments, satirical exhortations from a faux deejay (“Reject society! Return to nature!”), and all the belching and screeching noises he can coax out of whatever souped-up contraption it is that he calls his musical instrument. Everything stitched together for maximum hilarity and novelty, a nonstop ride in a shopping cart pushed by a drunken sorority sister in flip-flops, seamless acts of musical mischief like it’s 2010 and Snooki and The Situation are about to trip you up on the Boardwalk in Seaside and kick crabs in your face. If this was all rather arresting fifteen years ago — new advances in bugging your parents from the after-school hellion squad — it’s downright unbelievable now. It is as out of place in 2025 as a flower child at a Trump rally. I have got to believe that it is a hash made from leftover beats stashed in the back of the fridge during more party-hearty days. Because in order to create Skrillex music, certain conditions must apply. We must be broadly enthusiastic, confident that the good times are going to roll on for awhile. We must be accepting of shirtless bros with backward caps and the gaudy mass expression of their testosterone. We need beats and sections as defined as a farty squirt of chilled suntan oil on burnt skin. We have to reject dreaminess in favor of the bracing, salubrious effect of a nice slap on the ass. Most of all, we have to feel good about technology and the pace of change, with new innovations coming at us from all directions like bumper cars driven by teens jacked up on saltwater taffy. Obviously none of that applies now, which makes this album more than just a hedonic nostalgia show. It’s a sad reminder of how far we’ve fallen: proof positive, if we needed any more, that we’ve slid into a great depression.  

Sloan — Based On The Best Seller  So instead of finishing writing that page-turner, Chris Murphy is just going to slap a message of love on his tombstone and leave it at that. It seems expedient and succinct. His readers/listeners will surely appreciate the brevity. Alas, it is too late for Irish goodbyes: this is the fifteenth Sloan album and he and his mates have been pondering their legacy for the last four sets at least. They might serve it up to us in tasty two-and-a-half minute glam-rock capsules, but they’ve been pondering aloud for a long time. No group so obsessed with catchiness could ever be satisfied with a fleeting impression. These days, they’re just as concerned with the cost of sticking around. On “Live Forever,” they count the costs of immortality and decide it isn’t worth the tedium. They demand a few choruses, a memorable release, and maybe a graceful outro. May we all be so lucky. 

Smerz — Big City Life  Being dumb and playing dumb are two different things. So I am told by those who play dumb. Unless they’ve decided to play so dumb that words are beyond them and they’re stubbornly refusing to break character. I suspect Smerz might be in that category. The production here suggests that Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt are pretty sharp if not terribly musical: brittle Eurobeats, chintzy synthesized strings, deadpan and occasionally muffled vox, overlapping phrases, bass notes on the piano, negative space redolent of an empty tube station corridor at 3 AM. Over these spacy, evocative tracks Catharina and/or Henriette mumble interior monologues of party chicks either unable or unwilling to connect one impulse to the next. They are dancing, looking at the shoes and dresses of other girls, dancing more, (intermittently) kissing, smoking, experiencing loneliness and the rapture of the urban streets after dark. This, I think, is all true to the experience of many big city livers worldwide: they can access sensation but not emotion. Something has deadened their feelings and muted their intuition. It may be modernity. It may be the hard limits of their brains. Though they’re Norwegian and the big city they’re writing about is presumably cosmopolitan Oslo, Catharina and Henriette’s storytelling does not seem to me, when you come right down to it, to be much different from the Ugly American postfraternity tales we’re used to getting. At times Smerz reminds me, greatly, of Morgan Wallen in one beer two beer three beer four mode. His semiarticulate account of his own retarded demimonde is as honest and bewildered as theirs. They’re giving you sharp pictures of a real thing — photos you’ve got to get pretty low to snap.  

Sofia Kourtesis — Volver  I’ve always enjoyed this woman’s music, but this project takes the birthday cake, slices it right there on the cake stand, and spins it around and distributes pieces to the guests before you can pin the tail on the donkey. It’s a dazzle-lit swing around the club floor, under the party streamers and gold balloons, with the clear and vivrant sound enlivened by occasional Latin beats, big-ass throbs, the pitter-patter of rogue percussion, Han Solo laser blast sounds, and a whistle to let you know you’re getting out of line. Just kidding, Sofia doesn’t care what you do as long as you dance. Thus every synthesizer modulates, every overdub sweeps, every drum pattern builds to a skittering break, every romantic overture is met by a come-hither smile under the strobelight. Even the guy from Caribou seems to be having a bang-up time. And right in the middle of this too-brief encounter, the Peruvian folkie Miguel Ballumbrosio comes marching in with a great big beat and a chant-along melody, and, say, have you ever been at a house of music, enjoying a show, and suddenly a crew fills the floor from out of nowhere, brings the celebration to new heights, and then vanishes as quickly as they came? No? Yes? Because this is what we do scenes for: those mirror ball nights when anything can happen. 

Sombr — I Barely Know Her  Soft sounds from a callow fellow. I’d like to say that’s part of his charm, but it really isn’t: his alternate inclination and disinclination to replace his lost girlfriend with someone superficially similar is like something out of Olivia Rodrigo’s nightmares. No, what endears me to Baby Boose is his attention to craft. Well, maybe it’s him and maybe it’s Tony Berg and his other big money collaborators. Allow me to register a hearty IDGAF.  I don’t want to hear about nepo anything when the outcome is as classic as the Pantheon. All of these songs have verses that imply pre-choruses that then resolve in choruses and releases. They’re all played by flesh and blood musicians capable of sustaining a performance over three minutes without machine enhancement. Each is a vignette about a handsome dork in the city. You may not want to know the protagonist but the protagonist wants to know you. The musicians bestow upon you some nice big sloppy practice-space beats, developed pop melodies, Billy Joel chords and Springsteen ultra-lite arrangements. Gallons of reverb, of course, but that’s an endemic problem in NYC akin to rats in the sewers. That can’t be lain at the feet of Sombr. Sure, the single shamelessly rips off “Somebody That I Used To Know,” but it’s got a bridge in it that Gotye never could have written because of his obeisance to the loop. And look, people, you don’t have to write to make music. You really don’t. Bang a couple of sequences together and step on a few FX pedals and make a racket, and bam, that’s a track. It could even be a hit. I’m not going to be mad at you if it is. I’m probably going to dance along. But don’t be fooled by the temporary applause. Audiences would really prefer it if you’d pick up a pen and paper and get organized. Every consequential figure in pop-rock history — from Chuck Berry to Chuck D to that showgirl you’re all sick of — to has been a writer. Every one. I know what you are thinking, but this is not my ink-stained opinion. This has been ratified by aeons of public preference. The arc of musical history bends towards shit like ”Key Under The Mat”: highly written numbers with good compositional architecture and a melody you can carry with you once the song stops playing. Sombr and his manservants produce it accordingly, with emphasis on narrative hook and moments of sonic drama.  It’s a bit like The Neighborhood, or those rock-leaning Harry Styles albums. Certain nonbelievers scoffed at Harry but his records have stood the test of time. Check the elevation of your mojo when you’re in the grocery store and “As It Was” comes on. Harry’s music is going to endure. Superficial as it might initially sound, Sombr will, too. 

Sophia Kennedy — Squeeze Me  What do we make of a woman who flexes as she drives a truck across a bridge?  “I’m in control/I run the hair salon,” deadpans Sophia in my favorite leftfield boast of the year.  Just before that she reminds us that she’s got a whip in the back of her car. What, or who, will she use it on, I wonder?  maybe her main collaborator Mense Reents, whose motorik beats, Germanodisco, and decadent Weimar cabaret music could sometimes use a little more Autobahn pep. But club music this is not. Sleek. icy, and synthetic as it may sometimes sound, Squeeze Me is an auteur record made by a Baltimore expat in Berlin reflecting on formative moments in her childhood and stopping mercifully short of memior-izing.  I admit that it is a little worrisome when Sophia conflates audience enthusiasm with a high-chair feeding. Squeeze Me opens with an infant’s view of a mother’s face — massive, hungry, somewhat grotesque — and proceeds through wound-down fairground rides and imaginary friends and a fantasy of becoming a fly and penetrating her partner’s ear. The lyrics, full of knotty observations and jokes to herself, are stealthily good throughout. On the kraut-pop finale “Hot Match” she concludes with a sexy-ass metaphor that doubles as a statement of purpose: my key fits the burning door. I trust a few of you know what she’s talking about. Dangerous the world may be. But what good is sitting alone in your room. Come hear the music play.    

Sparks — Mad!  Melodically underdeveloped and brutally repetitive set from two older dudes who know better. Mad! is abrasive even by Sparks standards, and all of these herks and and jerks occur within airless and windowless sonic environments decorated by faux-orchestral strings and rhythm guitar that sounds like a hamster scratching on tinfoil. The satire is obvious, and the sarcasm about highway 405 is heavy handed enough to make Negativland blanch. I get it, Ron, you want to drive faster. So did Sammy Hagar. Verse representative of the album and the current Mael state of mind: it’s certainly been/a long red light/it’s certainly been/a long red light. And so on. Eric Idle beat them to the joke by a half-century. 

Stereolab — Instant Holograms On Metal Film  Welp, the synths still work. Turned ‘em on and checked. Maybe the pots are a little dirty. That happens with analog gear. Inertia makes grease build up in the input and output jacks. Despite their Space Age reputation, Laetitia Sadier and company have always been analog kids, concerned as they are with the parlous state of the world and the universal narrative violently imposed on progress and development and civilization. Palliative care for dying modernity and pre-natal care for the society to come: that is the prescription of Dr. Laetitia. She makes her rounds in the ideology hospital, perhaps with a little less pep than she had in her step at the beginning of the shift, passing out her pills with precision, marking checks on her checklist. Life support machines whir and beep, clocks are synchronized, laminates dangle from the necks of the staff, catch the lights, and sway like pendulums. It’s all clean and well lit, and it passes inspection, but you weren’t worried about that, were you. I must say that the sense of humor and commitment to loopy narrative that Laetitia has cultivated on her last couple of solo discs is completely absent here. Unless it’s hidden in plain view in the ones she sings in French? She would do that, wouldn’t she. Don’t make me resort to Google Translate, Laetitia.

Steven Wilson — The Overview  The Zaphod Beeblebrox of progressive rock steps into the Total Perspective Vortex. Zaphod had his unearned egotism to shield him from the deleterious effects of the knowledge of the immensity of the universe. Steven Wilson has his record collection, which, to me, is a better bet. You don’t need an improbability drive to know that whatever is out there in the recesses of space is not as good as In The Court Of The Crimson King. No, we’ve got all the meaning we need and then some on this benighted spheroid. This the relativism of astronomical distance risible unless you’re some kind of orbiting supercomputer, which Steven, humanist softie that he is, definitely is not. At least he’s not complaining about cellphones anymore. With its two sidelong suites broken into Baba Yaga sections, this is getting touted as Steven’s return to ‘70s prog, but what they really mean is that it’s the first album in his discography where its specific prog antecedents are unmissable. This might strike you as a funny thing to find on a record dedicated to the longview. There’s the “Revealing Science Of God”-like extended chant that opens the first side just like “The Revealing Science Of God” did on Tales, and the widdly-widdly Tony Banks lead that rides the scree down the other side of the mountain. Then there’s all that “Astronomy Domine”-style intoning of the handles of celestial bodies. They feel so magisterial on the tongue. Oberon, Miranda and Titania, et. al. Sometimes I think that the only reason our imaginations are captured by outer space is because of how poetically everything has been named. If the stars and planets were called, say, Gas Agglomeration B-XIX, I doubt anybody but Isaac Asimov would even bother to peer at them through a telescope. Well, Isaac and Neil Peart.

Suzanne Vega — Flying With Angels  Suzanne will have a glass or two of figurative language with dinner but she’s never going to get hammered on it. Marlene Dietrich may have signification for the narrator, but she’s also a poster on the wall, there to set a scene, and scenes by definition have illustrative value. There was a queen, and there was a soldier, and sometimes you don’t need to know anything more than that. So when she sings a punk rock song about rats, there’s a level on which she’s castigating guttersnipes in packs or predatory capitalists or militants or whoever else you might deem untrustworthy. More importantly, she’s singing about actual rats: furry guys who run across your shoe and give you a heckuva shiver when they do. Insofar as New York City is and always has been Suzanne’s personal space (even the song about Galway never leaves Manhattan), they’re a little too close for comfort for her. She knows their specific weight, and that particular flash in their eyes, and how they sound when they scurry around her unconscious. This close observation of particulars — an interest in street-level experience — lets her get away with putting God on the last train out of Mariupol and dodging witches on the sidewalk. It maybe even forgives her premature flight with angels. But nothing needs to forgive her sly reappropriation of Bob Dylan’s “I Want You” in the service of a female housekeeper to a successful man. That’s what she’s here for.

Talulah Paisley — Fool  Indiepop sung in a bratty kid’s voice evocative of Veruca Salt — the character, not the band. Lyris Faron knows what she’s doing, and while her contrivances are entertaining, they make this set a bit more of an art project than we’d typically like to see from a perky young band. The decision to interpose a cushion of immaturity between her narrator and the failed relationship she’s singing about is a tactical choice that suggests Lyris has got a sense of humor about it all, but maybe she’s just disassociating. Both the makeout sessions she describes and the language she uses to sing about them have a thirteen-year-old’s slumber party tone to them, and while she’s less coquettish than she is entitled, what she believes she’s entitled to is never completely clear to her or to us. She feels icky so she puts the brakes on the hanky-panky. She fantasizes about organizing an orgy but does not want to participate. She stares at the baby ballerinas but does not dance. This is a character by the edge of the swimming pool in the sun, braced to get pushed in, but nobody can be bothered to give her the fateful shove. Maybe the problem is her. Lyris and her band have decorated this comic book with anything and everything they can get their hands on: cheap synths, xylophone, mellotron, whistles, horns, plastic clatter and tape effects, spoons banged together like distemperate babies do in the high chair. It often feels additive for the sake of addition. Nothing here is exactly played by a maestro. But she does occasionally attain the rambling, freewheeling, audio verite feeling she’s after. Some fool might even call it innocent. 

Tame Impala — Deadbeat  Thank you for your message on [date here]. Kevin Parker is out of office and will not respond to messages until [return date].  If you need immediate assistance please contact [backup]. Kevin will respond upon return. Maybe.

Tate McRae — So Close To What  Well I’ll be: an old-fashioned pop project in which a cold hearted snake (look into her eyes) of reasonable talent points her narrow scope at the dancefloor and her genitals and nowhere beyond that. No painstaking self-elaboration, no detours into consciousness-raising or liberation theology and whatnot, no pop star intellectualism period. Just get into the groove/you got to prove your love to me, and by “love,” I of course mean affection for specific marketing segments.They’re out there and must be served. Tate is an okay singer in the pouty Ariana-derivative style, she’s a good dancer, she picks out her producers judiciously, and she fills out a music video well. I appreciate her appreciation of the basics. I admit, though, that after forty two reiterative minutes of bings and bongs and flash reflections in the revolving door, you might find yourself yearning for a half-baked Gaga manifesto.


Taylor Swift — The Life Of A Showgirl  One of the beautiful things about me, as Lana Del Rey might say, is that I find it extremely easy to imagine people having sex. Anybody you might name?, I can instantly see that person doing it with any other person(s), space aliens, trees, kitchen appliances, whatever.  So when Taylor invites us to visualize her grinding various holes on the root of that football player, I’m happy to oblige. After all she’s done for us, it seems churlish to deny her her exhibitionist fantasy, harmless as it is. Yet I do know there is a section of the Swiftie fanbase that is more familiar with the ins and outs of Taylor’s sex life than I am, and they have declared this latest love object less worthy of the star’s affections than such paragons of male virtue as Matty Healy and Joe Jonas. I further realize that Swift Inc., omniscient and plugged-in as it is, knows it too. Thus flaunting the specifically carnal elements of their English teacher/gym coach relationship (her words) and actually marrying the dude on the six o’ clock news feels like the most punk rock thing she’s ever done. It’s perfectly calibrated to madden the many who would vastly prefer it if Taylor would fuck Hello Kitty or some comparably plush individual. Frankly, I cram to understand what romance might mean to a person with superstar levels of exposure generally associated with the Pope and certain Greek gods, and one of the good things about The Life Of A Showgirl is that it’s pretty clear that Taylor doesn’t know either. Fair enough and predictable enough. What doesn’t sit right with me, though, is the implication that her reintegration into the flow of mainstream American life requires her to dumb things down like Kevin Barnes did on that one album where he was infatuated and happy. If you ever wondered if Taylor associates Europe with literature and sophistication and the United States with mandatory fun, boy howdy will the leap from the last panned set (which will certainly be reevaluated) to the new panned set (which will not be) confirm your suspicions. Maybe she’s right, but it’s a little crass for Miss Americana from Wyomissing, PA, of all people, to lay on that horn so hard. She might have noticed that we’re having a rough time over here and given us a break. That said, she’s been at this shit for a long time now, and there just aren’t all that many Christmas trees left on the Christmas tree farm for her to chop down for us. Consider that at this point in his run, Springsteen — the artist I always compare T. Alison Swift to — was deep into his fifty two channels and nothing on phase. There is nothing on Human Touch as tasty as “The Fate Of Ophelia” or “Honey,” or as delightful and dramatic as “Ruin The Friendship.” It’s house money now, and she’ll play with it in public if she wants to. Anything you want, Taylor. Anything you want. Even this. 

Telethon — Suburban Electric  These Milwaukee bucks share a practice space with Barely Civil and they come from the same scene that gave us Snow Ellet and Charmer, but they’re much more wiseass maximalist power pop than bloodletting emo. Over abrasive rhythm guitar, Kevin Tully tells his stories in a voice that splits the difference between sarcastic Jeremy Gaudet of Kiwi Jr. and Chris Collingwood at his most irritable. I appreciate the scene-shifting mid-song switch-ups, the tottering orchestral and gratuitous Dixieland insertions into arrangements that already feel saturated with sound, the protagonist who dies halfway through a three-minute song, the awkwardness and weird stabs of hostility, and Kevin’s determination to wallpaper each song from floor to ceiling with words. There’s even a deliberately dumb funk-out called “I Think I’ve Seen Enough;” somewhere, Graham Parker is smiling, or at least smirking with recognition. There’s a number sung from the point of view of a hard-working exorcist, and other narrated by a family man who takes a ride in a time machine to retrieve a ballpoint pen and discovers he can’t get back. Obviously Kevin is pulling your leg a little. But when he grasps his disgust with both hands and spits out his hard internal rhymes in the face of exurban stasis, he reminds us why this isn’t possible to mistake this record for the Barenaked Ladies. It’s rage that makes him run the engine so hard and perverse and spiteful delight that carries him the rest of the way home.


The Beths — Straight Line Was A Lie  Comparable to Hokey Pokey in that it is a testament of a songwriter at the end of a rope, crying out for a spiritual balm to take away the pain of existence in a charmless material world. It’s also comparable to Hokey Pokey because Elizabeth Stokes often sounds like Linda Thompson. It’s the plaintive fatalism that does it. She’s a girl in the city, or on an empty beach, bearing up under a heavy burden and singing, mostly to herself, but loud enough that friends might hear. Are you one of those friends? Beth has a message for you about the physical manifestations of depression and the ways in which feeling down strips the unifying enchantments from our bodies that preserve our sense of integrity, illusionary though it might be. A collaboration of bacteria, carbon, and light: that’s how she’s seeing herself in these joyless days. She’s only here to feed the mosquitoes, she tells us so dolefully that I almost think she utterly believes it. But she can’t utterly believe it. Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to lead the band through such impeccable indiepop, setting the table ten times over with the tablecloth so crisply creased, pouring the hot tea so perfectly steeped in earthenware cups, sitting at the head of the table just so, with an expectant look on her face that stops just short of hope. She rallies herself often enough that this set, downcast as it is, never disappears into the slough of despond. “Roundabout,” a love song, is so beautifully realized and so heartfelt that I’ll even forgive her for raising my hopes that it was a Yes cover. And the letter posted home to an estranged mother is shattering as a rock thrown through a kitchen window.

The Telephone Numbers — Scarecrow II  I’ve had the pleasure of watching Alicia Vanden Heuvel a few times in different outfits. Right after How I Learned To Write Backwards the Aislers Set opened for Belle & Sebastian at Hammerstein Ballroom. That was a big stage for a tweepop band with modest ambitions, but they filled it out nicely with low-key Mission District magnetism. Alicia was on bass and she was a microclimate all her own. Light sweater weather and a fluttering scarf for the marine layer seem appropriate. Belle & Sebastian were fantastic that night, btw. Stuart came out with Tom Jones swagger and hammed it up through “There’s Too Much Love,” and if I’d ever had any doubts about his commitment to the rock, they were dispelled right there. The members of the Aislers Set were a little more demure about the whole thing, but not so much that they spaced on their sense of occasion. The prior times I saw Alicia were home games for her: Poundsign at Bottom Of The Hill and a band of her own called Remedy & Wren at Rickshaw Stop for SF Popfest. I was on the bill with the Consultants that night. Did she stick around and watch us?, I couldn’t say. Anyway, it was all highly fetching in a letters and sodas sort of way, and to this day Alicia represents San Francisco to me. Do you have that too?, I wonder?, are there specific faces you’ve conflated with particular places, or is that just me mixing up the social with the cityscape as I do? I love San Francisco, so owning that real estate in my mind gives you a deed you’d never want to mortgage, even if you were determined to buy Marvin Gardens. A quarter century after that Belle & Sebastian show, it is satisfying to me to learn that Alicia remains in the Bay. She runs a recording studio called Speakeasy and makes records like this one where everybody jangles and strums and presents their melodies like a tray of sugar cookies. It’s the local specialty, and these are local color-ers. Several members of the Umbrellas and Reds, Pinks, and Purples make contributions, including Glenn Donaldson, who co-wrote the Telephone Numbers theme song. Andy Pastalaniec of Chime School gets the Leslie speaker whirring, and Oh Sees violinist Dylan Edrich fiddles all over the place. It’s a team, and Alicia is on it. Far be it for me to speak on the life trajectory of a woman I only met briefly in crowded backstage conditions, but it is my belief that if anybody is, Alicia Vanden Heuvel is exactly where she ought to be. God got this one right. The twee God, I mean. 

The Velvet Sundown — Dust And Silence  By now the latest version of artificial intelligence should have fabricated a decent hit act. Seems like the least we can expect from these digital train robbers after they’ve photocopied everything in sight. If they’re not going to pay us for our contributions to the algorithm, can they give us something that isn’t cheap plastic crap?  I say “latest version” because generative artificial intelligence, as they pompously call it, is just another example of machine-assisted composition. There’s nothing new about it, and most of the prior efforts at automating creativity were better. The large language model, which is really just a super-fast data aggregator, has sucked up tons of energy and resources only to strike out while its boosters continue to insist that a breakthrough is right around the corner. Chase that carrot on the stick, donkey. The problem with moving the goalposts over and over is that eventually you run out of field, and there those guys are, holding their poles while everyone in the stadium watches. We can’t have that. Not while a terrifying percentage of the U.S. economy is tied up in this alleged industry. So hype cannons are loaded with confetti and fired. Rumors are circulated and stories are planted as boffins kick this thing and plug it and unplug it and hope it coughs up something — anything — more impressive than a plagiarized term paper. We are supposed to be awed, or at least moved, that the Velvet Sundown has hundreds of thousand monthly listeners on Spotify.  This is a harbinger of something or other.  But the prominence of this computer fluff act tells us more about streaming services and their venal and slipshod methods of playlist assembly than it does about the pop audience. That the Velvet Sundown has no more or less personality than the average brainless psychedelic group is beside the point. If all generative artificial intelligence can do is add bulk to an Internet that is already about as bulk-laden as a virtual space can be, then it’s worthless. It’s worthless in a way that the most casual Internet user (and, more frighteningly, the least-savvy investor) can apprehend. Thus, the success of projects like the Velvet Sundown is worse than failure, because what they’ve succeeded at is the very thing that everybody has come to dislike about this particular technology. In 2025, the cat’s out of the bag. The same extremely online people who were once starry-eyed about generative AI are beginning to agree with the skeptics that it is a slop factory. They think it is turning Dead Internet Theory into dead Internet reality. The rest of us couldn’t have been bothered to care about it in the first place. So: guys, if there’s anything special happening in the GPT age, now would be a really good time to show it to us. If there are any bullets in that gun, you’d better fire them. Consider this a margin call on the great expectations. We don’t want a big pop to leave us with nothing but Hubba Bubba all over our faces. This would be a very dangerous time to do a market crash. Go on, chain Paul McCartney to a desk, get him writing, and pretend it came from the LLM. I promise I won’t blow the whistle.

The Weather Station — Humanhood  So Tamara thinks God is a mirror. That’s not the flimsiest theology you’ll hear in a pop song — not while Lucy Dacus has a record contract — but it’s still a dangerously solipsistic statement from an artist notorious for gazing at her navel. Mostly what she means is that the love you take is equal to the love you make, or something equivalently karmatic about fate paying you back for whatever it is you happen to be emanating. Well, what is Tamara pumping out into this rubbery cosmos of hers? Lots of woodwinds tulling it up in the margins of loose compositions, piano wandering across paprika plains, off-balance beats and shakers, close-miked ASMR vox, frank words about the paralyzing effects of clinical depression, some shit about water, and way more specific gripes than we’re accustomed to hearing from her. Basically Tamara is in an awful mood. She’s annoyed by children and teenagers, her clothing, consumerism, dating apps, people who want it all done by machine, her crappy boyfriend, neon signs, you name it. In fairness, this happened to Joni, too, but at least Joni was funny about it. Tamara is about thirty seconds from needing to talk to the manager. Will the universe bat this back at her? If it does, will she recognize it as her own ill will?

The Weeknd — Hurry Up Tomorrow  Wait, didn’t this guy die? Last I checked he was hanging out in the bardo with Jim Carrey. Turns out he croaked at the end of After Hours and spent Dawn FM journeying toward the light, which was probably held by a gaffer on a music video set. Hurry Up Tomorrow is, canonically speaking, the rebirth, and the re-born Abel is here to tell us, over a twenty-two track long goodbye, that this character is history. Cue Home Is Where: the end of The Weeknd is taking forever. As this is the finale of a putative trilogy, he’s emptying his tank, dousing us in Lionel Richie synthesizers and chord changes, horror movie cliché, and all the Fixx-style new wave pomp and depravity he can summon. Does that sound like a complaint?  Eternal Eighties pop kid that I am, I admit that I’ve enjoyed this entire fairground-popcorn-flavored existential journey, even if Abel never quite convinces me to care where on the eternal round of life and death he’s hanging out during any given track. In the booth he continues to be the closest thing we’ve got to “Dirty Diana”-era MJ, and nobody, not Britney, not Taylor Swift, not the Swede of the week, has ever matched his vision to Max Martin production to greater or hookier effect. (Check out “Give Me Mercy” for that cloud-parting, sunbeam-bathing, dancing on a ceiling feeling). The worst you can say is that the back half of this confessional gets bogged down with ballads, drugged-out fatalism, absurd self-importance and dances with Mr. Roboto, but that’s been true of Abel’s projects from time immemorial. On “Red Terror,” he finally gets real about the flight from Ethiopian oppression and the psychically destabilizing effects of migration that have always underpinned his recordings. If this is the end, he’s going out a winner. Right, fat chance of that. First rule of horror movies: the monster always comes back. 

The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die — Dreams Of Being Dust  The emo to metal pipeline is real. Maybe it’s not gushing with crude, but it’s an active conduit nonetheless.  TWIABP, for instance, already took a giant step toward hard-edged prog rock on the obscenely underrated Illusory Walls. As they’ve gotten better at their instruments, they’ve continuously embiggened the racket they’re making. It’s not tough to see why artists so occupied with the expression of volcanic emotions and disgust at our present political reality might decide to muscle up. The main mosher here is Chris Teti, whose work with such bands as Fiddlehead has shown him that he can rub steel wool in the listener’s face and get away with it. He’s gotten crack drummer Steven Buttery to go along with the latter-day Linkin Park program. Synth player Katie Dvorak is game for a horror show, too, and picks sounds reminiscent of a dentist priming a drill bit. I thought it was better when they were all making like Marillion, but nobody asked me. As for David Bello, he seems a little wearied by all of the screaming and maybe concerned that his plaintive Everyman delivery — best showcased here on the late R.E.M.-like “Oubliette” — was the superior carrier of his sociopolitical message. You may reasonably ask why I can tolerate Moriah Pereira’s metalcore moves so much better than these, none of which are half as ferocious as “The Center’s Falling Out.”  The answer is… I don’t know.  It could be that Moriah is careful to foreground her pop hooks even when she is screaming her head off.  It also might be that I will always stop to engage with an angry woman. An angry man just makes me want to cross the street. So while I love and respect this bunch and understand the reason for their fury, I’m, um, crossing the street. 

Tops — Bury The Key  This is a nice step forward from a soft rock band that looked to have a very low ceiling. They’re using better synthesizer sounds, finding more interesting chords and making space for flute excursions. The words are more paranoid, the guitar player serves up noodles that arrive reasonably al dente, and the drummer actually makes the UV needle jump a few times. That’s a first. My guess is that attempted badass tracks such as “Falling On My Sword” and “ICU2” are pure Magdalena envy, but i’m not quibbling — if the Tops kids have a disco-prog streak they’d like to thicken, I’m here for it. The sinister sound they’re cultivating bleeds into the breakup ballads and pushes them toward ’80 sophistipop territory in spite of the band’s Mac-attack intentions. That’s good. Unfortch, vocalist Jane Penny remains so mamby she can’t even whip up the nerve to make it to pamby. She probably thinks that her gossamer delivery imparts a ghostly chill to spectral material like “Standing On The Edge Of Fire,” but mostly she just ensures you won’t make out a fucking thing she’s saying. Allow me to say it for the umpteenth time: there is no singer in indiepop good enough to be a sound effect. Well, maybe Indigo De Souza. But (no coincidence) she’s the last one who’d ever let it happen to her.

Tracy Bonham — Sky Too Wide  Of all the tales of Clinton-era biz machinations, the story of Tracy Bonham is one of the saddest. To me, I mean; Tracy herself came through it okay, and she’s still making music at the age of fifty-eight, so the shark bites of her youth can’t be bothering her too much. From my perspective, Tracy was the number one victim of the Island Def Jam consolidation that tore the backbone out of both operations.  It made a lot of money, though not for Tracy. Island’s capitulation to market demands robbed us of a Bonham-Froom-Tchad Blake project that, considering that everybody involved was at the top of his or her game in ’97 or so, would have been a classic. Instead, the label forced Tracy to lead with a couple of oafish singles that didn’t match the feel of the Froom-produced material, and then dithered around for month after month in the hope of unearthing a hitmaking collaborator for an artist whose instincts they didn’t trust. Once they’d got what they wanted, it was too late: the clock was half past Alanis and the rock audience, preparing psychologically for the Bush Administration, demanded Limp Bizkit and Korn. The miraculous thing is that Down Here is really good. It’s a testament to how skilled she was at notes and chords composition when she was in her prime. Even the dumb strutters that the suits forced out of her are pretty fun. But it’s clearly not the record she wanted to make, and the label, fighting the last war as labels often do, totally misinterpreted the artist and insisted on orienting her toward guides unhelpful for her to follow. With the benefit of thirty years of hindsight, the most distinguishing feature of The Burdens Of Being Upright is the Beatlesque songcraft that, even then, was only partially obscured by the ham-handed grunge-era arrangements. Mitchell Froom was the perfect guy to bulldoze the metal latticework and reveal the strawberry fields beneath. Heck, they even had Pete Thomas around to play drums. They should have let those guys cook, or at least make their version of Martinis & Bikinis.  File under major missed opportunities.

Tyler, The Creator — Don’t Tap The Glass  Let it be known that Tyler, old soul that he is, snapped a streak of classic full-length sets in the traditional manner — by rejecting the notion of classicism altogether. Don’t Tap The Glass is a guided regression to oral-stage desires complete with lots of goof jams about putting things in his face/putting things in other peoples’ faces. Since Tyler is nothing if not a first-rate designer with a high-speed id to feed, he’s on point throughout, even if the point is mainly pussy/line it up like a chin strap. Most of this sounds like it was made for live performance at summer festivals, which was not true of the songs on Chromakopia. He clearly did not want to face the maniacal masses at Camp Flog Gnaw without some bounce-up-and-down nonsense for everybody to chant, and you wouldn’t, either. What distinguishes Don’t Tap The Glass from Kendrick’s crowdpleasing boom-bap backlash on GNX is Tyler’s inability to keep his fapping fingers off the knobs and faders. The sentiment may be simple, but the soundscapes are art: stopwatch ticks, thick, fudgy bass, chilly new wave synthesizer colliding with batteries of treated drum machine, air raid sirens, Ray Parker Junior samples, crooned hooks reminiscent of late eighties R&B fromage over interpolations of “Knuck If You Buck.” You might even call this combination of gorgeous collage and sheer puerility a reversion to the Odd Future days when the Moral Majority was still afraid of Tyler. He was a visionary then, and he’s still one, even though these days everybody knows it and he’s not banned in Australia anymore (I think). Always bet on a producer-rapper. This producer-rapper in particular. Even when this reluctant intellectual is indulging in overt anti-intellectualism, he’s always got a concept. Kid can’t help himself.

Van Morrison — Remembering Now  Famously, Van instructs us: get on the train, get on the train, this is the train, this is the train. Is the train Van’s dong? I’ve always thought so. Obvs, it isn’t only his dong. It’s a poetic song and there are lots of allusions to growing up, rites of passage, deliverance, first love, Irish shit, all that Blarney. But in pop, if you are singing about the train (come ride it), there’s really only one interpretation that will suit. Pop and R&B are subjects that van knows all about. On his signature number, is he really boning some drag queen in an alley? Well, sure he is, what else is there to do in Belfast? You can stroll the merry way jumping hedges first, you can clean some windows, or you can get on the train. People resist this interpretation of “Madame George” because they treat Astral Weeks as a sacred text. But sacred texts are depraved as fuck. Drop the needle on the Bible sometime if you don’t believe me. My point is that Van is not nearly as mystic or transcendent as we sometimes think he is. He’s a terrestrial guy with earthly concerns and an agenda that revolves around recognizable human needs. Just listen to him on the, er, climax to “You Know What They’re Writing About” from Into The Music. “Got something I wanna… give you,” indeed. That’s mere inches from Dick Valentine. If we can start to accept this about Van The Man, we can begin to get a handle on the problems with the supernaturally long tail that his career has had. On Remembering Now, his desire to hold hands in the sand and share kisses by the ice cream stand is consistently undermined by his fears about his waning virility. This has been his preoccupation for quite awhile. It’s been Van’s number one topic ever since he noticed a middle-aged dip in a libido that used to be as consuming as that of anybody in pop-rock. Got to get my mojo working, he sings on “Back To Writing Love Songs,” and by the next number, he’s telling himself that he mustn’t let the magic die down. He’s sitting in the sun and trying to get sunburned brown; he’s inviting you back to the big oak tree for inspirational reasons. Do you remember me?, do I know you?, he asks on the set closer. Rekindling the fire is a valid topic for rock, even if it’s no longer as easy for Van as listening to the lion and grabbing his toothbrush, his razor, and his underwear. But the simple truth is that good Van is horny Van — Van unworried about whether the train will run on time. For the past thirty years, he’s been checking the schedule way too much. Sometimes, it’s just as simple as that. 

Wednesday — Bleeds  The return of the girl that you were chosen to deserve. The sadder but wiser girl, as Professor Harold Hill says in The Music Man. Still mixing Sonic Youth headache-rock with FM southern classics, and adding her scout-eyed, Dixie-fried storytelling on top. It all fits together because she says so; don’t argue with Karly, she’s not in the mood.  This time around, she matches her Phairish drawl to some brutal alternative country, too: check “Elderberry Wine” for starters and “Gary’s II” for finishers. That last one is a story about a man who gets his face knocked in by an assailant with a baseball bat. Karly is sympathetic but mostly impressed that his dentures are not susceptible to the insidious power of Pepsi Cola. “Your teeth leapt from you/so you spat ‘em all out,” sings Karly, matching her poetic formulations to some real grotesque shit. Southern Gothic, I believe they call it. While she isn’t screaming as much as she did on “Bull Believer” (not physically possible anyway), her pain has intensified. Much like Hayley Williams on Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, she’s losing patience with a red state milieu in which she was once a bemused participant-observer. The reporter allows herself to editorialize. She draws connections between casual acceptance of guns and target practice with the Carolina murder suicide and sticks up for the squirrels tortured by some pocket-knife wielder. She’s even ready to compare hunters to trophy collecting serial killers. I dunno, I’m sure the drastically worsening political climate in the American South is responsible in part for this change in the emotional weather.  But mostly the problem is that the romantic relationship that buoyed Karly through the shitstorm of Rat Saw God is falling apart, leaving the narrator high and dry in the land of pissing pit bull puppies, rotting to-go containers, and murderous juggalos.  It’s not so fun and funny when you’re on your own.  “Whether they know it or not/everyone’s divorced”, she murmurs, trying as always to locate some company for her punishing misery.  With her gift for metaphor, she comes up with some doozies to describe her attempts to salvage what she can from the fire: “it’s like swimming through the cold spot in the lake,” she tells us, and she sounds like she’s shivering and nearly blue as she does. Somebody get this girl a towel before she jumps off the Tallahatchie Bridge. 

Weatherday — Hornet Disaster  This “emotional” guitar rock album is a noisy, scribbly mess, it’s about a hundred thousand hours long, and its metaphor for the singer’s quasi-romantic partnership is two big bugs repeatedly stinging each other. Blood, ichor, self-harm, feedback loops in wax paper nests. To make matters grodier — though never grody to the max, mind you — the main Weatherday guy is some sort of Swede. Eew. His articulation of the penetrative quality of a filthy basement-type destructive codependent relationship in the language of filthy basement-type guitar rock may suggest to you a less nambl-o-matic Twin Fantasy. What redeems Sputnik (that’s what he calls himself; ask him) is his ear for inventive melody and his knack for engraving his tunes in his sheets of dime-store distortion and six-string scrawl. even when he’s yowling and yecching like he’s just been made to drink a glass of turpentine, he never fails to advance and develop the song. Peer behind the corrosive front and the dedication to dramatic fundamentals becomes evident. He’s a little like Strindberg in that way, or one of those senile broadcasters who, even in the midst of incoherent, misremembered reflections on his playing days, always gives you the balls and strikes. 

Wet Leg — Moisturizer The British corporate entity is different from its American counterpart. Thus we cannot rightly expect British corporate rock to sound like BTO and Jose’s on a vacation far away. That music was buoyed by United States corporate confidence and the security that comes from a vast and hungry interior market. Britons, by contrast, were stuck by necessity with mercantilism, which gave a fatalistic cast to their corporate activity even before the Empire started falling apart. The British corporate rocker maintains the wry irony of the United Kingdom colonial officer in a strange and inscrutable land. That is not to say that Rhian Teasdale would countenance colonialist behavior, because she (probably) wouldn’t; don’t expect me to know for sure, I’ve never spoken to the woman. It’s a recognition that the way in which she moves through unfamiliar terrain — the cluuuub, queerness, relationships in general — is an expression of the detachment, bemusement, and dogged determination associated with all British corporate projects. Even her sexual swagger is played with an arch twist and a stiff upper lip. Finally, as all British executives do, she abandons the fight and decides that everything is basically okay, fine enough, and retires to the parlor. How do the neo-Churchillians say?, keep calm and carry on.

Will Stratton — Points Of Origin  This is a very very very nice try. It’s the year’s most well-intentioned album. Sometimes it’s even good. Will Stratton grabs for the brass ring that storytellers like Richard Dawson and Laura Marling seem to seize on every not-so-merry go-round. The points of origin he’s singing about are the loci of these ten Californian characters, plus the flashpoints of the wildfires they’re battling, or running from, or fascinated by, or trying not to think about. He kicks one from the perspective of an aerial firefighter, and another from a reluctant real estate agent exacerbating habitat destruction, and another from a soulful arsonist in the hoosegow, and another from a barfly whose beloved pub in the dry canyon has been consumed by the flames. He takes the longview on “Red Crossed Star” and puts the American West in geological context. Most of these narrators are single, or singlish, cultivating connections to the land and each other (there are many examples of Springsteenian, or shall I say Swiftian?, intertextuality between songs) but mostly swinging and missing, or not swinging at all. Will seems particularly fascinated by the relationship between incarceration and incineration, and implies that our willingness to lock up our neighbors reflects a desiccation of the soul that is inevitably reflected in the landscape. His gifts are literary and mainly prosaic, his phrasing is occasionally awkward, and it often takes him three stanzas or more to achieve emotional effects that Randy Newman — an obvious model — can summon in a phrase. The real problem, though, is his delivery. Will’s unvaried mumble lacks the passion required to inhabit his subjects, especially the criminals. He’s just not very good in some of these roles. The flatness of the performances does amplify the feeling that these wayward Californians are dangerously detached from the consequences of their actions, but I don’t think will really means to say that all of these people are versions of the same guy. I think he’s shooting for a Pynchonesque menagerie of threatened oddball lives, held together by the ways in which the fires have scorched them and cauterized their wounds. To really effect that, he’d have to bring them to life individually, and I’m not sure he’s got the range to do it. It feels unfair and unrealistic to expect our musical artists to be good at writing and conceptualizing and playing and acting; who could manage such a thing? Amazingly, some do manage to put it all together. I can appreciate Will for his sketches of California and Californians imperiled. But I must acknowledge that it falls short of that sorcery that, through the union of sound and characterization, summons indelible, inhabitable worlds. 

Youth Lagoon — Rarely Do I Dream  Every time a Republican administration takes over the White House, New York City is assailed. We had COVID. We had AIDS. We had religious fundamentalists blowing up the Towers. Harlem and the South Bronx burned. Ford, famously, told the city to drop dead after the bankruptcy crisis during the Nixon administration. The question is not whether there will be fresh hell. It’s what shape the devastation will take. I hear the locusts are available and revved up for opportunities. This is consistent with our understanding of the way the world works. New York City has Jews, queers, immigrants, and batshit guys who stand on the corner, point at their genitals and scream. There are billionaires and zillionaires and people whose pot to piss in was just repossessed. The rest of the country — the rest of the planet — cannot compare. They are all various shades of mushy middle, and mediocrity is their metier. They’re not our friends and it does not help anybody to pretend they could be. They want to show us that they are just as good, even though they aren’t. They demand that we listen to them, even though they’ve got nothing to say. Give them a plane and they will always be tempted to fly it into a building just to prove they can. And of course they can. Destruction is easy. Building things, on the other hand, is hard. It took the combined creativity of millions upon millions to raise this habitable monument to human enterprise. The same cannot be said of Xenia, Ohio. A funny thing has happened on the way to the apocalypse they keep promising us, that skyscraper-shaking, ground-rending judgment that is supposed to be visited upon New Babylon because of its wickedness and its inequality and its verticality and all the rest of it. It turns out none of those historic disasters have laid a glove on NYC. Bicycle over the Brooklyn Bridge and you’ll see what I mean. There it is, glorious as ever, all concrete and glass, fire and water, noise, cables, electricity, loud mouths, alligators in the sewers, all of it. Many individual New Yorkers will not survive the next disaster. That’s the way mortal combat goes. But New York City?, New York City will be fine. Call down hellfire, castigate the bums and the brokers and the one per cent, take your axe and chop away at a skyscraper all day; it doesn’t matter. it will always be there: laughing at the haters, indifferent to the bullshit, daring the next asshole who thinks he can seize enough power to take it down. So for the next three years, you can rest assured in the truth more enduring than any political regime. One monkey don’t stop no show.