The mid-year season just seems to come sooner and sooner each year, and we here at Soft Sounds/the Indieheads Podcast are more than happy to go with the flow, as we’re back with our Q2 2021 Favorites list! But some quick ground rules if you’re new, each member of the pod who has contributed to this list (myself/Matty, Rose, Zach, AJ, Natalie, and Jackie) will talk about two Q2 2021 albums, plus a non-Q2 wildcard of something they’ve been digging into across the quarter. But with that said, let’s eat.
Dean Blunt - BLACK METAL 2 (Rough Trade | June 11, 2021)
BLACK METAL is one of those albums where you’re forever changed after hearing it. I’m not sure if I heard it or The Redeemer first, but nevertheless, both changed the way I perceived music going forward. But whereas the first BLACK METAL is this sprawling work of art that explores the world of black music and its bastardization by a largely white music infrastructure, BLACK METAL 2 feels in some ways like a white flag in that battle, feeling more like an expansion on the musical motifs of his 2018 mini-album soul on fire. However, it’s this defeated feeling that makes this sequel so compelling. BLACK METAL’s structure, in my eyes, was meant to challenge listeners, especially those in the indie music and even experimental music scene, in what they expect from black artists, with most of Dean’s career post-BLACK METAL further exploring these themes of post-black masculinity. But as he sing-raps on “SEMTEX”, “Here we are, back on the guitar / And it's gettin' me / It's sweatin' me”, it's clear that re-entering this mode he was in on the first half of BLACK METAL and soul on fire is eating at him.
As he tries to tap into the same emotional cores of those albums, he simply can’t. Nobody listened to him then, so why are they going to listen to him now? It’s hard to think that someone as guarded as Blunt could become even more so, but as he sings on “ZaZa” to a friend, “What you want / You don't know what's right or wrong / So, one more thing / Numbin' out on everything”, you can’t help but feel like he’s projecting. But overall with its brief length, incredible engineering work from Kwake Bass, contributions from past collaborators like Joanne Robertson (whose vocals feature heavily throughout the LP) and Mica Levi, and Dean’s non-engaging yet insanely so vocal/lyrical work, BLACK METAL 2 is one of the most compelling listens of the year, and yet another sign that Blunt is one of the 21st century’s greatest artists. —Matty
The Armed - ULTRAPOP (Sargent House | April 16, 2021)
I need not find purpose, but will it. I do so on a foundation of impossible love.
A large majority of my listening for the last three months has just been The Armed, so let me attempt to describe what they’re like for the uninformed listener: The Armed sound like someone intentionally crashing a flashy, expensive car. The Armed sound like consuming a whole bag of jellybeans at once but half of them are that one cinnamon flavor. The Armed sound like they use a custom “blow dryer” pedal for their guitars. The Armed sound like music from a future where we all have tinnitus. The Armed sound like someone threw the concept of genre in a wood chipper. The Armed sound like someone’s new least favorite band. The Armed sound like somebody put that stupid gimmick group that had like a thousand guitarists playing a Foo Fighters song to much more effective use. The Armed sound like cult indoctrination music. The Armed sound like ten separate Youtube browser tabs playing Converge music videos at once that somehow synchronize perfectly. The Armed sound like the way Keisuke Masunaga draws. The Armed sound like a band that you or I could be in (And maybe you are!). The Armed sound like a very elaborate prank on music writers. The Armed sound like something that requires me to drop in adjectives like “ferocious” or “discordant”. The Armed sound like a hardcore band fronted by the next generation of pop stars. The Armed sound loud as hell and I love it. The Armed sound like ULTRAPOP. —Rose
WILDCARD: plas teg - latch relay (Self-Released | May 16, 2018)
It’s hard to discuss latch relay without first discussing the context under which I tragically discovered it. On April 14th, it was announced that Adam Perkins had passed away. While many knew him from his days on Vine with twin brother Patrick, he was also a budding musician who worked under the name plas teg. Despite religiously watching him and his brother’s content back in the day, I never got around to his music until I learned of his passing, which makes latch relay an intensely bittersweet affair, as what’s on here is so breathtaking at points, but knowing we’ll never get to see their full growth makes what is already a deeply emotional record even more so.
There’s a guarded intimacy throughout latch relay that I can only compare to the work of Dean Blunt, which if you read my words above on BLACK METAL 2 you’ll know that is high, high praise. While “Redwood Reverie” has rightfully been seen as the album’s biggest highlight with its heavy Sufjan influence, “The Engine” and its thumping drum machine, funeral synths, artificial strings and confessional nature mixed with religious imagery just grabbed me instantly. It’s been a while since a song has really thrown me on my ass like that, and Adam’s passing only makes its themes resonate that much harder. —Matty
There’s currently a fundraiser hosted by Patrick to help get the album pressed on vinyl and keep Adam’s musical legacy alive. Consider donating here.
ALLBLACK - TY4FWM (Play Runners/Empire | May 7, 2021)
Since his breakout mixtape 2 Minute Drills in 2018, the most distinct of ALLBLACK’s calling cards have been his senses of community and gratitude. Sure, put him on a track and he’s gonna rap about some slick, west coast pimp shit, but he knows where he comes from (the reference to 100s’ Ice Cold Perm on 2 Minute Drills could only come from an Oakland native) and knows that success is best enjoyed when it’s shared. It’s only fitting, then, that the cover art of his latest album, TY4FWM, features him surrounded by his crew. The title, too, speaks to this - it stands for “thank you for fucking with me,” a phrase you’ll hear time and again throughout the album’s 40 minutes. There’s a big tent feel to the feature-heavy tracklist; mainstream names like Vince Staples & G-Eazy rub shoulders with rising stars like ShooterGang Kony (who damn near steals the whole album with his verse on “How I Feel”) & Sada Baby and west coast legends like E-40 without any friction. And it’s a testament to ALLBLACK that his guests all sound truly excited to be sharing space with him. For his part, the man of the hour displays great adaptability - he can play straight man to E-40 on “10 Toes'' just as skillfully as he can form a Brothers of Destruction-level tag team with Drakeo the Ruler on “Ego.”
But, as reviewers before me have noted, while ALLBLACK is a great complementary piece, TY4FWM is most effective when he has the stage all to himself. He follows a lineage of charismatic, wisecracking Bay Area MCs who sound like they’re kicked back in a hot tub even when going into the nitty-gritty of gang life or the finer details of pimping. Tracks like “Anejo” and especially “Cobra Kai'' give ALLBLACK a blank canvas to show this off and splatter absurd taunts, boasts and threats (“I FaceTimed my opp, I told him check the score/Then went on the adventure like Dora the Explorer'' is a line I simply can’t stop thinking about) like Jackson Pollock. When he mobs, he really mobs, it’s like City of God; his enemies are “three dumbass lil’ boys, Ed, Edd, and Eddy.” Even when he’s serious, he’s fun, and that energy helps create one of the most enjoyable albums I’ve listened to all year. ALLBLACK might not be a household name yet, but if TY4FWM is anything to go by, he’ll surely be one to watch. —Zach
black midi - Cavalcade (Rough Trade | May 28, 2021)
It would be unreasonable to expect any band to put out a record as good as black midi’s 2019 debut, Schlagenheim. That frenetic, jazz rock odyssey was the declarative statement of an entirely new genre - the emergent phenomenon known best as gremlin rock. But, the ever unpredictable black midi cashed in on their newfound success with the confounding and esoteric Cavalcade, a veritable gordian knot of a rock album.
The lead single, “John L”, plays out like a demented festival march; its anthemic chorus perverted by the off-kilter and cacophonous guitar scales that bring it to an irasciable climax. From there, the album is just as dense and obtuse, navigating narrative non-sequiturs and nonsensical improvisational patterns alike. This sophomore record is no slump, in fact, it represents the trio now flexing their prowess on a captive audience; drawing the listener deeper into a labyrinth of inexplicable art rock.
This album, with mystifying deep cuts earned only through reputation like “Marlene Detrich” and “Dethroned”, almost certainly won’t convert anyone to the church of the gremlin mindset, but for the initiated, it’s a hearty second helping of improvisational instrumentals and abstract lyrical diatribes that are sure to excite over and over again. —AJ
WILDCARD: Gillian Welch - Time (The Revelator) (Acony | July 31, 2001)
What’s the best album you can think of made with the fewest pieces? There’s no shortage of candidates - there’s an entire world of records that qualify in the realms of ambient and electronic music alone. My answer, though, took only two guitars, one banjo, one timeless voice, and two genius songwriters to come into being. Nearly twenty years ago today, Gillian Welch released her masterpiece, Time (The Revelator), and the timing couldn’t have been better. Arriving six months after the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, which Welch appeared on and helped arrange musically, the stage was by this time set for an album like this to have as much of a mainstream moment as an artist like her could have. So, Welch and lifelong musical partner David Rawlings brought ten of their best songs to the studio, kept things simple and spare, and let the music do the talking. And while Time wasn’t a crossover success the likes of which fellow genre auteurs Nickel Creek would achieve in the years to come, it is almost undoubtedly Welch’s finest achievement as an artist - no small feat given the depth of her discography.
Credit it to the construction. From a purposefully limited toolbox, Welch and Rawlings manage to convey a wide range of tones and moods across the album’s 50 minutes. On any given song, the feeling swings from world-weary stock-taking on the quasi-title track and “Everything is Free” to the earnest longing of “Dear Someone” and the jaunty “Red Clay Halo,” which might be Welch’s way of rebuking the cries of in-authenticity which dogged her early career. The mood is so complete that the inclusion of a live track (recorded, as it happens, for a concert & documentary connected to the O Brother soundtrack) halfway through doesn’t feel jarring. And, with “I Dream a Highway,” Welch forecasts “Murder Most Foul” almost twenty years in advance by closing the album with a sprawling meditation on history, culture, and her own life and experiences. It’s a monumental closing track, and it only took two takes to stitch together. But what captures the greatness of the enterprise as a whole to me is the side A closer, “April the 14th Part 1.” A simple narrative - a narrator watches a sparsely-attended punk show, wishing to be part of something greater like the band they see - is given near-cosmic significance by Welch’s invocation of two events that took place on the same day through history: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the sinking of the Titanic. A go-nowhere character watching a band struggling to make “half a tank of gas” in take-home, granted the same reverence and respect as Elvis Presley, Casey Jones, and the Great Emancipator. Nothing sums up Welch & Rawlings’s ethos as artists quite like that. —Zach
Iceage - Seek Shelter (Mexican Summer | May 7, 2021)
I’ve come to terms with liking music that has been deemed “music critic-bait” and no longer feel sorry for it. I’m done putting up excuses for falling into these hype cycles — I simply like to enjoy the music, thanks.
Since the release of their (arguably underrated, for how little it’s still talked about) 2018 album Beyondless, Iceage has perhaps been the biggest poster child for this mentality that I have decided to be completely unapologetic for. Beyondless, improbably, proved to be the release from this Danish post-punk band that I poured and scrutinized over more than any of their prior albums. In part a refinement and tightening of the always-unsteady, always-primed-to-collapse sound of their previous albums and in equal part a means for the band to push the boundaries of what their sound could be (Brass sections! Vaudeville gallows humor! Drunken pseudo-Western music!), Beyondless felt like the first big step for a band figuring out how to outgrow the post-punk movement in the mid-to-late 2010s that they had found themselves lumped into in spite of their beguiling idiosyncrasies.
Within the first track of Seek Shelter, it quickly becomes clear that Iceage have recognized Beyondless as the first step of something new and decided to rig their success by jumping ahead twenty steps instantaneously. The clearest influence on this evolution is the album’s unlikely producer: Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3. Though the man behind Congratulations and Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper seems like perhaps the most ill-suited choice for a band who once wrote a slurring gallop of a post-punk tune about one thousand euro wine, Sonic Boom essentially melds the biggest strengths of Iceage with the sounds and sensibilities of a late-era Spiritualized album. The parallels are near-blatant on opener “Shelter Song,” but damned if the track opening up into a heavenly choral section doesn’t mark for the most grand entrance into the most exciting reinvention possible for Iceage. Those trademark elements of Sonic Boom’s vast musical and production history weave in and out of the album with the band’s core instrumentals and Elias Bender Rønnenfelt’s unique vocal cadence with a surprising amount of variety and cohesion. The gallop of “Dear Saint Cecilia” feels in essence like Iceage’s “Electricity,” while “Vendetta” before it incorporates a throbbing synthetic bass that wouldn’t feel out of place in the dub-esque recesses of Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper. But what keeps the album afloat and, arguably, among Iceage’s best is the band’s undeniable presence and symbiosis amid the fingerprints of its producer. The second you hear Elias moan elongated cries of love like a lemon squeezed into an eye on “Dear Saint Cecilia” or comparing love to circumcisions on “Love Kills Slowly,” there’s no mistaking Iceage for any of their peers, nor for anyone Sonic Boom has ever worked with before. And with the band sprinting forth into a harrowing close in the coda of closer “The Holding Hand” amid screeching string parts, the rush of Iceage’s brand of post-punk is never cast to the sidelines. Seek Shelter is what results when a band goes beyond beyondless. —Nat
Squid - Bright Green Field (Warp | May 7, 2021)
Ever since I came across this tweet, I have come to a realization: my favorite music genre of all time is rock bands making music about how scary England is. From the obvious stalwarts of this genre like Pink Floyd and Radiohead, to lesser known acts like Hood, I simply cannot get enough of rock bands using their art to depict England as a deeply melancholic and alienating place. I have never been to the UK to confirm for myself whether the country feels as bleak as its musical output often indicates, but purely going off the new album from the up-and-coming London post-punk band Squid, it seems England is only getting scarier by the day.
But what makes Bright Green Field one of my favorite albums of 2021 is not just its dystopian outlook on living in London, or it’s clever references to British novelists like J.G. Ballard and Anna Kavan, but rather how fucking fun this album is to listen to. Far too often I feel like post-punk gets a bad rap as being overly self-serious and pretentious, and while I can’t argue that this album isn’t at least a little pretentious, I do think it manages to engage listeners on a much more immediate, blood-pumping way than some of their more dour, intellectual counterparts in the thriving post-punk scene in London. This is no disrespect to bands like Black Midi and Black Country, New Road, whom I generally have a lot of time for, but this full length from Squid manages to be just as experimental and boundary-pushing as those other bands while also bringing a lot more energy and danceable grooves to the table. The playing on here (especially bassist Laurie Nankivell) is technically stellar throughout, and the band’s chemistry really shines through on this record, especially on longer jams like singles “Narrator” and “Pamphlets”. Despite the dark themes of the album and how effectively it taps into the anxiety and paranoia inherent to 21st century life, Bright Green Field ends up feeling like a joyful celebration of this band and the tight knit relationship they have formed in live shows and jam sessions, and it’s a true delight to watch them spread their wings on this album. I was already all the way on board the Squid hype train just based of off their early singles and EPs, and I am fully aware that this band is seemingly designed in a lab to appeal to me and my musical sensibilities (especially when they go full In Rainbows-era Radiohead mode on “2010”), but I’ve just gotta be honest with myself and embrace my love of little British freaks who can shred on guitar. And for my money, Squid are by far the best new band in this ever-growing musical category of bands who sing about the UK being scary. —Jackie
WILDCARD: Rilo Kiley - The Execution of All Things (Saddle Creek | October 1, 2002)
Sometimes I’ll look up the distance between me and someone I care about in miles, or in hours, just to see it as a knowable number, something that can be conquered with enough time and effort. If anything, being apart from people for over a full year made that distance even worse — a staggering, unfathomable being that became more and more daunting the further I let it taunt me. Now that I’ve been able to more safely traverse that distance, I find that it taunts me when I don’t, the echoes of distances past resurfacing, making the feeling of distance all the more pronounced in the present.
Revisiting Rilo Kiley’s breakthrough album The Execution of All Things in this context for the first time in several years has brought with it an earthshaking power that’s completely reshaped my way of hearing it. Of course, that subject is but one of the multitude of things the record is about (among divorce, fraying relationships, depression, self-loathing, and the slowly ravaging forces of mass extinction). But mostly, these past few months, I’ve been hearing, as if for the first time, Jenny Lewis’ lyrics reflecting on spanning the country on tracks like “Paint’s Peeling” and “Hail to Whatever You Found in the Sunlight That Surrounds You,” or in the repeated lyrics about “the disappearing ground” representing the traversable spaces between two people eroding away and stranding one another. And that’s what cuts to my core quickest and deepest, beyond all the mutedly impactful guitar flourishes from Blake Sennett and airtight melodies and Lewis’ penchant for blindsiding you with the most disarming thing she could possibly say at a moment’s notice. We all have different ways we remember the albums we grow emotionally attached to. And that’s how I choose to remember The Execution of All Things. —Nat
Backxwash - I LIE HERE BURIED WITH MY RINGS AND MY DRESSES (Ugly Hag | June 20, 2021)
The latest of Ashanti Mutinta’s releases as Backxwash is intensely bleak by its own design. Unlike her previous record, last year’s stellar God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out of It, the album chooses to plunge the listener immediately into its darkest recesses and in contrast to the preceding record, offers the listener no redemption by its ending, leaving itself as one of the most miserable records I’ve heard this year. That being said, though, it’s another incredible album on her part, and for such a depressing listen, it still manages to be an exhilarating experience. The production throughout runs wilder than ever, managing to work in the same intense metal-heavy excess of the previous album while also finding more nuance in individual moment-to-moment dynamics. The two more surprising notes of production choices (the guest beat from Hutson and Snipes of clipping. and the very tastefully employed Godspeed You! sample in the album’s finale) may seem jarring on paper, but are woven perfectly into the album’s overall jagged, but perfectly polished musical topography. Perhaps the greatest improvement here from Leave Him Out of It is the addition of more stellar guest contributions, such as Ada Rook’s shredding vocals and guitar leads on the album’s title track, the perfect tone-setting guest verse from Censored Dialogue on “TERROR PACKETS'', or the many other additions from names like Lauren Bousfield and (friend of the podcast!) Sadie Dupuis. I Lie Here Buried shows that Backxwash is able to perfectly step up her sound into a grander, even darker realm than before while still maintaining all the aspects that made her abilities as a relatively newer artist so thrilling to hear. It’s perfectly crafted horror, and one can only hope that the conclusion of her trilogy of releases next year manages to be as singular and exciting a record as the first two. —Rose
SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE - ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH (Saddle Creek | April 9, 2021)
Listening to ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH feels like slowly watching nostalgia tear itself apart, yet build itself back up at the same time. You take one look and this personification of nostalgia appears to be going through some Cronenberg body horror shit. And on another look, it appears totally normal, yet something feels off. In this uncanny valley is where ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH spends most of its runtime, but it’s the moments of true, unmistakable humanity that sneak in throughout the track list that make SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s fourth LP one of the most thrilling albums of the year so far. Simply put, once it grabs you, it’ll never fully let itself go. Long live the new flesh. —Matty
WILDCARD: Elite Gymnastics - Ruin (Acéphale | September 6, 2011)
Now here’s the thing folks: I have listened to a lot of not-from-this-year albums and songs but they were mostly ones that I’ve already rambled on about in here or on the podcast. The other option was Ruin by Elite Gymnastics, and considering that almost immediately after I got back in a phase with this one, Jaime Brooks announced the band was finally making a debut album that I’ll probably end up covering in a future Soft Sounds column, I ended up canning whatever words I had to say on that, considering I’d rather contextualize them in the space of the group’s return after a decade. In lieu of that, I will show you my last.fm statistics for the last three months, which should hopefully explain why I barely listened to any old music this quarter:
Anyway, please listen to Ruin. —Rose
Japanese Breakfast - Jubilee (Dead Oceans | June 4, 2021)
You might not have heard it here first, but 2021 is the year of Japanese Breakfast. The band’s mastermind and architect, Michelle Zauner, is coming off a best-selling, soon-to-be-filmed memoir, and still has an evocative video game OST to release later this fall. But her most notable achievement this year might just be Jubilee, the third Japanese Breakfast record, what might represent a watershed moment for all of indie rock.
This breakthrough success is born from several years’ of labor on the band’s behalf, as any fan of Psychopomp or Soft Sounds From Another Planet could attest to. Zauner’s natural talent (in both her inherent lyrical wit and guitar shredding) was apparent from the first moments of her 2016 debut, but this long-gestating rise to stardom has culminated in a record that celebrates life, joy, and the pursuit of happiness.
Tracks like “Paprika” and “Slide Tackle” stand out as self-reflective observations of this journey, but it’s the powerful moments like the single “Be Sweet” and finale “Posing for Cars” that reveal Zauner’s greatest strengths as a songwriter, pairing catchy earworms with potent and arresting lyrical passages, aliking herself to a modern poet. The jubilant, often meditative record traces an entire emotional spectrum, reflecting on lost love and life expiring in the same broad strokes. It is the greatest compliment to Zauner’s songwriting that the album she wrote casting the widest net feels among her most accomplished; that by the time an orchestral outro hits on the final track, any audience member would be hard-pressed not to feel wrecked by its sweeping, soulful pathos. —AJ
Skullcrusher - Storm in Summer (Secretly Canadian | April 9, 2021)
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you’re a folk artist with a name more fitting for a metal act, there’s an extremely high chance your music is gonna kick serious ass. Such is the case for Helen Ballentine’s Skullcrusher project, whose most recent EP, Storm in Summer, was brought to my attention by Matty not too long ago and has since become one of my favorite discoveries of the year. Coming from the same Los Angeles singer-songwriter scene as Phoebe Bridgers and Christian Lee Hutson, Ballentine’s music is spiritually and musically in-line with those two acts: simply constructed songs, carefully chosen embellishments, and lyrics that can’t help but draw the ear. The first track consists of just one repeated lyric - “I thrust my foot through the windshield in front of you” - that can create an entire world of possibilities in the listener’s mind. And that’s sort of how it is for the entire EP, as everyday situations, be it a solitary walk home from the library or a summer cloudburst, are made beautiful and new through Ballentine’s playing and singing. The record’s 15 minutes pass far too quickly, but if this is just an example of what Skullcrusher has in store, a full album should be well worth the wait. —Zach
WILDCARD: Masayoshi Soken & Various Artists - FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Original Soundtrack (Square Enix | March 26, 2014)
Did you know that the critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV has a free trial, and includes the entirety of A Realm Reborn AND the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 with no restrictions on playtime? Sign up, and enjoy Eorzea today!
If you identify as a “gamer,” chances are you have heard some version of the above before. FF14’s rise to popularity was certainly booned by the pandemic last year, in addition to a major rework in storylines and new free content. I got way too into the game over the last twelve months: most of which was summoned by the truly engrossing soundscapes of each world’s setting. For a franchise that has a legacy containing some of the most iconic musical cues in the history of the medium, FF14 soars to new heights, with a nostalgic and emotive score that is sure to pull at the heart strings of any invested player.
So much so, is this soundtrack key to the game’s success, that at this year’s fan festival celebration; delayed by COVID and entitley remote to promote the climatic finale to a decade of carefully paced storytelling - the final segment was a tribute dedicated to the game’s sole composer, Masahyoshi Soken, who revealed that he wrote an entire year of music from his hospital bed. Soken-san tearfully admitted that he was diagnosed with cancer just days before the global pandemic shut down Japan, and other countries worldwide. This event was the first time that he was reunited with his coworkers, and the players themselves. His labor of love, and the entire team that kept the game alive during the past year, was merely a testament to their passion and investment to their fervent community. I might be a relatively new player, but Final Fantasy XIV is one of the most wholesome online spaces I have ever engaged with. —AJ
WILDCARD: nthng - Unfinished (Lobster Theremin | May 14, 2021)
For my wildcard, I wanted to highlight yet another new release from this quarter, the first full length ambient project from techno producer nthng. The album’s title, Unfinished, is appropriate for this 90 minute project that often feels a little more like a grab bag of ambient tracks than it does a fully realized album, but despite the shaggy tracklist I found myself incredibly compelled by the many highlights here. nthng has a really keen ear for synth textures and melodies in his techno productions, so it’s no surprise that those skills translate well to ambient music, but even still, I was blown away by complexity and depth of feeling on display on many of these tracks. Some tracks like “Subnautica” utilize understated, gentle percussion while other tracks like “Son” and “Disappeared But Not Forgotten” pair the ambient soundscapes with spoken word vocal samples, but the true highlights of the album are the moments without any bells and whistles in which these haunting melodies and atmospheres are left to speak for themselves. Unfinished is far from a perfect album, but when it’s clicking, it reaches highs unlike any other ambient release I’ve heard so far this year. Tracks like “Atlantis”, “Deya Kingdom”, and especially “E-Crusader” reach Tim Hecker / Oneohtrix Point Never levels of sound design brilliance, proving that nthng has ambient music chops that stack up with the very best of the genre even in this relatively loose format. —Jackie
Wolf Alice - Blue Weekend (Dirty Hit | June 4, 2021)
It feels like the same damn weekend every time, circling the same places, feeling the same feelings, long after the markers begetting those feelings have vanished from the places they haunt. Of no matter — it’s the repetition in these places phantoms haunt that hangs a cloud over these weekends.
And yet, I find myself plunging myself into a new repetition of my own volition, playing back Blue Weekend over and over amid the cyclical patterns that wear me down. What is it that makes this repetition one I openly welcome? My best answer is twofold: the album’s unified variety and its striking emotional complexity. Even as someone who’s enjoyed the previous two Wolf Alice albums, the sense of cohesion and flow of this album feels tighter than before, each track ushering in a new approach to the scope and sound of the band’s vulnerable and biting take on the modern British alternative scene. ”The Beach” acts as an soaring introduction into the album proper via a slow build that feels effortlessly cinematic, the musical equivalent of a plane lifting off from the ground and taking off into the air. “Delicious Things” strings along a swirl of mid-tempo introspective uncertainty amid a narrative of temptation, before using its final lines to unveil a more personal form of revealing fragility. But, beyond the power of the album’s compelling musical choices in isolation, repeated listens reveal the album’s tracklisting laying out a series of post-breakup responses often in conversation with and (most revealing of all) in direct contradiction with the songs that precede them. The kiss-offs of cavernous carnal self-love on “Feeling Myself” and cathartic put-downs against conceitedness on “The Last Man on Earth” feel, at first glance, somewhat incongruous with the relatively sparse “No Hard Feelings” offering an amicable new normal as the direct narrative follow-up. But none of these tracks are in isolation from one another, as “No Hard Feelings” itself expands upon a different overarching thread introduced by “How Can I Make It OK?,” a constantly evolving decimation of synthpop revival that borrows equally from Kate Bush and Haim. It’s these details that I can only pick apart by deliberately plunging myself into repeating the album again and again, until the narratives feel like less of a story and more of a messy life given multifarious voice. It’s perhaps telling that one of my favorite moments on Blue Weekend is in the loudest and most voluminous scream on “The Last Man on Earth,” where several overdubbed Ellie Roswell vocal parts drive each successive word in “lies after lies after lies” further and further in. Here in this album I’ve found as a release from repetition is a moment that crucially hinges on it. And in hyperfixating on this album, this release has itself become repetition. Perhaps repetitions themselves are less pivotal to the malaise than the feeling being repeated. Perhaps, with this revelation, each weekend can be less blue. —Nat
Porter Robinson - Nurture (Mom + Pop | April 23, 2021)
Since my early teenage years, I have maintained a deep love of electronic music; but that love has been tested and strained at times, especially as the overwhelming saturation of commercialized EDM in the 2010s began to make me feel worn out and tired of the genre. For every unique electronic music producer I could point to that was pushing the genre forward, it felt like there were 100 other producers content to lazily copy the homework of others, leading to a scene that rapidly homogenized as it was becoming more and more profitable for the (mostly cishet white male) artists and promoters alike. Especially as I got more serious about music and was trying to distinguish myself as a writer, I began to look down on the genre I once loved more than any other, telling myself it was inherently less artistically and critically valuable than other genres because it was being pumped out in mass quantities to entertain swarms of white frat bros in Toon Squad basketball jerseys. Was electronic music even worth all the headaches and bullshit it was increasingly becoming synonymous with?
This crisis of faith in dance music is something I know I was not alone in, because my own arc of falling in and out of love with electronic music almost exactly mirrors the arc of one of my favorite artists, Porter Robinson. The earliest part of Porter’s career in 2011 resembled that of just about any other DJ at the time: at only 18 years old, still producing out of his bedroom in North Carolina, an early single rose to the top of the Beatport charts and before Porter knew it, he had signed a record deal as the first new artist on Skrillex’s OWSLA record label and began touring the festival circuit. But unlike most producers of his ilk who blew up quickly and immediately got absorbed into the growing EDM industrial complex, right away Porter felt incredibly stifled by the box he felt like he had an obligation to neatly fit into. Reflecting on his 2013 Language tour, he said that “The more I forced myself to work within those DJ-friendly limits, the more I resented the genre.”
This resentment with mainstream EDM led to a massive creative pivot, as his 2014 debut album Worlds saw him almost entirely abandoning the build-ups and drops of the Spitfire EP in favor of bright synth pop that was inspired by anime and video games and had more in common with Passion Pit and Chvrches than it did with artists like Skrillex and Diplo. But despite the massive success of Worlds and the subsequent tours, Porter’s spiral of self-criticism and depression continued, tweeting in 2017 that “you should know that self doubt and depression destroyed me in 2015. I wish I could have been making and releasing music that whole time.” Even though Worlds was a huge step in the right direction, the self-doubt and creative frustration lingered, as Porter struggled to recapture the spark that fueled his passion and love for the genre.
I include all of this extended background only because I think the context it provides makes his 2021 follow up Nurture infinitely more satisfying, as it finally feels like Porter is making music that fulfills him both creatively and emotionally. Nurture manages to be both a document of his struggles with depression, self-criticism, and creative block and also a life-affirming testament to overcoming those obstacles, and the results are clearly the best work of his career so far. From the album’s very first chorus this dichotomy is on display, as Porter sings tenderly but resolutely: “Look at the sky, I'm still here / I'll be alive next year / I can make something good.” It’s a very simple, yet powerful declaration; and that theme runs throughout the record as he reflects on his past struggles from a newfound place of peace and self-love. But it’s not just Porter’s mental state that seems to have dramatically improved, the technical craft of this album represents a huge step up from his earlier work, combining the sugary sweet electro pop of Worlds with a slightly more grounded and natural instrumental palette that makes Nurture feel more lived in and subtle compared to the bombast of his earlier work. The highlight from a production standpoint is the 6 minute mega-interlude titled “Wind Tempos” that starts out sounding like a riff on “All My Friends” by LCD Soundsystem before eventually giving way to a glitching vocal sample that sounds like a computer program having an emotional breakdown as it stutters and skips over a stirring piano melody.
Nurture is an album that should appeal immensely to those who have never checked out Porter’s music before, but to those like me who have followed Porter’s career closely and have rooted for him as a person the whole way, it feels nothing short of miraculous. Porter hasn’t suddenly become an entirely new artist or person in the 7 years between major releases, rather he has finally settled into exactly who he was always meant to be, bridging the gap between the rave smash hits he wrote like “Language” and Zedd’s “Clarity” with the kind of more personal, singer-songwriter oriented work he was striving for on Worlds. All Porter’s problems and frustrations with the industry and life haven't magically gone away, but rather he has learned to let go of what he can’t control, promising on the song “Sweet Time” that he “won't spend time resenting the way things are”. And when you couple that kind of personal growth with his musical maturation, all of a sudden the pieces fall perfectly into place. As he puts in on the closing moments of the album:
And then somebody somewhere finds
The warmth of summer in the songs you write
Maybe it's a gift that I couldn't recognize
Trying to feel alive
—Jackie