Best New Albums of Not-2017

It's December, and that means year-end list season! Sadly, I am a single person and not a giant music publication, so I can't give you a thorough idea of my favorite albums of 2017 until I'm all caught up in, like... February. But I can tell you for sure about some old stuff I listened to for the first time this year! All these albums were jams, stalwart compatriots, and meaningful to me. I recommend any of them wholeheartedly.

10. f(x) – 4 Walls (2015)

I’m not into K-pop, but I have enough friends that are into it, whose lessons I’ve absorbed through osmosis, that when I woke up one day and said, “I think this is the day I give K-pop a seventh chance,” I knew what I wanted to download. 4 Walls isn’t as cluttered as a lot of K-pop productions. You get one or two neat musical ideas every verse or chorus, doled out sparingly enough so that they all have time to sink in before the next one comes along (I especially love the wavering static sound in the verses of “Glitter” that smears the beat into 5/4 at the end of every measure). Instead of the members getting a featured spot, every song features a unified vocal approach. And the best three songs are also the last three on the album, so it’s a pleasure to listen to all the ay through. I can’t say I’m ~into~ K-pop still, but 4 Walls has ensured there will be an eighth chance.

Listen: f(x) – “Rude Love”

9. Ash Ra Tempel – New Age of Earth (1976)

New Age of Earth finds the old Ash Ra Tempel entirely dissolved except for mastermind Manuel Göttsching, who transitioned from psychedelic krautrock into becoming a proto-techno master. Although it would take almost ten more years for his New Age soundscapes to gel into electronica as we know it today, New Age of Earth shows how eager Göttsching is to use his new tools and his obvious talent for them. The album moves from fairy-like synthesizer fantasies (“Sunrain”) to gradually slower, spacier pieces (“Ocean of Tenderness” and “Nightdust”). Despite the foreboding cover art and extended titles, this album charmed and absorbed me. A very pleasant surprise.

Listen: Ash Ra Tempel – “Deep Distance”

8. Helmet – Strap It On (1991)

Helmet’s major-label debut Meantime is a bigger, more professional album, but its gauzy production caused the songs to blur into each other. Somehow, despite playing with the same tools, their first album Strap It On suffers none of that. Page Hamilton is preposterously influential for a generation of metal guitarists, who took his slash-and-burn start-stop guitar riffs. But drummer John Stanier is equally important, hammering his kit with machinistic intensity no matter how jazzy and difficult Hamilton’s time signatures get.

And they do get difficult; still on Alternative Tentacles rather than major-label Interscope, Hamilton is free to let his freakier and funnier side fly with cuts like “Sinatra” and “Murder.” The latter follows from the great tradition of Black Flag’s “Damaged II.” After a whole album of crushing, pounding riffs and hollered pain, the band unleashes a wild yowl of pain that undoes itself. You couldn’t ask for a much better indie-metal record.

Listen: Helmet – “Blacktop”

7. Max Richter – The Blue Notebooks (2004)

So what’s the point of the Kafka passages? Uh… search me. I got no clue. What I’m here for is the aching, tragic minimalism. Max Richter was one of the first to incorporate electronic soundscapes into very, very traditional classical compositions. He doesn’t use electronics to haunt the songs with digital ghosts – instead you have synthesizers cresting around, no more or less important than any other instrument. In 2017, composers will happily throw a synthesizer in there – your Hans Zimmers, Nico Muhlys, Bryce Dessners – so Richter’s sound no longer seems radical.

Which leaves only the music – simple, emotional, completely unpretentious or corny. Richter’s melodies and tempos are indebted to Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but he wants to tug on your heart, not poke at your brain. It’s no wonder that this approach became so influential to film scoring. These songs work as soundtracks and as cinematic experiences themselves.

Listen: Max Richter – “On the Nature of Daylight”

6. Janet Jackson – Rhythm Nation 1814 (1989)

Yes, I'll bring back The Crater's Edges eventually. After all, it introduced me to a lot of great music, which is how I listened to Rhythm Nation 1814. It’s a crime that the world allowed me to miss it, because this is one of those inescapable albums that generated hit after hit. Even just reading descriptions of its success – seven top five singles, best-selling album of 1990, nine Grammy nominations – causes one’s jaw to drop. Any man who made an album this successful, innovative, and great would consistently launch into the top 10 pop singers of all time, at the very least. And that is what Janet deserves.

Following on from the industrial R&B of Control, Jackson uses the same sound to tackle social injustice, racism, police brutality, media brainwashing, homelessness… things that still feel necessary today. And the songs! You’d expect from a 20-song, 65-minute album that there’s going to be a duff track somewhere, but the jams just keep coming. By the time the immaculate pop edifice “Escapade” tumbles into the heavy-metal thunder of “Black Cat,” I had given up waiting for a bad song. It’s just brilliant all the way through. One of the best pop albums of all time.

Listen: Janet Jackson - "Escapade"

5. Billy Bragg – Back to Basics (1987)

Billy Bragg’s signature song, “A New England,” opens with the line “I was 21 years when I wrote this song / I’m 22 now, but I won’t be for long.” It’s a Paul Simon quote, but coming out of Bragg’s voice – a thick, round, mangled accent – it’s impossible to argue that he doesn’t have his own sense of identity.

“A New England” first appeared on Life’s a Riot with Spy vs. Spy, one of three early albums collected here. For these recordings, Bragg used little more than an electric guitar and his voice, shouting folk-punk songs to the void before folk-punk existed. Despite his limited tools, he shows many sides of himself throughout: socialist rabble-rouser, interpreter of classics, national chronicler, poetic soul, sharp satirist, and confessional lover. He ties them all together with lyrical grace and a way with a catchy guitar hook. To anyone without the traditional equipment to make music, Bragg’s ingenuity and tenaciousness will inspire and intimidate in equal measure.

Listen: Billy Bragg – “Between the Wars”

4. Tame Impala – Currents (2015)

Kevin Parker is haunted by his potential as a rock-star. “Elephant” became his biggest song, showing up in commercials and movies, affording him a new house and private recording studio. But it was a re-recording of an old song, almost a parody of a bloozy rock standard, out of place among the advanced, thorny psychedelic rock of the rest of Lonerism. Not to mention that bands like Cage the Elephant and Young the Giant were doing watered-down Tame Impala and having explosive success. Couldn’t Kevin Parker do that?

He sure could, but he also finds it boring. Parker couldn’t stand being boring. It’s why he loaded up his psychedelic rock songs with psychedelic effects, sometimes to the detriment of the actual songs. So instead he took a left-turn into dance music. And, look, it’s not 2000 anymore. We shouldn’t be surprised when rock bands start ditching the guitars and picking up synths. It’s standard at this point. Instead let’s talk about how the synthesizers and drum machines fit Parker’s tendency to fiddle and experiment so much better. The actual songwriting is always crystal-clear, hearkening back to old FM soft-rock, R&B, and pop. But he knocks the standard 4/4 dance grooves out of whack, incorporating glitches, tape loops, unusual drum patterns, prominent basslines, and heavy stereo panning. So even when songs veer off into long bridges (as in the album closer and highlight “New Person, Same Old Mistakes”) Parker always reins it back in, making every excursion sound vital. Currents is audibly the product of an obsessive, unique songwriter. The obsessive fandom he’s garnered in response is totally justified.

Listen: Tame Impala – “Eventually”

3. Link Wray – Rumble! The Best of Link Wray (1993)

“Rumble” was the first song to use power chords on the electric guitar in a rock-and-roll song. For that reason, it deserves credit-slash-blame for every hard rock and heavy metal song it made possible. But just go back and listen to it. Hear the menace in Wray’s playing, how he drags the beat behind with his strums. Listen to the uneasiness of the guitar tone – it’s a distorted power chord, the kind of thing you always hear in rock songs, but never so unpolished and dangerous. Wray couldn’t press a pedal for that sound; he had to poke a hole in his amp’s speaker cabinet. That sound, the power-chord played through broken equipment, finally gave a noise to a feeling so intense that the form and the medium alone couldn’t express it. It was wild, and unruly, and when Link Wray & His Ray Men first played it, the audience demanded four repeat performances of it. No wonder they called it the devil’s music.

Here’s the thing, though. Nearly all the songs on this compilation are as good as “Rumble.” No, they aren’t all birthing genres. They all sound similar, really. Country-tinged, distorted surf rock instrumentals. But they all have the same power, of an idea so raw and so new that nobody had managed to make it sound “safe” yet. Wray’s run of early singles, all of which are on this compilation along with some worthy latter-day songs, are a burst of wild energy that manage to transform both originals and standards into pure fire.

Listen: Link Wray – “Ain’t That Lovin’ You Baby”

2. Panasonic – Vakio (1995)

Vakio is German for “constant,” and indeed the first song on this album, “Alku,” is a single tone sustained for two and a half minutes. Panasonic (later Pan Sonic) were one of the original glitch groups in early-90’s Germany. Listening to Vakio brings us back to the very earliest ideas anyone had about how to incorporate the sounds of malfunctioning electronics into songs. As such, the album is austere, spartan, alien. “Urania” sounds like an 8-bit video-game alarm noise with a microwave beatboxing on top of it.

Except… remove all the humor and fun and life from that description. Because it’s not a fun album. The rhythmic glitches pound out dead-on, lifeless beats. The tones blear and beat against your head, wobbling at frequencies that music isn’t supposed to wobble at. Listening to it might make you feel ill. But it’s intense, single-minded, visionary music. For as much as these songs unceasingly loop, I get something new and alien out of it every minute.

Listen: Panasonic – “Radiokemia”

1. Susumu Yokota – Sakura (1999)

When you listen to a lot of ambient music, as I do (everything else is too distracting to read to, okay?) finding a truly special release among the scores of faceless albums is a moment of instant and joyous connection. Ambient albums often have implicit concepts, but whether you like it or not is strictly utilitarian: do I want to use this album a lot? Do I want to let it seep into my life? Is it a space I find myself wanting to exist in? Yes, yes, yes.

Sakura is a tactile, inviting world that works as background music or as a dedicated listen. As background music it’s focused, keeping its head down while also conjuring a very Japanese love of the natural world, animals, food, etc. Upon closer inspection these jazzy electronic compositions take charming musical themes and work subtle, dissonant variations around them.

You can probably guess I threw on Sakura at almost every possible opportunity this year. Whatever you need it to do, it works. It did more favors for me this year than any other album. Least I could do is give it the #1 spot.

Listen: Susumu Yokota - "Tobiume"

The Crater's Edges #7: The Stooges (The Stooges v. Raw Power)

The Come-Up:

“Their music is loud, boring, tasteless, unimaginative and childish,” wrote Edmund Ward of The Stooges in Rolling Stone, right after their first album came out. “I kind of like it.”

Even in 2017 it’s not hard to see where he was coming from. Compared to other contemporary garage rock bands – MC5, Them, anybody on the Nuggets compilations – The Stooges were stupid. Their songs plodded in place, shuffling between two chords. Not very creative chords, either. Frontman Iggy Stooge sang about girls and fucking, and you were lucky to get the first one without the second. His legendary stage presence, which involved him hopping around shirtless, provoking the audience, swearing, exposing his penis, and rolling around in broken glass, could just as easily be empty shock theater. The Stooges had some inventive and unusual moments… but hell, those were probably just John Cale’s doing.

But this is The Crater’s Edges, and we’re not looking at albums in their own context. In retrospect The Stooges is a clear blueprint for the heights that the band would reach on their next two albums. Right now their power was muted. Scott Asheton stays in his pocket more than he would on future albums. Iggy hasn’t developed the range of yells and whoops that would come to characterize him, and so he mostly relies on subtle inflections in his delivery. Notice the way he blurts out “I want you… here,” on “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” or deadpans the chorus of “Real Cool Time” with the perfect amount of menace and insinuation. Iggy’s pig-horny on this album, and he sounds inescapably of the world rather than transcending it as he would later.

What’s most interesting about The Stooges is that its most experimental tendencies are not the ones that they followed up on. The album’s third track, “We Will Fall,” is a ten-minute dirge, driven by the band’s synchronized chanting and climaxing with a screeching viola accompaniment courtesy of producer John Cale. Cale is likely responsible for the famous sleigh-bells-and-piano arrangement of “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” which sounds like a lost White Light/White Heat track. A big reason for the song’s success and influence? Yes. A part of The Stooges’s sound going forward? Well, Iggy Pop would keep these left-field choices in his back pocket for moments in his solo career, but as for The Stooges, nah. The band was more interested in perfecting the shit-rock sound of “No Fun” than trying to be another Velvet Underground.

Thing is, The Stooges might have already been next-level, but the album doesn’t show it. Their live concerts apparently consisted of five songs that they would jam on and stretch out, and they assumed that would be good enough for an album. This suggests that their live presence was a lot closer to what we’d hear on Fun House than what we get here. Hell, there are in-studio extended versions of “No Fun” and “Ann” that confirm this, both descending into dread-laden instrumental vamps. Listen to that full version of “Ann” and tell me it’s not two steps from “Dirt.” The three songs that they had to, essentially, make up in one night before recording the album to fill out the tracklist (“Real Cool Time,” “Not Right,” and “Little Doll”) all feature more elastic grooves and creative band interplay than the pre-written ones. They also feature molten guitar solos from Ron Asheton, the only element of the band to come roaring at full power on this debut album. Listening to these songs, tossed-off as they are, it’s clear that The Stooges are growing more distinct as a band. But the stuffy atmosphere doesn’t suit them too well.

The Peak:

Fun House is a descent into Hell, one of the purest distillations of rock and roll’s exorcismic power. Locked in Elektra Sound Recorders studio with new producer Don Gallucci, with all the soundproofing torn off the walls, the band bashed out take after take of their repertoire, gradually shaking off their studio stiffness and locking into filthy grooves. The songs now extended as long as they wanted to – we only get seven tracks, but they’re freeform, bristling things that expand and contract like living organisms.

Every member of the band has ascended at this point – Scott Asheton’s drums push the songs around, lurching in uneven patterns that buoy the rest of the band. Dave Alexander locks in with him perfectly and is often the only thing tethering The Stooges to a rhythm. Ron Asheton, free to jump in at any time and not just during the bridge or ending, plays guitar like he’s summoning a demon. In an inspired move, the band picked up a saxophonist, Steve Mackay. He only appears on the last three songs, but his entrance on “1970” is one of the record’s greatest moments: a sudden intrusion of a free-jazz wail, dissonant and destabilizing. Iggy must fight with him for control, screeching “I feel alright!” with increasing madness as the entire structure goes off the rails.

It's Iggy himself who makes the greatest leap here, unlocking a new power in his voice. He baits the rest of the band to push it harder and louder with inhuman grunts, leers and boasts about how dirty and loose he is, and peels the paint off the walls with ragged yelps. It’s impossible to imagine the Iggy of The Stooges having the vocal power necessary to ring in “T.V. Eye” with that animalistic, immortal “LAAAAAWWWWDDDDD.” Here? It’s probably not even his best moment on the album.

Fun House is so complete and perfect an album that it’s hard to see what they could’ve added to it. Maybe nothing more needs to be said. Maybe this sound couldn’t have been pushed any further. Maybe I’m wrong, and in continuing as they were The Stooges would break through to some previously unknown tenth circle of hell. But the only obvious way to move on from… this… would be a major shift in sound.

The Comedown:

I consider this a first for The Crater’s Edges, in that the comedown album this week isn’t quite by the same band. My ideal candidate for this series is a band or artist who makes their three albums in the same creative swing. Sure, lots of stuff changed around Sonic Youth over the course of Sister, Daydream Nation and Goo, but the band themselves stayed the same. Between Fun House and Raw Power, though, we have a real break. After a fractious tour, during which several band members were fired and new ones were hired, as well as Fun House’s commercial faceplant, The Stooges broke up. Iggy Pop decamped from Detroit to New York City and struck up a friendship with David Bowie, who got him signed to a solo deal.

Iggy and guitarist James Williamson (one of the guitarists who had joined in The Stooges’ dying days) found themselves in want of familiar musicians while recording their album, and so the Asheton brothers were brought back in. The Stooges were basically back together, but because of Williamson’s influence on the already-recorded material, Ron Asheton was assigned to bass guitar. After two years of upheaval only to settle back down in a different configuration, The Stooges as they existed were no more. Now the members were supporting players assisting Iggy in making his album, and accordingly they were now billed as Iggy & the Stooges.

So to call Raw Power a logical follow-up to Fun House is inaccurate, because it was birthed of a different atmosphere. Raw Power is a more legible album, one that takes its cues from glam rock instead of psychedelia. You can directly trace the influence of songs like “Search and Destroy” or “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” on founding punk artists like Richard Hell and The Sex Pistols. Even further down the road, the combination of that punk attitude with the album’s romantic edge (exemplified by a makeup-sporting Iggy Pop leaning gloriously on his microphone stand on the album art) would go on to influence glam-metal bands like Def Leppard and Poison in the 80s. It’s an album that looks and behaves more like how we expect a rock-and-roll album to.

A big part of that is the input of James Williamson, a brilliant and influential guitarist in his own right, and the polar opposite of Ron Asheton. Unlike Asheton’s deeply instinctual, noisy playing, Williamson was a precise and flashy guitar instrumentalist. He scrawls laser-light guitar solos all over these songs, which serve to amplify Iggy’s emotions rather than destabilizing them. Had Ron Asheton taken the ending guitar solo in “Search and Destroy,” it would have been a moment of uncertainty, as the street-walking cheetah succumbs to a debauched world of his own making. In Williamson’s hands, there’s still an element of danger, but he soars instead on a bed of swift chromatic blues licks, fists pumping to the sky. We’ve been given real catharsis on this song, something that The Stooges had ever offered up before. No wonder its influence was more immediate than what came before.

Raw Power is Iggy’s album, though, and he shows his range here. One minute he’s bleating out “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell” in the rudest belch he’s ever conjured, the next he delights in drawing out the vowels in the chorus of “Penetration.” But the biggest leap he makes is in an area The Stooges aren’t known for: the lyrics. In the past Iggy’s self-conception was limited to deterministic statements: “I’m so messed up,” “I’m a real low mind,” “I’m loose.” Now on “Search and Destroy” he starts with one of the most legendary couplets in rock history: “I’m a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm / I’m a runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb.” And on the title track he delivers another iconic lyric: “Dance to the beat of the living dead.” Dig deep on the album and you can still find stunners like “There’s nothing in my dreams / Just some ugly memories,” or “Honey, come and be my enemy so I can love you true.” Whereas Iggy was a filthy animal on the last two albums, here he’s more like a Byronic hero. This is, after all, the album where he changed his stage name from Iggy Stooge to Iggy Pop. Raw Power is the album where he emerges from a long voyage into the night and establishes himself as an icon. More than any other album it’s the one that established his legend, and after all that he’s seen and gone through, nobody deserves it more.

The Verdict:

It’s obviously Raw Power, which manages the incredible feat of nearly matching Fun House the only way anything can nearly match Fun House: being completely different from it. On Raw Power you can hear the R&B edges of the MC5’s proto-punk sound being shorn off and forming into what we now understand as punk rock music. It’s not transcendent or awe-inspiring in the way Fun House is, but it’s an excellent rock album, rightly influential and rightly loved. I’m calling it for the comedown album this week.

You might also notice an elephant in the room, which is the choice between the original Bowie mix or the Iggy mix of Raw Power. I listened to both for this review and tried to keep it focused on the actual songs irrespective of how they sound. But as for which one I prefer? Well… there’s enough meat on that question for a whole other essay, especially when you consider the original John Cale mixes of The Stooges and the 1970: The Complete Funhouse Sessions and Heavy Liquid boxsets. I’ll tackle all those in a future essay soon.

The Crater's Edges #6: Janet Jackson (Control v. Janet.)

The Come-Up:

In writing these blog posts, I’ve found a related-but-not-quite-synonymous kind of album alongside the magnum opus. Call it the inventa opus: the work of discovery. It’s the album where an artist finally breaks free of their early-career shakiness and finds their own voice – one which may still carry the mark of their influences but is nonetheless a new and distinct thing. Sonic Youth had it with Sister and its leveraging of songcraft with noise experimentalism, and Autechre had it with Tri repetae and their commitment to minimalist glitch. Sometimes the inventa opus and the magnum opus are one in the same, sometimes not.

In the case of Control, it isn’t. But there is perhaps no clearer inventa opus out of all the albums we’ve covered. After all, the title track and first song begins with Janet Jackson monologuing: “This is a story about control… my control… control of what I say, control of what I do… and this time, I’m gonna do it my way.” Mission statement made. And after that brief bit of telling, she goes on to show us what she means.

But let’s back up! Because Janet Jackson, while undeniably a brilliant artist, isn’t the auteur or singer-songwriter type we’ve covered before. She grew up in the Jackson performing family under the management of her controlling father Joe Jackson. It was Joe who masterminded her first two solo albums, Janet Jackson and Dream Street. They weren’t bad projects, but they were intensely managed: focus-group-approved, musically inchoate, with no input from Janet herself. So she took the first in several industry-defining personal moves – divorced her husband, severed ties with Joe Jackson and the Jackson family industry to a much greater extent than her brother Michael had seven years earlier, hired her own producers and collaborators, and made a statement of independence.

Control, then, is a fantastically influential album. It writes its independence and artistic freedom directly into the text. Without this precedent, we wouldn’t have NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway, or P!nk’s M!ssundaztood, albums that broke their artists into pop royalty by emphasizing their independence from a stifling studio system and a change in sound. There’s an entire pop narrative invented by Ms. Jackson here. And it’s not the only way Control changed everything.

Because the album had a great sound that everyone wanted to copy as well. The producers and songwriters that Jackson hired were Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, founding members of The Time. You might also know The Time as the band that operated closely with Prince, who really forged the Minneapolis sound that sits deep within Control’s DNA. The album embodies that synthesized funk sound, where everything sounds like it’s reverberating in a small room made of aluminum. But it also pushes it forward by being more aggressive. These drum loops on these songs groove hard, bridging the gap between the digital pop style that Nile Rodgers had pioneered for Madonna in the early 80s and the New Jack Swing phenomenon that would emerge in the ‘90s.

In the middle of it all is Janet Jackson, who develops a unique personality with her lyrics that snaps all the musical elements together. In short, the thesis statement of Control is “I am a badass.” And she is! Listen to the opening salvo of “Control,” “Nasty,” and “What Have You Done for Me Lately,” one of the great one-two-three wallops in pop history, and try to deny that. But she’s a badass with enough range to express the most classic feelings of romance. By amplifying her independence, the moments when Janet Jackson years for love – as in “When I Think of You” or “He Doesn’t Even Know I’m Alive” – hit that much harder. After all, a song like “What Have You Done for Me Lately” can only come from someone who has an expectation of how to be properly treated. What kind of man could have the singer of “Nasty” swoon? One worthy of the song, undoubtedly.

Control has one final element that we won’t ever see again in Jackson’s albums: conciseness. Nine songs, with at most three ballads and no skits. Forty-two minutes. It’s a tight album with a palpable sense of discipline (or, dare I say it, control), and that makes it super-easy to listen to. But the inventa opus tends to be contrite – the first steps in one’s own space, the first words with one’s own voice, are an exploration. Does that work against the intended message of Control? A little bit, but the thrill of listening to a pop album with no filler electrifies me. Jackson would expand and lounge in her corner a lot more in the future, but her first steps into that corner have a charm all their own.

The Peak:

In the move from a tight, controlled statement to a sprawling, self-assured one, artists often lose something. Mostly consistency. A CD-straining, 70-minute magnum opus tackling themes of racial injustice, inequality, brutality? I think I know how this goes. It’s going to contain several world-beating songs that are worthy of the highest accolades, and then a pile of slush that everyone will ignore but nonetheless makes it a less-than-ideal listening experience. Case closed.

Except, no, it’s not. Rhythm Nation 1814 pulls off the impossible and manages to successfully give us more of everything that we loved about Control: more songs, more variety, more experimentation, more consistency. And it’s not even like an expansion of Control, because Rhythm Nation 1814 has its own identity. Rather than focus on Jackson herself, she’s rejecting the systems of inequality that arise in the world and arguing for education, enlightenment, and furious, righteous love as a balm to it all.

It was one of the best-selling and most successful albums in the world, charting hit after hit. Today, though, it’s been buried a bit. You’ll rarely see it even among poptimism-friendly publications as one of the greatest albums of the decade, even though it self-evidently is. Listening to it for the first time for this blog, I couldn’t help but hold my head in my hands as the hits, with immaculate consistency, kept coming. If you haven’t listened to it yet, I implore you to.

The Comedown:

In yet another moment of defying expectations, Janet. was such a monster success that it feels disingenuous to call it a comedown. It logged six singles on the Billboard Hot 100, a staggering feat which only pales in comparison compared to even more staggering success Rhythm Nation 1814, which scored seven (this makes it the all-time record-holder in that category). Arguably it’s not even the beginning of a downward slope, because the album after this one, The Velvet Rope, is hailed by many (usually fellow musicians) as her artistic masterpiece. But we must place the magnum opus somewhere, after all.

Rhythm Nation 1814 may have been thematically a departure from Control, but musically it was similar: industrial drumbeats, thick bass, pinging synths. By 1993 the innovations of Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis had filtered out into other mainstream pop acts; the New Jack was in full Swing. Accordingly, Janet. abandons the industrial drum sounds of Control and Rhythm Nation 1814 in favor of a more sumptuous, clean sound driven by hip-hop breakbeats. But that wasn’t the only thing that affected the sound of this album.

Jackson had just signed an enormous record deal with Virgin for $40 million, a record high that was soon broken by her brother Michael’s signing to Sony. After being at the forefront of pop innovation in the 80s, the Jacksons were entering their imperial phase. But people thought that Janet Jackson’s fame was primarily due to her family associations and the production/songwriting work of Jam & Lewis, despite her active hand in the songwriting and direction of her own music.

The result was that Jackson was more involved on the ground-level music-making on Janet. She wrote all her own lyrics, and co-wrote and co-produced all the songs. This variety really shows when you listen to the album; keep in mind that the first song that Jackson had sole writing credit for was “Black Cat” on Rhythm Nation 1814, a kickass genre exercise into hard rock/heavy metal. Jackson was, and is, a fearless and eclectic music fan who loves to cross genre lines.

The headstrong innovation on Janet. is best exemplified by the run of songs in the middle beginning with “If”. To start with, “If” is an eye-poppingly dense song, incorporating screaming electric guitar and meticulous acoustic guitar, dramatic strings, thumping bass, a hip-hop breakbeat, and then a sample of the Supremes’ “Someday We’ll Be Together” just for good measure. The intoxicating concoction means that Jackson can basically make the song all-chorus and get away with it, stretching the groove to ecstatic heights. Then we have “This Time,” my personal favorite song on the album and a strong contender for favorite Janet Jackson song period, an epic dance-floor stunner that Jackson sings through gritted teeth before dropping out in the bridge for… an opera interlude. It’s a flabbergasting choice, unimaginable on any other personality-centric pop album, but by the time the drumbeat comes back in and Jackson goes all out for the final chorus, and all the disparate elements congeal into a fist-pumping whole.

Afterward, “Throb” marginalizes Jackson’s voice even more – it’s a house song through-and-through, all the emphasis being placed on the production and beat with only occasional vocal contributions from Jackson herself. “What’ll I Do” is a 70s soul throwback of the kind that Sam Cooke would tear through. “Funky Big Band,” as its title suggests, brings back the 80s bass sound that was so prevalent on Control and Rhythm Nation 1814 in service of a funk stomper. And our dizzying run ends with “New Agenda,” a tune that veers a bit more towards the mean of the album in terms of sound but brings in Chuck D to pay some respect towards hip-hop, and he sounds galvanized to be in the presence of a social provocateur as visionary as him. These six songs communicate the musical landscape of 1993 as well as anything can: they embody the New Jack Swing sound that Jackson had helped pioneer, and seamlessly intertwine many other genres, both in-style (house, hip-hop, rock) and out-of-style (funk, soul, opera).

But there’s a complaint I have to lodge against Janet. It’s just trying so hard that it loses consistency, a trap that Jackson had so nimbly avoided on Rhythm Nation 1814. That run of songs in the middle is stunning, but the album gets off to too safe a start and by the end hits on a stretch of love ballads that become hard to tell apart. Nothing here is bad, because the contributing artists are operating on a rarefied level of craft, but you feel the length on Janet. in a way you didn’t on the album before it.

Nevertheless, if her goal was the prove her independence and standing as a musical artist in her own right: mission accomplished. From now on, Janet Jackson was Janet. No qualifiers needed. Nobody else capable of competing.

The Verdict:

I took a few days to simmer over this one! Control is tight, rigid and asskicking, while Janet. is intermittently transcendent. If the two albums were closer in length – say, if the former album were longer or the latter were shorter – I would go with Janet., but as a pure listening experience I’d be more eager to throw on the entirety of Control once more. This week, we go with the come-up album.

The Crater's Edges #5: Autechre (Amber v. Chiastic Slide)

The Come-Up:

One of the goals of this Crater’s Edges series is to examine the evolution of a band or artist through their peak, to see what they picked up over the course of their career that leads them to make their masterpiece and how they move on – or don’t move on – afterwards. Writing about electronic music narrows this down to its purest form. Electronic musicians aren’t superstars, their personal lives aren’t packaged as a narrative, and if they have the equipment, then they can bust out albums without even setting foot in a studio, making for less music-label drama. In a ton of electronic genres there aren’t lyrics. It becomes a pure exercise of identifying the sounds and examining how those evolved.

Autechre, over these three albums, show a very tangible evolution in their sound. Their first album, Incunabula, was a compilation of previously-released tracks that cast them as meditative ambient techno artists in the vein of Global Communication or Orbital. They were pretty good at this. Some ambient techno artists preferred to deploy vocal samples, but Autechre kept it strictly instrumental and let their synths carry the tracks alongside breezy breakbeats. Nobody regards Incunabula to be a classic, but standout tracks like “Bike” had an exploratory, pastoral vibe that showed promise. When you compare it to their later albums, it sounds downright cute.

Amber is Autechre’s first album that was meant to be an album, and the long-player format allows them to settle down and stretch out. Slower tempos and simpler melody lines abound. This is the closest that the band ever gets to straight-up ambient music. Having listened to it a lot to soundtrack my end-of-the-day readings and unwind, I can tell you it works well for that. These songs just don’t draw a lot of attention to themselves.

If you’re listening to it intently, you won’t find a lot of missteps, either – it’s a very consistent album even though there are clear standouts such as “Montreal,” a lost early Aphex Twin song if there ever was one, and “Slip,” which contains the album’s most intricate melody. That said, they all drag along far too much. Again, this isn’t a problem if you regard the album as utilitarian and are just looking for a quiet soundtrack to throw on while you do something else. But the songs don’t have enough detail packed into them to justify their extended lengths (only two songs clock in under six minutes).

But there are signs that a different path awaits for them. “Glitch,” true to its title, hums along on a distorted computer-modem sample, pinging in and out of the speakers like a living thing. It’s not quite accurate to say it’s the best song on the album, as Autechre are still invested in their ambient techno sound and spend more time exploring the limits of that. But it is the song that gets the most mileage out of the least input. It’s a clear sign of where Autechre’s true talents lie.

The Peak:

Tri repetae is a massive and satisfying moment of things clicking into place. The ambient techno sound is gone, and now Autechre are pioneers of what we all recognize today as Intelligent Dance Music (or IDM, since like most critics I hate the name and will avoid using it). Most of what substantively changes on Tri repetae are the drumbeats, which have gone from gentle waves pushing the song along into mechanistic locked grooves. We now have something less reminiscent of a trip through space than a trip through a brutal Industrial Age factory.

As for the sounds, well… when Autechre made “Glitch,” the sound of a glitchy tape was such a novelty in their catalogue that they named the song after it. But now that sound is the standard. I don’t know if Autechre had studied the work of noisy contemporaries Panasonic, but a punishingly minimal song like “Rotar,” which rhythmically punches your eardrums with analog blurts, shares undeniable sonic elements with them. And through it all, the uneasy bass tones provide invaluable color. The way they use those low tones on this album to keep the tracks engaging throughout reminds me of a jazz-fusion trumpet, if you can believe that.

For the first time Autechre sounded like the Autechre as we know them today, fearlessly diving into abstraction, minimalism, and harshness. Even the song titles reflect this; they weren’t quite the inscrutable keyboard-smashes we’re used to, but they had at least stopped being real words. They had discovered their palette, and were now free to paint on it.

The Comedown:

Chiastic Slide is little-remembered and little-loved, standing in between the twin triumphs of Tri repetae and LP5. In practice, Autechre discovered an entirely new sonic world of intricate glitch constructions and then regressed a bit. Chiastic Slide sounds more like a precedent, a building-up to their magnum opus than an antecedent to it. Its sound reaches for a synthesis of Amber and Tri repetae, and though its feet are still planted in the latter, you can still see why they chose to push their sound to one extreme.

Take the opener and album standout “Cipater”: it has the loud and minimalist drum programming of latter-day Autechre, but those drums are allowed to sputter and clash with a plaintive synth melody. It works very well, but in any other Autechre album the priorities would be reversed. The melodies would muster their forces and ultimately fall short, scattered around a brutalist drum loop. “Cichli” strikes a better balance with its curious, lightweight synthesized harps existing alongside, but never quite melding with, the glitch bursts. It’s the sound of an unfettered soul making its way through a terrifying labyrinth, blissfully unaware of the danger.

The result is that Chiastic Slide is their most lucid full-length, a democratic album that’s about as appealing as you’ll ever make glitch music. Even with the grinding drums in play it’s the cutesiest Autechre release since Incunabula. But it just doesn’t hold my attention the way their best ones do; the band doesn’t go full-bore on anything here, and as a result the tracks don’t have the bracingly hypnotic quality that keeps me thrilled over nine whole minutes, which Autechre songs tend to extend to. This sounds like they’re coloring outside the lines of what they’re best at. It’s still a tense, tight listen, but I just prefer Autechre acknowledging that aspect of their music and deciding to double down on it. That’s when the truly mind-melting stuff happens.

But can you blame them for trying? When an artist’s magnum opus is also the album where they find their sound, their unique niche, it’s natural to see where that sound can extend. They would dive down the hole of opaque brutalism on subsequent releases LP5 and Confield, but Chiastic Slide had to happen so they knew to do that in the first place.

The Verdict:

A toughie – both albums are skirting around the edges of the territory where Autechre would stake their claim as visionary electronic artists, dabbling in things that made them sound more like their peers. But they’re good for different reasons. Amber is a relaxing bed while Chiastic Slide is a jogging companion.

I’m going with Amber today. It works better in the utilitarian sense of putting it on to work to without taking too much of your attention, and in fact works better that way. Plus as a second album of ambient techno, it’s about as refined and well-judged as Autechre would get in that genre before throwing the whole thing out and coming up with something new.

The Crater's Edges #4: Brand New (Deja Entendu v. Daisy)

In the eight years since Daisy came out, we all seemed to realize how much Brand New meant. Publications everywhere – and I’m not just talking Alternative Press or Punknews.org, but supposedly high-minded ones like Pitchfork or Noisey – are rushing to acclaim Science Fiction because they know it’s the last chance they’ll have. Brand New are The Emo Band That Made It. They don’t have the cultural baggage of Fall Out Boy or their former rivals Taking Back Sunday.

My story with Brand New is just one of many, but over the course of their crossing over to the mainstream, I’m sure there are lots just like it. My first years of paying attention to music and engaging with new releases was spent on a small music forum. We liked what we liked there, which was mostly Pitchfork favorites but with some crossing over into other scenes. Roughly fifty regular posters participated there, of which three or four were legitimate punks –forming their own bands with friends, seeing shitty basement shows, following the incestuous scene with verve and attention. Those couple of folks never got us to really embrace Set Your Goals or Owen or whatever, but Brand New was a point of common interest. Jesse Lacey’s merry band started out being influenced by Their bands (Sunny Day Real Estate, Lifetime, Glassjaw) and into Our bands (Modest Mouse, Built to Spill, Pixies). They were a great equalizer.

Which is, in the end, due to the music. There was something special in Brand New’s music that caught the ears of people in two different scenes – even people like me, who wouldn’t even find out those scenes existed until years later. Something that encouraged their fans to explode with enthusiasm and share it with everyone they could, until finally it’s 2017 and Brand New are getting their due from everyone. The music did all that.

So let’s talk about it, finally, huh?

The Come-Up:

Brand New were already perfect for what they were on their debut album. Your Favorite Weapon is an ecstatic, tightly-wound collection of pop-punk songs. The band never lets up on its barrage of drop-tuned power chords or harmonized vocals and Jesse Lacey never stops being a flamboyant little shit both lyrically or vocally. But in the two years between their debut and Deja Entendu, Brand New first pulled the trick that would define them for the rest of their career: uprooting their sound and settling for something different that nonetheless sounds fully-formed and confident. Any other band who went from Your Favorite Weapon to Deja Entendu would need an album in-between to ease into that sound, to try things and fail forward. Not Brand New.

The main difference in sound is tempo. Their songs barreled forward with reckless intensity on their first album, but Deja Entendu is resolutely midtempo. The first proper song, “Sic Transit Gloria… Glory Fades” enters with a thumping, rubbery bassline pushing the song forward, and it would be an entirely alien sound on Your Favorite Weapon. That’s not to say that the band’s tools are entirely different – you’ve still got the energetic chorus, complete with screams – but they’re being bent towards other ends. These slower songs mean that the band has to lay down deeper grooves, and the instrumentalists step up to the plate: guitarist Vincent Accardi and bassist Garrett Tierney’s loping performance is vital to the success of “Jaws Theme Swimming,” and Brian Lane handles the frequent verse/chorus tempo changes on songs like “The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows” and “Guernica” with apblomb. And they sound great. Mike Sapone, who produced all the band’s albums, gives Deja Entendu a reverbed, dreamy atmosphere while letting all the instruments stay clear and noticeable in the mix. The album doesn’t hit very hard, but that floaty sound, like they’re holding back, is no small reason why Brand New mesmerizes so many people.

But – and he would probably hate to hear this – Jesse Lacey continues to play the role of rock-star frontman here. Fortunately, he’s shifted his lyrical concerns from adolescent put-downs, revenge against exes, and histrionic bitching into something more self-aware. “Watch me cut myself wide open on this stage,” he sings on “I Will Play My Game Beneath the Spin Light.” He’s well aware of the power he commands as a popular musician (“Oh, I would kill for the Atlantic / But I am paid to make girls panic while I sing”) and spends the album alternately pumping himself up over it and lamenting how toxic the position is. “Okay I Believe You But My Tommy Gun Don’t” is a pitch-black comedy of curdling masculinity, Lacey proclaiming “These are the words you wish you wrote down / This is the way you wish your voice sounds / Handsome and smart / Oh, my heart’s the only muscle on my body that works harder than my heart.” But on “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis,” that same power curdles and numbs him: “I will lie awake / And lie for fun, and fake the way I hold you / Let you fall for every empty word I say.” It’s the most dead and hopeless he’s ever sounded on record… to date, at least.

“Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis” is key to Deja Entendu. On the one hand, it’s the most beautiful melody the band has ever written, a terrific showcase of Lacey’s meticulous vocals. On the other hand, it’s where the band runs out of steam and shows the limits of this sound. Over and over on Deja Entendu (“I Will Play My Game Beneath the Spin Light,” “Okay I Believe You But My Tommy Gun Don’t,” “The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot,”) the band has gone from acoustic strumming to full-band rocking to enliven proceedings, and on “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis,” a song that really didn’t need it, they pull the same trick again. It sounds obligatory, as if they have no enthusiasm for it. It takes them four measures of dead-eyed power-chord strumming before they can even muster the last chorus. It’s as if they just realized, “hey, we’re pretty good at this sound, but it isn’t really where our heart is at.” And the three songs after it don’t offer much to change that view: “Guernica” is a lot of energy in service of no real lyrical soul, “Good to Know That If I Need Attention All I Have to Do Is Die” rides a fake-out ending as interminable as its title for far too long, and “Play Crack the Sky” can only offer an overdone metaphor (this relationship… is like a sinking ship!) At least when they closed out Your Favorite Weapon with an acoustic song, “Soco Amaretto Lime,” it was filled with bitter humor and irony.

By the end Deja Entendu shows the need for growth – which is quite a thing for a band that had already grown a massive amount in such a short time. Sure, I’m not hot on the end of the album, but those first seven-and-a-half songs are great. They showed that they could change with the times and deliver a worthy follow-up, that they weren’t going away any time soon. Not enough people were paying attention to them, but they should have been.

The Peak:

I said that it sounded like Your Favorite Weapon and Deja Entendu should have had an album of intermediate development in between them, so great were the sonic changes. Well, that’s pretty much what happened in between Deja Entendu and the subsequent album. Fans leaked eight demos that Brand New had been workshopping for their third album to the internet. These demos, eight untitled tracks under the bootleg name Fight Off Your Demons and eventually released to the public under the name Leaked Demos 2006, were mostly pretty good. They featured heartbreaking acoustic tunes, songs that wouldn’t have sounded out-of-place on Deja Entendu, and experimentation with new instruments.

But the release of those demos is mostly seen as a good thing, as the band scrapped most of them and opted to start over, with a new batch of songs that nevertheless benefitted from the trial-and-error manpower that they had already put into changing up their sound. So when The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me came out in 2006, Brand New had once again set their foot firmly into a new aesthetic. People responded – not as many people as should have been listening in the first place, but those who did heard something special.

Brand New, on their magnum opus, finally found a mode that they were supernaturally good at: discomfort. The quietLOUD dynamics were pushed to their extremes, desperate whispers giving way to piercing wails. Jesse Lacey ceded more lyrical control to Vincent Accardi, and together their words expressed a pitch-black existential despair. Mike Sapone outdid himself, sucking away the comfortable blanket of Deja Entendu in favor of letting the notes ring out and echo into what sounds like a gaping maw. Most importantly, the songs stopped being predictable: rather than uniformly starting midtempo and getting louder for the choruses, they squirmed, lunged, built up and collapsed.

It’s one of the best rock albums of the 2000s, one with an outsize (and arguably still-growing) reputation that far outstrips the modest success it had at the time. But it was one without an obvious follow-up, and though Brand New would keep being Brand New, when they finally returned, not everybody was happy with the results.

The Comedown:

Daisy sounds like an album from a younger band. Maybe that’s why people had a hard time wrapping their heads around it: Brand New chose to push one element of their sound to its extreme rather than play around with the shades of grey they had introduced on their last album. That kind of move is normally associated with artists who haven’t come into their own yet. The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me was self-consciously a masterpiece, an hour-long album with a variety of moods and a surprising wealth of approaches. Daisy, on the other hand, is Brand New’s shortest album at just over forty minutes. Compared to what came before, it’s lean, mean, and unforgiving.

The desire to push their sound to the extreme is clear from the opener “Vices,” which starts with a crackly recording of an opera singer before smashing through the walls with bludgeoning noise and Jesse Lacey’s hellish screams, so loud and mixed so far into the red that the recording clips with the effort of trying to contain it all. If anyone ever got the idea that Lacey was flaunting his good looks and poetic faculties to pose as a rock star, Daisy obliterates the notion. He’s not some brooding Byronesque hero here, but an avatar of despair – moreover, one completely willing to sit in the background. The climaxes of “You Stole” and “Bought A Bride” come not with the traditional Brand New shouted chorus but with white-hot guitar leads from Vincent Accardi.

The band’s love of quietLOUD dynamics persists here, but they’ve found new ways to be loud. Mike Sapone’s favorite trick here is to bury Lacey’s vocals behind distortion, while letting the band overtake him, most notably in “Daisy” and “Noro.” These songs blow out the drums and bass, leaving Lacey unmoored in an increasingly turbulent sea. The hypnotic “Bed” is the moment when the band learns the value of repetition, growing more intense with every chant of the harmonized “Laid her on the bed” chorus even though there’s no singular moment of explosion. It feels like they rejected the studio as a crutch in favor of working on their ability as a band. The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me was immaculately produced, but Daisy blasts the whole thing to the extreme so that the band have nothing to rely on but themselves. Everything on here is guitar, bass, and drums – no pianos, no overdubs, not even an acoustic guitar.

For all that Daisy gets rejected by Brand New fans, I think it was vital to their legacy. The influences here are clear, but they lean towards 90s noise rock – The Jesus Lizard, Fugazi, Jawbox, Slint. Those are names that mainstream publications have a lot easier time swallowing. Most of them had dismissed Brand New by 2003 (at the latest) and to hear them deliver an album that owed so much to that "respectable" strain of rock music made it clear that there was something more to Brand New. Which led them to work backwards and rediscover The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. So Brand New diehards waited for a new album because they wanted to know if Daisy was a one-off and the band would return to their “real” sound. New fans waited because they wanted to see how they built on Daisy to create a new sound. And they all waited. And waited. And the band’s legend grew exponentially, until…

Well, I already had a big thing about this at the beginning of the review.

The Verdict:

I’m an unabashed Daisy apologist, sorry. I think it’s their second-best album behind The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. I think it’s wild that they managed to make two albums that are so good for such different reasons. For the third time in a row, Brand New stepped into a new skin and inhabited it well. With the release of Science Fiction, it’s much easier to see how it fits into their evolution – as a mapping-out of how far they could push the abrasive discomfort of their sound. When they returned, eight years later, to something more expansive and Devil and God-ish, they sounded more confident than ever in who they were. Daisy is responsible for that.

But more importantly, it’s just a great noise-rock album. The highlights are doled out liberally, unlike the supremely frontloaded Deja Entendu, and the band turns in fantastic performances. I’m calling it, this week, for the comedown album.

Review: Kirin J. Callinan - Bravado

For the first minute or two, Kirin J. Callinan’s sophomore album sounds like it might be a reasonable follow-up to Embracism, which is one of the more underrated albums of 2013. For his debut, Callinan meshed art pop and dark electro-industrial music together and gave it an unmistakable garnish: his yowling vocals. Callinan stammers and roars on his songs, blurting out non-sequitirs and repeating garbled lines with a ferocity that recalls fellow Australian wild-man Nick Cave. His lyrics match that violent intimacy, resplendent with male sexual energy and insecurity.

“My Moment,” the first song on Bravado, seems to trace the same path, with a ping-ponging synth line and unsettling atmospheric touches as Callinan drawls in his sleazy baritone. The song lumbers to life like an animal waking up. But when it finally explodes, about two-and-a-half minutes in, it’s not with squealing dissonance or full-band rocking like you’d get on Embracism: it’s with a Europop beat drop. It sounds like something PC Music would put out! In one moment, it obliterates the idea that Callinan would continue or refine the sound of Embracism; instead he’s taken a hard left, picked up a sense of humor, and become an utter troll.

That’s certainly how I found out about him, just a few days ago. A clip from the music video of “Big Enough,” one of the singles from Bravado, is getting passed around Tumblr right now. In it, we roam through shots of the Australian landscape as a woman whistles a plaintive melody, before panning up to the sky and seeing… a giant phantasm of a man (Australian hard rocker Jimmy Barnes) dressed in cowboy garb screaming over the empty plains. Please, I implore you to watch that whole video, because if you’re anything like me, you will feel an indescribable joy at the absurdity of it. It doesn’t even matter whether you know it’s not serious – the video is such a perfect encapsulation of the kitschy Eurovision aesthetic that it transcends needing to be a joke or not.

And that’s the modus operandi of Bravado – it tackles and defamiliarizes many different genres, but Callinan’s quirks override them all in ways that are just slightly uncomfortable and unfitting. He reminds me of Perfume Genius in the way his songs seem to slough over, not quite fitting the boxes he makes for them. The album’s lead single “S.A.D.” (“Song About Drugs”) juxtaposes the anthemic 80s synthpop production with lyrics about getting “a lungful of dope smoke” and being “wrapped up in plastic.” But the music goes further, complimenting every line with a squeamish pitch-shifted harmony vocal and letting Callinan indulge in spoken-word sections. Even the fist-in-the-air chorus constantly throws you off-balance by modulating the key up and down every other line. Often this sloppy discomfort expresses itself in the lyrics: “Down 2 Hang” carries itself on a series of increasingly disturbing metaphors for how “she’s down to hang.” First “like gliders in the sky… or sneakers on a wire” but then like “an asphyxiated man with a belt in a van, his dick in his hand / Like Jesus, she is down to hang.” Right after that, “Living Each Day” encourages listeners to “live each day like it’s your last one,” but Callinan’s version of doing that means that he must “shrug off the urge to systematically kill.”

It’s all funny, of course, but it would be moot if Callinan didn’t bring some good songs to the table. If this was just an album of genre parodies, it wouldn’t be worth much more than a new Lonely Island album. “Living Each Day” lopes around with a bouncy bassline and dead-simple guitar hook. The dance tracks like “My Moment” and “Big Enough” may be silly, but they’re also ebullient and likeable.

Over the first five gobsmackingly weird and funny songs on Bravado, Callinan rewrites your brain so much that it sounds mystifying and unfitting when he starts taking himself seriously. The second half of the album is, by and large, straightforward sophisti-pop songs. There’s hardly a trace of humor in songs like “Family Home,” a touching tune about childhood friends and growing up in difficult circumstances. The only trace of the first half’s energy is “This Whole Town,” which has the EDM dance stylings but very little of the humor. Granted, the closing track “Bravado” manages to transcend all that – it’s a genuinely beautiful confessional little synthpop song. Taken as a single and music video alongside the other music videos from this album (“S.A.D.,” “Living Each Day,” “Big Enough”) it obliquely passes comment on those genre parodies – “After all this time / It was all bravado.” I suspect I’ll be replaying and loving this one more than any of the other songs on the album in the coming months. It would be such a touching end to the album… if only Callinan hadn’t intentionally decided to be touching halfway through with all those other songs.

What you get on Bravado, then, is one half of two different records sutured together. The first half is a head-expanding cavalcade of delightfully trashy/disturbing satire, while the second half is an 80s-inspired sophisti-pop record. The problem is that the first half commits to such a dizzying aesthetic extremism that, without any tip of the hand to show why these two opposites go together, the actually-pretty-good second half sounds dull and out-of-place. I still recommend the first half to anyone with an interest in the gonzo, cheesy, or ill-advised. On those songs, Callinan confidently steps forward with every bad idea he can muster. It’s a shame that he can’t commit to those bad ideas for a whole album.

The Crater's Edges #3: Carole King (Writer v. Music)

The Come-Up:

Technically Writer is Carole King’s debut album, but that’s misleading description. There’s no sense in which King is starting out or developing here: by 1970 she was already a seasoned industry professional. With or without a soon-to-be-breakout solo career she would have already amassed an impressive collection of hits for other artists: The Shirelles’ “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion,” (nowadays better known under Grand Funk Railroad), The Crystals’ “He Hit Me (It Felt Like A Kiss)” and Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” most notable among them. King-Goffin is one of the classic 60s songwriting teams alongside Holland-Dozier-Holland and Greenwich-Berry-Spector.

Even the title Writer foregrounds King’s experience as a craftswoman first and foremost. It’s a canny play to commercial concerns: you’ll like this because you already know Carole King, even if you don’t know her! And the music largely backs that up, because these twelve songs all share rock-solid construction and melodic sense. Pretty piano figures and (especially) driving bass figures by Charles Larkey round out the songs and ensure that there’s always something going on within the standard pop structures. King has a supple voice that catches the emotional content of these songs without allowing that to drag them down. Interestingly for a pop-oriented songwriter, she does particularly well with the more country-leaning songs such as “To Love” and “Sweet Sweetheart.” Now that’s a career turn that could have been rewarding and interesting.

But for all that Writer’s bet-hedging is a reasonable commercial decision, it doesn’t do the album any favors as a listening experience. These songs are all credited to Carole King and Gerry Goffin, who had divorced a year earlier. I haven’t done the research and tracked down the origins of every single one of these tunes, but at least three of them were big singles for other artists, so I think it’s safe to assume that this album consists of King excavating her back catalogue for songs to cover. Goffin-King penned a lot of different songs for a range of different artists in many genres, and that variety is on display here – you’ve got rockier numbers like “Spaceship Races” alongside adult-contemporary piano ballads such as “Child of Mine” and the aforementioned country tunes. While King’s songwriting sense does a great job of holding these songs together, the piecemeal nature of Writer can’t help but be felt sometimes. It feels less genre-spanning than genre-inchoate.

Whether that’s an issue of label pressure or just a mixed call on King’s part I can’t say, but it just brings this down from a very-good album to a very-good collection of songs. But that more than clears the bar for a singer-songwriter finally stepping out and making her own statement. Listen to Writer to find some hidden gems or just hear what King brings to her own songs that other artists don’t or couldn’t.

The Peak:

I’ve got no clue what word-of-mouth forces existed in 1971 to make Tapestry one of the best-selling albums in history, especially because Writer kind of sunk on release. But I’m going to suggest at least one cause: it was a clear step up in quality. I’m not saying Tapestry soars leaps and bounds over her debut, but with more original songs and more forceful production, the latter album establishes Carole King’s distinctive voice with authority and grace.

I mean, this is one of those absurdly stacked albums that could double as a greatest hits: King still brings back some of her old hits to cover, but this time she gives us her own versions of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” two of her all-time classics. This is also the album with “It’s Too Late” / “I Feel the Earth Move,” a double A-side that stuck around on the charts ridiculously high for a ridiculously long time. Oh, and King’s version of “You’ve Got a Friend,” which became a major hit for James Taylor. That’s already five songs out of a twelve-song album that conquered the world. That the rest hold together better than any two given songs from Writer (most of these songs were, after all, written for the album) means a sophomore record with higher highs and higher lows. I still don’t think it’s personally as good as some of the other peaks of 70s singer-songwriterdom like Blue or Rumours, but it has a broad appeal and emotional levelheadedness that those records don’t.

The Comedown:

Carole King had been richly rewarded by going in a more rocking direction with Tapestry (I mean, that album’s not going to blow anyone’s ears out, but it was at least louder and with more active, noticeable drumming) so it’s a surprise that Music is mostly a smoothening and softening of her sound. The warmth and brightness of the album cover really bleeds through to the music here, and King sounds more assured than ever.

Musically the album relies more on the band than ever before – most of what makes Music different is the percussion work of conga-and-bongo-player extraordinaire Bobbye Hall, plus James Taylor’s acoustic guitar accompaniments. Taylor had played guitar on all of King’s albums up to this point, but his contributions here are the most pronounced and complex, intertwining with King’s stately piano figures in ways that always surprise and delight.

The songs themselves lean more toward low-key, sometimes even jazzy. There aren’t any lyrical stunners like “Child of Mine” nor are there any world-beating singles – even “Sweet Seasons,” the big hit from the album, coasts by with genial good feeling and no pressing need to make a statement. Sure, Music isn’t trying too hard, but after delivering a huge smash album and locking down a great studio band who are audibly having joy working together, King sounds happy to be working in her element and letting the music flow.

And that’s a significant change from where she had been before - Writer was a bit scattershot in approach if not in quality, whereas Tapestry, monumental as it is, feels weighed down by its big hits. Music is the most tight and consistent of these three albums. It feels like she’d made it over a hill – from songwriter who dealt in three-minute statements and pop hits to a singer-songwriter who could allow herself to stretch out and enjoy herself over forty minutes. King was right to title this one Music, because nothing else in her career has so clearly communicated the joy of making music and being surrounded by it. What a joy to hear!

The Verdict:

To be honest, I’d heard neither of these albums before I started writing this post; Sonic Youth and OutKast, I was familiar with, but not Carole King. Music, though, surprised me, and is an album I can see throwing on as a standard feel-good low-intensity listen. This week the advantage goes to the comedown album.

The Crater's Edges #2: OutKast (Aquemini v. Speakerboxxx / The Love Below

The Come-Up:

OutKast ascended to pop stardom, then superstardom, then finally myth. It seems inevitable now, but in 1998 their next move wasn’t so obvious. Southernplayalisticcadillacmuzik was an instant Southern rap classic, an astonishing feat for two kids just out of high school, and rather than repeat their debut they transcended it with ATLiens. This was an album of rare vision – OutKast’s Southern scene prided itself on drug and gun talk - a down-to-earth realism. But these guys were down-to-Mars. Big Boi and Dre (soon to rename himself Andre 3000) positioned themselves as cosmic pimps, talented wordsmiths observing the ills of the world from an extraterrestrial perspective. They refused to sample old records and opted to create something fresh – in Big Boi’s words, “If it’s an old school jam, leave it to the old. We wanna have our own school of music.”

Most rap groups would bottom out after making two albums back-to-back of such staggering quality. Not OutKast – Aquemini might find them crashing back to Earth, but they don’t lose an ounce of their creativity. The result is OutKast’s best album, and I don’t care that I’m giving away the result of this week’s judgment call by saying that. It’s that important.

For Aquemini, the duo holed up in their studio with a bunch of professional musicians, jamming on musical ideas and crafting beats organically. From the jump, “Return of the ‘G’” offers a deeper, more seismic groove than anything OutKast or hip-hop had ever given us. You can get lost in just the bass playing on the title track. The grounding in musicianship and interplay yields thrilling results in the songcraft, too – I’ll never forget the first time I heard “Rosa Parks” break down into a harmonica-driven country hoedown. There’s a lot of living people playing the instruments on Aquemini, with deep and simmering influences from funk, soul and R&B. A comparison to the neo-soul scene of the late ‘90s feels obvious – and oh, would you look at that, Andre 3000 had just started dating the visionary musician and neo-soul fixture Erykah Badu!

But no neo-soul record had rappers of OutKast’s caliber on it. Now fully imbued with the alien soul that they first channeled on their journey to the stars, Boi and Dre command these songs. They rap with dumbfounding skill, sounding equally comfortable weaving intricate narratives as spitting freewheeling dope nonsense (see “Skew It on the Bar-B,” which is basically just the duo and Raekwon trying to one-up each other in the booth, competing for the hottest flow).

And when it seemed appropriate, OutKast simply abandoned hip-hop altogether. My favorite song on the album, and one of the greatest songs of the ‘90s, is “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” which conjures up a swampy, romantic groove so intoxicating that time stretches out, the world outside your headphones fades, and all the remains is that fucking incredible horn hook and the luxurious spoken-word intonations of Boi and Dre. If there’s a complaint I can lodge against Aquemini, it’s that the epic funk journeys at the end of the album can be draining. But maybe the real problem with them is that they can’t live up to the standard set by “SpottieOttieDopaliscious.”

The result is a massive album, in every way. It has nooks and crannies to get lost in, a visionary sprawl, and a natural gravitas. I have a copy of it on vinyl (one of the few hip-hop vinyls I own, unfortunately) and its massive, singular aura seems to suck all the air out of the space around it. To listen to Aquemini is to be lost in a strange, funky new universe.

The Peak:

With all other worlds conquered, OutKast only had to cross over to the mainstream, and Stankonia did that. The duo and their Dungeon Family production crew returned to looped digital beats, but kept the wild and freewheeling genre mix in play, also adding in electronic, dance and pop influences. Stankonia sounded much more accessible on the surface – “So Fresh, So Clean” was a sizable hit and “Ms. Jackson” a massive one. But even a casual listen to the album revealed that it was just as sprawling, unwieldy, and uncompromising as Aquemini. Lead single “B.O.B.” sunk on release, probably because it was too much – lightning-quick verses over a frenetic beat, complete with guitar and turntable solos and a hype-you-up choral epilogue. But the song’s stature has grown and multiplied a thousand times since its release and now critics recognize it as one of the greatest songs of the decade. It didn’t sound like OutKast had caught up to the mainstream, or even that the mainstream had caught up to OutKast. Rather, the two met halfway for an album that launched them into the public eye while they were still at their most creative.

It’s also, full disclosure, not an album I like much. Sure, the singles are all bangers, and there are some good album cuts (“Gasoline Dreams” and “Humble Mumble” are my choices) but five or six songs out of a twenty-four-song album, replete with interludes and skits, isn’t enough for me. I can’t help but ding Stankonia for sounding unfocused and overlong. This might have been a problem for Aquemini too, but there OutKast consistently brought the excellent songs, and those aren’t here.

But I can remove my glasses of subjectivity to acknowledge that maybe I just haven’t listened to it at the right time or in the right frame of mind. Lots of other people love this album. It’s one of the most acclaimed of the 2000s. One day, maybe…

The Comedown:

Speakerboxxx / The Love Below emerged out of separate solo projects that Big Boi and Andre had coincidentally been working on at the same time. Critics had noted the temperamental differences between the two rappers as far back as Aquemini, but releasing a double album comprised of two separate solo albums seemed to be the breaking point. Paradoxically, it was also the duo’s popular peak. Selling Stankonia – an ambitious political rap epic – to the mainstream was one feat, but managing to go diamond off a double album full of Miami bass, Southern crunk, P-Funk, showtunes, R&B, jazz, and electro-pop is dumbfounding. The planet that OutKast made with Speakerboxxx / The Love Below had such a massive gravity that concerns about its instability were temporarily put on hold while the entire world got down to “Hey Ya!”

I’m tempted to do what nobody has done before and try to review Speakerboxxx / The Love Below as one consistent thing, a unified statement from OutKast that just so happens to almost never have the two members on the same track. But it would be foolish. Big Boi and Andre 3000 were at very different points in their lives in 2003, and it shows. Instead I’ll flip the script in a smaller way and review The Love Below first.

Either Erykah Badu had Andre reeling for three years straight or he had a series of smaller relationships that didn’t work out in the interim; either way, The Love Below is laser-focused on the topic of love and all that entails: romance and separation, sex and sexuality, gender and gender roles. Andre plays every kind of character here, from confident lothario to heartbroken bachelor, one minute fully in the spring of love and the next denouncing an evil woman. It’s as if Andre is desperately inhabiting every kind of persona he can think of so that he can triangulate the reason for the deep and aching pain inside his own soul. Behind every lyric and every situation lies the same question: “Why didn’t it work out?” The tragedy of The Love Below is that he never finds an answer – the album-ending “A Life in the Day of Benjamin Andre” has him recounting his life’s story, but only up to the present day. “You give it all your time because that’s all you can think about – and that’s as far as I got.” He can’t imagine a future for himself even after all that soul-searching.

Musically he sounds equally lost. It’s not like the elements on The Love Below don’t fit together – Prince pulled all these musical elements (plus a few more) into a cohesive whole in the 80s, and Andre 3000 is as charismatic a performer as Prince ever was. But the songs themselves are just so aimless. Too many of them descend into a mess of studio experimentation, spoken word, and dull repetition. It’s a 78-minute opus that should be at least twenty shorter. This album is where Andre got his reputation as an unfocused, scattershot dreamer who couldn’t pull it together enough to make a full-length statement.

Which is a shame, because on the occasions he does pull it together, it’s as though he’s reached deep into the veins of the universe, pulled them out, and showed them to us. Fourteen years later, “Hey Ya!” remains the iconic pop song of the 2000s. The moment on the album where “She Lives in My Lap” ends its interminable fade-out, only for Andre to shout “1-2-3!” and bust out the most tragic, catchy, singular tune of his career is a moment where the world is righted. To follow that up with “Roses” is almost unfair. “Roses” is a jaw-dropping testament to Andre’s charisma – he manages to make a top five hit out of the chorus “I know you think your shit don’t stink / but lean a lil’ bit closer, see / roses really smell like poo-poo,” and extends a line in the second verse so absurdly far that the music drops out and it becomes a dark murder fantasy, while making it sound totally natural and even funny, all so that he can find a rhyme for the word “bitch” – and in doing so validates the whole project. The Love Below could’ve been so good with an editor, but we have these two shining singles and a scattered assortment of other good bits. It’s hard to get too mad at a man tearing himself apart, no matter how uneven the results.

Speakerboxxx, Big Boi’s half of the project, is even easier to like. Three increasingly wild solo albums later, we can dispense with the fantasy that Big Boi is as traditional and grounded as we all pretended he was. He just happens to have a sound that intersected well with the sound of mainstream hip-hop in 2003. He also has a sense of how to compact and do justice to his good ideas instead of letting them get away from him. “GhettoMusick,” the album’s opening salvo, covers a lot of ground – by the time Big Boi starts rapping, we’ve already gone through a blistering chorus and mellow interlude section – but he keeps it moving, swapping out the numerous parts whenever one threatens to get boring and putting a lid on it just short of four minutes in. “GhettoMusick” begins an eight-song run of more-or-less flawless music. These songs sometimes let their choruses go on too long, but it’s hardly a problem, because they are in fact wonderful choruses, and when they snap back to Big Boi rapping – rapid-fire, complex, so caught up in its own message that he doesn’t care if you don’t get it at first – it’s bracing and thrilling.

Amid the flurry of rapping that Big Boi busts out, one song sticks out to me: “The Rooster.” Here, he talks about trying to be a father to his oldest son (“Round two, a single parent, what is Big to do? Throw a party? Not hardly, I’m trying to stay up outta that womb”) and even describes trying to change his child’s diapers. The spectacle of a respected Southern rapper talking about his son peeing on him speaks of a different relationship to, well, relationships than Andre has. Big Boi was by this time married to Sherlita Patton (who he’s still married to! Yay!) and the sense of maturity and stability permeates Speakerboxxx. Big Boi here is a guy who knows what he wants and is utterly at peace with his place as a rapper, father, and celebrity. He even puts his son Bamboo on an interlude, egging him on to drop a freestyle. You can hear the paternal affection and genuine care that he gives his son, who manages to crack him up just as much as fluster him.

Far be it for me to chalk up the differences between these two deeply different rappers (who were nonetheless born to make music together) up to the state of their love lives, but especially with Andre, the topic invites itself. The standard critical line on Speakerboxxx / The Love Below is that Speakerboxxx is the better album while The Love Below is at least an admirable effort redeemed by two world-conquering singles. Put together it’s a big, messy, triumphant package that captures the summer of 2003 like few other albums do.

The Verdict:

Well – I already gave it away. It’s Aquemini, the massive statement coming from two rappers who were distinct yet vibing on the same wavelength. But I really have to emphasize that as a front-to-back experience, Speakerboxxx is just a joy, certainly the album you’d put on to have a good time. Aquemini, though, cannot be topped. I declare the come-up album the winner this week.