The 5 Best Songs Of The Week
The 5 Best Songs Of The Week
Pearl Jam’s “Who You Are”
In The Alternative Number Ones, I’m reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Number Ones on Mondays.
This column is so fucking weird. Sometimes, I feel like I’m writing these things right from the pit of my soul, flashing back on songs that were omnipresent when I was in high school and that have either developed into canonical classics or into barely remembered historical blips. Sometimes, though, the Billboard Modern Rock Songs chart diverges completely from my lived reality, or at least from the stuff that I can remember. The divide is never more stark than when it comes to Pearl Jam.
Pearl Jam were huge! They were bigger than Nirvana! They were easily, by far, the biggest alt-rock band of the early-’90s alt-rock crossover moment! That’s not just my memory. Numbers back it up. The sales of Pearl Jam’s first three albums were absolutely out of control. Eddie Vedder was the guy who Time put on the cover when the magazine wanted to run a big story on what the “alternative rock” hubbub was all about. Pearl Jam’s various ethical stances — their support of charitable initiatives and political causes, their refusal to make music videos after their “Jeremy” clip went supernova, their noble and failed battle against Ticketmaster — were gigantic news stories. My memory tells me that Pearl Jam were an inescapable radio presence for the first half of the ’90s. The charts, however, tell a different story.
In their insane three-album imperial stretch, Pearl Jam only sent one song to the top of the Modern Rock chart: “Daughter,” which got there for a week in January 1994. All of the other gigantic songs that they made in that run — “Alive,” “Even Flow,” “Jeremy,” “Black,” “Animal,” “Corduroy,” “Rearviewmirror,” motherfucking “Better Man” — did relatively piddling chart numbers. I couldn’t leave the house without hearing “Yellow Ledbetter” six times, but that song somehow peaked at #26 in 1994. It makes no sense! I don’t get it!
Pearl Jam didn’t make it back to the top of that chart until 1996’s No Code, remembered almost universally as the moment where they fully split away from the mainstream-sensation status and became a big cult act with a devoted audience instead. Even weirder: The band’s second #1 hit was “Who You Are,” a dreamy dirge with no chorus and a melody that I can’t retain in my brain to save my life. I must’ve heard “Who You Are” on the radio at some point, but I have zero memory of it. This song just floated past me, but here it is, amidst all these songs that will remain lodged in my brain until that brain rots into dust. It’s beyond me. Pretty cool song, though.
For a minute there, Pearl Jam were struggling. At the time, plenty of people were cynical about every stance that the band took and about extracurricular stuff like the Grammy acceptance speech where Eddie Vedder said, “I don’t know what this means. I don’t think it means anything.” (He wasn’t wrong!) In attempting to circumvent Ticketmaster, the band was only barely able to tour, playing slapped-together shows at out-of-the-way venues. Pearl Jam fought to keep things cheaper for their fans, but the fans would roll eyes at the inconvenience of traveling out to the few venues that the band was able to book. Vedder was seriously spooked by a female stalker who supposedly believed that he was Jesus. The band fired drummer Dave Abbruzzese, reportedly because he enjoyed being a rock star too much.
In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that Pearl Jam retreated the way that they did. In 1996, Rolling Stone ran an investigative cover-story exposé on Vedder without talking to the man, and the point seemed to be that he was merely acting miserable and that he’d always been a canny music-business operator who maintained a firm grip on both his image and his band. Thirty years later, Vedder is the only frontman of a big grunge band who is currently alive. Something about the Pacific Northwest’s specific cauldron of attention, jealousy, old-fashioned depression, conflicted punk rock ethics, and black tar heroin was toxic to the point of being lethal. Vedder found ways to cope with all of that, a feat that none of his peers accomplished.
Pearl Jam certainly seemed like the standard-bearers for the grunge era at the time, but the band actually steadily decreased in popularity in the early ’90s. In their golden age, every album sold less than the one before it, but you couldn’t really tell because they all still sold in ridiculous numbers. Ten: 13 million copies. Vs.: Seven million copies. Vitalogy: Five million copies. Those numbers were not sustainable, and Pearl Jam did not sustain them. Instead, they somehow found a way to transition into life as a working band. They figured it out. Even as a non-fan, that transition is pretty remarkable.
In 1995, released an EP called Merkin Ball, and they reached #3 with their song “I Got Id.” (It’s a 6.) Band members also got busy with side projects. Minus Eddie Vedder, the whole group backed up their hero Neil Young on his Mirror Ball album, though their band name couldn’t be in the promotional materials because of contract stuff. Vedder sang a couple of songs with the late Pakistani Sufi devotional singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan on the Dead Man Walking soundtrack. Mike McCready played in the one-album grunge supergroup Mad Season with Alice In Chains’ Layne Staley, and their song “River Of Deceit” peaked at #9. (It’s a 7.)
Pearl Jam replaced Dave Abbruzzese with Jack Irons, an old friend of Vedder. Irons, a former Red Hot Chili Pepper, was the one who showed Vedder’s demo to the other Pearl Jam guys in the first place, and he turned down an offer to join the band in the early days. The band’s Vitalogy tour turned out to be a disaster that ended at a San Francisco show where a sick and struggling Vedder had to leave the stage after a few songs, with Neil Young filling in for him instead. They canceled their remaining dates and then almost immediately realized that they missed playing live, so they rescheduled as many shows as they could. Once those shows got rolling, they secretly booked studio time and started work on what would become the 1996 album No Code.
No Code was the beginning of Pearl Jam’s middle period, the stretch when they cranked out a bunch of easily ignored albums that, if you listen to the die-hards, are secretly their best material. I’d never heard No Code before working on this column, and I’m just now diving into Yield and Binaural and all the supposedly great albums that followed. At this late date, I don’t hear No Code as some late landmark, but it’s a perfectly solid record. One might argue that that’s all Pearl Jam wanted it to be.
Pearl Jam recorded No Code with producer Brendan O’Brien, their collaborator on the previous two albums. As with Vitalogy, the process was reportedly tense. Apparently, nobody told bassist Jeff Ament about some early sessions, and he briefly considered quitting. But the presence of Jack Irons was a steadying influence. Irons was slightly older than anyone else in the group, and he had a wife and kids at home in LA. (Irons’ son’s band Awolnation will eventually appear in this column, as long as I keep writing it for long enough.) Irons facilitated a lot of communication within Pearl Jam, and he’s also the person who got the ball rolling on “Who You Are,” the album’s lead single.
The drums are the first thing that you hear on “Who You Are,” and they really jump out. Irons plays a complicated, circular pattern that sounds vaguely tribal. The rest of the band builds on that beat, layering harmonies and minor-key guitars. Vedder plays an electric sitar, and that alone is a sign that a gigantic rock band is entering its middle period, messing around with Eastern modalities. Vedder told SPIN, “Everyone has written that ‘Who Are You’ was obviously inspired by my collaboration with Nusrat, but that’s not where it came from.” Instead, the song’s core inspiration was a Max Roach drum solo that Irons heard when he was a kid, one that had a formative effect on him.
“Who You Are” doesn’t sound like a single. It’s a serene zone-out that doesn’t even have a chorus, and the mix is full of tiny discordant notes. Vedder never really belts on the song. Instead, he sings in a sweet, soft baritone that sinks right into the instrumentation. Vedder, Irons, and Stone Gossard are the song’s credited writers, but it’s easy to picture the whole group figuring the track out in the studio. In a way, you can hear the band gaining confidence in the song in real time. It starts off soft and tentative. It never truly gets loud, but it does bloom outward.
Nobody has ever given a very satisfying answer to the question of what “Who You Are” is about. Lyrically, Eddie Vedder seems to be figuring things out, exploring moods rather than concrete meanings. He was always better at that, anyway. Pearl Jam songs could get leaden when they got too self-consciously meaningful, and they’re often at their best when nobody knows what Vedder is talking about — see “Yellow Ledbetter,” a song that has confused lyrical analysts for decades.
On “Who You Are,” Vedder almost seems to be free-associating: “Come to send, not condescend/ Transcendent to consequences.” One one verse, he sings of “trampled moss on your souls.” On another, he sings about being “off the track, in the mud,” and then he offers a quick clarification: “That’s the moss in the aforementioned verse.” I think that’s so stupid, and I love it. This motherfucker was putting footnotes in his own lyrics and then singing the footnotes, and it still didn’t mean anything that anyone else could discern. As near as I can tell, “Who You Are” is about a feeling of ambient rootlessness, about wondering what role you have to play in some greater story. But I don’t really take meaning from the song. Instead, what I get is feeling.
On “Who You Are,” Pearl Jam are beautifully locked in. Vedder’s sitar, clichéd though it may be, adds some free-floating lift to the thing. The central riff is simple and repetitive in the best way; it moves with a mantra-like grace. I love the way the backing vocals well up behind Vedder. The drums are complicated enough that Pearl Jam stopped playing the song live for years after Jack Irons quit the band in 1998. The song comes together as a woozy, pretty little vibe. In 2013, my Stereogum colleague Ryan Leas named “Who You Are” one of Pearl Jam’s best songs. I can’t ride with Ryan on that one, but I respect the take. It’s a cool little zag, a spacey piece of texture that seems designed as a self-consciously minor work. It’s possible that I heard “Who You Are” on the radio tons of times but didn’t register it because the song faded so easily into the background, as if that was the plan all along.
As you might imagine, Pearl Jam didn’t exactly work hard to push “Who You Are” onto the public. They kept up their policy of not making music videos. They didn’t perform the song on TV, either. They played on a commercial-free Letterman episode around the release of No Code, but they went with second single “Hail, Hail” instead of “Who You Are.” (“Hail, Hail” peaked at #9. It’s a 7.) They released “Who You Are” as a proper commerical single, going against the prevailing alt-rock wisdom of the time, and the song reached #31 on the Hot 100 and #5 on the Mainstream Rock chart. It rose to the top of the Modern Rock chart quickly, but it sank back down even faster.
If you look at the Modern Rock chart during the one week that “Who We Are” sat at #1, you can see a few different narratives at work. The dominant sound of that moment was the janky, ironic quasi-rap of the Odelay summer, which would soon merge with sunny SoCal pop-punk in garish and unpredictable ways, as we’ll see in the next column. Grunge wasn’t altogether dead, but it was definitely dying. That week, Pearl Jam’s old buddies in Soundgarden were sitting at #4 with “Burden In My Hand,” a song that had already peaked at #2. (It’s a 7.) Stone Temple Pilots, a band that had previously come off as pale PJ imitators, were in there at #10 with “Trippin’ On A Hole In A Paper Heart,” which was on its way down from its #3 peak. (It’s a 6.) And then there was a whole lot of stuff that couldn’t have had less to do with Pearl Jam. The zeitgiest had moved on.
Like Pearl Jam’s two previous albums, No Code debuted at #1. Unlike those other albums, it did not keep selling in absurd numbers after that first week. No Code only went platinum once, which means it only sold a tiny fraction of what those other records had done. Talking to SPIN a few months after the album’s release, Eddie Vedder did not seem too bummed out about this: “It’s great! We can be a little more normal now.”
In the years that followed, Pearl Jam really did become a little more normal. They kept cranking out records and touring, an act that became a whole lot easier when they caved and finally agreed to do business with Ticketmaster again. Jack Irons left the band after a short tenure, and Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron, who’d played with PJ at their earliest gigs, stepped in and filled that role for more than a quarter century before finally leaving last year. Pearl Jam had some terrible moments over the years, like the crowd crush at the 2000 Roskilde Festival where nine fans died. That wasn’t the band’s fault, and they continued on after considering hanging it up in the immediate aftermath. They just kept going. They always kept going. They’re still going.
After “Who You Are,” Pearl Jam remained a constant presence on alt-rock radio, but they didn’t return to #1 for a solid decade. Still, they racked up hits. 1998’s Yield went platinum, and the truly great lead single “Given To Fly” reached #3, while the follow-up “Wishlist” peaked at #6. (“Given To Fly” is a 9, and “Wishlist” is an 8.) 1998 was also the only time I’ve ever seen Pearl Jam live. They headlined the second night of the Tibetan Freedom Concert in DC, and the only thing I really remember about their set is that they let the Red Hot Chili Peppers use their gear to play a few songs at the end of the show. (The Chili Peppers were supposed to play the previous night, but the show had to end early after someone got struck by lightning.) In 1999, the band’s one-off charity cover of Wayne Cochran’s 1961 oldie “Last Kiss” became a random-ass crossover hit, reaching #2 on both the Modern Rock chart and the Hot 100. (It’s a 7.)
PJ’s 2000 album Binaural was their first to stall out at gold, and the spacey lead single “Nothing As It Seems” peaked at #10. (It’s a 7.) They led off 2002’s Riot Act, another gold record, with the satisfyingly folksy “I Am Mine,” and that song peaked at #6. (It’s an 8.) During that whole stretch, some truly egregious Pearl Jam imitators were all over alt-rock radio, doing the shittiest versions of Vedder’s gargle-howl delivery, while the real deal were sitting right there. Eventually, though, alt-rock radio turned into an I Love The ’90s situation, and all the remaining OGs continued to rack up chart-toppers. Pearl Jam were among their number, so we’ll see them in this column again.
GRADE: 7/10
BONUS BEATS: Nobody really covers “Who You Are,” so I had to look elsewhere. Here’s fan footage of Pearl Jam trotting the song out at their own 20th-anniversary concert in 2011, with Glen Hansard, Liam Finn, and X’s John Doe singing backup and with Mudhoney drummer Dan Peters on floor tom:
(X’s highest-charting Modern Rock hit, 1993’s “Country At War,” peaked at #15. Mudhoney’s only Modern Rock hit, 1992’s “Suck You Dry,” peaked at #23.)
How ‘Girls’, Electrelane, And More Shaped ‘Something We All Got’
Midway through my video chat with Cootie Catcher, guitarist/vocalist/beatmaker Nolan Jakupovski suddenly wields a prop: “This, I think, is what we want to sound like.” He’s holding a copy of the Pastels’ 1998 remix album Illuminati, on which the Glasgow indie greats have their songs reworked by the likes of My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab, and Jim O’Rourke. “A lot of the songs on here, I hear them, and I’m just like, ‘Oh, this is literally what we want to do, but live.’”
Having heard Cootie Catcher’s excellent new album Something We All Got, out later this week, I’m not surprised that one of the Toronto quartet’s primary reference points bridges the gap between jangly, twee guitar pop and electronic manipulation. At various points across the record, fuzzy lo-fi melodies are backed by skittering programmed percussion; today’s new single “Quarter Note Rock,” on the other hand, is a seemingly straightforward rock number that gradually deconstructs into glitched-out distortion.
As for contemporaries, Cootie Catcher’s music draws parallels to indie pop juggernauts like Box For Buddy, Box For Star by This Is Lorelei — whose Nate Amos, incidentally, mixed Something We All Got — but rather than coming from a single narrator, Cootie Catcher’s songs tackle multiple points of view, with Jakupovski sharing vocal duties with bassist Anita Fowl and synth player Sophia Chavez. Thematically and sonically, contrast is a common thread binding Something We All Got. Read our conversation, edited for clarity, below.
Embracing Awkwardness
ANITA FOWL: A lot of my songwriting comes from a place of feeling sort of disconnected between what I’m thinking of saying and what ends up actually coming out. Wrong place, wrong time situation. And that’s very much the case with songs like “Straight drop.” We’re all roughly around the same age, mid-20s. When you’re a teenager and you’re awkward, that’s just part of growing up and being in a transition phase. But I feel like when you hit 25 and you’re awkward, it’s like, this is kind of just who you are. If you’re feeling a bit socially challenged, you kind of just have to embrace it. And so I let out a lot of those frustrations through the music, but even the album art is awkward; it’s a photo of all four of us crammed in this, like, school portrait situation. And I feel like it really highlights that even if we are trying to be our most serious selves — we got ready, posed, sat in a studio — we still come off a little awkward. And what’s more awkward than promoting an album that has your own face on it?
HBO’s Girls
NOLAN JAKUPOVSKI: I think the social aspects of Girls are really influential for us lyrically. It covers all these different types of relationships so well, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. And it’s really funny. I think we’re all really funny.
FOWL: And with the little music subplots, the characters are such good examples of people in the music scene. It’s eerily accurate.
Which of the girls do you feel like you most strongly identify with?
JAKUPOVSKI: I think there’s a little bit of Hannah in everyone.
FOWL: Toronto is full of Booth Jonathans, for sure.
How would you describe Toronto’s music scene to people unfamiliar with it?
JAKUPOVSKI: Toronto has a lot of small groups and cliques.
SOPHIA CHAVEZ: I think that’s why we have a lot of different voices on our album. We’re obviously besties, but we’re all kind of in different scenes and do our own thing.
Playing Live And Watching Live Sets On YouTube
JAKUPOVSKI: When we first started I was making beats for us to play along to live, but I wasn’t really considering that they’d be impossible to play to live. It can’t be too cool or too messed up. Now I have to think about that when I write or I’m composing beats.
FOWL: When we were first starting out, way in the early days, not even all of our songs had the DJ track. Sometimes we’d have to have other songs prepared just in case the venue or sound person couldn’t accommodate the DJ thing. That really inspired how we write songs, and I feel like on the new album we really figured out our formula.
Logistically, do you think watching videos of other bands playing live influences your setup?
JAKUPOVSKI: Yeah, we try to keep our setup as simple as possible. We bring a DJ controller, a synth, drums, bass guitar, laptop — that’s pretty much it. I think we’re definitely blessed that we can just pull up with that. I think this is why we are a product of current time and not a band from the ’90s or something.
What are some of your favorite live sets to watch online?
JAKUPOVSKI: There’s this whole concert video of Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü, and Minutemen all playing back to back. It’s pretty magical. But I even like watching just local bands on YouTube.
Disco Inferno
JAKUPOVSKI: There’s a lot of audio of them performing live, but I can’t find a single video, which is kind of tragic to me. They were an early instance of a band doing digital sampling live. I’m not actually sure how they’re making those sounds, to be honest — it must be a sample pad or something. But they were kind of doing what we’re doing in terms of the things they chose to sample, just in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It sounds more ethereal.
We sample each other a lot. I don’t think there’s anything too crazy on the record, but often we’ll sample a background vocal of us singing or a guitar idea and manipulate it and add it in somewhere else.
Electrelane
JAKUPOVSKI: There’s almost a rigidness to them that I really like. I really like how the drummer plays in that band and the way they use keys. What’s that song where they almost speed up…?
FOWL: “To The East?”
JAKUPOVSKI: It might be that song. I love when the drums come in, and I also really love that era of production in the 2000s. We also love those kinds of vocals — Nico kind of sings the same way.
FOWL: There’s a real affectation to it.
How you discover a lot of your favorite music?
FOWL: I found Electrelane through Nolan, like most things. I remember him telling me about them and then I started to get recommended them through the YouTube algorithm.
JAKUPOVSKI: Maybe our influence is actually the algorithm. [Whole band groans] It’s true, though! Jim O’Rourke used to not be on streaming, and I only have this album because I found it on YouTube.
FOWL: I was definitely a YouTube-to-MP3 converter warrior growing up. I think a lot of our generation was like that.
I do think the YouTube algorithm tends to be less sinister. There’s something a little more personal and niche to it.
NJ: Yeah, I’ll take the YouTube algorithm any day. There’s a lot of evil stuff on there, but most of the time it’s like, “Here’s an Arthur Russell live video for you.”
Something We All Got is out 2/27 via Carpark.
Cowboy Hunters Share New Song “Shag Slags Not Flags”: Listen
Glasgow-based musicians Megan Pollock and Desmond Johnston make up the band Cowboy Hunters. Their last single “Have A Pint” is an aggressive, circus-like romp inspired by the Lady Gaga interview clip-turned-meme. It’s absurd. It makes me laugh, but the music is so weirdly aggressive it makes me want to smash something, or maybe jump into a mosh pit of clowns.
Today, they’ve shared another song, “Shag Slags Not Flags,” a thorny explosion calling out loser racist internet trolls suffering from intense sexual frustration. Here are a couple lyrics from it: “Forty-three with a flag in her bio/ Said she hates blanks, but that is a typo/ The sexual frustration you could catch with your eyes closed/ Lonely at night, so turn to a wino.” Like their previous releases, it’s aggressive and funny, pointing out how fucked our world is with a big, shouty chorus. It’s off their forthcoming EP EPeepee that’s out March 20.
Listen below.
EPeepee is out 3/20.
The Knife’s ‘Silent Shout’ Turns 20
The voice doesn’t sound human. It doesn’t sound like one voice, either. It’s a distorted monotone chant that comes through in several registers at once. It’s a high-pitched whisper and a baritone rumble at the same time. It’s one voice, clearly, but that one voice is being shifted and stretched and morphed into a bizarre caricature of humanity. Even the heavy Swedish accent on that voice increases the disconnect. The voice sounds alien, and it speaks of alienation: “In a dream, I lost my teeth again/ Calling me woman and a half-man.” In the “Silent Shout” video, that voice comes out of a warped, distended, expressionless face, as if Joseph Merrick was intimidatingly bored when he asserted his humanity to a freaked-out mob at the end of David Lynch’s The Elephant Man.
As with David Lynch, sound design plays a huge role. But where Lynch filled his visions with ambient hums and clanks and whirs, the Knife went way more spartan with their 2006 masterpiece Silent Shout, which came out in Sweden exactly 20 years ago today. The aforementioned title track, the first on the album, opens with a nervous synth note pattern: Boom boom boom pause, boom boom boom pause. A pulsing house music kick drum comes in underneath it, and then a cold, flighty keyboard arpeggio. That arpeggio keeps nattering away, sometime drifting just out sync and then finding its way back again. In its way, that musical bed is just as disquieting as that electronically manipulated voice or the lyrics that the voice chants. “Silent Shout” is straight-up club music. It’s exciting and physical, and it carries a sense of freedom, of release. At the same time, it sounds like walls closing in on you.
Lynch was a big touchpoint for the Knife. Shortly after Silent Shout came out, Karin Dreijer told Pitchfork, “We talked about David Lynch a lot, especially Mulholland Drive, where they go to this concert in the middle of the night, and there’s playback music. We were very inspired by that when we decided to start doing live shows. I think I’m more inspired by films than music.” Dreijer mentions that the Knife were just starting to do live shows because live shows hadn’t been part of their mission since the two siblings started making music together. Karin’s brother Olof had been recognized a few times, and he didn’t like it. So when they posed for press pics or did the occasional rare live show in 2006, the Dreijer siblings wore plague masks and allowed themselves to simply become part of an audio-visual spectacle that erupted all around them.
These days, people tend to remember the Knife as an uncompromising art project, a group willing to disregard any thought of commercial success to make a sharp, uncompromising statement. After Silent Shout, they pushed further into experimental and conceptual realms, making the 2010 opera Tomorrow, In A Year and the 2013 double album Shaking The Habitual before disbanding entirely. Karin Dreijer’s solo project Fever Ray continues to carry the transgressive torch. But at the time that they made Silent Shout, the Knife were at least fringe participants in a European dance-pop underground. When nobody paid attention to their self-titled 2001 debut, the Dreijer siblings started messing around with club sounds and free downloadable plug-ins on 2003’s Deep Cuts. That’s still a fearless, idiosyncratic record, but it found an audience in ways that the group couldn’t have anticipated.
The Sony commercial was the Knife’s one real brush with mainstream fame, or at least with mainstream fame on any terms other than their own. Deep Cuts opened with “Heartbeats,” a big and bright synthpop jam that’s still by far the biggest Knife track on Spotify. The duo’s fellow Gothenburg musician José González released a hushed acoustic cover of that song, and Sony licensed the González version for a commercial for the Bravia TV — an instantly memorable clip where thousands of brightly colored balls cascade down a San Francisco street. As a result of that ad, the González “Heartbeats” cover became a huge hit all across Europe just as Silent Shout was coming out. It could’ve been a perfect hype-storm for the Knife, but they had other things in mind.
The Knife had to sign off on Sony’s license. They agreed to let the company use their song. They were putting out music on their own label, Rabid, and they figured that the ad money would keep them funded. During that period, the Knife didn’t exist off on their own icy island reserve. They were part of a little experimental pop community. The Knife produced “Who’s That Girl?,” a single from Robyn’s 2005 self-titled album, and Robyn took inspiration from the duo’s DIY ways when she started her own Konichiwa label. That same year, Karin Dreijer sang on the Norwegian duo Röyksopp’s single “What Else Is There?,” and that song was a chart hit in a bunch of countries. The Knife’s sound was eerie and futuristic, but it also had a certain nostalgic warmth to it. They were able to merge their style with what other artists were doing, and they could’ve continued on that route. Instead, they became something else.
Silent Shout exists at a magical pivot point. It’s the record that the Knife made right in between their time as a culty synthpop act and as a fully experimental concern. They had things that they wanted to say about sex, economics, gender, and the omnipresence of screens. They found minimal ways to say those things, constructing Silent Shout with nothing but synthesizers and drum machines that were already old and outmoded in the mid-’00s, and they knew how to make that shit bang. They also arrived early to the vocal-manipulation party, warping Karin Dreijer’s voice into something eerily and majestically post-human right around the time that T-Pain was first unlocking the commercial possibilities of robo-narcotized Auto-Tune effects. Their goals were different, but the Knife and T-Pain both gestured at a future where humanity was fungible, where emotion would be conveyed through glaringly artificial electronic effects.
In the aforementioned Pitchfork interview, Olof Dreijer talked about why the Knife used so many vocal effects on Silent Shout. He said that the duo wanted to make an album more ambient than Deep Cuts and that the vocals, if they were going to be there, had to help conjure “another state of mind” in the listener. “If you want vocals, you have to treat them so that you don’t get back to reality so fast. If you recognize the voice as Karin, then you also end up back in reality, so you have to create a person who is someone you don’t know, where you don’t know if it’s a male or a female or what.” This was many years before Karin started using they/them pronouns, before gender fluidity was even part of the mainstream conversation. Already, though, the Knife’s music worked to subvert binaries like gender.
In some ways, the blinky drum machine bounce and monotonal vocals of Silent Shout were an extension of electroclash, the irony-drenched art-kid club music that thrived in the early ’00s. But Silent Shout is bigger than that. The ominous power of the production and Dreijer’s disguised voice work together in eerie, forbidding ways; The critic Mark Pytlik called the album “haunted house” in a rave review. The album’s lyrics work as squirmy post-punk provocations. Karin Dreijer sings of sex work at an arch remove: “I’m dancing for dollars for a fancy man,” “Bend back, give head, it’s not pornography/ If you do it with the lights, then it’s art, you see.” They warn of the numbing effects of TV screens and demand control of their body. Those concerns have only sharpened with age, and now Silent Shout sounds like an album out of time, one that has lost absolutely none of its dark urgency.
When Silent Shout came out, the Knife didn’t sound like participants any pop-adjacent scene anymore. They were their own thing. Silent Shout was a huge deal within certain enclaves, but it didn’t leave much impression on the culture at large. The LP was a #1 album in Sweden, and Pitchfork chose it as the best album of 2006, putting it ahead of noisy records from TV On The Radio, Joanna Newsom, and Ghostface Killah. But on that year’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll, Silent Shout didn’t even place. The Knife made their US debut at New York’s Webster Hall, not a huge room but an excited one.
Two decades on, it’s hard to calibrate the legacy of Silent Shout. It’s an acknowledged classic of weirdo almost-pop, but it’s also a = singular record. Nobody else, the Knife included, has really made another album that sounds like Silent Shout, but I hear echoes of its eerie thump in plenty of the jagged, gothy music that emerged from various different undergrounds in the intervening years. The sound of malevolent, mechanized almost-humanity never goes out of style, and Silent Shout still sounds like a future that we haven’t been smart enough to avoid.
Grammys 2026 Performances Ranked Worst To Best
Is there any such thing as a great Grammys telecast? One where you’re just completely locked in through the whole thing, like “let’s all celebrate music together”? No, right? The worst Grammys telecast is a never-ending parade of self-congratulatory bullshit and boring balladry. The best Grammys telecast is a surprisingly OK experience.
In recent years, the Grammys telecast has started to become a reliably OK experience, which is a bit disorienting. The Recording Academy has made a concerted effort to get rid of the stink of past corrupt boomer leadership, and a new generational canon has emerged. The show will still make room for multiple Bruno Mars performances and accept any excuse to heap awards on Billie Eilish. John Legend will invariably pop up at some point. Emotive ballads will be belted. But the show itself isn’t as militantly, defiantly, intentionally out of touch as it once was. That’s a good thing.
The 2025 Grammys had a surprising number of good performances. Last night’s big broadcast didn’t quite hit on that level. Lots of the big winners — Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar, SZA, Billie Eilish — didn’t perform. Lots of other big names didn’t show up. There were so many tributes. The Best New Artist nominees all got compressed little two-minute windows to make an impression. Still, two minutes is something. Exciting younger performers were granted big and messy showcase moments. Only a few of the performances were absolute bullshit. For the most part, it was fine. After moving in the right direction, the show is mostly staying there, and the lack of significant backslide is its own kind of victory.
The big newsmakers in last night’s show weren’t the performances. They were the winners, the victory speeches, the occasional moments of genuine surprise and rupture. My favorite performance of the night came from Cher, who seemed to forget where she was before happily chirping that Record Of The Year was going to Luther Vandross, a man who has been dead for more than two decades. That was fun! Sadly, it was not, strictly speaking, a musical performance, so it won’t be on this list.
Instead, let’s do what we do every year and go through all of the night’s actual musical performances, from worst to first.
19. Trevor Noah singing that Bad Bunny song with the marching band
Bad Bunny didn’t perform on the Grammys because he’s doing the Super Bowl Halftime Show next week. The show’s producers were lucky that he showed up to accept the big award and do bits with the retiring host for the whole night. Naturally, Noah made a big thing out of attempting to goad Benito into a performance. It was hard to watch. In his role as semi-permanent Grammys host, Noah has just been kissing celebrity ass for years upon years. I cannot wait to see literally anyone else host this stupid show.
18. Alex Warren
Hey, what if Benson Boone couldn’t backflip and didn’t seem to have any energy and also couldn’t hit any notes live? Nevermind. Forget I asked. This guy was quick to blame his rhythmic difficulties on malfunctioning in-ear monitors, but it’s not like he would’ve been any good even if that shit was working right. Next time, save the floating platform for someone who will do something with it. Jelly Roll and his wife stole this performance just via the reaction shot where they were about to shove their tongues down each other’s throats.
17. Leon Thomas
Hey, look at that! We’re already out of outright shitheap territory and into the realm of comfortable Grammy mediocrity. Leon Thomas is a dog, he’s a mutt, and his performance was pretty much exactly what I expected, except that Thomas also got to show that he knows how to play a guitar solo, which is nice. The bass player looked like he was really into it. I was happy for that guy.
16. Reba McEntire with Brandy Clark and Lukas Nelson
We get a performance like this every year, and it’s really just a utilitarian thing. Someone has to sing a song during the first part of the in memoriam montage. This was a perfectly pleasant and understated version of that. It was nice. My big take here is: Get the music executives out of this montage. Musicians only. That’s just how I feel.
15. Bruno Mars and Rosé
What were they going for with this opening? It started out with Bruno Mars doing his version of Hendrixian shredding, and then it turned into a slightly messy headlong rock version of “APT.,” with strobes and people jumping around and the camera randomly switching to black-and-white very so often. “APT.” isn’t really the type of song that demands this kind of reading, but it’s an extremely fun song, and the performance was cute enough, I guess. This sort of slightly inexplicable professionalism is the Bruno Mars Thing, and he remains perfectly fine at doing that thing, so this was perfectly fine. Rosé is a gifted performer, but she once again felt like a guest on her own song.
14. Post Malone with Slash, Duff McKagan, Andrew Watt, & Chad Smith
On the one hand: Really? Post Malone for the Ozzy Osbourne tribute? He did fine, but also he was Post Malone, doing the Ozzy Osbourne tribute. If you can get two Guns N’ Roses guys, you can presumably get the whole band, so why not just do that? On the other hand: “War Pigs,” baby! If you want to put Slash playing the “War Pigs” solo on my TV, I’m not going to yell at you about it. Also, they didn’t just have Yungblud do another one of these Ozzy tributes, so that’s something.
13. Olivia Dean
This lady was obviously going to win Best New Artist before they even announced the nominees. Once I saw her performance, I understood her push a little better. It seems pretty clear that the Grammys and various associated forces would like to run the Amy Winehouse thing back, except this time without any obvious personal problems. None of that is very interesting, but it’s also not Olivia Dean’s fault. She gave a cute performance of a cute song, and my daughter said she looks like a Lego Friends character. I’m not fully clear on what that means, but it made me laugh.
12. The Marías
Pretty lady sings ghost lullaby, and Sprockets-looking guy plays underwater guitar solo. I am not mad!
11. Lola Young
Once again, I think I get what they’re going for here. What if someone sang a staid Grammy-style piano ballad — in this case, a very different version of the breakout hit “Messy”— but seemed to have something personally at stake, and also seemed like she might melt down right in front of you. I didn’t really care about the song, but this was compelling television. She has presence! I liked it better when she beat four much more famous people to win Best Pop Solo Performance and visibly couldn’t believe it, but the performance itself was fine, too.
10. Tyler, The Creator with Regina King
We are now in the “interesting trainwreck” portion of this list. I was a couple of drinks in by the time Tyler’s performance happened, so I’m not quite convinced that I didn’t hallucinate the whole thing. Tyler ran over and killed his confusing-ass Chromakopia persona? And he sprayed himself with gasoline like Zoolander’s roommates? And he had both an Oscar winner and an onstage explosion as part of his generally incomprehensible stage presentation? Tyler is an electric performer with a clear weakness for self-referential frippery. He didn’t need to do all that. This would’ve been a lot better if he didn’t do all that.
9. Sabrina Carpenter
Tyler, The Creator and Sabrina Carpenter are vastly different pop stars, but both of them brought the elaborate, chaotic too-muchness. There’s plenty to like about Carpenter’s performance. “Manchild”: Great song! She was clearly singing live, and she can do that. The old-timey baggage-carousel set was cute and expensive-looking, and it allowed for some light OK Go-style treadmill action. But why were all the backup-dancer dudes dressed as examples of different professions, like in a Richard Scarry book? Maybe the astronaut and the surgeon and the magician who I first mistook for an Abraham Lincoln impersonator were just different examples, like “all these guys could be manchildren”? She also had a real live dove, for some reason. I guess you only get to play the Grammys once a year, so you might as well dump out all your ideas at once.
8. Addison Rae
Addison’s buddy Charli XCX did “performing in the parking garage under the arena” bit last year, but she didn’t stage a whole musical number the way that Addison did. This was some absolutely elite hair-flipping.
7. Sombr
I was not expecting this guy to be near the top of the Best New Artist pack. I’m still not sure I get Sombr’s whole deal, but this performance was all sparkles and sharp angles and extremely confident shoulder-shimmies. As a tall gawky and white guy, I am perhaps unduly impressed when I see another tall and gawky white guy projecting absolute swagger like that. In any case, I believe that pop stars should come across as alien Muppets, at least some of time time.
6. KATSEYE
Every televised KATSEYE performance, up to and including their Gap commercial, is just an excuse for some hyper-elaborate brain-melt choreography. Nobody wants or expects it to be anything other than that. This was exactly what it was supposed to be. “Gnarly” may or may not work as a piece of big-budget faux hyperpop, but it definitely works as an excuse for a Step Up sequel to break out on the Grammys stage.
5. Bruno Mars without Rosé
Two Bruno Mars performances in one night? That’s the Grammys I know. In his first time on the stage last night, Mars’ rockstar theatrics were more than a little forced. But his second time up was the man in his element, going full Vegas schmaltz — the lit-up Valentine’s Day stage, the red suits with the spread collars, the gold chains. When I see a whole band doing choreographed steps, my mood lifts just a little bit, and that’s the whole idea. I have already had my first of what I’m sure will be many doctor’s office waiting room encounters with “I Just Might,” so the “new songs that sound like old songs” strategy is clearly still working.
4. Clipse with Pharrell and Voices Of Fire
At this particular moment in history, I don’t have the mental space to really consider what the fuck is happening with the Clipse. Over the weekend, Pusha T’s name appeared in the Epstein files. It was part of a crisis intake report, not anything verified. It could be a pure paranoid hallucination on somebody’s part. But it’s the kind of thing that can hang over a very good performance, which is what this was.
Look, let me have this one, OK? I have loved the Clipse for a very, very long time. I was at the damn Knitting Factory show. They could’ve done their heart-tugging John Legend song on this stage. That’s what I was honestly expecting. Instead, the grand wizards of the almighty blizzard busted out a coke-rap deep cut with a fake snowstorm on the Grammys stage. Let me think about the implications another day.
3. Ms. Lauryn Hill with the Vanguard, Lucky Daye, Leon Thomas, Raphael Saadiq, Anthony Hamilton, Bilal, Jon Batiste, Alexia Jayy, October London, Lalah Hathaway, John Legend, Chaka Khan, & Wyclef Jean
Did I get everyone in there? I hope I got everyone in there. The D’Angelo tribute portion of the evening started off with Lauryn Hill singing her part of their duet “Nothing Really Matters.” During D’Angelo’s part, his vocals were piped into the arena, with the camera panning over to an empty piano stool. and the absence hit hard. I wish the salute could’ve kept going for an hour, but instead we got a messy, disjointed, inconsistent, lovely montage, and the highlight, Bilal absolutely crushing “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” was high.
As for the Roberta Flack tribute, I honestly did not think that Hill would bother with “Killing Me Softly,” since she has never been afraid to take the contrarian path. As she sang “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” and “Feel Like Makin’ Love,” I honestly forgot about the song that probably made Hill famous in the first place. Then Wyclef emerged from the crowd with a guitar and a sparkly cape for the partial Fugees reunion, and I realized that there was no other way it could’ve ended.
The full tribute here felt like an actual act of community rather than a regularly scheduled, ultra-rehearsed Grammy spectacle. Even perpetual Grammy-night irritant John Legend at least made sense here, since he got his start singing backup for Hill. I don’t have any jokes here. This was just a lovely and chaotic spectacle, a fitting end to a long in memoriam segment for a year when we lost way too many towering figures.
2. Lady Gaga
What do you want me to say here? She looked like a German expressionist charcoal drawing, she had choreographed camera movements, and she wore a hat that looked like the fatal flying guillotine. “Abracadabra,” the song that debuted in a Grammy ad last year, sounded great as operatic synth-rock. If any of these other fools want to have any hope of competing with her, they’d have to do something truly drastic, like stripping down to their undies.
1. Justin Bieber
What a fascinatingly bizarre move. This guy got up there in nothing but boxers, socks, and in-ear monitors. He had a full-length mirror onstage, presumably to make that stage look more like a bedroom. He had no band — just a Yamaha RGX guitar, some loop pedals, and an MPC that he used to trigger a sampled 2 Chainz ad-lib. Somehow, Justin Bieber evoked Ed Sheeran, Kanye West, and Frank Ocean, all at the same time and in a good way.
Bieber curled in on himself while singing about pulling up with the roof gone like Jimmy Neutron. He walked offstage and ran back out because he forgot to turn his sequencers off. He made the big, star-studded room feel hushed and intimate. This was the right kind of bonkers pop-star move. Bieber generally acts like someone who hates attention, and he put on the kind of show that was guaranteed to get the most attention. I thought he sounded great, too. One of the real issues with Grammy performances is that even the best ones seem to be sucking up to everyone in the room. This was not that. This was the other thing.
Miles Davis’ ‘Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel’ Reissue: Review
Miles Davis was born in Alton, Illinois on May 26, 1926, and the Miles Davis estate and Sony Music — and probably to a lesser degree Warner Bros., which owns his last few releases — are celebrating the legendary trumpeter’s centennial this year. I fully expect to see a ton of reissues, and possibly some new vault material, all year long. (It’s John Coltrane’s centennial, too – he was born September 23, 1926 in Hamlet, North Carolina – and there’s a whole lot going on with his estate and archives as well.)
The first Davis release of the year is a reissue of a legendary box: the eight-CD Complete Live At The Plugged Nickel, first released in the US more than 30 years ago, in July 1995. (A slightly different, edited version came out in Japan in 1992.) I still have an original copy on my shelf; I bought it the week it came out, at a long-shuttered record store in Hoboken, NJ, and I’ve listened to it countless times since then.
The story behind the box is pretty fascinating. Davis had formed what came to be known as his Second Great Quintet – with Wayne Shorter on tenor sax, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums – in 1964. (An earlier version of the group featured George Coleman on sax; we talked about them in 2024.) In his autobiography, Davis wrote:
I knew that Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams were great musicians, and that they would work as a group, as a musical unit. To have a great band requires sacrifice and compromise from everyone; without it, nothing happens. I thought they could do it and they did. You get the right guys to play the right things at the right time and you got a motherfucker; you got everything you need.
If I was the inspiration and wisdom and the link for this band, Tony was the fire, the creative spark; Wayne was the idea person, the conceptualizer of a whole lot of musical ideas we did; and Ron and Herbie were the anchors. I was just the leader who put us all together. Those were all young guys and although they were learning from me, I was learning from them, too, about the new thing, the free thing.
That last sentence is crucial, because it’s what makes the music recorded at the Plugged Nickel, a small club in Chicago where Davis often performed around Christmastime, so astonishing.
The quintet recorded their first studio album, E.S.P., in January 1965. But they couldn’t get on the road to support it right away; as Davis explained:
My hip was operated on in April 1965, and they replaced the hip ball with some bone from my shin, but it didn’t work and so they had to do it again that August. That time they put a plastic joint in. My sidemen now had big reputations so they didn’t have any problems working while I stayed home and recuperated, watching the Watts riots on television.
In fact, they made some incredible albums during that time span: While Davis was idle, Herbie Hancock recorded Maiden Voyage; Wayne Shorter recorded The Soothsayer, Et Cetera, and The All Seeing Eye; and Tony Williams recorded Spring (which featured Shorter, Hancock, saxophonist Sam Rivers and bassist Gary Peacock).
Back to Davis:
I didn’t play again until November 1965, at the Village Vanguard. I had to use Reggie Workman on bass because Ron — who would do this kind of shit periodically — couldn’t, or wouldn’t, break a commitment to someone else. It was a great comeback and the people received the music real well. After that, I went on the road in December to Philly and Chicago, where we played the Plugged Nickel and made a record there… Columbia still has some tapes they haven’t released from that taping. But Ron came back for this gig and everybody played like we hadn’t been separated at all. Like I said, I have always believed not playing with each other for a while is good for a band if they are good musicians and like playing with each other. It just makes the music fresher, and that’s what happened at the Plugged Nickel, even though we were playing the same book we had always played. In 1965 the music that people were listening to was freer than ever; it seemed like everyone was playing out. It had really taken root.
They performed at the Plugged Nickel for a week, and two nights’ worth of music was recorded: three sets on December 22, and four sets on December 23. As Davis mentions, the band was not playing their new music onstage. They were playing tunes from his 1950s catalog like “Milestones,” “If I Were A Bell,” “Stella By Starlight,” “So What,” “My Funny Valentine” and “Autumn Leaves.” Only one piece from E.S.P. is performed on the Plugged Nickel box: “Agitation.” And it’s only played twice, across seven sets of music. Perhaps this is what inspired the approach the band chose to take, which has become an infamous piece of Davis lore.
The story goes that on the plane to Chicago, drummer Tony Williams — who, again, Davis described as the band’s “creative spark” — suggested to Shorter, Hancock and Carter that they play “anti-music” on the gig. As Herbie Hancock put it, “Whatever someone expects you to play, that’s the last thing you play.” This wasn’t free jazz, but it was a deliberate confounding of both band and audience expectations. So if a song had traditionally built to a fiery climax, on these two nights in Chicago they would let the music dissipate like a popped balloon. If a groove got too strong, Williams would break it up, or let it slacken until it was a struggle to move forward at all. If Hancock would ordinarily create a lush harmonic bed beneath a soloist, now he’d let them float out there alone, like Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff. And here’s the thing: The band all agreed to this idea, and they didn’t tell Davis.
And perhaps even more courageously, they stuck to the plan even when they got to the club and realized that Columbia was going to be recording them.
The resulting music is wild. It swings hard as hell — this band was never going to not swing. But tunes are introduced with the barest nods to the melody; Shorter’s solos go flying off in all directions or turn in ever tightening spirals like he’s trying to drill himself into the stage; the rhythm is double or triple time, then suddenly slows to a crawl; and pieces will end with a sudden, half-discordant chord and a cymbal crash, leaving you thinking, That’s it?
And even without being in on the plan, Davis manages to contribute perfectly. He was still not in good health, and his playing lacks a lot of the precision you hear in the studio and on other live LPs from even the year before. A lot of notes slide away from him, dribbling from the horn’s bell or coming out like the scrowl of a wet cat. I mean, listen to that version of “Stella By Starlight.” That is raw.
But he’s never lost amid what his band is doing; he gives them all the room to run they could ever want, and when he chooses to make himself heard, his leadership is unquestioned. He takes over, and instantly it’s like everything that’s been happening the whole night was his idea. This is as close as Miles Davis ever got to playing free jazz, and he made it work. And whether it was pure star power or the ability to grasp what was happening on the night, the audience was with the band all the way. This version of “So What” is nothing like the classic studio version from 1959’s Kind Of Blue, but the crowd is loving it:
The Plugged Nickel recordings were not released right away. Columbia shelved them. Two LPs’ worth, Live At The Plugged Nickel Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, came out in Japan in 1976, after Davis had retired from public performance; those were combined as a double LP for the US market in 1982. A few more pieces were released as Cookin’ At The Plugged Nickel in 1987. But for whatever reason, the sheer radicalism of this music didn’t really sink in for people until all seven sets came out in 1995, and people could track what Davis and his band did over the course of those two nights in Chicago. When the box hit, it was almost immediately hailed as some of the most fascinating live Miles material available. I know I’ve been enraptured by it for 30 years, even though it’s not an easy listen by any means. And now that it’s back in circulation, you should absolutely check it out.
TAKE 10
10
Angelika Niescier – “Rejoice, Disrupt, Resist”
German alto saxophonist Angelika Niescier enjoys collaborating with Americans. A few years ago, she had a New York-based group with bassist Christopher Tordini and drummer Tyshawn Sorey; they made three albums. Now she’s turned her attention to Chicago. This album features flutist Nicole Mitchell, alto and tenor saxophonist Dave Rempis, vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Mike Reed. The music they make together has a hard-charging energy, particularly thanks to Reed, whose drumming is parade-ground precise, with Stewart beside him delivering bass lines of a Charles Mingus-esque intensity. “Rejoice, Disrupt, Resist” opens the album with a quick shimmy of vibes before the rhythm section leaps into action, and when the horns come in, wavering like a mirage, the music falls into place with a very Chicago feel; it reminds me of something Fred Anderson and Ken Vandermark might have played together back in the ’90s. (From Chicago Tapes, out now via Intakt.)
9
Dave Holland/Norma Winstone – “Will You Walk A Little Faster”
This is a fascinating record. A collaboration between bassist Dave Holland and vocalist Norma Winstone, with saxophonist Mark Lockheart, pianist Nikki Iles, and drummer James Maddren, with guitarist John Parricelli appearing on five of the nine tracks, it’s entirely composed of previously unheard pieces by trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, a longtime collaborator of Holland’s. Three of the pieces use poems (by William Blake, Lewis Carroll, and Stevie Smith) as their lyrics. The rest are by Winstone. But what really sets this record apart is the presence of the London Vocal Project, a 25-member choir. Jazz plus a choir is not that common: Kamasi Washington does it, and a few other players (Andrew Hill, Donald Byrd) did it in the ’60s. And the choir here is not singing wordlessly, as they do on Washington’s records; they’re singing the poems. Carroll’s “Will You Walk A Little Faster,” which struts and bounces, is beautiful. (From Vital Spark, out now via Edition.)
8
Tomeka Reid Quartet – “Oo long!”
Cellist Tomeka Reid’s quartet with guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara is just a fantastic working band. This is their fourth album after a self-titled 2015 debut; 2019’s Old New; and 2024’s 3+3, and their collective voice is stronger than it’s ever been. The title, Dance! Skip! Hop!, conveys a kind of uncontainable joy, and that’s audible throughout the album. These four musicians are going off throughout this record. But this isn’t “free music” (defined however you like); Fujiwara and Roebke swing hard on every tune. And because they have a full-time bassist, Reid is not required to fill that role. Instead, she’s up front with Halvorson, playing really nice unison melodies and then tossing ideas back and forth as a duo. “Oo long!”, named in tribute to a restaurant Reid visited in Düsseldorf, features one of the noisiest, skronkiest solos in Halvorson’s catalog. (From Dance! Skip! Hop!, out now via Out Of Your Head.)
7
Dave Douglas – “Sandhog”
Trumpeter Dave Douglas loves to start bands. His latest is a quartet with pianist Marta Warelis, bassist Nick Dunston, and drummer Joey Baron. (The Four Freedoms of the album title were articulated by US president Franklin Roosevelt in 1941: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. No comment from me.) Their debut album was recorded on July 6 and 7 of last year at a festival in Spain’s Basque country — live, and then on the same stage, without an audience. The tracks that end with raucous applause and those that don’t blend seamlessly together, and the performances are uniformly red-hot. “Sandhog,” named for the workers who dug New York’s subway tunnels, is a hard-edged tune set to a big, pounding Baron beat, with Dunston — who also introduces the piece with a pulsing vamp — taking a fiercely string-slapping solo halfway through. (From Four Freedoms, out now via Greenleaf.)
6
Corcoran Holt – “Rae Ray”
Bassist Corcoran Holt’s second album as a leader is a deeply personal and even autobiographical statement; the compositions are often tributes to members of his family, evocations of major events in his life, or nods to personal and professional heroes. The band is excellent — it includes one of my favorite saxophonists, Stacy Dillard; trumpeter Josh Evans; keyboardist Benito Gonzalez; drummer Lewis Nash; and percussionist Kweku Sumbry. The music is occasionally intercut with voicemail messages from family members and other musicians, which mostly serve to tell us that Holt is a guy who’s not great about returning phone calls or emails. But, you know, if I had a message from Benny Golson on my phone, I’d never throw that shit away, either. “Rae Ray” is a dual dedication to legendary bassist Ray Brown and Holt’s wife Raven; it’s a piano trio piece with the bass featured prominently throughout. (From Freedom Of Art, out now via Holthouse.)
5
Jazz Sabbath – “Iron Man”
When I first heard about Jazz Sabbath, the idea seemed both obvious and deeply goofy. Jazz arrangements of Black Sabbath tunes – ha ha, hilarious. But Geezer Butler and Bill Ward were the most swinging rhythm section in hard rock, and all their songs are fundamentally blues tunes, so it makes musical sense. On their studio albums, they bring in horn players and guitarists, but on this double live LP, recorded last year in the Netherlands, you just get the core trio: keyboardist Adam Wakeman (son of Yes member Rick Wakeman, and Ozzy and Sabbath’s touring keyboardist for many years), performing here as “Milton Keanes,” bassist Jerry Meehan, aka “Jacque T’Fono,” and drummer Ash Soan, aka “Juan Take.” This version of “Iron Man” (a tune also covered by the Bad Plus) jumps the tempo up significantly, abandoning the clanging doom of the original in favor of a loping swing. (From Jazz Sabbath Live, out now via Blacklake.)
4
Quinsin Nachoff – “Patterns From Nature: I. Branches”
Brooklyn-based saxophonist Quinsin Nachoff’s latest album is a fascinating orchestral work recorded with a dozen players who travel the zones in between jazz and modern classical music, and the Molinari String Quartet. It consists of two long suites, the four-movement, 42-minute “Patterns From Nature” and the three-movement, 21-minute “Winding Tessellations.” If you’re looking for long horn soliloquies, look elsewhere. This is ensemble music, instruments coiling around each other like vines climbing a tree, with little blossoms of sound every once in a while as a single player may get a brief moment in the spotlight before being swallowed up by it all. “Patterns From Nature: I. Branches” opens with bells like we’re being summoned; drummer Satoshi Takeishi uses rattles, brushed snare and more to sketch a backdrop as pianist Matt Mitchell ripples and trills, with the strings, high and low, all around, calling out like invisible birds hiding in trees. (From Patterns From Nature, out now via Whirlwind Recordings.)
3
Melissa Aldana – “La Sentencia”
Filin, which I had never heard of until writing this column, was a style of Cuban pop music, inspired by romantic ballads from America and popular in the 1940s and 1950s; it’s pronounced like “feeling.” Saxophonist Melissa Aldana, who’s from Chile, has adopted the style for her latest album, interpreting songs from the era (plus a version of Brazilian composer Hermeto Pascoal’s “Little Church”) in a manner that reminds me of Dexter Gordon. Gordon always insisted it was crucial to know the words of the standards he played, in order to make sure he treated them like songs, not just melodies and chords. Aldana takes that approach here, and has said that since the songs were originally written in Spanish, she connects with them even more deeply. She’s joined by pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, bassist Peter Washington, and drummer Kush Abadey, and Cécile McLorin Salvant sings on two tracks. (From Filin, out now via Blue Note.)
2
Asher Gamedze – “Air”
South African drummer Asher Gamedze’s fourth album is all about community, friendship, and collectivism. The musicians — trumpeter Keegan Steenkamp, keyboardist Nobuhle Ashanti, bassist Zwide Ndwandwe, and percussionist Ru Slayen — don’t just play their instruments, they also sing spiritually inspired lyrics (by Gamedze) and are heard reading from an essay by South African civil rights activist Steve Biko, as part of a regular reading group. But the music is neither didactic nor preachy; it’s purely enjoyable no matter the context. “Air” is a slowly pulsing groove intended to make your head bob and your hands clap. Ashanti’s synth contributions are fascinating, seeming to include vocal samples as well as an almost theremin-like solo, as Ndwandwe, Slayen and Gamedze put together intricate rhythm patterns and Steenkamp floats in like a cooling breeze through a window on a hot, dry afternoon, playing a melody so gentle you’ll feel like you dreamed it. (From A Semblance: Of Return, out now via Northern Spy.)
1
The Messthetics And James Brandon Lewis – “Deface The Currency”
The Messthetics were an interesting band even before James Brandon Lewis came along. In 2018, 15 years after the legendary post-hardcore dub-rock quartet Fugazi had gone on hiatus, its bassist and drummer, Joe Lally and Brendan Canty, reunited in an instrumental trio with chameleonic noise-fusion guitarist Anthony Pirog. Their self-titled debut and its sequel, 2019’s Anthropocosmic Nest, were filled with rifftastic monster jams like “Quantum Path” and “Better Wings,” while mellower pieces like “The Inner Ocean” and “Because The Mountain Said So” showed their softer side. Both these albums were on Dischord, Fugazi’s label, which made the link between past and present possibly more emphatic than Lally and Canty might have intended.
In 2024, though, the Messthetics made two surprising moves: They expanded to a quartet with the addition of tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, and they signed to Impulse! Records. The collaboration with Lewis didn’t come out of nowhere; Pirog had appeared on the saxophonist’s albums No Filter and An UnRuly Manifesto. (I saw Lewis’ quartet with bassist Luke Stewart, drummer Warren Trae Crudup III, and Pirog play with Harriet Tubman in 2017 or so. They killed it.)
The Messthetics And James Brandon Lewis worked well because Lewis is a very riff-oriented player. His melodies aren’t complicated. They’re big and brash, and they come right at you, which means they work just as well on electric guitar as on tenor saxophone. And when he and Pirog were soloing simultaneously, as on a piece like “Three Sisters,” with Lally and Canty laying down a thick, dubby rhythm behind them, the music soared.
That record could easily have been a one-off. James Brandon Lewis is a busy guy. But now there’s a second album, Deface The Currency, and they seem to have really congealed as a band in a way that makes their pre-Lewis albums feel like a whole different thing. The way Pirog and Lewis take turns playing short solos, and the way Lally and Canty react differently to each of them (giving the guitarist a whomping hard rock backbeat, and the saxophonist a funky call-and-response), before they all come together at the 3:30 mark for a punk rock free jazz blowout, is fantastic. This is an album meant to be played loud. (From Deface The Currency, out now via Impulse!.)