Lubomyr Melnyk: Rivers and Streams

Ukrainian pianist and composer Lubomyr Melnyk has spent his career developing a method of performance called "continuous music." In pieces that stretch anywhere from 10 minutes to nearly an hour in length, Melnyk delivers a sustained flurry of high-speed arpeggiated notes. By holding down the sustain pedal, he allows tones to ring out indefinitely, creating droning ambience and phantom melodies.

The pursuit of continuous music has brought Melnyk impressive chops—his website boasts that he is the fastest pianist in the world—but little in the way of critical recognition or financial reward. In interviews, he has expressed some disappointment at falling through the music industry's cracks, his playing too unorthodox for the classical establishment and too traditional for the experimental music community. However, in the last several years, Melnyk has begun to connect with a larger audience through releases on small labels like Unseen Worlds and Erased Tapes, which concentrate on modern classical and electronic music.

Rivers and Streams is Melnyk's third release for Erased Tapes. In execution, it's not too different from his previous works for the label. The music is busy and technique-intensive, but tuneful and meditative. As Melnyk plays, his melodies meld together, shifting in tone and volume. Because he allows the piano to resonate, the sound blurs, turning concise and complex patterns into aural fog. According to the composer, the album is a meditation on water—not a huge stretch given the steady, trickling, ambient nature of Melnyk's style. The performances are enhanced via co-production from label founder Robert Raths and London-based composer, Jamie Perera, who modestly augment Melnyk's arrangements with guitar.

Informed by the work of American minimalists like Steve Reich and Terry Riley, Melnyk's music draws on repetition and also a certain degree of impromptu inspiration. However, those composers—Riley in particular—often employed alternate tunings and distinctive harmonies that helped to distance their compositions from Western classical music. Melnyk's music is just as expansive, but more conservative in its approach to harmony. He's more overtly romantic. Listening to the plaintive minor key melodies on "Parasol", you can understand how, for some, the pianist's sensibility might have crossed the sometimes-thin line that divides minimalist classical and new age.

However, this is less of a liability than it might have been in the past. New age is no longer the reviled genre it once was. And there are other, more appropriate modern parallels. Melnyk's shifting chords and rising crescendos will click easily for those who follow post-rock bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Explosions in the Sky. And in continuous playing, sustained repetition, and simple harmony you can also hear him as a more organic cousin to the burbling synthesizer music of '70s groups like Tangerine Dream or Ashra. This is not machine music, though. It's very human—serenity delivered through sustained concentration and ecstatic energy, via a lifetime of practice and perfection rather than the twist of a knob.

Zora Jones: 100 Ladies EP

 Zora Jones has described 2010 as her year zero. She saw DJ Rashad spin for the first time at a party in Montreal, where it was pretty much everyone's first encounter with footwork in a club setting. She and her friends ended up spending a week with the Chicago DJ, and he gave them a batch of tracks he'd produced with his Ghettoteknitianz crew. It opened up a whole new world for her. "That folder is still one of the main folders I go to for inspiration," she told The Fader. "Those tracks are so crisp to me and so influential. 2010 was the year for me."

You can hear the late Rashad's influence on Jones' debut EP, 100 Ladies—or at least, you can deduce it. Many of her tracks move at 160 BPM, smack in the middle of footwork's sweet spot. But in the past five years, Jones has also established her own sound, one that's indebted to footwork (and also to grime), but irreducible to either of those genres. It's several steps removed—and that's a direct result of the work that she's put in.

The title of the Austrian-born, Barcelona-based producer's EP is a reference to a pact that she made with herself: to make 100 tracks before she released anything. This isn't the first thing she has unveiled; there have been collaborations with Sinjin Hawke and DJ Taye on FractalFantasy (the imprint she runs with Hawke, which began life as an online outlet for audiovisual productions), and she's posted the odd solo track to her SoundCloud account. But this is her first extended statement, and the singularity of her vision is immediately apparent.

Aside from the occasional anchoring 808 kick, she favors thin, silvery sounds: brittle rimshots, tinny hi-hats, and 808 toms tuned toward their upper limits. Her main instrument is the voice—resampled, stacked in dizzying fifths, pitched up near dog-whistle frequency, and painted on in bright, loopy brushstrokes. Put together, these elements combine to suggest club music injected with helium and sent bobbing high overhead.

Of the album's seven tracks, only two come anywhere close to resembling established forms. "Zui", with its shuddering 808 patterns and stuttering monosyllables, wears its footwork influences proudly on its sleeve, and the lurching cadence of "Too Many Tears" sounds like an outgrowth of the "weightless" style of grime favored by Mumdance, Rabit, and Murlo. Again, though, her wordless vocal melodies stand proudly apart; they're eerie, shapeshifting things, part violin and part warbling bird, and their effect is spellbinding.

The EP is bookended by its best tracks. The footwork-tempo closer "First Light" pumps away like Philip Glass rearranged for tin whistle, Gameboy, and chipmunk, while the opening "Oh Boy" forsakes drums entirely; it's just wordless vocal trills pitched up into icy configurations accompanied by the hollow hum of whirly tubes. Despite their novelty, both songs remain unusually moving; for all the flyaway nature of her sounds, her compositions carry real emotional weight. They offer the equivalent of a solid musical form being melted down and channeled into tiny, sidewinding rivulets; it will be fascinating to see where these streams carry her next.

Underworld: Second Toughest in the Infants

At this point it seems that Underworld are remembered, at least by casual observers, as the rave act most like a rock band. There's nothing really harmful about this interpretation, but acting like a rock band—a euphemism for "had a frontman"—isn't really what separated Underworld from their peers. After all, the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers both worked in the album format to great effect, and, like Underworld, their live shows and general demeanor had more in common with Oasis than with, say, Spiral Tribe. In fact, what truly makes Underworld unique, and what coincidentally most closely aligns them with rock bands, is that they took themselves really seriously; their ambitions leaned to the serious and important. Unlike most people—lots of ravers included—they thought these things could be achieved using the rave template.

Second Toughest in the Infants is the band's second, spectacular attempt at making big, important rave music, and their second with young fusionist DJ Darren Emerson helping steer the ship (frontman Karl Hyde and Rick Smith had been making music, in one style or another, since the early '80s). It was reissued for its 20th anniversary this November, in both two- and four-CD editions, remastered and bundled with exclusive and/or unreleased extras. You can see the band posing in the album title, a funny little comment made by Smith's nephew that conveniently reads like poetic word soup. You see this, probably, before you realize the album opens with a 16-minute, three-part suite entitled "Juanita : Kiteless : To Dream of Love" and follows that with a 15-minute, two-part suite entitled "Banstyle/Sappys Curry". There it is, comrades: a heaping helping of Big, Important Music. If you want funny voices and funny haircuts, the Prodigy are in the tent to the left.

The great thing about mid-'90s Underworld is they made this beat-poetry-cum-rave-anthem splice work against the odds. Their secret was to act as if Hyde was not a vocalist at all but rather a particularly charismatic sampler: spitting out short, repetitive phrases that were afforded little more purchase on a track's mix than any other melodic curlicue. As an album, and as disc one of this reissue, Second Toughest holds up marvelously, dominated by the shapeshifting opening tracks but also featuring fan-favorite "Confusion the Waitress" and the stupefying "Pearl's Girl", perhaps the fist-pumping-est epic in a discography chockablock with them. "Stagger", the tormented kosmische saga that closes the affair, betrays the band's album-centric aspirations and beats Thom Yorke to the meandering electro-ballad by a decade.

The band's profile raised considerably with Second Toughest, which roughly coincided with the release of Trainspotting, the film making prominent use of non-album track "Born Slippy.NUXX". The track's popularity, and its association with the movie, perhaps unfairly tethers the band's sound to the '90s, though there's some comfort in remembering a time when music this loopy and progressive could dominate (European) airwaves.

Disc two reproduces all of the exclusive material from the absurdly good Pearl's Girl EP—five long pieces over 35 minutes that would stand as most band's best work even before adding the worthy reworks of the title track—and adds "Born Slippy (Instrumental Version)", which functionally has almost nothing to do with the more famous NUXX version, as well as "Born Slippy.Nuxx (Deep Pan)", an intriguing but ultimately boring remix.

Disc three offers a full slate of unreleased material, some of which ("D+B Thing", "Techno Thang", "D'Arbly St") gives away its throwaway nature by its title. "D'Arbly", meanwhile is seven minutes of downtempo lounge noodling. Only an extra version of "Pearl's" and "Bloody 1", yet another loopy 16-minute epic (Underworld could do no wrong in this format in the mid '90s), rescue this disc. Disc four offers seven (!) different versions of "Born Slippy.NUXX" (often simply titled "Nuxx"), several of them live. The main takeaway here is that you do not, in fact, want Hyde's scintillating vocal melody to continue for the entire runtime, no matter how much you think you love the opening minutes. But the disc also illustrates how much Underworld has in common with a jam band, iterating over long passages, massaging a track into form.

Second Toughest marks the last time Underworld's blend of ferocity, earnestness, and expanse felt transcendent. By the time they returned with Beaucoup Fish in 1998 they seemed more like an institution than a contender. But there's an absolute trove of potent material associated with Second Toughest; lesser bands might've mined this period for two or even three albums. The remasters sound great, and the two-disc version makes exploration reasonable for the unfamiliar, though both the original album and the essential Pearl's Girl EP can be had for a song in your local used bin. For the fanatic, the four-disc version offers a couple of gems and a thorough examination of the genesis of the band's most famous track, i.e. exactly the type of thing you might hope for from a not-explicitly-necessary reissue. Underworld made a point of going deeper, and carrying on for longer, than most bands would dare; they're worthy of a reissue that does the same.

iLoveMakonnen: iLoveMakonnen 2

The sense of intimacy social media allows with stars can be tricky. Even in the most naturalistic and organic-feeling social media moments—a Snap of DJ Khaled extolling the virtues of water and cocoa butter; unscheduled Twitter rants that turn into full-blown hip-hop feuds—an element of pre-meditated performance still exists. These guys wouldn't be successful entertainers without that instinct.

iLoveMakonnen is one of a few genuinely engaging artists on Snapchat. When he Snaps himself covered in blankets in a cold hotel room, or of himself confronting pre-show jitters, his personality comes through so clearly it's hard to not feel moved. He's always seemed like a genuinely unique and humble guy, maybe somewhat performatively so. But what social media isn't in some way performative?

This matters in perceiving Makonnen's art because his relatability has always worked in his favor, even when some of his songs threaten to go off-the-rails, since his limited voice can only take him so far. He seems like a guy you know. "Tuesday" was a giant hit because it nailed something about the melancholy one feels when out on a weekday—it feels liberating, because so few people are out, but it can also be a stark reminder of the aimlessness that comes when you're unemployed, or depressed, or, in the conceit of the song, dealing drugs on the weekend. But those details didn't matter. We've all had a Tuesday (or Wednesday, or Thursday) night end far later than it should have. And it struck the kind of relatable chord that Drake does well, which naturally led to his golden co-sign.

Fast-forward a year and after this spring's experimental but quietly compelling Drink More Water 5 mixtape, and Makonnen has released the official follow-up to his first EP on OVO Sound. Some of these songs have floated around for a year or so and are staples of his live performances. But more than even the first EP, which delivered a handful of great hip-hop-indebted pop songs, this sequel EP bursts with a confidence that's earned after you go through the hit-song-now-what? grinder. Compared to his last mixtape, the hooks are sharp enough to cut glass, and the sequencing ensures that every facet of Makonnen—from Heartbroken Makonnen to Riotous Makonnen to Warble Makonnen to Onomatopoeia Sex Jam Makonnen—alternates every song.

On the lights-down, open-curtain starter "Forever", Makonnen hits the ground running: "I remember when you said you needed a love that lasted forever," before the ominous beat finally drops. The open-throated ballad kicks off his second EP as ably as Tom Cruise scaling a mountain during the first moments of Mission: Impossible 2. By the time Santigold shows up to memorably rap a few bars, the hooks (literal and figurative) have sunken in—Makonnen is aiming for the fences with his pop instincts.

However, the record is at its best in the contemplative heartfelt-loner love songs, like "Second Chance" and "Being Alone With U", in which Makonnen embodies his hip-hop-Morrissey role. Closer "I Loved You" perfects this formula with a stark piano on a trap beat. Makonnen offers formulaic Drake-isms like "I know you think about me when I'm not around," but they feel fresh in context because we feel like WeKnowMakonnen.

"Trust Me Danny" is the EP's signature moment, a windows-down banger that pays homage both to Makonnen's producer Danny Wolf and a viral Vine. It encapsulates Makonnen's aesthetic as well as his target audience—fans and students of hip-hop who recognize that hooks need to sail for maximum effect for a track to land as a rap anthem. Makonnen isn't another "weird" rapper cashing in, making disposable jokes and internet references for a Twitter-ready crowd before everyone wakes up and goes, "Where are the hits? Where are the hooks?" On this EP, he's angling to be a real pop star, to step out of the OVO shadow (which hasn't produced a major pop crossover artist since the Weeknd) and onto the radio. It's hard to know if that'll happen, but coming with a likable persona, real pop-songwriting chops, and an established audience never hurt anybody.

Coldplay: A Head Full of Dreams

On the very first song on their very first album, Coldplay introduced themselves with a heartfelt declaration: "We live in a beautiful world." Fifteen years and some 80 million albums sold later, the British quartet haven’t elaborated on that philosophy—they’ve just amplified it. Where massive success has a tendency to make bands more jaded and aloof, Coldplay only seem more gobsmacked and in awe of life itself. Their songs aren’t just designed to uplift, they’re often about the very sensation of being uplifted. But on the band’s seventh album, A Head Full of Dreams, the band’s relentless campaign to raise our spirits is liable to induce altitude sickness.

Of course, there’s a perfectly logical reason for the album’s oversold optimism—A Head Full of Dreams is a reactionary retort to 2014’s Ghost Stories, a low-key response to a high-profile split that literally wore its (broken) heart on its sleeve. The new album, by contrast, is Martin’s unconscious recoupling record, the sound of a freshly single man stepping out onto the dancefloor to lose his mind and find new love. "You make me feel like I’m alive again," he sings atop the slinky disco of lead single "Adventure of a Lifetime", a lyric that succinctly sums up the spirit of the record like a movie poster tagline.

A Head Full of Dreams is Coldplay’s chance to reassert the eager-to-please exuberance that Ghost Stories deliberately downplayed, and prove that Adele isn’t the only artist who can mobilize a monoculture in 2015. Though written off by detractors as middle of the road, Coldplay’s centrist position is what ultimately makes them so singular—they’re the only rock band that could (and would want to) wrangle Beyoncé, Noel Gallagher, Tove Lo, Norwegian Top 40 architects Stargate, Kendrick Lamar producer Daniel Green, alt-rock lifer Nik Simpson, and “Gimme Shelter” scene-stealer Merry Clayton on the same record. A Head Full of Dreams is emblematic of Coldplay’s burning desire to be all things to all people, rolling up symphonic Britpop bluster, club-thumping bangers, dentist-office soft rock, finger-snapping R&B, and even some trippy touches that remind you of a time when this band just wanted to be as popular as Mercury Rev.

But the album has bigger ambitions. By weaving a spoken-word reading of an inspirational 13th-century Persian poem and a sample of Barack Obama reciting "Amazing Grace" into the mix, the album essentially conflates Martin’s post-rebound optimism with an all-encompassing, heal-the-world mission. His relentless need to take us higher feels most genuine when we get a sense of what got him so low in the first place. "Everglow" and the Tove Lo collab "Fun" bring ultimate closure to the Gwyneth saga with a pledge to enduring friendship (and, to prove it, the former track features Martin’s ex on backing vocals). And despite bearing a title that isn’t going to dispel their poor-man’s U2 rep, "Amazing Day" is a sweet ode to blossoming, post-divorce romance that channels the winsome charm of early singles like "Shiver". Best of all is "Birds", a shot of taut, Phoenix-styled motorik pop that provides a rare moment of intensity on an album that’s all about arm-swaying, Super Bowl-crashing bombast.

Even when A Head Full of Dreams hints at experimentation, it inevitably drifts back onto predictable paths. The title track eases us into the album on a glistening groove but halts its momentum for a now-obligatory "woah oh oh oh" breakdown that sounds like it was focus-grouped into the song. When Martin sings "I feel my heart beating" on "Adventure of a Lifetime", the arrangement drops out, save for a throbbing bassline that mimics the sound of, well, take a guess. And the readymade, gospelized charidee-anthem-in-waiting "Up&Up" sees many of the aforementioned guests get together to sing, "we’re gonna get it together," before Gallagher delivers a send-off guitar solo that essentially turns the track into Coldplay’s Perrier Supernova. At one point in the song, Martin asks, "How can people suffer/ How can people part/ How can people struggle/ How can people break your heart?" He doesn’t profess to understand the root of all our problems, but he’ll do his damnedest to provide a cure anyway.

For all the record's eclecticism, Coldplay remain a band that put the "us" in "obvious," blowing up the simplest sentiments for maximum appeal. Nearly every song is about ascension and transcendence, be it through intoxicants (the Beyoncé-assisted "Hymn for the Weekend"), rocket ships (the unlisted, listless slow jam "X Marks the Spot"), out-of-body experiences (bonus track "Miracles"), large ocean waves ("Fun"), rooftop stargazing ("Amazing Day"), winged creatures ("Birds"), or just sheer force of will ("Up&Up"—and this from a band that’s already written a song called "Up With the Birds"). But Martin has a tendency to sing of extraordinary, mind-expanding experiences in muddled metaphors ("My army of one is going to fight for you … my heart is my gun") and rote "high"/"sky" rhymes. And with his many wide-eyed ruminations on stars and moons and hearts and diamonds, it can sound like he gets his lyrical inspiration from a spoonful of Lucky Charms. Martin recently told the Wall Street Journal that he wanted "Hymn for the Weekend" to be the sort of single that would soundtrack a bottle-service bender at a nightclub and, essentially, that spirit of bonhomie permeates the entirety of A Head Full of Dreams. Except too often, the album’s pat platitudes place us on the other side of the velvet rope, left to ponder the sight of some self-satisfied people having the time of their lives.

Gloria Ann Taylor: Love Is a Hurtin' Thing

A month before the release of their debut album on 4AD, U.S. Girls dropped the video for the Slim Twig-produced single "Window Shades". For most listeners, it was a song about the emotional breakthrough of a woman finally confronting her unfaithful partner. But its production, with looped strings, piano, and hand drum, was startling to deep soul fans. "Window Shades" incorporated a licensed sample of Gloria Ann Taylor's 1973 single, "Love Is a Hurting Thing", a song found on a privately-pressed 12" called Deep Inside You featured one of the more anonymous spirograph sleeves from that era. Seen in the racks, the 12" might have looked like any number of local gospel or marching band albums from the mid-'70s, but this one came with a twist: a copy of the release, credited to Gloria Ann Taylor and Walt Whisenhunt's Orchestra, routinely tops four figures in online auctions, making it one of the most coveted soul/disco albums of its ilk.

Deep Inside You is the centerpiece of Love Is a Hurtin' Thing, Ubiquity's long-gestating compilation of highlights from Gloria Taylor's brief career, gathering five singles recorded between 1971 and 1977. For those of more modest means who've relied on mp3s culled from long-deleted music blogs, Hurtin' Thing fills in her discography as well as her biography. The mystery inherent in her music has led to some strange speculations online. Even her Discogs page puts her birthplace as Alabama, saying that she formed gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock and passed away 10 years ago (no doubt conflating her with one Gloria Ann Taylor-James). As these liner notes clarify, though, Taylor was actually born in a coal-mining town in West Virginia and is still very much with us.

That Gloria Ann Taylor didn't become a household name isn't of much concern now. It's difficult to become a star, much easier to be star-crossed, to find your music lost to time. So the fact that she never made it is not cosmic injustice so much as the actual indifference of the universe. It was in fact at the start of Taylor's career as a soul singer based in Toledo that she had her best shot at stardom. Compared favorably to Aretha Franklin, she had a powerful, church-bred voice that caught the attention of one of James Brown's arrangers and associates, Walt Whisenhunt, fresh off of working on Doris Troy's "Just One Look". They became both musical partners and a couple.

The number of forgotten, obscure, or lost soul singers revived in the 21st century runs long and deep, the "personal sacrifice, failed relationships, and missed opportunity" that these notes describe are all attendant of this peculiar genre. But before allowing hard-knock biography to color the reception of Love Is a Hurtin' Thing, just listen to the opening seconds of the title track. A blistering psychedelic guitar solo, like something left off of Nuggets, flares across the opening 10 seconds, but 20 seconds in, we're awash in opulent strings, piano, and Taylor's voice, a powerful instrument that seem to be echoing from a subterranean tunnel.

As production choices for a potential hit single in the early 1970s go, it's baffling, one part psych-rock, one part Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra, all competing with the fresh wound of Taylor's voice. There's a raw pain and cavernous hurt in Taylor's every exhalation, the lyrics questioning how love could bring such joy and pain. And the music itself is bent on evoking all of the ecstasy and agony, the crazed jags of adoration and confusion that stems from a dysfunctional relationship.

"How Can You Say It" has Taylor talk about giving her lover her last dime, then finding tears on his pillow. That wrenching whiplash of emotions are scored by lush orchestration and percussion swaddled in so much echo so as to suggest the sound Lee Perry would get out of the Black Ark in a few years' time. Same goes for "Deep Inside of You", where the strings, vibraphone, and Taylor's voice are all doused in heavy reverb, and for an instant, everything becomes disorienting and indistinct.

No other soul producer in that era would smother their vocalist in so many effects or arrange backing harmonies at such cross purposes to the main melody. So while Taylor voices heartbreak and anguish, Whisenhunt's idiosyncratic productions suggest something close to madness. But his choices—which no doubt made mainstream success impossible—are staggering 40 years on. On the haunting dirge of "Burning Eyes", Taylor's voice frays before our ears, shadowed by a muted trumpet and a horn section that seems to have lurched up from a graveyard. "World That's Not Real" is ominous yet ephemeral, buoyed by xylophone and Taylor's desolate voice. Almost a minute in, the piano hits a chord that Oliver Wang at Soul-Sides once deemed "Death's ringtone," yet at that, the song briefly brightens, only to sidle back into darkness, perching at the edge of the void.

Harrowing and feverish as these sides are, the most uncanny song remains the seven-minute version of "Love Is a Hurtin' Thing", a befuddling megamix comprised of the original version of the track as well as chunks of previous singles "How Can You Say It" and "Music", all cobbled together in the studio by Whisenhunt. To the mix he adds more stinging wah-wah guitar, silken orchestration, and a re-recorded drum track not quite in sync with the original that trainwrecks the whole thing (no doubt an attempt to cash in on disco fever). With funds low, it had a minuscule press run and was soon forgotten. Yet somehow, it all works. It's glorious and bewildering, magnificent and forlorn, defiant and defeated, an emotional speedball. Heard in 2015, the music is as indelible and inscrutable as ever. Or, as Taylor once sang about love: "It's a mystery no one can explain."

Diggs Duke: Civil Circus

Across several albums and EPs, the singer and composer Diggs Duke has channeled the greats of '90s hip-hop and soul, with a multifaceted sound touching lightly on D’Angelo and A Tribe Called Quest. In 2012, he caught the attention of British DJ and tastemaker Gilles Peterson, who included the musician’s "Nine Winning Wives" on Brownswood Bubblers Nine and signed Duke to his Brownswood imprint in 2013. Duke released long player Offering for Anxious on the label that year, and made what I thought was a nice splash on 2014’s The Upper Hand & Other Grand Illusions, a quick EP that dissected the power struggles in romantic relationships. 

On Civil Circus, Duke reverts to the soulful sound he employed on Anxious, yet the vibe here is firmly rooted in jazz. Album opener "Busker", with its mix of saxophones and live drums, works well in intimate spaces and carries a strong hip-hop knock. While some of the tracks are traditional in scope, others have an alternative slant that fit alongside artists like Thundercat and Flying Lotus, both of whom put esoteric spins on funk, EDM, and rap.

Civil Circus is full of shape-shifting compositions that make the album feel longer than its 26-minute runtime in a good way. The music feels remarkably spacious, and Duke’s songwriting is equally abstract and observational: Civil Circus conveys Duke’s innermost thoughts, no matter how vast or disconnected they might be. There’s a voyeuristic aspect to the album, and Civil Circus feels like a deep chat with a close friend. It’s almost gospel-like, and "Compensation"—a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar—hits the theme head-on: "God, in his great compassion/ Gave me the gift of song." "Stoplight Lessons" speaks to the newness of life and uncertainty of growing older. "Old enough to crawl," Duke hums atop an acoustic guitar, "but speech evades your grasp."

The album's structure gives way to a loose instrumental procession toward the end: "Street Preacher" and "Bumper to Bumper" stamp the LP’s panoramic view; "Damn Near Home", with its light horns and scenic moans, sets the scene for album closer "We Don’t Need Love", which chides superficiality. It’s a fitting end for the album and the impressive career Diggs has built so far. Civil Circus is about being honest and vulnerable. It's about looking up to observe the small things that make life so fruitful, and taking the time to appreciate what's normally taken for granted.

Magic Circle: Journey Blind

There's little better than the mixture of punk speed and metal riffs. Punk tempo supplies the adrenaline injection that metal's compositional superiority clearly needs. Massachusetts' Magic Circle are a variation on this principle: its members come from a variety of hardcore and punk bands, such as Mind Eraser, the Rival Mob, Innumerable Forms, and Doomriders, and they make traditional metal with a deceptively youthful spunk. Even as its most of its members were known figures in their home state, Magic Circle's debut still came out of nowhere in a sense: who knew they were capable of this? Their second record, Journey Blind, doesn't have the mystique of the first, but it makes up by being more assertive.

With its faster rhythms paying homage to that nook when NWOBHM was picking up but thrash hadn't quite emerged, the lead-off title track shows the influence of Stone Dagger, which features bassist Justin DeTore, vocalist Brendan Radigan, and guitarist Chris Corry, bleeding into Magic Circle. Don't get fooled by the Mellotron intro and think this will be a prog effort. Corry, along with Dan Ducas, turn every melody and lead into a hesher motivational speech. "The Damned Man" takes the majesty of the title track and gives it a more proto-thrash, biker-like thrust. Radigan is the ideal vocalist for this material, going in for maximum horn-raising wailing while maintaining a tough edge in most of the verses.

Another spirit that Magic Circle absorb, albeit not as obvious, is that of early Pentagram. Radigan's vocal range is greater than that of Bobby Liebling's, but he is able to convey darkness with a light of hope shining through, like Liebling before he descended into the path that's been covered to death elsewhere already. "Ghost of the Southern Front" is where the Pentagram influence really emerges, with Corry and Ducas adding a macabre boogie to their riffing. Their ending solos have that purgatorial feeling of Pentagram's "Death Row", perfect for looping. Closer "Antedivullan" begins with a softer passage not unlike Black Sabbath's "After Forever", and when they rage into their standard battle charge, the song's placements gives it a do-or-die urgency. Much like Metallica's "Damage Inc.", it's a choice anthem for going down swinging.

Magic Circle belong to a special group of new traditionalist bands alongside High Spirits, Crypt Sermon, Ranger, Iron Age, and (on the more progressive, much weirder end) VHÖL. All of these bands wear their influences on their battle jackets while bringing a real hunger to the table. Journey isn't just a great heavy metal record, it also dismantles the narrative that punk was put on earth to rid rock of its excesses. Hardcore kids can do something with more complicated structures too, and can draw the same sense of purpose that metal has been excellent in instilling for decades.

Babyface: Return of the Tender Lover

In the late 1980s and early '90s, Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, along with songwriting partners Daryl Simmons and L.A. Reid, developed a form of pop soul that's as geometrically precise as it is weightless. Songs like Toni Braxton’s "Breathe Again", Madonna’s "Take a Bow", and Boyz II Men’s "Water Runs Dry" occur in a seamless universe, all undisturbed surfaces that relentlessly shimmer. In 1995, "Water Runs Dry" itself seemed the most formally perfect incarnation of one of Babyface's primary pop expressions, the vaporous ballad; it’s gently animated by a brushed snare and an acoustic guitar, over which the members of Boyz II Men weave their voices together in fluid braids.

Babyface’s aesthetic is a distant refinement and elaboration of Prince and, beyond that, Curtis Mayfield, both of whom condensed pop and soul into irreducible collage. He’s capable of elastic funk and vast balladry but both are organized by an unusual pop sensitivity. Return of the Tender Lover, his first solo album of originals in 10 years, is part a period of renewed productivity for Babyface. Last year he released an album with Toni Braxton called Love, Marriage & Divorce, which described the length of a relationship through both gliding surfaces and reduced, raw circumstances; this year he contributed minimal blossoms of acoustic guitar to the Ty Dolla $ign single "Solid". But his new album is a kind of retreat—Babyface reduced to plush textures. Though Return of the Tender Lover deliberately references his sophomore album, 1989’s Tender Lover, nothing here is as dry and muscular as "It’s No Crime", or generously expansive as "Whip Appeal". In their place is buoyant, effortless pop soul.

It sometimes feels like a conscious inversion of Love, Marriage & Divorce; where that record was often capable of a fluorescent hostility, Return of the Tender Lover almost exclusively communicates security and support. "We've Got Love" and "Love and Devotion" convey an inflexible confidence, and the songs also seem supportive in their structure, as if engineered for maximum uplift. Babyface’s voice is as smooth as it's ever been, but it’s also always been somewhat granular in design; it sounds like a bloom of smoke.

El DeBarge appears on "Walking on Air", his first duet with Babyface since 1994’s "Where Is My Love"; like Babyface, DeBarge has been minimally present in the music industry over the past ten years, except for a solo album, Second Chance, in 2010, and in brief flourishes on DJ Quik records. His presence here is satisfying both texturally and textually, and "Walking on Air" is as rich and vivid as their previous collaborations. DeBarge’s voice is miraculously preserved, an incandescent peal capable of infinite ascent; in "Walking on Air", it seems to land somewhere in the troposphere. The only other collaboration on the record is with After 7, an R&B group from the '90s that contains two of Babyface’s brothers. On "I Want You", they supply harmonies, adding considerable weight to Babyface’s nimble vocal, and repeating the title until it melts into a kind of plural exhalation.

The collaborations on Return of the Tender Lover and the design of its production feel traditional, in the sense that they don't attempt to update Babyface's sound and instead lean comfortably on a long, established career. This dedication to tradition and honoring of his craft is less a throwback than a micro-adjustment of an enduring formula.

Pope Francis: Wake Up!

"Pope Francis releases prog-rock album" could only be a better punchline if the genre was swapped out with "chillwave," and nonetheless, here we are. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 78-year-old Argentine, is the 266th man to hold papal office; he is the first to directly condemn climate change and revive liberation theology and to have worked as a bouncer, and although past popes have released classical/liturgical compilations, Pope Francis is the first to go straight pop. 

Pope John Paul II, for context, released three albums during his papacy. They consisted of classical sacred music, and none inspired fond remembrances by the executives who released them (the Pope's records "shipped gold and returned platinum", one industry insider recently quipped to Billboard). Pope Francis might be different: He is our meme Pope, the Pope of Kim Kardashian tweets and re-Vines. Just this week, he found himself the subject of a #Popebars hashtag that imagined him spitting raps by Eminem and Drake.  The Holy See's populace is growing increasingly unruly, and it's a trip to hear this confusion worked out musically in the age of Spotify.

With collaborators that include a folk-swami, a theatrical lyricist, and a former member of Italian prog-rock band Le Orme, Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video. It’s like you drank a bunch of cough syrup and went to Live Aid: The Vatican. Every track features a Barnes & Noble-CD-section pop instrumental, sometimes with additional choral or solo vocals, building momentum that halts when Pope Francis starts speaking. The opening track is "Annuntio Vobis Gaudium Magnum!", the Latin for "we announce with great joy." Following that phrase is an assumed "habemus papem," or "we have a new pope," and the excerpted speech is Pope Francis’s first one after being appointed. It’s a powerful moment to commemorate, only slightly compromised by the fact that the instrumental sounds like a holiday-themed IMAX.

The song titles in Wake Up!, exclamation-point-loaded and decidedly outré, are in many ways better than the songs themselves. There’s a climate change track ("Cuidar El Planeta"); another track whose title translates to "The Church Cannot Be an NGO!", and one in Spanish that translates to "Faith is whole, does not liquefy!" There’s a track in Italian whose title translates to "Do not steal the hope!", and a closing track in Portuguese whose title translates to "Do what he tells you!" Only the title track (in full, "Wake Up! Go! Go! Forward!") bears a name in English.

On it, Pope Francis speaks to a crowd after wheeling streaks of electric guitar, a cinematic horn section, the track gridded loosely by a high-hat. "It is a duty to be vigilant," he intones, to a crowd in South Korea, as a light revue piano tinkles in the background. "To not allow the pressures, the temptations and the sins to dull our sensibility of the beauty of holiness." But, if this album is the indication, beauty isn't exactly holiness's sound.

But there is something beautiful about this album; it exists. Pope Francis, already a more human papal figure than any in recent history, is humanized even further by this album's total musical awkwardness, its bewildering genre, its pluralistic good heart. The album's producer Don Giulio Neroni—who produced Pope John Paul II's 1999 choral album; the Vatican is on a relaxed release schedule, but a release schedule all the same—told Rolling Stone that he "tried to be strongly faithful to the pastoral and personality of Pope Francis: the Pope of dialogue, open doors, hospitality." He succeeded. Chill Pope, the leader of 1.2 billion people, urges you to accept this weird-ass album as your spiritual Genesis, your graceless way of saying Yes.   

Sunn O))): Kannon

In 2008, Sunn O))) played a short series of duo concerts meant to acknowledge the band's modest, mimetic origins. Sunn O))) began as a tribute of sorts to Earth, the influential duo whose low, slow riffs and steadfast amplifier worship established the doom-metal mold that Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley were trying to fill anew. And for the first few years, that was the limit of the pair's output—lumbering riffs, played at a near-tectonic pace and deliriously high volumes.

During the next half-decade, however, Anderson and O'Malley evolved. They incorporated a constellation of metal, noise and experimental guests into a series of high-concept records—White1, White2, and Black One, each of which expanded the pair's personnel and possibilities.They staged high-profile, full-length collaborations with counterparts and heroes. They turned concerts in clubs and cathedrals alike into frame-shattering, wall-shaking temporary installations, where robes, fogs, and a shrine of their namesake amplifiers shaped a sort of heavy-metal happening. More than a 10-year anniversary, those 2008 shows represented chances to jettison the excess and prove that the anchoring idea—chords played so long and loud the listener heard every overtone and felt every subtle change—remained potent. The new art-metal masters wanted to show they could still get back to basics.

A year after those concerts, Sunn O))) issued Monoliths & Dimensions, an aptly named colossus that folded a horn section, a choir, a string section, a blown conch shell and black metal legend Attila Csihar speaking slowly into four pieces that were just ridiculous and divergent enough to work. In the years since, collaborations with Ulver and Scott Walker have also pushed Anderson and O’Malley farther beyond the early, atavistic comforts of Earth. Kannon is the first complete Sunn O))) since Monoliths & Dimensions, and it likewise documents a return to the elements for Anderson and O'Malley. Cut with a cast of familiar collaborators playing mere support roles to Anderson, O'Malley, and their amplifiers, Kannon reneges on that progression with a triptych of elegant yet underwhelming arcs and drones. It is typically loud. It is often pretty. It is, cumulatively, the first minor full-length studio album of Sunn O)))'s career.

There are, no doubt, many beautiful and bracing passages throughout Kannon. Few musicians can summon the same mix of patience, intensity, roar, and meticulousness as Anderson and O'Malley; it's wonderful to hear them interact in the pristine, refined acoustic setting offered by producer Randall Dunn. Near the midsection of "Kannon 1", the bass, guitar, Csihar's obscured voice, and a capillary of feedback lock into a perfect unison. Even delivered through headphones, the sound is somehow paralyzing and exhilarating, as though a team of masseurs has just found all the right pressure points. The playing is so careful and the recording so crisp that, during "Kannon 3", you can listen to chords and notes arrive one by one and track their slow disappearance into the din around them. It's like watching time-lapse footage of solitary raindrops forming a deep puddle.

But where Kannon exceeds as a collection of moments, it fails as both an album and an experience, especially given the general Sunn O))) scale. Brevity may be the only truly new idea the band incorporates here, as these three tracks just break the 33-minute mark. But Anderson and O'Malley don't seem to have squeezed the normal complications and layers into a tighter space so much as omitted them altogether. "Kannon 1" slowly gathers its riffs, pulling back the stage curtains for the subterranean rattle of an oddly subdued Csihar. "Kannon 2" begins with a wrestling match with a guitar that resolves in feedback and, again, introduces a familiar choir of incantatory voices, all surrounded by a wispy veil of electronic oscillations. The album's most unexpected instant actually comes at that song's end, when one massive, static bass note hangs still in the air. Percussion jostles beneath it, as though the enormous tone were rattling a household cupboard. Rather than explore the strange sound, Sunn O))) simply shut down the amps and discard it. And that's the problem, really: Kannon feels underdeveloped and rushed, like the start of a project that's been delivered prematurely. 

Since the release of Monoliths & Dimensions, Anderson and O'Malley have taken very separate paths. Anderson has re-launched the blues'n'doom outfit Goatsnake and retooled his label, Southern Lord, for old-school hardcore, crusty metal, and crossover fare. O'Malley, on the other hand, started an improvisational band with Keiji Haino and Oren Ambarchi, scored a film, composed for an orchestra, performed a new Alvin Lucier work, and launched a label devoted to such interests. That tension has long been an animating, thrilling force for Sunn O))). On Kannon, though, Anderson and O'Malley have opted to avoid rather than embrace it, to find a middle ground of compromise that steers safely away from the frisson of conflict. At least they sound good doing it.

Swans: White Light from the Mouth of Infinity / Love of Life

In the half-decade since Swans reformed, they have hammered away at a monolithic, all-consuming sound with unwavering focus. The three albums they've released since Michael Gira resurrected the project—2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, 2012's The Seer, and 2014's To Be Kind—taken together with contemporaneous tours and live albums, all feel like variations upon a single theme, expressions of an essential Swans-ness.

For a while, though, they were the most mutable of bands. In a half-decade span beginning in the mid '80s, they swiftly transformed from bone-crushing no wave brutalists to God-fearing gothic rockers, and then to featherweight neo-folkies. White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life, originally released in 1991 and 1992, respectively, marked the end of that metamorphosis, as the band settled into a sound at once songful and vast, luminous as a glass menagerie and forceful as a falling anvil.

The two albums have long been treated as minor works in Swans' discography: out of print for years, they were cherry-picked (alongside selections from 1989's major-label fiasco The Burning World and the Gira/Jarboe side project the World of Skin) for 1999's inauspiciously titled Various Failures 1988-1992. "I'm ambivalent about much of it, but then what do I know????" Gira has written of the music on that anthology. "Some of it is genuinely good I think. Anyway, I was learning (how to write a song) as I went."

It's true that the period marked a shift from pummeling mantras to something more "musical," with singing instead of shouting and cascading chords instead of just drop-tuned gut-punches. That said, even here, Gira's concept of "songwriting" remains idiosyncratic: there's little in the way of verse/chorus structures, mainly just mantra-like incantations and chords wreathed around gleaming pedal tones surrounded by wide-open expanse. Drummers Anton Fier (White Light) and Vincent Signorelli and Ted Parson (Love of Life) lay into their snares with military gusto, driving the music forward in surging tattoos, and their nonstop rattle contributes to a sensation of overwhelming excess. Close your eyes, and you can practically see the sounds exploding like fireworks against the darkness of your lids.

The textures and tone colors are well suited to Gira's favorite themes, like love, death, and the sublime. Where early Swans lyrics were notable largely for their grueling power dynamics and limitless abjection—see "Raping a Slave", "Filth", "Cop", etc.—here Gira explores a more nuanced perspective. It's hardly all kittens and rainbows; both albums are littered with ugliness, from the dirge-like "Better Than You" ("So glad I'm better than you," he sings, in the world's most dead-eyed Dear John letter) to the claustrophobic "Amnesia", where he tells us "sex is a void filled with plastic" and "everything human's necessarily wrong." Gira has rarely wallowed as beautifully as he does on "Failure", one of the great nadirs—in the best way possible—of the band's catalog. Over bluesy acoustic guitar and frigid digital synthesizers, his preacher's drawl drips like blood from a stone; it would be hard to imagine a voice with more gravitas. 

But Gira has never met a dichotomy he could resist—he eats love and hate, sprinkled with a bit of good and evil, for breakfast—and here we can see the pendulum beginning to tip from darkness back to daylight. "Her" wraps clanging, Children of God-style thunderbolts around one of the tenderest love songs Gira has ever written, and "Song for the Sun", "Love of Life", and "The Sound of Freedom" all stretch their arms wide to embrace the limitless possibility of the universe, anticipating the way that love and spiritual ecstasy will return to the fore in the group's post-reunion work, particularly on 2014's To Be Kind.

A bonus disc accompanying the reissues is mostly anticlimax. It features a handful of alternate takes and mixes from both albums, along with a Burning World-era B-side, selections from the World of Skin's Ten Songs for Another World, and a few live songs from Omniscience and Anonymous Bodies in an Empty Room, plus another live cut, "The Unknown", that doesn't seem to have been released before but probably could have stayed that way. There's a fair amount of overlap with Various Failures, and the sequencing is haphazard, zigzagging from release to release without much rhyme or reason.

But it's never a bad thing to be reacquainted with Jarboe's harrowing rendition of Nick Drake's "Black Eyed Dog", and her a cappella rendering of "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes", a centuries-old popular English song, is a welcome addition. (Both are from the World of Skin's 1990 album Ten Songs for Another World.) That the bonus disc leaves off "God Damn the Sun", The Burning World's heartbroken highlight, seems like a missed opportunity. In fact, at this point, a full Burning World reissue (along, perhaps, with both the band's 1988 "Love Will Tear Us Apart" covers) is long overdue, no matter how much Gira professes to regret making that album. Who knows, maybe he'll eventually come around. But for now, for anyone who wants to understand Swans' path from atonal self-flagellators to beatific supplicants of the sublime, these two reissues light the way, blindingly.

Jlin: Free Fall EP

Jlin's debut album Dark Energy felt like a keyhole peek into a bedroom producer's mind. In the broad array of vocal and synth samples, off-beat time signatures that varied from song to song, and even within the song itself, the conjunction of tens of ideas competing for dominance, you could hear a singular aesthetic being forged. One can imagine Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) spent hours crafting the music in a way that spoke to her.

On her new EP, Free Fall, this same excitement is still at work, though not in a manner as excitingly weird as Dark Energy. Dark Energy was a record for the individual, feeling more at home for solo listening than in a club setting. Free Fall feels like a tribute to the sounds that brought her to where she is. It is critical that these tracks are gathered on a single EP; it's not that they don't have a place in her larger oeuvre, but they also feel distinctly familiar in a way that Dark Energy did not. But because Patton is still smarter than almost any of her peers, it means that Free Fall creates the kind of thrills that only she can provide. The EP builds to peaks that grip the heart in a joyful vice; the listener will feel both excited and overwhelmed and unsure which emotion to embrace over the other.

Certain songs elicit this feeling more than others. "Eu4ria", like the aptly named "Guantanamo" from her debut, layers piercing screams and yells to create a horror-laden universe in three minutes. The track also sounds connected to Dark Energy closer "Abnormal Restriction", as definitive a statement about Patton's musical identity as you'll get. Populated with samples of Faye Dunaway's turn as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, "Abnormal Restriction" added a blood-freezing exclamation point to the end of the album. "Eu4ria" is lighter; Patton sampled an iconic phrase from the original film version of Stephen King's Carrie. "They're all gonna laugh at you," Carrie's mother yelled to her daughter in the film. Here, the phrase is interspersed in a frenetic beat that transforms it from a cry of anger and desperation to one of defiance.

"I Am the Queen" and "BuZilla" are two biting pieces of footwork that don't let up and shouldn't. It's not the sometimes lovely structural sonics of classic Chicago South Side footwork. Instead, like the EP itself, the tracks push things into weirder realms of aural storytelling in a matter of minutes. "BuZilla" reuses the phrase "live and let die." The longer one listens to the track, the more it feels like a call that refuses to wait for a response. Whatever happens will happen. Patton will continue to create regardless. It's an aggressive and focused answer to her "genre." Whereas Dark Energy was fueled by a personal, cinematic vision of doom, Free Fall is an invigorating wash of sounds, a collection of ideas that meld together the past with Patton's present to form another hard-won and potent artistic statement.  

Junglepussy: Pregnant With Success

Junglepussy is working within a lineage of comedic rappers, from Biz Markie to Ghostface Killah to Cam'ron and Action Bronson, rappers who elevate the muck and mundanity of life with zany non-sequiturs, adlibs and references. In terms of  sharp-witted artists who led to the increasingly rare seismic belly laughs on the subway this year, she's up there with novelist Paul Beatty, whose 2015 book The Sellout sent up American politics and culture in a way that proves good satire can change your truth. Junglepussy's Pregnant With Success is another reminder of how humor can bring the audience closer and form an emotional connection.  It's as bright as Beatty's novel is dark, but they're both charmingly demented, sharp-witted and necessary social critiques. They remind me how humor can transform literature and music, forms that often aren't as empirically funny as film and television, bringing the audience closer and forming an emotional connection.

She has a rare confidence that's rooted in playfulness: "This pussy don't pop for you," she gloats on "Pop For You", a song with watery snares and a glitchy melody. The hook feels like she's playing a character, a parody of contemporary male rappers, but it's more of a roast that has its roots on the surreal experience of being a woman in 2015. It also riffs on the language of the oppressor, so to speak. Junglepussy spits: "You look up to these dudes to tell you who to screw/What she'll look like if she your type/compliment her if she's light/if she's black don't get her hype." The joke comes at the end, when she compares a guy who takes her to the zoo versus one who buys her leopard print lingerie: "I got niggas taking me to see live animals and you're pulling up with animal prints?"

It's her perspective as a black woman, a regular woman, from New York City that makes this album transgressive. She raps as much about her voracious appetite as she does about fashion and sex. She references Money and Violence and haute Japanese eatery Nobu over a series of glossy melodies and booming bass courtesy of producer Shy Guy. She swiftly cycles through cadences that approximate the balloon-lunged bellowing of Ludacris and a spiky Da Brat flow. On "Country Boy", a song that feels like a nod to her Trinidadian and Jamaican roots, she channels Lady Saw's squawk and the grim commands of Buju Banton before issuing a whimsical sign-off: "I be dutty winin' down the Yellow Brick Road!" The beat on "Get To Steppin'" is the album's most aggressive: a synthetic Orientalist synth loop fights with battering bass and Junglepussy is in your face, exhorting you to step off whilst bigging herself up ("I was fuckin' with me when you wasn't"). It ends with a hilarious outro, a dorky jingle about online shopping and a rush of true swagger: "When your Fendi boots come in the mail, time to front on everyone in here."

But mostly Junglepussy is pure idiosyncratic id; she is unapologetically crass ("If your face ain't a sitting place, fuck up out my face") and freewheeling. Pregnant With Success' appeal lies largely in hearing Junglepussy talk shit like one of the girls, with the aim of pulling apart the patriarchy as she experiences it. She uses humor, the voice curling with every joke, to replicate the situations and street corners of her own life. And when you're listening and laughing out loud on the subway, that's Junglepussy's smart truth-telling finding its way into yours.

Jadakiss: Top 5 Dead or Alive

Jadakiss' first LP in over six years had its title as far back as 2010, when "Top 5 Dead or Alive" appeared on The Champ is Here 3 as a teaser for a record due later that year (and then in 2012). Like the original Champ is Here mixtape, 3 proved far superior to Kiss tha Game Goodbye and Kiss of Death, but it was bittersweet all the same for highlighting Jadakiss' strengths (spitting raspy punchline bars over someone else's beats) and admitting to his weaknesses by omission (putting actual songs together, getting those beats for himself). Impressive first-week sales notwithstanding, no one expects Jadakiss to be a commercial force anymore, which would presumably work to his advantage. Without the temptation to cater to a non-existent audience clamoring for him to make pop songs, you'd figure the boundaries between "album" and "mixtape" would no longer exist. This is kinda true of Top 5 Dead or Alive; the problem is that one of the world's best and most frustratingly aimless rappers ends up in the same no-man's land he always does.

The good news is that Jadakiss' typical means of scoring a chart hit is completely outmoded in 2015, so there aren't any chintzy Neptunes beats, unctuous R&B hooks or blatant attempts to recreate "Why" in its entirety. Yeah, Future shows up on the "street single", but he did the same favor for Uncle Murda this year—don't confuse his appearance for a guarantee of any kind of chart success. While Jadakiss can wild out on his own terms, the gothic turn-up of "You Can See Me" is a long way from the Tunnel; for not a single second are we led to believe that We the Best producer Lee on the Beats, Future and Jadakiss were ever in the same room, let alone the same frame of mind here.

Otherwise, Jadakiss continues to show why he was a perfect fit to do player introductions for the Brooklyn Nets back in October—Top 5 Dead or Alive is likewise an intermittently entertaining, but dead-end collective of big-money heavyweights long past their prime. Puff Daddy's yelling spree on "You Don't Eat" might as well have been sourced from a Bad Boy conference call in 1996. On "Kill," Lil Wayne continues his path towards tragicomic, Neil Hamburger-esque performance art: "She a Cancer, I hit her with that chemo dick" would be a prime candidate for Weezy's preeminent sad trombone line of 2015 if he didn't just quote Smash Mouth on No Ceilings 2. While Jeezy occupies a similar "veteran hardhead" ground as Jadakiss at this point, "Critical" doesn't try to find common ground; instead, it's the kind of hyperactive hi-hat beat that predates Thug Motivation 101 with Jada on a double-time Dirty South flow that interrupted "who's the best MC?" discussions during the late 90s in New York.

Despite its street-level money, power and respect rhymes, almost all of it feels divorced from reality, free of any kind of narrative grounding or personal disclosure: "you can call me Paul/ long as Peter pay," "If you ain't in the circle, for a square I'll get you lined" are typical punchlines that generate a smirk and disappear completely, mildly impressive feats of wordplay that only have meaning within the format's strictures. You might as well be watching Jadakiss solve crossword puzzles. 

There are brief indications that Top 5 Dead or Alive was workshopped within the past three years. There's a track about smoking weed and, wouldn't you know, Wiz Khalifa is on it instead of Redman. The chorus of "Jason" gives brief mentions to Eric Garner and Ferguson. Otherwise, Jadakiss has to remind you of a time when "top 5 dead or alive" was something fans of mainstream rap actually discussed: "Synergy" is the requisite give-n-go tandem rap with Styles P and it's flagrantly modeled after "We Gonna Make It", right down to the cadence of the hook. Even if there isn't the requisite track here in the style of "Why," Jada can't help but invoke its most infamous line (the one about Bush knocking down the towers). In the most desperate recall of his glory days, Jadakiss spits, "you heard my name on the last verse of 'Ether,'" which is technically true but feels like the equivalent of a boxing judge taking credit for Ali/Frazier.

Beyond muddled aims, extremely confusing and tone-deaf skits also seem to be a constant on Jadakiss projects. "Ahaa Interview" is a Madd Rapper-style Q&A where a salty veteran claims he's going solo over his resentments towards Jadakiss. You'd swear this was a scorched-earth attack on Sheek Louch, except the guy shows up two tracks later. I mean, Puff Daddy is here too, so I guess he didn't take "Rape'n U Records" skit to heart either. More importantly, a patron who sure sounds a lot like Busta Rhymes starts complaining about how heads don't check for "bars" anymore and now it's all about dancing and wearing blouses. You'd swear this was a diss against Young Thug, who's frankly been packing more inventive wordplay into a single verse these days than Jada does on the entirety of this "rapper's rapper" album. 

Swans: White Light from the Mouth of Infinity/Love of Life

In the half-decade since Swans reformed, they have hammered away at a monolithic, all-consuming sound with unwavering focus. The three albums they've released since Michael Gira resurrected the project—2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope To the Sky, 2012's The Seer, and 2014's To Be Kind—taken together with contemporaneous tours and live albums, all feel like variations upon a single theme, expressions of an essential Swans-ness.

For a while, though, they were the most mutable of bands. In a half-decade span beginning in the mid '80s, they swiftly transformed from bone-crushing no wave brutalists to God-fearing gothic rockers, and then to featherweight neo-folkies. White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life, originally released in 1991 and 1992, respectively, marked the end of that metamorphosis, as the band settled into a sound at once songful and vast, luminous as a glass menagerie and forceful as a falling anvil.

The two albums have long been treated as minor works in Swans' discography: out of print for years, they were cherry-picked (alongside selections from 1989's major-label fiasco The Burning World and the Gira/Jarboe side project the World of Skin) for 1999's inauspiciously titled Various Failures 1988-1992. "I'm ambivalent about much of it, but then what do I know????" Gira has written of the music on that anthology. "Some of it is genuinely good I think. Anyway, I was learning (how to write a song) as I went."

It's true that the period marked a shift from pummeling mantras to something more "musical," with singing instead of shouting and cascading chords instead of just drop-tuned gut-punches. That said, even here, Gira's concept of "songwriting" remains idiosyncratic: there's little in the way of verse/chorus structures, mainly just mantra-like incantations and chords wreathed around gleaming pedal tones surrounded by wide-open expanse. Drummers Anton Fier (White Light) and Vincent Signorelli and Ted Parson (Love of Life) lay into their snares with military gusto, driving the music forward in surging tattoos, and their nonstop rattle contributes to a sensation of overwhelming excess. Close your eyes, and you can practically see the sounds exploding like fireworks against the darkness of your lids.

The textures and tone colors are well suited to Gira's favorite themes, like love, death, and the sublime. Where early Swans lyrics were notable largely for their grueling power dynamics and limitless abjection—see "Raping a Slave", "Filth", "Cop", etc.—here Gira explores a more nuanced perspective. It's hardly all kittens and rainbows; both albums are littered with ugliness, from the dirge-like "Better Than You" ("So glad I'm better than you," he sings, in the world's most dead-eyed Dear John letter) to the claustrophobic "Amnesia", where he tells us "sex is a void filled with plastic" and "everything human's necessarily wrong." Gira has rarely wallowed as beautifully as he does on "Failure", one of the great nadirs—in the best way possible—of the band's catalog. Over bluesy acoustic guitar and frigid digital synthesizers, his preacher's drawl drips like blood from a stone; it would be hard to imagine a voice with more gravitas. 

But Gira has never met a dichotomy he could resist—he eats love and hate, sprinkled with a bit of good and evil, for breakfast—and here we can see the pendulum beginning to tip from darkness back to daylight. "Her" wraps clanging, Children of God-style thunderbolts around one of the tenderest love songs Gira has ever written, and "Song for the Sun", "Love of Life", and "The Sound of Freedom" all stretch their arms wide to embrace the limitless possibility of the universe, anticipating the way that love and spiritual ecstasy will return to the fore in the group's post-reunion work, particularly on 2014's To Be Kind.

A bonus disc accompanying the reissues is mostly anticlimax. It features a handful of alternate takes and mixes from both albums, along with a Burning World-era B-side, selections from the World of Skin's Ten Songs for Another World, and a few live songs from Omniscience and Anonymous Bodies in an Empty Room, plus another live cut, "The Unknown", that doesn't seem to have been released before but probably could have stayed that way. There's a fair amount of overlap with Various Failures, and the sequencing is haphazard, zigzagging from release to release without much rhyme or reason.

But it's never a bad thing to be reacquainted with Jarboe's harrowing rendition of Nick Drake's "Black Eyed Dog", and her a cappella rendering of "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes", a centuries-old popular English song, is a welcome addition. (Both are from the World of Skin's 1990 album Ten Songs for Another World.) That the bonus disc leaves off "God Damn the Sun", The Burning World's heartbroken highlight, seems like a missed opportunity.In fact, at this point, a full Burning World reissue (along, perhaps, with both the band's 1988 "Love Will Tear Us Apart" covers) is long overdue, no matter how much Gira professes to regret making that album. Who knows, maybe he'll eventually come around. But for now, for anyone who wants to understand Swans' path from atonal self-flagellators to beatific supplicants of the sublime, these two reissues light the way, blindingly.

Jlin: Free Fall

Jlin's debut album Dark Energy felt like a keyhole peek into a bedroom producer's mind. In the broad array of vocal and synth samples, off-beat time signatures that varied from song to song, and even within the song itself, the conjunction of tens of ideas competing for dominance, you could hear a singular aesthetic being forged. One can imagine Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton) spent hours crafting the music in a way that spoke to her. 

On her new EP, Free Fall, this same excitement is still at work, though not in a manner as excitingly weird as Dark Energy. Dark Energy was a record for the individual, feeling more at home for solo listening than in a club setting. Free Fall feels like a tribute to the sounds that brought her to where she is. It is critical that these tracks are gathered on a single EP; it's not that they don't have a place in her larger oeuvre, but they also feel distinctly familiar in a way that Dark Energy did not. But because Patton is still smarter than almost any of her peers, it means that Free Fall creates the kind of thrills that only she can provide. The EP builds to peaks that grip the heart in a joyful vice; the listener will feel both excited and overwhelmed and unsure which emotion to embrace over the other.

Certain songs elicit this feeling more than others. "Eu4ria", like the aptly named "Guantanamo" from her debut, layers piercing screams and yells to create a horror-laden universe in three minutes. The track also sounds connected to Dark Energy closer "Abnormal Restriction," as definitive a statement about Patton's musical identity as you'll get. Populated with samples of Faye Dunaway's turn as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest, "Abnormal Restriction" added a blood-freezing exclamation point to the end of the album. "Eu4ria" is lighter, Patton sampled an iconic phrase from the original film version of Stephen King's Carrie. "They're all gonna laugh at you," Carrie's mother yelled to her daughter in the film. Here,the phrase is interspersed in a frenetic beat that transforms it from a cry of anger and desperation to one of defiance.

"I Am The Queen" and "BuZilla" are two biting pieces of footwork that don't let up and shouldn't. It's not the sometimes lovely structural sonics of classic Chicago South Side footwork. Instead, like the EP itself, the tracks push things into weirder realms of aural storytelling in a matter of minutes. "BuZilla" reuses the phrase "live and let die." The longer one listens to the track, the more it feels like a call that refuses to wait for a response. Whatever happens will happen. Patton will continue to create regardless. It's an aggressive and focused answer to her "genre." Whereas Dark Energy was fueled by a personal, cinematic vision of doom, Free Fall is an invigorating wash of sounds, a collection of ideas that meld together the past with Patton's present to form another hard-won and potent artistic statement.  

SOPHIE: PRODUCT

When music from the project SOPHIE first emerged in 2013, it sounded state-of-the-art. It was the work of a producer who had rarely been photographed and who never gave interviews, which  seemed appropriate if also tiresome. Such mystery had long become a cliché by this point, but uncertain authorship suited these bulbous, sparkly audio objects, which seemed to float down out of the sky like a cluster of neon-colored balloons ready to pop. “Bipp” and “Elle”—the former impossibly buoyant with an earworm vocal line, the latter featuring deep bass and chasms of space, a bright and twinkly counterpoint to the grim tone common to dubstep— promised that future music was going to be weirder and more disorienting than we imagined but that it would also function as a bent version of popular song.

Two years and several singles later, SOPHIE—long known to be the work of London-based producer Samuel Long—is now understood mostly in the context of P.C. Music, a loose UK collective centered on producer A.G. Cook that recasts brazen commercialism as a kind of winking postmodern art project. PRODUCT, which collects the SOPHIE singles to date and adds some new songs, was released in limited-edition versions that packaged it with a jacket, sunglasses, and platform shoes, as well as a version sold with an object that looked like a sex toy. When you take into account that bounty of merch, and add the fact that SOPHIE’s “Lemonade” has in the last year been used to soundtrack a McDonald’s commercial, of all things, it’s clear that the act of buying and selling is deeply embedded within this project.

You might look at all this as a Warholian transformation of commerce into art or you might just see a run-of-the-mill cash-in, but neither of these perspectives adds much to the enduring brilliance of SOPHIE’s first pair of singles. Following on “Bipp” and “Elle”, “Lemonade” intensifies the sound, like switching from a freshly squeezed glass of the titular drink to drinking Minute Maid concentrate right out of the cardboard can. Befitting music constructed at least in part as a critique of consumerism, SOPHIE’s tracks are gleaming and immaculate on the surface and hollow to the core beneath it. “Hard”’s chiming synths and rippling bass are again set against wide spaces of unnerving silence, a void where a deeper sense of meaning might be.

These tracks argue, often convincingly, that the surface is everything. It’s Turing Test pop: if its exterior catches your ear and makes you feel things, that communication is proof enough that some kind of soul resides inside the machine. The closing track here, “Just Like We Never Said Goodbye”, shows this contrast in widescreen. It’s a melodic construction worthy of Max Martin, but the pitched-up voice, drum-free production, and generally half-finished feel highlight all the immediate pleasures of pop music while completely erasing the idea of a point of view. It’s so “almost there” you can’t help but play it over and over.

But SOPHIE is not, alas, an album-length proposition. Even at 26 minutes, the record drags, and the three song stretch of “MSMSMSM”, “VYZEE”, and “L.O.V.E.”—that’s 38 cents of your album dollar—is depressingly skippable. These tracks either recycle bits from the earlier singles (chirpy vocals, squeaky percussion) or fold in new elements that sound mundane (trap percussion, doomy synths), leading to tracks that sound like they could have come from anybody. That these are the newer songs doesn’t help matters or bode particularly well for what might come next. And then there’s the fact that music this compressed and this syrupy is best heard in small doses, before your ear gets tired listening to it.

So the main problem with PRODUCT, ironically enough, is one of format. Every industrialist wanting to get his or her goods to the world knows that you have to package them properly. Heard as individually and spaced many months apart, the best tracks here were diamond-hard realizations of very specific sonic ideas; placed on an album alongside songs that use similar ingredients but are markedly inferior, they rattle around in the can, perfect objects in search of the right container.

Blue Jean Committee: Catalina Breeze

 This summer, Jenny Hval sang of "soft dick rock" on her incredible and unsettling Apocalypse, girl. She explained to Pitchfork that part of this idea—an inverse of hyper-masculine cock rock—stemmed from her watching the two-part, three-hour History of the Eagles documentary.

Like Hval, Saturday Night Live alumni Bill Hader and Fred Armisen found something to ponder with History of the Eagles. On a two-episode chunk of their new parody series Documentary Now!, they paid tribute to the same expansive documentary that inspired Hval. But instead of The Eagles, Armisen and Hader focused on the fictitious Blue Jean Committee. What started out as fake has become fact with The Blue Jean Committee’s new EP, Catalina Breeze.The duo don't just lend their faces to the band: they wrote and recorded all these songs themselves, too—Armisen has a long history as a drummer, and is currently the bandleader onThe Late Show with Seth Myers, his Documentary Now! co-creator and SNL cohort.

Catalina Breeze barely passes the ten-minute mark through seven songs, but even in its brevity, Hader and Armisen manage to hit every hallmark of the California band they sought to be in Documentary Now!. The opening title track offers the most complete portrait of The Blue Jean Committee: keys mix with bongos and a swishy percussion section, while the repeating chorus of “Catalina breeze, Catalina” is just as breezy as you’d hope. It feels so comfortable and familiar that, for a minute, it feels like it’s not just funny business after all. Later, “Gentle and Soft” arrives as a harmony-heavy acoustic ballad adorned with an occasional twinkling chime.

Elsewhere on Catalina Breeze, it feels like The Blue Jean Committee is trying to hit as many ’70s songwriting themes as they can in as little time as possible. “Going Out to Hollywood” follows the trope of a narrative of a small-town diner waitress who’s got bigger dreams than her home can accommodate, while “Mr. Fix It” directly recalls ELOs’ “Mr. Blue Sky” in its jumpy, earnest appeal to a powerful cosmic figure. The band throws the slightest bit of funk into the mix with “Mama You’re a Dancer,” and “Walking Shoes” mimics the not-so-Southern rock peddled by the likes of the Doobie Brothers with a banjo hiding under peppy guitar licks.

All of this is enjoyable for music nerds, who get to pick out the embedded inspirations and influences. But ultimately Catalina Breeze is an impressive, if perhaps not entirely necessary, follow-through on a joke. It wasn’t enough for these songs to exist on TV; they had to get cut to vinyl and put out through Drag City, as well.  Catalina Breeze makes for a fun exercise, but as a standalone release, it’s a little, well, soft. 

Gloria Ann Taylor: Love Is A Hurtin' Thing

A month before the release of their debut album on 4AD, U.S. Girls dropped the video for the Slim Twig-produced single "Window Shades". For most listeners, it was a song about the emotional breakthrough of a woman finally confronting her unfaithful partner. But its production, with looped strings, piano, and hand drum, was startling to deep soul fans. "Window Shades" incorporated a licensed sample of Gloria Ann Taylor's 1973 single, "Love Is a Hurting Thing", a song found on a privately-pressed 12" called Deep Inside You featured one of the more anonymous spirograph sleeves from that era. Seen in the racks, the 12" might have looked like any number of local gospel or marching band albums from the mid-'70s, but this one came with a twist: a copy of the release, credited to Gloria Ann Taylor and Walt Whisenhunt's Orchestra, routinely tops four figures in online auctions, making it one of the most coveted soul/disco albums of its ilk. 

Deep Inside You is the centerpiece of Love Is a Hurtin' Thing, Ubiquity's long-gestating compilation of highlights from Gloria Taylor's brief career, gathering five singles recorded between 1971 and 1977. For those of more modest means who've relied on mp3s culled from long-deleted music blogs, Hurtin' Thing fills in her discography as well as her biography. The mystery inherent in her music has lead to some strange speculations online. Even her Discogs page puts her birthplace as Alabama, saying that she formed gospel group Sweet Honey in the Rock and passed away 10 years ago (no doubt conflating her with one Gloria Ann Taylor-James). As these liner notes clarify, though, Taylor was actually born in a coal-mining town in West Virginia and is still very much with us.

That Gloria Ann Taylor didn't become a household name isn't of much concern now. It's difficult to become a star, much easier to be star-crossed, to find your music lost to time. So the fact that she never made it is not cosmic injustice so much as the actual indifference of the universe. It was in fact at the start of Taylor's career as a soul singer based in Toledo that she had her best shot at stardom. Compared favorably to Aretha Franklin, she had a powerful, church-bred voice that caught the attention of one of James Brown's arrangers and associates, Walt Whisenhunt, fresh off of working on Doris Troy's "Just One Look". They became both musical partners and a couple.

The number of forgotten, obscure, or lost soul singers revived in the 21st century runs long and deep, the "personal sacrifice, failed relationships, and missed opportunity" that these notes describe are all attendant of this peculiar genre. But before allowing hard-knock biography to color the reception of Love Is a Hurtin' Thing, just listen to the opening seconds of the title track. A blistering psychedelic guitar solo, like something left off of Nuggets, flares across the opening 10 seconds, but 20 seconds in, we're awash in opulent strings, piano, and Taylor's voice, a powerful instrument that seem to be echoing from a subterranean tunnel.

As production choices for a potential hit single in the early 1970s go, it's baffling, one part psych-rock, one part Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra, all competing with the fresh wound of Taylor's voice. There's a raw pain and cavernous hurt in Taylor's every exhalation, the lyrics questioning how love could bring such joy and pain. And the music itself is bent on evoking all of the ecstasy and agony, the crazed jags of adoration and confusion that stems from a dysfunctional relationship.

"How Can You Say It" has Taylor talk about giving her lover her last dime, then finding tears on his pillow. That wrenching whiplash of emotions are scored by lush orchestration and percussion swaddled in so much echo so as to suggest the sound Lee Perry would get out of the Black Ark in a few years' time. Same goes for "Deep Inside of You", where the strings, vibraphone, and Taylor's voice are all doused in heavy reverb, and for an instant, everything becomes disorienting and indistinct.

No other soul producer in that era would smother their vocalist in so many effects or arrange backing harmonies at such cross purposes to the main melody. So while Taylor voices heartbreak and anguish, Whisenhunt's idiosyncratic productions suggest something close to madness. But his choices—which no doubt made mainstream success impossible—are staggering 40 years on. On the haunting dirge of "Burning Eyes", Taylor's voice frays before our ears, shadowed by a muted trumpet and a horn section that seems to have lurched up from a graveyard. "World That's Not Real" is ominous yet ephemeral, buoyed by xylophone and Taylor's desolate voice. Almost a minute in, the piano hits a chord that Oliver Wang at Soul-Sides once deemed "Death's ringtone," yet at that, the song briefly brightens, only to sidle back into darkness, perching at the edge of the void.

Harrowing and feverish as these sides are, the most uncanny song remains the seven-minute version of "Love Is a Hurtin' Thing", a befuddling megamix comprised of the original version of the track as well as chunks of previous singles "How Can You Say It" and "Music", all cobbled together in the studio by Whisenhunt. To the mix he adds more stinging wah-wah guitar, silken orchestration, and a re-recorded drum track not quite in sync with the original that trainwrecks the whole thing (no doubt an attempt to cash in on disco fever). With funds low, it had a minuscule press run and was soon forgotten. Yet somehow, it all works. It's glorious and bewildering, magnificent and forlorn, defiant and defeated, an emotional speedball. Heard in 2015, the music is as indelible and inscrutable as ever. Or, as Taylor once sang about love: "It's a mystery no one can explain".

Danny L Harle: Broken Flowers EP

"Broken Flowers" is often cited as the most fully-realized PC Music single, a polished gem of a track released on a famously ephemeral label. Its author, Danny L Harle, is a shadowy figure, even by PC Music standards. We do know that he's a childhood friend of label head A.G. Cook (with whom he performs in Dux Content), a classically trained composer and seems to have played a foundational role in defining the PC Music aesthetic. And yet, he's only released a few solo tracks since the label's emergence—he might be the least prolific Soundcloud phenom this side of Jai Paul. 

Anticipation for new music from Harle is understandably high, a fact that clearly hasn't been lost on PC Music. The Broken Flowers EP marks PC Music's inaugural joint release with Columbia Records, the first shot fired in what the label has described as, "[a] multi-tier attack exposing the radical DNA of chart music, and the heart and soul behind every lab creation." Clocking in at 4 songs and just under 15 minutes, the Broken Flowers EP is a focused, purposeful release, clearly meant to introduce the PC Music sound to new listeners and commercial heights.

The EP is bookended by the titular single—closing track "Awake For Hours" is really just a remix of "Broken Flowers" that speeds up the original to a breakneck pace. Luckily, "Broken Flowers" is still a thrilling listen two years on. This is the closest thing the label has to a deep-house cut, a song that would feel at home on almost any dancefloor despite its winkingly maudlin lyrics. The track builds with impressive precision, with sinuous arpeggios, marimba notes and reverberating vocal samples clicking into place atop a driving 4/4 beat. What's more, it sounds as if Harle has rebuilt the song from scratch for this release; where the original reveled in cliché house sounds, every element in this mix, including the vocals, feels cleaned up and refined.

The two new songs, "Forever" and "Without You", don't disappoint, even as they diverge from the template Harle sketched out on "Broken Flowers". Both tracks hew much closer to the PC Music playbook, with chirpy, pitched up vocals sitting atop glistening, Technicolor synths. "Without You" is a clear standout, surfacing the melancholic undercurrent that gave "Broken Flowers" its depth. Vocalist Emily Verlander pines for a lover over an airy track that heaves and sighs, exploring the tension between helium-inhaling vocals and confessional lyrics. The implication here is unclear--we're either being invited to dismiss the heartbroken pop song as naive or confront the infantilization of female narrators in pop. Harle's role as the male auteur behind the curtain further complicates our understanding, lending the song the sort of discomfiting air that's become a PC Music trademark.

As compelling as the music on the Broken Flowers EP is, calling it an EP feels like a bit of stretch—it's really just a single, one that's anchored by a remake of a track that's been out for two years. Then again, it's hard to blame Harle and PC Music for playing it safe given the stakes here. At the core of PC Music's agenda lies a desire to simultaneously critique and embrace chart pop by mimicking its form; what better way to signal the fulfillment of the label's ambitions than with an actual charting pop single? "Sometimes I feel, maybe/This could be real," Verlander admits on "Without You". She adds, ironically, "Trust me."