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.