Shake Appeal is a column that highlights new garage and garage-adjacent releases. This time, Evan Minsker gets into new releases from Memphis' Cretin Stompers, Philadelphia's Watery Love, Chapel Hill's Flesh Wounds, Melbourne's Eastlink, and Baltimore's Advlts.

Cretin Stompers: Looking Forward to Being Attacked [HoZac]

Billy Hayes and Alex Gates used to be in a band called the Barbaras, who were one of Memphis' great underrated garage-pop outfits (whose sole LP finally got released a couple years back). Gates went off with Magic Kids, Hayes found himself playing in Jay Reatard's band and, subsequently, Wavves. Now, alongside someone called Big Muff Radio, they're in Cretin Stompers, and their debut LP on HoZac is a total treat. It's erratic, what with its washy alien noise and incomprehensible high-pitched vocals. But beneath the oddball sonics are legitimately catchy songs that are worth diving into—"Randy Kraft", for example, is infectious as all get out. Oh, and Memphis art legend William Eggleston did the album art for this, which is insane.

Watery Love: Decorative Feeding [In the Red]

After a five-year trickle of 7"s (including a side that comes packed with the new issue of The Pitchfork Review), Philadelphia's Watery Love finally have a (very good) full-length out. With heavy guitar waves and crashing drums, it's an LP with that pairs power with an intriguing sense of narrative. Some of its best moments are the quietest ones, like the cool down on "Piece of Piss", with these ringing working-man guitar solos (like you'd hear in a Petty track or something) that come in before frontman Richie Charles sullenly slurs, "Why don't you just get out of my life?/ Why don't everybody leave me alone?" I could go piece by piece with this album and pick out highlights, but I won't bore you, because there are a lot of those. Listen to this album.

Flesh Wounds: "Bitter Boy" 7" [Merge]

Flesh Wounds are Montgomery Morris, Dan Kinney, and Laura King—a garage punk trio from Chapel Hill whose new 7" is a brazen ripper and an essential slab of wax. The solo on "Kennel Cough" emerges with the sort of roar that would've sounded appropriate on Tres Hombres. There's the cutthroat attack of "Let Me Be Clear", which roars past in under two minutes of incredible fury. The cover art is bleeding. Incredibly, this 7" is brought to you by Merge Records, who should probably make it more of a regular practice to scoop up incredible punk tracks from local bands and put them out, because this thing rules.

Eastlink: Eastlink [In the Red]

Out of the ridiculously prolific town of Melbourne, Australia, comes Eastlink, a band with four guitarists. It's worth mentioning that while "band with four guitarists" implies a non-stop shredfest, that isn't what Eastlink is, exactly. It's an album that isn't afraid to pull back for longer, droning stretches, like with the calm raga of "Dinnerchat". Their new LP has an impressive sprawl to it, where it's not afraid to ride out one mode for a while, supplementing a repetitive riff with various guitar textures. And when they want to turn up the power a bit, as they do on the awesomely abrasive track "Overtime", they completely succeed. PSA: Eastlink's members include dudes from Total Control, UV Race, Repairs, Lakes, and Straightjacket Nation.

Advlts: 7" [Southpaw]

Who are "Advlts, of Baltimore"? If their new 7" on Southpaw is any sign, they're more than your run-of-the-mill "we replaced a 'u' with a 'v' because it looks cool" fare. In 60 seconds, they establish a tone that's powerful in its elegant simplicity with "Raw Nerves". There are handclaps, a three-chord chug, and a guitar line that adds density without attempting to show off. On one hand, it all goes away too quickly when the minute's up. On the other, this sort of thing could easily wear out its welcome after three minutes. Good on 'em for keeping it brief; it's their vinyl debut, and a fine debut it is.

Also Worth Hearing: An LP from Sick Hyenas (via Dumpster Tapes); the new album from Chicago's Nones (via HoZac)

The duet version of “Love Never Felt So Good,” which brings the King of Pop and JT together in a way that only happened once while Jackson was still alive, is the album’s foremost bid for chart success; it landed on the Hot 100 at #20 after only three full days’ worth of tracking, thanks to strong sales and heavy radio play. Timbaland and J-Roc crib percussive elements from “Workin’ Day and Night", an Off the Wall highlight from 1979, and the song is kept brisk by those clicking beats and Jackson’s signature gasping, stuttering, and pseudo-beatboxing—give your monitor a grunt and a SHAMONE, just for kicks. This is the most modern version of “Love Never Felt So Good", but it suffers from Timberlake’s presence; though he gives it his best effort, he’s out of his league here. There is a grace and ease to Jackson’s vocal that Timberlake can’t match. Hearing him alongside Jackson is like watching a cross-country runner try to keep up with a bird. 

Normally my iPhone ringer is set firmly to "off," but I recently changed it to a new piece by the esteemed composer and one-time Pulitzer finalist Augusta Read Thomas. It's a 35-second, anxious tangle of pizzicato and odd-angled violin and cello lines called "You're Just About to Miss Your Call!" It really captures the existential panic that its title describes.

Thomas's piece was commissioned by the Spektral Quartet, an enterprising Chicago-based string ensemble that recently decided it wanted to populate the world's iPhones with contemporary classical music. For what they're calling the Mobile Miniatures project ("Your mobile phone is our newest concert venue"), they contacted 46 composers. For anyone who follows the world of contemporary classical, it's an embarrassment of riches: everyone from Bang On A Can co-founder David Lang to Nico Muhly to indie figures like Deerhoof's Greg Saunier and Julia Holter.

"We were brainstorming about ways to get past the people that already fill up our concerts to new audiences," says Doyle Armbrust, the quartet's violist, "and we decided on mobile phones, which can bring the composers' music to new people without someone having to step into a concert to do it."

On the face of it, this idea has the same endearingly second-hand feel to it that characterizes a lot of "modern" classical music initiatives: A good seven years after the idea of "ringtone culture" has come and gone—here comes the classical industry! But Armbrust sees the project in a different light. "Our friend Sumanth [Gopinath] actually wrote a book about ringtone culture, and how it peaked in 2008. It's been a downward trend every since," Armbrust says. "The thing is, there is a big divide between a 30-second capture of Kanye and a piece that is specifically written in this constraint of that amount of time."

The most creative rings come from composers who responded enthusiastically to that confinement. "My favorite pieces were from people who really took to heart the fact that the ring would feed back on itself," Armbrust says. "Jonathan Kirk wrote a piece where we're all essentially playing the same sixteenth-note material but at three clicks' different pace at the same time, so it gradually phases out. When that cycles back it has this sort of reverse-envelope feeling to it." Julia Holter, he says, "wrote us something that I would personally use as a wake-up alarm. It's this extremely slow rising 7th chord."

Composing a quartet for consumer smartphones is inherently ridiculous—and some of the pieces acknowledge that. Shulamit Ran's "Iowa Bells"  relies on the high, thin sounds we associate with old-timey test tones: violin harmonics, glockenspiel. Ted Hearne's "Copycat Crimes" plays with our programmed expectations for a phone ring; a regularly repeated phrase, separated by evenly spaced pauses. (His changes, almost imperceptibly, with each iteration.)  

Olga Bell, of Dirty Projectors and this year's spectacular solo album Krai, contributed a wake-up alarm called "Arousal In D" that, Armbrust laughs, "you might not want to listen to with your parents in the room, because it's a little sexy." (Though: "It is a great way to wake up, I can attest to that.") Matt Marks' "Wake the Fuck Up!" is self-explanatory: It's the quartet, shouting "wake the fuck up!" in their "best Mastodon voices." There's also, preciously, a "clean" version.

So now that the pieces exist, what does Armbrust hope happens to them? "We've put up posters in coffee shops with tear-off tags on them to get people downloading them, but [we want it to be] more grassroots than that," he says. "The idea is that someone is on the subway here, their phone's going to ring, and someone's going to say 'Hey, what is that? This is awesome.'"

Illustration by Joy Burke

This weekend, I’m getting married. Morgan and I have been together for over seven years at this point, and we’re having a small ceremony at her parents’ house in the woods. It'll be followed by a bigger party with some friends and family. She’s a fine art photographer, I write about music, and we were looking to cut corners on costs. Here's what we realized:

1. She didn't want to hire a wedding photographer.
2. I thought it would be best to enlist DJ Pre-Prepared Playlists Via My MacBook Air.

At this point, I’ve spent hours trying to nail down the right playlists, and it is not an easy job. There's a lot of second-guessing involved. I frequently catch myself trying to get in the heads of my more musically attuned friends who will be in attendance—people in bands, friends who have been loudly critical of my road trip playlists, and so forth. I've had to remind myself a bunch of times that hey, it's my wedding, and if people have a problem with the music I pick, tough shit.

Of course, it isn't that simple; there's still a crowd to please. Ultimately, it’s your day, and you can do whatever the hell you want, but you also have to take a minute to consider your audience. If I curated “A Very Garage Punk Wedding”, I might love it, but I'd be in a very small minority.

I've been asked to give some advice about how to prepare wedding playlists. That’s not an easy job. Every wedding and person is, obviously, very different. Your “rented hall and wedding planner” wedding is likely going to be very different from our "DIY, tent in the woods" wedding. (Man, do I hate the term “DIY wedding” with all its Pinterest and Etsy-based aesthetic implications, but it is what it is.)

If you want to be the music czar of your own nuptials, your job is to curate songs that mean something to you, create an atmosphere for mingling, and hopefully make it possible for you and your guests to dance and have fun.

And remember: You’re celebrating a partnership, so your wedding music is a democracy. Talk to the person you love, and if they say, “There’s no fucking way we’re playing Frankie Smith's 'Double Dutch Bus' at our reception,” you have to begrudgingly respect that wish.

Here are some thoughts on the wedding's various music possibilities along with my picks and playlists (sans anything that isn't on Spotify, natch).

Processional

The aisle walk is a good spot for a more popular love song, but as is the case with every single element of your wedding, it should mean something to you. One of my closest friends had a cello and clarinet play “God Only Knows”, which was obviously a slam dunk. The possibilities are endless, so think about a song you’ve both made moon eyes to and go with it.

What We’re Doing: Morgan’s uncle, who’s an excellent guitarist, is doing an instrumental version of the Beatles’ “In My Life”.

Alternate Recommendations: A children’s chorus singing a beatific rendition of Ramones’ “Oh Oh I Love Her So”. “Ram On” on ukulele but with just the whistling part instead of the actual vocals. “Satellite of Love”. You get the idea. 

Recessional

Think of something that sounds happy or at least content. The big moment’s just happened, the officiant's job is done, and now, something joyous could play while you guys kiss and walk away.

We initially thought about having George Harrison’s version of “If Not For You” play—All Things Must Pass was a very big deal in the early months of our relationship. Then we realized we didn’t want it to be such a Beatle-heavy ceremony.

What We’re Doing: Brian Eno’s “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More”. A weird pick, definitely—it’s not really a happy, content, or romantic song. The lyrics are about the narrator’s love leaving him to live in China and get married to someone else. But the melody is joyful and strange, and it makes me think of the coming years of the two of us listening to Taking Tiger Mountain in our living room. (Which is how we both came up with this idea in the first place.) At least for me, that's what this event is all about: looking ahead toward something wonderful.

“Cocktails”

Cocktail hour—that spot after the ceremony and before dinner which may or may not involve cocktails—has the loosest criteria of all your wedding playlists. You can build any kind of atmosphere you want: elated, chill, whatever. Basically, you’re building a mixtape for however you want to feel after you’ve just gotten married. Maybe you want to pre-game your meal with some Jock Jams, maybe you want something quiet or contemplative.

What We’re Doing: We picked a hodgepodge of songs that invite happy memories for us. Not all of them are “universal” in the way most wedding material should be (the Raincoats’ “Lola” cover) or explicitly about happy subjects (Mutual Benefit’s “Golden Wake”), but they’re warm songs that we enjoy a great deal and should generally be conducive to people milling around while eating cheese and crackers.

Dinner Music

Go for quiet and unobtrusive. You may not even want music at all given how much talking will hopefully be taking place. Think quiet ambient or jazz music.

What We’re Doing: We built a progression of sorts. It’s a mixture of early jazz, old French songs, pleasant instrumentals, old country/bluegrass ballads, soul ballads, instrumental tunes, ultimately culminating in Nico, Lou Reed, Marc Bolan, and Roxy Music. The prompt I gave myself was "moonlit/smells like a record store"—not sure if that makes total sense on paper.

Alternate Recommendation: Just put on Grouper.

First Dance

The first dance is a minefield for clichés, but all that really matters is that you pick a song that means something to both you and your betrothed. Think about the part of your mutual record collection that isn’t quite as universally heralded. Remember memorable shows you’ve attended together. Find a song that’s struck a chord with both of you.

Early on in the planning process, I suggested that our first dance be to “Small Plane” by Bill Callahan—we’d just seen him in Detroit a week or so before. But ultimately, that’s a song that impacted me more than it did Morgan. The song we picked is one that's important for both of us. 

What We’re Doing: “Rest of Our Lives” by Dum Dum Girls

Dancin' With Mom or Dad

Talk it over with your families. Maybe there’s a nice slow song that fits. (My cousin Marc tells me Carole King is a pretty sure deal in this scenario.)

What We’re Doing: This isn’t a tradition that we care about—my mom and Morgan’s dad included—so we’re skipping it.

Reception (Dancing)

If you’ve been faced with the task of being your own wedding DJ, you’ve probably already scoured dozens of sample playlists at this point. Awesomely, writers will explain why you shouldn't include "Live Like You Were Dying" or "What's Going On?". They’ll include things like “The Cupid Shuffle”, “The Cha Cha Slide”, “Don’t Stop Believin’", and so on. There’s a reason for this: Those songs are enormous crowd pleasers.

Mark Richardson wrote a Resonant Frequency about this back in 2002 which I very much agree with: 

... That's what's key about planning music for a celebration: it should make the guests, as many as possible, want to celebrate. Maybe part of the reason wedding music is associated with cheese is because your average guest likes a certain amount of cheese. And in the end, friends, family and well-wishers celebrating together is so much more important than which individual songs are played. My advice to you, when you're working on that playlist for your wedding day, is to forget what's cool. A wedding is probably not the time to try and turn people on to Cex or !!!, no matter how much you like dancing to them. Consider meeting your guests at least halfway, and maybe, if you're lucky, one of them will be kind enough to show you how to do the Electric Slide.

Mark's right—it’s all about people celebrating and having fun together. In compiling this playlist, I put myself through a two-part litmus test: 1) Is [song] a crowd favorite, and 2) Is it something Morgan and I enjoy? I definitely included exceptions to that rule—obscure soul sides, Classixx, fun tracks that I thought might pair well with the more obvious stuff.

Make sure your crowd pleasers are songs that you actually want to hear. While there are a great many people who will ride for pop hits of the late 1990s and early 2000s, those songs soundtracked our middle school years which, on this of all days, we’d prefer not to recall.

It’s also important to remember that you can’t make everyone happy with every song. An elderly relative may want to hear Benny Goodman, but that might ruin the flow of your playlist. If the floor year for your playlist is 1966, that’s perfectly OK. Conversely, if the only song from the past two years you include is "Happy" or "Get Lucky" or "Blurred Lines", that's fine. As long as Pharrell's in there somewhere, that's all that matters. (I'm only kind of kidding.)

The playlist I've compiled has soul music, oldies, late-70s rock'n'roll, some garage nuggets from the 1960s, and yes, some hits of today. Maybe you want to pay more attention to "cultivating a dancefloor", which would mean throwing in way more hits. I think what I've done with this playlist is split the difference between the dancin' moms and the 20-something snobs—you might want to air more on the side of the former, which would mean more ABBA, Hall & Oates, or Motown.

I keep looking at this playlist and thinking, "Where is the rap music?" I want so badly to shoehorn Rick Ross or 2 Chainz in there somewhere, but it just feels like it'd be lost on the crowd I've invited. If it's right for the room after the old folks take off, by all means, please do include "International Players Anthem" or its spiritual equivalent.

It's OK to include more than one song by the same artist. Narrowing it down to just one Michael Jackson song isn't easy, but it also isn't necessary.

You probably want to pare back the number of insider-y “it came from the internet” indie rock tracks. If you feel 97% confident that you’ll be drunk and jovial enough to hit the dance floor when that song comes on (and maybe, just maybe, create an “Unstoppable”-like movement), put it on there. If there’s a chance that you’ll just burst into tears as soon as it comes on, skip it.

And of course, it goes without saying, but: Pay attention to transitions. Try to make it so your playlist has a flow and logic to it.

Last Song of the Night

Not a requirement, but it’s nice to cool off from the dance portion and let people know that it’s time to get the hell out. The last time I DJ'd a wedding, they ended on "California Stars" by Wilco and Billy Bragg, which is an excellent choice.

What We’re Doing: “Annual Botanical” by the Barbaras, one of the all-time great (and extremely underrated) Memphis garage pop tunes.

Earlier this week, a collaborative video between Pharrell and Japanese graphic designer Takashi Murakami appeared online. The mind behind “Happy” remixed “Last Night, Good Night,” the theme to Murakami’s debut full-length film Jellyfish Eyes, which is currently touring the United States, and Murakami made an animated clip for the song featuring characters from his film dancing alongside a cartoon version of Pharrell. Predictably, most of the media attention around the clip has focused on Anime Pharrell.

But there's another star in this video—and she isn't human. The turquoise-haired woman commanding much of the video's attention (and whose electronic-dripped vocals are featured in the song) is Hatsune Miku, a digital pop star and one of the most popular performers in Japan today. The Pharrell song is only the latest in her recent string of international collaborations.

Miku serves as the anime avatar for Vocaloid, a singing-synthesizer software allowing users to generate vocals without a human singer, pulling instead from a pre-recorded sound bank. Vocaloid (“vocals plus android”) programs have been commercially available in Japan since 2004, but sales skyrocketed in 2007 after Crypton Future Media unveiled Miku as the first in their “character vocal series.” Propelled forward by a strong fan community on the Japanese equivalent to YouTube, Miku and the artists using her voice became mainstream fixtures in Japanese pop culture. Today, Miku appears everywhere from chart-topping albums to awkward pizza commercials, and is one of the nation’s most recognizable pop stars.

Outside of her home country, however, Miku has mostly been a go-to example for “weird Japan” stories. Long before Holgraphic Tupac and an increased awareness of the technology behind it, American media reports about Miku’s first Japanese concerts held in 2010 portrayed the events as something to gawk at. The internet allowed non-Japanese fans of Miku and Vocaloid music to connect, but beyond the web these artistic communities usually only appeared at anime conventions (Miku’s first American show happened at the 2011 Anime Expo in Los Angeles). Save for a small American ad campaign with Toyota, Miku and the culture surrounding her has been mostly filed away as nerdy. Her most notable achievement in America is probably being the voice of Nyan Cat.

The first major musical crossover between Miku and a non-Japanese artist came last year, when EDM wunderkid Zedd included a remix of his single “Spectrum” swapping out singer Matthew Koma’s voice for Miku on the Japanese version of his album Clarity. Arranged by the Japanese producer Livetune, the song has racked up thousands of views on YouTube and piqued Zedd's interest in the technology.

More Western artists have been fiddling around with Vocaloid software and music since that remix emerged. Canadian producer Ryan Hemsworth remixed a Miku-centric song from Japan’s Hachioji P, while a Vocaloid voice pops up at the end of Default Gender’s“Stop Pretending”. Just this week, rising North Caroline EDM-maker Porter Robinson unveiled a new track called “Sad Machine”, heavily leaning on Vocaloid, which he says will appear multiple times on his forthcoming debut album Worlds.

The biggest Vocaloid collaboration in America thus far came when Lady Gaga (who many thought took style inspiration from the character) announced that Miku would open a handful of dates on her current ArtRave tour, including this past week’s stop at Madison Square Garden. It’s a logical choice for an artist who loves spectacle—of course Lady Gaga would love the idea of a hologram opening for her in concert—but it will expose Miku to her largest audience outside of Japan yet. Pharrell’s Miku-related work further makes working with a synthetic pop star seem like business as usual.

Why have artists outside Japan finally started to show interest in Hatsune Miku? For one thing, the Japanese government is doing everything it can right now to spread a “cool” image of Japan, so pushing for projects with someone like Pharrell makes sense. But there's another factor: It's also far easier to work with Miku than a living, breathing pop star, given that she exists as either software or a hologram. Artists can do whatever they want with Miku. Crypton deliberately left Miku’s personality vague so fans wouldn’t feel restricted in how they could utilize her; in Japan, her voice has appeared in pop, rock, death metal, and techno songs—even convenience-store jingles.

But the recent embrace of Miku might also have to do with a shift in how Japanese pop culture is seen abroad. It might be that kids who grew up with Pokemon and Sailor Moon have come of age or that it just happens to be trendy at the moment, but elements of Japanese culture once deemed geeky are finally being celebrated by Western artists and fans. Whether it’s Frank Ocean singing about Dragonball characters or Grimes gushing about Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, Japanese pop culture’s reputation is changing—which means that it's the perfect time for Miku's crossover.

Quick, what was the top song of 2011, according to Billboard? Go on, think back to where you were three years ago now, and what was pumping out of your radio.

Did you say Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”? Good memory—congrats!

Or…sorry, you over there—did you say LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem,” featuring Lauren Bennett and GoonRock? You are also right!

Wait…I said according to Billboard, right? So which is the correct answer? There can be only one, right? Yyyyyeah…about that...

If you’re going to be home Sunday night, you’re confident the DVR is set for Mad Men, and you’re the sort of music geek who enjoys a televised spectacle, I heartily encourage you to tune into the 22nd edition of the Billboard Music Awards. Over the past few years, the BBMAs have emerged as a fairly entertaining pop showcase, at a time of year relatively devoid of awards shows. This year’s edition promises to be reliably starry and slick—with events ranging from a pair of rising pop starlets performing a probable future No. 1 single; to that “Blurred Lines” guy who dominated the radio last summer begging for his estranged wife to come back on live TV.

But if there’s one thing I, as a chart analyst, don’t encourage you to do, it’s pay any attention at all to who wins.

This is not because Billboard’s prizes are based on non–Ernst & Young–worthy voting procedures, or on a shadowy cabal. Indeed, compared with virtually any televised awards show, the BBMAs are determined by rock-solid numbers: the purchases, radio plays and online streams of actual American music fans. The Grammys depend on the inscrutable tastes of the Recording Academy, the MTV Video Music Awards on an opaque combination of MTV producers and web-addled voters. But the BBMAs, admirably, are “voted” on by people who aren’t trying to vote—ordinary music consumers. Billboard uses the same formulas for its awards that it uses to calculate its charts for the weekly magazine; for example, the formula for its televised Top Hot 100 Song prize is the same as the formula for the Hot 100 itself.

The problem isn’t with Billboard’s formula, it’s with Billboard’s calendar. You might think that an awards show crowning the biggest music of the year would define “the year” from January to December, or something close to it. Think again. For the BBMAs, Billboard defines its tracking year as March to February—a quarter-year off from the 12-month period it uses to determine its own year-end charts.

This all might sound like the quibbliest of quibbles. But that three-month temporal skew has a huge impact on who walks away with prizes on the TV show.

Music awards shows are notorious for having odd boundaries for their eligibility years. The Grammy eligibility year runs from October to September, for example; the MTV VMA year, from July to June. But you can forgive an awards show its quirky rules if it follows them consistently—there’s only one Grammy per year for Album of the Year or Record of the Year; only one Video of the Year VMA per year.

What’s crazy-making about Billboard is that it effectively rewards artists, songs and albums twice per year—once in print, once on TV—under two different eligibility periods, and the results often don’t line up. In the three years since the BBMAs returned to television after a four-year hiatus (more on that in a moment), at least one of Billboard’s two marquee prizes—the Hot 100 song of the year or Billboard 200 album of the year—has diverged from the winners the magazine announced in print just months earlier.

In 2010, Billboard, the magazine, named Ke$ha’s “TiK ToK” the No. 1 Hot 100 song of the year; the following May, live on TV, the Billboard Music Awards named Taio Cruz’s “Dynamite” the Top Hot 100 Song. For 2011, the magazine named Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” the year’s top song; five months later, the TV show named LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem” the top song. (Hence my trick question at the top of this article.) And for 2012, Billboard magazine named Adele’s 21 the year’s top album; five months later, the BBMA show gave the prize to Taylor Swift’s Red.

Imagine if the Baseball Hall of Fame announced one set of inductees in a news release and then—months later, when everybody showed up at Cooperstown for the in-person ceremony—swapped a few of the Hall of Famers it just announced for some other dudes. This is basically what Billboard now does every year. This prompts two questions: Why Billboard does this, and why a three-month skew has such an outsize impact on the final result.

The reason Billboard uses a different eligibility year for its televised awards has more to do with television than music. The Billboard Music Awards launched on TV in the early ’90s and aired for roughly a decade and a half on the Fox network, in December. That time of year made a lot of sense in terms of music-tabulating—every December Billboard closes its chart year, tallies the year’s top music and publishes its big year-end issue—but it wasn’t great for television. December is a spotty month for TV ratings, pockmarked with holiday specials and lower viewership by distracted shoppers; and the winter is already lousy with movie- and music-themed awards shows. After the 2006 BBMAs, Fox quietly allowed the show to go dormant, likely prompted by erratic ratings (and, possibly, the overhang from an FCC lawsuit over BBMA attendees with potty mouths at the podium). The BBMAs stayed off the air for four years.

In 2011, ABC contracted with Billboard to revive the BBMAs, for one main reason: to fill a gap for live awards shows in the spring. They settled on May, a sweeps month largely devoid of glittery TV events. It was at this point that Billboard chose a new eligibility year for the awards, running from the first week of the prior March until the last week of the subsequent February.

This eligibility year skews the music that’s eligible for prizes, leaning toward albums and singles that came out a bit closer to the show’s airdate, not the ones crowned in the magazine the previous December. For example, when the 2012 show aired, the late 2011 albums Take Care by Drake and Christmas by Michael Bublé were both up for Billboard 200 Album of the Year, despite having come out barely half a year before the telecast. Neither album placed high in the magazine’s year-end 2011 albums list. 

So why does moving the end of the yearly chart window just three months bollix the year-end results so much? The key word is in the previous paragraph, thanks to Mr. Bublé: Christmas. Where the holidays fall has a huge impact on what Billboard crowns as its song and album of the year. 

For decades, Billboard has defined its “chart year” in the magazine as December to November. The reason they don’t use a straight January-to-December calendar year is a relic of the dead-tree economy, publication schedule: The magazine’s big year-end double issue comes out a couple of weeks before Christmas, and so Billboard has to close the books around December 1 to get the issue out.

This one-month temporal skew, which have I long called the “Last Christmas effect,” is annoying enough for chart nerds. It gives a huge leg up to songs and albums that peaked the previous holiday season. So we often wind up with Hot 100 songs of the year that are more than 12 months old, like Whitney Houston’s 1992 smash “I Will Always Love You,” Billboard’s top song of 1993; or Nickelback’s 2001 smash “How You Remind Me,” the top song of 2002. Still, given Billboard’s understandable desire to close out its year-end charts before Santa comes down the chimney—a phenomenon that hasn’t gone away, even in the digital era—this one-month skew is something chart geeks live with, and it’s been with us since the days of the Archies.*

The Last Christmas effect is still having a decisive impact on the year-end charts. This past December, Billboard named the late-2012 hit “Thrift Shop” by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis the top song of 2013. This despite the fact that “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, the year’s No. 2 single, outsold the Macklemore track in calendar 2013 by about 350,000 copies and scored record radio airplay. What gave Macklemore and Lewis the edge at year’s end were the sales and airplay it was piling up in December 2012; that activity counted for 2013, under Billboard’s December-to-November formula. Tough break for Thicke. But in terms of legacy and the official record books, “Thrift Shop” is 2013’s top hit—Billboard said so.

Except they won’t be saying so on the Billboard Music Awards on Sunday, when the statue for Top Hot 100 Song of the year is presented—“Thrift Shop” isn’t even one of the five nominees. The five eligible songs are Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball,” Imagine Dragons’ “Radioactive,” Lorde’s “Royals” and Katy Perry’s “Roar.” (Thicke’s track is a favorite to take home the statue—talk about karmic revenge!—but the Dragons have a strong shot as well, having recently set a Hot 100 longevity record.)

No matter who takes home the statue, the Macklemore song stands literally no chance of repeating its status as 2013’s top song—a designation Billboard made in its pages just five months ago. It’s not hard to figure out how “Thrift Shop” got dropped from the running—the BBMAs’ March-to-February timeframe is the culprit. By March 1 of last year, “Thrift Shop” had spent all but two of its six weeks at No. 1 already, and it had been purchased 4 million times, out of its ultimate 7 million–plus in online sales; none of that early 4 million counts for the BBMAs’ 2013 tally.

Given how over-rewarded Macklemore and Lewis have been over the past year, it’s hard to feel aggrieved for them not getting another tchotchke this weekend. More seriously, while it’s understandable that Billboard doesn’t want to give out prizes each May to songs that are up to a year and a half old, I fail to see how giving prizes to songs as overplayed as “Blurred Lines” or the positively ancient “Radioactive” improves the situation—in all cases, the pop fan watching the telecast is likely to say, “Oh, that old thing?”

Perhaps suspense is a factor—if the Top Hot 100 Song of the year is previewed in a magazine in December, its win will no longer be news in May. But every other music awards show on television, including the Grammys and the VMAs, have come to treat the prize-giving as a sideshow to the performances—the real gooser of TV ratings. The suspense over the winners is minimal to all but the geekiest among us. Why not be accurate and consistent, for those of us who care?

I’m sure Macklemore is fine not taking home more hardware this weekend. The biggest losers in all this are we chart historians, the folks who regard Billboard as our Cooperstown. It’s annoying that the magazine is confusing the public and diluting the record books, and grating for those of us who want the question, “What was the top song of 2013, according to Billboard?” to have only one answer.

*Don’t even get me started on another layer of chart-year confusion caused by Nielsen Soundscan. Since its sales-tracking technology launched in 1991, it has become possible to get a precise, January 1–December 31 ranking of the top-selling albums of the year—a list Nielsen reports every January, separately from Billboard, that differs from the Top Billboard 200 Albums list published in December. In the 23 years since the accurate sales technology debuted, the No. 1 SoundScan album of the year (measuring from January to December) has differed from the top Billboard album of the year (measuring from December to November) a total of nine times, or almost 40% of the time. Many chart analysts now use SoundScan’s data, not Billboard’s, when referring to the last two decades of top-selling albums. (So when you’re discussing, say, 2005, there is a discrepancy between Billboard’s top album, which was 50 Cent’s The Massacre, and SoundScan’s, which was Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation of Mimi—Christmas sales boosted her that year.) This is what made the BBMAs’ March-to-February calendar even more infuriating for chart analysts when it materialized in 2011—it’s actually yet a third set of data. It hasn’t happened yet in the three years since Billboard brought back the televised awards, but it is easy to envision a scenario where one year Billboard magazine, Soundscan and the Billboard Music Awards will each name a different album of the year. Repeat after me, fellow geeks: ARGH.

Hell Awaits is a column by Kim Kelly and Andy O'Connor that shines a light on extreme and underground metal. This time, Andy recommends new releases from Midnight, Pavillion Rouge, Grst, and more. Welcome to Hell.

Midnight: “The Final Rape of Night”

Cleveland's masters of debauchery, Midnight, hinted at their recent apperance at Scion Rock Fest in L.A. that they would release a new album called No Mercy for Mayhem on August 19. “The Final Rape of Night” is our first taste of that new release, and the track is available on Hells Headbangers' new complilation, which you can get through the label's Bandcamp. This is the Midnight you either love or hate: sleazy speed metal that's too catchy for its own good. Not much has changed since Satanic Royalty, and Midnight is one band we shouldn't expect progession from. But if Midnight comes to your town, your job and kids can wait, because the opportunity to turn up with Aethnar can't.

Pavillion Rouge: "Droge Macht Frei"

In an essay describing his relationship with Mayhem guitarist Euronymous, Varg Vikernes said that when he was growing up he preferred going to house music parties rather than metal clubs: “I went to the techno club to get away from all the new metal people, because I didn't like the attention from them. I preferred the attention of nice girls, so to speak.” Burzum's emphasis on repetiton (and black metal's as a whole) does share some lineage with electronic music. French quartet Pavillon Rouge is what happens when you give a group of black metal kids a bunch of ectasty and have them record music after a night at a megarave. Their 2011 debut full-length Solmeth Pervitine went under the radar for most of the metal world, but it's a trippy record, like Aborym giving into happy hardcore. “Droge Macht Frei” is a new song from their forthcoming album, Legio Axis Ka, out on Dooweet Records in the fall. And y'know what? Black metal could use more throbbing bass drum. As long as the band doesn't resort to shilling molly water, we're good.

Grst: Fire Therin

Dead as Dreams, the sole full-length from San Francisco's Weakling, remains one of the most monumental black metal albums ever made. It was also the first significant recording in the career of John Gossard, one of metal's most underrecognized innovators. Eugene, Oregon black metal trio Grst pay tribute to Weakling with Fire Therin, an EP that covers “Dead As Dreams” and “Cut Their Grain and Place Fire Therin.” This is an audacious task, since plenty consider Dead as Dreams sacred. Considering this is only Grst's second release, following a split with The Will of a Million, only adds to the skepticism. Fire Therin, luckily, is a wondeful tribute to Dreams. It's not a straight play-through—there are some interesting floating electronic strings on “Grain.” Always fantastic for young bucks to not only pay tribute to their masters, but not feel hamstrung by reverence either.

Ranger: Shock Skull

Helsinki speed-metal freaks Ranger put out one of the best EPs of last year with Knights of Darkness— a group of youngsters doing the old man's game with riff-laden vitality. They're following that up with Shock Skull, a two song 7” just released on Ektro. These are two of the most ripping songs they've put out yet, every snare hit and solo adrenalized. Bassist and vocalist Dimi Pontiac, also formerly of the band Foreseen, still hits those glorious highs that induce open mouths and invisible oranges. So fast and vicious, you may forget you're going 90 in a school zone.

Body Hammer: II: The Mechanism of Night 

If Agoraphobic Nosebleed is too human-paced for you these days, Body Hammer has all the unnatural BPMs you could ever want. Through The Path Less Traveled Records, they'll soon release II: The Mechanism of Night. Largely composed and performed by Ryan Page, Body Hammer tear through cybergrind tracks that make you wonder if Al Jourugensen was as hopped up on speed as he claims. “Body Blockade” might be named because of its resemblance to The Endless Blockade, albiet at a more maniac pace. Night isn't just a digital headache, thought; there are songs throughout the album that go into more subterranean territories. “Banishing Ritual” is a notable example, with uneasy piano and distant percussion throughout. That and “Foregone Conclusion” have Joshua Marshall's abrasive sax playing fans of Painkiller will appreciate. Hell, if John Zorn won't give Painkiller another go, this'll more than take its place.

Whitehorse: Raised into Darkness

Tomorrow is the beginning of Maryland Death Fest (Kim and I will both be in attendance, holla!), four days of metal hedonism in Baltimore. Amongst the stacked bill is Melbourne doom crew Whitehorse, who just released Raised into Darkness through Vendetta Records. It's only their third full-length, but it also follows a series of EPs and splits with bands like Batillus, Hot Graves, and The Body. And like all of their releases, this is gruelingly slow doom punctuated by bursts of noise and Pete Hyde's shrieks. The underlying electronics, provided by David Coen, give this the momemntum most bands that play this slow often lack. “Lone Descent” in particular has these noises that make you wonder if something got caught in the fan and the band decided to record it. If you've had the pleasure of eating at Hip Hop Fish and Chicken—a lair of fried foodstuffs fans of all music genres can enjoy—Whitehorse sounds like the ensuing food coma.

Photos by Drew Gurian/Red Bull Content Pool 

Let's get this out of the way: No, D'Angelo did not announce a release date for his mystically delayed third album at his Red Bull Music Academy interview last night at the Brooklyn Museum. (Though, intriguingly, while walking into the room, I did overhear someone very close to the recordings mention that the album could come out as early as this August—obviously, such information must be accompanied with several thousand grains of salt… but still!) There were some hints about the record: in-control interviewer Nelson George got D to say that the album will be more guitar/funk-rock focused than anything he's done before (as evidenced by thenewsongs he's been playing on tour since returning to the stage in 2012). Further stoking the hype was ?uestlove, who came out of the audience and took the stage twice to giddily relay some classic D stories, ending the lecture by saying that the dark and heady Voodoo "sounds normal compared to… Unmentionable Third Record." When pressed on his new musical direction and how fans may react, D did say, "If it's confusing at first, that's a good sign." But really, the lack of news scoops didn't matter at all. The 90-minute chat was transfixing—and, even better, completely joyful—as it gave everyone a warm window into the man behind D'Angelo, Michael Eugene Archer.

Though he's built-up an impressively enigmatic rep through the years, D'Angelo seemed largely at ease during the lecture, lounging on a couch in ripped jeans, a t-shirt, scarf, and heavy-duty leather jacket. (A little Vornado fan was set up near his feet, ostensibly to help him from getting too hot under the lights and all those clothes.) Another thing: He's funny! Whether he was telling stories about his early rap group (incredibly called IDU—Intelligent, Deadly but Unique), or being scared of getting booed off the stage at the Apollo's famed Amateur Night—where he sang Johnny Gill's "Rub You the Right Way"—he looked upon his own history with a proud fondness and easy smile. Apparently, I wasn't the only one surprised by D's sharp storytelling: "I've known dude for 20 years and never knew he was THIS funny," wrote ?uestlove on his Instagram during the lecture. It all suggested the singer is in a good place at the moment, which—considering his reportedly temperamental nature—is a big relief. Watching him wax philosophical about his music and the music of his heroes, I couldn't help but think, "This guy seems so together, what's all the drama about?" But, of course, this lecture was only a glimpse. 

The casual format of these Red Bull Music Academy interviews seemed to make D'Angelo comfortable, too, and its quirks led to revealing little peeks into his personality. For example, for some reason, all of these sit-downs have the participants using hand-held mics rather than tiny, near-invisible clip-ons and, honestly, its kind of hard to look cool while just talking into a microphone you're holding in your hand. But D'Angelo did it—he loosely held the mic in his right hand far enough away from his face to make you forget about it but close enough to make his raspy voice come through loud and clear. He almost made it look like a cigarette. And one of the night's best applause moments came when he lit up a smoke inside the pristine auditorium as Voodoo's "Playa Playa" flowed through the speakers—a small, unconscious rebellion. It also didn't seem like a coincidence for him to start smoking at that very moment; while he gamely mouthed along when George cued up D's cover of Eddie Kendricks' "Girl You Need a Change of Mind", he looked somewhat more anxious when a couple of Voodoo tracks were played, as if they were reminders of a ghost he's still trying to outrun. 

My favorite quote from the evening occurred when George asked him about his uniquely sheltered in-studio set-up. When he records his vocals, D'Angelo requires solitude and apparently steps inside a self-described black "tee-pee" as he tries to get away from not only the outside world but even the studio itself. Explaining the technique, he said: "I'm trying to go deep in the onion." You could argue that he's spent many of the last 14 years since Voodoo's release too deep inside that onion, but there is a sweet spot somewhere between total isolation and the roiling uncertainty of humanity. During this lecture, at least, he found that place.

FYI: According to a representative from the Red Bull Music Academy, video from the lecture is scheduled to be posted online later today or tomorrow.

On the latest Pitchfork Podcast, host Corban Goble talks with features editor Ryan Dombal and reviews editor Larry Fitzmaurice about Coldplay's new album, Ghost Stories. Listen below or via the Pitchfork Weekly app. 

Welcome to Mixdown, an ongoing series where Pitchfork staffers and contributors talk about mixtapes, mixes, and other beat-based ephemera that may not be covered in our reviews section but are worth discussing. Today, Wesley Case, Meaghan Garvey, and Corban Goble discuss new singles by Nicki Minaj and Lil Wayne as well as tapes from King Mez and Noelz Vedere.

Corban Goble: Everything I knew about the new Nicki single—that it was co-written by Dr. Luke, that it was called “Pills N Potions”, that artwork—did not prepare me for what it actually ended up sounding like. Does this track make you more or less excited for The Pink Print?

Meaghan Garvey: This isn’t my favorite new Nicki song, but I’m so psyched to see that her return to “real hip-hop” (fart noise) was a troll move, to some degree. I couldn’t be more down for her rappity-rap songs this year, but what that obscurs is the fact that there was rappity-rap all over her last album, it was just easy to write them off because they were over sparkly beats. The whole idea of “Mixtape Nicki” is, to me, a bit of a fallacy; she raps way better now than she did in 2009. That said, I totally cried to “Pills N Potions” and I’m not ashamed.

Wesley Case: Co-sign the fact Nicki’s been rapping since Day One, and she’s never stopped. Like Meaghan, I’ve loved all of the loosies she’s offered in the lead-up to The Pink Print but “Pills N Potions” is not for me—which is fine, since I’ve always found her singles hit-or-miss anyway. (Really, what’s topping “Stupid Hoe”?) I’m sure the more I hear this song—and I’m expecting it to ring out all summer—the more it will click, but I was frankly surprised Dr. Luke produced it. It lacks his trademark saccharine oomph; I can’t tell if it feels unfinished or if the song is more powerful without constant fireworks. Lyrically, Nicki’s approach works for me because it’s a more substantive “real” (emotionally complex, filled with equal amounts of hurt and hope) than telling us these rappers are her sons. Those lines are still cool, too, but you can sink your teeth into this.

Her label boss and mentor, Lil Wayne, has been busier lately, too. He and Drake got the ball rolling with “Believe Me”, and then came the sorta-sharp “D’Usse”. Earlier this week, his Weezy Wednesday vlog previewed a silly banger called “Tina Turn Up Needs a Tune Up". Are you two feeling the supposed revitalization of Weezy?

CG: My eternal faith in Lil Wayne’s ability stipulates that if CV isn’t a classic, I have a lot of hard questions to ask myself.

MG: I didn’t actually know what D’usse was until Jay Z’s cringey “do say so myself” line on “Drunk In Love”, so personally I’m just psyched that I can replace that association. But “D’usse” is incredible, the kind of soulful stuff that might’ve popped up around Tha Carter II. And Wayne brings up one of life’s biggest enigmas here: How many fish did Hootie blow? Someone has to ask these tough questions, and I’m glad it’s Wayne.

WC: OK, good, so I’m not going crazy. It’s been interesting to see people comment “Dedication 2 Wayne is back!” in response to these songs. It shows how thirsty rap fans are for A) Wayne to be unbelievably great again and B) an epic run from an unhinged artist. (Get well, Gucci!) But as a Wayne stan with both measured expectations and high Tunechi standards, I think he’s been on a creative roll lately (his verse on “Senile” is Purple Haze-era Cam’ron, and he steals “Thug Cry” from Ross with the simple swing he adds to “I kill these niggas with silence”), and it bodes well for Tha Carter V. I like these recent verses and songs because you can hear and feel his wheels turning again. We wanted him to leave Rikers and dazzle us immediately, but it’s not that easy. At the very least, it should be better than Tha Carter IV, and in 2014, I’ll take that.

 King Mez: Long Live the King

CG: Though North Carolina rapper King Mez’s new tape has been out for a little bit, the project has been getting more attention as time passes. Meaghan and Wesley, what did you like or dislike about Long Live the King? King Mez is a risky name, first of all—one could easily dismiss as King Meh, amirite. (Also could you both fax me your signed contracts promising you will never stop going in before you respond, thx.)

WC: Or is it King Mezmerize, word to System of a Down? I, for one, am a sucker for the type of thoughtful ride-out music found all over Long Live the King. Throughout the 12-track tape, my ears would latch onto bars rather naturally (name-dropping Puffy's ex Kim Porter on “Flight” will do that, but then it leads to: “What you think because she call me 'her Mez' mean I’ma buy her Hermes purses?”) and then I’d rewind to unpack them. There’s a lot of dense writing on the tape, but it’s never showy—Mez sounds even-keeled even at his most vulnerable or introspective. You into it, Meaghan?

MG: I’m definitely getting some strong J. Cole vibes from this project, which, I mean… maybe it’s just a North Carolina thing. Admittedly, though, he’s definitely got bars—and a more interesting ear for beats than Mr. Cole World No Blanket. Still, things get a little preachy at times. He compares his verses to theses and chess at one point. “Morris” is definitely the standout for me here. He says “some of the lamest people I ever met were millionaires” on there, which is kind of a reverse double humblebrag.

CG: The sound of this tape is interesting; I didn’t really attach to the lyrics as much, but it seems like Mez struck a good balance. How would you guys describe the sound? It’s like “atmospheric boom-bap” or something? Or one time I saw a SoundCloud tag that said “ethereal trap” which maybe makes no sense, but maybe it makes all of the sense in the world.

WC:“Ethereal trap” seems as apt as “cloud rap” to me, so I won’t hate. Sonically, it reminds me of another fully formed 2014 project, Isaiah Rashad’s Cilvia Demo, though LLTK is a bit less adventurous. But there are similar elements that work: clipped vocal samples, strings, boom-bap drums, and a constant layer of haze that backs up the “atmospheric” tag. Like Cole, Mez makes some of his beats, too, so maybe that’s why he sounds so sure-footed to me. (Also like Cole: Mez can fall too in love with his own voice and wordplay, to the point of dulling himself.)

MG: I just think this dude is kinda boring and he likes Reggie Miller too much.

Noelz Vedere: Bittersweet Victory

CG: Although I think the popular opinion is that the phrase “Chicago rap” refers to hard-headed drill music, someone like Noelz Vedere (among others) shows that there’s a lot of colors in the kaleidoscope. Like, there’s someone in the Chicago landscape that has a thought of, “Hey, maybe I should reach out to Freddie Gibbs and Sir Michael Rocks!” Meaghan, as our Chicago spokesperson, what did you make of this? Bittersweet Victory reminds me a little bit of Chance the Rapper, in terms of how Noelz builds his songs, but without as much innate charisma or creativity.

MG: The past year’s actually seen a kind of backlash against drill sounds. They’re still pretty dominant locally, but the combination of Chance and Vic Mensa’s ascent—and a dearth of almost-guilt about the implications of supporting glorified violence—have turned things around, especially to people outside the city. Noelz Vedere is from the north side of Chicago, which is not really known for pumping-out rap because it’s the “nice” part of the city. A lot of the time, north side rappers wear their Kanye influence on their sleeve, which also holds true here. Wesley, your thots? 

WC: No need to listen further than the opener “Promise Land” to hear the Kanye influence. It starts a bit solemn and then swells in its final minute to a climax (a la the Late Registration track “Bring Me Down”). “God” gets mentioned as Charlie Wilson-inspired vocals add to the build-up, and then, finally, a slightly distorted guitar solo, like “Gorgeous” on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. A part of me naturally finds it heartening that this younger Chicago generation wears its debt to Mr. West on their sleeves. But really, Bittersweet Victory left me scratching my head more than anything else. Noelz can rap, clearly, but it’s all over the place. Meaghan, what else did you take from it?

MG: It definitely tries to mash every Kanye album into one project, which kind of neuters all of those different eras. “Blackout” is like a watered-down, bizarro “New Slaves”, and that sitting right next to Late Registration worship makes no sense to me. Also, no offense, but [Gretchen Wieners voice] people really need to stop trying to make Sir Michael Rocks happen.

Shake Appeal is a column that highlights new garage and garage-adjacent releases. Evan Minsker skipped a week, which means there's a huge backlog of awesome rock'n'roll records for this week's edition. Some have argued it's too many records and maybe he should cool it and pare back to five like he normally does. But fuck that: Enjoy this giant-size double-wide edition of Shake Appeal. 

Mordecai: Neil's Generator [Richie/TestosterTunes]

What's the noise coming out of Butte, Montana? It's Mordecai, a band that, according to legend, made one of their early records in a YMCA bathroom. Their new platter via Philadelphia's Richie/TestosterTunes is an impressive guitar record. They explore a variety of textures under the banner of muted production. They jangle under their deadpan vocals on "The Bird", they warble uneasily on "Morning Dew", and on "Cold Rain and Snow", they establish an expansive Steppenwolf-esque ramble. But just describing what they do song by song really undersells this record, whose narratives and performances are an appropriate pairing for the chaotic graffiti on the album's cover: Fascinating if you look at the big picture, rewarding if you hone in on individual elements. Neil's Generator is an enigmatic and required listen. 

Yi: Crying [self-released]

Oakland's Yi have unveiled their first long-player, and if you want to find the exact reason why you should be paying attention, skip over to track two, "Going Dumb". Though the vocals are largely unintelligible, it's actually a really sophisticated rock song. They employ satisfying two-part harmony vocals, a droning low end, an elated "la la la" section, and then they strip everything else away for a guitar solo that demands attention. The effect is so powerful because that moment feels tenuous on a record that's loud, fast, and fuzzy. Sure enough, they're back into a full-power assault by the next track. 

The Achtungs: "Full of Hate" [Total Punk]

The world is much better off because of Total Punk Records, who continue to deliver searing punk rock gems from all over the globe. After delivering killer records from St. Louis' Lumpy & the Dumpers and Sweden's Bäddat För Trubbel, now they're offering a 7" from Finland's the Achtungs. The A-side to their new platter, "Full of Hate", rips, and for a track that's about being filled with unbridled rage, it's got a joyful melody beneath its goblin-like vocals. They've got a new LP coming out later this year, which rules, because I definitely want to hear more from this band.

Hobocop: Half Man Half Cop [Slovenly]

Out of Oakland comes Hobocop, a band featuring King Lollipop himself, the Shannon and the Clams co-head Cody Blanchard. But this band is so far removed from those two projects. What we're dealing with here is a simmering, homemade minimalism—a rock'n'roll record that isn't afraid to get quiet before it goes loud and fast. It also isn't nearly as skate punk trashy as the band name might suggest. They've got an impressive knack for riding out grooves, and one where shorter accent pieces like the soulful 46-second instrumental "California Biodome" punch up the album without overstuffing it. It's a striking album that seems to owe as much to old jazz and soul records as it does to rock'n'roll. 

Southern Comfort: "Suzanne" [HoZac]

Oh man, another new project from Angie Garrick? That's right, the Sydney native who's released music recently as Angie and with Ruined Fortune just does not slow down. (She's also got a Straight Arrows LP out next month, if you can believe it.) Southern Comfort is Angie and Harriet Hudson, and their HoZac 7" "Suzanne" is a well done shot of beach pop that's cut with just a hair of that Ruined Fortune sludge. It's ragged and paced, and the guitar solo that turns up doesn't increase the speed or volume in any substantial way. It goes at its own pace, and hopefully, Angie decides to churn out more material with this band at some point. 

No Bails: Epyx Shredder [Pelican Pow Wow]

Attention fans of the Spits and all skate punk in general: You should listen to the debut LP from Kalamazoo, Michigan's No Bails. (Fact: It's the first long-player released by the consistently great label Pelican Pow Wow.) Is it "power chords and simplistic vocals" formulaic to the point where it sounds like a lot of skate punk that's come before it? Yes. Are a bunch of the lyrics super dumb? Oh, absolutely. ("Punch you right in the dick/ Fuckin' deal with it!") But that's exactly the lane this record occupies: It's aggressively simple; the soundtrack to watching skaters bail a bunch of times.

No Bails: "These Fucking Roads" on SoundCloud.  

Sick Thoughts / Waylon Thornton and the Heavy Hands / WAND / Inutili / Useless Eaters / Birds of Paradise: Singles [Goodbye Boozy]

Earlier this year, Goodbye Boozy Records put out a bunch of extremely solid rock'n'roll singles from bands all over the globe. (We highlighted the Ausmuteants 7".) They're doing it again with a pile of 45s that rule for vastly different reasons. There's the new one from Sick Thoughts. (With his My Life Is a Mess EP, Drew Owen is having a prolific week in an already-prolific year.) There's a split (co-released with Aagoo) featuring some Ty Segall-recorded material from WAND and Inutili. There's a new one from Useless Eaters, a stomper from W T H H, and a haunting folk tune from a new band called Birds of Paradise. And it's all good.

Slushy: Pastime Gardens [Grabbing Clouds]

At the very end of the second-ever Shake Appeal, a Randy Records 7" from the Chicago band Slushy made an appearance. The streaming B-side from that record was a catchy bubblegum tune that could've come from Oakland garage pop heads like Hunx or Peach Kelli Pop. With their sunny pop LP Pastime Gardens, they've expanded on that song's promise tenfold. What they've got here is an album with 14 tracks of beach party music. The lyrics are childlike, the melodies are sweet. "She's Going Away Now" has them swooning-yet-forlorn like Joey Ramone. The concepts and songs aren't at all complex, but that's where the utility lies here: Music for dancing and vibing and falling in love. 

Doozies / Flower Girl: Live in the Basement [Aloe Music]

The Doozies are from Washington, DC. Flower Girl are from Brooklyn. The two bands have been friends since childhood, and later this summer, they each take a side of the split LP Live in the Basement. From the sounds of things, it's an appropriate, like-minded pairing. Each band is offering pop songs with breezy melodies, but a delivery that packs power and oomph. And if you need incentive to get a physical copy, the sleeves were apparently screen printed and stamped-by-hand in a basement somewhere. Appropriate, considering the LP title.

The Hussy / Digital Leather: Split 12" [Southpaw]

Starting things off is Digital Leather, the formidable project by multi-instrumentalist Shawn Foree. On the other, it's Madison darlings the Hussy. And hey, why not, Foree also plays on some of the Hussy's side. While Foree smolders with his space-aged new wave tracks (which are a must-have if you're a fan of that Damaged Bug LP or, duh, any previous Digital Leather work), the Hussy's power pop attack is given an added layer of synth-based spaciness. This is what a split should be: Two sides that are inherently different while wholly complementing each other.

Also Worth Hearing: No Backskies from Gymshorts; a new single from Feral Jenny

Hell Awaits is a column by Kim Kelly and Andy O'Connor that shines a light on extreme and underground metal. This time, Kim sizes up new metal from Alraune, Sea Bastard, Triumvir Foul and more.

Alraune:“Exordium”

Following hot on the heels of a two-track cassette recently released by the peerless Graceless Recordings (snag a copy here), Nashville black metal perverters Alraune have just announced final details for their debut full-length. Dubbed The Process of Self-Immolation, the album is  due out on June 24th on CD and digital via Profound Lore, with vinyl to follow from Gilead Media on July 15th. This is an awfully highly anticipated album for those who have been paying attention to Alraune’s relentless progress, and it’s no surprise that The Process of Self-Immolation is an absolute beast of a recording. The band’s take on occult black metal stylings draw from the Scandinavian masters, the French introverts, and their own depraved visions, singlehandedly creating a new standard for USBM to strive towards and sneering at weaker acts whilst they’re at it. The cold, biting melodic scourge of second track “Exordium” exemplifies the band’s uncompromising approach to black metal fury beautifully. It’s as elegant and lethal as a vintage blade.

Sea Bastard:“Nightmares of the Monolyth”

Ever since Iron Monkey glotted the refined tradition of UK doom with crippled punk beats and absolute muck, sludge’s stumbling spectre —with its whiskey fumes and nodding tempos—has clouded the country’s output and given rise to abominable heavies like Conan, Dead Existence, Iron Witch, and the slavering wretches in Sea Bastard. This Brighton quartet is primed to release four new songs’ worth of dripping, waterlogged doom filth, and will let loose ‘Scabrous’ digitally and on double LP from Dry Cough Records, Mosh Tuneage, Black Reaper Records, and Catface Records (preorder it here). "Nightmares of the Monolyth” is a lumbering death dirge that slogs through upteen layers of sludgy, stoned, droned fuzz over the course of its ten-plus minutes, yet leaves us howling for more. This shit is so heavy it’s a small wonder their practice space hasn’t sunk into the sea by now. Let’s hope they’ve stocked up on sandbags, for our sake as much as their own.

Triumvir Foul:“Abhorrent Depths”

Triumvir Foul burbles out deranged, putrid death metal riffs that bump and collide beneath a smothering veil of distorted murk. The deathlike early '90s sound is proudly present, caveman grooves and all ( hell, there’s even an Autopsy cover!) But this quick’n’nasty release is veined with evil and dusted with something stronger than whatever Entombed was snorting way back when. As far as I can tell, the whole sordid mess is the work of two Portland-based individuals, and what it may lack in originality, it more than makes up for with sheer naked aggression. An Oath of Blood and Fire is the band’s self-released debut recording, and is available both digitally and in a run of 100 hand-numbered cassettes here. They’re new, and it’s raw, but this thing positively reeks of potential and you’re going to want to keep one eye open in anticipation of Triumvir Foul’s next move. Big ups to Dave from Coffinworm for pointing me towards this latest blasphemous racket!

Musk Ox:“Arcanum”

Musk Ox is the brainchild of neoclassical guitarist Nathanaël Larochette, an Ottawa-based composer and spoken word poet who has dedicated the last eight years to creating the gentle, pastoral take on neofolk he dubs “chamber folk.” Whatever it may lack in heavy metal thunder or ravishing grimness, Musk Ox more than makes up for with its richness in atmosphere and emotion, created in tune with the natural world and its terrifying beauty. Joined by cellist Raphael Weinroth-Browne and violinist Evan Runge, Larochette has sought to push Musk Ox’s progressive-minded sound even further on the trio’s upcoming second album, Woodfall. Larochette’s skill as a classical guitarist is unsurpassed, and has not gone unnoticed, either; keen ears will pick up shades of the acoustic interludes he composed for Agalloch’s latest album ‘The Serpent & The Sphere’ within Woodfall's five songs. The abridged version of “Arcanum” below is a lush, deeply affecting folk epic that flits between sadness and triumph, and would surely make Larochette’s spiritual forebears in Empyrium, Nest, and Tenhi proud.

Vilkacis:“Wolf’s Eyes”

Michael Rekevics is almost frighteningly prolific. Since he arrived in NYC a few years back, the California transplant has continued to push black metals’ fragile boundaries close to breaking with a rush of new projects. Though Rekevics is probably best known for his work with Fell Voices, those of us on the East Coast know him primarily as the drummer of the dearly missed Ruin Lust as well as main provocateur in the new and deadly Vorde, and now for his latest diversion (and second solo effort), Vilkacis. Psychic Violence and Dead Section Records will co-release an LP version of Vilkacis’ debut, The Fever of War, on June 10th, a few days before the band appears at a Northside Festival showcase curated by Show No Mercy & Hell Awaits (tickets available here). Savage minimalism culled straight from the Second Wave is the order of the day here, tempered by droning ambient passages and cloaked in all-consuming darkness. “Wolf’s Eyes” is an feverish orthodox din, all buzzing tremolo and strangled rasps with only the slightest hint of brittle melody.

Iron Hawk:“Hunger for Power”

Tasmanian metalpunk scum trio Iron Hawk has just dropped its debut EP, Boozehounds From Hell on Heavy Chains Records, and it sounds exactly what the beginning of this sentence would lead you to expect: raw, spiky speed metal crossed with mangy Motorpunk that dives in hard then bails in three minutes or less. The band has only been active since mid-2013, when Simön Slaughter, Ängie Climax, and Vyvyan Bästerd decided to start making beautiful music together. The result is a blackened speed punk orgy of drunken d-beats, thrashy riffs, and heavy moments of dark, foreboding crust. The production quality is nil, which is to say, it’s exactly how it should be. A spit shined recording is the last thing Iron Hawk needs; they’re all about keeping it mean and dirty. Pick up a copy of the tape here, and satiate your hunger for power! (Cheers to Jeff Treppel for the tip—as much as he loves lame symphonic metal, he’s got a nose for the good stuff when it counts).

Photo: TT the Artist by Olivia Obineme

When frantic Baltimore club DJ and producer Matic 808 remixed every track from Kanye West’s Yeezus last summer, it was the first time in a long while that Baltimore Club excelled on just its core fundamentals. On the mix, Matic took a piece of pop culture, keyed in on its most memorable moments, and mashed it up completely, all while serving as some sort of comic relief and a party starter. 

The 23-year old Matic’s Yeezus: Baltimore Club Edition created a short-lived, yet exciting moment for Baltimore club music that was actually from Baltimore. The project garnered interest from The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and caught the ear of producer Brenmar, who collaborated with Matic on a remix of The-Dream's "High Art". It was the first time that something from the city seemed to grab outsiders’ attention since 2009’s “I’m The Ish” by DJ Class, which got a Kanye West remix. Before that, it was the mid-2000’s “hipster obsession” moment fronted by local DJ and host of radio station 92Q’s “Off The Hook Radio," K-Swift. But the success of Matic’s remixstalled out. While club music in neighboring East Coast areas like Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia continue to have plenty of exposure, it’s the city that invented the frenetic dance music that appears stuck. 

“Club music gave me something to be apart of,” says Matic. “Learning the dances, meeting the people that frequented the parties, and always checking for new tracks and CD’s gave me a sense of belonging.” When K-Swift was the face of club culture during the mid-to-late 2000’s, in Baltimore, club music was a soundtrack to the inner city. You heard it daily on the radio, it was danced to at every high school party. It was the preferred music at cookouts and it’s what made clubs pop. Outside of a few DJs who mix it into their sets today, club music, as a culture, is barely present in Baltimore. 

“The music was fresh and people came out specifically for that music,” legendary Baltimore club DJ and producer Scottie B tells me as we sit in his basement and watch postgame highlights of the Pacers vs. Wizards playoff series. “That’s what sparked the clubs having nights for younger people. People over 21 would party with younger people because the scene was so vibrant.” As it stands now, there are no venues in Baltimore that dedicate a night to club music and club is condensed to a marginal 7:00-7:10 p.m. set every night on local station, 92.3 (Q), and an hour on Fridays from 9:00-10:00 p.m., hosted by KW Griff and Porkchop—best known for "Bring In Da Katz” (reissued by Night Slugs in 2012).

Photo: Abdu Ali by Diamond Dixon

Scottie and long time partner and DJ, Shawn Caesar own Unruly Records—a label that’s been in existence since club’s golden era in the early 90s and is responsible for K Swift’s iconic The Jumpoff mixtape series. It was through Unruly, too, that one of Baltimore’s first local stars, Miss Tony, a flamboyant and charismatic emcee whose tracks “Pull Ya Gunz Out” and “How You Wanna Carry It” are among the genre’s best known. Tony changed club music from a barrage of sounds to having someone vocally represent what relationship the people had with the music and the scene. “That’s why it took off,” says Scottie B. “People looked at club music as theirs. A lot of the music was shouting out neighborhoods and if you mentioned someone in a song, it was a good chance that your listener knew who that person was. There was a lot of ground support.” 

With multiple venues to access, an audience eager to be apart of something authentically their own and club records being in high demand, Baltimore club’s biggest moment was the pre-Swift 90s. “The music got smaller with K-Swift,” says Scottie. “With her, it was bigger with kids but older people didn’t like it. It seemed bigger because it was on the radio, which didn’t exist at its peak.” As the audience that Scottie and his contemporaries spun for got older and stopped going to parties, Baltimore club was beginning to die until K-Swift remarketed it to school-aged kids. Club’s growing popularity with the city’s youth and out-of-town interest was on the upswing until K-Swift’s untimely death from a swimming pool accident at her home in the summer of 2008 casted a dark cloud that still hangs. 

The easiest (and probably the most cited) reason for club music’s woes would be Swift’s death and the growing outsider interest in the genre—mostly associated with Diplo—around the same time, which many locals view as a leaching obsession that was eventually hung out to dry. “Just hearing it on the radio wasn’t sufficient enough for me,” says local DJ and party promoter, Cullen Stalin, in a cafe in midtown Baltimore. He moved to Baltimore from Philly in 1999 and after being introduced to club music, he realized that he wasn’t the only outsider of the culture eager to take part in ways other than being a consumer. That mindset for outsiders, he says, is in large part due to Jason Urick and his parties at Baltimore’s Floristree which would have club stars like Rod Lee (responsible for club hit “Dance My Pain Away”) and K-Swift play in front of mostly white, indie crowds—something that hadn’t happened before. Stalin became the middle man, essentially. Booking club artists to play for indie crowds and assisting M.I.A. and Diplo in working with club’s most promising talent at the time (Rye Rye and Blaqstarr), he represents a prickly chapter of Baltimore club’s narrative. “The day before K-Swift died, she introduced Diplo as the future of club music to the crowd at ArtScape,” he recalls. “That was prophetic in its own weird way but she was also vouching for him to the people of Baltimore.”  

If it weren’t Diplo, another non-Baltimorean would have likely found their way into the culture. “It’s a part of growth and wanting to expand,” says Blaqstarr, whose warping, tribal chant-like vocals and songs like “Rider Girl” and “Get My Gun” landed him work with M.I.A. “I wanna stay open so I could do all that I imagined I could do. Club music isn’t limited. I can play a harp or a guitar to club without having it seen as sampling a cartoon or a snare and kick.” 

Baltimore club’s decline is glaring once you consider how lively club scenes are in places like New Jersey, where DJ Tameil was one of the first outsiders to come to Baltimore before taking it back to his hometown and adding elements to create Jersey club. “I grew up on a lot of Rod Lee, DJ Technics, K-Swift, Blaqstarr, DJ Tameil, and Tim Dolla,” says Jersey club standout, DJ Sliink via email. “Once you lose the love for something, it's over. You can try to gain it back but that's work—hard work. Jersey club is like the new growth of Baltimore club. They were supposed to grow with us."

In an effort to bridge the gap between club artists from other cities, local radio host, DJ Angel Baby’s Get Pumped Vol. 2 mixtape features Sliink, Philly’s DJ Sega, Jersey’s Nadus, and expected Baltimore club DJs like James Nasty, Mighty Mark, and Matic 808. There’s something slightly revolutionary about Angel Baby’s decision to not be city-specific in curating a club record in 2014. “Even if club DJ’s outside of Baltimore don’t say it’s Baltimore club, we know where it comes from,” Angel Baby tells me over the phone. “Good music is good music. I like where the other club artists are going. You can’t deny how good their tracks are.” 

Arguably, the most inventive artists in Baltimore that fall under the club music tree are ones that are considered to be bastard children of the genre as they use it as a backdrop to more complex and expansive sounds rather than taking the club-purist route. While Matic is somewhat traditional in his formula, his mixes have industrial elements and are often more trippy than club has ever been. Abdu Ali’s 2013 release Push + Slay—mostly due to Baltimore-based Schwarz’s production— took as much from Baltimore club as it did hip-hop, ballroom, and punk which, he says, all have an expiration date, just like club music. “Just like any music genre these past 100 years, they come and go,” he explains in his Central Baltimore bedroom. “Even though it may not seem like it, one day hip-hop is gonna go away and not be a thing anymore. I bet people thought jazz was gonna be here forever. I think music is suppose to transform. I don’t get mad about that.” Go DDm, an occasional club-utilizing rapper says that club music isn’t as compelling to those who’ve grown up absorbing it: “It’s not new to us. People in others places can get excited about it but it’s what we’ve been hearing our whole lives.” 

TT The Artist is one of the more visible club artists. having worked with local new-age producers like Mighty Mark and better-known producers like Diplo and Brenmar. Moving to Baltimore from Florida, her youthful obsession with 2 Live Crew and Uncle Luke smoothed an easy transition to the dance-focused club music of the early-to-mid 2000’s: “There was more of a vibrancy when I came,” she says on her living room couch. “You heard it more—both on radio and in clubs. At Paradox (a venue that catered to club crowds from the early 90’s through K-Swift’s era), when Baltimore club came on, everybody ran to the floor. Nobody was standing around.”  

With tracks like 2013’s “Pussy Ate”, TT channels the vulgarity of vintage Baltimore club while connecting to Mad Decent the entity largely responsible for the genre’s short-lived global popularity. Along with Abdu Ali and DDm, she openly represents queer culture and regularly fuses outsider sounds with Baltimore club—both of which could be instrumental in the genre’s attempt at a resurging statement. Realistically, club music in Baltimore may never get to where it was over a decade ago, but does that even matter? People like Matic, TT, Abdu Ali and a handful of other Baltimore artists are trying to, once again, build a ground-up attraction for the city and even though the way to that destination is foggy, they aren’t letting up until people stop standing around. 

Image via Housing Works

Housing Works is a non-profit Soho bookstore that fights AIDS and homelessness, where Mountain Goats singer John Darnielle is about to read from his forthcoming debut novel, Wolf in White Van. Darnielle isn’t the first wordy musician with literary pretensions—there’s Colin Meloy and David Byrne and Patti Smith, to name a few—but a novel is the next logical step for someone who’s filled 14 studio albums, 23 EPs, and four compilations with relatable characters, dramatic situations, and recognizably literary themes like spirituality, drug addiction, and more.

Besides, the novel would be intriguing even if it were coming from an unknown. Work in White Van is the story of Sean Phillips, who’s been "isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of seventeen" which has led him to create Trace Italian, a text-based role-playing game played through the mail (Think Dungeons & Dragons). His story is intertwined with Lance and Carrie, high school students from Florida and players of Trace Italian whose gameplay begins to have real life repercussions, drawing Sean back into the world he’s neglected for so long.

Even so, Darnielle is a writer with only one work of published fiction—a novella based on Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality from the 33 ⅓ series—who’s being feted with the headlining spot at Tumblr-sponsored reading. Not every first-time novelist would be so lucky, but Darnielle’s work with the Mountain Goats has won him the devotion of thousands—which isn’t a bad place to start in a publishing industry that’s somewhere between "not great" and "completely, beautifully fucked" depending on who you talk to.

Illustration by Colleen Tighe

Take Alexis, a girl I meet who works in Brooklyn but lives in New Jersey. She’s standing at the front of the stage, right in the middle, and is wearing a Mountain Goats shirt. When it’s announced that a raffle will give away five Wolf in White Van shirts, two galleys, and a signed poster from Darnielle’s last appearance at Housing Works, she begins ardently clapping after "shirt." A minute later, she leaves and returns to her friends holding no less than 40 tickets, coiled around her arm like a lasso.

There’s Liz, who lives in Connecticut but came to NYC to catch this and a midnight screening of The Room, and Jessica, who thinks she saw every Mountain Goats show when she lived in Chicago for six years and can’t pick a favorite song when I ask her, only the one she’s been listening to most these days. ("Up the Wolves") Darnielle has super fans, and in preparation, the usual chairs at Housing Works have been done away with, the book carts shoved all the way to the wall, so that the quickly at-capacity crowd can circulate without crushing each other.

This has everything to do with the emotionally affirming nature of the Mountain Goats’ music, into which Darnielle has channeled the turmoil of his younger years. Look at a song like "Broom People", from 2005’s The Sunset Tree, narrated from the perspective of a troubled teenager who’s bullied at high school and at home before finally finding salvation in the arms of another person. It describes a hushed interior life almost too painful to speak out loud, then suddenly soars to a tear-producing high. It’s the sound of losing and finding yourself, rendered with novelistic detail and searing catharsis, the type of song that makes fans think, "Me too."

Additionally, Darnielle has always carried himself as a charming, thoughtful personality. In this modern age, he’s become a reliably engaging social media presence, delivering absurdist humor and topical observations on his Twitter and Tumblr while further drawing fans into his world. There’s a Tumblr dedicated to collecting his best moments, and were someone not familiar with the Mountain Goats there’s a solid chance they could see his timeline, think "Wow, what a funny and intelligent person" and only later realize, "Wait, and he makes music?"

Which means there are diehards who cheer wildly when the Housing Works host asks who’s here for the first time, casual fans who might know Darnielle and the Mountain Goats a little bit but not too much, and of course, the typically cultured New Yorkers who are here because it’s Thursday, duh. As one woman tells me, while double fisting a glass of white wine and a cup of coffee, "We’re Tumblr people, but also people who like readings and people who like the Mountain Goats." When the first speaker, Catherine Lacey, gets up on stage, she hesitates after looking at the crowd and says, "Literary readings do not look like these, if you go to these." She tells a tense story about a newly married couple who are beginning to hate each other on their honeymoon that could fit right into Tallahassee.

Lacey is followed by Rainbow Rowell, a popular YA novelist who prefaces her passage by talking a little bit about Darnielle. "I could not say I wrote this book because of the Mountain Goats," she says, "but I would not have written it without them." Specifically, it was The Sunset Tree, which is largely regarded as the band’s most personal album, that drew her in. "I felt like those songs were coming from inside of me, getting louder and louder," she says. "I cried over those songs. That album unlocked me, and continued to unlock me." As if proof, she quotes two lines from "Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod?"—"Alone in my room, I am the last of a lost civilization/ and I vanish into the dark and rise above my station"—and tears up while doing so.

The stage has been set for Darnielle, who gets up to abundant applause. He’s dressed in a recognizably casual outfit, one he’s played any number of Mountain Goats shows in—a grey jacket, a blue dress shirt unbuttoned at the top, heavily cuffed jeans, and black dress shoes. His introduction is brief and banterless, focusing on how he wanted to pick a passage that "digs a little deeper" rather than something that would get an easy laugh. Before reading, he takes his glasses off.

Darnielle’s reading voice is recognizably nasal, but without the need to rise above his band there’s an earthier, nearly stentorian tone in his delivery. This passage is heavy and jokeless, and nearly impossible for the crowd to audibly approve of. In it, Sean describes the car crash that his father has instructed him to lie about being in—the true nature of his debilitating injury is apparently left secret until the end of the book. Then, he reveals that his presence is unwanted at his grandmother’s funeral—that his father breaks down in saying so, and that he must accept the turn of events with the grace of someone who is relearning to live their life without going insane.

The injury has left Sean impossibly disfigured, and he describes looking up to Conan the Barbarian, the ripped warrior whose fantastic adventures surely played a role in Darnielle’s own adolescence. "He was my model," Sean says, and when he closes his eyes—here, Darnielle does the same while reading and nearly shivers—he can picture himself as Conan, his body no longer limp, his hair no longer scabrous and clumped. The short passage is filled with aphorisms that, with a little musical tweaking, could pass for whispered anthems in Mountain Goats songs: "I have a theory that the less you say when someone dies, the better"; "Some things you practice a few times, but it doesn’t make it any easier". In just a few minutes, Darnielle has described complicated family dynamics, escapist fantasies, and in the most effortless part, a second-person narration of a sequence in Trace Italian, the game that Sean’s invented. It’s compelling, and leaves little doubt that Wolf in White Van is the work of a real writer, not a well-connected blog star. When he’s done, he disappears from the stage—if he stays for long to mingle with his fans, I don’t see it.

After the reading, I catch up with Alexis—the ardent clapper with the Mountain Goats shirt and the ticket lasso. When I ask her why she’s such a fan, her answer gives me goosebumps. "There’s so many songs and so much to enjoy," she says, "but I’m a two-time cancer survivor, and blasting ‘This Year’ got me through it." This is what Rowell was talking about, how Darnielle’s songs have a way of speaking from inside you in times of need. When the raffle begins, Alexis waits anxiously to see if she’s won. Every ticket is called without recognition, to her disappointment… but the final prize, a galley of the novel, is won by her friend. Like the pleasure of his music, I can only assume they’ll share it.

On the latest Pitchfork Podcast, host Corban Goble talks with Pitchfork editor-in-chief Mark Richardson about L.A.-via-Florida indie rock outfit Hundred Waters' The Moon Rang Like A Bell, which was recently awarded Best New Music. Listen below or via the Pitchfork Weekly app. 

Shake Appeal is a column that highlights new garage and garage-adjacent releases. This week, Evan Minsker's been spending a lot of time thrashing to Zig Zags' cartoonishly menacing and awesomely heavy self-titled LP, out next week via In the Red. To mark the album's release, the band have shared a guest list via email. Also, a brief appreciation of the Dishrags reissue.

Photo by Denée Petracek

Perfect Day

Jed Maheu: Get up late, hang out with my girlfriend and my dog, play guitar, get drunk, watch Netflix.

Patrick McCarthy: Watching a "Roseanne" marathon on Logo TV.

Favorite Old Record

JM: We just got a van to tour around in and all that shit and it has a tape deck so I bought a bunch of tapes and one of them is a Diamond Head compilation and it’s like perfect “van music.”

PM: Cock Sparrer's Shock Troops. Always.

Dream Merch Table Item

JM: We already had beef jerky that we made ourselves so that was rad. I think we really wanna do sweatpants now. Nobody steal that idea.

PM: One of those coke mirrors from the local county fair. In the 90s I had a Guns N' Roses one and a weird stoner eagle one. I didn't know they were for coke back then but I picked up on some serious nefarious vibes.

Favorite 7" From the Past Year

PM: Black Bananas' "Physical Emotions"

Favorite Album From the Past Year

JM: If reissues count I say Iron Claw. If not all our buddies: the Shrine, Fuzz etc.

PM: A comp called Orange Cloud Nine that draws from these 1980s LPs by this Dutch bedroom rocker named Spike. Weird pop songs with a slight Island vibe, groove box drum machine, shredding guitar and sorta detached vocals.

Favorite Recent Band

JM: The Meatbodies fucking slayed at SXSW. I really dug OBN IIIs there too. They aren’t new but I had never seen them. They rule live. Ex-Cult was rad, J.C. Satan was rad. Fucking Protomartyr and fucking Power Trip. I don’t know how new all these dudes are I just finally saw them. Oh Satan’s Satyrs is rad too.

PM: Radkey. Best recent band name too.

Best Recent Show

JM: Meatbodies at SXSW, Slayer at the Palladium ripped. I have a friend who lives up in Hollywood hills and we climb on top of this mountain and can hear the shows at Hollywood Bowl. Bobby and I went up there and listened to Black Sabbath and then Dwyer from Thee Oh Sees and I were up there listening to Journey couple weeks back.

PM: Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois playing Wrecking Ball at the Wiltern in LA.

Favorite Drink

JM: Gin and Tonic. Beer makes me kinda sleepy and whiskey makes me really mean and gin turns me into a weird gay Southern gentleman.

PM: Vodka with ice and any sort of mixer.

Favorite Breakfast Food

JM: Bacon. I do a lot of smoked meats. Bobby and I had a short-lived BBQ team. We made our own bacon and own smoked sea salt. Ultimately it took up too much time when we shoulda been practicing and working on songs.

PM: A smoothie?

Recommended Reading

JM: Rickles Book by Don Rickles. Every chapter is just two pages long and the whole time he is setting you up for the punchline!

Nileism: The Strange Course of The Blue Nile by Allan Brown and The Disposable Skateboard Bible by Sean Cliver.

Ideal Environment for Hearing the New Zig Zags Album

JM: I think a van is cool or just driving in general. I think work is good too cause there is some funny shit on there that will help alleviate the stress and also some like smash stuff shit where when you get outta work you’re all like “fuck yea I can handle this shit just need some beer and cigarettes and turn it up!”

PM: Ideally, the album dubbed over your sister's INXS Kick tape, blasting from a boombox while you drink Schlitz and canoe on a lake in the year 1987. Either by yourself or with a group of 1-4 people.

One Record Everyone Should Own

JM: Love's Forever Changes

PM: Godley & Creme Cry 12" single.

Favorite Record Store

JM: Permanent Records!

PM: Permanent Records, Los Angeles.

Favorite Professional Wrestler

JM: I used to really like the Great Muta when I was a kid. He would spit this green mist in the other wrestlers' faces. Now most of the dudes are pretty boring. I still subscribe to WWE Network though. It’s a good deal.

PM: For weirdness alone, I.R.S.! The dude was some buff accountant who had serious beef with the Undertaker.

---

The Dishrags: Three [Supreme Echo]

If you don't know already, it's time to familiarize yourself with the Dishrags. They were an all-female punk trio from Vancouver who opened for the Clash and Ramones. They never released a full-length, but this collection of unreleased recordings from 1978-1979 shows a band that deserved a lot more attention than what they initially got. In addition to the comp's 14 unreleased tracks, it comes with their first single and a few rare tracks that appeared on other compilations. If you want to learn more about the band's history, you can consult the 16-page booklet that's packaged with the LP. 

Illustration by Joy Burke 

Every four years, the World Cup swallows the world whole, and on June 12, the Brazilian World Cup begins in São Paolo. Historically, FIFA's globe-hopping event has inspired the world's musicians to commemorate the tourney in official—and unofficial—capacities, resulting in some of captivatingly brilliant and gleefully strange music. As the Cup approaches, Pitchfork contributors have singled out some of the most memorable World Cup-related songs, featuring tracks by New Order, Lightning Seeds, Fat Les, Toni Braxton, Daryl Hall, and many more. 

The Village People and Die Deutsche Fußballnationalmannschaft: “Far Away in America” (1994) (full version)

In 1994, an executive at the German Football Association presumably decided to undertake a little intercontinental bridge building in advance of that year’s World Cup, which was held in these United States. Searching for some hot young talent from across the Atlantic to pair with the team, they somehow twirled their filofax and landed on the Village People, whose last U.S. hit was 1979's thematically disastrous “Ready for the 80’s”. Sadly, neither the 80s or the 90s were ready for the Village People, and nor were Die Deutsche Fußballnationalmannschaft, judging by the looks on the players’ faces in the accompanying video.

Watching soccer players appear in music videos is a unique study in terror. These are athletes at the top of their game, usually so confident and assured. But as soon as that camera rolls a cardboard-like stiffness sets in, all the face muscles tense up, and the only movement they’re capable of is a rigid side-to-side shuffle. Look closely, though, and you’ll see an exception to the rule here: Jürgen Klinsmann and his tousled blonde locks, bouncing away in a carefree manner, seemingly at ease with this whole “America” thing and perhaps even inspired by the Village People’s clunky nationalist browbeating. Where is Klinsmann these days? He’s about to lead out the USA team as head coach at this summer’s tournament. I like to think that somewhere, right now, he’s firing up that video and getting riled up like it’s ‘94 all over again. —NICK NEYLAND

Lightning Seeds: "Three Lions '98" (1998)

Though the Lightning Seeds’ bummed soccer ode “Three Lions” was originally crafted in 1996 (to memorialize Gareth Southgate’s penalty miss that kept England out of the European Cup Final) the World Up edition “Three Lions ‘98” was the one I heard first and the version that continues to resonate with me most. Even before you trace the song’s ascension into a full-blown phenomenon, “Three Lions ‘98” is a flat-out great Britpop song, containing such catchy clusters of hooks and a soaring chorus whose transformation into a stadium chant was less a stroke of luck than a matter of time. (Personally, as someone who is possibly too emotionally connected to the their favorite teams' outcomes, the whole "No plans for final day/ Stay in bed, drift away" thing.... BEEN THERE.)

Though the universe of “Three Lions ‘98” operates under sunnier skies—Ian Broudie and Co. recast the song with a “things are going to be different this time!” optimism as opposed to the original’s dour, so-it-fucking-goes worldview—the video is where you feel the song’s energy coming through. Broudie and co-writers Frank Skinner and David Baddiel hit the raining streets, basking in a new confidence as they talk shit and challenge a group of German supporters to a parking lot pickup game.

Football did not come home that year; England got bumped in the round of 16 in penalties, in a similar fashion to the way they exited the European Championships two years prior. (The new “Three Lions”, though, fared better by reaching #1 on the UK chart). Football, it turns out, wasn't "coming home" that year, but in this case, that's just unecessary context that spoils an otherwise spotless song.—CORBAN GOBLE

Il Divo and Toni Braxton: "Time of Our Lives" (2006)

In the summer of 2006, I was 17 years old and there were few things I enjoyed more than getting drunk and gyrating with other teenagers against a backdrop of loud pop music. So you can imagine my disappointment when FIFA unveiled a slow, melodramatic ballad as the official anthem of the 2006 World Cup. “The Time of Our Lives” was an international, multi-genre collaboration between 90s R&B star Toni Braxton and Il Divo, Simon Cowell’s operatic pop boy band, that managed to drag on in both English and Spanish despite the tournament being held in Germany that year.

“The Time of Our Lives” tried to be too many things for too many people, and in doing so only succeeded in becoming one of the least inspirational World Cup songs. It takes almost two minutes before we hear anything but Braxton’s airy voice, only to be joined by three non-native Spanish speakers singing in Spanish (and one native speaker, who definitely should’ve vetoed lyrics like "It is the passion to succeed"). In any case, I'm guessing the number of players who listened to this song before any game that year was approximately zero.

As the song FINALLY starts to pick up in the last thirty seconds, an ill-conceived fireworks display coupled with Braxton’s barely mid-thigh dress ends up revealing the better part of Braxton’s lower-half, and she doesn’t even flinch. I remember my teenage self taking note of her graceful recovery and ability to pretend like no one had seen any of this happen, and I guess that same logic could be applied to several soccer game scenarios. So thank you, Toni, for the small life lesson in an otherwise truly unremarkable song.—ALLISON MCCANN

Daryl Hall: "Gloryland" (1994)

We live in an age of American soccer enlightenment. Our domestic league is alive and well; Landon Donovan is trending on Twitter. But for the vast majority of the United States in 1994, soccer existed in a foreign compartment—the same one where the population kept thoughts of, say, Ravi Shankar, right up until he actually came to play in their town. Soccer was something the others did, but now they were going to do it here. 

So we responded by welcoming them. To the not-so-humbly-named "Gloryland". 

“Believe in what you do/ And you've the strength to see it through/ On the road to Gloryland”. Daryl Hall forcefully guts out. The implicit meaning: After a long qualification process in some (probably) repugnant shithole, now players, their fans, their nation can finally set their focus on The Greatest Country In The World. 

Of course, Gloryland hosted the World Cup not because of its soccer passion, but because of its flair for manufacturing mass appeal (the 1994 World Cup is still the best-attended in history). Hit machine Daryl Hall may have been tapped to sing this song for a similar reason; the “It’s in your heart/It’s in your hands” line in the chorus comes off as incredibly tone-deaf in a sport that specifically forbids the use of hands. Where most World Cup anthems emphasize world unity or, at the very least, some mode of celebration, Hall’s four-and-a-half minute dirge comes off as one big, overwrought “Look at America!” Hall performed it in 1994’s similarly-extravagant opening ceremony, which also featured Diana Ross taking a penalty kick on a fake goal. Like “Gloryland”, her effort went well wide of the mark. —ALEX ABNOS

Fat Les: "Vindaloo" (1998)

Through the mid-to-late ’90s, I was an ardent Anglophile—an easy thing to be in Toronto, given its large English-expat population, bounty of record stores stocked with the latest U.K. imports, and a popular Saturday-night dance party boasting the nom de mod Blow Up. But even while spending an inordinate amount of my fledgling-freelancer’s income on $15 import copies of Select magazine and zip-up tennis jackets, I could never abide by the footie fandom that would inspire fellow Brit enthusiasts to wake up at obscenely early hours on weekends to watch Man United matches at local pubs. To me, sports and indie rock were ideological opposites, yet the North American appreciation of Britpop always seemed to be intertwined with an equally fervent embrace of the country’s soccer-lad culture. (Do British fans of Nirvana and Mudhoney stay up into the wee hours watching satellite broadcasts of Monday Night Football?) And of all major profressional sports, the appeal of soccer mystified me the most... like, how was an infamous tradition of hooliganism and rioting ever inspired by a game that puttered about aimlessly for two hours and always seemed to be tied at 1-1?

In June of 1998, I embarked upon a post-graduation backpack trip through the U.K., for purely music-nerd reasons: attend my first Glastonbury festival; walk down the Berwick Street record-store row that appears on the cover of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?; spend half a day scouring the streets of Cardiff to track down the Super Furry Animals’ fabled Acid Casuals boutique. But from my first tube ride from Heathrow, I was reminded that I had unwittingly wandered in to the eye of World Cup season: A group of young preteen girls at the back of the train car were loudly singing in unison, “Vindaloo! Vindaloo! Vindaloo!” I had never heard the song before, yet I knew exactly what it was: the new soccer-themed single from Fat Les, a supergroup of sorts featuring Alex from Blur and the drug dealer from Trainspotting (now better known as Lily Allen’s dad) that I had skimmed over in the NME, but did not investigate further. Over the next three weeks, that one-word, curry-spiced chorus followed me around England like it was my own personal Benny Hill theme song—in pubs, in record stores, in impromptu singalongs by packs of drunkards sloshing through the sodden fields of Glastonbury.

But it wasn’t until I saw the video that I realized “Vindaloo” was not just some yobbo clarion call, but a glorious piss-take of everything that Britain held dear: nationalism, superiority, tea-drinking (and, at the time, Verve videos). In lieu of a patriotic pledge to the crown, we have a rallying cry named for a cheap take-out dish popularized by England’s largest visible minority. Instead of a parade of Beckham-ian superhuman athletes, we get a multicultural circus of walk-of-shamed prostitutes, baby-powdered sumo wrestlers, and the future stars of Little Britain with arrows and cleavers stuck in their heads. And yet, by reducing the vaguely valorious platitudes of so many other World Cup songs to pure, petty oneupmanship (“We’re gonna score/ One more than you!”) and schoolyard-grade “na na na” taunts, “Vindaloo” ultimately dismantled my philosophical fallacy that sports and rock‘n’roll fandom were incompatible. As the song proves, the defining qualities of both pastimes—illogical tribalism, public intoxication, and making an obnoxious racket—are really one and the same.—STUART BERMAN

Weezer: "Represent" (2010)

Shakira: "Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)" (2010)

Shakira’s Official FIFA Song for the 2010 South Africa World Cup, ”Waka Waka (Song for Africa)”, is a somewhat culturally tone-deaf number, and also the eighth most-watched YouTube video of all time. It’s colorful and catchy, in a way that if you’re not expressly looking for the cultural THIS IS AFRICA misappropriations scattered throughout, you just might get swept up in the fun. They got a blue-jean-bedecked Messi wearing a lion print t-shirt to kick a ball in the video! That counts as activism right? Nothing I could tell you right now could diminish the popularity of this song. It's a really fucking popular song.

Though the video’s message is clumsy, its heart (and its soca rhythm) is in the right place. “Waka Waka” samples “Zangaléwa”, a hit by the Cameroonian group Golden Sounds and pays homage to Surinam-Dutch outfit Trafassi, which is as deep as something like this can probably go and still win over a conference call. The power and reverberation of "Waka Waka" is such that Shakira's new World Cup song, "LaLaLa", is the the most popular song from this year's World Cup compilation album, despite not being chosen as the offical song or the official anthem.

The people have spoken. The people want Shakira.—CORBAN GOBLE

Ennio Morricone: “El Mundial” (1978)

The 1978 World Cup was an odd tournament, with a lone Scotsman showing the Netherlands how to really play total football, defending World Champions West Germany getting knocked out by Austria, and hosts Argentina facing accusations of dirty tactics by purposefully delaying the final. It may also be the only final largely played on a bed of confetti. Like I said, it was a weird Cup.

Another unusual occurrence was the selection of a film composer to come up with the official song—a good idea, but one FIFA has rarely returned to since. Ennio Morricone, busy elsewhere recording the soundtrack to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven that year, came up with a somber piece that fills exactly none of the criteria you’d expect from a tournament song: it’s not lively, or inspiring, or in any way joyous. What were you thinking, Ennio? Instead, it sounds like a scrap from one of Morricone’s spaghetti western scores that he’d twirled around his fork and let slip onto the studio floor. "El Mundial" was a thrill for aficionados of his work, but not much use if you’re a Mexico fan stuck on the terraces in Rosario, desperately searching for inspiration while watching your team get soundly beaten by Tunisia. —NICK NEYLAND

Pitbull: "We Are One (Ole Ola)" [ft. Jennifer Lopez and Claudia Leitte] (2014)

Something important to remember about the World’s Biggest Event: With all the money changing hands and flowing into FIFA execs' Swiss Bank accounts (and to referrees accused of fixing matches), some of the biggest worldwide conglomerates set up sponsorships to invest in the massive take from the Cup. When I was in Johannesberg and other cities in South Africa for 2010’s Cup, I was able to partake in the local food and the (very bad) domestic beer everywhere I went except for the confines of the grounds, where it was all Budweiser, Frito Lay, and lamb hot dogs from a faceless kosher conglomerate that I can’t remember the name of. (You could buy 20 beers at a time if you wanted though. I remember a group of English supporters who would buy a crate of beer, haul it back to the bleachers, and then return to fill up the empty crate.)

So, if you’re a corporation (say, Coca-Cola) funding a song that’s designed from the top-down to be a global hit, you tend to make safe, uncontroversial choices. This year the suits hit up proven anthem-makers Pitbull and J. Lo to create the whistling pump-up jam “Ole Ola” (no matter that neither have ties to Brazil), which is catchy as something this calculated could be. The song/branding opportunity's string-pullers brought in Brazilian star Claudia Leitte to give the song a measure of authenticity. It's uplifting, in a kind of scientific way.

For this Cup, listening to "Ole Ola" feels like peering into a fantasy. The dark clouds of Brazilian unrest or the smoke from the human rights catastrophe at the 2022 World Cup Qatari site have no place in the golden, we-are-one world of 2014’s Official World Cup song. All that "Ole Ola" has to say is that, in eyes of the biggest companies of the world, the FIFA World Cup and the bottom line are one.—CORBAN GOBLE

New Order: “World in Motion” (1990)

England’s efforts at providing a rousing song to send their boys off into battle had reached a nadir by the time New Order were contacted to provide “World in Motion” in 1990. The dreary official team song for the 1982 tournament, “This Time (We’ll Get It Right)”, even has a vague air of depression hanging over it—you can hear the sound of defeat sagging from the players’ voices. But by 1990 Bernard Sumner and his band were guzzling as much ecstasy as they could get their hands on, making them the perfect choice to provide a spirited anthem for the team, even if their desire to call the track "E for England" was sadly vetoed by the stuffy English Football Association.

With actor (and Lily’s dad) Keith Allen on board for his first venture into a mini-career writing these things, New Order mostly ignored the conventional team-effort approach to soccer songs, instead crafting a track in the lineage of their classic pop material (“Bizarre Love Triangle”, “True Faith”) with a few sporting touches thrown in. Until, that is, you get to the infamous rap provided by Liverpool player John Barnes, a man who looks and sounds paralyzed by fear in the video, as you might expect from someone required to deliver lines like: “catch me if you can/’cause I'm the England man."

Fortunately for Barnes, England’s exit in the semi-final of the tournament will be remembered as a far more painful experience than his mercifully brief musical career. —NICK NEYLAND

K'naan: "Wavin' Flag" (2010)

Entering the third group game of the 2010 World Cup, South Africa needed a win against France, a Mexico or Uruguay loss, and a goal differential swing of at least five in its favor to advance to the Round of 16. Lloyd Christmas had a better chance than the hosts. Except, weirdly, suddenly, Bafana Bafana had a shot at life beyond the group stage. In the 20th minute at Free State Stadium in Bloemfontein, Bongani Khumalo put the home team up 1-0. Katlego Mphela doubled the advantage in the 37th.

As he scored, three friends and I stood in the meat isle of grocery store near Hartbeespoort Dam, 90 minutes north of Johannesburg. The place erupted, clerks high-fiving patrons, stock boys no longer bothering even to pretend they were putting goods on shelves. Wide smiles everywhere, ours included. While my memory's a little fuzzy from the excitement, I'm fairly confident that K'naan was playing his World Cup anthem in the cereal isle while the entire store focused on a 24-inch television above a register.

Talk about how soccer brings people/communities/countries/[insert a group] together is mostly bullshit, correlation not equaling causation or just plain lazy. Too often, there's no great revelation. Just as there would be no great advancement surprise for South Africa. But individual moments can really matter. You learn that you don't need a miracle to wave your flag. Or, while we're here, another country's.—NOAH DAVIS

Vangelis: "Anthem" (2002)

As an Englishman, my abiding memory of the 2002 World Cup is of England goalkeeper David Seaman sluggishly leaping into the air, his arms flailing, his large ponytail flapping, as a shot from Brazil’s Ronaldinho arched over his head and into the goal. The hurt in Seaman’s eyes was haunting, but not as haunting as “Anthem” by Vangelis, the improbable choice of official song by whomever it is who gets to decide these things. The Greek composer, born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, helped trigger a wanton overuse of the term “dystopian future” with his Blade Runner soundtrack, but he wasn’t a total outlier in this field. Vangelis composed the music for the 2000 Olympics, although whether the tournament organizers were familiar with his double album opus with Aphrodite's Child, 666 (The Apocalypse of John, 13/18), remains unclear. Sadly, there was to be no repeat of that record’s "∞", which features the sound of a woman simulating orgasm. Instead, we got something akin to his Chariots of Fire work, with “Anthem” pegged as a slow-build piece that moves from forlorn sighs to orchestral bursts so mercurial it feels like a celestial being is about to descend down to Earth. Which is probably the kind of intervention holders France were hoping for when they were humiliated with a first round exit from the tournament. —NICK NEYLAND

Lonnie Donegan: "World Cup Willie" (1966)

R. Kelly: "Sign of a Victory" (2010)

You can virtually see the white board that begat R. Kelly's 2010 World Cup Anthem, with phrases like "chant," "anthem," "uplifting," "mention of a flag" and "soulful local choir" strewn about. So here we find Kelly on his "I Believe I Can Fly", singing the shit out of generic plesantries like "I can see the colors of the rainbow" and "I see the light at the end of the tunnel." (Personal favorite: "You open your eyes to global warming." So I guess Ford wasn't in on this one!)

And yet, despite how heavy-handed and on-the-nose "Sign of a Victory" is, it's absolutely and undeniably effective. Where Shakira's South Africa imagery felt forced and fake, R. Kelly strolling around Soweto and singing from rooftops seems... joyful? Natural? It's probably not, but such is the effect of the "Sign of a Victory."

I attended the Opening Ceremony in Soccer City, and before the opening game between Mexico and host South Africa kicked, R. Kelly performed "Sign of a Victory" in something that looked full chainmail. It might have been the fact that I was in that stadium, among South Africans and international tourists that had fantasized about this moment for eight years, blowing the now-banned vuvezelas like goddamn fiends, but Kelly's performance felt genuinely moving.—CORBAN GOBLE

Ricky Martin: "The Cup of Life" (1998)

If World Cup songs are ever given their own textbook—and universe willing, they someday will be—Ricky Martin's 1998 smash "The Cup of Life" would be the standard-bearer for the whole genre. It has everything you look for in a World Cup song. A giant, soaring chorus. A rhythm and horns section going absolutely batshit as they maniacally pound out a mambo beat. A sheet of lyrics that starts with the word "Ole!" and builds from there. A mysterious bubble-icious Europop trance that strings the whole thing together. Ricky screams: "Do you really want it?!" Did we ever have a choice?—CORBAN GOBLE

Photo by Ari Marcopoulos

When Adam “MCA” Yauch passed away two years ago, people mourned him as an artist and a human while also taking the opportunity to celebrate the group he belonged to, the Beastie Boys. It was obvious to most that there could be no Beasties without Yauch—and last week that was officially confirmed, when the New York Daily News reported that the two surviving members of the group would never again release music under that name.

The news is, of course, another sad reminder of MCA’s passing; it also means that their 2011 album, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, will be the final Beastie Boys LP. And that record—for my money, their best since 1994’s Ill Communication—is a great way to go out: a resurgence and celebration of everything that defined the group, from their high-octane goofiness to their forward-thinking approach to beat music to their roles as ambassadors for the city they loved.

The Beasties released just three albums in the 21st century, and only two with lyrics. The first, their post-9/11 album To The 5 Boroughs, sounds a bit dated now. On that record, the Beasties celebrate New York as if from afar. Their fun sounds forced, the music stripped-down, safe—this from a band that had been getting ever closer to its hardcore roots and making left-field explorations into jazz and funk. The album is an incredible cultural artifact, but the group doesn’t sound like itself (a fact they‘ve come to terms with.) 5 Boroughs is best understood today as an emblem of a wounded city, a call for solidarity that felt necessary at the time of its release.

There’s a quote from Jonathan Lethem about artists who get stuck in a single identity, declaring, “'I’m this kind of artist’—and then living inside the stiffening armor of that proposition for the rest of their career.” The Beastie Boys didn’t quite avoid this plight, but the identity they chose as New York Artists almost always left room for growth. And so, when the monochrome period that produced To the 5 Boroughs had passed, the Beasties struck back, first with their instrumental record, The Mix-Up, and then with Hot Sauce Committee Part Two.

The latter was a full-fledged return to form. The first thing that strikes you as a listener is just how heavy it is; it sounds like them, but it also sounds new, an updated version of Ill Communication’s progressive funk that’s both bass-heavy and energetic. The album is diverse but cohesive, and the fact that it's one of the few wholly self-produced Beasties records makes its technical expertise all the more impressive. Originally planned as the second part of a double release, it was delayed by Yauch’s illness. But the extra time allowed the Beasties to record more tracks, and to prune the weaker cuts from the record.

There are cues from earlier hits: “Make Some Noise” is a callback to fighting for your right to party, and “Let It Out” has a lot of shared DNA with“Sabotage”. But there are also the sweet little bites of novelty that we’ve always expected from the Beasties: the rap chops and playfulness on “OK”, the experimental, dubby lo-fi of “Tadlock’s Glasses”, the perfect summer brass on the Santigold collaboration “Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win”. 

That collaboration is just one of two on the album; the other features Nas. Two New Yorkers: one representing Queens, the other, the Lower East Side. One from an older musical generation, the other, current. It’s unforced symbolism, serendipitous, yet hardly coincidental. The diversity of the album required those two voices, just as it required the same kind of genre mash-up that the Beasties pioneered. And just as it required the closer, which now serves as a fitting coda to the group’s entire career, “The Lisa Lisa/Full Force Routine”. The track is a fifty second tribute to one of the innumerable musical acts that informed the Beastie Boys, and its closing lyrics double as their ethos:

"Full (Full) Force (Force)
Lisa Lisa, Cult Jam
All (all) night (night)
Listening to dope man
You could (you could) say (say)
Yes, we're looking pretty (pretty)
Money (money) making (making)
New York City"

The second wind that Pharrell's career has recently experienced has been a pleasurable occurrence in the monoculture, but the surprise of his latest career renaissance has only been matched by its harmlessness. Compared to the bubblegum-snapping weirdness of the music he made earlier in his career, Pharrell's in a safer place now, in that his recent work could be considered "club music" if you were attending a bat mitzvah that was being held in a club. When he recently sat down with Oprah to discuss his success, the talk-show doyenne showed him a compilation of videos from around the world set to his still-ubiquitous single "Happy". Overwhelmed, Pharrell started crying—and crying on TV with Oprah at your side is, if nothing else, a sign that you've truly made it.

The potential for Pharrell the Producer to become Pharrell the World-Conquering Solo Artist has never been more within the ageless-looking artist's reach, and the opportunity is clearly not lost on him. "I was the guy standing next to the guy," he said in the middle of his performance at last night's Apollo Theatre, a tie-in with American Express' previously dormant Unstaged concert series. "I got a chance to be here because you believed in me."

That's not the whole story: Press materials for Pharrell's recent solo album, G I R L, weren't shy in suggesting the record's genesis was a result of Columbia seeing dollar signs after hearing "Get Lucky" for the first time. A record with a host of other songs that ranged between "That'll do" and "No thanks," G I R L was evidence that, despite his considerable talents, Pharrell is just as content to do Just Enough to stay afloat musically. And indeed, his performance last night was a top-notch example of Just Enough: at 9:01 p.m., just one minute after the Spike Lee-directed livestream of the show was scheduled to start, Pharrell and his band took the stage, house lights on and house music blaring until it was abruptly cut off, and launched into things with most of the audience still taking their seats—an anticlimactic and somewhat awkward way for one of the most visible musicians of the moment to kick off a show at a legendary venue.

The 50-minute show that followed was a mix of G I R L cuts—roughly half the album was performed—and highlights from Pharrell's non-solo material that ranged from his verse on Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot", to his recent underrated Major Lazer collab "Aerosol Can", to a curiously "clean" version of N.E.R.D.'s "Lap Dance" that had a few white-tank-top bros in the audience thrashing about, albeit briefly. There were guest appearances from Busta Rhymes, who sported his best Cousin Skeeter haircut while performing "Pass the Courvoisier", and T.I., who came out and perfunctorily did his part on "Blurred Lines" before disappearing as awkwardly as he emerged. It certainly wasn't the collab-packed show that Coachella audiences were treated to just a few months ago, and even as a singular concert experience and considering the Apollo's comparatively modest size, the energy of the performance felt weirdly subdued; the constant presence of Lee's camera rigs provided further distractions from what was going on onstage, and made me wonder if I would've enjoyed the show more if I was watching it at home on my laptop.

Ironically, the show's most engaging moments occurred when there wasn't music at all. Pharrell is an exceptionally likable figure, even if he lacks the stage presence to classify him as a must-see performer, so his stage banter proved mildly entertaining as he sported a tattered jean jacket, a long beaded necklace, jeans with a bunch of trinkets hanging off the back, and yes, a green "Dudley Do-Right" hat. "You are now meeting all the different baes," he stated while introducing his crew of accompanying female dancers (two of which pull double duty as singers), adding with a total lack of subtlety that underlined his affable, kiddie-pool-deep persona, "Hashtag bae." After offering thanks to several individuals who played an integral role in his career—former manager Rob Walker, singer Tammy Lucas—he paused for a moment, and said, "I get too sensitive, so let me change the channel."

With G I R L, Pharrell made an attempt to engage with gender politics, however feeble it may have been; recent comments have shown that it's something he's continuing to wrestle on a public, surface-deep level, and so last night he spent ample time between songs paying tribute to the opposite sex. "I don't know about you guys, but I like different girls," he stated before launching into the stuffy "Marilyn Monroe". Later, he stated that "Women are not sitting down anymore" as a lead-up to a truncated version of Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl"—but not before unleashing one of the crassest corporate tie-ins I've ever seen directed towards the forever-ongoing issue of gender inequality: "When history changes, I'm gonna be on the right side of it with you—and so is American Express."

The glorified-loan-shark mega-corporation's branding for the event was, in actuality, somewhat subtle— the Apollo wasn't exactly emblazoned with reminders Not to Leave Home Without It—but Pharrell picked up the slack for them regardless. "Such great vision that company has," he stated in tribute to his corporate overlords. "Make some noise for American Express." The crowd obliged in such a way that it was hard to tell whether they were simply following instructions, or if they were all employees of American Express.

Complaining about corporate involvement in music culture circa 2014 is as effective as grousing about the weather—but Pharrell's insistence at over-shilling was enough to make a casual observer feel cynical (or, in the case of the audience members surrounding me, elicit nervous, confused laughter). It's important to remember, though, that even "Happy", that bastion of positivity that has quite possibly changed people's lives the same way perfect pop music has for decades, also helped sell one of the most successful animated major-studio films of last year. Pharrell is as capable of a pitchman as he is a producer, and as he barrels through 2014, the product he continues to sell most aggressively is himself—but if last night's performance was his latest pitch, it leaves me wondering if he whistled in the elevator beforehand.

Following a recent screening of We Are the Best!, a new masterpiece of punk-themed cinema, I had the opportunity to speak with its director, Lukas Moodysson. Since his 1998 debut film Show Me Love, the 45-year-old Swede has been renowned for celebrating young misfits, but We Are the Best! has been widely acknowledged as Moodysson's best film since 2000's Together. When he arrived in New York to promote it last month, though, tending to the concerns of journalists was not at the top of his list. "THE VERY FIRST THING I DID IN NEW YORK WAS: FIND THE BUILDING WHERE RIHANNA HAS AN APARTMENT," Moodysson wrote on his very active Tumblr, a collage of gifs and RiRi pics juxtaposed with quotes from the likes of Nietzsche and Miley Cyrus. Like another recent Swedish punk export, the young band Makthaverskan—who have made several appearances on his blog—Moodysson is an eternal teenager.

We Are the Best! is about two tough, hilarious, and skeptical-as-hell 13-year-old outcasts named Bobo and Klara. The setting is Stockholm in 1982—an era that, to our protagonists' disdain, has become properly New Wave. "He has betrayed punk," the outspoken, mohawked Klara declares at one point, of her older brother. "He only listens to Joy Division!" Isolated by their classmates, pissed at their gym teacher, and knowing that punk couldn't possibly be dead, the girls endeavor to channel their frustration and anti-conformist beliefs into a real punk band. Eventually, they recruit a fellow outcast named Hedvig (who can actually play guitar), hoping she'll ditch her devout Christianity and help them pull together their sound. There are hurdles to jump: The misogynist bullies in heavy-metal band Iron Fist, who dominate their youth center practice space; the adult men who insistently call them "a girl band." This only motivates Klara, Bobo, and Hedvig further. Their first song, which the actors impressively penned themselves, is an anti-mainstream rallying cry titled "Hate the Sport".

As documented by the Brookyln Academy of Music's recent "Punk Rock Girls" film series, We Are the Best! falls into a long tradition of femme-punk filmmaking à la Josie & the Pussy Cats and Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains. A film like this would require an outsider of a director, and as our following discussion reveals, Moodysson fits the role—the film was based on the 2008 autobiograpical graphic novel Never Goodnight penned by his wife Coco Moodysson. We Are the Best! is ultimately an ode to misfit camraderie, detailing the ways that music and friendship can still save the estranged among us. 

Pitchfork: How did you get into punk as a teenager?

Lukas Moodysson: I grew up in a small suburb outside of Malmö in the south of Sweden. If you felt a bit strange, there were not 10,000 different subcultures to choose from. Especially if you had some kind of rage inside you. There was just punk. And where I grew up, there were two of us. [laughs] It was me and my best friend. He's actually still my best friend. Or, my only friend. I don't have a lot of friends. We were the only punks. There were some who were older, but they were too tough—more masculine and aggressive, sort of drunk and destroying things. They seemed old, but they were just 15 or 16. Punk was extremely important for me, but for quite limited time, from ages 12 to 14. Then it changed to the Cure and that kind of music. Punk had a lot to do with anger. I felt I didn't fit in and all that.

Pitchfork: As a kid, what was the most important thing punk taught you?

LM: It taught me that you can do things without knowing how. I was into simple, handprinted fanzines—there were a lot of punk zines when I grew up. This was obviously before the internet. If you wrote something down, you could just print it and sell it for one dollar or something. That was very important. I remember going to some concert with Stiff Little Fingers, from Northern Ireland. I was 12, standing there and wanting to ask them some questions after the show. I never got the courage to ask, so I just stole other peoples' questions and wrote something down, and tried to publish a little fanzine with some guy I had met somewhere. A couple years later I started to read a lot, and was into poetry. That fanzine attitude stayed with me and I made a poetry fanzine, some kind of art thing. I think it came out three times. It's that attitude—you don't have to wait for someone's approval, you don't have to take a lot of lessons.

Pitchfork: What about the role of the teen outcast is important to you, and why do you think it's important to make misfits seem cool?

LM: First of all, it's a personal thing that corresponds, in some ways, to myself. I try to protect that inner teenager. That doesn't mean it takes over—I also am really happy to get older, and to get a little smarter, and I don't want to be a teenager—but I'm trying to protect that person inside of me who is open to things, and looking at things, and responding immediately and actively. A lot of grown-up people lose that. I have this theory that it comes back when you get really old, when you have lived your whole life. I am quite interested in old people. I remember my grandmother. Life gets sort of like—suddenly, it's a wonderful joy just to see the sun get up. That kind of openness is what I'm interested in.

At the same time, there is a feeling of some adult responsibility to talk to young people. I feel like I'm part of a Swedish or maybe Scandinavian tradition of taking children and young people seriously. Young people suffer in the world. Just some weeks ago, a girl I knew committed suicide. It should have been her 16th birthday on May 6. It's a difficult world to grow up in, and there are a lot of these young people out there. I'm not saying that I am Jesus and I'm going to save them, but there's a lot of culture in this world that is very negative, and dark, and heavy. It feels sometimes that someone should say something happy as well—that it's going to be okay, it's going to be fine; there are possibilities, and life gets better.

There is a scene in the film where Bobo is sad because she has thrown up all over these records at a party. She says, "Nothing in my life is going right." And Klara says, "You have a friend that really likes you. You even have two friends who really like you." I mean, that is a luxury. To have one friend is actually enough sometimes. But two friends? That is a fantastic thing.

Pitchfork: There's another scene in the film where Klara and Bobo are in the practice room at the youth center, playing their instruments for the first time. They had just been mockingly called "the prettiest girls in town" by some bullies. When they get in the practice room, Klara is hitting the bass and screaming, "The prettiest girls in town!" To me, that is so exemplary of what punk really is—having no technical idea what you're doing and just being very direct. Was there a scene that you felt was especially important in that sense?

LM: When I was making the film, I was listening to a song that is not very punk at all. It's by Morrissey, called "Sing Your Life". He sings about how you should step up to the microphone and name all the things you love, and name all the things you hate. It's that kind of direct approach—it's very touching and moving and also very true. Unfortunately punk wasn't really full of people who stepped up to the microphone and talked about things they loved. It was mostly what they hated. [laughs]

That's why I kept in the scene where they're walking on the street, and they find these big bags full of some kind of trash. They need to bring it home and find out what it is. It was important that they are so curious. It was something I discuseed with Mira Grosin, who plays Klara—she felt it was a really bad scene. [laughs] "What's this scene doing in this film? It's stupid, nothing happens." But that was very much the way I remembered growing up. You found something and brought it home. I'm not sure if young people do that as much these days because you have everything in your computer. I remember walking aimlessly on the streets, and you would get happy if you found an old shoe or something. That is also some kind of punk attitude: walking around, looking for something, not knowing what, finding something, and being really happy if you found not one shoe, but two shoes, and then you put them on, and they might not look punk, but at least you found them somewhere. [laughs]

Pitchfork: It's like relying on yourself to create your own fun.

LM: Exactly.

Pitchfork: Over the past few years, at least in America, there has been a resurgence of interest in riot grrrl and punk-feminism from the 90s. You started writing We Are the Best! before that, but were conscious of it? 

LM: Not really. I like a lot of American music and culture, but for me, growing up, "U.S." and "punk" didn't match. We never listened to American punk except maybe Dead Kennedys, but they were a bit exotic. It was only about Swedish music and British music. So, the Clash. Everything American was seen with a little skepticism. I have nothing negative to say about the movement that came 10 years later, but it wasn't something I related to a lot. It was funny that, by coincidence, Pussy Riot was in Russia at the same time that I was writing this. Pussy Riot was really taking some kind of punk to an extreme. They've done some interesting things; I've read a lot about them. At the same time, I have this feeling that political protest should stay out of churches [laughs] because I'm a bit religious. Of course, I didn't think they should go to jail. It's really good that they protest against Putin because of course he's crazy.

Pitchfork: I feel like We Are the Best! could be a part of this conversation surrounding Pussy Riot, the resurgence of riot grrrl, and current punk-feminism.

LM: At the same time, We Are the Best! is about people who are very young. They have a lot of strong ideas, but they don't really have any ideologies. They don't have an agenda of what they want. They have a lot of things they are against instinctively. I actually wrote a lot of other scenes, which are in the book, but didn't fit into the film. We would have to make a TV series to find room for everything. They were quite anti-porn and breaking windows of a porn shop, or trying to, but failing, of course. 

Pitchfork: There's a scene where Klara and Bobo are considering asking Hedvig, who is a Christian but also clearly an outsider, to be in the band. And they go, "It would be political of us to hang out with her." It's hilarious, but also shows how punks and alternative-minded people can be so self-important.

LM: They say they'll kick her out of the band if she doesn't stop believing in god. Alternative groups can be very un-alternative.

Pitchfork: Your 10-year-old daughter plays the role of Hedvig's younger sister in the film. What did she think of it?

LM: She felt it was funny. She's the person in my family who is most outgoing; she wants to be an actress and a superstar, and she has a lot of friends. All the others have been a bit awkward at first. [laughs] While we were making that scene, she was looking with big eyes at these older girls. I think she was very impressed and felt they were really cool and had a fun attitude. Afterwards, driving home in the car, she was silent and thinking. And she said, "I want to be older." [laughs]

Pitchfork: Most Americans would probably think of pop like Robyn or Lykke Li when considering contemporary Swedish music. Who is the best Swedish punk band?

LM: Everybody would agree on Ebba Grön, but they were also the most successful. They have a lot of songs in the film. They are the best. The band split up, but the singer is still around. He sings in Swedish, but it's really good music. It's not punk at all—it's closer to Lykke Li than punk. Lykke Li's parents come from that sort of background. Her father played in a band.

Pitchfork: I read somewhere that Eminem is your hero.

LM: I really like Eminem as someone who stops at nothing, but my hero is actually Rihanna. 

Pitchfork: What about Rihanna is heroic to you?

LM: I was having a depressed time last summer, and I needed something to take me up again. I started listening to her instead of all this sad, lonely music I was listening to before. It was exactly what I needed. I get a bit tired of music or films that are only vulnerable. At the same time, I am really skeptical of music that is only about power or energy. She's capable of both—all the energy in her voice is vulnerable and strong. The combination of those two things is what I am always looking for in everything.