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Tomorrow X Together's Yeonjun to release new solo album in November
Music

Tomorrow X Together’s Yeonjun to release new solo album in November

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Tomorrow X Together‘s Yeonjun will reportedly be releasing a new album before the year’s end – find out more below.

  • READ MORE: Tomorrow X Together – ‘The Star Chapter: Together’ review: separate paths, shared destination

Per South Korean news outlet Soompi, the Tomorrow X Together member has been hard at work at a new solo album, and is currently overseas filming music videos. He is also reportedly actively involved in the album’s production cycle.

Big Hit Music has since confirmed in a statement that Yeonjun is indeed working on a new record: “Yeonjun is currently working on a solo album, targeting a November release.” A confirmed release date or other information surrounding the album have yet to be announced.

It will mark Yeonjun’s official solo debut album, having previously released the mixtape ‘GGUM’ in September last year.

Late last month, Yeonjun and TXT released ‘The Star Chapter: Together’, a collection of solo tracks from each member of the group. For his solo offering, Yeonjun released ‘Ghost Girl’, which was co-produced by Yungblud.

Tomorrow X Together’s ‘The Star Chapter: Together’ scored a four-star review from NME, with Rhian Daly writing: “Whether subtly or explicitly, as on ‘The Star Chapter: Together’, you can expect TXT to continue to emphasise and explore connection, and use it to form a bright spot in our dark world.”

Daly wrote of Yeonjun’s ‘Ghost Girl’ in the same review: “Yeonjun’s dub-infused, Yungblud-produced rock cut ‘Ghost Girl’, takes things to extremes, depicting a connection so strong, it’s all-consuming. “Darling, if I’m with you / I’ll walk through the dark,” he rasps. “So what if I’m crazy / I breathe because of you.”

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Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo Announce Album, Share Video for New Song: Watch
Music

Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo Announce Album, Share Video for New Song: Watch

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Chat Pile:

10-09 San Francisco, CA – The Fillmore #
10-10 Los Angeles, CA – The Fonda Theatre #
10-11 Los Angeles, CA – The Fonda Theatre #
10-13 Mesa, AZ – Nile Theater #
10-16 Oklahoma City, OK – Tower Theatre #
10-17 Austin, TX – Emo’s #
10-18 Dallas, TX – The Echo Lounge & Music Hall #
10-19 Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall – Downstairs #
10-21 Tampa, FL – The Orpheum #
10-22 Orlando, FL – The Beacham #
10-24 Charlottesville, VA – The Jefferson Theater #
10-25 Baltimore, MD – Baltimore Soundstage #
10-26 Washington, DC – 9:30 Club #
10-28 Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Steel #
10-29 Philadelphia, PA – Theatre of Living Arts #
10-31 Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club #
11-01 Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club #

# with Fleshwater

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Chat Pile: North America 2025 Tour

Hayden Pedigo:

08-27 London, England – Stranger Than Paradise
08-28 Manchester, England – St. Michael’s
08-29 Larmer Tree Gardens, England – End of the Road Festival
08-30 Cardiff, Wales – Clwb Ifor Bach
09-01 Dublin, Ireland – The Grand Social
09-02 Belfast, Ireland – The Deer’s Head
09-04 Glasgow, Scotland – Mono
09-05 Edinburgh, Scotland – St. Vincent’s Chapel
09-06 Newcastle upon Tyne, England – The Lubber Fiend
09-07 Leeds, England – The Attic
09-10 Aarhus, Denmark – Alter Festival
09-12 Berlin, Germany – Gretchen
09-13 Bochum, Germany – Die Trompete
09-14 Leffinge, Belgium – Leffingeleuren Festival
09-16 Laval, France – La Guinguette le 11-22
09-17 Lyon, France – Le Sonic
09-18 Milan, Italy – Arci Bellezza
09-19 Reggio Emilia, Italy – Acid Tank
09-21 Marseille, France – Le Molotov
09-22 Barcelona, Spain – Sala Upload
09-24 Lisbon, Portugal – Galeria Zé de Bois
09-25 Vigo, Spain – Radar Estudios
09-26 San Sebastian, Spain – Lugaritz K.E.
09-27 Bordeaux, France – Base Sous-Marine de Bordeaux
09-28 Paris, France – La Boule Noire
10-22 Albuquerque, NM – The Cell at Fusion
10-23 Colorado Springs, CO – Lulu’s Downtown
10-24 Denver, CO – Swallow Hill Music
10-26 South Salt Lake, UT – Parker Theatre
10-27 Boise, ID – Shrine Social Club
10-29 Portland, OR – Mississippi Studios
10-31 Seattle, WA – Ballard Homestead
11-01 Vancouver, British Columbia – Wise Hall
11-04 Santa Cruz, CA – The Crepe Place
11-05 San Francisco, CA – The Chapel
11-06 Pioneertown, CA – Pappy and Harriet’s
11-07 Los Angeles, CA – Barnsdall Gallery Theatre
11-08 Ojai, CA – Ojai Valley Woman’s Club
11-10 San Diego, CA – Casbah
11-11 Tucson, AZ – Pidgin Palace Arts
11-13 El Paso, TX – Lowbrow Palace
11-14 Marfa, TX – Ballroom Marfa
11-15 Austin, TX – Central Presbyterian Church
11-16 Houston, TX – White Oak Music Hall
11-17 Dallas, TX – Sons of Hermann Hall
11-19 Kansas City, MO – The Ship
11-20 Omaha, NE – Reverb Lounge
11-21 Minneapolis, MN – Icehouse
11-23 Chicago, IL – Sleeping Village
11-24 Indianapolis, ID – Turntable
11-26 Toronto, Ontario – The Great Hall
11-27 Montreal, Quebec – L’Escogriffe
11-29 Brooklyn, NY – St. John’s Lutheran Church
11-30 Philadelphia, PA – Black Squirrel Club
12-01 Washington, DC – Union Stage
12-03 Atlanta, GA – Masquerade
12-04 Nashville, TN – The Blue Room at Third Man Records
12-05 Memphis, TN – 1884 Lounge

Hayden Pedigo: USA 2025 Tour

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Nourished by Time: The Passionate Ones Album Review
Music

Nourished by Time: The Passionate Ones Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Midway through “BABY BABY,” a highlight of the excellent new Nourished by Time record, there is a sudden, descending synth swell, coupled with a delirious groan: Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby, baby! This refrain, “baby, baby,” is the centerpiece of the song, and up to now, it has been mellow: a muttered coo, spoken like a groggy lover. As a vocalist, Marcus Brown is dynamic and world-weary, his elastic range spanning the hope and heartbreak of life in a withering empire. Weightless as his music may sound, it is burdened by capitalist rot, which is what makes it wrenching—pinpointing the precise moment you realize, like many Americans, that you are fucked. This despair floods “BABY BABY,” and at this specific juncture, when he trades his mutter for a moan, it curdles into something agonizing. No longer tender, “baby, baby” becomes a cry for mercy: the tipping point between having everything and having it taken from you.

Brown, an outspoken 31 year old from Baltimore, makes music for the things our dystopia steals from us. The moniker “Nourished by Time,” which borrows from “Guided by Voices,” is a statement of process: a “reminder,” Brown explained last year, “that if you put your energy and put your love and heart into something, it has no choice but to bloom.” As in his music, there is a bleak subtext to this beautiful sentiment. Energy, love, and heart—human things—are incompatible with late-stage capitalism, a system where time is not nurtured, but ground, along with people, into profit. His debut, 2023’s Erotic Probiotic 2, had a mournful varnish, a memorial service for hopes crushed and dragged away on conveyor belts. On “Workers Interlude,” when he pleaded “Don’t make me wait so long,” it felt like a meta-commentary: For Black, working-class Americans, time may never arrive to nourish you at all.

The history of revolution, in America, is peppered with cries of Wait! Be patient with the system. Brown’s music is inextricable from this history, which almost makes “Nourished by Time” feel winking, sarcastic. The feeling is more biting than ever on The Passionate Ones, whose titular characters, weary of waiting, wrestle for their humanity in a dehumanizing era. Unlike Brown’s prior releases, The Passionate Ones renders oppression as materially grimy, earthbound, suffocating. Where Erotic Probiotic 2 was hypnagogic in spirit—drawing from ’80s pastiche, sports-television samples, echo-heavy harmonies—this LP foregrounds rawer, more physical elements, without sacrificing Brown’s booming, atmospheric textures. For a musician so adept at concocting dreamscapes, this renewed iteration of post-R&B, punk-tinged and apoplectic, feels bluntly anti-escapist, as if to say: No, this is not music to dissociate to. These times call for urgency.

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Spoon's Britt Daniel Talks New Songs, Next Album, Meeting McCartney
Music

Spoon’s Britt Daniel Talks New Songs, Next Album, Meeting McCartney

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Indie-rock heroes Spoon are back with two new songs. The Austin, Texas, band just surprise-released “Chateau Blues” and “Guess I’m Fallin’ In Love,” quintessential examples of the kind of sharp guitar bangers the band has been doing well for decades. It’s the first new music they’ve put out since their excellent 2022 album, Lucifer on the Sofa. That album was a potent return to straight-ahead, band-in-a-room rock after a couple records that leaned more into studio craft, and everything about their new music suggests their next album will continue in that vein. “The songs that we’ve done so far for the first half of the record are very rock-forward,” says frontman Britt Daniel. “They’ve been very extroverted-feeling.”

Daniel says “Chateau Blues” began as a “as a country bar-band sort of swing,” and then evolved into a driving rocker. “I had this vision one morning as I was waking up of ‘Chateau Blues’ as a rock song. So I rewrote it as a song led by a riff — same key, same lyrics, almost the same melody — but the riff gave it life, and we added that Topper Headon-esque machine-gun beat, and it was suddenly like, ‘OK, yeah, this is definitely the way the song is meant to be.’ It’s a song about a man in his self-imposed exile, written from the point of view of his Uber driver.”

“Guess I’m Fallin’ In Love,” which shares a title with an old Velvet Underground tune, is moodier and droney but no less catchy. “Musically, it’s sort of like a modal spaghetti-western-type thing,” Daniel says. “It has this sort of low, slightly evil vibe to it. It’s about being wary of falling in love, feeling a bit unsold on the idea even as you feel like it might be happening. It started with the framing story of One Thousand and One Nights for the starting point and I ran from that.”

The band has been dividing time between their longtime home base of Austin and drummer Jim Eno’s new home of Providence, Rhode Island, working with producer Justin Meldal-Johnsen (Beck, Nine Inch Nails, St. Vincent). Daniel says the album is about halfway done, and doesn’t have a release date or title yet. “If you went by what I’ve been listening to the most recently, it’s a cross between CCR and Jessica Pratt, but I don’t know if you hear that in those songs,” he says.

Editor’s picks

While almost everything they’ve done so far is upbeat, it’s not all tough guitar rock, particularly a slow song Daniel really likes called “Midnight Radio Stars.” “My mom told me we should write some ballads. So i got to it,” says Daniel. He notes that Flaming Lips producer Dave Fridmann, who produced a pair of Spoon records in the 2010s, gave him the same advice: “He suggested I write a song like ‘Are You Lonely Tonight.’ I don’t think it’s like that, but it’s cool. It’s a lovely song. We worked on it for two or three days and I got into that mood. I felt sultry by the end of it.”

Lucifer on the Sofa felt like a career capstone for Spoon, attaining nearly universal critical acclaim, making it into the Top Ten of the rock album charts, and notching a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album. Daniel says he found attending the Grammy ceremony itself “a bit stale,” adding, “It doesn’t feel like it’s made for anything other than the TV. They don’t sell drinks in the arena that night. It’s not a vibe.”

Still, the night did involve one memory he’ll be able to treasure for life. “We got to meet Paul McCartney,” he says. “We’d never never met him before. He came out and talked to us. I think someone told him there were some guys over there who want to meet you. But, you know, what can I say? The guy is 80-plus years old, and when we left the party, he was dancing. He’d been dancing all night and he was still dancing. It was really pretty magical to see.”

Along with releasing the new songs, Spoon are also kicking off a month-long tour with the Pixies, one of the all-time great indie-rock bands and a huge influence on Daniel growing up. “This is something I’m not jaded about at all,” he says of the chance to hi the road with his heroes. “When I was in the later years of high school and into college, the Pixies and the Velvet Underground were it. That was how I wanted to write songs. That was the peak of cool for me.”

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Both the Pixies and Spoon have enjoyed long, successful careers — the Pixies’ first record came out in 1987, Spoon made their debut in 1996. But it wasn’t always easy sledding for Spoon. In the Nineties, they were signed and quickly dropped by major label Elektra Records, and summed up the experience with a song called “The Agony of Lafitte” (famously named after their former A&R guy). In 2000, they were the subject of a classic Village Voice article about the perils of indie rock in its post-1990s-boom phase that made Spoon beloved underdogs to many music fans. The band bounced back and went on a run of great albums beginning with 2002’s Kill the Moonlight (Number 123 on Rolling Stone‘s 250 Best Albums of the 21st Century), and they’re still going stronger than ever today. Now, they’re one year away from celebrating their 30th anniversary.

“We hadn’t really hit our stride when that [Village Voice] article came out, but nobody really knew that at the time. We didn’t either,” Daniel says. “It’s always seemed like the right thing to do to make another record. Whenever we needed to take a break, we do. Maybe that’s it. And the break doesn’t need to be very long… Maybe we’re just fuckin’ well-adjusted.”

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Spoon Tour Dates With Pixies 

Aug. 26 — Santa Ana, CA @ Observatory SOLD OUT
Aug. 27 — San Diego, CA @ Gallagher Square
Aug. 28 — Berkeley, CA @ The Greek Theatre at UC Berkeley
Aug. 30 — Troutdale, OR @ McMenamins Edgefield
Aug. 30 — Bonner, MT @ KettleHouse Amphitheater
Sept. 2 — Morrison, CO @ Red Rocks Amphitheatre
Sept. 4 — Oklahoma City, OK @ The Zoo Amphitheatre
Sept. 5 — Austin, TX @ Moody Amphitheater
Sept. 6 — Houston, TX @ White Oak Music Hall
Sept. 8 — Birmingham, AL @ Avondale Brewing Company
Sept. 9 — Raleigh, NC @ Red Hat Amphitheater
Sept. 10 — Asheville, NC @ Asheville Yards
Sept. 12 — Pittsburgh, PA @ Stage AE
Sept. 14 — Asbury Park, NJ @ See.Hear.Now Festival
Sept. 15 — Chicago, IL @ The Salt Shed
Sept. 16 — St. Louis, MO @ Stifel Theatre  
Sept. 17 — Nashville, TN @ The Pinnacle
Sept. 19 — Atlanta, GA @ Shaky Knees Festival 2025
Sept. 20 — Atlanta, GA @ Center Stage SOLD OUT

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Water From Your Eyes: It’s a Beautiful Place Album Review
Music

Water From Your Eyes: It’s a Beautiful Place Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

As they did on 2021’s concise yet intricate Structure, Water From Your Eyes once again prove that three perfect songs is all that one side of an LP really needs. “Nights in Armor”—written for Amos’ This Is Lorelei and then reworked—shuttles between glinting, Sarah Records-caliber indie pop, metal-adjacent chugging, and atonal skronk; part grunge and part shoegaze, “Born 2” traverses an Escherian staircase of changing keys that summits repeatedly on a note of fist-pumping triumph. Lyrically, it might be the most straightforwardly political thing that they’ve written, but the meaning is as cryptic as ever. For all the song’s promise of limitless possibility (“Born to become/Something else/Something melts”), Brown repeatedly drives home a single word—“psychopath”—like a silvery nail in a varnished coffin.

The second half repeats the format: three proper songs rounded out with two ambient sketches, but this time, one track hogs the spotlight: “Playing Classics,” a madcap dance-punk romp partially inspired by Charli XCX’s “Club Classics.” Its ebullience is almost awkward; its mismatching parts—disco hi-hats, Eurodance bass, too-bright keys, overdriven guitar solo, snatches of vocoder teased and just as quickly abandoned—summed up in the record’s most utopian sentiment: “Practice shake it you’re free.” I suspect it will be the album’s big hit, certainly in a live context. I don’t like it as much as anything on the A-side, but it is, truly, the album’s funniest song.

B-side opener “Spaceship,” though, is another roller coaster of backmasked guitars and shifting time signatures, closer in feel to the A-side’s contorted alt-rock. It’s hard to overstate how effortless Water From Your Eyes make even the most complicated grooves feel, and Brown’s hopeful singing (“So you dream, you build, you change/The cage looks like a window pane”) only adds to the suggestion of weightlessness. The country-fried “Blood on the Dollar,” on the other hand, feels almost like a demo, a bare-bones sketch for fuzzed-out guitar and muted drums. Slipping across slant rhymes and a sidelong Pixies reference, Brown might be singing about the end of empire, or the ennui of life online. The album’s lyrics never reveal anything as clear-cut as the thematic talking points—space, dinosaurs, measuring human existence on a cosmic scale—the duo routinely trots out in interviews, but that’s a point in favor of Brown’s suggestively mysterious writing. The duo’s banter may often resemble low-stakes brainrot, but Brown’s writing reaches beyond stoned dorm-room riffing into places where the punchlines dissolve.

“It’s either nothing is important or everything is important,” Brown recently told Fader; in context, they were talking about the cosmic existentialism that informs It’s a Beautiful Place, but it also feels like a fair assessment of Water From Your Eyes’ almost obsessive attention to detail. One detail in particular sticks out on this captivating, ambitious album: “For Mankind,” the ambient sketch that closes the record, is made of exactly the same sounds as the intro, “One Small Step”—a queasy wash of what might be a whirly tube run through digital processing, or perhaps a family of chipper sea lions. If you listen to the album on a loop, “For Mankind” will blur seamlessly back into “One Small Step,” effectively enclosing you within Water From Your Eyes’ invented universe. A front-row seat for the Amos-Brown mind meld—sprawling, amorphous, hermetic, overwhelming, heartbreaking, funny as hell. It’s a privileged vantage point.

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Water From Your Eyes: It’s a Beautiful Place

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Conan Gray's 'Wishbone' Debuts at No. 1 on Top Album Sales Chart
Music

Conan Gray’s ‘Wishbone’ Debuts at No. 1 on Top Album Sales Chart

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Conan Gray’s latest studio album, Wishbone, bows at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart, marking his first leader there. Simultaneously, the collection arrives at No. 3 on the overall Billboard 200, granting the singer-songwriter his highest-charting project yet on the latter list. Both tallies, dated Aug. 30, will be posted in full to Billboard’s website on Tuesday (Aug. 26).

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Also in the top 10 of the Top Album Sales chart, Billie Eilish, Niall Horan, Maroon 5, Chevelle, Chance The Rapper and Selena all make waves.

Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart ranks the top-selling albums of the week based only on traditional album sales. The chart’s history dates back to May 25, 1991, the first week Billboard began tabulating charts with electronically monitored piece count information from SoundScan, now Luminate. Pure album sales were the sole measurement utilized by the Billboard 200 albums chart through the list dated Dec. 6, 2014, after which that chart switched to a methodology that blends album sales with track equivalent album (TEA) units and streaming equivalent album (SEA) units.

Wishbone sold 53,000 copies in its first week (Gray’s best sales week ever) with physical purchases comprising nearly all of its sales. Vinyl sales accounted for just over 30,000 sold — Gray’s best week ever on vinyl. Wishbone also bows at No. 1 on the Vinyl Albums chart, marking his second leader. The set’s opening-week sales were bolstered by its availability across seven CD variants (including signed editions) and seven vinyl editions (some signed).

On the Billboard 200, Gray has charted five entries overall, with three of them reaching the top 10 (Kid Crow in 2020, No. 5; Superache in 2022, No. 9 and Wishbone in 2025, No. 3). On the Top Album Sales chart, he’s also notched five entries, with four hitting the top 10 (Kid Crow, No. 2; Superache, No. 22; Found Heaven in 2024 at No. 2 and Wishbone, No. 1).

Elsewhere on the latest Top Album Sales chart, Billie Eilish’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT surges 44-2 with 18,000 copies sold (up 988%), following the release of a one-year anniversary vinyl variant. Vinyl purchases made up nearly all of its sales for the week. (The 18,000 figure is the total sales of all the versions of the album, old and new, combined.) The anniversary edition of the vinyl was pressed on bio-vinyl dark blue and orange splatter with its cover printed on silver mirror foil board and contains a poster.

Another anniversary helps Niall Horan’s chart-topping Heartbreak Weather reenter the chart at No. 3, as a suite of five-year anniversary products help push the album back onto the ranking. Collectively, all the versions of the album, old and new, sold 12,000 copies in the tracking week (up from a negligible sum the previous week).

Heartbreak Weather was reissued for its fifth anniversary in two new vinyl variants (an opaque baby blue color variant with new cover art, and a deluxe double-LP set pressed on sea-blue and white splatter vinyl with expanded packaging and nine bonus tracks), a CD variant (with new cover artwork and eight bonus tracks) and a digital download (with eight bonus tracks).

Maroon 5 collects its eighth top 10 on the Top Album Sales chart as its latest release, Love Is Like, arrives at No. 4 with nearly 11,000 copies sold. TOMORROW X TOGETHER’s chart-topping The Star Chapter : TOGETHER climbs 7-5 (8,000, down 18%) and Chevelle nabs its sixth top 10 with the No. 6 debut of Bright as Blasphemy (nearly 7,000).

Chance The Rapper’s new studio effort Star Line starts at No. 7 with nearly 7,000 sold, scoring the third top 10 for the artist. Selena’s former No. 1 Dreaming of You reenters the chart at No. 8 with 6,000 sold (up from a negligible sum in the week previous) after a number of 30th anniversary reissue products were released. Dreaming of You was remastered for its 30th anniversary, and reissued across four vinyl variants, a CD and a digital download.

The KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack climbs 15-9 on Top Album Sales with its best sales week yet (nearly 5,500 — up 3%). The album has only been available to purchase as a digital download, but will see the impact of its release on CD (on Aug. 22) in the tracking week ending Aug. 28 (as reflected on the Sept. 6-dated Top Album Sales chart).

Closing out the top 10 of the latest Top Album Sales chart is TWICE’s THIS IS FOR, which is steady at No. 10 with 5,000 sold (down 22%).

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Mac DeMarco: Guitar Album Review
Music

Mac DeMarco: Guitar Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

The most affecting moment on Guitar comes 45 seconds into the fourth tune, “Nightmare.” The song begins mid-meter, DeMarco’s voice arriving so ahead of the beat that it’s like he has been searching for someone he can tell his troubles to. Maybe there’s been an argument, and his partner is still sleeping it off in the next room. It is a miracle, he confesses, that she sticks around at all. “Roll up those sleeves, boy,” he sings in a diminutive falsetto, cuddly as a teddy bear. “Smoke the whole pack/There’s no turning back from this one.” In a few perfect lines, this is the war of always trying to get your shit together, of trying to be good enough for the life into which you have wandered. By all interview accounts, DeMarco’s partner, Kiera McNally, possesses a saintly forbearance, sticking with him from those rough-and-tumble salad days to these idyllic times of pruning olive trees on an island; here he is, waking up bummed, then rolling up his sleeves to try and deserve her.

In two minutes, “Nightmare” bottles both sides of Guitar—DeMarco’s bummer survey of what he has been and his grim commitment to what he may still be. The past comes back to haunt him on “Knockin’,” a simple country-funk number where regrets he thought he’d overcome arrive like uninvited guests for a housewarming party at the spot where he hopes to spend the rest of his life. Evoking George Harrison on a morphine drip, “Home” finds him contemplating the places and people he’s already left, how seeing them again would feel like finding a ghost whose sole purpose is to remind him of his failures. Each beat is another towering speedbump that DeMarco is willing himself over and beyond, forcing himself into the future.

And DeMarco’s songs about that future are what make Guitar so endearing, what makes it land like a long hug from an old friend you assumed you’d never see again. “Sweeter” seems like a catatonic bummer, a from-the-brink testimonial of someone who has supremely fucked up, repeatedly breaking a lover’s heart until she vanished. But DeMarco’s promise—“This time, I will be sweeter/I can be much sweeter/Some things never change”—is so plainspoken and earnest that I find myself pulling for him like he’s some hapless sports team, one play away from saving the franchise. He searches for his core on “Punishment,” a sort of secular prayer about trying to find the thing that animates you, the thing that can serve as a safeguard against your worst instincts. Plodding in a way that suggests a daily ritual, “Holy” is more direct still, a plea to be cut free from the “curse from down below.” DeMarco can see the tether to his old ways starting to fray; just maybe it will finally snap.

DeMarco’s first album arrived the month I got engaged, his second a month or so before I turned 30 and got married. When his songs were daily reckonings with nights of excess, I was trying to get over inherited bacchanalian patterns of my own, to ease into some version of adulthood. His music made me feel like I was staring into some cracked rearview mirror. I get the sense from Guitar that DeMarco now knows what that’s like, as one tries to leave the pernicious habits that extend from a lineage of addicts. But these songs—soft lullabies and blues for himself about the hard places he’s been—make me think he’s getting somewhere new by being honest and at least a little optimistic. “All those days of trying to run/What a waste of breath,” he sings at one point, like he’s letting out a sigh he’s suppressed for 35 years. Maybe no matter the struggle, you could still be a little like this version of Mac DeMarco, too.

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Pavement: Slanted and Enchanted Album Review
Music

Pavement: Slanted and Enchanted Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

As much as they belong to the world of indie rock, what I love about Pavement is what I love about the music of a composer like Thelonious Monk, who once famously (or at least apocryphally) called into a Columbia University radio station to complain to a presenter talking about the importance of the “wrong notes” in his music that, in fact, the piano didn’t have wrong notes—that you could play a song as quaint and domestic as “Tea For Two” with just enough dissonance to stretch a listener’s sense of beauty while also conveying a sense of human fallibility that a more polished performance can’t. (The spiky, sour opening of Pavement’s “In the Mouth a Desert” could almost be a Monk line, the way all its ugly little turns resolve so rightly.)

Slanted and Enchanted is music of cowlicks, of family photographs at crooked angles, of accident as essence, the imperfect as perfect just as it is. Pavement happened to arrive in my life just weeks after the suicide of Kurt Cobain, an event that in certain ways deepened the band’s myth but in others made it almost impossible for me to connect with them the way I had before. Was this where that line of creative expression led? Was this, in some ways, what the music was about? Even at 12, I found my own angst both unavoidable and totally boring, the kind of thing you slough off on the way to a deeper and more interesting time. (I’d rather listen to your dreams than your pain, all day, every day.) The laxness and play in Pavement reminded me (and still reminds me) that accidents are natural and big feelings are often as transient as small ones and the margins are usually as lively and exciting as what some people call “the point”—difficult lessons for a natural cueball-squeezer like me, but ones that over time have kept me saner and seem to contain more practical magic than most others.

Pavement’s third member at the time of Slanted was Gary Young, a drummer who operated a small studio in the band’s hometown of Stockton, California, where the album was recorded. Young was more than 10 years older than Malkmus and Kannberg, the weed-dealing punk-hippie (this was when “dealing weed” was still a notable qualifier), passing time with whoever in town still seemed interesting. (“This Malkmus idiot is a complete songwriting genius,” Young reportedly told Kannberg.)

Young was both a gymnast and an alcoholic, qualities you can hear in how his playing fumbles and stumbles and still lands on its feet with a breathless ta-da. (The fills on “Lions (Linden)” on the Watery, Domestic EP, lately packaged with Slanted and Enchanted, are a great illustration of this; Watery, Domestic is, in general, perfect.) As much as Slanted is defined by Malkmus’s sloppy charm (the way he sings “eeeeeeelectricity and lust” on “Trigger Cut”—who else would do that?), it’s driven by Young. He didn’t last, partially because of his drinking, partially, it seems, because he was at the point in life where he felt too old to tour for dirt and sleep on floors. “Any concept of punky went out of the band with Steve,” Malkmus said later, referring to Young’s eventual replacement, Steve West. “He never experienced punk and wasn’t that way. I wouldn’t blame the whole demarcation on him, but that’s one thing that changed.”

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Susumu Yokota: Skintone Edition Volume 1 Album Review
Music

Susumu Yokota: Skintone Edition Volume 1 Album Review

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Inspired by a visit to Yakushima Island’s Unsuikyo Ravine—the inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke and home to the Jomon Sugi, a cedar tree estimated to be as many as 7,000 years old—The Boy and the Tree is part forest bathing, part plunderphonic immersion in Yokota’s record collection. Its 12 deeply psychedelic tracks fold together birdsong, chanting, raga, gamelan, flute, marimba, zither, revving motorcycles, and hand percussion. The ambient tracks take shape like drops of ink spreading through water; the rhythmic ones eschew conventional drum programming for scraps of percussion and stringed instruments from around the world, weaving them into pulsing throughlines that bring order to the gentle chaos of his flyaway sounds.

If The Boy and the Tree is Yokota at his most satisfyingly complex, 2003’s Laputa shows him at his most bewildering. The album’s 15 tracks—some just a minute or two long, and none reaching five—unfold like dreams, or landscapes blurring past the window of a speeding train. Even the best ambient music can be difficult to recall in detail once it has finished playing, but in the case of Laputa, you may have difficulty remembering how a given track even began. “Rising Sun” is a swirl of birdsong, drones, cowboy guitar, ring-modulated gurgling, and what sounds like a scrap of operatic aria lifted from a scratchy 78; “Gong Gong Gong” collages together gongs, pedal steel, and nonsensical spoken-word; “Lost Ring” superimposes ECM-grade ambience with Blade Runner-esque noir saxophone and, briefly and bizarrely, a perky splash of bluesy Hammond organ. The mood throughout is sometimes beatific, sometimes druggily disturbing. I’m frequently reminded of Philip Jeck’s slowed-down vinyl excavations; a ghostly quality hangs over every track and every sample, as though Yokota were seeking to contact spirits. The spectral “Trip Eden”—a liquid soundscape of moaning voices and shivery close harmonies—might be the most harrowing thing he ever recorded.

Seven albums can be a lot to absorb from any artist; all the more so when they entail such jarring shifts in mood—like Will—or require such focused, emotionally engaged listening, like Laputa. But Yokota benefits from the box-set treatment. To immerse yourself in his work is to be reminded of its uncommon depth, and to realize how intricately it’s all connected. The abject mourning of “Trip Eden,” the insouciance of “King Dragonfly,” the bliss of “Hagoromo”—they are all facets of Yokota’s pursuit of a totalizing picture of human emotion. In the original liner notes to Image 1983 – 1998, Yokota looked back on his years obsessed with dance music with alarm and regret. “My life became techno,” he wrote. “From morning until evening, rhythms were repetitively ticked off while sleeping, and fractal images were the only reflection I saw…. I was slipping into the memories of the future. After awakening from this mind-control, I started to seek and get inspiration from reality and everyday life; the food I eat, cats from my neighbourhood, and most of all, how I live.” These seven albums make clear how profoundly Yokota was able to translate his quotidian reality to tape, resulting in some of the most original and idiosyncratic ambient music of its era. Skintone Edition Volume 1 is a moving portrait of a life lived in sound.

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BigXthaPlug Arrested on Marijuana, Drug Charges After Album Release
Music

BigXthaPlug Arrested on Marijuana, Drug Charges After Album Release

by jummy84
written by jummy84

Back in his hometown of Dallas, rapper BigXthaPlug was hosting a release party for his third studio album, I Hope You’re Happy, his take on country. But just hours later, though, at 2:20 a.m. on Friday, X, born Xavier Landum, was arrested and booked on charges of marijuana possession (less than two ounces) and unlawful possession of a firearm, per People, who reviewed Dallas County Jail records. BigX’s representatives did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment. 

I Hope You’re Happy follows massive successes for BigX. Though he broke through as a soul-sampling rapper with the now-platinum album Take Care, in April, he scored a Number One hit on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs with “All the Way” alongside Bailey Zimmerman. I Hope You’re Happy features Luke Combs, Darius Rucker, Shaboozey, Thomas Rhett, Ella Langley, and more. Just today, the rapper’s music video for the Jelly Roll collaboration “Box Me Up” premiered. 

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“This album’s my heart, my story — the love, the loss, the heartbreak, the grind,” BigXthaPlug said in a press release. “I wanted people to feel it all with me, the highs, the lows, the real life that shapes you. I Hope You’re Happy is me mixing my urban roots with that country soul, tellin’ my story straight up, just me.”

In October, the rapper told Rolling Stone his breakthrough Take Care was motivated by his drive to provide for his two children. “I got to make it to where when my kids my age, they don’t want for shit,” he said. “And the only way to do that is by being where I’m at right now, doing what we doing right now.

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