pastemagazine

pastemagazine reviewed Ride Lonesome by Beck 3h

7.5

The LA shapeshifter ditches the pop proclivities of his last album for a reunion with the musicians behind Sea Change and Morning Phase. — Beck doesn’t stay in one place for long. You’ve got his early punk days, his Gen X slacker irony, his off-the-wall hip-hop, his KROQ pandering, his Latin-infused funk-tronica. He can and will do it all; he’s the type of artist who can make the music for Scott Pilgrim’s Sex Bob-omb, then release a sheet music-exclusive album, then co-headline a show with Willie Nelson. His last record, 2019’s Pharrell Williams-produced Hyperspace, leaned heavily into Beck’s pop proclivities, adorned with neon synths and tropicalia production. But it’s been twelve years since the Los Angeles polymath’s last folk outing, Morning Phase, the album that took home the 2015 Album of the Year Grammy in a veritable upset. Morning Phase was billed as a spiritual successor to 2002’s Sea Change, a divorce album fashioned from a lush palette of acoustic instruments, gauzy background vocals, and country and folk embellishments. After the straightforward pop of Colors and Hyperspace, Beck has returned, naturally, to the autumnal warmth of his folk duology. Ride Lonesome marks a new entry in this vein, and he’s reconvened with the same personnel that performed alongside him on Sea Change and Morning Phase: Justin Meldal-Johnsen on bass, Joey Waronker on drums, Jason Falkner and Smokey Hormel on guitar, Roger Joseph Manning Jr. on keys, Nigel Godrich on mixing boards. The new addition to Beck’s folk catalog plays like a check-in among its musicians, seeing what more they can find in this style that they didn’t unearth on their last outing together. Much of it follows the expected course, coasting along on the winds Beck and his band rode before on this record’s older siblings. Occasionally, though, those gusts lift them to a higher plane, hitting a sweet spot between intimate rootsiness and cinematic splendor. “Slow Canyon” treads familiar territory at first, the textural, metallic sheen of the guitar strings as essential as the notes they produce. Subtle slide guitar brushes against it, and gradually, Beck introduces performer after performer until the Calder Quartet and a bed of woodwinds cushion him like a feathery pillow, suffusing everything with resplendence without coming across as overwrought. Those woodwinds resurface on “Falling Through My Hands,” bolstered by barely audible organ, synthesizer, and harmonica, which Beck performs himself. Closing track “Beyond the Light” has all the bells and whistles, the strings and horns, and it’s a stunning finale that highlights how gorgeous the band sounds against an orchestral backdrop. On “For Your Love,” his core group exits the stage, save for the Calder Quartet and various string and horn players, and Beck’s voice sounds majestic in this makeshift concert-hall setting. The pace falters slightly when those symphonic flourishes are absent entirely, mostly because it sounds a tad stagnant, like ground that’s already been well-trodden. Still, everything sounds pretty, such as Stephanie Bennett’s gossamer harp on “Run Away” and Greg Leisz’s plaintive pedal steel on “If You Don’t Know What Love Is.” Like Sea Change, romantic strife finds outlets on Ride Lonesome through oceanic tides, dying flowers, and other natural phenomena, mirroring the largely organic instrumentation underneath. These entreaties and grievances occasionally lose their effect, largely for the same reason that the songs sometimes sound like Beck trying to make an album that sounds a lot like Sea Change. “In the Night” contains both poetic turns of phrase (“Your teachers and your saints / They’ll walk you to the grave / And say you’ll find your way”) and stale analogies (“Darkness came on by / Stories of the sky / To bury all the lies”). But the former, fortunately, shows itself far more often than the latter. On “Disappearing Act,” for instance, he mistakes a stray sound from an adjacent room for his lover, only to remember shortly after that they’re no longer there. The title track, meanwhile, opens with an evocation of paper roses that “forgot to bloom,” signaling a relationship doomed from the start. Hearing Beck in this mode, rather than, say, nonsensical raps about jiu jitsu and Shih Tzus, is compelling, especially when you consider that his breakout song positioned him as a monkey in a time of chimpanzees while getting crazy with the cheese whiz. In an interview with NPR from earlier this year, he reflected on the fruits of a more sincere approach to simplicity in his music. “Sometimes [my music] is just a little too clever,” he said. “I think the ultimate is just writing something simple and universal that doesn’t take a lot of trying to decipher. Simplicity is the ultimate.” Ride Lonesome may not differentiate itself much from what Beck has done before, but when it soars, it’s transcendent. He makes it sound so simple. [Capitol] Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist, critic, and musician. His work has also appeared in Interview Magazine, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City. You can follow him everywhere @grantsharpies.

pastemagazine reviewed Day and Night by Carly Rae Jepsen 4h

8.5

What’s most striking about the pop singer’s eighth album is how spatially and texturally interesting it sounds: choral vocals darken the corners, time-stretched samples burst apart when beats drop, instruments wash into each other. — Somehow, Carly Rae Jepsen can make tangible the electricity of a fleeting glance or a bitten lower lip. She writes open-armed pop songs from the center of her heart, capturing and crystallizing those fluttery feelings at their genesis before they can snowball into more complex forms. They’re usually about the small moments in a romance—the anticipatory tension of following a new lover to their room, the record-skip palpitations when they text you back, the ache of knowing your words aren’t landing, the final wave goodbye—blown up them up into all-consuming, widescreen images. She’s ecstatic and cringe; she’s down bad and yearning; she’s desperately trying to be cool when you’re around. The trail of broken hearts she walks must eventually lead to salvation, right? Jepsen’s Sisyphean search for love—a hero’s journey we will all take continuously as our lives molt and tangle and compound—found a real foothold in the swoon of an imagined eighties, all Day-Glo synths and gate-reverbed snares, her mezzo-soprano soaring through sticky hook after sticky hook. E•MO•TION, her 2015 breakthrough, was a bubblegum triumph, its on-the-sleeve ardor and occasional blunt horniness so relatable they were completely, blissfully overwhelming. With each successive album, she added shading and contour to her doe-eyed emotional availability, finding a few new sounds for her repertoire—mostly disco—but always returning to that well of towering, upturned New Romantic. Her last two albums, The Loneliest Time and its B-side sibling The Loveliest Time, saw Jepsen get a little older and weirder, embracing a bit of theater-kid melodrama here and some mushroomy indie pop there. They seemed to signify a new wisdom, acknowledging the occasional joys and multiplying frustrations that come from all that lusting and crying and fucking and pining through a wearier, more lived-through-it lens. A plainspoken theme weaves through her entire discography: Carly Rae Jepsen can’t help but feel it all, and there is always so much to feel. In the interim between The Loveliest Time and Day and Night, her new double album, Jepsen married music producer and songwriting partner Cole M.G.N., and the two had a child, which begged the question: What will Carly Rae Jepsen’s music sound like when she’s found what she spent so many albums looking for? The unsurprising answer is that it’s complicated, that nothing is ever really settled. Day and Night finds Jepsen navigating an existential wilderness, as contented as she is curious, searching for the balance between who she is and how she was. It’s a very interior record, sung softly, as though to a mirror, and filled with the dueling visions of domestic bliss and painful recovered memories. You can’t write new chapters without revisiting the previous ones, she seems to say. It doesn’t work like that. Day and Night is perhaps her strangest, most musically voracious work to date. She’s been increasingly chameleon-like recently, with songs like the French house banger “Psychedelic Switch” and gaseous groover “Kollage” tiptoeing into new territory, though she’s still so recognizably Carly. It’s no different across these twenty-four tracks. Even when her voice is treated more heavily than in the past, warped with Auto-Tune or sent through some particularly thick compression, it still has that blurred-edge softness, that slight verge-of-tears melancholy, those melodies that immediately bury themselves in the rivulets of your brain. She tries on a number of new deliveries, like the stepped rise and fall of the vocal melody on “Blue Skies,” or the almost Toni Braxton-like huskiness she takes on during the pre-chorus of “Near and Far.” Though she knows her way around a hook—like on the plush “Habits of Creatures”—she goes the opposite direction, reducing the verses to a single root note that the other elements dance around. Jepsen somehow never gets lost in her experiments; even if they’re only base hits rather than home runs, the big swings usually connect. The loose concept behind Day and Night is that the Day disc is a waking-hours, two-mimosa poolside kickback, while Night Ubers to the club with an extra pair of shoes in the bag. It’s a little on the nose in its thematic telegraphing, but sets the expectations well enough. Day is full of pastel tones, shuffling slacker drums, and a billowing atmosphere, an exploration of the wafting psych-pop that Jepsen began toying with on The Loneliest Time’s “Western Wind.” Most of this side, like the opening twofer of “After All” and “Habits of Creatures,” is cast in the languid, post-coital glow of life with a new partner, content to waste hours lying in bed attempting to touch as much of their skin together as possible. But over its twelve songs, the morning sunlight fails, casting long, reaching shadows. A few sober moments, like on “Wild Child,” find Jepsen imploring her lover to have patience. “Settle me down, down, down, do the best you can / All kinds of trouble, but all of this trouble’s for you,” she sighs, promising, “It’s gonna hurt / Baby, I’m gonna hurt you.” Night is full of middle-distance stares and sweaty, dissociative dance-floor reveries. It’s built to process heavy thoughts through movement, while still recognizing how they creep in during moments of catharsis. If we hold trauma in our bodies, it’s understandable that shaking it could bring up things we didn’t know we lodged deep in our core. Both discs have a recognizable arc—happiness curdles slightly, leading to unexpected questions and inevitable comparisons to past loves, but there’s always a way back to you—but Night’s feels a little more defined, and perhaps a little more real in how it zigs and zags between euphoria and gloom. The desperation of “Don’t Leave Me On The Dancefloor” leads to the giddiness of “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” which leads to the fear and overwhelm of those feelings on “Near or Far.” The disc ends with Jepsen turning her face toward the beaming light on “Super Sage,” but there are no drums, perhaps an acknowledgment that maintaining the rhythm of a good relationship is a lifelong process. What’s most striking about Day and Night is how spatially and texturally interesting it sounds as compared to most of Jepsen’s other work. The production on her albums typically hits a lot of pop signifiers: her voice is pedestaled in front of the instruments, long reverb tails emphasize the ends of bars, and tight harmonies are mixed low enough to create an almost imperceptible tension. Here, choral vocals darken the corners, time-stretched samples burst apart when beats drop, instruments wash into each other. Everything sounds cared for, as if placed into the stereo field with tweezers. There are tons of sly production tricks, like the live drums that sneak in during the second verse of “On Wires,” or the slight slapback delay that kisses Jespen’s voice on certain phrases, giving the track a hallucinatory sheen. For all its pop immediacy, Day and Night is an especially rewarding headphones listen, a complex machine creating something rapturously simple. Despite the ambition and curiosity that color the album, it can be a slightly patchy listen. “Versailles,” an early cut on Day, feels completely out of place, its stuttering arrangement a little reminiscent of E•MO•TION Side B’s baffling “Store.” “Just a Little Walk on the Moon” meanders without ever committing to one of its lovely sections, and the verses on “Good Fine Alright” feel underwritten compared to the chorus’ power. Night’s missteps are mostly lyrical: On “Motivation,” an otherwise hip-shaking ballroom jam, Jepsen declares, deadpan, “We go hard in this family.” She invokes having “the courage of a lion” on “Diver,” a cliché that nearly derails an otherwise decent song. But the sections where she and her collaborators hit a flow state, like the glorious run on Day from the War on Drugs-esque “Burning Heart” to the swelling psychedelia of “Soft,” or the back half of Night, which features the candlelit garage of “Hold Me to the Light” and the beachy house heater “No Labels, I Love You” (the first fruit of Jepsen and Cole M.G.N.’s team-up), are good reminders that when she’s on, Jepsen is one of the best pop songwriters in the game. Day and Night might not be the star-making statement she’s been chasing, but it is the sound of an artist eager to keep finding out who she is. [Interscope] Dash Lewis is a writer and musician based in Richmond, VA with bylines at Pitchfork, SPIN, Bandcamp and more. When not noodling with synthesizers, he’s in search of a great sandwich. Find him online @gardenerjams.

pastemagazine reviewed Marrow Deep by Mastodon 3d

8.5

The Atlanta metal heroes’ first album after the founding guitarist's tragic passing suggests a band that has never once written about death, but rather is facing it for the first time and racked by uncertainty and self-doubt over how to deal. — In March of 2025, proggy sludge-metal band Mastodon bid founding member, lead guitarist, and vocalist Brent Hinds adieu, while Hinds bid his ex-bandmates to go fuck themselves. “Sometimes people grow apart and they get interested in other things,” said Bill Kelliher, the group’s rhythm guitarist. “It was time to part ways.” “I won’t miss being in a shit band with horrible humans,” came Hinds’ retort three months later. So, overall, let’s just call the breakup mutual. Then came Hinds’ fatal motorcycle crash in August the same year, and an outpouring of grief from his fans as well as his erstwhile rockers-in-arms, who took his sudden death as a seismic blow, regardless of whatever curdling rancor led to his split from Mastodon. Death is a motherfucker, as well as a powerful force for reckoning; it hurts worse than losing a limb and provokes painful, impossible-to-ignore sensations like despondency, existential dread, and most of all remorse. If you could have just one more conversation with a deceased loved one, what would you do? What would you say? Would you reconcile with them? Express your anger at them for rifts opened and left that way before they died? Maybe you would sit back and jaw with them, which, as these exercises in wishful thinking go, sounds like a rather decent use of your time. On the other hand, if you’re a musician, you’ll pour all of that feeling into a fresh batch of songs and call it an album, which is what Mastodon have done in Marrow Deep, their ninth studio production. It is impossible to engage with their work here without thoughts of Hinds as well as drummer Brann Dailor’s late mother, and the influence both had on the textures of each of the record’s 12 tracks. The band started recording them in September, a month after Hinds died—too new, too recent, too incalculably terrible an experience not to have outsized impact on their sound. And hey, would you look at that: Marrow Deep is, in so many ways, a reflection of the profoundly discombobulating effect that death has on the living, being at once cleanly produced but messy, meticulously written. Chaotic and ugly but sublime. Mastodon’s sad truth is that they’ve done this before. Death is a familiar acquaintance and frequent guest on their albums: 2009’s Crack the Skye is shaped by the suicide of Dailor’s sister in his teen years, Kelliher’s bereavement at his mother’s death is core to 2014’s Once More ‘Round the Sun, and the band’s last record, 2021’s Hushed and Grim, is their farewell to Nick John, their longtime manager, who passed away in 2018. (The list goes on longer than that, but life is short enough as is.) Experience has little meaning when dealing with death, though, especially in cases such as Hinds’; as such, Marrow Deep suggests a band that has never once written about death, but rather is facing it for the first time and racked by uncertainty and self-doubt over how to deal. There’s a great beauty to their confusion, though perhaps it’s better to qualify the record’s overarching atmosphere as one of surrender—to death, to dying, to unreconciled friction, to the awful realization that we’ll never see our dearly departed again. Each track is a confluence of these ideas, related but nonetheless competing with one another; some, of course, afford such joinings with keener insight than others. Take “In the Ruins,” for example, where the band’s polyrhythmic tendencies marry with moody descending melodies from João Nogueira and plucked harmonics from Kelliher and Nick Johnston. After about two minutes of this soulful mourning, somebody slams the gas pedal, and the track picks up into higher gear, matching the chafed lyrics in the process. “The last act of love we can give to those we hold,” Troy Sanders howls over the fourth verse, “Where there’s deepened grief there was great love.” The song documents both a moment of calamity and the confrontation of its aftermath; if it’s literally about a collapsing house, we can pretty easily surmise that under the hood, “In the Ruins” is wrestling with Hinds’ exit from Mastodon, too. “No distorted ego when we’re given grace,” Sanders adds on the pre-chorus. What a novel idea: forgiveness. Sins are all the rage in the 2020s; we tend to prioritize talking about them at the expense of virtues. But forgiveness is an awesome virtue, and may be Marrow Deep’s engine from start to finish. On “Poisonous Weapons,” Dailor urges the song’s subject—Hinds, of course—to “turn, run as fast as you can,” to escape the grasp of addiction and alcoholism, as Sanders’ bass thumps and hums in agreement. Meanwhile, in the chorus, Sanders hails “the weakest link,” which sounds like a dirtbag thing to say about a dead man until one accounts for how hard it is to care about someone who leans into their self-destructive tendencies. You want to yell at them, pound your fists at them, shake them until they snap out of their cycle of sabotage. For what it’s worth, Mastodon did, and frankly still does, care about Hinds. “When you left you took the moon and stars,” Dailor croons over the fuzzed-up blitz of Johnston and Kelliher’s guitars, and his own rattling percussion, on the chorus of “Snakes for Dinner.” Maybe that’s a tough one to hear after “Poisonous Weapons.” But Mastodon’s relationship with Hinds was, to say the least, complicated, and the work the band does on the album in meeting those complications is a marker of immense maturity. It is possible to love someone as much as you loathe them, and to be grateful they’re gone as much as you miss them. Marrow Deep captures those intertwined conflicts with thunderous clarity. [Loma Vista Recordings] Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at “his personal blog.” He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.

pastemagazine reviewed Ow ∞ by Sylvan Esso 3d

8.0

The “suffering of suffering” hangs over the duo’s resilient, often minimalist fifth album. — The journey to Sylvan Esso’s fifth studio album was a cross-country trip, with a storm on either side. Quite literally—Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn left their longtime home in Durham, North Carolina, in the wake of Hurricane Helene in late 2024; shortly after they settled in Los Angeles, they found themselves surrounded by the January 2025 wildfires. The duo was already mourning the loss of their close friend Jessica, who died of sudden liver failure in 2023. If there is a single throughline on Ow ∞ (pronounced “Ow Infinity”), it’s grief. It’s not an album about death, per se, but about living in the wake of unimaginable loss, overcoming the pain that keeps piling up—“the suffering of suffering,” as Meath calls it on “Flood Season.” “Keeps on being flood season,” goes the song’s chorus, Meath’s delivery rote and matter-of-fact over a glitchy beat that jitters with static electricity. There’s nothing for her to do but keep wading through. Like the infinity sign in the album’s title, Meath and Sanborn’s sparse, patchy pieces of garage rock and indietronica loop like a Möbius strip of inevitable misfortune. “Thank goodness that it keeps on going,” Meath sings on “Ribbon,” then: “When does it fucking end?” Thick sheets of guitar distortion fall over bubbling synths and snares on “Sledge,” whose main refrain consists of the line “destroy, destroy, destroy,” but destruction is by no means an ending. If anything, it’s another turn of the wheel. After “Sledge” we get “Right to Left,” which begins with Meath admitting, “Yes, I was destroyed again.” As cymbal taps rattle beneath her understated vocals, she promises to “keep holding hands / running faster and faster / brighter, brightest at the end,” knowing full well that there may be no end at all—that this is both the biggest blessing and curse of being alive. Counterintuitively immediate and unpolished—no Sylvan Esso record has taken quite as long to come together as Ow ∞—some songs sound like demos, sometimes to their detriment, elsewhere heightening their emotional rawness, recalling classic grief albums like A Crow Looked At Me. Opener “Entertainment & Coca Cola” is a piece of warped and woozy psychedelia; the disjointedness of Meath’s double-tracked, stream-of-consciousness singing captures her feeble attempts to pull herself through each day while stuck in a haze of mourning. Among the bleeps and bloops of the minimalistic “Jessica,” Meath tries to hold onto scattered memories of her friend jumping into the water or prescribing her a meal of champagne and oysters from her own deathbed. The run of “Concrete Glen,” “Back Again,” and “Ribbon” is where Ow ∞’s minimalism becomes a bit monotonous and might have benefitted from dropping one of the record’s more energetic tracks like “Sledge” or “Hot Slob” in there to add some more variety. “Back Again” and “Ribbon” at times feel unfinished, but then again, so does grieving, suffering, and living. Closer “Plastic Sword” feels similarly inconclusive, to its credit. A neat resolution wouldn’t suit Ow ∞, because it wouldn’t feel honest. What does feel honest is Meath skipping along, swinging a weapon of little destruction, trailed by an army of children “gnashing teeth, screaming, yelling.” Sylvan Esso haven’t learned to push down the pain instead of crying out, nor are they supposed to. There will always be more of it ahead; that’s the bargain of being alive. Might as well play through the pain. [Psychic Hotline] Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound, and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.