NPR Music - New Music Friday: The best albums out Sept. 20

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

NPR Music's Daoud Tyler-Ameen and Lars Gotrich provide a guide the most exciting new releases out today. This week, the selections include some recordings that are new and some that are as much as a half-century old, verging on mythological. The producer Jamie xx began his career as a teenager making beats for the moody electronic band The xx. His solo recordings, including the new album In Waves, have tapped into a higher energy and a wider range of sounds. The saxophonist Nubya Garcia's new album, Odyssey, is as adventurous as the title sounds. And the Kansas City-based Blackstarkids swing between electronic pop, hip-hop and indie rock sounds that feel like they stepped off a time machine directly from the 1990s. Plus: A pair of releases that package previously unreleased material by Bob Dylan and Galaxie 500 sparks a conversation about bootlegs, alternate versions and other rare and unreleased favorites. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Just a quick heads up, this podcast contains explicit language. Lars, do you want to describe your t-shirt? I can't stop looking at it. Okay, all right. So we got Mariah Carey down on the corner, not in the corner, but, you know, on the side. And then Old Dirty Bastard. Mariah's in black and white and old dirties got, like, got some color. We got the names that Mariah Carey is in a, what would you call this font?

I would call that like a sort of a simulated version of like an airbrush font. Yes. Like if you went to the Ocean City Borgloff and you wanted a t-shirt and your name was Mariah, it might look like that. And then old ODB has just gotten like, you know, some tough looking font. Looks like the black flag font. Oh, yeah, it is kind of the black flag font. And then it says fantasy and, you know, it's a reference to the remix. The remix.

Where he and Mariah went back like babies and pacifiers. Is that it? In fact, I wonder, what is the back of this shirt say? Keep your fantasy hot like fire. Now, I'm going to guess that you did not get this from Mariah Carey's website. No, it is not an official Mariah Carey.com merch, although I do have official Mariah Carey merch. Yeah, no, no, no. I know you. I know you, Stan.

Yeah, I don't know. Sometimes you just got to take it to the gray market. Yeah, take it to the great market and get some underground designers doing their thing to your favorite artists. Yeah, a preview of coming attractions, everybody. Hey, everyone, it's New Music Friday from NPR Music, here to talk about the best and most discussion-worthy new albums out today, September 20th. I'm David Tadu, Tyler Rameen, here with NPR Music, writer, editor, and Viking of Choice. Lars Gottrich. Hello, my friend.

Thank you, David. That's a great introduction. Later on today's show, the unofficial releases we love. all of those live bootlegs and leaked demos and alternate versions still sitting on our hard drives that we can't let go. But first, we got some listening to do, and we're going to start with the first solo LP in nine years from the beatmaker at the heart of the British trio of the XX. This is In Waves by Jamie XX. So this record opens with a track called Wana, which is sort of a quiet, piano, you know, distant, It's very moody in the vein of what I think you would expect from Jamie XX if the last time that you checked in with him was nine years ago.

And then it transitions to a track called Treat Each Other Right, which is a lot more aggressive and beat heavy and it has transitions and drops and what have you. It feels like kind of a pledge to me that he understands the difference between the softer-edged, more kind of down-tempo music that, that he has made with the XX on his last solo record in color, and what it is to try to enter the club. My memory of in color is that it was both celebrated and somewhat rebuffed at the same time. Yeah, it depended which kind of press you were reading. Yeah, so it was celebrated as kind of like a decade defining

electronic dance album from the UK. Yeah. And it had a very specific pointed view. It was nostalgic. It was somewhat fuzzy. It was accessible. A lot of people, if you weren't into dance music, you could potentially love this record. By the same page, all those things I just listed were the reasons why a lot of hardcore dance music aficionados were like, I hate this. That's the thing. If you were reading criticism by pop critics, by generalists and things like that, it was mostly a warm reception.

If you were reading specifically the sort of dedicated electronic music press, then people were a lot more skeptical. So what we've got here is a little bit of both. You know, the danceability of this beat and the sort of scuffed up texture of the samples and all of that feels a little bit like a statement of purpose. I want to jump ahead to the Robin feature because... It's so good. I mean, it's just always such a privilege every time she shows up.

It feels like she only comes back to Earth to hang out with us every couple of years. There's a song called Life with Robin, She the Fembot. And it's a little bit of sonic roleplay from her, I would say, because the thing that she does so incredibly well in her own music is vulnerability, right? She's the queen of, you know, crying in the club. And even when she's being really vulgar, or funny or goofy. There's a lot of melancholy to it.

And the way this song starts out, she is full-on bionic woman. It's just, like, flat delivery, no nonsense, no cracks in the armor. Like, what a almost kind of a flex from Jamie XX to be, like, this song features Robin, but it's not going to sound like the Robin you truly love until about a minute 30.

That's the thing, and that's what I love. it really rewards you for sticking around. Because over time, she is who she is. And so the quivers in her voice kind of trickle out. And she transitions from that sort of flat, rhythmic speak song to something that's a lot more full-throated and melodic. And flirty. Yeah.

This is her in flirty mode, which is, I mean, I love all of Robbins modes, but this one is particularly a favorite of mine. The other one that really jumped out to me, I mean, there's waited all night we should mention, is the one with his bandmates from the XX, who are also, I think, a little bit in sort of cosplay mode. There are parts where they feel like a little bit more sort of synthetic in that kind of like sloganeering dance music mode.

But also by the same point, like it's fun because Romi like really came into her own as like a dance pop queen just in the last few years. And so like this song like plays it up in a way that's very satisfying. Yeah. And they just have this. like the XX, them three members of the XX, just have this great alchemy that I miss from the XX records. I'm a late convert to the XX myself. Yeah.

But I've enjoyed kind of like going back and going through all the solo records and like hearing, because they all still work on each other's records, which is like very sweet. I love it. No, yeah. I love when that happens. The other song that I wanted to mention is Breather. This one. And this one took me by surprise. Yeah?

Yeah. What do you hear? Because the first thing I thought of is the prodigy. And then I had to stop myself and say, is it just because Prodigy has a song called Breathe? But I think it's something else. There's a little bit of Prodigy. I heard the knife in there. Once they kind of got out of synth pop and made straight up electronic dance music.

Yeah. The thing that I'm responding to in Brewer is 2024, unfortunately, Fortunately, is the year of therapy speak and a lot of pop music. You got Doolipa, you've got Ariana Grande. Charlie X-X did it too, but in a way that I found satisfying. Because she actually addresses the problem and deals with it. The other ones, they don't. They just spout language signifiers and I am very bored by it.

But this one, apparently Jamie XX, like everyone else in the pandemic, had to figure out what to do this time because he's literally been touring since he was like 17 years old. Yeah. I think. And so this is the first time you just had to sit with himself in his thoughts. So I guess he did like YouTube yoga. Mm-hmm. Oh, that's right.

And so apparently the spoken word that happens in this track as it unfolds is from one of those YouTube videos, I think. Really? You're grateful for this present moment. It truly exists. Because the past is gone, and the future is uncertain. But what we know right now is this moment right here. The other thing about the way this track unfolds is that it starts out with that prodigy-like

menace. It's very, you know, it's got that thing that they did so well where it's like you're really hype, it's very energetic and you want to like jog in place and shadow box, but it's also scary. It's like you're on your way to beat some. somebody down. Yes. And then that vibe kind of goes away.

It's a little bit of a sweet. Everything sort of slows down and the tone changes and you get a vibe that's a little bit less like running and a little bit more like driving. It's a little steadier, a little less springy, a little more resolute. A little bit like melancholy staring out the window vibe too. Yeah. That I found like emotionally affecting in that a way that, again, with the therapy's I was like, I hate that I like this a little bit, but it is hitting.

And the album in waves, I think, follows that arc as well. Yeah. Where he is really, Jimmy XX is really guiding you through, I think, a DJ set. That's something he would do, like on, you know, 2 in the morning at some really cool club. He's taking you through the ups and downs, and this is the moment where, he's giving you the anger and then he's giving you the resolution. Yeah. Everybody, everybody take a break. I'm not going to send you out into the street feeling amped up. Everybody just, yeah, take a moment to look in each other's eyes.

Yes, yes, Doug. Let's do that right now. Okay, great. I went to Quaker School growing up. Maybe that's where that came from. Anyway, that is Inwaves by Jamie XX, an album with a lot to discover inside of it. Up next, Nabaya Garcia, an artist that we mentioned on the show a couple of weeks ago because of her appearance on another artist's album, Endlessness, by the experimental synthesis and heart player, Nalus and Efro. She is back in action with her own solo opus Odyssey. So when Anne Powers and I covered that Nala Sinephro record, I called Nobaya Garcia that record's secret weapon, in part because of how fluidly she was able to integrate herself into it.

A lot of that album is based around modular synth sequences, which have this sort of relentless clock to them that I have to imagine can be really overwhelming to try to keep up with in a live ensemble. but she sort of turned herself into a sequencer in a sense. She really slips into that groove with the way that she phrases her notes. Here she's, you know, totally off the leash. She's backed by her usual trio, Joe Armand Jones on piano, Daniel Casimir on bass,

and Sam Jones on drums. And speaking of secret weapons, holy hell, we should talk about Sam Jones. Are we talking about him now? Why don't we do it? You tell me, because we had a little moment about a particular track. Okay. So there's a song on Odyssey called Solstice. And I remember when I was listening to this record for the first time,

and I was taking notes, and all I wrote was drums. The drumming here is out of control. And when I first listened to it, it felt like when I see a visual effect in a movie, and I really don't know how they did it. Oh, yeah, yeah, totally. Because I just like, just sitting and trying to put together the math of what he's doing with his hands, it was just kind of beyond me, so much so that I had to go to our resident jazz expert Nate Chen. Oh, yeah.

To tell me, like, what is going on here? Because I know that he's been listening to this record and that he's a big fan. Nate had two insights. One, that this is an artist who's very influenced by UK drum and bass, that really broken beat style. He is doing it in a less sort of machine-like way, which gives it kind of a more organic character. He recommended listening to Chris Dave, Justin Brown, Flying Lotus, the Americans who are doing that kind of thing really well. The other thing is that Nate said he's pretty sure that Sam Jones is doing a linear technique

with his hands. You know what that is? No, what's that? So linear drumming is when you basically play the drums. monophonically so that you're only hitting one drum at a time. Okay. So if you imagine like a standard rock beat where you've got like eighth notes on the high hat and the kick on one and three and the snare on two and four.

Sure. This is more like, where it's like if the kick is playing, it's the only thing playing. If the snare is playing, it's the only thing playing. But he's doing it very fast. That is the hypothesis that at least with his hands, He's alternating between the symbol and the snare, and that's how you're getting that super fast, really frenetic thing. It's this very, in a way, it's sort of destabilizing because you don't get the sort of steady groove that you're, you know, that you're used to when a drummer lays down a beat.

This, you know, it kind of hollows out the middle of it. And that is so much in keeping with what Nobaya Garcia's been doing for the last, I think, five or six years. Because I remember when she first kind of broke out. She was on this great compilation of London jazz artists called We Out Here. And she was by far the standout track when I listened to that record. I was like, this is the star in the making. Yeah. Like I knew it.

And it was because I could hear all these different worlds. I could hear jazz. I could hear R&B, but I could also hear UK garage and rave music. And all the kind of pieces were there. They're all a little bit jumbled up. but there was just so much potential. And I think she started to really realize all these different worlds on source, which is the record came out in 2020.

Right. But I think Odyssey expands that world. Yeah. Odyssey is the record that says, this isn't the R&B part, this isn't the jazz part. This is all of the parts in one space. Yeah, totally. There's a track called Waters Path that really took me by surprise because it's sort of just a string interlude in what has been,

a very orchestral record. But you don't really hear like woodwinds, you don't hear vocals. You get this plucked, you know, what's it called, pizicado sound. Right. And it's very, it's like ripples in water. It's like, you know, you're just paddling down the river sticks. The river sticks. I don't know. There is also this, like, listening to the string sections on this album, not just on water's path, but it kind of like mixes in with also her voice on the saxophone. Yeah. There was a time when, And strings and jazz was kind of a joke. Uh-huh. Right?

It was just kind of like that was the way that you could make the lush romantic version of a popular song. Sure. It was a crossover move, parentheses, derogatory. Right. Yeah. And it's been cool to watch, especially artists within jazz, but outside of jazz, kind of like reclaimed the strings. And you can hear that in Kamazi, Washington over the stuff that he's been doing. You hear it in Flying Lotus, like he mentioned earlier.

He's essentially a jazz artist making electronic music. Yeah. And it's cool to hear Nabai Garcia use strings not as something to make it pretty, although it does, but sometimes harrowing, sometimes mournful, sometimes mysterious and confusing. Yeah. I love the way that she uses strings to so many deep effects on this record. Yeah, no. There are moments in it that sound. repurposed from a horror soundtrack.

Yes. Including Triumphance, the closing track, and maybe we can go out with that, which moves basically like a dub reggae track. That's the groove that's laid down. But it also sounds very haunted. There are piano key strikes that, you know, you could imagine John Carpenter wielding very well. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Your journey is yours full of many twists, and you'll meet those along the way who will come to know you That is Odyssey by Nubiah Garcia. One more before we go to break. Let's move on to the new record by Black Star Kids, Saturn Days. Lars, how to describe what this group does? All right.

Let me see if I can string the web together. Okay. Tribe Cold Quest, the Go Team, Warped Tour Pop Punk. Gotcha. Kanye and his old bass. Yes. I think those are, there's more, there's more, but that's like...

You throw those in all in the pot together, I think you get pretty close. So this is a trio from Kansas City, Missouri. And speaking of Tribe Called Quest, they sort of evoke classic hip-hop groups in the sense that, you know, you really knew the difference between a Q-tip verse and a Fife verse. Except here, it isn't even just about a distinct flow. It's a whole songwriting style. Maybe it's more like, I don't know, like the B-52s, or Blink 1282. I don't know.

But you've got three members. You've got Tai Fazon, who's sort of the main, like, MC. You've got D'Andre, who's their producer and sings a lot of the hooks. Right. And the Babe Gabe, who is somewhere in between. She's a singer, like, her parts are melodic, but it's also rooted in a meter that's very hip-hop, right? And when she wraps, you take notice. Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like you and I doubt have been talking about this band, just like in the office for a number of years. Well, they waltzed into my consciousness in 2021 with a song called Juno. You remember Juno. Oh, yeah. I think it was on our top 100 songs of that year. Yes, it was because I remember the thing that I wrote about them in my year-end blurb was that they are sort of structure agnostic. Like, they have verses and choruses and hooks, and they're recognizable in that way.

But if you sit down and try to group the lines neatly into, like, you know, quatrains of four, then you start to get lost. It's not really how they operate. And they're sort of structure agnostic in terms of how the group works, too. It's you really don't have the traditional sense of, like, this is what this person does. Everything is just a little bit gestural. It really feels like they maybe come up with the song titles first and then say like, okay, what do we do from here? Yes. So we've been listening to this song, Soulmates, which you can hear in an already such a counterintuitive approach to melody.

And this is the lead single. Reminds me a little bit of a couple years ago, Julianne Escobedo Shepard wrote a piece for NPR.org about Santa Gold. Santa Gold was the other artist I meant to mention earlier. That's the thing. That's maybe the missing link there. because the thing that is so singular, I suppose, about Santa Gold, is that she is a pop artist who sort of refuses to write pop melodies. Yes.

And I think the same is here. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The other thing that we should acknowledge about this record is, why don't we hear a little bit of the very end of the track Emancipation of Stevie Wonder? Because this is where the unifying concept of what is, in fact, a concept album comes into focus. Yeah. You knew around here? Saddam, that's where black people go in there.

What the fuck? I'm dead? How did I die? I'm supposed to know. You have to find Martin to find out. Let me show you around. I'm Willie. So what we hear here is this narrative about Saturn as the place where black people go when they die.

Well, I found this narrative of the album really interesting because, like, my personal love is, like, I love a lot of free jazz. And so I immediately went to Sun Ra. With Sun Ra, his whole mythology is that he comes from the planet Saturn, and he has come to Earth to basically liberate black people to bring them back home to Saturn. So here's a little flip of the script. Flip at the Afrofuturist script to almost kind of ask, like, well, what does that mean? Yeah, which they have a lot of fun with. There's a lot of like kind of, you know, goofy moments playing around with the fun of a sort of not purgatory, but a kind of a limbo state, basically, where you are judged by this universe's version of God, who it turns out near the end of the record sounds like Siri. Right.

And, you know, depending on what you've done with your life, you might be sent back to Earth to sort of wrap up unfinished business. The other thing that this connects to is, I think, a deep sense of self-awareness about how they are perceived as young black people in an alternative, quote-unquote, kind of scene. It is extremely self-aware of their place as musicians, especially as musicians not in one of the major cities. They're in Kansas City. Yeah. So they're not in New York. They're not in L.A. they are making this very idiosyncratic music as three young black people in the middle coast.

Yeah. And they are questioning themselves as much as they're questioning their listeners. Like, how are you perceiving this thing that we are offering to you? Yeah. You can hear that in the song Stereotype, which has this hook. You're a this, you're a that, you're a stereotype. Not only self-awareness, but a little bit of anxiety, right? Because it's a thing I feel like we've talked about on the show a lot this year.

about how artists who carry some kind of other difference, when they enter, you know, mainstream spaces, let's say, they are burdened with always having to sort of watch their angles and decide whether they are going to be vulnerable and honest about how they present themselves, whether they're going to keep certain parts of themselves secret, whether sharing their pain and their anxiety and whatever else. about the things that they've experienced is going to be a cathartic experience or whether it stands to be exploited, misinterpreted, co-opted, all of this stuff. Well, why don't we go out with Boys Go to Jupiter, which I think has a Buster Rhymes sample threaded into it?

Is that what that is? If you listen really close, it sounds like the hook from woo-ha, but I don't know. It's a very sort of blissful sound, but the lyrics are obviously about dealing with depression and isolation and loneliness. It's just all really part of the gumbo that this group is cooking up.

That is Saturn Days by Black Star Kids. We have got much more new music coming at you right after the break. Lars, I'm going to hand you the keys. Where do you want to take us next? Do, do you consider yourself as a person with eras? Oh, God. I mean, maybe not after this year, now that that concept has been so driven into the ground.

But we all have them a little bit, right? We tell ourselves stories about the progression of our lives, sure. Well, I mean, you know, we're joking about a pop star who's driven the idea of eras sort of into the ground. But the concept of an era of an artist is not a new thing. Right. Somebody who I often think of in terms of eras is Bob Dylan. I am no Dylanologist. Really not.

I got my favorite eras of Bob Dylan, but there is this new 27-disc box set entitled The 1974 Live Recordings. The definite article. It's not just some. It's not all of them. It's not all 40 concerts, but you get quite a few of them. There's also a truncated version, like a highlights version. Which, spoiler, that's what we listen to.

me listen to. We don't have time for 27 discs. It's over 400 songs, everybody. Give us a break. But my favorite, so I'll do this very quickly. Bob Dylan, the Foki. Bob Dylan, electric period. Bob Dylan, sort of lost years.

Bob Dylan, born again Christian. Yes. We had to get to that at some point. Bob Dylan, more lost years. And then Bob Dylan, kind of Renaissance and Nobel Prize winner. My personal favorite era of Dylan is represented here in these recordings. In 1974, Bob Dylan had not gone on tour in eight years. Yeah.

Which I'm like, I reread that preparing for this conversation. I was like, wait, what? Yeah, it's sort of hard to imagine, especially in that time. He was just, he was so massive. He was so revered, so reviled, that here's this person who decided, you know what, I'm going to do me. Yeah. I'm not going to play for you plebeians. I'm just going to do my own thing.

And then he was unhappy with his record contract with Columbia, and he got out of it, and he went to asylum, which was started by David Geffen. And David Geffen and, like, a concert promoter were basically like, let's get you back on the road. Yeah. And let's put you on the road with the band. Yeah. This is the heart of it. Yeah. And Bob Dylan had worked with the band before in various guises.

but the whole concept was, let's do 40 dates. We're going to do three months, North America. And this is my favorite era of Bob Dylan, because this is a man who's constantly reinventing himself, right? Yeah. This is when he reinvented his own myth. Yes. This is when Bob Dylan took all those beloved folkie songs,

and he was like, threw them in the trash, lit them on fire, and smiled as they burned. I mean, listening to this, I realized that I had to joke to the beast too much confusion. I mean, listening to this, I realized that I had really absorbed the idea of Dylan as the sort of stoic performer, that the version of him that lived the largest in my mind is like, don't look back, Dylan. Right.

Standing alone at center stage, you know, stoic and, steady and serious, maybe cracking a joke once in a while, but you wouldn't think to call him like lively or energetic as a performer. And here, I don't know, man, it sounds like he's having so much fun. There is always a, there is always an energy and a wild hair behind all of those old folk songs. Yeah. This is where the subtext becomes extreme text. Yeah. where the arrangements that Bob Dylan and specifically the band come up for these old songs, they're recognizable. Like, can you listen to It Ain't Me, Babe?

And it's like, yep, that's ain't ain't me, babe. But the way that the band, the band takes these songs, they just rev it up. They crank up their amps. They add unnecessary riffs and guitar solos. You know, we were talking about Sam Jones earlier, like speaking of, like, incredible drummers. Leavon Helm on these 1974 recordings is just wild. It's a weird thing.

He's so compelling as the lead singer of the band. You kind of forget he's such an incredible drummer too. Absolutely. I mean, you know, the way this tour was structured was that Bob Dylan and the band would get out. They performed some songs. And the band would perform their own songs. Then Dylan would play solo and that they mix and match it.

If you want to hear the band, the band, the band. recordings from the 1974 tour. They are available, but they're on a previously released record called Before the Flood. It's not everything. It's a sampler of sorts, but it is a great way to listen to the band being the band at this time. So you have the revved-up versions with the full band of all these Dylan songs,

but then you also have the solo, like, just, Bob and his guitar on a stage thing. And you would think that it would just sound like the old Bob Dylan. But even in these recordings, he gives like such different line readings to his old songs. Yeah. He's transformed by context. You know what this reminds me of, actually. In college during the like My Tunes era where it was like there was this incredible era of getting to just skim everybody else's iTunes libraries.

if you were connected to the same network. It was wonderful. And I stumbled on live recordings that somebody I knew had of Elliot Smith in the XO era, fronting a band with an electric guitar and just sounding so incredibly locked in. And I was like, this runs counter to everything that I ever knew about Elliot Smith as a live performer. And I think this is the same thing happening here. It's just it's, he, he seems so electrified by what the presence of the band is able to give to him, that even when they're not playing alongside him,

he is buoyed by that support and feels emboldened to make some choices. And it doesn't slip all the way over into the latter day reputation that like when friends of mine started to see Bob Dylan live in the 90s, like the thing that I always heard was like, he murders his songs. He just twists them into pretzels. Like I don't really know what I heard. This is him sort of like, it's a logical extrapolation from the original with just a little bit more kind of fire behind it. Yeah, it was like when, like I was saying earlier, it's like he is reinventing his own myth and he was figuring out how to take these songs that he knew his fans love, but maybe he was tired of.

And he wanted to make it exciting for himself. And he famously has said much after the fact that he was kind of disappointed with, like, that tour. It was like something to the effect of like, it was all style, no substance. But I think the style is the substance in this case. Yeah. I mean, never the contrarian. He's never going to be happy with the last thing he did. That's true.

Well, that is just a small fraction, less than 5%, let's say, of the 1974 live recordings by Bob Dylan and the band. Don't be like us. Go find the full thing. And you'll have yourself a time. One more before we get to our lightning round. What do you got? Galaxy 500 is, for me, you know how you have like a secret handshake band? Sure.

When you're talking to somebody who says that they love music and maybe you get a sense of their taste and then maybe they slip in a reference to Galaxy 500 and you're like, oh, okay. We can hang out for real. Yes. Galaxy 500 is one of those bands for me. So Galaxy 500, if you don't know, existed basically. only for a few years. They put out three albums in three years

starting in 1988. And each of the albums is a classic, in my mind, at least. And the kind of like the premise when they originally started the band was take the nervy post-punk

of the Feeleys and marry it to the eerie, dreamy primalism of the Velvet Underground. You know, famously the band that launched a thousand bands. Right. It's this trio of Damon Kukovsky on drums, Naomi Yang on bass, and Dean Wareham on guitar. Everybody sings, but the main singer is definitely Dean, who has this very distinct nasal, not wine. You know, the way I thought of it, because I was listening to the Nubiah Garcia record,

his voice sounds like a saxophone that's been dented and beat up. Yeah, no, I can take that. I mean, it kind of got them dinged in the American press at first. I feel like they were always a little bit better loved overseas, at least when they were actually together. And they were kind of progenitors of the slow core movement. So if you think of like low and codeine and things like that, they kind of like just kind of like took a step back and made everything a little bit slower, a little bit more genteel. But then they broke up. Yeah.

Spans do. And sometime in the mid-90s, there was a boxette. put out of their music. In addition to that box set, it was like a B-Sides compilation called Uncollected. And it had a bunch of stuff that people hadn't heard because when you're a band that puts out three albums in three years, you're going to have stuff.

Yeah. And over the last few decades, the love for Galaxy 500 has only grown. Yeah. The band members also just haven't stopped working. They've had their own band since then. Right. Yeah.

Dean Wareham has, he was in Lund. He was in Dean and Britta, and then Damon and Naomi had their own project together. Damon and Naomi. Because they are a romantic and musical couple. And they're keeping their music alive. I remember one time I asked Damon himself, I was like, because they always keep the Galaxy 500 records in print. And they're always cheap, which is great. And it was like, we do that on purpose.

We want people to have this music. I was like, that's cool. I don't have to pay $30 for a vinyl. issue of your album. I mean, we should all be so lucky. So the record that we're talking about today. Oh, yes, there is a record we're talking about. I think, no, but I mean, I think all of that backstory is relevant because the title here is uncollected Noise, New York, 88 to 90. And from what we've heard so far, you can derive the meaning of all of that, except perhaps for Noise New York. What is that? Noise New York was a studio run by the producer Kramer. Right. He

owned the record label Shimmy Disc, and he's produced a lot of records, including a record by Lowe that I love, but he has a very distinct production style, kind of almost an anti-production style, where he puts you in a live room, the band in the live room, he has who run through your songs, you only get one or two takes, maybe you get an overdub for like a guitar solo, and then that's it. Yeah. And so Galaxy 500 would famously go into the studio, for two days, and then they were done. Yeah. And so that is what you're getting from those albums,

but there is just so much on the cutting room floor from those sessions, including, I believe, there are eight unreleased tracks on this version of Uncollected. And what I like about how they structured, this kind of expanded version of the Uncollected compilation, is that it's chronologically ordered. Yeah, love that. It's a fun way to listen to an artist progress because it's in the scraps, it's in the demos, it's in the B-sides, that you hear the ideas that didn't work or the ideas that sort of worked. Or sometimes the songs that were really great but just didn't fit for whatever record was supposed to appear on.

So over the course of these albums, my favorite way to listen, I would probably listen to this a few different ways, but my favorite way to listen, but my favorite way to listen, to it this past round was the way that Naomi Yang's bass playing changes over time. Yeah. Very sort of rudimentary at first, but she's clearly influenced by Peter Hook from New Order. And so you hear more melody in her bass lines as you progress through these tracks. Yeah. That's kind of exciting. It is. No. She shares in common that thing with Peter Hook where you sort of like,

you don't realize until you listen to a lot of New Order records. in a row that like the hook is usually put the hook I should say it's usually played by the bass it's it's you know the the the the scents are kind of holding the the chords down but the thing that you know that you associate sort of iconically with a lot of new order songs is a bass melody and she's stepping into that role more and more and finding ways to you know fill the space it's just a fun thing about trios right is that there's like there's a lot of space to move around and every note counts so you got to be careful you can't be too distracted I really do kind of dig, just like with this Dylan record, some of these cast off recordings can really provide a cross-section of an artist's career that kind of runs counter to, you know, the iconography around them. Does that make sense?

Yeah, definitely. And you also, on this compilation, you also get songs that you already know in slightly different lights. So like the Fourth of July, the video mix. And I remember the music video for, and I was like, yeah, it does have a different light. different mix. Also, like, Blue Thunder is like, they're a kind of, like, iconic song. Yeah. Besides Tugboat. And there has always been a version with a saxophone playing throughout it that I've always loved. And you can find it on, like, expanded versions of On Fire, their second album. But it's nice to hear in the context of these sessions. And that's probably the song we should go out on from this segment. That is Uncollected Noise New York, 88 to 90 by Galaxy 500. That is our last featured album, but man, oh man, there is so, so much music out today that we

could not get to. The complete hall includes new records from Bright Eyes, Jonah's Policewoman, Julian Casablancus and the Voids, Katie Perry, Keith Urban, Nelly Furtado, Neon Trees, Manu Chow, Midland, Thirst and Moore. a posthumous lost album from Newsratfate Ali Khan. Lars, there were a couple that you wanted to shout out to. I wanted to shout out a record by Moore E's called Lacuna and Parlor. She is a ambient musician who's a little bit unpinnable,

and this one's got a nice little pedal steel on it. A new record from Nina Riser, she's a member of the post-punk trio Palberta. It's called Water Giants. It's very nervy synth pop. And here I'll throw out a third one. Alan Lict is a, he's got this mesmerizing set of guitar music. He's this minimalist composer from New York who's been on the scene for literal decades. It's called Havens. Awesome.

And finally, a nice surprise. The B-52s have spent the past few years on a farewell tour that has been extended many times over. The latest evidence that they can't seem to let the party stop, a fun new solo album from singer Kate Pearson called Radio's and Rainbows. which sounds a little bit like a Brooklyn warehouse party in 2005. I love this record. It's so much fun. If you wanted to go to Bushwick in the 2000s but skip the snark,

yes. This is a fun way to do it. Coming up, why do we fall in love with art that's not for sale? The allure of the unofficial release after this. Welcome back to New Music Friday for September 20th, 2024. I'm Daoud. Tyler Mean, here with Lars Gotrich. Lars, you've got the collector bug.

I do. Maybe more than anybody I know. People who follow Lars on social media know that spring cleaning in his household is mostly about getting the excess records out of his home. I can't get the records out of my basement. Sorry. So the two compilations that we talked about in the last segment from Bob Dylan and Galaxy 500 definitely suit the collector instinct. These are, you know, archival recordings exhaustively compiled. in a way that'll make the completists very happy.

But more than that, I would say that those records exist right at the edge of a realm that I know you and I. And I'm going to bet plenty of our listeners have a longstanding relationship with, which is bootlegs, rarities, demos, basically the beloved unofficial release. Right. And granted, the two records that we just heard are commercially available as of today. But before that, some of those recordings were probably floating around for years. Yeah, somewhere. And when you come across something like that, a little known work by a known artist, something that hasn't been packaged and distributed for the masses, but that found its way to you anyway, it's a really specific kind of thrill.

So before we wind the show down, it feels worth just taking a couple minutes to acknowledge how these kind of off-label recordings enter our lives and why they often mean so much to us. I mean, help me out. What are some of the major examples? because there's quite a few of these things that have become pretty legendary in their time. Well, specifically, like, in my time, when I was especially, like, prime music listening era, where I'm just, like, ingesting as much new music, old music as I can at any one time when I was in college in the early 2000s. I was a big fan of Radiohead, like, most people my age, probably. Most people in college.

Most people in college. So I devoured like a lot of the stuff you could find on Soul Seek and Napster and things like that. Right. Yeah. And I remember specifically when Hale to the Thief dropped on whatever the peer to beer was at that time. Sure. Lone wire, Caza, what have you. Yeah, yeah.

But it wasn't the finished record. It was essentially the demos or scratch versions. And a friend of mine grabbed it before it got taken down, presumably, even though, you know, it's like a tree. Everything just keeps growing, and people can just find the music where they need to find it. And we were taking a road trip from Athens to Atlanta to visit some folks, and we were blasting this, like, this version of Hail to the Thief that radiohead did not intend for its fans to hear. And we're just like reveling in the excitement of this illicit recording that we were not supposed to have, but being excited about the possibility of A, it was like a return to rock. Even though my relationship with Radiohead has changed a lot since college, I don't actually like Radiohead that much anymore. But I stole a prize and love like the kidday era basically

But like at the time I was like oh man they're making rock They're using guitars again blah blah blah blah but I remember the thrill of like having this thing that we weren't supposed to have And then actually getting the actual heel to thief and not being disappointed just Having a big question mark over my head like I was like oh We weren't supposed to hear that version Yeah. I don't know what to do with this, but I still, I kind of like it better. Yeah, it's a little bit of a moral gray area that kind of hung over that whole era in the early 2000s when peer-to-peer networks were the way that a lot of young people were hearing most of their new music.

If you go back a little earlier, you have things like, you know, Prince's Black album, this Prince record that nobody was supposed to hear. But, you know, if you were a hardcore collector, you might find your way to, you know, a. an unsanctioned vinyl version of it. There's also things like Jay Paul's, you know, a whole leaks project where there was this a leak of an album that effectively kind of ended his career in the moment that finally got a commercial release much, much after that. But it doesn't represent the totality of what we're talking about because sometimes artists, you know, lean into this.

Sometimes, you know, they have fun with the idea that there are other avenues besides the commercial release that, you know, the late. label and, you know, and everybody else around them has approved where they can sort of just decide to, you know, give something like directly to the fans and let them sort through it. I mean, a recent extreme version of that is Drake's 100 gigs for your headtop. Oh, yeah. Data dump, let's call it. Right. Where there wasn't really even necessarily an interest in like sorting it before it was given to people. It was just like he, you know, had gone through a little. bit of an image crisis over the first half of this year and just decided, you know what, as a show of

my artistic legitimacy, I'm going to put this out there to just let people know that, like, I am always working. I do care about the music that I make. Whether that worked on people, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, there's, I don't know. There's all kinds of things like this. But, I mean, we're talking about a slippery set of categories because sometimes an unofficial release becomes, you know, really a part of a band's lore and mythology in a way that even if the artist isn't necessarily into it is just kind of like unavoidable. Maybe a weird version of that is to come back to your bootleg t-shirt. You made a point to me when we were talking about what we were going to discuss today that sometimes an artist doesn't really

understand their own aesthetic as well as fans of their do. And sometimes fans take things into their own hands and sort of find the magic of, you know, what what the artist is leaving on the table. Does that seem fair? I think so. I mean, the way that I like to think about it is an alternate reality, but it's just reality. Uh-huh. Yeah. It's like to use another, you know, now I'm just pulling back from college, but I think about Wilco and around the Yankee Hotel Foxtrot era where they famously recorded several different versions of the same songs. And those also appeared on peer-to-peer networks. And that was just the way that you kind of had to deal with it for a long time. But, like, Welco had, like, a vision for that record. And it's still, it's a record that stands the test of time.

But there's still a part of you is like, well, what if I want to listen to, like, the weird version of camera? Yeah. You know, and eventually Welco did actually put them on a 11 LP box set. It's a lot. Yeah. It's not necessarily what we wanted. It's like, I just wanted the demos. But so there's that.

But something else I've been rattling around my brain about this concept of the bootleg is that, yes, there's as part of the artist wanting to present the fullest version of the. but the fans wanting to see the other versions of that artist. But there's also an aesthetic that is, so like you see my bootleg tea with Mariah, with the airbrushed letters and everything else, that has, because I think the bootleg has changed because now it's sort of legitimized a bit. So, like, you can, you can listen to a fish concert, like on a streaming service. is basically the next day after, like, it tapes. Same thing with the king, how do you say the king? King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. It's a, yeah, that's a tongue twister.

But yeah, they've done a similar thing. They're, you know, sort of air as apparent to fish. Yeah. And they've been live streaming all of their concerts, basically. Right. And then they're basically available to purchase the next day, like, on band camp with, like, bespoke artwork and everything else. So, like, people have, like, gotten hip to it.

Like, I even, I had a funny moment where, you know, I like to buy bootleg t-shirts because often the designs are better than the official merch. But I had to laugh when Carly Wright-Jepson, our dear pop queen, she released a t-shirt that was very much in the bootleg tea design aesthetic where, like, weird lettering and, like, lots of stuff on, like, on their shirt. And I'm like, someone's paying attention. Yeah. No, it's she, she knows. I mean, there's an evolution to all of this, right? Sometimes, you know, the story of one of these releases plays out over decades. You know, Liz Faire's Gurley Sound demos were this legendary thing that became an official release, you know, decades after the fact. But before that were just, you know, these demos that were her like very much like in this raw state in her element before she was really Liz Faire. That became. so instructive for, you know, a generation of people who were influenced not only by her songwriting and her instincts, but just by the kind of, you know, raw DIYness of what she was able to do. A different example, Kanye West's Good Friday series happening in 2010 was just about the last time that something like that could have happened. This was, you know, he was doing

MP3 drops in the lead up to what would become my beautiful dark twisted fantasy. Some versions of songs that would end up on that record and some that wouldn't. A lot of weird collaborations. There's a track with Rayquan and Justin Bieber and like kind of, it's like 2010 Justin Bieber too. It's wild. And the thing that changes all of this pretty irrevocably is streaming, right? Spotify debuts in the U.S. a year after that. And of course, like the way that fans and artists interact with streaming evolves over that period of time to the point where we get a double. deluxe version of some pop stars album 24 hours later. Yeah.

And it's, you know, maybe it's like songs that were meant for B-Sides. Maybe it was songs that were demos or whatever. But it is kind of cut out the idea of the unofficial, the unreleased, because now you can just put it wherever. There's like, there's no, there's no constraint to what an album release can be, which is, I know a conversation that you have been having on this podcast basically all year. Yeah, no, I mean, it keeps changing. But the advent of streaming creates, I would say,

both an expansion and a contraction of what is possible in this realm. Expansion in the sense that these no longer have to be, you know, hand-to-hand transactions or you don't have to, you know, find a weird website where something has been made available for a limited time. And maybe you download an MP3 or a file, gives you malware. Yeah, right, exactly. Or it's like, you think it's a, you know, a Kanye West song and it's actually a fish song.

Right. Yes, there's it too. But contraction in the sense that the sort of, you know, kind of lawless Wild West exhilaration of it, that kind of goes away. And everything that was, I don't want to say, extra legal, but out of the bounds of what is, you know, packaged becomes very, managed, right? Everything sort of falls under the realm of brand management and, you know, an artist's entire team and label is going to be a part of all of these decisions, which means that the things that make their way to you wind up being a lot more considered and a lot safer.

Yeah. Well, I feel like we can't finish without some personal disclosure. So I thought we'd each share an example with each other from our own collection. You know, for that? Who should go first? I can go first. So as hard as it is to believe, there was a time when Weezer didn't have very much music. Wait, what? They're sort of alarmingly prolific these days. But at the start of 2000s, they had their two well-loved first two albums and then years of silence. But because over the course of those couple of years, home internet had proliferated, they knew that they had this really passionate fan community that had kind of stuck with them.

So as they were making their string of comeback records, the Green Album and Maladroit and those ones, they took what was a pretty radical step for the time. In between records, they would just upload their songwriting demos to their website. There's things they were testing out, things that were unfinished, some that would eventually end up in albums and some that wouldn't. And there were dozens of these. And one of my favorites was a song called Private Message. I want you so badly. Too bad that.

He slammed me. So that is the sound that they were testing out for their fifth album, Make Believe. And instead, we got Beverly Hills and we are all on drugs. I decided to go a different direction with it. That sounds good. I don't think I've ever heard that before. I always loved that one because it feels like it could be a grease outtake. It's just got this very 50-as love ballad shape to it, except it's got the Weezer guitars.

And it just seemed like they were having fun. Anyway, what do you got? In 1976, the Stooges were coming apart. I mean, they were always coming apart. They were kind of like born from disaster. But there was a somewhat infamous bootleg of what would end up becoming their last concert before they got back together in the 2000s. And it was released under the title Metallic K-O.

The original recording was actually two different live sets, basically within the same week. And the band is in disarray. It's basically coming off of raw power. And they've added a pianist to the group. And Iggy was on all of the drugs. All of them. Basically. I'll take them all.

Yeah, he took them all. And you can hear them on this album. And so kind of very quick context is that Iggy was purposely baiting his audiences, not only on stage, but before the even went to the show. Like, he went to basically invited a motorcycle gang to come to his shows to, like, to fight him. And that's what you hear. You hear bottles crashing against guitars. You hear eggs being whipped at their heads.

You hear all sorts of things happening. And in the meanwhile, Iggy is like taunting them to do it more. Wow, I'm a little afraid. Let's hear it. I mean, the moment before they just died to launch into Louis, Louis, Iggy gets on state. He's a three, like a four-minute rant, basically. And he's basically like, you guys want to hear a better version of the set we just played? What do you want to hear Louis, Louis?

And all the bikers say, Louie, Louie, and so they go on to play a terrible version of Louis, Louis, which is a hard song to be terrible. Yeah, you really have to work. You really have to work at it. Oh, man. It's, man, you ever watch a video or look at it or hear recording or something and just say like, man, I'm so glad I'm not in that room. I'm doing great where I am. Oh, that's awesome.

Now, all due respect to Iggy and the Stooges, do you have another one where the music is, let's say, good? Yes. What do we go out with that, then? Jim O'Rourke, who, speaking of Welco, he was a member of Welco for a little bit. He was a member of Sonic Youth for a little bit. But he's also just been making music for decades. He put out some rock albums on Drag City that are great. He's put out a lot of instrumental and avant-garde and modular synth records as well.

He's been living in Japan for the last few decades, basically. But in 2002, he was asked to perform at the last minute at a show in Tokyo. So he's kind of a fine. He didn't even have, like, instruments or whatever, so he had to borrow a bunch of stuff. And he didn't have a set ready, basically ready. So he basically, like, ran through some of the songs that he knew he could play capably. And then he had been working on a drone version of Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. Curious.

With Alan Licked, who I mentioned in the Lightning Round. Right, yeah. They were supposed to do that together, like, in New York. But Alan Ligt wasn't into Tokyo. But, like, Jim, needed to fill the set. Yeah. And so he decided to do his 33-minute version of Fast Car.

And it starts out sounding like Fast Car. Jim Morarck, I actually love his singing voice. He hates it. So he sings it for like a little bit. But then the song devolves. It has that beautiful guitar figure. Right. And that figure maintains throughout the recording.

But then they're... all these beautiful ambient textures coming in and out. And sometimes it billows and grows to something enormous. And sometimes it's like deadly quiet. And I adore this bootleg. And Jim O'Royk himself, he was asked about it. And he was like, I'm not mad that it exists. I'm just mad that it didn't happen with Alan.

Which I found very sweet. Yeah, I love that. It's like, I meant I wanted to do this thing with my friend. but I ended up having to do it for this thing and somebody recorded it and put it on the internet and now it's on the internet and he's like whatever, basically. But it is a bootleg that I treasure.

And I'll probably listen to it like once or twice a year if I just need to like space out and meditate and all that business. That is gorgeous. It sounds to me like that thing that happens every once in a while where you accidentally play two songs at once, like a song on your phone and a video on your computer or whatever, and miraculously, it works? Yes.

I used to think of that song as uncoverable and shows what I know. Yeah, when Luke Combs did his first and I was like, Jepo worked did it first and did it better. Excuse me. Well, that seems like the perfect place to leave it. Thanks for that. That is it for this week's New Music Friday. Next week, the final word from two artists we should have had a lot more time with,

the English band broadcast and the Scottish producer Sophie, plus new albums from Alan Sparhawk of Lowe, Mustafa, Billy Strings, and more. In the meantime, send your feedback on today's episode to all songs at npr.org. Leave us a review wherever you get your podcast. Subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash music newsletter. And remember, you can get this show sponsor-free and support our work by joining NPR Music. Go to plus.npr.npr.org slash NPR Music,

or search for NPR Music and Apple Podcast to sign up. Today's episode was produced by Noah Caldwell. Our editor is Jacob Gans. I'm Dawood Tyler Amin. I'm Lars Gottrich. Happy listening, everyone.