Emerging from the detritus of the pandemic, Bleachers’ 2021 album Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night was the best thing Antonoff had done in years. The album got behind the wheel of Bruce Springsteen’s big pop ‘80s legacy, driving that ‘59 Chevy into a new world of modern production. Everyone for Ten Minutes is, in its best moments, more of the same Boss worship. The drums are big, modeled after the muscular pound of Born in the U.S.A., the guitars flash like switchblades, the saxophone curls soulfully underneath the parts where Antonoff isn’t sing-chanting along about the past.

When it hits all the right notes, as on “The Van” and “Dirty Wedding Dress,” it highlights that Antonoff plays the heartland poet schtick pretty well. The former rides a cut-up string sample into smooth ‘70s AM pop gold, digging into nostalgia about being young, broke and idealistic, touring small bands in small vans. The latter has a DNA that is deeply rooted in The River but has an abandon that makes it a tolerable homage, albeit one that came across much better five years ago. “Dancing” is just Antonoff and an acoustic guitar (plus a gigantic amount of studio wizardry) and ends up being the strongest composition on the record, as overproduced as anything else here, but stripped down to essentials, it feels just enough instead of too much.

Often, however, the album veers into more banal retreads and then moves further out into the wastes of ‘80s AOR. “We Should Talk” is just another angle on “Glory Days,” sometimes literally, with referential lyrics and a stridently big sound with the edges sanded off to fit into an arena somewhere in New Jersey. “Take You Out Tonight” tries to approximate the wild rush of The Wild, the Innocent & the E-Street Shuffle, complete with a lengthy instrumental break, but wears its influence so ostentatiously that it comes across like a bad cover rather than a clever homage. “I Can’t Believe You’re Gone” falls headlong into dated synth pop cheese, the kind where the keyboard player is using the presets. It’s the sort of prom dance reclamation that M83 did better on Junk. It’s hard to fault Antonoff’s lyrics about grief and attempts at recovery, but the frame they’re in is cheap, the kind that holds bad thrift store kitchen paintings in place.

Everyone for Ten Minutes is enjoyable if you’ve ever grooved along to “Rosalita” or even just John Mellencamp’s “Pink Houses.” For those who find the charm in big, gated drums, ‘80s saxophone lines and don’t mind songs living thematically close to the surface, it’s an album that you can put on in mixed company. There’s absolutely nothing new anywhere on the album, though. A case can be made that this is entirely appropriate for Antonoff’s heavy focus on where he came from, in terms of his family and his musical career. Nostalgic themes pair well with nostalgic music, after all. It doesn’t do much for the criticism that he’s much better behind the boards, however.

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After Yang focuses largely on just one family: Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith, their adoptive Chinese daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and, of course, Yang (Justin H. Min). At first, their life seems pretty normal: they take photos together, cook dinner and take part in an in-home dance competition. Yang is as doting as you’d want an older brother to be, patiently listening to Mika practicing the violin and hyping up her cooking. As the opening credits finish rolling, we learn the truth: Yang is an android, purchased by Jake and Kyra to help their daughter learn more about her Chinese heritage. And he has completely malfunctioned.

In the beginning, Jake’s treatment of Yang is not unlike the way you’d treat a broken iPod; he views the malfunction as a costly nuisance and a warranty hassle to navigate. The store where Yang came from offers to recycle his corpse and turn his essence into a personal assistant device. To Mika, though, Yang is her gege, and the sudden loss rends her life asunder. In an attempt to keep his struggling family together, Jake embarks on what seems like a wild goose chase: his friend sends him to a black market technician, who saves Yang’s memory bank and sends him to Cleo (Sarita Choudhury), a technosapien museum curator who provides him with a pair of VR glasses that allow him to see the brief snippets of existence stored in Yang’s internal hard drive.

These snippets are where the subtle visual magic of Kogonada’s films comes into play. His debut film Columbus spends much of its runtime finding beauty in mundane architecture and Indiana scenery, all brought to life with the help of cinematographer Elisha Christian. After Yang sees Kogonada and Benjamin Loeb upping the ante, allowing us to see the world through the eyes of Yang. This world is no utopia (there’s still plenty of anti-Chinese racism to go around), but there are so many moments of beauty. It’s an easy world to fall in love with, where clones and androids exist, and self-driving cars are lined with lush green plants.

Yang’s memories are universally tender, sliding between concrete events and abstract visions: dappled sunlight across a doorway, Kyra sitting and reading a book, a spiderweb in the sunlight, Mika learning to walk. These moments flash across Jake’s eyes, pulled with the randomness of memory itself, each one presented as a glowing point in the vast field of stars that forms the memory database’s interface. During his first journey through Yang’s memories, Mika finds him on the couch, and notices that he’s been crying. It’s hard to blame him — these snippets might just make you silently weep along with the film, too.

Jake learns, rather quickly, that viewing Yang as a piece of technology that taught his daughter “Chinese fun facts” was foolish — he was just as alive as the rest of his family. He had interests, pondered his own existence, went on his own small adventures, even fell in love with a woman, Ada (Haley Lu Richardson, Kogonada’s good luck charm and star of Columbus). What began as a journey to figure out how to salvage a tech investment becomes an attempt to piece together the puzzle of a rich life Jake knew nothing about.

We see the family’s own memory snippets as they come to terms with the loss of Yang, like his attempt to soothe Mika’s adoption angst by teaching her about tree grafting, and Kyra connecting with him over his butterfly collection. In one phenomenal scene, Jake explains his relationship with tea and the lack of language to adequately convey how tea tastes. “Do you believe it? That a cup of tea can contain a world? That you can taste a place, a time?” Yang wishes he could understand the worlds unlocked in the tea leaves, but we never wonder if he’s hurting for a richer understanding of life’s mysteries. He contains multitudes, beyond even what we get to see.

In the pantheon of android cinema, After Yang hits closest to Roy Batty’s “Tears in Rain” speech in Blade Runner, but mercifully, it doesn’t care much about beating us over the head with any of its messages. It’s indisputable that what we learn about Yang is that he had just as much humanity as the rest of his family, and After Yang is content to show, rather than tell, us that message. It asks endless questions about identity — in one scene, Jake asks Ada if Yang ever spoke about what it meant to be human, and she confessed that he was more concerned with what made him Chinese — but it allows those questions to hang in the air for us to ponder.

The slow, tender unveiling of the mysteries of Yang, especially his relationship with Ada, is best watched, rather than read about in essay form. There are further twists, but they’re presented not as grand reveals but as additional layers of a life the human characters knew too little about. The banal frustrations at the film’s outset morph into a complex portrait of a family’s grief, so potent that it all but demands that you sob to yourself as you watch it all unfold. After Yang could have been many different films, from a dystopian techno-thriller to a heavy-handed treatise on what makes life worth living. What we get is so much better: a subtle, touching and masterfully shot film about interconnectedness, the worlds we create for ourselves, and the process of exploring the worlds we leave behind when we’re gone.

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Yet, standard musical narratives of the early ’80s tend to focus exclusively on this BRock explosion, ignoring the parallel evolution of the Black Rio movement. Originating in the 1970s as a form of cultural resistance against the military dictatorship, Black Rio blended American soul, funk and jazz with traditional samba and forró, creating a vital, celebratory space for Black Brazilian youth. While towering figures like Tima Maia and Cassiano dominated the movement’s history, the narrative shouldn’t stop with them. Brylho was no mere footnote to BRock or MPB; they were a tight-knit outfit that captured the absolute peak of Brazil’s “boogie explosion.”

Brylho’s early history follows a familiar evolutionary path. Founded in 1978 as “Brylho da Cidade,” the band spent its early years finding its footing before resurfacing in 1983 with a shorter name and a leaner, more focused lineup. The core lineup featured bassist and vocalist Arnaldo Brandão, guitarist Paulo Roquette, drummer Robério Rafael, percussionist Bolão and keyboardist Ricardo Cristaldi. Rounding out the group was guitarist and vocalist Cláudio Zoli, a teenage prodigy who would soon leverage this project into a massive solo career. To elevate their studio recordings, the band brought in legendary arrangement titans Lincoln Olivetti and Serginho Trombone. Together, this collective crafted a distinctly Carioca sound—a smooth, laid-back melting pot where slick American funk and disco collided with the relaxed coastal rhythms of Rio de Janeiro.

The album’s centerpiece, “Noite do Prazer,” is often celebrated today as Rio de Janeiro’s smooth answer to George Benson’s “Give Me the Night,” but its contemporary reception was far more contentious. In an interview with Starling Cast, Brandão noted that the track initially drew negative press from critics who dismissed them as just another “suburban funk band.” Visually and sonically, the track defies that erasure. It opens with a squelchy synth cutting through swinging guitar stabs before settling into a reggae-inflected bassline. While Zoli brought the song’s foundational ideas to the group, Brandão reshaped the rhythm into something entirely new, inadvertently creating a template for modern Brazilian funk. Against this locked-in groove, the velvet, soulful vocals float effortlessly in the pocket before receding, allowing the entire band to lock into an extended jam session.

The album routinely bounces from the smooth soul of “Noite do Prazer” to high-velocity, kinetic dance tracks. On “Meditando,” rapid-fire hand drums pound relentlessly before unleashing a flurry of synths, guitars and a talk box reminiscent of the early 1980s British jazz-funk era. These vocal breaks are explicitly engineered to keep the dance floor moving. As that track closes, the band pivots to an early nod to hip-hop on “Cheque Sem Fundos.” Here, a prominent, groovy bassline pairs with punchy horn arrangements to provide a backbone for a rhythmic, spoken-word vocal delivery that serves as a fascinating precursor to the country’s later rap-funk explosion.

The recent 2025 vinyl reissue of Brylho proves that despite a brief recording career, the band’s impact has successfully outlived its original era. In the modern streaming landscape, vintage Brazilian funk is often reduced to a monolith—celebrated merely as a sun-drenched, upbeat background aesthetic. Younger, global audiences have essentially weaponized terms like “Brazilian City Pop” on platforms like TikTok, turning tracks like “Se Você For a Salvador” into viral, feel-good trends. While this digital resurgence introduces the music to millions, it often strips the songs of their historical context, ignoring the reality that this music was born out of the Black Rio movement’s fierce cultural resistance. By returning to the physical format, listeners are forced to reckon with the album as a complete work. Ultimately, Brylho is far more than a nostalgic relic of 1983 dance floors; it is a masterclass in genre-fluidity that remains remarkably crisp, vital and necessary today.

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She isn’t quite there, yet. Backed by studio musicians and produced by Justin Raisen (noted for work with Kim Gordon and Charli XCX), the album has a sharp sound that clearly shows its debt. Grohl often draws straight from ’90s alt-rock. She cites the Breeders and PJ Harvey as major influences, but she’s yet to become as distinctive as either of them. A handful of other likely influences spring to mind, most notably Hole, but you can take your pick of what acts you hear.

That doesn’t mean the album’s bad; it offers plenty of rewards beyond nostalgic reimaginings, including Grohl’s effective vocals. She can do disaffected, angry or scary all at once. Single “595” mixes the moods together. The song sounds like a come-on at times, an operator of a phone sex line offering lascivious suggestions to a potential customer. Grohl can menace, though, as when her talk betrays her murderous intentions. A liver-eating reference to Hannibal Lecter nods to her love of horror movies, an influence on the record along with her appreciation of David Lynch.

Grohl can deviate from the expected formula. “Often Others” connects more with metal than with grunge, and the driving guitars help it to stand out. The formal structure offers a little more variation, especially in its play with space. Likewise “Plastic Couch” benefits from its composition, moving from gentle indie number to much heavier territory with compelling ease. When the music explores more, mixing in shoegaze or sludgier tones, the album picks up.

The simpler numbers work well, too. Opening cut “THUM” does little to differentiate itself from its historical predecessors, but it still rocks, and Grohl knows how to talk about habitual nail-biting in a way that seems to matter, a psychological issue drilled down to an ostensibly small manifestation of a large concern. “Bug in the Cake” similarly rips along, but it’s Grohl’s wordplay in this ode to her grandma that turns it into a truly memorable cut.

The album’s highs show what Grohl’s capable of, and Be Sweet to Me is certainly a more-than-capable debut album. She also hits some limits on the record, primarily the sometimes redundant and indebted sound. Grohl has spoken in interviews about how many kinds of music she listens to. We see flourishes of that, but not a sustained commitment to boundary-pushing. That could be a choice, or the result of artistic inhibition (Grohl’s a young adult stepping out of a famous parent’s shadow) or even the effect of the collaborative process behind the disc. The songwriting and vocals suggest more idiosyncratic work to come. If Grohl can solidify a band and push herself a little, she should become an exciting artist to watch.

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There’s a moment, roughly 20 minutes into Siobhan McCarthy’s She’s the He, where we watch this moment happen. The frumpy, awkward Ethan (Misha Osherovich, a trans actor), having been conned into “pretending” to be trans so his best friend, Alex (Nico Carney, also a trans actor, also pretending to be trans), can get laid. The girl Alex is into helps Ethan femme up, and the moment he looks in the mirror, it all clicks. The music swells, and you can see a bolt of lightning punch through Ethan’s misery, and it all makes sense. Osherovich is a relatively green actor, but she conveys a vast ocean of feelings in just her eyes. It’s one of the best things about She’s the He, to the point where it feels like the key to this film working as well as it does.

It’s hard to know just what to feel about She’s the He outside of Osherovich’s fantastically subtle performance. Many things about it work, and oftentimes, they work because the production is full of trans people. The best example is Ethan, whose pre-realization wardrobe will be all too familiar to anyone who remembers their own time in that phase: baggy, ugly, colorless clothes, unkempt hair, a thick beanie. This is what you wear when you’re at war with your physical being, even if you aren’t totally aware of the conflict. Even Ethan’s attitude towards Alex’s plans conveys a level of complacent misery, where he knows the plan absolutely sucks and makes no sense, but the energy to stop it from happening is just not there. It doesn’t help that their classmates, teachers and even Ethan’s mother are convinced the two friends are gay; in one scene, their teacher (played exquisitely by the underused Aparna Nancherla) suggests they cover their graduation caps in rainbows.

The problem, though, is that so many things about She’s the He don’t work — and, even worse, the film was made with so much heart, it feels bad to even draw attention to it. For starters, the film doesn’t even seem to have much interest in fleshing out Alex’s plans, which go as far as sneaking into the girls’ locker room and haphazardly adorning the two of them in women’s clothes (including Ethan wearing a brightly colored bra over the trusty ol’ dysphoria hoodie). Alex’s dialogue holds much of the first act back as well, as his obsession with getting laid manifests as a filthy verbal tic: “I am a pussytarian, and this shit is giving me an eating disorder!” he says early on. Later, “This is a direct path to her heart… er, pussy. And her tits, which are the pussy of the chest!” It gives She’s the He the energy of Superbad, but without the filmmaking heft to back it up.

Many other aspects work. It has a killer soundtrack and layers of on-screen doodles, which both give the film the feeling of a classic ‘90s teen sex comedy reminiscent of American Pie. The multiple coming-out conversations Ethan has with her mother are painfully realistic, right down to her mother angrily telling her she’ll be too ugly as a girl to thrive and refusing to hug her. But, the overall plot feels disjointed and haphazard, with an unbearably strange climax: the school’s jocks discover what Alex and Ethan have done, throw on dresses, and invade the girls’ locker room and try to break down the door of a room where they’ve barricaded themselves. How do they escape? They throw used tampons and pads at the boys to get them to retreat. Teen comedies love grossout humor, but She’s the He isn’t quite sophisticated enough for them to feel like anything other than thoughtless juvenilia and a misguided reinforcement that menstruation is “gross.”

She’s the He is the kind of movie that makes you feel bad for not loving it. McCarthy, Osherovich, Carney and everyone else involved poured so much of themselves into this film, and in a lot of ways, it deserves the utmost respect for giving people something that the world needs more of: raunchy trans comedies. When McCarthy comes back and makes another movie, we do not doubt that a lot of the kinks and issues present with She’s the He will be ironed out. If we’re lucky, it won’t even include the phrase “pussy-eating centipede.”

Photo courtesy of Obscured Releasing

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The album’s heavy catchiness is established from the start as “There” crawls out of its darkened cocoon, the stormy, fuzzy guitars billowing like a subdued and less dreamy My Bloody Valentine. The song is straightforwardly melodic but yearning, seeming weighed down with sorrow but attempting to soar free, which gives it a more upbeat, or at least more energized, feel than most of the other songs on the album. It’s an excellent opener, and those who don’t respond to it are unlikely to get much from Deadlights – its sound – Lakis’ bright but indistinct voice against a gauzy but dense wall of guitar noise and clattering drums -is the sound of the album from start to finish. The best songs have a powerfully emotive feeling, though just what the emotions are mostly has to be guessed at, since the lyrics are only occasionally clearly audible. A hint may come from the album’s gestation period, which took place during a year in which Lakis’ mother was dying after years of paralysis, the result of a road accident a decade ago. Lakis states that, rather than grief, the album captures the freedom that comes from living through terrible experiences, but even so, it feels weighed down with sorrow, its strongest moments coming when that weight is balanced by the yearning for something better.

There are a few songs that feel tonally lighter, but given that the most immediate and apparently upbeat of them is titled “I Fall Apart,” that lightness may be deceptive. That track in particular has a very Curve-like tone as well as the album’s catchiest melody, while elsewhere “The Other Side” is just as accessible but more punkish. It has an aggressive edge that makes it feel almost like L7 playing shoegaze. “Heaven Felt Too High” soars like Lush despite a particularly gritty, grungy opening bassline but though it has a catchy enough tune it never quite grips in the way that “There” does, perhaps because its emotional tone seems uncertain, certainly not happy but never seeming to quite commit to a mood, making the song feel unresolved, a riff and melody in search of a feeling.

Despite the album’s varying shades of lightness, its many flavors of gloom are far more characteristic. There are songs like “No One’s Around Now” and “It’s So Amazing” that sound a little like Cranes, or like Curve or Lush covering the Cure circa Wish, and there are grim, slow and sludgy tracks like “Love Like a Dog” and the title track. “I Want You Here” opens with some atmospheric electronic stuff and is filled with yearning, but has a murky underwater quality, while the closing “With That Body” is just achingly sad. The album ends with just Lakis’ desolate voice murmuring as if to itself.

If Deadlights sweeps you up in its mood at the beginning, it will carry you along, not triumphantly, but as though hypnotized, right to its delicate, fragile end. For many, though, its central group of downbeat, mid-tempo, sensitive but uncertain songs may ultimately feel too similar to each other and the result monotonous rather than gripping. It’s worth finding out, though, because those who do take it to their hearts will find an album with secrets to be unlocked.

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The Japanese rapper Ace Cool supplies the voice of the hero, whom Suzuki follows from childhood through various periods in his life. In each epoch, like when he joins a pop group and later becomes the subject of an urban legend, he goes by a different name (“Jinsei” is the Japanese word for “life”). In the opening scenes, as a boy, the death of his mother traumatizes him, while his father transfers him to a new school. Enigmatic and shy, the boy gets the attention of Kin (Tanaka Taketo), a fair-haired classmate who finds him fascinating. Romantic attraction between them is all subtext, and this stretch is mostly an opportunity for Suzuki to establish his thesis: profound detachment attracts others like Kin to this boy, and it is this same quality that causes him to lead a life of quiet despair.

In formal terms, the look of Jinsei is admittedly a good match for the material. By draining the frame of color, it opts for lots of blues and greys, and the animation itself is deliberately stilted. Characters and objects move through the frame at what seems like a rate less than 24 frames a second, so the action looks like old Flash cartoons you could find online in the early 2000s. Sometimes this can lead to some deadpan comedy, like a scene where boys try out for a boy band, and mostly, this jerky movement creates a dissociative quality between the viewer and what happens. Coupled with countless shots of a figure framed in the center of the shot like they’re a news anchor, the film is closer to an audiobook with an illustrated accompaniment than an actual film.

Suzuki is clearly onto something. His character is firmly a member of Gen Z, and as his timeline accelerates beyond the present into the future, he becomes an everyman for the dissatisfaction and alienation that plague people his age. Maybe non-Japanese audiences will identify with this young man who says so little that others cannot help but guess at the depth that lurks underneath his steely exterior. The trouble is that this suggestion of depth is just that, a suggestion, and the gambit falters once you start to question the spell Suzuki tries to conjure. Maybe Jinsei is meant to be hypnotic, except it is too distant to ever become genuinely immersive. There is a specificity to Jinsei, and indeed, there may never have been a film quite like it. But couldn’t that also suggest there is a good reason no one ever made an animated film quite this way?

Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment

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The archetypal Kurt Vile solo record is 2013’s Wakin on a Pretty Daze. There, more so than on his four previous records or his work as the lead guitarist with pre-fame The War on Drugs, he established the basic sprawling classic rock-influenced haze that would carry him through every subsequent album. Over time, especially starting with 2015’s B’lieve I’m Goin Down…, he discovered the concept of hooks, and his songs deviated once in a while from lengthy stoned jams. Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me carries on this basic tension. You have songs like “99th Song,” a meandering 10-minute jam about the 99th song in his red loop pedal. On the other side, there are tighter-wound tracks like “Chance to Bleed,” one of the sharpest pieces in Vile’s whole collection. He repeats its hook of “Now you’ve got a chance to bleed/ With that old time, lo-fi, DIY, rock ‘n’ roll nights” more than is perhaps advisable for any other artist, but it’s such a great bit that each repetition becomes more fun than the last.

Vile goes back and forth between the two modes, managing to do both as well as he ever has. “99 BPM” billows with smoke and rides a vocal that feels like it’s had a place at least once on each of his albums. The closer “Avalanches of Snow” stretches out past seven minutes and combines his familiar guitar idioms with an interesting, soulful sax line. “You don’t know cuz it’s my life” is uncharacteristically busy at the beginning, where Vile sings animatedly about his life in Philadelphia and how it’s the town where Sun Ra lived. He also mentions two fairly obvious heroes of his – Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen – who wrote songs about Philadelphia, which he takes an amiable umbrage with because they aren’t from there. “But I still love you,” he soothes them, because even when he’s staking out his hometown territory, he still comes across as the friendliest guy with a guitar you’d ever hope to meet.

There are some experiments here and there to break up the rambling man jams. “Red Room Dub” combines his familiar guitar work with an electric piano accent, eschewing vocals altogether in service of working out new ways to state his old ideas. “Piano for Sarah” does the same thing, but strips back his usual layers to just a beautiful, stuttering piano loop over some affable rock drums. When his signature dirty guitar tone comes in at the end, it brings a new appreciation for the way Vile approaches his playing. “Every time I look at you” brings a gentle, more wholesome vibe, with a delicate arrangement and a lyric about being proud of your kid. He’s aging gracefully, letting his long hair grow even longer.

Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me fits neatly and easily into Kurt Vile’s catalog, another comfortable guitar rock record played loose and breezy. He explores a few different avenues for his writing, but keeps it mostly centered around classic rock played slow on lazy afternoons. The lyrics are, as usual, stream-of-consciousness, studded with lines that feel like the way the wind blows through a tree at a certain time of day. There’s meaning in it, but it’s often gone before you can fully grasp it. All the while, Vile’s guitar loops and swirls through his words and his structures like vines. The biggest indicator for liking his latest record is knowing and enjoying his style, but for those who do, it offers continued pleasures.

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Both Øye and Bøe play multiple instruments, sing (in English) and compose. They are adept at finding the right moods and the right chords to depict slower ballads as well as more upbeat grooves. Though you won’t hear them in a nightclub (that isn’t their style whatsoever), tracks like “Love is No Big Truth” or “I’d Rather Dance with You” have an infectious melody and a clever use of repetition. The reverb, which can often go wrong in amateur hands, works superbly to propel the tunes forward and further creates a looping effect that is hypnotic yet full of momentum.

1. “Homesick”

The guitar gets the piece going. And then the duo’s harmonized vocals enter. They are quiet, contemplative, intimate. It is something that Simon and Garfunkel would have written if they’d started in the 2000s. The twang of the guitars is perfectly matched with the mellow voice that sings about being homesick and wondering how they ended up where they are. The narrative fits the folk-rock troubadour tradition (think Cat Stevens, Al Stewart) about everyday life and the concerns that float through the mind. It is grounded by real-life events, like a boss being unhappy about losing sales, but it goes further with the idea that you “no longer know where home is.” It is a sweet, if melancholy, tune.

2. “Misread”

Changing the mood, the second track has an animated piano section paired with strings and an underlying guitar. The soft tone remains, yet it is joined by a quicker tempo, a sense of urgency. That is the tension that propels many of the songs forward. The mellow tone, notably in the vocals, is combined with instrumentals which are not quite upbeat or lively but which sound in-a-hurry, like they are slightly late to something.

3. “Cayman Islands”

Returning to interwoven guitar riffs, the duo channels Simon and Garfunkel once more. Then strings enter the mix, expanding the sound. It is a haunted sound, almost oriental in the plucked strings. This specific style isn’t new to the twosome. “Failure” from this first release also inserts strings. Even if their debut had a harder, more rock vibe to it, that musical blend continues to inspire and be developed in this second project. The little things, like tempo adjustments and instrument changeups, are key to the effectiveness of song transitions. The overarching sound is both strengthened and diversified (without fear of one specific track being overly oddball) by these small additions and considerations.

4. “Stay Out of Trouble”

Staying within the same mood, “Stay Out of Trouble” mainly features this lilting, slightly swung string musical motif. It is not the most memorable piece on the release. The notes sort of clomp about like a prancing horse. There is movement, but it’s more static and stationary than the other songs about it.

5. “Know-How”

One good and unexpected surprise is the addition of Canadian singer Feist (she had not released her noted The Remainder (2007) yet). Her vocals mesh nicely with the two male singers. Where both Øye and Bøe are whispery in vocal tone, Feist rounds the sound out. So, instead of having a colder, brittle, skeletal sound, there is a warmth vibrating out from the soundwaves. Also, the last 30 seconds of instrumentals are fantastic. Instead of simply dying away after the trio sings, the guitars and percussion increase in volume. Once again, the shift is subtle but rewarding.

6. “Sorry or Please”

An album that resides in a consistent sound can get labeled monotonous or narrow-minded by some people. Kings of Convenience could be accused of sticking to a certain style, and their blend and ways of layering instruments are reliably regular throughout. Is this problematic? Perhaps, but only when the song order is sloppy so that a listener starts to get bored by too many being “similar.” Even if those “similar” songs are well written or even quite catchy, the fact that they are next to one another, unfortunately, dulls them. Luckily, the duo doesn’t fall into this trap for the most part.

Case in point, halfway through the duo goes back to their debut album’s style, which has more attitude and wavers less. There are still glimmering guitar riffs, but the vocals are at the forefront, noticeable, less whispered and secretive. Having the horn in the mix (however muted) calls attention to the composition regardless.

7. “Love is No Big Truth”

One of the most memorable tracks on the album, “Love is No Big Truth” slides into a stronger pop tone, mainly through the catchy melody. It moves with ease, and the guitars hum and introduce the beat, and the ending repetition of “again and again” sings mesmerizingly. Calling it a simple song might seem like a negative comment; however, it is simple in the way that it instantly catches the ear. The layers are wonderfully considered and organized. The vocals pair with the instrumentals expertly. If this doesn’t intrigue you, these guys aren’t for you.

8. “I’d Rather Dance with You”

Now the main single comes a bit late in the overall track list. As with the previous song, this piece also has an upbeat tempo. The duo really appears to have hit on a solid sound that not only seems approachable, but also has a suave, sophisticated sound to it. Of course, if every one of their compositions mimicked this structure and musical phrasing, it would get old. Because they back off and keep a quieter tone, in general, on the release, this track (and the previous one) are all the stronger.

9. “Live Long”

Returning to the thrumming, plucking guitars and a softer sound, “Live Long” further layers in some mellow brass. As with other pieces, this addition allows the song to meld cohesively with the rest while remaining a slight surprise.

10. “Surprise Ice”

The duo turns inward on this one. Their vocals are even more whispery, and the instruments take a step back in shadow, not as situated in the spotlight as before. One might compare it to the overall tone of “Sound of Silence,” that airy, slightly chill atmosphere. The chorus is the best part of the piece, however. The rest gets lost. Perhaps, if this had been repositioned in the tracklist, it might have more of an impact.

11. “Gold in the Air of Summer”

With any good album, there are moments where songs could have been left out. This piece may be memorable to some or forgotten by others. Vocals are unchanged in style, and the muted style persists. There are some lovely sections and instrumental riffs here and there. Again, not a “bad” song, merely not as notable as others earlier on.

12. “The Build-Up”

Feist makes a second appearance at the end of a very good record; her voice weaves itself in like a colorful thread, adding but not distracting from the whole. Looking back, the album has a V-shape where the center, the highpoints are tracks seven and eight, and it then tapers off, goes off into darkness and silence. It is an interesting concept (if that was what the musicians were going for). Is there not an obvious pitfall in the idea of taking away energy from the remaining tracks once the two upbeat and catchy tunes have come and gone? Or is this an inside joke of sorts? A laugh at the idea of standard pop albums that are often unbalanced and overly stuffed with “hits.” Perhaps… For some listeners, it might be hard to come down for the middle section’s high. For others, it may be what is needed — a calming down, a breath as the build-up dissipates.

Riot on an Empty Street exhibits a folk-rock revival of sorts. Though they are clearly inspired by people like Paul Simon, Al Stewart or James Taylor, they mix in a contemporary understanding of reverb and a slightly jazzy sense of layering in different instruments to add a punch here and there. Though there are a few tracks that might have been cut, overall, the album is a memorable and mellow love letter to songwriting and tight harmonies.

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On her first album in five years, British composer and pianist Poppy Ackroyd explores those moments that fall between the posts, the phone calls and text messages; they might not even warrant a diary entry, depending on how literary you tend to be. Like so many of us, Ackroyd found herself at life’s mercy for a period of three years, navigating one tragedy after another while attempting to show up for her loved ones. This left Ackroyd feeling drained and creatively spent, which was made worse by a cross-country move, depriving her of her support network and community. Before she knew it, almost five years had passed, leaving her feeling that life was passing her by. This stasis ended up erupting into a period of almost unbelievable activity when Ackroyd got set up in a new studio space, where she conceived almost the entirety of Liminal in a little over three months.

The eight slight compositions that make up Liminal‘s 40-minute runtime don’t just pay lip service to Ackroyd’s concepts with high-flying song titles or flashy production gimmicks. The music itself parallels the themes of motion and stasis, as rainbow-like right-hand melodies endlessly searching over a sturdy structure of supporting chords, as on “Shimmer” or “The Unknown.” Other moments are more content to just introspect and drift, floating along on pointillist bass chords while Ackroyd’s violin reaches for the stars. Like many of life’s quieter moments, it’s devastatingly beautiful when you pay attention.

The fact that Liminal is such a thing of lovely, tender beauty is impressive, given how many ways it could’ve gone wrong. Many modern minimalist composers have a tendency to either default to technological shock-and-awe to overcome the piano’s historical associations or else they oversimplify Erik Satie’s furniture music into a pre-school soporific. It’s a tough balance to strike, as many modern music fans feel that music needs to be difficult or unpleasant to be worthwhile, which couldn’t be further from the truth, as Liminal makes undeniably clear. It’s also all too easy to shore up undercooked melodies and harmonies with a clever gimmick and a caulk of nostalgia and sentimentality. Ackroyd could easily have slipped between those cracks, as her music’s not melodically complicated or structurally complex. Instead, she threads the needle just so, landing close to Satie, Chopin or modern minimalists like Gonzales or Nils Frahm. It’s a reminder that even the smallest moments can loom large as mountains when you’re paying attention. Liminal is an exquisite reminder to take in and appreciate all of life’s moments captured in delicate, lovely detail.

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