The SoHo area where the band had recorded Daydream Nation had become a stretch of upscale retail spaces paying an eye-watering $12,000 per month in rent. The brownstone where Wharton Tiers had recorded Confusion Is Sex with the band had become condos; Tiers himself had been priced out and moved to Brooklyn. Rather Ripped, the band’s 14th album, would be the first in some time to be primarily recorded somewhere other than Echo Canyon. The building that the studio had occupied on Murray Street had, like Tiers’ space and so much of Bloomberg-era New York, also been sold off to develop condos.

In the spring of 2006, the band was in the process of losing its longtime Murray Street studio, eventually establishing Echo Canyon West in Hoboken. The period before that had been consumed with getting things organized and packed up; this coincided with the time the band had allotted to recording their follow-up to Sonic Nurse, so finding another studio became an urgent matter. They settled on Sear Sound, partly because long-time collaborator Jim O’Rourke had recommended it and partly because they had recorded Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Star there in late 1993. They chose John Agnello to help produce for a few different reasons as well, mainly based on J Mascis’ recommendation, but also because Moore admired the work he’d done engineering Sweet Oblivion, the 1992 album from Screaming Trees. It was a comfortable mix of legacy and community, but it would necessitate a deviation from how the band had been doing things for the past decade.

Sonic Youth weren’t the same band they’d been before 9/11 either. For one thing, the name “Sonic Youth” had become a misnomer. Steve Shelley, the youngest member of the band, was 44; Kim Gordon and Lee Ranaldo were in their 50s, and Thurston Moore wasn’t far behind. For the first time in the 21st century it was just the four of them, as well. Long-time fifth member Jim O’Rourke, who had played on Sonic Youth records since NYC Ghosts & Flowers, had left the band shortly before work on Rather Ripped began and moved to Japan to pursue film soundtracks and other creative projects. The remainder all lived fairly far apart from each other, with Moore and Gordon living closer to Boston than they did to New York.

All of this meant that the process for recording the new album would need to be different than it had been for some time. Ever since building Echo Canyon and recording A Thousand Leaves, the method had been to get together and spend hours jamming out tracks before taking the best parts of the recordings and piecing them together. Faced with the prospect of having to pay for their studio time again and reduced to being able to get together on weekends, it became necessary to come into the studio with solid riffs that could be quickly fleshed out into songs.

Something that tends to get glossed over in contemporary reviews of the album is that many of the songs had their genesis in a bag of riffs Moore had developed for, of all circumstances, music for commercials for HSBC. The idea of Thurston Moore, the Punk Rock Professor, collaborating on commercials with such a nakedly capitalist organization is astounding, although the need to pay for college tuition is an ever-present specter that makes for strange bedfellows. The whole deal sounds hellish; the marketing team behind the series of commercials was using “Kool Thing” as the demo song behind their visuals and apparently wanted each piece to be a basic rewrite of the “Kool Thing” riff. Moore, to his (slight) credit, did not go in for this, and took the collaboration as an opportunity to sketch out a bunch of interesting 10-second riffs that played with the form while staying true to his usual writing.

The concise method of songwriting – start with the riff and hammer out the song, with as little reworking as possible – as well as the departure of O’Rourke led to a relatively radical turnaround in what Sonic Youth sounded like in the mid-’00s. Armed with Moore’s recycled bank riffs, the band banged out an album that was much more song-oriented than the band had been in a very long time, perhaps ever. Moore himself noted the difference in how the band sounded before O’Rourke’s departure and after; O’Rourke’s contributions were “darker, twisted [and] complex” whereas Rather Ripped was “a far more straight up rock and roll album.”

That’s not to say that the songs on Rather Ripped aren’t immediately recognizable in such a way that could only come from Sonic Youth. Whether it’s because the initial genesis of some of the songs came from trying to figure out how to deliver multiple iterations of “Kool Thing” without blatantly rewriting it, or possibly because the sound of a “straight up rock and roll album” is, for Moore, Sister through Washing Machine, almost everything on the album could be mistaken at first blush for something on Daydream Nation made by a band that had slowed a step in their age but had grown into wisdom. “Incinerate,” the single, is arguably the most accessible song the band had ever released, save maybe only “100%.” The sound coming out of Moore’s guitar – plugged directly into the mixer, without an amp between them – is “Teen Age Riot” done and re-done until it is succinct, professional and possessed of a minimalism that seems far removed from the psychedelic punk jams of 1988.

This sense of stark minimalism carries through into many of the other songs as well. “Do You Believe in Rapture?” (the working title for the album) has as little ornamentation as possible, combining a steady kick drum and some light cymbal splashes from Shelley with light, brittle guitar chords that feel as though they could have been sampled directly from The Velvet Underground and Nico. There is some familiar feedback noise, but it lurks in the background rather than overtaking the song. Similarly, the closing track “Or” leans heavily on a thick, thumb-thumped bass line, a lumbering beast of a tone whose only real contrast is some acoustic guitar wrapping around it like vines squeezing some long-crumbled column.

Even the more complex songs aren’t all that dense. “Sleepin Around” and “Reena” both coalesce around a central riff and ride it like they’re summoning the ghosts of their early ’90s alt rock contemporaries. The former even has a passage that sounds like a standard rock guitar solo. Both “Turquoise Boy” (itself structured rather overtly like an early Velvet Underground song) and “Jams Run Free” have parts where they start to veer off into the kind of noisy tone-jams that characterized their work after 1998. Where previous iterations of these songs might have explored these ideas for five or more minutes, however, their Rather Ripped brethren keep the jams contained, choosing to get back to the song rather than linger overlong. The most sonically complex song on the album, “Pink Steam,” builds layers of Sonic Youth guitar adventurism for five minutes, but just when you think it’s going to launch off into something wild the vocals come in, and it settles down into a more traditional song for almost two minutes before ending.

It all sounded like Sonic Youth from various eras; Daydream Nation, of course, but “What a Waste” has traces of the youthful clenched-fist attitude of Goo and a couple of songs, “Lights Out” and “Rats” (the requisite lone Ranaldo track) hearken back to the old days when the band’s writing was full of the dark, squalid images of the streets and alleys of New York. The soundtrack behind those images from the early ’80s was much more willfully noisy, but traces of the days when their sound could be described partially as “evil” still existed in there somewhere. The upside to this was that it served as a late-period entry point for a new generation of listeners; people who had been busy being born when the band had been part of the Alternative Revolution came upon a gentler introduction to what Sonic Youth was about than any of their last few albums.

Still, though, it feels like a comedown after the run of Murray Street and Sonic Nurse. The latter, especially, when compared to Rather Ripped feels like a more exciting and explosive version of what the band had become in the new century. Rather Ripped stripped down what they had been doing to the bare essentials, which was necessary but perhaps not ideal. The heady sense of freedom to pursue whatever creative avenue they wished had always been integral to the band, and so Rather Ripped ends up feeling like what it was: a bunch of songs, several built around riffs that were made to be as “Sonic Youth” as possible to increase corporate profits. If it worked for HSBC, it didn’t for Sonic Youth. When the dust settled, the album didn’t sell appreciably more than either of the previous two albums, despite the pre-release hype at Geffen that the band might have found their way into another hit record.

It may have been, as David Browne noted in his biography of the band, that “it was the album Geffen must have hoped they would’ve made 15 years earlier,” but it came well past the time that anyone beyond the band’s long-term fans would have been paying attention anyway.
It would be their last album for Geffen as well. With the release of Rather Ripped, their record contract had been fulfilled.

There is a sense of unease running through the album that can be partly explained by this. The future was wide open, but with the expenses of middle age piling up, the lack of a record contract felt like free-fall rather than freedom. The unquiet truth was that Sonic Youth were even then on shaky ground. The lyrics on Rather Ripped add to the uneasy feelings present throughout. While some of Gordon’s songs, like “Reena” and “Pink Steam,” have literary inspirations, there’s an awful lot of imagery that, five years later, would seem a lot different than it did upon the album’s initial release. It’s an album seemingly obsessed with lust and adultery.

What should be made, for example, of Moore’s “Sleepin Around,” in the wake of his affair with his now-wife Eva Prinz, that blew up his marriage and the band? When Gordon sings, on the rather poppy “The Neutral,” “He’s not a dreamer or a schemer/ Running away from you/ He’s not a singer, an entertainer/ With no follow through/ He’s not a poet or a mystic/ With his cigarette unglued/ He’s not a cowboy or a loner/ With nothing to do/ He’s neutral, and he’s weary/ Not even brand new/ He’s neutral, yeah he’s weary/ And he’s so in love with you,” it’s hard not to imagine she’s directing this jibe at her then-husband. She wouldn’t write about the implosion of their marriage explicitly until the very end of their final studio album, but it’s easy enough to catch glimpses of the problems throughout Rather Ripped. Even “Reena,” ostensibly about the persona at the heart of a collective art project, was explicitly about adultery and features Gordon closing the song out with “I had a friend who lied all the time.” There’s nothing out there to definitively say that their problems were influencing the songs one way or another, but as with anything: once is a coincidence, twice is a pattern.

Rather Ripped occupies an odd place in Sonic Youth’s discography, one that’s hard to pin down specifically. It doesn’t have the adventurous spirit of the Sister/Daydream Nation era, and while it feels similar to the more succinct sound of Goo and Dirty, it lacks the headlong punch of either. It comes across as an aging band trying to recapture the magic, but even this isn’t entirely accurate, because they’d never experienced a moment where the magic hadn’t been there in some form or another. Like the Stones’ Tattoo You, it’s a late-period summation of what made them great without actually being great itself. It remains the one Sonic Youth album you can be sure that you can put on in mixed company and have it come out alright.

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The first song seems to miss the point of the rest of the album, but perfectly suits its moment. “Snakeskin Boots” features Ella Langley, which makes it especially relevant right now (notably, Lambert co-wrote and co-produced Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas”), but it’s the only cut on the record that sounds like it belongs elsewhere. The track (and therefore the album) opens with cinematic Western tones. This is the Wild West — or at least a spaghetti-western version — and Lambert and Langley come out with a loose sketch of a bandit woman, best summed up in two lines: “If the good all die young/ She’s gonna slip the hangman’s noose.” The mood works, and if the character remains a little underdeveloped, the performance sticks.

Only in the last 90 seconds of that track does it begin to cohere to the rest of the release, when a nice string section comes in, a touch made sensible when the following number, “Crisco,” explains everything that follows. “Ain’t we mixin’ country and disco,” Lambert sings, then adding an allusion to make sure we get it: “We could be like islands in the stream.” Crisco is Lambert’s country-disco record, a nod to the late ’70s sound of Nashville. It’s going to be “like Conway and Loretta.” The opener got a theatrical big-name collaboration, and then we moved on to something more urbane.

Not that all of Crisco adheres to country-disco stylings. It is all stylish, but it runs through a larger sound, covering both the original countrypolitan movement and the successors of Patsy Cline. The record wants to be played under a mirrorball, but nowhere too risque. You can dance to it, but sometimes that dance will be a tender waltz. “Two Things Can Be True,” with its gentle vocals and clean steel guitar, could have been released anytime in the last 60 years.

That element makes Crisco good but prevents it from being great. “Two Things” sounds like a classic, but its brokenhearted mood falls into tradition without defining or reinventing it. Next track “Cuttin’ Onions” provides a more modern flavor, and more of Lambert’s personality, but the album has too little of that. Her duet with Chris Stapleton, 2025’s “A Song to Sing,” earned two Grammy nominations on the strength of the pair’s vocals (and probably their fame), but it’s a pretty traditional update of the “Islands in the Stream” format with little to it. Lambert achieved her goal in bringing disco back, but there’s too little here to really latch onto.

“Till the Going’s Gone” sounds like 1974, which works well, until it also sounds specifically like Lambert’s cover of Jim Croce’s “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song.” Lambert’s take is excellent; she’s a stellar performer after all. But it all fits together without really being or saying enough. Lambert has brought a large swathe of country history into a single release, but it’s all so clean and professional — so pristine and perfect — that it lacks the sort of grit and vigor that Lambert has so often provided (regardless of the style she’s been working in). It’s modern AM radio without commenting on AM radio, and it goes down too easily, without being as noticeable as it should be.

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After spending a neat chunk of last autumn gallivanting around with Lorde on tour for her similarly brief fourth LP, Virgin, she returns with an album centered around the triumph that comes from rebuilding in the aftermath of tragedy. For Rodriguez, that tragedy is “only” material, but no less catastrophic: the house she’s writing about is a musical imagining of the sanctuary being rebuilt after her childhood home was destroyed in the California wildfires of 2025. True to form, though, brevity is queen on Dream House: Rodriguez crams 14 tracks into 29 minutes this time around, with five under two minutes, four of which are sub-minute interludes. For a record with such a potent emotional arc centered around home and comfort, it’s a little bit sad that she never settles in, keeping one eye trained on the door, ready to bolt.

It’s a shame, because what Rodriguez does give us works damn well. She’s never quite reached the upper echelons of pop stardom, but shortness aside, every Empress Of record to date has shown her propensity for consistent growth. Dream House is no exception, never shying away from its themes, but never feeling bland or trite. The sounds of nature and life fill its nooks and crannies: birdsong bubbles up underneath the beat and violins of opener “Wild Storm,” a soft breeze in the trees rustles through “Missing Out On,” conversations with contractors building the house at the center of the narrative take over the interlude tracks. These elements are easy to miss, but they’re an excellent counterbalance to the pop conventions that populate the record, built confidently on shimmering synths and bass grooves that scrape the sky.

Like Rodriguez’s career to date, Dream House straddles the divide between big-tent pop and intimate bedroom varietal, aided by persistent themes of home, safety, comfort and love that fill every song. Often, she’ll pull her punches a little, avoiding overreliance on the popcorn of the soaring pop song in favor of selling the intimacy of the story she wants to tell. “Blue Light,” which features a lovely Blood Orange cameo, stays grounded, pointedly resisting the temptation to aim for the heavens in the presence of such a big name. She wisely saves that for “SYW” two songs later, which slowly builds on itself before its chorus pulls us into a sugar rush of arena-ready dance-pop. One song later, we get the bubbly synth blips and skitterbeats of “I Pray 4 U,” one of the most addictive tracks of the bunch. It’s also one of the most simplistic, with Rodriguez singing the phrase “I pray for you” 18 times, but somehow it never overstays its welcome. Elsewhere, she switches up the vibe with the combo of “Waiting” and “Machete,” the former of which is a blissfully stripped-back piano/violin number that allows Rodriguez to showcase her voice, the latter of which is able to create some impressively dramatic vibes for a song with the line “I’m turning water into wine/ And I know that you’ll be thirstin’” in it.

The frustrating thing about Dream House is that its brevity makes the triumph embedded in the title-track closer feel… not necessarily unearned, but anticlimactic. It’s a sweet track, but the story behind the destruction and reconstruction of the titular house is left almost entirely in the press release, and the listener never really feels or understands the hard, slow road the fires put Rodriguez and her family on. We can believe that she really does want to “build us a dream house,” but it feels too metaphorical and not like the fruits of their labor.

It’s a shame, because the moments where you can tell there’s some extra pain beneath the surface, waiting to be addressed, are often the best on the record. Penultimate full track (not counting the interlude that preceded “Dream House”) “Trainsong” does it effortlessly, with Rodriguez singing, “I wanna make a home everywhere I go/ Wanna feel like I don’t feel alone.” It sounds metaphorical, but it also feels like the plea of a woman who feels unmoored, looking to shake the curse of that sensation. Empress Of is one of the better indie-pop acts around, and you can hear that all over Dream House. It would, however, be an indisputable knockout if, instead of keeping her shoes on, she let herself spread out on the carpet and make herself at home.

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On paper this sounds like your average direct-to-streaming action thriller, but the setting — an unnamed, futuristic post-Soviet city, sets it apart, at least. The director and co-writer, Michel K. Parandi, fashions his film after the many straight-to-video ’80s and ’90s cult oddities directed by Albert Pyun and Charles Band, who were able to explore digital textures while still pulling off some ludicrous stunts and exploring heady themes.

Unfortunately, April X does not live up to its inspirations. While it starts off strong, brimming with narrative possibility, Parandi and crew ultimately avoid taking risks and opt for what most direct-to-streaming and contemporary action movies do: riffing off John Wick in the worst and laziest ways possible.

It’s sad to see the film’s promise squandered so easily, especially when Storrie is trying his best to make sense of a script that’s jam-packed with ideas yet is never once bold enough to commit to any of them. The story ends up feeling like a watered-down version of Philip K. Dick’s novelette The Minority Report, complete with cheap VR goggles and chintzy Snapchat filters meant to evoke a cyberpunk aesthetic. Early in the first half, April X adopts the tone of a personal revenge type of story, but it barely makes any effort to acknowledge its setting or any of the themes that the venerable trope comes packaged with. There’s a subplot in which we witness Baxter slowly losing touch with reality, but the source of his mental stability is never fully explored nor even explained. Much of how the film goes from point A to point B feels disjointed and slapdash, as any subplots and characters introduced are soon glanced over and disregarded. When Baxter eventually finds his sister and helps her escape her predicament, it feels unearned and pointless. Any attempt at world building is nonexistent, as nothing is fleshed out or explored.

The film’s biggest missed opportunity involves this cyberpunk motif. Now that cyberpunk has become a trope after countless appearances in movies, books and video games, any use of its trappings should include an attempt to freshen up the formula. Storrie does voiceover narration throughout April X in the mold of classic film noir, but instead of giving April X some added texture, it sounds very similar to Harrison Ford’s sleep -inducing, studio-mandated overdubs in the original theatrical cut of Blade Runner.

April X is not a terrible movie, but its adamant refusal to do anything interesting with its material is a terrible waste. Storrie tries to get at something interesting here but is let down by the material. He may be a rising star, but he can’t carry this picture.

Photo courtesy of Sunrise Films / Rialto Distribution

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The music of the late ’60s especially reflects this Western fascination with Eastern music and culture, particularly India, as waves of burgeoning flower children picked up sitars and tabla in emulation of George Harrison after hearing “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown).” There’s a lot these musicians get wrong about Indian music, but it yielded no shortage of interesting, if sometimes misguided, cul-de-sacs, culverts, diversions and distractions in search of musical enlightenment. These are the territories mapped by Cherry Red Records via their Strawberry imprint on A Strange Light from the East – Eastern Influenced Western Music 1965-72, tracing the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll’s fascination with Indian music across 58 tracks spanning three discs.

Like every form of fusion, some of these experiments are more successful than others. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band of all people take remarkably well to the extended form of Indian classical music on “East-West,” with Butterfield’s harmonica taking on a harmonium wheeze as Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop trade liquid guitar lines over a passable imitation of a tabla beat, pushing the band into uncharacteristic extended jam territory that suits them well. For every “East-West” there’s a “A Strange Light from the East” by Tuesday’s Children, an unabashed Orientalist wet dream that’s as authentic and believable as Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast At Tiffany’s, flattening Chinese music to a generic plinky guitar riff in their attempt to conjure images of silk-clad harems and china dolls performing the Kama Sutra.

That’s not to say only the authentic recreations produce interesting results, though. The Flower Pot’s “Wantin’ Ain’t Gettin'” is India-by-way-of-the-nursery, about as deep and authentic as a Mother Goose rhyme but its sitar over a heavy breakbeat slow groove is a revelation. New Age lothario Mort Garson dons Indian music like a turban in an attempt to borrow some mystical gravitas under the moniker The Zodiac on “Libra – The Flower Child.” It’s as believable as a psychotronic recreation of Prince Rama battling Ravana and about as phantasmagoric and far-out, all Mellotron flutes, stately tabla beats and opening third eyes. Kaleidoscope’s “Egyptian Gardens” is an entertaining frivolity despite not being able to settle on a geography, name-checking Northeastern Africa and digging into Romani melodies before breaking into a plate-smashing Greek chorus, ultimately climaxing with a furious bouzouki-like freakout that rivals Vesuvius. The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band’s “Buddha” features some lovely Orientalist orchestral flourishes beneath some of the most nonsensical lyrics this side of the hash stick. It’s unclear what Buddha would want with avocados or candy, or that Bob Markley understood the Mahayana texts, but its zither-like sweeps over clip-clopping temple blocks sure do sound pretty.

The same could be said for “White Summer” by the Yardbirds, with ace musical appropriator Jimmy Page’s open-tuned guitar understanding the assignment better than most on the collection, drawing previously unthought-of connections between Irish music via Page’s DADGAD guitar tuning and Indian classical. Its guitar-doubling oboe melody is about as authentic as a regional amusement park mural, more like tripping out on an Indian tapestry in an English drawing room than traveling the Silk Road, but it’s an absolutely gorgeous reverie, nonetheless, possibly the most successful fusion of the bunch.

That’s the beauty of A Strange Light. Like so many of Cherry Red’s scene reports and genre overviews, they do a remarkable job covering the broad strokes while exploring all manner of odd bric-a-brac along the way. Less imaginative curators would have opened with one of the off-brand Beatles knock-offs like Big Jim Sullivan’s easy listening take on “She’s Leaving Home,” as authentic as a Windham Hill sampler with its saccharine flutes and earthy woodwinds, but it’s a very pleasant diversion nonetheless. So is “This Island” by Dantalion’s Chariot, who push the East-West hybridization into exotica territory with ethereal Yma Sumac-worthy vocals and generic, canned lapping wave sound FX conjuring images of meditating at the base of a volcano. They open with Bert Jansch’s scalding, slinky, trance-inducing “Anji” instead, though, which sounds nothing like the curry-infused pastiche of A Strange Light‘s lesser moments, starting with the spirit of the movement instead of starting right out with the stereotypes.

This makes A Strange Light from the East a good starting point for anyone who’s curious about the influence Eastern music had on psychedelic rock and prog while still being thorough enough for more seasoned collectors. You get your “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds – the starting pistol that kicked off the psychedelic arms race – your Lemon Pipers, best known for the head-expanding “Green Tambourine.” You get your Rascals, your Spencer Davis Group and even the fantastic Pretty Things, although the former are better known for their schmaltzy light rock while the latter are remembered for their muscular R&B. Most importantly, you get the Stooges’ rarity “We Will Fall,” which is 10+ minutes of doomy, droning strings and ominous bass drones that makes “The Black Angel’s Death Song” sound peppy and poppy by comparison. Unfortunately, Cherry Red’s completionist instincts means they include the whistles along with the bells, so there’s the occasional bargain budget bin liner along with the gems. This sometimes breaks A Strange Light‘s hypnotic reverie, but that’s a minor quibble. A Strange Light from the East is worth having simply to have these 58 tracks in one place at one time. You’ll have a much deeper understanding and appreciation of Eastern music’s influence on Western culture over the last 60 years once the spell wears off.

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Make no mistake, Eternal is comprehensive. At 14 CDs and two DVDs, the set collects multiple live performances over two years, from 1979 through 1980, the band’s final live performance, recorded just over two weeks before Curtis’ death. Before this, available collections of Joy Division live performances were spotty at best, which is frustrating given how often surviving band members have spoken about their live sound compared with how they sounded in the studio. While you don’t quite hear the punk intensity that both Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook claim the band had, the version of Joy Division we hear onstage throughout Eternal is leaner, sharper, and more malleable than the studio version.

Some of this is to be expected–studio recordings are meant to capture an idealized state of the artist, after all–but what’s striking from the first listen is how well the individual pieces of the band fit together despite seeming at odds with each other. Sumner’s crunching, sharpened guitar tones; Hook’s low, looping bass; Stephen Morris’ rapid drumming and Curtis’ gruff, commanding vocals all feel like pieces from different bands that shouldn’t work as one yet somehow do.

Even in the rougher recordings where one piece of the band sits at the front of the mix (usually Curtis, though a few songs push Hooky all the way up), the other, seemingly disparate elements accentuate each other and elevate the material. This becomes especially apparent when you listen to Eternal chronologically and hear certain songs make their live debuts and slowly take shape. While early singles like “Digital” and “Leaders of Men” appear fully-formed and so tight that one imagines the band could have performed them in their sleep, material from Unknown Pleasures and especially Closer take some time to take shape in front of an audience. Given that previous live recordings both functioned as snapshots of one night in the band’s career and were often poorly mixed, Eternal is well worth the effort purely on the basis of historical documentation.

What’s more important, though, is just how good a band Joy Division is on Eternal. Even as the early performances feature an occasional flub or forgotten lyric, the story told on this set is that of a band growing sharper and more in tune with each other with each performance, to the point that they become a well-oiled machine. One hears the eventual morph from punk to post-punk as the aggressive, gothic tendencies of their early performances give way to something sharper and more minimalist in approach. Through it all, the band remains utterly captivating, particularly Curtis.

Here, Eternal dismantles another myth about Joy Division, one crafted by the dark subject matter of Curtis’ lyrics and the tragedy of his death by suicide. Yes, we hear Curtis as he is often portrayed on record: a sullen, ominous figure expressing his inner turmoil, but that’s just one facet of his image as a performer here. He can explode with wild abandon, as he often does when performing “Digital” or “Transmission,” and he does a capable approximation of Lou Reed’s sardonic snarl on the band’s cover of “Sister Ray.” His work is easily the most captivating aspect of Eternal, both in how it illuminates often under-discussed sides of this troubled figure and how he seems to fuel the band around him.

It feels silly to talk about the idea of Joy Division being a great band as something revelatory. Of course Joy Division were great; haven’t you listened to Unknown Pleasures or Closer? But Eternal not only underscores what people already understand about the band; it removes a distance that has existed for decades, one that the occasional unofficial live album or dozens of tribute shows could never really emphasize to fans who never got to see them. Joy Division were a tangible, living entity, earning the reputation they had from more than just their studio output. Eternal introduces the band behind the myth: hardworking, dynamic performers who crafted a new sound while captivating audiences.

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Beth Orton’s show at Portland’s Old Church was a mix of regrets and joys. Though she was touring on new album The Ground Above, the musician lamented having to wait for so long once the record was completed to play the songs live. When introducing a song from Comfort of Strangers, an album that turns 20 this year, Orton mentioned that she had gotten “knocked up” immediately after its release and never got to properly tour it.

Yet the English musician had plenty to celebrate. A sold-out crowd sat in reverent silence, hanging on her every word. Orton mentioned that she enjoyed reimagining her songs with the three musicians who backed her. But sadness often permeates Orton’s music and a melancholy texture touched all the songs that evening.

Orton spent much of the show playing the keyboard, standing a few times to play an acoustic guitar. Now 55 years old, her voice is richly craggy, adding new shades to older material such as “Central Reservation” and “She Cries Your Name” from the 1993 debut record Superpinkymandy which she recorded with the recently departed William Orbit. However, nothing that evening sounded anything like the folktronica on which Orton cut her teeth. She ignored Trailer Park entirely and re-imagined “She Cries Your Name” as a spare folk song.

The set, which ran just a little over an hour, focused mainly on material from The Ground Above. The eight new songs Orton played are all excellent, but for a musician with nine albums under her belt, the short length of the show felt a little stingy. So while Orton did air out “Central Reservation,” favorites like “Stolen Car” and “Concrete Sky” were nowhere to be found.

Orton’s approach to the evening felt casual and she told stories about songs such as “Call Me the Breeze,” which she recorded in Portland with Tucker Martine at Flora Recording & Playback, and swore to the audience that she would come out and sign records after the show, despite not doing that at prior shows.

The Ground Above songs sounded superb in their live versions, leaning more on folk than the smoky jazz that flavors the album versions. Many were quiet meditations. Some were not – like “Otherside,” which exploded into a cacophony of drums.

Orton also included “Friday Night” from her excellent 2022 record Weather Alive. Meanwhile, the Old Church felt like the perfect way to experience these new songs, the audience huddled in pews with an imposing pipe organ behind the musicians. These are songs for the soul, better suited to a venue like this than a club where people stand around and talk.

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Music Is Invisible is Hassell’s first posthumous release, and the third in the Pentimento Trilogy. To make this four-track LP, Jeff Rona mixed a 2015 London live set featuring Hassell alongside Rick Cox and John von Seggern, to make a unique homage to the experimental musician. Rona was likely chosen because of his working relationship with Hassell. In the ‘90s, Rona played keyboard with the trumpeter on City: Works of Fiction and served as a co-producer on the album, and in 2014 helped with its rerelease. Rona says in the mixing notes that up to Hassell’s death, the two remained close.

According to Rona Hassell was originally uncomfortable with his trumpet performance in the concert that would become the basis for Music Is Invisible. At the time, Rona edited the mix and played this version for Hassell. Though Hassell liked it, he gave Rona more notes, along with his approval for Rona to continue editing the album, in a “creative” and “more polished” way if he so chose. What we hear on Music Is Invisible is a Rona-reimagined work with Hassell’s blessing.

Even with this information, you might find it hard to discern that Music Is Invisible comes from a live set. Trumpet, electronic synths and drums phase in and out like blips, sounding like uneasy transmissions from other times in distant galaxies. At times, listeners may wonder if what they heard was real or imagined, as the music often takes on an ethereal quality. Instruments often coalesce briefly to repeat a motif or two before disappearing, only to reappear unexpectedly.

Opener “Blue Ba-Ya” is funky and groovy, featuring Hassell’s soft trumpet ricocheting like a sine wave. For much of its runtime, the song becomes the aural equivalent of the quintessential ‘90s Windows Maze screensaver, twisting and turning until the listener is lost within the world Hassell’s band and Rona have created. Near the end, the piece becomes a bit grating as it pushes the limits, but a bass line pulsating in and out helps ground the listener. Third track “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” also features slightly off-kilter airport lounge music with skittering piano and throbbing beats flittering in and out of a computer mainframe.

“Blue Ba-Ya” and “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” are balanced by two sinister-sounding tracks. “Club Gris-Gris” has a spookier atmosphere, as synths become harrowing against Hassell’s trumpet. Sometimes Hassell’s licks are unpleasant and almost flatulent, but schizophrenic piano and clicky beats keep the listener’s interest. With its dark rhythms and evil horn sounds, “Electric Forest” has the urgency of a hot pursuit with life-or-death stakes. Hassell’s trumpet becomes a death knell. Synths percolate in the distance, sounding like footsteps against the ground.

Hassell’s sonics are in the Miles Davis Bitches Brew vein, making these experimental compositions most appealing to listeners who enjoy boundary-pushing jazz fusion. As such, Music Is Invisible encompasses a wide range of flavors, appearing like a demented, off-kilter soundtrack that is easy to become lost in and even easier to enjoy. However, Hassell’s trumpet playing can still be grating compared to more appealing electronic sounds; some listeners may desire a more pleasant sound.

Still, aural appeal isn’t the only aspect that makes great music. Rona’s mix of Hassell’s music shows this, and as such, Music Is Invisible becomes an ultimately fulfilling soundscape for those who appreciate Hassell’s compositions. Some may question whether this album should accompany the other two in Hassell’s Pentimento Trilogy, considering the LP’s posthumous release. However, Music Is Invisible, with Rona’s guidance, fits right in with its strange, eerie and beguiling predecessors. For Hassell fans looking for an appropriate sendoff, this album will resonate.

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Journalist Dimas (Endy Arfian) is imprisoned for the grisly death of his editor, after a late night being reprimanded by the man for covering the mysterious deaths of several workers in an illegal nickel mining operation in Borneo. Protesting his innocence but chipper nonetheless, Dimas is shown around Labuhan Angsana Prison by a motley crew: righteous leader Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya), migraine-afflicted medium Six (Yoga Pratama), devout Muslim Wildan (Mike Luccock), unassuming but cunning former professor Pendi (Lukman Sardi) and silver-tongued con man Irfan (Dimas Danang Suryonegoro). Both put off and distantly charmed by Dimas’ puppy-like cheer, the gang nevertheless resign themselves to his certain murder by his cellmate, the notoriously monstrous Tokek (Aming Sugandhi). One day, though, alone in the showers, Tokek is mauled to death by a ghastly specter assuming his form with some added trypophobic flair. Soon, similarly intimidating prisoners start dropping like flies, with Six and Wildan discovering a connection to the spiritual auras of each.

The titular ghost, they find, will kill anyone with the most negative aura in the room, naturally leading to comical precautions in keeping positive. The stretch of the film that unfurls here is its most dangerous in its use of broad humor, and not all the jokes land, but Anwar effectively removes any guardrails and displays a remarkable, organic elasticity of tone as the story commands. The prisoners’ dancing and slapstick antics naturally give way to yet more spectral slaughter, and the gang investigate to find a way to stop the ghost once and for all. Deducing through the nature of the Borneo miners’ deaths that the ghost has followed Dimas from Borneo, Six and Wildan piece together that the ghost wants revenge for that very mining operation on one particular target and set out to grant its wish.

From here on out Anwar more nakedly displays the preoccupations that were the driving core of Ghost in the Cell to begin with: the Indonesian class war. Even in Labuhan Angsana, as Irfan helpfully explains to Dimas and the audience, the ruling class live in opulence, in single cells guarded by hired goons of their own. Politicians and big shot white-collar criminals are given relatively free reign by the head warden, and politicians like Prakasa (Arswendy Bening Swara) continue to ruin the lives of the common people even through an ostensible punishment. Anwar’s framework doesn’t exactly allow for a particularly subtle or nuanced depiction of class issues, but thankfully filmmaking isn’t a subtlety contest, especially filmmaking as bombastic as his. Anything possibly old hat brought to the table is thoroughly made up for in sheer fervor: you get the sense that Anwar genuinely wishes for real, positive change among Indonesia’s greater communities and power structures. This genuine positivity thankfully is offset by the mean-spiritedness of the kills and the ferocity of Anggoro’s fights, avoiding twee “nicecore” trappings.

The thin line that Anwar walks tonally is exemplified in his ensemble work and the use of the character of Dimas in particular. Dimas’s impossible naïf persona often comes close to being incredibly grating, but his place among his surrounding ensemble tempers such a notion mostly with great success. Such cloying goodness is met with organic reactions both positive and negative from a confident and committed ensemble, from Aryasatya’s palpable conviction (no pun intended) as Anggoro to Bront Palarae’s sneering sadism as prison hack Jefri. All walks of life are here – Suryonegoro’s purely affable Irfan, Luccock’s zenned-out Wildan, Ho Yuhang’s stone cold mob boss Rendra – and instead of leaving them as disparate threads Anwar uses them to paint a cohesive portrait of a particular environment.

In that environment, Anwar’s direction combined with Dennis Sutanto’s stellar production design makes a thrilling use of scale. The camera goes careening and weaving through areas we previously thought familiar, and we are one with our adventurers as new and exciting terrains, literal or otherwise, are unveiled. The form seems as acrobatic in its application as Anggoro in his numerous martial arts sequences, and not just for the sake of it.

Anwar is found at his most freewheeling in Ghost in the Cell, but never loses sight of his core intent. There’s a shockingly poor CG kill, dialogue can veer dangerously close to line-o-rama and not all of the gags work among its admittedly enviable hit rate, but the king of Indonesian horror certainly manages to show that horror-comedies can still be invigorating, but most of all can manage not to lose sight of themselves. One can only hope genre fare can retain such values.

Photo courtesy of Well Go USA Entertainment

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Raymond Roussel, named for a French poet who influenced the avant-garde at the turn of the 20th century, makes its jazz interests explicit with two covers, both unusual without being esoteric. “black (is the colour of my true love’s hair)” began as an Appalachian folk song, of Scottish origin, but was later indelibly transformed, first by Nina Simone, who made it into a supremely brooding ballad, and then by the avant-garde singer Patty Waters, who turned it inside out. Raymond Roussel leans more toward the Waters end of the spectrum, often doing away with the song’s harmonic structure entirely. But Priest never quite makes the leap into ecstatic frenzy, as Waters does; though he can be blistering, he doesn’t shriek or howl, as you’d imagine Sonny Sharrock doing if he’d tackled the song. For much of the track’s 10-and-a-half minutes, he carves out a deliberately gradual, oblique variation on something resembling the melody, over a bed of delayed drones, bowed bass and crackling, erratic drums. Though its length and amorphous outline evoke the liberties of the avant-garde, the long, smoldering tones of Roussel’s “black” have more in common with Simone’s empyrean intensity than first meets the ear.

Likewise, Roussel’s take on Bill Evans’ “Five,” with its chittering percussion and warped twang, initially appears to be a total dismantling of the pianist’s original. But take a listen to “Five,” on Evans’ 1957 debut, New Jazz Conceptions (or the condensed, cooking live version from 1968 on Another Time: The Hilversum Concert, released in 2017), and you’ll hear some surprising congruences. Evans plays a jumpy bebop lick that never resolves in a traditional way, instead jumping to different, asymmetrical notes.

“five” thus has an unsettled, misaligned feeling, which Priest and Raymond Roussel lean into, with Cranfield dancing over the cymbals in free time and Meger adopting something like a lurching walk. But even Priest’s use of a chorus pedal, giving his tone the brilliantine gloss of ‘80s metal, and his use of bends and stinging whammy bar, which recall John Scofield at his most unhinged, can’t disguise the underlying structure that Evans so carefully built.

The album’s originals tend to hew toward extremes: “multi-watt” and “derelict lounge” are expeditions into abrasive textural noise, the former driven by phaser and delay and the latter by wiggly pitch shifting, slack-string thwacks and miscellaneous electronic rumbles; “spur” and “luster,” on the other side of things, are relatively restrained, more composed pieces, with Priest playing tight, nuanced arpeggios. “spur” features a prowling rhythm section balanced by a tangy, Bill Frisell-esque lead from Priest, while “luster” revolves around a delicate, swaying figure and lovely melodic counterpoint from Meger. A few cuts, such as the short title track and the mostly mellow “swerve,” attempt to fuse the band’s radical inclinations and electronic preoccupations with relatively conventional jazz phrasing, with mixed results — sometimes, the two modes lead to an impasse instead of reaching a destination. Still, for a musician with as many ideas as Priest and a band as versatile and adventurous as Raymond Roussel, not everything has to land. Some music can do just fine suspended in midair.

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