Alternative Music

Dawn Richard’s music feels as if it’s emanating from a higher plane than ours. Even back in her more radio-friendly days with Danity Kane and Diddy, the New Orleans singer imbued her songs with a rare vulnerability, emerging from the hedonistic landscape of late-2000s hip-hop and R&B with earnest, heartbroken compositions about losing love and finding it beneath the strobe lights of the dancefloor. She’s a singer of big emotions, and even as she’s pushed her solo work further into experimental realms, she has continued to foreground feeling above all else. Pigments takes this evolution a step further, transforming Richard’s voice into a luminescent mist. Conceived with bassist and neoclassical composer Spencer Zahn after the two collaborated on his 2018 debut, the album captures the se...

He begins the understated opener “2019-07-08 I” with feather-soft brush swirls, but on the second cut, he sets Mondays’ stride, as a simple bell pattern builds into a leisurely rhythmic stroll. Thirteen minutes in, the mood breaks. Bellerose hits some heavy quarter notes on his hi-hat; Butterss leans into a fat bassline; saxophone arpeggios, probably looped, float in front of us like smoke rings lingering in the air. It’s a glorious moment, punctuated by clinking glasses and a distant “whoo!” so perfectly placed we become aware of not only the setting, but also the supple knob-turns of engineer Bryce Gonzales in post-production. Anyone who’s heard great improvisation at a bar in the company of both jazzheads and puzzled onlookers knows this dynamic—for some, the music was incidental. Other...

On the ninth track of CEO Trayle’s HH5, the rapper is at war with himself. The song, “Alter Ego 2,” pits the sensitive and reasonable Trayle against his twisted counterpart C4, a voice in his head that moves like he has a death wish. A 2013 home invasion that left Trayle with seven gunshot wounds is the center of this track, and it continues to haunt him, even though he wants to move on. Telling C4 that he has a son and a future in rap now, those days of fear and bitterness are gone. But C4 is set on dragging him back into the mud. “Nigga must think you Superman, them seven shots ain’t teach you nothin’,” he raps with a slithery inflection, a ghoulish echo lingering in the background. The pressure doesn’t go anywhere; the song ends anti-climatically with the promise of money snapping Trayl...

The guitar riff that introduces “Ecstatic Reign,” the 16-minute closing track on Song of Salvation, is a sad, wispy melody that sounds a little like distant birdsong filtered through a chorus pedal and amplified inside an empty church. When a slow-motion drumbeat enters, drowned in echo that suggests a noirish fog lifting from the cymbals, it also sounds a little like “Lazy,” a 1994 slowcore lament by Low. The landscape slowly fills with distorted guitars, gothic synths, and death-metal growls that sound like a volcano erupting. Within moments, you are fully immersed in the world of Dream Unending, the dream-doom duo whose monuments to melancholy have never felt so crushing or beautiful. Before Derrick Vella was the guitarist of Dream Unending—or, as the liner notes credit him, the “Archit...