on the pulse - 2024 - #5 - kacey musgraves, future + metro boomin, flo milli, jacob collier, tyla, four tet, tierra whack, nourished by time

Nourished By Time - Catching Chickens EP - One of the biggest surprises for me last year was this genre-breaking Baltimore artist with the bonkers Erotic Probiotic 2, one of the best albums of 2023… and it turns out I wasn’t the only one listening, as he got picked up by XL and this EP is his first under that label. And what do you know, it’s great too, taking the gauzy, offkilter hypnagogic pop blurred with 80s freestyle into textures with a brighter gloss and sharper percussion, where striking lovelorn musings have the maturity to see a broader societal context that shapes loneliness and distrust in a collapsing world, where the late capitalism rat race and success within it is as much of a character warping these romances. I don’t love all the production - some of the chipmunked vocals don’t really work for me - but the melodic hooks are stellar and if it’s a reference to Rocky’s training exercises in agility, I’m excited for that title bout - excellent stuff!

Tierra Whack - WORLD WIDE WHACK - I have no idea why I didn’t cover Tierra Whack’s breakthough tape in 2018 with Whack World, a utterly kooky juxtaposition of single minute pop rap songs for a ridiculously colourful fifteen minutes that often left me wanting more, the sort of material that would seem weapons-grade applicable for TikTok but actually worked better as a whole thanks to just how effectively the flow and transitions of the album landed, a blur of quirky and effective wordplay and flows but also real pathos if you read between the lines. From there, she put out three EPs in 2021 that received some wildly mixed reviews, and now we have an album with more conventionally structured songs… and I’ll be honest, I’ve really struggled with this one, mostly because it’s the sort of project I should like a lot more than I do. And it’s frustrating because this is pretty much everything I hoped would happen after Whack World - the songs got a bit longer, but not enough to sacrifice the ear candy hooks and pithy punchlines as her melodic flow bends in weird directions, all in favour of a structure that showcases more tangible vulnerability amidst the wackier side, going to some extremely dark places in exploring depression across ‘NUMB’, which culminates in a crushingly bleak ending with ‘27 CLUB’. So naturally there’s a sharper tonal whiplash between songs, but that didn’t have to be a bad thing, especially as Tierra Whack seems very conscious of how the structure and metatext of her albums convey meaning in themselves. What that means is that Whack World despite its length felt intentionally constructed, whereas in expansion the darker cracks begin to leak through, the mask slips: she’s found success but feels hollow and undeserving, so there’s a creeping element of self-sabotage alongside a sensitivity to how it’s all being seen that has her crack even further, where every playful moment and bit of bravado feels like a desperate deflective bit of respite from depression… maybe this is how she’ll be happy, be it coming from imaginary friends and muses or slipping off to the movies or even just taking a good shower, where mundane routine can be its own release. But naturally that makes for a much heavier, introspective album, where if you’re expecting those wilder, technicolor bangers, not only are there fewer than you might expect, but they’re all underscored by that spare, creeping darkness, like the chilly ‘MS BEHAVE’. So I won’t deny that it’s effective and often still quite clever, and I’m relieved she came out from the other side… so why doesn’t it work as strongly for me? Well, some of it is that construction, in that it can feel somewhat self-defeating: despite being a pretty short album it has very little momentum, and with more space for these tracks to linger, beats that felt limited but paid off an idea on Whack World feel increasingly spare and undercooked with barely any development, which doesn’t do a lot to help any melodic hooks pop - honestly reminds me a bit of my frustration with Amine’s recent work. And… look, when you have a rapper as expressive as Tierra Whack, there’s a very fine line in compromising some of your natural performativity and energy to make a subdued emotive point; it makes sense why she did so, a big risk in brighter framing in emo is writing something so infectious that the darkness you’re trying to convey gets overshadowed and then ruthlessly commodified - and this is not a slight comparison, I like emo rap and I think this album absolutely fits that subgenre - but the balance isn’t quite there for me. Overall, I refuse to call this a bad album: there’s a level of structural care, emotive vulnerability, and real talent that Tierra Whack shows that even if it bounced off me in an odd way, I can imagine will hit like a ton of bricks for the right audience, even if said audience is narrower. There’s a part of me that believes you can deliver that sort of raw material with all the pop energy that Tierra Whack has and still take it seriously - you’re looking at a higher tier of older emo rappers, or the more underground emo trap cohort where Tierra Whack honestly makes more sense than being on fucking Interscope, or conversely pop emo like Jetty Bones’ excellent 2021 album Push Back - but that’s simply a choice of execution, which leaves this a tougher sell. I do not attach content warnings to albums lightly so take that into consideration with this one, and though it didn’t fully work for me… I think what Tierra Whack is doing is worth supporting, and I want to hear more.

Four Tet - Three - ...ugh, I really wish I got into Four Tet in the 2000s, his material since 2010 has been solid but not close to his peak, and going into his newest project… well, I like this more. It’s better structured, with the gauzy but plucky downtempo ambient balanced with burbling synths, vocal fragments, the occasional ragged wave of distortion, some faster, scratchy beats built for live shows, and cuts like ‘Loved’, ‘So Blue’ and especially the fluttery yearning around the cymbals of ‘Three Drums’ with more textured swagger that reminded me of his older hip-hop grooves. ‘Skater’ is the odd exception with the wonky alt-rock guitar tuning balancing smoother new age vibes, but I was more impressed overall by the slow transitional beat switches that felt near-effortless. Again, not Four Tet at peak melodic immediacy… but remarkably solid, I liked this more than I thought I would.

Tyla - TYLA - I was planning to open on how if an artist blows up off of one song, the major label debut often plays to the same template, but Tyla’s come-up feels almost oldschool, building local groundswell in South Africa to tangible artistic development in R&B under Epic until ‘Water’ exploded. Granted, it's hard not to hear this self-titled debut and how so much of it plays to that exact pattern… but thankfully it’s a good one. Tyla is a pretty expressive singer, and when her amapiano grooves touch on textured and organic guitar-backed R&B, house, and sandy Afrobeats, she has a sound primed with big choral hooks for hot festival stages, which might explain why the lyrics fall into basic cliches of self-love, dancefloor hookups, and heartache. Now without stronger backing melodies, it can feel a bit one-dimensional, but when the hooks pop, it’s a formula that works; overall, a likable and promising start, I want to hear more.

Jacob Collier - Djesse Vol. 4 - The frustrating thing in discussing Jacob Collier is that his well-connected talent can overshadow what he actually does with it, the classic genius music school act with ridiculous technical chops but limited organic inspiration, who I might respect more than I like. This is his fourth and potentially final chapter of this series… and I’ll be honest, when the first song ‘100,000 Voices’ on this seventy minute album ended with a horrible transition and quite possibly one of the worst “metal” sections I’ve heard in recent memory, I was tempted to veto this on the spot. Get past that and Collier mostly slips into a sheltered comfort zone of guest-studded, overpolished, bombastically yet “tasteful” soul where you watch a lot of exceptionally talented people utterly fail to find organic texture or potent groove - or just live up to the genre’s name… that is, when he’s not making twee “jazzy” genre swerves mid-song that proves he can while avoiding the question if he should, especially with anything remotely close to rap like on ‘Box Of Stars Pt. 1’, or rock like ‘WELLLL’ reminding me way too much of Styx, and yes, that includes that wasted guitar solo from Steve Vai. But these are not new critiques - I said a lot of this and more back in 2020 when I covered the last entry in this series - but with even more bigger names from Brandi Carlile to Michael McDonald, from Shawn Mendes to Stomzy, from John Legend and Tori Kelly delivering a cover of ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ that’s an absolute dud, to Kirk Franklin and all manner of orchestras, there’s a grandiosity to the album that wants to encompass a worldwide scope but feels increasingly like a Disneyfied sanitization of these sounds - getting fucking Camilo on ‘Mi Corazon’ doesn’t help matters - where I’m near-certain this is going to get big Grammy nods as what the Academy thinks makes them look good. And look, if I felt like this album had any thematic richness, I would be willing to try more and buy in - I don’t dislike Collier’s odd throaty delivery, he’s gotten better as a singer, and while this project is bloated as all hell and the momentum evaporates on the back half, there are performances and more conventionally structured songs I respect: Brandi Carlile is of course excellent on ‘Little Blue’, Lizzy McAlpine is effective alongside John Mayer’s restrained guitarwork on ‘Never Gonna Be Alone’, and even ‘She Put Sunshine’ feels like something Jack Garratt might have cut a few years ago, I kind of like it despite myself. But get even a few steps into the lyrics and this album feels derivative and vapid, with flimsy love songs wrapped around a paper-thin theme of bringing the world’s voices together to marvel at the scale where I can’t help but notice how self-aggrandizing it is in passing, that he was the one who could do it; it makes sense that Chris Martin shows up for ‘Over You’ with k-pop act aespa that blows a solid hook with wonky dubstep drops I’ve heard better mixed by bedroom producers, Coldplay is all about themes like this, but at least that band can capture darkness and a very human intimacy even at their worst that has more charm than this - exacerbated by the odd fact that for as much vocal harmonization is happening, there’s very little chemistry that manifests - and more importantly they know how to structure a coherent and album! Look, on some level I’m just the wrong critic for this: I’ve been listening to incredibly intricate and theatrical music for decades, I’m not going to be wowed on sheer technical prowess that the industry loves to wildly overpraise especially when the lyrics, hooks, and production are nothing to write home about, and if you’re going to have an album this twee and earnest there needs to be a stronger organic core to pull me in beyond the set dressing. He may be better off working behind the scenes as a producer for acts where they need that added bit of compositional flair or production polish - I loved his work on SZA’s ‘Good Days’, for instance - but to me, it feels hollow. The fans can have this one, and even for them… I dunno, it’s a tough recommendation.

Flo Milli - Fine Ho, Stay - Hey, Flo Milli finally got a mainstream breakthrough with ‘Never Lose Me’ and someone at RCA started using their brain and recognized with UMG feuding with TikTok, Flo Milli can fill in the market, and they moved up her album to capitalize! Hence the inconsistencies of her 2022 album continue and feel more prominent: the production sounds even more expensive but I can hear rush in TikTok song structures and slapdash mastering, and it’s split between bruising, quotable bangers with guests like Cardi B, SZA, Monaleo and even Gunna giving solid effort… and soft-focus melodic trap that’s utterly played out and doesn’t flatter her strengths, but it’s here because ‘Never Lose Me’ worked. And with quirkiness sacrificed for accessibility again, repetitive sex bars on a flurry of quick songs lose some lustre. Overall it’s brighter and catchier, I can hear this working… but if you want the hoes to stay, they might need a little more.

Future & Metro Boomin -WE DON’T TRUST YOU - …do you think Future and Metro Boomin knew just how much one guest verse would monopolize mainstream rap conversations the past few days, where the immediate non-response from those targeted feels like a story in and of itself? I was going to listen to this regardless - Metro Boomin and Future can work well together, you could argue the pairing are responsible for some of Future’s best work in the mid-2010s - but Future albums recently have their own frustrating baggage in limited content and usually running way too long to sustain the nihilistic wallow. And that places this album in an odd place, because while social media spent the weekend making increasingly stupid arguments about rap beef and Kendrick taking on both Drake and J. Cole at once, WE DON’T TRUST YOU becomes an interesting case study as both Future and Metro Boomin also clearly have issues with Drake as well, and this album is at its most compelling when engaging in that attack… or at least presenting the implication that a bridge has been thoroughly burned and battle lines are being drawn. To put it another way, it feels very intentional that The Weeknd just shows up for backing vocals on ‘Young Metro’, and a big surprise that Rick Ross actually delivered on ‘Everyday Hustle’; did not know there was potentially friction between him and Drake, where for Playboi Carti and especially Travis Scott it seems more like clique-hopping. And hell, when Future is locked into that darker, embittered lane, this album can actually summon some of that pseudo-gothic menace that epitomized his peak era and intensity of the mid-2010s, down to the synth choices and competently mastered trap percussion… albeit if you compare to Monster or DS2, as Future’s flow feels more controlled and downbeat amidst mixes that aren’t quite as immense, you might think the bombast has been turned down, that these beats are less impressive. I’m on the fence about this: I’ve come to appreciate Future more when he goes hard, especially given that he’s improved considerably as a technical lyricist in the past decade - keep in mind I don’t exactly love that “golden era” of Future and think that it’s aged more than you might remember - but if you fall out with a friend with whom you’ve made a lot of music and you’re now in your 40s and stewing in bitterness, it makes sense that your anger takes a different tone. But that’s the catch: those moments stand in stark contrast to many other songs where Future is playing by the numbers with less energy, in some cases with old snippets that go as far back as 2017 like ‘WTFYM’, and not only does that add unnecessary bloat that we’ve heard before, it’s a reminder that in terms of content Future can still be limited amidst the flexing and brand name porn and stealing your girl, and arguably not as flagrant as he normally is; you can tell he was taking this a bit more seriously, which may have muted the wilder swings. You can argue that the album is as much of a showcase of Metro Boomin with instrumental breaks and the frequent samples of the late Prodigy trashing rappers he thought weren’t hard enough… and while I’m grateful for competent mixing and mastering in mainstream trap, I’d struggle to say all of these have Metro and his coproducers at their best, especially when the album starts seriously dragging in its final third, which doesn’t bode well for their planned second album this year to drop mid-April! You can also tell for as much as this record calls back to the mid-2010s in its funereal bombast to elevate cuts like the title track, ‘Young Metro’, ‘Claustrophobic’, ‘GTA’, or the Mobb Deep flip on ‘Seen It All’ - and not for nothing I really liked the elegant debauchery of ‘Cinderella’ flowing into the organ-driven ‘Running Out Of Time’ with that guitar outro, Zaytoven’s flutes all of ‘Ain’t No Love’, and the soul flip of ‘Everyday Hustle’ - there are certain elements that could have been left behind, like that godawful synth horn on ‘Like That’ or those gauzy tones all over ‘Where My Twin @’; this album needed a much stronger conclusion. But overall… if anything, this feels compromised: if we got the Future album that was allowed to be as confrontational and nasty as its most promising moments, with the chaff cut for a more streamlined album, I’d be tempted to call this his best in some time. As it is with that second album reportedly coming, it doesn’t look like there was the quality control to trim this down to the very best… but this being Future, I’m not exactly surprised by that. That said, as someone who has been reviewing Future over a decade now - and man, some of those reviews aren’t pretty - I’m kind of shocked that not only do I think this is good, but trimmed down with more cutting focus and this could have been great. I’m probably giving a little too much credit to the instigating moments - I think the fallout from this album will determine if it has proper legs, and given Metro Boomin is tied to Republic which is under UMG, TikTok traction isn’t in the cards here - but I also can’t deny that the strongest moments here really clicked for me; we’ll see where it goes from here.

Kacey Musgraves - Deeper Well - I think I’ve made peace with the reality that Kacey Musgraves is not going to make the kind of music that first won me over on her anymore: I fell for the clever, textured, sweet but often biting country songstress of Same Trailer, Different Park, and since Golden Hour won her all the awards - and more notably she started only working with Ian Fitchuk and Daniel Tashian on production - she’s nowhere close to that headspace. And you know, that’s fine: for an album all about recentering oneself and rediscovering one’s capacity of love and contentment after 2021’s star-crossed had moments but ultimately felt a bit misaligned, that feels like a step in the right direction, at least one where she feels better about herself and she sounds a bit more engaged, especially in and around production which right from the jump has nowhere near as many awkward misfires this time, especially in the vocal mixing despite having a lot of the same technical crew. So we get a very mellow midtempo pop-country release, soft-focus, lower stakes, and generally organic but with the occasional better blended touch of synth or drum machine that doesn’t feel out of place, with the occasional dabbling in reverbed folk music to add some variance to the song structure with more minor key changeups like the slight gallop of ‘Jade Green’, the haunted opener ‘Cardinal’ that oddly gives me ‘Sweater Weather’ vibes. So it’s perfectly primed for those who are quasi-spiritual and pleasant and like being in nature… although you know deep down that there are more interesting topics to be discussed in this space, maybe even a more interesting conversation on how specific veins of quasi-mystical self-care can be commodified into self-absorbed branding, but you’re a bit too polite to really prod at them, especially as Kacey Musgraves has one of the sweetest voices working in the genre today. But her appeal on her earliest albums went beyond playing for vibes, and it’s the reason why I still feel a bit of distance here: even accepting that any societal commentary or darker introspection isn’t remotely in the picture, there’s a frustrating lack of specific detail that has stuck for the past few albums with Musgraves; she can paint a really pretty picture in striking colours, but I’m not getting the same depth, and I’m sure some of that came with dramatic contrast. That’s not saying there isn’t a compelling emotional dynamic: the arc of self-care and relearning vulnerability has some weight, the grief that comes with some endings like on ‘Cardinal’ and ‘Moving Out’, finding the ability to relax and go with the flow without getting high all the time like the gentle rollicking ‘Sway’, the few passing shots at how money and success doesn’t buy happiness or true companionship - although I question the choice to interpolate JID for ‘Lonely Millionaire’, because it reminds me of his own commentary on the subject on The Forever Story that was way more nuanced… or how Kacey herself used to hit a lot harder, especially on her first two albums. And by this point, this soft-spoken brand of misty pop / country / folk is far from new even in the mainstream - I’ve seen a lot of comparisons both sonically and thematically like to Hayley Williams’ Petals For Armor, but the one that really springs to mind isn’t even in that genre, it’s Chilombo by Jhene Aiko, which features a similar sweet, dreamlike, quasi-mystical arc of healing and discovering the capacity to love again, but there was a weighty gravitas to its framing and dramatic arc that found a deeper, world-weary wisdom that this album isn’t quite hitting, and I know she can! It’s thus a little ironic that the poppiest and most twee song here is one of my favourites, ‘Anime Eyes’, which should be so ridiculous with its quasi-robotic vocal layering and on-the-nose anime references and offkilter bridge breakdown, but it’s a moment where the poise is less refined and Musgraves really comes alive; I’d probably love this album if it had more of those idiosyncratic but sincere moments! As it is…yes, it’s better than star-crossed, I can argue it’s a return to form especially as Kacey’s floor of quality is high for me, it feels very sincere and sweet, it’s an easy listen and thus hard for me not to get caught up in the charm - but this album is also so deep in her comfort zone that it’s hard not to be reminded about the potential she’s showcased before, especially when this project isn’t particularly hook-driven and wants to luxuriate in that open space. Now it’s not like there’s a shortage of women in this space who absolutely can deliver that darkness and dramatic contrast, especially in indie country who if you like Musgraves you should absolutely check them out - Emily Scott Robinson, Caroline Spence, Kara Jackson, Courtney Marie Andrews, Michaela Anne, Karen Jonas, I can easily go on - but if you’re looking for a very pleasant vibe that might be the healing you need… look, I’m willing to meet this very good album where it is, but if this is the first deeper well, I think we should keep digging.