Actress’s music is basically a genre within itself, the way the British electronic musician distorts drone, R&B, grime, dubstep, and techno into smoked-out synth trips. His bleary-eyed chords and pneumatic beats are pathways into rain-streaked streets in London, Berlin shows blanketed in thick layers of cigarette haze, and afters where eyes are drooping but no one wants to go home. The producer has always been Black avant-garde, but on Radical Frame he owns this title wholeheartedly. He sets the scene like an independent film auteur, opening with surreal vocals before slinking into a tunnel of static and dark ambient pads. The beats are taut but the music, like most of Actress’s catalog, is spacious, even when the voices of grime MCs Casisdead and Rainy Miller drift in, filling dark crevices with haunted spoken word.
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Beck: Ride Lonesome [Capitol]
Feeling low has long been fertile territory for Beck, one of the great modern bards of loserdom. For Ride Lonesome, he reconvened the same band he made Mutations, Sea Change, and Morning Phase with: Smokey Hormel, Joey Waronker, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, Roger Joseph Manning Jr., and Jason Falkner. tapping back into that ever-flowing vein to create a windswept collection of folk, country, and alt-rock. Don’t let his hushed, hands-in-the-pockets vocals fool you: songs like the title track and “Disappearing Act” are proper power ballads.
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Beabadoobee: Pylon [Dirty Hit/Interscope]
