2. Losing My Religion

Impeccable, untouchable, not a note out of place. Despite its acoustic nature it sounds as insistent and relentless to me as something off of …And Justice for All. Once you learn what the song’s about — I had no freaking clue back when it was a hit — it feels like Stipe pounding on your door, begging for help, using Buck as a battering ram.

I wrote about my five favorite R.E.M. songs for the great Luke O’Neil’s newsletter Welcome to Hell World along with tons of other cool writers and such. My relationship with R.E.M. doesn’t go that deep but the stuff I know and like I REALLY know and like, so I hope that’s an interesting perspective.

NB: I would name the core unit at the heart of both Parliament-Funkadelic and the JBs (and their many side projects) as the greatest American band, followed by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and then probably R.E.M. But that’s really neither here nor there.

9. Interview With the Vampire

“Home Is Where You’re Happy” by Charles Manson

“Look, Charlie Manson wrote a couple of beautiful songs. Still, he was Charlie Manson.” Controversial, Daniel Molloy! The conductor of this vampire drama’s titular interview, played by Eric Bogosian, has very little patience for the bloodsucker in question, Louis de Pointe du Lac, and even less for Louis’s psychotic, pubescent protégé, the teenage vampire Claudia. It’s her Molloy compares to Manson, the cult leader who defined the death of the Age of Aquarius … and much to my everlasting surprise, it’s Manson who soundtracks the end of this episode. Molloy is right: Manson could be a talented songwriter in very limited doses, as his buoyant ode to personal freedom, “Home Is Where You’re Happy,” makes clear. It’s just hard to hear that happiness when you recall the fate of Sharon Tate, which is what makes the song a strong choice for the soundtrack of a show about magnetic mass murderers, even when they’re of the supernatural variety.

I wrote about ten of the best uses of popular music on TV this year for Vulture.

The 1990s albums reissued here, however, tell the story best. After a period in the pop-music wilderness, this is the decade during which Bowie reasserted his role as the godfather of alternative music, in pretty much any form it took. (The missing link between this box set and its 1980s equivalent Loving the Alien are the two records he recorded with his unjustly reviled rock band Tin Machine; I’ll just say “Justice for ‘You Belong in Rock n’ Roll’” and leave it at that.) Accusations of trend-hopping dogged Bowie at the time, for reasons that now feel increasingly silly—who wouldn’t want to hear him take a stab at industrial or jungle? This is the kind of genre play that paid dividends with his avant-jazz inflected swan song Blackstar, two decades later.

I reviewed the new David Bowie box set Brilliant Adventure—which features all his 1990s albums, including Black Tie White Noise, Buddha of Suburbia, 1. Outside, Earthling, ‘hours…,’ and the previously unreleased Toy—for Pitchfork.

Two of Vol. 4’s ten tracks have found enduring second lives as storied covers by other acts. The rollicking, science-fictional “Supernaut”—like an inverse “Iron Man,” it’s about a voyager through space and time who’s actually enjoying the trip—received a thrashing industrial makeover at the hands of a dubiously named Ministry side project dubbed 1,000 Homo DJs by Jim Nash, the (gay) head of their record label WaxTrax!. (Hold out for the version with vocals by Trent Reznor, which wound up suppressed by his old record label for years.) On the other end of the sonic spectrum, the moving piano ballad “Changes” was converted into a gut-wrenching soul scorcher by singer Charles Bradley, who transmuted its lyrics about a dissolved romantic relationship into a lament for his late mother. Blessed with one of Iommi’s wickedest riffs and Osbourne’s most vulnerable vocal performances, respectively, the original versions of both songs can stand next to these excellent reinterpretations without being eclipsed; Ward’s carnival-like percussion breakdown in “Supernaut” in particular feels like finding a prize in the song’s otherwise thunderous Cracker Jack box.

I reviewed Black Sabbath Vol. 4 for Pitchfork.

The annual holiday tradition returns: I wrote about ten of the year’s best TV music cues for Vulture.

The fifth and sixth volumes of Ghosts (subtitled Together and Locusts respectively) return to the atmospheric terrain now familiar from Reznor and Ross’ soundtrack work: buzzy ambience, simple melodic hooks, an emotional palette that vacillates between peace and dread. But rather than soundtracking an on-screen drama, they arise from the very real COVID-19 pandemic and its society-wide remedy, social distancing. The musicians say that the current crisis was the reason they completed the two records in the first place, “as a means of staying somewhat sane.” As such, Ghosts V-VI—released for free less than two months after the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency—are very likely the first major albums to have been inspired by the coronavirus crisis.

I reviewed the two new, free Nine Inch Nails albums Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts for Pitchfork.

The horror-movie atmospherics of Quake are the closest reference point for Watchmen’s first and strongest track, “How the West Was Really Won.” The show’s unofficial theme music—it recurs repeatedly in the series’ most frightful moments, including the ripped-from-the-comic image of a gigantic alien squid in the ruins of Manhattan—it’s the sound of Reznor and Ross going full John Carpenter, with a simple synth hook that seems to swallow up more of the world around you with each repetition. Its melodic structure recurs throughout the score, in the gently acoustic “Watch Over This Boy” at the end of Volume 1, the jazz throwback “Nostalgia Blues” on Volume 2 (co-written and performed by John Beasley), and the major-key weightlessness of “The Waiting Sky” on Volume 3. The original song is resilient enough to mutate in this way, showing off the duo’s skill with leitmotif as well as their considerable range. It’s the theme music Nine Inch Nails fans have been waiting for them to deliver.

I reviewed Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’s excellent three-volume Watchmen score for Pitchfork.

Michael Kamen is the sound of bombast. The go-to orchestral collaborator for a plethora of huge rock acts, including Metallica, Roger Waters and David Gilmour, and Queen, he also had a hand in emotionally soaring recordings by Eurythmics and Kate Bush. His work as a film composer was the accompaniment of choice for action and science-fiction filmmaking in the ’80s and ’90s, too, as he springboarded from his work on the film version of The Wall into The Dead Zone, Lifeforce, Brazil, Highlander, the Lethal Weapon and Die Hard franchises, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen AND Adventures in Babysitting…the list goes on and on. There’s a broad swathe of culture where if you have any fond memories of it at all, you have fond memories of Michael Kamen’s work.

Michael Kamen also contributed the original score for Road House, which is easy not to notice if you haven’t watched Road House several dozen times. In the trifecta of house band leader Jeff Healey and music supervisor Jimmy Iovine, Kamen is undoubtedly the lowest on the totem pole in terms of how you hear the film.

But you definitely hear him here.

When the time comes for Dalton to fight Jimmy Reno (that’s his canonical last name even though it’s never mentioned in the film; the same could be said for Emperor Palpatine in the original Star Wars trilogy, just for the record, and look how well that turned out), there’s no barroom boogie to be found. It’s Kamen’s frightened-sounding strings and call-for-help brass that define this fight. I’ve watched the movie with people who, for whatever reason, notice this right away, and their reaction is almost always incredulous: “What the hell is this music? When did this become Batman?” Incredulous, but delighted, since music this ostentatiously HOLLYWOOD EPIC is just about the only kind I can think of that’s appropriate for this savage escalation of hostilities.

From here on out, Kamen will be the dominant sound of the film. That should tell you something right there.

Variety is the spice of the Juan MacLean. Like label co-founder James Murphy, this core DFA act—comprising frontwoman and LCD Soundsystem alum Nancy Whang and Six Finger Satellite guitarist turned synth wizard John MacLean—has historically taken a magpie approach to dance and electronic sounds. That’s how a Heaven 17 pastiche like The Future Will Come’s 2009 title track can accompany a piano-house banger like “Happy Home,” or how the New Order-esque “Love Stops Here” can share real estate on 2014’s In a Dream with “Charlotte,” a song that sounds more like Beaucoup Fish–era Underworld than anything Underworld have recorded since. Derivative? Pshaw: Whang and MacLean are so proficient and so soulful in their craft that TJM always feels like its own life-affirming entity.

So what to make of The Brighter the Light, an album assembled with sameness in mind?

I reviewed the Juan MacLean’s new singles compilation The Brighter the Light for Pitchfork. (Don’t miss “Feel Like Movin'”!)

Type O Negative sounded how clove cigarettes smell, how crushed red velvet feels, how black hair dye looks when it stains your bathroom sink. Led by singer and bassist Peter Steele—a towering figure with bone structure to die for, best described as either Evil Thor or Dracula with a gym membership—these Brooklyn-based purveyors of goth metal spent their career exploring the genre’s inherent tension between seriousness and schtick. Originally released on Record Store Day in a limited run and now reissued (on gorgeous green vinyl), None More Negative packages nearly that entire career, featuring all six albums from their years on Roadrunner Records. (Their final effort, Dead Again, was released on another label and isn’t included here.) It’s a suitably massive set for a band best known for its eerie epics.

The best-known of these kick off 1993’s Bloody Kisses: “Christian Woman” explores its subject’s sublimation of sexuality into the crucified body of Christ with all the subtlety of “Ken Russell’s The Devils: The Musical.” It continues with “Black No. 1,” an affectionate send-up of a goth girl’s beauty regimen that launched the band into the public consciousness, via a striking black-and-white video that received heavy Beavis and Butthead rotation. Both songs showcase Steele’s distinctive, vampiric baritone, complete with theatrically rolled R’s and overemphasized consonants (“on her milk-white neck-kkh, the devil’s mark-k”). The man eroticized diction.

I reviewed Type O Negative’s box set None More Negative for Pitchfork. I should note that for me, any number grade above like 6.2 means “you should give this a listen, it’s worth spending some time with.” To the extent that the numbers are under my control (I never have the final say) I grade with that in mind, something that gets lost when people react to the numbers alone but which I believe is borne out in the text of the reviews. Which I hope people read!

Or rather, Dalton and Dr. Elizabeth Clay do not sell their collective soul to rock ‘n’ roll. As Dalton flips on the radio to find some mood music, they get as far as one complete recitation of the titular phrase from the song by German heavy metal band Bullet before wrinkling their noses, nodding “no,” and changing the channel. It’s 1989, and a quick listen of that high, multi-tracked vocal chorus reads “hair metal.” It reads inauthenticity, pretty boys, heshers, idiots, poseurs, L.A.—you could just as well say “40-year-old adolescents, felons, power drinkers, and trustees of modern chemistry.”

My pop-cultural awareness began in 1988, when my grandmother got me Appetite for Destruction for Easter. It blossomed fully, to the point where I consider it the dawn of my life as a thinking consumer of popular culture, the very summer Road House came out, in the form of Tim Burton’s Batman. In between there somewhere, I started watching MTV. As such I can assure you that didn’t need to have Nirvana in the zeitgeist to figure that there was something suspect about hair metal at the time. You didn’t even turn your nose up at metal entirely. Metallica were gigantic already, thanks to the video for “One.” Living Colour and Faith No More had absolutely massive alternative-inflected hits with “Cult of Personality” and “Epic,” emphasizing groove rather than shimmy and slink. And though no one appreciates this now, Guns n’ Roses’ oppositional relationship to the poodle-haired likes of Poison, Slaughter, Winger, and their close personal enemies Mötley Crüe genuinely made Axl Rose the John the Baptist to Kurt Cobain’s Jesus Christ. It was that distinct.

Of course I doubt any of this would be relevant to Dalton and Doc. When we first hop into his Benz as he departs the parking garage back in New York (the “what do I look like, a valet?” scene), the station on the radio is 102.7. That’s WNEW, New York’s storied home for classic rock. You weren’t getting anything flashier than “Rebel Rebel” or Thin Lizzy on that. As we see from his friendship with Cody, roots rock—white blues, blue-eyed soul, and most likely the original African-American article as well—are Dalton’s specialty. Sure enough, the moment he stumbles across the opening “These…arms…of…miiiiiiiiine” from Otis Redding’s torch song of the same name, Dalton does not touch that dial.

The interesting thing here is that Bullet are not hair metal, not really. Here, have a look and a listen:

Mustaches? In my hair metal act? Not bloody likely. This is just straight-up party metal, its fast-paced rockin’ boogie part of a transitional sound that combined the increased punk-inspired ripped-denim sneer of the genre as displayed by New Wave Of British Heavy Metal bands with the sweaty good-time glam of Slade, the New York Dolls, Thin Lizzy to a certain extent, and the like. This was a popular move at the time—ask Quiet Riot or Twisted Sister, to say nothing of the Brits themselves—and there’s no reason Germans couldn’t do it too. (One look at the album cover will have you thinking of Spinal Tap’s faster-paced parodies, like “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight”; that movie also came out in 1984.)

But Road House needed something that signified all that bad shit I listed above, and whether because it was cheaper or because music supervisor and future Interscope head/Beats by Dre billionaire Jimmy Iovine didn’t want to alienate his Sunset Strip contacts, Bullet got the nod. And insofar as the song sounds like the soundtrack to a barfight, perhaps it wasn’t such a bad choice. Dalton just does to the song what he’d do to its physical equivalent: end it quick.

Klaus Nomi is an easy artist to eulogize. The German-born East Village fixture’s striking, self-made look and soaring operatic countertenor—in layman’s terms, he sang really, really high—brought him to the attention of culture vulture supreme David Bowie. Nomi famously performed with the Thin White Duke on “Saturday Night Live,” hoping for a full collaboration that never materialized. A deal with Bowie’s label RCA, however, enabled Nomi to release two albums abroad before his death, from complications due to AIDS, in 1983. From ANOHNI’s angelic warble to Janelle Monáe’s sci-fi tuxedos, it isn’t hard to find Nomi’s legacy in pop’s outer reaches.

Klaus Nomi, his 1981 debut album, affords us an entirely different opportunity: celebrating Nomi’s music rather than his myth. When an album’s repertoire goes from Man Parrish to Chubby Checker to Camille Saint-Saëns, it’s hard to look anywhere but the music. As beautiful as Nomi was, it’s worth peeling your eyes away from the ghost-white makeup, mountain-range hairstyle, and Tristan Tzara tux to see the truly gifted musician beneath.

I reviewed Klaus Nomi’s wonderful self-titled debut album for Pitchfork.

29. Lords of Acid – Voodoo-U (1994)

Debuting with 1991’s Lust, Lords of Acid were best known for Belgian new-beat bangers with humorously filthy lyrics, the kind of club floor-fillers that hormonal drama club kids could put on their mixtapes. But the rampaging breakbeats, screeching-siren vocals, and double-barreled guitar and keyboard riffs of Voodoo-U were less funny and more frightening. The needles-in-the-red sound was as loud, lewd, and cavernous as the come-hither cover art by the artist COOP, which depicts a fluorescent-orange orgy in the bowels of Hell. Indeed, standouts like “The Crablouse” (a paean to the orgasmic prowess of pubic lice) and the explicitly witchy title track lent the demonic urgency of a summoning ritual to music for people who just really wanted to fuck other people in black mesh tops and vinyl pants. Go ahead, judge this one by its cover.

I reviewed Lords of Acid’s Voodoo-U, Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine, and Killing Joke’s self-titled debut album for Pitchfork’s list of the 33 best industrial albums of all time.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“So, you lookin’ for somebody?”

“You.”

You’ve just read the conversation Dalton has with Elizabeth when he spots her and her dress outside the Double Deuce. She’s leaning back against a post, a pose she’ll have occasion to revisit later in the course of their relationship. He’s just finished whipping someone’s ass, which, same. They have an easy and unmistakably sexual intimacy here that the film spends the following scene, depicting their coffee date at a local greasy spoon, blows to smithereens. Yet it’s really only upon repeated viewings that the Doc’s repeated and rather open and vicious skepticism regarding Dalton’s career and character alike becomes apparent. Rather it reads like a tiger and tigress sizing each other up, deciding whether when and where to fuck, knowing they have within them the power to annihilate each other but choosing to do something else to each other instead, something hot to the touch and sweet to the skin. I credit Kelly Lynch and Patrick Swayze with much of that, since there’s hardly a person either character meets at any point in the movie you can’t imagine jumping right into the sack with them with the slightest provocation, and that’s no less true here. But mostly I credit the band Alabama and their song “(There’s A) Fire in the Night.”

Despite spending the better part of my adult life among music critics and music nerds and being both myself, I’ve never heard Alabama so much as mentioned outside country circles. Whatever it is that’s allowed my cohort to deify Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, make a crossover star out of Kacey Musgraves, turn Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places” into an NYC karaoke staple, place the country affectations of Tom Petty and Stevie Nicks front and center in their respective late-period critical celebrations, and allow Lil Nas X & Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Old Town Road” to happen has never touched the biggest band in the history of the genre.

Listening to this song it is very, very difficult to understand why. Occupying the overlap position in the Bob Seger’s “Night Moves” / Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” / The Smiths’ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” Venn diagram you didn’t know existed, its minimal, dry guitars and water-on-the-snare-drums ’80s beat tell help singer Randy Owen tell his tale of one great night with one helluva woman. It’s not breaking any kind of ground (except perhaps the tight and expansive-sounding vocal harmonies during the chorus) and that’s the point. It’s guiding you, expertly, through familiar territory—bedrooms you’ve slept in and the people you’ve slept next to in them and your memories of both. Who wouldn’t want to warm their hands by that fire again?

The quick cut that follows Elizabeth’s explanatory “Me” leads us directly to a night sky, blank of stars moon and cloud. The camera descends onto a red orb emblazoned with a roaring fire. It descends further still, revealing the light-up signage of a diner. It’s an echo of the opening shot, which tells you right there that what follows is, in some as yet undefined way, momentous.

But it’s that rhythmic, percussive, low guitar line that sells the mood. When you hear that, and you see the night sky, and you take in the comfortingly ersatz glow of the lights, and you identify the kind of establishment we’re visiting, your mind quite naturally imagines a couple in the moments between when they realize they’re going home together and when they get up to do so. That tension and reserve is all in Jeff Cook’s insistent, somehow twitchy guitar. You pick up on instantly, you contextualize it effortlessly, you know what it’s about before Randy Owen’s singing comes in and proves you right.

Things don’t go great on the date itself, as we’ll see, though again not as bad as they appear at first glance, as we’ll also see. So for me, the music is the message here, and the message speaks true. Not for nothing is our first glimpse of this scene a fire in the night. One is being kindled whether the kindling and the tinder know it yet or not.

For the final stretch of the episode, the ambient sound is muted and a piano melody kicks in. It immediately felt like a callback to “Light of the Seven,” one of your best-known pieces—so, you know, I got worried.

That was 100 percent intentional. When I talked to Miguel [Sapochnik], the director, and when David and Dan came to my studio and we started working on this episode, we all agreed that it had to be a piano piece again, just like “Light of the Seven.”

That was the first time we’d used piano in the show; it really meant something different. You realize Cersei’s up to something and it all blows up. By using it again, we wanted to have the reverse effect. The piano comes in and people go, “Uh-oh, here comes the piano again. Something’s unraveling!” There was little hope throughout the episode. They’ve fought and fought, but the Night King is just unstoppable. Then he comes walking in, and the piano itself represents, like, “This is really it! It’s over!” Then there’s that big twist in the end. It definitely misled the audience because of what they knew from “Light of the Seven,” back in season six. We always treated the music as another character in the show.

I interviewed Game of Thrones composer Ramin Djawadi about his work on “The Long Night” and elsewhere for Vulture.

46. Paul Giovanni – The Wicker Man (1973)

The Wicker Man is never what you expect it to be. Like its hero, a Scottish police sergeant trying to find a missing girl in a pagan community, the New York musician Paul Giovanni was a stranger to the old Celtic folkways he was hired to investigate for Robin Hardy’s haunting horror film. His outsider’s ear for both the then-booming British folk scene and its ancient antecedents made the music he composed the ideal mirror for such a twisted journey. The opening song is a tightly harmonized adaptation of Scottish poet Robert Burns’ “The Highland Widow’s Lament,” nearly abrasive in its mournful mountain-air beauty. Sex is a frequent topic for the film and music, rendered in forms both profane (the absolutely filthy drinking song “The Landlord’s Daughter”) and sacred (“Willow’s Song,” the set’s dirty-minded but gorgeous standout). Rousing community singalongs and sparse hymns of ritual sacrifice weave conflicting narratives of their own. It’s a soundtrack that casts strange shadows and remains ungraspable, like a tongue of flame.

I reviewed the soundtracks for The Wicker Man, GoodFellas, and This Is Spinal Tap for Pitchfork’s list of the best soundtracks of all time.

Starting with 2008’s sprawling collection of instrumental work Ghosts I-IV (released under the Nine Inch Nails aegis) and accelerating with 2010’s Oscar-winning score for David Fincher’s The Social Network, the instrumental side of Trent Reznor has effectively shared equal billing with the more traditional industrial rock that made him a superstar. Never one for half measures, Reznor clearly sees the film-soundtrack work done alongside his longtime composing partner Atticus Ross as a chance to flex. “We aim for these to play like albums that take you on a journey and can exist as companion pieces to the films and as their own separate works,” Reznor wrote recently. He’s not kidding: The duo’s score for Fincher’s 2011 film The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for instance, is 15 minutes longer than the movie itself.

In announcing the release of Bird Box, the score for Netflix’s treacly Sandra Bullock survival-horror film of the same name, Reznor described it as a way of presenting the audience with “a significant amount of music and conceptual sound” that didn’t make the film’s final cut. Even then, that “Abridged” parenthetical in the title points toward “a more expansive” version of the album due later this year. It’s just as well since what Reznor and Ross have created is better than the movie they created it for. It does exactly what good soundtracks are capable of doing, and what they expressly intend for it to do: Emerge as a rewarding experience in its own right.

I reviewed Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’s Bird Box score for Pitchfork.

According to many British music publications, David Bowie’s headlining set at the Glastonbury Festival in 2000 is the greatest performance in the history of the legendary event. (NME, ever effusive, called it “the best headline slot at any festival ever.”) But it’s greatest that’s doing the work here, not performance. It’s not individual highlights that make the set so fondly remembered, but the overall gestalt. Like the old saw about climbing Everest, Bowie’s Glasto set mattered because it was there.

By the time he took to the Pyramid Stage, Bowie had spent 15-odd years in the mainstream-music wilderness—first, post-Let’s Dance, making milquetoast megapop no one particularly liked, then rebuilding his reputation with experiments in everything from Pixies-inspired garage rock (Tin Machine) to concept-album Eno-industrial (Outside) to a Nine Inch Nails/Goldie hybrid version of drum ’n’ bass (Earthling). Different people liked these experiments at different times and in different amounts, though never at the level of his 1970s and early-1980s output. (Earthling rules, for what it’s worth.) During much of that period, his greatest hits were largely retired from service in his live sets.

But now, with a generosity of spirit as lush and flowing as his hair—which hadn’t been that long since Hunky Dory—Bowie was back! Resplendently coiffed and backed by a familiar band of musicians (including pianist Mike Garson, bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, and guitarists Mark Plati and Earl Slick, all of whom worked with the star for years), the once and future king of art pop was welcomed by the sprawling home-country crowd like Arthur Pendragon returning from Avalon.

I reviewed David Bowie’s Glastonbury 2000 live album for Pitchfork. Giving a mixed review to David Bowie. Hell of a thing.

…And Justice for All is the biggest metal band’s best album. I see you, Master of Puppets people, but I’ve strapped on the blindfold of Lady Justice and let the scales tip where they may: Justice wins. The songwriting of singer James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich is their most complex and vicious, retaining the power of their early thrash while jettisoning its simplistic schoolyard chants and avoiding the less-compelling hard rock tendencies to come. Use, abuse, experience, and enough beer and Jägermeister to make Keith Moon drive a luxury car into a swimming pool had tempered Hetfield’s reedy yell into something fuller and more forceful, with none of his later cigar-chomping bluster. The lyrics are a ground-level portrait of bureaucratic order pushing down on people too powerless to fight back. And the sound is nearly industrial in its ear-killing intensity, a piece of serrated steel designed to carve you and leave its nihilism in the wounds. Oh, and maybe you’ve heard this: You can’t hear the bass.

I reviewed the excellent reissue of Metallica’s masterpiece …And Justice for All for Pitchfork.