Music reviews: Isaiah Rashad and Aldous Harding

‘It’s Been Awful’ by Isaiah Rashad

★★★

Isaiah Rashad’s new top-20 album is “as concise a statement about men in rap struggling with their sexuality as has ever been made,” said Mosi Reeves in Rolling Stone. Rashad, a longtime labelmate of SZA and Kendrick Lamar, was forced to grapple publicly with his bisexuality in 2022 when he appeared in sex tapes that were leaked not long after his previous album reached Billboard’s top 10. On this record, the Tennessee-raised songwriter and producer is as bracingly honest about his sexual fluidity as he is about his reliance on booze, pills, and powders. But he’s also “subtly pushing the art forward” as he puts his own stamp on “the muddy, melancholy Southern blues of mid-’90s rap.” While some listeners may find the weight of the 35-year-old’s confessions too heavy, said Luke Morgan Britton in NME, “it’s Rashad’s stark specificity that makes the lyrics cut through.” And when the music lands, as it “often does,” it “sounds like Southern rap filtered through a roof-down, summer-drive R&B haze.” That blend hasn’t made its creator a superstar yet. Starting now, “nobody should be sleeping on Isaiah Rashad any longer.”

‘Train on the Island’ by Aldous Harding

★★★★

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It’s “a fool’s errand” to try to locate the real Aldous Harding on any of her albums, said Jayson Greene in Pitchfork. On her new LP, a career best, the 35-year-old New Zealander “steps closer than ever to the camera lens without coming into focus” but only because she seems to present a new “I” on every song. Across four previous albums, “each a little deeper and stranger than the last,” Harding has been moving toward Train on the Island, an album of “warm and inviting” piano-and-guitar-driven music that’s also varied enough to serve as her ideal playground. Harding “cuts a divisive figure in the world of alt-rock,” said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. Devotees find her cryptic lyrics and sometimes mannered vocals fascinating; skeptics find her too self-consciously weird. But “what isn’t really up for question is her skill as a songwriter.” Though the mood on this record “tends to the cozy and languorous,” the most striking thing about its 10 tunes is “how tightly written and, in their own understated way, punchy they are.” All that’s required to enjoy it is an appreciation of “utterly lovely” melodies set atop music “that’s subtle but never bland.”