The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
New albums from Run the Jewels, Phoebe Bridgers
Run the Jewels, ‘RTJ4’
■ (Jewel Runners/BMG, 31/2 stars)
Run the Jewels’ new album, the emphatic, unrelenting “RTJ4,” was released earlier this month, just days after Americans took to the streets to protest the death of George Floyd at the hands of police. It was perfectly suited to the moment.
Rapper Killer Mike grabbed the nation’s attention with an emotional, off-the-cuff speech where he pleaded with angry protesters “not to burn your own house down for anger with an enemy,” adding “we want to see the system that sets up for systemic racism burnt to the ground.”
“RTJ4” speaks to the present by drawing on recent history. On “Walking in the Snow,” Killer Mike raps about the costs of mass incarceration and a nation that’s lost its capacity for empathy, rhyming about the 2014 death of Eric Garner in details that also describe the death of Floyd. “You so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me / Until my voice goes from a shriek to a whisper: I can’t breathe.”
Run the Jewels are unlikely agit-rap heroes. Hip-hop is supposed to be youth music, but both Mike and his white partner El-P are practitioners in their mid-40s, aiming to make music that speaks to the streets.
They’re succeeding. One of the remarkable things about “RTJ4” is that, on their fourth album, the ardor and the dexterity of their hard-hitting fury don’t sound the slightest bit diminished.
Pretty much everything works. That goes for the easy camaraderie that the two rappers display throughout, and for the contributions of guests. Pharrell Williams and Zack de la Rocha join in on the “Look at all these slave masters posing on your dollar” chant on “Ju$t,” and gospel great Mavis Staples is expertly deployed on “Pulling the Pin.” That song is in part about a grenade of insurrection that is set go off, and “RTJ4” puts the sound of that explosion to music.
Phoebe Bridgers, ‘Punisher’
■ (Dead Oceans, 3½ stars)
Phoebe Bridgers has kept busy since she debuted with 2017’s acclaimed “Stranger in the Alps.” She teamed with indie-folk peers Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker for an EP as boygenius, and she partnered with Conor Oberst, one of her emo inspirations, for an album as Better Oblivion Community Center. Those friends drop in on “Punisher,” her second solo release and one that builds on the promise of “Stranger.”
Bridgers is adept at examining moments of disillusionment or thwarted desire and lacing them with knowing humor. “The doctor put her hands over my liver. / She told me my resentment’s getting smaller,” she sings atop muted, pulsing guitars in the quietly reflective “Garden Song.” “I swear I’m not angry, / that’s just my face,” she sings gently, cushioned by strings, in the title track, in which she imagines awkwardly meeting Elliott Smith, one of her heroes.
The album is full of repeated images and lovely melodies — on “Halloween” and “Graceland Too,” especially — but it’s punctuated with songs that open up into something cathartic, such as the rousing horns (courtesy of Bright Eyes’ Nathaniel Walcott) in “Kyoto,” the electric guitars that build in “Chinese Satellite,” and the dense cacophony that aptly concludes the apocalyptic celebration “I Know the End.”