Atmosphere — more specifically, producer Ant and emcee Slug — have been capturing the underground imagination since the early ’00s, specializing chiefly in first-person stories of untenable women and unsustainable lifestyles. The group’s aggressive 2005 offering, You Can’t Imagine How Much Fun We’re Having, pushed this samples-and-sorrows aesthetic to its logical conclusion, and so When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold changes course. Slug shifts to storytelling about people he's observed prowling the Minneapolis landscape, including a struggling single mother (“Dreamer”), a mesmerizing, heroin-hooked love interest (“Shoulda Known”), and an overbearing pimp with an undersized piece of equipment and a penchant for oral sex. (This one, “The Skinny,” is actually a metaphor for cigarette addiction.)

As for Ant, he’s overhauled his style as well. Instead of cutting up other people’s tunes, he’s directed musicians in the studio, either writing their bass, guitar and synth parts or asking them to imitate the samples he’s chosen. TV on the Radio‘s Tunde Adebimpe appears on “Your Glasshouse” (providing, according to the group’s press materials, “Additional vocals & delaymodeler pedal thing”) and none other than Tom Waits beatboxes (of all things) on “The Waitress.” The result is a more soulful,… read more »